Call the Fire


The braves stretched his arms wide and bound him tightly to the two posts
that stood in the center of the village.  The area looked well used and he
didn't miss the slashes that ran in ragged random across the wood of the
posts any more than he missed the fact that the rawhide thongs that bit so
roughly into his wrists were new.  He was bruised and bleeding from the
treatment he'd already received at the hands of the hunting party he had
run into.  Looking around at the growing crowd and the look on their faces,
he suspected that he'd just tasted the edge of what he was going to go
through tonight.  In a vague way, it occurred to him that this could be it,
"the end", but he was more concerned with what was going on now than with
what might or might not happen later.  And right now, his captors were in
the process of describing how difficult he had been to capture from the
look of things.  The man they addressed looked like someone  important by
the respect the rest of the crowd was giving him.  Everything about him was
dark.  Including the pleased look in his cold eyes.
The crowd was starting to work themselves up now.  Never a good sign when
the crowd didn't need any help getting in a blood thirsty mood.  The
muscles in his back, shoulders, and arms were stretched taut as it was but
he tried the rawhide bindings anyway.  They held and he would have been
amazed if they hadn't but he'd needed to try anyway.
It was full dark now.  Never a good time to get mixed up in anything that
involved a crowd.  People always acted differently once the sun had gone
down.  As if somehow, God couldn't see them in the dark.
The chief the braves were reporting to stepped forward suddenly and the
crowd hushed.  His eyes drilled his prisoner and he pronounced what could
only be a judgment sentence.  The crowd went wild and it wasn't in any way
other than demonic as the drums began to beat.  The fires leaped suddenly
higher as logs were carelessly tossed on them.  The prisoner bowed his head
and said a quick prayer.  It consisted of three words.
"God help me."
Then he raised his face and his eyes narrowed as they focused on the
surging crowd that capered around him.  He may have been in worse scrapes
than this, but for the life of him, he couldn't think of a single one right
now.



She heard the surge in commotion outside her tent and a sick feeling stole
over her soul.  It was so strong that she almost gagged.  Darkness.  She
hated the feeling.  As much as she hated how familiar it had become to her
over these past years.
Angry, she pushed aside the door flap, caught her breath and froze for a
moment as her eyes told her what her heart already had.  People moved like
strangely played puppets with tangled strings, danced around fires piled
too high with precious firewood.  Their screaming, groaning calls were a
mockery.  Firelight danced off bared blades and bodies and everywhere she
looked she saw smeared blood.  A cold horror settled around her heart. 
Things had gotten bad before.  She had never seen it this nightmarish.  Not
during the worst of winters.  Not after the most successful war raid.
Both fearful of what she'd find and with a growing rage, she pushed her way
through the crowd, vicious as she knocked people aside.  Father Above, she
hated this.  They were gone in the blood madness, some of them even bore
fresh wounds, self inflicted or otherwise she didn't stop to wonder.  At
her passage people turned toward her in anger until they recognized the
flashing green eyes.  Shaman-woman.  A path of silence followed her as she
made her way toward the center of the crowd.
Sick with what she saw, she practically threw the last person aside as she
stepped into the center of the ring.  Behind her she sensed the way the
people she had touched slunk away toward their tents. Good!  Let them feel
shame.  Half expecting what she'd find, she turned toward the sacrifice
poles.  
And lost her breath.
Blond?  He was blond.  She couldn't remember the last time she had seen
blond hair.  He hung by his wrists and blood poured from him into the snow
and mud.  Somehow, he kept his feet under him enough so that he hadn't yet
dislocated his shoulders.  She couldn't see his face, his head was hung,
baring a neck that ran a strange protective streak through her.  She saw
dark, swelling bruises across his ribs and suspected broken bones.  His
light hair was dark  with his blood but still unmistakably blond.
Members of the tribe danced around him and inflicted wounds meant to cause
pain without granting the relief of unconsciousness.  Anger and hatred rose
fire bright in her chest and she found herself running forward without a
thought.  How many times had she seen this?  A knife glowed bright as it
fell, heated by the fire.
"NO!"
She threw herself in the way without a thought, caught the blade's edge
across her shoulder and reacted instinctively with an angry cry and a fist
that caught the knife wielder in the nose, snapping his head back.
"No more!"  She ordered it in a voice that carried across the entire silent
crowd.  With a hand she touched her wound, flesh still too shocked to feel
it yet.  Raising her bloody hand to the crowd, she snapped:
"This is what you want?  Ai!  Blood spilled!  Well, there!" she flicked her
wrist, sending shining droplets of her "sacred" blood into the crowd who
scattered from its hot touch.  "You have had it.  Now go home!"


