The Key to the Indian

by Lynne Reid Banks

  “You sleep much,” he said. “Long journey! Now it is time to greet you.”

  He lifted the baby and stood aside. To Omri’s – and his father’s – intense embarrassment, they now saw Twin Stars looming above them. She was holding a wooden basin. She sat down on the edge of the bed and, before either of them could realise what she was doing, she took a piece of soft cloth out of the water in the basin, squeezed it, and began to wash Omri’s father with it!

  He was so overcome, he couldn’t move. He simply stood there with his eyes tightly closed. Omri tried to escape, but Little Bull blocked his flight with a hand as big as a five-barred gate. He turned against it and watched, abashed, as Twin Stars dried his dad and – began to dress him!

  It was like a ritual. As she did it, she was murmuring soft words in her own language, like a chant. She fastened a belt around his waist, then gave him a long piece of doeskin, butter-yellow and flexible as satin, indicating that he should draw it between his legs and hang the ends over the belt. Then she helped him step into a pair of leggings. By this time he had got over his shame, and was actively helping, fastening the leggings to the belt himself. The moccasins were circles of soft doeskin with braided grass to tie them around the ankles.

  When that was done, the moment Omri had been dreading arrived: Twin Stars turned to him. She had his clothes in her hands.

  “I – I’ll do it myself, Twin Stars!” he croaked. But it was no use. He had to go through the ritual wash first, and be dried, and spoken to, and then he was allowed to dress himself. He was aware of his father standing near him chuckling under his breath.

  “It’s no use being ashamed,” he said quietly. “This is their way with guests, I imagine. We just have to go along with it. It’s – er… it’s really not so bad.”

  “Dad!”

  “No, I mean – we’re all far too prudish about our bodies.”

  Little Bull, who had gone away for a while, returned. “Wife say, not easy to make small clothes. Polite now to say good words to her.”

  They both thanked Twin Stars and said the clothes were beautiful. Which they were. But their chests were left bare.

  “Is there anything for up top?” asked Omri’s dad, touching his chest.

  “No. Mohawk men wear nothing there.”

  “Even in winter?”

  Little Bull picked up a large piece of fur-covered hide from the bed, and threw it across his shoulders as a cloak. “When winter comes, wife will make fur clothes,” he assured them. They looked at each other.

  “We won’t be here in the winter,” Omri said.

  “Meanwhile we’ve got our sweaters.”

  But when they put them back on, Little Bull let out a roar of laughter. Twin Stars hid her face to hide her giggles. They stared at each other, and then, without a word, took the sweaters off again. Neither of them could have explained it, but even at the cost of being cold, it didn’t look right or feel right to wear non-Indian clothes.

  “Now we talk,” said Little Bull.

  He stood up – far, far up, till his head was as high above them as a clifftop – and, leaving Twin Stars smiling and Tall Bear playing on the earth floor, he swooped on them and picked them up.

  Omri was made sick and dizzy by the speed with which he was lifted high above the safe earth, and he heard his father gulp and gasp. Little Bull held them, one in each hand, in front of his handsome face.

  “You want food?”

  “Not just now” Omri’s father managed to say.

  “Good. Talk first.”

  Little Bull stuck them without ceremony into his belt, wrapped his cloak around them, and they heard the dry rustle of the corn-husks as he brushed past the curtain, moved swiftly beyond the room and, quite shortly, out into the open air.

  16

  Perfidious Albion

  When Little Bull strode with them up a steep hill and into a thick belt of trees, Omri felt almost hit in the face by the impact of the long-ago forest.

  It was very different from the ones around the Hidden Valley where he lived. There was a feeling you never got in England, of wildness, of wilderness. Some of the trees were the oaks and beeches and willows and ash trees he knew. But there were others, so brilliantly coloured that, with the sun shafting through their leaves, Omri could scarcely look at them. It was like being roofed by jewel-coloured glass. The air was glassy too, it was so clear, and after the smoky, smell-laden air in the longhouse, it prickled in his lungs like frost-crystals.

