Original Death (13 page)

With a sinking heart Duncan saw there was no one else in the cell, no boy, no refugee from the massacre of Bethel Church.

He retreated a step, reflexively wanting to be away from the squalor and suffering, then looked again, more slowly, at the prisoners. For a moment he sensed Conawago at his side, so intensely that he thought he smelled the sweetfern sprigs the Nipmuc kept in his pockets, and he saw in his mind's eye the opened, extended hand that always meant he expected
something of Duncan. He clenched his jaw then knelt by the first of the prostrate figures. The man was ghostly pale and hot to the touch despite the chill of the air. Duncan saw a rag hanging on a bucket of water and made a compress for his forehead. The next man was much the same but did not even respond to his touch. Duncan gazed in horror at the black splotches on the face of the third. The fourth man, a soldier with long blond locks not much older than Duncan, gazed at the candle but did not see. He had been dead for hours.

Duncan studied the pathetic souls of the cell. There was almost nothing he could do for them. He approached the man with the bandaged shoulder, whose gaze was now fixed on the shadows at the back of the cell. The prisoner winced when Duncan pulled at the bandage but did not stop him from unwinding it. The long piece of linen had been applied by an experienced hand, probably by a regimental surgeon, but it should have been replaced long before. Duncan threw the foul cloth into the shadows and examined the long ragged wound. It was dirty but not festering. He retrieved the bucket with its wooden ladle and sluiced water over it.

“Huron tomahawk,” the prisoner declared in a hoarse voice. “I killed the bastard. Now he kills me.”

“The flesh is not mortified,” Duncan replied. “You just need to keep it clean.”

The man glanced at the prisoners on the straw and cast a bitter grin at Duncan, seeming to indicate that Duncan was only saving him for a worse fate. Duncan began ripping a strip from his shirttail. When he had the bandage ready, he took a cartridge-like container from a belt pouch and poured out its contents, a dark brown powder, over the wound. “A wise old healer makes this,” he explained. “He speaks words over it which his people think give it great power.”

“You mean a witch or an Indian?” The man asked, wincing as Duncan tightened the bandage over the wound.

“They say the people of the forest hold secrets that go back to the beginning of the earth.”

“And they send their lads deep into the earth to dig more secrets out,” the man said. He gazed again into the deepest shadows.

With a rush of hope Duncan called out toward the darkness. “Ishmael?”

There was no response. “
Shay kon
,” he said, trying the greeting of the Mohawks, then added, “Ojiwa of the Nipmucs? I come from your uncle.”

The movement was barely noticeable at first, a shadow moving across darker shadow.

Duncan straightened and repeated the Iroquois greeting, in a near whisper. When Ishmael stepped forward, he wanted to embrace the boy but instead stood still very still, as he might before a wild creature of the forest.

“They would never put children in here, so I was sure he had to be a ghost when I first saw him,” the wounded soldier said. “Suddenly he was just standing there, all pale and silent, staring at us like he had come to escort one of us across to the other side.”

Although the boy wore a shirt, it was unbuttoned. Duncan could see the traces of whitewash on his skin. But this was not the angry world breaker who had left the Pritchard farm, this was just another forlorn prisoner.

The boy studied Duncan warily, keeping himself slightly bent, as if ready to leap away at any second.

“I am the particular friend of Conawago, elder of the Nipmuc tribe,” Duncan declared, and he reached into his waistcoat pocket. “Kinsman of Hickory John.”

“Towantha,” the boy replied, using his grandfather's tribal name.

“Towantha,” Duncan repeated, and he pulled out the wooden medallion he had found in front of the dead Nipmuc.

The boy's eyes went wide. He took one step forward, then another.

“A twine?” the soldier interrupted, pointing at Duncan's sleeve. “You've been marked with a damned twine? You're bound for the gallows?”

Duncan just nodded, not taking his gaze off the boy. “I've been looking for you, Ishmael,” he said.

The youth darted forward and grabbed the medallion, clutching it against his heart. After a moment he looked up and studied Duncan with uncertain but intelligent eyes. “They would hang you for looking for me?” His English was slow but fluent, his voice heavy with fear.

“They would hang me for a killing at Bethel Church.”

“But you were not one of the killers. I did not see all their faces, but none had yellow hair.” The boy draped the medallion around his neck.

“We arrived not long after, seeking you and your grandfather. A patrol found me and Conawago with the bodies.”

“Conawago.” The youth mouthed the name in a reverent tone. “My grandfather spoke the name in the way he spoke of the old gods. He was waiting, praying Conawago would come. One last letter, he said.”

“I thought he sent letters every year.”

Ishmael turned to look into the flame. “He was making plans to leave. He didn't want me to know, but my friend Lizzie heard him speaking with her father about taking me into their home. They were cleaning out a storage room for me to sleep in. I could see the pain in his eyes. He was trying to find a way to tell me. Instead he would just recite old tales of Nipmucs who were called away to help the spirits when there was trouble on the other side.”

“Away to where?”

“One night I found him gone from his bed. He was in his shop. He had made a ring of fire, and in the center of the ring was an old knife with a flint blade. I thought he was going to complain that I should be in bed, but he just gestured for me to sit beside him. He was disturbed, and solemn. More than solemn. It was like he was stretched very thin, like something of him was somewhere else. He spoke to the spirits with old words, and then he was silent for a long time, his eyes not seeing, like his own spirit had gone away.” Ishmael glanced up at Duncan, confirming he still listened. That he still believed.

Duncan nodded. He had seen Conawago go away in such a fashion at fragrant fires on moonlit mountaintops.

“When he came back he shook me and said terrible things were happening on the other side, that if someone didn't go and fix them it would mean the end of all things.”

Duncan stared into the candle, silently cursing a world that had to burden a young boy with such thoughts.

