Original Death (12 page)

Before his hanging. The prisoner was given his choice for his last meal on earth.

Duncan sat against the wall again, huddled in his blanket, futilely trying not to stare at the twine around his sleeve. He was strangely scared to touch it. He desperately tried, but failed, to summon visions of his youth or memories of his days learning of the forest from Conawago. All that came were visions of the many McCallum clansmen who had swung from the king's gibbet.

Death was a beast that had to eat its fill, his grandmother used to say of the epidemics that sometimes swept the Highland towns. The deaths at Bethel Church were no mystery for him to resolve, they were just another sign that death was calling him.

He woke to a hand gripping his shoulder. Macaulay hovered over him, holding a wooden bowl of porridge under his nose. “Better when it's warm, lad,” the big Scot offered.

The other prisoners sat on their pallets, scooping porridge from bowls with their fingers. Duncan dipped a finger into the lukewarm gruel and hesitantly touched it to his lips before ravenously scooping it into his mouth.

“I thought I was to have mounds of bacon and pie,” he said when he had finished.

“Don't tempt the fates, lad. They do their trials and hangings in the morning. If they ain't come for ye by now then ye have another day. But they'll ne'er forget a prisoner with the twine on his arm. There's no . . .” Macaulay's words faded as a man with a bloody face was shoved into the cell, followed an instant later by two more prisoners. Macaulay sighed. “There be the reason. The hounds have been busy chewing up others this morn.”

The three men all fell to the floor of the cavern, holding wounds that oozed blood. They all wore the kilts of the Highland regiments. The forearm of the youngest hung at an unnatural angle. He clutched it in obvious pain.

Duncan shot up and went to the young soldier's side. When he reached for the arm the man pulled it away. “It's broken,” Duncan said.

“Goddamned right it's broken,” one of the other newcomers spat. “Didn't it sound like a snapped spoke when that provost bastard pounded it with his halberd!”

“I attended medical college in Edinburgh,” Duncan explained.

“You're a doctor?” the young asked with a grimace.

“Close enough. They arrested me for aiding my old Jacobite uncle before I got the robe.” He nodded at the arm. “If you don't let me splint it, it will never heal straight.”

He became aware of Macaulay at his side. “He's one of us, lads,” the corporal explained, and he gestured to the twine on Duncan's arms. The anger left the eyes of the new prisoners. The young Highlander gritted his teeth but did not resist when Duncan touched his arm again. Duncan frowned, then looked around the dim chamber. As the others silently watched, he stepped to the empty porridge bucket and slammed it against the wall, extracting two of the grooved, slightly bowed slats from its loosened hoops. Macaulay, quickly understanding, pulled out his shirttail and began tearing away a strip. Duncan nodded, then gestured to his patient's shoulder. The corporal planted himself behind the man and gripped his upper arm tightly as Duncan lifted the broken forearm. “What was the name your mother gave you?” he asked the man.

The young soldier looked up in confusion. “Colin,” he murmured.

“I can't hear you, trooper,” Duncan taunted loudly.

Anger swirled on the man's face for a moment then he shouted, “Colin Mc—” The words died away with a wince as with a quick pulling motion Duncan snapped the bones back into place.

The onlookers laughed. His patient looked at him sheepishly and
nodded his thanks as Duncan placed the makeshift splints on the arm and began wrapping it tightly with Macaulay's strip of linen.

The two other new arrivals quickly warmed to Duncan, letting him look at their bloody cuts and bruises, none of which were severe.

“Damn the provosts and damn the officers who unleash them,” growled Macaulay. “What happened, lads?” he asked.

“On the parade ground, standing in ranks,” explained the oldest of the newcomers. “Colin called out to ask where our pay was. The major didn't take to men speaking without permission. He demanded that the man who spoke step forward. He was even less pleased when all three of us stepped out of the ranks.” The man paused to push at a bloody tooth, which was obviously loose. “He said the paymaster waited for the others in the North but that we three would learn a hard lesson for our rudeness.”

