The Ransom of Mercy Carter (6 page)

The warriors had gathered in clumps. Yesterday had been complete victory for the Indians, and yet there was no rejoicing among them. Her captor’s eyes were on a bundle in the snow. She had seen enough death in her life to know it. One of the Indian wounded had not survived the night.

The posture of her Indian was human. It was grief.

“Mercy, I’m hungry,” said Daniel, and she said, “Hush. We’ll eat later.”

Mercy was hungry too. The hunger wasn’t yet pain, because Mr. Williams often called for a fast and Mercy was used to going twenty-four hours without food. No matter what woe was visited upon Deerfield—shaking fever, crop failure, the snatching of Zeb and John—fasting made Mercy feel safe again. If three hundred people ate nothing for a day and a night, surely the Lord would be impressed and might relent, and people would get well and corn would grow.

She and Daniel took a moment to squat behind trees. They cleaned themselves with snow, and when she washed his face with a handful of icy white powder, Daniel giggled. He wanted to wash Mercy’s face too, and she let him.

By the time they reached the rest of the prisoners, Mr. Williams had begun speaking. He had a great deep voice that sounded just right when he read the prophets in the Bible. He could be Elijah, he could be Jeremiah. Mercy loved his voice. It was shaking now, but not with the ecstasy of belief that possessed Mr. Williams during a sermon. It was shaking with fear.

If the Lord is not with Mr. Williams, thought Mercy, the Lord is not with any of us.

She threw away a lifetime of training, and instead of listening harder to Mr. Williams, she stopped listening
at all. Her
prayer
went so deep it had no form, it was just
Lord, Lord, Lord
.

And the Lord was good, for among the crowd, she saw Sam, John and Benny, her uncle Nathaniel, her aunt Mary, and far away from the rest, and separated from each other, her cousins Will and Little Mary.

She could not see Stepmama, the baby or Tommy, but no doubt they, like Mercy, had been separated. As soon as prayers were over, she would find them.

At some point during the night or early this morning, the French had joined them. There were far more soldiers than she had realized. A hundred French. At least two hundred Indians. With another hundred or so English prisoners, Mercy was among more people than she had ever seen gathered in one place.

They were standing in distinct groups, divided by expanses of gleaming snow. The still-bright French; the heavily armed Indians; the shivering English.

“The frown of the Lord,” said Mr. Williams, “is very great. This dread suffering is because we failed Him.”

I
failed Him, thought Mercy. I did not save Marah.

Mr. Williams prayed for the souls of the dead, listing name after name. Among those whose souls he entrusted to the Lord were her brother Tommy, her stepmother and the baby.

No
, thought Mercy. I let them all die? Even Tommy?

Sleep tight
, she had said to him. And now he would.

If she had not wasted time giving her cloak to Ruth?
If she had not taken Eliza’s hand when Eliza went blind with shock? If she had shoved Jemima out of her way? Could she have saved Tommy?

The Indian next to Mr. Williams interrupted him roughly. “We kill. You tell.”

Mr. Williams ceased to pray. “Joe Alexander escaped last night,” he said. “If anyone else tries to escape, they will burn the rest of us alive.”

Burn alive? Burn innocent women and children because one young man flew from their grasp?

Her Indian stood some distance away amid the other warriors. He was now wearing a vivid blue cloth coat of European design. In one hand he held his French flintlock, and over his shoulder hung his bow and a full otter-skin quiver—actually, the entire dead otter, complete with face and feet. His coat hung open to show a belt around his waist, from which hung his tomahawk and scalping knife. His skin was not red after all, but the color of autumn. Burnished chestnut. His shaved head gleamed. He looked completely and utterly savage.

He might sorrow for a dead brother warrior, but grief would make him more likely to burn a captive, not less likely.

Mercy imagined kindling around her feet, a stake at her back, her flesh charring like a side of beef.

Beside her, Eben seemed almost to faint.

Mercy had the odd thought that she, an eleven-year-old
girl, might be stronger than he, a seventeen-year-old boy.

The English were silent, entirely able to believe they might be burned.

The first person to move was Mercy’s Indian. Sharply raising one hand, bringing the eyes of all upon him, he pointed to Mercy Carter.

She was frozen with horror.

His finger beckoned. There could be no mistake. The meaning was
come
.

