A Flight of Arrows (39 page)

Two Hawks would never forget those hours in the wood, knowing it was his twin moving near him in the dark, moving into danger with their hearts as one—for finding Aubrey, at least. They had him back. He-Is-Taken. William Aubrey.
If
he returned to them.

Stone Thrower hadn't shared his doubt but had gone into that uproar
coming from the Senecas' camp as though all would be well, that he would bring back Reginald Aubrey and they would return to Oriska to find their women waiting to welcome them.

“They may be killing their prisoners, those warriors,” Stone Thrower had said when the shouting escalated. “It may be the British cannot stop them. I must go now.”

He'd taken bear grease and black powder from his bag and painted his face to help conceal him from familiar gazes. He had made Two Hawks wait for his brother, telling him that if he, Stone Thrower, hadn't returned by the time William found him again, to come close to the other camp but not into it.

“No matter what you hear or see. The two of you stay alive and return to your mother.”

So Two Hawks was left to crouch in the dark, worrying, praying. He thought of Anna Catherine. She did indeed have a bear's heart, coming deep into Oneida lands to find him. It filled his heart with courage. Yet this meant the time of facing her would come sooner. Would it be with joy, restoring her father to her? Or in grief, telling her of his death?

He heard his brother coming, English boots tramping the brush like a buck in rutting season, heedless.
You have much to learn, Brother
, he thought, then remembered his brother was exhausted and wounded besides. The fatigue of the day was a weight in his own bones. William's footfalls halted.

“Brother.” Two Hawks stood from the thicket several strides away. “I must teach you some bird call signals.”

William's face emerged from the darkness. He ignored the jibe about bird calls. “Aubrey isn't in Johnson's camp.” He paused, as if searching the darkness. “Where is…he?”

Suddenly angry, Two Hawks wanted to grasp his brother and tell him to call that man who had spent their lives suffering for his loss
Father
, but
he restrained himself. None of this was his brother's fault. They were still strangers to him. He must be patient.

“Our father is gone to see if Aubrey is among the Seneca prisoners.”

“He's
there
—in their camp?” Two Hawks heard William's alarm and hoped concern for their father was part of it. “Is he mad? Some of those warriors will have faced him in battle today.”

“You think he does not know it? Our father will take care.”

William fell silent, maybe feeling himself rebuked. Two Hawks started to say something softer but found he couldn't speak for the knot of worry in his throat. Silence grew, thick and tense, full of the voices of outraged Indians, the whine of mosquitoes, a hundred unasked questions. And the faces of the dead, foremost among them Ahnyero's. Other faces he'd seen in Oriska, living. Honyery and Louis Cook.

Beside him, his brother cleared his throat. “Stone Thrower…he's risking his life for my…for Aubrey.” There was a question in those halting words.
Why?
It was a question he'd asked their father too. Two Hawks hadn't found the words he needed to give answer before a twig snapped and his father's voice spoke out of the dark.

“I have said this once, but I will say it again. Listen now. The man you called
father
is a man I now call
brother
. We have the same Heavenly Father, he and I, and the sins for which I have been forgiven by that Father are no better or worse than his. What I do for him I would do for any brother. For my sons. Even for one who is not sure he wishes to be my son.”

Two Hawks heard William's intake of breath. He waited, but his brother didn't speak. “What is happening in that camp? Are they killing prisoners?”

“You do not wish to know what they are doing to their prisoners,” his father said.

“Is he there?” William cut in. “Did you see him?”

“I went among them and spoke to one who did not know me. I asked
after a certain warrior—one of those who took Aubrey. That one and others have started for their town far to the west. They took one prisoner with them. That prisoner was Aubrey.”

Two Hawks stood close enough to his brother to feel the shudder that went through him. “Which town? Ganundasaga?”

“Yes, and that may be good for us.”

“Good?” William asked. “How?”

“It is good,” Two Hawks explained, “because our father once lived among the Senecas there. They take him to the women.”

“What women?”

“The clan mothers.”

“Clan mothers?”

So much his brother did not know! “All children born to an Oneida mother have a clan. We are Turtle Clan.
You
are Turtle Clan.”

“I understand about clans,” William said impatiently. “But why mothers—women—at all? What have they to do with it?”

