Leopard in Exile (22 page)

Here it was—the treasure the angel had sent her to find. Meriel came forward, entranced, hardly daring

to imagine touching so holy a thing. As she gazed at it, the golden falcon seemed to burn brighter, until it

glowed so dazzlingly that Meriel could no longer see the Cup.

"Kessae!"

The shout made Meriel recoil. A man, his hair the soft cream-white of age, came running toward her out

of the darkness. Upon his head he wore a tall conical headdress of red-dyed feathers, and his features

were a strange mingling of European and Indian. Meriel saw with surprise that he wore an iron cross on a

thong about his neck.

"Are you a Christian?" she asked with surprise. Fumblingly, she held up her rosary.

The man's eyes widened with surprise. "
Dona de rella geon alinerr
?" he asked her suspiciously.

Meriel shook her head hopelessly, unable to understand him. She held out her rosary, hoping the holy

symbol could speak where she could not.

"I have come such a long way," she said softly.

Suddenly there was a sound of angry shouting, and the slap of many footsteps. A second man, dressed

as the first but many years younger, appeared at the head of a troop of painted soldiers. One of them

seized Meriel, jolting the rosary from her hands, and the Young Chief covered the Cup with a painted

drape, shouting angrily at the older man.

Following the Young Chief's orders, the guards bore her deeper into the temple, forcing her at last into a

small room—one of a row of identical cells—whose door was a formidable lattice of copper bars.

Though Meriel screamed and struggled, it was useless. They flung her inside, her momentum carrying her

to the far end of the prison. Meriel scrambled instantly to her feet and ran to the door. People spoke of

copper as soft and malleable, but the bars beneath her hands might as well have been iron, so immobile

were they.

"Please!" she cried, stretching out her hand.

The Young Chief turned to regard her, yet if he understood her impassioned pleas for freedom, he gave

no sign of it. After a moment, he turned away and left her.

Is this to be my fate? To have come so far only to become a captive of a strange lost tribe, my fate

forever unknown?

BE NOT AFRAID.

In the middle of the night, the Voice awakened her once more. Meriel gazed up at the angel, and her

eyes filled with tears. She had come all this way to protect the Grail, only to find herself the prisoner of

savages, and the Grail guarded beyond her own modest means to do so.

It has all been for nothing
, she thought rebelliously.

NOT SO, SISTER, the angel rebuked her gently. The glowing Being spread its wings wide, and in their

dazzling light, Meriel saw visions.

She saw Europeans come to the city in the river. The city was much smaller—mounds of earth and grass

stood where carved stone buildings once had been, but the people were the same. The whites came in

peace, to trade blankets and guns for furs, as happened in so many other places.

Then Meriel saw the River People lying ill in their stone houses, the sores of smallpox bright upon their

skin. She saw the streets of the city choked with the dead, the few survivors fleeing in fear of the plague,

vanishing into the wilderness, until nothing remained but a city of ghosts. Even the dead vanished, their

bones scattered by scavengers until no man could say who had died here, or when. NOTHING LASTS

FOREVER, SISTER, the angel told her. THE PRIESTHOOD WILL DIE AND THE PEOPLE WILL

SCATTER. WHO WILL GUARD THE GRAIL ON THAT DAY? YOU MUST TAKE IT NOW,

TO A PLACE I WILL SHOW YOU.

"How?" Meriel demanded in exasperation.

But there was no answer. The glorious Being was gone, and she was alone in her cell—more alone than

ever before, her task unfinished.

Savage Enchantment

(Baltimore, August 1807)

S
arah followed Grandfather Bear down the white shell trail. The forest she moved through was one she

had hunted many times as a child—or a version of it, at any rate. This was the path that led—in her

world—to the Cree village that had been the second home of her childhood. But why had Grandfather

Bear come to lead her to a place she knew so well?

She remembered the Elderkin's words. Perhaps Grandfather Bear also sought her help in that tangled

matter—in which case her destination might be a very different place.

But soon the trail she followed became broad and well-worn, as it was near the village. She could smell

water and woodsmoke and the scent of cooking. When she looked around, she could not see

Grandfather Bear, although she would have been hard-pressed to say when he had disappeared.

The quality of the light was different as well: the fragile, pale light of early morning.

Have I walked all through the night
? Sarah wondered.

Suddenly unsure of her welcome, she moved forward slowly.

She could just glimpse the roof-lines of the longhouses when the village dogs began to bark. The village

was home to about a hundred people. Beyond it were the orchards and fields belonging to the People,

the well-tended fishing pools and traplines. The colonials often thought that if land was not well-marked

by scars of habitation it was not in use, but such was not the case among the People. The forest was their

ever-filling Grail, and they saw no reason to remake it in their own image.

Knowing that her presence was no secret, Sarah walked quickly into the clearing. The People had a

saying that only hunters skulked, and Sarah had come to ask a favor.

Unexpected tears of homecoming prickled at her eyes when she saw the village. Everything was just as

she remembered it—the three longhouses roofed in bark and skins, the stretchers of green hides drying

out of the sun, the smokehouse woven of green pine branches reeking fragrantly of herbs and aromatic

woods. Until this moment, Sarah had not realized how homesick she was—not for America, or Colonial

Baltimore, but for
this
.

The dogs rushed forward, and Sarah held out her hands in a gesture of friendship. The leader sniffed and

bounded away, barking frantically. People began to appear, drawn by the commotion. There were many

familiar faces among them, men and women Sarah had known her entire life, but among them were two

she did not know: a tall sandy-haired man in European dress accompanied by a striking woman wearing

a long robe of beaded and painted white doeskin.

"
Wachiya
," the robed woman said in Cree, though with an accent strange to Sarah. "Are you she whom

we have journeyed far to meet?" she asked.