  There was also a subtle feeling that the forest was somehow alive, and that was scary. Of course, being small didn’t help.

  But being close to Little Bull’s strong, warm body, did.

  Little Bull sat down on a gigantic fallen tree, took them out of his belt and set them one on each thigh. Omri found it was like straddling a whale. He glanced at the ground. It was a long way away. His fingers searched for something to cling to, finding only the smoothness of stretched buckskin. But Little Bull kept a guardian finger and thumb looped loosely around him.

  The Indian began to speak. In fact, he seemed to be making a speech. His voice boomed out far above them. When they gazed upward, they could see the jerks of his adam’s apple like the prow of a ship moving sharply with the waves. But his voice flowed over their heads and was drowned by the cries of birds, the whirring of a million insects, and the loud rustle of twigs, leaves and branches in the forest canopy, which was sky-high above them.

  Omri’s dad leant towards Omri across the gap.

  “Can you hear what he’s saying?”

  “Not properly.”

  “Tell him.”

  “You.”

  Omri’s dad put his head back and shouted. Little Bull took no notice. Omri had an idea, and thumped with both fists against the huge thumb that encircled his waist.

  Little Bull, startled, looked down, then bent toward them. The sudden appearance of his enormous face close above them made them cower.

  “What?” he said. It came out as a roar that lifted the hair on their heads.

  “We can’t hear you, Little Bull! Come down to us!”

  The next moment they were lifted to dizzy heights; then the ground – covered with a glorious pattern of bright five-pointed leaves as big as hearth-rugs – rushed towards them as Little Bull stretched himself at full length on the forest floor. He put them down and they sat on the coloured leaves. It was like sitting on an endless leathery carpet of reds, oranges, yellows, browns and greens. The crisp air chilled their bare chests and they hugged themselves.

  “Little Bull has waited,” said Little Bull clearly. “Wait long before making plan. Wait for you. Longhouse council says, we can wait no more. We cannot stay here. There is much danger.”

  “What is the danger?” asked Omri’s dad.

  “English soldiers go home and leave us. People of the Longhouse are alone.”

  There was a pause. He scowled, as if suddenly remembering that they were English. But if so, it didn’t hold him back.

  “They promised very much, for our help. Weapons. Blankets. Trade goods. Pay from English king. They used fine words: ‘No Indian child will be cold again. No Indian woman hungry.’ Ha! So we fight. First the French. Then other Indians. We beat them. English thanked us! Very good! But as we fight, all is changing. White men come, more than hunters and traders, men with hunger for our land – many, many – from across the big water. Bad men. They call us savages, then teach us what that word means. Cheat, lie, do very evil things.

  “Then English king’s men come again to us. Again they need us, to fight these bad people. They call them ‘rebels’, men who hate English king and want to stay here and drive Indians out with tricks and lies, with white man’s sickness, with whisky, with guns, with fire.”

  “The settlers” said Omri’s father under his breath to Omri. “The European settlers who were starting to be American.”

  Little Bull didn’t hear him.

  “This time we tread the warpath with hot blood,
more than before. We hate these people. They are like fire in forest, river that forgets its path, that grows and grows and swallows everything. They move always toward the sunset.”

  “Westward.”

  “They cut down our trees, drive away our hunt-animals, burn our corn. Kill, and do worse than kill.”

  He turned his face away and his voice dropped. “Om-Ri. You asked one time about wife. Wife who is gone from me.”

  “Yes. You told me she’d died.”

  “This I told. But not how. Now you will listen. White savages come and burn our crops. They take my wife. Take her. You understand me? When found, she was not dead. She asked me to end her shame. I could not. But she—” He stopped and did not go on for a long time. They saw his throat move as the muscles tightened. “She choose her own ending. This eat me like the lump-sickness. White men do this who call Indians dogs. This the Indian does not do to woman – never.

