He turned his head and looked up at her suddenly, half-bewildered, half-defiant.
“I am the Lord thy God,” he said. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me. But I did, no? That’s mortal sin, is it not?”
She wanted to say no, of course not. Or to protest weakly that she was not a priest, how could she say? But neither of those would do; he was not looking for easy reassurance, and a weak-minded abnegation of responsibility would not serve him.
She took a deep breath and blew it out. It had been a good many years since she’d been taught the Baltimore Catechism, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you forget.
“The conditions of mortal sin are these,” she said, reciting the words precisely from memory. “First, that the action be grievously wrong. Secondly, that you know the action is wrong. And thirdly—that you give full consent to it.”
He was watching her intently.
“Well, it was wrong, and I suppose I kent that—aye, I did ken that. Especially—” His face darkened further, and she wondered what he was recalling.
“But . . . how should I serve a God who would take a child for her father’s sins?” Without waiting for an answer, he glanced toward the cliff face, where the remains of the mammoth lay frozen in time. “Or was it them? Was it not my God at all, but the Iroquois spirits? Did they ken I wasna really Mohawk—that I held back a part of myself from them?”
He looked back at her, dead serious.
“Gods are jealous, are they no?”
“Ian . . .” She swallowed, helpless. But she had to say something.
“What you did—or didn’t do—that wasn’t wrong, Ian,” she said firmly. “Your daughter . . . she was half-Mohawk. It wasn’t wrong to let her be buried according to her mother’s ways. Your wife—Emily—she would have been terribly upset, wouldn’t she, if you’d insisted on baptizing the baby?”
“Aye, maybe. But . . .” He closed his eyes, hands clenched hard into fists on his thighs. “Where is she, then?” he whispered, and she could see tears trembling on his lashes. “The others—they were never born; God will have them in His hand. But wee Iseabaìl—she’ll not be in heaven, will she? I canna bear the thought that she—that she might be . . . lost, somewhere. Wandering.”
“Ian . . .”
“I hear her, greeting. In the night.” His breath was coming in deep, sobbing gasps. “I canna help, I canna find her!”
“Ian!” The tears were running down her own cheeks. She gripped his wrists fiercely, squeezed as hard as she could. “Ian, listen to me!”
He drew a deep, trembling breath, head bent. Then he nodded, very slightly.
She rose onto her knees and gathered him tight against her, his head cradled on her br**sts. Her cheek pressed against the top of his head, his hair warm and springy against her mouth.
“Listen to me,” she said softly. “I had another father. The man who raised me. He’s dead now.” For a long time now, the sense of desolation at his loss had been muted, softened by new love, distracted by new obligations. Now it swept over her, newly fresh, and sharp as a stab wound in its agony. “I know—I know he’s in heaven.”
Was he? Could he be dead and in heaven, if not yet born? And yet he was dead to her, and surely heaven took no heed of time.
She lifted her face toward the cliff, but spoke to neither bones nor God.
“Daddy,” she said, and her voice broke on the word, but she held her cousin hard. “Daddy, I need you.” Her voice sounded small, and pathetically unsure. But there was no other help to be had.
“I need you to find Ian’s little girl,” she said, as firmly as she could, trying to summon her father’s face, to see him there among the shifting leaves at the clifftop. “Find her, please. Hold her in your arms, and make sure that she’s safe. Take—please take care of her.”
She stopped, feeling obscurely that she should say something else, something more ceremonious. Make the sign of the cross? Say “amen”?
“Thank you, Daddy,” she said softly, and cried as though her father were newly dead, and she bereft, orphaned, lost, and crying in the night. Ian’s arms were wrapped around her, and they clung tight together, squeezing hard, the warmth of the late sun heavy on their heads.
She stood still within his arms when she stopped crying, her head resting on his shoulder. He patted her back, very gently, but didn’t push her away.
“Thank you,” he whispered in her ear. “Are ye all right, Brianna?”
“Uh-huh.” She straightened and stood away from him, swaying a little, as though she were drunk. She felt drunk, too, her bones gone soft and malleable, everything around her faintly out of focus, save for certain things that caught her eye: a brilliant patch of pink lady’s slipper, a stone fallen from the cliff face, its surface streaked red with iron. Rollo, almost sitting on Ian’s foot, big head pressed anxiously against his master’s thigh.
“Are you all right, Ian?” she asked.
“I will be.” His hand sought Rollo’s head, and gave the pointed ears a cursory rub of reassurance. “Maybe. Just . . .”
“What?”
“Are ye . . . are ye sure, Brianna?”
She knew what he was asking; it was a question of faith. She drew herself up to her full height, wiping her nose on her sleeve.
“I’m a Roman Catholic and I believe in vitamins,” she declared stoutly. “And I knew my father. Of course I’m sure.”
