by Laura Frantz
What of Tempe?
They should have been at Harrod’s by now. Safely behind pickets. Having her wound dressed. Searching for a preacher.
The line lurched to a halt. All turned for an unhindered look, leaving Sion time to account for his party, Lucian at the column’s tail. Unbound, he was carrying Tempe’s packsaddle.
Cornelius had stumbled and halted the march. Though Sion understood little of what was said by his captors, one word wove a frequent pattern. Squaw. The Indians had taken to calling Cornelius that, belittling him for some grievance or another.
One warrior took a plundered canteen and approached Sion first, offering him a drink. They’d had little water. Though he was parched with thirst, he shook his head, gesturing to Nate and Cornelius and the others just beyond. Hands bound, Cornelius drank from the canteen the warrior held. And then, in a stunning display of impertinence, he spat a mouthful of water back at his captor.
The Indian’s flintlike expression hardened. In one agile, unremorseful move, he unsheathed his scalping knife and drove it hard into Cornelius’s middle before sending him over the cliff’s edge. The look of surprise and horror on Cornelius’s face as he fell was never to be forgotten.
Sion shut his eyes. Harper’s death, every detail, was resurrected in Cornelius’s last rash act. This had been a brother’s attempted revenge. Final retribution. But oh, at what a cost.
There was a brief pause before their tramp resumed, the gaping hole in the column that marked Cornelius’s place carrying a warning to any who dared trespass on an Indian’s pride.
They descended into the dense shade of a shriveled creek bed with water enough to hide their passing. The mossy stones were slick and sharp, the rushing water blessedly cool. Twilight shadows brought on the wink of fireflies. The sting of insects ebbed. The captives were herded into a grassy meadow near a spring that gurgled and tumbled over high rocks.
Nate ended up near Sion, but the axemen and Lucian were kept separate. The Indians seemed to shed some of their hostility and hurry, talking among themselves while a few warriors stood guard.
“By heaven, how long d’ye think they’ll bedevil us?”
A stitch of sympathy pierced Sion’s stupor at Nate’s worn question. Sion raised his gaze to the mountain they’d climbed over, their rocky trek marred by thirst and Cornelius’s death. Buzzards were already circling, denying Harper’s brother a proper burial. The wolves would come next.
With difficulty he said, “We’ll soon see the Chickamauga towns if my instinct’s right.”
Nate hissed a sigh. “Why don’t they just scalp us and get it over with?”
“Don’t you recollect what we heard at Fort Henry? One white man’s life is worth a hundred horses. That’s what we’ll gain them in trade goods.”
“Horses be hanged. They mean to burn us alive, I reckon, if my instinct’s right.”
Sion didn’t doubt it, though he was most mired by Tempe’s whereabouts. Had Raven spared her? Taken her the other direction with the horses when the trail forked? He wasn’t sure. There’d been too many Indians, and the warrior trailing him was bent on keeping him facing forward as if certain he posed a threat.
“Reckon little missy’s still with us?”
Sion stared at him. Betimes Nate had an uncanny ability to read his thoughts. “I pray so.” He could barely get the words out.
A few of the warriors began emptying Tempe’s packsaddle. Watching, Sion simmered. They were making a small festival of her belongings, one holding up a pair of stockings and garters, another her indigo dress. Laughing and murmuring, they divided the spoils—comb, hair ties, her Psalms and sewing kit. The hoecake Esther had packed was devoured. Had it only been yesterday they’d left Boone’s?
A blue jay shrilled. The Indians’ voices grew muted as exhaustion overtook him. Sion felt bewildered at his missing compass and rifle, the familiar, reassuring weight of powder horn and shot pouch. The sun was no longer a reliable guide. It slipped out of sight behind a vast wall of dark forest that had no end. He felt a terrible solitude, a keen lonesomeness borne of Tempe’s loss.
Nate was whispering again. “I heard tell of two of them red men. Five Killer is leadin’ and Big Jim is rear guard, all the worse for us.”
“The both of them were in Powell Valley.”
“Aye. The Boone massacre. That’s what nettles me so.”
