Fire Along the Sky (63 page)

“Rutting and talking don't go together,” he said. “Though I wouldn't mind a little moaning now and then, you want to urge me on.”

I am fighting for my life.
The thought came to her, quick and clean, and with it anger roared up out of her and Lily rose up against him with every bit of strength she had.

The boy grunted once and then again and then frowned at her in the flickering lightning, pressed his arm across her throat.

“Stop,” he said. His tone a little breathless but utterly reasonable. “Stop fighting and maybe you'll like it. I'm not as big as your Scot but I'm no mean portion either.”

She coughed around the dirty rag and began to choke, the taste of lye soap making her gorge rise. He watched her choking and then seemed to come to a decision. With his free hand he pulled out the rag.

“You see,” he said. “I'm no monster.”

She spat in his face and saw all the good humor run out of his expression. Had time to think,
Oh, no,
and then his fist had buried itself in her gut and the pain took her down. He lifted her head and slammed it down against the table so hard that she almost lost consciousness.

Don't let him get the best of you.
She heard Daniel's voice now, and closed her eyes and wished for him, for her father, for anyone at all, but she was alone and so she did what she could; she arched her back and hoped to push the boy off her long enough to catch her breath.

But Justus Rising was well grown and strong and he shook her like a puppy.

Don't let him. Sister, don't.

Her brother's voice did something for Lily, spurred her flagging strength and she arched up and managed to dislodge the boy—he was distracted by his fumbling at his breech buttons—long enough to slam her fist into his ear.

The boy grunted. “If that's the way you want it.” He was reaching under her skirts, and Lily lifted her head to snap at him, her teeth grazing the skin of his cheek, and saw what he looked like when a real anger came over him: like the devil himself.

“No!” she screamed into his face, her own anger roiling up out of her to match his. “No!”

Another crash of thunder, this one loud enough to wake the dead. The boy blinked, his expression shifting suddenly from determination to surprise, and then he collapsed forward, his whole weight on Lily until she bucked once more and he rolled off to crash to the floor.

Martha Kuick stood there, both hands wrapped around a length of firewood, her eyes wide and wild with fright and anger and a deep, abiding satisfaction. Behind her was Callie Wilde, a shovel in her hands, and then Curiosity appeared in the door. She pushed her way into the room, stepped over a broken chair, and put her arms around Lily, who had rolled herself from the table to stand, retching, at the hearth.

Over her shoulder she said, “Did you kill him, child?”

Martha was crouched on the floor next to the still form of the boy.

“No, ma'am, he's still breathing.”

“Too bad,” Curiosity said. She patted Lily's back while she retched.

“Callie, see if you can find the candles and get 'em lit. A fire would be a good thing just now too. And some water for Lily. I wish I had some of Axel's schnapps left over, I surely do.”

Lily wanted to talk, but breathing was taking all of her concentration and energy. Under Curiosity's stroking hands she felt her body begin to quiet, the rushing of her blood ebbing slowly. She began to shake.

“That's right,” Curiosity said. “You breathe deep, now. You safe, girl. I got you.”

“Should I fetch Jed McGarrity?” Martha asked.

“Simon,” Lily managed to say. “My father.”

“I know you'd like to have your menfolk just now, and your mama too,” Curiosity said evenly. “But let's think this thing through before we go running off half-cocked.”

A candle came to life, and then another. At their feet Justus Rising groaned and twitched. Curiosity looked down at him thoughtfully.

“First of all we got to get us some stout rope,” she said. “And then I want you girls to go fetch the Reverend Mr. Stiles. Invite him over here to do some preaching. I'm in the mood for a little fire and brimstone, myself.”

An hour later Callie and Martha, carefully instructed on exactly what to say, left the cabin. The storm had passed and the late summer afternoon was all shining green and damp gold, but even sitting in the sun Lily could not stop shaking.

She listened to Curiosity talking. Curiosity had an especially deep voice for a woman, and old age had added an edge to it, a crackling like walking through leaves in the fall. Everything about her voice was a comfort, but the words themselves made little sense to Lily. Something about Mr. Stiles and money and the orchard, and the things he had said when he had been confronted by Simon and Lily's father.

There was a cup of tea in her hands, sweetened with honey and milk. Lily took another sip and felt it settle in her belly, closed her eyes in the sunlight and saw Justus Rising's smile. She started and the cup sloshed in her hands, but Curiosity was there and she reached in quickly.

“No harm done,” she said firmly. Her hand settled on Lily's arm and pressed. “You listen to me, Lily. No harm done. He shook you up bad, but we got there in time.”

