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indians indiscriminately, and in one recent engagement, decimated a Mahican village.
    The action against the Mahicans, Blandine had heard, was particularly vicious. Soldiers set lodges afire with families still inside and shot the inhabitants as they fled. One army trio happened upon a young, pregnant Mahican, sewed her orifice shut with deer sinew, then induced labor by beating the girl with their musket butts. She died in her birth pangs.
    Fury answered fury, and now here were the vengeful Mahicans on the settlement’s doorstep.
    Blandine huddled with Lace and Mally at the far edge of the group ofcolonists. Two of the raiders pulled Patricia Reydersen out of the group. She began to shriek. Blandine met the woman’s agonized gaze and covered the eyes of Lace and Mally so that they should not see.
    Within view of the other settlers, the two raiders tore off Patricia Reydersen’s clothes. They alternately mounted her body to force her and, when she resisted, took up fist-sized stones to batter the woman’s face.
    For Blandine, it was as though she saw her own mother attacked. Why hadn’t she moved to help her? Would she be next?
    Several of the Mahicans gathered around the wounded Dutch soldier, Resoluet Waldron. Uttering short birdlike calls, they used the man roughly, pushing him back and forth, pummeling and kicking him. They stripped the soldier naked, too, laying him out prone, facedown. While two raiders extracted a souvenir fingernail from one of the bellowing man’s hands, another worked the blade of a battle-ax in a straight line down the skin of his spine.
    When the cut was sufficiently deep, the raider, a tall Mahican with a blue-painted face, dug into the wound with both hands, grabbing the bloody stretch of skin and peeling it off the flesh. The whole flap came up easily, with the sound of a raw beaver tail being split open. The flayed man thrashed, but the natives stood on his neck and arms to hold him tightly in place.
    None of the raiders seemed to be in any hurry. Several threw themselves on the ground in attitudes of aggressive repose, chatting, laughing, slapping one another’s chests. Those not directly involved in the attack on Waldron wandered easily in and out of the group of terrified colonists.
    One of the warriors approached Blandine, fingering her yellow hair as she tried not to flinch. He yanked a trailing curl, hard, then strolled off, looking back once or twice, marking her. She had picked up a few words of the language while trading. She heard the man say “mine.”
    Mally and Lace clung together, their faces wet with tears. They prayed in a desperate whisper. Hysteria and paralysis gripped all the colonists, women and children both. Blandine knew that she had to act, discover some way out, or she would follow Patricia Reydersen into death.
    Blandine said under her breath, “We have to get away. Now. The three of us.”
    Like everyone else in New Amsterdam, Blandine witnessed waves of blank-eyed Dutch refugees come south in flight from the Esopus war. Several told of being “freed” by their captors, experiencing an illusion of flight, only to be cruelly tracked down again. It was a common tactic of the native warriors.
    Blandine sought to turn a false escape into a real one. She began to move, trying not to panic, leading Lace and Mally away.
    Two raiders were close by, the one who had marked her before, painted with black-and-white zigzags, and another, a younger male whose whole body was stained yellow.
    They bent over with laughter, as though women captives edging toward the forest made for a tremendously comical sight. They pointed and howled.
    When Blandine, Mally and Lace were ten yards away from the mayhem, Zigzag and his yellow comrade broke off to follow.
    “Where you go, huh?” the big indian called out in English, still laughing. “Where?”
    “Keep on,” Blandine said. “Whatever happens, we stay together.”
    Behind them, a raider in the larger group stood up from