The Orphanmaster (11 page)

They were really going to marry. No one believed it, but everyone would see.

With her eyes closed, she lifted her skirts, the bunches of white petticoat, to reveal black stockings that reached to her thighs. She saw no reason to kick off her clogs.

When he had lain atop her for a while, she smilingly pushed his face back in a gesture he understood. He complied, turning over onto his back. Hannie rose on her knees, readying to position herself for utmost pleasure. A horsefly buzzed near her face. She brushed it away.

She suddenly realized that the branches of the black elm above her were studded with silent crows.

Then she saw it.

In the center of the clearing appeared the remains of a cook-fire. She knew it had not been there the week previous, before the storm. Wooden stakes had been driven into the ground in a circle around the blackened ash-pit. A cord of some kind hung from the stakes.

“Hannie?” Hans said, as the girl rose unsteadily from the patch of grass that was her prenuptial bed.

“Wait,” she said. “Wait a moment.”

She stepped toward the center of the clearing, brushing down her petticoat as she walked. The bombinating flies swarmed, targeting her eyes.

“Hannie!”

She needed to get to the cook-fire. To see. She felt she could not turn back.

Bones. Bones piled in a neat tower on the scorched earth. Big bones, too, nothing like those of a chicken or the remains of a pig roast.

Bones bladelike and white as frost.

The cord swung a yard from her eyes. Soft and viscous, it resembled the intestines of the lambs her family butchered every spring.

She turned around to see Hans lying inert, on his back, his hand thrown over his eyes.

“Hans, come see.” He ignored her. “Hans!”

A rustle from the woods at the far end of the clearing. A deer?

She looked back to the ash-pit, not wanting to, unable to resist.

Next to the bones, a fan of… What was it?

Fingers. Tiny fingers, such as those of her little sister Trude. Splayed out carefully in sequence, as though they were still part of a hand.

Next to the severed fingers, a corn-husk doll directed its mocking gaze toward Hannie.

And a symbol, drawn in blood everywhere, on the trees, the stones of the fire ring, the half-burnt logs. A circle cut by a cross:

The last thing Hannie saw was a piece of cutout deerskin stuck with an indian hatchet to a pinewood tree, fashioned into a kind of mask, with gaping holes for eyes and an eerie, twisted shape for a mouth.

Hans looked up when Hannie started shrieking. She didn’t wait for her beloved to come and see. She started moving her feet in the direction of home.

The tiny golden bat folded its wings, clung upside down to the ceiling of the lodge and whispered to Kitane of his coming death.

“Brother, why are you alone?”

“You, too, are alone,” Kitane responded soundlessly. “Where is your colony?”

“Where is your family?” the bat echoed. It spun slowly around into the shadows, then again caught a golden light. Hunching its leathery wings, it made the reddish hairs on its neck ruffle up like the collars of the Dutch.

Outside, the locusts raised a dry-husk chorus. “Why are you alone?” they said.

An old lodge, long abandoned, its mother and children no doubt
dead from the plague. The lice inside were lonely for their people. They welcomed Kitane.

Mid-moon in the harvest month. Kitane played his mind over what should be happening now, the sunlit life he should be leading, seeing it from the shadows of now.

Bringing in maize from his clan’s plantings. Hunting deer. Dressing deer. Cutting the venison into strips, hanging it above a fire. Looking toward winter.

Kitane and Showma and Munn, together with the clan.

That life gone. Swallowed by shadow. Instead, he was alone in an empty lodge on the edge of a pond-fed marsh. On his back in bed, watching a yellow bat hunch across the rough bark roof.

“It’s morning,” the bat observed. “I’ll be going to sleep now.”

“Go ahead,” Kitane said.

“You’ll be all right? I’m worried about you.”

“Sleep well.”

“Why don’t you sleep, too? This is, what, the third day of your waking?”