Sion looked down at his bound hands. A bold notion leapt into his head, but the rawhide tugs rubbing his wrists raw mocked him. “I’m going to try to make a run for it.”
Nate ran a hand over a week’s growth of whiskers. “I’ll wager you and Lucian have half a chance. Me and Spencer and Hascal . . .” Resignation tinted his tone. “For all their axe wieldin’, them boys ain’t sharp-witted. And I’m slow as molasses in January. I don’t have any hankerin’ to join poor Cornelius, but it was over right quick, I’ll give you that.”
Quick and merciless. Cornelius, volatile as a powder keg, had met his match. Nate’s danger lay in the fact that he was old and he was slow.
“I ain’t sure where he ended up,” Nate said, mournful. “But I won’t rest easy if I don’t know for certain if I’ll see you again.”
“I aim to run and get my hands on a gun and free you.”
Nate’s eyes were a glittering green. “I ain’t talkin’ about the here and now but the hereafter.”
Sion’s chest knotted. Wanting to offer some reassurance, if only for Nate, he spoke the first verse that flashed to mind. “‘For God so loved the world, that He gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’”
Wonder washed Nate’s face, but it was short-lived. As if aggravated by their low talk, a warrior came from behind and yanked Sion to his feet. Shoving him forward, the Indian herded him toward a sapling, where he was tied with leatherwood bark for the long, uncertain night.
The longhunters would come as soon as the fall hunting was better and the rivers easier to ford, the wilderness having spent itself on a long, lush summer. But not one soul did Tempe see as she sped south as if pulled by some invisible string. When she came upon a seam of brightly colored clay and a rock besmeared with war paint, her heart nearly tore in two. Bright sky blue. Pale green and royal purple. The colors of the moonbow. Sometimes a chief would leave his own personal sign, often blood red.
Another war party had been this way, mixing their colors here, perhaps the same warriors who had ambushed them. She moved on only to draw up short.
Tromping in a thicket a few yards away was a wild hog, its button eyes menacing. She tensed, aware of her empty saddle holster. With a shudder she nudged the mare’s flanks with her heels, the hog’s fearsome tusks firmly in mind. If she but had a gun . . .
Her stomach growled an empty protest. Come October there would be grapes and pawpaws and nuts. Persimmons abounded but needed a hard frost before sweetening. She yanked her thoughts from her hunger to more important matters.
Her mare was showing signs of foundering. Had Dulcey eaten too much cane? A great burning was rippling up and down Tempe’s leg where the wound was chafing with her constant movement. Disheartened, she murmured a prayer and pressed on, paying attention to the scant sign the war party had left. She refused to sink with panic when she came to a fork in the trail and the Indians seemed to have divided.
Wounded and without a gun and provisions as she was, what hope did she have of overtaking them? Raven had left her the mare at least, but her frantic flight courted calamity and every sinkhole in sight. If she reached home it would be naught but a miracle, sure as their Lord walked on water.
Pa, please . . .
She formed an impassioned plea long before she saw the first watery bend of the Shawnee and his rockhouse home. Would he listen? Go with her?
She remembered Sion’s calculations from days past. Boone’s was thirty leagues, some ninety miles, from the falls and inn. She’d covered half that the day of the attack and was now on th
e last leg of the journey.
She’d ridden most of the night by the light of the moon, till her head lolled on her chest and she’d fallen to the ground, sleeping in the grass where she lay. She’d come awake to the mare crunching cane along a creek.
Now, with the cobwebs clearing from her head, she revisited every secreted memory of Sion. The dark tilt of his hat. The rich timbre of his words as he’d read Herrick and the Psalms in her pain-clouded daze. The drop of her stomach when he looked at her. His calm confidence, be it facing a swollen river or the passing of a war party. The dimpled impressions in his large hands from countless lead balls. The tender way he spoke her name. His uncommon memory for laying off the land. His kiss. She dwelt on the details, branding them into memory till she knew them by heart.
Landmarks, beloved and familiar, began to crop up as if calling her name. A sulphur spring. A trammeled deer path. The biggest elm she’d ever seen, bigger even than the divine elm at Boonesborough, its roots matted with moss and drooping daisies. The music of the river and a horseshoe-shaped boulder left her eyes smarting.
