The horse seemed to relish the open road and quickly settled into the long loping gait used by military messengers. As he emerged from each curve and crested each hill Duncan half expected to see the boy, but by late morning his hopes began to fade, and he realized Ishmael himself could have found a horse, or a ride on some carriage or wagon.
His strength, and that of the horse, began to flag by early afternoon, and as he approached the southern end of Lake George, he dismounted and led the horse off the road and up the ridge that ran parallel to it. He found a small high clearing overlooking the lake then removed the saddle and rubbed down the horse with dried grass before turning it loose to graze. He ate a meal of jerked meat and lay at the edge of a stream, filling his canteen before dipping his face in the cool water, then leaned back on a paper birch, listening to the songs of the thrushes, the hammering of woodpeckers, the screech of a hawk high overhead. He extracted the letter he had taken from the schoolhouse and read the return address once more. Eldridge, Forsey’s, Albany. It had the sound of a commercial establishment. He unfolded the paper and for the first time read the message inside.
My dearest S, the crude, uneven handwriting began. The salutation was followed by a prosaic description of affairs in Albany.
The boatyard has been busier than ever making transports for the army. The hammers keep me awake long into the evening. An Oneida brought in the pelt of a snow-white catamount and declared it had magic healing powers. A Dutchman bought it for his sick infant. You would have laughed to see the moose that walked into the open door of the Reformed Church during services. There has been no word from New York town.
The letter was signed with a simple M. Duncan hesitated and looked at the address again. Henry Bedford, it said, though the letter was directed to someone whose name began with an S.
He withdrew the papers he had taken from the wall of the classroom. The first had the drawing of a cat on it, followed by the simple verse
Great A, B, C and tumbledown D.
The Cat’s a blind bluff. She cannot see.
Below it was the name Hannah Redfern. Under the drawing of a man with a fishing pole was the verse
The artful Angler baits his Hook
and throws it gently in the Brook.
Jacob Pine had signed the page. Next came a drawing signed by Abigail Hillwater of a tree with leaves falling, with the verse
Autumn succeeds in flame Yellow clad
With Fullness smiling and with Plenty glad.
A simpler drawing of a bird in a crude, younger hand, signed by Abraham Beaver, was over the verse
Fine Feathers make Fine Birds.
A boy named Noah Moss had signed a drawing of a fox staring at a long-necked bird, over the words
When the Fox preaches beware of the Geese.
Finally came a more refined drawing of a man looking up at a crescent moon over the words
Learn well the Motions of the Mind
Why you are made, for what designed.
It was signed Ishmael Ojiwa Nipmuc.
The verses, Duncan suspected, were from the popular book of children’s verse by John Newbery, a fixture in many British schools. But Ishmael had scribed another verse in much smaller writing at the bottom of his paper. The world’s a bubble, it said, and the life of a man less than a span. Francis Bacon. He extracted the oval medallion that had laid by Hickory John’s body. It was an exquisite carving of a deer and a bear standing like sentinels on either side of a kneeling man.
He stared at the medallion, knowing it must have held important meaning for the murdered Nipmuc, then set the papers in the grass around him, trying to understand what about them nagged him. He recounted the names on the crosses at Bethel Church. The captured children did not share the names of the dead. The children who shared the names of the adults had been killed. The Nipmuc wheelwright who lived apart from the war had a secret the raiders desperately wanted. He had kept an ancient flint knife hidden in his room that had sent Conawago rushing north. Bethel Church was built upon layers of tribal mystery.
As he stuffed the papers back into his shirt, he heard a new hammering, a staccato beat in the distance. This was no woodpecker. He lifted his rifle and found one of the ledges that broke through the cover of the trees, quickly stepping to the edge and just as quickly stepping back. He dropped to the ground and inched forward on his belly.
