She said nothing, but pressed a finger to her lips. Though dead, her eyes were as bright as gold coins. Her hair cascaded in ebony waves about her shoulders, and Matthew would have been lying if he’d said the infernal light didn’t make her heart-achingly beautiful. She was wearing a dark green shift decorated around the neck with intricate blue beadwork. He stared at the pulse that beat in the hollow of her throat, and saw moisture glisten on her cheeks and forehead.
It must be said, these demons did excellent work at the illusion of life.
He tried to angle his face toward her, but still his head was confined as were his arms and legs. “Rachel…I’m sorry,” he whispered. “You shouldn’t be here. Your time in Hell…was already served on earth.”
Her finger went to his lips, to bid him be silent.
“Can you ever…ever forgive me?” he asked. “For bringing you to…such a bad end?” Smoke drifted between them, and somewhere beyond Rachel the fires crackled and seethed.
She gave him an eloquent answer. Leaning down, she pressed her lips to his own. The kiss lingered, and became needful.
His body—the illusion of a body, after all—reacted to this kiss as it would have done in the earthly sphere. Which didn’t surprise Matthew, for it was a well-known fact Heaven would be full of angelic lutes and Hell full of flesh flutes. In that particular regard, perhaps it was not such a disagreeable place.
Rachel pulled back. Her face remained within his field of vision, her lips damp. Her eyes were shining, and the fire shadows licked her cheek.
She reached back and undid something. Suddenly the blue-beaded garment slipped off her and fell to the ground.
Her hands returned, lifting the woven mat from Matthew’s body. Then she stepped up onto what must be a platform of some kind and slowly, gently eased her naked body down against his own, after which she pulled the grass mat over them again and kissed his mouth with longing.
He wanted to ask her if she knew what she was doing. He wanted to ask her if this was love, or passion, or if she looked at him and saw Daniel’s face.
But he didn’t. Instead, he surrendered to the moment; to be more accurate, the moment demanded him. He returned her kiss with a soul-deep longing of his own, and her body pressed against his with undeniable urgency.
As they kissed, Rachel’s hand found the scrivener’s readied instrument. Her fingers closed about him. With a slow shifting of her thighs, she eased him into her, into the moist and heated opening that relaxed to allow entry and then more firmly grasped once he was sheathed deep.
Matthew was unable to move, but Rachel was unrestricted. Her hips began a leisurely, circular motion punctuated by stronger thrusts. A groan left Matthew’s mouth at the incredible, otherworldly sensation, and Rachel echoed it with her own. They kissed as if eager to merge one into the other. As the woodsmoke swirled about them and the fires burned, as their lips sought and held and Rachel’s hips moved up and then down to push him still deeper, Matthew cried out with a pleasure that was verging on pain. Even this central act, he thought in his state of sweating rapture, was a cooperation of God and Devil.
Then he just stopped thinking and allowed nature to rule.
Rachel’s movements were steadily strengthening. Her mouth was against his ear, her pine-scented hair in his face. She was breathing quickly and harshly. His heartbeat slammed, and hers pounded against his damp chest. She gave two more thrusts and her back arched, her head coming up and her eyes squeezed tightly shut. She shivered and her mouth opened to release a long, soft moan. An instant later, the feeling of pleasure did translate into a white flashing pain for Matthew, a fierce jolt that rippled from the top of his head down his spine. In the midst of this riot of sensations, he was aware of his burst into Rachel’s clinging humidity, an explosion that brought a grimace to his face and a cry from his lips. Rachel kissed him again, so ardently as if she wished to capture that cry and keep it forever like a golden locket in the secret center of her soul.
With a strengthless sigh, Rachel settled against him yet supported herself on her elbows and knees so as not to rest all her weight. He was still inside her, and still firm. His virginity was a thing of the past and its passage left him with a delicious aching, but his flame had not yet been extinguished. And obviously neither had Rachel’s, for she looked him in the face, her wondrous eyes sparkling in the firelight and her hair damp from the heat of exertion, and began to move upon him once again.
If this was indeed Hell, Matthew thought, no wonder everyone was in such a fever to make their reservations.
