A Flight of Arrows

by Lori Benton

  A dragonfly hovered before her face, then drifted off along the creek. She watched it, praying for wisdom, patience, the safety of the men she loved, those loved by Good Voice and—

  The clatter of pebbles had her turning so swiftly she nearly lost her balance on the stones at the creek’s edge. Strikes-The-Water was coming down the bank, face set, dark eyes aglitter in the light spangling off the water.

  The girl halted a pace away. “I go Oriska.”

  Anna blinked at her. “You’re going after Clear Day?”

  “I look for that one you are to make husband.”

  Redness rimmed the girl’s eyes. She’d been hiding near enough to overhear that marriage arrangement. Had it upset her so?

  “Strikes-The-Water, are you—” Anna began, but the girl backed away, chin held proud.

  “Do not say me go.”

  “But why are you going?” Anna asked, uncertain if the girl would understand the question.

  Strikes-The-Water’s face was like carved wood, polished and hard. “His mother much good to me. She worry. More eyes to look, I go.”

  She was doing this for Good Voice? Or was that what she wanted Anna to think?

  “I’ll keep your going a secret as long as I can, but I will not lie about it,” Anna said, a pain in her throat preventing her swallowing. “But if there’s fighting…take care. Please. I wouldn’t see you hurt.”

  Strikes-The-Water’s eyes flared with surprise, but she shook her head as if she hadn’t understood. Putting her back to Anna, she sprang up the creek bank and into the trees.

  30

  Fort Stanwix

  Hunkered behind a deadfall’s twisted roots, Two Hawks and Stone Thrower watched the ramparts of Fort Stanwix as the day drew to a close. The British had brought up a few of their big guns. An artillery camp was set up northeast of the fort. They’d had to skirt this and come at the fort with far more care than when Two Hawks left it at the start of the siege.

  Still lacking most of their cannon and the soldiers laboring to bring them forward, the British were building breastworks to protect their camps. Indians and green-coat marksmen crept around the forest fringe south of the fort, sniping at sentries. Those within were sniping back. Deeper in the woods, some Oneidas were shooting at the British when chance offered.

  Two Hawks flinched at every crack of firearms. The Oneidas were trying not to shoot at Mohawks or Senecas, only white soldiers, but William would look to them like any other green-coat of Johnson’s regiment.

  When Two Hawks left the fort after seeing Reginald Aubrey chased inside it, he and Skenandoah and Two-Kettles-Together had met Stone Thrower coming up from Kanowalohale with a band of warriors. After he told his father what he’d seen at the fort, they hadn’t gone with the others to Oriska but retraced Two Hawks’s steps to their present position. Two Hawks wondered what was happening at Oriska. Would Herkimer’s militia come before St. Leger’s guns arrived to aid the siege? Would St. Leger decide he had enough warriors to leave a guard on the fort and set off down the valley to wreak destruction? His father believed St. Leger wouldn’t be so foolish as to turn his back on a hornet’s nest, leaving the hornets to come swarming after him. He must first destroy the nest.

  “What do we do?” he asked, gaze trained on the fort while the sun hung low in the sky, shining between clouds that rumbled but hoarded their rain. “Do we seek for my brother or try to get into that fort to reach Aubrey?”

  His father’s profile appeared composed, save for the gathering of his bold brows. “I am praying about it now. Do you think that one now trapped in the fort meant to go in there?”

  “He came with those bateaux and was still outside the fort when the warriors attacked. It may be he was trying to leave, to go back downriver, but it was too late.” Two Hawks felt his gut clench at the memory of Anna Catherine’s father running for his life, how near that life had come to being taken.

  “I made him promise me a thing,” Stone Thrower said, still looking at the shadowy fort. “The day I gave him the white beads. I made him promise not to go after your brother alone. I said we would do it together. At the time I thought only to keep him from going off and making matters worse, but now I see it has all been working toward this, our paths coming together again, here in this place, with your brother so near. I do not know why Aubrey has come here. Perhaps it was because of something my uncle said. Perhaps not. But I will go down to him and see what Creator wills to happen next. I will get into the fort—after nightfall I will do it.”

