A Different Flesh (4 page)

“Oh, God be thanked!” Wingfield gasped.

“But—” Cooper began, then looked helplessly at his wife, not sure how to go on. He seemed to make up. his mind. He and Lucas bent by Wingfield. Together, they manhandled Wingfield to his feet, guided his stumbling steps over to Joanna's cradle.

He moaned again. It was empty.

Anne sat on a hard wooden chair, her face buried in her hands. She had not stopped sobbing since she returned to her senses. She rocked back and forth in unending grief. “God, God, God have mercy on my dear Joanna,” she wailed.

“I will get her back,” Wingield said, “or take such a vengeance that no sim shall dare venture within miles of an Englishman ever again.”

“I want no vengeance,” Anne cried. “I want my darling babe again.”

The colonists' first efforts at pursuit had already failed. They had set dogs on the sims' trail less than an hour after the attack. With the blood Wingfield had drawn, the trail had been fresh and clear. Only for a while, though: the ground north of Jamestown was so full of ponds and streams that the dogs lost the scent. Further tracking had had to wait for daylight—and with every passing minute, the sims took themselves farther away.

“Why?” Anne asked. The question was not directed at anyone. “Why should even such heartless brutes snatch up a defenseless babe? What are they doing to her?”

Wingfield's imagination conjured up a horde of possibilities, each worse than the one before. He knew he could never mention even the least of them to his wife.

But her first agonized question puzzled him as well. He had never heard of the sims acting as they had that night. They killed, but they did not capture—he felt heartsick anew as he worked out the implications of that.

Caleb Lucas said, “I fear me they but sought specially tender flesh.” He spoke softly, so Anne would not hear.

Wingfield shook his head. The motion hurt. “Why take so great a risk for such small game?” He gritted his teeth at speaking of Joanna so, but went on, “They would have gained more meat by waiting until one of us stepped outside his cabin to ease himself, striking him down, and making away with him. If they had been cunning, they might have escaped notice till dawn.”

“Wherefore, then?” Lucas asked. Wingfield could only spread his hands.

“What do you purpose doing now?” Allan Cooper added.

“As I told Anne,” Wingfield said, rising. His head still throbbed dreadfully and he was wobbly on his feet, but purpose gave his voice iron. “I will search out the places where the sims encamp in their wanderings, and look for traces of Joanna. If God grant I find her living, I'll undertake a rescue. If it be otherwise—”

Henry Dale stuck his head in the cabin door. His lips stretched back in a savage grin. “—Then kill them all,” he finished for Wingfield. “'Twere best you do it anyhow, at first encounter.”

“No,” Wingfield said, “nor anyone else on my behalf, I pray you. Until I have certain knowledge my daughter is dead, I needs must act as if she yet lives, and do nothing to jeopardize her fate. A wholesale slaughter of sims might well inflame them all.”

“What cares one pack of beasts what befalls another?” Dale asked scornfully.

Allan Cooper had a comment more to the point. “Should you fare forth alone, Edward, I greatly doubt you'd work a wholesale slaughter in any case—more likely the sims would slay you.”

That set off fresh paroxysms of weeping from Anne. Wingfield looked daggers at the guard. “I can but do my best. My hunting has taught me somewhat of woodscraft, and bullet and bolt strike harder and farther than stones.” He spoke mostly for his wife's benefit; he knew too well Cooper was probably right. Still, he went on, “You'd try no less were it your Cecil.”

“Oh, aye, so I would,” Cooper said. “You misunderstand me, though. My thought was to come with you.”

“And I,” Henry Dale said. Caleb Lucas echoed him a moment later.

Tears stung Wingfield's eyes. Anne leapt from her chair and kissed each of his friends in turn. At any other time that would have shocked and angered him; now he thought it no less than their due.

Yet fear for his daughter forced expedience from him. He said, “Henry, I know your skill amongst the trees. But what of you, Allan? Stealth is paramount here, and clanking about armored a poor preparation for't.”

“Fear not on my score,” Cooper said. “Or ever I took the royal shilling, I had some nodding acquaintance with the Crown's estates and the game on them.” He grinned slyly. Wingfield asked no more questions; if Cooper had made his living poaching, he would never say so straight out.

