‘I wish I could offer them a target,’ Tagay grunted before walking away, black dust rising from his footfalls, disappearing swiftly into the tree-line.
‘Come back here, boy.’ Jaquet hopped after him, and only Anne’s hand held him from pursuing further.
‘Leave him, Uncle Pierre,’ Anne said softly. ‘He is disappointed.’
‘As I am,’ said the Captain. ‘How can I trade my goods if we don’t find any Indians, eh? Tell me that! And if we can’t trade, we have to get back up to Gaspe´ to fish soon. You didn’t pay me enough to return to France with empty holds.’
His words were angry but the tone wasn’t. As always, the touch of Anne’s hand calmed him.
‘I know.’ She smiled. ‘A little more time, eh? Soon we will all find what we seek.’
‘Well, we won’t here. Something’s wrong in this land. When I was here in thirty-six with the Admiral, each of these places was a thriving village. If memory serves, this place was called Satadin. So see if you can get our friend back and let us push on upriver. The next village should be Stadacona and if they are not there, they are gone from this land and it’s Gaspe´ for us on the morrow.’
While Jacquet clumped back the way he’d come, Anne followed the small path Tagay had taken into the forest, grateful that she was out of sight of either man. It didn’t take Tagay’s disappointment, or Jacquet’s concern, to tell her something was wrong. The further they proceeded down the river the Captain called the St Lawrence, the more uneasy she felt. It wasn’t her uncertainty after the seven weeks at sea, nor the anticipation of the task ahead that caused her concern. It wasn’t the strange beauty of this land so different from anything she’d ever known, in its swathes of huge cypresses and cedars, walnut and spruce, its rocky inlets and towering cliffs. No, it was the one similarity with the three cities where lately she’d spent her life – Siena, London and Paris. Like each of them, this land reeked of death.
She climbed a hill through a series of stony terraces, like stairs hewn for giants, the forest thinning as she got higher. Where the hill levelled, wild grapes grew in random profusion. She found him there amongst them, his hands stripping the little green globes from the vines, chewing and spitting out tiny seeds.
He was aware of her but did not turn. Pulling a grape bunch towards her, she bit into the fruit.
‘Ach! Do you not think they are too young, Tagaynearguye? Wait another month and they may be sweet.’
‘And six months after that we could have wine, if we knew how to make it.’ Since she spoke to him in his own language he replied in the same. ‘What I would give for a glass of Bordeaux now.’
His voice had lost the harshness that the burnt village had brought to it and she moved toward him. ‘I know how to make it. My father made wine that would make you think your Bordeaux was vinegar.’
‘I doubt that.’ He watched her approach, held, as ever, by the smile in her eyes.
‘Shall we set up the first vineyard in the New World then, Tagaynearguye? Perhaps here, since you seem to like the fruit so much?’
Her hand descended to rest lightly on his. He let it lie for a moment only, then took it away. As always, the touch confused him, so he sought refuge in her words.
‘Why do you call me by my full name?’
‘Did you not tell me that “Tagay” only meant “Little” and the rest was “Bear”?’
‘Yes. But the French were too lazy to say the whole name. And “Little” was a good name for a pet!’
‘So perhaps I should just call you “Bear”. Since you have returned to your native forests.’
Tagay sighed. The sun had just ridden to its mid-point in the sky, and it beat down through the thinner foliage here. His skin felt sticky under his clothes.
‘I do not think I want my people to know wine, good or otherwise. Its pleasure comes at too great a price.’
‘Is that why you did not drink it on the crossing?’
He nodded, waving a hand at the insects that surrounded his head like a buzzing helmet.
‘Then we will make none, Little Bear.’
The heat, the insects, the taste of too-young grapes souring in his mouth. ‘Will you stop using my name like that?’ He saw her smile flee, startled by his sudden anger. ‘I will regret teaching you my tongue if you use it to plague me like one of these biting black flies.’
He slapped at his head, ran a few paces away. The horde merely shifted with him. He began to curse, as if he were still in Paris, waving his hands in the air, shuffling now this way, now that.
