Shawnee Bride (5 page)

Once more she took up the planning of her escape.

Although Clarissa was expected to be in attendance, it was Swan Feather who served as Wolf Heart’s chief nurse. Her arthritic hands ground the herbs between stones, mixed them into poultices and shaped them to Wolf Heart’s purpled flesh. Her knotted fingers wrapped the buckskin strips around his ribs, binding him tightly to the willow frame. He submitted quietly to her care. Only the subdued rage that smoldered in his eyes told Clarissa how much he hated being so helpless.

As Swan Feather worked, she also taught. Her ancient voice droned in the smoky darkness of the lodge, describing each herb, how it was mixed, how it was used. Clarissa listened eagerly, welcoming any diversion from the strain of being so close to Wolf Heart. Her command of the Shawnee language was growing by the day, as was her understanding of the healing medicine. Often she found herself anticipating Swan Feather’s questions, her mind forming answers as the questions were asked. When, Clarissa had dared to wonder aloud, would she be allowed to practice what she was so avidly learning? Swan Feather’s only response had been a shrug of her shoulders.

More and more the old woman had begun to rely on Clarissa to gather the herbs she needed. Clarissa had become adept at finding freshly sprouted yarrow among the meadow grass and coaxing thistle root from the earth without pricking her fingers. She was learning where to find the strongest willow bark and when to pick the sprigs of wintergreen that wound their way beneath the shadowy pines.

She enjoyed these forays and the freedom they gave her. She had even entertained the idea of disappearing into the forest and heading upriver toward Fort Pitt. But the risks of such a venture always made her hesitate. To beat the odds against her survival, she would need two things—a horse and a cache of supplies. So far, she had neither.

On this day, as she strode through the village with her empty basket, the people she passed nodded and spoke in greeting Children, laughing and unafraid, scampered past her ragged skirts. Dogs that had once barked and growled lifted their heads and wagged their tails at the sight of her.

White Moon, the women’s chief, was coming out of the council house. Her face crinkled in a smile as she saw Clarissa. “I was just coming to talk with you,” she said. “The young women want you to join their ball team for the spring bread dance.”

“The spring bread dance?” Clarissa blinked as the absurd image of Shawnee dancing around a loaf of bread shaped like a braided Maypole flashed through her mind. There was no image at all to go with the idea of a Shawnee ball team.

“It’s great fun,” White Moon reassured her “The women play against the men, and the losing side has to gather firewood for the big bonfire we’ll be having the following night. There’ll be dancing, singing, feastingah, but you look surprised. Why?”

“I—didn’t know—” Clarissa stammered, her face reddening as she groped for the right words.

“You didn’t know our people liked to have fun?” White Moon laughed. “Kokomthena, our grandmother, made men and women to enjoy themselves, and to enjoy each other’s bodies. When she looks down from the
moon and sees feasting, dancing and lovemaking, she is pleased.”

Clarissa gulped. “It’s just that I’ve never played your kind of ball before,” she hedged. “I wouldn’t know what to do. I’d be no good to the team at all.”

Again White Moon laughed. “Any woman who shows your courage in the gauntlet will do well in our game. As for your learning, the game is half a moon away. There will be plenty of time to practice.”

“But I have to help Swan Feather!” Clarissa blurted, seizing on the first excuse that came to mind. “She needs me!”

“Swan Feather will spare you to practice for the game. It will be to her honor if you play.” White Moon smiled over her shoulder as she turned to go. “The women’s team meets in the clearing most days, when the sun stands above that tall pine. Everyone will be happy to see you there.”

Dismayed, Clarissa gazed after White Moon’s graceful retreating figure. Where she came from, ladies did not play rough, rowdy games, especially against teams of men! What had she gotten herself into? More to the point, how was she going to get out of it?

Swinging her basket like the tail of an annoyed cat, she stalked through the outskirts of the village and into the forest. As her moccasined feet found the path to the meadow, the woodland stillness fell around her. The breeze whispered in the soft spring leaves. A thrush piped its song from a blackberry thicket, calming her turbulent spirit.

