Duncan looked at him in confusion. It made no sense. A missing escort would have been noted, would have been reported at the next fort. But the wagon had gone all the way to its destination with neither the missing guard nor the missing payroll noticed.
A man in a torn and soiled red jacket muttered a curse. “The world’s a bubble for sure, and the life of a man less than a span.”
The English infantryman who had spoken extended his arm, which was swollen with boils. The other prisoners soon followed, seeking Duncan’s medical advice. He reached for his pouch and did what he could, applying the healing powder Conawago mixed from forest herbs, washing dirty wounds and applying more makeshift bandages.
As he worked something nagged at him, plucking at the back of his mind until suddenly he shot up and returned to the infantryman with the boils. “Why did you say that?” he asked the soldier. “Why speak the words of Francis Bacon just then?”
The soldier shrugged. “Never met any Francis Bacon. Just on my mind I guess. That boy recited things in the dark as he sat by the entry, is all. He said some over and over, like a chant. That was one.”
Duncan knelt by the man and gripped his shoulder. “A boy?”
“The savage choir boy we called him.” The grin on the man’s face faded as he saw Duncan’s stern, intense expression. “Just a lad of eleven or twelve. Acted like one of those ghostwalkers, clutching his hands in Christian prayer one minute, drawing pagan images in the dirt the next. He looked like he had painted his face, but most of the color had rubbed away. He had been weeping. Wouldn’t let us comfort him. Took to watching the clock birds. Sat in the entry singing his forlorn songs, staring into the shadows of the tunnel like he expected some beast to rise up out of the earth below.”
“Surely a mere boy would not be sent into this pit.”
The trooper with the broken arm looked up. “I reckon it was the lad who interrupted the assembly yesterday, slipped right through the front gate and when the officer on duty wouldn’t hear his story he ran out on the parade ground, dodging those who chased him, shouting out that there were French Indians in the woods, like the attack everyone fears had started. Troops were sent running to the palisades. Some fool in town began ringing an alarm bell. Colonel Cameron came out and put an end to it right quick. The provosts dragged the boy away, though I figured it would be for a caning in the stable.”
A dozen questions leapt into his mind, but Duncan knew he could not risk betraying too much interest in Ishmael. “Clock birds?”
“The mice with wings.” The soldier with the boils gestured again toward the far end of the cavern where the waste buckets sat. “They go out and we know it’s dusk. They come back and we know it’s dawn.”
Duncan glanced around the cave once more, trying to make sense of the words. “But he was released?”
“Released of his earthly bounds, more like it. He finally ran deeper down the tunnel, toward the oblivion. Lunacy. Naught but blackness and death down there.”
A new weight bore down on Duncan. The one glimmer of hope he had nourished was that the boy yet lived, running free in the forest.
“There’s smallpox below,” the prisoner added. “The guards stopped going inside, just leave their gruel in the tunnel.” The man shrugged. “The pox takes what? Three, maybe five days to kill ye? Could be he’s still alive. But he has damned little time left, and a wretched time it will be. The monster below has swallowed him, and that’s the end of it.”
Duncan suddenly felt weak again. He stumbled back toward his blanket. He sat in a silent, numb state, sometimes on the verge of sleep, mostly just staring into the shadows. At last he rose and stepped toward the deeper shadows near the slop buckets and found the little mounds of fur tucked along the cracks in the stone. Below them he saw the drawings in the dirt of the floor: stick figures of men were falling over two lines drawn at a right angle, with stick-figure bodies below, as if it were men falling off a cliff. The image had been at the center of the wampum belt Duncan had seen at the witch’s hut. He pulled out the paper he had taken from the schoolhouse wall and found the one that bore the boy’s name, with the quote from Bacon. He began to piece together the description of the boy he had heard from Madame Pritchard and felt a tiny flicker of hope.
He sat inside the entry, waiting for the flying shadows. Finally they began flapping. The bats cast a spell over the prisoners, the men watching them with something like envy. Duncan studied them as they swooped out of the low arch. Most went right, up the tunnel, but several went left. He grinned. He understood the boy’s lunacy.
