A Wild Yearning, page 12
Ty didn't answer. When they got to the river's edge he flipped over a birchbark canoe and slid it into the water. Seizing her by the waist, he lifted her into it.
She looked around nervously. "Ty? We're not stealin' this thing, are we? I don't want to wind up in the Portsmouth gaol."
"We're only borrowing it for an hour or so." He got into the canoe with her. Leaning over, he cupped her face in his hands. "Delia, I'm going across the river and I want you with me, that's all. No other reason. I just want you with me."
He surprised himself with what he had said, for until the words came out he hadn't known his need was so desperate. Perhaps it was a simple matter of wanting her company—he was feeling lonely and restless, and she could always make him laugh.
His words had surprised her as well. Her eyes widened until they filled her face. She half stood up, and for a moment he thought she was going to scramble out of the canoe, then she sat down again. She dipped her head, refusing to look at him.
He paddled the canoe as he had been taught, the Abenaki way, holding his lower arms straight and using his whole upper body, rocking forward in a pushing, sculling motion. The paddle made a soft sucking sound as it left the water at the end of each stroke. He enjoyed the physical exertion of his muscles.
Inside, he felt like the string of a lute tuned so tightly it was about to break.
A light breeze brought with it the sharp fragrance of balsam and cedar. The clouds were breaking up, and late afternoon sun tinted the water a tawny gold. The tall, deep green trees that crowded in at the river's edge were reflected on the rippling surface. Green-streaked gold... the color of her eyes.
Even as he thought of her, she turned her head to look at him and smiled.
He didn't go directly across to Kittery but upriver instead. They rounded a bend and surprised a doe drinking at the bank. Her head jerked up and she stared at them, her eyes wide and unblinking, then she disappeared into the trees with a flip of her white tail.
Ty sent the canoe toward the bank where the doe had been. There was only a tiny strip of beach and stands of spruce and balsam fir encroached right down to the water line. The rainwet branches dripped onto their heads as they came ashore.
Ty paced the length of the small beach. He kicked at a rotting log that had been tossed up by the tide, his abrupt movement scaring a nearby sandpiper that had been picking among the pebbles.
Delia watched him, a small frown at the corners of her mouth. "This is a pretty spot, Ty," she said tentatively when the silence had drawn on too long.
"My father was killed here."
"Oh, Ty... I'm so sorry."
He had turned his back on her to look across the river. She came up beside him. He had been feeling cold, but then to his surprise she slipped her hand into his, intertwining their fingers, and it made him feel warm inside. Less lonely.
"By the Indians?" she asked softly.
"They were Pequawkets. Led by Frenchmen." Queen Anne's War it had been called, France against England, and the New World had merely been one of many battlegrounds. The existence of the war, the reasons for it, had meant nothing to a six-year-old boy living in a small clapboard house in The Maine on the edge of the wilderness. He still wasn't sure what it had been about.
"There had been talk all that fall about the Indian threat," he said. "About how the French had them stirred up by offering bounties for English scalps. Lots of folk left the settlements and went back to Boston. But my father had a business—he owned a shipworks and it was just starting to turn a profit. I can remember him and my mother talking about it, about how the business would fail if he had to abandon it, even for a year."
Ty paused, surprised at the vividness of the memory. Perhaps he remembered the scene so clearly because his mother had shouted at his father and she so rarely raised her voice. It had been his mother who was so dead set against leaving Kittery and the shipworks.
"Once winter came we all breathed easier," Ty went on. "But then one night we woke up to see a red glow in the sky from the other settlements burning upriver. It was a night in February and it had snowed again only that morning. We never expected to be attacked in the middle of winter with so much snow on the ground."
Ice had crusted the snow, and it crunched under their feet as they ran. The moon was out. Everything glittered silver, and little ice crystals danced on the wind. He kept falling down, and his father grabbed him by the arm, lifting him so high off the ground that his feet pumped in the air. He laughed aloud with excitement, too young to know he should have been afraid.
