Wind Dancer (10 page)

Samuel watched with a wave of sick dread as Isabelle's head snapped from the impact. Her eyes rolled back into her head. Her body dropped to the floor.

With a cry that came from such a deep place inside him he didn't recognize it as his own, Samuel launched himself onto the man, stabbing at him with his knife. But this Indian had unnatural strength. His arm, the one Samuel was sure he had broken, appeared suddenly sound. With a shrill scream the man turned, rolled his head back and forth on his shoulders, then brought down his war club.

The last thing Samuel saw was those eyes—those black, unearthly eyes.

Then
everything
went black.

A bright light was beckoning Isabelle. She looked up at it, blinking against the sharp intensity. She noticed how the light poured down through the translucent cloud of swirling waters where she simply free-floated. She looked down at her body, at the strange garment she wore, at the way she floated, up and up, through the clear blueness, her hair all around her, her body moving with preternatural grace. She could see her hands moving through the watery substance, helping to propel her along in an invisible arc toward the surface and the light. It was as if she was coming out of a deep sleep into another state of awareness where intense, flooding peace reigned supreme.

Now she saw an open door, and something leapt inside her, spreading pure joy throughout her being.
Yes. Yes!
The closer she moved toward the light, the more she strained with anticipation of an intense connection with it.

Then she heard the first faint strains of music. Soft at first, but slowly, achingly slow, it grew, rising and so beautiful she gasped. She detected the haunting echo of a bagpipe, joined soon by the yearning of a pan flute, instruments she had never heard
nor known the name of before now. The music beckoned her spirit, reaching down and touching guarded chords inside her, opening her whole being, like a key to some place she hadn't known was locked. She was powerless to resist—couldn't imagine how she ever had. Stringed lutes and violins joined in, filling empty spaces in her body. Then the gentle hum of harp strings joined with angelic voices. They sang in a language she had never heard and yet was familiar, as if she could understand if she only listened long enough. The voices rose in crescendo with an aching sweetness, until her chest began to heave with pent-up sobs of joy.

Full of wonder. Full of love.

Yes, so full of love.

Swimming faster she hurried onward, wanting more, wanting the light to consume her. The music grew until it surrounded her, filling her and embracing her, touching her in a thousand different places at once. She let out another sob, feeling an enormous release. And then another as the music penetrated to her very core. Any hardness, any barriers she had erected, the doubts and worries and confusion of life—all melted away.

She was engulfed in complete love. It was something she had never felt before but recognized in a flash of insight that it was something she had hungered after and searched for her whole life. It was the missing piece.

Isabelle swam faster now, in a panic to reach it. Nothing mattered beyond throwing herself into that light, becoming one with it. Her arms pumped, her longing for the light rising until she felt she would burst with pure joy.

Her desperation increased as she suddenly realized something was holding her in the water. Something had a firm grip around her ankles, keeping her from rising any higher. She fought it, kicked at it, but to no avail. Its grasp held firm, as if it had rights. Angry, and with a frantic sadness that went so deep she
could hardly breathe, she looked down to see who or what it was that held her firm between life and death.

The water below her was all darkness and movement. Then she was suddenly outside herself, watching herself panic as she searched the murkiness beneath her feet. Then the water changed somehow. It shifted.

She took a shuddering breath as she saw it … and screamed.

* * *

ISABELLE WOKE TO the sound of cries—her own—coming from what seemed a great distance. Awful, spine-chilling sounds. The sounds of the lost. Now a nightmarish dirge drummed through her body, pooling at her throbbing head.

She opened her eyes, saw the ceiling of the cabin, then images flashing overly bright, then snapping away, recent memories of angels and Indians, of light and terror battling to rise to her notice. She struggled to sit up, bracing one hand on the floor and slowly rising. Her head felt thick and sticky. Her eyes saw red all over her. The air itself seemed endued with blood—
my
own?
—and a haze blurred her vision. She blinked several times, trying to clear it.

