Firebrand's Woman

by Vanessa Royall

  She began to climb, but persisted. “Where are my husband and son buried?”

  “Better not to know. C’mon. Look. Why be thinkin’ of dreary things when they’re all in the past? Look, we can have a good time an’ a great future…”

  Great? Yes, once Jason had begrudgingly called this foul-mouthed barbarian great, in the sense that his instincts were not those of an ordinary person. Indeed, his instincts were not those of a human being at all, but rather of an animal, a dangerous animal possessed of multiple lusts, complicated hungers, which only rapacity, property, and pleasure could assuage. Without the iron exigencies of the frontier, would this type of man ever have gained renown?

  As Delia thought of these things, she realized that she had been acting unwisely. Harris’s strength and determination made resistance futile, made any form of direct attack upon him equally foolhardy.

  “Just tell me where the graves are,” she said, softening her voice with effort, “and then my mind will be at rest and I can face the future you suggest. It is the way among us,” she added, more softly still.

  “Hey!” he cried. “So you’re finally admitting it, huh? Melody told me all about that beadwork pouch, of course. I always knew you was redskin anyway, but that sure don’t make no difference now. I reckon a redskin is built pretty much the same as any other woman, ain’t that right? Anyway, they’re buried down near the river, in that grove next to the sawmill. Don’t worry. It was all done proper, an’ soon as that itinerant preacher comes circuit riding, we’ll have him say the proper prayers. Indian like you wouldn’t much care about our God anyway, eh?”

  Delia did not answer. She stepped from the ladder into the clover-smelling loft. Mounds of hay rose into the cavern of the loft, and Harris held the lantern high. “Right over there’s a likely place,” he said, his voice thick and husky with lust. “Tell me, you Indian women do it some special kind of way I don’t know about?”

  Delia turned and saw him there at the top of the ladder, at the edge of the loft. If she rushed him just at the right moment, he might trip and fall to the floor below.

  But he advanced on her. “Don’t tell me,” he grunted. “I guess I’ll find out, eh?”

  “It seems so,” she started to say, still searching for some ploy, some tactic that would allow her escape.

  But quickly he hung the lantern on a rafter and grabbed her, pulled her to him. She smelled his raw breath and felt his body hard against her, grinding into her. She cried out.

  “What? Yelpin’? This ain’t nothin’. I’ll have you yelpin’ to quite another tune!”

  Reaching for her breasts, he felt the leather pouch. Some weapon? he thought instinctively, and ripped the buttons from her leather jacket, tore open her blouse. The pouch fell out onto the clover.

  “What’s that?” he asked suspiciously, holding her hard.

  “Some…some jewelry of mine.”

  “Hey! So that’s what old Melody found, is it?” Not letting her go for a moment, he pushed her down, grabbed the pouch and opened it. The lantern flickered, but gave sufficient light to reveal the contents of the pouch; Delia’s treasures, relics, remembrances.

  “Why you keep this kind of junk?” he asked, genuinely puzzled, turning a bead necklace in his fingers, then squinting at the white pebbles.

  She shook her head. She could not bear to talk about it, or to have his rough hands on her possessions.

  “An’ here’s that serpent bracelet, like Melody said. What was it Ginral Jackson said? Chickasaw braves wear this kind of thing? I thought they carried them Red Sticks.”

  “That, too,” she said.

  “Well, it don’t do ’em much good now, do it? How’d you get this snake thing?”

  Delia didn’t answer. He guessed.

  “Had you an Indian warrior of a lover once, didn’t you?” The thought seemed a challenge to him. “Well, you look out now, hear? ’Cause he wasn’t nothin’ compared to—”

  Abruptly he stood up, unbuckled his belt, and pulled his breeches down to his boot tops. That was all. Then he was down beside her on the hay again, reaching and pawing, ripping away her clothes. His beard burned her face, her lips; and the calluses on his hands savaged her breasts. Against her thigh, she felt him hot and hard and throbbing.

  “I’ll be a little rough this first time,” he was panting. “Then we’ll settle down an’ do it right.”

