Into the Wilderness (78 page)

"This
will take a very long time," he said, not bothering to grin now.

She
tried to roll away and he slapped her, and slapped her again, until she lay
still looking up at his face and the canopy of trees with her ears ringing.
Behind him was a wild cherry tree in full bloom, framing his scratched face in
delicate white blossoms. It was a strange sight. Elizabeth smiled.

Lingo
started at her smile, and then his face darkened. His eyes traveled down over
her breasts. With a small flick of his knife he cut the first tie, nearest her
throat.

"There's
no hurry," he said, his eyes darting wildly. "Let me tell you first
what I've got in mind." He was speaking French now, his voice low and
easy, talked on and on while he played with the knife, laying the flat of the
blade on her cheek, touching the tip to the corner of her eye. She learned that
steel had a smell, bright and hard.

Elizabeth
wished for the ability to close her ears as she could her eyes. She turned away
inwardly, tried to gather her thoughts. She could not reach for her knife. The
musket was useless.

"I
see I have lost your interest," he said after a while. The knife jerked
again, cutting her skin this time with the tie. He grinned, and the bile rose
in her throat.

"Ah,"
he said, lifting up the silver chain with the bloody tip of the knife.
"You have been hiding treasures from me."

"Take
it," Elizabeth said.

"Oh,
I shall. When we are ... finished."

If
she struggled, perhaps he would kill her outright. For one moment, she could
not decide if that was something to be wished for, or not.

She
tried to fix on Nathaniel's face in her mind, but he would not come to her, as
if he could not bear the sight of her pinned underneath Jack Lingo.

Elizabeth
sobbed. Lingo slapped her, and her lip split against her teeth. He rubbed one
finger in her blood and drew it down between her exposed breasts. She began to
retch.

Lingo
jerked back, his face creased with disgust. Elizabeth rolled onto her stomach
and hauled herself to her hands and knees, vomiting into the soft mass of
moldering leaves. Her whole body shook with it.

She
heard him moving away. She hung her head and brought up the last her stomach
had to offer, blood and bile, mint and bitterness. Gagging, praying, she lifted
her head and heard an unexpected sound.

He stood
three feet away, his back turned to her, leaning with one shoulder against the
cherry tree. It struck her almost as comical, that he would think to turn away
while he pissed. She choked back something that might have been a laugh.

At
her side was his rifle. The gleaming barrel, more than three feet in length,
the long, polished cherry wood stock with its inset patch box and hinged brass
lid. Something etched in the brass plate in ornate script. Her vision doubled
but then cleared:

VOUS
ET NUL AUTRE

You and no other
.
Elizabeth's fingers curled around the cold metal.

Wake up now!
she heard
Curiosity's voice say clearly.
You can't
always be daydreaming when the fat's in the fire.

As he
began to turn back toward her, Elizabeth lurched to her feet with the rifle
barrel in both hands like a cricket bat. Her scream seemed to paralyze him,
tearing up from the gut, every ounce of her strength and rage in it. His
expression was almost resigned: one brow frozen high in reluctant admiration as
his eyes traced the arc of the swing.

The
edge of the stock met his head over the left ear. The cracking bone resounded
like nothing Elizabeth had ever heard before and she felt his skull pop like
the shell of a beetle underfoot. The force of the blow traveled up her arms with
a jolt that forced her backward, the gun dropping out of her hands just as Jack
Lingo hit the ground, folding in on himself.

She
stood looking down at him, her hands tingling at her sides.

Petals
were falling. They made intricate and lovely patterns on the spreading crimson
lake; they spangled the wild tangle of his matted hair. His eyes were open, and
his expression quizzical.

A
woman who had always taken pleasure in a task well done, Elizabeth turned her
face upward and sent a howl of satisfaction spiraling into the sky.

* * *

She
left him as he was, and went on without weapons, without provisions. A half
mile away, she stopped to listen, and hearing no sound of him, she sat down on
the forest floor. After a good while, Elizabeth rose to her feet, wiped her
swollen face with her own hair and checked the compass. She was off course, but
not badly. She began to walk.

At
Little Lost she stopped, and stumbled, and walked into the water, submerging
herself for as long as she could bear it. The cold was a mercy on her cuts and
bruises. She drank until she could drink no more, and finally came up on the
shore where she lay with her throbbing cheek against the firm, cool sand. A
loon swam by, its ruby eyes turned blindly toward her. She wondered how loon
might taste.

The
path to Robbie's camp was immediately familiar. It would be safe to run, if
only she had the energy. Her feet hurt, and her face was a misery. She wondered
if Robbie would recognize her.

The
clearing, then. Finally. The worn log benches and stone—lined cook pit, the
neat rows of traps hung under the roof, the woodpile. No fire burning, no sign
of Robbie. She called, and got nothing but a crow's raucous cry in return.
Elizabeth looked into a stand of pine and saw the bird balanced delicately on a
sycamore branch, its dusty black breast spotted with yolk and eggshell. Around
it, the robin darted and shrieked while the crow reached into her nest again.

Elizabeth
wondered if it was possible simply to die of despair.

She
dreamed of Runs-from-Bears, but in her dream he had grown young, his face
smooth and unscarred. As always, though, he smelled quite distinctly of bear
grease and hard walking. She huddled in on herself, seeking a deeper sleep in
which dreams did not rely on scent to send their message.

But
her stomach was growling, and under her hip a spray of pine needles had worked
themselves into a most uncomfortable spot. And the smell of bear grease was
still there, now accompanied by a voice, one she recognized. Elizabeth bolted
upright and knocked heads with Otter.

"My
God," he whispered. "It is you."

