Original Death amoca-3

by Eliot Pattison

  Duncan looked at Conawago, who lingered at the water barrel, staring pointedly into the water as if waiting for Woolford to speak the words to Duncan he had been unable to. “Across?”

  Woolford folded the belt very carefully, not looking up. “Conawago and the elders know. They are certain these mysteries must be resolved on the other side.”

  “Speak plainly, damn it.”

  When Woolford did speak, it was in a whisper. He looked up with anguish in his eyes. “You promised to die, Duncan.”

  It was late in the evening when Woolford returned to the tavern, admitted by a provost who warned the ranger he would have only a quarter hour with the prisoners. Woolford dropped a linen-wrapped bundle on a table and uncovered a loaf of bread and a cold leg of mutton. Conawago rose from the hearth. He had chosen to sleep since they had been locked in the tavern, as if to avoid Duncan.

  “There was news,” he announced as Duncan began to eat, “a letter from Albany.”

  Duncan paused, sensing the hesitation in his friend’s voice.

  “Duncan,” the ranger continued uneasily, “there was no time to send to that lawyer in New York town. I discovered the name of the magistrate in Albany who passed sentence on Eldridge, but the crusty old fool wouldn’t see me.” Duncan took another bite as Woolford stepped to the water barrel for a drink. “So I wrote to Sarah Ramsey,” he said into his mug.

  Duncan’s head snapped up.

  “The Ramsey name is still well respected in the colony,” Woolford quickly continued, as if fearing Duncan would interrupt. “She wrote to him, saying Lord Ramsey desired that the particulars of the Eldridge prosecution be sent to me here.”

  “I do not want Sarah to be burdened by. .” Duncan said stiffly, searching for words, “by all this.”

  Woolford ignored him. “The magistrate reports it was a most peculiar case. The victim had been tied to a tree and had his fingers cut off. The arrest warrant was issued because Eldridge was heard to threaten the man. At the hearing he said it must have been a savage who tortured the Dutchman. He said it must have been a Huron. A week later, Eldridge escaped the jail. It was taken as a sign of his guilt.”

  “A Huron?” Conawago asked. “Why would he say that?”

  “Don’t presume on my relationship with Sarah,” Duncan warned.

  “She has great affection for you, Duncan,” Woolford countered. “One of the comeliest lasses in the colonies. And one of the richest. Don’t tell me you never think of her.”

  Duncan tore away a piece of bread and stared at the table as he ate it. “Not a day goes by without me wondering whether she is safe, whether she is working the fields, whether she is continuing to learn to read.”

  “But?” Woolford asked.

  It was Conawago who answered after an uncomfortable silence. “But Duncan doesn’t think he deserves her.” The tavern was apparently a place where hard truths had to be spoken.

  “She would leave Edentown tomorrow if you offered to build a cabin with her in the wilderness,” the ranger declared.

  Duncan’s reply was a whisper. “All I have to my name is a rifle and a set of tattered bagpipes. I am the prisoner of a general and have apparently promised to go north to die for the Iroquois Council,” he said, exchanging a sober gaze with the old Nipmuc. “Which I will be honored to do if Conawago wishes it.” He turned back to the ranger. “I beg you not to discuss her further.”

  Woolford solemnly dipped his mug at Duncan and nodded.

  They ate for several minutes without speaking, until Conawago finally broke the silence. “A Huron,” he said again. “Why would the schoolmaster say that?”

  THE SOUND OF the horn roused Duncan from his troubled sleep on the hearth of the tavern. Through the window he could see soldiers running from the fort to the landing dock. A young officer bolted into the big stone house where the general slept. A ship was approaching from the North.

  Duncan found the door unguarded. By the time he reached the dock, the general was there with Woolford, studying the little brig through a spyglass. The sailing ship pulled a smaller boat behind it. Calder lowered the telescope and fixed Duncan with a gloating smile. “The triumphant return.”

  “Being towed home?”

  “As I explained, McCallum, my nephew Marston had things well in hand. We shall hear his report of how this half-king is standing down, deferring to us as we complete our invasion force. We will-”

  “Sir,” Woolford interrupted. His face was pale. He had been using his own telescope. “You must return to your quarters. Please. I beg you.”

