Original Death amoca-3

by Eliot Pattison

  The words reached the renegade. He lowered his knife, and for a few heartbeats he seemed lost in memories. Duncan inched closer.

  “He is dead, Regis. Your father is dead. It was his dream, born to the laird who had done battle in Scotland and given you breath in the Ohio country where he traded furs and took his Mingo wife. A former laird who had once lived in Paris and Rome, and who chose exile in America after the uprising, the trader who schemed with Jesuit missionaries and traveled to the Vatican to cajole the last desperate members of the Jacobite court. Lord Graham tied it all together.”

  Regis stared at the beads in confusion, as if he could not understand how they had appeared there.

  “There are those who say they will sear through your flesh if you lie,” Duncan pointed out.

  Regis did not react.

  Duncan began to glimpse another man beneath the hate and scorn of the Revelator, and through him he glimpsed a chain of similar men through the years. There had not only been the Scottish laird, lost in the rising and resurrected twice as a wilderness trader and secret Jacobite ambassador. There was the Jacobite prince himself, wasting away in the Vatican. And there was Brother Xavier, who could not adjust to a new world order.

  “It was always the same war, he said,” Regis murmured. “The kings against the small people. Except we will finish it this time.”

  “Your war is over. You have a chance to make things right. Give us the killer of Bethel Church.”

  “Each of my men is as good as fifty soldiers,” Regis snapped. “We will leave people writhing in pain all the way to the ocean.”

  As if on cue Scar stepped out of the building, dragging young Noah Moss under one arm.

  Regis grinned.

  Adanahoe pointed.

  The arrow went through Scar’s throat so forcefully that its point came out the back of his neck. Hetty turned and kicked the warrior as he dropped to the ground.

  Adanahoe silently stepped up to the body and pulled Sagatchie’s war ax from his belt.

  Regis seemed to grow weary. He stared again at the beaded belt in his hand. “I did not tell them to kill at Bethel Church. He-”

  “Ishmael!” Henry Bedford shouted as he leapt through the kitchen window, a pistol in his hand. The boy twisted, exposing Regis’s chest, and the gun fired.

  Regis’s face went empty. He gave a long groan as blood blossomed over his heart. He sank to his knees, reaching a hand out as if to grapple with the schoolmaster, then collapsed to the ground.

  Bedford’s own face was a blank as he stared at his work. The prophet, the fierce Mingo renegade who had nearly changed the world, lay sprawled on the ground, his life’s blood flowing onto the grass. There was movement at the windows above. The children were looking down at their dead tormentor.

  As the elders gathered around the body, Adanahoe bent and draped the white beads over his lifeless mouth. No more would lies escape his lips.

  Conawago’s head snapped up at the whistle of a lark. Duncan followed his gaze toward Kass, who had emerged from the ruins with her bow and was pointing toward the burial scaffolds. The half-king’s Mingoes were there, kicking at the loose dirt beneath the scaffolds.

  “Tell them to stop, Simon,” Hetty said.

  Duncan was not certain what surprised the schoolteacher more, to hear his true name or to hear his mother give him such an order. He seemed to have trouble focusing on her for a moment, then he darted to Hetty and embraced her. “The ordeal is over!” he exclaimed.

  Hetty seemed uninterested in his embrace. “Tell them to stop disturbing our friends.”

  Simon shrugged. “They are the Revelator’s men.”

  “No,” his mother said. “I watched them leave the back of the house before you leapt out the window. You told them to do so. You should not need a string of white beads when talking with your mother.”

  The schoolmaster frowned and backed away from Hetty, then turned and ran toward the Mingoes.

  When Duncan reached him, Simon was reloading his pistol as the Mingoes pushed sticks into the loose soil around the scaffolds. The schoolmaster spoke with a new, plaintive tone. “Surely you understand, McCallum. I never planned to kill that man in Albany. It was a misunderstanding over a card game. He said I was cheating. I said he had no proof. He said he would get a constable. An English magistrate will condemn a Welshman or Scotsman as easily as putting an ax to a chicken’s neck.” Simon took a stick from one of the Indians and began probing the soil himself.