Kitane rolled away to face the wall, the willow sticks of his bed snapping in their dryness. If the lodge were alive, the women would have watered the beds once in a while, keeping their woven branches supple and comfortable.

The swannekins came, the swannekins bore sickness, the swannekins wrecked everything. The Dutchmen. The English. The French.

Kitane heard the
scritch, scritch, scritch
of the bat crawling down from the ceiling. The creature appeared before his face, glowing like a little moon.

“Jesus,” Kitane said, taking the name of the swannekin’s lord-god in vain. “Get away from me.”

He closed his eyes and turned his mind to the girl Makitotosimew. Her name meant “she has large breasts.” And she did. They grew larger and larger in Kitane’s mind until they became gross and hideous.

He opened his eyes again. Brother bat spoke.

“Why are you alone?”

“I am Chansomps, a man of the locusts,” Kitane said. “Hear my friends outside the lodge. I am not alone. I don’t need to listen to you.”

“You are Kitane. The brave, the chronicler, the survivor, the slave, the godless, the revenger, the smasher of faces. You walk without sound.”

Last night, Kitane heard the witika calling him from the darkness at the edge of camp. He had never been more afraid.

And he envisioned not his past but a future life, one he had been seeing in his mind for the recent few days. He was walking down the street in Dutchtown. He had been there often, and he remembered well what it looked like, the swannekin lodges that it would make a stone sick to live inside.

As he walked a round-headed war club came magically into his hand. He touched his face and it was painted. He had burned the hair from his head with hot stones, leaving only a single roach, a rat-tail woven with turkey feathers that hung down his back and beckoned his enemies, “catch me if you can.”

And in this future life of his, Kitane would break into a run and lift the war club. He would pass quickly down the street killing men, women and children. Counting how many swannekin heads could he possibly crush before they got to him. Five? Fifteen? A score?

His father told him that before Kitane went into battle, he should know what he would do when he saw his own blood. Would the sight of his own blood mean that his fight was over? Or would it mean his fight had finally begun?

Perhaps he could kill thirty. He was Kitane, smasher of faces.

The vision of this future life was horrible and pleasurable at the same time. He returned to it again and again, like an itch.

Dying with Dutch blood on his hands. His blood and his enemy’s blood, comingled. Horror and pleasure. Afterward, they would place his body in a canoe and set it adrift from the shore.

Why are you alone?

“Because the world is on fire,” Kitane answered, out loud this time.

“Have you seen Kitane?” Blandine asked the question of every river indian she encountered in Beverwyck, getting only negatives in reply.

Well, perhaps not
every
Lenape. There were too many, hundreds,
stalking through the town, mixing with the Five Nation natives from the Mohawk River and interior lake valleys, all of them eager for trade.

“Swannekins,” the river indians called the Dutch. No one knew what the word meant, none of the Lenape would tell them. One theory had it translated as “fake men,” another as “a sharp stick upon which I mistakenly sit,” and another as “the saltwater people.” Likewise, Manhattan either meant “place of hills,” or “the place where we all got drunk.” And the Mahican tribal name, some said, actually meant “flesh-eaters.”

During the trading season, Beverwyck burst at its deerskin seams. From the steep promontory that marked the end of the town, it was possible to see straight down Yonkheer Street to the narrowing, placid river, now full of small-boats and anchored ships. A palisade encircled the community, surrounding dwelling-houses and shops, offering protection against the creatures, human or otherwise, that inhabited the wilderness.

A paradox, since those same inhabitants were welcomed, carrying heavy loads of furs, especially in the spring and summer months. In these two mid-fall weeks, after the first turn of leaves but before the harvest fair,
wilden
and
handlaers
haggled over the next winter’s furs, with trade goods exchanged for a promise of pelts. A hundred thousand beaver skins passed through Beverwyck in a single season.

Purple seawan streamed like gold. The village population swelled tenfold. When they slept at all, which was seldom, traders stacked themselves four to a bed. They could not often find one to rent. Landlords let every corn-husk mattress ’round the clock, in four six-hour shifts. Tents and lodges encircled the rude streets of Beverwyck proper.

