Sundancer's Woman

by Judith E. French

  Elizabeth had remembered the advice and followed it faithfully. The thought of losing one or both of her precious babies was too terrible to consider.

  Her life as a slave of the Iroquois before her babies were born was not something she liked to think about. The men of the Iroquois Confederacy—the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, the Seneca, and the Tuscarora—rarely beat their wives; the women held high positions of honor in all six tribes. Iroquois women had far more freedom and status than English women. They sat on high councils, decided the fate of prisoners, and started and stopped wars.

  But Elizabeth had never benefited from these powers. She wasn’t Iroquois; she was an English slave. Treated worse than the lowliest cur dog, she could be beaten, starved, ridiculed, or killed at her master’s whim.

  Rather, at her mistress’s whim, she mentally corrected herself. Seneca wives ruled the house, as did all Iroquois wives. While, technically, she belonged to Yellow Drum, it was his chief wife, Raven, who determined Elizabeth’s daily fate.

  When Yellow Drum had first brought her to this Seneca village, she’d been unable to speak or understand Iroquoian. No one would communicate with her in English, although many of the Seneca had a good command of the language. Raven had fed her only scraps; she’d given her a flea-bitten dog blanket to sleep on, and she’d kicked and hit her constantly.

  In those first months Elizabeth had nearly lost her mind. All her life, she’d been sheltered and cared for. She’d had servants to make her bed, to dress her, to prepare her meals and to sew her clothing. Here, in the Seneca village, she was the servant. She was expected to skin and gut animals, tan hides, carry firewood, cook, and sew. When she’d arrived, she had been totally ignorant of these skills, but she’d learned fast. If she hadn’t, she would have died the first winter.

  She’d been a lonely, terrified child, clinging to life because giving up had never been part of her nature. And then, when things had seemed the darkest, a miracle had occurred. She had swelled with child. Even before her son was born, Elizabeth had talked and sung to him. She’d carried him under her heart and known that he would bring light into her valley of shadow.

  The morning a Seneca wise woman had placed Jamie in her arms had been the sweetest Elizabeth had ever known. He gave her a reason for living, and he brought happiness back to her heart. Rachel had been another blessing, an unexpected joy that restored her lost faith in the Almighty.

  “The pony,” Jamie reminded her impatiently, breaking into Elizabeth’s reverie. “Tell about—”

  “The pony!” Rachel shouted.

  “All right,” Elizabeth agreed. “Let me see. It was a blue pony with yellow spots, wasn’t it?”

  Jamie giggled. “Black, Mama. A black pony.”

  Rachel nodded. “Wi’v a white nane and tail.”

  “Mane,” Jamie corrected.

  “Oh, yes. She did have a white mane and tail, but ...” Elizabeth smiled. “I think she was a green pony.”

  Jamie cast himself onto the moss and rolled over and over, laughing. Rachel squealed with glee, picked up a handful of berries and threw them at her brother. One struck him on the nose. He snatched one up and hurled it back. Rachel ducked behind her mother, and the blueberry hit Elizabeth’s chin.

  Jamie grimaced. “Ut-oh!”

  “Throw berries at me, will you?” Elizabeth teased. She picked two more from the basket and sprang to her feet. Jamie scrambled to get away while Elizabeth squeezed the berries so that juice dripped on to his neck and down his back.

  Rachel jumped up and down, clapping her hands.

  Elizabeth dropped onto the ground beside Jamie, and he rolled into her arms. She hugged him tightly, then kissed the tip of his nose. “Love you, love you,” she whispered.

  “Me, too!” Rachel called. “Me, too!”

  “Your little sister wants some,” Elizabeth murmured mischievously to Jamie. “Shouldn’t we give her berries too?”

  “Yes! Yes!” he cried.

  Elizabeth threw a berry at Rachel. Rachel jumped onto the log and danced along the length of it. “Can’t catch me!” she dared. “Can’t catch me!”

  “Oh, yes, we can,” Elizabeth replied, flinging a squashed berry at her daughter.

  Rachel bounced off the log and ran toward the basket.