The evening meal came, a watery oxtail broth with bread that was as hard as naval biscuit. Duncan checked the condition of his patients and listened as the other prisoners complained of the provosts, the army, the French, and the bloodthirsty Hurons who were allied with the enemy. The army seemed to be in worse shape than Duncan would have thought, with regiments depleted and morale low despite the recent string of English victories. Several of the men had been in the Americas for years. Some had suffered the fevers of the Indies, one had survived the terrible massacre in which General Braddock and much of his army had been destroyed near Fort Duquesne. Most had been in the horrible bloodbath of the first battle at Ticonderoga in which the Black Watch had lost two thirds of their men.
Duncan retired to his blanket and tried to sleep but spent much of his time drawing a map in his mind of the region around Albany and the Iroquois towns beyond. He found his gaze drifting toward the arch that led to the tunnel. His life hung by a thread. When the bats returned, the provosts would come for him soon after. A handful of officers would be rising, their orderlies adorning them with stiff collars and lace cuffs for the solemn words that would mean his death.
He waited until every man was sleeping, then rose and stepped into the forbidden corridor. There was no sound, no movement from the guard station at the top of the tunnel. He turned and slipped into the gloom below.
The tunnel narrowed and turned as it descended, the slow-burning pitch torches spread far apart now so that he could barely see where he placed his feet. He had grown to tolerate the fetid odor of the first cell, but that in no way prepared him for the reek that reached him. It was the smell of decay, of suffering, of death. For a moment he gazed back up the tunnel. Nothing but the king’s noose waited in that direction. He turned toward the death he did not know.
Dante’s hell needed nine levels to capture all the aspects of human suffering. The iron hole of the English only needed two. The chamber he stepped into echoed not with the sounds of slumber but of misery. Five men lay on filthy straw. Two were moaning and clutching their bellies. A man with a filthy bandage over his shoulder stared at the floor and murmured the same short prayer, over and over. A man who looked more like a skeleton than a living creature stared with vacant eyes at one of the cell’s two candles.
With a sinking heart Duncan saw there was no one else in the cell, no boy, no refugee from the massacre of Bethel Church.
He retreated a step, reflexively wanting to be away from the squalor and suffering, then looked again, more slowly, at the prisoners. For a moment he sensed Conawago at his side, so intensely that he thought he smelled the sweetfern sprigs the Nipmuc kept in his pockets, and he saw in his mind’s eye the opened, extended hand that always meant he expected something of Duncan. He clenched his jaw then knelt by the first of the prostrate figures. The man was ghostly pale and hot to the touch despite the chill of the air. Duncan saw a rag hanging on a bucket of water and made a compress for his forehead. The next man was much the same but did not even respond to his touch. Duncan gazed in horror at the black splotches on the face of the third. The fourth man, a soldier with long blond locks not much older than Duncan, gazed at the candle but did not see. He had been dead for hours.
Duncan studied the pathetic souls of the cell. There was almost nothing he could do for them. He approached the man with the bandaged shoulder, whose gaze was now fixed on the shadows at the back of the c
ell. The prisoner winced when Duncan pulled at the bandage but did not stop him from unwinding it. The long piece of linen had been applied by an experienced hand, probably by a regimental surgeon, but it should have been replaced long before. Duncan threw the foul cloth into the shadows and examined the long ragged wound. It was dirty but not festering. He retrieved the bucket with its wooden ladle and sluiced water over it.
“Huron tomahawk,” the prisoner declared in a hoarse voice. “I killed the bastard. Now he kills me.”
“The flesh is not mortified,” Duncan replied. “You just need to keep it clean.”
The man glanced at the prisoners on the straw and cast a bitter grin at Duncan, seeming to indicate that Duncan was only saving him for a worse fate. Duncan began ripping a strip from his shirttail. When he had the bandage ready, he took a cartridge-like container from a belt pouch and poured out its contents, a dark brown powder, over the wound. “A wise old healer makes this,” he explained. “He speaks words over it which his people think give it great power.”
