The musket went off with a thick gush of red flame and smoke, flying out of Rose’s hands as it fired, obliterating the odor of lovemaking with the acrid stench of scorched powder. The bed, and Oliver lying on it, was enveloped in a cloud of gray-white smoke. To Rose, the report sounded as if the entire house had exploded. She fell to the floor, covering her ears.
Fanny and Thoughtful found her there when they came to the door. When she saw the girls she began to shriek, a high-pitched sound that went on and on. Inside the cloud of powder smoke, the cat was yowling. The smoke cleared a little. Oliver’s face, stunned, and powder-burnt, appeared above the cloud. He was looking down at the bed.
“Jesus, Rose,” he said, in the exact tone of voice he had used after she bit him on their wedding night.
The screaming cat, half the fur peeled from its body, was tumbling convulsively over the coverlet. Oliver reached for the animal and it fastened its teeth into the fleshy part of his thumb. He lifted his hand, gazing dumbly at the dying cat, and tried to shake it loose, but it would not unclench its needly teeth.
Fanny looked away. Her eyes fell on what she thought was a second dead cat. She wondered where it could have come from, and then realized that she was looking at Oliver’s left foot. The buckshot had nearly torn it off the ankle.
Oliver, struggling with the cat, shifted his weight. Blood spurted from a severed artery and splattered on the pages of Oliver’s letter, which had been blown all over the bed by the muzzle blast of the musket. Oliver stared at the red stains, not yet realizing that they were blood. His eyes began to search for the source of the stains.
“Oliver, the cat,” Fanny said in a distinct voice. “Look at the cat.”
Oliver nodded obediently, grinned, weakly shook his hand with the cat dangling from it, and fainted.
“Squirrel, find Ash, quick,” Fanny said in French.
Thoughtful ran out the door. Fanny grasped Oliver’s foot, a mangled red nest of ripped flesh and shattered bone. She could not see the severed artery.
She said, “Rose, bring the light.”
Rose was still shrieking. Fanny slapped her hard on the cheek, leaving a smear of blood from Oliver’s wound on her skin, then handed her the light.
“Hold it close,” Fanny said. “I must be able to see, Rose. Otherwise, you will have murdered him.”
Rose, swaying and gagging, held the lamp. The spurting blood, sticky and warm, sprayed on Fanny’s hair. She still could not see the artery. She seized Oliver’s pitcher of ale and poured it all at once into what had been Oliver’s huge hammer of a foot.
The blood washed away for an instant and she could see into the wound. She put her fingers into the chewed flesh, grasped the artery between the nails of her thumb and middle finger, and pinched it shut.
“The smell,” Rose said, sobbing, “I can’t bear it.” She staggered out of the room, holding the lamp high and vomiting.
“Rose, bring the lamp back!” Fanny shouted, but Rose was running down the passageway.
The cat meowed into the darkness, a series of long thin notes above the staff. Oliver lay perfectly still. After a moment, Fanny could hear him breathing.
3
Aboard the Pamela, after he had discovered that Fanny was intelligent, Ash had shown her a series of anatomical drawings by the Italian artist Berrettini, Pietro da Cortona. The artist had peeled back the skin of a classical male figure and exposed the blood vessels and nerves, the tendons, the bones. The detail was exact, the draftsmanship exquisite.
As he prepared to amputate Oliver’s foot, Ash spoke to Fanny about the differences between the drawings and the realities of the body.
“Paper and ink have many advantages over flesh and blood from the point of view of clarity and consistency,” he said, touching Oliver’s mangled foot with the point of a scalpel. “In the living body, nerves and veins are seldom where they should be. In the diseased or injured body, the form in which the surgeon invariably sees it, the artistry of God has been vandalized. Here the astragalus is destroyed, the metatarsus is shattered, the great phalange and two others are missing. No foot or ankle remains. Could Rose have imagined what complexity lay concealed beneath this skin? Proverbs: ‘A foolish woman is clamorous: she is simple, and knoweth nothing.’”
