Blood of the Oak: A Mystery

by Eliot Pattison

  He played until his throat was too dry and his fingers ached, then was given ale and asked to play some more. All enmity was gone. They were all Scots and the old music stirred something deep and common in their blood, a visceral bond that could never be put into words.

  Mrs. Ross stood on a bench and her rich voice reached over the crowd, hushing it. “I ne’er could brook, I ne’er could brook,” she sang. “A foreign loon to own and flatter. But I will sing a ranting song, that day our king comes o’er the water.”

  Duncan recognized the melody as “Lady Keith’s Lament” and took it up with his pipes. Not a soul stirred as she continued:

  I once had sons, but now ha’e nane

  I bred them toiling sorely

  And I wad bear them a’ again

  And lose them a’ fer Charlie.

  REQUESTS CAME FAST, AND HE RESPONDED TO EACH ONE. “ME Bonnie Highland Laddie,” called McQueen, then “Charlie Is My Darling” came the call from one of the wives. His music grew faster and men and women began to dance.

  McBain, only slightly slowed with ale, climbed the edge of the well and began “The Tears of Scotland” before Duncan could catch up. He switched to the sad lament and caps came off again:

  Whilst the warm blood bedews my veins

  And unimpaired remembrance reigns

  Resentment of my country’s fate

  Within my filial breast shall beat.

  A fiddle began playing in the silence that followed, and the dancing recommenced. He lost all track of time. The moon had arched over the darkened valley before the last man collapsed with exhaustion.

  Sometime before dawn the dead African rode in.

  ANALIE’S SCREAM ROUSED DUNCAN FROM THE MOST PEACEFUL sleep he had had in weeks. For a few hours he had been a Highlander again, with the joyous company of other Highlanders. But the Blooddancer had gone to great lengths to remind them they were on a trail of death.

  The shirtless African had been tied to the saddle, his back braced with a narrow plank. He had been dead several hours. His eyes stared unseeing into the rising sun above cheeks that each held four long slash marks. He was heavily scarred, from the narrow, careful zigzag line that raised lighter flesh to adorn his jawbones to the hard, ugly ridges that were witness to repeated lashings. On his chest, where the dead flesh would never scar over, strips of skin had been peeled away to form the words YOUR TAX. Blood, from the torture, and from the wooden stake that had finally been driven into his throat, had soaked his britches and the saddle he sat on.

  “The blood dripped onto the saddle, meaning he died after being tied to the horse,” Duncan declared. “Why would the horse come here?” he asked Murdo.

  “Because she’s mine. She’s come home from the horror. And he is one of ours too. Atticus. I told you about him. He was a freed slave but he went back down into slave country when he heard about the missing men. About the bravest thing I ever witnessed. Left ten days ago for Townsend’s Store.”

  They began slicing away the ropes that bound the dead man when suddenly Tanaqua’s hand clasped around Duncan’s and pulled it away. He took a step back as the Mohawk touched the dead man’s hand, which was stuffed in his pocket. A strand of old bone beads extended out of the callused hand. Tanaqua pulled out the hand to see what the dead man, in his dying, had chosen to grip.

  The Mohawk unfolded the lifeless fingers, then abruptly began murmuring a prayer in the forest tongue. In the dead man’s palm, tied fast by the strand of beads, was an intricately carved figure of a man, except that his head was that of a fish with eyes of red pebbles. In his death, Atticus was clutching the sign of the lost Iroquois half king.

  CHAPTER NINE

  They moved southward in grim silence. Duncan had known there was no point in arguing when Tanaqua had dropped his pack beside Duncan’s as they prepared to leave Ross’s farm. The Mohawk had meant to bury his friend but the mythical half king had reached out through the fog of time to speak to him. When Murdo Ross appeared leading three horses, his wife had gasped and run to his side.

  “No Murdo! Dear God, not you too!” Margaret Ross had cried. She had pulled on his massive arms, then pounded on his chest, sobbing as he stood motionless. “Have we not lost enough already?” she pleaded.