“The end of all things,” the boy repeated. “The next day I asked him what he meant, thinking I hadn't heard right. He wouldn't tell me, but he didn't deny saying the words.”

“Ishmael, why did you seek out the schoolmaster's mother?” Duncan asked.

He had pushed too far. The boy's face took on a stony expression and he glanced toward the shadows from which he had come.

“I could have gone north, disappeared into the woods,” Duncan tried. “But there is a bond between my clan and Conawago's clan. Your clan.”

“You are not of the forest.”

“I am of the mountain and sea, from the land called Scotland. The English killed my clan.” He looked back to the other prisoners on the pallets, toward the disease and death. They were all asleep, or unconscious. He had done all he could for them. “We will need some kind of light,” he whispered to the Nipmuc boy.

Ishmael stared at him for several breaths then with a quick nod gestured Duncan toward the deeper shadows. Duncan freed the nearest candle from the wax droppings that sealed it to its rock and followed.

The boy had lowered himself onto a blanket. In his hand was a snakelike piece of wax. As Duncan held his candle closer, he saw that Ishmael had braided together several heavy threads from the blanket and had been pressing wax around the braids, using it as a wick, rubbing the wax in his hands to make it pliable. Duncan lowered the candle and with gestures showed the boy how to hold his makeshift light so he could drip more wax onto it, sealing the wick then dipping the threads into the wax pooled at the top.

Duncan fought a terrible foreboding about what they were about to
do. “These passages have many forks,” he said, struggling to keep his voice calm. “How will we choose the route?”

The Nipmuc boy extended a makeshift pouch made from a cloth torn from the blanket. He nudged it, and shapes inside it began to stir. Duncan's grin was hollow. The hope was as thin as a thread, but it was the only one they had.

They worked for another hour on the little candle, then Duncan warned they could not risk waiting much longer. Their guides would only serve at night, and judging by the flight of the other bats, it was already hours after sunset. As he returned the bigger candle to its base, a big hand appeared on his shoulder.

“Macaulay!” Duncan gasped as he turned toward the man. “You fool!”

“I'm in this with ye, McCallum.”

Duncan made a frustrated gesture toward the pallets. “It's smallpox! You've come to the smallpox!”

“As ye and the boy did.”

Duncan pulled Ishmael closer to the light. “Look at his face.” He had not forgotten the words of Madame Pritchard. The boy had had the pox and carried the marks on his cheeks. “He won't get it again. And I took the inoculation in Edinburgh.” Duncan's professors had insisted all the medical students receive the controversial treatment, both to experience the mild course of the disease it caused and to protect the population of the college.

Macaulay eyed the men on the pallets uneasily, then shrugged. “And didn't I serve a year in the Indies and never once sick? I'm as healthy as a horse. I am fated to die charging at the enemy with a sword in me hand.”

“Healthy as a horse and as big as one,” Duncan added. “You might not be able to follow where we are going.”

Macaulay saw now how the boy lingered impatiently at the entry, the makeshift candle now lit in his hand, and seemed to finally comprehend. “There be only death waiting farther inside this mountain, McCallum.”

“Not if we follow our guides,” Duncan replied and was about to join
the boy when one of the prisoners moaned. He was kneeling at the last pallet, shaking the blond-haired man.

“He's gone,” Duncan said as he pulled the soldier away and led him back to his pallet. He turned and watched in confusion as Macaulay unfastened the twine around his arm. The big Scot murmured a prayer over the corpse then tied the twine around the dead man's arm. “Your age, same color hair,” Macaulay pointed out. “They'll take time to work up the courage to look down here for you. Then when they do, this will confuse them all the more.”

Duncan slowly nodded then mouthed his own silent prayer for the dead man and turned to Ishmael.

Moments later they were hurrying down the tunnel, past the last trace of light from the torches above, not stopping until they reached the first intersection of two passages.

Macaulay cursed. “Surely this is folly. We have no idea—”

“Most of the bats fly up the tunnel,” Duncan interrupted. “But not all of them.”

The boy reached into his makeshift pouch and pulled out one of his captive creatures. He held the bat gently near his lips, whispering to it, then released it. The bat flew back and forth as if to get its bearings then shot down the left-hand tunnel. Ishmael followed so quickly that he was nearly out of sight before Duncan and Macaulay sprang after him.

The boy set a fast pace and muttered a syllable of glee when the tunnel began to ascend. No one gave voice to the fears Duncan knew they all shared. Their little candle would last no more than an hour.

They reached another fork, and another, each time releasing one of Ishmael's bats and following its chosen path. Several times they had to bend to their knees to crawl, the boy surrendering the candle to Duncan, who managed an awkward gait while holding the rapidly diminishing light. Macaulay began murmuring a prayer.

Suddenly they arrived in a cavern that had been heavily worked with pick and chisel, opening into three more tunnels. “One more,” the boy
declared uneasily as he produced the last bat, spoke to it in his native tongue, and released it. It circled about then shot straight upward. As Duncan extended the candle over his head, the flame bent.

“Wind!” Ishmael exclaimed.

“God be praised!” Macaulay exclaimed, then he quickly quieted as the flame revealed that the ceiling was several feet over their heads. As they stared hopelessly upward, the candle sputtered out, leaving them in a cold empty blackness.

A long dreadful moment passed before anyone spoke.

“Jesus wept!” groaned Macaulay. “We'll never find our way back. T'is our grave for certain.”

Duncan reached out in the darkness, searching for Ishmael, but touching only the cold rock wall. “It's still night. The returning bats will tell us when the sun approaches. Then we just find a way to follow the daylight coming through their hole.” He shifted a few feet and reached out again, finding the boy's shoulder, which he gripped firmly. “A few hours, no more.”