A Flight of Arrows (37 page)

They were deep into the western ravine, fighting through to the hottest part of a punishing battle that had raged since the morning.

Hampered by the pain in his hip, taxed from the effort to meet soldiers and warriors who rose from behind smoke-hazed stumps and hemlock trunks to engage them, Reginald doubted he could endure much longer. He'd lost count of the times Stone Thrower had blocked the blow of hatchet or bayonet meant to end him, even as the Oneida fought his own battles. In the confusion and desperation enveloping this fight, the lines between friend and enemy had blurred. They were taking violence from both.

It was some moments of glimpsing the white-coated figures dodging and rushing about before Reginald realized he was seeing men of Johnson's regiment—Royal Yorkers—wearing their coats turned inside out, not militia in hunting shirts. They'd been looking for
green
coats, first among the rain-washed dead where already the stench was gagging despite
the cleansing downpour. Reginald had slowed their progress, insisting on looking into the face of every mutilated corpse in green. When the impossible scope of that grisly task grew apparent, he'd heeded Stone Thrower's urging to get in among the soldiers still fighting.

“My sons live,” the warrior had insisted. “We will not find them here.”

By stealth and force, they'd made their way toward the wooded height and the thickest fighting. Panting, scrabbling through brush, weaving through trees. Scored and grazed in sundry places but with no serious hurt. Thus far.

As the ground leveled beneath their feet and they sought their bearings for what confronted them, they sensed a shift in the surrounding chaos. Indian war cries had assaulted Reginald's ears for so many days on end, he hardly registered them. Now, though, their tenor was changing—the same word shouted, echoed back from throat to throat. Half-veiled in drifting smoke, lithe brown figures turned and leapt away, breaking off the fight, making for the ravine below.

Stone Thrower pushed him down, saving him from a musket ball that slammed into a hemlock trunk at head height. “They retreat to the camp. They know of Willett's sortie.”

Reginald looked wildly about, relief and panic clashing. Would the Yorkers retreat as well? How could they possibly cover all this ground if—

Three warriors, faces painted, came crashing through a thicket yards away, headed straight for where they crouched at the base of the hemlock. Senecas. Stone Thrower hauled Reginald up again to meet the attack as a fourth figure, a soldier, stumbled into view and came between them and the onrushing Senecas.

The soldier's coat was smeared in leaf matter, but it had once been white. Whether a Yorker in turned coat or a militiaman in hunting frock there was no telling. Tall and hatless, tailed hair brown, he could have been anyone, but something about that span of shoulders, that set of head, the way he moved…

The Senecas met the soldier at the base of a stony ledge. One raised a club and knocked him to the ground with a blow to the head. While his companions turned back to protest, the Indian lifted the soldier by the hair, turning his face up.

A slack-mouthed face. William's face.

Beside him Stone Thrower loosed a cry of rage. The warrior grasping William's hair snarled something in defiance as his companions turned in alarm. Stone Thrower was already upon them, Reginald a step behind. While Reginald rushed at one of the Senecas, the butt of his rifle raised, Stone Thrower knocked the other's legs from under him with a powerful swipe of his gun, then raised his blade to the one fixing to scalp his son. The Seneca flung William to the ground.

Reginald broke off his attack on the third Seneca as the warrior went reeling from a blow then lunged through agony and panic to William's side. Staring blue from a mask of filth, William's eyes were dazed. He struggled to get his knees under him, gaping at Reginald, who felt a crushing of relief, a glorious agony in his chest.

“William!” He touched his son's head. His palm came away slick with blood.

William's eyes rushed full with recognition, before they sharpened, looking beyond him. “Father—take heed!”

Reginald turned instinctively, fearing he'd made a fatal mistake in abandoning that warrior without killing him, but it was Stone Thrower come to crouch beside him. William, perceiving an enemy, struggled to find a weapon, hand scrabbling, closing over a stone.

Reginald grabbed his hand. “Don't be afraid. We're going to get you away. This is your—”

But Stone Thrower had hurled himself away again.