“Just in time,” Lily said.

“Listen to me,” Curiosity said, more firmly. “You got a choice now. You can let yourself get caught up in what might have happened or you can use this. You got the power now. If you get it in your head to waste the opportunity, why, you can say the word and your menfolk will teach that boy a lesson he won't never forget. But then he'll be here still, every day, for you to see. No, Lily, you got to pull yourself together and think. The boy was trying to take something from you, but what he did was, he gave you the power. You going to throw that away?”

Don't let him.

What?
she wanted to ask her brother. More than anyone else, she wanted her brother just now.
Don't let him do what? Control me? Hurt me? Take something away?

She lifted her face to the sunshine and listened. After a while she said, “Tell me then. Tell me what it is we have to do.”

They left the room as it was, though it bothered Lily greatly. While they waited, she looked for the shards of the china cups and saucers, putting every little bit she found into a careful pile. In a bucket full of water she found one of the cups, whole and unharmed. It seemed to her a miracle, and it loosed the tears that had been hovering just out of reach. Curiosity handed her a handkerchief and let her get on with it.

“Now look at this,” Curiosity said, turning the china cup in her long fingers. “I don't think I ever seen anything so pretty in my life. Look at the way it takes up the light. Do you suppose someplace there's folks who drink out of cups like this one, regular like?”

“I think there must be,” Lily agreed, her voice still shaking. “Though it's hard to imagine.”

Curiosity made a humming sound deep in her throat. “I expect you'll see all kind of strange things when you go traveling the world. And you'll put it all down on paper, won't you, and we'll sit here looking at your drawings and wonder at it all.”

Lily was shaking so that she could hardly speak. What she wanted to say was,
No, no, no, I'm never going away from here, from you, from any of my people, from home.
But some part of her mind knew that this was Justus Rising's poison still inside of her, trying to put down taproots.

It would please him to know that he could put such fear into her that she would simply roll herself into a ball and go to sleep for the rest of her life. And she would not allow him to have any such power over her.

She said, “Yes. I will, I promise.”

“I know you will,” Curiosity said softly. “You are the brightest light, Lily Bonner. You do shine on.”

Her long hand cupped the back of Lily's head and rocked it gently, and then Curiosity got up and went back to watching at the window.

Lily dried her face and was doing the same for the cup when she heard Callie's voice on the porch, and Mr. Stiles.

Curiosity straightened her back and gave her headwrap a tug to set it to rights. Then she looked hard at Lily and seemed to be satisfied with what she saw. She opened the door.

All Lily could see was Curiosity's long form, outlined by sunshine.

“Mr. Stiles,” she said. “Ain't it good of you to come so quick like. We got something of yours around back. And then Callie here got a business proposition for you. But first say hello to our Lily, would you?”

She stepped aside and the sunlight filled the cabin. Lily felt it on her swollen mouth and the bruise on her jaw; she saw it on Mr. Stiles's shoulders and the slope of his hat.

He stood there for a very long moment. She could make out nothing of his face or his expression, but his whole being seemed to shiver, just slightly.

Finally he cleared his throat. He said, “Where is my nephew?”

“Tied up out back, like I said,” said Curiosity. “Now let's us have a word about Miss Callie's proposition.”

It was a delicate business Curiosity had proposed, but Lily had no doubt that the old woman would manage it, and so it was. When the talking was done, Lily let herself be shuffled off and hid away, first with Curiosity's daughter Daisy and then in Uncle Todd's laboratory. She was vaguely aware that her father and Simon must be looking for her, that her mother would be worried, but she knew, too, that Curiosity would handle all that.

It was Callie and Martha who brought her word that she could come out. Callie put a piece of paper in Lily's hands—steady now, or steadier, at least—and waited for her to read it.

“This is a bill of sale,” Lily said. “You've bought the orchard and the farm . . . for forty dollars?”

Callie nodded. She was flushed with pleasure and trying not to show it. Thinking still of what had happened at the cabin, and what might have happened.

Martha said, “Curiosity lent her the money. She said Callie can pay it off after the harvest and first pressing.”

“I'm pleased for you, Callie.”

Callie sat down with all the thoughtless grace of a young girl. “Manny is going to run the farm. He says he didn't really want to teach school anyway. Your mama didn't seem to mind too much.”

Lily kept her thoughts to herself, but the girls were too excited to notice.

“Do you think maybe Levi will come back to work the orchards? Manny can't do it all on his own, and Curiosity says we have to keep going to school.” Callie said this with such seriousness that Lily found herself smiling for the first time in a long afternoon.

