Wild Yearning

by Penelope Williamson

  Suddenly another Indian had stepped abruptly between them. This one was taller and broader than the others and obviously their leader, for one curt word had stopped the fall of the club. Then he’d seized Delia by a fistful of hair, growling a spate of words at her, and though she couldn’t understand him, there was no mistaking his meaning: she was not to be so foolish again. He’d thumped her collarbone with his pointed finger, hard enough to make her cry out. “Lusifee!” he’d said, causing the other Indians to laugh, although there wasn’t a trace of humor on his face.

  Delia, hauled up on her toes, had her face brought up to the man’s broad, naked chest. It was smooth, brown, and hairless. His rank sweat made beads on his greased skin. Oddly, he wore a rosary around his neck. She realized he had been the one with the strange necklace who had tauntingly taken a bite out of her apple. The one who had scalped Nat. Nat…

  “Lusifee,” he said again, poking her a second time and giving her a rough shake before he shoved her down the trail in front of him.

  They’d had only one brief rest after that, when the Indians had paused long enough to unearth a cache of breechclouts and leggings, with which they quickly covered their nakedness before setting off again at a loping jog. It was obvious they feared pursuit and wanted to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the Merrymeeting Settlement.

  Night had almost completely fallen by the time the Indians stopped. They chose as a campsite a small moss-covered clearing with a feeder stream running through it. The women immediately fell on their knees before the creek. Delia thought she had never tasted anything so wonderful as that delicious, icy water. But she was only able to wet her mouth with it before being jerked away from the stream by her hair. The captives’ wrists were again bound and this time they were each tethered to their own Indian, as if they had been allotted like slaves to a master. Delia was tied to the big one with the crucifix around his neck.

  Throughout the interminable day, their captors had been steadily dwindling in numbers, peeling away to disappear into the surrounding forest until only three remained. Now they built a small, almost smokeless fire, and one of the Indians brought out pieces of pemmican and parched corn from a bearskin pouch. Then they did a strange thing—they crossed themselves before they ate, in the Papist manner.

  The men sucked and gnawed on the pemmican and nibbled noisily on the parched corn, laughing and taunting the women who watched them hungrily. All except Elizabeth, who stared straight ahead, seeing nothing.

  “Please,” Sara Kemble finally said in a tiny, hoarse voice. “Aren’t you going to feed us?” But the Indians ignored her.

  Delia studied the man she was bound to, seeing prominent cheekbones, a broad nose with a low bridge, and heavy-lidded, slanting black eyes. Straight black hair, unbound and unadorned, framed his face. From the way the others had all deferred to him she decided he must be some sort of chief. While the other men laughed and grimaced, his face never changed expression. There was an aura of utter cruelty to this man; he was as hard and sharp as the blade of his tomahawk. Although he had saved her earlier, Delia had no doubt he could kill them all on a whim.

  There was something else that made her think she could expect no mercy from this man. From the war club tied to the leather strap across his chest there swung a scalp of yellow hair. Nat’s scalp.

  The Abenaki caught Delia looking at the scalp and lifted it, running his fingers through the bloodstained strands of hair. His lips curled into a tight, evil smile.

  “Ye bloody, murderin’ bastard,” she snarled at him beneath her breath, secure in the knowledge that he couldn’t understand English. He must have picked up the tone, however, for his eyes narrowed and his lips thinned, although he said nothing.

  Delia stared at him, letting her hate show on her face; for the moment she was like Elizabeth, beyond caring what he did to her. For the first time since she had witnessed the slaughter in the logging camp, Delia was free of the need to concentrate all her thoughts on summoning the will to put one foot in front of the other. Now her mind fastened fully onto the horror of Nat’s death and her grief was a sharp, stabbing pain in her heart, raw and heavily laced with guilt. Their last words had been such bitter ones. And she couldn’t bear thinking of Tildy and Meg, who had lost their father so soon after burying their mother.

  At least the girls were safe, she comforted herself. They had to be. She had seen no children’s scalps dangling from any weapons. She offered up a prayer of thanks that all the children had been within the strong, secure walls of the manor house taking lessons from Anne Bishop when the murderous savages had struck.