  “That explains why you were hiding in Bethel Church,” Duncan said, “but not what you did there. And I might understand a death in the anger of the moment. But we had the report from the magistrate who condemned you. That man, your first victim, died hours later tied to a tree in the forest. His fingers on one hand were cut off. You said it must have been a Huron. But it was just what a young Mingo half-blood learned when he ran with Huron war parties. It became a mark of the poet of death. I should have known that first day at Bethel Church. There were almost no clothes in your room there. You had already packed, because you knew the raiders were coming. I should have asked myself earlier who would have known to use Ishmael’s medallion against Hickory John. I should have understood when I saw your mother’s reaction to the deaths of Black Fish and Rabbit Jack, to the way their eyes were cut out. I should have understood when Black Fish spoke of his dream. You liked to use the Bible and verses of poets in your classroom. Writing a script about the other side and the resurrection of your old friend Regis was a lark for you. The two of you must have had a good laugh when you decided he would become the Revelator and you the poet of death.”

  The schoolmaster raised his pistol toward Duncan.

  “There again I was blind. I did not understand the two of you had been raised together, had gone on war parties and learned to kill while you were still boys. From the same village, where Lord Graham used to call as a trader and kept a wife, where Xavier the Jesuit taught about the sins of the world. Osotku the Delaware warned us about Regis, said he knew him. What he actually said was that he knew the crossed boys. Two boys, two half-bloods who always cheated.”

  Simon looked up at the sound of more footsteps on the path. Hetty, Conawago, and Ishmael appeared. As if in warning Simon gestured to the Mingoes who had been with him, who had retreated into the field of boulders but held their axes ready, then to the plain below. Half a dozen warriors were indeed erecting new slave posts. He glanced at his mother uneasily before replying to Duncan. “What I did was teach school. All my students were from the tribes,” Simon added.

  “Regis handled the Mingoes and Hurons,” Duncan continued. “Brother Xavier took care of the French and the traffic in secret messages, and old Lord Graham handled the Scots. But none had a connection to Bethel Church. You were the connection. You were Regis’s particular friend as a boy. You learned about Shakespeare with him, and about killing. And you devised the scheme to make a duplicate wagon and steal the payroll.” Duncan produced one of the pieces of paper from the wall of the schoolhouse and extended its drawing of the wagon.

  Simon frowned. He wasn’t shamed, he was just impatient. “You must have the coins! It’s the only explanation!”

  “Regis was about to say you were the one who swung the killing hammer at Bethel Church. It’s why you shot him. He wasn’t reaching out for help as he died, he was pointing to you. As terrible as the acts of the others might be, they were acts of war. But the deaths at Bethel Church, they were cold-blooded murder. You swung the hammer to crush the skulls of those who had befriended you, even students you taught.”

  The schoolmaster leveled the gun with a peevish sigh. “One keg of coins is all I ask. There is a French settlement at the mouth of the Mississippi. I can make a new life.”

  “You killed them all, Simon,” came a tight, high voice. “They gave you a home, and you killed them.”

  Simon turned to look at Hetty. For an instant he was just a regretful son. “I learned to play war the European way. Come with us,
Mother. I will build you a grand house in the Louisiana country.”

  Sadness filled Hetty’s eyes. “All these years I spent sewing lace to pay for your lawyer, and you were guilty. You were just planning more murders. I sent you the last valuable keepsake I had from Wales, and you used the silver links for rum and women.”

  Simon seemed about to argue when a stone hit his cheek. “You killed my grandfather!” Ishmael shouted, and he threw another stone, then another.

  The schoolmaster leapt to the boy, violently slapping him on the face. “Ever the disobedient cub, Ishmael!”

  With a shudder Duncan saw the warriors from below ascending the ridge, the ones in the rocks slowly advancing with weapons raised. The hell dog appeared on a nearby boulder, its eyes fixed on Simon. The schoolmaster glanced at the dog and hesitated for a moment. He too would have heard how the creature was inhabited by the spirit of the noble warrior who had been his father.

