by Jamie Carie
“Corn’s as tall as Millie.” Jake leaned back in his chair, grasped the waist of his daughter, and pulled her close. “We’ve been here three summers now. The first year was lean, but this year should be the best yet, eh, Naomi?”
His wife smiled and sat down, her hand finding his across the table. “We pray every day it will be so.” Her face was tired, but she wore a contented smile.
Samuel’s gaze sought Isabelle as she sat silently across from him. He wondered, for a moment, what it would be like to be married again, imagining what it would be like to live with a woman like Isabelle, to have children with her. And, for only a moment, he let himself imagine that this was his cabin, his life.
Something must have shown on his face, because Isabelle suddenly grinned at him, full of devilment and knowing, and sassed him by announcing, “I don’t imagine growing corn is so exciting.” Then quickly to her hosts, “Noble, I am sure, but I crave a life more adventurous than fields to hoe.”
Naomi laughed, ladling steaming stew into bowls. “No, miss, growing corn doesn’t hold much excitement,” then she reached for Rose and pulled gently on a ringlet, “but feeding growing youngsters can be pretty satisfying, all the same.”
“I suppose so, ma’am, but …” Isabelle sighed, seeming in genuine resignation of her own nature. “I want something … more …”
They all laughed, but Samuel felt a pang in his chest. He might be a man like this Jake Lynn, but Isabelle was no Naomi and never would be. It would be good to remember that.
Naomi rose from the table. “Speaking of youngsters, those boys should be back from the woodpile by now.” With a frown she walked to the door. Then a thin, boyish scream rent the air. Then another. Naomi jerked the door open, her face void of color.
* * *
SUDDENLY, THE WORLD was chaos.
Indians charged into the cabin, tomahawks swinging. Naomi, being just inside the door, was the first target. A tall savage, heavily painted, with his head shaved save a tuft at the crown, grasped a handful of her hair and lifted it high above her head. Naomi screamed, wild-eyed, as he swung his lean, muscled arm, scalping her with one sure swing.
Samuel registered the blood dripping from the weapon as he snapped back to conscious thought and action. Naomi fell to the floor in a crumpled heap as Samuel dove for his weapon, seeing everything, assessing the enemy’s strength. War whoops and a flurry of swinging weapons surrounded them, making it difficult to hear and see what was going on.
Samuel grasped his long rifle that had been lying on the floor beside his chair. He looked to Jake in time to see the blade of a knife being shoved into the farmer’s chest, hearing the gasp of bubbling air that followed. Then Samuel locked eyes with Jake’s killer who now turned toward Samuel, advancing, intending to kill the men first.
Samuel raised his rifle and shot his attacker through the heart. He then scooped up Jake’s gun, took quick aim and fired again, killing the one he thought to be the leader, judging from his face paint and the ring of ornate feathers woven into his black hair.
With no time to reload, Samuel dropped the rifle to the floor and grasped the familiar handles of his tomahawk and knife.
Now would come the hard part.
Glancing across the room, he saw that Julian had been cornered and was without defense. Isabelle was in the other corner, rifle in hand, God love her. Samuel found he couldn’t think clearly. Which way to go? Julian or Isabelle? Julian had no chance without his help. Isabelle was armed, but could he turn his back on her? For a moment he stood, motionless, wavering. He could not save them both.
The choice was taken from him as a warrior advanced. On instinct alone he fought off the Indian in his face, a giant of a man with a war club. Reaching out he grasped the club, feeling the man’s strength pushing against him. Samuel allowed his foe to push the club up near his throat, a trick he had learned from Simon Kenton that misled the opponent to believe his enemy was weak. Just as the club touched his throat, Samuel put the full force of his muscle behind it, turning it neatly with practiced ease and smashing the man’s head with his own weapon. Instinct had him moving toward Isabelle. Had she fired the rifle?
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Millie was hiding behind the door, unnoticed. He thought he had seen Rose hit but was reasonably sure she had crawled under the table, alive. He heard a gun go off, saw a warrior fall at Isabelle’s feet, but another nearby was reaching for her hair.
