Wild Yearning

by Penelope Williamson

  Soon, the fight began to take its toll on the men’s stamina as more and more blows connected with tender flesh. Their breathing grew labored; their oiled muscles strained, glistening in the torchlight.

  Then the Dreamer got lucky. One of the jagged flints on his club snagged a sinew on Ty’s rawhide shield, tearing it from his hands and sending it sailing like a plate over the heads of the whooping crowd.

  The Dreamer’s mouth stretched into a smile of triumph, which slowly dissolved when Ty didn’t back off as expected. Instead, with a bloodcurdling war cry, Ty launched into an attack. The Dreamer, his cudgel already whistling forward with what he had thought would be the killing blow, saw it fall uselessly where Ty had been. The Dreamer blindly raised his shield, but Ty knocked it aside, not with his club but with a lashing kick of his foot. He followed the kick in one continuous movement with a blow of his balled-up fist to the Indian’s solar plexus.

  The Dreamer’s mouth pouched like a fish’s as he gasped for air. His grip on the shield relaxed a fraction and Ty easily knocked it from his hand. Enraged, the Dreamer lunged at Ty with his club raised, but Ty nimbly stepped aside and, swinging his foot up, brought his heel down hard on the back of the Dreamer’s knee.

  The Dreamer’s legs buckled and he started to stumble forward, but it was Ty who stopped him from falling. Gripping a fistful of his greasy black hair, Ty hauled him backward, slamming a knee into the Abenaki’s arched back.

  He pressed the length of the knotty club against the Dreamer’s exposed throat, slowly exerting force until the man’s face turned dark purple and his eyes began to bulge. A breathless hush had fallen on the crowd. Everyone knew that with a simple flexing of his powerful arm muscles, Ty could break the other man’s neck.

  Ty’s breath came in retching gasps, rivulets of sweat shimmered on his oiled skin. His eyes clashed with Assacumbuit’s. “The woman is mine.”

  For an interminable moment the sachem’s face was impassive. Then he jerked his head in a quick nod. “The woman is yours,” he stated. “As is the Dreamer’s life.”

  “I’ll take the woman.” Ty relaxed the pressure of the club and released his grip. “This life isn’t worthy of my trouble.”

  The Dreamer slipped slowly to the wooden floor, his head hanging as he gagged and choked. A shocked murmur coursed through the crowd at this insult—to throw a man’s life back in his face as if he were an enemy so puny he was not even worth the killing.

  Assacumbuit said nothing. He simply turned and walked away.

  Ty flung down the cudgel and swung off the platform. Delia waited, white-faced with relief, for him to come to her. As he approached, she saw the sharp stamp of exhaustion on his face. Raw cuts and purpling bruises scored his body. She hadn’t been able to follow the exchange between Ty and his father. All she knew and cared about was that Ty had survived, and she wanted to wrap her arms around him and hold him close.

  He paused in front of her. But when she looked into his eyes she saw nothing but emptiness.

  “Ty …?”

  He started to raise his hand as if he would touch her face, then let it fall. He walked past her, following Assacumbuit into the night.

  Ty let the tent flap drop and paused, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim, firelit interior of the lodge. It was empty except for Assacumbuit, who sat with regal grace on reed mats before the hearth, leaning against a backrest. Draped around his shoulders he wore one of the trappings of his rank—the magical eagle-feather robe.

  Ty walked stiffly toward him, for in spite of just having spent an hour in the sweat lodge and taken a swim in the lake, every place where the Dreamer’s club had landed was aching and sore. “You sent for me, my father,” he said, when he stood before the grand sachem.

  Assacumbuit raised his head, fixing Ty with his unfathomable black eyes. “I am not your father.”

  Ty was careful not to let the hurt show in his face. But along with the hurt he felt anger and he summoned that forth instead. “You sent me back to the Yengi and as a dutiful son I obeyed. But before then I called you Father for ten years. The past can’t be changed.”

  The sachem gave his characteristic French-like shrug. A few years before, Assacumbuit had journeyed to France to be a guest at King Louis’s court. He had been knighted by the great Sun King and presented with a sword. Along with the sword he had picked up a few French habits, including the shrug.

