Savage Lands (45 page)

When Elisabeth knelt silently beside her, Marguerite did not turn. She only put back her head and wailed to the sky as though she meant to draw every last star down from the heavens and into the cold earth. Elisabeth closed her eyes and put her hands together against her breast and felt the cry in the clenched-up parts of her chest.

The night deepened. The savage children were at last despatched to bed, and the glow from the distant fire grew faint. And still the mourners cried out to the sky, sending forth in the tumult of their music all the wordless sorrow of the world. From time to time, two or three of the blanketed figures rose from the circle and quietly walked away and immediately their places were taken by others who came forward, knelt, drew their blankets over their heads and took up the woeful song.

When at last Elisabeth stood, it was almost dawn and the trees traced black lace against the pink-grey hem of the departing night. Her throat was raw. The savage women bowed their heads and were silent. The air was new and still, broken only by the birds who sang without restraint, delighting in the new day. Then they stood and, turning to the child, guided her with the utmost gentleness to her feet.

Marguerite looked up. Her face was smeared with dust and her dark-ringed eyes were huge.

‘Madame,’ she whispered in French.

‘Marguerite,’ Elisabeth whispered back, and she held out her hands to the child and the girl took them in her small ones, pressing them hard against her thin cheeks. Elisabeth knelt down, the pain in her stiff knees causing her to flinch, so that their heads were level. She longed to take the child in her arms but something stopped her, something she could not explain that was to do with separateness and with respect.

‘You came.’

‘Yes.’

‘My mother–’

‘I know.’

Marguerite blinked, biting on her lips.

‘The night was clear, did you see? She would not have got lost.’

Elisabeth remembered then what Auguste had once told her, that according to the savages the great swirl of stars at the centre of the sky was the trail of souls leading to the Great Village of the hereafter, where the hunting was abundant and it was always spring.

‘The brave and the loyal do not get lost.’

‘Was my mother brave?’

Elisabeth closed her eyes, pressing the girl’s forehead against her own. She could feel the child trembling between her hands.

‘Yes. She was very brave.’

Marguerite pulled away. Her eyes were bright with tears. She scrubbed at them with her fists.

‘I am not brave,’ she muttered.

‘Oh, but you are.’

‘No. I am afraid.’

‘We are all afraid,’ Elisabeth said. ‘The brave are afraid. That is what makes them brave.’

It was morning. The sun spilled over the trees, slanting into their eyes, and the village was busy with the noises of the day.

‘Come,’ she said gently. ‘It is time to eat, to rest.’

Marguerite did not come. She stared instead at the piled-up heap of turned earth, at the knee prints pressed into its soft crumb.

‘The crying is almost done,’ she said. ‘Then my mother’s spirit will be safe and she can come to me. In my dreams. Like the spirits of my ancestors.’

‘Yes.’

‘When do you take me?’

Elisabeth hesitated. Pulling her shawl from her shoulders, she folded it carefully, smoothing out the creases until it made a neat square.

‘I – I am not here to take you with me,’ she said. ‘You belong with your own people. You should go back to your village, to the place of your ancestors. I came to grieve your mother and to wish you
bon voyage
. I have no more claim on you.’

‘I am to go free?’

‘Yes.’

She watched as the child knelt at the graveside, her head bowed, her hands burrowing into the loose earth.

‘You do not want me any more?’

‘Oh, child,’ Elisabeth said. ‘I want you with all my heart. It does not make you mine.’

‘Then whose am I?’

‘You are a child of the proud nation of the Yasoux, the tribe of your mother. You belong to your kinsfolk, who share your blood, and they to you.’

‘You would send me to live among strangers, because I share their blood?’

‘They are your people.’

‘No,’ Marguerite said, shaking her head. ‘You and the master are my people. You and the cows and the Negroes and the cross-faced men with the funny voices.’ Her thin shoulders shook. ‘Please, Madame. I belong with you.’

Elisabeth looked into the small tilted-up face and her throat closed in a knot.

‘I will study hard,’ Marguerite said pleadingly. ‘I promise.’

