by Lisa Jensen
Indians.
Where is the watch? How have they come aboard? But the braves are stealthy as ghosts, and my men blundering fools.
An errant streak of late moonglow through the skylight illuminates shine on a long black braid, and a shine in the black eyes watching me, as the door yaws open in silence. He’s tall and heavy-chested, a single eagle feather woven upside down into his braid.
“Red Eagle,” I breathe, straining to conceal my alarm.
“Your memory is strong, Captain.” The voice is low, terse. The big brave nods once. “Red Eagle was my grandfather. I am Eagle Heart.”
And I am Methuselah, but of course I don’t say it. I know better than to raise my weapon or rouse my men, now the braves are already on board. How many of them stand in the shadows? Enough to hold Stella fast, a glimmer of white in the darkness. Enough to make painful mincemeat out of me. I glance at the pale smudge that is Stella. She found something to her liking in that trunk after all, a long white nightdress. I’m absurdly touched.
I’ve no prayer of fighting them off, but none makes any move toward me. It must be Stella they want. Did they mean to butcher her, they’d have done so already. They’ve bound her hands behind her, and tied a clout of buckskin over her mouth, I see it now, but her expression betrays no more emotion than the warriors’ own. Eagle Heart stands implacable as an oak before me, face impassive but for his keen black eyes, awaiting my next move.
“There’s no need to bind her mouth,” I hear myself say quietly. “Who will she cry out for? I am already here.”
Eagle Heart regards me a moment, nods once again. From the corner of my eye, I see the cloth fall away from Stella’s mouth. She makes no sound, continues to stare straight ahead. I keep my eyes on Eagle Heart.
“Now you will let us pass, Captain,” he says to me. He makes no move to grapple me out of his way or raise his knife to me, but that doesn’t mean he won’t, if provoked. But for this moment, I’m still extended the courtesy of a parley.
“What do you want with her?” I ask him. “Have you not women enough of your own?”
Eagle Heart raises his chin a degree and glares down at me. “We do not need your woman.”
“But…”
“She is not for us,” he declares. “She is for Little Chief Pan.” He makes another subtle move of his head, scarcely more than a shiver in his eagle feather; a blade snicks out of the shadows and up under Stella’s throat. “And now you will let us pass.”
How can I do otherwise? I back into the passage as they file out, Eagle Heart in the lead and four or five of his men behind, mustering Stella between them. It takes all of her attention to manage her bare feet and long gown over the door sill and up the ladder with the knife at her throat. She does not look at me.
My woman, he called her.
* * *
“Captain.” Brassy stands in my cabin doorway. It’s barely dawn, yet he finds me awake and dressed, my hook buckled in place, grim purpose in my eye. “The woman,” he mutters, his voice low and wary. “She’s gone.”
“I know.”
My men were not slaughtered this time. Gato and Nutter were on watch, the one half-drowned in sentimental ballads, the other capricious at best, and every man jack of the crew basted in rum. The braves didn’t even bother to kill them; they must have been insensible already. Now, in the blazing morning sun, they swear and posture impotently to hear that redskins boarded the ship, give thanks they weren’t scalped in their hammocks. Time was my men went about festooned in feathers from the war bonnets of the braves they’d killed, but those were not these men. Indeed, I disrecall the last time we skirmished with the braves at all.
For Stella to be in the possession of the Indians is not necessarily a sentence of death; she might be a pawn or a hostage. But she’s not in their custody, or so Eagle Heart told me. They captured her for Pan.
* * *
“Oi! Call the cap’n!”
It’s Nutter out in the skiff pulling for the Rouge as if pursued by the Furies of Hell. Dispatched to the creek for fresh water an hour ago, he leaves Swab in the boat, hauls himself up the chains, and clatters straight over to me.
“Cap’n, look,” he gasps, and hands me an Indian arrow fletched with a single eagle feather, a scrap of pierced buckskin halfway up its shaft. On the nappy side, a crude representation of a hook has been etched with a hot implement; on the reverse, an image of the waning moon in its current phase.