He couldn't say how long the pain had lasted, the torture.  The crowd was
demonically precise in the way they flayed the skin from his body.  And the
women in the group were the worst.  So much for the gentler sex, the part
of him that was still managing to hold on to humor had thought.  He locked
his jaw and refused to cry out as the edge of a blade ran its way across an
exposed rib.  Not that he didn't think there were times when a good yell
couldn't do wonders but now wasn't one of them.  There was no way he was
going to show weakness or egg the crowd on.  Screaming would have done
both.
He was so far gone in the pain that it took him a long moment to realize
when it stopped.  He heard a voice, words he couldn't understand, realized
belatedly that it was a woman's voice and not the chief's after all.  And
then arms closed sweetly around him, twining around his neck as a woman's
soft body pressed against his battered one.  It could have been the start
of another form of torture but he took the relief it offered for the
moment.  He laid his forehead against her shoulder, inhaled the incredibly
clean scent of her.  God, she felt good.
The chief's voice rang out in the sudden stillness and on instinct he tried
to move, to place her behind him, before he remembered that his wrists were
still bound.  Because there was hatred in that voice.  Hatred of his
rescuer.  She sounded more than able to stand on her own though as she
snapped out a sharp answer in her clear voice.  Her words continued and he
heard tones of sanity and reasoning in it, authority, sensed the way the
crowd moved behind him in response to her.  The chief spoke again but this
time it was a different voice that rose in question afterward.  It didn't
take long or many other carefully placed suggestions by his rescuer to have
the crowd's feelings divided.  As near as he could tell from the few words
he did understand, it wasn't so much that anyone wanted him spared as they
wanted to wait.  But who or what they were waiting for he couldn't tell.
The slender arms around his neck shifted, wrapped around his chest now. 
Her voice was in his ear, low and soft, but he heard the iron that ran
through it.
"You must stand.  No matter the pain.  When cut free, you must stand."
The pain muffled the surprise he felt to hear her speaking English, no
matter how oddly accented, and he nodded.  Lights danced in front of his
eyes and his world was quickly blurring.  He hoped she didn't ask him to
stand for too long.  
He heard a snap, and one of his arms sagged.  New pain screamed up and into
him but he bit it down, braced his legs as his other arm was freed.  He
held his balance but only just and that was only with her added support as
she wrapped her arms back around him.
"Come now.  Walk with me."
Her voice, near his ear again.  He found himself smiling crookedly.  In a
ragged voice he murmured:
"You never said anything about walking."
Not that it mattered.  He'd walk if he had to.  Just so long as it got him
to somewhere vaguely safe where he could collapse.


No one protested as she led him away from the crowd and into the relative
safety of her tent.  They were too busy arguing.  Walks Tall was only the
war chief.  He was not the sachem.  The tribe's sachem was not here right
now, gone on a hunting trip.  It was the sachem's right to decide what was
done with prisoners.  Walks Tall did not have right to this stranger.  Not
yet anyway.  A shiver moved through her as she thought of what life would
be like for them all when Walks Tall did take that final position of power
for himself.  Because there was no "if" about it.
"Here" she crooned softly, gentle as she lowered the stranger into the warm
embrace of her sleeping robes, "safe here.  Rest now."  Eyes sharp with
pain opened wider than, fixed on her and hands suddenly caught her by her
shoulders as she leaned over him.  They were big hands, strong and agile,
and she knew a sudden instant of fear for what he might do in his pain. 
His eyes narrowed as he looked at her in the dim light and she held herself
still and unthreatening.
"English?" his voice was raw and she quickly covered his lips with the tips
of her fingers.
"Not to talk" she murmured, reaching blindly for the water skin, unable to
tear her eyes from the blue fire of his.  Her stomach uncoiled strangely in
her, and she felt relief as her fingers finally closed around the leather
of the water bag and he looked away to see what she was doing, freeing her
from the trap of his eyes.
A quick, deep breath served to settle her and then she untied the mouth of
the skin, slipping behind him to gingerly prop him up so that he could
drink from it.  With a trained eye she watched the way he moved.  Not many
broken ribs then.  No bleeding on the inside somehow.  His skin hung in
ribbons in some areas and the scaring would be extensive but not so very
bad or disfiguring.  It puzzled her, distracted her thoughts as she
carefully lowered him back down, absently brushing soft hair back from his
forehead before she moved to set her tea pot to boiling.  This tribe was
cruel.  They were very good at causing both pain and damage.  It was
something she had not learned to live with in all the many years since she
had first been brought to live among them, kidnapped because of her healing
skills, her "white magic".  Shaman-woman.  This tribe enjoyed the torture
of their captives.  The stranger was badly hurt.  But it should be worse.
She glanced back at him, saw that he was either sleeping or unconscious. 
His breathing was deep and even.  This was good.  She did not know how long
she could protect him from the will of Walks Tall.  Eventually, they would
come for him, willing to risk the wrath of her "guardian spirits" in order
to take him away.  Take him away for death and torture.  She shuddered
again, wrapping her arms around herself as she looked down at the sleeping
man.  He was handsome.  Handsome beyond belief.  But there was more to it
than that.  It was a something in his eyes, in the way he had touched her. 
Maybe something in his face.  In her spirit she felt him, somehow a man
both strong and gentle.  And she had not known that a man could be both
without the one overwhelming the other.
The pot over the fire hissed as water bubbled over its sides and she chided
herself for her distracted thoughts as she caught up a cloth and rescued
it.  Setting it aside she turned, started collecting her herbs and tools. 
She must heal him somehow and she must do it quickly.  Soon enough they
would start to remember that she was as white as he was and they would
begin to think that he had come to rescue her.  To take her back.  And then
they would kill him.



