Читать книгу The Champlain Road - Franklin Davey McDowell - Страница 8

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Thodatouan, naked but for the breech-clout and fine traceries of blue and red tattoo lines, winding in intricate design over his muscular body, sat on a stump by the edge of the Ossossanë corn fields, scowling at the serried ranks of triple palisade points, which made an impregnable defence around the largest village of the Bear Clan. He turned to a warrior hunched on the ground, saturnine face black with reproof. “I came from my house to this silent seat, where there are no other ears, and you speak slow words.”

The other grunted defensively. “The words are slow words, O Thodatouan, because they are not good. I followed the hunting trail for half a sun and came to Scanonaenrat. It was dark when I reached this village of the One White Lodge and there I saw Arakoua, daughter of Annaotaka.”

“Had the Sunbeam her wampums with her?” the chief’s dark eyes flashed.

“No, O Thodatouan. The wampums were hidden in the forest. She and one other woman were alone. She had left her village because the sub-chief, Enons, was a fool. He kept no watch of a night. She told him the Hawk had spoken to her and said red fire would turn Teanaostaiaë to grey ashes. He, who is chief now that Annaotaka is on the long river, would not listen. So, she could stay no longer in a place that had offended the Hawk.”

“Enons is a little chief and a big fool. The Hawk spoke words of truth to her. I have felt within me that the Hodenosaunee will come and that soon.” The chief looked sternly at the warrior. “A tied tongue is a safe tongue. I would be alone with my mind.”

Thodatouan stared at the ground and the lines in his face deepened. Arakoua had been warned by her guardian spirit, the Hawk, which the Great Spirit had shown her during the traditional fast marking the transition from childhood to womanhood. Thodatouan no more doubted the Hawk as her protector than he doubted the protective influence of the Bear, which came to him in a dream at the fast of pubescence. The Hawk had spoken to her with the voice of intuition and such small voices do not lie. She foresaw disaster, otherwise she would not have spoken thus of her guardian spirit.

He slowly walked to the village gates, where a group of youths wagered on a game of odd and even straws. He beckoned to one with four feathers of a messenger tied in a knot of hair. “You know Teanaosti, chief of the fighting men at the big stone fort. Say you to him that Thodatouan hears the voice of Hinonaia from the land of Hodenosaunee. If he asks how, or why, you speak thus and so.”

The chief gave his instructions in a quick, sharp whisper and dismissed the messenger with an impatient wave of the hand. “Teanaosti is a man and a warrior,” he confided to a withered apple tree. “He will know what my words say.”

Thodatouan glanced back and frowned at the excited gamblers. “I will return to the seat of silence and mark out my trail for the coming of the next sun. There is a duty to my brother, Annaotaka, who is not here, and to Arakoua, who is here.”

Arakoua stood by a pool, beside an obscure path which cut the trail between Skanonaenrat and Teanaostaiaë, and glared at her companion. “The Clan of the One White House! They are no clan but the slops of my own people. They are as lice, pah!” She spat and wriggled her shoulders.

“I am tired. I did not close my eyes last night.” The woman whined.

“Could anyone sleep in that crawling house!” Arakoua wriggled again and stamped a moccasined foot in futile rage. “Me, the daughter of a great war chief, they treat me no better than they would a Hodenosaunee slave.”

She pulled off the deerskin dress, threw it beside her companion and sat upon it. “I will remember the One White Lodge people. Where shall we go?”

“Back to our own house?” the other ventured.

“Back to Teanaostaiaë? No! The voice within me said it was death. And there is Enons! He will not forget the words I said to him, he who licks the hands of the black-robed ondaki. What happens to a fox pup that licks a strange paw?” She looked at the woman crouching beside her. “I, Arakoua, will tell you. The fox pup will come to a bad end. So will Enons. The Keeper of the Wampums heard me tell him thus and so, and he can record my words, that the black robes have addled his mind so that he forgets the Hodenosaunee and the Thorontohen Road.”