Anne did not try to follow. She felt stung, as if one of the biting creatures that harried him had remained behind for her. She had spent the seven weeks on the ship learning the tongue of the Tahontaenrat. There was nothing else to do on the tedious voyage and she had always been good at languages. She saw it as a way of knowing him. But the more fluent she became, the more he had closed off from her.
‘Why are you here, Anne?’ He shouted at her in French now, as if his own tongue pained him.
‘You know why. I am here for my father, to finish what he began. And I am here for you,’ she replied, her voice low.
‘For me?’ Words he wanted to hear tormented him like biting insects. ‘For me? And who am I?’
She began to reply but he cut her off. ‘I thought I would learn that answer for myself, from the land I never knew, from my people. But that land is a pyre of ashes and my people are scattered by the winds. And I cannot even shed these clothes.’ He clutched at his doublet front so violently that two of the last buttons popped off. ‘Anything else I put on would be false. False! I am not Tagaynearguye. I am the French Court’s little pet.’
‘You carry your people there, Tagay.’ She pointed at his chest. ‘I know by the way you have talked of them, of the dreams you have recounted to me. I know about dreams. I know the truth of you in them.’
‘Dreams?’ His laugh cracked and he began scrabbling in the little leather pouch at his belt. In a moment, a small stone was in his hand. It was a deep, almost obsidian black, with a series of fine, sandy lines running up its squat, squarish shape.
‘This was my uncle’s dreamteller, his “Oki”. He found it in the belly of a huge fish he caught somewhere near here. He was the chief of the tribe and Cartier stole him and his sister, with me in her belly, and took him to die on the banks of the Seine. If dreamtellers told true, would it not have told Donnaconna never to have left the shores of his own river?’
He was facing away from her now, looking down the vine-clad, stone terraces to the valley below. They were high enough so that in the distance the great river could be seen, shimmering in heat haze.
‘He gave it to me before he died. “Take it back to the land, and use it there,” he told me. Well, I’m back!’
His voice rising to a shout, he reached behind him, bending back to throw.
A hand closed over his. ‘Oki – objects – have power, Tagay,’ Anne said. ‘Donnaconna’s stone. The silver cross in my pouch that my brother once nailed to a tree in Tuscany. Above all, that which my father swore to bury, that many men covet still, the six-fingered hand of Anne Boleyn. To some, only a stone, a piece of metal, some old bones. But we know the truth of power, Tagay. You don’t throw away power. Your uncle, my father, they were right. Power is to be used.’
The next village was not a pile of cinders. Fires there were, at least fifty of them, and their smoke rode the wind over the log palisade that encircled the village. Kettles, full of meat, simmered above rock hearths, in a wide cleared space where all the houses converged in a giant circle. These were made from slabs of cedar and there were scores of them, of different sizes, though a similar shape, the largest being at least forty paces in length and fifteen wide, the same in height. And every one was deserted.
‘You can stop that now,’ Jacquet called to Bertrand, the youngest of the crew, ‘for there’s no one here to appreciate your greeting.’ The boy immediately lowered the flute he’d been blowing ever l
ess enthusiastically as they had walked through the lifeless village. The fingers that had been stopping holes were now occupied with crossing himself repeatedly.
The Captain was as concerned as each of his men. ‘Where are they?’ he muttered. ‘This place is, or was, Stadacona. I’d recognize those cliffs anywhere. Spent a winter nestled against them with the Admiral in thirty-seven. If anything, it’s bigger than it was then. Someone set those pots to cook. Where the devil are they now?’
‘Or what devil has taken them.’ Tagay’s joy at seeing the smoke from the cooking fires of his people had been ripped away by their absence, leaving an even greater desolation. ‘Maybe the demon who burned the other villages first stole all life from them, as he has done here. And when he has finished eating the people, he returns to destroy their homes.’
