After seventeen days of travelling, they reached the Chickasaw nation. Though the chief greeted them with the customary displays of friendship and the white men responded as tradition demanded, Auguste had the good sense to be afraid.
When it was time for Babelon to return to Mobile, the men embraced. Auguste closed his eyes as he pressed his friend’s back and his heart tightened with something that was almost homesickness.
‘Keep a garden,’ Babelon called as he stepped into the pirogue and motioned to the guide to push off. ‘If you must be imprisoned here, you might at least turn it to your advantage.’
Auguste did not trust himself to answer. As the pirogue pulled out into the fast water at the centre of the stream, he turned and strode briskly away up the bank. Babelon called out after him, something about being wary. Auguste did not turn round nor did he slow his pace. It was only when he reached the village that he opened his fists and let the last of his dismay run like sand from his uncurled fingers.
At first Auguste’s presence among the Chickasaw aroused suspicion and hostility. As he passed through the village, he cast behind him a shadow of suppressed whispers and silences. Discourses were bundled up and away from him as he approached, just as the more genteel women of La Rochelle had bundled up their skirts in winter to avoid dirtying them in a muddy puddle. The
minko
had lodged him with an elder by the name of Chulahuma. Sometimes, when he woke in the night, he could see the eyes of the elder gleaming in the darkness.
But Auguste was a good hostage and a good spy. Cautious by temperament, he had a gift for indistinctness. Desirous neither of savage companionship nor of the deference customarily demanded by his kind, he obscured himself in the ebb and flow of a life to which he had long been accustomed. The rhythms of it soothed him. He did not hunt with the men, for they did not wish it, but he fished and made tools and sketched, eking out the rough paper he had brought with him from Mobile. There was solace in the unfamiliar freedom from responsibility, from the care of any living thing.
There was solace too in isolation. The Chickasaw were not like the Ouma. They did not pretend to find a place for him among them. To them he was a paleface, unfathomed and unfathomable, separated by the uncrossable chasms of colour and civilisation and the Catholic Church, and Auguste was content to keep it so, though his religion amounted to little more than a vague feeling of dread and a powerful fear of death. He had gone to Mass in Mobile once when he returned from the Ouma, just to see. The church in La Rochelle had coloured glass and incense and men in tall hats who chased away boys like him and Jean when they crept in for the warmth of it, but the chapel in the fort had proved to be not much of anything, just a hut with a rough cross on the wall. Auguste had not known whether to be consoled or disappointed.
As the last weeks of summer thickened and set, Auguste grew fluent in the Chickasaw tongue. Otherwise there was little to do. The English did not come, only the occasional Canadian trader in search of deerskins. Time hung heavy on him. It was almost by accident that he began once more to gather the insects and plants that caught his attention. He sketched the beetles that the Chickasaw ground for dye and the thorn apple that was used in Chickasaw medicine, inducing as it did a condition of waking sleep close to idiocy. He sketched the traders too, surreptitiously. He grew deft at capturing a face in a few lines. The likenesses were accurate and unkind. When Chulahuma saw them, he laughed and took the charcoal from his hand so that he might make marks on the paper of his own.
And so it was that Auguste lived among the savages quietly, without ceremony or stealth. He seldom spoke unless first spoken to and never asked a question nor proffered an opinion. Such directness was unnecessary. The Chickasaw village, like most villages, resembled a water pouch; though by and large it retained its contents, there was always enough leakage to identify what was inside.
Auguste learned much. He learned that the Chickasaw were skilled in the art of diplomacy, keeping as their friends both English and French and ensuring that each always thought themselves at a slight advantage, so that they might find themselves in a profitless alliance with neither. He learned too that they found the lure of trade enticing and liquor of any kind irresistible, for liquor induced in them the dream state in which they conversed with the spirits of their ancestors. Several of the Chickasaw warriors were drunk a good deal. Sometimes Auguste drank with them, though not to encourage the voices in his head. On the contrary, he drank to shut them up.
