Queen of Swords
Page 19

I am the granddaughter of Falling-Day, who was a great healer. I am the great-granddaughter of Made-of-Bones, who was clan mother of the Wolf for five hundred moons. I am the great-great-granddaughter of Hawk-Woman, who killed an O’seronni chief with her own hands and fed his heart to her sons in the Hunger Moon, in the time when we were still many, and strong.
She wanted to tell these people about the other women who claimed her as their own, who had taught her well, women who did not look like the people around her now. The stories they wanted to hear had to do with other Indians, the tribes to the west and the battles they had fought.
And so Walking-Woman told them. As she spoke and Ben translated she noted how his tone shifted, and tensed, and grew strong with the flow of the story.
She spoke of the days she had been known as Walking-Woman. She told them of her husband, Strikes-the-Sky of the Seneca, of her uncle Strong-Words and the rest of her family. She told them about Tecumseh, also called Panther-in-the-Sky, and his brother, The Prophet, who had been the undoing of all their hopes. She told the story of her years living among the Real People on the Wabash at Tippecanoe and the day Harrison’s troops came and destroyed it all. She told how her uncle Strong-Words and his sons fought and died in that battle; she spoke of her own husband, who had been sent out to recruit other tribes to Tecumseh’s vision of a nation of red-skinned men and women united in their determination to keep some of this continent for themselves. How Strikes-the-Sky had gone out on this sacred mission and never returned.
She knew as she told this story that she was being judged, and that many found her lacking. Her husband had been a Red Stick from the north. It was men like him who had roused the Upper Creeks to a war. A war that had been lost, once and for all, at Horseshoe Creek, at unimaginable cost not to the whites, but to the rest of the Creek nation, and to every other tribe. It was because of that war that they were here, where they did not belong and did not want to be.
Hannah, agitated and truly alive for the first time in so many weeks, found she was thankful for the opportunity to tell her own story to people who understood, because their stories were much like her own.
An older man asked through Ben what she knew about the future, and whether it was true that Jackson was coming to this place to drive the Real People into the sea.
To Ben Hannah said, “Tell them I know less than they do. You can answer their questions about this war better than I can.”
“I can’t tell them what they want to hear,” Ben said, but he spoke for a long time anyway, and Hannah saw that the people liked and trusted and respected him. She understood almost nothing of what he said, but she knew, because it was all so familiar. Another O’seronni war, and the Indian tribes had to decide where they stood. Which side they would fight for, or if it might be possible, this time, to come away from another O’seronni war with the little they had intact.
In the dusk they walked back to the clinic on the rue Dauphine. Glad now of the shawl that she pulled close around her, Hannah walked with her head lowered. The past had come to claim her, and it would not be shaken off so easily.
“Was I wrong to take you there?”
Ben spoke French. Hannah wondered if he realized it, or if he meant to say something by that choice of language. You are among my kind now, or You must put aside what you think you know. Or maybe he was only tired, as she was. Tired but content, as she had felt after a day in the cornfield as a girl, cleansed by hard work and sweat, having earned her food and her rest.
“You know you were not,” Hannah said. But she thought of the last woman she had examined, no more than forty years old though she looked sixty. The troubles she brought to Hannah were the kind that nothing in the clinic apothecary could cure. Ungrateful children, stolen opportunities, broken promises that left a burning in the gut.
“What do you have for that?” The woman had been jittery and eager, her black eyes too bright as she caressed the grinding bowl in her lap. The smell of corn and sour sweat and bitter words hovered around her like a shroud. “You got something to bring justice down on a bad heart?”
“No,” Hannah had told her through Ben, glad for once that she did not speak the same language. “That’s not the kind of medicine I know about.” And she saw that she had said the right thing. She had passed some test set for her by Ben Savard, and earned his trust.
“While you’ve been out exploring,” Jennet said, “I’ve been whispering in corners with Rachel. Don’t grimace, cousin, it will give you wrinkles before your time.”
Hannah held up the shoe she had just pulled off her foot. “I’d give a great deal for a pair of moccasins, or even the doeskin to make my own. So tell me about Rachel, before you burst.”
“She’s in love. She’s really certain this time.”
Hannah pushed out a great breath. “Mr. Bellamy?”
“Oh no, Mr. Bellamy was days ago. You must pay better mind, Hannah. Rachel has given her heart to a M. Reynaud. Who is, she assures me, the perfect gentleman. Half French, half English, tall and fair, and he dances like an angel.”
“Does an angel dance?” Hannah asked, yawning.
“When he is not busy making his fortune, yes. He dances and pays court to a highly strung sixteen-year-old who takes great satisfaction in the drama.”
Something in Jennet’s tone caught Hannah’s attention. She turned to look at her cousin.
“Pay me no mind,” Jennet said, blushing a little. “Nathaniel was unsettled all afternoon and none of us could comfort him.”