Fighting off what looked to be little more than a boy, Samuel quickly knocked him to the ground with the blunt side of his tomahawk, ducking under the swing of yet another war club, moving deftly to drive his knife between the man’s shoulder blades. Samuel was almost to Isabelle.
He heard her then. A sound coming from her throat, a screaming, enraged whooping as savage as that of any Indian in the room. He felt more than saw her stab her attacker with the long knife Clark had given her. The blade effortlessly penetrated his throat, immediately silencing the warrior, and he crumbled to the floor. With a quick jerk she pulled the weapon from his neck and looked up into Samuel’s eyes, legs spread in a fighting stance, her black hair wild about her face, eyes flashing fire. “Julian,” she breathed, knowing his thoughts and telling him she could take care of herself. Where had she learned to fight like that?
Samuel turned from her, pulled his smaller knife from his thigh, found a vulnerable spot between the upper ribs of the Indian to his right and buried the knife in his heart, thus clearing the path to Julian.
Only four enemy warriors remained standing. One, tall and hairless, with a lone feather hanging down his back, his face painted half black and half white, had backed Julian into a corner. Samuel saw that Julian had a knife raised, something that must have been hidden on his person. The warrior easily knocked it from his hand and advanced with a panther-like grace that bespoke his skill. This man was no mere brute; he knew hand-to-hand combat as a dance. Samuel had seen it before and knew that if he didn’t get to Julian immediately, he was a dead man. And it wouldn’t be a quick death either. This man would torture him.
The warrior in front of Samuel fell to the floor with a sinking thud. Samuel couldn’t even remember how he’d killed him—he was fighting from his subconscious now, moving on instinct more than anything. He reached Julian, thinking the young man should have been dead long ago; it seemed to Samuel that hours had passed since the first Indian had appeared in the doorway. Something shifted inside him, and he realized: Something other than a cold-blooded massacre was intended here.
Samuel let out a guttural yell as the Indian swung his war club into Julian’s body, dropping him to the floor like a rag doll. The savage turned then, sudden and aware, toward Samuel. There was a light in his wide-eyed challenge—a light of certain victory.
Samuel faltered as recognition bloomed inside him like an explosion.
It was Quiet Fox.
His wild, painted face and savage grace bore no resemblance to the sulking guide he had met on the trail … but it was him.
Samuel didn’t have time to assimilate fully the implications of Quiet Fox’s presence in this room. To his left, Isabelle had managed with light-footed swiftness to move closer to Samuel. In mere seconds she had picked up another rifle, loaded it, swung around in a semi-crouch, aimed, and fired, killing another assailant. The sound reverberated through the room as Samuel’s heart swelled with pride. She was amazing.
Suddenly there came a horrendous cry from outside the cabin, and Samuel could now smell smoke. God help us.
Isabelle screamed then, drawing Samuel’s attention away from the door. The man they had known as Quiet Fox had grasped Isabelle by the hair and turned her toward him. Time stood still as he swung back his mighty arm, and there he held his war club poised in midair. He turned his shaven head and stared, victorious and deep, into Samuel’s eyes while Isabelle kicked and clawed at him. Then, with abrupt movements, the savage leaned his face into Isabelle’s, his black eyes wide and demented, looking as though h
e had no soul.
Isabelle’s face changed, from that of warrior to slave, her gaze now terrified. Samuel heard her gasp of recognition.
He dove for Quiet Fox’s arm, wrenching it behind his back. He heard a crack as the man’s shoulder gave way, then a grunt from the Indian. Shock and rage lit the Indian’s features as he looked back at Samuel. Then, using his other hand, he grasped his war club and broadsided Isabelle across the head.
Samuel watched with a wave of sick dread as Isabelle’s head snapped from the impact. Her eyes rolled back into her head. Her body dropped to the floor.
