Firebrand's Woman

by Vanessa Royall

  She didn’t resist—couldn’t, probably, because of the knife. But wasn’t she acting kind of funny? She should resist. That was the way it was supposed to be. That would make it better.

  But she didn’t.

  What the hell. He slipped a leg behind her and flipped her down on the ground behind the rock. Keeping the knife at her throat, he spread her legs with a hard hand, rolled in between, and found with his fingers what he was looking for. Poised above her, Fes balanced himself with one hand in the dirt beside her shoulder and kept the knife in his other hand, in case she was to get any smart ideas. He had the point of the knife aimed just between those two fine breasts of hers. Still balancing on his arm, he targeted his body, straightened, and shoved himself into her. The sudden, excruciating pleasure shot through his body, and even had he cared, he could not have understood the sense of unspeakable violation that Bright Flower was suffering.

  What he could understand, though, even as he pumped away at her, was that she was trying to get the damn knife! She grabbed his knife hand and seemed to be trying to wrestle the weapon away from him. “Whoa there!” he grunted, making ready to give her a little slap on the side of the head, when suddenly he realized she was not trying to pull the knife away from him. She was trying to pull it into her body—and she did. Choosing the only way she could think of to save her sense of spiritual honor, Bright Flower pulled Fes’s hand down, and the knife with it. The blade slipped into her heart, and blood leaped from her body even as Fes Farson’s seed shot into her. But she was dying, and in her eyes Fes Farson saw a final gleam of triumph. She died, and Fes withdrew from her and leaped to his feet in stunned confusion. God, now why did she have to go and do that? He might have a heap of trouble with them redskins now, for Christ sake. Jesus! He looked down at her perfect, naked, dead body. Bright Flower’s eyes were still on him, boring into him, as if she saw his fate. He shivered and yanked up his trousers, trying to decide what to do with her. Couldn’t leave her here, that was for sure, an’ digging a grave would make no end of noise, wake everybody…

  Hey, they were all asleep, he reasoned, getting shrewd and canny again. If he could just sneak her back…

  So, not looking at Bright Flower’s eyes, he hoisted her up on his shoulder and, before carrying her back to her sleeping place, peered cautiously all around.

  But not cautiously enough. He did not see Teva observing him from behind the bushes at the edge of the woods.

  Chapter XII

  Gyva returned to the encampment not long before dawn. She had not slept at all, but she felt as if she would never have need of sleep again. A great thing had been in need of settling, and she had done it, for Torch and for the tribe. She had shrunk from the killing of the raiding Choctaw long ago. She had killed Harris because only by his death was her freedom to be won. But the killing of Red Dagger was like a final responsibility, without which the tribe’s old life could not be left behind.

  “Is it done?” muttered Teva.

  “Yes.”

  “Now there is another.”

  The witch-woman explained. She had seen Gyva leave the encampment. She had watched Fes Farson cross to Flower and depart. And she had seen Flower go to the place of the rock.

  Such a fate Gyva would not have wished upon anyone, and she silently praised Flower’s hard courage in the face of unspeakable violation.

  “And Torch?” she managed.

  “He sleeps.”

  “Farson has seen enough circlings of the sun,” she said.

  “I agree,” Teva nodded.

  “Where is Flower’s body?”

  “Farson carried it back, and laid it down next to Torch. All were asleep. It will seem like a self-killing, accomplished by Flower out of despair.”

  Gyva bit her lip. Even in crisis—though it must have affected him—Fes Farson seemed to have a reservoir of desperate and icy calm. She and Teva would have to match and exceed the level of his self-containment if they meant to destroy him.

  And they did mean to do so.

  Morning came, and once again the Indians formed their long column, which wound its slow way through their ancient, well-beloved country, on into a land whose face they did not know. But before setting out, the dead had to be tended. Each day, each night, an old woman or a young child or a brave wounded in the battle with Jackson would succumb to the rigors of the march. They were buried along the trail, and each morning a prayer was made over their graves.