Her hand, she saw as she lifted it to locate the source of the agonizing pain in her head, was covered with the vital fluid, making her stomach spasm with dread. She found a long gash extending from her right temple up and into her hair and probed it with her fingers, trying to remember how it came to be there. Turning from the wall, she scanned the floor of the cabin, panic and sickness rushing over her. Bodies of several Indians lay at her feet. Further up, the body of a white man—Jake, wasn't it?—lay face down, arms raised above his head, hands spread
wide in a death plea. Visual memories rushed over her, touching her skin, making it crawl for a hole to hide in. But her thoughts were so disjointed that she still couldn't understand what her eyes were seeing.

A faint movement from under the table made her suck in her breath and hold it, hold her whole body as still as the wall she lay against. She strained to see the small form, making out only a hazy shadow. Was it one of the girls? There had been two, hadn't there?

Then she saw Naomi lying by the door. Was her chest moving? Struggling to stand, Isabelle slowly picked her way over to the woman's side. Squatting beside her, Isabelle grasped her shoulder and shook her, trying not to look at the bloody, hairless top of her scalp. “Naomi … Naomi, can you hear me?”

The woman groaned and turned her head on the floor. She was alive. Isabelle shook harder. “Wake up.” Turning to the form under the table, Isabelle motioned with her hand, thinking a daughter's voice would rouse a mother. “Rose, is that you? Come here, Rose. We must wake your mother.”

A sobbing sound came from the shadow. Isabelle shakily stood, stepping over forms that she averted her eyes from, and coaxed the child from her hiding place. Taking the child's hand she helped her out, hugging her as she came into Isabelle's arms, the small body quaking. “Come, Rose.”

Isabelle walked her back to Naomi, fighting the dizziness that threatened her head and clinched her stomach. “Rose, your mother has been wounded. But don't look at the wound, Rose. Just look at her face and shake her and call to her. Do you understand?” Isabelle looked hard at the little girl, who seemed incapable of answering, staring back in a glassy-eyed gaze.

“I'll do it,” a voice said from behind the door. And then the face of Millie, sheet white but cognizant, peered at them from around it.

“Oh, Millie. Thank the Lord. Come and wake your mother.” Isabelle motioned her over, marveling that the two girls were completely unhurt. Then remembering the boys, she looked up at the door and straightened, knowing she was going to have to go outside and look for them.

Her movements now growing quicker and surer, she picked up two rifles and found some ammunition, felt the core knot of determination that was so much a part of her. The long column of her back stretched to its full height, little by little, bone by bone, taking over the fear. This was the familiar. This was known.

Stepping over dead bodies and pools of blood, she made it to the open door. With a last look at the girls and Naomi still on the floor, she assured them, “I will return.” Then she quickly loaded the rifles, stepping outside, staying close to the walls of the cabin, then the nearby springhouse, picking her way across the clearing.

Smoke billowed from the area of the woodpile. A few more steps into the open, and there, by the woodpile, were the farmer's sons. All dead, their bodies lying like blackened dolls on top of the blazing woodpile.

“No … no!” she cried out, now running toward the horrific scene. She fell on her knees a few feet away, knowing there was nothing she could do, rocking back and forth, sobs wringing from her throat. She was unable to tear herself away from the vision of a small arm dangling over a log, smeared black with smoke.

“Oh God, help us!” Her ragged cry rent the air as she covered her face in her hands. Just … trying … to … breathe.

She saw it then. In her mind's eye, the half-black, half-white painted face of the Indian that had struck her down. She remembered him … remembered his name. Quiet Fox.

Tremors of fear and anger and something else that she had no idea how to identify now overtook her, coursing through her body. She stood and ran about the area, ignoring the blood coursing
down her cheek, the excruciating pain from the gash, searching for any sign of the man responsible for this tragedy. Searching for any outlet for a woman's anguished rage.

Finding no one, she finally stopped, breathing heavily, remembering the girls and how frightened they were, how long she'd been gone.

She rushed, stumbling in a shocked state at the entrance, seeing again and smelling anew the carnage of the cabin—once a haven from the elements for a frontier family, now a bloody grave won by the devil.

