Fire Along the Sky Fire Along the Sky

by Sara Donati

  “I suppose the smell might get his attention,” she said in a conversational tone. “Perhaps he'll give us the braziers just to get rid of me.”

  Hannah, her mouth full of cornbread, held out another gown. This one, never pretty, had seen hard use in its life; it was stained at hem and cuffs and a burn on the skirt had been patched with a fabric that matched neither in color or pattern. And still it was the best they had between them.

  “I'll have to kittle up the skirt with my belt,” Jennet said, reaching for it. Water ran from her hair over her arm and hissed into the fire.

  Hannah said, “Come and let me comb through your hair again, and then we must be gone. It's almost light.”

  Jennet did as she was bid, pulling the cocoon of blankets more closely around her shoulders.

  “Tell it again,” Hannah said.

  Jennet said, “Braziers, firewood, rations, Sergeant Jones.”

  “But not in that order,” Hannah prompted.

  “Not in that order. Jones first, or nothing else will do any good.”

  Behind her Hannah hesitated. “It's a fine line you'll have to walk.”

  “Och, that you leave to me,” Jennet said. “I'm a daughter of Carryck, you mustn't forget. Did my father the earl not declare I could charm blood from a stone?”

  “We don't need any more blood,” Hannah said.

  Jennet's mouth tightened. “We'll be rid of the wee Welsh cockerel before the day is out, or I'm no my father's daughter.”

  Just before sunrise they took their leave from Runs-from-Bears and joined the queue of women waiting at the garrison gates, all of them with blankets wrapped around their heads against the cold rain, all of them ankle deep in the muck and mud. Most were bent low by the weight of baskets filled with laundry or mending. A few of the youngest, still supple or pretty enough, carried nothing and wore little under their blanket coats.

  Most of the women greeted Hannah, but to Jennet they gave only shy nods. Jennet might dress rough as they did and her hands might be as blistered with work; she could speak Scots and plain English and a common French, but the cap of damp curls under her hood was the yellow of corn silk, and her skin was as translucent as milk after all the cream has been skimmed from it. A white woman among the camp followers was odd enough, but one as young and fine-born as Jennet Huntar who was here to nurse prisoners of war—she must be a mystery and a danger.

  The gates swung open and the crowd pushed forward.

  “Do not put yourself in danger,” Hannah said as they went forward. In response came only her cousin's grin and a fluttering of fingers.

  “What is there to fear, with Sergeant Brodie to escort me?”

  Waiting for Jennet just inside the gates, Uz Brodie heard this, exactly as Jennet meant him to. His cheeks had been scrubbed clean, resulting in two very red and shiny spots to either side of a blue-veined nose. On that hard-worn face a schoolboy's blush was both comical and touching.

  In the followers' camp Jennet was an object of suspicion and some jealousy, but inside the garrison a pretty young Scots widow with a friendly word for everyone was highly thought of, and sought out. Doors opened quickly when she approached, and jackets and hats were put to rights. There were a dozen men who took every opportunity to cross paths with her, and then always found some topic to keep her talking for a minute or two.

  In the first days the men had hesitated to ask questions. Then one of them had got up the courage and wondered out loud what it was that brought a young woman of good family to Nut Island. Jennet, ready for the question, had cocked her head to one side like a little bird and returned curiosity with wonder and Bible verses. And, she added, innocently enough, wouldn't any of the brave men of His Majesty's forces want and deserve a nurse like herself should he ever find himself, Lord preserve, on the other side of the border, in such a place as this? Among themselves the men decided that Mrs. Huntar was a war widow, a rumor that she did nothing to correct.

  When asked about her connection to the Mohawk medicine woman called Walks-Ahead, Jennet would change the subject so neatly and sweetly that no one noticed, at least until it was too late, that she had provided no information at all. Jennet had the gift for pleasing and appeasing with a few bright words. It worked to their advantage and solved many of their problems, but not all.

  Standing in front of the stockade was the problem that had sent Jennet to the colonel: one of the few men who had resisted her charms. Approaching him with mud sucking at her heels, Hannah kept her expression studiously blank.