  This morning the bodies of Bright Flower and Bright Badger were laid to rest. Teva said the prayer:

  O Great and mighty Spirit,

  Thou who hast from thy well of

  inscrutable wisdom caused thy children to

  be cast out of their heartland,

  accept unto thy care today

  the spirits of those whose bodies

  have already been accepted by thy earth.

  Take unto thyself Bright Flower

  and take Bright Badger, too,

  that they should know the love of the infinite,

  and that their deaths shall have meaning.

  Gyva did not weep. Her heart held too much fury for mere tears. She was waiting. She and the seeress had prepared Flower’s body for burial, and had given other members of the tribe to understand that the maiden had succumbed to sudden fever, compounded by malaise. If the real cause of death became known, the people would rise up, even in this bleak hour of extreme travail. And if they rose up, the jackals would crush them utterly, kill them to the last living soul. Flower would be avenged in due course, but not now. She watched the blanket-wrapped body as it was lowered into the red earth, and thought, I knew you, Flower, better than you believed. Because we were both women, and knew love. I knew you because of Torch. So go in peace, and know that I love you, too, in the end.

  She felt simple sadness when Bright Badger was lowered to his final resting place. The poor boy seemed to have been born under the mark of the black star, his life a luckless series of mishaps and accidents and disasters of greater or lesser magnitude. After Jason had helped him escape from Gale Foley’s place in Harrisville, he had returned to the tribe to enjoy, for a short time, a measure of respect and admiration hitherto beyond his experience. But he was essentially a good-humored, shallow, loutish lad, and the manner in which he boasted of his captivity and escape, the manner in which he basked in well-meant but routine praise, soon turned his fellows against him. He became something of a laughingstock, until there were those who all too gleefully recalled that it was Bright Badger’s own slow-footed stupidity that had caused him to be captured by Harris in the first place. Bright Badger ceased to boast then, and he went on to live as quietly as he could, tending cattle—rather carelessly—and caring for the horses in a manner not much better. Indeed, a horse had laid him low. Setting up the encampment on the previous evening, a tired, skittish mare had kicked him in the head. It was not meant for Bright Badger to lay eyes upon the strange, distant land of Oklahoma.

  And for how many another Chickasaw, thought Gyva, watching the earth being tossed down now upon the bodies, would such a view be forbidden?

  She glanced around discreetly. Most of the jackals were completing their breakfast at a campfire not far away. Fes Farson was with them, but he was not sharing in their mean chatter. No, he stood watching the burial scene and looking over the Chickasaw. He is probably calculating what Bright Badger might have brought on a slaver’s auction block, Gyva reflected. Or how many pieces of gold Flower would have fetched from the owner of one of those houses where the jackal men purchased with hard coin what they could not win with loving tongue and gentle heart. Bright Badger and Flower might be lucky to have died before the unfolding of unknown horrors lying in wait.

  Then she saw Farson’s eyes on her. There was puzzlement in them. He was wondering about Bright Flower. Did he know that Teva had seen him with the maiden? He did not seem to.

  She looked away, not abruptly, just let her gaze pass casually from him. He must not know
. He must wonder. He must guess. He must begin to worry. But could Fes Farson worry? Did he have it in him to agonize over a thing, until he began to come unraveled, to make mistakes? That was the question.

  Before the march began that day, Gyva went to Torch and helped lift him onto the stretcher on which he traveled. He was conscious, but he seemed to have difficulty recognizing her. The wound on his skull had covered itself, but Gyva had no way of knowing how much damage had been wreaked inside his head. The wound in his breast was infected, and daily changes of dressing revealed pockets of festering pus.

  “Where…are we…bound?” he asked dully.

  She touched his forehead gently. Hot and dry. A bad sign.

  “Oklahoma,” she said. She motioned for a dipper, then slowly gave cool water to her chieftain and beloved.

  “Is it far?” he asked, when he had ceased drinking.

  She did not wish to tell him how far it was, lest he give up his fight to live. “Only beyond the river,” she said soothingly. “Just sleep, and in a time we shall be there.”