  She tried to pull her mouth away from the horrible taste of his breath, which was like burning, which was like death.

  “Here,” he said, thrusting his manhood into her hand. “Don’t you know how to do nothin’?”

  Delia tried to think. If she seemed to cooperate with him, even to acquiesce to his brutal assault, perhaps he would drop his guard, perhaps she might reach his knife or gun.

  No—too far away, at least right now. Down below his knees where his belt was. And she simply could not force herself to a semblance of complicity in this attack upon herself. The man was all over her, and every place he kissed or touched left pain, or the shadow of pain, or the feel of odoriferous dirt upon her skin.

  “Squeeze it,” he said. “Rub it. What’s the matter with you, anyway? What kind of training did you get from that Virginian anyway?”

  That insult to Jason was what she had needed to brace herself, to steel herself against Harris. His lower body was jerking in her hands, and he was moaning, trying to enjoy himself, even as a part of his mind kept vigilant against her. You can never trust a redskin…

  “I am sorry,” she crooned. “But I shall please you.” And shutting her mind away from the revulsion she felt, she gave him a long kiss on the mouth, a kiss to dazzle his brain, and she felt him relax, give way…

  She kissed him again and then shifted her position, trailing her mouth down across his hairy, stinking chest. “Ahhhhh…” he sighed, and ah, what dreams of pleasure did he imagine, as he lay down and spread himself upon the sweet clover, waiting for the gift to begin. He felt her breath upon him, close, tantalizing, and in a minute the magic kiss would come down around him, and he was thinking, I underestimated this here squaw, I surely did, when he felt an odd tugging around his boot tops—and in a frozen instant that lasted as long as eternity or as long as his life would last, he remembered how the hilt of his knife stuck out of the scabbard at his belt, and how the knife felt when it was pulled from the scabbard, exactly as the tugging felt now.

  The delicious kiss for which he waited never came, but the knife did, down into his naked chest. He was surprised that it hurt so little, as if everything, all sensation, had ceased; and he knew, fading, falling, that the hot pool upon his chest was life slipping away, a fountain pouring gently out of himself.

  The last thing Rupert Harris saw in life was a beautiful woman hovering above him, her body pure as an angel’s must be, and her eyes dusky and depthless and triumphant, indomitable, fierce glints of coal far back in the folds of the mountains…

  Delia took up her leather pouch, tied the drawstring around her neck, and pulled on her clothes. She took Harris’s belt and buckled it around her waist, pistol on her left, knife—wiped clean of blood-on her right. Taking the lantern from the rafter, she moved to the ladder and climbed down. Then she threw the lantern back up into the loft, waited an ominous moment, then heard the unmistakable crackle, saw the flash of light that meant lantern oil had ignited the clover. Under cover of darkness she made her way down toward the river as, behind her, the livery flared. She heard the commotion among the few survivors of the village, heard their sleepy, dispirited voices. “Ah, let it burn. Ain’t nobody in it, anyway. Be screamin’ like hell if they were.”

  The grove by the mill, Harris had said. Easy enough to find, soft beneath her feet where the spades had dug and turned the gentle earth that held the remains of her second life. She could not tell where Jason was buried, or where Andrew lay, but the stars did glow upon that night, and a scimitar of moon rode the sky beyond Twin Mountains. For a moment she stood there, beneath the stars,
upon eternal earth, her head bowed; and anyone seeing her might have surmised that she was lost in prayer. Within her mind there were no words. Within her heart were many things, but most of all love and loss, and the promise that never again would disaster like this be visited upon those whom she loved. Indeed, that thought was a prayer, a prayer and a promise.

  Then she pulled from her pouch her own necklace of beads, tore apart the strand by which it was bound, and let the beads spill into her cupped palm.

  “This I leave to you both,” she called softly, saying their names. “Jason. Andrew. Each of these beads is a memory, and a wish. If it is true, as Ababinili has promised, that we live again beyond the North Star, borne forever upon trails of windfall light, I shall see you there.”

  She cast the beads up on the tender earth.

  “Delia is ended now, too,” she told them, turning away.

