“Shit,” he said under his breath, and leapt into the brush off the path. Jupiter, now what? Climb a tree? He was breathing hard, sweat running in his eyes.
All the trees nearby were juniper, some very large but dense and twisted, impossible to climb. He dodged round one and crouched behind it, trying to still his breathing.
His heart was hammering in his ears; he’d never hear pursuit. Something touched his hand, and he swung the frying pan by reflex, leaping to his feet.
The dog let out a surprised yelp as the pan glanced off its shoulder, then bared its teeth and growled at him.
“What the devil are you doing here?” William hissed at it. Bloody hell, the thing was the size of a small horse!
The dog’s hackles rose, making it look exactly like a wolf—Jesus, it couldn’t be a wolf, surely?—and it began to bark.
“Shut up, for God’s sake!” But it was too late; he could hear Indian voices, excited and quite near. “Stay,” he whispered, putting out a palm toward the dog as he edged backward. “Stay. Good dog.”
The dog did not stay, but followed him, continuing to growl and bark. The sound of this further disturbed the pigs; there was a thunder of hooves along the path and a surprised whoop from one of the Indians.
William caught a flicker of movement from the corner of his eye and whirled, weapon at the ready. A very tall Indian blinked at him. Hell, more of them.
“Leave off, dog,” said the Indian mildly, in a distinct Scots accent. William blinked in turn.
The dog did cease barking, though it continued to circle him, unnervingly close and growling all the time.
“Who—” William began, but was interrupted by the two original Indians, who at this point appeared suddenly out of the undergrowth. They came to an abrupt halt at sight of the newcomer—and cast a wary eye at the dog, who turned its attention on them, wrinkling back its muzzle and displaying an impressive array of gleaming teeth.
One of the original Indians said something sharp to the newcomer—thank God, they weren’t together. The tall Indian replied, in a distinctly unfriendly tone. William had no idea what he’d said, but it didn’t sit well with the other two. Their faces darkened, and one put a hand impulsively to his club. The dog made a sort of gurgling noise in its throat, and the hand fell at once.
The original Indians seemed disposed to argue, but the tall Indian cut them off, saying something peremptory and flipped a hand in an unmistakable “Be off with you” gesture. The other two exchanged glances, and William, straightening up, moved to stand by the side of the tall Indian and glowered at them. One of them gave him back the evil look, but his friend looked thoughtfully from the tall Indian to the dog and shook his head, the movement almost imperceptible. Without a further word, the two turned and left.
William’s legs were shaking, waves of fever heat passing over him. Despite a disinclination to get any closer to the dog’s level than necessary, he sat down on the ground. His fingers had gone stiff, he’d clutched the handle of the frying pan so hard. With some difficulty, he unbent them and set the thing down beside him.
“Thank you,” he said, and wiped a sleeve across his sweating jaw. “You—speak English?”
“I’ve met Englishmen who’d say no, but I think ye’ll maybe understand me, at least.” The Indian sat down beside him, looking at him curiously.
“Christ,” William said, “you aren’t an Indian.” That certainly wasn’t an Algonkian face. Seen clearly now, the man was much younger than he’d thought, perhaps only a little older than himself, and plainly white, though his skin was sun-browned and he bore facial tattoos, a double line of dots that looped across his cheekbones. He was dressed in leather shirt and leggings, and wore a most incongruous red-and-black Scotchman’s plaid over one shoulder.
“Aye, I am,” the man said dryly. He raised his chin, indicating the direction taken by the departing Indians. “Where did ye meet wi’ that lot?”
“By the lake. They asked for tobacco, and I—gave it to them. But then they chased me; I don’t know why.”
The man shrugged.
“They thought to take ye west and sell ye as a slave in the Shawnee lands.” He smiled briefly. “They offered me half your price.”
William took a deep breath.
“I thank you, then. That is—I suppose you haven’t any intention of doing the same thing?”
The man didn’t laugh aloud, but gave off a distinct sense of amusement.
“No. I’m no going west.”
