Into the Wilderness (68 page)

He
came to sit beside her. "Aye, that it is. So what is it you want?"

She
managed to look him in the eye. "A day abed with you without the need to
get up and go."

Nathaniel
leaned over her. "I please you, then, do I?" He wasn't smiling
anymore, but there was a contented look about him.

She
pushed at him a little. "You know that you do."

"Well,
then, Boots, I'm glad to hear it. Because you please me mightily, too."

"I
don't recall using the word
mightily
,"
Elizabeth said primly, and she yelped as he grabbed her, pulling her up against
him to pinch her bottom.

"Mightily!
Owl Mightily!" she conceded, laughing and trying to squirm away from him.

He
settled down with her half—pulled across his chest.

"Can
we do that, tomorrow?" she asked. "Stay abed?" She knew the
answer before he shook his head, but it was a disappointment anyway.

"Wouldn't
be wise. We'll have our days abed, if you haven't got tired of the business by
then."

"Oh,
now who's fishing for compliments?" she asked. She sat up to look around
herself. There was a small island in the middle of the lake, populated by beech
trees and crowned with a few tall pine trees that reflected unevenly in the
water.

"Shall
we swim out there?" she asked lazily, lying down again.

"Not
with your foot the way it is," he said. Instead of rising, Nathaniel
stretched out and pulled her head to a more comfortable spot on his shoulder.
This pleased her, but it was hard to ignore the rumbling in her stomach.

"There's
trout enough for the taking," she suggested.

But
Nathaniel was pointing into the sky, and she followed the line of his arm and
drew in a sharp breath.

Above
them the eagle still circled, but she wasn't alone.

Against
the gathering clouds, the pair dodged around each other and then seemed to
purposely collide in midair. With locked talons they plummeted downward in a
free—fall interrupted by a series of complex somersaults. Suddenly they tore
free of one another.

"They
mate for life, but they go through this every season anyway," Nathaniel
said. The pair was rising again, the sound of their wings clearly discernible.
Talons struck and the birds fell in a swoop that ended in a long roll. Once
more the performance was repeated, and this time the male covered his mate in
mid—fall with a great scream of triumph, a sound almost human.

"Not
exactly lowly Venus consorting with Man," said Nathaniel. "But you
might call it sporting,"

Elizabeth
stifled her laughter against his chest. "Very unseemly, this
conversation."

"But
you like it anyway."

"I
like it precisely for that reason," she said, suddenly thoughtful.
"It is a great luxury, the freedom to speak what is on my mind. What other
person in the world male or female could I ask about these things?"

"Don't
go imagining I'll always have an answer," Nathaniel said.

"It
isn't an answer I want—"

"Aye,"
Nathaniel interrupted her, squeezing her hand. "It's the freedom to talk.
I know, I know. So you're in the mood for talk right now?"

Elizabeth
didn't answer. She looked into the shadows of the forest, wondering about the
eagles. "She didn't seem to enjoy it very much, did she? Nor did he, for
that matter."

"They
don't take joy in mowin', not the way folks do." He glanced at her out of
the corner of his eye. "It's a good sign, anyway," he said. He had a
thoughtful look about him.

She
still found it strange sometimes to hear that Nathaniel took such things
seriously, signs he read from the animals and the stars and his own dreams, in
which he sometimes flew over the world. Her first and strongest impulse was to
reject it all as wishful thinking, but slowly she was beginning to wonder not
so much about the truth value of Nathaniel's beliefs, but at his powers of
observation.

"Do
you think we'll be like that, always struggling and then coming back
together?" she asked.

He
rubbed a hand across her back. "I expect we'll tussle," he said. His
rubbing became slower and more purposeful, and she shifted a little and
murmured against his chest.

"You're
tired," he said. "And you hurt, I guess."

"It's
not so bad," Elizabeth admitted. She was tired, that was true; she thought
she might never move another muscle. But if she gave Nathaniel any
encouragement at all, they would forget about swimming and food altogether for
a while. It would take her mind off her foot; he could make her forget anything
and everything when he came to her.

"Come,
then," he said into her hair, tugging on the clasp to release it. “Come
consort with me, darling'. If you've the mind for a little venery, that
is."

She
could feel him smile, but she didn't rise to his teasing. Instead Elizabeth put
her hands over his chest, breathed in his smells. She could get dizzy
sometimes, this close to him. With one finger she traced the line of his jaw,
and thought about kissing him. She intended to kiss him, and very soon, but for
the moment she was content with thinking about it.

"Boots,
tell me, tell me what you want," he said against her ear.

She
squirmed a bit and buried her face in the curve of his neck, gasped as she felt
him cup her hips and pull her up against him. She slid a hand down his belly.

But
Nathaniel caught her hand and held it away from him, his head tilted hard to
one side and his expression suddenly preoccupied and distant. Elizabeth froze,
seeing his concentration directed outward, to the forest. He heard something.
She softened her own breathing, closing her eyes to screen out distractions in
an attempt to hear what he did. There was something, just above the sounds of
the lake. It might have been the wind on the cliff face, but the treetops stood
unruffled against the sky. It came and went and then came again. Singing. Very
faint, but clearly singing.

Nathaniel
was on his feet, reaching for his gun. "Stay here," he said softly.

"No."
She stood up, too, and then staggered.

He
pushed her back down, gently. "Scoot all the way under there, and keep
yourself small. Do you have the musket? Good. I'm just going to have a
look."

After
a moment she did as he had directed, sitting with her knees under her chin and
the musket in the valley of her lap. She watched him skirting the lake. He
stopped to listen and then walked on again, disappearing into the bush with a
brief look back toward her. Elizabeth stood up then, unable to stay still.
Listening with all her power of concentration, she could hear nothing at all
except the sounds of the lake, and the birds. The singing—if it had been
singing—had stopped.