  “The past is finished,” he said.

  Swearing softly, Ty flung his head back and stared at the smoke hole in the ceiling.

  “Sit and smoke with me,” Assacumbuit ordered. “And stop sulking like a woman because you cannot make things back into the way they never were in the first place.”

  A dark flush stained Ty’s cheekbones. Then he laughed. The old fox had never in ten years raised a hand to Ty, but he could use words like a whip, and many was the time Ty had felt their sting.

  As Ty settled himself, Assacumbuit prepared the pipe for smoking. It was the calumet, the sacred pipe. Its bowl was carved from the valuable red pipestone that came all the way from the land of the Ojibway, the Great Lakes. It had a reed stem carved with an intricate design and decorated with feathers.

  Assacumbuit smoked first. He sent a puff skyward, an offering to the gitche manitou. He passed the pipe to Ty, who repeated the ritual and passed it back. More puffs were dedicated to Earth, Sun, and Water, and then to the four points of the compass. Only after the ritual was completed would they speak.

  The concoction they smoked was called kinnikinnik, a mixture of tobacco and other plants known for their vision-enhancing properties. The smoke it produced was making Ty feel euphorically light-headed. Too much more of it, he thought as he took the pipestem yet again, and I’ll be floating up there on the ceiling.

  They smoked for a long while in silence while Ty waited, for the grand sachem must be the first to speak.

  “You fought well tonight,” Assacumbuit finally said.

  Ty flushed at his father’s praise, for it was rarely given. “I was well taught.”

  Assacumbuit snorted softly. “That chop to the back of the knee—I didn’t teach you that.”

  “The Yengi universities are dangerous places,” Ty said, and the old warrior actually smiled.

  He passed the pipe to Ty. “You made a mistake, however.”

  Ty drew deeply on the calumet, inhaling the smoke. It was working wonders on his bruises. He was numb all over now and the world was beginning to blur nicely around the edges. “Oh? What mistake was that?”

  Assacumbuit nodded at a skin-wrapped bundle in a far corner of the lodge. His eyes glinted with amusement. “That wasn’t my shield I sent to you. It was another’s. A warrior, in fact, who was a terrible coward and died early in battle.”

  Ty laughed softly. He felt almost giddy from the effects of the smoke, and relief. He found that he was glad Assacumbuit hadn’t favored him over his own blood son. He also felt a quiver of fear at the realization that he had taunted the Dreamer over the magic of a shield that had no magic at all. Ironically, because he had been unable to kill Assacumbuit’s only blood son, he had instead heaped such shame upon the man that the Dreamer’s fate would now be worse than death.

  Assacumbuit drew deeply on the pipe, his lids fluttering closed. “My son has a weakness and you wisely exploited it. But you have a similar weakness. You both must learn to draw your power and your pride from within yourselves.”

  Ty tried to pull his head back from where it floated on the ceiling. “Why have you taken up the hatchet against my people?” he finally said. His voice sounded fuzzy to his own ears, as if he spoke through a blanket.

  “Then you admit at last that the Yengi are your people,” was the sachem’s answer, which was no answer at all.

  “I live among them now. Thanks to you.”

  “You lived among the Abenaki once.”

  Ty clenched his jaw and tried again to gather his scattered thoughts. With Assacumbuit, a conversation, even in the be
st of circumstances, was often like fencing with a ghost. He tried a different tack. “What is the French black robe doing here?”

  “The Yengi are as countless as the sands. We have scarcely a place left to spread our blankets.”

  “And so? What does that have to do with the black robe, who I might point out is Yengi as well?”

  “Your brother and those who follow him have taken the French god as their own.”

  “Ah,” Ty said, for in spite of Assacumbuit’s circuitous way of speaking and the cloud in his brain made by the kinnikinnik, he was beginning to piece together the reason behind the raid on Merrymeeting. An Abenaki sachem was elected to the position by the women of the tribe, through whom the hereditary lines passed. He was chosen for his abilities; it was not a birthright. Nor was his rule absolute. The decision to go to war was determined by council, but any warrior seized with the desire was permitted to organize his own raid at any time.

