Eye of the Raven (14 page)

"Burn it," suggested McGregor.

"There is something else the magistrate needs to fully understand," Duncan interjected, turning to his Nipmuc friend. "The significance of the nails was mentioned in passing at the trial. What exactly do the Iroquois remember about men being tortured with nails?"

"Surely it has nothing to do with-" Brindle's objection was cut off by Duncan's upraised palm.

"The English and the Iroquois have not been antagonists for a long time," Duncan said. "But the nations begin to sense what the English truly think of them, at the worst possible time. Tormenting Skanawati by placing him beside the captive post. Flaunting the nailing of men to barns and trees. Why do the heathen rage," he said, repeating the Psalm.

Conawago gazed at the post as he spoke. "Since before memory Iroquois raiding parties have gone up and down the Warriors Path, through the Virginia country to reach their traditional enemies. But then one year an Iroquois raiding party found a farm across its ancient path. They halted, debating whether to turn around. But the militia had already been alerted and confronted them. The Iroquois said they simply wanted passage down the trail, as was their custom, promised not to harm any settler. The militia refused. The Indians had little food, expecting to live off the land. When they took some corn from a farmer's field, the Virginians called it war. The Indians were outnumbered. Some fled north, a dozen were captured, beaten, tortured, some hanged. Those who did not die right away were nailed to the side of a barn facing the Indian trail as a warning. Some took a week to die."

Brindle studied Conawago in silence, then gazed at the wagon, under which several of his party were already bedding down. "We will move camp," he said with a sigh. "Call out the militia and teamsters to assist us. And I will ask Brother Conawago to extend our apologies to the chiefs. We are but strangers in a strange land."

The moon was high by the time they finished moving the Quakers' camp to the flat below the crest of the ridge, where half the other travelers had already bedded down.

Magistrate Brindle was disquieted, and despite the late hour he had his nephew hang two lanterns beside him so he could read his Bible. His thin face had the expression of one staring into the murk of the wilderness for the first time, a strong man facing evils he never knew existed. The first time Duncan had entered the wilderness he had crawled under a rock and hidden.

"Have you been to treaty meetings before?" Duncan asked McGregor, keeping an eye on the shadows along the treeline. Conawago had disappeared during the shifting of the wagon.

"Aye. In Albany. Grand affairs."

"With as many Indians as here?"

"Here? This is a mere three dozen or so. When the trunks are finally opened expect a hundred or more."

"Trunks?"

"A few chiefs may come to make their marks on the king's paper. But the rest come for the gifts. Blankets will be distributed, and muskets and knives and bolts of cloth. If the gifts aren't there, the Indians won't talk." The big Scot gazed at the row of fires along the edge of the woods, where the Indians had camped. "Except the savages with us keep sharpening their knives and tomahawks. As if they expect an outbreak of hostilities instead of a treaty."

With deep foreboding Duncan ventured toward the Indian camp, desperately hoping for a glimpse of Conawago, nagged again by fear for his friend. It was as if death, having been cheated of him at Ligonier, still hovered near. A dog barked from a lean-to of pine boughs built against a wall of ledge rock. The soft voice of a woman comforted a child, the sound of rushes scouring a pot came from near a dying fire. The quiet domestic sounds reassured him. He quickened his step and ventured closer to the lines of fires along the edge of the woods, pausing at each in turn to look for his friend.

At first he thought he had tripped on a root, not realizing until too late that it was a pole deftly levered between his legs. As he stumbled, the Indian wielding it slammed the pole against Duncan's knee while pushing with a twisting motion at his shoulder. Suddenly Duncan was on the ground, with four warriors atop him, pinning each of his limbs. The one kneeling on his left shoulder held the edge of a tomahawk to his throat. The words that rushed out in the Iroquois tongue were whispered, and too fast for Duncan to understand. But the tone was unmistakable.

They hit him, striking repeatedly with small clubs on his legs, on his arms, not enough to break bones but enough to hurt, enough to bring bruises that would last days. The two men holding his legs uttered sounds of amusement. The one with the tomahawk leaned closer, hissing at Duncan, the hairs of his amulet brushing Duncan's neck, the turtle tattoo on his cheek visible in the moonlight. It was the young warrior from the fort, who had stood at Skanawati's side when he had made his confession. His eyes shone fiercely as he slammed the blade of the tomahawk into the earth inches from Duncan's ear.

