The High Missouri (12 page)

Dru was looking at Stewart ruefully. Dylan wondered why. They had so many secrets, these old men.

“You are my clansman. I judge you to be an idealist, like my former self. I wish to give the knives to you… symbolically. What they mean, you must discover.” He put them into Dylan’s hands, and the case, and held Dylan’s hands on them with his own.

Stewart looked down at Dylan with his gray, shadowy eyes in their cavernous sockets. “This is your responsibility. Learn to throw the knives accurately and with great force. That is their nature, and it yearns to be fulfilled. Learn to kill with them. Learn to hunt. Learn even to hunt deer.”

Something shifted in the Scot’s eyes, dark, obscure.

“However, I urge you not to let them drink human blood. They thirst for all blood, indiscriminately. You are different. What you must do… that’s your duty to discover.”

He gazed at Dylan with enigmatic urgency.

Then, in a hearty way, Stewart said, “I must walk about and see some gentlemen. You practice your throwing technique.”

Leaving, he turned back to them. “Young Mr. Davies, the ball is tonight and I leave before noon tomorrow. I shall expect an answer from you in the morning, early.”

Chapter Eleven

Anastasie and Lady Sarah were in front of the wigwam. From the distance, where Dylan was walking up from the river, it looked strange. Anastasie appeared to be in a trance, slowly, slowly twirling in front of Lady Sarah. Then Dylan saw that Anastasie was wearing a satin gown, floor length, very dressy. And Lady Sarah was holding a large hand mirror mounted on wood, with a handle, so Anastasie could study her own appearance. She was turning her body slowly, and twisting her head to look, like a young girl going to her first dance and whirled on the wind of enchantment.

“I forgot,” Dru had said last night. “I promised her I’d take her to the grand ball this year. Wait till you see her all got-up.”

No question Anastasie was going, and on the wings of romance. Lady Sarah took the mirror and inspected her bulldog face. Yes, it was a show. Anastasie had even painted her head. The part in the center of her head was vermilion, and green and yellow lines waved across her forehead. The effect was barbarous but striking.

The
annual fling of the NorthWest Company, they’d said, and the grandest of times. He didn’t know if he was invited. No one ever told him anything around here.

“You’re going,” said Dru, in a tone that hinted, If I have to go, you do too. “We’re all going.” Seemed grumpy about it.

Now Dru said, “Get dressed. You’re borrowing my outfit, the one laid out there.” He nodded his head at clothes on a boulder behind Anastasie, still transfixed by her own image. It was a black frock coat with long tails, dove-gray waistcoat, and scarlet neck cloth. “Anastasie loves it,” Dru said, “and keeps it for me. Too sodding dandyish. If you wear it, she won’t make
me
.”

“Oh, Dylan,” gushed Anastasie, “we’ll have so much fun. The dinner is…” She rolled her eyes.

Dylan held the jacket up and looked at it. Yes, grand, something to strut in. He didn’t mind playing the swell. And his knives would look great on the back of the jacket. Even if they were mostly empty menace.

Suddenly Fore was planted in front of him with cocked hips. She gave him a roll of eye and a flirtatious smile.

Dru said, “Mr. Stewart is escorting her.”

Dylan looked from Dru to Fore and back to Dru. “But—”

“Laddo, the lady wants to dance, especially with Mr. Stewart. It’s an honor for her.”

“Monsieur Stewart,
comme il est beau
,” said Fore mischievously.
“Est-ce que vous voulez marcher avec moi à la Grande Salle?”
Will you walk me to the Great Hall? She tucked her hand into Dylan’s elbow, ready to march.

Dylan didn’t know what to say. Yes, he supposed he would deliver this provocative woman to the rooms of the man who would make a whore of her.

That did not unnerve him so much as the way she had painted her face. Two white lines from each eye to earlobe, and two echoing white lines slanting back from her widow’s peak.

Fornicating Woman.

Dylan was half drunk. It was a solution to his anxiety. He kept looking across to Fore during dinner and seeing his dream of the Bosch figures, himself and Fornicating Woman rutting on the coals of hell, in terrible agony. The awful thing was, it appealed to him and heated his blood.

Perhaps Fore knew his dilemma and enjoyed it. She seemed conscious of his glance, and was smiling with extra vivacity with Mr. Stewart. Dylan wondered if she was speaking English. Clearly she understood enough to have overheard him telling Dru about the dream and how Fornicating Woman was painted. He also wondered if she had played Fornicating Woman with Mr. Stewart in his rooms in place of a drink before dinner.

It was Stewart she wanted, she and Dru had hinted. Not Dylan, nor even Saga again, but Stewart. Thank God, he told himself.

