Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [468]
“Tell me this dream.”
Was it truly a dream I would tell her, or a memory like these, brought to life on the wings of smoke from a burning tree? It didn’t matter; here, all my memories were dreams.
I told her what I could. The memory—of the storm and my refuge among the red cedar’s roots, the skull buried with the stone—and the dream; the light on the mountain and the man with his face painted black—making no distinction between them.
The old lady leaned forward, the astonishment on her features mirroring that of her granddaughter.
“You have seen the Fire-Carrier?” the girl blurted. “You have seen his face?” She shrank away from me, as though I might be dangerous.
The old lady said something peremptory; her startlement had faded into a piercing gaze of interest. She poked the girl, and repeated her question impatiently.
“My grandmother says, can you say what he looked like; what did he wear?”
“Nothing. A breech-clout, I mean. And he was painted.”
“Painted. How?” the girl asked, in response to her grandmother’s sharp question.
I described the body paint of the man I had seen, as carefully as I could. This wasn’t difficult; if I closed my eyes, I could see him, as clearly as he had appeared to me on the mountainside.
“And his face was black, from forehead to chin,” I ended, opening my eyes.
When I described the man, the interpreter became visibly upset; her lips trembled, and she glanced fearfully from me to her grandmother. The old woman listened intently, though, her eyes searching, straining to discern meaning from my face before the slower words could reach her ears.
When I finished, she sat silent, dark eyes still fastened on my own. At last she nodded, reached up a wrinkled hand and took hold of the purple wampum strings that lay across her shoulder. Myers had told me enough so that I recognized the gesture. The wampum was her family record, badge of her office; speech made while holding it was tantamount to testimony made upon the Bible.
“At the feast of Green Corn, this many years ago”—the interpreter’s fingers flashed four times—“a man came among us from the north. His speech was strange, but we could understand him; he spoke like Canienga, or maybe Onondaga, but he would not tell us his tribe or village—only his clan, which was the Turtle.
“He was a wild man, but a brave one. He was a good hunter, and a warrior. Oh, a fine man; all the women liked to look at him, but we were afraid to come too close.” Tewaktenyonh paused a moment, a far-off look in her eye that made me count back; she would have been a full-grown woman then, but perhaps young enough still to have been impressed by the frightening, intriguing stranger.
“The men were not so careful; men aren’t.” She gave a brief, sardonic glance at the ceilidh, growing louder by the minute. “So they would sit and smoke with him, and drink spruce beer and listen. He would talk from midday till the dark, and then again in the night by the fires. His face was always fierce, because he talked of war.”
She sighed, fingers curling over the purple shell strands.
“Always war. Not against the frog-eaters of the next village, or the ones who eat moose dung. No, we must lift our tomahawks against the O’seronni. Kill them all, he said, from the oldest to the youngest, from the Treaty Line to the big water. Go to the Cayuga, send messengers to the Seneca, let the League of the Iroquois go forth as one. Go before it is too late, he said.”
One frail shoulder lifted, fell.
“ ‘Too late for what?’ the men asked. ‘And why shall we make war for no cause? We need nothing this season; there is no war treaty’—this was before the Time of the French, you understand.
“ ‘It is our last chance,’ he said to them. ‘Already it may be too late. They seduce us with their metal, bring us close to them in the hope of knives and guns, and destroy us for the sake of cooking pots. Turn back, brothers! You have left the ways of years too great to count. Go back, I say—or you will be no more. Your stories will be forgotten. Kill them now