"There was a garrison house over in Portsmouth and the river was frozen solid. All we had to do was run across the ice and take shelter there." His eyes, dark with pain, scanned the narrow bank. "This was as far as we got."
They had seemed to come flying right out of the trunks of the trees, whooping their war cries. His mother screamed and his father fired off his musket once and then his mother screamed again. A hard arm wrapped around Ty's throat and he saw the flash of the tomahawk. Although he kicked and struggled, even his child's mind at last understood that he was about to die. Then his mother flung herself against the man who held him, and although others came and dragged his mother off, the moment was over and Ty knew he wouldn't die after all.
But it was too late for his father. They had stood right at this spot, he and his mother, while the Pequawkets danced around them, chanting their triumphant battle songs. A pool of bright scarlet darkened the white, white snow beneath his father's head, and icy crystals swirled around the bloody, gaping flesh where the dark brown hair had been.
Later, when Ty was fourteen and an Abenaki in every way but blood, he had gone on his first war party against the Mohawks to the west, and he had taken three scalps of his own. He had felt so proud and brave and lusty that day, and he had danced in triumph over his victims' deaths just as the Pequawkets had danced around his father.
Suddenly, Ty's legs began to tremble. Heedless of the wet ground, he sat among the rocks, settling Delia between his thighs. She leaned against his chest and wrapped her arms around her drawn-up legs. Ty thought that he liked having her there, just the feel of her within the circle his body made on the bank. A sense of calm and peace stole over him, perhaps the first he had felt in years... since that day he had been torn from his Abenaki family and brought back into the Yengi world.
They sat in silence for a long time. Then she stirred and rubbed her palm across his bent knee, and when she spoke he knew she had been thinking about him, about what he had told her, and he wished now that he hadn't done it. He felt suddenly embarrassed to have revealed himself in that way.
"They took you and your ma captive," she said. "What a terrible thing t' happen t' a boy of six."
He wanted to tell her it hadn't been so terrible. But then it probably had and he'd only made himself forget. "They loaded us down like beasts with packs," he said. "Stuff looted from the houses they had burned. And they marched us four hundred miles, all the way to Quebec. The French were paying ten pounds apiece for English prisoners, ten pounds for scalps, too, so if you couldn't keep up you got beat first—"
"But surely not ye! Ye were just a little boy."
"I was big enough to walk." He twisted a lock of her hair around his finger and pulled it behind her ear. "After a while the beatings stopped making an impression. You got so tired and cold you didn't care what they did to you anymore, and so you just laid down right there on the trail. That's when you got the tomahawk. We started out from Kittery with twenty-six captives, all women and children, and only ten of us made it to Quebec."
"I would've hated them," she said fiercely. "I would've wanted t' kill them all."
Ty thought that maybe not for himself, for he had been too young, but for the others it might have been hate that had kept them alive.
"What happened then?" Delia asked. "What happened once ye got t' Quebec?"
"The Pequawkets are a tribe of the Abenaki nation," he said. "Chiefs from all the Abenaki tribes had gathered that winter at Quebec for a powwow, a war council. One of them was Assacumbuit, a grand sachem from an Abenaki tribe known as the Norridgewocks. One night, the Pequawkets put on a big bragging show, with singing and dancing, all about the raid they had pulled off. They paraded us captives before the others. Assacumbuit saw my mother and decided he wanted her. He offered the Pequawket warrior who owned us fifty beaver hides for us both—a king's ransom. So instead of going into a French prison, we went back into The Maine with Assacumbuit and the Norridgewocks. And you might think her a coward, but she didn't hate him."
Delia's hand tightened on his knee. "Oh, no, Ty. She must have been so very brave t' endure all that. So strong."
"Not that strong. She died having Assacumbuit's child."
"Yet ye loved him," Delia said, uncannily guessing at the reason for his torment. "In spite of what they did t' ye an' yer ma, ye loved yer Indian father."
"Yes..." The admission felt torn from him. "Yes, I loved him."
"So why did ye leave him? Why did ye come back?"