  When they finished eating, the men passed around a pipe, smoking in silence. Looking at the sharp-boned, dark-skinned face of her captor, Delia was reminded of Ty and a calmness descended over her fevered thoughts. There was no doubt in her mind that Ty had survived the raid and that he was coming after her. It was only a matter of time and she was going to have to work at keeping herself and the others alive until he could find them.

  The tobacco made the men drowsy. The night darkened and grew colder. Delia glanced at Elizabeth, hoping she had fallen asleep, but the girl still stared unseeingly at the shadowy trees beyond the flickering firelight.

  Suddenly Sara Kemble began to rock back and forth, whining softly to herself. “I shouldn’t be here. It’s all Obadiah’s fault. He sent me to deliver that chair to Mrs. Sewall. I didn’t want to go.” Sara’s captor eyed her askance and his fist tightened around his club. But Sara continued to moan, oblivious. “I never liked Nancy Sewall. I’m glad she was scalped. Glad, do you hear? But I shouldn’t be here. It’s Obadiah’s—”

  “Shut up!” Delia hissed at her. “Do you want a tomahawk buried in your skull?”

  Sara fastened beady, malicious eyes on Delia’s face. “They killed your Nat. Killed and scalped him and it serves him right for marrying you. I told him you were nothing but a grog shop tart. But he didn’t listen to me. Oh, no. I’ll wager he’s sorry now.”

  Delia set her teeth on a scream of rage and looked away. But the anger immediately gave way to an almost overwhelming desire to throw herself down and sob and beat the ground with her fists. Oh, Nat … Nat…

  Sara’s outburst had caused her pockmarked captor to burst into a low singsong chant. Suddenly he jerked to his feet and began to dance, enacting a pantomime of that morning’s raid. He gestured at the other two, inviting them to join him, but although they nodded and punctuated his chants with high-pitched whoops, they remained stretched out lazily before the fire.

  He ended the dance by leaping high, stabbing the air with his war club. Throwing back his head, he cupped his hands around his mouth and gave voice to the sharp, prolonged wail of the wolf.

  He killed Sara Kemble the next morning.

  They had set out just before dawn, turning in the direction of the Kennebec. At the riverbank the Indians uncovered a large six-man, birchbark canoe that had been hidden in the brush, camouflaged by spruce boughs.

  Sara plopped down on a boulder by the water’s edge and refused to get into the canoe. “I’m not going, thank you. It could tip over. I could drown.” She said it politely, the way one would turn down a second cup of tea.

  Snarling in anger, her captor lashed at her with the end of her leash, but it had no effect. “No, no, no,” she said, shaking her head like a stubborn child. “I’m not doing it and you can’t make me.”

  Delia watched as rage darkened the Indian’s scarred face. She started to climb out of the canoe, thinking she could coax some sense into Sara, when she was jerked back by the end of her tether. She landed with a rattling jar, one of the thwarts jabbing into her hip. The bright blue sky above wavered and dimmed as tears of pain filled her eyes…

  Elizabeth screamed, a thin, piercing sound that sent a pair of ducks flapping across the water. The scream was followed by a horrible gurgling sound coming from the bank. Delia scrambled to her knees, wrapping her hand around Elizabeth’s mouth, cutti
ng off a second scream and pressing tight enough to leave a bruise. “Sssh, Lizzie, it’s all right,” she whispered softly, turning the girl’s head away from the gruesome sight on the shore. “Don’t scream. It’s all right now.”

  The pocked-face Indian got into the canoe, carrying Sara’s blood-splattered mobcap and her faded, graying brown hair. Elizabeth was crying hysterically beneath Delia’s hand.

  Delia’s captor yanked her back by the hair, tearing her hand from Elizabeth’s mouth and releasing an outpouring of sobs, like pulling a plug from a dam. “Don’t kill her!” Delia screamed, for the girl’s cries sounded frighteningly loud, shattering the peace of the spruce-lined river.

  The big Indian’s fingers bit into Delia’s arm as he pulled her away, shoving her down into the bow of the canoe with his hard, greasy body. He barked a command at her, but Delia struggled against him, lashing out with her feet and fists, sure that if she didn’t stop Elizabeth’s crying, the girl’s captor would kill her with one blow from his tomahawk.

