The Key to the Indian

  Two minutes later the adjacent pole fell, and then the next. It was enough. The children could now be handed out, the women squeezing through after them. There was no panic now; the evacuation happened in a calm, orderly way. Bundles and baskets were pushed through – some women were still running to and from the doomed longhouse, rescuing possessions and supplies.

  At last the bodies were passed through – three of them. Men’s arms received them, and there was a stunned silence broken by muted cries of anguish, sorrow and rage.

  Then, quite abruptly, everyone was through and Omri and his father were alone.

  “Okay, come on. We have to get ourselves out now.”

  The posts had been cut at about twice Omri’s father’s height. It was still no easy matter for them to climb out, especially weakened and weary as they were.

  “You go first, bub.” And his father made Omri clamber on to his shoulders. Then, when he still couldn’t reach, his dad took his feet in his hands and, straining, heaved him up to half the length of his arms, till Omri could get a good grip on the shattered top of the stump and haul himself up with the soles of his moccasins pressed against the pole. His shoulder gave him hell, but he did it because he had to. But how was his dad to follow?

  Omri stood on the top of the stump, surveying the scene beyond. It had seemed very dark at first beyond the stockade, where the light of the fire couldn’t reach, but now he could see quite well, and he realised there was a brilliant three-quarters moon; it had only seemed dark before because they had been in the stockade’s shadow.

  Omri could see the whole group of Indians at a distance. He couldn’t make out exactly what they were doing. Suddenly he saw a man on horseback and his spirits swooped up.

  “Dad! Dad! I can see Little Bull!” he called to his father, still down below, above the increasing roar of the flames. “He’ll see me, he’ll get you out! And – wow! – Twin Stars is with him! They’ve got Tall Bear, they’re all safe! Little Bull!” he shouted at the top of his voice. “Little Bull! We’re here! Help!”

  And he waved his arms and danced on the stump.

  But Little Bull took no notice. He couldn’t hear him. He was at the far side of the group. Omri could see him, gesturing, calling, neck-reining the pony in and out of the crowd. He seemed to be organising them. He had a couple of muskets slung across his back and Omri knew he must have taken them off dead raiders. He wondered fleetingly if he’d had time to take any more scalps.

  From the pony’s back, he could probably have seen Omri, silhouetted against the flame-lit smoke, if only he would look in the right direction. But now he jumped down and was lost among the crowd, and then in the moonlight Omri saw an old woman being heaved on to the pony’s back, followed by an old man who straddled the horse’s flanks behind her. Then a bundle… And with a sudden sickening of the heart, Omri realised.

  They were leaving.

  Now, tonight. Of course, what else? Their home was burning; most of their possessions, and what little safety they had had, were gone. What else could they do but to start their long, dangerous journey north tonight?

  In fact they were moving off. Omri could just make out Twin Stars, with the baby on her back, leading the pony at the head of a straggling column. They were going… leaving Omri’s dad trapped below and both of them stranded.

  But that wasn’t the worst. They were going without saying goodbye. Omri felt suddenly absolutely certain that he would never see his Indian – his friend, his blood-brother – again, if Little Bull didn’t see him now.

  And how could he see him, when his back must be turned like everyone else’s and he was heading away from the longhouse, up the hill and into the dark wood?

  22

  A Sacred Object

  As Omri stood on the stump, the fire hot on his back, feeling absolutely gutted, something came between him and the heat.

  He swung round toward the longhouse, and saw a vast black looming figure. The next second it had seized him.

  “Gotcha, ya varmint!”

  Omri nearly passed out. It was one of the men who had tried to murder the women and children! He too must have been trapped. He had hidden while the Indians were there, while the women were escaping, and now he – and the other, Omri could see him, too – were going to creep away through the only way out.

  “Where’s th’other of ’em?”

  A slight pause, then: “There! Where ya feet is! Watch out, he’s a-tryin’ to run!”

  “Oh no ya don’t!”