She was being a goose, Clarissa chided herself. She had faced far worse than this silly game, where she would have nothing to lose but her dignity. All she had to do was grit her teeth and get through it. Then she could
crawl off and nurse her bruises while the Shawnee enjoyed their feasting and dancing.

Feasting and dancing.

Clarissa froze in midstep, eyes wide, heart pounding. Why hadn’t she thought of it sooner? The coming festival, with everyone distracted by merrymaking, would be the perfect time for her escape.

She hurried down the meadow path, her mind churning with plans. With so much food being prepared for the feast, she would have no trouble slipping some corn cakes and venison into a parfleche and concealing it in the woods to be picked up later. As for getting her hands on a horse—Clarissa shivered with anticipation. No one would be eager to guard the animals during the celebration. With any luck at all, she would be able to slip into the enclosure, choose her mount and lead it quietly into the trees. By the time the reveling Shawnee missed her, she would be mounted and well on her way back to Fort Pitt.

Half a moon away, the women’s chief had said. As civilized people counted time, that would mean the frolic was about two weeks off. That would give her ample time to prepare.

The sight of the sun-flecked meadow through the trees hushed the wild milling of her thoughts for a moment. Each time she came to this place, she was stunned by the ever-changing beauty of its waving grasses and flowers. She would miss that beauty when she was safely back in Baltimore, she realized with a sharp tightening of her throat. She would miss many things.

Most of all, she would miss Wolf Heart.

But this was no time for sentiment, Clarissa upbraided herself. In the days ahead she would need a clear head
and an uninvolved heart. Anything less, and she would be lost.

Struggling to remember Swan Feather’s instructions, she gathered pokeweed, thistle, plantain and wood sorrel from among the long grasses. Cattails were sprouting around a pond at the meadow’s far boundary. Those too might prove useful, Clarissa reasoned, and she set out to get them.

The morning breeze toyed with her hair, its touch so tantalizing that she reached behind her head, loosened the leather thong that held back her curls and let them stream in the wind as she ran. Red-winged blackbirds called from the rushes that rimmed the pond. Their harsh whistles scolded her cheerfully as she bent to the task of cutting spring cattails with the small sharp knife she’d brought along.

Glancing up, she caught sight of something else growing along one of the cold streams that fed the pond. Watercress! She loved watercress—and its tangy leaves would make a fine spring tonic for Swan Feather, whose usual energy had begun to flag of late.

She circled the pond, taking care to watch for snakes in the swampy morass of weeds. She could still see the watercress, but the stream on this side was walled off by brambles and stinging nettle. Approaching from the other side might be easier, or at least not so painful.

Impatient but determined, Clarissa raced back around the pond. By now the sun was high, her skin warm and flushed as she flung herself down beside the joining of pond and stream. The watercress was on the far side now, still out of reach, but perhaps if she leaned out over the calm crystal water she just might be able to—

Clarissa’s heart lurched as she glanced down and
caught sight of her own image, perfectly mirrored in the pool’s quiet surface.

Since the day of the gauntlet, she had avoided looking directly at anything that might reflect her own face—a polished knife or hatchet blade, a glassy trade bead, an open bowl of water. She’d had no wish to see what her fingers told her was there—the long slanting scars, the misshapen nose. Now for the first time she confronted her own changed features.

A gasp escaped her lips as she stared down at the water. The face that stared back at her was not the flawless porcelain oval she remembered. But its features were far less grotesque than she’d imagined them to be. It was, in fact, an interesting face. A striking face.

She tilted her head, noting how the broken nose and slightly lopsided upper lip lent her an air of raw sensuality that she had never possessed before. And the skin above her left eyebrow was slightly puckered, giving her eyes a questioning look. As for the scar across her chin that she’d imagined to be so hideous, it was little more than a shadow, like an elongated dimple.

“You will wear a new face—the face of courage.”

Wolf Heart’s words echoed in Clarissa’s memory as she blew on the watery surface, shattering the image into a hundred rippling fragments. How much courage lay behind her intriguing new face remained to be seen. But for now she had better things to do than sit here admiring herself like a flame-haired Narcissus!

