Original Death (18 page)

To his surprise the doeskin contained nothing inside its folds. The
treasure was the skin itself. Its inside surface was covered with faded drawings, images like those of tribal chronicles that told of battles and great chieftains. But these were no stick figure characters of warriors and bears. The images had been done with an artful hand in a European style. A little girl stood at the rail of a great sailing ship, watching whales frolic in the ocean. A young woman stood hand in hand with a man before a prosperous-looking farmhouse. In the next panel the house was burning, the man lay with an arrow in his chest, and the woman was being led away by a neckstrap. Next the woman was at a bark house of the tribes, grinding corn on a stone, then with a tall warrior under a crescent moon. She carried an infant in the next, then stood beside a young boy at a burial scaffold. The next was a scene of Indians casting stones and sticks at the two. In the last the woman and child clung to each other in the night, looking up at a wolf silhouetted by the moon. He thought of the frail woman in the lodge. Maybe Ishmael was right. Maybe Hetty had died and had been called back for one last task on earth.

He spun about, suddenly aware of eyes on his back. The great brown mastiff sat only three paces away, watching him. But there was no anger or challenge in his eyes this time. What Duncan saw there was sadness. He looked back at the last image on the doeskin. It could have been a wolf in the scene. Or it could have been a great dog.

Without knowing why he bowed to the animal, then shifted so the dog too could see the objects. It approached warily, sniffing them attentively. As it did so, a memory stirred unexpectedly. He had seen an old silver coin like that, a precious heirloom preserved by his mother. It was a teething coin, passed down through families for the infants of each new generation. The sad, drunken, angry witch had had a human life once, had been part of a proud family. But she had decided that here, after the massacre at Bethel Church, after receiving a message belt from visitors from the West and destroying her existence in Albany, here she would finally abandon it.

He stayed very still as the dog studied him, pushing its muzzle against his chest as if taking the scent of his heart. When it backed away, Duncan
wrapped the ring in the doeskin, stuffed the skin inside his waistcoat, then packed the other objects in their grey cloth and refastened the bundle to the prisoner post.

As he walked back to the longhouse, the dog followed. By the time he reached the entry it was walking quietly at Duncan's side, as if they were old companions.

The appearance of the creature seemed to awaken something in the Welsh woman. A new light entered her eyes. As her gaze shifted back and forth from the dog to Duncan, he realized it was not so much the arrival of the animal that stirred her as its choice to stand at Duncan's side. It was as if Ishmael, and now the dog, were reconnecting her to the world. She seemed to become aware of her surroundings, and she studied the lodge and then Ishmael and Macaulay as if seeing them for the first time. She touched the boy's hand and ran her fingertips along his forearm with a strangely affectionate motion. “The tribes sometimes call this place the fount of thunder from the way the storms like to settle here,” she said in the voice of a tired old matron. “I hope it did not frighten you.”

Ishmael glanced at Duncan then turned uneasily toward the woman. “I was not scared, Mother,” he said hesitantly. “I was listening. My grandfather thought lightning bolts must be words spoken between the spirits of the sky and spirits of the land. He used to take me out in the storms and listen, marking the differences in the sounds. He taught me how there were different kinds of thunder, whispering thunder and angry thunder, patient thunder and warning thunder.”

Before the boy could react, the woman reached out and pressed him to her breast. The hell dog sniffed Ishmael, then turned to the front of the lodge and sat facing outward, as if protecting them all now.

The woman held the boy for a long time. It was not clear who was comforting whom.

“The dog,” Duncan ventured. “Is he yours?”

Hetty cocked her head. “A warrior belongs to no one. Sometimes he disappears for weeks at a time. But the day that belt came, he was back.”

“In Albany they called him the hell dog.”

The Welsh woman considered his words in silence then nodded, as if approving of the name.

