LIFE NEAR THE BONE (7 page)

Angelique walked forward and again put her hand on the panther’s back. He stopped, straightening, awaiting command
.

“I want a runner to go to all the tribes, island wide, and invite them to this place. There will no more be separate villages and groups. We will all be as one. And I am the queen of all. Obey me.” She glanced around at all who had gathered before her. “All of you.”

The elder motioned to their fastest runner and gestured for him to go. He immediately set off into the woods to disappear into the thick jungle to summon the tribes.

Angelique smiled now. Had she not tamed the panther and made him her vassal, this would have been vastly more difficult. She patted the head of the big cat.

“Now call for my mother and tell her I will need a maid servant and she will be that maid servant. I also require a hut.”

After dispatching another runner to collect the child’s mother, the elder went to his own hut, which was the largest in the village, and swept open the grass door. “This is yours,” he said. “Please. I can build another.”

She liked the elder and when she passed him by on the way into his hut, she tapped his arm. “I make you my chief food gatherer and advisor. Sokuru and I require large quantities of fresh food, preferably meat and seafood. Be sure to keep us well supplied and your fate is secure.”

She entered the darkened hut, the panther strolling behind her. She closed the grass door and sat down on a cushioned bed of palm fronds. It had been a long night and she needed sleep, but not yet.

Sokuru paced before the door, back and forth, until she told him to lie down and rest. “Only if I am in danger,” she instructed the cat, “do you attack.”

The cat came to her and purred as he rubbed his fat cheek against her much smaller cheek. Then he moved like the majestic beast he was toward the back of the dwelling and circled twice before he lay down for a much-needed nap.

There was a small tapping outside the door and Sokuru raised his head.

“Come,” Angelique said. She motioned with her hand for Sokuru to relax.

Angelique’s mother, Lenosa, entered. She rushed to her daughter without noticing there was a beastly presence in the room. When she went to embrace the girl, Angelique pushed her away. “Don’t ever touch me.”

Shocked and hurt, Lenosa said, “But Kera…”

“Never call me that again, I told you! Kera is dead. I am Angelique and you will address me as you would your queen, for I am your master now and not your child any longer.”

“No entiendo.” Tears stood in Lenosa’s eyes.

“Listen to me, you dumb pig woman. Your Kera died. You had her raised up, which was a selfish thing for you to do, and a thing for which you will later be punished. And then you gave me, not Kera,
me
, to the witless soul who did this thing. Kera drifted into the dark and did not return, do you understand that? I am Angelique and I am not like your Kera, nor am I like you or anyone on this forsaken island. I will live forever, but because that witless Mujai brought back a child, I will remain a child forever, too. I am doomed to this little body because of you and I ought to have your head on a spike, but if you prove yourself useful, I’ll let you live.”

Lenosa listened to this blasphemy with wide eyes. It was evident she would not say “no entiendo” again, no matter how confused she might be.

“I will serve you,” she said, bowing her head with grave misgiving and a sharp pain in her heart where she had carried her daughter, Kera, for ten years.

“Yes, that’s right. Trust me when I say Kera is dead and gone. I see you understand. You and Mujai carried out an unholy act. He paid for it this past night when I took his life. I would not hesitate a minute to take yours.”

“Could you…could you tell me where you came from?”

Angelique cocked her head and raised her eyebrows. She smiled and it chilled Lenosa’s heart. “I like a curious spirit. But if I told you you would not believe me. Suffice it to say I am not ten years old, but ten thousand times ten thousand. It has been a thousand years since anyone was able to raise the dead so that I could return to this world. I find it…” She glanced around the bare hut and the palm leaf walls. “I find it nearly unbearable. You are a barbaric people. Nevertheless here I am. And here this is. And that is that. Now fetch clean water and come wash me, I am dirty.”

