Original Death amoca-3

by Eliot Pattison

  Duncan twisted out of the sergeant’s grip, threw out his foot, and shoved him backwards onto the rolling grist stone. Hawley gasped as he saw the heavy stone roller advancing toward his head, then rolled onto the floor. As he rose, his knife was in his hand, aimed at Duncan’s belly. He swung, Duncan ducked, he swung again, and then he froze at the sound of a gun being cocked.

  “Fort Johnson is a sanctuary, sir,” Molly Brant declared as she stepped through the entry, holding a heavy pistol. Ishmael and his new friend were at her side.

  “I am on General Amherst’s business, woman!” Hawley hissed and ventured a step closer to Duncan.

  Molly ignored him. “William will be so disappointed when I tell him I had to kill a man at my own birthday celebration.” She moved the pistol up and down as if deciding where to aim. “I am a crack shot, sir. Shall I just take an ear for now?”

  “One shot is all ye’ll have,” Hawley growled. “I’ll have my knife in both of ye before ye can reload.”

  Molly sighed and aimed at Hawley’s groin. “Be gone, sir. If I see you again I will call some Mohawk friends who will not be nearly so gentle with you.”

  For an instant Duncan thought Hawley was going to test her skill, but the ranger thought better and lowered his blade. He cursed and slipped out into the dark.

  “Once more, I appreciate the hospitality,” Duncan offered.

  Molly smiled and handed the gun to her son. “Thank the boys. They saw him lurking about like a thief,” she said, and she rubbed Ishmael’s head.

  As the sun set, they took food to Hetty and Macaulay at the landing, and as their companions ate, Ishmael helped Duncan make pine bough beds near their fire. Duncan lay down beside Ishmael but knew he had unfinished business at Fort Johnson. He waited until slumber overtook the boy before rising to study the grounds for any sign of Hawley, then he warily worked his way along the path to the blockhouse on the hill.

  He soon found himself at a ledge overlooking the river where a log bench had been erected. Behind, he had a clear view of the compound of Fort Johnson, lit by lanterns and pitch torches. To the front, a long expanse of rolling hills glowed under a purple and golden sky.

  “This is the way Eden dies,” a deep, contemplative voice said over his shoulder.

  Duncan could not hide his surprise at finding William Johnson standing beside him. He offered a respectful nod to the Irish baronet, then he turned back toward the spectacular landscape. “I can’t but wonder if Eden was so beautiful.”

  Johnson lifted a pipe to his lips, coaxing smoke out of the smoldering tobacco. “I was a year or two younger than you, McCallum, when I first traveled up this river. My knees trembled like a frightened child’s. I was terrified of its beauty. It was so majestic, so powerful, so untamed. A world different from any I had ever known.”

  “Inhabited by a very different people.”

  Johnson looked at Duncan in surprise, then nodded. “Aye. I fear we are the Romans, and the ancient tribes crumble before us. We want to treat the land like it is just one more little vale off the Thames. But the biggest mistake is that we treat the natives as if they were just cruder versions of ourselves. It took me years to understand how wrong that was. The more I understand the people of the woods the more time I want to spend with them.” Johnson bent and picked up a feather from the ground. He studied it as if it might hold some secret message. “I’ve been given royal gifts, anointed as a baronet, installed as a colonel. But all of that is as dust compared to the day the Haudenosaunee adopted me as a chief of their longhouse.”

  A flock of geese flew past, so low and close the two men could hear the wingbeats.

  Duncan broke the silence. “From the day the English destroyed my clan nearly fifteen years ago,” he said, “my heart was in a shadow. Then I learned to walk at the side of an old Nipmuc.”

  The man beside him had none of the airs of the loquacious baronet who had lorded over the feast. He spun the delicate feather between his fingers, then looked out toward the setting sun.

  “I owe you an apology, McCallum. It was only in the past hour that an Onondaga friend found me. I had no idea you were the Scot who stands with Conawago. You would have sat at my right hand today had I known. I envy you. He is one of the last of his kind.”

  “Last of the Nipmucs.”

  “Not just that, but yes.”

  “So you are acquainted with him?”

