Apalachee

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

chapter twenty-three Lucia turned her head away and would not watch while they did to Ana what they had just done to her. Trying not to listen as they told Ana to jump, she looked down at the ground, pulling at the new green grass and breaking it off in her fingers. The woman Margarita moved closer to her and put a hand on her knee. Margarita herself would be next after Ana, and her hand, though trembling, was meant to give comfort. She was older than Lucia and had a half-grown son named Pablo, a thin, sad little boy who had gone out with his mother that day at San Augustı́n to help her gather wood before the storm. They too had gotten lost. They too had been found by the slave-catchers. Ana was coming back now, breathing hard from her exertion, and as she sat down beside Lucia, the Englishman who could only speak his own language drew the boy Pablo to his feet, and the other Englishman, the one who could speak Indian languages, motioned for Margarita to come stand before him. As Margarita rose to her feet, Lucia put an arm around Ana. Ana leaned against her, trembling and breathing in short, quick breaths. For more than a moon now they had been forced to trudge north from San Augustı́n through a desolate country of swampy creeks and rivers and then up into a higher land of rolling hills. At night they would lie linked together by a rope knotted about each of their necks while one of the warriors sat up by a small fire to guard them. By day the rope was removed and they were free as they traveled—free of each other but not of the warriors who watched them closely, never relaxing their guard. Yet Lucia would not lose hope or think of herself as a slave. She thought only of Carlos, of being free again, of finding him. She imagined how it must have been for him on the day she was taken, how he must have heard the news that slave-catchers had struck and that three women and a boy had been taken. And how he must have walked a little faster, trying not to worry, only to reach the hut and find it empty. She imagined how he must have gone to Teresa’s hut to look for them, and how Teresa would have been the one who told him as she held her crying baby in her arms. How did he feel when he heard? She could only imagine. Strong on the outside, torn with pain and helplessness on the inside. He would have wanted to rush out and bring her back, but of course he could not, and he would have known that, too, from the first moment. So what did he do? Did he leave right away to come north to the Creeks? Did he travel on the very trail she had traveled, or were there other ways to go? A man alone could have traveled faster than the warriors with their captives. If he had come on the same trail, he would have caught up with them by now, and if he had, she would have surely known it, somehow. He would never have passed by them off the trail and gone on. So he must have gone another way. But where was he now? How would she ever find him again? She was hoping to be taken to a Creek trading town. There were Apalachees in Creek towns and she might have a chance to speak to someone, to tell who she was and where she was from. And maybe Carlos, if he ever came that way, would hear of it and find her, somehow, maybe follow her into the English settlement. But what could he do if he found her, one man against the power of the English? If only she could stay in the Creek country , escape her captors and find him in the trading towns. But how to escape ? She had thought about it for all this time, every day, every night, watching for a chance, for one single moment when she could break away and be free. But the moment had never come. And now there were Englishmen buying them on this trail in the middle of nowhere, and maybe they would not even be going to a Creek town, and then there...