Suddenly Ishmael reached inside his shirt and produced the fletched end of an arrow and tossed it on the ground by the fire. At first Duncan thought he was showing it to Hetty, but then he saw in her face that she had seen it before. He had used the letters, as Duncan had, to find the woman, but then he had shown her the arrow. Duncan picked it up and studied the long stiff feathers of its fletching. The coloring was of a bird unfamiliar to Duncan in a distinctive uniform pattern, each dark grey feather bearing two circles of white. He realized he too had seen the pattern before, drawn in the dirt floor of Hetty's hut beside the crumbled letter Ishmael had left there. It meant something to the woman.

“I stole it from a raider's quiver when he set it down,” Ishmael explained to Duncan, “and broke off the end to show my grandfather afterwards. He knew the fletching of every arrow made on this side of the Mississippi.” He looked up with a melancholy glance at Duncan. “But now I know. It was Mingo,” Ishmael said to Hetty in a questioning tone. “Because you went west, not north, to find your captured son.”

When she did not disagree, he turned to Duncan. “I thought she would give me some notion of where the raiders would go. Then I saw that belt. A Mingo delivered that belt to her.”

“But you raised the alarm in the fort by crying out that Hurons had attacked.”

A spark of mischief flashed in Ishmael's eyes. “Because they would never react if I said they were Mingoes. I thought there was a chance the troops could trap the Mingoes close to town and maybe I could speak with them. I never expected to be arrested.” He paused as he saw the uncertainty still on Duncan's face. “No Mingo would come so far east as Champlain except for his war.”

“His war?” Duncan asked. He glanced at Hetty, suddenly remembering that she had lived with the Mingoes, that they had been the tribe that had banished her.

“The half-king's,” Ishmael said in a near whisper. “The one who spills blood for the old gods.”

Duncan weighed the boy's words and began to glimpse the depth of his pain. “Why,” he asked Hetty, “would his grandfather and the others of Bethel Church have to die to protect the old gods? Why would the old gods need the king's coins? Why take the other children?” Why, he wanted to ask, would a feather and belt of beads cause you to leave your life behind?

Her eyes filled with challenge, as if she resented his questions. “You will have to ask him,” Hetty replied. “If he lets you keep your tongue.”

No, Duncan meant to protest, I have to find Conawago and the children. “We will never find him in the wilderness,” he said instead.

“The white sachem will know where to find him,” she declared, and she began packing for travel.

THEY PADDLED FOR hours, making steady but slow progress, the current against them having strengthened from the rains, with Hetty and Ishmael in the center of their canoe, the old woman fast asleep. The dog had made no effort to climb into their crowded vessel but followed the trail that hugged the bank, keeping pace with long, effortless strides.

They had rounded a big bend in the river when Hetty pointed to a landing where a score of canoes were pulled up on the bank. Macaulay nodded at Duncan's suggestion that he stay hidden near the canoe, then they followed Hetty up a trail that wound through huge sycamore trees.

When the thick trees opened onto a broad field, Duncan expected to find a palisaded fort, and he halted in surprise. A European estate had been transported into the wilderness. The tall three-story house in the center of the sprawling yard was of cut stone, as was a sturdy blockhouse on the hill overlooking the compound. A hundred paces beyond the great house was a mill, its wheel turning against the water of the brook beside it, and a large barn that seemed to be in use as a lodging for native visitors. Several of the Indians could be seen bending over steaming pots at half a dozen
fires, while others worked butter churns and still another group butchered a deer hanging from a tree. He looked back at the house, noticing now its heavy shutters and the narrow slotted windows on the upper floors. The house itself was a fortress.

It had been Macaulay who had revealed the identity of the white sachem, explaining that the taverns of Albany echoed with tales of the legendary William Johnson, who reigned over the colonial and tribal troops in the region, the hot-blooded Irishman who had been awarded a baronetcy after leading the famed victory at Lake George three years before. Duncan tried to recollect what he had read about the man, who often figured in the New York and Philadelphia journals. William Johnson had been an impoverished teenager when he had arrived from Ireland to set up a trading post along the river. No European had been more adept at forming bonds with the Iroquois, and he had quickly risen to become not only the senior emissary between Britain and the tribes but also senior officer of the peculiar militia of the region, which combined tribal warriors with Dutch, German, and English settlers. The Hero of Lake George, the journals had labeled him after he and his irregulars had won the first significant victory for the British at the long lake. He had been lauded not only for defeating the French with his largely Iroquois force but also for saving many French captives when the tribesmen had tried to put them to the knife.