“Come out of the brush when I was at the creek,” Nutter pants. “Shot into the dirt right beside me. Coulda nailed my foot to the damn bank.”
“It would have, had that been its object,” I assure him.
“Some kinda message, Cap’n?” Filcher asks at my elbow.
“I’ll soon find out,” I mutter.
* * *
It’s hours past midnight when I tie up the skiff at the creek mouth and debark into the shadows. The late moon is on the rise, a lascivious green grin in the black night. My black coat renders me as obscure as possible, and I carry my sword, but I come alone. Did Eagle Heart desire to harm me, he had ample opportunity last night. The sender of this arrow has something to communicate to Hook at this hour, and I will hear it.
Aside from the unwholesome purple mist curling above the water, oozing out of the loreleis’ fetid jungle, nothing appears to move, but I know the stealth of the braves. I set my hat so the feather cocks jauntily upward and step out onto the creek bank. Without so much as a rustling of leaves, a tall, sturdy silhouette separates from the dark mass of the underbrush and steps out as well. Eagle Heart, himself, his expression stony, black eyes agleam.
“I am alone, Captain,” he tells me.
“As am I,” I respond.
Eagle Heart slowly spreads open his arms so I can see the only weapon he carries, a sheathed knife stuck in the beaded, plaited belt round his buckskins. I do the same, revealing the hilt of my sword. Our eyes lock; he moves very slowly to pluck his knife out of his belt and place it on the ground at his feet, straightens up, takes one step backward. I again follow his lead, place my sword on the ground, out of my reach, back away. We stand unarmed, regarding each other. How like his grandfather he looks, although he does not affect the same long headdress of feathers. His face is scarcely lined at all. Hard to believe this youthful sprout is their chief, but for his imposing demeanor.
“You wish to speak to me?” I say in the pregnant silence.
Eagle Heart nods. “I am glad you have come.”
Slowly he reaches for the medicine bag hanging from his belt, its brave beading worn away in patches, its leather fringe in tatters; I recognize it as the one Red Eagle once wore. My muscles tense, ready to dive for my weapon should something unpleasant emerge from that ancient pouch, but all the young chief withdraws from it is another scrap of hide. With a wary glance at me, he lays the thing on the ground between us, smoothing it more or less flat, rises again, backs toward the shadows, and nods at me to pick it up.
Slowly, I grapple out my spectacles, peer at it by pale moonlight. It’s a map, burned into buckskin. There are simple renderings of points I recognize: a familiar stand of willows in the wood, a fallen log, an outcropping of rock. A path twists through them to a black spot in the center.
“Tomorrow she will face a council called by Little Chief Pan,” Eagle Heart tells me. I don’t have to ask who “she” is. “To answer for her crimes.”
“What crimes?”
But the young chief will not be baited. “This is where the council will be held,” he says, nodding at the map.
Pan’s various lairs in the wood have always been protected by enchantment. On the rare occasions that I or my men stumble across one by sheer blind chance, the boy merely dreams a new part of the wood into existence that we have never seen and builds himself a new one. But never before have I had a map.
“Remember it,” Eagle Heart intones, and when I’ve fixed the route in my memory, he rolls the buckskin back into his pouch.
I stare at him. “Why show this to me?”
“Our women,” he begins, “my mother, they fear he will do her some mischief. He is only a boy. And boys can be … reckless.” We regard each other in a moment of empathy I should never have thought possible. “We will very much regret an innocent life come to harm,” he goes on.
Easy enough to take the high moral ground, now he’s delivered her to the Pan. And yet, he brings me the map. “Can you not advise him to be merciful?” I fence. “You are his allies.”
Eagle Heart slowly shakes his head. “My men will not oppose him. We do not wish to lose our homeland.”
Of course, the Indians can ill afford to anger the boy. Their crops would fail, the buffalo would die off, their villages would not survive. They’d be banished to make their way in a hostile world that’s long since passed them by.
“You risk much coming to me.” I eye him keenly. “Why?”