She’d not been home since the flax harvest. Now mid-August, the river was at its most fordable. She chose the narrowest place, the sun bedazzling the water and blinding her. She shut her senses to the daylilies and the trumpet vine and the excited warble of birds. Nothing could slow her, distract her.
Abandoning Dulcey, pushing past her pain, she started up the embankment beyond the fording place, senses quickened to the smell of a chimney fire or any flash of movement among the trees ahead. But all that met her ears was the dull roar of the falls as her eyes adjusted to the denseness of her own beloved woods. She would see Pa as soon as she could, but first . . .
Was the inn still standing?
30
The miseries of that hour cannot well be described.
—COLONEL ROBERT PATTERSON
They were running now on this third day as if trying to hasten past some unseen enemy. A full-out, leg-shattering sprint. Nate had been put at the rear of the column, the chain carriers in the middle, while Sion maintained his position behind Five Killer. He wasn’t sure about Lucian. Tethered by the neck and wrists, this time in front, Sion ran behind the young chieftain, every coppery feature engraved on his conscience.
Five Killer wore his hair long, his hawk feathers fluttering in the fickle breeze. Gleaming with bear grease, he wore only loincloth and moccasins, as unencumbered as Sion felt weighted by shirt and leggings. Bereft of his own weapons, he longed to pluck Five Killer’s British-made tomahawk and scalping knife from his belt.
A nameless river flowed to their right between steep bluffs that took them up and down deer trails, testing their agility and endurance. He had eaten and slept little, tied to the sapling as he’d been, thoughts ricocheting between Tempe and his plan of escape.
Methodically, he’d made a study of his captors, fifteen all told. All formidable and easily riled. Five Killer had that air of authority he’d witnessed in Daniel Boone and Ben Logan while the other warriors were a hodgepodge of features and habits. His own guard, a bowlegged, gaunt giant, seemed to take peculiar pleasure in punching Sion with the muzzle of his gun when Sion made a move not to his liking. Beneath his linen shirt were myriad welts and bruises, but the fate of James hung squarely in his mind, giving him no cause to complain. Other than Tempe, it was Nate Sion was most worried about.
The grit of dust clogged his throat, the river an ongoing temptation. If they turned him loose he would drink it dry. All this movement left him strangely exhilarated and depleted at once, a throbbing mass of tension and vexation. At another vicious jab to the back, he wanted to crush his guard with his bare hands. Love thine enemy was the farthest thing from his mind.
At noon they halted in a valley tinged russet, a prelude to fall. Hascal fell to the ground, face red as an orchard apple. Spencer, so winded he was choking, collapsed against a shagbark hickory. And Nate . . .
Sion looked back expectantly. Scoured every tree and bush and moving figure. A great chasm began to open up inside him. Tiny pinpricks of panic told him searching was in vain. Nate was not at the end of the column.
Nate was gone.
Something in Tempe’s spirit gave a warning. Were there warriors here? In these very trees? She longed to still the tumult of the falls and just listen. Sion had done that well, standing so still he seemed made of rock, so attuned to all that was around him she felt he sensed the slither of a snake across the ground. With the falls turning her deaf, she relied on sight alone.
Scrambling up the bank toward home, she favored her gimp leg and hand, more mindful than ever of Russell’s limp. A crushing longing stole over her to be reunited with the ones she loved. Sion foremost. Ma and Pa. Russell and Paige. Even Nate and Lucian and Esther had found a home in her needy heart.
The ground was dry, rocks and brush biting into her good hand as she climbed upward, staying off the familiar path. The slant of the sun foretold noon, but no savory odors carried on the humid air, no ring of axe or anvil. The closer she drew, the more she was aware of nothingness. Life carried a palpable rhythm, and she felt its absence even before she gained flat ground and a break in the trees.
There in the clearing sat the Moonbow Inn, burnt to a dusting of gray ashes, a few heavy timbers lying partially charred. Gone was the dogtrot and barn-shed. Only the springhouse and cabin chimneys, made of river rock, still stood.
