“Boys,” he said, leaping back up into the saddle. “Get into battle formation, and let’s move out. Them flank parties on the river is goin’ to be in big trouble, if they ain’t already.”
Torch chose to wait in the village; and, from the command post of his wigwam, he received and relayed orders through scouts and messengers—calmly, always calmly, never raising his voice. He was dressed in the full regalia of a chieftain-warrior, from a resplendent headdress of blood-colored band, with beads and the feathers of a white heron, to a ceremonial breech-cloth, also red as the eternal Chickasaw blood, to moccasins upon which had been etched the sign of the one Torch must kill this day. A. J. Outside the wigwam waited Torch’s white stallion, and upon it the saddle of Chula Harjo, a talisman, a symbol that he who rode the white stallion already possessed half of Jackson, and would by flight of arrow, slash of knife, thrust of lance, acquire the remainder today.
Torch sat bare-chested in the wigwam and listened to the news as it was brought by messengers. When the time came, when he knew where the center of the battle would be, thereto would he go. Of all the women in the tribe, only Teva the seeress was with him. The old crone remembered history, recalled the wisdom gained in long lost circlings of the sun, battles fought in lost canyons beyond the mist and shimmer of time. It was Teva’s duty, during the coming struggle, to recount the cunning strategems of old, should the young chief have need of them.
“How is it in thy heart, old woman?” Torch asked, but he spoke affectionately, for during the early time of his chieftaincy Teva’s counsel had invariably served him well. He could tell in her face and bearing that she had little time left upon the earth, and his bond with her was stronger for that reason. Not many of the Chickasaw people had given as much to the welfare of the tribe as had this tottering witch-woman.
“My heart beats,” Teva growled from her place beside him at the fire. “What more could one ask?”
They were alone for the moment, the last order having been transmitted by messenger, and no returning scout having appeared with further news of Jacksa’s advance.
“I see not the blood beneath the mark of the cave upon thy face, ancient one. Does this bode well or ill for us?”
“In truth, I do not know. This bloody pawprint of mine, with which I have lived since first I drew breath, responds not to my will but to things beyond my own understanding.” She paused and gave Torch a hard, searching look. “And truly,” she added, “there are things to be known that do not require witchery.”
“I hear in your words the hint of something important. And yet you do not reveal your thought. Am I to guess it?”
The old woman was silent for a while longer, her eyes still hard upon Torch. “I think you know that of which I speak,” she said at length.
“Truly I do not. Is it of the battle to come, or of the past?”
She shook her head, gave a rueful, toothless grin. “It is meant for man and woman to be hot-blooded,” she sighed. “But there is a time and place for all things, for the rites of the flesh are as sacred as any other—perhaps more sacred. But violations of the spirit, violations of vow and duty, do indeed cause a trembling in the heavens, for which recompense must be paid, lest lust shudder the tender precipice upon which our nation is poised.”
So that was it. Teva knew that Torch had made love to Gyva, only an hour before. Torch remembered how Gyva had shivered in his arms after the loving, as if suddenly she were cold. And he remembered her fear that something bad would transpire, something to make them pay in suffering for what they had shared in illicit joy. Torch had not believed her. But now, regarding the soothsayer’s black and knowing eyes, he wondered. Yet how could the Great Spirit even think to send retribution? Torch’s life—his very soul—had always been joined to Gyva’s. The duties of his leadership, to which he had been most faithful, could not require that he deny a love of vast significance. And of his promises to Bright Flower…
Torch looked away.
“Battle is will and blood,” he said. “The greater the love in one’s heart, the greater the courage. As you have said, the blood comes not to your mark, and you do not know the possible course of this day.”
“I should know it,” the woman returned. “I have always sensed triumph or tragedy in the past. But not today. Today I seem to see another vision, which inspires me not to prophecy but to woe.”
“What is it?” he asked, concealing a growing sense of alarm.
Teva was silent for a long time. “Do you remember the dream you were given during the time of the manhood ritual?”
Of course Torch remembered. How could he ever forget? A dream within a dream, a river within a river, and buried in the sand at the bend of the river a golden stick, the words upon which he had seen but had not remembered. He felt the naked skin upon his back grow cold. Was Teva telling him that his failure to recall the words of the secret of life heralded failure in battle against Jacksa today? Looking upon himself, he saw his smooth, taut skin, his great strength, his iron-muscled arms, upon which the serpent bracelet seemed to move and writhe in the flickering firelight. Would his strength prove as faulty as his memory had been?
“I remember the dream,” was all he said. “What of it?”
Teva leaned forward and placed her curled fingers on his arm. “I too have seen the river.”
Shocked, he stared back at her. “But of what meaning is such a vision? Especially, what does it mean to us today?”
“That I do not know, but I surmise it is why the blood does not flow beneath my mark.”
She spoke in riddles! “I am confused. You must enlighten me.”
“I did not dream the river, nor the bend in the river where lies the golden sand. I saw the river. I was there. It was more real than any vision, and far more true.”
