Ululating screams erupted out of sight, and the undergrowth disgorged a dozen more forest men, each carrying a club and knife. The men stood over Cornwall, kicking him, flicking him with their knives, shattering one wrist as he buried himself defensively behind his arms. He could see Brudloe, his head profusely bleeding, thrashing wildly about. Brudloe managed to reach his own knife and, pulling it from its scabbard, viciously slashed at the jabbing limbs surrounding him. He connected with the muscle and bone of a warrior not agile enough to leap out of the way until he was bludgeoned senseless. Brudloe was then lifted and dragged into the brush, and Cornwall felt a noose being fitted around his own neck and tightened until his hands were securely bound with a leather strap. He was herded off the path and dragged a few hundred yards into a clearing.
Cornwall was thrown down next to Brudloe, the noose around his neck tightened still more, so that his breath wheezed through his throat. The warriors hunkered down, examining the flintlocks, hefting the weight of the ax, ignoring their captives as they spoke quietly in their own tongue. Cornwall looked at Brudloe, a blackened knot rising up over one temple, uncertain he was still alive until he saw Brudloe’s chest heaving beneath his shirt. Cornwall brought his bound hands up to his chin, gently feeling inside his mouth. Several bottom teeth were loose and they fell, like kernels of corn, into his gently probing fingers. His jaw was cracked, perhaps in several places, and he knew when the shock wore off, there would be pain. His wrist was badly broken, but at least there were no bones showing through the skin.
The Indians seemed content to wait until Brudloe began to stir, moaning and cursing. As soon as he had regained his wits, both he and Cornwall were heaved up and, prodded and kicked, forced along through the woods heading north, following no discernible path. The pace, rapid and unrelenting, brought them across hilly, rough-scrabble terrain strewn with boulders and choked with bracken and dense fern. After a few hours of stumbling progress, Cornwall decided that there was no fixed route to their forced march; rather, their captors were taking, in a crisscrossing, arbitrary fashion, sudden directional changes, as a flock of wary, migrating starlings would do.
They came to a stream, and Cornwall was pushed facedown into the water, which he took to mean that he was to drink. As his hands were tied in front, he could cup the water and take his fill, whereas Brudloe, his hands tied behind, had to lap up water like a dog. They were kicked to the other side of the stream, and Brudloe started up a steady, low cursing that continued angrily for hours until dark, when they stopped to make camp. They were thrown a biscuit each, but Brudloe’s demands and gestures to be untied went unheeded, and he had to rely on Cornwall to feed him like an infant. Cornwall then broke apart tiny pieces of the hardened biscuit, which he shoved through swollen lips, dissolving them on his tongue to be swallowed with his spit. The warrior that Brudloe had slashed with his knife sustained a deep gash in his leg, and when he peeled off his blood-soaked leggings, the wound hung open and fleshy on his thigh, like the mouth of a corpse. In good humor, with no grimacing or spectacle, he packed the gaping wound full of leaves, which he took from a bag tied at his waist. Taking up a bone needle and a hair plucked from his own head, he commenced to sew up the ragged flesh. The Indians made no fire that night, nor any night, until they had traveled, to Cornwall’s reckoning, a week in a general northwesterly fashion.
The pain of his injuries was terrible, especially at night. But in the daylight hours the rhythm of the ceaseless walking and the studied quiet of their captors, uttering only what sounded to be abrupt, cautionary warnings, brought a kind of settled acceptance to Cornwall’s mind. Apart from their initial thrashing, the Indians had not mistreated them, feeding them little, but no less than they themselves ate. After a few days, Brudloe was retied, with his hands to the front, but he was also leashed with a noose like Cornwall’s that tightened at the slightest bit of resistance from him. The only burden to Cornwall’s sense of ease was Brudloe’s ceaseless scheming and raving about escape and how he would murder each one of the “fuckin’ black whoresons of Satan.” But the astonishing thing, at least to Cornwall, was that the Indians were not black, as he had long believed; they were a golden color, lithe and oiled, their skin flexing over sinewy muscles like eels over rocks. They were in stature small, but as with the fabled cairn people from his own native country, they did not so much travel on the land as through it, their feet leaving no mortal tracks in the mud to speak of their passing.
Cornwall had heard about Indians from the New World. He had even paid a penny to see one exhibited in the Tower in London a week before he and Blood had robbed the king’s jewels. The specimen was dead and stuffed like a partridge, of course, but he looked nothing like the men who walked with resourceful vitality through the forest in front of him day after day. The preserved figure, propped up in a dark, squalid cell, was as short as a child, with opaque blackish-gray skin and a broadened nose with thick lips. The figure was naked except for some rings of brass around its ankles and arms, and its eyes were sewn shut with coarse thread. Their Indian captors spent their time, while not walking, grooming themselves and one another, painting their skin with ocher and red clay, braiding shells and feathers into their forelocks, plucking out or scraping off with an oyster shell the rest of the hair on their heads. He would have considered it womanish if not for the grave, ritual-like manner in their ablutions.
After the first week, small groups would veer off into the bracken, returning hours later with the carcass of a deer or smaller animal. Then the evening fires would be built, spitting cuts of flesh and bone with branches to cook over the flames. The captives were given their portions, and when Cornwall could not chew with his shattered jaw, he thought he would go mad with the desire to gnash the charred flesh between his remaining teeth. One of the warriors squatted down next to him, handing him bits of meat he had first chewed to a soft pulp. Without reservation, Cornwall gratefully accepted the meat, sucking on the juices before swallowing each piece.
Brudloe, grimacing distastefully, muttered, “How can you feed off ’im like that? You’ll be wormy in a month.”
After another week they came upon a village of conical dwellings made of shingled wood and animal skins, with clustered gardens of corn and beans. They were met and escorted by a guard of young warriors, whooping in triumph as he and Brudloe were led to the largest dwelling. Their fiery escort made Cornwall almost exuberant, and he could not help but smile at the old women and children who walked next to him, examining his clothes and skin as though he were a prized stallion. Brudloe took exception to the handling and kicked out and spat at the people when they came too close.
The young women were exceptionally comely to Cornwall’s eye, with the same fluid skin as their brothers’, their breasts partially bare, high and mounded, dotted with dark brown nipples. To his dismay, he found himself becoming aroused, and the women good-naturedly mocked and teased him for it when his member tented the front of his breeches.
A man wrapped in a mantle of bleached deerskins stepped from the dwelling and stood blinking at the captives. He had the face of an Old Testament prophet and was supported on both sides by two young women perhaps not past their girlhoods. When the prophet’s eyes came to rest on Cornwall, the Londoner grinned, wanting to reach out and touch the leathery skin, exploring with his fingers the striated shells and bones fringing the ancient man’s cloak. Cornwall looked around at the glistening, naked children, the old women with their gentle probing hands, even at the warriors painted and poised like exotic birds, and he thought, Fairies. They’re like fairies.