“That ain't why we're here,” Colin interjected. “We would have just gone to the brig in the fort for a few days, but we were being held by the stables when the major met Colonel Cameron around the corner from us. They didn't know we were listening until the provost shouted a warning to the colonel. But it was too late. We heard the report, that the king's payroll never made it to the northern troops, that the paywagon was empty when it arrived. As the Colonel walked away, the major shouted that it was impossible, that no one could steal from such a wagon, that the report had to be a mistake. When he realized we had heard, he was furious, and he ordered the provosts to send us to the iron hole. We put up a wee protest,” Colin said, nodding to his arm. “We'll be down here until they find that chest of coins.”

Duncan considered the words. “What kind of wagon would it have been?”

“Purpose built. One-of-a-kind. I've been a guard on it more than once on runs to Ticonderoga and Crown Point. Like a heavy coach, but it has a special box bound with iron, built into the inside where the seats would be. Like a rolling safebox.”

“Jock MacLeod was one of the escorts?”

“Colin!” Macaulay barked in warning.

“They have shit for honor!” the young soldier shot back. “You think I care about their damned secrets?” He nodded to Duncan. “Jock was with it.”

“Ye don't know that, son,” Macaulay interjected. “The escorts don't know their assignment until they report to duty.”

“But I was on sentry duty at the gate when the wagon pulled out. Jock waved at me, from the top of the wagon.”

“He died at Bethel Church,” Duncan said, “when the wagon passed through.”

Macaulay frowned. “Then the poor lad must have seen sign of those raiders and stayed behind to make sure the wagon was safe. He was always bigger than life, our Jock, probably thought he could take them single-handed. He died a hero to be sure.”

Duncan looked at him in confusion. It made no sense. A missing escort would have been noted, would have been reported at the next fort. But the wagon had gone all the way to its destination with neither the missing guard nor the missing payroll noticed.

A man in a torn and soiled red jacket muttered a curse. “The world's a bubble for sure, and the life of a man less than a span.”

The English infantryman who had spoken extended his arm, which was swollen with boils. The other prisoners soon followed, seeking Duncan's medical advice. He reached for his pouch and did what he could, applying the healing powder Conawago mixed from forest herbs, washing dirty wounds and applying more makeshift bandages.

As he worked something nagged at him, plucking at the back of his mind until suddenly he shot up and returned to the infantryman with the boils. “Why did you say that?” he asked the soldier. “Why speak the words of Francis Bacon just then?”

The soldier shrugged. “Never met any Francis Bacon. Just on my mind I guess. That boy recited things in the dark as he sat by the entry, is all. He said some over and over, like a chant. That was one.”

Duncan knelt by the man and gripped his shoulder. “A boy?”

“The savage choir boy we called him.” The grin on the man's face faded as he saw Duncan's stern, intense expression. “Just a lad of eleven or twelve. Acted like one of those ghostwalkers, clutching his hands in Christian prayer one minute, drawing pagan images in the dirt the next. He looked like he had painted his face, but most of the color had rubbed away. He had been weeping. Wouldn't let us comfort him. Took to watching the clock birds. Sat in the entry singing his forlorn songs, staring into the shadows of the tunnel like he expected some beast to rise up out of the earth below.”

“Surely a mere boy would not be sent into this pit.”

The trooper with the broken arm looked up. “I reckon it was the lad who interrupted the assembly yesterday, slipped right through the front gate and when the officer on duty wouldn't hear his story he ran out on the parade ground, dodging those who chased him, shouting out that there were French Indians in the woods, like the attack everyone fears had started. Troops were sent running to the palisades. Some fool in town began ringing an alarm bell. Colonel Cameron came out and put an end to it right quick. The provosts dragged the boy away, though I figured it would be for a caning in the stable.”