Oliver’s leg was propped up on two wooden blocks, the ruined foot dangling. Ash had every candle in the house brought into Oliver’s bedroom and placed around the bed. Oliver’s stripped body took on the waxy light of the candle flames. He had been slightly injured by the buckshot in many other places, and rills of blood from these untended wounds formed a scarlet network on his skin.
His hands and his undamaged ankle were tied to the bedposts. With a quill pen, the same one Oliver had been holding in his hand when Rose came into his bedchamber, Ash drew a line around Oliver’s leg, just above the ankle.
There was no blood now. Fanny operated the tourniquet, a triangular device made of brass and leather and canvas straps that fitted around the leg. The tourniquet, operated by a screw, compressed the tibial artery between the ankle and the knee. By adjusting the screw on Ash’s command, she was able to regulate the flow of blood, leaving the flesh clear while the surgeon made his incisions, but permitting the blood to flow so as to cleanse the wound—Ash believed in the antiseptic properties of blood in combatting animacules—and to prevent the flesh from mortifying. Fanny was also charged with counting Oliver’s pulse and respiration and reporting any fluctuation to Ash.
Ash picked up his knife again. “Tighten,” he said.
Fanny rotated the screw on the tourniquet a half-turn. Ash made an incision completely around the leg along the inked line, cutting through the hairy skin and the fat beneath it down to the muscle at a single stroke.
He folded this flap of skin back into a cuff. He touched the rosy exposed muscles with the point of the knife: “Tibalis anterior, peroneus longus, peroneus brevis, flexor digitorum longus.”
He went on speaking in Latin: “See? The nerve is not where the Italian’s pen said it would be. Flesh is not art. Loosen.”
Fanny operated the tourniquet. Why was Ash speaking Latin? He had not done so for months. She had to concentrate in order to understand, and Oliver’s life was at stake.
“Count his pulse,” Ash said. “Tell me if there is any change.”
Ash cut through the muscle in two swift motions, transferring the knife from his left hand to his right as he reached the halfway point of the circle. He picked up a saw.
“The blade is made of clock spring,” he said in English, as there were no precise words for clock spring in Latin.
He went on in Latin as he sawed through the tibia and the fibula with assertive strokes: “The blade must be very strong and perfectly tempered. It was developed for use in cutting ivory, particularly ivory combs, where great precision is required. The teeth of the surgeon’s saw are larger than those of the ivory saw so as not to become gummed with green bone, a most difficult substance to cut cleanly.”
Oliver’s leg was now severed. It fell onto the bed. Ash put down the saw. Working with amazing rapidity, he tied off the two tibial arteries and the other blood vessels one by one, naming them as he did so.
“Loosen.”
Fanny turned the handle on the tourniquet.
“More. Open it completely.”
Holding a lamp in front of a small mirror, Ash put his face close to the stump, searching for bleeding. There was none.
“Help me,” he said. “Dip this lint in this bowl of oil, so much at a time, then hand it to me.”
Fanny did as she was told. Ash packed the stump in lint, drew the flap of skin over the stump, sutured it with a large curved needle, and wrapped it in bandages. Oliver was still unconscious. Ash rolled back his eyelids, listened to his heart, counted his breathing, and wrote all this information down, sharpening the quill with his scalpel. The whole operation had taken no more than twenty minutes.
Oliver groaned and moved. His severed foot still la
y on the bed. A wave of fear went through Fanny, the first emotion she had felt since the operation began. What if Oliver opened his eyes and saw the foot? Fanny picked it up, put it into a basin, and slid it under the bed.
Ash was already at work, probing for lead in Oliver’s other wounds. As he extracted the pellets, he threw them into the floor. None had penetrated far. Fanny bandaged each wound with oil and lint while Ash probed the next. Oliver was now shuddering in his unconsciousness. They removed the wooden blocks, lowered his stump, and covered him with blankets.
Oliver shouted something—they could not understand what—and worked his tongue in his mouth. His eyes opened in a wild stare. Ash seized his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger, twisted, and squeezed. Oliver’s eyes came into focus.
“Do you know where you are?” Ash thundered. Oliver nodded.
“Who am I?”
“Ash.”