  “No! Not the basket,” Elizabeth cried. She crawled on hands and knees to grab the basket before her daughter could reach it. Leaping up, she tucked the container of berries into a forked branch high above the children’s heads.

  Rachel wrapped herself around her mother’s knees; Jamie tried to climb up her back. Laughing, Elizabeth dropped onto the log. “I surrender, I surrender,” she gasped, as both children slid into her lap. She wound her arms around them and kissed the crowns of their heads. Their thick, dark hair was as soft as raw silk and smelled of mint and blueberries. “I love you,” she murmured. “Love you ... love—”

  “Ugly Woman! Ugly Woman, where are you?” called a harsh feminine voice.

  “Ut-oh,” Rachel said.

  “Ut-oh,” Jamie echoed. “Mother Raven.”

  Elizabeth put a finger to her lips. “Shh, don’t tell,” she whispered.

  Jamie shook his head. “We won’t.”

  “Won’t,” Rachel agreed with a firm nod.

  “Ugly Woman!” Raven shouted. “Where are you? I know you came this way!”

  The children slid off her lap; Elizabeth stood up and retrieved the basket. She put her finger to her lips again and winked at Jamie. Then the three of them crept away in the opposite direction.

  Chapter 2

  Seneca Country—the American frontier

  Autumn 1764

  Alate autumn gale swept down from the arctic tundra, raking the northern wilderness and lashing the cold, black waters of Lake Ontario into a seething frenzy. South of the great lake, ancient trees groaned and bent under the howling fury. Trunks snapped and crashed to the forest floor, sending deer and smaller animals fleeing before the storm.

  Gusts shook the oaken gates of the walled Iroquois village, howled through the cracks in the palisade, and ripped at the elm-bark coverings of the Seneca longhouses. Inside, families huddled close around their fires while elders muttered about ghosts and other supernatural creatures that wandered on such nights.

  The female slave who had once been Elizabeth Anne Fleming and was now known as Ugly Woman drew another fur robe over her sleeping children and wrapped herself in a blanket.

  “I told you to bring in wood before dark,” said Yellow Drum’s first wife, Raven.

  Elizabeth knew it was useless to remind Raven that-she had carried in enough fuel to last throughout the night and all of tomorrow.

  “She’s lazy,” Raven told her husband in the shrill whine that never failed to set Elizabeth’s teeth on edge. “Lazy and stupid. We’ll all freeze in our sleep because of her thoughtlessness.”

  “She’s going for more wood,” Yellow Drum replied.

  “I’m going,” Elizabeth agreed.

  “Sell her,” Raven urged.

  Elizabeth drew in a deep breath and steeled herself for the coming confrontation.

  Raven didn’t disappoint her. “She is stupid and worthless. Sell her to the Delaware trader. Where else will you get such a price for an ugly fox-haired woman?”

  “My daughter speaks sense,” said Raven’s gray-haired father, Tracks Elk. He drew another deep puff on his clay trade pipe and blew out the smoke slowly. The scent of tobacco mingled with the odors of roasting chestnuts and damp wool.

  “Why are you standing here with that stupid look on your face?” Raven demanded. “Go get the wood.”

  Elizabeth murmured a submissive reply and left the hearth area. Raven’s home was the second from the end of a longhouse divided into private areas by thin inner curtains of reeds and deerskins. To reach the two outer entrances on either end of a longhouse, it was necessary for those families who lived in the inner apartments to pass through the adjoining families’ liv
ing quarters.

  Elizabeth passed through her neighbor’s home in silence, and they ignored her, as was proper. When six or more families inhabited the same longhouse, rules were established to insure privacy. One of those was to ignore what didn’t directly concern you.

  Elizabeth untied the exterior door flap and sheltered her face with her hands against the blast of wind. She pulled the blanket tight around her shoulders and leaned into the storm as she crossed the common ground to reach the communal wood storage area.

  It was very dark and cold. Luckily, she didn’t need to see where she was going; she knew the village streets by heart.

  Elizabeth tried not to let Raven’s harsh words or those of her mistress’s aging father bother her. Raven had threatened to make Yellow Drum sell her many times, and yet she was still here.

