Eye of the Raven (3 page)

He was so distracted by the haunting words of the Iroquois chief he nearly collided with Conawago when his friend abruptly stopped. They were almost at a junction with the east-west Forbes Road, the flat bed of which could be seen through the trees. A desperate moaning sound, that of a small mammal in its death throes, rose from the forest near the trail. Conawago surveyed the heavily wooded slope for a moment then sprinted toward a large beech near the trail, Duncan at his heels.

A brown-haired man, a European of perhaps thirty years, sat against the tree, the crimson on his chest glowing in the early morning light. The fresh blood was spreading across the front of his shirt and britches, his left arm was strangely raised along the tree trunk. His eyes were wild and pleading, his breathing labored, and though he kept opening his mouth as if to speak, only moans came out.

"Save your strength," Duncan instructed as he knelt beside him, his medical training in Scotland quickly taking over as he surveyed the wounds. An abrasion to the right temple where the blood was dried and clotted. A deep gash in the thigh, from which blood was pooling on the ground. A wound in his chest, from which blood oozed through his shirt. Duncan raised his canteen to the man's chin, letting the water trickle over his lips. The man coughed, then seemed to quiet as he recognized that help had arrived. Conawago cut a vine and began tying it around the man's thigh. If they did not act quickly the man would bleed to death. More ghosts were coming, Skanawati had warned.

"We must lower him," he told Conawago. But as he gently pulled on the stranger's shoulder the left arm, resting up on the trunk, resisted. He pulled the arm to no avail, pulled so hard it uncurled the fingers that had covered the palm. "God's breath!" he exclaimed. The man's hand was nailed to the tree.

Duncan shut his eyes, collecting himself, then quickly probed the shirt, looking for the entry wound. He found a long tear in the fabric over the center of the bloodstain, then lunged back as he opened the shirt.

"His heart!" he gasped and stared in disbelief. He had heard of men having their hearts cut out by the savage Hurons. But somehow what Duncan saw seemed even more hideous. Pressed into the man's breastbone, pounded into the flesh so that its teeth were embedded in the tissue, was a large clockwork gear. Blood oozed from between the teeth of the gear. Man becomes tree, Skanawati had said. Man becomes machine.

"There was moss on the bank by the road," Conawago told him, "and spiderwebs on the alder bushes," referring to the tribes' most common treatments for staunching wounds. He opened one of the pouches he kept on his belt, pulling out a bundle of herbs.

Duncan set his rifle and pack on a rock and darted back up the trail.

He was on his knees, pulling moss from the spongy bank, when he suddenly froze. Men were moving along the road nearby. Cursing himself for leaving his rifle with Conawago, he lowered himself into the bracken then watched as two men appeared, not on the road but its northern flank, approaching the old Indian trail. Moments later two more appeared on the south side. They were too stiff, too clean, too uncertain to be rangers, but they had been trained by rangers, who always deployed scouts to parallel the path of their parties. He sensed through the earth, as Conawago had taught him, the drumming of many feet on the forest floor a moment before he actually saw the marching soldiers. More than two dozen men came into view, marching single file, most with short military muskets slung on their shoulders, several carrying the long rifles the French feared so much. There were no regular army uniforms among them, though half a dozen wore identical blue and buff coats and all wore a patch of red cloth pinned to their tricorned hats or the collars of their heavy waistcoats. Militia. Duncan let them pass then slowly rose, and he was about to call out in greeting when an anguished cry split the still air.

"Murder!" shrieked a young, terrified voice. "God protect us! It's the captain! The savages!"

Duncan threw down the moss and ran. He had passed half the men in the column before they could react with more than surprised cries, but several of those who were already running toward the bloody tree spun about, lowering their weapons at Duncan as he sprinted toward them. He wove in and out of the column, ducking a gunstock swung at his head, rising up to drive his shoulder into another as the soldier lifted a tomahawk from his belt. Two muskets discharged, the balls slashing the air near his ear, and someone cursed at the fools who fired so close to the column. He could see Conawago now, saw the confused look on the old Indian's face as the first of the strangers reached him, landing a glancing blow with a gunstock on his shoulder.

The next man charged with a tomahawk aimed for Conawago's skull. Duncan roared with anger and launched himself through the air, grabbing the upraised arm at the height of its deadly arc, his momentum pulling the soldier down. Duncan rolled as he hit the ground, rose, and sprang into the knot of men who hovered over Conawago.

"You mistake us! We are no enemies!" he shouted as he threw one, then another of the men to the ground. Then suddenly a cold blade materialized at his throat. He felt a handful of his long blond hair seized and his head jerked backward.

"If ye be part of this vile work we'll have y'er scalp too," his assailant snarled. Duncan twisted, threw a hand over his shoulder, and grabbed a handful of beard. Then the blade pressed tightly against Duncan's jugular, forcing him to drop his hand.

"We scout for Woolford's rangers!" Duncan gasped, watching in horror as more men joined in the beating of Conawago, kicking him, pounding him with gun butts. "You must stop!" he pleaded. "We are no enemy, I tell you!"

The beating eased as the men looked up, not at Duncan but at the man holding the blade behind him. One of the soldiers put a finger to the neck of the bloody man at the tree. "He's gone, sergeant.

"Y'er friend has killed our captain!" hissed the voice at his ear.

Duncan gazed at the dead officer. His eyes were already glazing, his skin growing waxy and pale. "We found him like this. We were trying to help."