“I would guess he'd be pleased to come back to Paradise,” she said. “He and Manny together will make sure the orchards flourish.”
As your father would have wished.
This last she kept to herself, and neither did Callie raise the subject of Nicholas Wilde. Out of superstition or resignation, Lily wasn't sure. They had had no word from or of Nicholas since the day he handed over everything he owned to Stiles.

They were quiet for a moment, and then Martha seemed to remember something. She said, “They left an hour ago. Mr. Stiles and Justus. Curiosity says you should come now, before Simon decides to ride after them.”

“Simon knows?” Lily asked, alarmed.

“No!” Callie said, almost too quickly.

Martha gave her friend a stern look. “But they all suspect something must have happened.”

Callie nodded. “That's why Curiosity wants you to come now, so that your menfolk can see that you're all right and stop them from doing anything foolish.”

“Curiosity thinks I can stop Simon, does she?” Lily said with another, smaller smile. “I hope she's right.”

“I don't,” Callie said, turning her face away. “I hope Simon rides after them and hangs Justus Rising from the first tree he sees.”

Lily put an arm around the girl and hugged her tight. There was little to say that wouldn't have sounded false, and so she summoned up an old song out of her childhood memories, a song whose words she couldn't recall, but with a melody so sweet that it could not be forgotten. It was all the best she had to give.

Chapter 39

“Was he a good husband to you?”

Liam Kirby's voice came hushed and raw in the gathering darkness and touched Hannah's face like a hand.

All around them the men, wounded and whole, lay awake and listening. There was no such thing as privacy in this stockade; in that way it put Hannah in mind of a Kahnyen'kehàka longhouse.

She said, “Yes. He was a good husband.”

“You bore him children.”

“A son,” Hannah said, and before the question could be asked: “He is dead.”

“Ah.” There was a long pause filled by Liam's hitching breaths. In and in and out. A faint rattling sound from his lungs, or maybe she was just imagining that.

“It is not my past that is important just now.”

A flicker of a smile moved across his face, rough with beard, his lips fever-blistered. He said, “You want to sing my death song, Walks-Ahead?”

Blue-Jay moved fitfully on his cot just behind Hannah, and she put out a hand to quiet him.

“For that you would have to tell me the rest of your story.”

Liam grimaced and managed a small shake of the head. He was in considerable pain, but he would expend what little energy he had hiding it.

Hannah said, “You would have liked Strikes-the-Sky, and he would have liked you.”

“That doesn't sound like a compliment, the way you say it.”

She drew a breath and held it for a moment. “It is, and it is not.”

“Will you marry again?”

Hannah made a sound in her throat. “I cannot imagine it.”

He turned his head away. “You will marry again.”

She said nothing, and after a while Liam seemed to understand that she would not be drawn into this particular conversation.

“Your father. He is well?”

“Yes, all my family are well.” She looked into the dark where Daniel lay listening, but could make out nothing.

Hannah said, “You gave up bounty-hunting.”

“You know that I did. You shamed me out of it.”

She made a sound deep in her throat, one that said she doubted such a simple explanation but would not challenge him.

“We used to have such good arguments,” Liam said. “Why do you hold back?”

“I have no energy for such things,” Hannah said. “And neither should you waste yours.”

“Will you tell me how to die as you told me how to live?”

She drew up in surprise, and shock, and shame. When she could make herself speak she said, “Ask what you like.”

“Tell me about my daughter.”

In the next cot a sailor with a fever in his lungs coughed explosively. Hannah went to give him water, and when she came back she settled down again and tried to order her thoughts.

“What has Daniel told you?”

“That she looks like me,” Liam said. “That she is nothing like her mother. That Jemima has run off and left the girl an orphan.”

“He read you the letters from home,” Hannah said.

Liam closed his eyes. “I can almost hear Elizabeth's voice in the written words. She tries hard not to judge, but she cain't hide it.”

“Where Jemima is concerned, she fails, yes.” Hannah had thought herself to be empty of curiosity after so many years, but a question came to her and in her weariness she put it to words.

“Why Jemima?” she asked. “Why ever did you take up with Jemima that summer?”

He said, “You know the answer to that.”

A flush of anger drove the weariness from Hannah. “Do not lay the blame on me, Liam Kirby.”

His head turned toward her, his face a pale oval in the darkness. “The blame is mine,” he said. “Mine alone. I was lonely and angry and I let myself be brought low. What will you tell her about me?”

For a moment Hannah was confused. She saw herself and Jemima, tried to imagine that conversation.