  In another moment, Omri’s dad had been pounced on and lifted in a coarse and filthy fist. The men stared at their captives, then at each other. There faces wore wolfish grins. The one who held Omri squeezed him so hard he screamed.

  “They’s real as you or me! They ain’t nothin’ to be scared of! Try how yours squeaks when ya pinches him!” The other one twisted Omri’s father’s arm and gave a shout of glee.

  “Stop! Don’t!” shouted Omri.

  The men burst out laughing. “Stop! Don’t!” they cried in high, mocking voices. “They ain’t nuthin’! They’re more scareder’n we was!”

  “They stopped us shootin’ them Injun sows! Let’s kill ’em. I c’d bite the head off of mine an’ spit it half a mile!”

  “Half a mile? Let’s see ya!”

  “Watch me.” And he opened his cavernous whisky-stinking mouth and made to put Omri’s head in.

  It was the end. Omri was sure of it. He was too exhausted to fight and there was no hope at all. In that split second, he gave himself up to a horrible death.

  Something huge and heavy whistled past Omri and buried itself in the man’s head.

  He dropped like a stone and Omri with him, but he had a soft landing on the man’s stomach. A moment later his father dropped out of nowhere and landed beside him.

  They looked up, and saw the second man take a flying leap over the cut ends of the poles, and then they heard a faint, brief whistle. The arrow caught him in the chest and he seemed to pause in mid-air before crashing to the ground beyond the palisade.

  Little Bull came straight to the gap in the poles. He saw Omri and his father on the chest of the dead man, and they saw him smile a little. He stepped over the stumps, picked them both up, stuck them into his belt – then, without a word, he charged – straight into the burning longhouse.

  Omri and his father, already half-stunned with shock, could only cover their noses and mouths with their hands, but it didn’t help much. They choked and coughed and their eyes ran.

  Omri tried not to breathe. His eyes were tightly closed. He didn’t see where Little Bull was going. He felt the heat getting worse. He saw bright red through his eyelids. He smelt hair singeing – was it his? He cowered down in remembered terror – the fire! The fire!

  He felt Little Bull stoop, half squashing them at his waist, then straighten, turn and run – run – then the cold night air, blissfully smoke-free, caressed their faces and enabled them to open their smarting eyes.

  They were at the palisade, where the two dead men lay, one inside, one out. The one whose skull had been split by the tomahawk was staring up at them through a veil of his own blood. The other lay on his face, the arrow broken under him. Little Bull put his foot on the first man’s chest and wrenched out his weapon.

  And then they heard the crash as the rooftree of the longhouse broke and the blazing building, from which they had just emerged, collapsed in a mighty surge of smoke and sparks that topped even the sharpened spikes on the stockade posts.

  Little Bull leapt the stumps and ran a little way up hill, stopped, turned and looked back.

  “Little Bull?”

  The Indian’s hand closed round Omri and lifted him level with his face. He was breathing hard. “Forgive me,” he said in his deep voice. “I forget you at time I fight. I forget you at time we leave. But our women tell me your action. You are no boy. You are warrior. You are my blood brother. Little Bull will not forget you again.”

  He set them on the
ground and knelt before them. He laid something wrapped in skins between them.

  “You will go back soon?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  Little Bull hesitated, then took off one of his moccasins and laid it on the ground near them. It formed a sort of cave.

  “No, Little Bull! You can’t march barefoot!” exclaimed Omri’s dad.

  “Cold can kill you, not me,” the Indian said. “You must not die. Twin Stars will make another moccasin, on journey.” Then he said, “Now you will know why I came back.”

  He put his hands on the thing he had been carrying. It was flat and wrapped in buckskin, on which Omri could see beautiful decorations, colourless in the moonlight. But one whole corner was blackened by fire.

  Little Bull was very still. He looked as if he were praying. “This is holy,” he said.

  Reverently, he unwrapped something oval and flat, and held it before his face. Omri gasped. It changed him – made him into another being, awesome, grotesque – an other-worldly stranger.

