Eye of the Raven amoca-2

by Eliot Pattison

It was Moses who answered. "There was some survey equipment. One of the warriors with the last chief sold it in Shamokin for rum. When he got drunk he did not mind speaking about what he and the old chief had done, killing an enemy of all our peoples."

  Stone Blossom rose and disappeared into the nearest longhouse, returning a moment later to drop a doeskin packet into Duncan's lap. "I was going to bury it," she said. "It is tainted."

  He unwrapped it to discover an elegant little wooden box, of a kind made for jewelry or keepsakes. It was artfully worked, with an inlaid pattern of diamonds across its front. But a crude design had been scratched into the hinged top, in the shape of a turtle. On the bottom was more scratching, though in very careful block letters. E Townsend, it said, 1756.

  As Duncan turned with more questions a low rumble rose from the direction of the new grave. Someone was beating the great log drum.

  "Johantty said you must join him after the moon rises, to sing the dead." Stone Blossom gestured toward a dark object at the edge of the ring. Conawago had retrieved his pack, with his pipes.

  Duncan solemnly nodded. "Can you first tell me when Skanawati learned he was to be a negotiator for the new treaty?"

  "He had already gone down the trail," the chiefs mother said. "A messenger was sent to him with the news from Old Belt. Johantty is one of our fastest runners. Even so Skanawati had gone very far west."

  "But Skanawati had been here, preparing the rituals, readying for the move." It was the closest Duncan dared approach to the dream that had changed the chiefs plans.

  Stone Blossom stared into the fire a long time. "I do not know you well enough," she said.

  "All the leaders of my clan were killed," Duncan whispered to her. "I will not let it happen to yours."

  The old woman studied him with new interest. "A message came from the other side. When I showed him he knew everything had changed."

  "Showed him what, Grandmother?"

  "I took him to the sacred place that once anchored our village. I showed him the crack in the world."

  Although they left just after dawn the next morning, when they pulled their canoes onto the bank two miles upstream, Johantty was there with his three companions, tending a fire by a small sweat lodge. The youth had not slept, Duncan was certain, for the two of them had drummed and piped at the graveyard, looking over the river, long past midnight. Wary of asking more questions, Duncan watched as Conawago began stripping to a loincloth, then Johantty pointed to a small wooded island opposite the lodge. They had to cleanse themselves before venturing to the sacred place. Stone Blossom appeared from behind a shrub, wearing nothing but a woolen breechcloth herself, and entered the lodge, into which the other youths were carrying hot stones cradled with sticks. Johantty tossed Duncan a length of wool. Duncan stripped and arranged it like a kilt before stepping into the purifying steam of the lodge.

  An hour later Duncan warily watched the island as Conawago, Stone Blossom, and he approached it. From a distance it had appeared to be just one more wooded hump of rock in the center of the river, an island perhaps two hundred feet long. But in a river filled with little tree-covered islands this one stood out for its dramatic rock formations and clump of misshapen beech trees at the northern end.

  Duncan kept as silent as his guide, watching the old woman, then mimicking her action as she plucked a sprig of sweet cedar from a small tree. Yet even when she stopped and placed the sprig on a flat slab at the highest point of the gnarled ledge rocks and looked at him expectantly, he did not understand. But then he heard the gasp of surprise behind him, and he turned to see Conawago staring at the rock at their feet.

  What Duncan had taken to be cracks and seams in the rock were carvings, dozens of primitive symbols of animals and men, trees and fish. They were very old, even ancient, and the effort to make them with stone-and-wood tools would have been extraordinary. The styles and size varied, some of the carved petroglyphs so worn by weather that they were barely visible. And almost none were entirely visible, for they had been attacked.

  Hammers or axes had been taken to the signs, cracking and splintering the rock, obliterating the stone so that in some cases there was nothing but a rough, shallow bowl of freshly exposed rock left.

