Читать книгу The Champlain Road - Franklin Davey McDowell - Страница 10

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Teanaostaiaë, the Keeper of the River! Ekhiondastsaan, the Place where Water is Pressed Out! They are no more,” the other cried brokenly. “The sun shines as blood over—”

“St. Joseph destroyed by the Iroquois!” Father Ragueneau’s voice was metallic. “You tell me this?”

“We tell you that, O Aondecheté, and the other village. The Hodenosaunee came suddenly upon them.”

“Out of the forest they came,” added the second, “as though the moon of the dead was full in the sky; and the Clan of the Cord sends many journeying to the Land of the Shades.”

Godfrey interrupted impatiently. “What nations were in the attack?”

“We saw the warriors of the Angnieneeron,” was the sullen reply.

“The Mohawks.” Godfrey ignored the Hurons’ resentment at the abruptness of the question.

“Anouennen! What of him?” There was a curious, flat tone in the Father Superior’s voice as he spoke of Father Daniel by his Huron name that made Father Le Mercier stare in surprise.

“We know nothing of Anouennen. We heard he was at Teanaostaiaë.”

“As I feared.” Father Ragueneau’s face was as white as chalk stone. “Do you wait, rest and eat. Our men will look after your wants.”

Slowly he walked to the courtyard, lips moving almost soundlessly, as the wounds of his heart were translated into words. “Antoine Daniel! To him has come the glorious crown of martyrdom for which he prayed. And I, living in the security of this—” He sighed. “No, it is not for me to grieve, rather it is for all of us to be worthy of such a splendid sacrifice. Huronia has been sanctified by the blood of a man holy and courageous, even as the world was sanctified by the blood of Him who died upon the Cross. No, we must not sorrow—ah, Godfrey, you are here.”

Godfrey and Father Le Mercier had seen the messengers squatted against the palisade, eyes fixed upon the bare earth, as warriors who mourned. He looked at the Father Superior with a thoughtful frown. “With your permission, mon père, I will take Philip Chastillen and Louis Desfosses, and see what can be—”

He stopped as Father Le Mercier cut in sharply, “We must exercise every care. The Iroquois must be in strength. St. Joseph was a town of 2,000 inhabitants, more than 400 families.”

“We must have some definite information.” The Father Superior fingered his chin with nervous touch. “Do nothing rash, Godfrey; but I must have more word of Father Daniel.”

“I will be careful, sir. I fancy the Mohawks are in retreat, so my absence will not endanger the fort. I may yet be able to rally the Cord warriors and give them such a drubbing that they will not forget it.”

“Do as you think best,” Father Ragueneau said. “I cannot understand how such a strong position could be stormed so easily.”

“Crass stupidity, probably no guard kept,” Godfrey said shortly, and left to summon the two soldiers. “We will wear trail clothes,” he ordered. “Be ready quickly.”

The musketeer uniform had early been abandoned for forest use. The blue and silver of the officer and the blue and white of the men were useful for impressing visiting Indians but useless on the trail. Godfrey had substituted moccasins, leggings, knee breeches, jerkins of leather, with leather cap, to withstand both the wear and dampness of the trail. He gave instructions to the Sergeant, Robert Lausier, to take over command of the fort.

“Caution is vital,” he warned Philip and Louis. “Do not use your muskets without command. If we should meet with two, or three, Iroquois we will use our long knives. You can each strike a knot in a wall at ten paces and your throwing arm will be effective up to double that distance.” He thrust a pair of pistols in his belt, substituted the silver scabbard for a leather one, buckled on sword belt and was ready.

The Hurons arose as he came to the inner basin and their eyes brightened at the sight of the two men. “We will try and make speech with these people of the Long House,” Godfrey said briefly. “Do you take Louis, here, in your canoe. I will go with Philip in the other.”