  “Sergeant Jones,” she said. “Good morning.”

  He was a small man, soft of jowl and gut but with a jaw carved out of twisted gristle. The frizzled hair that showed under his hat had once been red, but had faded to a rusted iron gray. Wiry twists of the same color exploded from his ears and nostrils and cascaded over his pinkish eyes. When he opened his mouth he showed bloody gums studded with teeth like bits of weathered wood.

  The muscles in his jaw popped and worked. Then he leaned forward and spat so that the gob of tobacco and spit landed just short of Hannah's toe. One of his better moods, then.

  “Where's the princess?” he said.

  “Mrs. Huntar had an errand this morning,” said Hannah. “She will be here soon.”

  He considered her for a moment and then stepped aside just enough to let her walk by, though not without brushing against him. He smelled of sweat and stale tobacco and ale, and other things she did not want to contemplate.

  As she passed he said, “I hear there's a pig upriver can speak French. But we got our own wonders, a redskin what talks like you.”

  “For what do I live and breathe,” said Hannah, “but to amuse you, sir?”

  There was no better way to rile Sergeant Jones than to speak above his understanding, something that was amazingly easy to do. For a moment Hannah thought that she had gone too far, but she watched him compose himself—he had not lasted so long in the dragoons without some measure of self-preservation. Hannah cursed her own short temper; she would have to be especially watchful today.

  “I'll look forward to seeing her,” the sergeant said as Hannah walked away. “Coming here all alone, like.”

  It was an empty threat. He might be prodigiously dim, as Jennet liked to put it, but Sergeant Jones was cunning enough to save his games for the prisoners who were least able to protect themselves. Sometimes, when she saw him from afar, Hannah was reminded of the fox she had killed so long ago on the mountain, and she wished for her bow, and a good straight arrow.

  The armed guard at the double doors that opened into the stockade paid her less attention. Whether out of disinterest or fear of their sergeant, Hannah had never been sure. They went through her baskets, as they always did, and then the doors swung open.

  The stockade was far better guarded than it was built. A building much like a stable, slung together as an afterthought. It had a few narrow windows that leaked cold through their shutters, a plank floor with mud oozing up between the cracks, and rows of narrow wooden bunks. On each bunk was a thin pallet of muslin ticking stuffed with straw, and on each pallet two men were meant to take their rest with the comfort of one or, if they were very fortunate, two blankets. The only heat came from an ancient and inefficient stove in the very middle of the room.

  In her first interview with the colonel, Hannah had been informed that there was no space even for the most desperately sick prisoners in the regular infirmary, nor was there money or inclination to build a separate hospital for them. If the Mohawk medicine woman called Walks-Ahead was insistent on tending to the injured or ill in the stockade, then she must make do with a few tables, a pierced tin lamp, and however much firewood and water the prisoners were willing to haul for her. He said this with no malice or any emotion at all, and Hannah was thankful for his honesty, if not his lack of generosity.

  As she stood at the door, fifty pairs of eyes turned to her, and she saw there what she saw every morning: surprise that she had not fled in the ni
ght, and varying degrees of relief and resentment.

  One corner of the room she had taken over as her sick ward, but before she could go there and see her brother, she must spend the few minutes she had with the healthiest of the prisoners, who were assembling for work duty. One of them caught her attention immediately.

  “Josiah,” she said. “They've put you on the work detail? How is your wrist?”

  The young man bobbed his head and would not meet her eye. “It'll do, miz.” In the interest of their own safety and hers, the men knew her as Walks-Ahead. Some of them, the ones who were uncomfortable with her presence here, never called her anything at all, although they were polite enough, and tolerated her attention when they required it. She would have liked to think it was out of respect for her, but Hannah knew it had more to do with Blue-Jay, whose reputation as a swift dispenser of justice was well established.

  She took a quick look at the young man's wrist, which had been badly broken and was still not completely healed. Certainly if he was asked to dig, the damage would be substantial. Hannah could go to the guards and ask for a favor, or to the sergeant and ask for a dispensation, or even to the garrison commander, if she felt strongly enough. But today Jennet was pleading a more important case in front of the colonel, and they must all tread very lightly.