Suddenly one of the Indians at Duncan's feet gasped as he was lifted bodily away. As a second assailant mysteriously rose Duncan could see Henry Bythe calmly standing with a lantern while Sergeant McGregor and two more kilted soldiers methodically removed the attackers, lifting them and tossing them away like sheaves. Duncan did not understand why the warriors did not resist, why they did not even rise up from the ground where they landed, then saw that they were looking not at Bythe or the Scots but at a figure in the shadows, an older Iroquois wearing a headdress made of a fox skin, the head of the animal perched over his forehead.

"This is what happens when we journey with such devils," the Quaker said as the Scots faded back into the darkness. Bythe seemed entirely unafraid of the warriors around him.

Duncan struggled to his feet, rubbing the pain out of his limbs as he tried to grasp which devils the Quaker spoke of.

"They have no place in a treaty. The war does not affect them like it does Pennsylvania and New York." Bythe began brushing off the dirt on Duncan's back as he spoke. "They should go home to their easy southern life."

"The devils you refer to are the Virginians?" Duncan asked, about to point out it had not been colonists who had attacked him.

"Of course. What happened here was naught but revenge for the Virginians' attack on our prisoner. The southerners cannot be trusted. If it were up to them we would be driven to abandon this very road."

"The road?" Duncan asked, confused again.

"The Forbes Road. They were furious when General Forbes decided on the Pennsylvania route two years ago. The general even intercepted secret correspondence from their Colonel Washington seeking to reverse the decision. They insisted the western lands were already theirs, that the road to Fort Pitt should run from Fort Cumberland, to ease the travel of Virginians."

Duncan had not appreciated the political significance of the road. It did indeed open the western lands to Pennsylvania settlers.

"'Twas but a game. Those bucks meant to frighten, not seriously injure you," Bythe declared.

Duncan rubbed his shoulder, realizing that indeed the aches from the blows were already receding. "How could you know what they-" Duncan's question died away as the Indian wearing the fox headdress stepped to Bythe's side with a casual nod at the Quaker.

Bythe lifted a hemp bag from where it lay by his feet and extracted a slab of bacon and sack of flour, dropped them back into the bag, and handed it to the Indian. "Johantty is Skanawati's nephew," Bythe explained with a gesture toward the youth who had led the attack, "the others also from the chiefs village." As Bythe explained to Duncan, Johantty rose, glowering at Duncan, then motioned his comrades back into the shadows.

"The future of the western lands, Mr. McCallum," Bythe declared in a genteel voice, "is properly a matter between the Iroquois and the Penn province."

Duncan considered the words for a long moment, uncertain whether he was meant to take warning or invitation from them. "Would you consider it possible, sir," he ventured, "that Skanawati is innocent?"

Bythe did not hesitate. "We would consider it certain, sir," he countered, "that even if Skanawati killed a solitary Virginian that act would not explain all the other deaths along the Warriors Path this year."

Duncan stared at him in astonishment, then reminded himself that Bythe was the provincial emissary at Fort Pitt, which meant the nations he dealt with were not European.

"The surveyors Townsend, Putnam, young Cooper, and his bride," Bythe recited. "Brother Brindle and I sent out secret inquiries about them months ago."

"Skanawati himself was seeking to understand the deaths," Duncan observed.

"So my friend Long Wolf has led me to understand," Bythe said, with a gesture to the Indian in the fox headdress, still at his side. "Perhaps you have not met the chief of the Mingoes, the western Iroquois?" The chieftain nodded silently at Duncan. "He is one of those who understand our true enemy is the French. Just days before Burke's death Skanawati warned him of Hurons in the area of Ligonier."

"Yet you let your brother-in-law hold Skanawati as a prisoner.

Bythe raised a hand to cut off Duncan's protest. "Simply because he warns friends about raiders does not mean he is not secretly allied with them. That is a question we are still seeking to settle."

The two men looked at Duncan expectantly. "Does Long Wolf perhaps know of the signs on the trees?" Duncan asked Bythe awkwardly. "Conawago suggests that-"

Bythe interrupted by holding a finger to his lips, then pointed to the chieftain, who gestured for Duncan to follow toward a lodge at the rear of the camp.