Meanwhile he sent word with those traders that passed through that all was steady. At night he lay on his cot of stretched deerskin and rehearsed Chickasaw words in his head. He thought that if he dreamed in Chickasaw he might find peace. Night after night she came to him when he slept. In his dreams she was always big with child, implausibly big, so big that her arms could not reach around her, and always beside her was the slave, so close that they might have been joined together like freaks at the fair, her splayed slave hands dark against her mistress’s swollen belly.
Then one day a band of elders from a village far off in the westernmost part of the Chickasaw nation came to the village. Auguste was at the river. When he returned to the settlement at dusk, he met a group of hunters also returning to the village. They carried a pair of deer suspended on poles. The beasts’ heads lolled back, their throats and bellies pale in the dwindling light, and, as the men walked, the swinging carcasses scattered petals of blood on the foot-pressed earth. They were almost at the village when they saw a band of their own men walking swiftly to meet them. Their faces were grim. One of them muttered something to the leader of the hunting party that Auguste did not catch. The hunter nodded. Rapidly they walked over to Auguste. One took his fishing pole and basket. The other two seized him by the arms and hustled him forward.
‘What are you doing?’ he protested. ‘Where are you taking me?’
They did not answer. When he resisted them, they twisted his flesh, half lifting him from the ground. He called out to the other hunters, pleading with them to help him, but they did not move. The warriors dragged him to a windowless hut of mud and palmetto, sunk low into the earth. In the dim light he could make out a worn deerskin thrown on the dirt floor and, in one corner, a pot of water and some cold corn porridge, cut into rough squares. Otherwise the hut was empty. There was a slash of white, turning the men into statues.
‘Why?’ he cried out. ‘What is my crime?’
There was the slap and pull of leather as the door was fastened against him and then, for a moment, silence before the thunder exploded into the sky like a cannon.
He remained in the hut for two days. It rained incessantly, battering against the mud roof of the hut. No one came. Soon there was no more water. Time kinked and stretched. Sometimes he was very afraid. His imagination betrayed him and his bowel also. The damp seeped into his bones. He was very cold.
It was late on the third day when they came for him. When they hauled him out he stumbled, overcome with dizziness and the clean chill of the air. It had stopped raining and he had not heard it. He gulped the air like water and caught his own powerful animal stink. The men dragged him towards the
minko
’s hut. Smoke rose like flour in the darkness. He knew both men from the hunt. He thought of the deer swinging from the pole by its hooves, eyes rolled back in its sagging head, tongue slack. A skilled hunter could skin and gut a deer in four incisions. Again his bowel turned to water, and he whimpered in fear and disgust.
There were perhaps twelve of them gathered there, ranged in a half-circle around a pyramid of wood thatched with palmetto brush. The wood was wet and the fire hissed and spat. In the reluctant flames the men’s faces were polished copper. Pressing on his shoulders, Auguste’s guards forced him down into a squat. He blinked, gazing up into the circle.
From his place at its centre, the high
minko
regarded him expressionlessly. Then he nodded. Auguste felt his arms jerk from their sockets as his wrists were twisted behind his back and tied tightly with a strip of leather. When they released him he fell forward, striking his nose upon the ground. There was a rock embedded in the mud and the pain was flat and dull. He felt the gush of blood, tasted its metalled warmth and the cold mud upon his lips. Blearily he raised his head.
‘Raise him up,’ ordered the high
minko
’s speaker, for it was the custom that the chief himself remain silent when among his council. Auguste lurched forward as an arm hooked beneath his forearms and hauled him roughly to standing. Fingers twisted in his hair close to his scalp, forcing his head backwards. He imagined the slice of the knife around the base of his skull, flesh peeled expertly from bone. A warm rush of urine bloomed upon his thighs.
‘Witness the faithless deceiver. May vengeance be ours.’
The high
minko
raised his right hand. A warrior stepped in front of Auguste, a leather flog held aloft. There was a silence taut as a violin string and then a wild burning pain as the lash caught him, marking the crook of neck and shoulder in sudden scarlet.
‘The oath of kinship is a sacred pledge binding our nations together in the sight of our ancestors,’ intoned the speaker. ‘There is no greater offence beneath the sun than treachery.’
