Up Jumps the Devil (42 page)

Five white men emerged from the woods not too far away, dragging Wahsinatawah between them.

“Your friend,” whispered Pocahontas.

“He's not—”

“You have to help him. Or else I will.”

“Fine,” sighed the Devil. He was her slave. He wondered if she knew it.

THAT NIGHT
, the Devil slipped over the stockade wall, and found a shadow to hide in.

A lot of pale men sat around various cook fires, talking in low tones, sometimes pausing to eye the treetops swaying above and beyond their fort, as if they feared the night and the land itself.

Following his nose from shadow to shadow, the Devil found Wahsinatawah writhing on a wooden table, held down by white men stripped to the waist. They were digging in his wounds with red-hot knives. The Devil understood that these men were trying to help the young hunter. To heal him. Maybe to slaughter and eat him later, who knew?

The Devil stepped up to this assembly, nine feet tall, breathing fire. They scattered to hide in barrels and sheds, and the Devil picked up Wahsinatawah like a dead turkey and leaped with him over the wall.

Into the meadow, Pocahontas had lashed together a rough sled of saplings and green branches, upon which Wahsinatawah could be pulled through the woods.

The young hunter had fallen unconscious immediately upon his rescue. He now woke up to say “Thank you,” and stayed awake just long enough to have a peek up Pocahontas's skirt.

THE DEVIL WASN'T
too surprised when he sniffed the air, just before dawn broke, and listened to the wind, and discovered that they had been followed.

Goddammit! All he wanted to do was hold Pocahontas and sing songs to her and put his knobby wooden cock in her and be happy, and these white men were fucking it all up.

He put down his side of the travois, ran deerlike through the woods, over moss-fat stones and dead trees, until he nearly stumbled over what looked like a knight.

The Devil remembered knights. This one wore chest armor, and had stopped to refresh himself at a stream. He had dipped his helmet in the cool water and appeared quite relaxed, but the moment the Devil came flying out of the woods, he hopped to his feet and drew a long, bright sword.

The Devil allowed the sword to break off in his side, and bashed the knight unconscious with his fist. The man went down hard in the creek, and would have drowned if the Devil hadn't pulled him onto the sand.

As he was performing this act of mercy, three very serious-looking hunters—Falling Water men—came jogging up the creek bed, hallooing and waving.

It took a minimum of conversation to make it plain that these fellows were looking for their sister. The Devil introduced himself with discretion, and, with the armored man slung over his considerable shoulder, led them back to where Pocahontas sat doing her best to keep poor Wahsinatawah's wounds clean, and humming a prayer-song to herself.

She leaped up when she saw her brothers, who hugged her and fussed over her and scolded her some. Then this strange party struck out together for home, arriving just in time for lunch.

“Just in time for lunch!” cried the village children, leaping about Pocahontas.

Pocahontas beamed, hoisting a tiny girl on one hip, and placing a boy on the Devil's shoulders. The remainder of the children boiled around them as they walked, clutching at her dress, reaching for her hands, and singing her name.

Children, the Devil, saw, loved Pocahontas the way animals loved him.

LUNCH, SERVED IN THE VILLAGE
longhouse, took a while. There were speeches.

There was a speech from each of Pocahontas's brothers, welcoming the Devil to their village and hearth, wondering aloud what his intentions were and what he'd already tried. Their father, a thick, strong man of middle years, wondered more about the white man in the damaged armor. The Devil had left him propped up outside the door, and every once in a while they heard a metallic
ding!
as the village children threw rocks at him.

It was decided that they would lay the white man on a stone and smash his head. “Then we'll go kill the rest of them, too,” said the chief.

The three brothers stripped the woozy, terrified knight to his pantaloons, dragged him to a big rock in the middle of the village, and forced him to rest his head on it. The eldest brother was swinging a war club around his head when Pocahontas came storming through the crowd and threw herself over the knight in a thoroughly inappropriate way.

“Get
off
of him!” commanded her father.

She did get off, but she stood over him like a mother lynx, tense and hissing.

“This is senseless!” she spat.

No one met her eyes.

“They will come here,” answered her eldest brother. “More and more of them. It's true, and you know it.”

She didn't answer him. She looked at the Devil, who stepped forward. They parted for him, and he carried the white man away from the stone and out of the village, with Pocahontas beside him, still angry, still glaring.

“Fools,” she hissed.

She banged on the white man's armor. “Him and his kind, too.”

They passed over streams and open meadows until they came to the edge of the land's broadest river.

There was a different look in her eyes when she said she wanted to stop there, a look like a clear sky or clear water. She reached between his leggings, took hold of him in a way she hadn't before, and made him gasp. Her dress came apart like spidersilk in his fingers, and then they were in the water.

The Devil had seen Pocahontas run like a doe and swim like a fish, but this did nothing to presage the animal she now became. His erection wobbled between them, and she drove herself upon it with a scream, convulsing in every part, tightening around him like a snake. They slipped underwater, twisting until their lungs burst and they surfaced, shrouded in her hair, gulping air. She made love to him as if she meant to devour him, opening her legs until her hip joints popped, until their eyes locked and stayed locked, and they were tender with each other the way lions must be tender.

When they had exhausted each other, Pocahontas and the Devil sprawled naked on the sand. The Devil reached for her, afraid she'd be cold, but she pulled away.

What?

“I can't,” she said.

“Can't what?”

“I can't … how can I say it? I can't
be
this.” And she gestured in frustration, indicating herself, her body.

Couldn't be what? Flesh? Human?

“It's too much,” she said. “It's like lightning! It's like having a storm inside me!”

He held her face in his hands, and looked deep, and there she was.

