The Indian raised the paddle. Water ran down the edge of the blade, dripping like quicksilver into the water. ‘Yes, Girl Cat?’
‘When you said the chief was near, how near did you mean?’
Tecumseh smiled. ‘Two days upstream.’
Maclean wasn’t going to like that; no, not one little bit.
The fireworks began at dawn when Maclean realized that we were still heading up the Frederica River with no sign of nearing an Indian settlement.
‘Put us ashore!’ he bellowed at Killbuck. ‘I’m taking the girl back right now!’
Killbuck continued to paddle as if nothing was happening.
‘Tecumseh, I’m warning you!’ shouted Maclean across the water. ‘You take me to the Courageous or you and your people will suffer the consequences!’
The young leader’s face remained impassive: he too was temporarily deaf.
Maclean then turned his attention to me. ‘You little witch! I’ll kill you when I lay my hands on you.’
Taking a leaf out of my hosts’ book, I feigned inscrutable composure – something that was much easier to do knowing there was a safe stretch of water between us. This drove Maclean over the edge. He lunged for the paddle and tried to wrestle it from Killbuck. All he received in return was a stunning blow to his head which knocked him back. He lay flat in the bottom of the boat, mouth still gaping at the shock that anyone might stand up to him.
Tecumseh said something to his sister. She laughed.
‘Why are you laughing?’ I asked, wondering if I could risk making conversation.
Kanawha sought for the words to translate. ‘Brother say, “What a peaceful morning now we enjoy.”’
I smiled to myself. Yes, peace at last.
Maclean sat up some minutes after the tussle clutching his head, but he must have decided his best course of action was to bide his time. I could feel his gaze like the heat of a fire on the back of my neck. He blamed me for this abduction, which was wonderfully ironic if you think about it. Despite worrying about my own fate, it was pleasant to reflect that he was getting a taste of his own medicine.
The day passed slowly as the three canoes made their way upstream, leaving arrow-shaped wakes as we plunged into the heart of this mysterious world. I passed the time gazing at the banks, trying to understand what I was seeing. I knew we were on the edge of a vast land, still barely known to white men. The forest seemed to stretch for ever; there were no landmarks that I could discern, no taverns or milestones, every stroke of the paddle taking me farther from home. How did the Indians find their way?
Kanawha had been watching me and interpreted my interest in line with her own.
‘There, good hunting,’ she said, pointing to a tangle of trees. ‘Weleetka. River good to fish. A happy place.’
I nodded. It felt the polite thing to do, as one would when a gentleman shows you the features of his estate. ‘Very . . . er . . . pleasant. Does it belong to your family?’
She shrugged. ‘Yes, that is what white men say. They give us rolls of paper saying ours but then return and take it away. I do not understand how it is ours if it is theirs also.’
I frowned. ‘But if the land is yours, by law they can’t take it. You should throw them out.’
Tecumseh, who had been listening to our conversation, nodded. ‘You are wise girl, Cat. You should be Indian.’
I felt a hand pull at my pigtail: it was Kanawha playing with my ginger hair, perhaps checking it was real. Her gesture reminded me that I was still dressed like a boy and no longer needed to keep up the disguise.
‘Can I borrow a comb?’ I asked.
She felt in her pouch and pulled one out. ‘I do it.’
Tugging off the string that had confined my hair, she let it fall free in straggling locks. She lifted an end and sniffed.
‘What is on it?’
‘A kind of grease – the sailors use it to keep their hair back.’ Maclean always insisted that I kept it under control so that no girly locks escaped.
‘Smells like whale.’
‘Probably is.’
‘Yuck.’
It did little for my self-esteem to be repulsive to people I had thought of as savages until a few hours ago. The canoe lay low in the water. The answer was obvious.
‘Excuse me a moment.’
I dipped my head into the river, making the canoe lurch. Kanawha shrieked and Tecumseh pulled me back.
‘You spill us out,’ he scolded. ‘Sit still. We stop soon.’