  “False face holds the spirit of ancestor,” Little Bull said from behind the mask. “His voice called to me from the fire.”

  Omri’s father was astonished. “Why are you showing it to us, Little Bull? Isn’t it only for your sachems – your holy people?”

  Little Bull said, “Little Bull show you this because you helped to save our women. You came with me to save him from great danger. You are not like other white men. Spirit in false face wishes you to have this great honour. Old Clan Mother—” He paused, but only for a split second, and his face showed no emotion. “She asks that I do this to show respect for little people of her dream.”

  He put the mask back into the buckskin bag. “He goes with us. Without him, no hope. No—” He clasped his hands, one set of fingers holding the other.

  “Link—”

  “Yes. Chain. Like Covenant Chain of Iroquois that holds tribes together, holds my people to the time before. Where we must go now, we will be new, like babies, but born from nothing. Our ancestors must come with us.”

  “Yes,” said Omri’s father. “They’re your history.”

  Omri was suddenly choked with feeling. He had the strangest impulse. He wanted to say words he knew in his heart he didn’t mean, but the need was so strong he could hardly resist. He wanted to say, to beg: “Little Bull, take us with you!” At that moment he could have said goodbye to his whole life, so as not to have to say goodbye to him.

  But he kept silent. He put out his hand and Little Bull bent and touched it with his finger where once their blood had mingled. They looked into each other’s eyes and Omri knew, without knowing how he knew, that it was for the last time.

  “We are of one mind,” the Indian said.

  And he rose, and turned, and ran, swift as a deer, up the hill and into the forest after his people.

  Omri and his father lay out in the open all night.

  Even huddled in the moccasin, it was bitterly cold and they felt they might not survive. They could hear wolves howling up in the woods. Once an owl swooped low over them, its white underparts flickering in the moonlight. They clung together, shivering and scared and almost unbearably lonely, now Little Bull had gone.

  Ironically, it was probably only the fact that the rest of the stockade – the part nearest to them – suddenly blazed up some time after midnight, that saved them from the effects of the frost and from marauding animals.

  In the deepest, darkest part of the night, when his dad was dozing, Omri cried. He put head and shoulders out of the moccasin cave, and looked down the hill at the longhouse. There was little left. Each time small gusts of wind blew on it, its embers glowed fitfully like some dying thing drawing its last painful breaths. Omri cried bitter silent tears of sadness for his Indian and what he had left behind, and for Omri’s loss of him.

  Just as the sky was paling and Omri could see the streaks of clouds to the east, showing the blackened, still smoking ashes of the longhouse and the abandoned fields beyond, it all ended.

  Omri didn’t even have time to savour one final second. Only, as he travelled faster than light through the layers of time, the smell of the smoked hide and the burnt wood and the unsullied earth they were lying on – and a strange, vagrant whiff of sweetgrass – stayed with him in his nostrils even after he got home.

  23

  Patrick’s Bit of Fun

  “I do remember well where I should be, and there I am.”

  These were the first words Omri heard when he opened his eyes, and it was to be a long time before he heard them again. When he did, he remembered them, and realised that his father, in his shocked, dazed state, had been quoting from Shakespeare.

  It didn’t sound strange at the time; it sounded quite right. They were where they should be: sitting in the car on Peacock Hill, looking through the windscreen at the sun (which was five hours’ travel higher than it had been a split second ago). And for several moments that was all they did.

  Then Omri remembered he had hurt his shoulder and moved it; the pain was still there. He thought of the ogre, squeezing his ribs, and breathed deep, and felt it. He remembered he’d been wearing buckskin leggings and moccasins and a breech-cloth, but now he was dressed in ordinary clothes. He remembered that, before he’d left, he had been sitting on a pile of sleeping bags and had his feet on a box. But those had gone.

  “They must have been burnt in the fire,” he murmured, frowning. Then he turned his head slowly to the right and saw Patrick.