“You mean a witch or an Indian?” The man asked, wincing as Duncan tightened the bandage over the wound.
“They say the people of the forest hold secrets that go back to the beginning of the earth.”
“And they send their lads deep into the earth to dig more secrets out,” the man said. He gazed again into the deepest shadows.
With a rush of hope Duncan called out toward the darkness. “Ishmael?”
There was no response. “Shay kon,” he said, trying the greeting of the Mohawks, then added, “Ojiwa of the Nipmucs? I come from your uncle.”
The movement was barely noticeable at first, a shadow moving across darker shadow.
Duncan straightened and repeated the Iroquois greeting, in a near whisper. When Ishmael stepped forward, he wanted to embrace the boy but instead stood still very still, as he might before a wild creature of the forest.
“They would never put children in here, so I was sure he had to be a ghost when I first saw him,” the wounded soldier said. “Suddenly he was just standing there, all pale and silent, staring at us like he had come to escort one of us across to the other side.”
Although the boy wore a shirt, it was unbuttoned. Duncan could see the traces of whitewash on his skin. But this was not the angry world breaker who had left the Pritchard farm, this was just another forlorn prisoner.
The boy studied Duncan warily, keeping himself slightly bent, as if ready to leap away at any second.
“I am the particular friend of Conawago, elder of the Nipmuc tribe,” Duncan declared, and he reached into his waistcoat pocket. “Kinsman of Hickory John.”
“Towantha,” the boy replied, using his grandfather’s tribal name.
“Towantha,” Duncan repeated, and he pulled out the wooden medallion he had found in front of the dead Nipmuc.
The boy’s eyes went wide. He took one step forward, then another.
“A twine?” the soldier interrupted, pointing at Duncan’s sleeve. “You’ve been marked with a damned twine? You’re bound for the gallows?”
Duncan just nodded, not taking his gaze off the boy. “I’ve been looking for you, Ishmael,” he said.
The youth darted forward and grabbed the medallion, clutching it against his heart. After a moment he looked up and studied Duncan with uncertain but intelligent eyes. “They would hang you for looking for me?” His English was slow but fluent, his voice heavy with fear.
“They would hang me for a killing at Bethel Church.”
“But you were not one of the killers. I did not see all their faces, but none had yellow hair.” The boy draped the medallion around his neck.
“We arrived not long after, seeking you and your grandfather. A patrol found me and Conawago with the bodies.”
“Conawago.” The youth mouthed the name in a reverent tone. “My grandfather spoke the name in the way he spoke of the old gods. He was waiting, praying Conawago would come. One last letter, he said.”
“I thought he sent letters every year.”
Ishmael turned to look into the flame. “He was making plans to leave. He didn’t want me to know, but my friend Lizzie heard him speaking with her father about taking me into their home. They were cleaning out a storage room for me to sleep in. I could see the pain in his eyes. He was trying to find a way to tell me. Instead he would just recite old tales of Nipmucs who were called away to help the spirits when there was trouble on the other side.”
“Away to where?”
“One night I found him gone from his bed. He was in his shop. He had made a ring of fire, and in the center of the ring was an old knife with a flint blade. I thought he was going to complain that I should be in bed, but he just gestured for me to sit beside him. He was disturbed, and solemn. More than solemn. It was like he was stretched very thin, like something of him was somewhere else. He spoke to the spirits with old words, and then he was silent for a long time, his eyes not seeing, like his own spirit had gone away.” Ishmael glanced up at Duncan, confirming he still listened. That he still believed.
Duncan nodded. He had seen Conawago go away in such a fashion at fragrant fires on moonlit mountaintops.
“When he came back he shook me and said terrible things were happening on the other side, that if someone didn’t go and fix them it would mean the end of all things.”
Duncan stared into the candle, silently cursing a world that had to burden a young boy with such thoughts.
