Sorceress

  Our captors retired some distance to talk among themselves. One was minded to kill us there and then, but their leader overruled him. It was not long to night falling, so the halt was timely. He ordered the others to make a camp. They left us tethered to a tree, hobbling us like beasts to be sure that we did not get away.

  They brought us water and fed us with dried cornmeal, moistened a little to make it palatable. It was standard fare for warriors on the trail and the same as they ate themselves. It was parched stuff and there was little of it, but it gave some nourishment and brought strength back to all of us.

  Ephraim crawled over to me. ‘Can’t you use the talking magic like you did on the soldiers?’

  I shook my head, pointing to the amulets they wore at neck and chest. It would not work on them.

  We went on in this way for three more days. On the fourth night we only stopped for the briefest halt, and we went on as soon as light showed in the eastern sky. We were close to their home village and this day was a special day for them; they were in haste to get home. The way was difficult, boggy underfoot and tussocked with rush and coarse grass. They hurried us on, forcing the pace, cuffing us with clubs, jabbing us with lances, scolding any stumbling. We went on reluctantly. Journeying was better than arrival. There was no telling what they intended, and if it was death, then it would not be quick.

  The day promised heat, but mist curled from the marshy ground. The way we took was eerie, passing through a cemetery land where clothing streamed from the trees like tattered banners and the blind-eyed antlered skull of some great horned creature watched over all.

  Beyond this burial ground lay the camp. It was set on higher land: a great stockaded settlement bristling with sharpened staves made from tall trees criss-crossed against each other. It rose before us, hunched like a porcupine. I faltered and would have stopped had I not been shoved roughly onward. I had seen this place in dreams and every sight, every sound was ominous, from the pebbles on the path to the grunts of our guards and the creak of their moccasins.

  Lookouts on high platforms saw us approaching and called out, announcing our presence to those within the stockade. The way in was through a double line of staves set to overlap each other. We wound through this narrow way and into the village proper. Before we entered I could hear drums beating, and chanting, and the stamp of feet dancing. We had come upon them at a time of festival or ceremony, but as soon as we appeared, all sound stopped.

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  39

  Home

  The whole village was there foregathered. Our captors untied our bonds, allowing us to chafe the feeling back into wrists and hands. They did not fear our escape now.

  Small children dashed out of the jostling crowd to throw stones and insults. They showed particular attention to Ephraim, attracted by his hair, his difference. If they sought a reaction, they were to be disappointed. He knew what was expected and how to behave. He stood, arms folded, adopting the faraway stare of Black Fox, his brother. Black Fox was already composing himself, preparing his mind for what might happen. He had to show that his courage was equal to any trial. To show weakness, to cry for mercy, would mean that they could take his soul and his strength would go to them; or else he would become an earthbound spirit and never reach the plains of heaven. He must be able to withstand anything. They could put him to the most excruciating torture designed to test his fortitude beyond measure. They could do the same to us and make him watch. They could take us all to a place where death would come as a most merciful friend. It would take us three days to die.

  The men who had brought us in stepped back and left us for inspection. Three women came out of the crowd and looked us over as a master might a servant at a hiring fair, or a farmer buying cattle. The women wore clan marks on their cheeks: turtle, wolf, bear. These were the clan mothers, rulers of the long houses that dominated the village. They would decide our fate.

  The women stood in front of us. One of them turned my head, noting the wolf mark on the left side of my face. It matched hers. She looked into my eyes and smiled.

  The other women bade Black Fox and Ephraim strip and stood back in frank appraisal, taking in the lithe power of Black Fox’s body, marvelling at the shocking whiteness of Ephraim’s skin in contrast to the brown of his face and hands. At length they turned and at a nod from them the people ceased from milling and began to line up.

  The women walked back down the forming corridor, retreating to their long houses. These were impressive bark-clad dwellings, greater than any I had ever seen before, of ten to fifteen fires, large enough to take twenty to thirty families. The houses were marked as lodges by the clan insignia above the doors.