“Who is this person?”
“Fanchon.”
“No. Try again.”
“Fanny. Give me a drink.”
The pitcher of ale had been refilled. Fanny poured some into a cup and held it to Oliver’s lips. He choked, coughed, and when the spasm reached his stump, screamed in pain.
“Jesus Christ!” he cried.
Fanny put her arms around Oliver’s neck and pressed her cheek against his stubbled face. He oozed clammy sweat and made noises low in his throat.
“Oh,” he said, “oh, Fanny-my-love, what a fool, what a fool.”
“Ssshhh,” Fanny said. She knew he meant himself.
Ash mixed opium with honey. As soon as Oliver could unclench his teeth, Fanny put the medicine on his tongue with a spoon. It was a strong dose. In a matter of seconds, Oliver’s eyes closed.
“Graves could never teach me Latin, such a fool,” he said before he lost consciousness.
Ash untied Oliver’s wrists and sat beside the bed, counting his pulse. Fanny picked up the basin containing Oliver’s amputated foot and walked along the darkened passageway, holding her breath against the stench. Rose had been right about that. Why should human flesh smell so much worse than meat? No doubt Ash could explain.
On the landing of the stairs, a candle burned beneath a mirror in a golden frame. Fanny looked at herself in the glass. Her face was covered with dried blood; the bodice of her nightgown was caked with it.
Fanny’s skin burned feverishly. She put the basin down and opened the window. Cold air gushed into the house; snow fell off the sill onto her bare feet. Her body stung from it. She washed her face in snow, handful after handful, and scrubbed the blood off her hands.
The window faced east. Venus, as white as the moon and as big, compared to the moon, as the stone to a peach, was just rising above the horizon.
Fanny remembered the ancients’ name for it: Phosphorus, the morning star. When it appeared as the evening star, the Greeks had called it Hesperus. Henry had taught her these facts as a means of making Greek more interesting, holding her up to the window in Catherine Street and pointing out the yellow planet, no larger than a pea, that shone so weakly over London.
She stood by the open window, quaking in her blood-soaked nightgown. The wind had begun to blow, moaning down the chimneys and making the Manor creak like a ship, driving the snow before it and lifting it up in plumes and devils that raced across the open spaces.
4
The wind had been blowing for three days when Two Suns finally discovered the Abenaki name of Philippe de Saint-Christophe. Until then Philippe had had no name among the Abenakis, because they could not remember anything about him.
As always happened, his true name, Atelang, or Wind Hunter, came into being at the same time that his story began. At the time, the Abenakis and Philippe were walking down the Connecticut River, about two days’ march from Alamoth.
It was midmorning. The ice under their feet was so clear that they could see the water running beneath it. Mountainous banks of snow shut the river off from the surrounding country, creating a little world of bluish ice and white snow with a strip of bleached sky above; they had not seen forest or animals, or even the tracks of animals, since the new moon. The moon was now just past the half.
It was very cold. The wind blew hard at their backs. The Abenakis could not run fast enough to keep warm because they were held back by the small sleds they were dragging behind them. This was very annoying. Without sleds, they would have been able to move much faster and work up a sweat. The sleds were Philippe’s idea. They were loaded with rope, gunpowder, food, two small cannon, and many pairs of moccasins and snowshoes.
Because of the sleds, which kept on getting snared on the branches and rocks that were frozen into the ice, the Abenakis were always falling down. Hair, who was clumsy, had broken his nose the day before, and now he fell again. Something struck his testicles as he went down and he writhed on the ice. The other Abenakis stopped in their tracks and looked away from the injured man, as politeness required.
Hair, speaking to his injury, said: “This is very painful. Please stop. I think we should bury these sleds and go home and leave you here to hit some Cowasuck or Englishman in his balls when he digs them up.”
Two Suns was the oldest man in the party, and the Abenakis had learned that the French preferred to talk to old men, so he said to Philippe: “Maybe my son Hair is right. We could bury the sleds and try to find some deer that are stuck in the snow and kill them, and then go home.”
“Jaghte oghte,” Philippe said. “Maybe not.”