He touched her hand. “Will you tell my daughter about me?”

“Yes,” Hannah said.

“Tell her all of it,” Liam said. “The bad and the good both. So she doesn't make more of me than she should. Tell her, I'm sorry I never got to see her.”

Hannah nodded in the dark. “Yes. I will do that.”

He cleared his throat, and when he spoke next he brought forth the language they had spoken as children, the language of her mother's people. The words came rough and poorly formed from his mouth, but he was offering her something and Hannah could not refuse it.

He said, “I should have waited that summer, when you were in Scotland. I shouldn't have run off. Things would be different now, if I hadn't been so impatient.”

“Tell me,” Hannah said, though she didn't want to hear any of it. “Tell me how.”

And she sat while he spoke, haltingly, slowly, reaching for words, to draw her the picture of a Paradise that might have been.

When he slept, finally, she leaned over and pressed her mouth to his brow, and then Hannah went to her own cot and waited for sleep.

Rumors were as unavoidable as lice in the crowded, overheated stockade, and sometimes almost as irritating. The soldiers brought all news to Jennet, as they might bring a coin to a banker to find out what it was made of. Jennet was not generally easily persuaded and sometimes laughed out loud at a particularly outrageous claim, though never in such a way as to insult a man's dignity.

Since the sinking of the
Ferret,
soldiers had been pouring into the garrison by the dozens, militia and regulars both. When the work parties returned in the evenings with details, the debates began.

“They've got the blood lust now,” an old sergeant told Jennet. “They liked the taste of the
Ferret
just fine and now they'll go hunting.”

Long John took offense at such pessimism. “Let the bloody lobsterbacks show their face on American waters,” he grumbled. “And the Vermont boys will make short work of them.”

The other kind of rumor was even more disturbing. Mr. Whistler brought it to Jennet and presented it like a particularly disgusting piece of offal.

“They say we're to be moved to Halifax, Miss Jennet. To a prison ship.”

Jennet, who liked Mr. Whistler for his careful ways, his odd humor, and his unwavering loyalty to Hannah, paused from her work to smile at him. “Who exactly has been saying such a thing?”

Mr. Whistler pursed his lips and dug into the thicket of beard on his neck. “Word came in with the work party. Sometimes the guards talk free around them.”

The man Jennet was tending let out a long groan that ended in a soft whimper of pain. Some men needed comforting in their extremity and others chafed under it. This one, a sailor with three teeth and a stunning collection of scars on his back, was the latter type.

She said, “Pull yourself together, Mr. Mason. You still have your leg, after all. Is that not worth some pain?”

The muscles in the broad throat flexed as he swallowed, but the sailor managed a nod.

Mr. Whistler handed her a piece of toweling that once she would not have used to wipe down a dog, but now Jennet took it gladly. To him she said, “I doubt it will come to that.”

He had bright brown eyes under a single long, bristling white eyebrow, and now they were fixed on her as if they could dig right into her mind to whatever thoughts she was hiding away. But Jennet had been raised to keep secrets carefully and close, and finally Mr. Whistler heaved a shoulder in grim resignation and went off with the basin of bloody water.

“Heard about them Tory prison ships,” said the sailor. He had a high, broken voice, ruined by shouting or drink or both. “Don't much care for the idea of dying in one of them.”

“Nor shall you,” Jennet said.

She meant to sound sure of herself but in fact it was all a ruse; she was sure of nothing at all. Two days since Runs-from-Bears had left for Montreal, and still there was no word, from him or from Luke. During the day she could keep her worry to herself, but alone with Hannah it spilled out of her.

“Has Luke ever given you cause to doubt him?” was Hannah's only response to Jennet's long recitation of worries.

Which was true, of course, but hard to remember in the heat of the day, when the flies covered the faces of the wounded and the stench of sweat and blood and excrement was thick enough to spoon.

They had lost another four of the survivors from the American ship, and soon they would lose Liam Kirby, who was waning visibly, almost from hour to hour. For a while Jennet had wondered if he would prove Hannah wrong and rally, somehow expel the foreign metal out of his chest cavity by pure force of will.

The oddest thing, the most unexpected thing, was the way Daniel had come to life as Liam Kirby slipped away. It was not something to be thankful for, certainly. She told herself that as she caught sight of Daniel. His injured arm was strapped firmly to his side, but with his free hand he was holding a cup to Kirby's mouth.

Behind Jennet a man's low moan rose suddenly into a wail, and she went to see to it.

