The Orphanmaster by Jean Zimmerman Page A

dryness. If the lodge were alive, the women would have watered the beds once in a while, keeping their woven branches supple and comfortable.
    The swannekins came, the swannekins bore sickness, the swannekins wrecked everything. The Dutchmen. The English. The French.
    Kitane heard the
scritch, scritch, scritch
of the bat crawling down from the ceiling. The creature appeared before his face, glowing like a little moon.
    “Jesus,” Kitane said, taking the name of the swannekin’s lord-god in vain. “Get away from me.”
    He closed his eyes and turned his mind to the girl Makitotosimew. Her name meant “she has large breasts.” And she did. They grew larger and larger in Kitane’s mind until they became gross and hideous.
    He opened his eyes again. Brother bat spoke.
    “Why are you alone?”
    “I am Chansomps, a man of the locusts,” Kitane said. “Hear my friends outside the lodge. I am not alone. I don’t need to listen to you.”
    “You are Kitane. The brave, the chronicler, the survivor, the slave, the godless, the revenger, the smasher of faces. You walk without sound.”
    Last night, Kitane heard the witika calling him from the darkness at the edge of camp. He had never been more afraid.
    And he envisioned not his past but a future life, one he had been seeing in his mind for the recent few days. He was walking down the street in Dutchtown. He had been there often, and he remembered well what it looked like, the swannekin lodges that it would make a stone sick to live inside.
    As he walked a round-headed war club came magically into his hand. He touched his face and it was painted. He had burned the hair from his head with hot stones, leaving only a single roach, a rat-tail woven with turkey feathers that hung down his back and beckoned his enemies, “catch me if you can.”
    And in this future life of his, Kitane would break into a run and lift the war club. He would pass quickly down the street killing men, women and children. Counting how many swannekin heads could he possibly crush before they got to him. Five? Fifteen? A score?
    His father told him that before Kitane went into battle, he should know what he would do when he saw his own blood. Would the sight of his own blood mean that his fight was over? Or would it mean his fight had finally begun?
    Perhaps he could kill thirty. He was Kitane, smasher of faces.
    The vision of this future life was horrible and pleasurable at the same time. He returned to it again and again, like an itch.
    Dying with Dutch blood on his hands. His blood and his enemy’s blood, comingled. Horror and pleasure. Afterward, they would place his body in a canoe and set it adrift from the shore.
    Why are you alone?
    “Because the world is on fire,” Kitane answered, out loud this time.
    “Have you seen Kitane?” Blandine asked the question of every river indian she encountered in Beverwyck, getting only negatives in reply.
    Well, perhaps not
every
Lenape. There were too many, hundreds,stalking through the town, mixing with the Five Nation natives from the Mohawk River and interior lake valleys, all of them eager for trade.
    “Swannekins,” the river indians called the Dutch. No one knew what the word meant, none of the Lenape would tell them. One theory had it translated as “fake men,” another as “a sharp stick upon which I mistakenly sit,” and another as “the saltwater people.” Likewise, Manhattan either meant “place of hills,” or “the place where we all got drunk.” And the Mahican tribal name, some said, actually meant “flesh-eaters.”
    During the trading season, Beverwyck burst at its deerskin seams. From the steep promontory that marked the end of the town, it was possible to see straight down Yonkheer Street to the narrowing, placid river, now full of small-boats and anchored ships. A palisade encircled the community, surrounding dwelling-houses and shops, offering protection against the creatures, human or otherwise, that inhabited the