by Lori Benton
Two Hawks fought on, shoving grief to the corner of his heart to wait for space to blossom there. It was his brother, maybe still living, he must be concerned with now.
Living where? Among those Yorkers who had fooled the militia with their turned-out coats?
The Tryon regiments were mingled now, fighting side by side against friend and kin, as the Oneidas fought Senecas and Mohawks, Cayugas, Onondagas, and Indians from farther off. Some wept as they killed. He had killed a Mohawk warrior. Though he hadn’t wept to do it, he’d found a moment during the rain to be sick over it.
He had killed two Yorkers, fighting close with his hunting knife and tomahawk. Both times he’d nearly waited too long to meet the white man attacking with bayonet, for fear it was his brother coming at him. But neither soldier had worn the face his father carried. The face from Two Hawks’s dream.
General Herkimer had made good use of the terrain. He had his men fighting in pairs now, one firing while the second reloaded behind tree or stump. Even so, the enemy had penetrated far among them, nearly to Herkimer himself. That brave man was still propped against his saddle with his shattered leg outstretched, giving orders, rallying his men. A chief worthy of following. But Two Hawks wasn’t heeding his wisdom. He wasn’t using the tree cover to his best advantage, not fighting with another watching his back. He was moving alone through the skirmishers, twisting, lunging, fighting off attack as it came, searching…as someone, it turned out, had been searching this killing ground for him.
“Two Hawks!”
He heard the shout a second before she slammed into his side, dodging so hard through smoke and trees she’d no room to slow herself. Her rain-wet hair had straggled free of its braid. There was a gash on her brow. Another scored the knuckles that clenched her rifle. Otherwise she seemed whole. In body if not mind.
“Crazy woman!” He yanked Strikes-The-Water down behind two trees fallen together and shook her hard. “What foolishness brings you here?”
Glaring at him, she pulled free. Gunfire crackled around them, but even more shouting and thrashing as men fought hand to hand among the trees.
“I have seen him!” She panted for breath between the words, voice hoarse from screaming. “A white man with your face. A soldier with the turned-out coat who is your brother!”
The news left his anger hanging in shreds. “You saw him? Where? Alive?”
“Yes, alive—not a stone’s throw from us now. I almost killed him!”
Two Hawks grasped her again, fingers closing over the sleeve of her shirt—she wore the breechclout of a warrior and nothing below but moccasins; her legs were bruised, scraped, smeared with earth and blood not her own. His mind spun with too many thoughts to sort out. He must get her out of this. He must find his brother. How could he do both?
“In which direction from this spot?” he demanded. When she pointed, he fixed what he saw in his mind, a gap beyond the end of a fallen tree where two small trees brushed the tips of leafy branches in an arch. “I see it. Now go. You should not—”
“I have more to tell you,” she shouted back. “More from that one you want to make your wife. She and the black-haired one are at your mother’s lodge. She looks for you to say her father no longer stands against you.” Her face darkened as she shared this news. “You have his blessing—and that of your mother.”
Anna Catherine was with his mother, in Kanowalohale…and there was no one now who stood against them marrying? It was hardly possible to take it in. Two Hawks had a second, maybe two, to exult in the words before a heavy body crashed over the felled tree behind which they hid. They started up, whirling to face an attack that didn’t come. The soldier was dead, shot through the head.
Around them a pocket of stillness settled. The fight had passed over that spot and shifted down the slope. Two Hawks gulped acrid air through a raw throat to hiss, “This is no place for you. Go back to where it is safe.”
A muscle in Strikes-The-Water’s jaw flexed. “I have killed three. I have—”
Two Hawks turned her, planted a foot against her rump, and shoved her back toward the militia lines. “Go!”
She staggered, caught herself, gave him back a scathing glare, and went. Finding the place he’d marked, those two young trees growing close, he started out of hiding to find his brother.
They were deep into the western ravine, fighting through to the hottest part of a punishing battle that had raged since the morning.
