The Adventures of Silk and Shakespeare (14 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

what charms,

What conjuration, and what mighty magic

—
Othello
, I.iii.

The water was warm. It flowed soothingly down his body and eddied back and around and over him, gentling and lulling. His long hair was watercress—he rubbed it against his cheek and neck. A porcelain face looked out at him from a circle of milk-white hair, and the irises in its large eyes were tiny goldfish.

Ginny grabbed his hand hard. She pushed against him with one arm and sat up, clutching his hand. Shadows. Dark blotches moving against the dark sky.

“Jim?” he whispered.

“Silk?” The voice was hesitant.

“It’s me. And I’ve got Ginny with me.”

The black man climbed lithely down, stepped onto a boulder and balanced there. He looked hard and direct at one, then the other. Pine Leaf and Yellow Foot came down deliberately.

Ginny separated herself from Silk. He could feel the difference in her across the space between them, as though her inner music had changed.

“Ginny,” said Jim softly and firmly.

“Yes, Jim.” There was a metallic edge in her whisper.

“Are we gone under?”

“I hope not.”

“Surrounded?”

“Yes.”

Silence. Silk could see the mulatto’s face turned into his, and feel the dark eyes.

“Silk, I oughta scalp you myself,” Beckwourth said hard. He clenched and unclenched his huge fist.

“Save Siksikas the trouble,” rasped Pine Leaf.

“No. They promised.” Ginny separated the words, like tapping them out. Amazing how hard she sounded now.

Pine Leaf snorted.

Yellow Foot was squatting shoulder to shoulder with Silk, and getting materials out of the pouch he kept around his neck.

“Hell, we’re not even armed,” Jim moaned. He clubbed his fist on his knee. They’d all left their rifles in camp as nuisances, and maybe dangerous temptations. The crevice was indefensible, a trap.

“We’ll go at daylight,” Jim said.

“Better now,” said Ginny. “They wait, they’ll get nervous.”

“Daylight,” repeated Jim. “They’ll be less jumpy if they can see us.”

Silk flinched, then shivered. Yellow Foot, having painted himself a little, was sending up a keening sound, a thin wail, all the more eerie for starting in Silk’s ear.

Pine Leaf murmured in Crow to Jim and started painting herself as well.

“No need for death songs. Truly,” Ginny said in a flat voice. Jim shrugged. Pine Leaf and Yellow Foot ignored her.

So Jim asked how the Blackfeet had caught on, and Silk was relieved to know that they hadn’t just spotted him today—they knew Jim and Silk were here the whole time, and wanted to follow them back to their camp, but failed.

Pine Leaf joined Yellow Foot, singing her death song, an incantation that echoed hauntingly in the narrow, high crevice.

Jim talked it over with Ginny as if they weren’t singing. The report of a black man and a white youth, she said, made it easy to figure. Her father had sent Beckwourth and his friend she’d never met. Just like her father, she said bitterly—boss you around, but let someone else do the work.

She appreciated, though, their crossing hundreds of miles of enemy country to help her. That was friendship, she said—misguided friendship. And she was sorry for her deceit this afternoon, she told Silk. She took advantage of his youth.

That hurt. Silk was fighting back tears. And Ginny probably was barely older than he was. He’d been so stupid.

The warriors had decided to watch the invaders and do nothing and follow them back to their companions—get the whole lot. But when Jim and Silk left in the small hours, the trackers lost them in the dark and the rain.

Ginny was surprised that only four had come. Brave people. Silk looked at Jim’s face, but saw no flicker when the mulatto realized Ginny didn’t know about Antoine.

“What are you not telling us, Ginny?” Jim asked sharply.

“You know what you need to know.”

Silk thought she glanced sideways at him as she spoke.

Eventually the ululations died away, and the five sat a while in silence. As though the songs had kept him warm, Silk began to shiver.

At first light Jim stood up. “Let’s do it,” he said neutrally. He didn’t whisper now, and his voice seemed to clang.

Ginny led the way, then Pine Leaf, Yellow Foot, Silk, and Jim—each one clambered up the wall of the crevice and stepped into the chill dawn.

In each of the four directions stood Blackfoot warriors silhouetted against the gray sky, tall, dark, and still.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

I have no other but a woman’s reason

—
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
, I.ii

So far so good.