  “He has dined at my table more times than I can count. We have passed happy hours together in my library debating the Greek philosophers while blizzards howled outside. He and my wife played scenes of Molière in our pavilion one summer. A lifetime ago.” Johnson spoke toward the feather now. “I would give much to spend a week or two at his side in the woods.” He looked up at Duncan with a sad, sheepish grin.

  “I lost my chance fifteen years ago,” he continued. “He had spent some nights under my roof, reading my books, then announced he was leaving for Lake Champlain, on a straight path through the mountains instead of along the rivers. I had never seen that high country. He wanted to borrow a volume of Aristotle. I said I would gladly give him the book if I could travel with him. He agreed, though he insisted we must leave before dawn. But I encountered a coppery lass under the moonlight. Iroquois women are formidable, lad. They know their own skin. She grew amorous. The women have a saying on such nights: The moon will not be refused. I woke up midmorning and Conawago was gone. He had left the book on the table, open, with a feather pointing to a passage. ‘A man is the origin of his action,’ it said. I wanted to weep.”

  Johnson paused and looked out over the glowing hills. “I have often thought of that lost journey. It’s strange, but I think I would have been a different man if I had chosen differently that night. A better man. It’s preyed on me all these years, though I’ve never spoken of it to another soul until now.”

  “Why do so now?”

  “Maybe because I see so much of myself in you. Because you still have choices ahead of you. Because Conawago is in grave danger, and you and the Welsh witch are his only chance of staying alive. We think she may know the half-king, think he may have even summoned her.”

  Duncan’s heart seemed to stop beating for a moment. “What danger?”

  “Conawago met one of my scouts in the North, an old acquaintance of his. Conawago gave him a message for the Council of elders at Onondaga Castle. He told them they must protect the old shrines, that nothing was more important than protecting the old shrines. Why would he say that?”

  Duncan studied the Irishman for a moment, wondering how much he knew about the Nipmucs. “Old shrines are where the tribes speak with the old gods.”

  “I think the half-king wants the gods for himself.”

  “I don’t understand,” Duncan said.

  “He claims to be the voice of the old gods, and that the old gods want him to lead a new nation of tribes.”

  “But that has nothing to do with Conawago.”

  “I wish you were right.” Johnson nursed his pipe for a long moment. “Old legends of the Haudenosaunee speak of a place in the North where there’s a passage to the other side, where men and tribes were taken for judgment in another time. The Lodge of Lightning, it is called in the old tales, for they say it is where lightning gathers out of the sky. The elders speak of it as the most sacred of places, so sacred it is kept a close secret. Only a handful of the old ones are said to know where it is and how to open the passage. The Council has been debating these months whether to reopen the shrine, and they have finally sent warriors to protect it. If that damned Revelator took it for his own use, he would become the most powerful chieftain for hundreds of miles.”

  Duncan closed his eyes a moment, knowing Johnson had just answered the question that had been haunting him. “It is where Conawago is going.”

  The words seemed to stab at Johnson. He sighed and lowered his pipe then stepped closer to the river. He raised his hand with what seemed great effort and released the little feather into the wi
nd and watched it fly into the darkening sky before turning back to Duncan. “The half-king seeks its location so he can go there. He knows it lies near an abandoned Iroquois village, but there are dozens of those.”

  Duncan’s throat went very dry. “If the half-king finds it and discovers Conawago there. .”

  “The half-king will just see him as another Indian in European clothes. He reviles such men, says they are abominations, the means by which the poison that is killing the tribes spreads. He is said to have roasted one alive last month.”

  “How would you know this?”

  “I may have been born in County Meath, but I have become more Mohawk than Irish.”

  “This is no time to speak in riddles, sir.”

  “I have couriers who keep me connected with the Council at Onondaga Castle. The Council has ways of knowing all that happens in their lands. I have never seen the sachems of the Council more disturbed. The half-king seeks to force them into an alliance with him. He says the old spirits are angry at them, that if they do not join, the spirits will abandon them. Without the spirits he says the Iroquois will become hollow men and will be destroyed alongside their British friends.”