As Lenosa bowed her way backward out the hut door, Angelique sank back onto the palm mattress. She didn’t know why she had told the woman so much. She had the very human need to confide in someone and Lenosa was as good as another. She probably didn’t understand a word of it anyway. There was nothing in Lenosa’s life experience that could parse such a tale and make reason out of it.

From the moment Angelique opened her eyes and saw Mujai in the firelight of the dirty little hut, she knew she must get away from this place. Discovering it to be an island plunged her into deep despair. These people didn’t even fashion boats, but fished with their hands and bark rope nets tied to long poles, fishing from shore. They were so primitive they still had witch doctors and hadn’t even the skill to weave cloth to cover their nakedness. When she had walked the Earth alive before, a thousand years in the past, Angelique hadn’t even known this little island existed.

But Angelique had been in dire straits before. Many times. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t work with it.

She lifted one hand and held it before her eyes in the shadowy light. She turned it from palm to top, from top to palm, examining it. Her hand was so small, so frail. She would never be a woman, never know a man, never birth children of her own. Just because she had been given life it didn’t mean she would grow. In fact, she would remain as she was the rest of her days. Fully half of life’s joys were denied her. Her physical strength was minimal. This was the cruelest curse of all, to be trapped in a child’s body, and it had never happened before.

On the other hand, she could sense the nubs of thick matter in her back, at the top of her shoulder blades and knew eventually she could make them grow, splitting human skin as easily as air parting leaves in a tree. The nubs were the buds of her wings. Her wings! She had not come into this body completely without resource.

And at least the vessel was female. Not just female, but superbly beautiful. She had
some
advantages, she admitted. Some advantage is all she would ever need.

CHAPTER 6

THE COMING OF THE SPANIARDS

Angelique had ruled the island for two hundred years and was so weary and bored that she instituted human sacrifice into the culture to spice things up. Each season of the year she had the people choose a victim by lottery. A large flat stone jutting out over the sea was used as a sacrificial altar and in a grand sweep of a hand-made axe, the victim’s head was separated from his body, both thrown afterward into the surging sea below the rocky cliff.

Sacrifice did nothing for Angelique; was not amusing or interesting in any way. What it did was instill in the people a fear that she needed kept at fever pitch. At first they feared her control of the panther, Kokuru. When he died of old age, toothless and clawless, they then feared her because she had not aged. She remained the same ten-year-old child she had come back into after death. That was enough to keep her power over the superstitious native aborigines for long years more.

“Our little queen,” they whispered. “Surely she came to us from the gods to remain so young and to never grow old.”

Then there were a few attempted coups and attempts on her life. The funny thing about power is that someone always wants to take it away from you. The funny thing about fear is that it wanes, grows cold and transforms into anger and a thirst for revenge unless the ante is upped.

Angelique side-stepped the assassination attempts easily enough. She could read the eyes of the plotters, she could sense the presence of someone who meant to do her harm. Though she had those traitors to their queen summarily executed, publicly torn limb from limb, she knew she needed something else to keep the kingdom on an even keel.

Everything changed the day the tribe had decided was the winter season start, either October or November, 1493, she was later to determine, when a young man had been chosen for sacrifice. He was led to his death place willingly, his hands tied behind his back with leather thongs for precaution. Some of them, at the last moment, changed their minds and screamed for mercy and tried to run away. The honor waned at the prospect of death.

An axe, made with a large piece of sharpened shale stone wedged into a length of polished hardwood, lay on the stone awaiting him. He was placed on the stone on his stomach. He turned his head and looked at Angelique who stood close by. She could see the fear in his eyes. She blinked, feeling nothing.

She turned from him, bored, and looked to sea. She was the first to spy the ships on the horizon sailing toward the island. She made an audible intake of breath. The victim, noting her alarm, lifted his head and stared out to the sea, too.

The young man lying on the altar began babbling like a mad man. In the two hundred years Angelique had been stuck on the island not one soul had come. Now was her chance to escape! Her heart raced, blood rose to her face, and she stepped back from the precipice.

