Alice Munro glanced up at the waning half-moon with a feeling of minor annoyance. She had seen five half-moons since she had come to the Lenape camp and at least as many full moons. It would not have been a bad way to keep track of time, if she had thought of it sooner. But during the first convoluted days after her arrival she had not paid much attention to the night sky, and so as a result she had no idea how many days or weeks had passed between then and her newfound sense of temporal awareness.
She supposed the twelve-month calendar didn't matter as much out here. In the wilderness time moved to the rhythm of falling leaves and frozen streams, not the beat of metal gears behind mechanical hands. But it was rather disorienting to think she had turned eighteen and not even realized it.
She returned her attention to the worn pages in front of her elbows, letting her ankles cross absentmindedly as she lay on the grass. Not a proper posture by any standards, but there was no one here she particularly cared to impress. And it was easier to make out the faded French words by firelight lying down.
"Et lorsque, après des batailles gagnées, tout Londres brille d'illuminations, que le ciel est enflammé de fusées." She whispered the words as softly as possible, reminding herself to ignore the closing s's and not linger too long on the n's. Conceding that she had an acceptable knowledge of Lenape, Temakwe had taken it upon himself to correct her French pronunciation. It gave the herbalist something else to criticize. She would probably thank him for it later.
Although she would never have said so out loud, it felt good to study a language slightly more refined than Lenape. The Delaware were polite enough, but she didn't think she could ever accept as fully civilized a language that had no word for please. However, that small propriety did not entirely atone for the crime of using too many letters. That alone she thought would justify blowing the French off the continent.
She did not feel afraid when the sound of gunshots split the silence, only a curious irritation that the attackers came with no warning. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Hinutet reach across the fire for her younger brother. A swarm of moving bodies began to emerge from the trees. Her last coherent thought was that at the moment, with his tomahawk brandished in his right hand and his black eyes blazing in anticipation of battle, Teme confirmed every preconceived notion she had ever had of the red-faced American savages. Then her feet stumbled backwards. Someone collided with her shoulder. Alice found herself lost in a sea of arms, legs and shrill, disembodied voices. Without knowing for certain which direction was right, she ran against the crowd and waited for the paralysis to start.
The sky was almost dark when they caught the first glimpse of smoke behind the trees. Without slowing down, Uncas took a moment to appreciate that for once the cosmos was aligned with the current state of human affairs. The few remaining autumn leaves trembled with the screams of the terrified, the terrifiers and the dying. He spared his brother a brief glance. Now that they had finally caught up to their prey, Nathaniel was probably glad they had left Cora and Jack behind, although he had not been nearly as happy about the arrangement when they had left the cabin two days earlier. His brother saw him and nodded back. No further interaction necessary, they returned to their old routine of fighting other people's battles. It seemed to be the only thing they did lately.
A flash of gold caught his eye, but when he turned to look more closely it had vanished. He shoved it to the back of his mind and moved on. To his right, he saw Nathaniel shoot a Huron two feet away from cracking the skull of a short-haired girl in a green shirt, who ran straight past without even looking at him. Uncas had just enough time to wonder how his brother felt at being so thoroughly brushed off before the swing of a tomahawk forced him to dodge left.
His slipped on a puddle of blood. Cursing his clumsiness, he threw out his hand and landed on his knees. He looked up at the source of his stumble and immediately wished he hadn't. Leaning against a tree, a French scout clutched his stomach in a futile attempt to keep his intestines in their proper place. His head lolled drunkenly to one side as he took in the latest arrival.
"You're not Lenape." The scout let out a strangled laugh as though he had said something funny. Uncas wondered why he was wasting what little breath he had left stating the obvious. He lifted his tomahawk and prepared to put the man out of his misery, madness or both.
"Don't." The English word sounded strange in the Frenchman's mouth, which was rapidly filling with blood. He held his hand above his chest in an apparently defensive gesture. The effort it took made his voice even more hoarse and strained. "Not your fight. And I didn't come here…for a stupid…revenge quest."
Uncas eyed the man skeptically and did not lower his weapon.
Alice willed herself to become invisible, but that was almost impossible when she was the only unarmed white person in a stream of brown and black. So failing that, she settled for hoping that everyone else around her was too preoccupied with their own predicaments to pay much attention to her.
