A Dark and Promised Land Read Online Free PDF

while Vega glimmers down through the smokehole. Out in the forest, a nighthawk chuurs and Rose thinks she hears a wolf howl, but it might be a dream.
    The next morning dawns cloudy and grey, the light in the Indian’s tipi broadening in the dull morning. The child beside Rose is stiff and cold. Rose had cried many tears in the long night, and, looking at the girl, all she feels is an empty sorrow. She pushes the matted hair aside and closes the eyes, muttering a brief prayer.
    The air in the tipi is thick with smoke and the low-tide smell of the colonists. Rose vaguely wishes she still had the perfumed handkerchief she had often pressed against her nose while aboard the close, foul ship.
    She sees one of the Indian women nursing an infant. They are comely enough, she decides, despite their bizarre colouration. High cheekbones, small, flat noses, and full lips. Black hair rolled up on either sides of their heads, held in place by a strip of leather and a bone pin. White paint and red ochre cover their arms, and white woollen blankets ringed with twin indigo stripes serve as coats. Soft leggings of skin, decorated with beadwork in colourful patterns. Their feet are dressed in slippers of a similar material, likewise decorated. They are very exotic, Rose decides.
    â€œWe be forsaken,” moans an Orkneywoman from beneath a heavy fur robe. Limp hair hangs in her swollen red face. She jostles her huddled neighbors. “The heathen be eatin’ us for certain.”
    The nursing woman gives her an angry look. “If that was our wish, you already be dead,” she says, her comprehension of their language startling the colonists. An uncomfortable silence follows.
    An old Indian woman — with hair as long and white as her robe and with a face the texture and colour of old boot leather — leans sideways and farts. She opens a toothless mouth in a broad grin. Everyone begins giggling.
    Rose turns to the woman with the infant and hesitatingly introduces herself. The child suckles with great vigour. Its mother stares into the fire. After a long pause she replies, “I am Isqe-sis.”
    â€œThank you for helping us, Isqe-sis. We would not have survived on the beach.”
    Isqe-sis looks up at her. “No good you die there. Tomorrow take to fort. Much …” she thinks a moment, “gifts for your lives: knives, pots, blankets. This why we do.”
    â€œYou mean a reward?”
    The woman nods.
    â€œI see.” Rose frowns. “Is this fort very far?”
    â€œNo far. One day’s journey.”
    Rose thinks the utilitarian motives for the Indian’s help far from Christianlike, and though it gives her a vague sense of being a hostage, she realizes their value is in being kept alive, therefore it is unlikely that any of them will be murdered or eaten. She had expected to see scalps hanging from the poles of the tipi and is surprised that there is only a few ermine, a white goose, and a pair of skin bags containing the dried meat and the strange tea. Despite herself, she feels vaguely disappointed at how crudely prosaic it all seems.
    â€œRose? Is that you?” Her father taps on the outside of the tipi.
    Standing outside, huddled in their borrowed skins and blankets, they stare with fear at the encircling forest. Twisted black spires leaning this way and that, hung with pale green epiphytes that flutter like nightmarish cobwebs in the thin wind. Shadows lie heavy beneath the trees. The bright skulls of slaughtered animals hang on several boughs, and the clearing looks even more disturbing by day than it had by night.
    Another fire had been started, and the old Indian woman walks over to a carcass hanging from a tree. She saws off chunks of meat, impales them on willow twigs, and places them over the fire. The roasting smell is glorious.
    The colonists gather around, ravenous. Lachlan asks how Rose is feeling, and she affirms that she is well enough, all things