A Different Flesh (5 page)

The sound of the edge of a hand striking a wrist and a harsh whispered curse snapped Wingfield from his lascivious reverie. “Be damned to you right back, Henry!” Caleb Lucas said hotly. “Edward said no killings whilst his daughter remains stolen, and if you come to his aid you can do his bidding.”

Dale picked up his pistol, which by good luck had fallen on soft grass and neither made a betraying noise nor discharged. “The filthy creatures all deserve to die,” he growled, barely bothering to hold his voice low.

His face was pitiless as a wolf's. Wingfield abruptly realized Dale had never expected to find Joanna alive, but was along only for revenge. If by some stroke of fortune they should come across the baby, his comrade might prove more dangerous to her than the sims.

All he said, though, was, “My thanks, Caleb. Away now, quiet as we can. Come morning we'll hash out what to do next.”

Cooper led them away from the sims by the same route they had taken in; again they passed by the lone watcher close enough to catch its reek. They camped without fire, which would have brought sims at a run. After gnawing leathery smoked meat, they divided the night into four watches and seized what uncomfortable, bug-ridden sleep they could.

When morning came, they took council. “It makes no sense,” Henry Dale complained. “Where was the sim you fought, Edward? None of the beasts round their blaze showed the knifemark you said you set in him.”

“I thought the same, and again find myself without answer,” Wingfield said; if Dale was willing to let last night's quarrel lie, he did not intend to bring it up himself.

“Hold—I have a thought,” Caleb Lucas said. Somehow he managed to seem fresh on scanty rest. “When we spied the sims' fire, we hared straight for it, and gave no more heed to the track we'd followed. Could we pick it up once more—”

“The very thing!” Allan Cooper exclaimed. “'Sblood, we're stupider than the sims, for we acted on what we thought they'd done when the truth was laid out before us, had we only the wit to look on it.”

“Shorn of the windy philosophizing, the point is well taken,” Dale said.

Before Cooper had time to get angry, Wingfield said hastily, “Could you find the spot where we saw the smoke, Allan?”

“Maybe his royal highness there would sooner lead us,” the guard snapped. Dale opened his mouth to reply, but Wingfield glared at him so fiercely that he shut it again. At length Cooper said, “Yes, I expect I can.”

He proved good as his word, though the trip was necessarily slow and cautious to avoid foraging sims. When the Englishmen returned to the place by the two pines, they cast about for the trace they had pursued the day before.

Cooper found it first, and could not help sending a look of satisfaction at Henry Dale's back before he summoned his companions. They eagerly followed the track, which, to their growing confusion, ran in the same direction they had previously chosen.

“Cooper, we've already seen the brutes did not come this way,” Dale said with an ominously false show of patience.

“No, all we've seen is that they did not reach the band. Tracks have no flair for lying.” Cooper held his course; Dale, fuming, had no choice but to follow. A few minutes later, the guard stiffened. “Look here, all of you. Of a sudden, they spun on their heels and headed northeast.”

“Why, I wonder?” Wingfield said. He glanced toward the column of smoke from the sims' fire, pointed. “They could easily see that from here.”

“What does it matter?” That was Henry Dale. “Let's hunt down the beasts and have done with this pointless chatter.”

“Pointless it is not,” Wingfield said, “if it will help us in the hunting. Were you coming to a camp of your friends, Henry, why would you then avoid it?”

“Who knows why a sim does as it does, or cares? If it amuses you to enter the mind of an animal, go on, but ask me not to partake of your fatuity.”

“Hold, Henry,” Cooper said. “Edward's query is deserving of an answer. In war, now, I'd steer clear of a camp, did it contain the enemy.”

“Are sim bands nations writ in small?” Dale scoffed.

“I tell you honestly, I do not know for a fact,” Cooper replied. “Nor, Henry, do you.” Dale scowled. Cooper stared him down.

The country rose as they traveled away from the James. The sims they were following stuck to wooded and brushy areas, even when that meant deviating from their chosen course. After seeing the fourth or fifth such zigzag, Cooper grunted, “Nation or no, that pair didn't relish being spotted. Soldiers travel so, behind the foe's lines.”

