Original Death (16 page)

“Macaulay!” Duncan exclaimed. “I thought you had second thoughts about leaving the regiment.”

“Naught left for me there.”

“It goes hard for deserters.”

The big Scot grinned. “Way I figure it, the army deserted me. And it only goes hard for those foolish enough to be caught.”

Duncan saw now the pack hanging from the man's shoulder. “You've been busy yourself.”

Macaulay grinned. “Sometimes the quartermaster is careless with supplies.” He lifted the pack to his shoulder. “If we be going west, I know where the army scouts leave their canoes.”

TENONANATCHE HAD BEEN the great east–west thoroughfare of the Iroquois people long before Europeans had arrived and renamed it the Mohawk River. As they paddled upstream Ishmael offered the names of the decaying palisade towns they passed, abandoned in search of fresher soil for crops, and pointed out spirit sites on low overgrown mounds or huge trees that were said to harbor lesser gods of the forest. Duncan studied the boy with the strong face and penetrating eyes, realizing that Hickory John had shown him the sites just as Conawago had shown Duncan similar sites, and regretting the cruel turns of fate that had kept the last three Nipmucs from making such pilgrimages together.

The river was used by both the Iroquois and the soldiers who traveled between Albany and the western forts. Four times approaching canoes forced them to hide in overhanging alders. Once, six canoes loaded with scarlet-coated British infantry glided past going west. The others proved to be natives hurrying by as if on urgent business.

By late afternoon dark clouds began rolling toward them from the west. The storm moved quickly, flinging lightning into the steep hills. The wind rose, bending the grass along the banks, pushing the alders and willows, then with a sudden blast it jerked the bow of the canoe toward the bank.

Ishmael, clutching his spear, jumped off as they reached the shallows and pulled the canoe onto the muddy shore. There was no chance of maneuvering their light craft into such a wind, and the lightning was getting closer. Duncan called out for the boy to help haul the canoe higher up the bank, but suddenly Ishmael seemed to forget his companions. He stood staring into the woods.

Duncan leapt into the water, steadying the canoe for Macaulay as he climbed out. The sky was darkening rapidly, giving new brilliance to the violent flashes of lightning. Macaulay shouted at the boy to help carry their packs, but still Ishmael did not respond, and now Duncan saw that the boy was gazing down a tunnel of foliage, created by dense trees arching over a trail leading to a solitary bark lodge that appeared to have been abandoned many years before.

Macaulay gave a yelp as lightning struck across the river. Rain began slanting downward. He grabbed his pack and ran past them toward the lodge, Duncan at his heels.

They glanced at each other as they reached the sturdy structure, grinning at their luck at finding shelter, but Duncan paused. Ishmael still had not moved. The boy was already soaked by the heavy rain, and as a massive strike of lightning crashed behind him, Duncan darted back and pulled the boy to the lodge. He called the boy's name repeatedly when he got him under the cover of the old bark roof, but Ishmael just kept staring, now into the shadows at the back of the longhouse. The wind was blowing even harder, the temperature dropping steadily. The river was barely visible through the sheets of rain.

Duncan saw that Macaulay too was staring, though it was at Ishmael. In his hand the big Scot clutched the iron nail many soldiers kept to clean their weapons. In the Highlands iron had always been a charm against evil.

“He's soaked,” Duncan said. “We need a fire.”

Macaulay gave no sign of hearing until Duncan shook his arm and pointed to the pile of dry wood along one wall. “We're not going anywhere the rest of this day,” he said. “You tend to the fire.” He gestured to the water dripping through the old bark roof. “I'll make a dry place.”

Longhouses had a framework of beams overhead, where smaller logs provided shelves for storage and from which blankets or skins were hung to divide the dwellings into family compartments. Duncan found several old skins lying on the ground and draped them over a section of overhead beams above Macaulay's sputtering flames.

Only when Duncan led Ishmael to the flames did the boy acknowledge his presence. “This is the place I sought,” the youth said. “But I never would have found it. The storm brought us here.”