William began to feel a little easier, though the heat of his endeavors was beginning to give way to chills again. He wrapped his arms about his knees. His right arm was beginning to hurt again.
“You don’t—do you suppose they might come back?”
“No,” the man said, casually indifferent. “I told them to be gone.”
William stared at him.
“And why do you think they’ll do as you say?”
“Because they’re Mingo,” the man replied patiently, “and I’m Kahnyen’kehaka—a Mohawk. They’re afraid of me.”
William gave him a narrow look, but the man was not practicing upon him. He was nearly as tall as William himself, but thin as a coach whip, his dark-brown hair slicked back with bear grease. He looked competent, but not a person to inspire fear.
The man was studying him with an interest equal to his own. William coughed and cleared his throat, then extended a hand. “Your servant, sir. I’m William Ransom.”
“Oh, I ken ye well enough,” the man said, a rather odd note in his voice. He put out his own hand and shook William’s firmly. “Ian Murray. We’ve met.” His eyes traveled over William’s torn, disheveled clothes, his scratched, sweating face, and his mud-caked boots. “Ye look a bit better than the last time I saw ye—but not much.”
Murray lifted the camp kettle off the fire and set it on the ground. He laid the knife in the embers for a moment, then dipped the hot blade into the frying pan, now filled with water. The hot metal hissed and gave off clouds of steam.
“Ready?” he said.
“Yes.”
William knelt down by a big poplar log and laid his injured arm flat on the wood. It was visibly swollen, the bulge of a large remnant splinter dark under his skin, the skin around it stretched and transparent with pus, painfully inflamed.
The Mohawk—he couldn’t yet think of him as anything else, despite the name and accent—glanced at him across the log, eyebrows raised quizzically.
“Was that you I heard? Screamin’, earlier?” He took hold of William’s wrist.
“I shouted, yes,” William said stiffly. “A snake struck at me.”
“Oh.” Murray’s mouth twitched a little. “Ye scream like a lassie,” he said, eyes returning to his work. The knife pressed down.
William made a deeply visceral noise.
“Aye, better,” said Murray. He smiled briefly, as though to himself, and with a firm grip on William’s wrist sliced cleanly through the skin beside the splinter, laying it open for six inches or so. Turning back the skin with the point of the knife, he flicked out the large splinter, then picked delicately at the smaller slivers the cypress shard had left behind.
Having removed as much as he could, he then wrapped a fold of his ragged plaid round the handle of the camp kettle, picked it up, and poured the steaming water into the open wound.
William made a much more visceral sound, this one accompanied by words.
Murray shook his head, and clicked his tongue in reproof.
“Aye, well. I suppose I’ll have to keep ye from dying, because if ye do die, ye’re bound to go to hell, usin’ language like that.”
“I don’t propose to die,” William said shortly. He was breathing hard, and mopped his brow with his free arm. He lifted the other gingerly and shook blood-tinged water from his fingertips, though the resulting sensation made him light-headed. He sat down on the log, rather suddenly.
“Put your heid atween your knees, if ye’re giddy,”
Murray suggested.
“I am not giddy.”
There was no response to this save the sound of chewing. While waiting for the kettle to boil, Murray had waded into the water and pulled several handsful of some strong-smelling herb that grew on the verge. He was in process now of chewing the leaves, spitting the resultant green wads into a square of cloth. Extracting a rather shriveled onion from the haversack he carried, he cut a generous slice from this and eyed it critically, but seemed to think it would pass without mastication. He added it to his packet, folding the cloth neatly over the contents.
This he placed over the wound and wrapped it in place with strips of cloth torn from William’s shirttail.
Murray glanced up at him thoughtfully.
“I suppose ye’re verra stubborn?”
William stared at the Scot, put out at this remark, though in fact he had been told repeatedly, by friends, relatives, and military superiors, that his intransigence would one day kill him. Surely it didn’t show on his face!
“What the devil do you mean by that?”