Elisabeth could not swallow. Instead she reached out and very slowly smoothed the child’s hair away from her forehead. Marguerite closed her eyes, leaning into her touch.

‘I will try to be good,’ the child whispered.

The tips of Elisabeth’s fingers brushed the curve of the girl’s ear, the sharp jut of her jaw.

‘I miss my mother.’

The child’s neck was smooth and warm. Elisabeth could feel the jump of her pulse against her fingers, and she remembered a night long ago when her fingers had tightened around another neck and she had thought anguish unendurable.

‘I know,’ she murmured, and she stroked the child as she stroked the cows when she milked them, to steady them both.

T
he savages came at night. They came all the way into the yard and slaughtered one of the cows and her half-grown calf with her. Dark puddles stained the dirt of the pen and there were splashes of blood on the rails and on the trail behind the kitchen hut that led into the forest. No one knew how they had contrived to kill the beasts without waking the settlement. The gate to the pen stood open, and looped over the post were the two collars with their metal bells. The cow that remained had not escaped. It huddled against the fence, its flanks pressed against the splintery bars and waited, as it always waited, for milking.

‘Those bastards,’ Fuerst muttered. ‘They would destroy everything we have worked for.’

Auguste said nothing but only blew on his sagamity to cool it.

‘I suppose we must after them, harvest or no?’

Auguste shook his head.

‘Not directly. Let them think themselves safe.’

The men went to the fields, muskets slung across their backs. Auguste went with them. In the silent yard Vincente pressed her brow against the cow’s flank, her hands tugging at the udders in the way that the German woman had shown her. The milk did not come. The cow twisted against its rope, jarring her neck. Vincente straightened up a little, pulling the stool closer, and began again. The udders slipped in her hands. The cow stamped its protest, barking her shin with its hoof, and almost kicking over the bucket.

Hot tears sprang into her eyes.

‘Stop it, you stupid animal,’ she hissed at the cow, and she jabbed her shoulder hard against its belly, crushing the teats in her clenched fists. Fuerst’s wife always did the milking, that’s what the Rhinelander woman had told her as she balanced her bulk precariously on the milking stool. The woman was big with child and the effort of reaching for the teats had turned her face brick red. Her name was Nellie. Fuerst’s wife had had a knack with the cows, Nellie had said. No one else could get milk from them like she could.

It was at that moment that Vincente had determined to master the knack of it. It was not so simple as it looked. Vincente tugged again, her brow creased with vexation.

‘The child mistakes ferocity for feeling, and as for melody!’ she heard her mother murmur, with her tinkling laugh. ‘She wields that harpsichord as though it were an axe.’

Vincente’s stomach was empty. It moaned a little, stretching up beneath her ribs, and her head swam. When she closed her eyes, tiny silverfishes darted through the darkness. She thought of her mother then and of the shrinking disgust that would compress her mouth if she were to see her daughter, a le Vannes who could trace her lineage through marriage to the noble families of France, in a place like this, milking a cow like a peasant girl. The cow had the warm, frowsy smell of a slept-in bed. She rested her forehead against its flank, and the gurgle of its stomach made echoes in her skull.

The food she had brought with her from Mobile was almost all gone. The previous night, while Auguste slept, she had crept to the kitchen hut, but the door was locked, and though she set all her weight against it, she could not open it. Instead she had slid to the ground, the need in her belly straining the fibres of her, stretching her fingers from her palms, splaying her toes, every nerve strung shrill. To steady herself she had pressed down with her hands into the dirt, closing her fists around handfuls of dust and pebbles and tendrils of dried grass and, for a moment, she had been seized by a violent impulse to cram her mouth with earth.

Instead she had opened her hands and the dirt had run out between her fingers. She had put her head back against the door, the splintery wood snagging her scalp, and she had stretched up her neck as though she would fill her mouth with darkness. The sky was vast above her, so crowded with stars that in places they swirled in a milky soup, blotting out the night.