Fort William Henry, at the end of Lake George, was much larger than he had anticipated. He recalled reading how it had been reinforced and strengthened after the British had reclaimed it following the terrible massacre by French Indians there three years before. The parade ground inside the palisade held ranks of soldiers being drilled. Two heavily laden bateaux were rowing away as another was being loaded. On a broad flat outside the palisade more soldiers were being trained, marching, stopping, pivoting, fixing bayonets, and charging at straw figures tied to posts. They were moving through stations, sprinting up an earthen mound at one position, leaping over a trench at another, then spreading out with mechanical precision into the treacherous double line of muskets that had wreaked havoc on so many European battlefields. With grim recognition he saw the final station, a hundred feet from the gate. Troops completing the circuit were drawn into tight formation and ordered to halt to gaze upon a scaffold where the body of a man swayed at the end of a rope.
Duncan tossed several coins on the table as the innkeeper reached to remove his breakfast dishes. He had paused on his desperate ride from Fort William Henry for a few hours’ sleep, rising before dawn to cover the last few miles to Albany before releasing his horse and stopping at the first tavern on the outskirts of the town. “I’m looking for a place called Forsey’s,” he ventured.
The old Dutchman eyed him in surprise. “Enlisting, are ye?”
“My brother’s an officer,” he replied warily. His brother Jamie had indeed been a captain before being court-martialed as a deserter.
The innkeeper didn’t seem particularly convinced, but he shrugged and pointed out the window. “Down Water Street then turn at the old elm and head toward the river. Sign’s out front.”
By New World standards, Albany reeked of age and culture. For a few minutes as he walked down the cobbled street he felt he was back in Holland, where he had been a boarding school student. Stout brick houses with stepped roofs and smaller, brightly colored, tidy abodes with tall chimneys lined his passage. He reminded himself that the town had its start as the Dutch community of Fort Orange more than a century earlier. A woman tended asters in a cemetery beside a yellow building marked as the Dutch Reformed Church. A team of matched horses was being hitched to an elegant carriage before a stately house. A beefy, unshaven man led a procession of several weary-looking Indians bearing enormous bundles of furs on their shoulders. Heavy wagons loaded with barrels rumbled over the cobbles. An Indian woman sold baskets under a huge tree. He looked up, recognizing its fan-shaped branches, then turned down the cross street and descended toward the Hudson. Halfway down the street was a substantial brick building. With a sinking feeling he saw the soldiers, nearly all officers, idling near its entrance. He ventured close enough to read the sign over the front door before ducking into an alley. Forsey Bros, it said. Clothiers to the Military.
He waited in the shadow of a stable behind the building, watching women in plain work dresses carrying red and blue fabric out of a cellar door to hang on a rope stretched between two trees. When one of them inadvertently kicked over a basket of their split-stick clothespins, scattering them across the ground, Duncan emerged into the sunlight to help her collect the pins.
She looked at him suspiciously but offered a stiff nod of gratitude when he dropped the last pin in the basket. “I was looking for Mrs. Eldridge,” he ventured.
The woman looked as if she had bitten something sour. “The old widow witch? Like as not cajoled some fool into trading a pint of rum for a fortune-telling and is passed out in her hut.”
“Fie!” the second woman snapped. “Th
at’s no Christian way!”
“Christian don’t exactly describe her,” the first woman sneered.
“And thank God you have been spared the torment she has known,” the older woman chided. Her companion gave an exaggerated grimace and retreated toward the cellar.
“Hetty’s life has been harder than most,” the woman explained to Duncan.
“She works here?” he asked.
“Most days. Sewing lace to officers’ tunics, though I daresay she’s never worn lace in her life. If she’s in her way she’ll not say a word to you.”
“In her way?”
The woman winced. “Her hut lies beyond the yard where they build the bateaux. Not hers exactly, but no one had the spine to put her out when she squatted in it.”
The shipyard at the bottom of the hill was a hive of activity. Wagons stacked with timber were lined up waiting to unload. Three separate boats were under construction, each braced within heavy pilings above the muddy bank down which they would slide upon completion. Mallets and hammers beat an unsteady rhythm. Rough-looking men working with planes and chisels glanced up at Duncan and seemed to dismiss him as one of the trappers or scouts who frequented Albany. Curses rose from a long deep trench in the ground where a man on the wrong end of a heavy sawblade spat out the wood dust constantly falling on him.