Hampered by the pain in his hip, taxed from the effort to meet soldiers and warriors who rose from behind smoke-hazed stumps and hemlock trunks to engage them, Reginald doubted he could endure much longer. He’d lost count of the times Stone Thrower had blocked the blow of hatchet or bayonet meant to end him, even as the Oneida fought his own battles. In the confusion and desperation enveloping this fight, the lines between friend and enemy had blurred. They were taking violence from both.
It was some moments of glimpsing the white-coated figures dodging and rushing about before Reginald realized he was seeing men of Johnson’s regiment—Royal Yorkers—wearing their coats turned inside out, not militia in hunting shirts. They’d been looking for green coats, first among the rain-washed dead where already the stench was gagging despite the cleansing downpour. Reginald had slowed their progress, insisting on looking into the face of every mutilated corpse in green. When the impossible scope of that grisly task grew apparent, he’d heeded Stone Thrower’s urging to get in among the soldiers still fighting.
“My sons live,” the warrior had insisted. “We will not find them here.”
By stealth and force, they’d made their way toward the wooded height and the thickest fighting. Panting, scrabbling through brush, weaving through trees. Scored and grazed in sundry places but with no serious hurt. Thus far.
As the ground leveled beneath their feet and they sought their bearings for what confronted them, they sensed a shift in the surrounding chaos. Indian war cries had assaulted Reginald’s ears for so many days on end, he hardly registered them. Now, though, their tenor was changing—the same word shouted, echoed back from throat to throat. Half-veiled in drifting smoke, lithe brown figures turned and leapt away, breaking off the fight, making for the ravine below.
Stone Thrower pushed him down, saving him from a musket ball that slammed into a hemlock trunk at head height. “They retreat to the camp. They know of Willett’s sortie.”
Reginald looked wildly about, relief and panic clashing. Would the Yorkers retreat as well? How could they possibly cover all this ground if—
Three warriors, faces painted, came crashing through a thicket yards away, headed straight for where they crouched at the base of the hemlock. Senecas. Stone Thrower hauled Reginald up again to meet the attack as a fourth figure, a soldier, stumbled into view and came between them and the onrushing Senecas.
The soldier’s coat was smeared in leaf matter, but it had once been white. Whether a Yorker in turned coat or a militiaman in hunting frock there was no telling. Tall and hatless, tailed hair brown, he could have been anyone, but something about that span of shoulders, that set of head, the way he moved…
The Senecas met the soldier at the base of a stony ledge. One raised a club and knocked him to the ground with a blow to the head. While his companions turned back to protest, the Indian lifted the soldier by the hair, turning his face up.
A slack-mouthed face. William’s face.
Beside him Stone Thrower loosed a cry of rage. The warrior grasping William’s hair snarled something in defiance as his companions turned in alarm. Stone Thrower was already upon them, Reginald a step behind. While Reginald rushed at one of the Senecas, the butt of his rifle raised, Stone Thrower knocked the other’s legs from under him with a powerful swipe of his gun, then raised his blade to the one fixing to scalp his son. The Seneca flung William to the ground.
Reginald broke off his attack on the third Seneca as the warrior went reeling from a blow then lunged through agony and panic to William’s side. S
taring blue from a mask of filth, William’s eyes were dazed. He struggled to get his knees under him, gaping at Reginald, who felt a crushing of relief, a glorious agony in his chest.
“William!” He touched his son’s head. His palm came away slick with blood.
William’s eyes rushed full with recognition, before they sharpened, looking beyond him. “Father—take heed!”
Reginald turned instinctively, fearing he’d made a fatal mistake in abandoning that warrior without killing him, but it was Stone Thrower come to crouch beside him. William, perceiving an enemy, struggled to find a weapon, hand scrabbling, closing over a stone.
Reginald grabbed his hand. “Don’t be afraid. We’re going to get you away. This is your—”
But Stone Thrower had hurled himself away again.