It wasn’t a circus atmosphere, really. There were no jugglers or players. Trade, trade, trade, that’s what everyone was here for. A single-minded passion seized the whole town. Forget the hunt, forget the harvest, forget eating and sleep.

Profit was afoot, and the Devil take the hindmost.

“Yay, dearie, want a job of work?” a prostitute hailed Blandine in passing. “On your back, your beaver’d fetch a beaver easy.”

Antony made a fake lunge at the offending woman, who cackled and made a dash for her hovel.

This was Antony’s second year at Fort Orange’s Beverwyck market.
When he had accompanied Blandine the year previous, the milling crowds disoriented him, a crush of people so different from the land of his birth. He was repeatedly baited to fight. Blandine managed to extricate him each time, but she hadn’t planned on taking him along again.

He surprised her by begging to go. “Are you sure?” she asked. “You didn’t enjoy it last time.”

“I did,” Antony said.

“You fought, you remember?”

“So what? Look at me. What’s fighting to me?”

So the giant came along, and seemed to feel more in his element than before.

“You’re a big one, now, ain’t you?” the laughing whore taunted Antony. “Come, let us measure it, see if you’re big all over.”

Antony lifted his blouse, and the prostitute screamed in mock horror.

Blandine laughed and passed on.

She was feeling good. What merchandise Blandine still had left, she held back for the climactic market Saturday, the culmination of the annual autumn trading fury (second only to the spring trading fury) that gripped the whole district.

She had already placed her pelt guns, her hand tools and metal implements, most of her cloth. Her only mistake, she noted for the future, was to ignore the fundamental draw of iron traps. She had none, and could have traded a score.

She saw indians of both sexes parading through the streets, flaunting the ropes of wampum around their necks that represented so many hundreds of guilders to the visiting Europeans. The dense odor of rum hung in the air along Handlaer Street, the drink being sucked down and traded with equal avidity.

Houses and shops of red moppen and yellow Gouda brick anchored the town. Blandine could see the tips of merchant masts riding in the Fort Orange harbor. Everyone was here. One last final push. Let it begin. She was more than ready.

And yet she couldn’t shake off the idea that someone was watching her. It was partly what Antony said about Lightning. But it was also Blandine’s own notion, a physical, prickly sensation that dogged her.

She stopped to confer with a trio of Mohawk women, translators she knew from her earlier seasons at Beverwyck. Two of them had ax heads suspended over their breasts on necklaces of deer sinew, while the third wore a gigantic spoon from an English silversmith.

She asked if any of the three had seen Kitane at the Beverwyck market this year.

“He’s gone mad,” a crooked-toothed woman named Oota said.

“You know this?” Blandine said seriously.

“I refused him my body,” Oota said, “and he lost his mind.”

The other two women hooted with laughter.

Blandine persisted. “I want to ask him about the killing across the river, the tenant farm boy in Pine Plains.”

The group fell instantly silent, looking sullenly away from her.

“Perhaps one of you might know about it,” Blandine said.

“Nobody talks about that,” Oota said. She pronounced the Iroquois word that meant “taboo.” “You won’t find anyone around to say anything on that subject.”

Blandine hoped that Kitane would. Throughout those market days, she sought him out. They had been cohorts, she and the Lenape trapper, in a small company of merchants who had journeyed up the Mohawk River to trade during the market weeks of the previous fall.

Kitane proved himself the most competent scout, the best hunter, the most artful trader. He out-
handlaer
-ed the
handlaer
s and out-natived the other natives.

Blandine believed she had formed a friendship with Kitane in the weeks along the Mohawk River. When their paths came to part, though, and they said their farewells, the native had displayed a dead core that frightened her. She realized that any real connection with him could exist only on some faraway plane to which she herself had no access.