I sat back on my heels and breathed for a minute. I’d lost my hat and my hair had escaped. I shoved it out of my face and started my laborious climb once more. I had to reach Gilbert and free him—or arm myself (I had a scalpel and two probes in my emergency pack—to say nothing of a few poisonous toadstools I’d collected last time I was out) before Oliver got hold of himself and caught up with me.
I glanced over my shoulder; Oliver was about forty feet downslope, wrapped around a stout poplar that had withstood the landslide. Someone was standing beside him, looking down at him.
I jerked round to look again. Loyalist or rebel, I didn’t care; either one would help me.
I waved my arms and shouted, “Hallooo!” and the man looked up. It was an Indian, and one I didn’t know. I suffered a brief spurt of panic when I thought that Scotchee Cameron might have failed us after all, but a second glance told me that this man wasn’t Cherokee. He was medium height and quite slender, and his hair was gray, roached and tied in a knot at the back of his neck. He wore a breechclout and leggings, with an embroidered silk vest—and nothing else above the waist but a collection of silver bracelets. He waved a hand to me, clinking audibly.
“I say, madam!” he called, in something like an English accent. “Are you in need of assistance?”
“Yes!” I shouted back, and pointed at Oliver’s body. “Is that man dead?”
The Indian glanced down and toed Oliver in the buttock. Oliver twitched, groaned, and reached back to swat away the nuisance.
“No,” he said, and put a hand to his belt, where I now saw that he carried a substantial knife of some sort. “Do you want him to be?”
I got to my feet and edged crabwise down the slope until I was in conversational range of the stranger—and Oliver, whose eyes were squinched shut, but who was plainly conscious and wishing he weren’t.
“Having you dead would solve a good many problems,” I told him. “But I’m told that two wrongs don’t make a right.”
“Really?” said the Indian, smiling. “Who told you that?”
“Never mind,” I said. “At the moment, I need to look at this man and be sure that he isn’t badly hurt, and if not, then I need to go back up there”—I jerked a thumb over my shoulder—“and finish digging up the man who’s buried, so I can take care of him.”
“He’s not dead?” the Indian asked, shading his eyes with his hand as he surveyed the slope. “He looks dead.”
He did, but I was hoping that appearances might be deceiving. I was about to say this when a slight rustle in the wet brush betokened another arrival, and Young Ian stepped out, holding a little boy who was sucking his thumb and regarding me warily.
“Oh, there ye are, Auntie,” said Young Ian, his face lighting at sight of me. “I thought I heard your voice!”
I felt as though I might just dissolve with relief, and flow downhill myself, to puddle at the bottom.
“Ian!” I waded out of the mud and seized him in a one-armed hug. “How are you? Is this Oggy? He’s so big! Where’s Rachel?”
“Ach, all the women are havin’ a pish in the woods,” he said with a shrug. He nodded at the elderly Indian. “I see ye’ve met the Sachem. This is my auntie, Okàrakarakh’kwa; the one I told ye about.”
“Ah,” said the Sachem, and bowed, hand on his embroidered waistcoat. “It is my pleasure, honored witch.”
“Likewise, I’m sure,” I replied politely, twitching my mud-clogged hem in the ghost of a curtsy. Then I turned back to Ian.
“What do you mean, ‘all the women’? And who,” I added, suddenly catching sight of a larger boy of perhaps seven or eight, hovering shyly in the shadow of the wood, “is this?”
“This is Tsi’niios’noreh’ neh To’tis tahonahsahkehtoteh,” he said, smiling as he put his free hand on the boy’s shoulder. “My elder son. We call him Tòtis.”
115
Little Wolf
THE RAIN RESUMED WITH uncommon force, and it was some time before Gilbert Bembridge was completely excavated, cursorily treated for shock, diagnosed with a minor concussion, and his wound—a long but shallow slash over one shoulder blade, where his friend had tried to stab him—field-dressed. Oliver Esterhazy was treated for shock of various kinds and several cracked ribs. Luckily Kenny Lindsay and Tom MacLeod appeared at this point with two canvas-wrapped rifles and a mule, rain pouring from their hats, and took charge of the two lieutenants with the intent of removing them to Kenny’s cabin, which was no more than a mile away.
“Dinna fash, Missus,” Kenny said, wiping the back of his hand under his big red nose. “My wife can see to them until the rain stops. You’d best go home before Himself has an apoplexy, if he hasna already done it.”
“He hasn’t got enough blood left for a good apoplexy,” I said, and Kenny laughed, apparently thinking I was being witty.
Ian’s party, reassembled from the woods, had trooped down to the road where they’d left their wagon, and were huddling—with the unhitched horses—under the meager protection of a broad limestone shelf and a few pieces of waxed canvas.
I had reached the point of total saturation long since, my hands were a mottled blue with cold, and I couldn’t feel my feet. Even so, I felt a surge of joy at seeing Rachel’s face peering out of the tiny shelter. Her look of anxiety flowered into happiness and she ran out into the rain to grasp my frozen hands and tow me into a warm jumble of bodies, which all burst into questions, exclamations, and intermittent shrieks from what seemed like a large number of children.
“Here,” said a familiar voice beside me, and Jenny handed me a canteen. “Drink it all, a leannan, there’s no much left.” Despite being so wet externally, I was parched with thirst and gulped the contents, which seemed to be a dilute spiced wine mixed with honey and water. It was divine and I handed back the empty canteen, now in sufficient possession of myself as to look round.
“Who …?” I croaked, waving a hand. “All the women,” Ian had said—and that’s what he’d meant, allowing for age. In addition to Rachel and Jenny, there was a pale, stick-thin woman huddled beside one of the horses, two round-eyed young girls soaking wet and plastered against her legs, and another, perhaps two years old, in her arms.
“This will be Silvia Hardman, Auntie,” Ian said, ducking into the shelter and handing Oggy off to Rachel. “Uncle Jamie asked me to see to her needs in Philadelphia, and what wi’ one thing and another, I thought she and the bairns had best come along wi’ us. So … they did.”
I caught an echo behind that casual “one thing and another,” and so did Mrs. Hardman, who flinched slightly but then drew herself up bravely and did her best to smile at me, her hands on her skinny little daughters’ shoulders.
“I met thy husband two years ago, by chance, Friend Fraser. It was most kind of him to have sent his nephew to inquire as to our circumstances, which were … difficult. I—I hope our momentary presence here will not discomfit thee.”
This last was not quite a question, but I managed a smile, though my face was stiff with cold and fatigue. I could feel a lukewarm trickle of water running slowly down my spine, finding its way through the layers of sodden cloth sticking to my skin.