“But what-”
“It is a place where we shall one day be, and that is why…
Then Torch understood. Teva was speaking of another land, another place. The Chickasaw would go down to defeat today, would become yet another nation dispossessed and exiled by the white jackals. And Teva had visited a place to which they would be sent. He expressed this thought.
“I do not know,” she muttered. “I do not know for sure. It did not seem home to me, neither old nor new. But, like the river, we were on our way, on our way to…somewhere.”
Without accepting her implicit message of forthcoming defeat, Torch thought of the one he loved most.
“And Gyva?” he asked. “Was Gyva with us along the river?”
Teva’s cackle was harsh. “You ask not of your wedded wife?”
“And Bright Flower, and all the rest,” he added hastily.
Teva shrugged. “We see what we see. You saw a stick and forgot the message inscribed thereupon. I saw a river, and did not bring back its name.”
“And you do not recall, either, where I was taking our people?”
With his words Teva sat bolt upright, as if struck by some element of her vision that she had incompletely understood before.
“What is it?” Torch asked sharply, thinking her body might have suffered some seizure or attack.
“Nothing,” she said, without conviction, still wrapped in dark knowledge.
“You must tell me!” he demanded. “Where was I taking the people?”
“You…you…” She faltered.
“Go on. I demand to know it.”
“You were not taking us anywhere,” Teva murmured, not looking at him. “You were not leading us.”
Torch felt the breath go out of him, and sensed that his lungs took in no more, but he did not care just then. It was as if, in Teva’s words, he had been given irrefutable proof of his own death.
Retribution? For loving Gyva? How could it be?
“But I do not understand—” he started to say.
Then a brave burst into the wigwam. “Battle has commenced on the river to the west,” the messenger cried excitedly.
Torch had no more time to contemplat
e his fate. He did not have to anymore; it waited outside. He mounted his stallion and went to meet it.
Chapter VIII
Gyva had been given the duty of organizing the women and children. In a battle such as the one envisioned, much of the fighting would be done some distance from the village, and this fighting was the responsibility of the braves. Should the braves falter and be driven back into the village—or, worse, should they be defeated in the forest, along the river—then the women themselves must fight Chula Harjo until they were victorious. Or until they were defeated.
For such they had vowed. There would be no more retreat.
Gyva remembered most of the women, and knew they would fight with arrow and knife, tooth and nail, as long as they were able, and so would the older children. It was the smaller children who presented the greater problem.
“I shall bear my son upon my back during battle,” cried Two-Reeds, she of broad back and ample girth, out of whose fertile womb had come nine children, this boy-baby to whom she referred being her last. “If I should see there is no hope, I shall myself take him with me into death.”
There was much nodding of heads at this.
“It is unnecessary,” Gyva countered.
In spite of her authority, they hooted when Gyva said this. She had survived the jackals, true; but, after all, what did she know of children, and safety in battle?
“The littlest can be taken even now into the forest south of the river,” Gyva tried again.
“No, no. They shall stay with us. We cannot chance them to fall into Chula’s hands. He will torture them. He will sell them into slavery!”
There was no persuading them. It was as if they yearned for this final confrontation, to end once and for all the cloud hovering over the nation. Yet she tried again to safeguard the little ones.
“I myself stand here alive because once Jacksa Chula, for all his depravities and true malice, did not let me die.”
“Yes, but he would have sold you into slavery!” cried one of the older women, who knew the old stories of Gyva’s rescue at Cradle-of-the-Speaking-River.
“I do not believe so,” Gyva said. “But listen! There is little time.” She thought swiftly. “Let me offer this. Those mothers who are nursing, or have recently given birth, and those women who are with child—none of you will be able to offer furious battle. So you be the ones to take the youngest across the river. Indeed, your presence here would hinder our progress in battle.”
There were a few nods and some murmurs of assent in support of such logic.
“And if we triumph, of which I am certain,” Gyva continued, although she was not so certain, “then return to the village to gaze upon the head of Andrew Jackson. If we fail, which I do not for one moment countenance, not even as a possibility, then you may return, or you may melt away into the forest. Your closeness to us during the battle will be sufficient to fulfill your vow to be a part of this final struggle, and all know it. And most importantly, there need be no death, particularly not that of a child, unless it is utterly unavoidable.”
“You speak as Torch speaks,” commented an old squaw, not at all critically.
Others agreed, so in the end it was decided to take the small children to safety. Gyva loaded her pistol, the one she had taken from Rupert Harris, and was tightening her bowstring when Bright Flower appeared. Torch’s wife was readied for battle herself, carrying a full quiver of arrows and a knife at the band of her buckskin skirt.
“You speak as Torch speaks,” she said, bitterly repeating the words of the old squaw. Gyva heard both fear and sorrow in her voice.
There was no time for a quarrel. “Our chieftain has ever been wise,” Gyva said quietly.
But Bright Flower felt threatened, and she felt compelled to point out, “He is our chieftain, but he is my man.”
“Yes,” said Gyva, feeling a stab of guilt, and the memory of the apprehension she had felt after loving Torch.
“I know,” Flower continued, “that you are in his heart. Often in his eyes I seem to see your image, even when he is looking at me.”