“Arden,” he gasped.

“Yes.”

They held each other's eyes for a long time. Long enough for shadows to shift around them. For the tide to turn in the river, and fall back toward the ocean, and for gulls to begin their evening cries.

SHE EXPLAINED THAT
the body she wore, this nut-colored girl-goddess, was not hers. She had chosen to share a body already human, already grown, because she thought maybe this way she wouldn't be shocked by the world and its flesh.

“But it's too much.”

“You can—” he began, desperate.

“I
can't
!” she wailed, beating at his chest. “You don't understand! It's like taking a creature bred in a cave and plunging it into the sun! It's like being on
fire
!”

“Yes!” he crowed. “Wonderful, glorious
fire
!”

“I hate it!” she screamed, and, like a slippery fish, squirmed loose. She ran, and he gave chase.

It was like before, except without joy or the thrill of play. It seemed to the Devil that he was trying to catch everything he thought he'd given up, and the thing he'd given it up for. Without her, there was nothing.

With a wild leap, he bore her to the sand, turned her over, and struggled for words.

But she was gone.

The girl in his arms was a magnificent woman-child, but she was only that.

He gathered his pride. He still had that. He spoke to the girl, wanting to make her feel safe, but this proved unnecessary. She knew nothing of the angel who had possessed her. Instead, she remembered everything that had happened as if she had done it herself. She was proud of her words at the killing stone. She was glad about what they had done in the river. She did not quite remember the things that had been said afterward, or why she had run from him, but shrugged it off the way young people do, blaming youth and passion.

She resolved upon taking the white man to his fortress town, and maybe they would all become friends. Maybe they could keep fear from turning into fighting.

Even without Arden inside her, thought the Devil, this girl had some fallen-angel blood in her family, way back sometime.

Walking naked beside him as they returned down the beach, she was not self-conscious. Indeed, she held up her head and seemed to appreciate the wind in her hair and on her skin, even to appreciate the wind in
his
hair, and the woodenness and smoothness of
his
skin, taking his arm as they walked.

He nearly choked, thinking of Arden, but remembered that he was proud.

HE SPENT THE NEXT YEAR
grasping at shadows.

They lived together in a lodge of green branches and buckskin, between the forest and a slow, deep stream. He built wickets and caught fish, and they hunted together and sang hunting songs together, and when they made love they looked deep inside each other with a sadness neither spoke of.

He knew he should leave her, but he couldn't.

She allowed each day, as it came, to be enough. She loved the man-demon who was sometimes able to love her back. She felt the Earth turning beneath her feet, and let that be enough, too, and was thankful.

They lived together that way for four seasons.

The Devil had conquered Assyria and ruled Egypt and driven Sumeria to its knees, but he wasn't strong enough to walk out on Pocahontas.

REALLY, WHEN HE LOOKED BACK
on it,
she
left
him
.

Winter came, and with it a long, heavy snow, until branches creaked and the forest sighed as if turning in its sleep.

Pocahontas worried about the white men, in the fortress they were calling Jamestown. The Devil awakened one night to find her sitting up. She had let the deerskin blankets slip aside, and was shivering.

“They'll starve,” she said.

“Yes,” he answered.

It was true. He had watched them from the trees, eating their leather shoes and belts. Eating their dead. Eyeing one another like hungry rats.

He almost said, “Let them starve,” and she almost said, “Who will we become if we allow such a thing?”

THEY BROUGHT GAME
to the stockade gates, and roasted corn. They brought blankets. They told the white men what trees to cut for wood that would burn hot and burn slowly, and where the sturgeon swam in the winter, and could be caught with nets, sleeping.

The white man they had saved came forward. He was grateful, and treated them with respect. Now that he was not lost in the woods or about to be killed, he had a good and intelligent light in his eyes, a rare light. The Devil saw that he was a complicated man who wanted complicated things.

The man wanted Pocahontas to stay. She could be of such value to them.

She shook her head, smiling, and touched the white man's cheek. Then they left together, she and the Devil, and returned to their strange, lonely home.

HER BROTHERS VISITED
, painted for war, and told Pocahontas and the Devil how their father had decided that the whites and their fortress must be pushed into the river. They must be stopped before their numbers were too many.

Pocahontas told them “No!”

But they didn't listen. They warned her, warned the Devil, to leave their lodge, because soon it would not be safe there.

“Come back to the village with us,” they said, but they knew their sister's answer without having to hear it.

“Make yourself a spear and come with us,” they told the Devil, who filled his pipe and ignored them.

The brothers left, and that night Pocahontas slipped away to the fortress and warned the white men there.

She stayed with them, then. She had no choice, nowhere else to go.

Pain lanced the Devil's heart.

He coughed and gasped, but it wasn't his heart, really. It was his whole self feeling his love being torn from him. Or worse, getting up and walking away.

He felt the weight of his years, which was a weight too vast even for an immortal soul. The only thing that could bear such weight was the Earth itself.

So the Devil returned to the Earth for a time. As he had after Egypt, and after Rome. He walked with a bleak stare into the mightiest, deepest, most unknown forest, among great trees and ancient stones, and there he crouched and closed his eyes and let the snow cover him, let the ice harden on him until he, too, was like a stone. And he stayed that way across five summers or more, until one day two hunters, Corn People, traveling afar, came upon him and remarked how this stone was so like a man. Not just a man, but a man who had been saddened beyond endurance. They poked him with their spears, just as you might stir coals in a fire or dry leaves with your foot, and cried out in surprise when the stone stood, cracking and creaking and shedding ice, gave them a sleepy, irritated look, and stumbled away, yawning.