  “This is my hearth and the longhouse of my family,” Raven had railed at Elizabeth over and over in the past. “An Iroquois man listens to his wife in all matters of the home. I do not want you, and I will not have you here, eating my food and ruining the fine skins my husband brings back from the hunt.”

  “Sell us back to the white settlements,” Elizabeth had replied before she’d grown wise enough to hold her tongue.

  “Us? There is no us!” Raven would fling back at her, usually accompanied by a blow from her fist or a kick. Elizabeth had grown very good at avoiding Raven’s physical attacks, but nothing could block the never-ending flood of verbal abuse. “The children are mine by Seneca law. You have no rights to them,” Raven always shrieked. “You are nothing! Lower than a toad.”

  “I gave them life,” Elizabeth would insist. “They love me. Even you cannot separate a mother from her children.”

  “They are Seneca,” her mistress would remind her. “Despite their pale skins, they will soon forget you—a deformed female so slow of wit that she cannot even learn to speak the tongue of humans properly.”

  Yes, Elizabeth mused, as she kept walking into the wind. Yellow Drum’s chief wife had threatened to sell her many times, but never to the whites. Yellow Drum had vowed that he would never let her return to her own kind. She knew too much of Seneca ways, he said. She knew where the summer hunting camps and the sacred burial grounds lay. She knew how many warriors Yellow Drum could summon to make war against his neighbors, and she knew how many men carried guns.

  “I will kill her before I sell her to the English or the French,” he had declared at the council fire last spring. From such a stand, there could be no retreat. An Iroquois war chief’s word to his people must be kept, or no one would trust him. He would lose face, and no brave would follow him into battle.

  Yellow Drum would not let her go back, but he might sell her to another Indian. Especially now.

  Last night, Elizabeth had refused to let her master have sex with her. She had not lain with him since her daughter was born three years ago. Naturally, she had breast-fed Rachel, and it was customary for an Iroquois woman to abstain from pleasures of the mat until her last child was weaned. Elizabeth’s milk had dried up in the spring. For months, she’d hidden the fact that she was no longer nursing her daughter. In late summer, Raven had discovered her secret and had demanded that her husband either sell Elizabeth or get her with child again.

  Last night, he had tried. She had won that contest, but tonight might be different. Even though Yellow Drum had made it plain that having sex with her was a duty, rather than a pleasure, she knew she’d hurt his pride. Yellow Drum was a stern warrior, but not a cruel one. He had forced her to have sex with him the first time because Raven had driven him to it. He’d always performed the act quickly, rolling away as soon as he’d spilled his seed into her. And the next few days, he’d always seemed unwilling to look into her eyes. Still, he could be stubborn and dangerous if his honor was threatened. He might not want to have sex with Elizabeth, but if he thought he had to do it to prove his manhood, he would be difficult to deny again.

  Elizabeth threw up her hands just in time to keep from walking into the corner of a longhouse. She knew her way through the village, but the wind made walking difficult. Her teeth were chattering and her fingers numb by the time she reached the storage shed.

  Balancing an armload of frozen branches while trying to keep the blanket around her wasn’t easy. She turned to start back, and had taken three steps when she stopped short. Standing in the faint light of the opening was the silhouette of a huge shaggy animal.

  “Oh!” she cried out, not sure if this apparition was animal or human.

  “Don’t be frightened,” a deep masculine voice said. The man parted his robe so that she could see his face.

  Elizabeth’s heart was pounding. “I don’t know you,” she said. Every man in the village was familiar to her. This could only be the Delaware half-breed who’d come to trade with the Seneca. Many Blushes had pointed him out to Elizabeth earlier in the day. She’d gotten only a glimpse of him across the dance ground, but he was not a man a woman was likely to forget.

  The stranger’s skin was light, his blue-black hair worn long with a thin braid on either side of his handsome face. His shoulders were wide, broader even than Yellow Drum’s, and his bare arms bulged with muscle. He had the look of a predatory wolf, and his eyes had followed her.

  She hadn’t been able to tear her gaze away from him until Many Blushes had tugged at her sleeve. “Yellow Drum is a jealous man,” the young woman had reminded her. “It won’t do to show a lack of modesty by staring at the trader.”