What happened next was to Reginald a swift jumble of impressions. Stone Thrower’s tomahawk arcing upward. Horror on William’s face. Himself yanked bodily from the ground. Hands dragging him from William’s side. The scene at the base of the ledge opening up to him. Two Senecas lay dead. Stone Thrower drove his tomahawk into the neck of the third—which meant whoever had Reginald now wasn’t one of those who’d attacked but another who had happened upon the chance to take a captive and leapt at it.
William shouted. Stone Thrower turned and saw him. More Indians flitted around them through the smoke. Two were rushing straight at William just above that lip of stone, on the verge of leaping down. Reginald twisted in his captors’ hold, keeping Stone Thrower in view, and with all the strength left to him shouted, “Save him!”
He hadn’t been attempting escape, but his captor couldn’t know that. The last Reginald saw before pain exploded through his skull was Stone Thrower turning back, seeing the warriors bearing down from above. He reached William’s side…then the pair were obscured by smoke and brush.
No one came after Reginald. On the ragged edge of consciousness, he embraced relief. Another face arose before him. Lydia.
Then darkness blotted out all.
As he came leaping down the slope, Two Hawks saw Stone Thrower’s familiar shape below a stony ledge. And he’d seen—or thought he’d seen—a white man who looked alarmingly like Anna Catherine’s father being dragged away through the wood by Senecas. Two more Senecas dropped off the ledge to attack his father and what appeared to be a turned-coat soldier slumped at his father’s feet. Raising his tomahawk, Two Hawks leapt onto the back of the nearest Seneca. They landed hard together in a cracking of brush and fern. Two Hawks rolled free, his tomahawk bloodied. The Seneca didn’t rise. He whirled to see his father grappling with the other, knocking him to the ground with his rifle, one powerful killing blow. There was only the soldier between them, still on hands and knees. Blood coursed down his face from a wound high on his head. Even so, Two Hawks knew him. He staggered, nearly dropped his weapon from trembling fingers, then hurried to his father, kneeling now.
“Here is your brother,” Stone Thrower said, relief blazing from a face marked with exhaustion and strain. “Now you. Thank Creator for you!”
Two Hawks knew an instant of joy before the sight of so much blood on his brother’s brow and face overshadowed it with worry. “Is he badly injured?”
They’d spoken in Oneida. His brother tried to rise but fell back into the leaves, groaning. Two Hawks might have groaned as well. All that study of English and in the moment it mattered the tongue had fled him! Impressions of the last moments swirled through his mind. One snagged, and a cold knot formed in his belly.
“Was it Aubrey? Did I see—”
“You saw,” his father confirmed. “But we must save your brother now. Help me.”
Two Hawks jammed his tomahawk through his sash. He got a shoulder beneath one of his brother’s arms. His father did the same. They rose together with William’s sagging weight between them. Two Hawks was touching his twin for the first time since the day of their birth and could not pause to wonder at it as they staggered over bodies clogging the wood, blocking their way.
“Where is our path out of this?” Two Hawks cried as they swerved aside from men still hacking each other, some so spent they fought on their knees, though half the British force and nearly all their warriors were turning back toward their camps at the fort, some dragging prisoners along, others wounded comrades.
“Run in their wake for now,” his father gasped, chest heaving with effort. “We carry one of their wounded. Until we cross the ravine and can make our way out of this, we are Senecas.”
William’s head lolled between them, coming to rest against their father’s neck.
“We must find help.” Two Hawks didn’t think the militia was pursuing the retreating British. He hoped that brave general, Herkimer, was still among the living. Many cried out as they passed, moaning for help, water, mercy to end their suffering. It tore at Two Hawks to pass them by unaided.
“Oriska,” his father said. “We take him there.”
There would be healers at Oriska. Women to tend the wounded. No doubt many would be brought there out of this battle today. But it was a long way to carry his brother. Miles.
Kanowalohale was much farther, still Two Hawks wished for Lydia and her healing skill, longed for Anna Catherine, his thoughts already reaching out in grief, though she didn’t yet know there was reason to grieve. Bear’s Heart, we had to choose.
Even if their brother survived, there would be hearts on the ground when he saw Anna Catherine again, instead of the joy they might have known. Would she forgive their choice?