She took a long, deep breath. “I can do this,” she said to no one and anyone. “I
will
do this.”

Naomi was sitting up with a red-soaked rag held to her torn head. She was dazed and bleeding badly but alive, the scalping short of its mark. Isabelle looked around the room, at each body, carefully and thoroughly.

Where were Julian and Samuel?

“Mon frère, mon ami d'enfance,”
she cried aloud.

* * *

A GROAN FROM Naomi had Isabelle rushing to her side. “Can you talk? Can you get up?” She had to get them all out of this hellish place.

Naomi looked at her girls, turned her mangled head toward Isabelle and nodded. “I can get up.”

Isabelle held out her hand, helping her stand. They took a few breaths, waiting to see if Naomi would be overcome and faint. When she didn't, they turned toward the door.

Naomi said, “Go outside girls, it's safe now.”

Isabelle nodded at their questioning looks as Naomi stopped and turned back, staring at the lifeless form of her husband.
His face was clear, no injury to mar its handsomeness. Naomi took a long look, then turned, hard-eyed, and staggered out the door. To Isabelle she said, “I see that you are not in much better shape than I am, but if you could get some food, a water bucket, and some rags out of the cupboard, I would appreciate it.”

Isabelle nodded.

Isabelle managed to gather the supplies and carry the heavy burden over to a tree where mother and daughters now sat. She unwrapped some salve she'd found, not knowing if it could help with such a massive wound, trying not to look but unable to ignore the sight of Naomi's scalp. Isabelle helped Naomi press a fresh rag against the wound until the bleeding subsided.

The Indian who had tried to scalp her had missed his mark—a rare occurrence, Isabelle knew. Only the very top of Naomi's scalp was gone, and while she would never have hair on the top of her head again, she might live if the dreaded infection didn't set in.

“Naomi, we have to get you and the girls to Kaskaskia. Do you own a wagon, a horse, something to carry you?”

Naomi's voice was surprisingly strong. “In the barn, if the savages haven't stolen them, there is a wagon and two horses. They … they were Jake's pride and joy.” She covered her trembling mouth with her hand, looking deep and dark into Isabelle's eyes.

There was such anguish in her eyes as she spoke her husband's name that Isabelle wanted to turn away, but she did not. They stared at each other, each communicating hereto unknown depths of pain. And something else, something they both felt core deep—the need for revenge.

Isabelle gripped Naomi's hand, looking hard at this woman whom she had only just met but who now, in this moment, was closer than a sister. “We can do this. Just lie back and rest while I ready the wagon.” Her gaze switched to the daughters, her voice commanding. “You girls, stay with your mother. If the bleeding
starts up again, come and get me. I will be in the barn.” They looked so frightened, so in shock, that she didn't know if they had even heard her.

Naomi grasped Isabelle's skirt, stopping her. “My sons. Tell me what has happened to my sons.”

Tears sprung to Isabelle's eyes. She could only stare at Naomi for a long moment, then whispered, “I found them on the woodpile.”

Naomi turned her head away, her face ashen.

Before Isabelle had taken two steps, Naomi was calling at her again, asking, “And your brother? And Mr. Holt? I did not see them in the cabin.”

Isabelle turned back toward Naomi. “They are not here. Which means they may have been captured. I have to track them if I have any hope of ever getting my brother back … and I must leave soon. Millie can drive you to Kaskaskia.”

“You would go after them? Alone? You should go with us. Tell the American army what has happened and let them find your brother.”

Isabelle shook her head. “I can't wait. The Indians may mean to torture them, and Julian could never withstand it. Tell the Americans that I will leave them signs to follow, gashes in the trees. And then we'll see …”

“See?”

“See what the Americans
really
mean by freedom.” Isabelle turned to walk away, but Naomi stopped her in her tracks with a whispered plea. “Who are you, really?”

She slowly turned her head back to the woman with whom she now shared so much, her blood-soaked hair sticking to her shoulder, her gaze shattered. “I am only a woman like you Naomi. A woman desperate for the justice of God.”