"Seems safe enough now."
"Nothing is safe here, you will learn."
"But it's so open!" Alan protested, shifting the sling of his fusil on his shoulder. "Two hundred yards to the trees, and the scouts."
"Hide behind tree, hide in those groves. Lay in the grass. Ten warriors, twenty? They could be on you before you get that gun to your shoulder."
"Delightful." Alan shuddered. "Look, about that snake yesterday. Never kill a snake."
"No."
"Never wash meat in a stream, never piss in one, never put out a fire with water. Never get downstream of a widow, or upstream from a wife. Avoid women in their monthlies like the plague. What else?"
"A great deal more, Lewrie," McGilliveray said. "But it makes sense to us. Women are a separate animal from man. Not like us at all, so we have to be careful we are not defiled. We know the Thunder Boys are the ones who create mischief in this world, and people bring it on because they mixed elements that should not have been mixed. In the world above, everything is perfect, each animal, each plant, and man and woman, larger than us, and perfect. Down below in the underworld, monsters and witches and Water-Cougar, one of everything, but evil. In the right here world, sometimes the perfect comes down, sometimes bad comes up from below, like Spear-Finger, the old woman who kills and steals men's souls to feed on so she can live forever. Even when she was finally killed, she did not really die. The good and the bad always come back, so people must always be on their guard not to defile their spirit, or offend the Great Spirit by defilement. For their own good, their family and clan, and their nation."
"Is that what you believe personally?" Alan asked. "Are you a Christian, or do you believe the native religion?"
"When my father took me to Charleston, and then to England, he taught me about God and Jesus, but I always found it a little confusing," McGilliveray admitted. "Even after a year at Cambridge, I find the old ways more comforting. Mister Cowell and his friends tried to explain the unexplainable as he puts it, but the various points of doctrine are troubling to me."
"Ah well, most people have that problem. Most call themselves Deists and let it go at that." Alan grinned.
"Then you do not honor your God who made you, as we do. To say that God exists, and then continue your life your own way, is to negate your belief," McGilliveray expounded. "Others leap about and speak no known tongue, shake and dance in glory. They raise the Bible on high and declare everyone sinners but themselves. But then they go out and kill eagles for sport, kill snakes, sleep with their women in their courses. All Christians treat the earth as a dead thing to walk upon, and all animals as dumb food. When we kill an eagle to get its feathers for our great men, it takes much prayer, and we ask the eagle, and the Great Spirit, who is most in the birds, and in the eagles of any race of animals on earth, to forgive us for we have to do this. Christians would strip this land bare, chop all the trees, slaughter all the game far beyond what they could eat, because God gave man dominion back in the cloud-time before the clans saw their signs. Look here," he said, pointing to a circle tattoo on his chest, which enclosed a four-legged equilateral cross.
"This is the circle of the world between the sky and the underworld. The four principal directions, and where they meet, right here now. Everyone of Indian blood knows here is where he must live if he wants to be good, following the laws laid down by the Great Perfect Spirits."
He reached out and put a hand inside Alan's shirt.
"Hold on, my good fellow!" Alan snapped, unused like any Englishman at being pawed at. But McGilliveray took hold of his small juju bag strung about his neck and weighed it thoughtfully.
"How odd. I had expected to find a cross," McGilliveray said with a wary expression. He let go of the bag so that Alan could tuck it back into his shirt. "The white man's cross is off-center. There is no sense of being centered, and the directions lead off to nothing, which is why all white men, all Christians are so unhappy, and want to have dominion. I saw the old roods, the Celtic crosses of your people in the long ago, which had circles around the center, but the directions go beyond the circle. They must have been close to the truth in those days, but even so, they never really knew peace."
"We could have had a fish, you know. What would you make of that, I wonder?" Alan groused, still resenting the manhandling.
"Then it would be a great fish that swims the world's oceans and never knows rest," McGilliveray intoned. "If one cannot find peace, then one will try to run everything to one's own satisfaction in the search for peace. How much better are my people, who live so close and snug to each other, in a great family. We know want, but we share equally, not like you who store up food and wealth from each other and let other men of your kind starve or beg. If our clan or town is rich in food, we all eat well. If there is little, we all starve together, and pray that we have lived well, so that the Great Spirits and the perfect spirits of the deer people, bear people and fish people may come to our hunters and help us by giving us their lives. If a man was starving back in your London, and he came to your door, would you send out a slice of your roast beef to him? I do not think you would, sir. To you, all is property and goods. You are a Christian yourself?"
"Church of England, and damned proud of it, sir."
"So many of your people say that, but they do not really believe in their crucified son of God, not in their hearts. And which God do you serve with your little bag?" McGilliveray asked with the smugly superior tone of anyone who thinks he is more righteous than the next.
"It's a good luck charm, from a young lady of my acquaintance," Alan had to admit sheepishly. "One of her servants made it… to keep me safe from drowning, and such."
"Not even representative of any god, then. How sad. What is in it, do you know?"
"No, I don't. And what's in yours?" Alan asked.
"My personal medicine."
"Then please be so good as to leave mine alone in future," Alan spat.
McGilliveray glared and trotted toward the head of the column.
"Bet the Wesley brothers would love you," Alan muttered to himself once McGilliveray had gotten far enough off, thinking how absurd it was to be discussing theology with a Cambridge man in breech-clout and scarifications with his bare arse waving about in the breeze.
At the evening stop, not half a day's march from the second lake where they would find McGilliveray's tribal towns, Alan took a tour of his men, seeing to it that they were bedded down comfortably and had a hot meal. Some of the Seminolee had put up some birds and nailed them with their insubstantial cane arrows tipped with fish bones or tiny flints. There was sofkee, a hominy meal mush, a soup or stew of the birds, succotash of sweet corn kernels and beans, and cool clear water to wash it down.
The men had been issued a small measure of rum, liberally mixed with water to have with their meal, and the Seminolee had crowded round to take a taste, though McGilliveray was leery of the practice, and warned all not to share more with them.
"'Ere ya go, Mister Lewrie, sir," Cony said, dishing up a bowl of sofkee with some of the game-bird stew ladled over it. "H'it ain't bad, really. Better eatin'n we got in the Chesapeake, sir. An' I got yer rum ration laid by, so's the Seminolee won't notice."
"You're a wonder, Cony," Alan said, sitting down cross-legged on a piece of sailcloth by a crackling small fire with the other officers. McGilliveray was at another fire with the Seminolee, stuffing food into his mouth with one hand and talking with the other. Pipes were going on all sides, though it was a rough blend, Cowell stated.