“The end of all things,” the boy repeated. “The next day I asked him what he meant, thinking I hadn’t heard right. He wouldn’t tell me, but he didn’t deny saying the words.”
“Ishmael, why did you seek out the schoolmaster’s mother?” Duncan asked.
He had pushed too far. The boy’s face took on a stony expression and he glanced toward the shadows from which he had come.
“I could have gone north, disappeared into the woods,” Duncan tried. “But there is a bond between my clan and Conawago’s clan. Your clan.”
“You are not of the forest.”
“I am of the mountain and sea, from the land called Scotland. The English killed my clan.” He looked back to the other prisoners on the pallets, toward the disease and death. They were all asleep, or unconscious. He had done all he could for them. “We will need some kind of light,” he whispered to the Nipmuc boy.
Ishmael stared at him for several breaths then with a quick nod gestured Duncan toward the deeper shadows. Duncan freed the nearest candle from the wax droppings that sealed it to its rock and followed.
The boy had lowered himself onto a blanket. In his hand was a snakelike piece of wax. As Duncan held his candle closer, he saw that Ishmael had braided together several heavy threads from the blanket and had been pressing wax around the braids, using it as a wick, rubbing the wax in his hands to make it pliable. Duncan lowered the candle and with gestures showed the boy how to hold his makeshift light so he could drip more wax onto it, sealing the wick then dipping the threads into the wax pooled at the top.
Duncan fought a terrible foreboding about what they were about to do. “These passages have many forks,” he said, struggling to keep his voice calm. “How will we choose the route?”
The Nipmuc boy extended a makeshift pouch made from a cloth torn from the blanket. He nudged it, and shapes inside it began to stir. Duncan’s grin was hollow. The hope was as thin as a thread, but it was the only one they had.
They worked for another hour on the little candle, then Duncan warned they could not risk waiting much longer. Their guides would only serve at night, and judging by the flight of the other bats, it was already hours after sunset. As he returned the bigger candle to its base, a big hand appeared on his shoulder.
“Macaulay!” Duncan gasped as he turned toward the man. “You fool!”
“I’m in this with ye, McCallum.”
Duncan made a frustrated gesture toward the pallets. “It’s smallpox! You’ve come to the smallpox!”
“As ye an
d the boy did.”
Duncan pulled Ishmael closer to the light. “Look at his face.” He had not forgotten the words of Madame Pritchard. The boy had had the pox and carried the marks on his cheeks. “He won’t get it again. And I took the inoculation in Edinburgh.” Duncan’s professors had insisted all the medical students receive the controversial treatment, both to experience the mild course of the disease it caused and to protect the population of the college.
Macaulay eyed the men on the pallets uneasily, then shrugged. “And didn’t I serve a year in the Indies and never once sick? I’m as healthy as a horse. I am fated to die charging at the enemy with a sword in me hand.”
“Healthy as a horse and as big as one,” Duncan added. “You might not be able to follow where we are going.”
Macaulay saw now how the boy lingered impatiently at the entry, the makeshift candle now lit in his hand, and seemed to finally comprehend. “There be only death waiting farther inside this mountain, McCallum.”
“Not if we follow our guides,” Duncan replied and was about to join the boy when one of the prisoners moaned. He was kneeling at the last pallet, shaking the blond-haired man.
“He’s gone,” Duncan said as he pulled the soldier away and led him back to his pallet. He turned and watched in confusion as Macaulay unfastened the twine around his arm. The big Scot murmured a prayer over the corpse then tied the twine around the dead man’s arm. “Your age, same color hair,” Macaulay pointed out. “They’ll take time to work up the courage to look down here for you. Then when they do, this will confuse them all the more.”
Duncan slowly nodded then mouthed his own silent prayer for the dead man and turned to Ishmael.
Moments later they were hurrying down the tunnel, past the last trace of light from the torches above, not stopping until they reached the first intersection of two passages.
Macaulay cursed. “Surely this is folly. We have no idea-”
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