“Even if you have reason,” Caleb Lucas said a while later, ruefully rubbing at the thorn scratches on his arms, “why did the wretched creatures have to traverse every patch of brambles they could find?”

“Not for the sake of hearing your whining, surely.” Had Cooper given Henry Dale that rebuke, he would have growled it. With the irrepressible young Lucas, he could not keep a twinkle from his eyes.

All the Englishmen were scratched and bleeding. Wingfield stopped to extract a briar that had pierced his breeches. The bushes around him were especially thick and thorny, their leaves a glistening, venomous dark green. Only against that background would the white bit of cloth have caught his notice.

He reached out and plucked it from its bramble without realizing for a moment what it meant. Then he let out a whoop that horrified his comrades. They stared at him as at a madman while he held up the tiny piece of linen.

“From Joanna's shift!” he said when he had calmed enough to speak clearly again. “It must be—the sims know nothing of fabric, nor even pelts to cover their loins.”

“Save their own pelts, that is,” Lucas grinned. Then the excitement took him too. “Proof we're on the right track.”

“And proof—or at least hope—my little girl yet lives,” Wingfield said, as much to himself as to the rest. “Had the sims sought no more than meat, they'd not have left the shift round her so long, would they?” He looked to the others for reassurance.

“It were unlikely, Edward,” Cooper said gently. Caleb Lucas nodded. Henry Dale said nothing. Wiping his florid face with his sleeve, he pushed ahead.

Late that afternoon, near the edge of a creek, the Englishmen came upon the scaly tail of a muskrat—all that was left of the beast save for a blood-soaked patch of grass Allan Cooper found close by. “Here the sims stopped to feed,” the guard judged. Further casting about revealed a sharpened stone that confirmed his guess.

“This making of tools on the spot has its advantages,” Caleb Lucas said. “One need never be without.”

“Oh, aye, indeed, if one has but three different tools to make,” Henry Dale said sourly.

Wingfield did his best to ignore the continual bickering. He went over the ground inch by inch, searching for signs of Joanna. He finally found a spattering of loose, yellow-brown muck on some chickweed not far from the edge of the stream. His heart leaped.

The others came rushing over at his exclamation. Dale and Lucas stared uncomprehending at the dropping, but Allan Cooper recognized it at once. “The very same as my little Cecil makes, Edward,” he said, slapping Wingfield on the back. “This far, your baby was alive.”

“Aye,” Wingfield got out, giddy with relief. His greatest fear had been that the sims would simply dash her against a treetrunk and throw her tiny broken body into the woods for scavengers to eat.

“They have her yet, I must grant it,” Dale said. “Do they take her back to their fellows for tortures viler than those they might perform in haste?”

“Shut up, damn you!” Wingfield shouted, and would have gone for Dale had Cooper and Caleb Lucas not quickly stepped between them.

“Have you not called them beasts all this while, Henry?” Lucas said. “Beasts kill, aye, but they do not torture. That is reserved for men.”

“Leave be, all of you,” Cooper ordered in a parade-ground voice. “Yes, you too, Caleb. Such squabbling avails us nothing, the more so when a life's at stake.”

The guard's plainspoken good sense was obvious to everyone, though Wingfield could not help adding, “See you remember we know it is a rescue now, Henry. I charge you, do nothing to put Joanna at risk.”

Dale nodded gruffly.

The Englishmen hurried on; hope put fresh heart in them and sped their weary feet. Soon they were going down into marshier country again as they approached the York River, which paralleled the James to the north. They all kept peering ahead for a telltale smudge of smoke against the sky.

Darkness fell before they found it. They had to stop, for fear of losing the sims' trail. Wingfield drew first watch. He sat in the warm darkness, wishing he had some way to let Anne know what he had found. His wife would still be suffering the agony of fear and uncertainty he had felt until that afternoon, and would keep on suffering it until he brought their daughter home.

He refused to think of failing. He had before, when he thought Joanna dead. But having come so close, he felt irrationally sure things would somehow work out. He fought that feeling too. It could make him careless, and bring all his revived dreams to nothing.

