River City (10 page)

The previous summer, on his sail up the Atlantic coast, Cartier had encountered Micmacs. They did not know what to make of one another. Sailing farther north along the Baie de Chaleur, the
Émérillon
intersected a second band. They called themselves Iroquois and had come from a place far inland, travelling to the sea by a great river. That interested Cartier, for as a sailor he was not inclined to explore dry land. When the Frenchman erected a thirty-foot cross overlooking the bay and claimed the continent in the name of France, Donnacona took an interest, demanding to know the meaning of the structure. Cartier fibbed. He conveyed that the cross was a navigational aid, to assist him upon his return to the region.

After that encounter, they considered the grave issue of Donnacona’s sons returning with Cartier to France. The pair could provide convincing stories for the king. As well, the time in France would allow Cartier to learn a portion of their language, and the boys themselves could learn French. A difficult discussion. Cartier had visited Donnacona in the evening and sat across a fire. He vowed to find the great river and return the boys to Stadacona the following year. He might never have convinced the father were it not for the boys’ intervention, for they sat by the fire also, the flames flickering in the darkness of their pupils. Their minds were burning. Their souls were in flames. They wanted to climb aboard the giant canoe and travel across the great waters to another world. They could become great chiefs one day, they argued, with knowledge learned across the water. In the end it was the youthful conviction of Domagaya and Taignoagny that allowed the transfer to happen.

Although he lied about the meaning attached to the cross, and although the outcome was precarious, the captain managed to keep this one promise,
returning the young men to Stadacona.
Les sauvages,
a term that meant “people who live in the woods,” made a profound impression in court and particularly upon the king. Making use of the king’s affection for the lads, Cartier persuaded Francis I to finance his next voyage to assure the safe return of the two boys.

Now they were home, and their own father did not know them.

The land they called France assaulted the young men with such an array of wonders that neither Domagaya nor Taignoagny was certain he’d survive. One more chateau’s garden, one more trip in a golden carriage behind beasts called horses, one more long-table with seats for an entire village and food for a month’s festivity, one more king’s ball, one more blue- or green- or brown-eyed glance from a blonde- or red- or brown-haired lovely young woman, her body heaving out of a cinched dress, and both young men might collapse and cease to walk again. They felt immortal. They could not die because they were already dead, for they’d entered a new state of being where they no longer existed in the world as they had experienced it, for the world they’d known was forever gone.

At the feasts for the king, his court and his friends, so many beasts would be placed upon the table that they didn’t know which one to eat. Often they sampled a bite of each. Cartier sat next to Domagaya one night. On the voyage to France, during fair days upon the sea, Cartier had learned to speak a smattering of Iroquois from him, as he seemed less shy than his brother, while both young men had learned French in the company of the cabin boy, Petit Gilles. Domagaya commented to Cartier at the long-table, where ninety men and ladies of the court were nibbling, that the hunt must have been a good one.

“Sorry?” Cartier asked him back. “What hunt?”

“Many animals.” Domagaya indicated the array of dead beasts.

Cartier promised to take the two young men on a French hunt.

The boys didn’t believe what their eyes were seeing. In small enclosures and in tall houses, the white men kept beasts, animals and fowl that Cartier
called cows, pigs, goats and chickens, and when they wanted to eat one they did not go away on a hunt. Instead, they walked from their house across to the animals’ tall house and selected a beast to be slaughtered. They raised their animals like the Hochelaga Iroquois back home raised corn! Other animals, similar to wolves and foxes, were not for eating, but ran with the men in the woods and walked beside them across the grassland and lived with the men in their homes, curled up by the fire. Sometimes they misbehaved, and a man would swat what he called his dog and the dog, which had big teeth and could snarl and bark frightening sounds, whimpered like a child. At first, they were frightened when they came across a beast in the house, but Taignoagny learned to play with one of the smaller dogs, and the beast would lick Taignoagny’s face until the young man laughed like a pale-skinned girl while Domagaya ran from the room to the pissing room clutching his belly in terror.