There was no speech and no movement from a hundred captives and three hundred enemies. It was the French Mercy hated at that moment. How could they stand by and let other whites be burned alive?

She had no choice but to go to him. She set Daniel down. Perhaps they would spare Daniel. Perhaps only she was to be burned.

She forced herself to keep her chin up, her eyes steady and her steps even. How could she be afraid of going where her five-year-old brother had gone first? O Tommy, she thought, rest in the Lord. Perhaps you are with Mother now. Perhaps I will see you in a moment.

She did not want to die.

Her footsteps crunched on the snow.

Nobody spoke. Nobody moved.

The Indian handed Mercy a slab of cornmeal bread, and then beckoned to Daniel, who cried, “Oh, good, I’m so hungry!” and came running, his happy little face
tilted in a smile at the Indian who fed him. “Mercy said we’d eat later,” Daniel confided in the Indian.

The English trembled in their relief and the French laughed.

The Indian knelt beside Daniel, tossing aside Tommy’s jacket and dressing Daniel in warm clean clothing from another child. Nobody in Deerfield owned many clothes, and if she permitted herself to think about it, Mercy would know whose trousers and shirt these were, but she did not want to think about what dead child did not need clothes, so she said to the Indian, “Who are you? What’s your name?”

He understood. Putting the palm of his hand against his chest, he said, “Tannhahorens.”

She could just barely separate the syllables. It sounded more like a duck quacking than a real word. “Tannhahorens,” he said again, and she repeated it after him. She wondered what it meant. Indian names had to make a picture.

She smiled carefully at the man she had thought was going to burn her alive as an example and said, “I’ll be right back, Tannhahorens.” She took a few steps away, and when he did nothing, she ran to her family.

Her uncle swept her into his arms. How wonderful his scratchy beard felt! How strong and comforting his hug!

“My brave girl,” he whispered, kissing her hair. “Mercy, they won’t let me help you.” In a voice as childish
and puzzled as Daniel’s, he added, “They won’t let me help your aunt Mary, or Will and Little Mary either. I tried to help your brothers and got whipped for it.”

He stammered: Uncle Nathaniel, whose reading choices from the Bible were always about war, and whose voice made every battle exciting. He needed her comfort as much as she needed his.

“Uncle Nathaniel,” she said, “if I had done better, Tommy and Marah—”

“Hush,” said her uncle. “The Lord set a task before you and you obeyed. Daniel is your task. Say your prayers as you march.”

In a tight little pack behind Uncle Nathaniel stood her three living brothers. How small and cold they looked.

Sam lifted his chin to encourage his sister and said, “At least we’re together. Do the best you can, Mercy. So will we.” They stared at each other, the two closest in age, and Mercy thought how proud their mother would be of Sam.

“Mercy,” cried her brother John, panicking, “you have to go! Go fast,” he said urgently. “Your Indian is pointing at you.”

Tannhahorens was watching her but not signaling.

He isn’t angry, thought Mercy. I don’t have to be afraid, but I do have to return. “Find out your Indian’s name,” she said to her brothers. “It helps. Call him by name.” She took the time to hug and kiss each brother.
How narrow their little shoulders; how thin the cloth that must keep them from freezing.

She had to go before she wept. Indians did not care for crying. “Be strong, Uncle Nathaniel,” she said, touching the strange collar around his neck.

“Don’t tug it,” he said wryly. “It’s lined with porcupine quill tips. If I don’t move at the right speed, the Indians give my leash a twitch and the needles jab my throat.”

The boys laughed, pantomiming a hard jerk on the cord, and Mercy said, “You’re all just as mean as you ever were!”

“And alive,” said Sam. When they hugged once more, she felt a tremor in him, deep and horrified, but under control.

A
GAIN SHE WAS
toward the end of the line.

The pace was hard. They were heading northeast, with the goal, she assumed, of reaching the Connecticut River. It would be frozen solid, an actual road through the wilderness, but first they had to get there.

It was one thing to follow a well-worn cow path over a hill stripped of its trees. It was another thing entirely to cut through the forest. Beneath the snow, like snares for rabbits or pits for deer, were the crevices and jags of the earth. Cliffs tumbled to the side. Fallen trees from ancient storms were like jumbled masts of ships thrown
in the path. Tangled vine and briar grabbed legs and snapped against faces.