She didn’t care about the sacrifice anymore; she didn’t care about the people or their fate. The ships were coming!

She must hide out before they arrived. The people

would tell the strangers about her, their queen, their long living, never aging child queen, but they would never find her. She could not take the chance the strangers on the ships might be murderous, and of course they would be superstitious, thinking her a demon if they believed she did not age. Regardless, the person in a position of power on this island would be the first to die. Chop off the head of the serpent, the serpent dies.

She must not let the strangers know of her. Not yet…

She rushed down the hillside away from the jutting stone and the gathered people. Some cried for her to come back. “Save us, save us!” they cried. Some saw the ships and crowded toward the cliff’s edge to watch, curious about what a ship meant and who the strangers might be.

Angelique sped down the hillside, through the empty village, and plunged into the jungle, taking nothing with her. She knew of a good place, a safe place. After lifetimes spent on the island she had walked, at one time or another, every inch of the landmass, from seashore to seashore.

This place she knew was not far distant. It was a natural cavern high up a mountain, camouflaged by the thick over growths of vegetation that grew there. She had found it by accident on one of her ramblings and made a mental note, knowing one day she might need a hiding place and this one was perfect. Hard to reach. Hidden. Unknown by the natives.

She knew one day someone would come. Fate could not be so cruel as to deposit her on an island in the middle of an ocean and leave her there for the rest of her days. She just knew someone would come!

#

Angelique had lived before many times, the Haitian incarnation only the one that had not yet ended by either murder or accident. She had known the royal family in Egypt when the girl queen, Cleopatra, had reigned. Before that she had known the times of the early days of the Roman Empire, before it was an empire—when indeed it was not yet Rome, but just a trail at the bottom of the seven hills leading to salt deposits. There were other and varied incarnations throughout history, all of them made interesting to her because she found a way to manipulate her way into power, into security, into riches. But never before had she come back as a child, cursed forever to a small, frail body. And never before had she been abandoned and trapped this way on an unknown little island where the populace hadn’t even progressed toward a civilization that knew how to build ships. She had tried to teach them, over and over again, and had sent off crews in rough-hewn dugouts, but either the rough seas pushed them back to shore, or crashed them headlong into the cliffs.

The ships sailing toward the island meant freedom, for they were real ships, ships with sails, wide-breasted and sturdy. They looked like greater ships than even the Romans had built during her time in that age of history.

She would wait until these seafarers left again, for surely they’d find nothing to plunder or of interest on the island, and when they left she would secret herself aboard one of the vessels. Freedom! She knew she must leave this island and these primitive people or go insane.

She had reached nearly to the top of the rugged mountain and flailed at the thick vines and bushes that covered the entrance to the cave. From her vantage point high up the mountainside, she could see the ships coming, their sails unfurled yet, the waters parting before their mighty bows. They were beautiful to her, these ships, and indicated the people who constructed them were from an advanced civilization. The sight excited her so much she could hardly pay attention to what she was doing.

She pulled and hauled and the hanging vines held fast, thwarting her. She cursed her strength, cursed the little arms, the small hands, the short legs of her tiny body.

I didn't know
! She raged to herself. She had not known, waiting in the dark, that the body awaiting her entry was that of a little child. Had she any inkling she would never have made the leap, dooming herself to life lived in miniature. All she had known was that Death had found a human, had taken it, and had summoned her forth. She tried to see through the veils separating her world from this one, to determine what the dead body might be like, but everything shimmered, like light on water, blinding her. She would either enter or turn back and she couldn't turn back. She was already too close to the earth, trapped in its atmosphere, spiraling downward from stars and galaxies, falling from the dark heaven she'd inhabited for too long. She saw the body as a pinpoint of light and no more. Nothing could stop this invasion, nothing could brake her descent, and once she was inside the body, she owned it, having let go of the spirit in the other world, and embedding it in this one, in this small body of a little girl.