They had arrived amidst the preparation of a feast. Planks were being laid on trestles along the broad front of the house. Several tribal women wearing calico dresses seemed in charge of the household and were directing a small army of younger natives, German settlers, and even several Africans.

Hetty seemed uneasy around so many strangers, but Duncan saw the bright curiosity in Ishmael's eyes, and, leaving his pack and rifle with Hetty as she settled onto a log in the shadows, he led the boy into the throng. The long table was quickly being transformed as tankards and chargers of wood, pewter, and even china materialized on its planks. No one objected when Duncan guided the wide-eyed boy into the huge house. The wide central hallway held several small paintings on its yellow plaster
walls, framed landscapes of mountains and lakes, but otherwise the hall had the air of an arsenal. Racks of muskets lined one side, racks of spear-like spontoons and halberds the other. The walls of the sitting room, however, offered neither signs of war nor of European opulence. They were adorned with the trappings of an Iroquois chief, including a half circle of tribal arrows radiating like the rays of a rising sun from an orange hub. An elegant robe of fur and feathers hung on another wall, under a long ceremonial pipe. Beautifully worked tomahawks and clay bowls with crenulated patterns along their lips lay across the mantle of the fireplace.

“You are welcome in our house,” came a soft, refined voice behind him.

Turning to greet the European woman who spoke, Duncan could not hide his surprise at seeing instead a comely Iroquois woman dressed in a simple vermilion dress. She smiled at his reaction. “Although the anniversary of my birth is not for some weeks, William will soon be off to war once more and has decided to celebrate today. He likes to call our little settlement Fort Johnson, but I prefer to think of it in more hospitable terms. All travelers are welcome in our humble home. Let us pull the thorns from your feet and wipe the dust from your eyes so we may speak as friends.”

The woman in the European clothes, in her very European house, was offering the Iroquois words for welcoming travelers. Duncan grinned but was suddenly very conscious of his unkempt appearance. She smiled again as he pushed back the long strands of hair that had escaped from the tail at his neck. “We have no call on your hospitality, ma'am,” he said awkwardly.

“Of course you do, and I am no madame. I am Molly Brant, and we welcome all visitors, of all nations,” she said and cocked her head at Ishmael in curiosity for a moment before gesturing to the tall, lithe woman who had appeared at her side. “Kass will see to you,” Molly said, then hurried to a group of men carrying chairs from the dining room.

They followed the woman named Kass out the rear door to a bench set by a hand pump where buckets of water and towels lay waiting. Ishmael could not take his eyes off the woman. “You are Mohawk?” the boy blurted out.

“Molly is Mohawk. I am Kassawaya of an Oneida clan.” A gentle smile lifted her high cheekbones. “Many Mohawk and Oneida reside in the household of Colonel Johnson. When the last of my family was sent by the Council to fight in the North, Molly and the Colonel asked me to stay with them.” As she glanced toward the river, Duncan saw the little tattoo of a fish on the woman's neck, above her necklace of glass beads.

“You can bring the big Scot who hides by the canoes. He has nothing to fear from us.”

“He is shy,” Duncan replied, realizing she suspected he was a deserter. “If he smells the ale he may come yet.”

Kass's dark eyes flickered with amusement, then she grew serious. “It is dangerous to travel on the river alone. You will have to choose a binding or one will be forced on you.”

“Binding?” Duncan asked.

“Will you be bound to the king's army? To the French? To the tribes? To the rebels in the West?” With a quick deft motion her hand went to Duncan's belt and pulled away the leather cap Woolford had given him. “Or perhaps to the half-wild rangers?”