  Duncan and the general turned, confused by the tightness in the ranger’s voice. Duncan looked back at the brig. There was none of the cheering he would have expected upon the return of a victorious mission, no celebratory cannon shot. The men in the boat under tow were strangely sober and still.

  “We found them drifting five miles offshore, sir,” an officer on the brig reported in an uneasy voice as it slipped alongside the long dock. As the crew hauled in the towline, none of the men in the smaller craft moved to acknowledge Calder. The general, clearly off put by the snub, reached the end of the dock in several long, eager strides. “Marston! Pray, what news! Marston lad, when do we. .” His question faded away with an anguished groan. Woolford rushed forward to grab his arm as the general swayed, about to collapse.

  There were five soldiers in the boat, all sitting stiffly upright, not moving. Duncan approached slowly, puzzling over the strange T-shaped frames of saplings behind each man that were lashed to the benches on which they sat. He saw now how each was also lashed to the neck of the man it supported. Then as the boat was turned, he saw the empty faces and understood the terrible truth.

  The general’s nephew and every other man wore only his uniform coat, unbuttoned. The shirts that would have covered their bellies were gone. Their bellies were gone.

  “Mother of God!” Woolford cried.

  Two of the junior officers who had joined them dashed to the side of the dock and retched into the water.

  The men had been eviscerated, dressed like butchered deer, before being propped up like mannequins. The Revelator had promised only hollow men would return.

  When the general looked back to Duncan his face was ashen, his voice a dry croak. “Go,” he moaned, “take your pitiful band north and stop this demon.”

  Chapter Twelve

  A man who takes a peaceful passage at sea for granted soon finds the gods spitting in his eye. Duncan heard the words of his grandfather, mariner of the western isles, so vividly he could smell the peat smoke on the old man’s clothes. He braced himself as another swell crashed over the bow of their little brig.

  Duncan had underestimated the inland sea. When they had begun their sail north, he had described it as a pond to the ship’s commanding officer. It had no tide, had no currents, none of the rocky shoals that plagued the vessels of the Hebrides in Duncan’s youth. The bearded naval lieutenant who served as captain had smiled patiently and pointed to a bank of clouds on the northern horizon.

  They had had difficulty convincing their Iroquois companions to board the vessel, trying to explain that it would provide the quickest passage into the Saint Lawrence, where the Revelator’s bands were converging. Custaloga had wanted, but not received, assurance they would hug the shoreline, for the natives almost never strayed more than half a mile offshore. Even Sagatchie, intrepid warrior and ranger, had to be coaxed by Woolford to set foot on the ship. Conawago, veteran of several transatlantic crossings, had finally cajoled the elders by telling them the vessel was nothing more than a big lodge on the water.

  Now Duncan looked back with guilt toward the small aft cabin where the Iroquois huddled, holding their bellies, clutching their protective amulets, some bent over buckets. He gripped a shroud line as the sturdy vessel heaved over another swell, raising his face into the wind-driven spray. Like his grandfather, he had always preferred to take his storms in the open. As much as he regretted his companions’ discomf
ort, he could not deny the thrill that welled up inside when the storm had hit. More than once as a boy his mother had angrily fetched him from his grandfather’s side as they stood on seacliffs in the teeth of a gale. The blood of the Furies ran in their veins, she had fumed on such nights, and more often than not his grandfather would escort Duncan to bed before going back into the storm with his pipes. Duncan would steal to the window in the loft where he slept and wait for the lightning flashes that would illuminate the old man playing the pipes at the cliff edge. He had been convinced that his grandfather was a living part of the storms, stirring the winds to greater force with his pipes. Every few weeks Duncan still woke to the image, the sound of the howling pipes and the answering winds echoing in his head.