What happened next was to Reginald a swift jumble of impressions. Stone Thrower's tomahawk arcing upward. Horror on William's face. Himself yanked bodily from the ground. Hands dragging him from
William's side. The scene at the base of the ledge opening up to him. Two Senecas lay dead. Stone Thrower drove his tomahawk into the neck of the third—which meant whoever had Reginald now wasn't one of those who'd attacked but another who had happened upon the chance to take a captive and leapt at it.

William shouted. Stone Thrower turned and saw him. More Indians flitted around them through the smoke. Two were rushing straight at William just above that lip of stone, on the verge of leaping down. Reginald twisted in his captors' hold, keeping Stone Thrower in view, and with all the strength left to him shouted, “Save him!”

He hadn't been attempting escape, but his captor couldn't know that. The last Reginald saw before pain exploded through his skull was Stone Thrower turning back, seeing the warriors bearing down from above. He reached William's side…then the pair were obscured by smoke and brush.

No one came after Reginald. On the ragged edge of consciousness, he embraced relief. Another face arose before him.
Lydia
.

Then darkness blotted out all.

As he came leaping down the slope, Two Hawks saw Stone Thrower's familiar shape below a stony ledge. And he'd seen—or thought he'd seen—a white man who looked alarmingly like Anna Catherine's father being dragged away through the wood by Senecas. Two more Senecas dropped off the ledge to attack his father and what appeared to be a turned-coat soldier slumped at his father's feet. Raising his tomahawk, Two Hawks leapt onto the back of the nearest Seneca. They landed hard together in a cracking of brush and fern. Two Hawks rolled free, his tomahawk bloodied. The Seneca didn't rise. He whirled to see his father grappling with the other, knocking him to the ground with his rifle, one powerful killing
blow. There was only the soldier between them, still on hands and knees. Blood coursed down his face from a wound high on his head. Even so, Two Hawks knew him. He staggered, nearly dropped his weapon from trembling fingers, then hurried to his father, kneeling now.

“Here is your brother,” Stone Thrower said, relief blazing from a face marked with exhaustion and strain. “Now you. Thank Creator for you!”

Two Hawks knew an instant of joy before the sight of so much blood on his brother's brow and face overshadowed it with worry. “Is he badly injured?”

They'd spoken in Oneida. His brother tried to rise but fell back into the leaves, groaning. Two Hawks might have groaned as well. All that study of English and in the moment it mattered the tongue had fled him! Impressions of the last moments swirled through his mind. One snagged, and a cold knot formed in his belly.

“Was it Aubrey? Did I see—”

“You saw,” his father confirmed. “But we must save your brother now. Help me.”

Two Hawks jammed his tomahawk through his sash. He got a shoulder beneath one of his brother's arms. His father did the same. They rose together with William's sagging weight between them. Two Hawks was touching his twin for the first time since the day of their birth and could not pause to wonder at it as they staggered over bodies clogging the wood, blocking their way.

“Where is our path out of this?” Two Hawks cried as they swerved aside from men still hacking each other, some so spent they fought on their knees, though half the British force and nearly all their warriors were turning back toward their camps at the fort, some dragging prisoners along, others wounded comrades.

“Run in their wake for now,” his father gasped, chest heaving with effort. “We carry one of their wounded. Until we cross the ravine and can make our way out of this, we are Senecas.”

William's head lolled between them, coming to rest against their father's neck.

“We must find help.” Two Hawks didn't think the militia was pursuing the retreating British. He hoped that brave general, Herkimer, was still among the living. Many cried out as they passed, moaning for help, water, mercy to end their suffering. It tore at Two Hawks to pass them by unaided.

“Oriska,” his father said. “We take him there.”

There would be healers at Oriska. Women to tend the wounded. No doubt many would be brought there out of this battle today. But it was a long way to carry his brother. Miles.

Kanowalohale was much farther, still Two Hawks wished for Lydia and her healing skill, longed for Anna Catherine, his thoughts already reaching out in grief, though she didn't yet know there was reason to grieve.
Bear's Heart, we had to choose
.

Even if their brother survived, there would be hearts on the ground when he saw Anna Catherine again, instead of the joy they might have known. Would she forgive their choice?

August 6, 1777

Oriska Town

W
illiam hovered on the edge of waking, aware of a fire's crackle, of voices speaking within range of his hearing. Men's voices, their tones uneasy. He couldn't make out their words. A louder voice was raised in an odd, broken rhythm. Chanting? Why could he not understand? Something about it all was wrong. The wrongness weighed like earth heaped over him, smothering and dark. An ache beat in the center of his chest. Worse was the throbbing in his head. Why did he hurt so abominably?