  It was Gyva who moved silently, fleet as a shadow, through the forest. She set a course toward the Twin Mountains, looming beneath the rind of moon, moving softly and unseen toward home. Her lungs were filled with the scent of pine. Her mind was as clear and inexorable as the winter river, slipping toward the falls. Her heart beat steadily, at one with an ancient world, as she raced homeward through darkness and the night.

  Chapter VI

  “You’re certain of this? You’re absolutely certain?” inquired Andrew Jackson gloomily.

  “Even Mr. Harris is dead,” replied Fes Farson, ducking his head in pretended grief, studying the great Jackson. Old Hickory didn’t seem any too eager to go out on the warpath, and this fact surprised Farson considerably. He watched Jackson ponder the information about the Chickasaw raid that had all but destroyed the Harrisville community, and glanced around the Hermitage. By God, it was magnificent, best house ol’ Fes had ever seen. I’ll have me one just like it, ’cept bigger, he promised himself. Biggest house in Farsonville.

  “You sure it was this Chief Firebrand who done it?” Jackson grunted.

  “Ask the men with me,” Fes said, putting on an aggrieved expression, as if hurt that his word had been doubted.

  Fes had prepared well. He’d spent the night of the raid with Tanya, Randolph’s nigger wench, and he’d put John Thomas through his paces many a time. In the morning, after assigning Tanya to a plow, where she was still at work preparing the fields for the cotton crop, news had reached him that Rupert died in a fire at the livery.

  Fes knew two things the minute he received that news: one, that that half-breed Delia had tricked old Rupert, caught him with his breeches down, so to speak, and two, that if he played his cards right, Harrisville and all that went with it—future coal included—could, without too much trouble, become Farsonville.

  Fes liked the sound of it.

  So he’d gone immediately to some of the older, less remote communities, which had not yet been attacked, and spread the word of Chickasaw savagery, spread the terrible news of Firebrand’s attack. People in those towns were horrified, terrified, and it took no more than the merest suggestion to persuade them that a delegation to Jackson at the Hermitage was the best thing for them to do.

  “Fes is right, Ginral,” they were telling Jackson now. “We got to go up there and clean house. Ain’t no village a’goin’ to be safe till that renegade Firebrand and his Chickasaws are plumb swept right out of there.”

  Jackson sat before them in his rocking chair and considered. That a whole community had been ravaged was incontrovertible. That he had a responsibility to these settlers was beyond question. And, two days before, he had received in the mail a dispatch from Washington, D.C., informing him that the Indian removals program was going forward at full pace. As he sat there rocking, all the points came together, added up, and demanded action. 1828 gleamed before him, and the White House, too, more brightly than ever. Jackson knew what he had to do, and it seemed that a provocation had presented itself that made his decision inescapable.

  “Boys,” he said slowly, rising from the chair, “I hear tell them mountains of east Tennessee make mighty good hunting this time of year.”

  The sudden shouts of the men, Fes Farson among them, fairly lifted the roof from Jackson’s big house, and Rachel appeared, a little frightened, at the top of the main staircase.

  “It’s all right,” Old Hickory told her, glancing up. “Go back and get your rest.”

  She did return to bed, for she was feeling poorly again. Now she felt even worse. Because she sensed that nothing was right at all.

  Torch went to the doorway of the wigwam and moved the heavy pelts aside, stepped out into the air. The chill of the morning invigorated him, and there was beauty in the way ice clung to the bare branches of the trees. His soul quickened and, as always at dawn, he felt strong. Yes, he had been correct in his heart; he had been correct all along. This quiet village, lost in misty morning, with his people safe, asleep, dreaming—perhaps some of them making the drowsy, tender love for which dawn is meant—this peaceful life was wise, was just, was all that had to be. He knew that he was right. He would hold to the path of peace that had, after so many long years of fighting, given the Chickasaw room to breathe. Why, in these past years, none but the sick and old had gone to graves along the river; and during daytime the cries of babes, the chortling yelps of toddlers, brought sounds of joy to the village. With peace, hope had returned, and with hope the future rose new again, like the sun returning now, and all the days lay bright upon the distant horizon.