  “’Tis the monster who killed our girl, Peg,” the big Scot declared when she finally tired and fell into his arms. His wife had finally nodded through her tears, then embraced him so tightly and for so long it seemed he would lose his breath.

  “I’ll stop any new messengers,” Smith said as he shook hands with Duncan. He handed Duncan a half-burnt tax stamp, explaining it was used like the broken dice as a sign among runners. “I wish I could do more.”

  Duncan had forced a smile. “You can win the battle for Conococheague,” he replied, then nodded to Analie, standing with the Ross children, and mounted.

  They had not even reached the bottom of the mountain before the Acadian girl had come running behind them, carrying her own pack. Without a word Tanaqua had scooped her up to ride behind him.

  They had pushed the horses hard the first day, cantering past settlers’ wagons, sparing the mounts by leading them up the steeper hills, and had dropped exhausted by their campfire that night.

  In the small hours, with a sliver of a moon overhead, Duncan had awakened to see that Tanaqua had replenished the fire. The Mohawk sat with the bead necklace in his hand, with the little fish man propped on a rock as if to keep watch.

  “It is very old, the way of this strand,” the Iroquois ranger said.

  “You mean the bone beads.”

  “The white are bone, the purple are from oyster shell. But no, not the beads, the message.” He saw the uncertainty on Duncan’s face. “Yes, the way of the message. It was used between war parties long ago. From the days before my mother’s mother. It shows numbers and places. First is the address, the destination of the message. “He pointed to six purple beads strung together.” It means Onondaga. Where the six tribes of the League come together, the capital of the League. This was meant for the Great Council.”

  Tanaqua pointed to the designs at the bottom, consisting of, first, four figures connected at the legs by a line of white beads, followed by a solitary purple bead surrounded by white beads. “The north star is to their back,” Tanaqua said, pointing at the solitary bead. “Captives from the north it means.”

  “It was sent by an Iroquois,” Duncan said, question in his voice, and pointed to a line of solitary white beads surrounded by purple beneath the four captives. “More than nineteen. Four Iroquois captives, and many more. It has to mean they are all together.”

  “From an Iroquois,” came a voice from the other side of the fire, “who knew the message system of the runners was no longer to be trusted.” Murdo was braced up on an elbow.

  Tanaqua seemed not to hear, for he still puzzled over a final design. Suddenly his eyes went round with surprise. He looked up at Duncan then back at the belt. Duncan made out a tree with wavy lines below it, like water, and what looked like a bear on two legs roaring at it. “I have seen this only once before,” the Mohawk said. “On one of the skin chronicles about my grandfather’s grandfather’s time. There were shaman who could drive away evil spirits by taking bear shape.”

  “You mean like an exorcist.”

  “The black robes called them such.” Tanaqua ran his fingers over the intricately worked beads. “The beads ask for great spirit warriors to come.” He looked up with a forlorn expression. “But all we have is the three of us.” His gaze slowly turned to the little wooden carving of the fish man, propped against a log as if to watch over them. “But how could the half king know about the missing men?” the Mohawk asked.

  Duncan’s only reply was his own question. “How could a dead runner know about the half king?” The flickering of the flames gave movement to the wooden figure. “Surely you understand, Tanaqua, that the half king can no longer be alive. The stories about him are from long ago, decades before any of us were
born.”

  Tanaqua shrugged. “The stories about him say he was a great war chief who became a shaman.”

  “You mean a priest,” Murdo said.

  “Your priests,” Tanaqua replied, “they go among the people to speak the words and perform holy rites for assemblies of your faithful. Not this half king. He was a great warrior once, but as he grew older he saw that his path was to be the one who stays behind. The gods who live in the land can’t move. He stayed alone with them to help them as their lands were . . . were changed.”

  “A monk then,” Murdo suggested.

  “A monk,” Tanaqua said tentatively. “It is said he could speak with the animals of the forest. A monk of the forest spirits.” He looked at Duncan with something like pleading in his eyes. He was, Duncan knew, still having difficulty accepting that he and Duncan were following the same path, and even greater difficulty explaining himself to Europeans. “A man like that could defy the rules of common men. He could summon other spirits. He could—” his voice dropped to a whisper, “summon the Blooddancer if he needed vengeance.”