“It wasna meant as an insult,” Murray said mildly, and bent to tighten the knot of the impromptu bandage with his teeth. He turned away and spat out a few threads. “I hope ye are—because it’ll be a good distance to find ye help, and if you’re sufficiently stubborn as not to die on me, that would be good, I think.”
“I said I don’t propose to die,” William assured him. “And I don’t need help. Where—are we anywhere near Dismal Town?”
Murray pursed his lips.
“No,” he said, and raised one brow. “Were ye bound there?”
William considered for an instant, but nodded. No harm in telling him that, surely.
Murray raised an eyebrow.
“Why?”
“I—have business with some gentlemen there.” As he said this, William’s heart gave a lurch. Christ, the book! He’d been so confounded by his various trials and adventures that the true importance of his loss had not even struck him.
Beyond its general entertainment value and its usefulness as palimpsest for his own meditations, the book was vital to his mission. It contained several carefully marked passages whose code gave him the names and locations of those men he was to visit—and, more importantly, what he was to tell them. He could recall a good many of the names, he thought, but for the rest …
His dismay was so great that it overshadowed the throbbing in his arm, and he stood up abruptly, seized by the urge to rush back into the Great Dismal and begin combing it, inch by inch, until he should recover the book.
“Are ye all right, man?” Murray had risen, too, and was looking at him with a combination of curiosity and concern.
“I—yes. Just—I thought of something, that’s all.”
“Well, think about it sitting down, aye? Ye’re about to fall into the fire.”
In fact, William’s vision had gone bright, and pulsating dots of dark and light obscured most of Murray’s face, though the look of alarm was still visible.
“I—yes, I will.” He sat down even more abruptly than he’d risen, a heavy cold sweat sudden on his face. A hand on his good arm urged him to lie down, and he did, feeling dimly that it was preferable to fainting.
Murray made a Scottish noise of consternation and muttered something incomprehensible. William could feel the other man hovering over him, uncertain.
“I’m fine,” he said—without opening his eyes. “I just … need to rest a bit.”
“Mmphm.”
William couldn’t tell whether this particular noise was meant as acceptance or dismay, but Murray went away, coming back a moment later with a blanket, with which he covered William without comment. William made a feeble gesture of thanks, unable to speak, as his teeth had begun to chatter with a sudden chill.
His limbs had been aching for some time, but he had ignored it in the need to push on. Now the burden of it fell full on him, a bone-deep ache that made him want to moan aloud. To keep from it, he waited until the chill relaxed enough to let him speak, then called to Murray.
“You are familiar with Dismal Town yourself, sir? You’ve been there?”
“Now and again, aye.” He could see Murray, a dark silhouette crouched by the fire, and hear the chink of metal on stone. “It’s verra aptly named.”
“Ha,” William said weakly. “I daresay. And h-h-have you met a Mr. Washington, by chance?”
“Five or six of them. The general’s got a good many cousins, aye?”
“The g-g—”
“General Washington. Ye’ve heard of him, maybe?” There was a distinct hint of amusement in the Scottish Mohawk’s voice.
“I have, yes. But—surely that …” This made no sense. His voice trailed off, and he rallied, forcing his drifting thoughts back into coherence. “It is a Mr. Henry Washington. He is kin to the general, too?”
“So far as I ken, anyone named Washington within three hundred miles is kin to the general.” Murray stooped to his bag, coming out with a large furry mass, a long, naked tail dangling from it. “Why?”
“I—nothing.” The chill had eased, and he drew a grateful breath, the knotted muscles of his belly relaxing. But the faint threads of wariness were making themselves felt through puzzlement and the gathering fog of fever. “Someone told me that Mr. Henry Washington was a prominent Loyalist.”
Murray turned toward him in astonishment.
“Who in Bride’s name would tell ye that?”
“Plainly someone grossly mistaken.” William pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. His wounded arm hurt. “What is that thing? Possum?”
“Muskrat. Dinna fash; it’s fresh. I killed it just before I met ye.”