The thing Hannah feared most of all, more than the idea of a prison ship, was fever, and fever had come to the stockades, as she had known it must. She could smell it in the sweat of the man who tossed in his sleep. Whether it was typhoid or some other prison fever she could not yet tell, but that would show itself by the time the day was out.

Now she stood looking at her medicine stores, or the little that was left of them. There was some laudanum, enough fever tea to get them through today, and nothing beyond tepid water and a quart of vinegar to treat everything else.

Mr. Whistler stood beside her at the little worktable and hummed to himself, something he did when he was uneasy. He had been humming all morning.

“Will you go, then?” He asked the question without looking at her.

“I suppose I must.” It was the last thing she wanted to do, but it seemed as though she could no longer find excuses to avoid visiting the garrison hospital. She would scrub their floors, if it meant the medicines the men must have.

“No hope of a shipment from our friend?” Mr. Whistler asked.

Hannah said, “There is always hope, Mr. Whistler. While I am gone, would you see to it that the fever tea is divided evenly where it is most needed?”

He nodded. “And the laudanum?”

“Mrs. Huntar will see to the laudanum.”

Jennet would try to see to the laudanum, that was true. Daniel would refuse it, insisting that his portion go to Liam Kirby. Unless he died while Hannah was gone.

“Very well.” He paused, and in a lowered voice he said, “You won't let them keep you too long?”

“No,” Hannah said. “I will not.”

She went to Daniel first, to tell him what she was planning. Liam had fallen into a restless sleep, curled on his side. The dressings on his back, changed just hours ago, were already crusted over with blood and discharge.

“His mind is wandering,” Daniel told her. “It's the pain that does it. He thinks I'm Rudy McGarrity.”

Jed McGarrity's son Rudy had died of the scarlet fever long ago.

“He's in the shadow lands,” Hannah said.

If Many-Doves were here she would sing the songs that would help Liam make his way, but right now Hannah could think only of O'seronni medicine, of the laudanum which would make his passing easier.

She crouched down next to them and put a finger to the pulse in Liam's throat. Fast and uneven, it told the rest of the story.

“He told me something this morning. A long time ago, when his brother wouldn't let him go to school, he would look in the window, until our father caught him at it one day. There was something about Ephraim Hauptmann getting himself stuck in an ink bottle.”

Hannah found herself smiling. “I haven't thought of that in years.” Hot tears prickled behind her eyes.

“Go on,” Daniel said. “I'll sit with him. Don't let the French doctors get the best of you.”

“And how do you suppose I should manage that?”

Her brother had eyes the green of a spring forest, and he blinked at her now in the way that said she was being dense.

“Why, speak to them as Curiosity would.”

That made her laugh aloud. “I'll try that,” Hannah promised.

For all the weeks she had spent here, Hannah had managed to avoid the army surgeons who ran the hospital on the far side of the parade grounds. She knew what she would find there, the kind of welcome she could expect, the questions they would ask. Ten years ago she had spent a summer at the Kine-Pox Institution in Manhattan, learning as much about white doctors as she had about vaccinations and anatomy and surgery.

She might help herself by listing her teachers, or at least the teachers these men might have heard about and respect. Some of them had reputations that reached as far as Québec and Halifax and London: Hakim Ibrahim Dehlavi ibn Abdul Rahman Balkhi. Dr. Valentine Simon, Dr. John Ellingham, Dr. Karl Scofield, Dr. Paul Savard. Dr. Richard Todd. Those names might make them listen, at least, to what she had to say; they might win her some of the medicines she must have.

Or they might look at her: muddy hem and bloodstained apron, weary eyed and stinking of the men she cared for, and laugh in her face.

That she would suffer, too, if it resulted in the things she needed, the medicines she must have.

I am Walks-Ahead,
she reminded herself.
I am the daughter of Sings-from-Books of the Kahnyen'kehàka people. I am the granddaughter of Falling-Day who was a great healer, great-granddaughter of Made-of-Bones who was clan mother of the Wolf for forty years, I am the great-great-granddaughter of Hawk-Woman, who killed an O'seronni chief with her own hands and fed his heart to her sons. I am the stepdaughter of Bone-in-Her-Back.

They might laugh, yes, but they could take nothing away from her. Nothing of importance.

This thought came to her in her stepmother's voice, steady and calm and true, and Hannah stopped where she was and straightened her shoulders.

And heard another voice, just as familiar.

She stopped and looked around herself, for the first time. The parade ground was teeming with troops at drill and there was a new ship at the docks, flying Royal Navy colors. That in itself was nothing unusual; ships came and went so often with men and supplies that Hannah had long ago stopped paying attention.