Duncan paused at the far edge of the yard near a massive dog with shaggy brown hair sitting on its haunches. It possessed a wild, noble air about it, and Duncan, who had befriended several such creatures in his youth, instinctively took a step closer.
“Wouldn’t,” came a terse voice behind him. The speaker was a burly bearded man covered in sawdust who had just climbed out of the sawpit.
“Just admiring your animal,” Duncan offered. “I’ve seen many mastiffs and hunting hounds but few as magnificent as this beast.”
“Not my animal, nor any man’s here. It just appeared two days ago. Will have naught to do with us. Won’t take meat, won’t take a bone. I’ve got Iroquois here who say that warriors killed in battle sometimes come back as such creatures for unfinished business.”
Duncan inched closer. The dog did not move its broad, heavy head, but a low rumble of warning rose in its throat. His expression was suddenly that of a fierce predator.
The man produced a rag from his pocket and began wiping his face. “It just stares like that. All day, all night as far as we know.” The man, Duncan realized, was frightened of the animal. “A boy threw a stone at it. The dog just gave him its eye and the boy fell back into the pit, broke his damned ankle. My men are calling it the hell dog.”
“Perhaps it waits for a boat, for some trapper to arrive,” Duncan suggested.
The man snorted. “That’s what I thought at first. But someone pointed out that the Welsh witch has been inside there ever since he arrived. Yesterday two of my men refused to come to work. Today four more. I said I was going to shoot the damned beast, and one of the Oneidas said my wife would be a widow by the next moon if I did.”
With a chill Duncan now saw the dog stared not at the river but at a decrepit log hut near the bank.
The structure clearly survived from the town’s early age, when Albany and before that Fort Orange had been centers for the fur trade. The logs at one corner were rotting, lending an unstable tilt to one side of the roof. The low roof had skulls scattered across it, of beaver, otter, hares, and other small mammals. Several of the willow hoops used for stretching skins lay rotting against one wall. From the low uneven eaves hung the black-and-white furs of polecats. From a pole near the door feathers fluttered in the breeze, all of them from crows or ravens.
Duncan ventured several steps closer to the cabin then turned uneasily. The sounds of the work in the yard had stopped. The eyes of every man in the yard seemed to be on him. The rumble of the dog grew louder. A sharp complaint from the man who had spoken to Duncan sent the men back to work.
He approached to within six feet of the dog then dropped onto one knee, holding his rifle upright like a staff. He collected himself, looking down at the grass for several moments before addressing the animal with soft, respectful words in the Mohawk tongue, words he had heard Conawago speak to a bear that had walked into their campsite one night. When the dog did not react he tried them in English. “I honor the tooth and claw of your spirit,” he intoned. “I honor the beauty of your paw and know your greatest strength lies in not using it.”
A low growl came from the creature’s throat, but it slowly shifted his eyes to meet Duncan’s gaze as he repeated the words, shifting between the tribal and English tongues. He steadily lowered his voice, until it was a faint whisper, but stopped only when the dog stopped growling. From a belt pouch he extracted a small yellow feather he had found in the forest and set it on the ground in front of the animal. As the dog cocked its head at the feather, he slowly rose and backed away, toward the hut.
The door of the structure was ajar. He called out the woman’s name, then slowly pushed the door open when no response came. A strange translucent veil hung over the entry. He advanced a step then froze as he realized it consisted of the skins of huge rattlesnakes, the heads pinned inside the lintel, the rattles hanging to betray the passage of any who entered. He clenched his jaw, pushed the skins aside, and stepped into the single room of the decaying cabin.
The air was thick with the smoke of cedar, used by the tribes to summon spirits. He stood still, letting his eyes adjust to the dimness, surveying the strange chamber he found himself in. More animal skins, moth-eaten and tattered, hung on the walls. Woodcutting trestles supported rough planks for a low table, with a lopsided milk stool the only seat. The woman sat in a corner on a pallet of cedar boughs, her eyes fixed on the bottom of a green onion-shaped bottle she clenched in her hands. A piece of cedar wood smoldered in a bowl at her side.
