Original Death amoca-3

by Eliot Pattison

  The color drained from Duncan’s face. “Surely Amherst would never-”

  “He can endure one more setback on the battlefield. But a mutiny will ruin him forever. No chance of the king’s honors every general aches for.”

  “There’s nothing I can do. You know I have to find Conawago and the missing children.”

  Woolford surveyed the empty yard then pushed Duncan deeper into the shadows. “I am ordered to secretly recover the payroll. By any means possible. Good men have already died for it. How many more will there be?”

  “I can understand why you are an agent of the empire. Surely you can understand why I will not be.”

  The words struck a nerve. Woolford was a man who knew much more about the workings of the empire in America than Duncan. The ranger frowned. “I am an agent for the king’s justice,” he said, as if correcting Duncan. “I accept that what happened to those at Bethel Church is connected to the theft. Help me so I can help you. I will send one of my best men with you. There still may be time to keep the treasure from the French. Conawago must have understood. It is why he went north.”

  “No. He does not trouble himself with the affairs of distant kings. He raced north for something far more important to him, something to do with a breach in the spirit world.”

  As Woolford stared at him Duncan reminded himself that the ranger captain knew the tribes better than Duncan himself. When he finally spoke there was new worry in his voice. “You mean because of something he found at Bethel Church.”

  Duncan glanced back at the forest, aware that the provosts had patrols out. If he was taken again he would be chained to the prison wall with no chance of escape. “Because there was a desperate plea in a letter. Because the only other old Nipmuc was tortured and murdered. Because he found an old flint knife secretly kept by that dead man. Because he does not believe it is inevitable that the tribes must submit to the Europeans.”

  Duncan’s words seemed to cause his friend more pain. “A flint knife?”

  When Duncan nodded, Woolford sagged. “There are old legends of how flint knives were used by the gods to carve the first human out of sacred wood and cut openings from the next world to earth.” The ranger gazed into the forest a moment before continuing, now in a despairing tone. “There’s a native rising, Duncan. I’ve reported the signs to General Calder but he doesn’t want to hear. Colonel Johnson, the superintendent of Indian Affairs, sends disturbing reports, which Calder shows only to me, and forbids me speaking of it with the other officers. His eminence General Amherst ridicules any officer who shows concern for the tribes, or about the tribes. An Iroquois is just another savage creature of the forest, the supreme commander told me last time I saw him, not worth the time of a true king’s man.”

  Woolford looked nervously about. “There’s a new cult among the western tribes, spreading like wildfire. Its leader says he has been given a sacred charge, that he is connected to the spirits on the other side and speaks for the old gods, that there is a terrible war beginning on the other side, in the spirit world, and only he knows how to stop it. At their campfires they shout for a war of extermination. Their leader makes overtures to the French while his warriors take vows to drive the settlers back to the sea. The beast he spawns will have an insatiable hunger for European flesh.”

  “What tribe?”

  “That’s the point. If their leader has his way, all the tribes. He is becoming like a god to them.”

  “An Iroquois?”

  “Bands of Iroquois left for the West a generation ago, tribesmen who considered the federation to have grown too soft and weak. They call themselves Mingoes. He is a Mingo, a self-proclaimed half-king, one who reigns over the lesser tribes. In English he calls himself the Revelator.”

  He had never seen Woolford look so despondent. “It could change the war, change the balance of power in the colonies,” the ranger said.

  Duncan looked back toward the river, where he had first heard the name of the Revelator, and took a step away.

  Woolford reached to his belt and extended his black leather ranger’s cap to Duncan. “Wear this. It will make you less conspicuous to soldiers.” Duncan settled it over his crown, gave a mock salute to the officer, and slipped into the shadows.

  Skirting the main streets, staying in the shadows, he followed the sound of the hammers and saws in the boatyard. The Welsh woman haunted him. He had unfinished business with her. He moved from tree to tree as he approached the river, not knowing if the workers would have heard of his arrest. He pushed the cap squarely on his head, stepped to the last tree before the open bank of the river, and froze.