  He turned back to Ishmael. When he struck the boy again, knocking him to the ground, Conawago moved quickly but Hetty was faster, darting forward and covering the boy with her body. Simon grabbed the back of her shirt and heaved her aside like a sack of flour.

  “You shame your father and me!” she cried from the ground, but her son was beyond hearing.

  Simon grabbed Ishmael and lifted him upright. “Your grandfather’s head sounded like a ripe melon when I hit it! He just kept singing like the others, the old fool.”

  “His was a warrior’s song!” Ishmael shouted back. “I heard him! He died with more honor and bravery than you’ll ever have!”

  The fury with which Simon pummeled the boy was frightening to behold. He pounded the boy, knocking him to the ground. Suddenly his pistol was aimed at Ishmael.

  “No!” Conawago shouted, and he charged at the schoolteacher, who shifted the gun towards the old Nipmuc.

  As Duncan leapt forward, a brown shape hurdled past his shoulder.

  The pistol fired, hitting the hell dog in the chest, but the great creature still clamped its jaw around Simon’s throat, sending him reeling backwards. Simon dropped the pistol to beat the dog with his fists, staggering backward, struggling to get the furious animal off him. Then they were gone.

  Man and dog disappeared over the high cliff. By the time Duncan reached the edge, there was nothing but a ring of ripples where they had vanished into the water.

  The Mingoes roared into action, lifting war axes to strike as Duncan threw himself against Ishmael and rolled away with the boy in his arms. Conawago stood over Hetty and was raising his own club to defend her when their attackers abruptly stopped.

  Impossibly, Duncan heard a bagpipe. He followed the confused gaze of the warriors toward the head of the trail from the boat landing.

  William Johnson stood there, leaning on a walking stick, beside Woolford and a solitary piper of the Black Watch. Emerging at a fast trot from the trail behind them was a seemingly endless line of Iroquois and Highland warriors.

  By midmorning of the second day, Johnson and his army were gone, his flotilla of sloops, bateaux, and canoes stretching out for a mile down the river, joined by more and more Caughnawags pushing off from the bank. The Irish colonel had wisely chosen not to press Duncan for a detailed account of his travels since they last met. Indeed, the head of the tribal and militia troops had seemed to lose all interest in reports from the field of war when he discovered who lay on the scaffolds on the high point over the river. He was visibly shaken by the death of his friends. Immediately he had turned to Tushcona and Adanahoe.

  “You are blinded by tears of grief. I would wipe them away with my words,” he said, the opening lines of the Iroquois condolence ceremony. He had gestured to Kass to join them as they settled in a small circle to continue the ritual.

  Nearly an hour had passed before one of his men interrupted to report that the half-king was among the dead at the old abbey. Johnson rose, promising to return to Onondaga Castle to conduct a weeklong mourning ceremony, then he hurried to the barnyard to look at the bodies. His eyes grew round. “I hope the Iroquois understand the miracle you have worked for them,” he said to Duncan and Conawago, pumping their hands.

  He had given them free rein to dispose of the bodies, and after consulting with the elders, a mass grave had been dug at the far end of the old slave-trading field. The terrifying Revelator, shaper of tribal nations, was just another renegade corpse tossed into the hole. When the grave had been filled, they had used the posts the Mingoes had raised to light a bonfire over it. The heat and ashes would bind them in the earth for many years, Adanahoe declared. The elders wanted such men kept out of the spirit world for as long as possible.

  Much more care had been taken for another of the dead. After Johnson’s men had recovered the bodies of the two who had fallen off the cliff, Hetty had insisted on burial in the ground for her son, but over the grave, alongside the scaffolds of the two fallen Iroquois, she had directed the building of a third scaffold. On it she had arranged the body of the courageous brown dog. If any had doubted her claims that a warrior, her husband, had lived inside the beast, none did now. Hetty had dutifully cleaned her son’s body but had shed no tears and offered no words over it. Over the warrior with the four legs she had wept, then cleansed it with great care while chanting the mourning songs. Before they had raised him onto the platform, she had woven small, bright feathers into the long hair of his legs, as though to help him fly to the other side.

