Читать книгу The Champlain Road - Franklin Davey McDowell - Страница 9

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The iroquois would strike in strength, Godfrey knew. He hoped an opportunity would come to lead the Hurons in a ranged battle. He was confident of the Huron warriors following him, for he had led them to victory but six months before. Tall, slim and forest-bitten, his lean face, not unlike that of the war chief Annaotaka in profile, was burned to the deep brown of oiled leather by the fire of the sun and the lash of the wind. His granite nerves and cunning had won him distinction throughout the Huron clans.

He glanced at his slender hand and long fingers, flexible with the strength of steel, and laughed softly. That hand had snapped the axe-arm of an Iroquois as mid-winter frost snaps the limb of a tree. The incident occurred in the Seneca raid of the last autumn and the raiders had fled Huronia roundly trounced, leaving behind them prisoners to writhe at the Huron torture stake. Godfrey grimaced. It was not war that prisoners should be burned in slow fires or mutilated in helpless agony. To kill in the heat of battle he understood, not the diabolical acts of cruelty practised impartially by Hurons and Iroquois upon helpless victims. He had mercifully shot the captive with the broken arm and it said much for his ascendency over the victorious, howling Hurons that they had permitted such an act of mercy.

The Captain of the Musketeers thrummed finger tips against the palisade and studied the brown hardness of his hands. Soon they would be the hands of a seigneur. Five more years to serve as the Captain of the Musketeers and he could then take his rightful place as a member of the gentry of New France. The location of his seigneury did not interest him. Ville Marie, Three Rivers, or even near Quebec, where his lands might lie was a matter of no importance. He had fought the Iroquois in Huronia and bested them. He would find himself a suitable chatelaine for the stone manoir and found a family with its roots sunk deep in the soil. He struck the parapet a blow of satisfaction, then frowned. In roseate dreams he had forgotten the plight of Huronia. There was no security that Fort Ste. Marie could withstand the Iroquois for five months rather than the required five years of service. He leaned against the parapet and moodily watched the flow of the river.

Heat waves spun misty forms and figures upon its broad surface, as if an endless succession of mirrors were passing to reflect the infinite blue of a sun-washed sky. The slow drift of the water to Matchedash Bay caught up his world in a hypnotic rhythm that fascinated by suggestion of strange fantasies. The motionless pines of the far shore seemed to recede into dim distance, then advance in sombre menace, the blue-black of their needles outthrust as countless darts held by invisible fingers. A faint undertone came to him in measured roll. The Thunder Birds of the Hurons were stirring in their invisible nests, high up where that bright lamp, the Evening Star, lights the black vault of night after the sun has passed to the Land of the Souls in the gold and crimson of its glory. Godfrey nodded indolently at this fancy of Indian mythology and waited with detached interest for the Thunder Birds to open and close their wings, so that the skies would flash with fire. A curious lethargy crept over him. He grew indifferent to immediate associations. A sense of omnipresence, of a knowledge intuitive in its exactness, was his, as surely as if a bolt from the Thunder Birds had rent an opening in the screen of the future through which he might see.

He knew that with the Thunder Birds flashing across the heavens, the Iroquois were stalking through the forest. The flames in the skies became great pyramids of fire rising from Huron villages given over to torch, the red-gold of the sun-rays on the river darkened to ugly crimson of Huron blood that stained both earth and water; and so, too, had the needles of the pines turned to arrows and they drove against the walls and bastions of Ste. Marie as rain is driven upon the thrust of the wind. He jerked upright, made to shout alarm and gaped in confused dismay.

The river moved on its unruffled way and the sun shone in unbroken calm. Only the low rumble of thunder from out over Huron’s wide waters broke the summer’s peace. Godfrey looked fearfully about him. It was hard to accept the reality of this security and quiet. He stared with unbelieving eyes toward the forest. He had never considered it in such ominous terms before. Always it had been friendly, sheltering him from enemies. True, there were dangers concealed, but they were dangers to be expected and he had faced them with high heart. Now, he had seen the forest in a new mood, an intangible thing, implacable in enmity, its very shadow surcharged with disaster. Despite the heat of the day he shivered. Strange things, he knew, happened in Huronia. Many were the visions seen by the mission fathers and the miracles done before their eyes; and they often spoke of good and evil spirits encountered in their daily work.

There was Jean de Brébeuf, whom Godfrey had passed through the postern gate only a few hours before, a mystical personality in a vigorous body, bearded and strong of bone and muscle as the noblest of his noble Norman forebears; and as they had taken the Cross, so did he; only his crusade carried him to the far-off wilderness of the New World. There his beard and black fringe of stiff hair had grown grey, but his great strength and massive frame defied years and hardships.