‘Enough of that talk!’ Jacquet bellowed, as his men crossed themselves ever more furiously. The last thing he needed was his crew to start seeing the Devil in this. Captain or no Captain, they’d take the ship back to France on the instant.
Anne was standing slightly away from the men. ‘Listen,’ she said, and each laboured to pitch their hearing above the beating of their hearts. At first, there was nothing but the wind. Then something came to each of them, on swirls of air.
‘It sounds like … wailing!’ Bertrand whimpered. ‘The Indian’s right, the Devil’s abroad.’ He turned toward the river, took a step.
‘Quiet!’ Jacquet’s head was tipped toward the cliffs. ‘Sounds like cheering to me. And laughter.’
‘What is up there? Do you remember?’ Tagay said.
‘Aye. You seem to climb for ever up those rocks and then suddenly you come out on a huge meadow.’
‘My uncle told me of that place.’ Tagay said. ‘He called it Dayohagwenda – “Opening through the woods”. My people – perhaps they are there.’
‘I don’t like it,’ muttered Jacquet. ‘What would make the whole damn village leave their cooking fires?’
‘Well,’ said Tagay, his face suddenly flushed, ‘shall we go and find out?’
‘I couldn’t make the climb, not with this.’ Jacquet ground the crutch’s end into the earth. ‘And my men won’t go without me.’ He thought for a moment. ‘You go, Tagay. By yourself. That way, if the Devil is up there, he’ll only get his own.’ He smiled, briefly. ‘We’ll wait for you back at the river. On the river.’
He turned, walked a few paces back toward the palisade, turned back. ‘Come, girl,’ he said to Anne, who had not moved.
‘No,’ said Anne. ‘I’m going too.’ She halted the protest that came from both men’s mouths. ‘Of course I’m going. You think I’ve come this far to slink away? We are here to meet these people. Tagay’s people. There is no other choice.’
They had, each of them, heard that tone of determination before.
‘Come then,’ said Tagay.
A trail, beaten by thousands of feet, led from the rear of the village, traced along a stream, then began winding up a steep slope. It was hard climbing to limbs that had only been able to stretch the length of a caravel for weeks at sea, and the sun bore down ferociously. Using his arms to pull at the shrubs that lined the path, as well as his pumping legs, Tagay pulled himself up, Anne struggling behind. As they got higher, the cries above grew louder.
They reached the summit and the noise doubled, screams bursting through the small screen of scrubby pine that crested the cliff top.
‘Keep low,’ Tagay turned back to whisper, ‘and be ready to run.’
Through a stand of oak, the trail then plunged into a wall of shoulder high grass. The voices weaved through it, as if the shouters were just the other side of a screen.
Tagay signalled back to the last oak, whose branches stretched over the green sea ahead. Anne understood and immediately began climbing, Tagay following, letting her guide him to the foot and handholds, for he had watched her on the ship and she could go up a mast as swiftly as any of the sailors. When they reached a branch that looked solid enough, Tagay moved past and pushed outwards through the foliage.
Leaves parted on mayhem. The tall grasses reached only a few paces in and then there was a great plain filled with screaming humanity. All were semi-naked, men and women, a breech cloth and dust their only covering. A cloud of it hung above the horde that surged forward, then swayed back, men, women, children, packed so tight that many had been lifted from the ground and were borne by the press, each head thrown back, wailing to the sky:
‘Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ahum!’ The voices started on a high note and slid down the scale, then rode up and ended in the mighty crescendo of the final phrase.
Anne found that her hand had reached into the pouch at her waist and was clutching her brother’s little silver cross there.
‘Are they possessed, Tagay? What agony are they in?’
Before he could reply, another tormented cry came from the far side of the field. Yet peering through the dust cloud, he could see that it was no echo but another wedge of people, letting out the same shrieking rise and fall of notes.
‘Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ahum!’
Silence followed, as complete and dreadful as the noise that had preceded it. Then a single, deep male voice let out a cry that conjured shapes from the ground between the opposing groups. A dozen men stood in two lines of six facing each other. Every man was naked, save for the small apron that barely covered the loins. Every man held a carved and curled stave in his hands.