  She said, “If the wrist begins to swell, ask to be transferred to some other kind of work.”

  Something flashed in the young man's eyes, and she knew that she had both amused and affronted him. Of course Josiah Adams would do no such thing. He was a hotheaded son of Vermont, and he would cut off his hand before he asked quarter of a redcoat.

  Quickly she walked down the line, looking for signs of fever and asking questions. Most of the men were not well enough fed for the kind of work that they would be asked to do: hauling wood or water or digging latrines or building fortifications. None of them would complain.

  Blue-Jay was at the end of the line, as always. Compared to most of the others he was in excellent health, and his mother would have wept to see him.

  She said, “Let me look at your tongue.”

  He shook his head, impatient, amused; boy and man she knew him, and expected little else. He said, “Daniel's fever was so high last night I almost sent for you.”

  “I will have to take the bullet out.” Hannah said it aloud for the first time, and in response he blinked at her.

  “Will you have the help you need?”

  “Jennet will be here soon,” Hannah said. She spoke Kahnyen'kehàka, because it drew a wall around them in this place without privacy. “And there was a package from Montreal yesterday. I have the medicines I need.”

  He might have had questions, but the queue was moving forward and the guards were quick to strike out at laggards. Hannah waited until the doors had closed and then began to pick her way across the room, crowded even now with half the men gone. From outside came a short scream and an explosion of laughter. Sergeant Jones, doing what he did best.

  Hannah swallowed down her frustration and stopped to look at a man who had lost the sight in one eye. Every day he asked her when he would be healed.

  The truth could not come as a surprise to him, but Hannah saw no need to rob him of hope, just yet. Instead she went to her little sick ward where her brother lay in this, his newest fever.

  The prisoners were an odd mix of militiamen, army regulars, rangers, scouts. They were white and red, young and old, backwoodsmen, fishermen, and farmers from Vermont and New-York State and from as far away as Maine. The newest of them had been brought to the stockade just a week ago after a week's march. Of those fifteen men, six had already died, three were here among the hopeless, and the rest had been sent out to work.

  She started, as she always did, with the worst wounded, the ones no one could help. John Trotter, once a butcher, was in the last stages of the smallpox; an Abenaki who called himself St. John had suffered a blow to the back that had rendered his kidneys incapable of their work; Olivier Theriot, a pig farmer from the Vermont–Canada border, had pneumonia in both lungs and a rage against the Tories that kept him alive far longer than Hannah would have predicted.

  And there was the boy. They did not know his name and never would, for the bullet that had destroyed his jaw and burrowed into his head had plunged him into a coma so deep that no pain could rouse him. He lived only because the other prisoners had carried him here, dribbling water and gruel into his mouth. Out of respect for his bravery, they told her, but Hannah knew that it went far deeper: they nursed him for his youth and his beauty and for other reasons none of them could put to words.

  The boy was no more than fifteen, slender and sleek, with a perfect face as blank as a doll's. Every day his eyes sank a little deeper in his skull, and soon he would slip beyond their reach and be buried in a pit under a blanket of quicklime.

  Hannah spent a few minutes with each of these men, wiping sweaty faces and giving them teas she had brewed not to cure them, but to give them relief from pain, and rest.

  While she was busy with them Mr. Whistler brought two more buckets of snow and set them to warm near the oven. He was one of the older prisoners, his freckled skull fringed with hair as stiff and straight as straw. Because he had been an apothecary's assistant in Boston, Mr. Whistler had appointed himself Hannah's majordomo, and had quickly got into the habit of reading her mind, or trying to. Most of the time he was close to right.

  He was a strange little man but willing to do the most disagreeable jobs, and cheerfully; he didn't care that Hannah was Indian, or that she wasn't a man. He cared only that she had proper doctor's instruments and a surgeon's kit and medicines, and most of all, that she could name all the bones of the body with their Latin designation.

  “A doctor without Latin ain't no doctor at all,” he explained to the men who needed her help, to make sure they understood their good fortune.

