The King's Beast

by Eliot Pattison

  “We must have the burial at dawn, with Reverend Podrake reading from his Bible,” the French scholar announced, “for the captain is eager to set out for Pittsburgh. He says that storm came early, the first of many spring storms, and if we tarry they will strengthen the current and surely slow our passage.” Dumont sighed as the litter disappeared down the track, then pulled out his list of discoveries to review with Duncan. “All our weeks of travel and so little time to explore now that we’re here. Only a day’s work, really.”

  “But such an impressive day’s work,” Duncan replied in genuine admiration. In addition to the giant femur, Dumont’s collection included the tusks, several huge rib bones, a dozen great vertebrae, a score of small unidentified bones, a dozen relics in the shape of thick bricks, and a skull that appeared to be from a vastly oversize bison.

  “Over forty artifacts,” Dumont proudly declared, “though in Philadelphia we will sort only the very best to send on to London. But Franklin certainly must have this!” He pulled a cloth covering from an object he had lifted from his bedroll. It was the skull of what seemed to be a great cat, except that it had two long spikelike teeth extending five inches from its upper jaw. “We will stun them in London with our fanged wonder! They will see that the colonies have teeth!” Duncan had almost forgotten that the Frenchman was planning to escort the bones to Franklin.

  Dumont’s gaze drifted toward the wide buffalo trail that led to the boat landing. “The tusks are the finest ivory I have ever seen. I should have sent a warning to the captain.”

  “I am sure he will take great care in packing them,” Duncan replied as he watched Boone disappear into the forest. The woodsman seemed strangely restless, and Duncan could not help but wonder why he would have troubled himself to bring deerskins for Ezra’s shroud, which was a custom of the tribes, not the colonists.

  “No, no, about the second boat. This country abounds with fortune hunters.”

  Duncan hesitated, then raised an eyebrow at his friend. “There was no second boat, Pierre.”

  “It appeared the day we arrived, just before dusk. You and I had already come here but those who stayed on the Arabella saw it pass in the waning light, which was bright enough to reveal a black-and-white checkerboard pattern along the top of its hull. It veered into the bank downriver, toward that little settlement we heard about. Our business may no longer be a secret. One of those tusks would be worth far more than an entire cargo of furs in New Orleans, and vastly more in London or Paris.”

  “The Muskrat,” put in one of the Irish crewmen, spitting the name like a curse. “She’s known for slick practice. Takes on cargo that’s kept under black canvas, if ye get my drift.”

  “Surely the captain put out a guard,” Ishmael said.

  “No need,” said the Irishman. “The boys who just returned said she departed before noon today, back up the river.”

  “You mean downriver,” Duncan said. “Keelboats go downriver to sell their goods in the Louisiana lands.”

  “Not us. Not them. They went back up, poling against the current like we’ll be doing soon.”

  “She came for a day, then turned around?” Duncan asked, new worry entering his voice. “As if her business was finished.” Not us. Not them. As if her business was the same as Duncan’s.

  The riverman shrugged. “Maybe they had business in the settlement, a rough place of drunks and sharps, I hear. Maybe they picked up some cargo or a passenger. Maybe they needed to make a better camp ’cause they needed repairs or someone took bad sick. There’s good sandy landings a few miles up.”

  Duncan frowned, wondering if it was time to reveal to the others that Ezra had been murdered. He turned to confer with Dumont, but as he did so the Frenchman cried out in alarm. Some of the crew had nearly dropped one of his giant ribs, and he darted away to lecture them about the fragile, irreplaceable nature of their cargo, then decided to follow as they left. “I will speak to the reverend about the burial,” he called over his shoulder, and was gone.