The men who had refused to exchange their boots for Indian moccasins had to stop and wring the blood out of their stockings.

As the day wore on, and Daniel fell, and Mercy fell, and Ruth fell, and Jemima fell, and Eben fell; as each time they were slower to get up and saw yet another mountain ahead and understood that they were not going around, they were going over—well, Mercy did not know how long they could continue.

She was often overtaken by Indians coming up from the rear. Except for Tannhahorens, Mercy could not yet tell one from another. Were these the same two or three, circling and checking? Or Indians just now coming from the battle site? Or—more likely—returning from hunting the escaped prisoner?

Mercy found herself checking scalps. Joe Alexander’s hair was curly and brown, pulled into a tail which itself curled and flopped. She found herself thinking, No, that one’s too blond; that one’s too short. By nightfall, horrifying as this pastime might be, she knew that nobody had caught Joe. He had gotten home.

Such as it was.

Mercy put one foot ahead of the other and refused to think of Deerfield.

Sarah Hoyt had been given some moose jerky by her
Indian and she passed chunks to the other children, who chewed as they walked. It was as hard and dry as a shingle on a roof.

Sarah’s Indian had divided his loot, carrying his share tied in English blankets but putting Sarah’s share inside an Indian leather sack. The forehead strap that attached Sarah’s burden was embroidered with glittering glass beads. Every time Mercy looked at Sarah’s headband, she wondered whose fingers had made that. Whose needle; whose design?

She always thought of Indians as being men; warriors. But the strap was proof that there were also Indian women. Women who loved beauty; who spent time on embroidery as once Mercy’s mother had spent time on ruffles.

“Does it hurt to carry things by your forehead?” she asked Sarah.

“No. It’s heavy, but it rides well. At least so far. By dinnertime, it’ll probably bother me.” Sarah was laughing. “If we have dinner. If we don’t, I’ll really be bothered.”

Hairpins and bonnets had not been in Sarah’s mind when she was yanked from her bed, so her beautiful auburn hair was not fastened up and hidden but streaming in the wind. Mercy marveled that nobody had scalped Sarah. Didn’t the savages see that coppery red hair and want it?

Perhaps they did not scalp because of hair color.
How did they make their decisions? How did they decide who deserved life and who did not?

“How can you laugh about anything, Sarah?” said Jemima. She wiped tears away and sniffled heavily. “I hate this! I hate everybody. I’m not doing it.”

“Then you’ll be dead,” said Mercy. She could not be patient with Jemima. They all carried burdens, in their hearts or in their arms.

“Jemima,” said Sarah, more gently, “did you not listen to Mr. Williams? We have to survive for each other and for the Lord. It is our duty.”

Jemima kept crying.

Mercy with Daniel and Sarah with her pack put their minds on their feet and walked faster. Behind them straggled Ruth, wheezing and carrying nothing; Eben, carrying everything; Eliza, barely carrying herself; halfblind Joanna, whose pack had been taken back by her Indian after Ruth threw it and who now carried only a fur rug draped over her shoulders, which made her probably the warmest prisoner on the march.

Jemima carried her pack in her arms, sobbing into it.

Joseph Kellogg, Joanna’s brother, had three toddlers literally in tow, each child holding to a rope he’d wound around his wrist. It had been his plan that they would stumble less if they kept a grip on the rope. But to such little children it was a game. They skidded along, letting Joseph pull.

“Go, horsie!” cried Waitstill Warner. She was a pretty
little girl; cold but not aware of it; hungry, but forgetful of that too. Daniel wanted to get down so he could be hauled on the rope like his cousin Waitstill.

“They’re having fun,” Jemima accused. “It’s wrong of Joseph to be making sport. Their mothers are dead.”

“Jemima, Joseph is keeping them from crying,” said Sarah. “They don’t know how awful this is. They’re having an adventure.”

But Jemima would not be comforted.

“Here,” said Mercy, “have some jerky. You’ll feel better.” She didn’t really want to give it to Jemima. Jemima was perfectly sturdy. Anybody could fast for a day or two.

“I will not feel better,” wept Jemima. “I want to go home. I want my mother.”

There were plenty of mothers on the march, but not Jemima’s. Jemima was one of the stranded children. No father or mother, no brother or sister. Whatever had happened to their families, nobody had seen it or nobody wanted to talk about it.