Macaulay muttered a curse.

“It's just an old Iroquois lodge,” Duncan assured him, but he recalled the boy's earlier description of their destination: the place where witches were made. The tribes had their own lore of supernatural creatures. Hetty Eldridge had come out of the wilderness under the guise of a treaty, but in fact the tribes had forced her out because they preferred the witch to work her spells in the European world.

“There's a tale of a magic trickster who travels in and out of the spirit world,” Ishmael said. “Sometimes she traps travelers to make them her slaves on the other side.”

“Traps them?” Duncan asked.

“Entices them with what they want. If you are hungry after a long day she will have pots of maize and strawberries waiting. If you need shelter a lodge appears.”

Macaulay eyed the boy uneasily before quickly laying more wood on the fire.

“Surely not a decaying one with a leaky roof,” Duncan pointed out, forcing a grin.

“A new one would make you suspicious,” came Ishmael's sober reply. The boy's hand gripped the amulet that hung from his neck.

Duncan left his companions to stand at the entry, surveying the landscape. Iroquois lodges were built in bottomlands and were abandoned when the soil in their maize and squash fields was depleted. The lodge should have overgrown fields nearby, but there were none.

As the daylight faded Duncan went to search for more firewood, leaving Macaulay to coax heat into their little pot of corn mush and berries as Ishmael absently drew with a stick on the dirt floor. The rain had subsided to a soft drizzle.

He carried an armful of wood into the lodge and left again, slipping
into the thick growth at the edge of the clearing. Duncan kept telling himself that the uneasiness he felt was because of Ishmael's strange behavior, nothing more, but he also remembered now a night on a mountaintop with Conawago when the northern lights had been eerily dancing across the sky. The old Nipmuc sage had spoken of places where the spirit world intersected with this world, where beings from the other side might slip across on missions from the spirits. He was angry at himself for letting the skittishness of his companions affect him, but he had also learned such things, and such places, were often metaphors for Conawago, that they were ways of speaking of things that otherwise would be too painful to discuss directly.

The forest around the lodge was unnaturally quiet. The air seemed unsettled, and he suspected more severe weather was coming. He would have expected that birds would be flying in the lull between storms, that in the dusk deer and other small mammals would be active. But there were no birds, no deer, no fox, no squirrels. He circuited the site in increasingly wide circles, walking along the riverbank then stealthily cutting back into the forest. On his third circuit he halted above a low open swale overgrown with brush and small trees along its sides. He realized that it was a less used continuation of the path from the river. The lodge had not been the original focus of the path, only a waypoint, as though it had been built after the passageway. He followed it toward a waist-high mound, perhaps ten paces in diameter, built in a circle of trees. In its center was a post with leather straps. Some were old and rotting, others were fresh. He backed away as he realized he had seen such a post before, in Pennsylvania. It was a
gaondote
, a prisoner's post, where captives were tormented and sometimes put to death. As his spine pressed against a tree, he turned to look into the eye sockets of a human skull embedded in the wood. He clenched his jaw, forcing himself to study the adjoining trees despite his pounding heart. Half a dozen held skulls of large forest creatures. The mound was a place of ritual, and of death.

He continued to scout until he found a campsite near the riverbank that had been used only a week or two earlier by a party that had chosen
not to sleep in the old lodge. Crude hoops made from branches tied in circles with leather straps hung along the edge of the clearing. He lifted one and smelled the wood, noting the leaves and bundles of berries. Mountain ash, or rowan in the Old World. There were several hoops of ash, but also oak and alder. They were not skin-stretching hoops as he first thought, they were charms against evil spirits, charms he had seen as a child. They were not made by Iroquois but by those who had learned to fear demons in the wild and ageless Highlands.