  The attack on Merrymeeting had been the Dreamer’s idea, an idea no doubt fostered and encouraged by his French priest. The Dreamer was campaigning to be the next sachem in a manner not too different from that of a colonial who might run for election to the office of magistrate. But it was a dangerous game the Dreamer played and it could lead to another all-out war between the Abenaki and the English settlers.

  “You wish to marry the Yengi woman?” Assacumbuit asked, in an uncharacteristically unsubtle attempt to get Ty’s mind off the subject of the raid.

  At the thought of Delia, Ty smiled. “Yes. I want to marry her.” I want to bury my heat in her at night. I want to see her face first thing upon waking. I want to spend all my days and nights loving her.

  And then he thought of how he had come to have her— through Nat’s death and the Dreamer’s shame. And he felt guilt, for he knew he didn’t deserve her, not at that cost, and relief that fate had given her back to him anyway.

  His father was nodding wisely, as if he had read Ty’s thoughts. “She does make the eyes glad to look at her.”

  “And the heart as well,” Ty said. He was finding it easier and easier to admit his love for Delia.

  “I, too, loved the Yengi woman who was your mother.”

  Ty was surprised at this bald statement, and more touched than he would have ever thought possible. It gave him the courage to ask, “Why did you make me go back? They didn’t even know I was alive until you told them.”

  He didn’t think Assacumbuit would answer. The man sat so still, his glazed eyes staring blankly from a face that revealed nothing. Then he stirred and looked up, and the black eyes he fastened on Ty were lucid, and uncomfortably penetrating.

  “I made you go back because I knew your heart would always be Yengi.”

  Ty’s smile was tinged with bitterness. “My Yengi grandfather accused my heart of being Abenaki. Which is it? I wonder. Do I have two hearts then, or none at all? What am I?” he said, unconsciously echoing the cry of despair and confusion he had made to his grandfather five months before.

  Assacumbuit merely shrugged. “You play a game with your own head. You know what you are.”

  “I’m a physician. And soon I will be Delia’s husband,” Ty said, not even aware he had spoken aloud. He felt surprise at the sense of peace that simple statement gave him.

  “You are a Yengi shaman? Truly?” Assacumbuit exclaimed with such astonishment that Ty laughed. The old warrior digested this in silence, then he shrugged, setting aside the pipe. “Wurregan. Go now. Your bride awaits you.”

  Dismissed, Ty stood up. But he hesitated. “You’ve been across the great ocean and so you’ve seen,” he said. “The Yengi are, indeed, as numerous as grains of sand on the beach. Tell your son. The Abenaki must try to live in peace with the Yengi, for you can’t hope to defeat them.”

  “Them?”

  “Us,” Ty acknowledged reluctantly. “You can’t defeat us.”

  The grand sachem shook his head slowly, sadly. “My son, my son, we have no choice but to try. I would die before I let my heart grow soft.”

  Delia waited.

  She had been left alone inside a wigwam. Remembering that Ty had a smaller version outside his own cabin, she had spent the first few minutes of her solitude exploring the Indian dwelling with curiosity. It was snugly built of a framework of light saplings bent together and layered with long strips of birchbark and hides sewn together. In the center of the single circular room was a primitive hearth—a stone-lined firepit with a small opening in the roof above it to let out the smoke. Mats of woven rushes covered the earth floor, but there was no furniture except for a bed made of balsam boughs and padded with moose hides and bear furs.

  A group of Abenaki women her own age had brought her here. She had been stripped and clothed again in a long gown made of soft caribou hide that was elaborately trimmed with porcupine quills and embroidered with colored moose hair and English beads. Around her waist the women draped a girdle of wampum, with tassels made of shells and beads that rattled when she moved. Delia felt more like a queen being pampered by her ladies-in-waiting than an Abenaki captive.

  With a show of great respect, the youngest, a girl of about fourteen, lifted a heavy cape made of a single panther hide and let it fall heavily over Delia’s shoulders. Then her hair was brushed until it shimmered and spread in waves over the cape. A small headdress of swan’s feathers, as white and fluffy as clouds, was placed like a crown on her head.