The second time was slower-paced, though even more intense than the first. Matthew could only lie and vainly attempt to match Rachel’s motions. Even if his movements had been totally free, a weakness that affected every muscle save one had claimed his strength.
Finally, she pressed down on him and—though he’d tried to restrain it for as long as he might—he again experienced the almost-blinding combination of pleasure and pain that signalled the imminent nearing of a destination two lovers so vigorously sought to reach.
Then, in the warm wet aftermath, as they breathed and kissed and played a game of tongues, Matthew knew the coach must by necessity be retired to its barn, as the horses had gone their distance.
Presently, he closed his eyes and slumbered again. When he opened them—who knew how much later—the demon with a yellow third eye was at his side, using a white stone to crush up a foul-looking brown mixture of seeds, berries, and fetid whatnot—and the whatnot was the worst of it—in a small wooden bowl. Then the demon gave a combination grunt-and-whistle and pushed some of the stuff toward Matthew’s mouth between thumb and forefinger.
Ah ha! Matthew thought. Now the true torments were to begin! The mixture being forced upon him looked like dog excrement and smelled like vomit. Matthew clamped his lips shut. The demon pushed at his mouth, grunting and whistling in obvious irritation, but Matthew steadfastly refused to accept it.
Another figure emerged from the smoke and stood beside Matthew’s pallet. He looked into her face. Without speaking, she took up a pinch of the exquisite garbage and put it into her own mouth, chewing it as a display of its worth.
Matthew couldn’t believe his eyes. Not because she’d voluntarily eaten it, but because she was the dark-haired, thin mute girl he’d last seen at Shawcombe’s tavern. Only she was much changed, both in demeanor and dress. Her hair was clean and shining, more chestnut colored than truly dark brown, and on her head was a tiara-like toque formed of densely woven, red-dyed grass. Smudges of ruddy paint had been applied to her cheekbones. Her eyes were no longer glazed and weak but held determined purpose. Also, she wore a deerskin garment adorned with a pattern of red and purple beads down the front.
“You!” Matthew said. “What are you doing h—” The thumb and forefinger struck, getting some of that gutter porridge past his lips. Matthew’s first impulse was to spit, but the demon had already clamped one hand to his mouth and was massaging his throat with the other.
Matthew had no choice but to swallow it. The stuff had a strange, oily texture, but he’d tasted cheese that was worse. In fact, it had a complexity of tastes, some sour and some sweet, that actually…well, that actually called for a second helping.
The girl—Girl, he recalled Abner saying with a laugh when Matthew had asked her name—moved away into the fire-thrown shadows before he could ask her anything else. The demon continued to feed him until the bowl was empty.
“What is this place?” Matthew asked, his tongue picking at seeds in his teeth. There was no answer. The demon took his bowl and began to also move away. “This is Hell, isn’t it?” Matthew asked.
“Se hapna ta ami,” the demon said, and then made a clucking noise.
In another moment Matthew sensed he was alone. Up above, he now could make out through the smoke haze what looked to be wooden rafters—or rather, small pinetrees with the bark still on them.
It wasn’t long before his eyelids grew heavy. There was no re
sisting this sleep; it crashed over him like a green sea wave and took him down to depths unknown.
Dreamless. Drifting. A sleep for the ages, absolute in its peace and silence. And then, a voice.
“Matthew?”
Her voice.
“Can you hear me?”
“Ahhhhh,” he answered: a sustained, relaxed exhalation of breath.
“Can you open your eyes?”
With only a little difficulty—and regret, really, for his rest had been so deeply satisfying—he did. There was Rachel, her face close to his. He could see her clearly by the flickering firelight. The dense smoke had gone away.
“They want you to try to stand up,” she said.
“They?” He had a burned, ashy taste in his mouth. “Who?”
The demon, who no longer wore the third eye, came up and stood beside her. With an uplifting motion of the hands and a guttural grunting, the meaning was made plain.
Two of the females who’d attended Matthew appeared, and began to work around his head. He heard something being cut—a leather strap, he thought it might be—and suddenly his head was free to move, which immediately put a cramping pain in his neck muscles.