  They had thought Analie, lying by Murdo, had been sleeping, but now she shuddered and snugged herself up against the big Scot, who wrapped an arm around her.

  ON THE THIRD NIGHT THEY MADE THEIR CAMP BY AN ORCHARD high above the road. Tanaqua had begun to talk openly about Duncan’s reputation as the Death Speaker, suggesting that the spirits must have lent him such skills. As night descended Duncan sat opposite him at the small crackling fire and tried to explain how he had been trained to observe things in a scientific manner.

  “Scientific?” the Mohawk asked.

  “The study of the world around us. Breaking down the world into all its parts and seeing how they relate to each other. Getting to the essence of things.”

  “Essence,” Tanaqua repeated, and contemplated Duncan’s words. “The essence of the bow lies in the stillness of the pull,” he offered as an example.

  Duncan nodded. “At Edentown I melted the bullet fragments I took from Woolford. I could see they were pure, not like the balls shot in frontier guns.”

  “So the science means reducing things to their spirit.”

  When Duncan did not disagree, Tanaqua insisted he explain what the Death Speaker learned about the killers at Edentown. Duncan told him how he knew two guns had been used, how a timber hand ax, a European tool, had been used to remove Red Jacob’s arm, and how he had deciphered the map the Oneida had inked on his body. He expressed his frustration over his lack of knowledge about what had happened at Johnson Hall to trigger the desperate run to Virginia.

  “When I was young,” Tanaqua said, “my grandmother told me there were invisible demons, old spirits who used to watch over what we humans do. That’s what you need, Duncan, an invisible demon.” The Mohawk stretched and laid back on his blanket.

  As he tried to sleep, Duncan once more sought to piece together what he knew from Woolford’s report of the strange night at Johnson Hall. An owl hooted from deep among the apple trees, its persistent call seeming to mock him. Hoo hoo hoo. He sat up. Duncan had an invisible demon.

  He found the girl lying in the grass, gazing at the stars a few feet from where Murdo kept watch. “Analie,” he started, “you said when you went to Johnson Hall that you sat and read books as the others talked.”

  “Sir William doesn’t like his books taken from his house, or even into the kitchen. So he let me sit in that big room he calls his library.”

  “I want to hear it all, everything you recall from that visit. When I was young I played a game called Blink and Tell. You are taken to a room, or a stable, and have to study everything until you blink, then you are taken away and have to tell all that you saw.”

  “I like games!” the girl exclaimed.

  “Excellent. Tell me everything.”

  “Some Cayuga boys were playing with hoops when we arrived,” she began. “After an hour or so with them Red Jacob said I would need a bath if I played any longer so I went inside. We had dinner—”

  Duncan interrupted. “Everything. Who was happy, who was sad. Who expressed pleasure at the arrival of Sir William’s son and who didn’t.” Francis Johnson was of mixed blood, Duncan recalled from their one meeting years earlier, but did not call Sir William’s wife Molly Brant his mother. The baronet had shared the lodges of many Iroquois women. “What did Francis say when he presented the letter of Dr. Franklin from London?”

  Analie squeezed her knees close to her chest and looked up at the moon for several heartbeats. “Is it the Death Speaker I sit with?” she asked, then raised a hand like giving a vow. “Everything. Mr. Francis arrived as I was going into the house after playing hoops.” Woolford, Red Jacob, and the girl had watched the jubilant greetings from Sir William on his return after nearly two years’ absence. Francis had gone to London to build trade connections and to represent Sir William’s interest as Superintendent of Indians. A fast rider from Albany had come the night before with the news, so a festive meal had been planned, including the company of three visiting chieftains. “He had a white and purple disc on his watch fob, chased in silver, which the chieftains greatly admired. They were the ones who raised their voices first.”

  “You mean there was an argument?”