  Delia’s nails raked through the soft flesh of the Indian’s cheek. He hissed at her and sent her reeling from a vicious blow across her face. For a moment the world grayed and dimmed, then she struggled upright again. But Elizabeth had at last stopped the sobs on her own, by pressing her fist into her mouth.

  Putting the back of her wrist to her bleeding lip, Delia glared at the man who had struck her. Never, never had she felt such hate. “I spit on ye, ye bloody bastard, ye murderin’ savage, ye…”

  His hand lashed out, encircling her throat and jerking her head up. He brought his face close to hers. The cuts her nails had made on his cheek dripped bright red blood. “Understand this,” he said in perfect, unaccented English. “Savage I might be, but I am no bastard. My parents were married at my birth. And my people call me the Dreamer, although you will call me master.”

  Delia set her teeth on the retort that wanted to fly out of her mouth. The pressure of the hand against her Adam’s apple increased, cutting off her air.

  He stared at her for a long, long moment, until Delia’s vision began to blacken, then he let go of her throat and, picking up a paddle, pushed the canoe out into the current. “Come, lusifee,” he said, while Delia struggled to keep from gasping as the air rushed back into her lungs. “Let us see if you can show the same spirit when it comes time to run the gauntlet.”

  The gauntlet.

  Delia hoped the terror she felt didn’t show on her face. To prove she was unaffected by his words, she forced a nonchalant smile. “My name is Delia,” she croaked.

  The smile had no effect on that impassive face. “You have no name now but awakon, ” he finally said. “Slave.”

  Delia’s smile wavered only a little bit. “Then what does lusifee mean?”

  But he merely stared at her, his eyes as cold and as black as a frozen pond.

  They heard the sounds first—whooping, strident cries, the staccato beat of drums, the baying of dogs. The smell came next—a nauseous odor of putrefying fish. Sight came last—a clearing beside the shores of a great, silver-plated lake palisaded by majestic dark blue spruce.

  Within the clearing stood a village of longhouses and wigwams, surrounded by a stockade of tree trunks twelve feet high. Around the village lay fields of cornstalks, their dry leaves crackling in the evening breeze. Heaps of alewives, fertilizer for the cornfields, decayed in piles outside the stockade, stinking up the air with an oily, rotting smell. Flames of pine knots flickered in the gray dusk and smoke coiled upward from lodge tops and dozens of small, open fires. The air resounded with the din of shouts and yodels, yapping dogs and throbbing drums.

  The canoe glided onto a gentle shore. At the Dreamer’s sharp command Delia climbed awkwardly, with legs that were stiff and cramped, onto a pebbled beach. Ignoring the man’s fierce glare, she turned to help Elizabeth. Tiny shivers racked the girl’s slender body and her lips were blue with fear. Delia started to comfort her, but the hypocritical words stuck in her throat.

  For she had seen the gauntlet.

  The gates to the stockade were open. Starting from the entrance and stretching to a low wooden platform in the middle of the village wound two parallel lines of men, women, and children. Armed with digging sticks, clubs, and thorny branches, they chanted a haunting ai, ai, ai sound, over and over, to the incessant beat of the drums.

  The Dreamer stopped so abruptly that Delia, who was tethered by a thong to his wrist, almost walked on his heels. A Jesuit priest in black cassock and skirt strode out between the gates, swinging a censer that filled the air with wispy trails of incense. He stopped before the Dreamer. To Delia’s astonishment, the big warrior knelt on the ground at the priest’s feet and bowed his head for the man’s blessing.

  The priest fixed his fanatic blue gaze on the prisoners. He was an extremely thin man, all fleshless bones and pallid skin. His lips were two sharp diagonal slashes beneath a nose that curved like a fish hawk’s beak.

  The Dreamer jerked so hard on Delia’s leash that she had to grasp his arm with her bound hands to keep from falling to her knees. His flesh was marble-hard and slick with grease, and she clung to him, swaying dizzily, before he flung her off him.

