The King's Beast

by Eliot Pattison

  Boone stirred the fire with a stick, sending up a shower of sparks. “You didn’t listen well enough, McCallum. The gods will follow the bones, Catchoka said. But then he said no one can stop them.”

  Duncan stared into the flames, struggling to understand. “The shaman didn’t want the gods to leave,” he suggested, “but the Shawnee were powerless to stop them.”

  Boone answered with a solemn nod. “When changes come to their world, they start at the Gods’ Gate, for that is their connection to the other side. They know their world is shifting.” The woodsman fixed Duncan with a hard stare. “He didn’t only tell you that you must be their claws.”

  Duncan thought back on his hour in the bone chamber. “He said I must be their eyes and their claws.”

  “I had to drug you,” Boone said, a hint of apology in his voice, “but before you drank that tea, Catchoka talked about the gods going. They have to go with you now, he said, into the world that killed Ezra. But do you recall what he said next?”

  “He said the gods will have to decide about the shifts in the world.” Duncan considered the words for a few heartbeats. “He was worried, not just about whether I could find the killers. He was worried about the Shawnee.”

  “He fears what the gods will find, Highlander. He fears they may get lost in a world they do not understand. He fears the European god will crush them. He fears they may never come back.” For some reason Boone cast a cool, challenging gaze at Ishmael. “Even if those bones find a fate that satisfies the gods, he is convinced they will not return if Ezra and his granddaughter are not avenged. He didn’t just say you were their eyes and their claws. He also said you were their hope.”

  Duncan could find no response. He had wanted so badly to believe that Ezra’s death had nothing to do with him. But the incognitum and its gods had made it otherwise.

  They sat for long silent minutes, listening to the frogs and crickets. The moon-silvered river stretched out before them, the path to a destiny none of them wanted.

  “Come sup with us,” Duncan finally suggested to Boone and his friends.

  Boone cast a skeptical eye toward the camp of the rowdy rivermen. “The captain still got that jug of rye?”

  “I thought someone said you were a Quaker.”

  “My blessed mama was a good Quaker to be sure. But that don’t make her son a monk,” the woodsman replied, and lifted a burning brand to light their way along the bank.

  “You’re a long way from anywhere, Daniel,” Duncan observed. The two men had warmed to each other as they ate Gideon’s bountiful meal of fried fish and corn bread, and now sat against the roots of the huge sycamore.

  Boone gave a grunt that might have been a laugh as he finished lighting his clay pipe. “I was born in Pennsylvania province, in the Oley Valley near Reading town. One day when I was sixteen my father came in from the hay field all glum. My mother said, ‘Squire, I declare you look like you lost your best friend.’ ‘Sweetheart,’ says he, ‘I realized today that anywhere I stand in my field I can see the smoke of another man’s chimney.’ So we packed up and moved to North Carolina. I never quite understood until after I was married and standing on my own porch one day and spied folks building a cabin down in the valley, not even a mile away. From that day on I felt penned in. I had to be free of all that civilizing. Don’t need another man looking over my shoulder all day. Running with the stags in the Kentucky mountains, now that’s freedom. Some days I just watch the buffalo, for hours, just for the joy of it. The only men are the tribesmen who are part of the forest themselves. The wild land has a way about it. The tribes understand that and connect with the land in ways most Europeans don’t, or can’t.”

  “An elder of the tribes once told me that the forest soil is in their blood,” Duncan said.

  “The tribes talk about the spirits in the trees and the gods in the forest.” Boone looked upward as he spoke, into the limbs of the aged tree. “I heard a preacher once tell a warrior friend of mine that such talk is sacrilege, that there’s no room in the Bible for such things. My friend said that’s because the men who wrote his Bible lived in the desert.”

  Boone puffed on his pipe before turning back to Duncan. “They say the leaders of the Sons of Liberty are mostly merchants and tradesmen. So tell me this, Highlander: Do they think they have to buy their liberty? Or does the king have to buy it from them?”

  Duncan cocked his head at the unexpected words.