  “Then I will go into the enemy camp and find my brother.” Two Hawks had been thinking of this as he and his father ran the distance back to the fort but hadn’t spoken of it until now.

  Stone Thrower looked at him sternly, alarm in his gaze. “No. That is too dangerous. I meant to send you back to Ahnyero and our warriors.”

  Two Hawks felt the familiar frustration rising. “They will be attached to the militia regiments, coming along to this place to keep these British and their warriors from coming through our lands. That is not dangerous?”

  Stone Thrower nudged him back behind the fallen tree. The smell of rotting leaves was strong, and the smell of their sweat and the earth. “There is no path going away from this place that does not lead through danger. But leave the finding of your brother to me and Aubrey, who are bound by the promise.”

  Two Hawks wanted to protest, but his father clutched his arm. The light in the forest was dimming, yet the regret in his father’s face was plain.

  “Listen to me,” Stone Thrower said, the words thick with feeling. “I have not always been a good father. Many times I made you think you disappointed me, that my heart was fixed on your lost brother so that I could not see you. But that was not true in my heart. I would take back every one of those times if I could.” Stone Thrower’s fingers gripped fiercely, as if to drive the truth of his words into his son’s very bones. “You make this warrior hold his head proud whenever he sees you, whenever he thinks of you. Remember that as you go. Be of good courage—and keep yourself whole.”

  It was the blessing of a warrior but also of a father. Strength and love. For a moment they stayed thus, Two Hawks awash in both, unable to speak. At last he said, “I will go back to Ahnyero and do my best to stay alive. But I will not shrink back from what Creator sets before me to do.”

  Stone Thrower’s hand left his shoulder only to cup his neck.

  “I would never think it of you.” He pulled Two Hawks’s head forward until their foreheads pressed together. “May Creator give you wisdom and keep you strong.”

  It was full dark before Stone Thrower left their place of hiding. In seconds he was gone among the trees, the rustle of his steps dying to silence. Two Hawks fastened his gaze on the small side gate where already they had watched another Oneida scout make it through the enemy’s thin line—and been shot at in so doing.

  His heart beat hard as he waited, never taking his eyes off the cleared ground near the fort, until a figure, hardly more than a shadow, came out of a depression in the ground and seemed to crawl across the open space between that last cover and the fort, so low did he hunch himself to run. The shadow nearly made it to the gate before the first shot fired.

  Two Hawks’s belly clenched, but the figure did not fall. More shots cracked before his father reached the gate, but he never stumbled. The gate opened wide enough for a man to slip through. Then it shut.

  Two Hawks stayed where he was, panting as if he’d been the one dodging and running. He bowed his head against his knees, reaching for the presence of the God whose wisdom and strength his father prayed he would receive and walk in, then rose to make his careful way back to Oriska.

  31

  August 5, 1777

  Fort Stanwix

  They’d set fire to an abandoned barracks outside the fort the previous evening. In the dark of predawn, smoke lingered on the air. Such hadn’t dampened the spirits of Joseph Brant’s warriors. Along with Watts’s company and some of But
ler’s rangers, they’d positioned themselves around the fort, taking cover where they could. From behind a breastwork of turf and logs hastily erected the previous day, William peered into darkness just beginning to lift. He could make out the fort’s pickets, the bulk of the glacis and ramparts beyond. All was silent, until in the wood behind him a cardinal loosed a string of short whistles that ended on a low trill, not unlike the vibration of a plucked bowstring.

  Though he’d done so twice already, William groped in the dark to check his rifle’s priming—his musket was in Sir John’s camp, along with the Welsh bow; the cardinal’s song made him think of it and briefly wonder what the Indians would think if he brought that out—then settled himself to await the light.

  A moment later, down the line to westward, a sharp popping arose; from the fort the cry of someone wounded.