When he woke up it was dark.  He couldn't say whether it was still the same
night or the next.  He heard the soft sounds of movement and turned his
head.  The woman who had rescued him was kneeling next to him and when he
moved she glanced at him, smoky eyes surprised.  In the darkness he
couldn't put a color to them but he knew they weren't brown.
Her surprise fled as quickly as it had come and she gave him a smile that
was somehow soft and bright at the same time.  
"Did dream?" she asked and her voice was low.  There was a smoothness to
its sound, to the odd inflections in her words.  He gave her a smile.
"Not at all."  
She nodded and continued replacing the bandage she had pressed against his
side.
"Is good."  She stopped herself, paused for a moment before firmly
correcting herself:  "It is good.  That there were no nightmares."  One of
her fingers touched an old scar that curled along his shoulder and her eyes
moved to find his.  "You have bled before."
She used the Powhatan term for it.  Sawwehonc.  Which meant more than
simply bleeding.  It meant life's blood, heart's blood.  He almost smacked
his forehead at how long it had taken him to put everything together.
"Roanoke."  It hadn't been a question but if it had been he wouldn't have
needed to hear her answer to know it was true.  Her head snapped up at the
sound and her eyes widened, dark pupil's dilating.  He gave her a crooked
smile.
"Would have figured it out sooner but my head was a bit fogged."
She turned away from him suddenly but not before he caught a glimpse of the
stricken look on her face.  Concerned, he sat up, locking his jaw as he
ignored the pain.
"Hey" he curved a hand around her slender shoulder, gently turned her
toward him.  Tears were in her eyes and her face was a still mask as she
fought them.  She looked suddenly very young.  He cupped her chin with a
hand, tipped her face up.  "What's wrong?"
Her narrow jaw locked for a moment and he watched her draw in several long,
shaky breathes.  Apparently, she decided not to trust her voice because she
used Indian trade sign language to bluntly state:
"Village dead."
His eyes widened and he shook his head.
"Na" he told her in Algonquin and Indian sign when his vague linguistic
skills failed, "village busy with people.  Belonging to Powhatan
Confederacy.  My ship is there now."
A soft sound escaped her lips and she leaned forward, touched his cheek
with long fingers, eyes liquid.
"Do not lie" she begged.  He gave her a half smile, taking her chilled hand
in his warm one.  His eyes met hers.
"I'm not."
A quiet, strangled sound escaped her then and she bowed her head as tears
broke past her lashes and spilled down her cheeks.  Gentle, he drew her
into his arms.  Her body shook with sobs and tears wet his skin as he held
her close.  She was silent as she cried but he felt the release of it.  How
long had she been holding back her tears?  How long had she thought her
tribe was dead?  He hadn't heard mention of any recently kidnapped women
when he had talked to Governor Dare.  As a matter of fact, as far as he
knew, there hadn't been anyone kidnapped since the Mohawk raid that had
occurred just before Roanoke had joined with the Powhatans.  And that had
been almost five years ago.  A sudden suspicion ran through him and he
looked closely at the hair he was gently stroking back from her face. 
Narrowed his eyes to see it better in the fading firelight.
At first glance her hair looked almost as dark as the natives around her. 
She must stain it with walnut.  But she hadn't recently and the darkness
was fading from her hair.  It caught glints of red and gold from the fire. 
Rich brown.  It reminded him of autumn.
Her tears were fading and he touched her cheek.  Brilliantly clear eyes
raised to met his.
"Fortune?" he asked softly.  And then he heard her laugh, joy bubbling
through the tears.  It sounded like river water over pebbles.
"Aye" she answered, her smile like a burst of sunlight in a dark room. 
"Oh, aye."  And she hugged him, soft laughter still spilling from her lips
like rain.




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