  As Ishmael and Gideon readied the camp for a meal, Duncan wandered out into the Lick, gagging as he passed a crack from which particularly potent fumes leaked out. He settled onto a broken vertebra that someone had cleaned off for use as a stool. This was not the visit he had anticipated. He had looked forward to studying the legendary Lick with an explorer’s glee, intending to make detailed notes and sketches to share not only with those who had sent him on his mission but with Conawago and Sarah as well. He had thought they would have a week or more to explore the extraordinary place. Nothing had gone as anticipated. More than anywhere he had ever known, the Lick seemed a place unconnected with the rest of the planet. There was something threatening about the sulfurous clearing, but also something reverent, and he bemoaned that it was so close to the river, making access too easy for those who would exploit it. Men would come to mine it not for its knowledge, but for the silver that collectors would pay for its relics.

  Once more he recalled Ezra’s expression when they had first glimpsed the Lick. The freedman had shared Duncan’s excitement, but on reaching their destination that excitement had quickly faded to confusion, then pain. What had he sensed about the place? Duncan had too hastily treated their work at the Lick as just a task for the Sons of Liberty. Ezra had recognized a deeper significance in the Lick, and if Duncan had bothered to try to understand Ezra’s reaction, he would have taken more precautions. The closing words of the letter he had pulled from Ezra’s throat haunted him. Franklin had prayed that Ezra would find a worthy partner to protect him. But Ezra had only found Duncan, and Duncan had failed him.

  His inability to explain the death gnawed at him as he rose to wander through the eerie forest of bones, trying to make sense of Ezra’s fate. Had he been killed while trying to stop others from taking the bone, or had he been killed in an attempt to force a secret from him? The pounding of the letter down his throat hinted not so much of vengeance as of angry frustration.

  Duncan returned to find Gideon alone, mixing molasses into a pot of simmering beans. “You and Ezra were close,” he suggested.

  “From the same plantation, even the same tribe, though we lived in different villages and he was several years older. His mother and my mother were sisters. He and I were taken by the slavers together and finally won our freedom together. After we came out on the Ohio the first time, he knew I loved the river and helped me get this job on the keelboat.”

  Bitter memories of Duncan’s own time spent working beside Virginia slaves flashed through his mind, and he recalled a moonlit night on the water when he had confessed to Ezra that he too was a freedman, having served a seven-year bond and captivity on a plantation. “I seldom meet men who have had the chance to buy their freedom,” he said.

  A melancholy grin rose on Gideon’s face. “He and I made healing potions and such, things we learned from the old women of our tribe when we were young. Folks began buying them and found they worked better than the doses they got from their own doctors. We saved our money and bought our freedom. Before we left, we taught others how to make them, so they could earn enough to buy out their own bonds.”

  “I had almost forgotten this was not the first Ohio trip for either of you.” Duncan recalled how reticent Ezra had been when asked about his past, but knew how painful his memories must have been.

  “Our old master had shares in one of those land companies. He offered good wages for us to join his survey expedition.”

  An unexpected question occurred to Duncan. “What happened on that expedition?”

  Gideon considered Duncan’s question, then shrugged. “It changed both our lives.” As he spoke, another group of rivermen appeared from the track to the river.

  “Gideon,” Duncan said, keeping his voice low, “I need to know if he gave you anything. Something for safekeeping? Something someone else might desire?” The cook’s only response was to tighten his jaw. “I can’t understand why he was killed. If he had a secret I need to know it, for it may hel
p me find the killers. And it may tell us if more lives are in danger.”

  Ezra’s younger tribesman straightened, frowning at Duncan, then reluctantly stepped to the piled cooking supplies and from its center withdrew an object wrapped in an old shirt. He laid it on their makeshift table. When he looked up, there was warning in his eyes.

  “Nothing to do with those Philadelphia people,” Gideon said. “Yesterday he asked me to get it to an old man we know in Carolina.”

  Duncan had expected a message, or some kind of secret token. “You mean something he found in the Lick?” he asked in confusion. When Gideon did not reply, he pushed back the cloth to reveal one of the brick-shaped objects they had not yet identified. It was nearly eight inches long and over four wide, with a shimmering chestnut patina on the sides and tapered at the bottom. Its top surface was packed with long, rough, curving ridges. “Carolina,” he said as he studied the relic. “Where you and Ezra won your freedom. You mean an old man on your plantation? A tobacco slave?”