A wicked celebration, this ball, that led men and women into the suites and cabins and bushes and under the canoes, and sent back mournful cries of love. Dylan would be no part of it. He would ease his nerves with wine.

The drinking was legendary, said Dru, averaging as much as ten bottles of wine per man. Dylan didn’t believe that for a moment. He would keep his drinking moderate. Just enough to ease his nerves when he looked at Fore.

The diners were gala—the partners in short clothes and swords, the clerks in sober dark suits, a few guides like Dru and Saga in the colorful
voyageur
style. Most men were making a display of polished weapons. Mr. Stewart carried a sword. Dylan couldn’t name the type, but maybe it was a centuries-old sword within his clan. For some reason, Dru carried only a knife, and Saga only his quirt. As usual, Dru was pledged not to drink.

The native women attired themselves in Louis XV gowns and other country copies of European fashions, and sometimes jewelry worthy of a courtesan. They wore this garb with decorum that would have suited a duchess. It made Dylan feel he was not in the
pays sauvage
but a fantasy country, a place created by an artiste of fey imagination.

The dinner was lavish. They ate with silver and drank from crystal. The napery was Irish linen. Three courses had come so far—baked whitefish with mushrooms, venison roast with boiled potatoes, smoked hams with corn pudding, and white bread—light, fluffy, delicate, with butter from the fort’s farm, a particular treat.

Dylan, Anastasie, and Lady Sarah ate moderately. He noticed that Dru and Saga acted like they were storing up for the winter. Dylan was sure they wouldn’t be able to dance. Saga was also imbibing like an Indian. Dylan wondered if he was a binge drinker, as many Indians were reported to be. He wondered if the bastard was even half trustworthy.

It didn’t matter—not tonight. His black mood of the last few days was evaporating. He didn’t have to sin, and he wouldn’t. He was a free agent, he could remember the light and live by it. He could stay here. He could go deeper into the wilderness. He could go back to civilization and stay there. He could return here as a missionary. A free agent.

He’d asked Dru what he should do at the banquet. “When among wolves,” Dru answered, “howl.”

Howl he would. Tonight he was in the
pays d’en haut
, he was celebrating, he was eating and drinking handsomely but moderately, and he intended to dance—to cavort, frolic, gambol, to spin his body through the air and feel rapturous.

Dylan was thrilled. Anastasie and Lady Sarah stuck to the traditional steps of their people, but Fore danced like a peasant white woman—vigorously, athletically, yet with an insinuating elan all her own.

Most of the native women danced in the Ojibway and Cree manner, bobbing up and down sedately in one place, sometimes leaving the ground with both feet. A few Indian and mixed-blood women did the jig step, sometimes comically so, but most of them kept to their dignified bob.

It was the white men who were riotous. They set their feet to following the jig, a demonic dance of fast-running triplets that took you over, wore you out, and left you spinning. The orchestra gave it a driving rhythm, fiddles, fifes, flutes, and underneath these nimble skirmishers, the babble and drone of the bagpipes. Dylan gave himself up to the dance. It was exhilarating.

Not that he danced every dance. He sat out some of the reels and the naughty French songs, and occasionally the band would let the dancers cool off while they sang out a tender Scottish ballad. Dru muttered about wanting a Welsh harp, but no need for that. Dylan thought these highland jigs could not be beat.

Fore never sat down. Mr. Stewart took the first dance, Saga the second, Dylan the third, Mr. Stewart cut in, she came back to Dylan, Saga cut in, she came back, and so on and so on. Dylan danced with Anastasie and Lady Sarah of the bulldog face as well, in their manner, without touching. Fore was more fun.

He was beginning to get hot—both sweaty hot and lustful hot. It was the way Fore looked at him while they danced—not that she didn’t look at every man that way. It was impertinent, brazen, blistering with sensuality. What did she want? Whom did she want? Dylan supposed she and Mr. Stewart would go back to his rooms and dally once more.

When Saga cut in again, Dylan decided to ignore Lady Sarah and Anastasie standing by the wall. He would take a break in the cool air of the long, north country evening. He loved the long mother-of-pearl twilight. Maybe he would go down and see the other dance of this gala evening, the one of the common
voyageurs
, the one held down at the cantine salope. From in front of the Great Hall he could hear a solitary fiddle crying out a maudlin tune across the meadow.

It was another world down here. These were rough Frenchies, paddlers out from Montreal or seasoned men of the north country, illiterate, uncouth, and carnal. They were having their blowout after one six-week season of hard paddling, and before another. They danced like animals, some of them agile as cats, others lumbering as bears, all strong, robust, and vigorous. They were drunk. So were the women, Indian and mixed-blood women in their deerskin dresses. Perhaps it was the wine in Dylan that made them look barbarously wonderful.