He took a deep, sighing breath and his shoulders slumped as he let it out. He nodded then, and the lines of his face relaxed a little.
She left him sitting on a rock, and made her way down to the stream to splash cold water on her face. The shadow of the cliff fell across the creek and the air was cold with the scents of earth and pine trees. In spite of the chill, she remained there for a while, on her knees.
She could still hear the voices murmuring in trees and water, but paid no attention to them. Whoever they were, they were no threat to her or hers—and not at odds with the presence that she felt so strongly nearby.
“I love you, Daddy,” she whispered, closing her eyes, and felt at peace.
Ian must be better, too, she thought, when she made her way at length back through the rocks to where he sat. Rollo had left him to investigate a promising hole at the foot of a tree, and she knew the dog wouldn’t have left Ian, had he considered his master to be in distress.
She was about to ask him whether their business here was complete, when he stood up, and she saw that it wasn’t.
“Why I brought ye here,” he said abruptly. “I wanted to know about that—” He nodded at the mammoth. “But I meant to ask ye a question. Advice, like.”
“Advice? Ian, I can’t give you any advice! How could I tell you what to do?”
“I think ye’re maybe the only one who can,” he said with a lopsided smile. “You’re my family, you’re a woman—and ye care for me. Yet ye ken more even than Uncle Jamie, perhaps, because of who—or what”—his mouth twisted a little—“ye are.”
“I don’t know more,” she said, and looked up at the bones in the rock. “Only—different things.”
“Aye,” he said, and took a deep breath.
“Brianna,” he said very softly. “We’re no wed—we never shall be.” He looked away for an instant, then back. “But if we had been marrit, I should have loved ye and cared for ye, so well as I could. I trust you, that ye’d have done the same by me. Am I right?”
“Oh, Ian.” Her throat was still thick, raspy with grief; the words came out in a whisper. She touched his face, cool-skinned and bony, and traced the line of tattooed dots with a thumb. “I love you now.”
“Aye, well,” he said still softly. “I ken that.” He lifted a hand and put it over her own, big and hard. He pressed her palm against his cheek for a moment, then his fingers closed over hers and he brought their linked hands down, but didn’t let go.
“So tell me,” he said, his eyes not leaving hers. “If ye love me, tell me what I shall do. Shall I go back?”
“Back,” she repeated, searching his face. “Back to the Mohawk, you mean?”
He nodded.
“Back to Emily. She loved me,” he said quietly. “I ken that. Did I do wrong, to let the old woman send me away? Ought I to go back, maybe fight for her, if I had to? Perhaps see if she would come away wi’ me, back to the Ridge.”
“Oh, Ian.” She felt the same sense of helplessness as before, though this time it came without the burden of her own grief. But who was she to tell him anything? How could she be responsible for making that decision for him—for saying to him, stay, or go?
His eyes stayed steady on her face, though, and it came over her—she was his family. And so the responsibility lay in her hands, whether she felt adequate to it or not.
Her chest felt tight, as though she might burst if she took a deep breath. She took it anyway.
“Stay,” she said.
He stood looking into her eyes for a long time, his own deep hazel, gold-flecked and serious.
“You could fight him—Ahk . . .” She fumbled for the syllables of the Mohawk name. “Sun Elk. But you can’t fight her. If she’s made up her mind that she doesn’t want to be with you anymore . . . Ian, you can’t change it.”
He blinked, dark lashes cutting off his gaze, and kept his eyes closed, whether in acknowledgement or denial of what she’d said, she didn’t know.
“But it’s more than that,” she said, her voice growing firmer. “It isn’t only her, or him. Is it?”
“No,” he said. His voice sounded distant, almost uncaring, but she knew it wasn’t that.
“It’s them,” she said more softly. “All the mothers. The grandmothers. The women. The—the children.” Clan and family and tribe and nation; custom, spirit, tradition—the strands that wrapped Works with Her Hands and held her to the earth, secure. And above all, children. Those loud small voices that drowned the voices of the wood, and kept a soul from wandering through the night.
No one knew the strength of such bonds better than one who had walked the earth without them, outcast and alone. She had, and he had, and they both knew the truth.
“It’s them,” he echoed softly, and opened his eyes. They were dark with loss, the color of shadows in the deepest wood. “And them.” He turned his head, to look upward, into the trees beyond the creek, above the bones of the mammoth that lay trapped in the earth, stripped to the sky and mute to all prayer. He turned back, raised a hand, and touched her cheek.
“I’ll stay, then.”
THEY CAMPED FOR the night on the far side of the beaver pond. The litter of wood chips and debarked saplings made good kindling for their fire.
There was little to eat; no more than a hatful of bitter fox-grapes and the heel of bread, so hard by now that it had to be dunked in water to chew. It didn’t matter; neither one of them was hungry, and Rollo had disappeared to hunt for himself.