Their course skirted the eastern shore of Lake Isiaragui. Godfrey could not but admire the recuperative powers of the Hurons, for although they had made a journey of more than four leagues, they appeared as fresh as his men, and handled their paddles as tirelessly. At the southern bend of the lake, the canoes were carried across a portage to a wide river and they swept forward, borne on the fast-running current. Some distance from the main trail to Teanaostaiaë, the leading Huron held up a warning hand and made for the shore. Canoes were carefully concealed in the underbrush and as silently as they had come, they stole over a rough and deeply-pitted trail. After the brightness of the river it was as if they had entered a land of perpetual gloom, dappled infrequently by threads of sun-rays that sifted through the canopy of foliage high overhead. They walked with cautious feet, for where the path was not strewn with debris and stones, or pitted by dangerous holes, it wound around great outcroppings of rock, loathsome in their dank rash of pallid-green moss. The trail sharply dipped to skirt a stream and they were circling a deep pool, when the leader held out a warning hand. With a jerk of two fingers he pushed through a thin screen of underbrush to a hole filled with steaming water. Close by the nearest pole, at the edge of the slanting sides, a fire burned about a pile of stones. The Huron pointed first to a heap of women’s garments and then to scarlet blotches on the ground. He touched one and looked at the smear on his finger. “Fresh!” he muttered and motioned down the trail.

Godfrey nodded understandingly. “A sweat-box,” he whispered to the soldiers. “Indian girls took a steam bath out here. Dug a hole and heated the water to boiling with hot stones, then slung tunics over the stakes and sat there and sweated. After they would take a plunge into the pool. A great reviver, if one can stand the shock.” He turned to the Huron who had been on hands and knees studying the trail. “How many?”

“Two maidens, three Angnieneeron.” He pointed to the southeast. “They go to join the main Hodenosaunee trail. We go this way and meet them a half a league from here.” His finger moved in a small arc. He smiled crookedly and touched his short-axe.

Godfrey shook his head. “Knife work,” he said with finality. “You leave this to me and my men.” He crooked a finger to the soldiers. “We’ll each take an Iroquois. Throw your knife to kill. There must be no alarm. We don’t know how many there are in the forest.”

They slipped down the trail soundlessly. Godfrey whispered his plan to the leader in the Huron tongue. The Indian grunted assent. “There is a bank overlooking the trail at a sharp turn. A good throwing point from the bushes. We will stop there.”

The path narrowed to a deer-run. The thick boles of the forest thinned and as the underbrush thickened, the sun streamed upon them again. Swarms of insects danced in crazy gyrations and bit ferociously at face and hands. It was with relief that they came to a stop and crouched behind a thorn thicket upon a point of high ground. The leading Huron slipped away, then he beckoned to them from a clump of berry bushes. Godfrey saw the twisting trail a few feet below him. “Ideal,” he murmured, listened hand to ear, moved a few feet forward and returned quickly. “Just in time,” he murmured to the soldiers. “Two girls in front and three Iroquois behind. You, Philip, take the one nearest, and Louis, the centre. I’ll look after the third. Remember! aim for the heart or the neck. One throw; there must be no more.”

The Hurons watched expectantly as the long, hunting knives were withdrawn from sheaths. Perfectly balanced, the heavy blades whetted to razor edge, they were deadly weapons in the hands of expert throwers. The destruction of the two Cord villages gave the Mohawks a fancied security and they beguiled their march by the subtle torture of dilating upon agonies awaiting the captives, punctuated by realistic blows of short-axe hafts. Godfrey could hear one captive weeping loudly, the other snarling defiance.

“And these pretty fingers, O daughter of a chief,” an Iroquois was laughing, “one by one a clam shell will cut them off. How you will squirm and moan under the pain of it!”

“You a warrior!” Hate gave a deadly edge to her voice. “Some day the sun will look down upon me stamping on your face, spitting in your eyes.”

There was the dull crunch of wood striking flesh, followed by two more, and the sharp cry of the second woman. “I will teach you respect!” the warrior snarled. “You belong to me, you and that body of yours. Some day I will burn it, a slow fire that will eat it up as a snake eats up a toad.”

“That would be better than suffering you,” was the scornful rejoiner. “I will not cry out. You would scream like a frightened rabbit.”

There came the sound of more blows. Godfrey gasped. “Arakoua!”