  “The river,” he sighed, trying to smile, “and the bend where sand is gold…”

  For the first time, Gyva allowed herself to hope for his recovery. He was not delirious now, and neither was he hallucinating. He remembered his sacred vision. As he spoke, his eyes seemed to clear a little, his gaze sharpened, and she saw herself reflected in his eyes.

  “Ixchay, Dey-Lor-Gyva…”

  But that was all, just then.

  “Come on, let’s move out!” Fes Farson was shouting. “Be mid-mornin’ before you lazy-ass redskins get your breechcloths organized, fer Christ sake.”

  Once on the trail, Gyva guided her horse away from the jackals and whispered to Teva, who rode behind her. “What about Farson?”

  “I have considered it. Today, ask of each woman and maiden the gift of one glass bead or ornament.”

  “What?”

  “A present for Mr. Farson,” Teva explained obscurely. “Before we reach Memphis, we must make a present to him for the fine care he has bestowed upon us.”

  Gyva did not understand Teva’s plan, if indeed she had one. But nevertheless she went from woman to woman, explaining nothing, telling them only that the seeress had need of fragile ornaments. Shrugging, they complied. Perhaps Teva had one last trick that might save the Chickasaw, in which case the offering of a bead or trinket was more than worthwhile.

  Days passed, and they came down out of the hills and onto the sweltering flatlands that led to the Mississippi valley.

  “I reckon we’ll reach Memphis in a coupla days,” Fes allowed late one afternoon. He had brought his horse alongside Gyva’s. “Once we get to Memphis, my responsibility to y’all is over. Unless, of course, I decide to sell you all to some nice plantation owner.”

  “No,” Gyva said. “We shall cross the river and seek our destiny.”

  “Wait!” old Teva interrupted. “Mr. Farson, do you truly harbor in your heart plans to turn us over to slave traders?”

  He cackled. “That’s fer me to know an’ you to find out, as the man says.”

  “Perhaps if I might make an offer of wealth in excess of any you might receive from a slaver?”

  What was Teva thinking about? wondered Gyva. Was she thinking that the pitiful collection of beads and jewelry taken from the women of the tribe would assuage Farson’s greed? The seeress must be growing senile. History did not so readily reverse itself. The trinkets that the white man had once used to rob the red man of his land would not now buy back from the white man the very lives of the Indians themselves.

  “So you got some hidden gold, eh?” Farson was gloating. “Tell the truth, I always expected as much. How much you got?”

  “Come tonight to our fire,” Teva told him. “And we shall count how much it is.”

  “It better be plenty,” grunted Farson, sawing the reins and turning his horse back toward the center of the column.

  When they stopped that night to make camp, Gyva walked the long line, asking after the health of her people, gauging how much damage had been done by the day’s march. Several women had collapsed. Three children were sick with exhaustion. One brave—young Grey Bough—was dead, his body thrown over the back of a horse for burial in the morning. A bad day, but there had been worse. The Chickasaw regarded her with dark, patient, suffering eyes. “The river lies before us now,” she told them, with as much hopefulness as she could summon. “After we cross the river we shall be free.”

  “Tomorrow?” they asked.

  “Maybe tomorrow. We must circle Memphis, and pass down the bluffs. Then we are free.”

  She saw in their eyes that they wanted to believe her, and such desire would help them through at least another night. She walked back to Teva, and found the old woman painstakingly at work over a fire. A small kettle bubbled with a succulent stew, which immediately made Gyva aware of her hunger. She took her tin bowl from the saddlebag.

  “No,” Teva commanded. “It is for our guest. Only rabbit, I am afraid, but the most tender parts thereof, and also tubers and wild onion for taste.”

  Truly the stew gave off a most enticing aroma. But if the seeress thought a mere meal would warm Farson’s heart, her old mind was softer than Gyva had imagined.

  “And what do you hope to gain by this?”

  “Whatever there is to be gained,” said the old woman, stirring the stew.

  It was no use to argue with Teva. Her heart was in the right place, whatever might have happened to her mind. Gyva sat down, rested, and chewed a chunk of bread that had grown hard and dry in her saddlebag. Perhaps Farson would not gorge himself on all of the stew. There might be some remaining.