He'd seen battle, that was why. He'd been wounded. Struck down after hours of fighting. Memories flooded in, reeling like drunkards, until one steadied and caused his gut to clench. Reginald Aubrey. The man had found him and seconds later been captured.

Indians
. He opened eyes, saw the face of a warrior looming over him, and flailed in panic. The pain in his head roared high and blinding. When his vision returned, the warrior still bent over him.

But it wasn't a warrior, he now saw. It was a woman. The one he'd seen in the heat of battle. That fierce, beautiful creature who'd started to slay him, then let him live. Only now her face was clean, save for a cut on her brow, her hair smoothed back in a braid, black as a raven's plumage. She studied him intensely, no longer fierce. Still beautiful.

“You—” He barely croaked the word, but her dark eyes widened, reflecting
firelight. Her hand brushed his brow, her touch warm. When she smiled, William momentarily forgot both raging head and bewilderment.

“I am Strikes-The-Water, Deer Clan,” she said in careful English. “You are He-Is-Taken, Turtle Clan.”

He was what? Taken? Turtle…? But she'd looked away and was speaking to someone else now. He made to push up onto his forearms. The pain raged up behind his eyes again, and blackness followed it.

Clear Day had tried to reach Oriska before Two Hawks left for the soldier camp but had hurt himself on the way. Just a twisted ankle but it slowed him. Strikes-The-Water had found him on the trail, helped him to Oriska by the morning of the battle, then slipped away and followed the warriors. Clear Day confirmed that Anna Catherine and Lydia were at Kanowalohale. Two Hawks longed to go to them, yet feared all the more to tell Anna Catherine he'd seen her father dragged away to what would surely be a brutal death. How could he go to her with such news?

That was what he and his father and his father's uncle were discussing when William woke. They broke off their talk and hurried to where Strikes-The-Water had taken root at his brother's side to clean the blood and powder soot from his face. Two Hawks moved to the other side of the pallet on which his brother lay in the lodge of one of Oriska's healers, where other warriors had been brought. These were not the worst injured and so were stoic in their suffering. Elsewhere in the town, many of Herkimer's men were being tended. They'd kept William away from them. They'd removed his coat—the telling green still turned inward—to check for injuries. What they found were scrapes, bruises, a bad one in the center of his chest. It was the blow to the head that had made his brother swoon over the four miles they'd carried him. They had gained help along
the way as others straggled out of the ravine, weaving dazed and exhausted through the bodies of horses and men slain on the road as they fled, cut down by Thayendanegea and his warriors. It had been a gruesome and worrisome march. Now at last his brother had uttered speech—and Two Hawks hadn't been beside him to hear it.

“He spoke to you.” He wrenched his gaze from that face so like his own to frown at Strikes-The-Water. “What did he say?”

“He knew me.”

The girl sounded pleased about it, but Two Hawks frowned. “After seeing you once in the midst of battle?”

“And why not?” she challenged. “I do not think the sight of me in battle is a thing a man might easily forget.”

Two Hawks managed not to roll his eyes—or let her see he secretly agreed with her. He would not forget the sight any time soon himself.

Stone Thrower knelt beside the girl and placed a hand on her shoulder. “You have done well, Daughter. You helped my uncle when he was in need. You were first to find this lost son of mine. Now you tend him with diligence. Since his mother is not here to do it, my heart is glad for you.”

Strikes-The-Water's eyes glinted at his words. She looked away at the women moving about the other wounded. “She will be so happy.”

Two Hawks was abashed at his impatience—and for not thinking of his mother. He was thinking of her now, wishing she could share this moment. He reached across his brother's chest and took Strikes-The-Water by the arm. “My father speaks true. You have done much for us.”

She nodded stiffly, accepting his words. He was withdrawing his hand when William's shot up and grasped it.

Two Hawks stared into his brother's eyes, startled at how like their mother's they were, though he'd known this to be so. But these were not painted eyes, tiny soulless chips of blue, but living eyes looking at him, looking through pain and fear and seeing him.