She rounded the turn in the trail, naked as she came from the sweat-box, head high and eyes aflame, and beside her the cringing companion, weeping and bent of head. Behind, hair braid in hand, walked their captors, bodies daubed with vivid war paint and faces hideously streaked with congealing blood of yet other victims. They joked with a third warrior who lounged a few paces in the rear. At intervals the captives’ heads were jerked back, as axe-hafts clouted shoulders and backs.

“Now!” whispered Godfrey. The startled Iroquois saw three arms swing upwards from a mesh of green, saw three knives flash from their hands, and saw no more. Godfrey leaped through the bushes, retrieved his knife and glanced at the sprawling figures with satisfaction. “A neat bit of work, if I say it myself,” he commented, and cut the vine stems binding the women’s hands behind them.

Arakoua whirled upon the twitching figure at her feet. “See, you son of a rabbit!” she cried. “I do as I say. I jump on your face—so! I grind my heel on your nose and flatten it—so! And I bend over and I spit in each eye—so ... and ... so!”

“A lovable child of the forest.” Godfrey snorted and eyed with disgust the second woman, squatted on haunches, wailing as she rocked back and forth. Arakoua arose and kicked her upright. “Stop blubbering, you offspring of a rat!” she commanded.

“And you, O Teanaosti, my brave Guardian of the Beautiful River!” She flashed him a smile with shining eyes, spread out her arms and slowly pivoted before him. “Look at me. Am I not beautiful? Is not my body wholly desirable in your eyes—my body and my charms?”

Godfrey felt the burn of his face, as it turned to the dull red of the sumac berry in autumn. “You will take this quacking duck with you and go wash the blood off your shoulders and back. Then put on your clothes and join us. We are going to Teanaostaiaë.”

“There is a cross-path a few paces down the trail. I will do as you say, for where you go there shall I be also, to comfort you,” Arakoua beckoned imperiously to her companion.

Godfrey shrugged as they left. “It might have been worse.” He glanced at Chastillen and Desfosses. Their round and heavy faces were expressionless. “I know you’re like two blown-up bladders. If you want to guffaw, now is the time—not later.” He turned to the two Hurons and noted the dripping scalps hanging from their breech-clout cord. “Is that true about the cross-path?”

They grunted an affirmative. Teanaostaiaë was their goal and the fate of their families their objective.

The cross-path was a trail to be used in emergency only. Overgrown with creepers and underbrush, it wound about yawning gullies and climbed steep hills, where stunted trees grew precariously out of rock seams; and ever flies swirled about them to bite and annoy. They had gone but a short distance when Arakoua and her companion joined them. Both wore tunics of deerskin, caught about the waist by a thong, and their moccasins were as plain as their dress. Arakoua stepped beside him. “Are you not glad I came back to you so quickly?”

“Certainly. You will be safe with us.”

“I am safe by myself. This is my woods.”

“I thought it belonged to the Iroquois.”

“Our warriors did not think the Hodenosaunee so close. Now they are dead,” she answered easily. “See, I have worn my dress because you told me. If not, I would have worn my wampum belt only; it is underneath. Am I not good?” She inclined her head and laughed.

He looked at her, then voiced exasperation. “Do you realize your town is wiped out, that your people are butchered, that you only escaped by a miracle?”

“The dead are dead. They are passing Ekarenniondi on the way to the Land of the Shades. I told them to keep watch; they were fools and did not. My father would not have done as they did, but he has gone to Te Iatontarie, the Town by the Little Great Water.”

“And you do not mourn at the loss of your clan?” Godfrey stopped and stared at her.

“We can rebuild the town,” she said composedly. “The foolish are gone and our women will breed more warriors. There are other clans. We will go to the land of the Hodenosaunee and many Long Houses will burn with their warriors inside them.”

“Your beads, your precious wampums, they are gone.” He was determined to bring realization of the calamity that had befallen her.

“No, they are safe, hidden in a hollow tree. I am not a fool as Enons is.”

“What are you going to do now?” he asked for the want of something to say. “Search for your brothers, or family?”

“The Hodenosaunee sent my brothers to the Land of the Shades many moons ago.” She leaned the closer to him and her white teeth glistened in a smile of invitation. “I stay with you. I am your woman now.”

