Leopard in Exile (41 page)

Their situation was grave, for they were alone and on foot in an implacable wilderness with nothing more

than the clothing they stood up in. She did not know what had happened to Meets-The-Dawn or The

Daughter-of-the-Wind, whether they had escaped the ruined city or had died there. That Meriel had

walked all this way from Baltimore in such a condition—and survived—was marvelous to Sarah, but

Sarah could not bring herself to count on such fool's luck for her own survival.

The two of them slept the first night after their escape from the Numakiki in drifts of autumn leaves for

warmth, and breakfasted upon raw fish tickled from the stream, for though Sarah could well have caught

a rabbit in a snare of braided grass, without a knife she could not skin it, and without flint and steel there

was no way to make a fire to cook it Starting a fire with a fire-drill would take hours of tedious work,

even if Sarah had been certain of how to make one.

But on the morning of the second day, Sarah awakened in the first light of dawn to see Meets-The-Dawn

walking toward her, his hands spread in a gesture of peace.

He had a large bag at his hip, and slung across his back was a rifle in a fringed and beaded sheath.

Obviously he had taken the time to loot the disordered city before escaping it.

"Meriel—look!" Sarah said, rousing her companion.

Meriel sat up, brushing her tangled hair back from her face and reaching instinctively for the falcon-cup.

Sarah knew now that the thing was magic, but what more it was, Meriel wouldn't—or couldn't—say.

"
Wachiya
," Meets-The-Dawn said.

"
Wachiya
," Sarah answered gravely.

Meets-The-Dawn glanced toward Meriel, and it seemed to Sarah that there was a new assessment in his

glance.

"When the waters stilled, the Daughter-of-the-Wind and I left the city in a canoe. We were swept to the

far bank in the torrent that followed, and only now have we been able to cross the river and find you."

"I am grateful that you did," Sarah said feelingly. "Is the Sahoya with you?"

"Let us rest here a day, and I shall bring her. Then shall we decide together what shall be done. For you

have found your friend and brought her out of her captivity, yet I feel your quest is not yet done."

"This is a good plan," Sarah said.

He slung a large bag down from his shoulder and set it at Sarah's feet, then disappeared abruptly as

silently as he had come. Sarah stared after him, and so it was practical Meriel who pounced upon the bag

and delved into its contents.

"Oh, Sarah—look! A comb! And bread—this must be from the city—and salt, and some knives, and a

flint and steel—there is everything here!"

Sarah smiled to herself. How quickly one's notions of what was luxury could change.

"If there is flint and steel, we must gather wood and start a fire, for we will have guests for breakfast," she

answered almost merrily.

As Meriel had gathered wood, Sarah had built a hearth of river stones and found a patch of wild onion

before taking time out to order her hair and Meriel's into neat braids. Within the hour, Meets-The-Dawn

had returned with the Sahoya and a string of fish from the river. This morning's breakfast was in great

contrast to that of the previous day. Warm and full and in possession of a fine steel knife, Sarah felt much

at peace with the world. If it were only possible to persuade Meriel to give up her mad plan of journeying

to Louisianne, Sarah would be entirely content.

"Now that you have found your friend, where do you go?" the Sahoya asked pointedly, when the last of

the fish had been eaten.

"I am going to Nouvelle-Orléans," Meriel announced, as though her decision had nothing to do with what

any of the others might say.

Sarah stared helplessly at her friend for a moment. "Then I, too, am going to Nouvelle-Orléans," she

answered lamely.

"The English are not welcome there," Meets-The-Dawn said, pointing out the obvious.

Sarah shrugged. It was hard to remember that this world considered her English, when she had grown up

thinking of herself as an American.

"You bring magic to the French," the Sahoya said, pointing at the bundle that rested, even now, close by

Meriel's side.

"Not to the French," Meriel said. "But I do bring it to Nouvelle-Orléans, because I must."

