Ride the Fire

There would be no escape.

“I don’t want to die!” Eben sobbed, his freckled face wet with tears.

Nicholas took a deep breath, sought for words to comfort the two younger men, found none. He had taken them under his wing shortly after he’d joined Washington’s forces, tried to teach them to track and to shoot well. None of that mattered now.

“I have no wish to die either.”
Especially not like this.
“But if death is all that is left to us, then we must face it with courage.”

His words sounded meaningless, even to his own ears, but seemed to calm them. Josiah was nineteen, Eben only seventeen. They reminded him of his younger brothers—Alex, William and Matthew. They didn’t deserve this. No one deserved this.

Nicholas had known from the moment they were taken captive what the Wyandot would do to them. He’d warned Josiah and Eben, but they had not listened. Instead, they’d allowed themselves to be deceived by feasts, promises of adoption and the pleasures of sex with comely young Wyandot women. But those promises were false, food and sex merely part of the ritual of sacrifice.

Nicholas supposed that caring for the physical needs of their prisoners and bringing them pleasure took away some of the guilt the Wyandot must feel at torturing people to death—if, indeed, they felt guilt. But he had seen the deception for what it was, had eaten his food in silence, turned the woman away. Dark-eyed and pretty she had been, but he would not risk getting her with child and leaving a piece of himself behind to grow up here. Nor would he betray Penelope, his fiancee.

Fidelity when death was imminent might seem strange to most men, but Nicholas had been raised to keep his word and to put loyalty to family and friends above all else. He would try to die the way he had lived.

Washington’s force had been encamped near the Ohio when the Wyandot had attacked under cover of night. Nicholas had been discussing the next day’s march with George over a bottle of Madeira when they’d been interrupted by the sounds of war cries, shouts and gunfire. He’d fought his way across the camp toward Josiah’s and Eben’s tents and spied them in the distance, wild with bloodlust, pursuing a group of fleeing Wyandot into the forest.

Jamie—Nicholas’s elder by four years and his uncle—had served with Washington during his march north in I754 and had fought beside George in the blood and mud of Fort Necessity. But Jamie now had a wife—lovely Brighid—and two small sons. He would not leave them. Nicholas had reasoned he could do the job just as well as Jamie, as they had been taught together by Takotah, the old Tuscarora healer who had made her home with his family since long before he’d been born. It had seemed right that he fill Jamie’s shoes.

And now?

Now he would need every ounce of strength, every bit of courage he possessed. He was not immune to fear. Eleven fires had been lit in fire pits running down the center of the enormous longhouse. Old women busied themselves building up the fires, adding wood until the lodge was uncomfortably warm in the already stifling July heat. As the fires crackled, Eben again began to weep, Josiah to curse the Wyandot.

“W-will it be quick?”

Nicholas had heard stories, accounts of the French priests who’d first encountered the Wyandot a hundred years before. He prayed the priests had lied. “I don’t know.”

“Bloody savages!” Josiah spat on the dirt floor. “It’s good they like fire, because they’re goin’ to burn in hell!”

Wyandot villagers began to drift through the low entrance; men, women, children. Soon the longhouse was packed from end to end. The Wyandot stared at their prisoners with solemn eyes, and Nicholas could sense an undercurrent of expectation.

Last to enter was the Wyandot war chief, Atsan, who had dressed in ceremonial garb, a great bearskin cape draped over his bare, aged shoulders, a single eagle feather in his scalplock. He held up his hand to silence the murmurs and whispers of his people, began to speak in Wyandot. His words floated just beyond Nicholas’s comprehension, strangely familiar and yet utterly foreign. He did not speak Wyandot, but it sounded somewhat like Tuscarora, which Nicholas knew well. Several times he thought he understood a word or phrase—Big Knives, fight, river—but the words were spoken so quickly that Nicholas couldn’t quite catch them.

And then Nicholas recognized one:
“See-tah.”

As Atsan’s last words drifted into silence, the women who’d undressed them moved to the fires and began to stir the flames.

Something twisted in Nicholas’s gut. He tried to force down his fear.

A young woman appeared at his side, the same young woman he’d rejected the day before. She looked up at him, her brown eyes dark with an emotion that might have been anger—or lust. In her hand was a knife.

Nicholas just caught a glimpse of the blade before she slid the tip into the skin of his belly. His muscles tensed in surprise at the razor-sharp pain.

To his left, Eben shrieked.

Nicholas watched in odd detachment as the woman deftly carved a small pocket from his flesh and wondered for a moment if she intended to skin him. Hot blood poured down his belly, past his exposed groin to his bare thighs. She looked up, met his gaze, a faint smile on her lips. Then she stepped aside to make room for an old woman who carried a small, glowing ember from the fire on a flint blade. Nicholas realized what they were going to do a moment before they did it, and took a deep breath.

I will not cry out. I must not cry out.

He heard screams. Were they his screams?

No. It was Josiah and Eben.

A hiss of breath was all that escaped him. His gaze met the young woman’s and held it.

Pain consumed him—blistering, searing pain. His entire body seemed to burn. Sweat poured down his face, stung his eyes. He fought to control his breathing, to keep his thoughts focused, but felt himself growing dizzy, disoriented, almost delirious, as if his mind were seeking escape from the unbearable torment that had become his body.

They will not break me.

Rage. It cut through Nicholas’s pain, through his muddled thoughts, burned like a brand in his gut. He searched the crowd for Atsan, found the old man watching him, met his gaze. Drawing on his knowledge of Tuscarora and doing his best to imitate Wyandot inflection, Nicholas spoke, his voice rough with pain and hatred.

I am dying, but I will conquer my enemy.

He would die, but he would not give in to pain.

She had noticed him the moment the warriors had brought him and the other Big Knife prisoners into the village. The men claimed he had slain at least nine Wyandot warriors before one of them managed to strike him on the head with his club, leaving a gash on his left temple. Still, it had taken four men to subdue him and bind his wrists.

Lyda had known from the moment she saw him that she wanted him. When he looked her up and down and then turned her away as if she were worthless, the humiliation had been almost unbearable. She was considered a great beauty by the people of her nation. More than that, she was a woman of power, a holy woman, granddaughter to holy women dating back to the beginning of her people, and a daughter of Atsan, the great war chief. No man had ever turned her away. Until yesterday.

She had rejoiced then to know he would be sacrificed in flames and had vowed to play a role in his torment. But now? Her grandmother slipped another ember beneath his skin. His body jerked, every muscle taut as he strained against the cords that held him. Breath hissed from between his clenched teeth. His brows grew furrowed with obvious agony. Sweat drenched his black hair, ran in rivulets down his face. But he did not cry out.

Lyda knew what she wanted. She’d had lots of men in her twenty-three years, had taken a few into her mother’s lodge as husbands. Though she had grown tired of them all rather quickly and set them aside, she had rejoiced in the pain of birth and rush of waters that had brought her three daughters into the world. But with a man such as this—a man who looked at her with hatred in his strange blue eyes, who was bold enough to reject her and who endured suffering with the strength of the bravest Wyandot warrior—think of the children she might bear! They would be proud, handsome and strong, and their courage would bring her honor. She would have his seed.

Of course, it wouldn’t be easy. Her father had already committed the man to fire and death. And after witnessing his courage, the warriors would be eager to eat his flesh, particularly his heart, so that they might take in his strength. They would not wish to spare him.

But, of course, her father had never been able to deny her anything.