"To hell you say! This savage was leaning over him with a bloody knife! Fixing to lift his hair."

"We are scouts for the rangers!" Duncan repeated, his own anger rising now.

"In that case we won't kill him here," the sergeant shot back. "We'll take him to the fort and have a proper trial before we kill him."

As the pressure of the blade on his throat relaxed two men roughly seized Duncan's arms, holding him tightly as the militia men went back to work on Conawago, with boots and heavy sticks. As the old Indian collapsed to the ground Duncan begged them to stop, cursed them in English then Gaelic, shouted at them, twisted violently to shake his captors off. Then one of the clubs slammed against his own skull. He fell to his knees, his arms still pinioned, unable to cover his head against the second blow. The last thing he saw was Conawago's precious little ceramic god, as old as time itself, being shattered against his breastbone.

UNCAN BECAME AWARE of the pinpricks of pain on his forehead first, then on his shoulder, and in his confusion thought he was back on his prison ship from Glasgow, where the rats had worked on his flesh while he slept. He smelled the filth and decay of the ship, sensed the slime of the moldy walls. A loud screech stirred him, a second caused his head to roll over, then new spikes of pain pushed open his groggy eyes.

A dead hand, gray with decay, was on his chest, being fought over by several blackbirds as others pecked at his own flesh.

Duncan's cry of horror came out as a dry, rasping croak. He pulled himself up, grabbing a club to pummel the scavengers, then cried out again as he saw the thing in his hand was no log but the lower half of a decaying human leg. He scrambled out of the shallow pit he had been thrown in, scattering the birds with a handful of dirt, not stopping until, his chest heaving, he pressed his back against a heavy palisade wall.

Quickly, still gasping, he took stock of his surroundings. He was at a large fortress built on a hill above earthworks, where blueuniformed artillery officers drilled their men around field guns. The garbage and days-old detritus of a surgeon's table had been thrown into the pit through a narrow opening in the wall near his head. As he fought a wave of nausea he realized his captors had sought out the pit, had planted the rotting hand on his chest, had, he saw now, knocked down a makeshift scarecrow that had kept the birds away. He closed his eyes, fighting another tremor of nausea, then stepped along the wall until he came to a gate, searching his memory of the military landscape of the western forest. He and Conawago had been less than a day's march from Fort Ligonier, the second biggest of the western fortifications after Fort Pitt.

The scarlet-coated sentry, a British regular, gave him a chilly nod as he slipped through the western gate. Spotting a well a hundred feet away, he waited until an Indian woman in a calico dress finished filling her gourd container then lowered the bucket and drank deeply, rinsed his hands in the remaining water, and emptied it over his head. Beginning to feel alive again, he found a perch in the shadows, leaning against a post of the porch that ran along the front of a long one-story building from which he could survey the grounds.

Small artillery pieces were mounted on swivels along the walls, sentries stationed at each corner. Opposite him men in artillery blue and infantry red wandered in and out of a second long building with several doors, all of the men wearing the small brass gorgets over their breasts that were the sign of rank in the British army. A handful of Indians, the Stockbridge scouts often used by the army, squatted beside a painted animal skin, tossing the white pebbles used in their games of chance. A solitary brave, wearing his hair in the narrow scalplock favored by the Iroquois, sat under a chestnut, slotting small iron arrowheads onto newly fletched shafts. Squads of infantry drilled to the sharp, impatient commands of their sergeants. All around him was an atmosphere of order, discipline, and fear. Although with the fall of Quebec the tide in the bloody war had turned at last in the favor of the British, the fighting was far from over in the wilderness.

"It isn't their knowledge of the spheres as such that impresses me most," came a refined voice from beside him, "it's that they possess it so intuitively."

Duncan turned to see a well-dressed man sitting on a keg by the wall of the building, gazing at the solitary Iroquois. "I'm sorry?"

"The aborigines. All the secrets of the natural world reside within them, yet they express their wisdom not through their words but through their actions. Their knowledge of natural philosophy is instinctive. We barbarians have to have it pounded into our skulls."

The extraordinary words came from an extraordinary-looking man. The stranger was in his midthirties, perhaps ten years older than Duncan. Over a fine linen shirt he wore a waistcoat in whose pockets hung the fobs of not one but two pocket watches. His long brown hair was tied at the back Indian fashion, with a strip of the dyed eelskin used by the river tribes for decoration. Around his neck hung both a small brass snuff box and an amulet wrapped in what looked like mink fur. His hands were unadorned but for a ring of oak leaves tattooed around one wrist like a bracelet. Over his woolen britches was a pair of leggings like those worn by rangers, though his were of doeskin decorated at the top with beadwork. On his feet were the heavy leather shoes worn by soldiers.

"I expressed my admiration for the archery skills of that bronzed Shawnee gladiator this morning as he was casually shooting squirrels out of a high oak. He explained that the force was in the wood of his bow and the accuracy in the lines of the shaft, that all he does is say a prayer to the spirits that loaned him the power of the wood, then point. A more perfect scientific explanation I could not expect from any number of learned professors." He looked up with a bright, curious expression at Duncan. "I am composing algebraic equations that explain the force of the arrow," he declared, tapping a linen bag that hung over his shoulder. "I could show you if-"

He was interrupted by a stocky man in an apron who briefly appeared in the doorway behind them to toss him a plug of tobacco with a quick utterance of thanks.