"I am Sarah Cunningham," Sarah answered, puzzled, in English.

"Then come, for I and my husband have much to speak of with you."

Though these two guests were not Cree, Sarah realized that she knew them well by reputation, for in

their way, they represented the hope of the People as well as of their own tribe. Alexander MacGillivray

was the son of Lachlan MacGillivray, who had married a daughter of the Wind Clan of the Creek nation.

Now his son Alexander, whose Creek name was The Beloved Man, ruled the whole Creek nation as the

consort of the Sahoya, The Daughter-of-the-Wind. The Americans of Sarah's own world had been glad

to treat with MacGillivray, whom they had named "King," and so had been willing to treat the peoples he

guided as their equals, meeting with them in council and setting their hand to treaties of mutual benefit.

Whatever had brought the Sahoya and her husband eastward, it was a matter of importance great

enough to command an alliance between two tribes that had maintained little contact with one another in

the past. And obviously they had expected Sarah's arrival, for to journey here from their tribal lands in

(as it was known here) Western Transylvania was the work of many weeks. Their journey would have

begun as many weeks ago as Sarah's own, long before she had realized she would seek out her kindred.

Soon Sarah was seated around the council fire in the Chief's House, with Alexander McGillivray to her

right and the Sahoya on her left, and the elders of her own tribe grouped before her. The requirements of

hospitality must first be met before business could be discussed, so Sarah sat impassively through a token

meal of corn porridge and venison, washed down with a smoky birch-bark beer. Though her face

remained impassive as good manners demanded, within her, Sarah's heart was singing. She was home—

home
!

But this was not the home in which she had spent her girlhood. If the village and its people were familiar

to her, then the reverse was not true, as she discovered a short while later.

"I greet you, brother," Sarah said formally to the young warrior who offered her the pipe of tobacco that

signaled the fact that business could now be discussed. Meets-The-Dawn was her foster brother—they

had grown up together.

But the man before her met her gaze with no hint of recognition. Shaken, Sarah took the pipe without

saying anything further. The harsh tobacco burned the inside of her mouth, and she was careful to inhale

shallowly. Her own brother did not know her. If she had needed any more proof that she was far from

the land in which she had been born, Sarah needed it no longer. She knew these folk, but they did not

know her.

"You have traveled a great distance to come to us, Sarah Cunningham," The Daughter-of-the-Wind said,

when at last all the formalities had been observed.

Sarah turned to meet the sachem's eyes. The Sahoya was the medicine-sachem of the Creek, and

fleetingly Sarah wondered what powers such a one could command in this world.

"I did not think it was so far as it is," Sarah answered, striving to keep her disappointment out of her

voice. She was still a daughter of the People, and among them it was the height of rudeness to wear one's

emotions upon one's brow, forcing everyone they met to share them.

The Sahoya's gaze rested upon her with cool approval.

"Is this a tale that can be shared? Since before the Courting Moon grew large in the sky the spirits have

spoken to me of you, telling me that you journeyed to our younger brothers, the Cree. The spirits have

said that I must aid you, for the sake of all who live in this land—not only the People and the Anglais, but

our elder brothers of the land as well."

It seemed that The Daughter-of-the-Wind was also privy to that same prophecy that the Elderkin had

shared with her back in England, Sarah thought in despair. It was a great pity no one seemed to know

just
how
it was she was to accomplish whatever it was she was to do!

"I will tell you the whole tale, as I have never told it to any man or woman before. There is much in it that

remains a mystery to me, and I humbly beseech your guidance." Sarah bowed her head.

"Go on," the Sahoya said, and the Cree leader nodded in agreement.

"In this world I am known as Sarah, Duchess of Wessex, though in truth I was born in Baltimore in a

world very different than this—a world where America rebelled against King George to become a free

and independent nation."

"King George?" MacGillivray said in his strong Scots burr. "Who the devil is King George?"

Sarah cudgeled her brains for the scraps of English history her mother had dinned into her in the

schoolroom. It had not seemed important to her, here in America, to memorize the history of a country

she would never see. "He is a German king, who rules England because there are no more English kings

to govern her. It was his folly and tyranny that drove my countrymen to rise up against him."

MacGillivray shook his head in wonder. "Englishmen turning on their king like a pack of Frenchmen? It's

a hard thing to believe—not that the Sassenach don't deserve it," he added with a faint smile.

Sarah spread her hands in a broad shrug of dismissal. "It is a tale long past, of no moment save to

illustrate that there is world upon world, each lying close beside the next like the pages of a book." She

placed her palms together to illustrate, men spread her hands again. "And so I came from that world to

this, and here many strange adventures befell me."

Sarah told the tale of being recruited by Dame Alecto Kennet and the Dowager Duchess of Wessex to

take the place of her dying counterpart in this world, and how despite their best efforts she had seen

through the masquerade to take her own place as herself in this new world. She spoke of her husband,

the Duke of Wessex, and of how the scheming of an ambitious nobleman had entangled her with Lady

Meriel Highclere and Louis of France.

"The Dauphin—alive!" MacGillivray exclaimed. "How can that be?"

"A distant relative hid him in the country for many years," Sarah said. "Both the English and the French

would have used him for their own purposes if they could, but all that Louis wanted was to live his own

life, free of the fear of death."

"Aye, I reckon the puir wee bairn'd have little taste for a throne after the life he'd led," MacGillivray said

sympathetically.

"And the English Duke—your husband—had this man in his power, and freed him?" the Sahoya asked.

Her tone indicated disbelief. It was unlike the People to so lightly surrender so great an advantage.

"The Wessexes," Sarah observed drily, "have long been accustomed to doing precisely as they please.