  If peace might just be kept.

  Now in the matter of Red Dagger, Torch thought, walking toward the well for a drink of clear water, framing the response that his message would contain.

  Then, soundlessly, moccasins soft on the earth, a sentinel ran from the forest, approached his chieftain, stopped, and made fast signs with his hands to ensure silence. Sound carried easily, even in winter trees. The sentinel’s fingers moved as if he were at work upon a loom.

  Torch interpreted. Someone in the forest—approach-our village—very fast—apparently alone. This time of year? he wondered. What does it mean?

  The instincts of a warrior sensing threat came immediately to Torch. This approaching person might be a scout, a runner, an advance guard of an attack. His mind worked, and his own hands flew.

  From where? he asked.

  Harrisville, the sentinel signaled.

  Torch thought it over. Someone coming alone through the mountains could only have gotten this far if all the night had been spent in travel.

  Armed? his hands inquired.

  I was not close enough to observe. I felt the warning must be carried here immediately.

  “You did well,” Torch whispered, and at that moment the first fingers of dawn lanced from behind the eastern wall of clouds. Inexplicably, in a manner that was so natural that Torch later imagined Ababinili had placed the thought in his mind, he felt simultaneously a great tenderness and a terrible knowledge. But at the time he did not know why, nor did he have time to think of it, because the ancient seeress tottered out of her wigwam, still wrapped in her sleeping skins, her body and the bundled pelts steaming in the dawn.

  Old Mark-of-the-Cave, handprint red against her skin, looked to the wall of the forest. So did Torch, and the sentinel, who reached back expertly and fingered an arrow that rested in the quiver upon his shoulder blades.

  “Now it all begins. Now it all ends,” muttered the witch-woman in mournful ambiguity. “The words of Four Bears are fulfilled.”

  Torch and the sentinel heard her words clearly, but neither had opportunity to reflect upon them. From the forest, bathed in the cold, hard light of dawn, strode such a sight as none of them had ever imagined. It was a figure dressed in the long skirts of the jackal women, but sullied with earth, bark, and the twigs of the forest. The strange apparition paused once, there by the edge of the trees, to shake more twigs and dry leaves from her long, raven-black hair. She saw the three of them standing there in the center of the village, chieftain and sentinel and seeress, and stood erect
before them. Her coal-black eyes were alive and burning. The buttons of her jacket had been ripped off. Around her slim waist she wore a wide belt and from it hung a pistol and a killing-knife. She lifted her chin toward them and stood erect and unmoving. The effect was that of a great brave of whom tales are told, returning for an instant to earth.

  I have been to far regions, Gyva told them with her eyes, her bearing. I have been to far places and have passed through the fires. Touch me now who dare.

  Torch felt a fullness, a rapture, against which even the cold logic of leadership could not hold fast.

  “I bring you warning’ Gyva told them then. “Chula Harjo will be on the march. Let us prepare.”

  The villagers gathered to see and hear this apparition whom they had once known, then banished. “It is a trick. Remember all of her other deceptions, in the old times? This is one who has whored to the jackals, and we must not listen.”

  “Silence,” said Torch. “Speak,” he commanded Gyva. Many among the tribe observed with skeptical gaze the apparent indulgence with which their chief treated this banished troublemaker.

  But Gyva surprised them all. She had truly been through the fires, and the pain had taught her much.

  “I come here asking nothing, not even shelter, nor to remain,” she said. “I come to you with a warning, that you may prepare yourselves against destruction, and by having brought this warning, I have repaid you, one and all, for having raised me in my childhood, and sheltered me. There is nothing more that I deserve of you, or that I ask of you.”

  She told them of Jacksa Chula’s political position, succinctly, coldly, masterfully.

  She informed them of the Choctaw treachery, and of the howls for revenge that, mistakenly, the white men would now bring upon Chickasaw heads.

  And she told them an attack was inevitable, would come soon, and would indeed be the battle for which all men like Harris and Fes Farson and their ilk had long been waiting.