  Half the workers stood in a line as though at the edge of an invisible circle, staring at smoke and burning timbers. The cabin was gone. As he watched, the last of its walls collapsed into the fire, sending a shower of sparks and embers into the air. The men watched it somberly, some fearfully. No one made any effort to extinguish the blaze.

  Duncan dropped his pack, leaned his gun against the tree, and approached the burning ruins. He paused when he reached it, studying the onlookers. Most kept gazing uneasily at the fire, as if expecting something to rise up out of it. One man repeatedly made the sign of the cross on his chest. Duncan paced around the ruins, looking for any sign of Hetty Eldridge. There was no hope she had survived. The old dry wood would have burned like an inferno.

  Duncan knelt and picked up a rattlesnake skin that had escaped the flames.

  “It started from the roof.” The deep voice came from over his shoulder. He turned to see the bearded foreman.

  “The roof?” Duncan asked absently. With a strange impulse he wrapped the long skin around his fingers and thrust it into his belt.

  “A dozen of my men ran to their families this morning when the arrows started falling,” the foreman explained. “The garrison went on alert. There have been rumors of the French mounting an attack on Albany these past months.”

  Duncan’s head snapped up. “You’re saying Hurons did this?”

  The bearded man shrugged. “French Indians, sure. Like ghosts. They could have as easily fired the whole town but they chose the witch’s hut, as if she scared them more than our troops. Poor woman never even tried to escape. One of my men said he heard hideous laughing as the flames leapt up. The walls may as well have been soaked in lamp oil, the way they burst into fire.”

  The heat of the old wood would have been like a furnace, searing Hetty’s flesh from her bones. Duncan picked up a long stick and poked the embers at the edge of the fire. There were shards of rum bottles. He pushed further, raking out fragments of bone. With a sudden chill he saw the skull of a large dog, with a shriveled skeletal hand reaching out of its jaw.

  “God’s breath!” the foreman exclaimed. He grabbed the stick and shoved the skull deeper into the ashes. “If my men see that they won’t be back for a month.”

  Duncan turned to the man in confusion.

  “Yesterday at sundown the beast went inside her hut after watching it all these days. The woman began chanting, loud enough for us to hear. Words of the savages. Some of my men said she was taking control of the animal. Some said she was entering the body of the beast. Might be we could have stopped the flames at the outset, but my men. .” the foreman shrugged. “No one wanted to.”

  A sudden wind kicked up the pieces of charred snakeskin around the edge of the hut, stirring them into the air. They swirled over the ruins, several lighting on fire then rising up into the sky.

  “Snakes are the messengers to the spirit world,” Duncan heard himself say. “Go-betweens, between us and the other side.”

  The foreman took a step back, his worried expression now fixed on Duncan. He glanced at his men, half of whom had fled, then shook his head. “I’ll never get them back to work until I push these damned ruins into the river.”

  There was no sign of Macaulay at the stream where Duncan had last seen him. Ishmael waited by the overhanging ledge holding a crude spear fashioned from a hickory pole a
nd a sharp stone.

  “The woman Hetty,” Duncan announced. “The mother of your schoolmaster. She’s dead, Ishmael.”

  The boy cocked his head and seemed about to ask a question but remained silent, touching the amulet that hung from his neck and turning his gaze to the northwest.

  “Where is it?” Duncan asked. “Did she tell you where the raiders were going?”

  When the boy looked back there was worry in his eyes. “She would not speak but I saw that message belt. The old ones are ending all ties with this world, it said. There were symbols of lightning I did not understand.” He shook his head in despair. “Once the Nipmucs would have known how to stop such things.” He turned away as if he did not want Duncan to see his face, and he spoke into the wind. “But there are only two Nipmucs left in all the world.” When he turned to Duncan there was a new determination in his eyes. “The witch knew more. If she is dead, then there’s a place where witches are made,” Ishmael declared matter-of-factly. “If they are made then surely they can be remade.” He set off at a trot, spear in hand.