  Now, Elizabeth was face-to-face with this man, and she was frightened. “Let me pass,” she said.

  “Why are you out on such a night?” he asked.

  She trembled like a leaf in the wind. “Let me go, I say.”

  “You don’t have to be afraid of me.”

  “Yellow Drum will come to see what’s keeping me.” She tried to move around the stranger, but he stepped to block her way. “Please,” she said. “I will be beaten.”

  “Are you his wife?”

  She shook her head. “I am unwed. He is my master.”

  “What do they call you?”

  She would not say the hateful words. “My name is none of your affair, Delaware. Let me pass, or I will scream.”

  “I swear to you, I will not hurt you. I came to see to my horse. He’s tied in the abandoned longhouse beyond this building. When I saw you, I wondered who would let a woman—”

  “I don’t have time to talk to you,” she said. “Please, let me go.”

  He put his hand on her arm, and she flinched. “Let me help you,” he said. “I’ll carry your wood.”

  Stunned, she let him take her burden. What manner of madman was this, she wondered, to do a slave’s work? “A Seneca warrior does not ... does not carry firewood,” she stammered.

  He chuckled, a deep, hearty sound. “It’s as well I am not a Seneca warrior.”

  Words formed in her mind and came tumbling out. “You cannot,” she protested. “You will cause a scandal! Men will laugh at you. And ... and I will be beaten!”

  “Then we’d best not let them see us, shall we?” he answered. And before she could do anything to stop him, he turned and strode out of the shelter with her wood.

  She hurried to keep up. The wind was behind her now, pushing her along. “You shouldn’t do this,” she protested. “You don’t understand.” But he kept walking and she was helpless to do anything but follow.

  “You’re going the wrong way,” she said when he turned left at an intersecting path. “There.” She pointed. Again, she heard a deep chuckle.

  “Best you show me the way,” he rumbled.

  There seemed to be no choice but to obey. When they reached the outer doorway of Raven’s longhouse, the stranger carefully put the branches back into her arms. “Thank you,” she said. She was still shocked. No Seneca man would have thought of helping with a woman’s chores, and few females would assist a slave. This Delaware was unlike any brave she’d ever known.

  “It will be o
ur secret,” he answered.

  Still shaken, she hurried through the neighbor’s hearth place and into Raven’s. She need not have worried. Yellow Drum and Raven were still arguing. No one paid her any mind as she added the new wood to the pile against the far wall.

  “Ugly Woman is my property,” Yellow Drum proclaimed to his chief wife. “I took her from the English, and I sired a fine son and a daughter on her. I alone will decide when and if I grow weary of her.”

  “This is my hearth,” said Raven. “I say it is time to be rid of her. Winter is coming. Why feed another useless mouth? Take the Delaware’s offer. Where will you find another rifle like his?”

  “Keep your voice down,” Yellow Drum said. “Do you want everyone in the longhouse to hear your nagging?”

  “Why should I be silent?” Raven demanded sarcastically. “Last night you went to her mat, and she drove you away. It is common knowledge in the long-house, probably throughout the village, that you did not scratch your face hunting. Why shouldn’t I say what everyone is already joking about?”

  Elizabeth crouched in the shadows beside her children and stroked her daughter’s hair. Flickering firelight shone on one chubby cheek and made the little girl’s soft, dark tresses gleam. “My Rachel,” Elizabeth whispered. The Seneca called her Fawn That Drinks at First Light, but in Elizabeth’s heart, and when they were alone together, she was always Rachel.

  A lump rose in Elizabeth’s throat. Rachel and Jamie were her most precious possessions. Nothing and no one would part her from them. She’d rather die. But neither did she wish to bear another child of rape.

  “What say you, Many Blushes?” Raven asked Yellow Drum’s second wife. The young squaw giggled and murmured something Elizabeth couldn’t hear.

  Many Blushes was a Cayuga, new to the Seneca village and to her marriage. Yellow Drum had joined with her in early summer. Elizabeth was certain that plump, laughing Many Blushes was the reason Yellow Drum had been willing to stay away from her sleeping mat and Raven’s for so long.