  The women stationed themselves with the other leaders at the doors of the different houses. The women chose what happened to prisoners. The village must have sustained losses, for we were not to be tortured and burnt. We were to be adopted. But first we would have to run the gauntlet.

  The people stood in two lines now: men, women, children, all holding whips, clubs, sticks, anything they had to hand with which to beat us.

  We had to gain the door of the house. To falter, to fail, to fall would render us worthless and we would be put to death.

  Black Fox went first. Club and stick came striking out at him, but they struck thin air as he streaked on, feinting right and left, dodging feet and legs stuck out to trip him. He was through before most of them knew that he had even gone past. The man who had taken us smiled in broad admiration. He beckoned Black Fox to the Turtle Lodge. The men standing at the door came forward to greet him, clapping him on the back, hugging him about the shoulders, welcoming him in like a brother.

  Next it would be Ephraim. He stood next to me, straight-backed, and stared forward, ignoring the renewed taunts of the dung-flinging children, but he was trembling like a yearling colt before its first race.

  ‘I will take care of you,’ I whispered.

  He nodded and set off as swiftly as Black Fox, but he was younger and he had been weakened by the journey and his ordeal on the lake. He soon caught heavy blows to back and shoulder and this slowed him further. He was about to falter, a blow to the thigh buckling his leg under him, but he staggered on crouching lower, body skewed over his weakened leg, soaking up blows from left and right. I thought he would make it on his own. Then a small boy, his face full of chuckling malice, stuck out his foot. Ephraim was about to pitch over it and fall face forward into the mud. I stared down the row. Everything slowed. The child overbalanced and tumbled in front of Ephraim who stepped over him and stumbled onward. He only had a little way to go now and the other boy on the ground was proving a distraction, causing people to mistime their blows. They flailed at thin air or clashed with each other. They looked at their weapons in wonder, but Ephraim now was through them and staggering up to the lodges.

  He would have followed Black Fox, but the clan mother from the Wolf Lodge caught him. She took him in her arms and nearly carried him to her door.

  Her gaze came back to me. It was my turn to walk between the lines of people. Women do not have to run the gauntlet. The people lowered their weapons and stepped aside to let me through.

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  We were bathed, feasted, given new clothes. We had proved ourselves worthy and we were Kahniakehaka now. People of the Flint. Adoption is common among many nations, to replace people lost to them through sickness or war. I soon saw why we had been taken into the tribe.

  Sickness was present in the Wolf Clan long house. It was midday, but there were still people on the sleeping racks; throwing off their robes in the grip of fever, or lying in scarce moving torpidity. I went closer and saw that their hands and faces were covered with the weeping sores and erupting pustules. They had the spotted sickness, what the English call smallpox.

  The clan mother watched from her place at the central hearth and her face was troubled and full of sorrow. Such sickness can kill nearly all before it has run its course.

  She spoke to a smaller w
oman who jumped from her place and came over to join me.

  ‘They call me Wahiakwas, Picking Berries, I am Pennacook, like you. I was taken in a raid on my village many years ago. I was brought here at this time of year, in the moon of strawberries, and adopted by the Kahniakehaka.’ She glanced round at the bodies spread about. ‘These fell ill when a trader came. He was Dutch. What they call asseroni, maker of knives. They did not know he was sick, or else he would never have been allowed in, but now ... ’

  ‘How long?’ I looked at her. ‘How long since he came here?’

  ‘Not long. A week since he fell sick –’

  ‘How many are ill like this?’

  ‘Four or five in each house ... ’

  It was late, but it might still be of benefit, and it might stop others from getting it.

  ‘Tell the clan mother I wish to speak to her.’

  The clan mother took me to the chief man. He would have to approve my plan.

  He stood at the head of his lodge, awaiting my approach. His face was stippled with markings, his head hung round with weasel skins and topped with a coronet trailing eagle feathers. He was richly girdled about with wampum belts. He was not tall, his men on either side dwarfed him, but they left careful space about him. He wore his power like a cloak.