The lash came again. Auguste cried out.
‘The warrior who would harm those to whom he is contracted in friendship must be burned to ash and his spirits banished to drift alone and in great agony. What say you?’
Slowly the warrior raised the flog.
‘If your nation is betrayed,’ Auguste whispered, ‘then I am also. I know nothing of any treachery. I swear it.’
The lash bit. Scraps of thought rose from Auguste’s head like moths. Only the pain made sense.
‘You collect the thorn apple to dull our senses. You steal the likeness of every pale-faced stranger who passes through our village. But still you know nothing. Do you think our great nation eyeless, witless?’
Auguste swallowed, his tongue clumsy in his shrivelled mouth.
‘Honoured
minko
, the plants, the drawings – they are but amusements. They signify nothing.’
The lash came again, deeper this time. The ring of faces smeared and slid.
‘See the fire that burns for you, betrayer. Do you not think the time nigh for confession?’
Auguste’s eyes closed. A hand jerked back his head, so that his shoulder screamed.
‘What would you have me confess?’ he pleaded. ‘I know nothing.’
‘Then the burden of your heart’s treachery shall weigh your spirit to the earth forever to relive in ceaseless anguish the agony of your death. Men, prepare the fire.’
Auguste trembled as he raised his head.
‘Kill me,’ he whispered, ‘and you shall bring down upon your nation all the righteous rage and vengeance of my people, whose blood you foully and baselessly shed.’
When the lash cracked the air, his legs buckled.
‘It is our vengeance you should fear, the vengeance of a blameless nation lured by treachery and false promises into certain slaughter at the hands of its old enemies,’ the
minko
’s speaker cried. ‘Did you truly think us so easily duped, that at your bidding we would walk obediently into the bloody ambush of the Choctaw and never smell the trickery of it?’
Auguste blinked in disbelief at the speaker, his drifting senses sharpened by shock.
‘See how the white man’s silence speaks more strongly than his denials.’
‘You are wrong. Your charges are baseless. We wish you for our allies.’
This time the lash came twice. The wound curled back its red lips to reveal a white gleam of bone.
‘Do you call our kinsmen liars, paleface?’
‘Not liars, sir,’ Auguste said with an effort. ‘But mistaken.’
‘Mistaken? Mistaken about the English trader who is not English but a brother of yours, bound in the pay of your own chief? Mistaken about the English musket he promises us for every Choctaw prisoner we bring him? Or mistaken about the false brother who eats of our meat only to despatch us to slaughter?’
A dreadful cold took hold of Auguste. He knew then that he would die. Summoning all that remained of his strength, he raised his head.
‘On all counts mistaken,’ he said again.
A man in a cloak of feathers moved in front of Auguste. It was Chulahuma. Above his head he held a stick the thickness of a man’s wrist. It gleamed wet in the firelight.
‘Why must you persist in your deceptions?’ the
minko
’s speaker shouted. ‘Your calumnies can but dishonour you further.’
Somewhere far off there were raised voices, the crack of a musket. A youth entered the circle at a run, a burning torch held aloft. Auguste saw how the sinews stood out on Chulahuma’s neck as he brought the stick down with all his strength. Something in Auguste’s shoulder exploded. There was a rushing slackness in Auguste’s limbs and he knew he would faint.
‘Can’t you see?’ he whispered as he began to fall. ‘My honour is all that is left of me.’
W
hen it was winter Jean-Claude came back to Mobile. By then there was no disguising her condition. She turned as he pushed open the door and he looked at her and she smiled, willing him to smile too.
‘Look at you,’ he said, and he opened his eyes wide and shook his head and twisted up his mouth. She took his face in her hands. He was almost smiling.
‘You’re home,’ she said softly, and though she blinked the tears spilled from her eyes and ran down her cheeks.
‘Surely it is not so bad as all that,’ he replied.
And she laughed a choked-up laugh, feeling his beard coarse and unfamiliar against her palms.
‘You have been gone so long. I – thank God you are safe.’