They
weren't often apart in the last days, and when they were, it was a strange
thing. It was true that she was more and more at ease in the forests, but
Elizabeth knew that she was still very vulnerable. While Nathaniel hunted she
saw after her clothes, or his, or cooking, any task to take her mind off what
frightened her most: what would happen if he didn't come back. It wasn't so
much being lost that worried her, although that was a real danger, one too
vivid to be contemplated for long. But what worried her more was coming back to
Paradise without Nathaniel. Facing Hannah, and Hawkeye. And her own life,
without him. The longer he was gone, the more detailed her anxieties became.

There
was a shrill whistle; she turned to see Nathaniel emerge from the forest
farther up the shoreline. He came toward her at a trot. His preoccupation was
still there, but some of the tension was gone.

"Man
hurt," he said.

"Who?"

"Don't
know him. He's got shelter up there, but he's in bad shape." Nathaniel
began to gather up their things.

"Very
bad?" she asked, reaching for her pack.

"Aye,"
said Nathaniel. "He's dying."

Nathaniel
set her to hauling water. In spite of her foot, and the fact that the stream
was a good distance, and the awkward makeshift rawhide bucket, and the great
deal of water they would need; in spite of all that, he set her to the task,
and waited until she had started off for the first time before he went into the
shelter. The fact was, he didn't know whether or not the man was dangerous, and
he just didn't care for the idea of Elizabeth nearby. Not yet.

The
singing had faded away just before he came upon the camp, where he had found
the stranger in an uneasy and fevered sleep. Looking at him, it hadn't taken much
for Nathaniel to figure out that he was on the run: his skin was the deep color
of wild plums in August, his hair and beard like mottled fleece, his hands
great overused tools. On his heavily muscled upper chest there was a brand that
Nathaniel could just see through the opening in the homespun shirt. A runaway
slave, of a good age, but strong. And he was dying. The deeply sunken eyes gave
it away. That, and his left arm: below the shoulder it had swollen to twice its
normal size, straining the hunting shirt he wore to bursting. The stink of
putrefaction hung about him like a burial blanket.

Before
he fetched Elizabeth, Nathaniel had spent some time looking around. Things were
out of kilter here, and it worried him. A lean—to carefully built out of the materials
at hand by a man who knew his work, who had more intelligence and imagination
than tools. Inside the shelter there was a makeshift cot and a flattish boulder
that served as a table. On an old blanket spread out neatly Nathaniel saw an
ancient musket, but no evidence of shot or powder, some snares, a single beaver
trap, and the remains of a meal of rabbit and fiddlehead ferns on a mat of
woven reeds. In a rough carved bowl covered by a flat rock there was some dried
meat and peas, but otherwise no provisions. Outside there was a hatchet, a
short shovel, a hammer, a knife, a whetstone, a single cook pot, all scattered
to the elements and already showing the first faint glimmer of rust. This had
been the first sign that something was very wrong; Nathaniel knew instinctively
that a man who could plan and build this camp would never have treated his
tools in such a way; they stood between him and extinction.

Nathaniel
reached up and poked a hole in the roof, and then he started a small fire below
it, burning the filthy grass bedding and then the roofing material itself—bark
shingles mostly, lashed together with cord braided of roots—to drive the stench
away. Even while he worked, the man didn't wake, and Nathaniel wondered whether
he would at all, or if he would slip away without even telling them his name.

When
Elizabeth returned for the third time with the filled bucket, he sent her back
down to the lake to bring him as much sweet flag as she could carry. She went
without a complaint, trying to hide her limp.

Through
all this the man slept, twitching and starting. He cried out in pain and then
mumbled, slipping back down into a deeper sleep. In his dreams he was fighting
a battle other than the one that would kill him. Nathaniel couldn't make sense
of his fears, of the things he had done to protect himself. There were piles of
rocks, fist—sized and right for throwing; dried grasses twisted into torches,
maybe thirty of them that Nathaniel could see just inside the shelter. A pike
constructed of three long branches bound together with a sharpened stone at one
end, as if to fight something he had no wish to be near. And then there were
the pits.

They
were the first thing he had pointed out to Elizabeth when he brought her up
here, one by one. Each had been covered by bark mats, and Nathaniel had only
narrowly missed a fall before he saw them, spaced irregularly around the camp.
He had searched them out, yanking the covers off and throwing them onto the
cold cook pit. They were all of the same good depth, but not so deep that you
couldn't climb out—except a man who fell in wouldn't be in any shape for
climbing: each one was studded with slender branches sharpened to a lethal
point.

When
the sweet flag was burning inside the shelter, Nathaniel asked Elizabeth to start
the cooking fire and see to the food. It was twilight, and they were both
hungry. She did as he asked, but he could see by the set of her jaw that she
had gone long enough without information. He joined her at the cooking pit,
hunkering down beside her while she worked. And he told her what he knew about
what was to come.

"A
doctor?" Elizabeth asked feebly, when he had finished.

"It's
too late to take the arm off. Even if there was time to go fetch
somebody."

"I
see." She was cutting meat into chunks and tossing it into the pot. There
was a settled quality to her face when she worked through a problem. Nathaniel
watched her thinking, almost seeing the darting of the ideas behind her eyes.
Looks—Hard was Runs-from-Bears' name for her, but it was a good one.

"He
could take some broth, couldn't he?" she asked quietly.

"I
expect he could," Nathaniel said. "He probably ain't had anything for
more than a day."