"He made me," Ty said, but now he didn't want to talk about it anymore. Instinctively, she seemed to sense it, for she asked no more questions. She fell into a silence with him, leaning against his chest, and that strange sense of peace stole over Ty again, in spite of the memories.
No one, especially his grandfather, had understood why Ty had so hated being brought back into his parents' world. They couldn't understand that after ten years Ty was Abenaki; he could remember little of his earlier life and only a few words of his native tongue. He had a family, a man who had made him his son, and a stepbrother they called the Dreamer, who was both friend and rival, another boy to hunt and fight with. Yet when he was sixteen, a peace treaty had been signed between the Abenaki and the English that called for a repatriation of all captives, and so Assacumbuit had turned him over to the garrison at Wells.
That particular peace had lasted all of six weeks, but by then Ty's grandfather had sailed up from Boston to get him. Sir Patrick immediately set about making an Englishman of Ty, usually by flogging him with a cane whenever he lapsed into Abenaki or reverted to his Indian ways. In the Norridgewock village, Ty had been a sannup, a respected warrior, and to find himself being beaten like a slave or a woman had been a shameful experience.
He had endured the beatings in stoic silence, because he'd been raised in the Abenaki way to be respectful to his elders. But he reminded himself over and over that he had done nothing wrong, that he was proud to be Abenaki, to be Assacumbuit's son. Yet inevitably the doubts had crept in. Before long he felt neither Yengi nor Abenaki. He belonged nowhere, cared for no one. He had spent the last years of his youth lonely, confused, and very, very bitter. At times he wondered if he had ever outgrown those feelings, especially the loneliness.
Ty stirred, jerking his mind back to the present by an act of will. Unconsciously, he rubbed his cheek lightly across the top of her head. "It's time we were getting back," he said.
They drifted downriver with the current. Delia sat between Ty's legs, and he showed her how to paddle the canoe in the Abenaki way. He held her arm, directing the pull of the stroke He was surprised at the strength he could feel in her firm muscles as she flexed them. Her flesh was warm and she smelled of sassafras and of the piny forest they had left behind. The wind whipped a tendril of her hair across his mouth; her breast brushed against his arm. And in spite of his melancholy mood, his groin stirred and tightened.
Before, it had always been small, ephemeral blondes who would catch Ty's eye, icy women who had to be wooed and conquered first, then bedded. He had never thought he could be attracted to a girl like Delia, with all her rough edges and easy ways. A tavern wench who belonged only to the last man to have her. Yet she had dignity and pride, and something, something... Was it that she could be wooed and bedded but never conquered? he wondered. The thought disturbed him.
She craned her head around and looked up, and Ty was captivated by her lips as they smiled and parted. Her breasts rose and fell in time with the water lapping against the side of the canoe. The wind lifted her hair; it spread and fluttered like a raven's wing. Their eyes met, held, then flashed apart.
He watched her breasts lift as she drew in a breath and her mouth part open as she spoke. "If the Abenakis adopted ye, they must have given ye a name. What did they call ye?"
For a moment Ty was so bedazzled he couldn't think. "What?"
"Yer Abenaki name."
"Bedagi."
"Beda—" she started to repeat after him, but he put his hand across her mouth.
"The Abenaki believe you shouldn't use a person's name too often, or its power gets used up."
She nodded, her eyes serious. Still, he kept his fingers across her mouth for a moment longer and when he finally did let his hand fall, she wet her lips with her tongue, and Ty's breath caught. He shifted his weight to ease the pressure of his breeches tightening across what had become an iron-hard erection.
Her eyes held his and he felt himself being sucked like a twig into a whirlpool, drawn helplessly into those green-tawny depths. "Can ye say what it means in English—without usin' up its power?" she asked, her voice low and seductively husky.
Ty had to swallow before he could speak. "It means Big Thunder."
Delia burst into loud laughter.
"What the hell's so funny, brat?" he demanded, disappointed—or was it relieved?—that the spell had been broken.
"Oh, Ty... Ty!" Delia exclaimed between whoops. "Big Thunder—how it suits ye!"