  He listened in silence as my plan was explained to him.

  ‘Why?’ he asked Picking Berries. ‘Why would she do this?’

  ‘They are sick and I am a healer,’ I replied through her. ‘Your people are my people now.’

  ‘Very well.’ He looked to the warriors flanking him. ‘It is done.’

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  The house was made away from the village, outside the bristling palisade. The sick were brought on pallets to me and then I was left. I asked them to gather fresh flowers, as many as they could find, to make the house fresh and wholesome, and to bring the herbs and medicines I needed, gathering them from the forest. Then I told them to leave me, only coming to bring any others who fell ill from the sickness. Food and fresh water were to be left outside the fence I ordered made.

  I already had fifteen patients, including several children. I set about caring for them as best I could, hoping that the task would not be too much for me.

  I built a fire and put a pot to boil to prepare a herbal infusion to bathe their sores and to help prevent infection. I set to pounding and grinding, preparing ointments and decoctions to bring down fevers and purify the blood. I sang as I worked, an old tune in my own tongue, ‘So early, early in the Spring ... ’ It was one my grandmother used to sing about the cottage. I felt her spirit around me and I called on her to send strength to me now.

  Light was fading on the first night as I sat before my fire, surrounded on all sides by the cries of the sick and the groans of the dying. Suddenly, I felt the air in the house change. The door flap was pulled back and someone was entering. I heard the tick and scratch of a turtle rattle and a face loomed out of the flickering darkness. Any ordinary woman would have bolted. I truly thought this was a spirit, the earthly manifestation of a god. My heart jumped in my chest and I bid it stop. I was no ordinary woman. I was powwaw. I was a sorceress.

  I waited, staying quite still, and watched him circle, as a great cat might circle its prey. The body and clothing were those of a man, but the coat was of fantastic design, cloth, skin and fur all sewn together, and set about with discs of shell and copper and iron. The coat clinked as he danced around me, and the face turned towards me was huge, twisted and distorted, with ragged hair like raven’s wings, the eyes great cavernous spaces, the skin the very colour of blood.

  I reached in my pouch and offered him tobacco. He stepped away from me with his arching catlike tread and began to pass among my patients, dancing down the rows and chanting, shaking his rattle over them, hovering his hands above their bodies. Even the most restless grew quiet as he passed and when he returned the whole hut seemed full of peace and tranquillity.

  He came to where I was standing and stood before me. I could feel the power coming from him like heat from the fire.

  He removed the mask to show a face almost as ugly and twisted as the guise which had concealed it. One eye was closed and drooping. A great cut, made by tomahawk or hatchet cleaved that side of his face from forehead to jaw, carving through the Bear Clan mark he wore on his cheek. The other side was whole. The dark eye was bright with intelligence, but the skin was deeply pitted and badly pocked. He stood before me, a man now and a flawed one, but I felt no diminution of his power.

  ‘I am Satehhoronies, Tall Sky, because I see far as a bird flying high.’ He turned his blind eye to me. I understood his meaning: you do not need eyes to see. ‘I am Ronaterihonte, Faith Keeper. I am also a healer, as you are.’ He raised the mask he held between his hands. ‘This is who I become when I perform the ceremonies. This is who brings me the healing power. This is carved from the living basswood; it has much orenda, what you would call manitou.’

  He spoke in the tongue used by the tribes of New England. When I looked at him, he replied to my thought.

  ‘I speak many languages.’ He repeated the phrase in English, then in French and what I took to be Dutch. Then he smiled and his face changed to almost beauty, showing what it must have been before being so ravaged and scarred by disease and war. ‘I have come to help you.’ His fingers went to his cheek, reading the pitted skin. ‘As you can see, I have had this sickness before.’

  ‘Those that have had it once do not generally fall sick.’

  ‘Just so. And you? For this sickness kills white men too.’