"Otter,"
she said, and drawing in one deep breath to steady herself, Elizabeth reached
out and grasped both of his forearms with her hands.

"Do
you have any food?"

His
look of surprise and shock was quite suddenly replaced by a sense of purpose.
He disappeared for a moment but was back before she could rise to follow him,
putting a piece of dried venison in one hand, and a great hunk of ho cake in
the other. Her mouth filled instantly with saliva.

Otter
watched her eat. She saw his eyes moving over her face tentatively, as if he
could not quite believe what he saw.

"Is
it so very bad?" she asked finally, between mouthfuls.

He
blinked in affirmation.

Suddenly
exhausted again, Elizabeth slumped. She looked at the sky and was surprised to
see that it was still very early, long before noon. She could not have been
sleeping for more than an hour.

"Nathaniel?"
Otter asked, warily.

"He's
alive," she said. She did not often weep; she had always prided herself on
that, the ability to control excesses of pain or anxiety until they could be
digested in private. But now, even as she found the necessary words and told
the story in a fairly calm and quite comprehensible way, tears ran down her
face and drenched the remains of her shirt. She finished as quickly as she
could, leaving out only what she could not bear to relate: how Nathaniel had
received his wound, and what had delayed her. Otter was young, but there was a
reserve about him that reminded her of Bears. She was infinitely grateful not
to be asked to explain her battered face.

"We
have to go after Nathaniel, and Todd." His eyes flashed at this last name,
and Elizabeth remembered that there was unsettled business between Richard and
Otter. She tried to remember what Nathaniel had told her of the march to
Canajoharie, but her head was muddled, and the world seemed bent on a lopsided
spin.

"But
Robbie," Elizabeth repeated, thinking of his strength and his experience
and his love of Nathaniel. If anyone could save them from disaster, it must be
Robbie. "Do you know where Robbie's gone?"

"There's
no time to waste, waiting for him," Otter pointed out.

Elizabeth
could not hide her disappointment, although she had no wish to insult Otter.
But he was looking at her, for the moment, with a narrowed gaze and for the
first time Elizabeth saw Falling—Day in him, her quiet determination.

"We
got to get you cleaned up before we set out," said Otter, and he
disappeared in the direction of the caves.

Questions
were running together in her head, all of which she wanted immediate answers
for. What Otter was doing here in the bush on his own, whether Hannah and
Hawkeye and the others were whole and safe, how soon they could leave, how long
it would take. If he believed Nathaniel could still be alive. She dared not let
herself think about it, about the time lost, about what she had left behind
under the wild cherry tree, about Nathaniel. She had not yet given up on him,
and she would not, until she had seen him laid in the ground or had gone to her
own grave.

Otter
came back at a trot, his hands full of what he needed to tend her wounds.

Elizabeth
got to her feet, and he helped her.

* * *

Back
on the trail with her wounds cleaned and bound, and Otter's solid back always
in sight, Elizabeth felt herself floating. She knew that she was near to
collapsing, and that she must soon ask him to make camp. But they had only been
under way for an hour, and she felt the press of time as surely as she felt the
throbbing of the bruises that ranged up and down her ribs.

And
also, there was the matter of the cherry tree. In less than an hour's walk they
would come upon it, and there would be no choice but to explain. Elizabeth
wanted that behind her, and so she took a mouthful of ho cake to chew slowly,
and she focused her energies on putting one foot in front of the other.

She
had been worried about Otter's youth, about his impulsive behavior: walking
behind him, she thought at great length about the gunshot which had bolted the
sleigh team, and what might have come of that. But he had been trained by men
she trusted and loved, and he walked with their gait and posture and keen,
sweeping gaze, his rifle forward and primed. For the moment she was content to
follow him. This passivity would not last as long as her collection of bruises;
this well she knew herself.
 
But for the
moment, she was thankful for Otter, who set a good pace and didn't coddle her.

Elizabeth
convinced herself that she was capable of walking past that spot under the
cherry tree. She had nothing to hide; could hide nothing, in fact. She would
not let Jack Lingo reach out from the grave to make one last attempt to keep
her from Nathaniel. Not that he had a grave, or ever would.

In
the end when she recognized the turn of the trail, she could not go on. Otter
went those few steps without noticing that she hung back, and she heard a soft
exclamation. A long silence followed.

There
was a dead oak which had fallen into a small pond. She had not noticed it on
first passing. Out of the thick layer of pungent green scum that blanketed the
water, a rack of branches bleached the color and glossiness of old bone pointed
at the sky. On each sat a single grackle, dark feathers iridescent in the late
sunlight. Elizabeth counted fourteen of them, motionless, their eyes turned to
her. She could not remember ever seeing grackles in these forests before.
Blinking hard, she wondered if she were imagining them, or if perhaps they were
part of that other forest which seemed to always be there, right below the
surface: the forest of red dogs and stone men, birds shimmering in rainbows and
lovers who wandered the swamp murmuring their vows in Latin. Her ability to
reason these things away had been worn thin, as thin as the wooden disk that
lay still between her breasts. She touched a finger to Joe's bijou and watched
as the birds flew away, one by one.

She
started to find Otter standing in front of her. Elizabeth lifted her chin and
met his gaze. His eyes were so dark, but they were like her own in at least one
way: in them she could read what he was feeling. And what she saw she could not
at first credit.

"Awiyo,
aktsi'a," he said hoarsely.
Well
done, my sister
.

Otter
opened his palms. On the left, a large gold coin shimmered against the deep
bronze of his skin; His Royal Highness King George II seemed to be winking at
her, as if he approved of this change in his circumstances. In the other
palm—Elizabeth blanched to see it—there was a tooth. Long and yellow and
wickedly curved. It was still bloody.