  “The food's come,” he said to her, first thing.

  Under direction from the guards two of the men were carrying in the great cook pot, its contents sloshing.

  “Then take this,” Hannah said, pushing one of her baskets toward him and pulling back a rag to show him the day's treasure.

  “Eggs!” he said, his eyes flashing surprise and delight. “There must be three dozen of them!” He picked up one of the bigger ones, no bigger around than a silver dollar, but far more precious.

  “It's hardly worth the work of cracking them,” Hannah said. “They are so small. But I thought you could stir them into the gruel.”

  “Crack them?” Mr. Whistler echoed, looking at the egg in his palm. “Why, we'll swallow 'em whole. Where'd you get eggs?”

  “A delivery came from Montreal late yesterday,” she said. “From our good friend.”

  She never mentioned Luke's name, and neither did Mr. Whistler ask. But he was looking at her down the curved slope of his long nose.

  “Did he send the medicine you wanted?”

  “Some of it,” Hannah said. “Enough.”

  “You'll do the operation, then?”

  Hannah glanced at her brother. “Yes,” she said. “As soon as Mrs. Huntar comes.”

  With a grunt of satisfaction Mr. Whistler gathered up the bundle of eggs and trotted over to the men who were gathered around the gruel.

  Hannah went to her brother and crouched beside his pallet. He was asleep, a rare thing given the pain he must deal with, day and night. Later he would need all the strength he could muster, and so she did not wake him. Instead she did as she had been trained to do: she observed him.

  At twelve Daniel had already been taller than every female in the family, and now his lower legs extended well beyond the end of the bunk. All the bones in his face shone through his skin. Even a full month's beard, dark brown and curly, could not disguise the way his mouth was bracketed with pain lines. His lips were cracked and bloody with fever.

  If he had learned only one thing in his brief time as a soldier, it was the meaning of pain. On top of that he
was wound up tight in a heavy wool blanket.

  No matter how patiently or firmly she explained that a fever was not a fire that could be suffocated, Mr. Whistler could do nothing less than swaddle a fevered man like a newborn. Usually Blue-Jay was able to stop Mr. Whistler by simply making sure that there were no blankets to spare, but this morning Daniel was wrapped as Hannah had swaddled him the day he was born in the middle of a February blizzard.

  Without any effort at all she remembered the smell of him, the rosy slick skin, how hot he had felt in her arms, how he had quieted when she held him and spoke to him. How he had opened his eyes and looked at her, eyes green from the start under a mass of damp dark curls. Eyes as green as the sea.

  When he was still an infant she had sometimes unwrapped him just to study the shape of his knees or wrists, the curve of his shoulders, the folds of skin at his neck. Her father's son, her brother.

  Now if she were to unwrap him she would find the evidence of the lost battle that had brought him here. She had heard the story many times already, and no doubt would hear it again. Every time she had to contain her temper and impatience and listen as if she could never have enough of such things: messengers gone wrong, poorly marked trails, troops waylaid, ammunition lost in whitewater, failed maneuvers, flawed strategies, bullets spent and graves dug.

  And the result: her brother's body, a map of the war. Bruises from hip to neck, still dark over the broken ribs but otherwise faded to the yellow-green of a storm sky. Nicks and scratches and the bullet wound, raw and seeping.

  The bullet in his side was what concerned her at the moment, but it was not what worried her most. She had dealt with wounds like this one so many times that she had a feel for them, and this one would not get the better of her. She would not allow it.

  She could not say as much for his arm. Crouched beside him Hannah studied the curve of his neck where it met his shoulder. A year ago she would have been hard-pressed to remember the names even of the major muscles, but now it seemed she could simply look through cloth and skin and past bone to the heart of the damage caused when he had fallen unconscious from the tree. He had asked her, and she had given him the details he wanted: the brachial plexus, a braid of nerves bedded in the shoulder, protected by bone and muscle, the names of the five trunks that moved down into the arm to branch and branch again. More names he did not need to know and would not recall: radial, ulnar, median, musculocutaneous.