  ‘When I was a child I suffered a milder kind. Cowpox my grandmother called it. She gave it to me.’

  ‘Gave it to you?’

  I nodded. ‘She took some matter from one of the sores on the hands of a milkmaid, then she made a little cut in my skin. Any who suffered from that sickness never got the worse one, that’s what she said, and I believe it to be true.’

  ‘There could be wisdom in that.’ He rose from the fire and held his hand out to me. His grip was warm and strong. ‘It is a good thing that you do, Mary.’

  ‘How do you know my name?’

  ‘I know much.’ He made his look distant and mysterious. Then he smiled his lopsided smile. ‘I could say through magic, but in truth the boy told me. You have a new name now, did you know?’

  ‘What do they call me?’

  ‘They call you Katsitsaioneh, which means Bringing Flowers. Come, there is much to do.’

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  So he stayed and helped me fight the sickness, and I own that without him, I would have joined the dead whom he took daily from the house. He helped heal the sick, and he gave comfort to the dying. When they went beyond us, he buried their bodies with all due ceremony. But still they came, more and more of them.

  One day he asked me again for my grandmother’s healing wisdom about this plague.

  I told him and he sat in thought for a long time.

  ‘Perhaps we can do the same. Take matter from one near recovered, introduce it beneath the skin of the others in the tribe.’

  ‘What if they die?’

  ‘If this goes on –’ he looked at me bleakly – ‘they all die. I will talk to my brother healers. Then we can raise it in council, then the people will decide.’

  I did not think that they would agree to such a drastic plan, and it was discussed long round the council fire, but at last it was approved.

  Neither of us knew whether our treatment would work. At first it seemed to make things worse, but gradually the cases became fewer and fewer, until one day none was brought to us. The time stretched on to a week, then two. No one else came in with the sickness. Our remaining patients recovered. After months of working until we were ready to drop with tiredness, we had nothing to do.

  We came out when the leaves were no longer green, and the people hailed us, they hailed us both.

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  40

  Medicine Lodge

  All my patients had
gone. The house that had been made for them was empty. I set about cleansing it, raking out and burning the bedding, then burning juniper and tobacco to purify. There were no flowers now, so I gathered spruce and pine for their fresh, sharp smell. As I worked, the idea came to me clear as a striking bell. I would not join the others in the Wolf Clan long house inside the palisade. I would stay here. The sick would come to me. I would care for them, just as my grandmother told me the sisters did long ago, before King Henry’s men turned them out and left their priory, infirmary and all, to fall into ruin.

  I explained to Satehhoronies that this was what I intended to do. He thought for a while, then he said:

  ‘The people respect me, but they fear me, too.’ He stroked the mask propped next to him. ‘They fear this.’ Then his hand went to his ruined face. ‘And they fear this.’ He shook his turtle rattle. ‘They fear this, ohtonkwa, the spirit, but you fear nothing. I will stay with you.’

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  I did not want for company. Wahiakwas, Picking Berries, often came to visit me, bringing other women, and we would sit and work together. They showed me how they worked birch bark and hide with dyed moose hair. I showed them the way I had been taught to embroider, using steel needles traded from the Dutch, and we worked together, making ordinary objects fine.

  The first thing I made was a box for my special things, the second was a knife sheath for Ephraim to wear at his naming ceremony. Ephraim came to visit me often. He liked to talk to Satehhoronies, for the medicine man had travelled far in his life and the boy loved to hear about the places he had visited.

  Satehhoronies chose Ephraim’s new name. He was to be called Kaheranoron, Rare Corn Stalks. The name had belonged to one who had departed to the spirit world and the naming ceremony was held at the festival of ripe corn. It was an important occasion, marking not just Ephraim’s acceptance into tribe and clan, but his passage to young manhood. It was time for him to leave his mother’s side. I would have worried for him, for he had no father now Sparks Fire was gone, but Black Fox would be there. He would help him.