Anne suddenly knew what she was watching. Her father had taken her once to a tournament of knights in Bologna. ‘Tagay,’ she whispered, clutching at his shoulder, ‘these men fight each other.’
As she spoke, someone stepped forward from the far crowd and hurled something into the space between the two lines of warriors. The distinct clack of wood on wood came, as eight of the men merged into a solid group where the thrown object had landed. Grunts of exertion rose from the dust cloud that partially obscured them; then, suddenly, a round object burst out of the mêlée and hurtled toward the two men to the left who had stood clear of the fight. One of them flicked it from the ground up into the air with his stick, then hit it in the same movement across the field, to the men who had stood off there. A stave rose, struck; the ball – for that is what it had to be – flew upfield.
There were cries of alarm from those below the tree, screams of delight from those opposite as the warrior who had knocked the ball forward pursued it. He was heavily tattooed, blue and black lines curving around his body in wreaths of leaf and reptile shapes. Taller than the one who chased him, a shrug of hips gained him a few yards, to the further dismay of those below the oak. But the smaller man was swift and caught up, just as the taller reached the ball. Despite a vicious chop down that seemed aimed more at fingers than stick, and produced another howl of outrage from those below them, the smaller man managed to knock the ball beyond the taller one’s reach. A team-mate, sweeping back, caught the ball on his stick and knocked it into the air; three men leapt, sticks high and, to agonized shouts, the ball hurtled back the way it had come, down the centre of the field.
‘This is a ball game, yes, Tagay? It is not war?’
He turned, excitement in his eyes, the first she’d seen since landfall. ‘It is much more than a game. War is the better word. This is Otadajishqua.’
The words were lost in the shrieking. Where the ball had rolled another group contended, more joining in as they arrived, others standing off. The ball escaped, only to be snatched back into the struggle.
Suddenly it rolled free, long enough for a stick to knock it away. Someone mis-hit it, and the small defender who had rescued it previously now retrieved it, bounced it up on his stick end and ran around a wrongfooted opponent. She could see where he was heading. She’d hadn’t noticed, till then, the twin gates of two poles that faced each other at either end of the field. They were twice the height of a man, a few paces apart.
Now it was the turn of those below to let out the whoops of encouragement, those opposit
e the shouts of fear. The tattooed man was trying to close down the ball-runner, yet the smaller man seemed to sense him reaching out. He sped up and, as if he could see behind him, leapt, the stick thrust viciously between his pumping legs. The tattooed man fell as he thrust, the smaller man surging beyond him and, as the crowd’s roar built, the ball carrier bounced the ball into the air then cracked it hard. It flew straight between the gates.
The shout that arose from below seemed as if it could lift them from the branch. The team’s supporters surged forward, surrounding the players. A chant began, Tagay shouting as loud as any, and Anne recognized the one word they were chanting. It began slowly, building in volume each time. It was Tagay’s own name, without the ‘Little’ attached.
‘Bear! Bear! Bear! BEAR!’ the crowd screamed.
Then, just as they had started altogether, suddenly and altogether they stopped. Only one voice continued shouting the word and then only once more.
‘BEAR!’ screamed Tagay into the silence, and everyone there, the supporters, the players standing or lying on the ground, all turned to look at the man standing on the end of an oak branch.
The stillness lasted for five heartbeats. Tagay knew, because he could hear his. The people stared at him, he stared back, and the only movement was that of his arms, raised aloft in the triumph of the Bear, now slowly falling to his side.
Then the world below them exploded. The crowd began to move forward as one body. A group of twenty or so older men, clad in cloaks and leggings, turned and stepped toward the tree. But those who reacted swiftest were those who had lately contested in the game. They ran to the base of the oak, their game sticks raised before them like weapons. Two had bent to the ground to snatch up bows. One of these was the smaller man who had shot the ball between the posts. The other was the tattooed warrior.
Blood Ties Page 32