His gaze does not waver from mine, although another beat of time passes between us. “Our elders tell us that innocent blood must never be spilled in this place.”
“That has never pertained to my men,” I point out.
“Your men engage in warfare. My men, too, are warriors. When we pledge to fight each other to the death, we are no longer innocent.”
“The boys make war,” I protest. “How can they be thought innocent?”
“The boys do not understand what they do,” the young chief replies. “They forget their actions and can not learn from them.”
“They have license to murder at will,” I say sourly.
He fixes me with his flinty gaze. “The wisdom of our elders is very old. Older even than you, Captain. It is said that if one innocent life is lost here, this place, the Dreaming Place, all of it will end.”
End? Can such a thing be possible? No wonder the chief is desperate enough to seek my help. “But I am no barrister; I cannot speak on her behalf,” I try to reason. “It will go much harder on her if the boy believes she is valuable to me.”
The young chief does not ask me the obvious question, the one I cannot, dare not answer. What exactly is her value to me? But it’s plain in his penetrating silence as he gazes at me.
“Well, what can I do about it?” I grumble.
“Our storytellers say you have lived for many suns and moons in this place,” replies Eagle Heart. “The elders tell us that great age brings wisdom.” He eyes me pointedly. “You must be wise.”
I stare back at him.
“If you bring your men,” he adds quietly, “we will kill them all.”
Chapter Eighteen
THE BOYS COUNCIL
“It’s a trap!” Filcher insists, bug-eyed with dread, when I climb into the skiff under the larboard main shrouds.
Once again, Brassy found me sober and alert at daybreak, fastening my gold-trimmed scarlet coat, my habit de guerre. But this mission calls for a diplomat, not a warrior, so I’ve selected a less martial hat, my mahogany tricorne with its froth of gold lace and pink flamingo plume. I tell the men I am summoned to a parley with Pan, but I am not so witless as to mention the map.
“Don’t go, Cap’n,” Filcher wheedles, in a panic at having to command the ship in my absence. They all saw what happened to me in our last battle.
“Nothing can happen to me, Mr. Filcher,” I remind him, with a show of cavalier ease, flipping back the tails of my scarlet coat as I sit. “And there’s a great deal to be gained if I learn where the boys keep their lair.”
At least no one can argue with this.
“What about us, then?” Nutter grumbles, at the tackles.
“Man your guns. Hold your positions.” Do your worst, I narrowly prevent myself adding, for I’ve seen how little interest Pan takes in murdering my men if I am not here to see it, and today he’ll be busy. “It’s not every day I’m invited into enemy country,” I point out. “If I can’t make it pay, I’m not worthy of the name Hook!”
Now as I pull through another brilliant blue morning up the coast for the northernmost extremity of Pirates Beach, I’m not at all convinced that anything I say will persuade the Pan from whatever course of action he chooses. It never has before. Yet I was reckoned quite a wit in my day, and Pan is only a boy, as they all keep telling me. In a war of wordplay at the boys’ trial, might not a seasoned wit prevail over youthful willfulness?
At midmorning I stow my boat in the underbrush and claw my way up the cliffside trail to the wood. I make my way from the willows to the log, and finally to a tumble of ancient rocks, choked with high yellow grass and bristled shrubbery, where I conceal myself to peer into a little clearing. The council, as Eagle Heart called it, is already underway.
“The prisoner may not speak!” cries Pan, perched like a little lordling atop a high tree stump at one end of the clearing. The Lost Boys, sitting clustered together to one side of the stump, all cheer wildly. A row of stoic Indian elders, all male, sit opposite the boys, a line of chess pawns ready to be deployed: two boxy, big-shouldered fellows, one corpulent, a fourth arrow-thin, all wrapped in blankets, with long gray or white braids and furrowed, impassive faces.
