Shaman, Robert Shea [new ebook reader .txt] 📗

"Why couldn't you will the estate to Nicole? She's a de Marion."

"Nicole cannot do battle with Raoul when she has eight children to care for. Her husband is an excellent man, but not a fighter. White Bear, you are the only one."

"I still think as a Sauk, Father. Among the Sauk one man may not own land. And to claim so much would be a great crime."

"In you the heritage of the de Marions and the Sauk claim to this land are indissolubly united. You will be doing this for the Sauk as well as for me and for yourself. I believe that it was God's plan that I father you, that you spend the first fifteen years of your life among the Sauk and then these past six as a white. Now you have a chance to be rich and to have power. You can learn how to use your wealth to protect your people. You can do much for them if you stay here and fight for what I give you."

Standing over his father, White Bear lifted his head and gazed up at the great stone and log house on the hilltop. He wondered whether he was not being foolishly stubborn, refusing Victoire and the land the château governed.

Pierre looked sad and weak and very old. All summer long White Bear, heartbroken, had watched him suffer and diminish. He knew he could do nothing to cure his father, and that his refusal to give him the answer he wanted to hear was prolonging his pain. White Bear felt he would agree to anything, if only it would give peace.

Looking into his father's pleading face, he saw that Pierre was using up his last strength. White Bear could not let the final word Pierre might hear from him be no.

White Bear could no longer separate his own anguish from Pierre's.[143]

He drew a deep breath in through his nostrils. "Yes, Father. I agree. I will take what you offer me."

The look on Pierre's face was like a sunrise. White Bear saw a warm, pink color flowing back into the pallid cheeks.

Pierre took White Bear's hand. His touch felt cool, but his grip was firm.

"Thank you, my son. I will walk the Trail of Souls with a happy heart."

Yes, you will go in peace, but I must stay to fight and suffer, White Bear thought. But he was glad that he could make his father happy. He leaned back against the tree and watched huge white clouds drift over the distant river.

"Let us make this a sacred agreement, son," Pierre said. "Bring the calumet and let us smoke together."

"Yes, Father." White Bear sighed and stood up. Slowly, as if he were dragging chains, he walked up the grassy slope to the front door of the house.

As he passed through the great hall he saw Armand Perrault, seeming almost as broad as he was tall, staring at him. Armand's eyes were as small and full of hatred as a cornered boar's. Feeling a chill, realizing this man was one of those he would have to fight when the time came, White Bear nodded to him as he went up the stairs to Pierre's room. Armand stood motionless.

A short time later White Bear was back at Pierre's side with the feather-bedecked calumet and a lit candle protected by a glass chimney. From his own room he had brought down the deerskin pouch holding his small supply of Turkish tobacco, purchased in New York. It would serve. All tobacco was a sacred gift of Earthmaker.

He dribbled the moist brown grains through his fingertips into the pipe's narrow bowl and packed the tobacco down gently. Pierre's faded blue eyes, the whites a sickly yellow color, watched him closely.

He held the candle flame to the tobacco and drew in a series of rapid puffs, feeling the smoke burning his mouth. When the pipe was well-lit, he turned it and held the mouthpiece to Pierre's lips.

Pierre took a long puff, held it in his mouth and let it out. White Bear's heart lurched with fear as Pierre began to cough. Holding his throat with one hand, Pierre gestured with his other hand for White Bear to draw on the pipe.[144]

The sight of beads of blood on his father's lips horrified White Bear. He took a corner of Pierre's blanket and wiped away the bright red drops. Then he took the pipe from his father's hands.

Grieving for the freedom he was giving up, he pulled the hot smoke in till it filled his mouth. He let its bitterness sink into his tongue as bitterness sank into his heart—the realization that this promise would cut him off forever from Redbird, from Sun Woman, from Owl Carver, from the life he longed to return to. He let the smoke out with a long sigh and laid the pipe down. He felt as if his life was over.

But he felt some relief, too, because he was no longer torn by indecision. Now Pierre and he were content to talk of small things—how full the corn bins were this year, what White Bear had seen and heard in New York City, whether it would rain again tomorrow.

Pierre's voice grew softer and softer, and gradually he drifted off to sleep. His grip on White Bear's hand was still strong. White Bear let his head rest against the tree trunk and returned to a favorite childhood pastime, trying to see animal shapes in the clouds.

He was not surprised when the Bear appeared at his side. The huge head, covered with fur white as the clouds, pushed past him, poking its black nose into Pierre's shoulder. Somehow White Bear knew that Pierre would feel no fear when he awoke, even though he had never seen the Bear before.

Pierre's eyes opened, and he looked up at the Bear and, as White Bear had expected, only sighed and smiled.

"Eh bien, je suis content." And Pierre got to his feet as easily as if he had never been sick.

Pierre did not say good-bye, but White Bear had not expected him to. They had said their good-byes already. White Bear remained where he was, sitting with his back to the maple tree.

With his left hand lifted to rest on the high hump at the Bear's shoulder, Pierre walked down the slope. White Bear saw, rising from the rim of the hill, the arc of a rainbow.

