Redemption (10 page)

“Our people are the people of the flint. You call us Mohawk, but this is not our name. Our name is Kanien’kéha:ka. We are one of the original members of the six nations that form the Iroquois League. Our history is vast and interesting. I urge you to learn more about it, but today we will be using our drums and talking of our legends. These legends were originally passed on in the Kanien’kéha language, an Iroquois dialect, but I will share it with you in English.” He beamed at the crowd. “Aren’t you relieved?”

A few people chuckled.

He spoke of the sacred drums used in ceremonies. The drums we would use were to be very different than those. I nodded, for I expected as much. The Kanien’kéha:ka guarded their rituals closely.

“I will begin by telling you the story of The Wife of the Thunderer. While I speak, you will notice my trusty sidekicks,” he paused for effect and the crowd laughed again, “will be beating a rhythm on the water drums. This rhythm, along with the timbre of my voice should combine to push against the boundaries of your imagination if everything is working for you as it should in there.” He pointed to his head, to the amusement of the people around me.

He wove his story in a way only a master of his craft could. This man may recognize me—and the Mohawk were not fond of supernatural creatures, especially not ones of stone—but my deep love of history made coming here worthwhile.

When he spoke of Ahweyoh, the protagonist of the story, and her trials against her aunt and the man she was to be married to, I remembered another man telling this story in a very different setting. That night there had been a fire and some dancing. The drums beat in my head and reminded me the feeling of life that had courses through my veins when amongst the people of the flint. It reminded me that I was more than just stone. I was alive. The sensation was euphoric, as if new essence trickled within me. I saw pictures in my head, remembering the tribes that were this man’s ancestors during the earlier days of Montreal’s colonization.

Then I heard the incantations.

I wasn’t sure if they were part of my memories or of the real word around me. The words came softer than a whisper. When I faced Aude, I saw her lips moving, barely more than a tremble. I shivered.

Her eyes met mine and what I saw panicked me. A depth I hadn’t noticed before and something else, something I knew couldn’t really be there, a power that had died out some time ago. Essence pooled freely in her, not tightly guarded like usual, essence like I used to see in the de Rouen witches. Like I saw in Marguerite. She blinked a few times and her eyes returned to normal. Still pretty, still expressive, but no longer ageless. I wondered if I had imagined it all. If I sought redemption from Marguerite’s fate so badly that I now saw her in other people. I searched her eyes while the man talked, but what I thought I’d seen never returned.

A strand of red hair fell into her face and I automatically tucked it back behind her ear, unsure where the gesture came from. Not wanting the other people around us to hear me, I leaned into her and whispered in her ear, “What was that? What just happened?”

She didn’t say anything at first and I pulled back to look at her eyes. They were full of conflict.

“What was what?” she asked. Her eyes were wide and frightened. Wherever the chanting came from, it freaked her out a lot more than it did me.

I inclined back toward her, closer to her ear to whisper in it again, “‘Release your spirit to the man of stone, let him take over your sins.’ Only you chanted it in Kanien’kéha.”

“In Ga-yoon-gae-
huh
?” she asked, trying to mimic my pronunciation.

“In Mohawk.”

“Yes, I know what it means, but you speak Mohawk?” Her eyebrows rose.

Of course, this is what she would focus on, really the most unimportant thing in this conversation.

“I speak many languages … it comes with all the moving around.”

“I don’t think I believe you. And one thing I know for sure is that I don’t speak Mohawk.”

I leaned back on my hands and thought for a minute. Could this be some deep-rooted genetic memory? “Hmmm … Maybe this is something coming to you from your ancestry?”

“My ancestry?”

“You are at least part Native, right? Maybe even Mohawk?”

“No. Well, I don’t think so … ”

“You don’t know?” Things had changed quite a bit since I last took an active role in society, but I was still rather certain her situation was not a common one.

“No, I don’t know.”

The drumming began again as the shaman led the group through another story, this time about a boy who lived with bears. We listened to the man, but from the way she kept sharing glances with me, I could tell the spell-like atmosphere had been broken for her.

We didn’t get a chance to talk again until we were given a twenty-minute recess. She headed toward the drums on display.

“Look, Aude, I’d like to talk.”

She looked between me and the drums and then gave a sigh and nodded.

I led her to one of the university’s common areas and we sat on a bench together. There was an awkwardness I couldn’t place and we didn’t look at each other for a while. I tugged at my shirt collar and bent forward with my arms stretched out.

“When you said those words … How did they come to you?”

I didn’t look at her. I wanted to make her comfortable to make sure she’d tell me everything.

“I … I don’t know. I mean, it doesn’t make any sense … It’s not really supposed to be happening. It’s in my head … or it was supposed to be in my head, like I’m going crazy or something.”

“I heard you.” I placed my hand lightly on her shoulder. Her shirt was soft under my hands.

“It comes with drumming … ” she started. I became immediately interested. These were exactly the answers I looked for. “Both times this happened, it started with drumming … ” She looked right at me then. “This is not the first time this has happened to me. Last time, I heard voices too. But there was no one there,” she said.

“What kind of voices?”

“Just normal voices. Well … ” She scraped her boot against the tile floor. “This is going to sound crazy … ”

“Probably not,” I said.

“Well, I could swear I heard you. But it seems I keep hearing your voice in strange places, and I didn’t even know you then.” She buried her head in her hands. “It makes even less sense when I say it aloud.”

It didn’t make sense. To hear our mind speak, she wouldn’t only have to be an essentialist with decent power, but to be one of the de Rouen witches, a line that had died with Marguerite.