  Gideon slowly nodded. “A wise man from across the ocean. I don’t know the word for what he is. The tribes here, they would call such a man a shaman. But men from Europe might call him a witch.”

  Duncan lifted the relic, surprised at its weight. He had not yet had the chance to examine any of the artifacts in detail. Something from his old days in medical school clawed at his memory. “Will we ever solve the mystery of such things?” he wondered out loud.

  “But I know what it is, Mr. Duncan,” Gideon said. As if to explain, he gestured for Duncan to follow him down the hill to the edge of the Lick. They walked to a pile of rotting logs that appeared to have been thrown there in a storm. Gideon pointed, and Duncan saw that the bottom log was no log at all but a long slightly curving bone that had a row of identical oblong holes along its top. “I was only a boy when the neighboring tribe captured us and carried us to those black ships on the coast,” Gideon explained. “But I remember how when I was very young the ground trembled in the night and I ran to my mother in fear. Do not be frightened, my mother said, for they are our protectors. Then she carried me outside to see. I never knew living creatures could be so big. She said they were mountains that had been granted life by the gods so they could protect our tribe. They were very wise, wiser than men, my mother would say, so wise they always knew when they were dying, and then would all go to the same place, so the old gods could greet them as they entered the next world. When you became a man in our tribe, you were taken to that sacred place to spend the night alone among the bones. I was looking for firewood after making camp when I found this. Ezra said he had seen many of these that night he had been left alone in that place.”

  Gideon took Ezra’s relic, which Duncan had tucked under his arm, and gestured him to kneel so he could look at the end of the long bone that was obscured by the logs.

  “Blessed Michael!” Duncan exclaimed as he saw more of the brick-like objects, still in their sockets. “A jaw!” He finally recalled his old lessons about the fauna of Africa. “You speak of elephants!” A professor in Edinburgh had kept a similar tooth in his office and would sometimes bring it to class to debate whether it derived from an herbivore or carnivore.

  Gideon solemnly nodded. “Sacred to our people. If the creatures here weren’t elephants, Ezra said, then they were American cousins of elephants. And elephants were the protectors of our people. The old man in Carolina, the shaman, he would know the right prayers to say over their remains, and Ezra said maybe then they will come back to help our people. All those years on the plantation he had a recurring dream. In it, elephants were pulling down the manor house.”

  “Ezra was saying prayers,” Duncan said, “because this too was a dying place of old, wise creatures.”

  Gideon ran a tentative finger over the ridges of the ancient tooth. “He was worried ’cause he didn’t know the right words. He wanted to calm the gods’ anger, so they would still listen to our people. Ezra told me he hadn’t known these were the creatures we would find here, that this was what Mr. Franklin was seeking. He said that our tribe would have considered it a grave sin to take the remains away from their sacred dying place, that white folks don’t understand that there were places where gods visited, ’cause they don’t have the same gods.” Ezra’s cousin led Duncan back up the hill as he continued his explanation.

  “If strangers came to take away such things in the land of our birth, our tribe would have driven them away with spears and arrows. He said maybe this was his destiny, to be here to explain to the gods that Mr. Franklin had a sacred use for them, that Mr. Franklin was something of a shaman himself and so must have known. He said the great storm yesterday meant the gods were taking notice but that so far they were not convinced. He said if only we could get this tooth back to Carolina, the old man would find a way to speak to the gods and the spirits of those dead ones. Or maybe, he said, the tribes who live here know the right prayers.

  “I took him some food in the night, though I was frightened because of those awful brimstone fumes and the mists swirling about. It was like the Lick was of the earth, and not of the earth. I said that to Ezra and he said it was true, but that none of the Europeans understood that, maybe not even you, which scared me even more. Now I wonder if maybe it was a sign, maybe it was an angry god who killed him. Or maybe the gods needed him on the other side to explain why men came to disturb this place.” Gideon shrugged. “Ezra said maybe the others would help too, the chosen ones.”

  “The chosen ones?”

