This time, it stayed quiet until its mother returned.
This band did not have one firekeeper as the other had.
From time to time, a female or young male would come up to the blaze and toss on a branch or a shrub. The system seemed haphazard to Wingfield, but the fire never looked likely to go out.
A group of sims had gathered on the far side of the fire around something their bodies kept Wingfield from making out. Whatever it was, it mightily interested them. Some stood, others hunkered down on their haunches for a closer look. They pointed and jabbered; once one shook another, as if to get a point across. Wingfield could not help chuckling to himself, they reminded him of so many Englishmen at a public house.
Then the chuckle died in his throat, for he saw that one of the males there had a great glob of mud plastered to the hair from its rib cage.
The sim moved slowly and painfully.
Wingfield touched Cooper's arm. "On my oath, that is the one I fought. I knew I marked him with my knife."
"Then we tracked truly, as I thought. Good. Now we, " Wingfield's hand clamped down tight on the guard's wrist, silencing him. From the center of that tightly packed bunch of sims had come a familiar thin, wailing cry.
"Joanna!"
"How do you know 'tis not one of their cubs yowling?" t Henry Dale demanded. "All brats sound alike."
"Only to a single man," Wingfield retorted, too full of exaltation and fear to care how he spoke. Against al hope, his daughter lived, but how was he to free her from her captors? And what, the question ate at him, as it had from the onset, what had prompted the sims to steal her in the first place?
A couple of sims stepped away to take food, opening a gap in the crowd.
"There, do you see?" Wingfield said triumphantly. No matter how dirty she was (quite, at the moment), smooth, pink Joanna could never be mistaken for a baby sim.
As if to make that pikestaff-plain, one of the sim infants lay beside her on a bed of grass and leaves. Terror stabbed Wingfield as an adult ran its hand down his daughter's chest and bel y, but then it did the same to the hairy baby next to her. It stared at its palm, as if not believing what it had felt.
The sim Wingfield had wounded held up one of Joanna's hands, then that of the infant of its own kind. Then it held up their feet in the same way. The other sims grunted. Some looked at their own hands and feet, then toward Joanna's. Except for size and hairiness, there was not much difference between their members and hers.
But then the sim patted Joanna's smooth, rounded head, and that was nothing like what the tiny sim next to her had. Already its brow beetled bonily, and above it the skull quickly retreated. Noticing that, one of the adults rubbed her own receding brow. She scratched, for all the world as if lost in thought.
"What are they playing at?" Henry Dale whispered harshly.
Wingfield, at a loss, could only shrug.
Caleb Lucas said, "If a tribe of devils set up housekeeping outside London and we wished to learn of what they were capable, were it not wise for us to seize on a small one, knowing ful well a grown devil would drag us straight to perdition?"
"Why are you dragging in devils?" Dale did not have the type of mind that quickly grasped analogies.
Allan Cooper did. "Youngster, meseems you've thrown your dart dead center," he said. "To the sodding sims, we must be devils or worse." He stopped, then went on, sounding surprised at where that line of thought was taking him, "Which would make them men of a sort, not so? I'd not've believed it."
Wingfield paid more attention to Joanna than to the argument. She was still crying, but did not seem in dreadful distress. It was her hungry cry, not the sharper, shriller one she used when gas pained her or something external upset her.
The female sim that had scratched its head might have been the mother of the infant with whom Joanna was being compared. It took Joanna away from the wounded sim and lifted her to a breast. The baby nursed as eagerly as if it had been Anne. Wingfield told himself that was something his wife never needed to know.
He invented and discarded scheme before scheme for rescuing his daughter. The trouble was that the sims would not leave her alone.
Even while she was feeding, they kept coming up to stare at her and touch her. She ate on, blissful y oblivious to everything but the nipple.
"By God, I shal get her back," Wingfield said.
He spoke loud enough to distract Allan Cooper. "What? How?" the guard said.
And then Wingfield knew what he had to do. "Do you three cover me with your weapons," he said, "and should the sims harm Joanna or should I fall, do as you deem best. Otherwise, I conjure you not to shoot."
Before his comrades' protests could more than begin, he got up from his concealment and walked into the light of the sims' fire.
The first sim to see him let out a hoot of alarm that made the rest of the band whip their heads around. He walked slowly toward the fire, his hands empty and open; he had left his crossbow behind when he rose.
Had the sims chosen to, they could have slain him at any instant He knew that. His feet hardly seemed to touch the ground; they were light with the liquid springiness fear gives. But the strange unreality of the moment gripped the sims no less than him. Never before had an Englishman come to them alone and unarmed (or so they must have thought, for the pistols in his boots did not show, in truth, he had forgotten them himself).
But then, the sims had never stolen a baby before.
Females snatched up youngsters and bundled them away in their arms as Wingfield passed. Lucas had it right, he thought wryly; it was as if Satan had appeared, all reeking of brimstone, among the Jamestown cabins.
He stopped a few feetin front of the male he had fought. That one had stooped to grasp a sharp stone; many of them lay in the dirt round the fire. But the sim made no move to attack. It waited, to see what Wingfield would do.
The Englishman was not sure if the sim knew him. He pointed to the plastered-over cut he had given; to the bruise and scab on his own forehead; to Joanna, who was still nursing at the female sims breast.
He repeated the gestures, once, twice.
The sims broad nostrils flared. Its mouth came open, revealing large, strong teeth. It pointed from Wingfield to Joanna, gave a questioning grunt.
"Aye, that's my daughter," Wingfield said excitedly. The words could not have meant anything to the sim, but the animated tone did.
It grunted again.
Wingfield dug in his pouch, found a strip of smoked meat, and tossed it to the sim. The sim sniffed warily, then took a bite. Its massive jaw let it tear and chew at the leathery stuff where the Englishman had to nibble and gnaw, and made its smile afterward a fearsome thing.
When Joanna finally relinquished the nipple, the sim holding her swung her up to its shoulder and began pounding her on the back. The treatment was rougher than Wingfield would have liked, but was soon rewarded with a hearty belch. The female sim began to rock Joanna, much as Anne would have.
Wingfield pointed to his daughter, to himself, and then back in the direction of Jamestown. As best he could, he pantomimed taking Joanna home. When he was done, he folded his arms and waited expectantly, trying to convey the attitude that nothing but going along with his wishes was even conceivable.
Had he hesitated, faltered for an instant, he would have lost everything. As it was, that aura of perfect confidence gave him his way. None of the sims moved to stop the female when it came forward and set Joanna in his arms.
He bowed to it as he might have to a great lady of the court, to the sim he had fought as to an earl. Holding Joanna tightly to him, he backed slowly toward the brush where his companions waited. He expected the tableau to break up at any moment, but it held. The sims watched him go, the firelight reflecting red from their eyes.