“I want you to know,” Rachel said as the two females continued to cut Matthew free from his pinewood pallet, “that you’ve been terribly injured. The bear—”
“Yes, the bear,” Matthew interrupted. “Killed me, and you as well.”
She frowned. “What?”
“The bear. It killed—” He felt the straps give way around his left wrist, then around the right. He’d stopped speaking because he realized Rachel wore her wedding dress. On it were grass stains. He swallowed thickly. “Are we…not dead?”
“No, we’re very much alive. You nearly died, though. If they hadn’t come when they did, you would have bled to death. One of them bound your arm to stop the flow.”
“My arm.” Matthew remembered now the terrible pain in his shoulder and the blood dripping from his fingers. He couldn’t move—or even feel—the fingers of his left hand. He had a sickened sensation in the pit of his stomach. Dreading to even glance at the limb, he asked, “Do I still have it?”
“You do,” Rachel answered grimly, “but…the wound was very bad. As deep as the bone, and the bone broken.”
“And what else?”
“Your left side. You took an awful blow. Two, three ribs…how many were broken I don’t know.”
Matthew lifted his right arm, unscathed save for a scabbed wound on his elbow, and gingerly touched his side. He found a large patch of clay covering the area, adhered by some sort of sticky brown substance, with a bulge underneath that to indicate something else pressed directly to the wound.
“The doctor made a poultice,” Rachel said. “Herbs, and tobacco leaves, and…I don’t know what all.”
“What doctor?”
“Um.” Rachel glanced toward the watchful demon. “This is their physician.”
“My God!” Matthew said, dumbstruck. “I must be in Hell! If not, then where?”
“We have been brought,” Rachel answered calmly, “to an Indian village. How far it is from Fount Royal, I can’t say. We travelled over an hour from where the bear attacked you.”
“An Indian village? You mean…I’ve been doctored by an Indian?” This was absolutely unthinkable! He would have preferred a demonic doctor to a savage one!
“Yes. And well doctored, too. They have been very kind to me, Matthew. I’ve had no reason to fear them.”
“Pok!” the doctor said, motioning for Matthew to stand. The two women had cut the leather thongs that had secured his ankles, then had withdrawn. “Hapape pok pokati!” He reached out, picked up the woven mat that covered Matthew’s torso, and threw it aside, leaving Matthew naked to the world. “Puh! Puh!” the doctor insisted, slapping his patient’s legs.
Reflexively, Matthew started to cover his private area with both hands. His right hand went quickly enough, but a searing pain shot through his shoulder at the mere nerve impulse of moving the left. He gritted his teeth, fresh sweat on his face, and made himself look at the injury.
His shoulder all the way past his elbow was wrapped in clay, and presumably other so-called medicines were pressed to the wound beneath the earthen bandage. The clay also was smoothed over a wooden splint, and his elbow was immobilized in a slightly bent position. From the edge of the clay to the fingertips, the flesh was mottled with ugly black and purple bruises. It was a ghastly sight, but at least he still had the arm. He lifted his free hand to touch his forehead. He found another clay dressing, secured with the sticky paste-like material.
“Your head was gashed,” Rachel said. “Do you think you can stand?”
“I might, if I don’t fall to pieces.” He looked at the doctor. “Clothes! Do you understand me? I need clothes!”
“Puh! Puh!” the doctor said, again slapping Matthew’s legs.
Matthew directed his appeal at Rachel. “Might you please get me some clothes?”
“You have none,” she told him. “Everything you wore was covered with blood. They performed some kind of ritual over them, the first night, and burned them.”
What she’d said sent a spear through him. “The first night? How long have we been here?”
“This is the fifth morning.”
Four whole days in the grasp of the Indians! Matthew couldn’t believe it. Four whole days, and they still had their scalps! Were they waiting for him to get well enough to slaughter both him and Rachel together?
“I think we’ve been summoned by their mayor, or chief, or whatever he is. I’ve not seen him yet, but there’s some special activity going on.”
“Puh! Puh!” the doctor insisted. “Se hapape ta mook!”
