The Orphanmaster (14 page)

All morning, though, she felt as though she had a shadow. Another one, apart from Antony, whom she could plainly see.

She would glimpse Drummond occasionally, passing through the crowd or standing with his fellow grain merchants. He never looked toward her, but Blandine got the sense that he was somehow posing for her benefit.

She decided to ignore him and go about her business.

The molasses-for-saltpeter trade proved lucky. Daniel Voorhees, one of the main munitions dealers in the settlement, came to market looking for all the sulfur and saltpeter he could buy. Much of his supply had been ruined in the recent storms.

Embers de With returned to Blandine, eager to trade back for his original keg of stone salt, but she had already heard of the need, and approached Voorhees herself.

“A pony keg,” Voorhees said, when Blandine rolled the little wooden barrel toward him. “I have six bolts of bleached Haarlem linen for it.”

“I’ll take twelve,” Blandine said. When the man refused, with curses, she kicked the keg backward, away from him, and followed after it. He called her to return, offered the twelve bolts and was dismayed when she demanded fifteen. He yielded them to her, sourly, but they were hers just the same.

She found a good home for the cloth, too, trading up for six barrels of seed corn. Then the corn went for wheat, a trade to a plantation owner whose maize had gone to rust that year. He had wheat, he needed corn, so Blandine bartered his ten barrels for her six.

She had the good luck to be the first trader to greet Blue Shirt, the Seneca sachem, when he came in with sundry pelts he had held back from spring market, hoping to get a better price in the fall. He had otter, muskrat, cat, deer, but was particularly well stocked with good, merchantable mink.

Blandine immediately saw what he had, knew that mink was at a premium just now with the new fashion set by the French king for soft, turned-fur collars.

“I have no use for wheat,” Blue Shirt told her when she made her offer. “You know that.”

Blandine eyed the other traders at the fair. They hadn’t noticed Blue Shirt yet, but they would soon enough. She didn’t have much time.

“Wait for me here,” she told the Seneca chief, using the trading patois. “Please, I’ll come right back.”

She stuck a pipe filled with tobacco into Blue Shirt’s hand, hoping to occupy him.

Blandine hurried across the Fuyck, thinking,
Wheat, wheat, wheat—who needs wheat?
Not wanting to say it out loud. Thinking for an instant of Drummond, the erstwhile wheat trader.

She was going to lose the trade, she knew. She couldn’t let that happen.

A bearded, stench-ridden savior appeared to her in the person of
Skag Smith, a toothy English frontiersman who sat amid a scattered pile of rum casks. Trying to control her urgency so as not to spook the man into upping his price, she bartered her wheat laterally, ten barrels for ten of rum (what the indians called “English milk”).

Seconds later, she returned to Blue Shirt and suddenly found herself in possession of twelve dozen finely cured mink pelts.

The other traders also knew the whim of
le Roi Soleil
, knew what mink would fetch the next season in London and Antwerp, but they didn’t get to Blue Shirt in time. Blandine had virtually cornered the Beverwyck market.

A small crowd of
handlaers
gathered around her. She fended off furious offers and counteroffers. Antony glared at the traders whenever they got too close to her bale of pelts.

Blandine felt splendid. She was at the top of her game. She had a brief, glancing wish that the English popinjay could see her now, but immediately banished the thought as unworthy of her.

Embers de With emerged from the clutch of traders around Blandine and approached.

“Fashion will change, that’s what it does,” he pronounced. His opening gambit. “Who knows how long mink will hold its present inflated value?”

“And yet, the whole world tags along after Louis,” Blandine said. “Are we not sheep? What he wears, the courts of London, Portugal, the Empire, even Spain are sure to adopt.”

“Not Spain, surely not Spain,” De With said.

“They dye the fur black,” Blandine explained.

De With countered, “And of course there is an ample supply of mink from Russia.”

Suddenly Edward Drummond was there by her side. “You’ve not heard of the tsar’s edict of embargo?” he said to De With.

De With flinched. “An embargo?”

Drummond nodded. “Total and complete. To protect the Siberian mink population, which has much diminished in the wild.”

Blandine almost laughed, but she also had the concomitant urge to smash Drummond in his supercilious, hair-draped face.

“Please, sir,” she said, sotto. “I can well attend to my own affairs.”

“An offer of pertinent intelligence, merely,” Drummond said loudly. “I have just recently come from the Grand Duchy of Muscovy.”

Have you really? Have you just come from there, you precious English ass?

Blandine focused on De With, who paced, hyperventilating, practically popping the buttons on his vest. He was less cool than in the morning, when he and Blandine had conducted their molasses-for-saltpeter barter.

The pressures of trade affected different men in different ways. Some could not see their way clear to consider it as she did, as merely a great game.

“You know, I’ve heard of a scheme to farm-raise the creatures,” Blandine mused. “Perhaps that would be a way to assure oneself of a steady supply of mink. But getting the husbandry of it might take a few seasons.”

“By which time,” Drummond interjected, “the French king could have returned to ermine.”

“Or sable,” Blandine said, smiling sweetly.

Shadows lengthened around the Fuyck. Men had begun to stumble for the taverns, exhausted by the frenzy of bartering. The day of trade was nearly over.

“All right!” De With said. “What will you take for the bale?”

“My whole supply? Wouldn’t that be foolish of me?”

“Just tell me,” the maddened trader said.

“I really wouldn’t know. What can you offer?”

“For the Lord’s sake, woman!”

Blandine fingered the silky pelts in her suddenly golden cache. “You have a holding in Beverwyck town, on the heights off the river,” she said. “Almost an English acre, I think, from the looks of the plat map.”

De With stared at her. Land, solid ground, earth-and-soil property, in exchange for the skins of dead animals. “That piece is just off the Post Road,” he said, a faint tone of accusation in his voice.