  “Conawago thinks there has been a break in the path to the other side. He believes he has ways to patch such rifts,” Duncan offered uncertainly.

  “The half-king,” Johnson said, “the Revelator. It is how he rallies so many of the lesser tribes, how he believes he will subjugate the Iroquois. He himself will cross over and fix the rift. When he finds the most ancient of shrines, he says he will have the power to vanquish the renegade European spirits. The tribes can then follow him into a glorious world of his making.”

  Duncan had a hard time speaking. “This place. Conawago has kept its location a secret all these years.”

  “The Nipmucs were the monks of the woodland tribes. The Nipmuc elders always knew.”

  “The raiders at Bethel Church tortured a Nipmuc elder.”

  Johnson’s eyes went wide. “A Nipmuc lived at Bethel Church?”

  “He lived out of sight, with an English name. Conawago and I arrived to meet him, but he had been killed just hours before. He had sent a message to Conawago. This is how we first die, it said.”

  Johnson seemed to stagger. He put a hand on a tree to steady himself. “My God. He was talking about the end of time for the tribes. When they lose the spirits on the other side, they will wither and die. The Nipmuc at Bethel Church was tortured for the location of the Lightning Lodge. Now the half-king knows where it is. The Council already sent some of its best warriors to protect it, Kass’s brother and father among them. It is the Council’s last desperate chance. But he will be unforgiving of any who interfere with him.”

  Duncan’s mouth was dry as sand. “You’re saying Conawago. .”

  “You know damned well what I am saying. Conawago and the half-king are racing to the same place, and when the half-king arrives he will shred Conawago’s flesh from his bones.”

  Duncan did not know how long he sat gazing in anguish across the rolling landscape. Run, a voice inside shouted. Save Conawago. But he suspected having a European at his side would make things no better for the old Nipmuc.

  When he looked back, Johnson was gone. Kass was standing there, as if she had been patiently waiting for him.

  “There is someone from the war,” she announced. The role of demure hostess at Molly Brant’s side seemed be wearing on her. Her hair was loose. She had pinned a piece of sweetfern to her bodice, in the fashion of maids Duncan had seen in the Iroquois towns. Hanging from her neck was no longer her beaded necklace but a small pouch for the amulet of her protective spirit.

  “You have a brother and father in the war,” Duncan observed.

  Kass nodded. “They have been given a sacred duty, yes. The Council is used to solving its problems with words, but words will not be enough this time.”

  She gestured him to follow her.

  As they reached the blockhouse on the hill above the compound, Duncan hesitated. Two stern warriors stood guard at the door, and he now saw the iron bars on the windows of the squat building. The building was as much a prison as a defensive post.

  Kass sensed his discomfort. With a small silent motion, she clapped a hand over her heart and then extended it, opening her palm toward him, in a sign that he could trust her. “Please,” was all she said. Duncan followed her inside, to the base of a steep ladder stair that led to the upper floor. She gestured upward and backed away. He climbed the steps warily, realizing how little he really knew of William Johnson. If Johnson truly answered to the commanders in Albany, he could be walking into a trap. Officers in Albany still wanted to hang him. He scanned the candlelit chamber at floor level when his head cleared the opening. Along each wall was a cot, with a table and chairs at the center. A man slept on the farthest cot. He ascended and approached the cot cautiously.

  As a board creaked under Duncan’s foot, the sleeping man sprang to life, rolling off the bed and dropping into a fighting crouch.

  “Sagatchie!” Duncan gasped.

  The Mohawk ranger appeared to have come from a battlefield. His face was bruised, one cheek swollen, his hair matted from a wound bleeding on his crown. As he straightened, holding his belly, he was almost too weak to stand. He stepped to the table and dropped into one of the chairs.

  When Duncan hastened to examine Sagatchie, the ranger held up a restraining hand. “A few blows, no more. No bullets touched me,” he said, and he touched his amulet as if in explanation.

  “But why are you a prisoner?”

  His question brought a bitter grin to the Mohawk’s face. “The guards do not keep me in, McCallum. They are to keep others out.”

