A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(44)
Jane controlled her irritation. “I’m answering as well as I can. He’s always been a very bright and sensible man. He loves me, and he wouldn’t want to lose me. If I said we needed to go, I think by now he’d believe me. So I think he would go if I asked. But nobody knows how anyone will react. There are moments when saving your life means immediately doing the same things that you would do if you had an hour to think about them first. So nobody knows how it will go until it happens.”
“Okay,” said Jimmy. “I just wondered.”
“That’s fine,” said Jane. “I guess the bigger answer to your question is that I believe the things I’m telling you will make you safer. Some are things I’ve taught other runners to do, and those people are nearly all well and living new lives. I do the same things for myself.” She stood and picked up her coat on the way to the door. “Now I’ll give you a chance to think about what we’ve said so far. I’ve got to go out for a bit, but I’ll be back.” She had talked her way out the door before he had a chance to reply.
She went down the back stairs, along the lower hall, and out the side door of the hotel. As she walked she came close to the car and glanced at the windows and tires as she passed, then continued out to the street. She walked past a row of fast-food restaurants and an open field, and on for about a mile. The night air and the solitude gave her a chance to cool down and think.
There must be a reason she had been stung by Jimmy’s questions. Maybe it was that he had discovered the uncertainty she had always lived with and hidden from everyone. It was humiliating to admit that the uncertainty existed, and maybe more so because Jimmy was an old acquaintance, almost a member of the family. She had wanted him to think of her as invulnerable rather than weak and plagued with marital problems. She hadn’t been able to ignore him or throw him off the scent. He was wondering what she had always wondered, and he had a relative’s prying persistence. His sincerity was disarming, and it had made her try to answer questions she would have cut off if anyone else had asked. Tonight was a bad time for her to have this conversation, because Carey was angry with her, and she had already been in a bad mood about it.
She had never admitted it aloud to anybody, but being married to somebody who wasn’t Seneca was difficult. She loved Carey and knew him well, and she thought hard about everything she heard him say or saw him do. She believed that he loved her just as much, and thought as hard about her. But over the past year something disturbing had come to her.
A year ago she had lived through a series of terrible trials. When she had reached her worst point, when she was in fiery, throbbing pain from the burns, and weak from the gunshot wound, surrounded alone by cruel enemies and preparing herself for death, she had thought about Carey, and the thought of him had not helped her. He was something good that she’d had while she was strong and happy, not a weapon she still possessed that could strengthen her when she was in a battle for her life. Thinking about Carey had only made her wish to live and get back to him, not to stay strong and live up to the promises she had made to her runners. Thinking about Carey had made her weak, the way thinking about food makes a starving person weak.
As she had endured the ordeal, she kept digging into the back of her mind, searching for something that would help her in those last days of life. What she’d found were her ancestors, the Seneca warriors who had fought the wars of the forests. The men who had gone off in small parties to raid the countries of enemies would sometimes find themselves in trouble. As they were returning home along the trails they might be overtaken by a party of enemies so large that they could never hope to fight them off. Sometimes one warrior would run for a time with the others, then come to a strategic point, often one with the high wall of a cliff on one side and a ravine on the other. He would stop there and turn to block the trail while his friends and companions continued on to escape. The lone warrior would stand on that spot and fight. As the enemies arrived, he would kill as many as he could with arrows, then fight hand to hand for as long as he could raise a war club or thrust a knife. His intention was to fight until he was killed, but sometimes the enemies would overwhelm him and take him captive.
Jane knew that captive warriors had been tormented—beaten, then cut, mutilated, flayed, then burned. A warrior was expected to remain strong and unyielding through all of it, to display such incredible bravery that his captors would be shocked and fear the next Seneca warriors who came their way. Even after the warrior knew he was too deeply wounded and crippled to save himself, he would still look for a chance to strike, grab one of the captors, and kill him before his own death came.
In Jane’s mind the stories about captured warriors were distilled into a vision of a single warrior. His solitude was part of his torment, just as it was part of hers. She thought about the warrior and pictured him among his enemies until she could almost see him with her eyes open. She honored him for his courage and his pride, and tried to behave the way he had. When she began to feel the weakness coming on her, feel herself becoming too tired to struggle, too hopeless to remain silent through the pain, she used the warrior’s image to fight it. She thought about the old Seneca warrior at the darkest time, concentrating hard and continuously. She knew that he had been one of her ancestors. He would have recognized her face, her hair, her skin, and the language she spoke, and understood her and known her in spite of the blue eyes she’d inherited from her mother. And during her ordeal she became, for a brief time, like that warrior. She had watched until her chance had come, until the two men guarding her had fallen asleep. Because of that she was alive tonight, walking along a highway outside Cleveland, and they and their friends were dead.