Savage Lands (22 page)

This one was different from the others. From the very start, Elisabeth felt the fierce vehemence of his attachment, as though he dared her to fight him, and her gladness was touched with sorrow for the others who had gone before. So distinct were the sensations of him that had she not known him tethered tight in her womb, she might have thought that he moved through her, flashing fishlike in her blood, spinning along the cables of her nerve-strings. There was no part of her that was not stirred by him.

His son. He was a boy, she was sure of that too. A son, flesh of her flesh, with Jean-Claude’s tapered fingers, Jean-Claude’s tucked-away smile. The thought of it stirred her, so that the soft parts of her prickled with a luxuriance that was almost desire. Alone in the cabin, she held her husband close, her hands flat on her belly and her eyes tight shut. She thought she had never loved him so well as she loved him now.

It was the tonic that had done it, the medicine of the savages. Somehow it had unpicked the snarled-up knots and twists of her cat’s-cradle womb and spread it out anew, flat and smooth and ready. She imagined Auguste’s face when she told him, the pleasure that would light his face, the duck of his head as he tried to contain it. The tips of his ears would turn pink. He had learned much from the savages, but it surprised her that Jean-Claude said he was a fine negotiator. It seemed to her that he had not yet mastered the savage art of concealing his feelings. They would have him stand as godfather, if the baby held. If the baby held. She added the provision quickly, appalled by her own recklessness, and held her thumbs tight. Nothing provoked Providence to vengeance more quickly than conviction. It was for that reason that she told no one of the baby. The longer the words remained unspoken, the stronger the hex that kept them true.

The trees grew heavy with fruit and in the savage fields the pumpkins fattened. It was harvest time. The settlement waited, but the English attack did not come. Like the other wives Elisabeth hoarded food. She bought earthenware pots from the savage market and had Okatomih help her with the bottling. The sun was hot as the slave bent over the fire, her hair damp with the steam as she boiled the crocks to prevent spoiling. When the pots were full, Elisabeth took them to the wood store.

The hut was warm. The stale air smelled of sweet cypress and metal. It tasted like blood. The bundles were half concealed behind the log pile, heaped on top of one another and wrapped in dirty sailcloth. When Elisabeth had finished stacking the crocks against the wall, she hesitated. Then she touched one of the bundles, feeling the coarse grain of it between her fingers. It was greasy, thick, without the fibrous weft of savage cloth. Whoever had secured the bundles had been careful. The corners of each one had been folded into sharp triangles and secured with canvas straps. Elisabeth ran her hands over the uppermost bundle, expecting the grind and slip of grain, but instead the shape of it was hard with distinct edges. She pinched with her fingers, feeling a curved hollow, like a water pipe. She frowned, puzzled. Then she covered her mouth with her hands. The taste of metal was sour in her throat.

She took the pots back into the house and stored them under the table. When she sat down to eat she set her bare feet against their cool bellies and thought of the plump fruit sealed tight inside, its flesh fattening with sweet syrup.

An uneasy calm settled over Mobile. Elisabeth passed her days in the broken-down cane rocker beneath the shade of the front porch that faced out towards the street, lulled by the heat and the chair’s monotonous pendulum creak. The linen grew grimy and weeds sprouted between the planks of the cabin. The other women frowned as they passed her sprawled in the rocker and whispered among themselves. Once the wife of Burelle the taverner, who lived across the lane, limped over and stood before her for a long time, her little red eyes bright in her slab of a face, before she shrugged and, turning, limped away.

Elisabeth liked it best in the evening as the sun slanted low and the mosquitoes danced in the lavender sky. It was easier to dream in the twilight, when the air was soft and warm as flesh and the edges of things slackened and blurred. She could imagine him then, her son, fat-legged and curious in the dust, or at the corner of the road, calling out to her and all grown up. He would be a tall boy, naturally, with tapered fingers and a wide brow, the image of his father. But when she looked up at him and took his hands, it was not Jean-Claude’s handsome face she saw upon his shoulders but Montaigne’s, his neat round head and unkempt beard and hooded eyes, his wise and steady gaze, and the calm words that curled from his fingers onto the indifferent page.

She hugged her belly then, feeling the corners of the book press into her flesh, and though she understood the wisdom in Montaigne, the fine-grained gloss of learning and reason, she grieved for him. He never truly loved, she thought, and with all the fierceness of grief, she strained for her child’s safe arrival and her husband’s safe return.

W
hen the commandant was at last assured that the English soldiers were not coming, he despatched a detachment of five men to the village of the Alabama who had offered corn for the French storehouses. Only one of the pirogues returned. One day’s journey from the first village of the Alabama, a band of savage warriors had ambushed the French expedition, killing three of them and leaving the others for dead. The savages had been armed not with the weapons of the natives but with English muskets and lances.

The injured men were taken to Bienville’s house, where their wounds were bound and a mission mustered for reprisal, twenty soldiers from the garrison and almost one hundred savage warriors raised from neighbouring nations. It returned with a string of prisoners whom they paraded through the town roped together like cattle. The prisoners moved noiselessly in the dust, their heads held high, their blank faces impossible to read. Among them was the warrior who had boasted of killing two of the white men. In full view of his fellows, he was bludgeoned to death, scalped and his body thrown in the river. Such was the justice of the savages, that blood must be avenged by blood.

The rest of the prisoners were sold to the settlers as slaves.

Bienville’s swift and violent reprisal against the Alabama restored an uneasy almost-peace to the region, but it was not long before emissaries from the Choctaw brought worrying news. Yet again the English had attempted to secure the allegiance of their close neighbour and foe the Chickasaw, showering them with guns and promises of favour. Though much desolated by disease, the Chickasaw remained a proud and fierce people, their martial instincts little dimmed by misfortune. The Choctaw were afraid. They beseeched the French for bullets and gunpowder so that they might defend themselves.