  “What I’ve been trying to cipher out,” Boone continued, “is whether freedom means something different to those Sons of Liberty living in their big homes in Boston and Philadelphia than it does to those living in cabins and lean-tos in the wilderness.”

  “Does it matter?” Duncan asked. “Is freedom really different for a blacksmith in a Hudson village and a warrior in the Kentucky wilderness?”

  “That’s like asking if freedom is different for an eagle and a workhorse.” Boone drew on his pipe and blew smoke toward the stars. “I’m thinking it is different, very different, and maybe it’s that difference that got Ezra and his wife killed.”

  “But how could—” Duncan’s question was cut off by the discharge of a musket. The sentry in the camp was firing at something in the night.

  Boone was a step behind Duncan as they ran to the sound of the shot. The woodsman cursed as they reached the camp, then cocked his rifle and aimed at a shadow moving on the river. He fired, then shrugged, uncertain of the outcome, and reloaded.

  As he did so, cries of abject terror split the night. A riverman scrambled past Duncan, stumbling as he fled the river. Not from the river, Duncan saw as he was nearly knocked down by another desperate poleman, but from a monster approaching on the river. “He wants the bones back!” the riverman cried. An angry god was coming for them.

  Even the intrepid Boone was shaken. He instinctively raised his rifle, then lowered it again. “Christ on the cross!” he gasped. “What is that thing?”

  “God’s retribution! Our punishment for sacrilege!” Reverend Podrake had arrived, looking bedraggled from slipping in the mud, and extended his Bible like a shield in the direction of the dragon-like beast.

  Even from a distance they could see that the huge creature walking on the water had curving tusks on which a man was impaled. Its boxy head was bobbling up and down as if it were chewing. Four legs extended out of the hulking body. They made no movement, but still the creature eerily progressed toward them. The entire creature, including its tusks, was on fire.

  “The devil’s hound!” one of the Irishmen called, crossing himself as he took refuge behind a tree. As he spoke, the beast turned in their direction.

  “Shut yer teeth, ye fool!” another man snapped from the shadows. “He heard ye!”

  Podrake spread his arms and beckoned the crew. “Pray with me! Pray to save your immortal souls!”

  Several men hesitantly rose out of hiding, as if to comply, but then the wind shifted and the beast turned again. Duncan realized he could see the moonlit bank on the far side through its body and he began to make out its crude, scaffold-like framework. “Not a beast from hell,” he called out as he ran to the bank for a closer look. “It’s from the men who killed Ezra! Get the poles to fend it off!” he shouted, but then the creature turned sideways to them, driven by the river current. “It’s only timbers!” Ishmael shouted. “Just timbers and reeds lashed together on a raft of logs. And that’s no man on its tusk, it’s an effigy of reeds!”

  Boone raised his rifle once more and fired. One of the flaming tusks shattered, dumping the body into the river.

  The captain was the first to join Duncan on the bank. “I declare,” he muttered as they watched the burning monster drift downstream. “Had us well scared, I don’t mind saying.”

  “Just wood soaked with grease or lamp oil,” Duncan explained, trying to ignore his own racing pulse.

  “A lot of trouble for a prank,” the captain observed.

  “Not a prank. It was meant to stop us, or slow us.”


  “If it’s to slow us, why do this in the night when we’re not even underway?” the captain asked.

  It was a good question. “Are all your men accounted for?” Duncan asked.

  With a few angry shouts the captain gathered his men. “The two tribesmen we hired as extra polemen ran off into the woods. Probably won’t see them again. But why?” he asked. “How does this obstruct us? That damned tree in our channel is the obstruction!”

  “I don’t know,” Duncan said. “Unless it was to drive the crew away from the boat.”

  The captain yelled for his mate to check the tethered keelboat. He paced impatiently, watching the burning creature disappear down the river, then cursed again and marched to his boat, Duncan a step behind.

  Duncan could see from the mate’s grim expression that the news was bad. “Every pole is gone,” the squat, muscular man reported.

  “God’s breath!” the captain barked and pushed past the stunned man to leap onto the Arabella, darting to the racks on the cabin walls where the poles were stored at night. They were empty. “Look for them!” he roared.