With a cry that came from such a deep place inside him he didn’t recognize it as his own, Samuel launched himself onto the man, stabbing at him with his knife. But this Indian had unnatural strength. His arm, the one Samuel was sure he had broken, appeared suddenly sound. With a shrill scream the man turned, rolled his head back and forth on his shoulders, then brought down his war club.
The last thing Samuel saw was those eyes—those black, unearthly eyes.
Then everything went black.
10
A bright light was beckoning Isabelle. She looked up at it, blinking against the sharp intensity. She noticed how the light poured down through the translucent cloud of swirling waters where she simply free-floated. She looked down at her body, at the strange garment she wore, at the way she floated, up and up, through the clear blueness, her hair all around her, her body moving with preternatural grace. She could see her hands moving through the watery substance, helping to propel her along in an invisible arc toward the surface and the light. It was as if she was coming out of a deep sleep into another state of awareness where intense, flooding peace reigned supreme.
Now she saw an open door, and something leapt inside her, spreading pure joy throughout her being. Yes. Yes! The closer she moved toward the light, the more she strained with anticipation of an intense connection with it.
Then she heard the first faint strains of music. Soft at first, but slowly, achingly slow, it grew, rising and so beautiful she gasped. She detected the haunting echo of a bagpipe, joined soon by the yearning of a pan flute, instruments she had never heard nor known the name of before now. The music beckoned her spirit, reaching down and touching guarded chords inside her, opening her whole being, like a key to some place she hadn’t known was locked. She was powerless to resist—couldn’t imagine how she ever had. Stringed lutes and violins joined in, filling empty spaces in her body. Then the gentle hum of harp strings joined with angelic voices. They sang in a language she had never heard and yet was familiar, as if she could understand if she only listened long enough. The voices rose in crescendo with an aching sweetness, until her chest began to heave with pent-up sobs of joy.
Full of wonder. Full of love.
Yes, so full of love.
Swimming faster she hurried onward, wanting more, wanting the light to consume her. The music grew until it surrounded her, filling her and embracing her, touching her in a thousand different places at once. She let out another sob, feeling an enormous release. And then another as the music penetrated to her very core. Any hardness, any barriers she had erected, the doubts and worries and confusion of life—all melted away.
She was engulfed in complete love. It was something she had never felt before but recognized in a flash of insight that it was something she had hungered after and searched for her whole life. It was the missing piece.
Isabelle swam faster now, in a panic to reach it. Nothing mattered beyond throwing herself into that light, becoming one with it. Her arms pumped, her longing for the light rising until she felt she would burst with pure joy.
Her desperation increased as she suddenly realized something was holding her in the water. Something had a firm grip around her ankles, keeping her from rising any higher. She fought it, kicked at it, but to no avail. Its grasp held firm, as if it had rights. Angry, and with a frantic sadness that went so deep she could hardly breathe, she looked down to see who or what it was that held her firm between life and death.
The water below her was all darkness and movement. Then she was suddenly outside herself, watching herself panic as she searched the murkiness beneath her feet. Then the water changed somehow. It shifted.
She took a shuddering breath as she saw it … and screamed.
* * *
ISABELLE WOKE TO the sound of cries—her own—coming from what seemed a great distance. Awful, spine-chilling sounds. The sounds of the lost. Now a nightmarish dirge drummed through her body, pooling at her throbbing head.
She opened her eyes, saw the ceiling of the cabin, then images flashing overly bright, then snapping away, recent memories of angels and Indians, of light and terror battling to rise to her notice. She struggled to sit up, bracing one hand on the floor and slowly rising. Her head felt thick and sticky. Her eyes saw red all over her. The air itself seemed endued with blood—my own?—and a haze blurred her vision. She blinked several times, trying to clear it.