  But that was not the worst of the damage. With a long, quivering wail that sent a chill down Duncan's spine, Stone Blossom knelt at the largest of the carvings, a three-foot-long image of a raven. It was the centerpiece, as if the bird were the leading deity. But the raven was dead, split down the center by a narrow crevasse that continued for over ten feet to the end of the ledge. As the old woman laid her arms on either side of the image and bent low, whispering to it, Duncan followed the crack to the side of the exposed ledge and saw the black burn marks there. Knowing it was made by gunpowder did not change the effect of seeing the crack. It was gut-wrenching. The most remarkable Indian shrine he had ever seen had been destroyed, desecrated by European tools. He could not argue with Stone Blossom's perception that it portended something terrible for her world.

  "It was here we came to on festival days," Stone Blossom explained when she was done. "When I was a child, when I was a young woman, when I was a wife and mother. Even as a boy Skanawati would come and sit here for hours. It was always a place of great power." Her voice choked with emotion as she gazed over the destruction. When she spoke again it was in her native tongue, answering questions softly asked by Conawago.

  Duncan roamed around the wide-open ledge that gave a view of the river in every direction. The symbols were everywhere, and as he found several still intact at the rim of the broad ledge he thrilled at the thought of the ancient hands that had reverently chiseled them into the stone. He touched one of the overhanging beech trees, twisted and stunted by the river winds, and saw how thick its trunk was. It too was ancient. It had witnessed the reverence, heard the chants that would have been used to empower the completed figures.

  He paused, studying the way the rock fell away at the north end. Crude steps, long ago overgrown with lichen, had been cut there. He bent and pushed through the laurel along the edge, dropped off the ledge, and followed the barest shadow of a trail that ran from the bottom step. Broken stems hanging over the bushes indicated that others had recently found the shallow cave at the end of the trail.

  Ancient hands had also worked the walls of the cave, some with chisels like on the ledge above, some with pigments. Most of the images had been recently scraped away with a blade, some covered with bear grease, but he could see features here and there of hunters with spears, of huge oxlike creatures with short horns, of moose and bears three times the height of the human figures. As he stepped inside, an unmistakable odor rose from the rear of the cave. Someone had defecated against the back wall.

  "She weeps," Conawago said behind him. He pulled a heavy branch back to let more light into the cave. "She weeps," he repeated.

  The pain on his friend's face was so deep Duncan expected to see tears there too. But Conawago's grief was tempered by an intense fascination, an awe he could not hide. Gazing reverently, his eyes came to rest upon the most intact of the little images. It was a human figure facing one of the ruined bears, holding out not a spear but what looked like the skull of another animal. "This," he said, "is who we were."

  He walked slowly along the walls, pausing at each image. "For generations, she says, since long before the formation of the confederation, people of her clan have come here, left offerings, sat under the full moon and performed their chants. Even in the middle of a war the enemies could come here and be as one."

  Duncan could hear the excitement in Conawago's tone. Their journeys during the past months had been in search of such places of power. "This is who we were," Conawago repeated as he gazed again at the image of the man reaching out to the bear, then gestured toward the feces on the wall that had ruined another painting. "This is who we become."

  "Surely it was Europeans who did this."

  "Stone Blossom knows who did it. Shamokin Indians, town
Indians. Some Iroquois, some town Delawares out on a trapping expedition. They had little success and were on their way home. An English trader going up the river found them camped here and bartered a keg of rum for the few skins they had taken. They spent the day getting drunk here. One of the Indians had been instructed by missionaries and told the others their bad luck came from these graven images. They spent hours drinking and destroying. At some point one remembered they could sell the old images to collectors in Philadelphia, so they tried to pull some up. There used to be a shrine of old human skulls, holy men of the tribes, some from many generations ago. They threw them all in the river."

  "When Skanawati found out he beat several of them within an inch of their lives. He told his mother it was a sign, that the village had to move into the endless mountains, to the other place he had found, to protect it and keep it secret."

  "You mean his hidden valley?"

  "It has another shrine, she says, below a high ledge with similar carvings, where a raven makes its nest."

  "They should have moved then."

  "It takes much preparation. They had to wait until warm weather, gather syrup from the spring maples, make the new grave." Conawago rubbed at one of the grease-stained images, saw that the grease was carrying away the pigment, and gave up.