Stretching to her limits, she caught a fistful of watercress from the wet green tangle at the stream’s mouth, yanked it loose and tossed it into her basket. The leaves gleamed like tiny cabochons of Chinese jade where they lay against the drying meadow herbs. When she sampled a sprig, its fresh peppery taste burned lightly on her
tongue. Swan Feather would enjoy it, too, she reminded herself as she reached for more. And perhaps Wolf Heart, as well.

Wolf Heart.

Something tightened in her chest as she thought of him waiting in the darkness of the lodge, glowering like a tethered eagle, seething with boredom. In that other, distant world, she might have brought him books to read or set up a chessboard and challenged him to a game. She might have entertained him with a tune on the clavier, which she played prettily if not brilliantly. She might have even invited friends over for a discussion of philosophy or mathematics. But here, in this wilderness, there was nothing of light or learning, nothing to challenge the mind of an intelligent man like Wolf Heart He was wasting his life here among the Shawnee. But that was his choice, Clarissa reminded herself.

Her own choice would be different.

At the meadow’s edge, she paused to fill the folds of her skirt with fresh green grass. She would be wise to make friends with the horses. If they knew her and expected food, the nervous animals would not be so skittish when the time came to lead one away.

With purposeful steps, she strode back along the trail toward the village. Two braves rolling bark for a canoe greeted her with good-natured grins. From the doorway of a lodge, a tiny dark-eyed girl smiled shyly as she clutched her puppy in her arms. The world of the Shawnee was not all bad, Clarissa conceded. But it was not her world. Soon she would leave it all behind.

She swallowed the hardness in her throat as she approached the clearing where the horses were tethered. One distant day all of this would be like a dream. The river and the forest. The village and the people—Swan
Feather and White Moon, Cat Follower and the battlescarred Hunts-at-Night. The women and the children. And Wolf Heart.

Clarissa choked back a little cry as the truth sank home.

When she left the Shawnee world, it would be forever. There would be no letters, no returning for visits. To these simple people, her going would be as final as if she had died.

Her own memory, she knew, would dim as well. In the long years to come—years filled with the trials of living—the faces so clear to her now would fade like portraits drawn in sand.

She would lose them all.

Wolf Heart eased his bruise-mottled torso upright along the willow frame, gritting his teeth against the urge to groan aloud. He was alone in the smoky darkness of the lodge. Swan Feather had hobbled off to tend her corn patch and Clarissa had left on one of her many errands. No one was here to fuss over him or cajole him to a show of cheerfulness. For once he could act as miserable as he felt!

A rivulet of sweat dripped from his armpit to trickle down his side. He had not bathed fully since before the vision-quest, and he smelled like a white man. The musky odor, which he had disliked all his adult life, had spawned his habit of swimming daily in some pool or river. Now the smell lay on his unwashed skin, rising like a miasma into the stale air around him. He felt dirty, prickly, sore and mean.

And Clarissa had just appeared in the doorway of the lodge.

“How are you feeling?” She still spoke to him in English
when they were alone. As a result, his own memory of the language had sharpened, and he found himself speaking fluently, using words and phrases he had not heard since boyhood.

“How do you think I feel?” He glared at her and was wryly amused when she bridled in response.

“I was only being polite. You didn’t have to snap at me!” She set down the herb basket to brush away the grass blades that clung to her pathetic rag of a skirt. Why would she bother with such a small vanity? Wolf Heart found himself wondering. And why would there be torn grass on the front of her skirt, when there appeared to be none on the back? What was Clarissa up to now?

“Are you hungry?” She bent to the herb basket to inspect her gatherings. A finger of sunlight, probing through the bark roof, ignited the blaze of her hair. Wolf Heart watched the quick sure movements, of her hands, aching suddenly with the urge to reach out, catch those hands in his own and feel the roughness of her small chapped knuckles against his skin.

These past days and nights in the lodge, seeing her, hearing the velvet rasp of her breathing in the night, catching the essence of her woman-scent as she passed
him
in the small space had been sheer torment. He knew what the vision had told him. He knew that he and Clarissa could cause each other nothing but grief. But that did not stop him from wanting her.