With cold water dripping down my neck, I watched as Tecumseh angled the canoe to the shore. We reached the little beach before the other boats. Kanawha skipped out, beckoning me to follow.
‘Quick,’ she called, ‘before Mac Clan gets here. We go wash. Brothers cook breakfast.’
I ran after her. She led me some way into the trees until we reached a little stream that fed into a stony pool. It was icy cold but I didn’t care. Stripping off my filthy sailor’s clothes, I plunged in. Kanawha dug in her pouch and threw me a bar of rough soap.
‘Come in: the water’s lovely,’ I lied, splashing her.
Laughing, she shook her head and backed away.
Once I had seen to myself, I turned my attention to my clothes. Rubbing with soap and beating them on the stones, I soon had them reasonably clean. The only problem now was that they were soaking wet. I began reluctantly to clamber back into them, shuddering at the unpleasant feel of wet cloth on my skin.
‘No, no. You die of cold,’ said Kanwaha seriously. ‘Wait here.’
She disappeared and after ten shivering minutes she returned from the camp bearing a pile of clothes. ‘These are mine. They fit you.’
The folded garments smelt a little of fish but were soft and dry. I pulled on a long green cotton blouse with a wide cape collar edged with silver coin brooches, somewhat like a gypsy’s shawl. The garment fell to my knees and was belted with a cloth appliqué tie, decorated with beads. I then stepped into a pair of black buckskin leggings edged with red. They felt comfortable and warm – so much better than petticoats or the ragged trousers I’d been wearing. Proud of my colourful new clothes, I held out my arms.
‘How do I look?’
Kanawha covered her mouth with her hand to laugh. ‘You are like Indian maid now.’ She took the comb out and attacked the tangles in my hair. ‘Now I plait.’
By the time she had finished I was completely transformed into a pale-skinned, red-haired Indian with hair bound back by a beaded ribbon.
‘Cat of the Cat Clan,’ she dubbed me, tapping my tattoo, which peeped out of the scooped neck of my tunic.
I bowed. ‘Greetings, Kanawha of the Wind Clan,’ I said formally.
‘Breakfast?’ she suggested.
‘Race you?’
And with shrieks of laughter we bounded through the trees like two deer with Spring fever.
She won of course.
*
Back on the river, I was enjoying being a passenger. My fate had been placed in the hands of others and I could do nothing. Accepting this, I let go of the fear that had burdened me for so long. Every hour Maclean spent trying to get me back gave Frank a chance to prove himself. I had achieved what I intended and it no longer mattered what became of me. I had no sense that these particular Creeks were planning to do any of the terrible things I’d read about. If anything, they were going out of their way to be friendly. All in all, for someone adrift in an alien land, I judged I wasn’t doing too badly.
Kanawha passed the time in the boat telling me stories of her people. Every sight and sound seemed to cue another legend, full of the creatures and scenery of this country. She told me how the Indians believed that the land was created by Crawfish, who stirred up the bottom of the sea so that mud came to the surface. Next, Buzzard flapped his wings and made it dry, forming hills and valleys. Then came Light, creeping at first into the world thanks to Star. Moon soon followed and finally Sun. When a drop of blood fell to earth, the first people sprang up in that
place. That was certainly something I’d never heard mentioned in church on Sundays, but then my parish priest had told me we came from a garden, shaped by God from the dust, His breath in our bodies, so perhaps our beliefs were not so very different after all.
Sitting silently in the canoe as we travelled further into the unknown, drinking in story after story, I felt that Kanawha’s words were spinning a magic spell around me. The stories fitted this world, slipping into place like a foot into a well-worn shoe. My old life seemed so far away, as unreal now as this country had been to me when I’d heard travellers’ tales in London. Nothing that mattered to me there made any sense here. What was Drury Lane to a girl who knew nothing of plays and acting? Would Kanawha not find the idea more alien than any of her legends were to me?
As the riverbanks flowed by, Kanawha told yet more stories about how her people had learnt to hunt, to grow corn, and how they were taught to live in balance with the world they knew.
Until the white men.