“It is the women of a clan who decide the fate of captives,” Stone Thrower said without the exasperation Two Hawks had not kept from his voice. “Whatever fallen warrior those Senecas mean to avenge, that warrior's women will decide Aubrey's fate. If he does not slow them too much and they kill him on the way.”

Two Hawks didn't wait for William to react to that. “There is time to overtake them?”

“Yes,” Stone Thrower said, but something in his tone gave warning of further evils.

William sensed it. “There is more, isn't there?”

Stone Thrower told them what it was and Two Hawks felt a quailing in his belly as he listened. A council of headmen made up of Mohawks, Senecas, Cayugas, and Onondagas had decided to send a bloody hatchet to the Oneidas. “We are now enemies to those who called us
brother
. The
Great Longhouse is torn down around us, and we are no longer a people bound together.”

William said nothing. There was no knowing what he thought or felt, or if he understood the significance of this terrible thing. The Confederacy that had long held their nations together was in tatters. Perhaps even the Great Tree of Peace had been uprooted. Only time would tell about that.

Many had seen this day coming and feared it. Now it was here.

“What do we do?” William asked, and Two Hawks knew whatever was happening between the nations didn't alter the path before them this night.

“We do what I could not do for you the day you were taken—we follow those who took Aubrey,” Stone Thrower told his firstborn. “And, Creator willing, we take him back.”

August 7, 1777

Oriska

I
t didn't need the fingers of one hand to count the loved ones Anna could name without attaching to them some dreadful anxiety. The rest stood in dire need of heavenly aid: Two Hawks, William, Stone Thrower.
Papa
. Even Lydia, who had roused by the time they'd carried her inside, only to stare unseeing at the fire in the center of the lodge they'd been given for shelter while Anna hovered and fretted, thoroughly ignored. It was Good Voice, with her refusal to despair, who brought Lydia back to herself.

“Clear Day says Senecas took him,” she'd said, kneeling beside the pallet where Lydia sat ashen and mute. “For a time my husband lived with them. He has friends among them. That was a very bad time for us, but look now, Heavenly Father is using it for our good. And better even than friends among men, Creator is with my husband. And
my sons
are with him.” She'd uttered that last in a tone of wonder, though of them all she alone had yet to see William.

Anna's eyes welled as Good Voice reached for her hand, sharing that wonder with her. When they'd wiped away their tears and looked at her again, Lydia's gaze, though still pain filled, had cleared.

“William is with them? I'm glad for that.” She looked around at them all. “Pray with me?”

Strikes-The-Water held back, but Anna, Clear Day, and Good Voice joined in beseeching heaven for the men they loved to be strong, to be
brave, to be kept safe, to yield to the will of the Almighty as He revealed it, as the fire sent its sparks flying upward. Then Lydia straightened and looked about them, as if remembering what lay beyond the bark walls of their borrowed shelter. “How many wounded are here?”

“Much wounded,” Clear Day said. “Some will not see another sun. Some will, with help.”

Lydia firmed her jaw with purpose. “Where is my medical case? Come, Anna. Let's go and see to them.”

Everyone in Oriska who had strength to wipe a brow, change a dressing, hold a warrior steady while a broken bone was made straight did those things many times through the night, but none tended with more devotion than Anna Catherine and Lydia. Watching them, it came into Good Voice's mind that every soldier or warrior they touched might have been Two Hawks, or William, or Reginald, for all the care they showed. Good Voice was doing her part, though she tired easily. To be with child again at forty summers…

“Rest,” Lydia told her often. In turn Good Voice kept a watchful eye on Lydia. She wasn't about to see her warriors bring Aubrey home to find this good woman had worked herself ill while they waited.

Of them all, Strikes-The-Water had the least patience with the injured. At some point during that first night, while no one was looking, she had left Oriska. Probably headed back to that fort still under siege. That one would go into danger with the boldness of a warrior, stubborn and reckless. Good Voice had sighed over her but thought,
She is as Creator made her
. Still it would be good to see her joined with a husband soon, though it wouldn't be with Two Hawks.