  “Mr. Francis was talking about the pursuit of Indian affairs in London and mentioned that Lord Amherst convinced him that no proposal for support of the tribes should be presented to Parliament this year.” The announcement would indeed have caused an eruption at Johnson Hall. Amherst was reviled by the tribes and Johnson himself for having abandoned the Iroquois after their long and costly support of the British in the French war. “Oh, when I went with Miss Molly to pay that dispatch rider, who had spent the day sleeping in the stable, he said he felt guilty taking her money. She asked why and he said Mr. Francis and his friends had been in Albany for a week and should have been able to send a letter by regular post, but that was no concern of his and he would take the four shillings all the same.”

  Duncan had no time to puzzle out her words, for Analie quickly continued, explaining how Mr. Francis had then quieted his father by giving him the letter from Dr. Franklin. “Sir William was overjoyed at first, then very distressed over whatever news it sent. But then when Francis left the library Sir William acted very curiously. He laid the letter on his desk beside another he pulled from a drawer. He held his head in his hands a long time, whispering curses, then when Mr. Francis returned he quickly hid them both in his desk. Mr. Francis poured him a glass of a new currant liqueur he had brought back from England. Sir William drank and they went in to dinner.”

  “And then Sir William got sick?”

  Analie nodded. “He drank the liqueur and got real sick.”

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON DUNCAN AND TANAQUA LAY ON A LEDGE looking down at the little crossroads settlement of Townsend’s Store, on the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge mountains. They had ridden hard, following descriptions runners had previously given Murdo and Duncan’s sketch of the map segments that had survived on Red Jacob’s hand—the southernmost section. The stationmaster should be in the inn, which they decided was the largest of the buildings, with a long open-faced stable at its rear.

  The rolling hills of the Virginia Piedmont country stretched before them to the eastern horizon. Duncan saw the discomfort on the Mohawk’s face, then looked back at Analie and Ross. This wasn’t simply a new land to all of them, it was a new world. In New York and Pennsylvania the farms and their little villages existed in pockets of cleared land surrounded by the wilderness. They had seen from their high perches that Virginia was different. Nearly the entire landscape stretching before them showed the hand of man.

  “I am going in alone,” Duncan declared to his friends as they reached the trees where they had tied the horses.

  “What, and let you drink all the ale?” Ross protested.

  “A solitary man won’t raise as much suspicion. A warrior from the north will be out of place,” he observed with a nod
at Tanaqua. “And if any of the runners has broken and spilled secrets, one of the first would likely be about the big bull of a Scot who runs the next station to the north.” He did not miss Ross’s frown. “Analie needs your protection.

  “Keep the papers safe,” he said to the girl. “I have what I need in case I should have to win a confidence,” he added, tapping his legging. “And you,” he added, with a hand on her shoulder, “should sing our friends a song. They become morose.” He had grown fearful for the girl as the miles stretched southward. She was unpredictable and seemed to think that by playing the innocent she could always ward off danger. She seemed to have forgotten that those they stalked had tried to kill her, but he had not.

  Analie nodded, then threw her arms around him for a tight hug.

  “I’ll leave my rifle and pack,” he said to Tanaqua. “If things go badly, just ride for Pennsylvania.”

  The buildings of the settlement were not of the stone and logs used in the north but of quartersawn planks and brick. The tavern was a squat, prosperous looking two-story yellow building with a wide brick chimney. In the stable yard behind it several horses were hitched to posts, and parked to one side was a wagon that had the look of a hearse, only taller, its body just a square black box.

  Duncan tied his horse in the stable, then stood in the shadows to study the quiet settlement. They had found no sign of the killers on their rushed journey from Pennsylvania but he was certain they had to be close. The little crossroads was a station for runners, and here he hoped to at least find out what lay between the two rivers on Red Jacob’s map. Galilee, had been Teague’s terse reply when he had asked where the captives were. Galilee in the sotweed country.

  He slipped from horse to horse, looking for signs of being ridden hard, then scouted the stable, even the hayloft. If the tavern truly was a station for the secret runners, there would be mounts for them nearby, and quarters for the runners to rest.