  He was on the driver’s side of the car, standing outside the window, looking in at them. His face looked funny. Omri couldn’t say how. Red, as if he’d been running; rather shiny. His mouth was open.

  “Hi, Patrick,” Omri said.

  Patrick didn’t answer. He was scrambling into the back of the car.

  “Get home,” he said. “Quick.”

  Now Omri’s dad seemed to wake up. He twisted his head over his shoulder, and winced. “What’s the rush?”

  “I’ll try to tell you as we go,” said Patrick. Omri stiffened. He sounded as if he’d been crying. Patrick? Crying? “Please, please hurry!”

  The key was in the ignition – of course. Patrick had just turned it. Slowly, as if he were stiff and aching, Omri’s dad took the spare key out of the glove compartment and switched the engine on with it.

  “I remember now. I’ll have to back all the way down. Damn.”

  “Shall I walk behind the car, Dad, and guide you?”

  “Don’t bother, I can manage.”

  And he did, more or less. But it was too tense for talking. Several times he ran the back wheels up the side of the narrow track, and had to edge forward again, and once they thought they’d got stuck in the sand – the wheels spun maddeningly. Patrick, in a fever of impatience, jumped out and hurled himself against the bonnet, and got them clear.

  And then they were back on the road, and Omri, deeply uneasy, said to Patrick, “Why do we have to hurry?”

  “I’ve – I’ve lost Boone.”

  Omri twisted his head, ricking his neck. “Lost him? What do you mean? Lost him?”

  “And Ruby Lou. I – I brought them back. I – they – I thought it’d be fun to give them a boat-ride. I found your old coracle, you know, that miniature boat-thing you got in Wales. It was a bit big for them but it floated beautifully, and I filled the bath up and – and put them in the coracle and showed them how to row. I made special little oars for them from ice-cream spoons – the real oar was too big—”

  “Wait a minute. Did they want to do this, or was it your idea?”

  “Never mind that now! I’m telling you! They got the idea and they were rowing around in the bath and enjoying themselves and then your mum called me for breakfast. I meant to go back straight afterwards, but there was this programme Gillon was watching on TV, and—”

  By this time Omri was kneeling up on the front seat and gazing over the back of it at Patrick in growing anxiety.

  “You forgo
t them!”

  “Your mum must’ve gone into the bathroom and seen the bath was full and just – pulled the plug.”

  “Did she see them?”

  “Couldn’t have done. She’d have said something.”

  “So the water ran out. So what?”

  “So… I went back, and – the coracle was there in the bottom of the bath, and – and—”

  Omri just stared at him. He wasn’t breathing. Something awful was coming.

  “And they were gone. Both of them.”

  “Where? How could they be gone?”

  “I don’t know. But Kitsa had been there.”

  Omri gasped. His father swerved the car into the side of the road – they were about a hundred metres from home – and turned towards Patrick.

  “You don’t mean the cat had—”

  “Where? Where was she?”

  “She’d gone back to her kittens. But she’d been in the bath. I could see her paw-marks.”

  There was a terrible silence in the car. Then Omri’s father slowly turned round and drove on. What was there to say? There was nothing to say. All Omri could do was sit there trying not to see in his mind’s eye what he was seeing.

  “You left them in the bathroom. All alone. You left the door open—”

  “No! Of course I didn’t! I shut it, I’m certain I did, but your mum left it open.”

  “You left them there for anybody to find—”

  “There was just the three of us and we were all downstairs eating.”

  Eating… Omri said suddenly, “Stop the car, Dad.” But it was too late. He threw up, mostly out of the window. Then he just hung there, breathless and sweating, thinking, Not Boone. Not Boone. Not Ruby. No. He wanted to hit Patrick, he wanted to murder him. No, he didn’t. He just wanted to be back in time, two hundred years before this awful thing had happened. Twenty minutes ago, it hadn’t happened, the sun was just coming up…

  He pulled his head in and said hollowly, “When did it—?”

  “Just now. This morning. Just before I had to leave to get you back. I ran the whole two miles. Uphill.”