  “So we fight these rebels. Burn and kill like them. And they fall to our warriors like deer. We drive them back and back. Their blood washes our land clean and it becomes again our land. This is our fight, but England’s also. We look that the king’s men keep their word! And then – whaaah! – the English say ‘finish’. They give up and go.”

  “They knew they’d lost their colony,” muttered Omri’s dad. He was looking very uncomfortable. As if he was ashamed. But why? thought Omri. What the English did hundreds of years ago wasn’t our fault.

  “Couldn’t you go on fighting the settlers without them?” he asked.

  “The English had clever talk to make us tread warpath, now they make new talk. They say, ‘We go home. No more war’. They say we must plant again the great Tree of Peace. Bury weapons as Iroquois did long ago, when the great Peacemaker ordered that we stop fight Mohawk against Onondaga, Oneida against Cayuga and Seneca. English say, we must make new Confederacy, this time with rebels. This is their counsel! But these are not Indian brothers to bring to the white roots of our Peace Tree! They are our enemies, for ever. Anger burns our hearts. We want to fight. But we cannot follow warpath now without English weapons and other things we need. We cannot fight bows and arrows against guns. And our guns are empty.

  “And rebels’ fire burns against us again. More hot than before, because now they want vengeance. We have no supplies. Many fields black with fire. Fruit trees cut. Our stomachs grow small. We must stand on our land against their guns, as in the beginning of the white man’s coming. Or we must find new hunting-grounds where white men cannot follow.”

  “And you need to decide where to go,” said Omri’s father.

  “Yes. That. And to turn angry young warriors from warpath when they want to fight without hope to win. Who will father new children if all our young men are dead?”

  There was a pause in the conversation. Omri looked into Little Bull’s smooth golden face in the flickering, shifting light. It was not just the cold that made him shiver, because for seconds at a time it seemed as if Little Bull vanished. The light would flash on him again, showing his dark, anxious, expectant eyes. Then, again, he would fade into a shadow.

  A thought he couldn’t explain or repress seemed to write itself across Omri’s mind: Desperate. He feels desperate. We owe him. We must help. But wasn’t this as ludicrous as Little Bull saying to him, the first time he ever saw him, “You touch – I kill”? What could they possibly do to help?

  At last Omri’s father said, “Which of the Six Nations of the Iroquois do you belong to, Little Bull?”

  “Three eagle feathers stand in my gustoweh. I am Mohawk, elder brother among our nations.”

  “I need to look up some things in my books.”

  “You bring paper that tells what will come?”

  “Yes. I want to see what the Mohawks actually did. Of course that doesn’t mean your longhouse couldn’t do something different.”

  Back in the longhouse, in the compartment belonging to Little Bull’s family, Omri and his father were left alone with their things. They were shielded by a stack of baskets, in a corner by the bark wall.

  Omri’s father immediately sat down cross-legged on the earth floor. Omri thought he looked strange in his Indian clothes, like an actor who’s forgotten to fix his hair and take off his watch. Indians’ skin, he’d noticed, was not red at all, but it wasn’t white either and his father really looked like a ‘paleface’.

  He took Stolen Continents out of the box they’d brought. It had bits of paper sticking out, marking places, and he opened it to one of these, putting his face right down to the page. Omri realised he had lost his glasses when he lost his own clothes.

  “What are you reading, Dad?”

  “I want to find out what happened with the Mohawks. I seem to remember some of them had settled in Canada long before the Revolutionary War. And the British promised them more land around Lake Ontario, to keep for ever, as a reward for their help. I just have to see what happened to them and whether our lot could join them. It’d get Little Bull out of the way of the horrors that are coming to the Indians who stay here, anyway.” He looked at Omri and said soberly, “This is such a terrible moment for them. You can’t imagine how powerful the Iroquois were once! How well-organised and what ferocious fighters. They claimed to have conquered half this country, before it was a country. And now they’re facing annihilation. Let me read, Omri.”

  He became immersed in his book.