“Just so,” Blandine said. She waited.

“It is a full acre,” De With said.

“Oh? I didn’t mark it exactly.”

He paced, bulging in gut and eyeball, furious at the thought of being beaten by a girl.

“I would need a signed and witnessed deed of transfer,” Blandine said.

At this, De With erupted. “My word is good!” he shouted at her. “Ask anyone.”

Blandine looked around. A crowd of traders attended the deal in amused anticipation. Drummond looked on attentively.

She waited for De With some more. Come on, man, come to it.

Finally, the exasperated merchant said, “The acre plot is yours,” and a laughing cheer went up from the assembled traders.

Blandine looked over at Drummond. In spite of herself, she exchanged a small smile with the Englishman.

“One thing,” Blandine said, turning back to De With. “Or two things, really.”

“What are they?” De With said.

Blandine yanked one of the mink pelts from the tightly wrapped bundle. “I keep one out,” she said. “A gift for a friend.”

“For her lover,” the
handlaer
Warner Wessels shouted, and again the whole crowd laughed.

“Yes?” De With said. “And the other thing?”

She knew what she wanted. Her original trade, the one with which she had started out the day. “I am in need of a jug of good Barbados molasses,” Blandine said.

Across the faces of the stones were written the name of the sun, the name of the wind, the name of the heart and the kidney and the liver. But what was written most and written largest was his name.

Lightning.

The sun blazed copper-bright. Behind the warrior swayed the deer he had netted and killed, still draining its fluids onto the gnarled roots below.

The tree from which the carcass dangled stood at the mouth of the cave. His cave, Lightning’s own secret. The Place of Stones.

The clearing at the top of Manhattan Island sang with the rushing river of stones, clacking together in the stream the Dutch called Spuyten Duyvil. The song made this the Place of Stones. The stones made this a castle for witika.

As a child Lightning had visited, on the Manhattan shoreline below, the great Lenape village of Shorakapock. A place of summer feasting. Chepi lived there, Alawa, Nuttah and old mother Hausis. Now they were all dead.

He could wade into the ancient shell middens of Shorakapock, dive so deeply into the pile of cast-off oyster shells that he was buried to his chest. He could thus swim through the past banquets of the village. The middens stretched around the end of the island. Endless shells, as many as there were stars in the sky.

And he was well aware that there were shells in the pile that he himself had tossed away during the feasts of summer, sweet salty water pouring down his chin as he gobbled the succulent flesh of Brother Oyster.

The blood of the deer still drained.

Before dawn that morning, he had cut away a slice of its hide, ragged with reddish cold-weather fur. He laid out the skin as he prepared himself to do the work for his master. Lightning’s blade had shone scarlet with blood, like a sunrise sun.

But he scraped the hide in the old way, not with a knife but with a sharpened clamshell. He flipped over the skin and touched the remnants of flesh. He crouched above the stone and punctured his palm, dripping his life blood to merge in a swirl with the deer’s innards. Rubbing a finger across the welts of blubber, he brought the blood to his lips. A milk of life, even in death.

The hide called out to him from the hot stone on which he had laid it out.
Where will be my eyes?
the skin asked.
What shape for my mouth?

He had to lie down awhile to think. He flopped on the open grass, the skinned shank of a swannekin child a foot from his face.

Brother Deer had his own memory, he thought. Brother Deer held within himself the crown of antlers and the troubles his people had suffered at the hands of the swannekins.

I will help you in your fight for vengeance
, said the deer.

Lightning thought of how he might slice the raw leather, with a sure hand and a woman’s finesse. Over these last months, he had developed skills he never knew he had.

The eyes, the mouth, he would carve them beautifully. As witika requested.

All the while his languorous mind coursed slowly over the laying-outs that had taken place in the past and would occur in the future. Inside the cave opening behind him, trophies stacked themselves haphazardly.

Heart, kidney, liver. Fingers, many fingers, and toes, collected from the laying-out places around the island. Each of them so small, as precious as the seashells from which seawan beads were carved. His master preferred to keep orphan garments, stained or clean, as mementos, but Lightning treasured the parts of the body.

All that was missing was that which was given up to the feast.

The dead called to him, too.
Where are my eyes, where is my penis, where is my uterus?

Ho, ho, he answered, they are here.

He loved to witness rot.

He had lain for hours, motionless as a stone, flat on his belly in the grass. A few feet away, his totems. Silently, patiently, he watched the progress of putrefaction, the leg shank crusting yellow, the blackened ooze from the organs, the way things transmogrified into other things.

The process of decay held for him a majesty greater than any he had ever felt in the song circles of his people, the vision quests, the ceremonies that made him a man.

The dangers were constant. All of nature seemed determined to raid his bounty.
Heart, kidney, liver, I will be your protector.

Buzzards flapped down, eager for a meal. Brothers, this is not your time. He crooked his arm and chucked at them lazily with rocks. Go! They rose away, lazily also, apologizing.

Sister Coyote whined, snuffling under the rock ledge, pleading for some meat.
Brother, please, please,
she said,
I beg of you
.

His heart was as of stone.

He held himself warily against them. He must guard even against the resolute armies of ants.

But some he favored.

Come, Brother Fly, friend moth, beetle chieftain with your legion of followers. He watched them carry their morsels away. One after another, numberless. Still he lay quietly, until the maggots burst out of their eggs and began to eat. He could hear the tiny tusks munching.

I am ready, brother
, a soft voice whispered.

It was the mask, calling him. Its outline revealed itself, perfect in shape and dimensions.

He got to his feet and crossed the Place of Stones to approach the sacred skin. He petted the scabby, mottled surface, uneven with fat globules and veins.

Witika’s next mask.

He lifted the blade and began to cut.