  Duncan let the cold water soak him and the spray slash his face as the little ship heaved and rolled. He had been so blind, so scared, so confused the past weeks. Answers to the terrible mysteries plaguing them always seemed to be lurking close, but always just out of his grasp. His vision was obscured. He loathed his growing sense of being one more victim, of being beaten down by unseen hands. If he was meant to die on this quest, he wanted to understand why. His despair battered him worse than the storm. He wanted to be, he needed to be, scoured by the elements. His grandfather had told him that sailors who survived storms at sea came out new men, with brighter souls and stronger hearts.

  As the ship lurched again, he glanced behind to confirm that the captain still firmly held the wheel, then he saw a new shape clinging to a line. With a gasp he released his hold and sprang across the slippery deck.

  “Ishmael!” he cried above the din. “This is no place-” Another wave crashed over the deck, choking away his words. He dove for a line to keep from washing overboard and grabbed the boy with his free arm.

  “The elders say the gods are angry at us!” the boy cried. The wind slammed a gull against the mast, and its lifeless body dropped to the deck. The boy looked at the dead creature, then at Duncan, as if it proved his point.

  “No, Ishmael!” Duncan shouted into the boy’s ear. “This storm is driving us to where we need to be. The gods aren’t trying to kill us, they are just seeing if we are up to the task they gave us.”

  Ishmael gazed uncertainly at Duncan, then a determined grin grew on the boy’s troubled face. They remained motionless, not speaking, as the wind and water lashed at them.

  “You can hear her,” Duncan said when the wind ebbed for a moment. “Every ship has her song in a storm.”

  Ishmael cocked his head, then slowly nodded, telling Duncan he understood. The wind had reached such a velocity that the taut lines and fittings of the masts were resonating with a low hum.

  “This is one of the real things, isn’t it?” the boy declared.

  Duncan nodded. A wild and unexpected joy pulsed through his heart. They were, together, hearing a voice of nature, the voice of gods, as some natives would say. For a moment he was his grandfather, standing with a young boy witnessing the rawness of the earth, humbled by the power of what the natives would call the real world.

  “What she does is real too,” Ishmael said, and Duncan glanced at the boy uncertainly before making out a sound of higher pitch. He missed the woman when first scanning the deck behind them, finding her in the wind-driven spray only when her chant grew louder.

  Hetty Eldridge had wedged herself between the low cabin wall and a post of the port rail. The repetitive Haudenosaunee words she spoke were fast and slurred, but he could make out enough to understand. They had been the first Iroquois words he had ever heard, invoked in a raging storm of the north Atlantic. She was speaking to the black snake wind, the spirit who brought storms.

  His heart wrenched. Surely she was too weak to hold on much longer, but he didn’t dare release the boy. It seemed as though the strength of her spirit alone was keeping her in place. Her face was a terrible mixture of defiance and fear. He watched with increasing desperation as her hand lost its grip on the railing. He had seen a man washed off a deck. One moment the sailor had been darting for a loose stay, the next a wave had reached out and he was gone. The black snake wind could be a prankster, Conawago had once told him. It delighted in bursting the arrogance of humans. Duncan cursed it now for making him choose between the old woman and the young boy. He unwound his arm from the rope that held him and showed Ishmael how to twine his own arm around it.

  Before he could move, another wave, bigger than those before, crashed over the bow. He doubled over, holding Ishmael close. The captain was having trouble keeping the rudder straight. The ship shifted dangerously into a wallow between waves, and as the officer struggled to regain control, another wave hit the ship broadside.

  “Hetty!” Duncan cried out as the woman lost her grip and slid across the shifting deck. With an anguished groan Duncan began to release himself, then a figure darted out of the cabin hatch, scooped up the woman with one arm, and seized the mainmast with the other, pressing her tight against it as another wave hit.

  Woolford offered a grim nod to Duncan, then pulled a length of rope from his waist and quickly bound the woman to the mast. Hetty, looking dazed, did not protest her restraints, even silently accepted the gag that Woolford tied around her mouth before retreating into the cabin. The words of the Welsh witch, Duncan realized, had been disturbing the elders.

  A quarter hour later the sun broke out of the dark clouds, and the angry water subsided to low rolling swells. Woolford reappeared to take a dazed, sodden Ishmael from Duncan. Two sailors sped to the stern, where they relieved the exhausted captain.