The kitchen hut was a few strides from the gate to the cow pen. If the savages had come then, if they had found her there, crouched like a criminal by the kitchen hut, they might have taken her instead. They might have cut her throat with their flat knives and carried her away, wrists and ankles bound tight together over their hunting pole so that as they walked, she swung a little from side to side like the deer when they brought them out of the forest. Her blood in a spreading pool in the dirt, her life leaking from her to fall in dark petals into the dust of a savage land.

They would have hardly noticed she was gone. Auguste and the Rhinelander left always before dawn, leading their trail of almost-men behind them and the women too. It was nearly harvest, Fuerst said. No one could be spared. Vincente was left alone all day with Nellie, who wheezed through her mouth like a mule and spoke only to protest at her discomfort. The list of her complaints was inexhaustible. Vincente tried to ask her about Elisabeth Savaret, about the slave, but the Rhinelander woman only shrugged and muttered about the ache in her back. Alone in the heat of the afternoon, Vincente swallowed mouthful after mouthful of rough yellow bread, but though she could seize her flesh in both hands she felt as though she were disappearing. She knew that in Mobile the wives would have already begun to forget her.

Dumbly, Vincente pressed her brow into the cow’s warm flank. The heaviness in her chest caused her back to bow. Carelessly, like a child playing at pretend, she moved her hands on the udders. The cow shifted a little and made quiet chuntering noises in its throat. Slowly at first, and then faster, the milk hissed into the bucket.

That evening a hunting party came to the plantation. When the Rhinelanders saw the savages, they ceased in the eating of their dinner and made to stand up, several of them bunching their fists and calling out to one another excitably. The clamour raised Auguste, who had gone with Fuerst to the upper settlement. Quickly he snatched up his gun, cocking it ready.

‘Stay here,’ he said to Vincente, who hesitated and then followed him, clutching her apron about her. It would be worse to be left alone.

When he saw the savages, Auguste let the gun fall.

‘These men are not of the Chetimacha tribe,’ he said impatiently. ‘They are Bayagoulas. Our allies.’

He listened gravely. When they were finished he turned to Vincente.

‘Tell Fuerst that they bring word from the village they call Strayed Pigeon,’ he said. ‘His wife is safe there and the slave girl too.’

Vincente did as he bid. When she followed Fuerst from the cabin, she saw Auguste point towards the fire in the men’s camp. Later, when food had been brought for the savages and a camp struck, she saw the men talking again with Auguste. He carried a bundle in his arms, which he gave to them.

‘What did you give them?’ she asked when at last he came in to supper.

‘Not much.’

‘What manner of not much?’

Auguste paused in the pulling off of his boots and looked up at her. Her ears pinked a little. It disturbed her, the way he had of finding the meaning of things under the words, but, like a blush, the sensation was not entirely disagreeable. She smoothed her skirts, jutting out her chin.

‘Gabrielle Borret says that the French have always given too much to the savages. She says it is the reason they grow greedy.’

Auguste regarded her.

‘It is their custom to give and receive gifts.’

‘So what did you give them?’

‘Not much,’ he answered, and dropped his boots on the floor. ‘A few trinkets, beads and the like. A little gunpowder and shot. Some brandy.’

‘They say the savage will do anything for brandy.’

‘And so we bring God’s light to the Devil’s empire.’

He intended to provoke her. Angrily Vincente clattered his plate before him.

‘So Fuerst’s wife condescends to come back, does she? How much longer must we wait?’

‘A few days, perhaps. Until her business is complete.’

Vincente pushed her own food around her plate. She could not eat, not while he watched her.

‘Who in the Devil’s name does she think she is, this woman?’ she demanded. ‘Conducting business with the savages?’

Auguste was silent. Then he shook his head.

‘I do not think I know,’ he said.

‘I have heard no good of her, I cannot deny it. Anne Negrette, Perrine Roussel, they . . .’

She trailed off, the words shrivelling under the light of his unblinking stare. In the silence that followed, he lowered his gaze, straightened the spoon beside his bowl. Then he picked it up and began to eat. He chewed and swallowed, then raised his spoon again. Neither of them spoke. He finished eating and pushed his bowl away. The grease on the bowls hardened and turned white. Somewhere a dog howled, dragging its cry down the slate-dark sky.