She scanned the crowd for a familiar face and found several, but they looked as panicked and directionless as her own must be. She did not dare stop moving even to take a closer look. She knew what waited in the stillness and the silence, and she could not afford to go back there, not when she was surrounded by burning houses and incoherently screaming assailants. She tried to suppress the sense of inevitability that all of this had happened before, so of course it would happen again.
She caught sight of him on the edge of the throng, a part of the massacre but not. He moved with a purpose the other fighters lacked. His black eyes locked on hers, and Alice realized instantly that the last few months had not changed him at all. His eyes glistened with the same cold rage as when he had seized her wrist by the river. For a moment it did not seem improbable that they had never left that spot and the last summer and autumn had existed only as a dream in her deluded mind. The Huron cut down his opponent with the graceful ease of one used to commanding his body. Then he turned his deliberate strides in her direction.
Alice ran for the trees, knowing he could follow her wherever she went but reasoning at least there she would have to deal with only one enemy and not thirty. She couldn't help thinking it felt horribly unfair. He clearly hated her with every fiber of his being, and she didn't even know why. She wondered if he would tell her before he cut out her heart. Then she began to wonder if dying hurt much, and how long she would lay on the grass with her ribcage split open before her body decided it had lost enough blood and she would stop wondering anything.
She tripped over an uplifted root. She twisted around and saw him pass through the treeline, looking more like an unstoppable force of nature than a human being. He never ran. He did not have to. She was not even sure why she bothered scrambling to her feet with her back against a tree whose name someone important had taught her and she had forgotten. The Huron lifted his tomahawk – which she noticed had much more crimson than grey – and coolly hurled it in her direction without breaking the rhythm of his stride.
"I remember you," the scout said hoarsely. "Saw you…at William Henry. Didn't think you belonged there either. Did you never…wonder…why your lives got so complicated?"
Not really, Uncas thought, but the delirious scout made the mistake his family would never have made and took his silence for assent.
Alice did not remember moving, but a moment later his tomahawk had buried itself in the tree and she wasn't there anymore. The Huron's face remained as contemptuously frigid as before. He was closing the gap between them much faster than she would have believed possible. He drew a long knife from beneath his robes, and she knew she ought to be thinking of her father or her sister, but all she could remember was the last time she had seen him raise his hand and send four men to kill someone whom logic and past experience told her she should have forgotten.
She backed away, knowing she could never go fast enough stumbling backwards on the palms of her hands but unwilling to take the time to get up. She felt more than saw his shadow fall over her. He looked down at her with a cold appraisal that bore an odd resemblance to one of her teachers in London eyeing an assignment completed too late. With something that could have been annoyance, he glanced up at the trees behind her and stopped.
He cocked his head. He looked genuinely surprised. Alice was sure if he looked back down he would find the same surprise mirrored in her eyes, but he did not. His knife slipped from his fingers as he took a few steps forward and landed on the grass to her left. The abrupt change in circumstances left her too dumbfounded to feel properly relieved. He was no longer interested in her.
Later, when she had time to question the who, the what, the where and the why, a thousand reasons would present themselves to explain the next few minutes, and she would reject all of them as false. She would remember the Huron standing motionless with his back to her. She would remember how her eyes travelled from his rigid back to his forgotten knife less than a handbreadth from her fingers. She would remember how it seemed logical to pick it up and equally logical to get her feet. And after that, it was almost a matter of course to step forward and slide it between his shoulder blades.
His arms flew up. A tremor rippled down his spine as he stumbled forward and turned to face his unlikely attacker. The frail, fair-skinned child looked even more terrified of him in death than she ever had during his life. His knees hit the ground first, followed by his shoulders and his head. His last coherent thought before his vision clouded was that someone, somewhere, was laughing.
Alice did not know how long she stood gazing down at the twitching mass of muscle and bone at her feet. She did not know less than thirty paces away stood an older, wiser and equally jaded Indian who could not decide if what he had witnessed was justice or not. She did not know how her knees were still supporting her, but it felt wrong that they should. The shrieking behind the trees sounded curiously distant as she sank to the ground, stared at a dead man and waited to sink into an oblivion that never came.
French passage, full excerpt:
"And when, after a victory is gained, the whole city of London is illuminated; when the sky is in a blaze with fireworks, and a noise is heard in the air, of thanksgivings, of bells, of organs, and of the cannon, we groan in silence, and are deeply affected with sadness of spirit and brokenness of heart, for the sad havoc which is the occasion of those public rejoicings."
- Voltaire, Letters on England