Stella stands at the foot of the tall stump, her cinnamon-colored hair loose above her shoulders, hands still bound behind her back, watching it all with her lively eyes. An old blanket with a hole cut in the middle has been thrown over her head, so as not to offend the precious innocence of the boys, I suppose, with the sight of her immodest shift. There’s something poignant in the sight of its dirty white hem, torn and muddy from the wood, peeping out from underneath the skewed edge of the blanket, but I’m relieved to see that someone has given her a pair of sturdy buckskin slippers to wear, beaded in the Indian fashion.
“But that’s foolishness. I must speak if I’m to defend myself,” Stella reasons. I cringe for her as I huddle behind the scrub; there is no reasoning with boys. Call them foolish, and they’re goaded to ever more reckless acts of imprudence and perversity just for the delight of thwarting you. Boys are made of petulance and bravado; they do not respond to reason.
“You are not allowed to defend yourself,” scowls the Pan, angry to be contradicted. “We all know you broke the law, and now you have to be punished.”
“Punish her! Punish her!” chant the other boys.
“What law have I broken?” Stella fences.
“I’m the one asking questions!” Pan exclaims. But the redskin elders, sitting across the clearing from the boys, all look at him in expectation, so he heaves a great impatient sigh at this delay. “You came to the Neverland against my wishes,” he tells her. “I said no, and you came anyway.”
“But why was I forbidden?” Stella persists.
“Because you talk too much!” Pan explodes. But his angry face turns crafty in the blink of an eye. “There, that’s another law you broke,” he cries. “Girls talk too much, and ladies are worse.”
He’s on his feet now on top of the stump, arms folded across his chest, gazing down at Stella, secure in the triumph of his logic. She says no more, gazing up at him, just like all the saucy little Wendys who ever tried to prove their mettle, coaxing, even arguing with their beloved Peter. He doesn’t like to be defied, but he never minds so much when the Wendys do it, for then it’s only make-believe. He knows they adore him; that’s what gives him power over them, however much they might protest and stamp their little feet. But Stella does not betray her feelings so easily. He can’t be sure she adores him, and so he loses the power of allure over her. He always forgives the Wendys because they are children. But he’ll not forgive Stella.
“What’s the sentence for breaking the law, men!” he cries.
“Kill her! Kill her! Kill her!” the Lost Boys chorus happily.
Stella ignores them, watching Pan, and he chafes under her scrutiny. Would she fall to her knees or plead for her life or even bow her head, acknowledge his superiority, he might show her mercy. But she does none of these things, and her quiet courage, the thing he finds so laudable when the l
ittle Wendys are defying me, now irritates him almost to a frenzy.
Suddenly, Stella turns to face the gabbling boys. “Do any of you know what it means to actually kill someone?” she prompts. “You? You?” The boys she’s addressed, a chunky little Hindu fellow with missing teeth and a squirrel tail on his belt, and a grimy, leaner boy with reptile skins knotted round his middle, shrink back as if lightning bolts had issued from her eyes.
In a fury, Pan launches himself off his perch to hover before Stella’s face, blocking her view of his boys. “It means to win!” he cries savagely. “I always win. You’ll see!”
I’ve never seen him so wound up. He might do anything in this state. The elders shift uneasily, murmuring among themselves in their private language, while the boys resume their lusty chanting. There must be braves hidden nearby, watching these proceedings, but they won’t interfere. No one else in all of the Neverland is foolish enough to oppose the boy. Cursing myself for the fool I am, I rise from behind the barrier of scrub and stride into the clearing.
“Stop!” I roar, and the chanting and muttering give way to an awkward pause. Everyone’s gaze swings to me.
“Hook!” cries Pan. All the boys scramble for their weapons, but I strike an accommodating pose and slowly spread my arms so they can see I’ve not worn my sword. My scarlet coat opens as well, to show I have no pistols stuck in my belt. I even peel back the lace cuff of one sleeve and hook back the other to show there are no knives concealed underneath.
“What are you doing here?” demands Pan, still on his guard.
“I assure you, I am quite alone,” I tell him. “I only intrude in the interest of justice. Ladies … er, Gentlemen of the council, I must lodge a complaint. This trial is not fair.”