Taignoagny was helped onto the back of a beast the Frenchmen called a horse, and the horse went walking around its enclosure as Domagaya fell to his knees, not knowing if his brother was still a brother or a four-legged, two-headed wild beast with a penis the size of a small pine. Domagaya was usually the more daring of the two, but the sight of his brother attached to an animal caused his teeth to chatter uncontrollably. A servant was summoned to carry him back to bed.

More wonders. In pails, the French collected milk from the teats of beasts called cows and goats—and drank it! And gave it to their children! Taignoagny, who was always thinking, said, “That is why! The white milk of cows. That is why they have white skins!”

“That is why,” Domagaya agreed. “They are raised on the milk of cows and goats. They are not half-gods. They are half-animals!”

Hens gave eggs for the nourishment of the pale-skins, and young women gathered the eggs every morning and brought them to the table, and the Indian men ate the eggs and marvelled at this food freely provided by the animals. They had such wonderful animals in France! They were not like the irritable bears or the shy and sprightly deer. They were nothing like moose. The birds of this place called France were not like the seabirds who deposited their eggs in the walls of cliffs that, if a young Indian boy wanted to fetch one, he had to risk
his life. These birds were much more generous. The pale-skins had birds who refused to fly! Domagaya was determined that, when he got back to his land, he would make the animals behave. He would put the deer in enclosures and tell them not to jump over the fence, to wait there until he was ready to come and kill them. And he would put the bears in big bear houses and tell them to be still, to go out only when they were willing to fish for him in the stream. And he would tell the ducks not to fly away from him, just as the chickens did not fly away from the men and women of France. He would milk the moose and become a half-animal, too. All he had to do was to learn this language, this animal language that the beasts understood and obeyed.

So Domagaya studied French in great earnest.

One day, they did go on a real hunt, for quail. The men of the court took
les sauvages
along with them, and the boys talked about the experience between themselves that night into the following morning. A man would aim a long spear at a bird, and with one finger pull a small tooth. Fire and noise burst from the arrow, so fiercely that both Taignoagny and Domagaya landed on their bottoms with the first blast. Out of the sky, after the spears had barked, birds fell down. These were the birds not willing to listen to the language. But the dogs did! The dogs raced away to find the fallen quail, and when they did, they brought them back in their teeth to their men. Oh, how Taignoagny wanted to have beasts like these when he went home to his land, while Domagaya wanted an invisible arrow that talked with a voice of fire and made plump, tasty, flying birds land on their backs.

On a cool, misty morning, the Indian men were taken to hunt deer on the king’s land. They were astonished to finally find a familiar animal: deer! In France! Domagaya was invited to slaughter one, so walked toward the animal, silently and quickly at times, and the Frenchmen watched from a low hill, fascinated by his movement. He stole through the bushes, although this was a forest unlike any he had known, as it suffered from an absence of trees and underbrush and, from time to time, sprouts of water rose into the air out of circular stones on the ground. Domagaya moved towards the deer, creeping forward now. The deer studied him. The Indian man crept forward. The deer stared into his eyes. Domagaya’s heart sank. He had been spotted. He had been
smelled. The deer continued to sniff and stare. Then resumed a calm graze. Domagaya walked up to the deer and slit its throat.

Across the lawn, where the courtiers were watching, men and women collectively gasped. Then suddenly burst into cheering. That night, the conversation around the king’s table was all about the
sauvage
who had used a knife—a
knife!
—to kill the deer they were eating.

Taignoagny and Domagaya discussed why a deer in France would let him do that. “She saw you,” Taignoagny repeated. “She smelled you.”

“She does not know how an Iroquois smells.”

“This is true.”

“It’s like with pigs? They wait until the king wants to eat one, then they die.”

“Deer are not pigs,” Taignoagny pointed out. “Pigs are fat … pigs are slow. Pigs make strange noises.”

“The hoof of a deer and the hoof of a pig are alike.”

“The mind of a deer and the mind of a pig are unalike.”