  “Our friends took poorly to the weather,” the ranger observed, nodding to the hatch, where the Iroquois were filing out. Sagatchie looked as if he had fought a battle. Kassawaya’s hands were shaking. The Iroquois elders gathered around Hetty, who seemed not to notice them. Her eyes, aimed toward the distant shoreline, were empty and unfocused. Two dead seagulls lay at her feet.

  The captain, so fatigued he seemed to have trouble climbing down to the main deck, nodded his gratitude as Duncan offered a hand to steady him. “That blow was as good as two days’ sailing. We’ll be entering the Saint Lawrence by tomorrow afternoon,” the bearded officer declared in a hopeful tone, then he turned to call on his men to raise more sail.

  Hetty groaned like an injured cat. “No, no, no!” she screeched, and they turned to find her gazing in anguish at them. She seemed not to notice Sagatchie, who was untying her, but she had clearly heard the captain’s report.

  “I would have thought you joined the others in wishing for dry land,” Duncan said, but then he saw the snakeskin entwined around the woman’s hand and suddenly understood why she had come on deck. She had not been trying to banish the storm, she had been encouraging it. “Where would you have us go, Hetty?”

  The Welsh woman produced a small wooden cylinder from the folds of her dress and clutched it tightly in her hand. “Away,” she murmured forlornly. “Away from all that must be. Away from the hole in the world, where death awaits.” Suddenly she looked up at Duncan as though just seeing him, and she thrust her hand behind her. As he reached out, she moved with surprising speed, ducking down and twisting past Duncan and Woolford, darting to the ship’s rail.

  Duncan leapt as she raised her hand, but too late. She threw the object in a long arc over the water.

  He reacted without conscious thought, dropping his waistcoat and slipping off his shoes as he climbed the rail. Ignoring Hetty’s wail of protest, Ishmael’s fearful cry, and Woolford’s angry curse, he launched himself over the side.

  Even before he reached the water he heard the captain shouting frantic orders. He did not look back to make sense of the hurried activity on deck, just kept focused on the little speck of brown on the surface forty feet away. A few powerful strokes brought the wooden object into his grasp. He treaded water, staring in confusion at its ornate carved symbols. By the time he looked up the ship was over a hundred yards away and picking up speed. He would soon be alone on the wide inland sea
.

  “I seem to recall,” came a voice from behind him, “this is not the first time you have thrown yourself off a ship. At least you waited for the storm to pass this time.” Duncan turned to see Woolford standing with a bemused expression in the bow of the ship’s dinghy.

  Ishmael stared at him wide-eyed as he climbed over the ship’s rail. “How could you do. .” The boy seemed to have trouble finding words. There was more fear than wonder in his voice. “All that water. A man should be lost in it. You must be fish.”

  Duncan hesitated over his strange wording then saw that the boy was clutching his amulet. He glanced back at Conawago on the raised aft deck. The old Nipmuc was listening. Duncan had begun to realize that it was unsettling to the Indians, especially Conawago, that he had grown so close to them, in many ways become one of them, but had not embraced a spirit protector. “No Ishmael, there is no spirit of trout or pike inside me.”

  “A mighty sturgeon perhaps,” the boy ventured.

  Duncan offered an uncertain grin. “Nor sturgeon.”

  The boy studied Duncan with the eyes of a wise old man, then spoke with disappointment in his voice. “But anyone can see it, the thrill of a spirit touching you, pushing you, as you parted the water. Another man would have been pulled into the depths.”

  Duncan looked back to Conawago, half suspecting that the old Nipmuc had put the words in the boy’s mouth. He did not know why he was so reluctant to admit the truth of Ishmael’s words, for he indeed felt something thrill inside him when in the water.

  “At the old hearths an uncle or shaman would present you your amulet when you came of age.” Ishmael spoke like a patient kinsman. “Those close to your heart would know your spirit animal, though none would say its name for fear of frightening it away.” There was an odd melancholy in the boy’s words now, though Duncan did not know if it was for him or for the loss of the old hearths.