Harry Turtledove: A Different Flesh

"Go on with what you were about,*' he told her. "I'll tend to Joanna."

Anne sighed gratefully. Wingfield tossed the soggy linen into the pile with the rest for tomorrow’s washing. He found a dry cloth, wrapped the baby's loins, and set her in her cradle. Anne rocked it while they ate.

Joanna tolerated not being held, but showed no interest in going back to sleep.

She squawked indignantly when Anne made the mistake of trying to turn her onto her belly, and remained irritated enough to stay awake even after her mother picked her up.

Her fussy cries rang loud in the small cabin. After a while, Wingfield thrust a torch into the fire. "Let's walk her about outside," he suggested. "That often seems to calm her."

Anne agreed at once. She rocked the baby in her arms while her husband held the torch high so they would not stumble in the darkness.

With his free hand, he batted at the insects the torch drew.

The James River splashed against the low, swampy peninsula on which Jamestown sat, and murmured as it flowed by unimpeded to the south.

Above it, on this clear, moonless night, the Milky Way glowed like pale mist among the stars of the Scorpion and the Archer.

Elsewhere, but for silver points, the sky was black.

Even blacker against it loomed the forest to the north. Suddenly Wingfield felt how tiny was the circle of light his torch cast: as tiny as the mark the English had made on this vast new land. The comparison disturbed him.

From the edge of the forest came the cries of sims, calling back and forth. Wingfield wondered how much meaning lay behind them. Those bestial ululations could hardly be true speech, Henry Dale was right there, but they were much more varied, more complex, than a wolfpack's howls.

Anne shivered, though the night was warm. "Let us go back. I take fright, hearing them so close."

"I mislike it also," Wingfield said, turning round. "We are not yet here in numbers enough to keep them from drawing nigh as they wish.

Be glad, though, you were stil in dear England those first two years, when they thought us and ours some new sort of prey for their hunting."

He touched the knife on his belt. "We've taught them better than that, at any rate."

"I've heard the tales," Anne said quietly.

Wingfield nodded. As was the way of things, though, not all the tales got told. He had been one of the men who brought John Smith's body back for burial. He knew how little of it rested under its stone, awaiting the resurrection.

To his mind, the sims' man-eating habits gave strong cause to doubt they had souls. If one man devoured another's flesh, to whose body would that flesh return come the day of judgment? As far as he knew, no learned divine had yet solved that riddle.

Such profitless musings occupied him on the way back to the cabin.

Once inside, Anne set Joanna back in the cradle. The baby sighed but stayed asleep; she probably would not rouse till the small hours of the morning.

The embers in the fireplace cast a dying red glow over the single room.

Wingfield stripped off his clothes; in the sultry Virginia summer, nightwear was a positive nuisance.

Anne lay down beside him. He stroked her smooth shoulder. She turned toward him. Her eyes were enormous in the dim light. "Here it is, evening," he said, at the same time as she was whispering, "This even, is it not?" They laughed until he silenced her with a kiss.

Afterwards, he felt his heart slow as he drifted toward slumber.

He was hotter than he had been before, and did not mind at all; the warmth of the body was very different from that of the weather. He did not know why that was so, but it was. Anne was already breathing deeply and smoothly. He gave up thought and joined her.

He was never sure what exactly woke him, some hours later; he usual y slept like a log til morning. Even Joanna's cries would not stir him, though Anne came out of bed at once for them. And this noise was far sofoer than any the baby made.

Maybe what roused him was the breeze from the open cabin door.

His eyes opened. His hand went for his knife even before he consciously saw the two figures silhouetted in the doorway.

Thieves, was his first thought. The colonists had so few goods from England that theft was always a problem, the threat of the whipping-post Not withstanding.

Then the breeze brought him the smel of the invaders. The Englishmen bathed seldom; they were of often rank. But this was a thicker, almost cloying stench, as if skin and water had never made acquaintance. And the shape of those heads outlined against the night. Ice ran through Wingfield. "Sims!" he cried, bounding to his feet.

Anne screamed. The sims shouted. One sprang at Wingfield. He saw its arm go back, as if to stab, and knew it must have one of its sharpened stones to hand. That could let out a life as easily as his own dagger.

He knocked the stroke aside with his left forearm, and felt his hand go numb; the sims were devilish strong. He thrust with his right and felt his blade bite flesh. The sim yammered. But the wound was not mortal.

The sim grappled with him. They rol ed over and over on the dirt floor, each grabbing for the other's weapon and using every fighting trick he knew. The sim might have had less skil than Wingfield, but was physically powerful enough to make up for it.

A tiny corner of Wingfield's awareness noticed the other sim scuttling toward the hearth. He heard Anne shriek, "Mother Mary, the baby!" Bold as a tigress, she leapt at the sim, her hands clawed, but it stretched her senseless with a backhand blow.

At almost the same moment, the sim Wingfield was battling tore its right arm free from the weakened grasp of his left. He could not ward off the blow it aimed, but partially deflected it so that the flat front of the stone, rather than the edge, met his forehead. The world flared for a moment, then grayed over.

He could not have been unconscious long. He was already aware of himself, and of the pounding anguish in his head, when someone forced a brandy bottle into his mouth. He choked and sputtered, spraying out most of the fiery liquid.

He tried to sit; hands supported his back and shoulders. He could not understand why the torch Caleb Lucas held was so blurred until he raised his arm to his eyes and wiped away blood.

Lucas offered the brandy again. This time Wingfield got it down.

Healing warmth spread from his middle. Then he remembered what had happened with one sim while he fought the other, and he went cold again.

"Anne!" he cried.

He looked about wildly, and moaned when he saw a blanket-covered form on the floor not far from him. "No, fear not, Edward, she is but stunned,"

said Allan Cooper's wife Caite, a strong, steady woman a few years older than Anne. "We cast the bedding over her to hide her nakedness, no more."

"Oh, God be thanked!" Wingfield gasped.

"But, " Cooper began, then looked helplessly at his wife, not sure how to go on. He seemed to make up his mind. He and Lucas bent by Wingfield. Together, they manhandled Wingfield to his feet, guided his stumbling steps over to Joanna's cradle.

He moaned again. It was empty.

Anne sat on a hard wooden chair, her face buried in her hands.

She had not stopped sobbing since she returned to her senses. She rocked back and forth in unending grief. "God, God, God have mercy on my dear Joanna," she wailed.

"I will get her back," Wingield said, "or take such a vengeance that no sim shal dare venture within miles of an Englishman ever again."

"I want no vengeance," Anne cried. "I want my darling babe again."

The colonists' first efforts at pursuit had already failed. They had set dogs on the sims' trail less than an hour after`

the attack. With the blood Wingfield had drawn, the trail had been fresh and clear. Only for a while, though: the ground north of Jamestown was so full of ponds and streams that the dogs lost the scent.