"Why?" Sarah demanded, unable to stop herself. "What about Louis? What can you possibly accomplish

in Nouvelle-Orléans? And what is that… thing?" she finished inadequately.

Meriel gathered the bundle into her lap, cradling it protectively. "It is what I was sent from Baltimore to

the Numakiki to find," she said simply. "And now I must bring it to Nouvelle-Orléans. I hope Louis will

be there," she added, and for a moment Sarah saw tears well up in Meriel's green eyes, "but his fate is in

God's hands. As is mine."

One of the Duke's favorite sayings was that it was folly to argue with an idealist, and Sarah supposed that

Meriel might be lumped into that category. Unless Sarah were to hit her over the head and carry her

back to Baltimore by force, there was no other course of action but to accompany her, for Sarah's

stubborn sense of honor rebelled entirely against abandoning the friend she had come so far to find.

The Sahoya glanced at Meets-The-Dawn, and her face was unreadable. "And what will come of you

bringing this magic, not to the French, but to Nouvelle-Orléans?" she asked Meriel.

"I don't know," Meriel said simply.

Quick as a striking weasel, the Sahoya grabbed for the bundle. She recoiled with a cry almost instantly,

and the cup tumbled free.

It still seemed like an ordinary, if fantastically opulent, object, but at the same time it seemed more real

than anything of the forest that surrounded them—and the Sahoya's fingers had been burned as if she had

touched red-hot iron. Sarah reached gingerly for the cup at the same moment Meriel did, and her fingers

closed on it first.

It did not burn her, but Sarah was suddenly filled with a strong sense that she wanted nothing to do with

it. Somehow, to open her inner ears to the song this artifact sang would be to change her essential nature

entirely. Yet Meriel handled it without trouble, and with every evidence of pleasure.

"This thing is no friend to the People," the Daughter-of-the-Wind said flatly, as if she were passing some

terribly final judgment "If you allow it to do what it will, the future you saw for this land may come all the

easier, Sarah of England."

Meriel stared at Sarah in puzzlement as she folded the cup back into her buckskin shawl.

"I will do all I can to stop that," Sarah said thinking of her vision of the terrible metal cities of the future.

"But Meriel must also do as she feels is right. She is my friend, and I will help her."

"Then our ways walk together no longer," the Sahoya said. "And my aid to you is done. We will find a

village from which we may go our separate ways."

"That would be best," Sarah said with reluctant fairness. "Where we are going is dangerous, and I do not

want to draw the People into a quarrel between the French and the English."

"Wise words," the Sahoya answered grudgingly. "And I wish you safe journeying, both now and when

we part. I will see to it that you are provided with all you need to travel safely."

Well, SHE certainly has a high opinion of herself
! Sarah thought uncharitably. Nothing of those

thoughts showed on her face as she thanked the Creek sachem for her kindness, for by her own lights,

the Sahoya was being very generous in her offer of aid and protection. But it was equally true that none

of the nations of the People would willingly involve themselves in a quarrel among the great European

powers that fought for control of the land and its wealth. >

"If it must be that our ways part, men I will leave Sarah with this last gift of the Numakiki,"

Meets-The-Dawn said, passing Sarah the rifle that lay on the ground at his side. "She walks in dangerous

roads, and I would not abandon one of the People with no brother's gift to guard her back."

Sarah examined the rifle with interest. A slide and bolt on the side revealed that the weapon loaded from

the breech, not the muzzle, unlike every other rifle Sarah had ever seen. Still, it was clean and beautifully

kept.

Someone had lost a prized possession when Meets-The-Dawn had liberated this weapon. The bag of

powder and shot that he handed her looked much like that which she had for her Baker, and she made

no doubt this rifle would fire as well as the one she had lost.

"It is a handsome gift," Sarah said. "I am in your debt."

She knew what had motivated Meets-The-Dawn's gift to her. Among the People, a man who came

courting would expect to woo his chosen lady with rich gifts. Though he could not expect to see her

again, he courted Sarah as though she were a free woman.