The commandant was in no doubt as to the gravity of the situation. He arranged immediately to return with the emissaries to the nation of the Choctaw so that he might present to the chief of the largest settlement two barrels of gunpowder and a renewed pledge of allegiance. While Babelon and Auguste took the
calumet
to the chiefs of the lesser villages, Bienville himself would continue to the village of the
minko
, or high chief, of the Chickasaw.

‘Better times lie ahead,’ he told Auguste as he bid him farewell, his pirogues heavy with goods he could not spare. ‘We shall have peace.’

It was some weeks later, when Babelon and Auguste were lodged at the Choctaw village of Grey Rock, that the commandant’s orders reached them. They were to travel to the Chickasaw directly. Once there Babelon would remain only for as long as was demanded by savage custom before returning to Mobile. As for Auguste, he was to remain there for as long as was necessary, learning their language and reporting back to Bienville any significant political or commercial activity.

‘So, once again you are become a spy,’ Babelon murmured.

‘No,’ Auguste answered grimly. ‘I am become a hostage.’

The journey took several days. When they reached the place where the Choctaw and the Chickasaw nations met, their Choctaw guides refused to travel any further, and Auguste and Jean-Claude were forced to continue on alone. They did not talk about the English or about the savage threat. Auguste would have been happy not to talk at all. Instead he was obliged to listen as Babelon talked in ever wilder terms about trade and commerce. They would cultivate great gardens of plants for the nobility of Europe, great nurseries of slaves for the cultivation of the New World. When Auguste remarked sharply that he thought Babelon a soldier, Babelon replied only that he meant to resign his commission. Did the commandant not have him already working as a merchant, trading with the savages for food? His dealings in slaves had meanwhile gained him something of a reputation among the
coureurs
.

‘The difficulty with slaves, of course, is the unreliability of the merchandise,’ he said. ‘The savage slave has a habit either of escaping or of dying in captivity. Neither is good for profit.’

‘I shouldn’t think that their first concern.’

‘But it is mine. Which is why as soon as I am able I shall set up a business for their exchange. I mean to trade them for slaves from Guinea. It is perfect, don’t you see? How can a savage slave run away to his village when his village is hundreds of leagues away across the sea? If he insists upon dying instead, then let him die on the voyage there at the trader’s trouble and expense.’

‘And your Negro?’ Auguste asked. ‘What if he dies on you?’

‘He shall not. The Negro makes an altogether better slave. That is why I propose to offer three savages for every two of them. That way everyone is happy.’

‘Shall you not need the commandant’s consent?’

‘Perhaps, but then the commandant and I have had business dealings before to our mutual satisfaction. I have always found him a reasonable man.’

Business. The murmur of it rose from Babelon like flies from dung. It flavoured everything he touched, everything he said. It seemed to Auguste that he could not put bread on his plate without Babelon evaluating its potential for resale.

‘It is fortunate that your banishment is only for the winter,’ Babelon remarked more than once. ‘We shall not miss much of the plant season.’

Later, when they were almost at the Chickasaw, he turned to Auguste almost casually.

‘I thought I might talk to your boys about the garden. See what we can salvage before the season ends.’

Auguste thought of Babelon in his garden, his greedy fingers crushing leaves, tearing up roots.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Why on earth not? We have time for another shipment before the river freezes.’

‘No. I – it’s over. The business. I have had enough of it.’

Babelon frowned. Then he laughed.

‘Come now. You don’t mean that.’

‘Yes,’ Auguste said. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘But why?’

Because of you, Auguste wanted to say. Because I do not like what you are becoming, what you have become. Because I cannot bear the way you look at me, the way you talk to me, as though I am for sale too. Because I no longer trust you.

Instead he shrugged.

‘I am tired of it.’

‘Tired of it? Tired of success? Of making money?’

‘Is that so extraordinary?’

‘Extraordinary? It is complete bloody madness.’

When Auguste protested, Babelon held up the flat of his hand.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘I am in no temper for another of your sermons. Do as you wish. You are hardly the only man in Louisiana capable of picking flowers.’

They did not speak of it again. For the remainder of the journey, they sustained an imitation of their old familiarity. It was not always uneasy.

But something between them had changed. It was not a dwindling of affection, for in the new distance that divided them Auguste felt the sharpness of love more acutely than ever. The ties that bound them had not loosened. Instead, in a manner Auguste hardly understood, they had twisted and tightened so that Auguste could no longer move easily within them. At night when he remembered their evenings together at rue d’Iberville, there was a barb in his throat that made it hard to swallow.

He was to blame, he understood that. It was he who had changed. Babelon was exactly as he had always been. After supper he settled beside the fire with Auguste as he always had, threading his words together like strings of brightly coloured beads, and when it grew late, as he always had, he went to a hut that was not his. And though it was true that Babelon’s interest in commerce had intensified, that his passion for trade and profit played like a bow over the very nerve-strings of him, it was as much true that he was no less Babelon because of it. If anything, his zeal served only to emphasise the contours of his nature, so that he was made more himself than ever.

It was Auguste who had lost the knack of being himself. He grew impatient, quick to anger. He picked fights with Babelon over matters upon which he had never before held strong opinions. He drank too much. He did not understand it, except to perceive, dimly, that somehow whatever it was that served to link his thinking mind and his physical self had been severed. There were times when his hands moved and their movement startled him. It was as though he occupied himself only fitfully and even then frequently without conviction. It was a discomfiting feeling, to be at the same time inside himself and quite separate from his own sensations and responses. He observed the vehemence of his moods, the physical ferocity of his antagonism, and it unnerved him. In his head he considered himself perfectly disinterested.