  A dozen questions leapt to Duncan’s mind. The Mohawk had been at Bethel Church the last time Duncan had seen him. He was supposed to be on patrol along the lakes, where the murderers had escaped. But his questions died on his tongue when Sagatchie spoke again.

  “Hawley will seek you out,” the Mohawk declared. “Beware of every shadow.”

  Duncan lowered himself into a chair. “He attacked me this very evening. Molly Brant persuaded him to leave.” He hesitated. “How would you know that? You were one of his men,” he said a moment later, as if answering his own question.

  The Mohawk shook his head. “I was a guide. A watcher.”

  “A watcher?” Duncan asked. “Watching for what, exactly?” Duncan saw Sagatchie’s stony expression and knew the ranger was a man who kept many secrets. “Watching him come for me?” he asked bitterly.

  “I told you,” came a weary voice from behind Duncan. Patrick Woolford stood on the stairs, mud on his sleeves and grime on his face. “I was sending my best man to help you.” The ranger captain turned on the stairs, motioning to someone below. One of the guards followed him up, carrying a body on his shoulder, which he lowered onto the floor.

  Sergeant Hawley would stalk Duncan no more.

  Duncan found no sign of a wound on the sergeant until he rolled him over. The oozing gash in his back was over his heart. Duncan looked up at Sagatchie and Woolford.

  “Rangers don’t stab other rangers in the back, Duncan,” Woolford said, sensing the suspicion in his gaze. “Not even one who deserves it.” He seemed about to explain further when he saw Sagatchie’s injuries and darted to the table.

  The questions all came from Woolford now, in the Iroquois tongue, and so fast Duncan could not follow. After a few minutes of hushed exchange between the two rangers, Woolford looked up.

  “Who else knows you came this way?” Woolford asked Duncan.

  “No one.”

  “Sagatchie is known in some circles as one who performs dangerous assignments for me, assignments in the shadows of the war. He was following Hawley because we suspected Hawley meant to do you harm. And with luck he might have taken us to the half-king’s messengers.”

  “Messengers?”

  “I have had men patrolling trying to discover how the half-king commun
icates with the French. If we can cut off his line of communication, we will cripple his plans for alliance.”

  “But surely that is impossible. They could be anywhere in thousands of miles of wilderness.”

  “Difficult, but not impossible.” Woolford dipped a finger in a mug of water on the table and hastily drew an irregular oval. “This is the great lake, Ontario.” He traced a dotted line of moisture inside the top of he oval and continued, “There is a water route along the northern shore that is used by the Jesuits and French trappers. The Jesuits rule it with an iron hand and surely would not condone an alliance with tribes who butcher women and children. The half-king would keep his distance from that path. No canoes would ever dare the waters in the center of the lake. And the half-king would not move openly through the heart of the Iroquois

  country south of the lake. That leaves the southern shore and a corridor of perhaps twenty miles south of it. My men have been watching there these past weeks.”

  “It was just Sagatchie’s bad luck that he met raiders on the river,” Duncan surmised.

  Woolford settled into one of the chairs. “Not raiders. Deserters. He found your signs at the old spirit lodge by the river. Someone had been lying in a narrow gully by that mound with that prisoner post. He went down in it to investigate, and when he climbed out they jumped him, began beating him. When he broke away they shot at him.”

  Duncan shrugged. “Deserters are desperate men.”

  “These were a special kind of deserters. Very savvy about the workings of the army, and the rangers. Sagatchie says they all had bare legs.”

  “Highlanders?”

  “There is no better cover for murder then war. It’s always happened. A hated officer is found with a bullet in the back of his head. Who’s to say it wasn’t an accident, or that he turned to rally his men and was hit by the enemy? The general asked me to look for patterns. The Highland units were thrown together quickly, sometimes with only a few weeks’ training before shipping out from Scotland. That meant a number of the key administrative billets were not necessarily Highlanders. I found five suspicious deaths among the Highland troops. Four were Englishmen. One of those was a quartermaster, another a provost who arranged guards for the paywagons. General Calder and I were watching some of the Scots. There was talk of secret meetings with French agents in the forest. That’s why Sagatchie was with Hawley’s patrol at Bethel Church.”