  “They’re floating toward the Mississippi,” Duncan said. It would have been the work of a few moments to throw the poles into the river. Without the long poles used for pushing against the bottom, the keelboat could never progress upriver. “I’ve seen spares below,” he recalled.

  “Four spares, yes. But ye may have noticed we use ten,” the captain muttered. “Four will get us nowhere against this current. It’ll take a day or more to find the hickory we need and then cut ’em down, peel ’em, and shave ’em to shape.” The Cornish man spat tobacco into the dark waters. “I declare, McCallum, this expedition of yers is cursed.”

  Duncan looked over the captain’s shoulder at Boone, who fixed him with a meaningful gaze as he held out the mooring line. “Not cursed, Captain,” Duncan said as he studied the rope in Boone’s hand. “Not tonight. Tonight we were lucky.”

  “In a pig’s eye!” the captain snorted.

  “They didn’t come to steal the poles,” Duncan said, then took the rope and held it up for the captain’s inspection. It was half severed. “They came to steal your boat and the shots discouraged them. They must have just tossed the poles as they fled.”

  “I know a grove of hickories less than a mile from here,” Boone said. “And if they be the ones who killed Ezra and the chief’s granddaughter, I’ll soon have a score of warriors cutting wood so you can take up the pursuit.” He directed a warbling whistle to summon his native companions, then spoke rapidly to them before turning back to the captain. “They’ll have a couple trees down already when I arrive with your men in the dawn.”

  “Not all the men,” Duncan said as he eyed the frame posts of the cabin. “I want two with me, and tell them to lay out all the Arabella’s canvas.”

  Duncan felt as if a great burden was lifted from his shoulders as the Pittsburgh docks at last came into view. They had pressed relentlessly, even keeping underway at night when the moon was bright. It had been hours after leaving the grandfather sycamore before the captain finally ended his nervous muttering about saltwater sailors poaching his boat. He had seen the approving grins on his crew’s faces, but didn’t acknowledge the success of Duncan’s plans, with a reluctant nod, until a strong gust stretched the canvas overhead, the stays went taut, and the boat began making headway against the current.

  The captain had been loath to surrender three of his precious spare poles and had fumed as Duncan and Ishmael had cut two of them shorter to act as booms. By the time the remainder of the crew returned with new poles, Duncan and Ishmael had raised their makeshift mast, tied the canvas onto the booms, and hung their sail.

  Soon the following wind had strengthened enough that his sturdy boat was making twice her normal speed, and the captain was sufficiently satisfied to release his men to work on shaving and shaping the new poles. Now, as they finally glided into the small port, Duncan saw his quarry. The black-and-white checkered keelboat was readily visible, tied to the farthest wharf.

  “Easy, McCallum,” the captain said as he watched Duncan stuff a hand ax into his belt. “This is a military post. Best we let the provosts of Fort Pitt think this is just another spat between watermen, which they be well accustomed to. When boats return home the crews tend to get energetic, if ye catch my drift. My boys ain’t forgotten they had the bejesus scared out of them by that flaming monster. And it weren’t right for them to block the channel and try to steal my Arabella. But tossing our poles, that be as grave a sin as can be imagined on the river. No better than river pirates.” As he spoke several of his men gathered behind him, each holding an ax handle or barrel stave. “Let us soften ’em up for ye.”

  “My feud is with their passengers,” Duncan said.

  “And ye think their passengers have been just tarrying on the boat until ye arrive? That boat’s been here a day or more.”

  Duncan gazed in disappointment at the moored boat as the truth of the captain’s words sank in. For days he had been so ravenous for revenge that he had not thought beyond their arrival at Pittsburgh. He handed his hatchet to Ishmael. “Find teamsters and two wagons, then you and Pierre get our cargo loaded with proper cushioning,” he instructed the young Nipmuc and leapt onto the rough planks of the wharf. “We leave at dawn,” he called over his shoulder, then slipped into the throng of traders, trappers, and tribesmen who crowded the street below the walls of the great fortress.