Her heart lurched. She gave a strangled cry. “Nay . . . nay!”
Beyond the gaping emptiness spread the trammeled, blackened corn and flax fields. The ash hopper in the yard was tumbled, water troughs overturned, fences down.
The noise of the falls, so soothing before, turned mournful. She picked her way through the rubble, craving something recognizable. Save for a few nails of Russell’s making, the destruction was complete.
Next she sought mounds of earth. Gravesites. Over and over the ground she walked till she was convinced her people weren’t here. Hadn’t been burnt or buried.
Thoughts of Pa crowded in, and then her everlasting, choking need of Sion cut through her grief. She’d tarried too long here, but in her shock and dismay at finding her home in ruins, she’d forgotten her empty belly and slow-to-heal wounds. It was Pa she needed. Only Pa could help her.
Retrieving Dulcey, she made straight for the rockhouse. The trail beneath her was as known as her own name, but her whole world was off center, the inn—her internal compass—as shattered as the land stealer in her pocket.
Lord, be You here?
The Almighty seemed far away, unmoved by wounds and war, hatred and heartache. Her earthly father, holed up in a cave, imprisoned by his own misdeeds, might be missing too. And though she wanted to shout and call to him and end the agony of not knowing, his name knotted in her throat till she couldn’t breathe.
Turning loose Dulcey, she tramped through brush and around boulders to reach the rockhouse, overcome when she heard the hiss of the ladder as it left the ledge and plummeted to the ground.
By the time she reached the top, great silent sobs tore at her. Glad she was of Pa’s bearish embrace, smothering her tears. Amazement filled her at the nudge of a wet nose. Smokey stood wagging her tail, clearly at home in their lofty perch. Pa had likely hoisted her by rope.
“I wasn’t sure what became of you.” Pa held her tight, the fury of her cut lip no longer between them. “I could hardly live knowing I’d sent you away so sorry-like. Do you forgive me?”
She nodded, moving past what seemed of small consequence. “I saw the inn—what’s left of it. Where’s Ma and Russell? Paige?”
“Safe on the Watauga, if there’s anywhere safe.” He drew her to the back of the rockhouse. “A war party of Cherokee and Shawnee set fire to the place a fortnight after you left. Russell refused to repair any British guns and stood his ground like a proud Patriot. He threw the muskets in the river. Over the falls.” There was pride in his voice, a hard-won admiration. “The Chickamauga wasted no time i
n burning down the inn. I hid your ma and Russell and Paige behind the falls till I could see them safely through the Gap.”
“Yet you came back.”
“If I’d gone with them, it would have been to a hangman’s noose. I had no wish to leave you besides.”
She drew apart from him. She needed to speak of Sion but hardly knew where to begin. Kneeling, she hugged Smokey next, glad for the feel of the dog’s rough tongue on her tear-wet cheek.
“What’s with the surveyors?” He was staring at her splinted hand, a dozen questions in his eyes. “They didn’t abandon you in the midst of the trouble?”
“Nay. We were ambushed a few days ago.” The suddenness of it haunted. “Sion Morgan and the others were taken south. Raven was with the war party—”
“Raven? He’d been with you, I thought.”
“Till the caves, aye.” She stood and drew up her skirt to reveal the gash beneath. “We went exploring, Sion, Raven, and I. There was a rock slide. Raven disappeared.” She paused in the phrasing, certain he’d spared her in the ensuing ambush. “And then without warning, he was with Five Killer and the Chickamauga between Boone’s and Harrod’s.”
“You reached the settlements? They’re still standing?”
“Barely. They’re all low on provisions.” She lowered her skirt. “A colonel and his regiment came through but didn’t stay long.”
“With the war blazing in the East, George Washington can ill afford the loan of men.” He began reviving a fire from a few scant coals. “Your leg needs dressing. I’ll see to your hand next.”
“There’s no time. We have to find Sion, his men—”
Defiance twisted his face. “The very surveyors who work for the Loyal?”
“Pa! They’re good as dead if we don’t go after them. You know the Indians hate surveyors—”
“Aye. But ’tis like asking me to aid the one who wronged me. The one I killed.”
