“If I can stand it so can you,” Ethan offered, and Solange flashed him an insulted look.
“Just close your mouth for a minute and breathe deep,” Hannah said, and she made the first small incision. In practiced motions she accepted the last ivory vaccinator from Curiosity and spread the serum over the cuts. She had just picked up the lancet to make the incisions on Solange’s other arm when the girl straightened suddenly and she leaned away.
“Who’s that?”
“Don’t try to distract us now,” Curiosity said, more sharply this time. “Let Hannah finish, it won’t take but a minute.”
“I’m not trying to distract you,” Solange wailed just as Ethan said, “Hannah, do you know those Indians?”
Hannah finished with the lancet and the vaccinator before she looked over her shoulder. Her father and stepmother were standing just outside the door, and with them were two men she had never seen before.
“They aren’t Mohawk,” said Ethan, craning his neck. “At least they don’t dress like Bears or Nathaniel.”
Just at that moment the taller of the two turned to look in the door.
A stranger, a Seneca by his dress, and possibly the most frightening human being Hannah had ever seen. It was not so much his size—the men of her own family were as tall and strongly built—or his features, which were pleasant enough but unremarkable. It was the expression in his eyes, cold and sharp and alive. Like a panther hunting, Hannah thought. His head had been shaved for war, leaving behind a long scalplock at the crown. A single hawk feather dangled from the rawhide tie, coming to rest behind a small ear pierced with three silver studs.
The stranger caught her gaze and he stilled, muscles tensed.
Solange hiccuped her distress, the sting of the lancet forgotten. “Look, Grandma,” she whispered. “Don’t that look like the meanest man you ever saw?”
“Little girl, you hush,” said Curiosity. “Cain’t tell nothing about a man from the look of him. I hope you ain’t going to be one of those people who cain’t see the roses for the thorns, missy.”
Grumpily Solange said, “He don’t look much like roses to me. Not to Hannah either, the way she’s looking at him.”
Then the stranger smiled. He smiled at Hannah and at Hannah alone, and just that simply, everything changed.
“See now,” Curiosity said softly. “See?”
Eager to find out more about the strangers, Ethan and Solange flew out the door without a word of farewell, leaving Hannah and Curiosity alone for a moment in the trading post. From the open door to the tavern came the sound of Anna’s voice as she pressed the last of her doughnuts on the men who had stayed behind to debate the good and bad of being vaccinated. Hannah wiped her lancet three times before she closed it into the instrument case, and she listened to the other conversation, the one that was taking place on the porch.
The men were doing most of the talking: He-Makes-Them-Ready, and hungry, and how many years?
“What are you waiting for?” Curiosity pushed her gently. “Go on now, they’ll come looking for you next.”
“Who?” Hannah said, “Who are they?”
“Don’t know that young man who came to the door to look at you,” Curiosity said. “But that other voice I hear you should recognize yourself, girl. I know it’s been more than a few years but I hope you know your uncle Otter’s voice when you hear it.”
For once Lily Bonner was happy to put aside her drawings and run errands. She ran with her brother and Blue-Jay all the way home; she ran to tell Pines-Rustling the good news; she ran to draw water and to stir the coals in the hearth; she ran about in the cabin from workroom to table to hearth and back again. There was soup to warm for the travelers and cold meat and bread to get ready. The boys were hard at work stacking firewood out in the clearing between the two cabins; tonight they would have a real fire, a Kahnyen’kehàka fire. Because Strong-Words—whose boy-name had been Otter—had come home from the west, and brought a friend with him.
Many-Doves had been so happy to see her youngest brother that she had cried out. All the women, even Lily’s mother, even Hannah, had not been able to hold back tears; the men cleared their throats and thumped each other on the back and spoke too loud saying very little at all.
This morning—it seemed so long ago she could hardly believe it was true—Reuben had been buried and she had been so angry to be left behind; now she could hardly stop smiling, because there was a homecoming to celebrate. There would be stories around the fire, more stories even than Hannah and Ethan had brought from the city. Strong-Words had been gone a very long time, and he must tell it all.