“The deer knew I had come to kill her, Taig. I looked into her eyes. I saw her thinking. She thought to herself, I am on the king’s land. This red man has come to kill me so that he can eat me. I will let him do that, because I love the king.”

“Is that what she was thinking, Dom?”

“I saw in her eyes what she was thinking.”

If Domagaya could comprehend the thoughts of the pale-skins’ deer, then Taignoagny considered that he might be able to comprehend the thoughts of their women. They stared into his eyes so often, virtually compelling him to interpret their thoughts. They’d lift their startling, half-bare chests, and giggle, and twirl their dresses, then scurry away laughing. How would it ever be possible to understand them? And yet, he believed that he had begun to discern patterns in this strange world. The gardens demonstrated that the trees, plants and flowers of France were willing to live according to the pleasure of their keepers’ vision, just as animals lived and died according to the whims of their keepers’ hunger. The chickens laid their eggs purely for the sake of the pale-skins’ morning diet. Taignoagny had begun to suspect that the women of the king’s court might similarly be in favour of offering themselves for the sake of
their men, although whether they would do so for one they called a
sauvage,
he was not sure. From the way they looked at him, he was beginning to wonder, so for reasons quite different than his brother’s, Taignoagny also vigorously applied himself to the study of French.

That winter, while the brothers were being initiated into court life at Fontainebleau, the seafarer Jacques Cartier took a Mediterranean trip to Sicily. Aboard an Italian vessel as a passenger, he spent long, uneventful days preparing his supply list, for the king had consented to provide three vessels for his next voyage, the largest undertaking of his career, which made an obsessive review of his requirements necessary. In the back of his mind he was already musing about the possibility of wintering in the New World. Of this notion, he would not whisper a word in case it slipped back to the king’s ears, yet he had vividly imagined the triumph of his return a year later than expected. He’d be assumed dead, together with the ship’s company. To commemorate the drama of his arrival home, and to be properly forgiven for the delay, he’d need a significant gift to appease the king. A renowned patron of the arts and a Renaissance man, King Francis I had sponsored Raphael and Titian. His favourite, Leonardo Da Vinci, had died in his arms. That passion for the arts eclipsed any fervour he might have nurtured for transoceanic escapades. The king gave only the lowest priority to New World exploration.

Cartier needed to find a way to startle him, to fire his imagination as did the artists. His voyage to Sicily, then, was intended to guarantee that a proper present from the New World be found. To locate it, he would rummage around the old.

Often windless, the voyage was quiet. Time dragged as slowly as the rising sun and setting moon for the ambitious captain. He longed to be in command of his own vessel again, and regretted in his darkest hours that he had not chosen a land to explore that offered a more forgiving climate, one that might allow him to stay abroad longer. He missed the wildness of those distant shores, the daily challenge to navigate and survive, the exhilaration of unravelling
an uncharted coastline. The journey across the Mediterranean bored him.

Given that he had much to prepare, many were surprised that he’d chosen to indulge in the sojourn. Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici de Monreale was an old friend of Cartier’s, but surely the cardinal could afford to travel to him, or the journey could wait. The captain insisted that he needed to speak to his spiritual counsellor before he could properly embark, and explained himself no further. Cloaked in mystery, he bided his time on the small ship sailing east, and endlessly prepared his lists.

To Taignoagny’s eyes, the new woman who had arrived at court, the elegant, haughty and superior Francine Tousignant de Tocqueville, seemed so staggeringly beautiful that, in her company, all contact with the language of the French he’d learned vanished from his lips. She flagrantly burst from her dress, for, unlike the other women, she was neither a flimsy twig of a girl nor a sapling, but a fine stout maple of a woman, with large hips and robust arms—a woman who looked as though she could carry water up from a shore with a child on her hip, or pull a sled in winter—and yet, similar to other French girls in court, she possessed a smile as chaotic as a gale, her black hair heaped above her head in twists and twirls, while her wide eyes, if somewhat unfocused, were as green as a summer forest. He was saying all this to her in Iroquois, and she was twittering into her hands and exchanging quick asides with her gathered friends.