Some white soldiers had been put into bateaux, the morning after the battle, to be taken downriver to Fort Dayton to be nearer their people.
Anna Catherine oversaw their going. Many had taken comfort from her since the night hours when she came out of the lodge to see to their needs. She'd tended warriors too, those without people in Oriska to do for them. Anna Catherine was kind, gentle, steadfast, and brave. She would make a good wife and mother.

Good Voice stood on the riverbank where a stream came down to meet it, in the morning when the air was cool. Mist came off the water in tendrils. A doe with her fawn stepped out of the trees to drink. The bateaux for the wounded soldiers were filling up and departing. Watching Anna Catherine moving among the wounded, Good Voice could almost see the last shreds of disappointment over the choices of her second-born, what they would mean for his children down all the generations to come, rising off her like the mist lifting from the stream. Rising and drifting away.

Heavenly Father wove all things together for good, for those who followed His path. Did not the Book say it was so? That their families should be united now in love instead of hate…Was it not like a God of redemption to do such a thing?

May it be so with my firstborn. May my eyes see him at last. May his heart find joy in seeing me
.

On the second day after the battle, the remainder of the injured militia departed Oriska. Lydia rose from the last of them, a young man whose badly wounded leg she'd managed to save, as he was lifted on a makeshift litter. He grasped her hand at parting, thanked her, then was carried to the waiting bateau, and Lydia found herself abruptly bereft of purpose. Most of the warriors still in need of care were those of Oriska; the Oneida healers had them well in hand. A few from Kanowalohale needing further time to heal would soon be making their way to that town.

Bloodstained and bedraggled, Lydia swayed as she watched the bateau
carrying her last patient being poled away from the bank. As the vessel caught the river's current and was carried from sight, the fear she'd held at bay came crashing down with such force she nearly crumpled under it.

As if they had anticipated such a happening, beside her swiftly were Anna and Good Voice. “Now it is time for you to rest,” Good Voice told her.

Rest
. Lydia couldn't fathom the word. She closed her eyes but couldn't close her ears to Anna's plea.

“Don't lose hope, Lydia. They'll find Papa.”

“Will they?” Lydia searched for the hope that had so long sustained her. Reginald was free in his spirit—Clear Day had learned that much from Stone Thrower. Something had happened between those two inside Fort Stanwix, before they joined the battle. And there was that kiss…

Or was that fleeting promise of love all she would ever embrace? A grasping at smoke.

She wept. They helped her to the lodge, where she must have slept. Voices spoke, words beyond her comprehension. Firelight flickered. Sometimes a gentle hand stroked her brow. Anna's, she thought. The next thing she truly remembered was hearing Clear Day speaking in Oneida, of which she understood nothing until the very recognizable name of General Benedict Arnold passed his lips.

She sat up, blinking and disheveled. Clear Day sat by the fire, Good Voice on a bench nearby. On another Anna slept.

“The messenger rode fast,” Clear Day said, switching to English as a courtesy to her, “coming to find Herkimer with the news.”

Lydia had seen General Herkimer after the battle, but only briefly. He'd conducted himself with level-headed courage after the devastating ambush had been sprung—she'd heard it from the lips of nearly every man of his she'd tended—and was the saving of many lives. But his leg was grievously wounded, already festering. He'd been taken swiftly downriver to his home at the Little Falls Carry.

“This war chief, Arnold,” Clear Day was saying, “him who Aubrey fought with on the lake last autumn, he will be coming with more soldiers to relieve those at the fort. He will scatter the British back to the west. This is what the messenger had to say.”

There would be no invasion of the valley. Not now. God willing.

Good Voice said, “I think, Uncle, we will return to Kanowalohale to await my husband and my sons, and the one they go to recover.”

Almost Lydia spoke in protest of leaving Oriska, then reconsidered. “The warriors from Kanowalohale, the wounded ones, have they left yet?”

Good Voice met her gaze. “Soon they go. I thought we should go with them. Help them along.”

“I should rather do that than sit waiting.”

“That is my thought as well.”

“I will remain,” Clear Day said. “When they return I will tell my nephew and his sons where you may be found and come with them to you.”

“Iyo.”
Good Voice nodded toward Anna, lying with her hair fallen loose like a blanket, shining brown and gold in the firelight. “Let us wake this sleeping daughter of ours and make ready to return.”