Sorceress by Celia Rees

Author:Celia Rees
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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24

The settlement

I was determined to enter the settlement and see if there was anyone left alive there. I was joined by others, who came not to help, but to glean what the Nipmucs had left, searching for food, for blankets, anything that had not already been taken. War was making us into birds of carrion; scavenging among the destruction.

In many of the houses, the roofs had burnt and beams had fallen, but walls and floors remained relatively intact. Men and women lay where they had been struck down. Each one was scalped and beyond my help.

I crossed the threshold of a house near the centre of the settlement. The door lay twisted, broken on its hinges, shattered and splintered by blows from a hatchet. The roof was gone; the house lay open to the elements. Halfway across the floor the body of a man lay trapped under a criss-cross of burnt and fallen beams. There was nothing I could do for him. He was dead even before the roof fell down on him. A blow from a war club had crushed his skull like eggshell.

I stepped over him into a mess of smashed plates thrown from an overturned table. Over in the corner, slashed bedding smouldered, chests from home gaped open, their contents spilling. Broken pots littered the cold ashy hearth. Beneath my feet was a trapdoor, leading to a root cellar. I did not want to join in the scavenging, but we needed food for the journey, for our own survival.

I pulled up the trap, thinking I might find their place of winter storage. Instead I found a boy. He was lying on his back, a great gash on his forehead. I knelt down beside him. The wound was deep and encrusted with black, but fresh blood seeped from the ragged edges. He lay insensible, pallid unto death, but a faint pulse beat in his neck. He was alive.

Black Fox came to see what I had discovered. When he saw, he took out his hatchet and his scalping knife.

‘No!’ I held his arm. ‘He’s no more than a boy. He will not die.’

I was determined to save him. There was too much death around me already and I was a healer. It was my duty to preserve life, not take it. I bid Black Fox lift him out into the open. A stream ran through the village. I carried water from it to bathe his face and clean the filthy wound. His eyelids fluttered open. The sight of us set him swooning again, but I resolved to take him with us. I made a travois for him, binding him to it, then bid Black Fox tow it while I walked behind.

When we stopped and camped for the night, I bathed his wound again. He was still insensible, so I left him strapped to the travois and scoured the woods around for what I would need to heal his wound. I scraped gum from the balsam fir and gathered oak

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