  Minutes later they joined a game trail that led north, and as they crossed a ridge they began to glimpse a broad river in the distance below, the traditional path into the western wilderness. Ishmael pointed to it and set off with renewed energy. They had reached a fork in the trail at the bottom of the ridge when a burly man appeared from behind a tree.

  “Macaulay!” Duncan exclaimed. “I thought you had second thoughts about leaving the regiment.”

  “Naught left for me there.”

  “It goes hard for deserters.”

  The big Scot grinned. “Way I figure it, the army deserted me. And it only goes hard for those foolish enough to be caught.”

  Duncan saw now the pack hanging from the man’s shoulder. “You’ve been busy yourself.”

  Macaulay grinned. “Sometimes the quartermaster is careless with supplies.” He lifted the pack to his shoulder. “If we be going west, I know where the army scouts leave their canoes.”

  Tenonanatche had been the great east-west thoroughfare of the Iroquois people long before Europeans had arrived and renamed it the Mohawk River. As they paddled upstream Ishmael offered the names of the decaying palisade towns they passed, abandoned in search of fresher soil for crops, and pointed out spirit sites on low overgrown mounds or huge trees that were said to harbor lesser gods of the forest. Duncan studied the boy with the strong face and penetrating eyes, realizing that Hickory John had shown him the sites just as Conawago had shown Duncan similar sites, and regretting the cruel turns of fate that had kept the last three Nipmucs from making such pilgrimages together.

  The river was used by both the Iroquois and the soldiers who traveled between Albany and the western forts. Four times approaching canoes forced them to hide in overhanging alders. Once, six canoes loaded with scarlet-coated British infantry glided past going west. The others proved to be natives hurrying by as if on urgent business.

  By late afternoon dark clouds began rolling toward them from the west. The storm moved quickly, flinging lightning into the steep hills. The wind rose, bending the grass along the banks, pushing the alders and willows, then with a sudden blast it jerked the bow of the canoe toward the bank.

  Ishmael, clutching his spear, jumped off as they reached the shallows and pulled the canoe onto the muddy shore. There was no chance of maneuvering their light craft into such a wind, and the lightning was getting closer. Duncan called out for the boy to help haul the canoe higher up the bank, but suddenly Ishmael seemed to forget his companions. He stood staring into the woods.

  Duncan leapt into the water, steadying the canoe for Macaulay as he climbed out. The sky was darkening rapidly, giving new brilliance to the violent flashes of lightning. Macaulay shouted at the boy to help carry their packs, but still Ishmael did not respond, and now Duncan saw that the boy was gazing down a tunnel of foliage, created by dense trees arching over a trail leading to a solitary bark lodge that appeared to have been abandoned many years before.

  Macaulay gave a yelp as lightning struck across the river. Rain began slanting downward. He grabbed his pack and ran past them toward the lodge, Duncan at his heels.

  They glanced at each other as they reached the sturdy structure, grinning at their luck at finding shelter, but Duncan paused. Ishmael still had not moved. The boy was already soaked by the heavy rain, and as a massive strike of lightning crashed behind him, Duncan darted back and pulled the boy to the lodge. He called the boy’s name repeatedly when he got him under the cover of the old bark roof, but Ishmael just kept staring, now into the shadows at the back of the longhouse. The wind was blowing even harder, the temperature dropping steadily. The river was barely visible through the sheets of rain.

  Duncan saw that Macaulay too was staring, though it was at Ishmael. In his hand the big Scot clutched the iron nail many soldiers kept to clean their weapons. In the Highlands iron had always been a charm against evil.

  “He’s soaked,” Duncan said. “We need a fire.”

  Macaulay gave no sign of hearing until Duncan shook his arm and pointed to the pile of dry wood along one wall. “We’re not going anywhere the rest of this day,” he said. “You tend to the fire.” He gestured to the water dripping through the old bark roof. “I’ll make a dry place.”

  Longhouses had a framework of beams overhead, where smaller logs provided shelves for storage and from which blankets or skins were hung to divide the dwellings into family compartments. Duncan found several old skins lying on the ground and draped them over a section of overhead beams above Macaulay’s sputtering flames.

