A Flight of Arrows (20 page)

Sam thrust a linen-wrapped parcel at him. “I set aside your ration and grease for your face—have you seen the like of these mosquitoes? I itch from scalp to soles.” His gaze held steady, offering more than food.

“They're appalling.” William took the parcel, hesitated, then added, “I appreciate it.”

Sam's long-absent grin flashed in the firelight. “Manage not to land on me when you fall into your bedroll later and we'll call it square.”

July 1777

Lake Ontario

W
illiam wasn't rowing, poling, or otherwise engaged with propelling the massive bateau in the vanguard of the advancing army. He was leaning against the vessel's side, gazing westward into shrouding mist, when the bark canoe appeared out of the drifting vapor. It was one of many such small craft surrounding them in the veiled, watery dawn, moons to the vanguard's planet. St. Leger, discounting the intelligence obtained from the Mohawk's captives, had ordered an advance—the Royal Yorkers among them—to proceed down the lake to Fort Oswego to join Butler, Brant, Claus, and their assembled forces.

They'd left Buck Island in darkness, amid the splash of oars and sweeps, the terse bark of orders. By the time they reached the lake—little more than a sense of the river's islanded channel widening into something far more sweeping in size—dawn had flushed the enclosing mist the delicate hue of a ripened peach. Somewhere a loon gave its eerie call. Ahead, a flotilla of waterfowl, disturbed by the bateaux's passage, burst into raucous motion and scattered before them on indignant wings.

By contrast, the canoe, and the Indians in it, emerged from the mist in silence, as if the vapors themselves had coalesced into form off the bateau's side. The warrior at the bow sat a head higher in the craft than his fellows, long bronzed arms gripping a paddle that sliced the lake's dark waters. Slowing the canoe to glide in tandem with the bateau, Joseph Tames-His-Horse looked at William. No surprise lit the dark gaze—
never a chance meeting with this Indian—but a measured intensity that drilled like a lance, as if the Mohawk meant to underscore the words spoken by firelight the evening before.

More than a week after their first encounter on Buck Island, Watts's company had been ordered to draw their firing allotment of fifty rounds per man. William had been on his way back to his tent, cartridge box full, when once again the Indian cut him from his fellows with the skill of a collie among sheep.

“Come,” he'd said. “I dreamed of you. We must talk.”

Bemused by the invitation—or command—William nonetheless followed the Indian past outlying tents and sentries, past stumps of trees felled for boat building, to a faint trail leading through untouched forest. In moments they reached a fire and a brush shelter. The warrior motioned William to sit while he went about pouring coffee from a pot steaming at the fire's edge. Joseph Tames-His-Horse handed him a cup, then seated himself and unearthed a clay pipe, which he packed with a mixture of dried bark, leaf, and tobacco. Its fragrance mingled with the coffee's, a brew surprisingly rich. When he got it drawing well, the Indian raised the pipe to the four directions, then offered it to William, who accepted, thinking that aside from the forest ringed about and the stars accumulating above, he might have been in some gentleman's parlor on a summer's eve, such were the unhurried manners of his host. He passed the pipe back and waited.

After topping off William's coffee with the last in the pot, Joseph sat back and said, “Here is the thing about why I am in this fight.”

Having all but forgotten the question he'd put to the Indian days ago, William listened, sensing an urgency to communicate simmering beneath the outward calm.

“I have a sister, back along this river a distance.” Joseph nodded toward the rushing chatter that reached them through the wood, the St. Lawrence flowing east toward Montreal. “A thing happened with her that I did not like. She took a husband. That is why I left. Why
I
am here.”

William's brows bunched in an attempt to understand why a sister marrying would have driven this Indian from his home. Had he disapproved her choice? Seeing how that powerful jaw was clenched, he hadn't the nerve to ask.

“I also have a sister,” he surprised himself by saying. “Or one I thought of as a sister, though she isn't in truth. Anna.” As her name hovered on air thick with smoke and the drone of mosquitoes, the rhythmic croak of frogs and the fire's fluttering, he was blindsided by memory of Anna standing at the top of the stairs at Lydia's house, bathed in candlelight, clutching her forgotten cap. “I left her when I came north to join Johnson's regiment.”

A year gone. Did she think of him still, pray for him? He felt the Indian's gaze.

“She is your sister…but not?”

“You know of me,” William said, “that I was taken—stolen—at Fort William Henry. That's when Anna came to be my sister. She was rescued by…” He cleared his throat. “By the man who raised me. His wife had birthed a son the same night we—my twin and I—were born. That son died. Reginald Aubrey took me to replace him. He and my…”

“Who is my mother and my brethren?”
He'd lashed the question at Anna, wanting no response. Now it gnawed at his soul, demanding answer.

“The Aubreys were attacked with his regiment on the wilderness road. That's where he found Anna, her parents dead beside her. We were together on the farm until I left for Wales, still a boy. I saw Anna no more until I returned last summer.” He stopped, overwhelmed by the recital of these bare facts, though oddly grateful for the chance to voice them.

“You regret leaving her,” Joseph said, as if he knew.

“We didn't part well, see. And it troubles me now, thinking of her in the path of…this.” William waved a hand at the dark wood, in the direction of the army encampment. “Terrifies me, if I'm honest.”

Unlike the MacKays, he'd come north seeking refuge, not revenge. The regiment had offered him a place between what he'd been and…whatever he would be. Or so he'd thought. How had he not foreseen it would come to this?

