Читать книгу The Book of Duels - Michael Garriga - Страница 28

Asi-yahola (a.k.a. Osceola; born Billy Powell), 31,

Seminole Warrior

We came to you naked singing the hawk-tail song and offered you the white feather and the black drink and you shackled me, friend, caught me in chains like one of your dark slaves and held me in a cage where I bared my teeth and growled like the wolf until my cunning spirit said to you, In five days’ time I shall bring to you the men of my band, and you stroked my spine, made a great present of this Spanish rifle whose stock is well oiled and holds the weight of the deer shank, and now I aim it at your head as you waddle from the same fort where you told me what the Great Father demands—you do not know, friend, that on a cool night when the stars crackled in the black sky of my boyhood, the Great Father you serve, General Jackson, led an army of whites and traitorous reds, thick as the summertime locust, to kill and drive us from our homes and we fled into this flat wet country—now that same man threatens that if we do not go to the far side of Mother River to live among the false and faithless Creeks he will send another storm to roll over us—but I will tell every living man this: I am no longer a young blade of grass bending in the big wind, I am now the hard cypress standing strong in swamp water—so bring your thunder and rain, friend, but I will not be swayed and you will not have our land and you will not have our rivers or swamps or sward and you will not have our dignity, which the Breathmaker gives us from his very mouth, and neither will you have our Negroes—not our slaves or Maroons and not my wife and my son, the one you call half-breed, the same as you called me the day you bade me sign the Great Father’s treaty, the one I stabbed with my scalping knife as my signature as well as my promise: my white half hates you, friend, and my Muskogee half will make your skull red and leave it to blacken in the sun while your body is devoured by the vulture and the rat—

I cry my war whoop and we step into the open and you can see I am true to my word: I have delivered all of my men—sixty hadjo, each in battle dress singing the death-scalp song and running straight at you—but do not fear, dear friend, for they will drive past you and on into the fort—no, I alone will stop and wait for you to arm yourself before I kill you and share your scalp with all.