Who was she? Was she really crazy? Had she imagined these things? Considering the traumatic events she had been through, I’d be tempted to believe it if it weren’t for the power I was sure I had seen in her when she chanted. If she was an essentialist, then she could be playing games with us, but why? I needed to be on my guard.

“You’re quiet.” She sighed. “This is why I haven’t told anyone about this. I knew how crazy it would sound.”

“You’ve told me something you’ve never shared with anyone else? Why tell me?”

For some reason it mattered that she had, but I couldn’t put a finger on why.

“Well, maybe I would have broken down and told anyone who would have asked,” she said.

“Oh, I see. If someone else does ask, I don’t think you should tell them.” The urge I felt to protect her was ridiculous considering the doubts I had about her, but I wasn’t known for always making wise decisions.

I watched her play with her jewelry, and then she met my gaze. “It’s because they’ll know I’m crazy, right?”

She appeared almost vulnerable. It amazed me. I’d been watching her for a while, and I hadn’t seen her this way before. I had the strange need to reassure her.

“They may
think
you are crazy, but I doubt you are.”

“So what’s wrong with me then?”

“Why do you think there is something wrong with you?”

“Uh, hello? I’m hearing drums and people chanting in my head! Why are you acting so cool about it anyways?”

“How am I supposed to act?”

“You should laugh at me or try to talk some sense into me … convince me it was my imagination. At the very least, you should act freaked out by it all.”

I shook my head at her and instantly made a decision I could come to regret. “No, I believe you and I think there is one person we should talk about this … ”

“Who? A shrink?”

“The teacher of this workshop.”

“What?”

“After the workshop, let’s talk to him. I think he’ll have insight.”

Because I realized that though the shamans have historically feared us and even used their own control over essence to drive us away and sometimes harm us, there was another side to this story. One related to the drums and chanting. And anyway, they weren’t all bad. Marguerite and I had even befriended one in the past when we had decided we needed to study them better. Though
that
story hadn’t ended well.

“I don’t think so … I don’t … ” She looked at me and bit at her lower lip. “Well, we’ll see, okay?”

The shaman started a new story after our short break, this time about how fire had come to the people of the six nations. When the drumming started, Aude reached out to grasp my hand. The contact shocked me and I flinched, but I didn’t remove my hand.

“Sorry,” she whispered under her breath, “the drumming … ”

“Are you feeling okay now?”

She nodded.

She seemed genuinely relieved and I had to admit the warmth of her hand in mine was nice.

“Aude … ”
I whispered her name in my head.

“What?” She answered what she shouldn’t have heard. What was happening? Was this related to the Native’s mystical use of essence? Could they do something normal witches couldn’t?

The story wasn’t a very long one and I didn’t hear a word of it. Something was building up inside me and I couldn’t grasp what it was. Was it dread or excitement? Somehow both twisted together in my gut. I wanted to do something about it, anything, but I didn’t know what, so with tension wrapped around me, I continued with the workshop.

Drums were distributed to us and we were told to examine them and experiment. We filled them with different levels of water brought to us in large buckets and tested out the different sounds. Aude enthusiastically tried new ways of making sounds from her instruments, by tapping their taut hides in different ways and occasionally adding more water to her drum. All her worries and concerns seemed to have disappeared for the time. We were in her element. This was where she thrived.

Her eyes crinkled when she smiled at me. “Aren’t you into music?” she asked. “Come on, play with your drum.”

“I play the piano.”

“Yes, you’ve said that before. I like the piano.”

“You do?”

She shrugged. “It’s a little unpredictable. You don’t really look like the piano type.”

I smiled then. “I’m very unpredictable.”

And for some reason I felt like I’d just come really close to making a personal revelation.

“Yes, I guess you are, and now, you should unpredictably enjoy the drum. And anyways,” she laughed, “I play the guitar.”

“I thought you sang.”

“I do both.”

“But you don’t play drums,” I said.

“No,” She smiled. “I don’t play drums.” To illustrate her point, she pounded a few more times on her drum.

I laughed.

When we broke for dinner, we went to a sushi place where we sat in a quiet corner, face to face. It reminded me of the last time Marguerite and I had dined together, though of course, the circumstances here were infinitely different.

I picked a piece from the mosaic of sushi on my platter using my chopsticks, and paused. Something from our prior conversation nagged me. There was more to know.

“You don’t know your parents’ background?”

“I don’t know my father.”

“But your mother must have known him? Can’t she tell you anything about the man?”

She shook her head. “Mom’s complicated,” she said. There was more to the story, but she wasn’t going to share.

“Oh,” I said before popping a piece of fish in my mouth. I didn’t know what to say. Why did conversation have to be so difficult?

“What about you?” she asked between bites. “What’s your family like? There’s Garnier, of course, but what about your parents?”

“For as long as I remember, it’s been my father, my brothers, and me.”

“Brothers? You have another brother?”

“A younger one … Vincent.” At least, younger looking. In many ways, Vincent was older than we were. Even Antoine hadn’t lived through as much as Vincent.

I was dying to try my mind voice with her again, but also really afraid. I didn’t know what it meant and I didn’t entirely trust the Native mystical powers that held the only explanation for the occurrence. I no longer feared she was a witch from another family trying to trick me, since another family would not be able to hear my mind voice, but it didn’t mean her power couldn’t be dangerous to me. What Marguerite had learned from the Iroquois tribe had proved to be very dangerous. Even deadly.