“You parted with her in anger?”

William looked at the Indian, catching in his eyes a glint of pain.

A breeze off the river met the fire, ruffling the flames. William took a sip of coffee and, finding it cold, set the cup on the ground.

“I wanted her to come with me. She'd suffered nearly as great a shock as I, discovering the truth about me, about my brother she'd befriended years ago. She guessed it, see, the moment she set eyes on me again.”

“She is that girl?” Joseph asked, a light in his eyes. “I remember now, your brother spoke of seeing her. All these years she has been between you, a bridge to each other, though she did not know it?”

William stared at the Indian. “I suppose that's true.”

A bridge. One he'd recklessly burned?

So much they hadn't known.
Anna, I'm sorry
. He flung the plea southward yet again, but for the first time sensed its echo coming back to him across the mountain wilderness, though not from Anna.
William, I tell you I am sorry
…

Joseph leaned toward him, his intensity disconcerting. “Listen. You must go back to this sister who is not a sister.”

A mosquito buzzed at William's eye. He swiped it away, covering the shock of the Indian's words and those others he must have imagined. “I cannot. And if I could, it would mean going back to…”

“Your father?”

“That's not what he is,” William bit out, more harshly than he'd meant to because the word was wrapping itself around his heart and making him sick with longing. Regret. “My father's an Oneida called Stone Thrower. You know him.”

The Mohawk drew on his pipe, found it had gone out, set it aside. The breeze shifted the fire's smoke across their faces—relief from the mosquitoes. “It has been how long since you learned the truth of who you are?”

“A year.”

“And still you hold such hate?”

“Not hate.” He heard the defensiveness in his tone, even as honesty spilled forth. “Not anymore. I might still have left in the end, but I regret doing so without understanding why he did it. I thought him a good man.”

Joseph Tames-His-Horse gazed at him. “I have not lived long enough to get much wisdom. But it is my thinking that men do most of what they do for two reasons: for love or for pride. For which of these did the man who made himself your father do what he did?”

William opened his mouth, then shut it. He'd nearly told a boldfaced lie. “For love,” he said through a tightened throat. “For my…for his wife. He did love her. Once.”

“You can admit he maybe did this thing unthinking, or thinking only of his pain in that moment, or the pain of the woman he loved? Maybe as you felt when you left your sister, a thing you now regret?”

The words were said without condemnation, yet William's face burned. He nearly rose to bolt back through the trees to the safety of his tent, to men who asked nothing of him but obedience and duty and the keeping of the oath he swore. Instead he blurted, “What of you and your sister? Do you regret leaving her?”

Anguish rippled over the Indian's features before it was suppressed. “I cannot be with her as I would wish.”

“
Be
with her?”

Joseph Tames-His-Horse hurried to say, “You must understand how the Haudenosaunee reckon kinship. My sisters are not only those born to my mother but every woman in my mother's clan. Burning Sky was not born to my mother or any woman of the Wolf Clan, but she was adopted by one. That makes her my sister, no matter her blood.”

“Your sister is adopted?” William asked, startled by the revelation.

Joseph nodded. “Born white but taken, like you. Only she was made Indian where you were made white.”

William gaped at the man seated cross-legged beside him, the planes of his face shining in the firelight, the tail of his scalp-lock tied with feathers—aside from wearing no war paint, as wild an Indian as William could picture. And his sister, this Burning Sky, was a white woman.

“At what age was she captured?”

“Fourteen summers.”

No infant. A girl near grown who would remember—her name, her life, her family.

“You wish to ask of her?” The Indian watched him closely. “Ask. I will answer, if it will help.”

William heard his breath coming loud through his nostrils, breathing in the smoke from the fire. “Has she found peace? Has she forgotten? Or…forgiven?”

The questions might have been poised on his tongue, waiting to be called forth.

Joseph briefly closed his eyes, opening them to stare into the flames, as if in them he could see the sister called Burning Sky. “It was hard for her, at first. I left Kanowalohale and returned to our village soon after she came to be there. I'd had a dream of her and thought that meant…” He paused, shook his head. “Dream paths do not always lead where it seems they will.”

The Indian didn't explain the statement.

“I did all I could to be a brother to her, reminding her that Creator is over all, and in all, and with her always. She learned to be content. I believe in her heart there is peace. But there is also grief. Maybe soon there will be children to fill her heart.”

The man wouldn't look at William now. “Dream a lot, do you?”

Joseph took up a stick and pushed at the fire's embers. “Too much.”

A coldness opened in the pit of William's belly. “You said you dreamed of me.”

“I did.” The Indian shoved the stick into the flames, sending sparks toward the shadowy branches above. “In my dream you turned your coat,” he said. “You turned your coat inside out and went another way.”

William felt as if he'd been slapped. Heat flared in his face, beading sweat across his lip and brow. “You speak of desertion?”

“What I said is what I saw.” Joseph Tames-His-Horse met his gaze square but said no more about the dream. “Those Oneidas who are your family, to them you are known as He-Is-Taken of the Turtle Clan. Your place among them has been long empty, but you are not forgotten. That place is waiting for you. Think about that. And there is this about that man who took you—this Aubrey. You cannot see his heart. You did not stay to let him speak it to you. There is no going forward for you until you first go back and clear that path between you. But there is hope.”