“He is married to you,” Gyva said softly, knowing the truth of it, the bitter weight of it. “And you have made vows until death. What more do you ask?”
Bright Flower looked back at her with hurt-filled eyes, and departed to the station she had been assigned, next to the forest by the playing field. If worse came to worst, the braves, falling back, were to lead Jackson’s men onto the open field, and the women, concealed in the trees, were to open fire on them.
Sadly Gyva watched Bright Flower walk away. Then she saw the messenger race to Torch’s wigwam, and a moment later Torch rushed out and leaped into the saddle upon the back of the white stallion.
“We go to the river!” he cried to the braves who would fight with him. “Now hasten. We must succeed on the river, for Jackson approaches from the north faster than we had thought”
Then he rode from the village, and Gyva watched him go. But for some secret reason of the heart, she did not think for a moment of battle and death, but was transported in memory back into the past, saw him again as he had been in the young days when she had been growing into her womanhood: how his body had moved as he strode across the dusty ground in the village, how he had looked at her for the first time, in the manner that a man looks at a woman, and how he had said, his voice filled with new meaning, wordless promise, “Ixchay, Dey-Lor-Gyva. Are you well?”
“Ixchay!” she had responded, a little flustered, a little surprised, but delighted beyond description. But before she was able to say anything more, he had gone away.
Now he was going away again.
No, he is not, she decided. And, mounting a horse, she galloped into the forest after Torch and his war party.
There were three parts to the battle, which lasted from mid-afternoon until dusk. Torch and Gyva participated together in the first, which took place on the river to the west of the village. The jackals had been surprised by the Chickasaw waiting in ambush, but fought fiercely with superior numbers, fought with firearms against arrows and knives, and would readily have prevailed had not Torch and his braves and Gyva arrived to offer support to the beleaguered Indians.
Simultaneously, on the river to the east of the village, the second part of the battle was taking place. In this engagement the jackals triumphed, leaving braves dead and dying in the river and upon its banks, and sending red, bloodied water down the current, like curtains of war paint thrown across the river, like scarlet streaks of dye in the blue sky.
Jackson heard the sounds of these two struggles and nerved his men for an immediate attack. “The Indians are occupied now,” he said, “just as I planned. Let’s hit the village.”
He counted, of course, on the village being defended, but he had underestimated the number and ferocity of its defenders. He erred, too, in thinking that the river battles would not be over as quickly as they were. But it was Jackson who not only participated in but served as focal point for the third and main part of the battle. Before he and his contingent reached the village, their senses were numbed by the screaming and shooting that rose from the river engagements; Firebrand was one jump ahead of the white men, and Jackson knew it. Opposed by a foe even cannier than he had suspected, the general exhorted his charging men: “Fight hard and fast. If our men on the river lose, Firebrand and his braves will be back here, and on our necks!”
Not one of them needed a repetition of this advice. The Tennesseeans charged out of the forest and across the meadow. Before them crouched the wigwams of the Chickasaw, the dwellings of their home village, which had never before received a militia assault. Jackson led the charge, brandishing a sword, riding hell-for-leather toward the village, his white mane flowing. Beside him, behind him, the Tennesseeans pounded on, brandishing rifles and pistols and knives. They had already begun firing. Yet, captured as they were by the momentum of the charge, they could not fight back all the terror that rose from a strange and savage cry that th
e Indian defenders were making:
Chula Harjo! Chula Harjo! Chula Harjo!
Over and over came that cry, like a chant, an incantation, and the chilling sound of it pierced the soul.
Too late it struck Jackson as odd that so many of the braves seemed out in the open, that they had not taken more pains to conceal themselves. And too late he knew why this was so. At the edge of the meadow, just where it reached the village, holes had been dug and covered with grass, vines and ropes had been strung taut between stakes in the ground. The horses reached this place, plunging at full gallop, and their legs were snapped like matchsticks. The terrible cries of the horses, rolling in agony on the ground, matched in extremity and horror the cries of the Tennesseeans.
As soon as the horses and riders began to fall, the Chickasaw braves dashed forward with knives and tomahawks, leaving their women behind barriers to cover the attack with bows and arrows. A wicked, slashing, ferocious battle commenced, just as Torch and his party galloped forward, elated by their success down at the river.
Chula Harjo! Chula Harjo! Chula Harjo!
Jackson, grappling with a sinewy brave, saw Torch coming, and then, disbelieving, saw beside the chieftain a woman of incredible beauty, racing toward him like a mountain cat on the attack, her face full of rage and radiance. He knew immediately who it was. I should have killed her when I had the chance, he thought sadly, as he sent his Bowie knife between the ribs of the brave with whom he was struggling. He had time to half turn to see the eyes of Gyva and Torch upon him.
Well, it had come. The time to settle everything once and for all.
Then Fes Farson leaped forward, or blundered forward, into Jackson’s line of sight. Gyva, riding toward the general, decided in an instant, and slashed at Fes with her knife. At the same moment Firebrand dived from his horse, sailed over Farson, and landed on General Jackson. The two men crashed down into the bloody dust.
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