“What will the council say, though, Allan?” Dale demanded. “They will not take kindly to a guardsman haring off at wild adventure.”

“Then damnation take them,” Cooper replied. “Am I not a free Englishman, able to do as I will rather than hark to seven carping fools? Every subject's duty is the king's; but every subject's soul is his own.”

“Well spoken! Imitate the action of the tiger!” cried Caleb Lucas, giving back one quote from Shakespeare for another.

The other three men were carefully studying him. Wingfield said, “You will correct me if I am wrong, Caleb, but is't not so your only forays into the forest have been as a lumberer?”

The young man gave a reluctant nod. He opened his mouth to speak, but Dale forestalled him: “Then you must stay behind. Edward has reason in judging this a task for none but the woodswise.”

Wingfield set a hand on Lucas's shoulder. “No sense in anger or disappointment, Caleb. I know the offer came in all sincerity.”

“And I,” Anne echoed softly. Lucas jerked his head in acknowledgment and left.

“Let's be at it, then,” Cooper said. “To our weapons, then meet here and away.” Wingfield knew the guard had no hope of finding Joanna alive when he heard Cooper warn Henry Dale, “Fetch plenty of powder and bullets.” Dale's brusque nod said the same.

Before noon, the three men reached the spot where the dogs had lost the sims' scent. As Wingfield had known it would, the trail led through the marshes that made up so much of the peninsula on which Jamestown lay. By unspoken consent, he and his companions paused to rest and to scrape at the mud clinging to their boots.

His crossbow at the ready, Wingfield looked back the way he had come, then to either side. For some time now, he had had a prickly feeling of being watched, though he told himself a sim would have to be mad to go so near the English settlement after the outrage of the night before.

But Cooper and Dale also seemed uneasy. The guard rubbed his chin, saying, “I like this not. I'm all a-jitter, as I've not felt since the poxy Spaniards snuck a patrol round our flank in Holland.”

“We'd best push on,” Henry Dale said. “We'll cast about upstream and down, in hopes of picking up tracks again. Were things otherwise, I'd urge us separate, one going one way and two the other, to speed the search. Now”—he bared his teeth in frustration—“'twere better we stayed in a body.”

The bushes quivered, about fifteen paces away. Three weapons swung up as one. But instead of a sim bursting from the undergrowth, out came Caleb Lucas. “You young idiot! We might have shot you!” Cooper snarled. His finger was tight on the trigger of his pistol; as a veteran soldier, he always favored firearms.

Lucas was even filthier than the men he faced. His grin flashed in his mud-spattered face. “Send me back no if you dare, my good sirs. These past two hours I've dogged your steps, betimes close enough to spit, and never did you tumble to it. Have I not, then, sufficient of the woodsman's art to accompany you farther?”

Wingfield removed the bolt from his bow, released the string. “I own myself beaten, Caleb, for how should we say you nay? The damsels back in town, though, will take your leaving hard.”

“They'll have plenty to company them whilst I'm gone, and shall be there on my return,” Lucas said cheerfully. “And in sooth, Edward, are we not off to rescue a fair young damsel of our own?”

“Not wondrous fair, perhaps, since the little lass favors me, but I take your meaning.” Wingfield considered. “We'll do as Henry proposed before your eruption, and divide to examine the streambank. Caleb, you'll come with me this way; Henry and Allan shall take the other. Half a mile either way, then back here to meet. A pistol-shot to signal a find; otherwise we go on as best we can. Agreed?”

Everyone nodded. A sergeant to the core, Cooper muttered, “As well I don't have Caleb with me—I want a man I know'll do as he's told.” Unabashed, Lucas came to such a rigid parody of attention that the others could not help laughing.

He and Wingfield hurried along the edge of the creek, their heads down. Herons and white-plumed egrets flapped away; frogs and turtles splashed into the turbid water. “There!” Lucas said. His finger stabbed forth. The print of a bare foot was pressed deeply into the mud.

“Good on you!” Wingfield clapped him on the back, drew out one pistol, and fired it into the air. He reloaded in the few minutes before Dale and Cooper came trotting up.

Dale, who was red as a tile, grunted when he spied the footprint. “The brutes did not slip far enough aside, eh, my hearties? Well, after them!”