A dozen questions leapt into his mind, but Duncan knew he could not risk betraying too much interest in Ishmael. “Clock birds?”

“The mice with wings.” The soldier with the boils gestured again toward the far end of the cavern where the waste buckets sat. “They go out and we know it's dusk. They come back and we know it's dawn.”

Duncan glanced around the cave once more, trying to make sense of the words. “But he was released?”

“Released of his earthly bounds, more like it. He finally ran deeper down the tunnel, toward the oblivion. Lunacy. Naught but blackness and death down there.”

A new weight bore down on Duncan. The one glimmer of hope he had nourished was that the boy yet lived, running free in the forest.

“There's smallpox below,” the prisoner added. “The guards stopped
going inside, just leave their gruel in the tunnel.” The man shrugged. “The pox takes what? Three, maybe five days to kill ye? Could be he's still alive. But he has damned little time left, and a wretched time it will be. The monster below has swallowed him, and that's the end of it.”

Duncan suddenly felt weak again. He stumbled back toward his blanket. He sat in a silent, numb state, sometimes on the verge of sleep, mostly just staring into the shadows. At last he rose and stepped toward the deeper shadows near the slop buckets and found the little mounds of fur tucked along the cracks in the stone. Below them he saw the drawings in the dirt of the floor: stick figures of men were falling over two lines drawn at a right angle, with stick-figure bodies below, as if it were men falling off a cliff. The image had been at the center of the wampum belt Duncan had seen at the witch's hut. He pulled out the paper he had taken from the schoolhouse wall and found the one that bore the boy's name, with the quote from Bacon. He began to piece together the description of the boy he had heard from Madame Pritchard and felt a tiny flicker of hope.

He sat inside the entry, waiting for the flying shadows. Finally they began flapping. The bats cast a spell over the prisoners, the men watching them with something like envy. Duncan studied them as they swooped out of the low arch. Most went right, up the tunnel, but several went left. He grinned. He understood the boy's lunacy.

The evening meal came, a watery oxtail broth with bread that was as hard as naval biscuit. Duncan checked the condition of his patients and listened as the other prisoners complained of the provosts, the army, the French, and the bloodthirsty Hurons who were allied with the enemy. The army seemed to be in worse shape than Duncan would have thought, with regiments depleted and morale low despite the recent string of English victories. Several of the men had been in the Americas for years. Some had suffered the fevers of the Indies, one had survived the terrible massacre in which General Braddock and much of his army had been destroyed near Fort Duquesne. Most had been in the horrible bloodbath of the first battle at Ticonderoga in which the Black Watch had lost two thirds of their men.

Duncan retired to his blanket and tried to sleep but spent much of his time drawing a map in his mind of the region around Albany and the Iroquois towns beyond. He found his gaze drifting toward the arch that led to the tunnel. His life hung by a thread. When the bats returned, the provosts would come for him soon after. A handful of officers would be rising, their orderlies adorning them with stiff collars and lace cuffs for the solemn words that would mean his death.

He waited until every man was sleeping, then rose and stepped into the forbidden corridor. There was no sound, no movement from the guard station at the top of the tunnel. He turned and slipped into the gloom below.

The tunnel narrowed and turned as it descended, the slow-burning pitch torches spread far apart now so that he could barely see where he placed his feet. He had grown to tolerate the fetid odor of the first cell, but that in no way prepared him for the reek that reached him. It was the smell of decay, of suffering, of death. For a moment he gazed back up the tunnel. Nothing but the king's noose waited in that direction. He turned toward the death he did not know.

Dante's hell needed nine levels to capture all the aspects of human suffering. The iron hole of the English only needed two. The chamber he stepped into echoed not with the sounds of slumber but of misery. Five men lay on filthy straw. Two were moaning and clutching their bellies. A man with a filthy bandage over his shoulder stared at the floor and murmured the same short prayer, over and over. A man who looked more like a skeleton than a living creature stared with vacant eyes at one of the cell's two candles.