Silk kept looking at Jim’s face, struck by its impassivity. While the warriors circled them with bristling lances, marched them to camp roughly, and herded them into the council tipi, Jim’s expression had been still as deep water. An enemy could read nothing there, certainly not fear.

Pine Leaf was so blank she looked bored. Yellow Foot kept his head down and still, as though in silent prayer.

Silk kept his mind on emulating them, and trying to figure what power let them hide their turmoil.

The lodge was huge, and Silk thought maybe even Black-feet wouldn’t kill you in the council tipi.

As Silk sat down, a wave of dizziness swept over him. He wobbled, and caught himself with a hand.

He knew he showed sickly, and didn’t care. He was going to die.

Silk forced his attention back to the head man, the one behind the fire pit. He was getting the ceremonial smoking started, lighting the pipe to make the circle of the men around the fire pit. Maybe that was good. But the crowd of young bucks behind, and women, scared Silk plenty. The young bucks looked to be steaming with bloodlust. And among the Blackfeet, Silk had heard, the women did the torturing.

Silk, he barked at himself—Shame! You’re a goshdarn—no, a goddam—Judas goat. You’ve killed your friends! Enough self-pity!

Whether from fear or shame, he could feel the sweat run cold down his spine and down his crack and wet his buckskin pants.

When the pipe came to him, he puffed briefly, trying to look reverent, and passed it on. He knew he’d rushed it, but it felt like it would make him nauseous.

At last the talk started, in the Blackfoot language. Yellow Foot, next to Silk, whispered that the head man was asking why people of the Absaroka had come so far into Blackfoot lands. Then Jim told him (in words and signs) the simple truth, that they came to rescue Ginny, their friend.

When Jim finished, the head man said that his young men did not like the Absarokas here. They remembered all the crimes of the Absarokas against their fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters. They did not like to see Pine Leaf dressed in clothes stolen from a Blackfoot woman.

He paused ominously.

If the Absarokas came on a rescue mission, why did they bring a woman with them? Everyone knew Pine Leaf was a warrior, but they wanted to see what answer would be made.

“It is the way of Pine Leaf,” Jim answered simply.

The head man pursed his lips, then nodded. “Let others speak,” he said softly. He turned and motioned to someone in the back.

Ginny stood up in the crowd behind the circle of councilors and captives. Silk thrilled a little to see her. She had changed into a gorgeous blue blanket dress ornamented with elk’s teeth. She waited a moment before speaking, her face flushed with reined-in excitement.

“My friends,” she began in English, making signs at the same time, and looking at the captives. Her voice was firm and deep. Silk was proud of her. “I say friends because it was a gesture of friendship to risk your lives to save me. I have spoken to the people of the Blackfoot nation already and asked, since you came out of good will for me, that you be treated as my friends, and your lives spared.

“That, I hope, is what your captors must hear. This is what you need to hear: The Blackfoot people are now my people. I am here because I wish to be by the side of my husband.”

Silk was sure he blanched. He thought maybe even Jim’s face moved.

She motioned broadly with one arm to the man sitting by the door flap, in the position of least honor. He stood up.

“This man,” said Ginny, “is…” Here she spoke a Blackfoot name Silk did not catch.

Silk glared at the young brave. He was tall and yet looked broad-shouldered. His entire face was painted blue. Across his forehead, clear to the bridge of his nose, hung a flat hank of black hair striped vertically with yellow. He wore a white-man shirt of heavy cotton, with German-silver arm bands. Between his hide leggings hung a full-length breechcloth of brilliant scarlet, elaborately quilled.

Sumbuck is dressed up to show off, grumbled Silk to himself. And he had to admit the effect was, well…magnificent.

“I carry his child,” Ginny said simply, her face radiant.

“I have spoken of you as friends. And I have asked my brothers and sisters for your lives. Yet you are not true friends, because like my father, you do not understand me.” She spoke decisively, Silk thought, boldly, even heroically.

“I address these words to you, and ask you to carry them to my father. It was foolish of you not to know that an educated woman, a lady, can love a Blackfoot man. Foolish and arrogant, in the way of the whites. You think yourselves superior to the people I have chosen for my own. You do not know them or me.

“My husband is a splendid man, his brethren a magnificent people. I am proud to be one of them, to have my son be one of them.

“Look with your own eyes and see my love. Hear me. Learn.