He paced about the campsite, noting how close it was to the water. Soldiers of the northern campaigns had been trained by American rangers not to camp so close to bodies of water for fear of being trapped against them. The Scots who had been here had not been under the discipline of an officer. A small patch of red in a bush caught his eye, and he plucked it from the branches. It was a crude human figure, made of dried corn husks in the fashion of the dolls he had seen in Iroquois villages. But as he lifted it he saw it was no doll. It wore a little red coat and sported a tuft of grey squirrel fur gathered at the back with a length of red thread like a miniature wig. It was a British officer. Jammed between its eyes was a little arrow. It was a campsite of deserters.

As Duncan threw the figure down, more thunder rumbled in the west. He began picking up dried branches. They would need a lot of firewood that night.

Ishmael was attentive but subdued when Duncan returned, and he joined without argument when Duncan asked him to help retrieve more wood. It was Macaulay now who was withdrawn, silently eating his hot mush, then standing at the entry to look into the falling night. As he turned to retire to his blankets, he made the sign of the cross on his chest.

Later, after Duncan made a sentinel's circuit around the lodge, Ishmael sat with him across the fire, studying Macaulay's now sleeping form. “The way he marked his chest,” Ishmael said, “it is the way of the black robes. But the British do not follow those ways.”

Duncan hesitated. Calvin's reformers had ravaged the
monasteries and cathedrals of the lowlands, but the Church of Rome had a centuries-old grip in the Highlands and the Hebrides. The sign of the cross had been so common in his boyhood he had thought nothing of the Scot's gesture. But the boy was right. The British had driven out all the vestiges of Catholicism, banned priests from serving with the army, banned mass among the troops. “It is a thing from western Scotland,” he offered, staring at the big infantryman. The Jacobites, the Scottish rebels who supported the exiled Stewart prince, were ardent Catholics, but the army dealt severely with anything hinting of their old enemies.

“They do it against devils,” Ishmael said.

“An invocation of God.”

“Against devils,” Ishmael repeated. “Dark things of the night. My grandfather helped me join with my protector,” he explained, touching the little amulet pouch that hung around his neck over the medallion that was now inside his shirt. “Also against devils.”

“You have been raised an Anglican,” Duncan reminded him.

“Grandfather said I would never understand Europeans if I did not understand their god, that I would never be able to truly speak with some Europeans unless I know how to speak to their god.” He fixed Duncan with a challenging stare. “But when my grandfather took me alone into the woods, to the old worship trees, to the boneyards of our people, he would tell me never to forget I had no cross in my blood.”

Duncan chewed on the words. “He meant all your blood is Nipmuc.”

“The only young one left in all the world, he told me. Once we watched a newborn fawn taking its first steps. If that was the last fawn ever to live, he asked, what should the life of that fawn be?” Ishmael fell silent. The boy clearly struggled for an answer.

“It would be for the fawn to keep alive the essence of the deer,” Duncan suggested, knowing that they were not speaking of deer but of Nipmucs, and that words would never be enough.

Ishmael gazed into the flames. “It is for me to keep the stories and the prayers of our people alive. When I was only six he began telling me them
in cycles, different ones every night for a month, then when the moon shifted we would start over, until I could repeat them all.”

Duncan too stared at the fire. He knew it was irresponsible at a camp in the wilderness, that doing so would hurt his night vision should trouble come, but somehow he could not leave the boy, could not stop from trying to see what the boy saw in the flames. “We went to a burial ground in the mountains above Bethel Church,” he said softly. “The maples around it were all bloodred even though other trees had no color yet. A stream flowed by with silver water. A Mohawk named Sagatchie was with me, who read the stories on his skin. The animals of the forest paused to watch when we lifted Towantha onto his burial platform.”

As the boy studied Duncan with his bright intelligent eyes, something seemed to fall away between them. He leaned forward and listened as Duncan described every detail of the death rites for his grandfather, nodding as if in gratitude when Duncan described how they had found a snake and how he had left salt in the Highland tradition. When he finished Duncan tossed more wood on the fire, and they both stared into the flames again.