Shaman Part 80

"I would tell you if I had done that. I did want to, and she wanted to, but I would not. Does it make you hate her to know she wanted that of me?"

Redbird's head was bowed so that he could not see her face. "You are a man many women would want. I cannot hate them all."

"When I asked you to untie Nancy today and take her to our wickiup, you could have refused me, as Running Deer did to Wolf Paw. Then the women would have cut her to pieces. I could not have stopped them. I thank you for honoring my wishes."

Redbird said, "You would have tried to stop them, and you would have been hurt. I did not want that to happen." She looked up at him suddenly, smiling. "And I knew that people would say, 'See, White Bear's wife does as he asks, but Wolf Paw's wife makes him look foolish.' It felt good to make Wolf Paw look foolish, after what he did to us."

It warmed him to hear her say "us."

"Now I want to do something more for her," he said. "But I can only do it if you will say yes to it." He held his breath.

Redbird said, "If you made her your wife, then no one in the band would dare to hurt her."

White Bear let out a deep sigh. He should have known her thoughts would move as swiftly as his own. He had wondered how to say it to her, and she had said it for him.

"Only to protect her. Not to be truly my wife. Will you consent?"

She stroked the back of his hand. "I think it would be a good thing if we keep her safe. You and I did not want our people to fight and kill the pale eyes." She pressed her warm hand against his. "At least we can keep them from killing this one."

The ripples on the lake reflected fragments of moonlight. White Bear felt he could see his love for Redbird, and it looked like what lay before him--a lake of silver. He leaned against her, and her back rested against his arm.

"I promise you I will not bed with her."

She smiled at him again. "Why promise that?"

The question surprised him. "You are my true wife and the only wife I want." He recalled Black Hawk's loyalty to Singing Bird. That was the right way to live.

Redbird said, "If you do go to her in the night, I will understand.

Especially now when I am so big and we cannot get together easily. I believe you when you say you love me more than her. But she is tall and has hair like gold and very white skin, and I am small and have brown skin. Perhaps the pale eyes in you would prefer her."

"I think the pale eyes in me and the Sauk in me are one. And that one prefers you."

She took his hand and moved it down her body till he felt the warm, soft place whence, in little more than a moon, their baby would emerge.

"I want to do this with you now," she whispered. "I think we can, if you go into me only a little way."

When Redbird and White Bear returned to their wickiup, the crescent moon had reached the high point of its trail across the sky. Within the simple shelter he and Redbird had built, it was too dark to see anyone.

His mother's voice whispered, "Eagle Feather and Yellow Hair are sleeping. She is terribly frightened, but she has been through so much she is exhausted."

"I thank you for helping her," White Bear whispered. "In the morning I must tell her that Black Hawk will not let her go."

"That makes me sad for her," said Sun Woman. "She is in such misery. I sense a strength in her, but this is a very bad time for her. You must not stop being kind to her, not even for a moment."

Sun Woman ducked out through the doorway of the wickiup.

Nancy was sleeping in Redbird's bed. Redbird and White Bear lay down together on his pallet of reeds and blankets, her back against his chest, and slept.

When White Bear's eyes opened, the faint light filtering through the layer of bark overhead let him see a figure sitting up across from him.

Outside, he heard the sounds of the camp stirring, men and women calling to one another, horses stamping.

He felt a rush of pity as he recognized Nancy. What she must be feeling at this moment!

"Oh my G.o.d," he heard her say. "Lord Jesus, help me." It must have taken her a moment to realize where she was.

"Nancy," he said, trying to keep his voice calm and pleasant, "come with me and let us talk."

They left the wickiup and she walked through the camp with her eyes on the ground, too frightened, he supposed, to look about her. People stared, but White Bear wore a forbidding look, and they kept their distance.

She had on a doeskin dress that Sun Woman had given her, and she had done up her two blond braids the way she always had. He felt a little catch in his throat as he looked at her and remembered those not-accidental meetings on the prairie near Victoire.

Every so often as they walked along she twisted her shoulders inside the soft leather and rubbed her arms uncomfortably. They pa.s.sed a group of warriors who had felled a big oak tree and were burning and sc.r.a.ping its inside to make a dugout. The men stopped work to watch her go by.

Seeing the way they looked at her, White Bear thought, _Yes, she must marry me_. He hoped he could persuade her that it would be the only way for her to be safe.

He led her to the western edge of the high ground on which the band had made their camp. They stopped when the earth underfoot turned soft and wet. Before them lay an expanse of reeds that vanished into morning mist.

"Did you talk to Black Hawk?" she asked, her voice trembling. "Can I get away from here?"

White Bear remembered Sun Woman's admonition to be kind to Nancy at every moment. He tried to think how best to tell her the bad news, how to add only the smallest possible amount of fear to her burden.

"Black Hawk is pleased that I stopped the people from hurting you yesterday," he began tentatively. "He said the white men despise Indians when they kill their prisoners."

Her lips trembled. "He's not going to let me go, is he?" she said, and sobs began to shake her body. When she was able, she turned pleadingly toward him. "Couldn't you do anything for me?"

White Bear spread his hands helplessly. "I talked to him as best I could." He tried to tell her something encouraging. "He just wants to keep you until he can talk to the soldiers and make some kind of a truce."

She drew away from him, her red-rimmed eyes wide. "A truce? Does Black Hawk really think he can make a truce? Don't you realize what _your people_, your brave Indians, have been doing all over the frontier?

Burnings and ma.s.sacres everywhere. I told you what they did at Victor.

Do you think the soldiers would ever be willing to talk peace with Black Hawk now?"

White Bear had listened to the returning warriors' tales of victories over the long knives at Kellogg's Grove, at Indian Creek, along the Checagou-Galena road. In despair he had realized that what the Sauk saw as battles in a war to defend their homeland were, to the white people of Illinois, b.l.o.o.d.y and abominable crimes. Who, after all, had Black Hawk's war parties been killing? Some soldiers, but mostly farmers and their wives and children.

It tormented him now, as it did day and night, that no one could see the bloodshed as he did, with the eyes of both a white man and a Sauk. To him, what the Sauk were doing was horrible, but it was done out of a desperate need to cling to the land that meant life to them.

And Nancy's capture showed him how much his years among the pale eyes had changed him. Even if Wolf Paw had brought back a captive woman who was a stranger to him, he would have tried to save her. Nor could he feel that a people willing to torture any woman to death were fully _his_ people.

Nancy shook her head. "There will be no truce, Auguste. They're coming to destroy you."

"We asked for peace," he began, "before all this killing started. I went with a white flag myself--"

Her chest heaved, and her face was a mottled red and white.

"They don't _want_ peace with you. Your braves will kill me when they realize that. Or the soldiers will kill me when they kill all of your people."

"No!" he cried, knowing the truth in her words and fighting the agony within.