The trail ran northwest, almost paralleling the James River but moving slowly away. It became harder to follow as the ground grew drier. And the effort of sticking to it meant the four trackers had to go more slowly than the sims they pursued.

By evening, the Englishmen were beyond the territory they knew well. Explorers had penetrated much farther into the interior of America, of course, but not all of them had come back—and with the colony's survival hanging by so slender a thread, exploration for its own sake won scant encouragement.

At last the thickening twilight made Wingfield stop. “We'll soon lose the trace,” he said, smacking fist into palm, “yet I misdoubt the sims push on still. What to do, what to do?”

Again Caleb Lucas came to the rescue. “Look there, between the two pines. Is't not a pillar of smoke, mayhap marking one of the sims' nests?”

“Marry, it is!” Wingfield turned to Allan Cooper, the most experienced of them at such estimations. “How far away do you make it?”

The guard's eyes narrowed as he thought. “The sims favor large blazes, as being less likely to go out Hmm, perhaps two, two-and-a-half miles—too far to reach before full dark.”

“All the better,” Dale said. “I'd liefer come on the accursed creatures with them unawares.” No one cared to disagree.

Cooper took the lead as they grew closer. “Reminds me of a scouting party I commanded outside Haarlem,” he remarked, and reminisced in quiet tones until they drew within a few hundred yards of the fire.

He stopped then, and waved the others to a halt behind him. “Let me go on alone a bit,” he whispered. “If they're smart as Spaniards (which says not much), they're apt to have a sentry out, and I'll need to scout a way past it.”

He slipped away before Henry Dale could voice the protest he was plainly forming. Whether a poacher or not, Cooper had told the truth: he could move silently in the woods. It was too dark to see his face when he reappeared, but his whisper was smug: “The bugger's there, just so. Here, hands and knees now, after me, and he'll never be the wiser.”

“That were so in any case,” Dale retorted, but he lowered himself with the others.

Again Wingfield caught the thick, warm stench from the sim. It never sensed him or his comrades, who crawled past downwind—another proof Cooper knew his business. The Englishmen peered through a last thin screen of bushes at the band of sims.

Perhaps twenty-five were there. Several slept close to the fire. From time to time, a grizzled male threw a fresh branch onto it; the sim would let it get low, but never close to going out.

Along with the odors of smoke and sim, the air still held the faint flavor of roasted, or rather burnt, meat. Bones from small game lay about. Every so often a sim would pick one up and gnaw on it.

The sims ate anything. A female turned over stones and popped the grubs and crawling things it found into its mouth or handed them to the toddling youngster beside it. The firekeeper grabbed moths out of the air with practiced skill, crunching them between its teeth.

Another, younger, male was using a hammer made from a piece of antler to chip flakes from a rock it held between its knees.

Wingfield studied the sims with growing disappointment. None bore a knife wound, and he saw no sign of Joanna. The three or four infants in the band all bore a finer coat of the dark brown hair that covered their elders. One was nursing at its mother's breast and fell asleep in its arms. The female sim set it down on a pile of leaves. It woke up and started to yowl. The mother picked it up and rocked it till it was quiet again.

Allan Cooper let out the ghost of a chuckle. “Looks familiar, that.”

“Aye,” Wingfield whispered back. “We may as well be off. We've not found here what we sought.”

To his surprise, Henry Dale said, “Wait.” He had been watching a pair of sims grooming each other, hands scurrying through hair after ticks, fleas, and lice. The scratchings and pickings had gradually turned to caresses and nuzzlings. Then the sims coupled by the fire like dogs, the male behind the female. The rest of the band paid no attention.

“Shameless animals,” Dale muttered, but he watched avidly until they were through.

He was, Wingfield recalled, unwed, and with his temper had enjoyed no luck among the single women at the settlement. Unslaked lust could drive a man to madness; Wingfield remembered the sinful longing with which his own eyes had followed a pretty cabin boy aboard the
Godspeed
.

But even if sure the prohibitions in Deuteronomy did not apply, he would have let sim females alone forever, no matter what vile rumor said Spaniards did. One could close one's eyes to the ugliness, hold one's nose against the stench, but how, in an embrace, could one keep from noticing the
hair
…?