And Father Isaac Jogues, delicate of mould and retiring of disposition, was a man of deepest humility, who lived only for the good that he could do. He had come to Huronia a dozen years before, when less than thirty years old and a priest a mere seven months. Under his capable direction Fort Ste. Marie had taken form and strength, and a scant three years after its completion, he had been captured in an Iroquois ambush of a supply flotilla returning from Quebec. With him was taken René Goupil, noted Parisian surgeon, journeying to Fort Ste. Marie to take charge of the hospital. Father Jogues might have effected his escape, for accident left him concealed in a thicket of tall reeds and the way to freedom was invitingly open. A swift runner, he could have outstripped the fleetest pursuer and his capture alone was due to high ideals and fearless sense of duty. “How could I desert these poor Frenchmen, neophytes and catechumens entrusted to my care by the Lord?” he had written. “It was my duty to face even death by fire to save them from perdition. I called out to an Iroquois to come and take me. He hesitated, fearing an ambush. ‘Be not afraid,’ I said, ‘conduct me to the French and Huron prisoners.’ When I saw René Goupil, who had fought so courageously, I embraced him affectionately ...”

There was much more that Godfrey remembered only disjointedly ... of the journey into the Mohawk country, “sufferings of the body almost intolerable,” Father Jogues had said; for upon him and Lay Brother Goupil fell the fury of Iroquois resentment and they excelled in devising atrocious tortures. Only the anguish of slow fire at the stake was spared them and in those days of torment it was as if they stood together on Calvary, one with those at the foot of the Cross. A short-axe put a period to René Goupil’s sufferings, but Father Jogues was miraculously preserved, smuggled to safety by the Dutch and sent to France to be welcomed by the Queen, Anne of Austria. Iroquois ferocity had mutilated him so, that being imperfect of body, with hands mutilated, he had been deprived of the consolation of saying mass; and this Pope Urban VIII had restored by special dispensation. He was back in Canada again, courageously entering the lands of his inexorable enemies to found the new Mission of the Martyrs to the Mohawks. Well might he have written, as did Father Bressani, “I could not have believed that a man was so hard to kill.”

Then there was Antoine Daniel, now at his mission of St. Joseph, in the big Huron frontier town of Teanaostaiaë—he of the thin face, skin tightly drawn over cheek bones, and mouth a straight, determined line. Godfrey admired Father Daniel’s soldierly bearing. He was a fitting brother to the valiant Captain Charles Daniel, whose name was a byword for high adventure in the ports of the Old World and the New. Father Daniel’s close-cropped hair and beard, and eyes deeply-set, black and flashing, all were in keeping with the military swing of the hard, brown body, proclaiming him as true a soldier of the Cross as was his brother a sailor of the Crown. Each day held its miracles for Father Daniel and time and again divine intervention had thwarted the cherished ambition of his life, the crown of martyrdom.

It was invidious, Godfrey knew, to assign special virtues to one or three of the fine group of men labouring in Huronia, when those same virtues were common to the eighteen fathers of the mission ... François Joseph Bressani, who wrote from an Iroquois village to the Superior General, “I do not know if your paternity will recognize the handwriting of one whom you once knew very well. The letter is soiled and ill-written because the writer has only one finger on his right hand left entire and cannot prevent the blood from his wounds, which are still open, from staining the paper. His ink is gunpowder mixed with water and his table is earth.” And Father Bressani was once more travelling the Champlain Road, upon which he and Father Jogues had been captured ... Charles Garnier, born to wealth and position and so absorbed in his rigorous pastoral duties that the letters from home lay neglected for days before he found time to open them ... Noël Chabanel, a self-imposed exile from France and his beloved chair of rhetoric to a mode of life repugnant in every way, who each day suffered a martyrdom of the flesh but not of the spirit ... men as diverse as the sun and the stars are diverse, and, one and all, they walked with the saints and fought the forces of darkness in all honour ... men who lived and moved in an atmosphere which brought the supernatural to the borderline of common experience.

The Captain of the Musketeers was essentially a soldier and concerned himself little with affairs spiritual. His business was that of arms and war, not of doctrine or speculation, for by nature he was a man of action and a realist. He reviewed his disturbing experience, and found but one logical explanation. The heat of the day and rhythmical movement of the river combined to dull perception, so that submerged fears were imaged upon the mirror of consciousness. He hit the palisade a resounding thump. Its wood, at least, was stout and real, great boles of elm upstanding to defy the clutching fingers of enemies. He turned with a start. A shout came from the twin bastions. The church bell pealed out a warning to all workmen. He looked to the south and Lake Isiaragui, and saw two canoes race into the river. He swung over the palisade platform and dropped the eighteen feet to the ground, just as Father Ragueneau and Father Le Mercier, Assistant to the Superior, hastened from the residence. Godfrey growled out what he had seen. Father Ragueneau stared in anguished suspense. Father Le Mercier’s thin face whitened, his angular form straightened, and arms opened in a gesture of despair.

They reached the inner landing basin, as a twist of paddle blades spun canoes into the water ditch. Two Hurons stumbled to shore, quivering from exertion. “We come from the land of death,” one gasped and threw out his hands in the act of mourning.