Lily had heard many things about this mysterious uncle. Her mother held him in great regard because he had helped her once when she had been in the deepest despair, and alone. Lily knew about the time Grandfather had gone to Canada to fetch Strong-Words home and ended up in gaol for his efforts. She knew Strong-Words’ temper had gotten him and everyone else in trouble; she had heard whispered stories she was not supposed to hear about Strong-Words shooting at Uncle Todd. This was something she didn’t understand at all; Uncle Todd could be mean and he was always cranky, but there must be something else in the past that no one wanted to tell her, most probably something that happened long ago in the time of the wars.
Once Lily had asked her father when she would be old enough to hear the whole story and he had given her the look that was both thoughtful and a little irritated and told her that twenty years or so would do it. It was not the answer she wanted but she knew that pushing would do no good at all.
Mostly Strong-Words was known, here and at Good Pasture, as a storyteller. And he had brought his brother-in-law, a Seneca called Strikes-the-Sky who had fought with him in the wars waged on the western frontier. Maybe they had taken scalps; maybe they would tell about it, something Lily’s father and grandfather would never do; about this she knew better than to ask. Even Daniel and Blue-Jay didn’t ask about such things, and when they included them in their games they made sure to be well out of hearing of the men.
The soup was just hot enough when Lily heard her father’s familiar owl call. The boys ran with her to meet them while Pines-Rustling waited on the porch with the babies. Their people came out of the woods, Kateri riding on her father’s shoulders, all of them smiling.
In the last of the summer-evening light they came into the glen. At the bottom of the lake under the falls Strong-Words stopped, held up his rifle high, and let out a high yipping call that echoed up the cliffs and back again.
In the crook of Pines-Rustling’s arm little Galileo mewled and cried.
“It’s all right,” said Blue-Jay to the baby. “It’s just Strong-Words telling the spirit of the mountain that he is home again.”
There was as much food as they could cook on short notice and a fire as high as a man, stories and laughter and voices raised in friendly disagreement. Lily was so happy that she could hardly sit still; she wandered from her mother’s lap to her father’s, from Grandfather to Runs-from-Bears and started all over again.
Strikes-the-Sky sat quietly, eating and talking when someone asked him a question but mostly staying out of family talk. After half an hour of watching him Lily knew a few things, even if she didn’t know how to feel about them.
The first thing was simple enough: Strikes-the-Sky was the handsomest man she had ever seen next to her own father. She couldn’t say why he was handsome, if it was in his nose or the set of his eyes or his brow or chin, but he was. The strangest part of it was that he had two faces, the serious one that he wore like a mask, and the real one, when he smiled. Both of the faces were beautiful and frightening too: the serious face made a person want to run away, and the real face made the same person run right back. Like a fire burning too hot on a cold night, when a person needed to hover near but could hardly stand the heat.
The second thing was harder, but just as clear to see. Strikes-the-Sky had come to claim her sister Hannah—no, that wasn’t right. He
had come to claim her sister Walks-Ahead for himself. Lily wasn’t sure when he had got that idea—maybe he had come all the way from Seneca country for no other purpose. Or maybe he had just realized himself that Hannah was the reason he was here.
Not that he said anything of the kind; nobody did, but it was true anyway. While he ate or listened or answered questions, Strikes-the-Sky watched Hannah. He watched her like other men watched her, as if he had come across some unexpected treasure that would disappear if he dared to look away. The difference this time was that Hannah was watching him too.
Hannah meant to hide it, but she couldn’t do that any more than she could grab the stars out of the sky and hide them in her pocket. It shone on her face as bright as any moon, and everybody saw it. The women first, who exchanged glances and then soft smiles; then Grandfather and Strong-Words, then Runs-from-Bears, who whispered something to Many-Doves and got elbowed for his trouble. Then finally Lily’s father, whose face went very still and serious.
“Come help me get water.” Daniel pulled at Lily’s arm roughly.