“You are nothing of the sort. You will stay with your own people.”

Arakoua turned on him furiously. “You kick me away! Me, the daughter of Annaotaka! You treat me as if I were a stray bitch eating village refuse!”

“Nothing of the sort,” he said coldly. “I tried to show you how the daughter of a great chief should act.”

“You ouimchtigouches are all the same,” she returned contemptuously. “You talk one way and act another.”

“Men of the wooden ships, eh!” Godfrey spat. “You borrow words from the Aochraouata carelessly. Do I look as if I sailed here in a wooden ship?” He mopped his face with the back of a hand and gazed out over the leafy sea of the Cold Water Valley, thinking of the incongruity of the Algonquin name for the French.

“And you want me to say to my people that the great Teanaosti has taken me for his woman. That I now go with him?” She walked close to jostle him.

“I did not say that. I said you were to try and help your people, as your father would were he here.”

“And you will say to them, ‘I, Teanaosti, have come for Arakoua. She is my woman. I will take her to my arms each night.’ ”

“Can you realize an overwhelming disaster has occurred, that the biggest town in Huronia is wiped out and its southern frontier is gone!”

Arakoua balanced the Iroquois short-axe haft in her hand. “This came from the dead hand that beat me. The blood debt will be paid. I will lead our warriors like the Little Thunder and I will burn her.”

Godfrey sniffed. “Little Thunder! Rubbish!”

She fondled the short-axe in both hands and looked up at him. Her eyes were as two black opals, flecked with fires of reddish green. “You trail this woman?”

“I have other things to do,” he said curtly. “She doesn’t exist.”

“So!” Arakoua was silent. The short-axe dropped to her side. Her eyes searched his face from under long, dark lashes. “The Little Thunder was here today. Some day I will burn her.”

“How do you know that?” There was a conviction in her voice that surprised him.

“Without the help of an oki the Hodenosaunee could never have taken Teanaostaiaë.”

“If she is an oki how can you kill her?” Godfrey stared over the underbrush crowding the side of the trail, so that she would not see his smile.

“People kill big spirits,” she said simply. “Your Son of the Great Spirit was killed. I will burn Hinonaia!”

“She does not exist and she was not here,” he contradicted flatly.

“She was here.” Arakoua dismissed the subject with a flourish of the short-axe. “What am I to tell my people?”

“Ask them what you can do to help them.”

“And say nothing about my Guardian of the River, that I am his woman?”

“Your mind is backward,” Godfrey said desperately. “You have one code of morals, one way of doing things. We have another.”

“You have the ondaki way, not the ouimchtigouche way,” she said critically. “I do not like the ondaki way.”

“Your people call the black robes ondakis because you say they are ‘in the secret of the spirits’. Their way is the best way, the Christian way.”

“I am not a Christian,” she said hotly, “and you are not in your country. You are in my country. You should do as my people do.”

“We hope to teach your people better,” he said gravely.

“What have the ondakis done for us?” Her eyes flashed with passion. “They brought us death, disease and famine and bewitched our short-axe arm so it will not strike true.”

“The words you speak come from the tongue of a liar,” Godfrey rasped. “You heard them from the lips of the arendiwan. You know crops are plentiful at the big stone fort, that last winter half of your nation would have died if we had not fed them.”

“Your spirits are not our spirits: only our spirits know what is good for us.”

“You have no Great Spirits,” he retorted roughly, “only some imaginary okis that you believe crawl into a hole, chunk of stone or waterfall.”

“They protected our people long before your ondakis came and we were powerful and strong of numbers.” She glanced sidewise at him. “Perhaps you will tell me about your spirits, me your woman.”

“I am no ondaki, I am a warrior; and I haven’t said you’re my woman.”

She weighed the axe in her hand. “I, Arakoua, the daughter of Annaotaka, a great war chief, am not good enough for the Guardian of the River.”

“My mouth did not say that,” he snapped. “You changed my words.”

“The howl of the wolf, then the bark of the fox.” There was a fine scorn in her voice. She lapsed into sulky silence.