"You've missed the whole point," he said, laughing now as well, although the tight swelling in his breeches remained.
Then the laughter left her face and that serious, beckoning look came back into her eyes. She had turned to face him, sitting back on her heels, but now she straightened and leaned forward to put her hands on his thighs. Before he could even guess what she was about to do, she brought her sweet mouth up to his.
The shock of her lips on his sent excitement surging back into Ty so hard and fast it rendered him momentarily dizzy. The canoe rocked dangerously, but he didn't notice. He clutched her shoulders and pressed his lips down savagely hard onto hers, plunging his tongue into her mouth. She fell backward, bringing him with her. He shuddered violently at the feel of her warm, pliant flesh, but in that same instant, the force of their weight slammed into the birchbark hull. The canoe rolled.
Ty kept his hands locked on Delia's shoulders as they were dumped with a splat into the water, but the canoe flipped over on top of them, landing a glancing blow on his brow. He blacked out for several seconds. When he came to, Delia was no longer in his arms and he was being pulled beneath the river surface by the force of the current.
Thrusting up with a hard kick, Ty tossed the streaming hair from his eyes, coughing up what he had swallowed while unconscious. He tread water, looking for Delia and fighting down a seizure of panic when he didn't spot her right away. The overturned canoe was drifting away from him downstream, and for a moment he had the terrifying thought that she might be trapped beneath it. Then suddenly her head and one arm bobbed up a few feet away and he relaxed with relief, only to see her black hair go down again and her thin, white hand disappear from sight.
He dove down after her. The snow-fed river was freezing and inky black; he could see nothing. He groped, feeling for her, and the fear and the cold squeezed the air from his lungs. His chest began to burn and the frigid water stabbed at his eyes. Just as he thought he would have to surface again, his hand brushed her cloak. He tangled his fist in it and surged up, dragging her with him.
She hadn't lost consciousness yet and he expected her to fight him from panic, but instead she lay limp within the cradle of his arm. He was easily able to swim the few dozen yards to the bank and haul her up onto its gravelly slope.
He helped support her as she struggled to push herself half upright, bracing on her straight, outstretched arms. She retched and coughed the water out of her stomach as her heaving lungs fought for air.
Finally, her stertorous breathing calmed. Pushing the wet hair out of her face with a shaky hand, she turned her head, giving Ty a weak smile. "I've never been too good at swimmin'."
"Jesus, Delia!" he shouted at her because he had been so damn scared. Then he noticed that her lips were blue and shivers rippled along the surface of her skin, and he got scared all over again.
Ty had never built a fire so fast in his life, at least not without a tinderbox. Gathering up bits of fibrous bark and small twigs, he laid a pile of kindling. Then he found a dead dry stick about the width of a thumb-span and flattened it on both sides with his jackknife so that it would lie firmly on the ground. He notched it, and then, taking a slender dry branch, he sharpened one end and set it into the notch of the larger stick. He twirled the spindle rapidly between his palms. After what seemed an eternity a thin line of smoke appeared.
He blew on the spark and then used larger branches and logs to build up the fire, and as the wood caught he scolded her.
"You are the most damn helpless creature it's ever been my misfortune to lead into the wilderness. You can't ride and you can't swim. You fall into pits and go wandering off by yourself and stumble across old Indians that you're just damn lucky don't take your scalp. You can't hit a standing barn with a rifle and I don't suppose you've even the remotest idea how to go about setting a snare."
"D-don't know," she said through chattering teeth, inching up so close to the fire she was practically sitting in it. "I've n-never tried t'."
He took off her sodden cloak and wrapped his arms around her, drawing her up to his chest, trying to impart some of his own body's warmth to her as well. "Well then, what the hell good are you?"
"I c-can catch fish with my bare hands."
He laughed. "I'd forgotten about that."
"An' I can make ye laugh, Ty. I've gotten real good at that."
"Ah, Jesus, brat..." He hugged her tightly to him and, unconsciously, because she was so close, he pressed his lips into her hair. He held her like that for a long while, until she stopped shivering.