  They had reached the camp. Gideon took back the huge tooth and began to wrap it again. “I asked him what he meant and he tapped his pocket where he had kept that letter from Mr. Franklin during most of the voyage. He said maybe in America there are different kinds of shamans, and maybe men like you and Franklin could find a way, those who work in the shadows to plant seeds of truth.”

  “Us? We were the chosen ones?”

  “He trusted you. He said maybe you and Mr. Franklin knew different prayers that might still reach these gods. He said everyone knows lightning is a path to the gods.”

  The words stabbed at Duncan. Ezra had trusted him and now he was dead, murdered by an unseen hand because Duncan had missed something, had not understood the lethal path that Benjamin Franklin had sent them on. He looked back over the Lick, where fingers of fog now reached out of the lower ground. The gods were beckoning.

  He turned to the young freedman. “You said where he had kept the letter. Do you mean he no longer had it when he arrived here?”

  Gideon screwed up his face and touched his own totem, under his shirt, then lowered his voice. “I don’t know. There’s some kind of magic at this place. He had that letter signed by Franklin, yes. But one night last week we were sitting at the stern watching the stars and he took it out. He said he had decided it was too dangerous to keep. As I watched he tore the letter up and threw the pieces into the river. It was gone, I am sure of it.” Gideon looked to Duncan as if for an explanation, but Duncan had none. The cook shrugged, whispered “magic” again, then returned the tooth to its hiding place and brought a mug of tea for Duncan. “Captain will want you to inspect the cargo before we set out.” He shrugged again. “I wish we could stay longer. Ezra’s spirit is not settled.”

  Duncan sipped the hot brew and nodded. “For Ezra’s sake, it’s best that we go.”

  “Best for Ezra?” Gideon asked.

  “We owe him justice,” Duncan said. “It was no angry spirit that knew about the letter from Franklin, and killed him because of it. His killer is on either our own boat or the one racing ahead of us for Pittsburgh.” As he spoke another group of the rivermen arrived, instantly drawn to Gideon’s fragrant pot over the fire. Dumont unexpectedly stepped from the shadows of the track, looking winded and pale. He ran over to Duncan.

  “I thought you were going to the boat,” Duncan said, then noticed that his friend’s clothing was soiled and torn.

  “Mon Dieu, mon ami!” the Frenchman said. He was b
reathing heavily, and his face was streaked with dirt. “It is a blessing we can stay no longer. Sauvages!” he muttered, shaking his head as he looked toward the cook. “How can I tell Gideon?”

  Duncan glanced toward the woods, then at his rifle that leaned against a nearby oak. “What savages?”

  “Our party carrying Ezra back to the river was beset by a dozen warriors. No one was badly hurt. But they stole Ezra’s body!”

  The company was reduced in number, and spirit, when they gathered for their meal at sunset. The treasures from the Lick had been hauled to the boat and half the tents struck and carried back to the river by those who would sleep on the Arabella that night. Gideon’s biscuits and beans seemed to lift the men, however, and by the time Boone and his two native companions reappeared, quickly consuming what was left in the pot, some of the rivermen—former blue water sailors—were singing about the enticing ladies of Spain.

  The tight-lipped Boone offered a meager smile as Gideon poured out cups of hot cider, and soon even the tribesmen were tapping their feet to the songs.

  Gideon and the remaining crew, exhausted from a stressful day, had dropped into their blankets by the time the flames died in the fire ring. Ishmael left Duncan with Boone and his companions to wander out into the now moonlit Lick, the remaining rib bones glowing like the arches of some ruined cathedral. Boone pushed the kettle back into the coals and chipped pieces from a block of compressed tea into it.

  Duncan gave voice to the suspicion that had been shadowing him all evening. “You know where his body is.”

  Boone gazed out over the Lick, where Ishmael moved ghostlike among the tendrils of ground fog. “This land is not your plaything, McCallum,” the woodsman declared.

  “I’m sorry?” It occurred to him that Boone had never explained how he had known of the Sons’ secret expedition. He recalled that the woodsman had been absent the night before, when Ezra was murdered.