“Oh, yes,” Catherine assured her. “Not war paint, of course, but to celebrate an occasion—a marriage, the visit of a chief, the Strawberry Festival …”
“An occasion,” Rachel said, with certainty. “Yes, it is.”
“Remarkable,” Catherine said happily, gazing over Rachel’s shoulder at her completed reflection in the mirror. “With those dark brows and lashes, your eyes are … startling. In a good way, to be sure,” she added hastily, patting Rachel’s shoulder.
WAKYO’TEYEHSNONHSA HAD A modest but good farmhouse on her land—and, like Thayendanegea, had a longhouse behind it, standing at the edge of the forest, so the wood and the hides and the leather thongs that bound it together seemed to melt into the trees.
Like a large animal lying in wait, Rachel thought.
She had met them in the yard before the farmhouse, invited them in, and offered them milk and whisky, with little sweet biscuits. Admired Oggy with what seemed great sincerity, and though she had blinked at sight of Rachel’s paint, treated her with a delicate respect, though never quite meeting her eyes.
She was lovely. Dressed in the Mohawk fashion of shirt and trousers of soft deerskin, decorated with a dozen small silver rings, small and still lithe, despite having birthed three living children and Yeksa’a, Ian’s stillborn daughter. Rachel thought they were much of an age, though Works With Her Hands bore the marks of weather and of sorrow in her face. Her eyes were still warm, though, and lively, and she met Ian’s glance often and fully.
The children had come in briefly, brought by an older woman who smiled at Ian. The two youngest, girls of maybe four and two, were lovely, with their mother’s soft dark eyes and solid, handsome faces that perhaps resembled their late father’s. Rachel refrained from looking too closely at the eldest boy—perhaps seven or eight—and successfully fought the temptation to look from the boy’s face to Ian’s.
He resembled his siblings, but didn’t look as much like them as they looked like each other, she thought. His face was lively, but charming rather than beautiful, and his eyes didn’t look like his mother’s. Dark, but with a glint of hazel that the others didn’t have. He was tall for his age, but thin.
“This is my eldest son,” Emily said, introducing the children with a smile of pride. “We call him Tòtis.” Tòtis looked curiously at the visitors, but seemed mostly interested in Oggy and asked his name, in English.
“He hasn’t yet got a real name,” Ian said, smiling down at the boy. “We called him for the governor of Georgia, a man named Oglethorpe, until his proper name should come.”
The children were taken away, and they made conversation over the food. After they had eaten, Works With Her Hands said she must go to the longhouse for a few moments—and invited Ian to come, saying that perhaps it had been a long time since he had been in such a place. She said nothing about Rachel, leaving it to her whether to come, too, but Rachel nodded politely and said she would feed Oggy and then perhaps follow them.
“I confess to curiosity,” she said, smiling directly at Works With Her Hands. “I should like to see the sort of place that my husband called home for so long a time.”
She had a very good idea as to Wakyo’teyehsnonhsa’s motive in inviting Ian to attend her in the longhouse. This was the setting in which Ian had first become attracted to her, the sort of place they had lived in together. The thought made her heart beat faster.
For the first time, she wondered whether Ian had desired her to come with him as a form of protection.
“God knows,” she said to Oggy, undoing her laces. “But we’ll do our best, won’t we?”
IAN COULD SMELL it long before she pulled back the bearskin that hung over the door of the longhouse. Smoke and sweat, a trace of piss and shit. But mostly the smell of fire and food, meat and roasted corn and squash, the tang of beer—and the smell of furs. He had done his best to forget the touch of cold winter on his skin and the smell of her smooth musky warmth in the furs. He shoved the memory aside now, with the ease of long habit, and stepped inside. But the heavy air touched him and followed him into the dark like a hand laid lightly on his back.
It was a small house, only two fires. Two women sat by one of them, tending a couple of pots, while three small children played in the shadows and a baby’s squeal was cut short by its mother putting it to her breast.
The squeal raised the hairs on his neck in reflex. Another memory, and one he had forgotten: Emily’s silent tears in the darkness, after the loss of each of their bairns, when she heard the mewling of new babes in the longhouse at night. But Oggy was older and louder. Much louder. Strong, and the thought comforted him.
She led him to her sleeping compartment and sat down on the shelf, gesturing him to sit beside her, against the dark soft mass of the rolled-up furs.
They were far enough from the women outside as not to be overheard unless they shouted, and he didn’t think it would come to that. The glow from the fires was enough, though, to see her face. It was beautiful; still young, but serious, and shadowed with something that he couldn’t name. It made him uneasy, though.
She looked at him for a long moment, unspeaking.
“Do you not know this person anymore?” he said quietly in Mohawk. “Is this person a stranger to you?”
“Yes,” she said, but with the trace of a smile. “But a stranger I think I know. Do you think you know this person?” Her hand touched her breast, pale and graceful as a moth in the semi-dark.
“Wakyo’teyehsnonhsa,” he whispered, taking the hand between his own. “I would always know the work of your hands.” It was rude to ask someone directly what they were thinking, save when it was men planning war or hunting, and he laid her hand back on her knee and waited, patient, while she gathered either her thoughts or her courage.
“What it is, Okwaho, iahtahtehkonah,” she said at last, using his formal name and giving him a direct look, “is that this person will marry John Whitewater. In the spring.” Well, so. Clearly she had taken Whitewater to her bed already; a man’s stink was noticeable in the furs behind him. It gave him an absurd pang of jealousy—followed by guilt at the thought of Rachel—and he wondered for an instant why it should be worse that now he kent the man’s name?
“This person wishes you happiness and good health,” he said. It was a formal statement, but he meant it and let that show. She drew breath, relaxed a little, and suddenly smiled back at him—a real smile, which held acknowledgment of what had been true between them and regret for what could be true no longer.
She put out her hand, impulsively, and he took it, kissed it—and gave it back.
“What it is,” she repeated, her smile lapsing into seriousness, “is that John Whitewater is a good man, but he dreams of my son.”
“Of Tòtis? What does he dream?” It was plain that the dreams were not good ones.
“He has dreamed that when the moon begins to wax, he sees a boy standing there”—she lifted her chin to point to the entrance of her sleeping compartment—“against the moonlight that comes from the smoke hole, and the boy’s face is not seen, but clearly it is Tòtis. Waiting. He dreams that the child comes, night by night, the light growing stronger behind him and the child growing bigger. And John Whitewater knows that when the moon is full, a man who is my son will come in to kill him.”