  Duncan paused by a smithy where an ox was being fitted with shoes to gaze back at Ishmael. Earlier in the week he had found the young Nipmuc in the small hours before dawn sitting on top of the cabin, gazing westward with an uncharacteristically troubled expression. Duncan had wordlessly joined him, folding his legs under him in the tribal fashion.

  “That Catchoka,” Ishmael had said after several minutes, “he acted like I understood about the bones. Boone was going to drug me too but the Shawnee wouldn’t let him, saying I was one of them.” Duncan did not understand the anguish in the youth’s voice. “Before we carried you back to the boat Catchoka gave me this.” Ishmael opened his palm to reveal a lanyard with a curving object. A bear claw, Duncan thought at first; then he saw how it glowed in the moonlight and recognized its longer, more subtle shape. It was a fang from one of the ancient cat skulls.

  “He said the old gods are fierce. He said he was glad one of the people was going to be their companion, that the gods were going with me into a new kind of battlefield and I would know when they needed my warrior’s hand.” Ishmael glanced at Duncan, then fixed his gaze on the moon. “He seemed to think I should be honored by his words, but I didn’t feel anything but fear, Duncan. We didn’t know what we were doing when we took those bones. We just gathered them up like they were some old sticks on the ground. They have great meaning for the tribes, we know now, but they also have great meaning for those Englishmen who killed Ezra, and we don’t know what that is.”

  Duncan struggled to find a reply.

  “Ever since that night of the burning monster I haven’t slept well,” Ishmael confessed. “Not because of the monster, but because of what Boone said. It’s as if the Shawnee expect their gods to become lost and we have to be their guide. Us! We are more lost than anyone!

  “When I left that shrine cave Catchoka came out and pressed this tooth against my heart. ‘These are the bones of our soul,’ he said, then just went back inside. Our soul. He thinks we are the same, but his tribe is nothing like my tribe. We were born a thousand miles apart, in different worlds. I was raised with European ways. I wish I could say I was of the same people as Catchoka, but I can’t.”

  “You are the same blood as Conawago,” Duncan said, reminding Ishmael of his uncle. “Conawago and Catchoka are not so different. You are not foolish enough to think you have the wisdom of their years. But one day you will have their years, and their wisdom, as only one of the first blood could have. Wear it close to your heart,” he added, nodding to the fang. “Your fe
ar is the opening. Without that fear I think the door to the old gods will stay closed to you.”

  Ishmael stretched the lanyard out, holding the ancient fang toward the moon. “The bones of our soul,” he said, uncertainty still in his voice. He looped the lanyard around his neck, nestling it beside his tribal totem.

  Since that night he had spoken no more of the fang, or of the old gods. But now he showed a new confidence, and an almost angry determination, as he directed the unloading of their cargo.

  Duncan sat in the shadows at the back of the settlement’s largest tavern, watching as the workers from the new coal mine entered for their end-of-day pot of ale. The miners and rivermen had taken up a ribald song, then broken into a cheer at the arrival of a man in a dark green waistcoat, who climbed halfway up the stairs and then paused and pitched a shilling to the tavern keeper to buy a round for the entire company, raising more cheers from the weary customers. As he hurried up the stairs, he met Duncan’s eyes with a quick, nearly imperceptible nod.

  Five minutes later Duncan tapped on a door in the upstairs corridor and opened it without waiting for a response. Jonathan Reynolds was the most prosperous trader in Pittsburgh and occupied a spacious set of rooms that took up the entire front of the two-story building. He sat now at a small worktable by a window that looked out over the wharf. “The provost marshal had to send soldiers down to break up a brawl involving the Arabella’s crew,” he said without a greeting. “Not a propitious start for your journey to Philadelphia, McCallum,” he continued, sounding peeved. “You were to transfer your cargo with as little attention as possible.”

  Before replying, Duncan stepped to the window. One of the Arabella’s crew sat slumped against a tree as if only half-conscious. Another, now loading cargo onto a waiting wagon as Dumont supervised, had a long bloodstain down his shirt front. “They had some unfinished business with the Muskrat,” he said to Reynolds, who had sold his commission in the army two years earlier to start his trading post.