  William jerked, startled. Shouts and yelps of triumph left him reasoning his way through a morass of dread. Reginald Aubrey wouldn’t be on the wall. Wasn’t part of any regiment, not with that bad hip. Like as not he’d just been jarred awake in one of the barracks…yet William couldn’t know for certain. Thanks to Sergeant Campbell, he hadn’t even spoken to Tice before the captain approached the fort under the white flag.

  Not that it would have mattered, as it happened. Tice had been escorted blindfolded to Gansevoort’s headquarters, where he’d remained for the time it took the rebel colonel to dismiss St. Leger’s demands. The little Tice observed within the fort had flattened the general’s crest. The garrison was strong, its commanding officers seemingly immune to intimidation. St. Leger would have to take Stanwix the hard way—once his artillery and supplies were brought forward.

  Rather than spend the time necessary clearing the creek, the general had ordered a road cut along an old footpath. The bulk of Johnson’s regiment was detailed to assist in that backbreaking work. William had volunteered to join those grabbing up axes and trudging off westward. Watts had refused him. “You’re too good a marksman to waste on road building.”

  So might he have been, had his heart been in it.

  Earlier, another Yorker had taken cover behind the breastwork. William had barely glanced aside, it being too dark to discern features, but when his start at the morning’s first firing drew a snigger, he swiveled to face Archie MacKay, Robbie’s elder brother.

  “Lucky shot, that?” Archie asked, a hint of scorn in his tone.

  “Aye,” William said. “Who could see in this murk?”

  “Indians, or so I hear. See like wolves in the dark.” When William made no reply, Archie nudged him with his rifle barrel. “What say ye, Aubrey? Do they?”

  William leaned against the breastwork, peering through a crack in the logs at nothing. Campbell or the guard outside St. Leger’s tent—likely both—had been spreading rumor of him. “I’ve no notion what they see,” he muttered.

  “No?” Archie prodded. “If ye dinna, then who—look there!”

  An arrow, bright with flame, streaked a blazing arc through the graying dawn toward the fort, disappearing behind the ramparts.

  They watched. Waited. No fire sprang up within the fort.

  Off to the east more fiery arrows flew, engendering derisive shouts from the fort’s defenders. Someone on the rampart shot into the gloom. The ball thudded into turf paces from William’s breastwork.

  So dawned another day of siege.

  Inside the militia barracks, on his straw pallet near the doorway, Reginald awakened to the crack of the day’s first gunfire. He lay rigid in all his limbs, heart pounding, mind readjusting again to time and place. Stanwix. Not Fort William Henry.

  One thing hadn’t changed in the span of years since the last siege he’d endured. He was still groping in the dark to find his way…and missing the path completely. Redemption remained elusive. Because it didn’t exist? Lydia believed nothing he could do would make right that terrible wrong he committed. Perhaps all along she’d seen it, and him, more clearly than anyone.

  As he lay there beset by fleas and the deeper torments of fear, confusion, and dread, he ached for Lydia. He yearned to see her, touch her, hear whatever wisdom she might have to speak into his soul, wanted her by his side for the rest of his days. If he survived this siege and whatever followed, he would find the courage to make it happen. But he couldn’t think of the kiss they’d shared on the quay, the hope and fear and love in her eyes as he told her he was bound upriver, without thinking of Clear Day and the words exchanged inside the office on the Binne Kill.

  “I cannot wait for William,” he’d told the old Indian. “Now you tell me he is part of Johnson’s regiment at Oswego, I cannot wait for him to come marching to me at the head of an army. I must go to him. Convince him his course is a wrong one.”

  He still cringed to remember what Clear Day had said to that.

  “The way you long for the return of that one you call son is the same way his parents have longed for him these many seasons of his life.”

  As those words hung in the air, Reginald had felt the decay of his sins like a desiccation in his bones. The Indian had drilled him with a steady gaze, unbearable—until Reginald had seen the gentleness behind it.

  “Listen. I am telling you a thing you must understand and believe—that what you feel now is what your Father in Heaven feels for you, waiting and waiting for you to come back to Him, longing to run after you, to search you out. To show you a good path to walk.”