Duncan leaned his rifle against the doorframe and settled onto the floor in front of her. Her hollow eyes slowly found him, and her lips curled into a lightless smile. When she turned the bottle he saw that her wrists were encircled with such heavy scars she seemed to be wearing bracelets of raised flesh.
“Poison snake take you home,” she suddenly declared. Her voice was dry as sticks.
A chill crept down Duncan’s spine. “I am here about Henry Bedford,” he declared, and paused. He had made an assumption about the relationship of the woman who sent the letters and the schoolteacher, but it did not seem possible that this fearful crone could be the man’s mother. “Mr. S.,” he tried. “And a student of his who may have come looking for him.”
She trapped some smoke inside the bottle and became so engrossed with it she seemed to have forgotten his presence. After several long moments her gaze shifted to Duncan’s foot and slowly wound its way up his leg. She finally looked him in the face. Even then her only reaction was to cup some of the smoke in her hand and release it under his chin.
He noticed a crumpled paper that lay at her side, similar to the letter he had inside his shirt, and he fought the temptation to grab it. “The boy Ishmael. Has he been here?”
She leaned close to him, so close he could smell her sour breath. But she did not seem drunk. “You are one of them then.”
He paused, noticing now a pattern drawn on the earthen floor beside her, a parallelogram with two dots and a slanted line inside. “One of them?”
“The dead of Bethel Church.”
Duncan swallowed hard. “Madame, I am here, sitting in front of you in this world.”
“Then you know nothing.”
“On that much we agree,” he muttered. He saw now a belt of beads on her lap, not the shiny glass beads of European traders but the plain wampum shell beads of the tribes. His head snapped up. It was a message belt, used in the wilderness for communication between native villages, even between separate tribes. He had not seen many, but he knew they always conveyed vital, solemn messages. Belts might warn of epidemics or summon members of tribal councils to meetings. Black belts, comprised solely of dark
purple shells, were used as a declaration of war. This one held a complex pattern of stick figure humans and animals. It made no sense that the woman in front of him, a Welsh seamstress with a taste for rum, would have such a belt.
Duncan saw now more beads, a single strand of white wampum laying on the pallet. He lifted it and conspicuously draped it over his open hand. The white strand was a warrant of truth among the tribes. No man could hold such beads and lie, though he was not certain what they might connote to a Welsh widow living in Albany.
“My name is Duncan McCallum,” he tried again, raising his hand with the beads. “I seek the boy named Ishmael, Ojiwa of the Nipmuc, who came here from Bethel Church after its people were massacred.” His free hand extracted the letter he carried and held it in front of her. “You know the schoolteacher there. You are his mother,” he ventured. When she did not object, he continued. “Ishmael was here because he believed you knew something of those who captured your son and his students.”
Her cackle was like a rattle in her hollow chest. “If he is gone he needed to be gone. The half-king stands tall. White George stumbles. Not long now. When the dead walk the living tremble. How many times can you die?” As she laughed again, Duncan glanced toward the entry, fighting a compulsion to flee.
“Where do they go to?”
“Beyond, and beyond.” The woman kept cackling, holding the bottle up to an eye and looking at Duncan through its bulbous translucent glass.
Duncan clenched his jaw in frustration. He gazed at the wampum belt, knowing that without Conawago he would never unlock the riddle of its beads. “Your son and his students. How do I find them?”
“People think there is forgiveness on the other side,” the Welsh woman croaked. “But that is where payment is made.”
“Damn it!” he snapped. “There’s children to be saved, woman! Enough of your gibberish.”
She cocked her head toward a bear skull he had not seen before, suspended from a roof beam so that it seemed to float in the air. She seemed not to see him now. As he watched uneasily, she began to unbutton her soiled linen blouse. “Enough of your gibberish,” she echoed. With one quick movement she pulled the blouse down, below her small, pinched breasts. “Here is where they go!”
Original Death amoca-3 Page 6