  They found Stone Blossom on her knees, gazing again at the shattered images. She stood as they returned, gesturing them closer, then taking a hand from each of them in her own. "You have been purified in the heat of our lodge," she said. "You have each spoken to our dead. You have come to this same place from different paths." The matriarch looked at them expectantly.

  "What is it you wish, Grandmother?" Conawago asked.

  "You must help us through this. Together," she said pointedly, steadily regarding him. She had seen Conawago's despair. "I dreamt of two outsiders coming to help our village. I could never see their faces, until now."

  Conawago went very still, closing his eyes for a moment before glancing at Duncan. "We are here," he whispered.

  "Every guide we have sent to find our path has failed," she said. "But the two of you know things together you do not know apart." The old woman nodded at them solemnly, then released their hands and bent to lift bundles of rushes she had gathered from the river's edge. Duncan and Conawago each took one, and they knelt with Stone Blossom to clean away the debris from the little gods.

  Only when they had finished did Duncan speak. "Why," he asked Conawago, "during such an important time for the village and his clan would Skanawati go to Philadelphia?" The new chief would have just taken over from his predecessor and had already told his people they had to move their village.

  Conawago repeated Duncan's question to the woman in her tongue, triggering a low, hurried conversation. "Last year," his friend finally explained, "she says there was an Englishman who had been trapping, who stopped in Shamokin. He came in from the endless mountains. Skanawati spoke with him, at Rideaux's place. The man had told Rideaux he had seen the old shrine on the ledge. Skanawati's shrine."

  Duncan looked up with new despair. "Surely he did not try to destroy that one as well?"

  "Not at all. He said merely the mountains had no good fur left."

  "But that does not explain. . " Duncan started, but the woman was done, turning back to the canoe.

  "Moses told me the rest last night," Conawago said, pain rising in his voice now. "That Englishman was Francis Townsend, the surveyor killed months later on the Warriors Path. Skanawati learned from Rideaux that he had not just been trapping. Townsend was educated, knew how to look for minerals. He had drawn a detailed map with the plan of selling it in Philadelphia. He had been at the shrine, had drawn it on his map. And he had marked that its valley was rich in minerals and Indian artifacts."

  "So Townsend went back to Philadelphia to sell his map?"

  "A piece of paper like that could be worth more than a wagon of pelts. Skanawati left for Philadelphia an hour after learning of the map, even though he had never been there, had no idea how to find this man. When his brother learned that Skanawati had gone to Philadelphia he too left, a day behind. Skanawati returned a month later, alone. He said nothing of what happened until just before he left the village three weeks ago. He said then to his mother, pray for the spirit of his brother, her second son, for he had died a warrior's death in the city of the Quakers."

  Duncan considered the words. "Why would his brother have followed him to Philadelphia?"

  "His brother had been earning money to buy seed corn for the village."

  "What are you saying?"

  "He did not understand the scratchings Townsend made on his papers. He did not know about Skanawati's plans for the new village until he returned. But he had been the guide for Townsend when he drew the map."

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Socrates moon was the name Conawago assumed in the European world, the swarthy exotic traveler who had crossed the Atlantic several times, looking and speaking the part of the educated gentleman when need be. Duncan watched with a weary grin as his friend completed the transformation by donning a crumpled waistcoat he kept rolled in his pack over his linen shirt, covering the long trail of hair gathered at his back.

  "You will put me to shame in the taverns," Duncan chided.

  "No. Because you are staying here," the Indian said, with a gesture toward the little clearing they had found in the forest overlooking the city. It was an argument that had risen with increasing frequency during their days of hurried travel from Shamokin. "Lord Ramsey is somewhere on those streets," Conawago reminded him again. "He will have you in chains a moment after he spies you. And once he has you, Duncan, you will be lost forever." The old Nipmuc had once told Duncan that Ramsey was a manifestation of the malevolent spirits that dwelled in certain corners of the wilderness, waiting to commit mayhem.