  Fes swaggered toward them, sat down peremptorily, and sniffed the air. He had his whiskey jug with him, but he did not offer it. No redskin lips ought to touch that upon which a mighty white man places his thirsty kiss.

  “So? What’re ya waitin’ fer? I’m hungry.”

  Teva got up slowly, her old joints protesting, and went to the kettle, spooning sweet, steaming rabbit stew from the kettle to a heated bowl. She stuck the spoon in the bowl, hobbled back to Farson, handed it to him, and sat down. He poked the pieces of tender rabbit, and his eyes lit up. “Hey!” he said, “this ain’t half bad!” He took a big mouthful. “Ain’t half bad at all,” he repeated, chewing happily with his mouth open. “Now, if you don’t mind talkin’ business while I eat, how much money have you got?”

  “Money?” asked Teva, as if confounded.

  Gyva almost sighed in exasperation. The witch-woman herself had invited Farson here tonight in order to discuss money, and now she had forgotten all about it.

  “That’s right,” said Fes, gulping another enormous mouthful of rabbit stew. So tender was it that he didn’t even bother to chew. Didn’t have to. “You said you was goin’ to make me an offer an’ buy me off. ’Cause of the slavers. Why, you stupid old bat! Don’t you even remember?” He gave Gyva a disgusted glance, circled his finger round and round next to his temple as if to say, See? Daft as a loon she is, and took another mighty mouthful of the stew. Gyva watched him eating. Her poor stomach was rumbling, her mouth wet with a hunger stirred by the aroma of the food. Farson finished his bowl and shoved it forward. “More,” he said.

  Teva made as if to rise, but Gyva beat her to it. She would give Farson some more, and while doing so she would have some stew herself.

  “Come on now, where’s the gold?” Farson demanded.

  Gyva was halfway to the kettle, which simmered happily over the fire. Teva seemed to be trying to make some cautionary gesture, as if to tell Gyva something dangerous lay in wait for her, something to be avoided. And Fes Farson was demanding money.

  Then he became totally silent, completely still, for the shred of a terrible instant. In that instant he clutched at his gut, eyes wide with horror and a dawning awareness of what had happened.

  “Nooooo!” he cried, “Oh, no!” He leaped up as if to run, realizing at the same tim
e that running would do no good. It was too late to run.

  Gyva stood, stunned and horrified, midway between Farson and the fire. Old Teva just sat there on the ground, smiling now, with a look of tremendous triumph on her face. The blood beneath her pale mark even pulsed and surged a time or two. And Farson held his belly, eyes wide as ever, mouth open, as from his mouth the blood began to come. Some strange, inexplicable pain seemed to hold and possess him. Screaming, he ripped off his clothes, rolling upon the earth now. Indians, summoned by the commotion, gathered around, and the jackal guards raced over to regard Festus. He flopped naked and bloody upon the earth, the blood coming from his nose and mouth, and then from his genitals, too, and from every orifice upon his body. It seemed as if blood would emanate also from the very pores of his flesh, but this he was spared. He did not die quickly, but neither did it take too long for him to succumb, and he flopped and gasped one last time beneath the horrified gaze of his men, beneath the obsidian, implacable eyes of the Chickasaw.

  When at last Farson was still, old Teva got up and addressed the jackals. “It could not be helped,” she told them. “It was a curse.”

  The guards looked at her, then at Farson. It had certainly been a curse, all right. Two of them began to vomit and raced for the trees. The rest backed away, to gather at some distance, talking fast and low.

  “You killed him, Teva, did you not?” the Indians asked.

  “No,” she grinned, toothless and indomitable. “We all killed him.”

  “It was the stew, of course,” Gyva guessed.

  Old Teva grinned some more. “No, no. How could it have been the stew? The stew was splendid. Do you question my skill with kettle and condiments?”

  She gave a high, cackling laugh. “It might, however, have been the beads I ground into fine powder, and which I used to flavor the stew. I will not say it was not that.”