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for such a little time, but she was well aware that she had been a partner in
the decision to include
Silent Woman and that at the time she'd had the power to veto that decision.
Cloud Dancer's life had been pretty unhappy up to meeting Hawks, but Silent
Woman's past was Cloud Dancer's worst nightmare. Pity had turned quickly to
respect for the strange tattooed woman, and Cloud Dancer had participated in
the ceremony of blood. She now regarded Silent Woman as one of her own blood
and as much her wife as both were the wives of Hawks. The family was not a
collection of individuals: The family was One.
The survival program had stripped everything from her concerns except the
basics. Her memories were not impaired; it was simply that all she had been
was no longer relevant. Family, tribe, nation their world was now three people
in a canoe, and nothing else was important enough to think about. The unit had
certain basics that were required. It must be fed. It must find shelter and be
hidden from enemies each night. It must be guarded. It must survive. Of
necessity the women must be the warriors, and those were the tasks of
warriors.
She was also a wife. A tribal wife served and supported her husband, gave her
body willingly to him, and, if the spirits willed, bore him many fine
children.
Absolutely nothing but these concerns occupied her thoughts and motivated her
actions.
The only way to learn about Silent Woman was to ask yes or no questions, but
there was little truly to be learned. She had no memory of her past at all, no
memory of where she'd come from or where she had received the tattoo and why,
or even of ever having given birth to a child or, for that matter, ever
having had a tongue. The shock and trauma of her horrible times had simply
been rejected, blotted out, and locked away forever in some corner of the mind
where such things go. She had not in fact even thought in a language anyone
could have truly recognized, for it was an amalgam of terms and concepts from
dozens of languages strung together in a way that worked but was uniquely her
own. It
was not a complex language. She did not, even with the English recoder, get
much of what Hawks or Cloud Dancer said, because her vocabulary was so limited
and her rules so basic.
She had known only that she hated the Illinois passionately but that she never
had any other place to go. Her geographical world was the village where she'd
lived and The Other Place where all the strangers came from and went to. She
was still being constantly amazed that The Other Place was so vast, but it
still was a single entity in her mind.
Then she'd seen her masters toying with the captive pair and had known that
after the game they would kill the man and make the woman like her, and she
hated the Illinois and the village. So, when she had accidentally bumped into
Cloud Dancer and realized that they were planning to flee, she had thought
only about helping them and hoping that they would take her with them, away
from the village to The Other Place. And they had. She had never regarded
herself as anything but property, but she knew she preferred to be the
property of Hawks, a man both handsome and brave, and in whom there was a
gentle streak she had not known before, and some sadness or hurt deep inside
as well. She had never thought of being a wife to such a one. In fact, she
really had no concept of
"wife," but she understood that to the other two it made her an equal with
Cloud
Dancer. That was the heady stuff of impossible dreams.
She was not stupid; that was the mistake the others had made. She was,
however, almost totally ignorant, having not even the grounding of a sense of
tribe and culture as almost any of the others back in the village had. She was
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already now at a higher level than she could have conceived possible; she
wanted only to preserve that. They were her world, all she had or desired.
They were everything. She loved them both. Her whole life was nothing but
obedience and service. She would love, obey, and serve them even if it meant
her death, and she would never survive them.
They were approaching one of the increasingly frequent bends in the river, one
that made the water in front seem to vanish and which might be the same river
as that seen distantly through the trees on the right. Hawks had decided
against trusting such visions after they tried a portage the first time; the
water through the trees had turned out to be an oxbow lake, a bend in the
river that had been cut off by built-up silt as the river changed its course.
He no longer felt the strong urgency he had up north, considering how long
they had been on the river without encountering anyone.
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