It smelt clean inside the panier, like wood shavings. She heard Chichibud buckling his own seat straps.
“Hold on, pickney. Go, Benta. Straight to the bush.” The bird stood up, shook her wings into place, and took off at a run. She pelted round the back of the house, using her wings for balance whenever she swerved. Tan-Tan closed her eyes. The bumpy, jolting ride in the confined dark… a memory nearly a decade old rose in Tan-Tan’s mind, of crashing round in the trunk of the sheriffs’ car while it drove her and Daddy to exile. Daddy…
Soon the sound of Benta’s feet hitting the ground changed from a thud to the crackle-bounce of corn trash. Tan-Tan opened her eyes. They were in the fields around Junjuh, fleeing fast in the dusk towards the bush.
They broke into the bush proper, to the cover of the trees. When the first young branch scored the side of her face, Tan-Tan crouched down inside the panier. More withies slapped whup-whup against the panier. Tan-Tan didn’t know how Chichibud was protecting himself from them. But Benta slowed only slightly, trampling what she could and avoiding what she couldn’t. The roaring in Tan-Tan’s head hadn’t stopped since she’d impaled Antonio on her knife. Bad Tan-Tan was screaming silently: Antonio dead, he dead. Antonio dead. You kill he.
After some time, Chichibud called for Benta to stop. Tan-Tan heard him sniffing the air.
“Them coming for we, Tan-Tan. Bringing the dogs.”
The dogs! The dogs that had made it to Toussaint had all interbred into one tough, bad-tempered mongrel strain. They would track a scent till Kingdom Come. Tan-Tan had seen animals that the Junjuh pack had torn apart. It was too much to deal with. Dumbly, she twisted back to look at Chichibud.
He said, “Benta, is up to you. The dogs must lose we scent. Tan-Tan, you strap in good? Hold on tight.”
“Wroow,” Benta cooed. She hopped over to the nearest big tree and dug one set of powerful claws into its trunk. Even in the reddish dusk Tan-Tan could see the tips of Benta’s claws sinking into the wood. The bird reached up and dug her beak into the trunk a little higher. And to Tan-Tan’s amazement, Benta started to climb. She sidled up foot by foot, using her beak to pull her up higher into the tree, up into the branches where the leaves could hide them and the dogs would lose their scent in the air.
Chichibud laughed a low shu-shu. “Oonuh tallpeople don’t really know what packbirds could do, oui?”
Tan-Tan held on to the sides of the panier till her fingers cramped around it. “You should leave me, make them find me.”
“For that mad sheriff to hang? You was only trying to defend yourself.”
“One-Eye would be right to hang me. I k-kill Daddy.”
“Papa Bois see what really happen in that room, Tan-Tan. He ain’t judging you.”
Benta had reached a thick limb high up in the tree. Before Tan-Tan knew what was happening Benta was leaping to a next tree, flapping her useless wings as she went. Tan-Tan gave a little scream.
“Hush. Don’t make the dogs hear we.”
Benta landed sure-footed in the next tree and kept climbing. And now Tan-Tan could hear the pack of dogs baying, following their scent and the clear trail Benta’s tracks must have made. The dogs were crashing through the undergrowth, with the men shouting behind them: “Here! This way!” Lights from hurricane lamps were dancing through the bush like duppy lights in the dark.
Benta froze.
Tan-Tan held still like the last breath between life and death. She didn’t even dare look down. The dogs were whining and running around, looking for the scent they’d lost. One-Eye’s voice said, “Is what the blast wrong with allyou bitch hound? Find them, I say!”
The men laid about the dogs-them with whips. The dogs yelped. But they’d lost the scent and there was no more trail.
“Let we go home,” said a voice. It was Melonhead. Tan-Tan managed to stop her cry before it had left her lips. She sat in the dark with Chichibud and Benta, knuckling hot tears and grit flies from her eyes.
The lights and the sound of the hunting party were gone. Chichibud made a chittering noise with his claws. Tan-Tan knew that sound; he was worried. “I think is time,” he said to himself. “We know say it would happen.” Benta gave a low, grumbly series of warbles that made Tan-Tan think of nannysong. But they were only nonsense phrasings. Benta started climbing again, higher and higher up the tree till the stars were visible through the branches. She kept climbing, testing her weight on smaller and smaller branches. Tan-Tan was queasy from the swaying of the climb. Would the branch hold? She looked out over the bush. She could just make out one-one light twinkling back in Junjuh Town: the hurricane lamps people hung outside their front doors every night. The darkness was a thick blanket round her, like the blanket in the trunk of the autocar when she’d run away with… Chichibud’s voice was barely a whisper when he said:
“Oonuh tallpeople been coming to we land from since, and we been keeping weselves separate from you. Even though we sharing the same soil, same water, same air. Tonight, that go change, Tan-Tan. I taking you far away, where Junjuh Town people can’t find you. For me to do that, you go have to come and live with we douen. You go find out things about we that no other human person know, starting tonight.” She twisted round to look at his silhouette, crouched on Benta’s back in the clotting dark. “Understand the trust I placing in your care, doux-doux. Understand that I doing it to save your life, but you have to guard ours in return.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“When you take one life, you must give back two. You go keep douen secrets safe? You must swear. I know you ain’t feel to talk right now, but you must swear out loud.”
Tan-Tan’s heart was hammering hard and slow in her chest like drum. When you take one life, you must give back two. Tan-Tan bowed her head and accepted the obeah that Chichibud had just put on it. “I swear, Chichibud.”
“Remember what you swear, child. Papa Bois listening.”
What would he do now? She remembered how she used to think douen people were magic.
“In the daytime,” Chichibud told her, “packbird is ground bird. But is nighttime now. No-one to see.”
And he raised his voice: “Benta! Now!”
The packbird gave a squawk that sounded like joy. She puffed her chest in and out repeatedly, then started to beat her wings, hard and fast. They were shadows whipping through the dark. And they were growing. The wings that Tan-Tan had always believed were clipped were filling out, getting long and strong.
“Chichibud! What she doing?”
He had to shout to be heard above the beating wings. “The channels in she wings does fill up with air when she need to fly.”
Fly? Benta leapt out of the tree and plummeted towards the ground below. Tan-Tan screamed. But one beat of the powerful wings hooked at the air and with the next beat Benta was powering them high above the bush, soaring through the air, high, higher, till Tan-Tan couldn’t make out the treetops in the darkness.
Chichibud leaned forward and shouted over the rushing wind, “Since allyou tallpeople start coming to New Half-Way Tree, packbirds only fly at night, and in places where allyou can’t see. I taking you to a place no other tallpeople ever see either.”
The wind sang past Tan-Tan’s face. The breeze blew away her tears. The cold, crisp air cleared a little of the fog from her brain. Tan-Tan the Midnight Robber was soaring out above her kingdom, free from thought, nothing to fear. Sweet chariot, time to ride. She laughed out loud. But the wind blew the laugh from her mouth and carried it away. Antonio dead, Bad Tan-Tan hissed at her. You kill he. When you take one, you must give back two.