  Against thee, thee only, have I sinned…

  Reginald had reared up his head, startled by the intrusion of scripture into his roiling thoughts. It had shaken him, hearing the voice of his Father in Heaven again after so long a silence. He’d flinched from it even as his parched soul yearned for it to wash over him. Cleanse him.

  It wasn’t so simple. He’d not sinned against the Almighty alone but against so many others. The evils laid to his account hadn’t ceased their enumeration despite the mercy of the Oneidas he’d wounded. They went on in the void of his soul, stone piled on stone, a crushing culpability.

  Then Clear Day had said, “But facing Creator without a breechclout to cover one’s nakedness takes courage. My nephew found the courage to do it while he bled before you, on his knees with the white beads in his hands. Have you that courage now?”

  Stone Thrower. In desperation he’d latched onto thought of William’s father, an impulse for action, something he could do, crystallizing in an instant.

  “Look you, I shall go upriver,” he’d told Clear Day. “To Stone Thrower. There’s a promise between him and me. I’ll find him. Together we’ll find William, restore him. Make it right…”

  He’d dared to hope it was the Almighty’s leading. But he hadn’t found Stone Thrower, and now the pit of guilt and despair that had greeted him daily for two decades opened beneath his heart and he braced himself to keep from falling down into it again.

  Around him men were beginning to stir, rustling straw, fouling the smoky, clammy air with their unwashed flesh and stale breath and night waste, groaning with weariness and dread for what they would face that day.

  From outside the barracks rose a flurry of shouts and barked orders, voices tinged with alarm. It would be more flaming arrows, shot from Indian bowstrings. Thus far no fires had taken serious hold. No structures had been lost. Resigned to rising to help deal with the nuisance, Reginald opened his eyes—and sucked in a startled breath. Silhouetted in the gray of the open doorway stood a figure, tall and wide shouldered, long haired, the toes of his moccasins inches from Reginald’s nose.

  “You have seen my uncle?” Stone Thrower asked calmly.

  Reginald managed to unfreeze his flesh enough to nod in affirmation.

  “Iyo. Come, leave this stinking place. We will talk.” The Indian turned and went out of the barracks.

  He found Stone Thrower waiting outside the door. In the half light of a clouded predawn, soldiers scurried about, dousing fires engendered by the arrows still sailing over the fort walls every few moments. Regina
ld pressed close to the barracks wall, but Stone Thrower behaved as though all was calm around them, putting his back to the fort and facing Reginald. “My uncle is well? He is safe?”

  Voice still hoarse from sleep, Reginald said, “He wouldn’t come upriver with me no matter how I urged. He’d someone waiting for him near my farm. That is what he said.”

  Stone Thrower gazed at him, face unreadable in the barely lifted dark. “One went with him to that place.”

  “Two Hawks?” Reginald was thinking of Anna, who’d pleaded to come with him upriver to find that young man.

  “My son is gone to Oriska to meet the warriors who will join with that general coming to help these ones here.”

  “General Herkimer. I met with him on my way upriver. He was preparing to come.” Reginald paused, pinned to the barracks wall not by fear of arrows but by that dark gaze searching his face with unbearable scrutiny. He was at once overjoyed to see the man and ashamed to stand before him. “By now I expect Clear Day is back at Kanowalohale. He told me Wil…”

  But his throat closed over William’s name.

  Silence lengthened, punctuated by shouts as arrows arced over the turf and timber walls.

  “I know what he told you,” Stone Thrower said.

  Men were issuing from the barracks now, grumbling, cursing, staggering in weariness. It was as familiar as if Fort William Henry had happened yesterday. Only this time he was trapped with the father of the babe he’d stolen then.

  The moment couldn’t have felt more surreal.

  Stone Thrower grasped his arm and led him away from the busy barracks to the cabin used as a trade store for the Oneidas. The air within was stale, smelling of ashes and the few skins lying stacked on largely empty tables. Stone Thrower left the door open for what light there was to see and pushed Reginald inside.

  Unable to bear the tension, Reginald wrenched from the man’s hold and faced him. “How are you come here? And when?”