“All right,” Matthew said, choosing to face the inevitable. “I’ll try to stand.”
With Rachel’s help, he eased down off the pallet onto a dirt floor. Modesty called him but he couldn’t answer. His legs held him though they were fairly stiff. The clay dressing on his broken arm was heavy, but the way the splint crooked his elbow made it bearable. At his left side his ribs thundered with dull pain under the clay and poultice, but that too could be borne if he didn’t try to breathe too deeply.
He knew he would have been instantly killed if Jack One Eye himself hadn’t been so old and infirm. To meet that beast in its younger years would have meant a quick decapitation, or a long suffering death by disembowelment such as Maude’s husband had endured.
The Indian doctor—who would have been naked himself but for a small buckskin garment and strap covering his groin—walked ahead, to the far side of the rectangular wooden structure that housed a number of pallets. Matthew realized it was their version of an infirmary. A small fire crackled in a pit ringed with stones, but from the huge pile of ashes nearby it was evident a smoky inferno had raged in here.
He leaned on Rachel for support, if just until his legs grew used to holding him up again. His mind was still hazed. It wasn’t clear to him now if his amorous encounter with Rachel had been real or a fevered dream brought on by his injuries. Surely she wouldn’t have crawled up on that pallet to make love to a dying man! From her there was no indication that anything had occurred between them.
Yet still…might it have happened?
But here was something real that he’d imagined to be a figment of his dreams: on the floor, along with other clay cups and wooden bowls and carved bone pipes around the fire, was the broken half of Lucretia Vaughan’s heart-decorated pie dish.
The healing savage—who would have made his compatriot Dr. Shields blanch with terror—drew aside a heavy black-furred bearskin from the infirmary’s entryway.
Blinding white sunlight flooded across the floor, making Matthew squeeze his eyes shut and stagger. “I have you,” Rachel said, leaning into him so he might not fall.
There was a great excited clamor from outside, complete with squeals, whoops, and giggling. Matthew was aware of a brown mass of grinning faces pressin
g forward. The Indian doctor began to shout in a voice whose irritated tone was universal: Stand back, and give us space to breathe!
Rachel led Matthew, naked and dazed, into the light.
forty
THE ASSEMBLED MULTITUDE, which numbered eighty to a hundred or thereabouts, went silent as Matthew emerged.
The foremost group of them backed away, heeding the doctor’s continued shouts. As Matthew and Rachel followed the loinclothed healer, the Indians trailed in their wake and the shouting, giggling, and excited vocals began to surge loudly again.
Matthew would have never dreamed in a barrel of rum that he might have found himself naked before the world, clinging to Rachel and walking through a horde of grinning, hollering Indians. His vision was returning, though he was still overwhelmed by all this light. He saw a score of round wooden huts, some covered with dried mud and others moss-grown, with roofs upon which grass grew as thickly as from the earth. He caught sight of a lush plot of cornstalks that would have dropped the farmers of Fount Royal to their knees. Two dogs—one gray and the other dark brown—came to sniff around Matthew’s legs, but a shout from the doctor sent them running. The same happened when a giggling pack of four naked brown children neared the pallid patient, and they ran away squealing and jumping.
Matthew saw that most of the men—who shared the doctor’s narrow facial structure, lean body, and topknot of hair growing from an otherwise shaved head—were nearly nude, but the women were clothed in either deerskin garments or brightly dyed shifts that appeared to be woven from cotton. Some of the females, however, had chosen to let their breasts be bared, a sight that would have made the citizens of Fount Royal swoon. Their feet were either bare or clad in deerskin slippers. Many of the men were adorned with intricate blue-dye tattoos, and also a few of the older women. These tattoos appeared not only on the face but also on the chest, arms, thighs, and presumably just about everywhere else.
The mood was festive. Men and women were childlike in their glee, and the children—of which there were many—like little scampering squirrels. Of real creatures, there were aplenty as well: pigs, chickens, and a barking battery of dogs. Then the doctor led Matthew and Rachel to a hut that seemed to be centrally located within the village, drew back a buckskin decorated with blade carvings to gain admittance, and escorted the visitors into the cool, dimly lit interior.