Free! It was something she had longed for all the days of her life, and until now she had not really

understood that it was a chimera, an illusion. There was no freedom, only service to one cause or

another. No one who lived or thought or breathed could be free of the faculty of judgment, and in the act

of judging came the choosing of sides.

She had always thought of Meriel as a timid little mouse, but Meriel was willing to risk great danger and

even death for her faith. Sarah had long wondered if there were anything she herself would be willing to

die for, and at last she had come to realize that there was: the cause that her father and her husband both

fought for.

Justice. Justice, personified in the benign and constitutional rule of the rightful King. Without justice there

could not be law, and without law and justice there was only chaos, in which brute strength ruled at its

whim. She would dedicate her life to opposing that.

And so, despite the fact that she believed the Sahoya's warning, Sarah would help Meriel convey her

burden to the City of Nouvelle-Orléans.

Their journey was swift now, as if unseen hands smoothed their way. Four days' travel downriver

brought them to a village of friendly Natchez, where the Sahoya invoked her people's trading agreements

to gain for all of them everything they would need for their separate journeys. The Sahoya and

Meets-The-Dawn headed north and east, toward English-held Transylvania, and Sarah and Meriel

traveled downriver in style, on a passenger flatboat whose deck was nearly as big as that of the ship that

had brought Sarah here from England.

No one would recognize either of them as English women in the native dress they now wore. Sarah wore

buskins, fringed leggings, and a short buckskin tunic. Her blanket was rolled and slung across her back,

and a bag of powder and shot hung at her hip. Her hair was oiled and tightly braided, and the braids

wrapped for most of their length in thin-scraped doeskin, so that they hung stiffly at her back.

Meriel was dressed more modestly, in a calf-length tunic and high moccasins. She wore her red

Numakiki cloak now, and carried her precious burden in a tightly-woven basket on her back. Her hair

was oiled and braided as Sarah's was, her braids pulled forward to lie upon her breast, and she wore a

cross carved of buffalo bone around her neck on an intricately-knotted thong, for some of the Natchez

had been Christians, and she had been able to regain the symbol of her faith from them. From a distance,

they looked like any young Native hunter and his woman, bound downriver on business.

And when they reached Nouvelle-Orléans… what then?

It was a question only Meriel could answer.

Soon it will be over
. That thought was uppermost in Meriel's mind, for the dreams that guided her had

begun again as soon as she and Sarah were on their way once more. Only this time her dreams were not

of the Grail, but of the place to which she would bring it. In dreams she saw the towering gothic building

which rose above the wood and brick structures around it—the Cathedral de Saint Louis in

Nouvelle-Orléans, upon whose high altar she could lay her burden down at last.

Why had
she
been the one called upon to rescue the Holy Cup from the Numakiki, and why must she

now bring it to Nouvelle-Orléans? Meriel had prayed for answers and found none. All that was left to her

was the glorious mystery of perfect obedience. It would have to be enough.

His horse was waiting for him as usual in the stable at The Clouds, and Corday rode back to town with a

strangely unsettled mind. The masquerade he had devoted most of his adult life to was about to end. He

should have felt gratitude and relief, especially after these last tense months of working both as

d'Charenton's personal secretary and as the liaison between all the factions intriguing for Louisianne's

freedom, but all he could feel was a sort of blank despair.
Nerves. Dat's all it is. De English Duke has

said it: D'Charenton would dismay an angel.

Fortunately, the aged voluptuary was unlikely to notice Corday's absence. More and more, these past

weeks, d'Charenton had withdrawn into his pleasures and his arcane rituals, spending hours in the

dungeons beneath the Cabildo and the Cathedral with Delphine McCarty and a succession of ever

younger and more innocent victims.

But if he should suspect
…

Resolutely, Corday thrust the thought from his mind. He didn't dare to think such thoughts, lest they