Pierre walked the rainbow path with the long, vigorous stride of a young man. The Bear accompanied him with a rolling gait, looking like the biggest dog that ever lived walking beside a hunter. White Bear smiled to watch them.

They climbed the archway of color that leaped out over the Great River until at last they disappeared in the dazzling disk of the sun.[145]

White Bear's head fell back against the bark of the tree, and he closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, his father was lying beside him, still holding his hand. But Pierre's grip was without strength. He lay with his head sunk in the pillow, his mouth fallen open, the whites of his eyes showing between half-closed lids. He was not breathing.

White Bear's tears came hot. He heard a voice—his own voice—rising in his chest.

"Hu-hu-huuuu ... Whu-whu-whuuuu ..." It was the sound mourners made at Sauk funerals.

He wrapped his arms around his knees and rocked back and forth, sobbing and keening in the way of his people. Soon he would have to get up and go into the château and tell people Pierre de Marion was dead. He must be the first to bring the news to poor Grandpapa. But for a while he would sit alone with his father and wail for him.

Sitting on the ground under the maple tree, he looked down and was not surprised to see marks in the bare, damp earth. The prints of wide pads twice the size of a man's feet. At the end of each print, deep holes left by five claws.

Raoul did not think he could put up with much more of this funeral. He had to wait till it was all over before he could make himself master of Victoire, and he wanted desperately to act now. He tried to calm himself by remembering the Indians he'd stalked and killed at Saukenuk last May and June.

Raoul and the fifty men he'd recruited to represent Smith County in the state militia had arrived at the Rock River in style, carried up the Mississippi from Victor to Fort Armstrong, at the mouth of the Rock River, on Raoul's new steamer Victory. Paid for with the profits of the lead mine, the Victory was propelled by two side paddle wheels, and it could make the St. Louis-Galena round trip in exactly a week.

They'd come to hunt Indians and Raoul had made sure they did, camping in the woods on the south side of the Rock River opposite the Indian village and shooting at redskins whenever they had a chance. It pleased Raoul to think they'd gotten half a dozen, maybe more.

Finally fed up with talking, General Gaines had ordered a general[146] assault on Black Hawk's town at the end of June. The militia were eager to slaughter every Indian in Saukenuk, and they'd swept in.

And the damned, sneaking redskins were gone. Seeing themselves outnumbered, they'd slipped out of the village, down the Rock River and across the Mississippi the night before. The Smith County boys, along with the other militiamen, were in a fury of frustration. They had to be content with the poor-second satisfaction of burning the Indian town to the ground.

To Raoul's great annoyance, instead of pursuing Black Hawk, Gaines sent a message to the chief asking for yet another parley. Black Hawk and some of his braves came back across the river to talk peace. Just like he hadn't shown the whole world what a coward he really was, the stubborn old Indian had marched up to Gaines's tent walking like a peacock, with feathers in his hair.

Hang the redskinned son of a bitch, was what Raoul thought. Instead, Gaines just made him sign another fool treaty—as if the Indians ever honored any treaties—and even promised to send them corn because they hadn't had time to plant any.

The disgusted militiamen called it the Corn Treaty. Old Gaines must be almost as big a coward as Black Hawk.

Raoul and the Smith County boys hung around the Rock River, sniping at Indians in canoes till their provisions ran out; they flagged the Victory down on her next northbound trip and rode her home.

Home, where what was going on made Raoul madder than ever. Pierre was dying and the mongrel—from the same tribe Raoul had been fighting down on the Rock River—was strutting around as if he already owned Victoire.

That would end today. If Raoul could pull it off.

Raoul eyed Nancy Hale, standing only a few feet from him among the two hundred or so mourners in the great hall of Victoire. What would she think, Raoul wondered, when he played his hand today? He pictured what the tall blond woman would look like naked under him in bed.

Oh, he'd make her sweat and moan and thank him for it.

But first, of course, he had to succeed today. He had to drive the mongrel away before he could court Nancy. Whether her preacher father approved of him or not, he couldn't turn away one of the biggest landowners in Illinois.[147]

And that's what he'd be, after today.

He didn't see how he could fail. Surely the servants and the townspeople wouldn't take the mongrel's part.

Still warming himself by staring at Nancy Hale's straight back, Raoul thanked God he'd never been quite able to bring himself to marry Clarissa.

He felt a twinge of unease as he recalled that taking up with Nancy would mean kicking Clarissa out of his bed, and that might mean trouble with Eli. To his relief, Eli had accepted Raoul's not marrying Clarissa, even after she bore him two kids. But that was only because Eli figured it would happen eventually, maybe after Raoul got control of the estate.

Well, once he had the estate, he comforted himself, he could see that Clarissa and their two out-of-wedlock boys were well taken care of.

It galled Raoul to be so dependent on a man like Eli, to be—he hated to admit it to himself—afraid of him. A heap depended on Eli's playing his part today in helping him get control of the estate. Today, Eli would be leading the Smith County boys, ones who'd been at the Rock River last June. Having been offered a good day's pay, they would do a little more Indian fighting.

Raoul felt as if he were going to burst. He couldn't stand this waiting, while the priest droned on