  The Indian women giggled and cast shy glances up at her. Delia had a hard time believing that only two hours ago these kind, friendly people had voted to have her tortured and burned at the stake. No wonder, she thought, Ty so often seemed to be two different men.

  After dressing her, one woman told Delia through a mixture of sign language and a smattering of English that she was to help prepare a meal. Then food was brought in: an enormous pink-fleshed salmon, which was put to bake on the hot stones; ears of corn to be roasted in their husks; a stew of beans and squash and squirrel meat bubbling in a bark dish; and finally a haunch of a moose, already cooked and basting in its juices.

  The succulent smells reminded Delia of her hunger-pinched stomach, but when she politely asked if she might try a piece of the fish, she was told in between blushing giggles that she must serve her man first and watch him eat his fill before she took a bite of it herself.

  Delia huffed with indignation at this injustice. Except for that tiny amount of pumpkin mush, which had had about as much flavor as a bowl of sawdust, she hadn’t eaten in four days, and here she was supposed to sit and watch while Ty stuffed his handsome face. Why, she would probably start drooling like a starving dog, provoking him—him with his re-fined ways—into calling her a pig, just as he had done once before. Which was why, after the giggling women left, Delia snitched enough of the food to take the edge off her hunger.

  There was nothing, however, to take the edge off her impatience.

  After being dragged by a leash like a prize cow through a hundred miles of wilderness, being forced to run naked down a gauntlet of screaming savages, then being fought over like a bone tossed between two snarling curs, Delia was like a pot of water on a low fire—slow to boil but nonetheless getting hotter and hotter. Oh, she had a few choice words she intended to say to Dr. Tyler Savitch. Although if Delia knew her man, when he finally got around to coming to her tonight the last thing on his mind would be conversation. But she was determined this time not to surrender to those charming, seducing ways.

  With Nat dead—and she squelched the pangs of guilt that came with the thought of Nat’s death—she and Ty could now marry. But how could she be sure of him, sure that he would ask her? Not too long ago he had abhorred the very idea of marriage to the likes of her. And she had worked so hard these last months to erase the stigma of her past. She was respectable now, almost a real lady. She wasn’t about to undo it all for a night of passion. Just because he had won that awful, ridiculous fight, that didn’t mean he had the right to take her like a prize of war.

  Sh
e paced the wigwam, punching her palm with her fist to drive home her points—she was damn bloody tired of being referred to as a possession that could be taken, or won, or owned. This time she was going to make Tyler Savitch court her properly. Respectfully. Just because he’d finally dredged up the nerve to admit he loved her, that didn’t mean she was going to fall right into his arms. Or into his bed.

  My woman, he had called her. “Ha! He’ll soon find out he has to earn the right to call me that,” she muttered hotly to herself. “He’ll soon learn that—”

  “Who are you bawling out this time, brat?”

  Delia’s heart slammed up into her throat and she whirled around. Light from the pine knots outside the open tent flap threw his shadow in front of him, obscuring his face. But she had heard the teasing laughter in his voice. And the love.

  They stood facing each other, saying nothing. Then he let the animal skin fall, shutting out the night sounds and torchlight.

  “Oh, Ty!” Delia cried, flinging herself into his arms and covering his face with soft, fluttery kisses.

  He captured her head between his two hands so that he could kiss her properly. But nothing had prepared either of them for the exploding impact of the first touch of his lips on hers. It was fire to gunpowder, water to parched throats. It was the summer sun blazing up suddenly, hard and fast and hot, in the eastern sky.

  It was love and passion and eternal life.

  They tried to devour each other with their mouths. She twisted her fingers in his hair, pulling his head down so she could kiss him harder, as if she could fuse her lips to his with the heat of her passion. She probably would have let herself faint for lack of air rather than stop kissing him, but at last he tore his mouth from hers, burying his face against her neck.

  His breath blew against her skin in hot, harsh gasps. Their hearts beat together, louder than the Abenaki drums. His hands moved up and down her body, as if he were trying to touch her everywhere at once.