Just then a white-tailed buck plunged over the snowbank and fell, head over heels, antlers rattling, onto the ice of the river. The Abenakis, knowing that anything could happen in the world at any time, were not startled by this event, but they were very interested in it. How had the deer reached the river in such deep snow? What could be chasing it?
Stunned by the fall, the buck lay where it was, oblivious of the 150 Abenakis in full war paint who were standing on the ice no more than twenty paces away. It was not dead; its ribs heaved and the Indians could see its breath condensing in the chilled air. The deer lifted its head. As it regained consciousness, the wind howling down the Connecticut dumped the scent of all 150 human beings into its nostrils.
This overpowering whiff of mortal danger seemed to disconnect the animal’s spirit from its legs. The buck scrambled to its feet, tried to run, fell, got up again, fell again, tried to run again, tried to climb the vertical snowbank, and crashed onto the ice a second time. The Abenakis saw that the deer had broken one of its forelegs.
Finally the deer staggered to its feet. Legs splayed, it stood broadside to the wind. The wind pushed the buck downstream. Its hooves skidded over the ice, and after a moment in which the deer slid faster and faster over the ice, it sat down on its white backside.
The Abenakis burst into laughter. The deer looked away, pretending that he did not hear them. Used to be Bear got out his bow and launched an arrow, but the wind took it away. Talks in His Dreams tried too, with the same result. Soon the air was full of arrows, but the wind, eddying in gusts of forty or fifty miles an hour, blew them harmlessly away as if the deer were protected by an enchantment. Dozens of arrows disappeared into the snowbanks or clattered on the ice.
This was a very bad sign. “I think we had better go home,” Hair said again in a very loud voice. “This deer doesn’t want us to go any farther down the river.”
Just then the buck seemed to come to an understanding of the ice under its feet. It straightened its legs, lifted its head, and gave Philippe, who was the human being closest to it, a long brotherly gaze.
Then, as easily as if it were running over the springy floor of an evergreen forest on four good legs, it bounded down the river, stepped gracefully among the spent arrows.
“Huh!” the Abenakis said in unison. The deer heard them and bounded very high into the air.
Then the Abenakis saw that Philippe was chasing the buck. Knees pumping, greatcoat swirling, he sped down a long straight stretch of th
e river. The deer ran easily ahead of him, rack thrown back along its spine, white tail flagging. The Frenchman seemed to have no chance of catching up.
Philippe had insisted that every Abenaki bring a shield with him. For some reason he was now carrying the shield that belonged to Used to be Bear. The shield was strapped to his back. Because Used to be Bear was so huge, this was the biggest shield in the tribe. It was made of the doubled hide of an entire moose, and it was prettily decorated with the severed and tanned ears of the moose and of many other kinds of animals.
Philippe seemed to be gaining on the buck, which was still heading down the ice in a series of tremendous bounds. As he ran, Philippe fixed the bayonet on his short rifle.
He was moving at tremendous speed, faster than the injured deer could run. The Abenaki suddenly understood why. Used to be Bear’s shield was acting like a sail; the wind was pushing Philippe along with it like a leaf.
The deer was tiring. It fell, rose to its feet, ran on, fell again. Philippe skidded past the prostrate buck and turned. He thrust the shield into the snow so that it wouldn’t blow away and walked slowly back toward the deer. The animal, confronted by the man, and apprehending the overpowering scent of danger behind it, scrambled to its feet and tried to climb the snowbank. It fell, skidding down the ice with legs whirling.
Philippe, who was waiting for it, stabbed it through the heart with his bayonet. The buck reared onto its hind legs, heart pumping vermilion, and fell over backward.
Leaving his sled behind him, Two Suns jogged down the ice. Philippe was cleaning his bayonet in the snow. His chest was heaving after his long run after the deer.
Two Suns said, “That was interesting, Wind Hunter. You only had to stab the deer once to make it die.”
Two Suns knelt down on the ice, cut open the buck, removed the liver, and handed it to Philippe.
“Wind Hunter!” he said, very low, so the owner of the name would not hear.
Bride of the Wilderness Page 35