Duncan hesitated as Long Wolf disappeared into the entrance of a structure made of skins draped over a framework of bent saplings.

"The fire is made and the smoke rising," Bythe said, motioning Duncan inside.

"I'm sorry?"

"It means a council has been called."

Duncan eyed the Quaker uneasily, then saw that Johantty and his companions were standing nearby, watching him, and stepped inside.

Conawago sat on the earthen floor of the makeshift shelter with Long Wolf and three other Indian elders, sharing a long stone pipe of tobacco. Knowing better than to interrupt the intense, fevered conversation that was underway, Duncan found a space and sat cross-legged on the floor, wondering for a moment why the five Indians sat in a lopsided circle, with an empty place at the far side.

The others took no notice of him and continued speaking in low, fast voices that allowed Duncan to catch only a few words, though not the sense of the overall discussion. Wolf, he heard, then tree, turtle, Onondaga, and Skanawati. The solitary life he led with Conawago gave him few opportunities to listen to conversations between Iroquois, and now as he gave up trying to make specific sense of their words, he opened himself in the way he'd been taught to listen in the forest. There was eloquence in the voices, but also something else. Conawago had told Duncan if he listened carefully he could tell the difference between the call of a young owl and an old one, for the older bird spoke with wisdom and melancholy over all the death it had witnessed. The voices he heard now were those of old owls.

He lost all sense of time and became lost in the spell of the rapid dialogue and the random images it summoned. The haunting piles of bones at Braddock's battlefield, Captain Burke nailed alive to a survey tree. The bizarre symbols, unknown to Indian or European, on the boundary trees. Mokie about to be carried away with Burke's dead body.

A touch at his knee brought him back. "Will you speak to us of what the dead man teaches?" Conawago asked.

"I'm sorry?"

"These chiefs from the Grand Council of the Iroquois have spoken about Skanawati, and his actions these past weeks. I have spoken of the events since the first day near Ligonier, of Skanawati's confession, and of the trees. They are disturbed that raiders took Burke's body. I have told them you come from a lost land, where you were taught how to make the dead speak. I told them you, too, sought out his body, touched it."

Duncan looked from one man to the next, each face as inscrutable as the one before. Even if one of their own had confessed to murder, what concerned them most was the theft of a dead body. The oldest of the Indians, whose wrinkled, leathery face spoke of great age, nodded to Duncan.

"Old Belt of the Mohawks desires you to share your knowledge," Conawago said.

The old chief extended the long pipe toward Duncan, gesturing, moving over to make room for Duncan at his side.

Only after Duncan had settled by Old Belt and inhaled deeply of the fragrant tobacco offered him did the chief speak, this time in English with a heavy French accent. "My people, guardians of the eastern door," he said, using the traditional Iroquois description of the Mohawk tribe, "are accustomed to returning from a victory with a prisoner. But never have we heard of a dead man being captured as if he were alive. Did you perhaps see that one come back to life and fight those raiders?"

The way Winston Burke, days dead now, still preyed on him, Duncan was tempted to agree. The Virginian's ghost cast a long shadow over the treaty convoy. "No. He was bound and tied inside a blanket."

"Perhaps the blanket was writhing the way a cocoon writhes just before the butterfly emerges?"

Duncan shuddered, then studied the chiefs. He was looking at the heads of the tribal treaty delegation, he realized, and now knew why there was an empty place in their circle. They still considered Skanawati an active member of their delegation. "No," Duncan said quietly. "He did not come back to life to fight the Hurons."

The chief in the fox headdress spoke at last. "Not Hurons," Long Wolf said, pronouncing his English words very slowly. "Renegades. Outlaws. What is the word when your king hires those German soldiers?"

"Mercenaries."

The Mingo chief nodded. "Mercenaries." He pointed to an object by the little fire, the bone-and-bead breastplate Conawago had found at the ambush. "This is Nanticoke, or maybe Conoy," he said, referring to two of the smaller tribes that traditionally lived along the Chesapeake and its tributaries. "Most of them have lost their ways. Some would kill for the leg of a chicken."