“Brother,” Two Hawks said, glad to find his English hadn't deserted him. “Do you know me?”

For a stretching moment, their gazes locked, then William's flicked over Two Hawks's features, showing his thoughts clear to read. Doubt. Uncertainty. Recognition. “You. Anna called you…Two Hawks?”

Two Hawks let his breath out in a rush, unaware he'd been holding it. “That is my name. I am also called Jonathan. Did she tell you so?”

His brother's eyelids squeezed tight, but the strong chin with its scanty dark stubble—little more than Two Hawks's own—moved gingerly in the faintest of nods. “She tried to.”

Was that regret in the strained and suffering voice? Did his brother want to know them now? Two Hawks wavered but a moment, then decided he didn't care what his brother wanted.
They
wanted it, his family.

“And here is our father, Caleb, also called Stone Thrower. Open your eyes, Brother, and look at him.”

It came out a challenge. Perhaps his brother heard it so. His brows pulled tight as though he summoned courage, then he opened his eyes and looked at their father, who had tears running down his cheeks. William got his elbows under him and pushed himself up to sitting. He swayed as if he would fall back again.

Three sets of hands reached for him, but Stone Thrower's found him first. William slumped against their father, who started to wrap him in strong arms, then stopped himself, took him by the shoulders, and held him steady. Their father wore a look of vulnerability such as Two Hawks had never seen.

“My heart is full with praise to Creator for this moment. I have waited long to say a thing to you…my son.” Stone Thrower's strong throat worked as he swallowed. “I ask you to forgive me.”

William's brows tightened again. Confusion and wariness marked his features. “Forgive you?”

“For not being strong enough to fight off those redcoats who took your mother,” Stone Thrower said, looking into the face of his firstborn, “and you and your brother unborn, into that fort and kept you there, so that I was not by to protect you when you needed me.”

Looking rattled and pale, William glanced aside at Two Hawks. He looked again at their father but didn't give him the answer he sought. Instead he took in the lodge beyond their small circle. “You brought me out of the battle,” he said. “To where?”

“Oriska,” Stone Thrower said, voice still gruff with emotion. “Many wounded are here.”

“Herkimer's men and our warriors,” Two Hawks added, trying to deny the hard knot of impatience rising up. He lowered his voice, though he spoke in English, which not all in that lodge could understand. “They do not know what side you fought for.”

William glanced at the turned coat lying in a grubby heap nearby. Distaste was in the look. “And my mother? Is she here?”

Two Hawks felt glad at this question, but before he could answer, Strikes-The-Water said in her broken English, “She at Kanowalohale. With others you know. That one, your sister. And other, black hair.”

William blinked, clearly confused by this. Then understanding, and alarm, cleared his gaze. “Anna…Lydia. Here in the west? How come they to be?”

“Woman not always stay home when danger comes to her people,” Strikes-The-Water replied and smiled again at his brother. She had captured William's attention fully now. Two Hawks felt impatience brewing again. He looked to his father.

“Will you do a thing for me?” Stone Thrower said to Strikes-The-Water before the girl could say anything more to William. “Will you go to Kanowalohale and bring my wife and her guests to Oriska?”

The swift thundercloud that moved across Strikes-The-Water's face portended a storm of protest.

“It is for my brother you would do this.” Two Hawks had spoken in Oneida, so William couldn't know why Strikes-The-Water looked at him now as she did, but the softening in her face was telling. At least to Two Hawks.

“I will go for him.” Strikes-The-Water rose gracefully and went to the door, pausing to look back once at William, who was looking after her. She smiled again, then was gone.

Two Hawks noticed how his brother's gaze lingered after her.

“My…” William put a hand to his eyes, pressing hard. “Reginald Aubrey. He was captured. Senecas, I think. Look you…was he saved? Is he here?”

Only the fire's popping and the murmurs of other voices in the lodge broke the heavy silence that followed. Two Hawks saw the moment his brother understood. If it was possible, he grew even whiter.

“It was a hard thing,” Stone Thrower said, “choosing between. It was you he bid us save, not him.”

His brother looked as though he would be sick. “They will show him no mercy.”

Regret rippled over Stone Thrower's face. “There may be time. Now that my sons are whole and safe, I will go to find him.”