“It’s your turn,” she said to him, unwilling to look away from Strikes-the-Sky, who was unwilling to look away from Hannah. “You do it.”
“Come now,” Daniel insisted, and Lily gave in finally and went off in the dark with her brother. Blue-Jay was waiting for them.
“What is it?” Lily said, glancing back at the fire over her shoulder.
“You know what it is,” Daniel said impatiently. “Look at the way he’s staring at Hannah.”
“He can look if he wants to,” Lily said, a little sullenly. She wasn’t sure how she felt about Strikes-the-Sky, and she didn’t much like being forced so quickly into taking sides. “What does it matter if he looks?”
Daniel’s mouth narrowed down, the way it always did when he wanted something but couldn’t think of a way to get it. From that Lily knew that her brother and Blue-Jay had been arguing about Strikes-the-Sky for a while. If Blue-Jay were willing to go along with whatever plan Daniel had in mind, he wouldn’t have come to get her in the first place.
“They are looking at each other,” said Blue-Jay “You can’t stop that once it’s started.”
“And everybody’s watching them look,” added Lily. “That doesn’t help either.”
“It’s like a lightning strike,” said Blue-Jay to Daniel, whose expression was growing darker with every word. “My father says it happens that way sometimes between a man and a woman. It happened that way between your mother and father.”
Daniel gave Blue-Jay a furious look and stomped off into the dark. He would be gone until he had figured out a better argument, or learned to see things differently.
Lily didn’t follow her brother. She stood with Blue-Jay while watching the scene around the fire, an easy quiet between them. They watched the grown-ups moving around and listened to the voices that came to them over the sound of the waterfalls, serious now as Strong-Words and Strikes-the-Sky took turns telling about the wars to the west. They push, Lily heard Strong-Words say very clearly. And, they will never stop pushing.
Blue-Jay’s dark eyes shone eager in the dark as he listened. He was like every boy and man Lily knew: war stories made him spark like flint. Ready to catch fire; willing to burn. Lily did not understand it.
Strikes-the-Sky stood and the firelight threw his shadow up into the heavens. He was straight and strong, and Lily’s fingers itched for a pencil to see if she could catch the truth of him, put his spirit down on paper. Then when she was an old woman she would look at that paper to remind her of this night when she knew that it was really going to happen: Hannah would go from them soon, to start her own family.
She said, “Maybe he will want to stay here with us.”
Blue-Jay made a sound deep in his throat. “He will want to take Walks-Ahead away,” he said quietly. “To the west, to his people.”
“She might not want to go,” Lily said, more firmly. “She doesn’t have to go if she doesn’t want to. My father won’t like it.” And then another thought came to her, one that was even more unsettling. What if she didn’t go alone? What if Strong-Words’ stories of the west were enough to make Many-Doves and Runs-from-Bears pack up their family and go too?
She touched Blue-Jay’s arm lightly, and he looked down at her. Lily opened her mouth and shut it again. Then she said: “It’s like standing on the edge of a cliff.”
Blue-Jay said nothing at all, because he understood her without a lot of talk; he knew exactly what she was thinking. And because she was right.
Chapter 35
——
June 16
Hannah woke with a start just before dawn, agitated and alert, as if someone had chased her out of her dreams and into the waking world. She pressed a hand to her racing heart and reached for the dream, but it was already gone. Waiting for her to come back to bed, like a lover. She shook her head to clear it of that unwelcome and unsettling image.
Then she remembered that Strong-Words had come home. He was her uncle, but as a child she had always thought of him more as an older brother. Then he had been a boy called Otter, and he had taught her how to dive into the lake under the falls and showed her secret places on the mountain. He had taken her hunting with him when she was hardly old enough to skin a rabbit; it was Strong-Words who taught her many of the Kahnyen’kehàka stories that she now told in her turn to the young ones.