She clasped hands about legs and fell to thinking of the Thorontohen Waterway, which followed the dip of the streams through the Neutral territory for five days’ trip to an island sheltered bay, on the wide Ontare. Here was Thorontohen that gave the Waterway name, a place of trade used by Neutral and Iroquois. Across the lake was the Seneca country, nearest of the Five Nations to Huronia; and the Thorontohen Waterway had been closed to the Hurons for years.

“Enons is a big fool,” Arakoua continued. “The Hodenosaunee will come up from Thorontohen and a great crowd shall wail as they tramp past Ekarenniondi on their way to the Land of the Shades.”

The woman nodded dully. Something of a shudder shook her thin frame. Ekarenniondi, the Standing Rock, that grim road-mark to the Huron spirit land, had been much in her mind during the past hours. Three leagues from the end of Nottawasaga Bay, the Standing Rock reared its bulk from a desert of boulders and desolation as might a ruined keep of a once-noble castle. Scarred and pitted by the storms of centuries, its sides were painted with pictorial records of valorous chiefs who had passed that way, so that other wayfarers, less courageous, would know that great hearts had gone before them and march on undismayed. Arakoua laughed savagely. “The road past Ekarenniondi will be crowded with warriors and women on their last journey. Out of their sleep, and in their own houses, will they be awakened with the red short-axe in their eyes. They will see no more in this world.”

She sneered at the crouching woman. “You are tired and frightened. I am tired and fearless. There is a sweat-box here. We will make a fire and steam. We could go to that new place, St. Ignace.” She pronounced the name with difficulty, then added, “Atondo, my father’s chief, there, is as bewitched as Enons, and more dangerous. Some day he will get himself killed. I, Arakoua, say this to you.”

She unclasped fingers from interlocking grip about her legs and prodded the woman with a vigour that brought forth a yelp of protest. “Squeal not, O dead bones. Go get firewood to heat the stones and we will sweat and be fresh again. Then we will take a new trail to the great, stone fortress and see Teanaosti, even the great chief Aondecheté, himself.”

The Aondecheté of the Hurons, otherwise the Father Superior, paused before the massive stone tower of the postern, eyed the heavy iron-braced oak gates and sighed. “Only a few hours ago Father Brébeuf passed through here on his way to St. Ignace, and just yesterday morning Father Daniel left for his mission of St. Joseph—brave men gleaning in dangerous fields and they know not what hour may bring them death, or worse.” He shook his head. “These fortifications were reared under the direction of Father Jogues. What terrible agonies he endured at the Iroquois torture stake! Fingers burned away to first and second joints, and even worse than that. Truly he was a martyr of Christ; and I—”

He left the sentence unfinished until he had passed through the courtyard to the palisade gate where the heavy planks spanned the water ditch to the outwork. “I feel like the veriest coward hiding behind these defences when my brothers are braving such dangers in the field.” They reached the inner landing basin, just as the messenger arrived.

“Teanaosti,” the youth began without preamble, a sign that his message was of importance, “the great war chief, Thodatouan, hears the voice of Hinonaia from the land of the Hodenosaunee.”

“They live far away, seven days’ journey to their first village,” Godfrey said slowly.

“The voice is coming closer. The Little Thunder may be heard at any sunrise.” Not a muscle of the tattooed face moved.

“Ears may hear false noises, as they may hear what is not in the forest of the night.”

“There was no night and there was no forest; the ears that heard were ears that make no mistakes.”

“Did the eyes that belong to the ears see the Little Thunder? Did they behold her, as one beholds an enemy standing before them?” Godfrey inquired sceptically.

The youth grunted negatively. Godfrey stared doubtfully and dismissed him with courteous words of thanks. “Thodatouan has received a warning of some sort. It’s all very indefinite, and I don’t know how much faith to put in it. Of course, this Hinonaia is a lie.”

“I am not so sure Hinonaia is a lie.” Father Ragueneau turned to retrace his steps to the fort. “There must be some substance for the general belief. The Algonquins claim to have seen her. They say she is a golden woman, a devil hot from hell who urges the Iroquois on to slaughter. They say she has a bodyguard of chiefs. Truly the powers of evil mass their attack.”

