Red Prophet Page 0,137

first they reaped the Whites in bloody harvest, clubbing them to the ground, piercing them with flints. Ta-Kumsaw shouted at them to take muskets, powder, ammunition from the dead, and many Reds obeyed. But then Old Hickory got the disciplined core of his men into action. The guns were turned. And the Reds, exposed on the open field, were felled in great swathes of grapeshot.

By evening, the sun going down, Detroit was on fire and the smoke filled the nearby wood. In that choking darkness stood Ta-Kumsaw with a few hundred of his own Shaw-Nee. Other tribes made isolated stands here and there; most despaired and fled into the forest, where no White man could follow. Old Hickory himself led the final assault against Ta-Kumsaw's wooded fortress, bringing with him the thousand Americans who weren't busy looting the French city and smashing the idols in the Papist cathedral.

The bullets came from all directions, it seemed. But through it all Ta-Kumsaw stood upright, shouting to his men, urging them to fight on with muskets stolen from fallen Americans in the first attack. For fifteen minutes that seemed like forever, Ta-Kumsaw fought like a madman, and his Shaw-Nee fought and died beside him. Ta-Kumsaw's body blossomed with scarlet wounds; blood streaked down his back and belly; one arm hung limp by his side. No one knew how he found the strength to stand, he had so many wounds in him. But Ta-Kumsaw was made of flesh like any other man, and at last he fell in the smoky dusk, bearing half a dozen wounds, any one of which would surely have been fatal by itself.

When Ta-Kumsaw fell, the firing slackened. It was as if the Americans knew that they had only to kill that one man, and they would break the spirit of the Red man, now and forever. The dozen surviving Shaw-Nee warriors crept away in the smoke and the darkness, to bear the bitter news of Ta-Kumsaw's death to every Shaw-Nee village, and eventually to every hut where Red men and women lived. The great battle was hopeless; White men could not be trusted, French or American, and so Ta-Kumsaw's great plan could never have succeeded. Yet the Red men remembered that at least for a time they had united under one great man, had become a single people, had dreamed of victory. So Ta-Kumsaw was remembered in song as Red villages and families moved west across the Mizzipy to join the Prophet; he was remembered in stories told beside brick hearths, by families who wore clothing and worked at jobs like white men, but still remembered that once there was another way to live, and the greatest of all the forest Reds had been a man called Ta-Kumsaw, who died trying to save the woodland and the ancient, doomed Red way of life.

It was not only Reds who remembered Ta-Kumsaw. Even as they fired muskets at his shadowy figure in the woods, the American soldiers admired him. He was a great hero out of olden times. Americans were all farmers and shopkeepers at heart; Ta-Kumsaw lived a story like Achilles or Odysseus, Caesar or Hannibal, David or the Maccabees. "He can't die," they murmured as they saw him take bullets and still not fall. And when at last he did fall, they searched for his body and did not find it.

"The Shaw-Nee dragged him off," said Old Hickory, and that was that. He wouldn't even let them search for the Renegado Boy, figuring that such a White traitor was no doubt as faithless as the French and snuck off during the fight. Leave be, said Old Hickory, and who was going to argue with the old man? He won them the victory, didn't he? He broke the back of Red resistance once and for all, didn't he? Old Hickory, Andy Jackson - they wanted to make him King, but they'd have to settle for President someday. Yet in the meantime they could not forget Ta-Kumsaw, and rumors spread that he was alive somewhere, crippled by his wounds, waiting to get healed up and lead a great Red invasion from across the Mizzipy, from the swamps of the South, or from some secret hidden fastness in the Appalachee Mountains.
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All through the battle Alvin worked with all his might to keep Ta-Kumsaw alive. As each new bullet tore through flesh, Alvin mended broken arteries, trying to hold Ta-Kumsaw's blood inside him. The pain he had no time for,