When they came, many of her people were killed by the pox until the Indians were weakened, unable to hold on to what was theirs. Now they were continually being made to move on, dwindling into the woods or going west.
I couldn’t help feeling ashamed of my skin as she spoke. To her, we were the wily tricksters who bully when strong, lie when weak.
‘You must hate us,’ I commented after she had told me of yet another betrayal by my kind.
Kanawha looked surprised at the suggestion. ‘It is . . . complicated. Some of us have married with white people. We learn to speak your tongue.’
‘But we hate those that kill, lie and steal,’ Tecumseh butted in from the other end of the canoe.
I gulped: had he been thinking of my attempt to liberate a canoe from their possession?
‘Now there are so few of us, some hunt among other tribes in the mourning wars,’ he continued.
‘What are mourning wars?’
‘When we lose our brothers we go and seek new blood. We capture prisoners to take their place, people to become one of us.’ He whistled over to his brother in the third canoe, summoning him alongside. ‘Tell Girl Cat how many you brought back last time you went hunting.’
The hard-shelled warrior Little Turtle smiled at me and held up five fingers, mistaking my shocked expression for admiration. ‘Two got away,’ he admitted with a modest shrug. ‘We let them go – they were not worthy.’
My throat was strangely dry. ‘And what if the prisoners don’t want to join your clan?’
‘They have no choice,’ Little Turtle said dismissively as if this was not a consideration.
‘I see.’
I turned back to Tecumseh and saw that he was looking at me with particular intent. Suddenly Kanawha’s gifts of clothes bore another, very disconcerting meaning.
‘But I suppose it’s just other Indians who you recruit, isn’t it?’ My voice was almost a squeak.
Tecumseh shook his head. I think he was laughing at me. ‘No, if someone is meant to be one of us, it does not matter where they come from. Our leader, Chief McGillivray, had a Scottish father, his mother was half French. Only a quarter of his blood is Wind Clan. He is well chosen to be our chief in these times, do you not think, when our future depends on how we deal with strangers?’
‘Er, yes, I suppose,’ I muttered, wondering where this was leading.
‘And with hair like yours, you could be one of his children.’
I kept quiet, thinking no answer was safest.
Kanawha leant forward and tied a shell necklace around my throat. A moment before it would have been welcome; now I felt unsettlingly like a favourite pet being pampered. I fingered the tiny shells, completely at a loss as to what I should do.
‘You said captives have no choice. What did you mean exactly?’ I asked Little Turtle.
The warrior steered skilfully around a rock poking out of the water like a shark’s fin and rejoined us on the far side.
‘Captives are either killed, enslaved, or adopted,’ he replied.
‘And how do you decide?’
‘The clan decides. It depends what we need.’
‘And at the moment, what do you need?’
Little Turtle grinned. ‘I do not know. We have been away long time.’
‘So have I,’ I muttered, thinking of the months that had passed since I had been at home among the theatre people who knew me. I missed Drury Lane, the streets around Covent Garden, the sense of belonging somewhere. I had never seriously considered that I might not return; now this truth struck me like a slap to the face. I had leapt out of the frying pan, and now found myself in the fire.
ACT IV
SCENE 1 – WIND CLAN
Towards dusk at the end of the second day, we paddled up to a landing stage and disembarked. Scores of other boats were tied to the wooden jetty, bumping gently into the supports as the river current tried to entice them away. Racks of nets were stretched out to dry, the rank smell of fish powerful on the night breeze. Tube-shaped fish traps made from hoops covered in hide were stacked neatly on the quayside. A hundred yards or so away, lights twinkled among the trees.
‘Home, Chickamauga,’ said Kanawha, shouldering her bundle. ‘Come.’
She led me up a well-trodden path away from the clouds of little insects that hummed on the margins of the river. Having nothing to carry, I took a bag of crabs from Tecumseh and followed. The creatures were still alive, squirming desperately in the sack as if they knew their days were numbered. Kanawha had promised me a crab stew fit for kings, a speciality of her grandmother, so I had a vested interest in lending a hand. She had already reached the trees. I sped up to catch her as Killbuck’s canoe was now at the mooring. I could hear Maclean cursing and complaining. He was intending to have the business settled immediately – this night or never, as he’d declared to me only that morning. Even though the Courageous would probably have sailed by now, Maclean pinned his hopes on returning to the nearest seaport and finding a trading schooner to take us to the West Indies to catch up with it.