“Until your people change, we must be enemies. If necessary I would kill you, or my father, the grandfather of our child. For my love is the Blackfoot people and their way of life and the hoop of the people in which my son will grow to be a man.” Her arm took in all those gathered in the council lodge, and in the village beyond, and in all the village that made up the sacred encampment.

“I believe that you came here in good faith. And I want you to carry my words to the man who calls himself my father. Let my people be.”

Ginny and her husband sat down. Silk wished to hell she hadn’t said that about killing them if necessary.

A man next to the chief began to speak, half audibly at first, casually. Yellow Foot’s fingers said that he was asking why the Blackfoot should even talk of letting these captives go. They were Crows, barbarians, the authors of a thousand crimes past and future. A Blackfoot should not soil his eyes by looking upon a living Crow.

One by one the other councilors spoke their minds. All recalled the legion crimes of the Absarokas against The People, and some recounted the particular offenses of Antelope Jim and Pine Leaf. All talked briefly, in an offhand manner. What point, they seemed to be saying, could there be to debating the fate of Absaroka captives? Everyone knew what must be done with them.

Silk kept struggling for breath, and striving for control by reminding himself that he deserved what was coming.

At last the head man himself spoke again. He acknowledged the arguments of his councilors, so strong as to need no emphasis and brook no rebuttal. Yet he confessed himself moved by the pleas of Little Prairie Dog Woman, as he called Ginny. Maybe he was getting weak of will, to be swayed by a woman’s tenderness. Yet he was.

Also, he said, he could see some small reasons to grant the captives life. It would be nice to think of these two fighters, Antelope Jim and Pine Leaf—what a boneless nation the Crows were, that a woman could be a war leader—in debt to the Blackfeet for life itself. For the rest of their days, at any moment of pleasure, such pleasure in living as a lowly Crow could find, they would have to think they owed this pleasure to the generosity of the Blackfeet.

Silk was thinking that he could tolerate dying—it was something anyone could do—if only he didn’t have to be tortured.

Suddenly he wondered if he would have to see Jim and Pine Leaf and Yellow foot tortured. He heaved a little and was glad he had nothing inside to throw up.

Besides, the head man went on, it was funny to see the great woman warrior reduced to housewife garb. If the Absarokas were men, one of them would keep her so always, and big-bellied, and not permit a woman to fight their battles. Maybe one of the men of the Blackfeet would want to keep her, and teach her to be a woman—would she not make a better Blackfoot woman than a Crow man? Pine Leaf’s face was blank as ever.

Silk had a terrible thought. Had he not turned his thoughts away from Pine Leaf to a woman he’d never seen, had he remembered whose banner he swore to lift high, Pine Leaf would not be about to die. Silk Jones was a darned traitor.

The head man had another thought or two in favor of the captives: He admired the spirit of Absarokas who would come so far to rescue a friend, especially a friend who was not of their people. And he respected the courage of anyone who would come only four strong among the Blackfeet, outnumbered as the herds of buffalo outnumber the boys who scout them. But this was also Absaroka arrogance, so perhaps it should be punished.

He shrugged. He didn’t know if they should live, his shoulders said—it was a matter of no great importance.

Perhaps, he said lightly, the young boy, the white-man Crow, could be allowed to take word back to the trader and the Crows, and the other three given the honor of dying bravely.

Silk felt a huge revulsion. He could barely keep himself from yelling out “No!” He was furious at the head man for angling toward that suggestion.

Suddenly a voice came from the rear—a woman’s voice. Silk thought Yellow Foot’s face almost showed feeling as he translated.

This woman, he whispered, was the woman of virtue chosen by the nation to lead the dance of the sun tomorrow. Her chastity spoke of the strength of the people, to be renewed once more tomorrow during the next sun.

The people should not be distracted by these captives on the eve of the great ceremony, she said. All minds should be turned to tomorrow, and to the sacrifices of the young men who would pay homage to the sun with their blood. Why not decide the fate of the captives on the day after? No one wanted to give these Crows any thought today, and certainly not tomorrow. Even Crows, if the ending of their lives started today, would not all be dead by morning.

Silk flinched at the hint about torture, and glanced at Yellow Foot’s face in shame—and saw there what looked like a glint of hope. And then Silk thought of it: Two days of life may give Antoine time to spring us.