  Omri knew he should stay close to him, but he was restless. And hungry! He sniffed. Through the strong smells of bark, smoke, sage and smoked skins came a rich, meaty smell. The clean, cold air of the woods had sharpened his appetite. This morning they’d foraged in the box, and found nothing. The tins of meat and beans and soup mocked their lack of a tin-opener, and Omri thought enviously of Patrick, tucking into the stuff in the cold-box.

  He drifted towards the smell of stew. Just to get a better whiff of it. He knew he mustn’t break cover, but if he just put his head under the corn-husk curtain…

  The next second something huge pounced on him, and gigantic teeth closed around his body.

  17

  The Old Woman

  A wave of absolute terror went over Omri.

  He was snatched from the ground and borne along. He guessed at once that it was a dog that had pounced on him – he had seen, or at least heard, dogs around the longhouse – and he managed to stay perfectly still. He felt instinctively that if he struggled, its great teeth would close and he would be bitten in half, and the thought was enough to paralyse him.

  As it was, he was held tightly – he could feel the teeth digging into him without piercing his skin – and carried at speed along the aisle, to him as wide as a six-lane highway, between the family compartments towards one of the central fires.

  Halfway there, his fear-frozen brain came to his aid.

  He was small, rat-size to the dog, but he was not a rat – he was a human being and he must smell like one. Perhaps that was why the dog had not simply eaten him on the spot. The scent of human would confuse it.

  In a flash he remembered the old man who’d lived next door to them in their last London house. He’d had a dog. It was very obedient and well trained. He used to throw things for it to chase, in his garden next to theirs. When it brought the ball or stick or whatever it was, it would stand in front of the man, who would say in stern tones:

  “Drop it! Drop it, I say!”

  Omri had once peered over the fence and asked him if the dog understood his words. “More the tone of voice, actually,” the man had replied.

  “So if you said it in French, he’d still do it?”

  “Can’t speak a word of French,” the man had said shortly, “so we’ll never find out.”

  And Omri couldn’t speak a word of Iroquoian.

  The dog holding Omri slowed down as it came near the fire. Omri felt the heat scorching his skin and instinctively twisted his head to look. To him it looked like a blazing forest. The smell of stew was very strong now – there was a caul
dron-like pot hanging from a hook over the smoldering side logs.

  What if he said, “Drop it!” to the dog, and it dropped him – into the red-hot embers?

  The dog stood still. It turned its head, with Omri still firmly held between its teeth. It seemed to be looking for something – waiting for an order. Omri made up his mind. When the dog’s head was turned away from the fire, Omri shouted:

  “Drop it! Drop it now!”

  For a split second the teeth tightened and Omri thought his last moment had come. But then, quite gently, the dog bent its head and laid Omri on the ground.

  He lay there, his heart nearly bursting out of his ribs. There was slobber all over his torso, and bruises wherever the teeth had been. He felt himself gingerly, while the dog sniffed at him, but somehow respectfully now.

  It’s a dog, thought Omri. That’s all it is. Just a stupid old dog.

  He got up slowly, his eyes on the dog. He noticed it was white all over, and of a breed he had never seen before. It backed away, whining softly.

  “Get lost!” Omri shouted commandingly. “Push off! Scram!”

  The dog’s hair suddenly bristled and Omri thought he had made the worst mistake of his life. But then it turned, tail between legs, and slithered under the nearest corn-husk curtain, yelping with fear.

  Omri stood near the fire, dry-mouthed, shaking, and tried to recover himself. He knew he should get back straight away to Little Bull’s compartment, but he didn’t know which one it was and for him it was quite a long walk, a walk frought with danger all the way. Besides, the smell of stew, and the warmth of the fire, held him as long as he felt weak from his scare.

  Just then he became aware of a movement. He turned his head sharply, and saw that someone was watching him.

  She was sitting on the other side of the fire. An old, old woman. The reason he hadn’t seen her before was because part of the fire with its drifting smoke was between them, and she was quite still, a dark, hunched figure with a ladle in one hand and a wooden bowl in the other, just watching him through the smoke.