37
August 6, 1777
Oriska Town
William hovered on the edge of waking, aware of a fire’s crackle, of voices speaking within range of his hearing. Men’s voices, their tones uneasy. He couldn’t make out their words. A louder voice was raised in an odd, broken rhythm. Chanting? Why could he not understand? Something about it all was wrong. The wrongness weighed like earth heaped over him, smothering and dark. An ache beat in the center of his chest. Worse was the throbbing in his head. Why did he hurt so abominably?
He’d seen battle, that was why. He’d been wounded. Struck down after hours of fighting. Memories flooded in, reeling like drunkards, until one steadied and caused his gut to clench. Reginald Aubrey. The man had found him and seconds later been captured.
Indians. He opened eyes, saw the face of a warrior looming over him, and flailed in panic. The pain in his head roared high and blinding. When his vision returned, the warrior still bent over him.
But it wasn’t a warrior, he now saw. It was a woman. The one he’d seen in the heat of battle. That fierce, beautiful creature who’d started to slay him, then let him live. Only now her face was clean, save for a cut on her brow, her hair smoothed back in a braid, black as a raven’s plumage. She studied him intensely, no longer fierce. Still beautiful.
“You—” He barely croaked the word, but her dark eyes widened, reflecting firelight. Her hand brushed his brow, her touch warm. When she smiled, William momentarily forgot both raging head and bewilderment.
“I am Strikes-The-Water, Deer Clan,” she said in careful English. “You are He-Is-Taken, Turtle Clan.”
He was what? Taken? Turtle…? But she’d looked away and was speaking to someone else now. He made to push up onto his forearms. The pain raged up behind his eyes again, and blackness followed it.
Clear Day had tried to reach Oriska before Two Hawks left for the soldier camp but had hurt himself on the way. Just a twisted ankle but it slowed him. Strikes-The-Water had found him on the trail, helped him to Oriska by the morning of the battle, then slipped away and followed the warriors. Clear Day confirmed that Anna Catherine and Lydia were at Kanowalohale. Two Hawks longed to go to them, yet feared all the more to tell Anna Catherine he’d seen her father dragged away to what would surely be a brutal death. How could he go to her with such news?
That was what he and his father and his father’s uncle were discussing when William woke. They broke off their talk and hurried to
where Strikes-The-Water had taken root at his brother’s side to clean the blood and powder soot from his face. Two Hawks moved to the other side of the pallet on which his brother lay in the lodge of one of Oriska’s healers, where other warriors had been brought. These were not the worst injured and so were stoic in their suffering. Elsewhere in the town, many of Herkimer’s men were being tended. They’d kept William away from them. They’d removed his coat—the telling green still turned inward—to check for injuries. What they found were scrapes, bruises, a bad one in the center of his chest. It was the blow to the head that had made his brother swoon over the four miles they’d carried him. They had gained help along the way as others straggled out of the ravine, weaving dazed and exhausted through the bodies of horses and men slain on the road as they fled, cut down by Thayendanegea and his warriors. It had been a gruesome and worrisome march. Now at last his brother had uttered speech—and Two Hawks hadn’t been beside him to hear it.
“He spoke to you.” He wrenched his gaze from that face so like his own to frown at Strikes-The-Water. “What did he say?”
“He knew me.”
The girl sounded pleased about it, but Two Hawks frowned. “After seeing you once in the midst of battle?”
“And why not?” she challenged. “I do not think the sight of me in battle is a thing a man might easily forget.”
Two Hawks managed not to roll his eyes—or let her see he secretly agreed with her. He would not forget the sight any time soon himself.
Stone Thrower knelt beside the girl and placed a hand on her shoulder. “You have done well, Daughter. You helped my uncle when he was in need. You were first to find this lost son of mine. Now you tend him with diligence. Since his mother is not here to do it, my heart is glad for you.”
Strikes-The-Water’s eyes glinted at his words. She looked away at the women moving about the other wounded. “She will be so happy.”