“We must find a way to prove she is a lie.”

“She is no lie to the Hurons,” the Father Superior said and slowly ascended the ladder to the palisade defence platform.

“I wish I could get a chance at her—if she exists,” Godfrey returned warmly, scaling the ladder to join him on the rampart. “If the Hurons would only forget this nonsense and unite, we could teach the Iroquois such a lesson they would be glad to let us alone for a generation.”

“I know of nothing that can be done. The sorcerers wield a tremendous influence for evil and pursue us with malignant hatred. We can but place our faith in the divine will and try to soften their hearts.” Father Ragueneau answered sadly and walked to the rampart curve, where the palisade turned to flank the outwork water ditch.

Godfrey glanced at the well-knit figure and felt relief that the future of the Huron mission was under such capable direction. He knew that should Huronia fall it would not be due to lack of intelligent effort, or courageous defence, but solely to exhaustion of resources against a resolute and tenacious foe. In Father Ragueneau there was another captain of the faith such as Jean de Brébeuf, himself a one-time father superior during the pioneer years of the mission. Father Brébeuf had been succeeded by Very Reverend Jérôme Lalemant, now Superior of the Order in New France, with residence in Quebec. It was Father Lalemant, who, with practical organizing ability, had seen the weakness of decentralization in the dangerous Huron field and had concentrated the separate missions into an administrative unit, at Fort St. Marie.

Father Ragueneau had taken over direction of the Huron Mission upon the elevation of Father Lalemant to Quebec, and under a new decree that the superior of Huronia should hold office for a period of not more than three years. Godfrey knew that Father Ragueneau’s time to retire was close at hand and he thought with approval of his talk with Father Brébeuf that morning, when the priest intimated that he had written to the Superior General pleading for Father Ragueneau’s retention of office. “He is in truth an excellent superior,” Father Brébeuf had penned. “He is accomplished in all respects, has no equal here, and may never have. The mission is much indebted to him for his prudent, firm, yet gentle government.”

Godfrey was gratified at this tribute. Father Ragueneau was as a father to him. He glanced affectionately at the black-robed figure, as the Father Superior’s mouth tightened. “We have Indian visitors. I see them in the outwork, over double palisades and a water ditch, just as any coward would. Why am I not out in the villages, sharing the dangers with my brothers?”

He glanced upward at the blockhouse superstructures of the twin bastions by the inner landing basin, then into the outwork, where the white Church of St. Joseph stood beside the Indian guest house and the hospital building, and, lastly, he eyed a cabin with its barred windows. One section of this was his outwork cabinet; the other, the dispensary of Apothecary Joseph Molère, whose compounds were highly prized by all but most stubborn pagans. “A prisoner!” Father Ragueneau added, in quiet desperation. “A prisoner behind stone and oak.”

“A general, mon père, directing his forces in a defensive campaign,” Godfrey amended. “Six years ago Huronia embraced the entire peninsula, ten leagues wide and a dozen leagues deep. Now it’s shrunk to almost half that size. Teanaostaiaë is—”

“Our mission of St. Joseph!” Father Ragueneau interrupted sharply. “It’s capture is unthinkable. Father Daniel and you supervised the defences. If it were smoke I saw, it could not have come from Teanaostaiaë. It could withstand any assault.”

“Not a surprise attack, and it is the logical place to strike. Annaotaka is away with the best warriors. Enons is an ambitious sub-chief. I warned Father Daniel to watch him.”

“Father Daniel spoke to me of his interest in our teachings,” the Father Superior said absently. “Father Daniel did not think him sincere but saw a political consideration behind—” He stopped as a tall figure in a black cassock rounded the twin bastions. “Father Chastelain has returned. I must talk over some matters with him.”

Godfrey watched the two priests walk toward the House of Ste. Marie with a lighter heart. The Spiritual Director of the Mission to the Hurons, Pierre Chastelain ministered to the dozen villages attached to the residence. Godfrey feared for him when he went forth upon the lonely journey of five leagues to visit his parishioners. With small bands of Iroquois infesting the trails, life was uncertain in Huronia.