“Oh. Good.” He felt obscurely comforted and couldn’t think why. Not the muskrat; he’d eaten muskrat often enough and found it tasty, though the fever had stolen his appetite. He felt weak with hunger, but had no desire to eat. Oh. No, it was the “dinna fash.” Spoken with just that kindly, matter-of-fact intonation—Mac the groom had used to say that to him, often, whether the trouble was being thrown from his pony or not being allowed to ride into the town with his grandfather. “Dinna fash; it will be all right.”
The ripping sound of skin parting from the underlying muscle made him momentarily dizzy and he closed his eyes.
“Ye’ve got a red beard.”
Murray’s voice came to him, filled with surprise.
“You’ve only just now noticed that?” William said crossly, and opened his eyes. The color of his beard was an embarrassment to him; while the hair on his head, chest, and limbs was a decent sort of dark chestnut, that on his chin and privates was an unexpectedly vivid shade that mortified him. He shaved fastidiously, even on shipboard or on the road—but his razor, of course, had departed with the horse.
“Well, aye,” Murray said mildly. “I expect I was distracted earlier.” He fell silent, concentrating on his work, and William tried to relax his mind, hoping to sleep for a time. He was tired enough. Repeated images of the swamp played themselves out before his closed eyes, though, wearying him with visions that he could neither ignore nor dismiss.
Roots like the loops of snares, mud, rank brown dollops of cold pig shit, the turds uneasily humanlike … churned dead leaves …
Dead leaves floating on water like brown glass, reflections shattering around his shins … words in the water, the pages of his book, faint, mocking as they sank away …
Looking up, the sky as vertiginous as the lake, feeling that he might fall up as easily as down and drown in the water-clogged air … drowning in his sweat … a young woman licked the sweat from his cheek, tickling, her body heavy, hot, and cloying, so that he turned and twisted, but could not escape her oppressive attentions …
… sweat collecting behind his ears, thick and greasy in his hair … growing like fat slow pearls in the stubble of his vulgar beard … chilling on his skin, his clothes a dripping shroud … the woman was still there, dead now, dead weight on his ch
est, pinning him to the icy ground …
Fog and the creeping cold … white fingers prying into his eyes, his ears. He must keep his mouth shut or it would reach inside him … All white.
He curled into a ball, shaking.
William did at last fall deeper into a fitful sleep, from which he roused some time later, to the rich smell of roasted muskrat, and found the enormous dog lying pressed against him, snoring.
“Jesus,” he said, with disconcerting recollections of the young woman in his dreams. He pushed feebly at the dog. “Where did that come from?”
“That’s Rollo,” Murray said reprovingly. “I made him lie wi’ ye for a bit of heat; ye’ve got a shaking ague, if ye hadn’t noticed.”
“I had noticed that, yes.” William struggled upright and made himself eat but was happy to lie down again, at a safe distance from the dog, who was now lying on his back, paws drooping, looking like nothing so much as a giant hairy dead insect. William passed a hand downward over his clammy face, trying to remove that disturbing image from his mind before it made its way into his fever dreams.
Night had come well on, and the sky opened overhead, clear and empty and vast, moonless but brilliant with distant stars. He thought of his father’s father, dead long before his own birth, but a noted amateur astronomer. His father had often taken him—and sometimes his mother—to lie on the lawns at Helwater, to look up at the stars and name the constellations. It was a cold sight, that blue-black emptiness, and made his fevered blood tremble, but the stars were a comfort, nonetheless.
Murray was looking upward too, a look of distance on his tattooed face.
William lay back, half-propped against the log, trying to think. What was he to do next? He was still trying to absorb the news that Henry Washington and thus, presumably, the rest of his Dismal Town contacts were rebels. Was this odd Scottish Mohawk right in what he’d said? Or did he seek to mislead him, for some purpose of his own?
What would that be, though? Murray could have no notion who William was, beyond his name and his father’s name. And Lord John had been a private citizen when they had met years before, on Fraser’s Ridge. Murray could not tell, surely, that William was a soldier, let alone an intelligencer, and could not possibly know his mission.
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