  They eyed the city that stretched below. "It is a big city," Duncan observed. "And he but one man. In all the city he is the only one who knows my face."

  "Only London is greater in the English world," Conawago said. "But the places we need to visit are ones likely frequented by Ramsey. He despises you. He considers you a traitor to his house, knows you removed him from the affection of his daughter and caused the loss of his New York estate. His evil cannot be defeated, Duncan, only avoided."

  "I will not hide. Every hour the hangman's noose is closer to Skanawati's neck. Every hour the real killer draws closer to another murder."

  Conawago frowned. "Are there no words I can say?"

  "I seem to recall Stone Blossom saying we were fated to find the path together."

  Conawago sighed, then reached into the pack hanging from his horse and unfolded a second waistcoat, lent by Rideaux. It was threadbare in spots but would cover Duncan's own shirt, tattered and soiled from hard travel.

  Rideaux had remembered the Englishman whom Skanawati and his brother had followed the year before. "Townsend came back weeks later with a commission as a surveyor," the Frenchman had confirmed. "A quiet, intelligent man. Thin like a rail." Townsend had stayed at Rideaux's compound en route to Philadelphia and had exclaimed over the grandeur of the mountains and shown his map. The Frenchman had been the one to describe the markings on Townsend's map to Skanawati. "It was as if I had kicked him in the belly," Rideaux recalled. "He wanted to know who else had seen it. As far as I knew, no one, and I told him so. He then asked me to tell no one else, never say such a map existed. He asked me to write Townsend's name on a piece of paper. He asked for some food, and a second pair of moccasins."

  "Moccasins?" Duncan had asked.

  "It meant he was going on a long journey. I put everything in a pack, and off he went, running like a deer. Next day his brother comes in, cheerful and laughing. But the moment he heard that Skanawati had abruptly left for Philadelphia his merriment stopped. Notwithstanding my vow I knew I had to explain to him about the map, and when he learned it showed Skanawati's secret village site, he suddenly turned grave. Minutes later he was gone.
I never saw him again. Later I discovered he had asked for some paint, as if going to war."

  Rideaux had searched their faces, seeing the worry. "The fastest way to Philadelphia," he offered at last, "is on horse, over the trail to Reading."

  "We have no horses," Duncan said. "We have no money."

  The Frenchman left them to engage the group of Indians working outside, soon returning to retrieve a heavy wooden box from a cabinet. He counted out a stack of coins and pushed them toward Duncan. "Horses will be in the yard in five minutes. A canoe will take your friends back to the treaty delegation. Go with God."

  Now, walking slowly, they led their horses toward the sprawling city. A hundred things could happen when they stepped onto the cobblestone streets, almost none of them good. Duncan's foreboding was so great that only when he heard Conawago negotiating with him did he notice the stout bearded man who offered to stable their mounts.

  Minutes later, their packs and weapons entrusted to the stableman for an extra coin, Duncan walked uneasily into America's metropolis. The smoke of hundreds of stoves and fireplaces drifted over the rooftops. Small, well-tended farms stretched from the outskirts, many with children hoeing rows of vegetables. Ox-drawn wagons stacked high with firewood, charcoal, or sacks of grain lumbered toward the city.

  Duncan had almost forgotten that a visitor to any city first experienced it through his nostrils. Wafting through the underlying scent of sewage and wood smoke were lighter hints of tallow, freshly tanned leather, and beeswax. Soon came the sounds of hooves on stone, smiths at forges, hammers on the planks of new houses.

  The street underfoot felt unnatural, like solid ground after months at sea. The two men exchanged uneasy glances and kept moving. A girl chased hens away from a bed of tulips. A boy loudly hawked a slim broadsheet. A youth in a white apron pushed a handwagon stacked with freshly baked loaves.

  Conawago approached the boy and proffered a coin, speaking with him as he took a small loaf, half of which he handed to Duncan. "I asked where one goes to find maps of the frontier," his friend reported. "He replied that he surely doesn't know, but if it's men of learning we want, best go closer to the government house and the steeples." Conawago gestured toward the white towers extending above the trees in the distance.