Someone struck up a second fiddle in raucous harmonies with the first. Someone else banged something metal like a drum.

A Frenchy hollered something indecipherable, and most of the dancers stopped dancing and… They were mock-paddling. Yes, pretending to be in a canoe, yes, going up a rapid, getting knocked around by the waves, yelling in excitement, paddling more fiercely.

The canoe flipped! Down went all the
voyageurs
and their dark ladies, knees knocking, heads thumping the ground, feet waving. Dylan saw hands groping bosoms and bottoms and crotches of both sexes, and heard claps of lascivious laughter. One fellow cried that poor Pierre had drowned, and Pierre acted out a mock expiration, arms akimbo. Up came the paddlers to get back into the dance. One couple scurried hand in hand into the lavender twilight and the lake-wet fog.

Cantine salope
, whores’ saloon, they called it. No wonder. Not that it was so much different in the Great Hall. There the bribes were bigger, the manners less direct, the licentiousness the same. The smell here was different. Instead of perfume, there was raw sweat, pungent and spicy, at once noxious and bracing, the aroma of the beast.

At least the devil made his lure enticing.

The wine in Dylan wanted to dance. Or was it the devil? God help me, he thought, I don’t care. His legs started moving without him.

A hand took his.

Fore. Fornicating Woman, her face and hair slashed with four white stripes, slashes of Bosch. Fore without Mr. Stewart.

Their bodies joined in the dance.

He didn’t know how he had gotten here. They were singing and laughing raucously, he knew that, and they started canoeing again, and naturally fell and linked legs and arms and lips and other parts.

I’m in an orgy.

He accidentally fell between the legs of Fore, perfectly crotched.

Be still, Dylan Davies! he ordered himself, but it made no difference. He was beyond caring. He felt like his body was crawling on her.

She didn’t move seductively. She nicked up swiftly and sucked on his earlobe. He felt it in his cod.

Then she squirmed like a fish and slipped away. Everyone was up, and Fore gave him a hand up and they were dancing again, and she held something to her mouth. One of his knives. He felt the holsters and the left one was empty. The blade gleamed luridly against her white teeth in the last ebb of the light. She slid a small pink tongue out and licked the length of the knife, drawing it gently sideways, never stopping the dance, never hesitating or missing a beat. Then she slipped the knife back into his holster and ran her tongue along his jugular vein.

He danced. She danced. She spoke not at all, French or English, as though wordlessness was a pact between them, a bond, or a spell. He knew the spell not with his mind, as something acquired, like learning, or civilization itself, but in his bones, as he had known the vibrating of the Dylan bell when he touched his forehead to it, in his bones, in the core of his being. The spell was like a river’s strong current. They were swimming in it, living in it, and the river was coursing strong, throbbing strong, the flow of his own blood.

Dylan and Fore, Fornicating Woman, left the dancers wordlessly, in the thrall of their pact. Standing against the rough timbers of the
cantine salope
, in silent concert, Dylan committed his first carnal act. Fully clothed, they joined, copulated, mated, rutted, fornicated. She touched him but would not let him touch her with his hands—not her face, not breasts, not hips, nothing. She used her lips, her tongue, and her hands variously and creatively. When at last she mounted him—it was the only place she let him touch her—he was finished immediately, but she kept on fiercely and in an urgent rhythm that made it all happen again without pause.

He was pushed helplessly against the wall, weak, pulled wherever she wanted, wherever the dark and wordless currents of her throbbing animal nature took them. He was bobbing along at sea, hanging onto something, he couldn’t say what, rising and falling with the swells, lost, hopeless, rising and falling, falling and rising, world without horizon, world without hope, amen.

When she had sapped the juices from him again, Fore took his hand—now the touch of her mere hand was electric—and led him back among the dancers. He thought he would stumble, but he danced. If he stopped dancing, he would die.

It was mad. Even now that he had frigged Fore, frigged her wantonly, drunkenly, lewdly, his thirst for her was not slaked. He wanted her more, again and again. He would frig her until he dropped. Then, terribly, he would want her all the more, with desperate urgency. All this he knew absolutely, and was helpless before it.

Two Frenchies fell to fighting right under the dancers’ feet. When Dylan paused, Fore urged him with her body to keep dancing.

Brawling, they were. One woman pleaded with them to stop, another cackled them on. Dylan wondered which one they were both wanting to frig. One man, smaller and wearing a pigtail, squiggled to his feet. He jumped onto the other’s barrel chest with both feet. Whoof! went Barrel.