I had argued with him, telling him he wasn’t thinking straight. The chances were that it was already too late for him to restart the charade of me being his cabin boy. He’d not taken my cool reasoning well and vowed that I was going with him or going to hell.
That’s what he thought.
Kanawha took my arm and pulled me through a rickety gate and into a kitchen garden. At the far end of the path was a little cottage built from wood and thatched with reeds. I was surprised. I did not know what I was expecting – tents or caves even, not this: this looked so familiar. I suppose I had never imagined the Indians’ home, thinking they were permanently on the move, huntsmen not farmers. Indian furs were famous and much sought after in the fashionable world so I had assumed that the trappers lived wandering lives on the trail of big game. My education had clearly been faulty: there was more to Indian life than beaver skins, as proved by the fields of newly sown crops that surrounded the village.
‘Like it?’ Kanawha asked hopefully, pointing to the cottage. ‘It is Grandmother’s house.’
‘Yes, I like it.’
As Kanawha ran down the path, a huge dog burst from round the back and rushed to her, leaping up with both paws on her shoulders, smothering her face with licks. To my nervous eyes, the beast looked more wolf than dog. She danced with him for a moment, before taking his collar.
Kanawha said something in her language, then repeated it for my benefit in English. ‘Yopo, this is Cat. Enhesse. Friend.’
I approached gingerly.
‘Hold out your hand so he can smell you,’ Kanawha ordered.
I did as I was told, trying not to flinch back as the great hound sniffed my scent.
‘There, he know you are friend now.’ Kanawha let go of his collar and bounded to the front door. ‘Puse! Puse! Estonko!’
A high shriek, like the sound made when the fox gets in the henhouse, echoed from the hut. Decked in a red tiered dress with colourful ap
pliqué edging and a profusion of bead necklaces, a tiny woman rushed on to the porch, arms outstretched.
‘Kanawha, heres ce!’
The little lady folded her granddaughter in a hug, then held her out at arm’s length, checking her over to make sure all was well. Her white hair hung in two thin plaits either side of her beaming face. With skin as wrinkled as dried prunes and only a few teeth remaining, she looked to me at least a hundred years old. Kanawha whispered something then nudged her grandmother to look in my direction. Not knowing what to do, I curtseyed when I saw the old lady’s dark eyes were upon me. This provoked a peal of laughter that would have cracked the bells of St Paul’s.
‘Come,’ she chuckled. ‘Welcome.’ As I moved within reach, she clutched my forearm, pinching the skin. Turning to Kanawha, she spoke rapidly in her own tongue.
‘My puse does not speak many words in your language,’ Kanawha explained. ‘She thinks you look too pale – like a ghost.’
I shook my head, meeting the woman’s gaze. ‘I’m no ghost, Grandmother.’
With a cluck of her tongue, she patted my cheek hard and beckoned me to follow her into the house. I guessed this meant she was now convinced I was flesh and blood.
The house was furnished simply – table, chairs, a low bed with a quilted cover – but everything was spotless and smelt of fresh herbs. It was the first comfortable place I had been in since Boxton and I could not help sighing with relief as I sank into a chair – before immediately leaping to my feet again as a cat yowled and shot away. The old lady cackled with laughter as she pushed me back down. Kanawha was already putting a cauldron of water on the hearth – she had been serious about her promise of stew. The two Creek women chattered away in their own language and, from the occasional glances thrown in my direction, I guessed that my predicament formed part of the general catch-up. The cat, by now recovered from her shock, leapt lightly on to my lap and I stroked her, soothing both herself and me. If I’d learnt anything it was to grab my peaceful moments when and where I could.
‘Come, eat,’ said the old lady.
Cat-O'nine Tails Page 14