  “He was the best of companions,” Duncan offered as she worked, trying to break through her grief. He watched as she cut away a lock of the brown hair and carefully folded it into her amulet pouch. “I am sorry, Hetty,” he said. “I should not have done it, but. .”

  She looked up to see the folded doeskin in his hands.

  When she did not respond, he laid it flat on a rock. At the center of the chronicle of her life was the ivory ring carved with dragons. Her hand trembled as she lifted it and held it close to her eyes. “I was very young when my father died,” she whispered. “My mother was sick and decided to send me to my uncle in America. On the day my ship sailed she gave it to me, saying my father had always worn it around his neck.” She sighed. “In my life I had only one true love,” she said and began tying the ring into the hair of the dog’s neck. “He will like having dragons with him on the other side.”

  “I never had the honor of his name,” Duncan said. “I do not know what to call the creature in my prayers.” He was not sure she had heard him, and after a long silence he retreated.

  “Roghskenrakeghdekowah,” she said to his back. When Duncan turned, a tear was rolling down her cheek.

  “War chief,” Duncan translated, and he solemnly nodded. “I should have known.” He pulled out the elegant dirk Cameron had given him. With a prayer in Gaelic, he laid the dirk against the dog’s body and backed away.

  Hetty had sat by the scaffold for hours, oblivious to the others, oblivious even to the brief thunderstorm that swept over the island. Although others tried, only Ishmael was finally able to speak with her and lead her back to the abbey. After a hot meal, the boy sat with her and asked her to explain the images on the doeskin.

  Now the Welsh woman, looking frail and hollow, stood with the rest of them as they watched the great flotilla recede toward Montreal. It was Conawago who broke away first, followed by Ishmael. Minutes later they turned to see the two Nipmucs waiting below the knoll with shovels in their hands.

  They moved in silent procession to the site of their first great fire, on the night they had burned the old torture posts. Everyone remained strangely quiet as they shifted the ashes to the side to expose the bare soil. They dug deeper, making a large square several inches deep, then they pried and loosened the packed soil until finally they exposed the first of the kegs. Following Duncan’s directions, Tatamy’s men had buried the kegs deep, sitting upright.

  No one spoke until the kegs were lifted out, their chalk signs of the Jacobites conspicuous in the bright sunlight. Duncan, borr
owing Conawago’s ax, shattered the top of the nearest keg. For a fleeting moment he thought they had been terribly mistaken, for all he could see was gunpowder, but then Conawago sank his fingers into the keg and extracted a bright silver coin from the black grains.

  Duncan handed the ax to Ishmael, and the Nipmuc boy, amusement growing on his face, opened the other kegs while Tushcona and Adanahoe followed, sifting up handfuls of coins from each to confirm its secret contents.

  Duncan walked around the kegs. “I never thought we would get this far,” he confided to his companions, and he looked up to Woolford.

  The ranger captain shrugged. “I am not the director of this particular drama.”

  “We could take it back,” Duncan suggested.

  “We could,” Woolford agreed. “No doubt the king would give Amherst some more initials to put behind his name.”

  Duncan knew his friend was as weary of kings and generals as he was.

  “The troops will be paid from the booty taken in Montreal,” the ranger reminded him.

  Duncan paced around the kegs. It was more money than he had ever seen, more than he would likely ever see again. It could buy a vast plantation at the edge of the frontier. It could buy an entire town. A handful scooped from one keg could buy out his indenture, the deed of servitude that still hung around his neck. He and Conawago could make a stately home on a mountain, bigger than Johnson’s own mansion, furnished with a grand library where Conawago could spend his last years reading to his heart’s content. He could build an infirmary to care for the tribes.

  He realized the elders, even Conawago, were staring at him. Wealth was an alien notion to them. Piles of coins had been used against the tribes ever since the Europeans arrived. Many had died, so many more had suffered, because of these very coins. The martyred father of Xavier had been right. Gold and silver worked against the spirit of the tribes. These coins in particular had only brought treachery and death.