He had come home to tell new stories, of the Seneca and the Shawnee and the Battle at Fallen Timbers, where he had first met Strikes-the-Sky, two years older but war-tested. He had left here as Otter with nothing but his weapons, and come home a husband, a father, a leader of warriors. A stranger to her, in ways she had never imagined when she was a little girl and her family had seemed as steady and constant as the mountain itself.
And he had brought Strikes-the-Sky with him, who looked at her and made her want to look back.
She was used to the way that white men stared at her; her long weeks in the city had resigned her to the fact that she must learn to live with these stares that no white woman would tolerate. She ignored them, or when she could not, she had learned to say the words that would make most men turn away. Some had the sense to be embarrassed; others hid their discomfort with anger.
Things were the same when she was among her mother’s people at Good Pasture: men studied her. The looks they sent her way were more disturbing, because they were strangely pleasing to her.
The young men at Good Pasture wanted her, yes. They wanted her for her body and her face and her voice, as the white men did, but to the Mohawk she was no mystery. They knew her as a healer; they knew her as a good daughter and sister. They knew that she was the granddaughter of Falling-Day, and the great-granddaughter of Made-of-Bones. They might want to touch her, but there was more to it: they looked at her and thought not only of the feel of her but of the line of strong women she came from. Because she was strong too, and that did not frighten the men at Good Pasture.
Last year at the Midwinter Ceremony a young man of the Turtle longhouse, a young man braver than the rest, had asked her to go walking, to dance so that he could watch her, to come in turn and watch him play baggataway; he would have put his blanket around her shoulders when his team won, if she had come close enough to let him. She had liked him for his simple good manners and the way he laughed so easily, and so she had sometimes gone walking with him.
When he had waited long enough Hannah let him draw her into the shadows and touch her face and kiss her shyly; she had moved away before she could learn the taste of him. When she left Good Pasture to come home to Lake in the Clouds, she had not thought much about him. At night when she woke from unfamiliar dreams that made her body twitch in unfamiliar ways, she remembered the shape of his mouth alone.
In the spring his mother had sent a corn cake to Many-Doves and a question: when would they come back to Good Pasture? There were things she wanted to discuss. It was the old way of starting the marriage negotiations, an
d that pleased Many-Doves. Hannah was surprised and flattered in a way she could not deny, but most of all she was unsettled.
Once Many-Doves saw that Hannah had not expected the gesture and did not welcome it, she sent the offering back with Spotted-Fox, who had stopped on Hidden Wolf on his way to trade furs in Albany. To Hannah’s relief, Many-Doves had not told anyone at Lake in the Clouds about any of it, not even Runs-from-Bears or Elizabeth. Hannah did not need to explain, or even to think about it anymore. The truth was, she could hardly remember what Walking-Elk had looked like.
Not even a day ago she had seen Strikes-the-Sky for the first time, and she knew already that she would never forget his face.
She could go to Many-Doves and ask her what to do; that was the way these things were handled. She could ask Elizabeth, who would listen quietly and give her good advice. But the idea of speaking out loud what she was feeling made Hannah so anxious that she had to get out of bed.
On the table she saw the neat pile of her daybook and the vaccination records she had begun last night, and that reminded her that Dr. Todd was expecting her this morning. There was work in the laboratory, the notes from his autopsy of Gabriel Oak for her to read, and he wanted to go over the rest of the notes from the Kine-Pox Institution with her.
She was hungry, but Curiosity would feed her. Hannah dressed quickly, smoothed her plaits, packed a basket with the things she would need, and slipped out of the cabin.
Otter and Strikes-the-Sky had put down their pallets on Many-Doves’ porch, and Hannah could not help but notice that they were already gone. They might be swimming under the falls, or in the caves or any one of a hundred places on the mountain. She swallowed her curiosity and trotted most of the way to the village.
The Todds’ kitchen was empty but for Bump, who was finishing his porridge. He smiled broadly to see her and raised a hand in greeting. Perched up on a stool he reminded her of a robin; he was wearing a faded red waistcoat and his head bobbed as he ate. “You’re early this morning, Miss Hannah.”