  She was almost fainting from fatigue and lack of food. It had been four days since she had eaten, except for a few roots and nuts she had managed to forage for herself and Elizabeth while on the trail. Even above the stink of the alewives, she could smell the savory aroma of roasting meat and she thought she was capable of begging for it on her knees. She had been hungry many times in her life, but never like this.

  The Dreamer barked an order at her in Abenaki. She stared back at him, trying not to show her fear. But fear was a metallic taste in her mouth, like blood.

  “Strip!” the Dreamer barked again, in English this time.

  Delia stared down the long line of Abenaki, ready to lay their clubs and sticks across her bare flesh. The whooping of the men and the strident screeching of the women and children had risen to a crescendo. Some of the women and girls had turtle shell rattles and bear claw bracelets tied to their ankles and knees, and they stomped their feet, shaking the rattles in time to the beat of the drums. A few boys played reed flutes, while others swung long cords of shells in circles over their heads, producing a grating, eerie whine.

  For the first time Delia noticed the scalp poles that encircled the platform, marking the end of the gauntlet. Dozens of scalps —dried, stretched on round hoops, painted and decorated— flapped from the poles in the lake-cooled breeze.

  In the Boston grog shops, Delia had listened to stories about white captives being forced to strip naked and run the gauntlet. Usually they didn’t make the women prisoners run it, she had heard, but sometimes they did. Sometimes…

  The Dreamer’s face appeared suddenly before her, his lips pulled back in a sneer. “Strip, lusifee. Now.”

  A thin, blue-veined hand fell on Delia’s arm. “I suggest you obey,” the French priest said, his words heavily accented, “or he will cut the clothes from your body. And he will not do it gently.”

  God protect me, Delia prayed, and with trembling fingers unlaced her bodice. Her short gown and petticoat had been ripped and stained by the arduous four-day journey, but she had never realized what an armor were a woman’s clothes, even if they were only rags, until she stood naked before the Dreamer’s cold eyes and the mob of screaming, bloodthirsty Abenaki.

  “You!” the Dreamer snarled, pointing a stiff finger at Elizabeth. “Strip.”

  Elizabeth stood unmoving, sunk deep within her well of fear. The Dreamer took a step forward, his knife flashing.

  “No!” Delia grasped his arm, cringing at the cold, greasy feel of his flesh. At the sight of the knife, Elizabeth’s eyes had rolled back in her head and she had crumbled slowly to the ground. “You can’t make her do it,” Delia cried. “Can’t you see she’s with child? It would kill her.”

  He stared at Delia, a look of incredulity on his face. “She runs. Unless you are willin
g to take her place.”

  Delia’s legs began to tremble, but she nodded, swallowing hard. “Aye. I’ll do it in her stead.”

  He stared at her for a long moment. Then he said, almost sadly, “Lusifee. You will not survive it twice.”

  Delia looked down the long double row of club-wielding Abenaki, all screaming for her blood. Her chin came up.

  “I’ve survived my share of beatings,” she boasted, to shore up her wavering courage. “Aye, an’ by experts too. No pack of bloody, ignorant savages’ll defeat Delia McQuaid.”

  The Dreamer grabbed her arm and flung her forward. “Run! Run hard!”

  Delia ran. She pumped her arms and legs so fast the first blows merely glanced off her back. But the Abenaki were more loosely packed toward the middle of the gauntlet and they had more play to swing their clubs. The sticks and cudgels seemed to fly at her from everywhere. The pain when they landed drove the air from her already heaving lungs and stole her vision.

  She flung her arm up to protect her face and worked her legs harder, her toes digging into the soft earth. The platform loomed up directly in front of her and she knew with a thrill of triumph that she would make it.

  Then a child Tildy’s age stuck a stick between her legs.

  She toppled forward like an axed tree, without even time to fling out her hands to break her fall. Her teeth bit through her tongue, and blood, hot and salty, filled her mouth. Her ears rang like a carillon of bells. The Indians swooped down on her with their weapons, beating her mercilessly.

  She struggled to her hands and knees. Blood trickled into her eyes from a cut above her brow. The child who had tripped her swung his stick at her face, but she grabbed it from his hands and whacked it across the nearest pair of shins. The woman jumped back, howling in surprise and pain, dropping her club. Snatching it up, Delia swayed to her feet.