Her hand, she saw as she lifted it to locate the source of the agonizing pain in her head, was covered with the vital fluid, making her stomach spasm with dread. She found a long gash extending from her right temple up and into her hair and probed it with her fingers, trying to remember how it came to be there. Turning from the wall, she scanned the floor of the cabin, panic and sickness rushing over her. Bodies of several Indians lay at her feet. Further up, the body of a white man—Jake, wasn’t it?—lay face down, arms raised above his head, hands spread wide in a death plea. Visual memories rushed over her, touching her skin, making it crawl for a hole to hide in. But her thoughts were so disjointed that she still couldn’t understand what her eyes were seeing.
A faint movement from under the table made her suck in her breath and hold it, hold her whole body as still as the wall she lay against. She strained to see the small form, making out only a hazy shadow. Was it one of the girls? There had been two, hadn’t there?
Then she saw Naomi lying by the door. Was her chest moving? Struggling to stand, Isabelle slowly picked her way over to the woman’s side. Squatting beside her, Isabelle grasped her shoulder and shook her, trying not to look at the bloody, hairless top of her scalp. “Naomi … Naomi, can you hear me?”
The woman groaned and turned her head on the floor. She was alive. Isabelle shook harder. “Wake up.” Turning to the form under the table, Isabelle motioned with her hand, thinking a daughter’s voice would rouse a mother. “Rose, is that you? Come here, Rose. We must wake your mother.”
A sobbing sound came from the shadow. Isabelle shakily stood, stepping over forms that she averted her eyes from, and coaxed the child from her hiding place. Taking the child’s hand she helped her out, hugging her as she came into Isabelle’s arms, the small body quaking. “Come, Rose.”
Isabelle walked her back to Naomi, fighting the dizziness that threatened her head and clinched her stomach. “Rose, your mother has been wounded. But don’t look at the wound, Rose. Just look at her face and shake her and call to her. Do you understand?” Isabelle looked hard at the little girl, who seemed incapable of answering, staring back in a glassy-eyed gaze.
“I’ll do it,” a voice said from behind the door. And then the face of Millie, sheet white but cognizant, peered at them from around it.
“Oh, Millie. Thank the Lord. Come and wake your mother.” Isabelle motioned her over, marveling that the two girls were completely unhurt. Then remembering the boys, she looked up at the door and straightened, knowing she was going to have to go outside and look for them.
Her movements now growing quicker and surer, she picked up two rifles and found some ammunition, felt the core knot of determination that was so much a part of her. The long column of her back stretched to its full height, little by little, bone by bone, taking over the fear. This was the familiar. This was known.
Stepping over dead bodies and pools of blood, she made it to the open door. With a last look at the girls and Naomi still on the floor, she assured them, “I wi
ll return.” Then she quickly loaded the rifles, stepping outside, staying close to the walls of the cabin, then the nearby springhouse, picking her way across the clearing.
Smoke billowed from the area of the woodpile. A few more steps into the open, and there, by the woodpile, were the farmer’s sons. All dead, their bodies lying like blackened dolls on top of the blazing woodpile.
“No … no!” she cried out, now running toward the horrific scene. She fell on her knees a few feet away, knowing there was nothing she could do, rocking back and forth, sobs wringing from her throat. She was unable to tear herself away from the vision of a small arm dangling over a log, smeared black with smoke.
“Oh God, help us!” Her ragged cry rent the air as she covered her face in her hands. Just … trying … to … breathe.
She saw it then. In her mind’s eye, the half-black, half-white painted face of the Indian that had struck her down. She remembered him … remembered his name. Quiet Fox.
Tremors of fear and anger and something else that she had no idea how to identify now overtook her, coursing through her body. She stood and ran about the area, ignoring the blood coursing down her cheek, the excruciating pain from the gash, searching for any sign of the man responsible for this tragedy. Searching for any outlet for a woman’s anguished rage.
Finding no one, she finally stopped, breathing heavily, remembering the girls and how frightened they were, how long she’d been gone.
She rushed, stumbling in a shocked state at the entrance, seeing again and smelling anew the carnage of the cabin—once a haven from the elements for a frontier family, now a bloody grave won by the devil.
She took a long, deep breath. “I can do this,” she said to no one and anyone. “I will do this.”