When he surrendered sentry duty to Lucas, he thought he would be too keyed up to sleep. As it had back in his own bed, though, exhaustion took its toll; the damp ground might have been a goosedown mattress ten feet thick.

Henry Dale spotted the sims' fire first. The Englishmen were much closer to it than they had been to the one a couple of days before, for it was smaller and not as smoky. The hour was just past noon.

“We wait here,” Allan Cooper decreed, “so we may approach by night and lessen the danger of being discovered.”

They soon found that danger was real. A sim on its way back to the fire walked within a double handful of paces of their hiding place. By luck, it was carrying a fawn it had killed, and did not notice them.

“Ah, venison,” Caleb Lucas sighed softly, gnawing on smoked meat tough enough to patch the soles of his boots.

The wait seemed endless to Wingfield; the sun crawled across the sky. To be so close and yet unable to do anything to help his daughter ate at him. But getting himself killed with an ill-considered rush would do her no good either.

The Englishmen made low-voiced plans. All had to be tentative. So much depended on where Joanna was around the fire, what the sims were doing to her (Wingfield would not let himself consider Henry Dale's notion), how many sims there were, how much surprise the rescuers could achieve.

At last the birds of day began to fall silent. The sky went gold and crimson in the west, deep blue and then purple overhead. When stars came out not far from where the sun had set, Allan Cooper nudged his fellows. “Now we move—cannily, mind.”

The guard led them as they crept toward the fire. He was humming a Spanish tune under his breath. Wingfield did not think he knew he was doing it. But he had learned his soldiering against Spanish troops, and a return to it brought back old habits.

This band of sims dwelt in more open country than had the other. The Englishmen could not get very close. Half their plans, the ones involving unexpectedly bursting from the woods and snatching up Joanna, evaporated on the instant. They whispered curses and watched from the nearest shrubbery.

At first glance the scene in front of them did not seem much different from the one they had watched a couple of nights before. There were more sims here, perhaps as many as forty. Three or four males were roasting roots and bits of meat on sticks over the fire, and passing the chunks of food to sims who stood round waiting.

Another male was cutting up an animal that, with its skin removed, Wingfield could not identify. He stiffened. That was no stone tool the sim used; it was a good steel knife. Henry Dale noticed that at about the same time he did. “Damned thieving creatures,” he muttered.

A female set the young one it was holding down on the ground, then rose and ambled away from the fire, probably to relieve itself. The infant followed it with its eyes and shrieked in distress. The adult came back and played with it, dandling it in its arms, rolling it about, and making faces at it. After the child was quiet, the female left it again. This time, it stayed quiet until its mother returned.

This band did not have one firekeeper as the other had. From time to time, a female or young male would come up to the blaze and toss on a branch or a shrub. The system seemed haphazard to Wingfield, but the fire never looked likely to go out.

A group of sims had gathered on the far side of the fire around something their bodies kept Wingfield from making out. Whatever it was, it mightily interested them. Some stood, others hunkered down on their haunches for a closer look. They pointed and jabbered; once one shook another, as if to get a point across. Wingfield could not help chuckling to himself—they reminded him of so many Englishmen at a public house.

Then the chuckle died in his throat, for he saw that one of the males there had a great glob of mud plastered to the hair from its rib cage. The sim moved slowly and painfully. Wingfield touched Cooper's arm. “On my oath, that is the one I fought. I knew I marked him with my knife.”

“Then we tracked truly, as I thought. Good. Now we—”

Wingfield's hand clamped down tight on the guard's wrist, silencing him. From the center of that tightly packed bunch of sims had come a familiar thin, wailing cry. “Joanna!”

“How do you know 'tis not one of their cubs yowling?” Henry Dale demanded. “All brats sound alike.”

“Only to a single man,” Wingfield retorted, too full of exaltation and fear to care how he spoke. Against all hope, his daughter lived, but how was he to free her from her captors? And what—the question ate at him, as it had from the onset—what had prompted the sims to steal her in the first place?

A couple of sims stepped away to take food, opening a gap in the crowd. “There, do you see?” Wingfield said triumphantly. No matter how dirty she was (quite, at the moment), smooth, pink Joanna could never be mistaken for a baby sim.