  Only when Duncan led Ishmael to the flames did the boy acknowledge his presence. “This is the place I sought,” the youth said. “But I never would have found it. The storm brought us here.”

  Macaulay muttered a curse.

  “It’s just an old Iroquois lodge,” Duncan assured him, but he recalled the boy’s earlier description of their destination: the place where witches were made. The tribes had their own lore of supernatural creatures. Hetty Eldridge had come out of the wilderness under the guise of a treaty, but in fact the tribes had forced her out because they preferred the witch to work her spells in the European world.

  “There’s a tale of a magic trickster who travels in and out of the spirit world,” Ishmael said. “Sometimes she traps travelers to make them her slaves on the other side.”

  “Traps them?” Duncan asked.

  “Entices them with what they want. If you are hungry after a long day she will have pots of maize and strawberries waiting. If you need shelter a lodge appears.”

  Macaulay eyed the boy uneasily before quickly laying more wood on the fire.

  “Surely not a decaying one with a leaky roof,” Duncan pointed out, forcing a grin.

  “A new one would make you suspicious,” came Ishmael’s sober reply. The boy’s hand gripped the amulet that hung from his neck.

  Duncan left his companions to stand at the entry, surveying the landscape. Iroquois lodges were built in bottomlands and were abandoned when the soil in their maize and squash fields was depleted. The lodge should have overgrown fields nearby, but there were none.

  As the daylight faded Duncan went to search for more firewood, leaving Macaulay to coax heat into their little pot of corn mush and berries as Ishmael absently drew with a stick on the dirt floor. The rain had subsided to a soft drizzle.

  He carried an armful of wood into the lodge and left again, slipping into the thick growth at the edge of the clearing. Duncan kept telling himself that the uneasiness he felt was because of Ishmael’s strange behavior, nothing more, but he also remembered now a night on a mountaintop with Conawago when the northern lights had been eerily dancing across the sky. The old Nipmuc sage had spoken of places where the spirit world intersected with this world, where beings from the other side might slip across on missions from the spirits. He was angry at himself for letting the skittishness of his companions affect him, but he had also lear
ned such things, and such places, were often metaphors for Conawago, that they were ways of speaking of things that otherwise would be too painful to discuss directly.

  The forest around the lodge was unnaturally quiet. The air seemed unsettled, and he suspected more severe weather was coming. He would have expected that birds would be flying in the lull between storms, that in the dusk deer and other small mammals would be active. But there were no birds, no deer, no fox, no squirrels. He circuited the site in increasingly wide circles, walking along the riverbank then stealthily cutting back into the forest. On his third circuit he halted above a low open swale overgrown with brush and small trees along its sides. He realized that it was a less used continuation of the path from the river. The lodge had not been the original focus of the path, only a waypoint, as though it had been built after the passageway. He followed it toward a waist-high mound, perhaps ten paces in diameter, built in a circle of trees. In its center was a post with leather straps. Some were old and rotting, others were fresh. He backed away as he realized he had seen such a post before, in Pennsylvania. It was a gaondote, a prisoner’s post, where captives were tormented and sometimes put to death. As his spine pressed against a tree, he turned to look into the eye sockets of a human skull embedded in the wood. He clenched his jaw, forcing himself to study the adjoining trees despite his pounding heart. Half a dozen held skulls of large forest creatures. The mound was a place of ritual, and of death.

  He continued to scout until he found a campsite near the riverbank that had been used only a week or two earlier by a party that had chosen not to sleep in the old lodge. Crude hoops made from branches tied in circles with leather straps hung along the edge of the clearing. He lifted one and smelled the wood, noting the leaves and bundles of berries. Mountain ash, or rowan in the Old World. There were several hoops of ash, but also oak and alder. They were not skin-stretching hoops as he first thought, they were charms against evil spirits, charms he had seen as a child. They were not made by Iroquois but by those who had learned to fear demons in the wild and ageless Highlands.