Original Death (24 page)

He drifted into a fog of despair and fatigue. He would do better in the next life, he mused. This life had been one misadventure after another, just a series of fits and starts with no real purpose, no anchors except for Conawago and the gentle Sarah Ramsey. He had wanted nothing more
than to be a doctor among his beloved clansmen, but the Highland life had been systematically destroyed, leaving him a transported criminal, an indentured servant, a fugitive who found his way into prison every few months. Now, here, it ended, in the camp of a bloodthirsty prophet.

A new vision seized him. Conawago was escorting him into a council fire where Scottish and Indian chieftains spanning many centuries silently passed around a pipe. From somewhere in the shadows behind them came a melancholy song.
I am coming home, mother
, the hoarse, faltering voice chanted.
On the wings of my eagle I fly
.

“May the old ones embrace you. May the old ones sing your name in the dawn.” These were the words of a tribal ritual, a refrain in response to a death song. Suddenly Duncan realized they had been spoken near his ear. He was abruptly awake. Beside him Sagatchie gazed into the shadows ahead of them, reciting the mourning words. A bright moon had risen, making his features clearly visible, and the stoic warrior's face was full of emotion.

“I am coming, Mother,” came the song again, “with a fat deer on my back,” the voice croaked from in front of Duncan.

His heart rose into his throat. The dead Delaware was singing.

Chapter Nine

“H
e knows he is about to cross over,” Sagatchie whispered, his voice full of admiration. “I have known many Lenape,” he declared, more loudly. “Your tribe may be broken, but its warriors are not.”

The song faded away. Words came in faltering gasps. “There was a time . . . when the Lenape . . . were the masters of the forest. All along the great rivers tribes trembled at our name.”

“With a thousand such as you my friend, you would be masters again,” Sagatchie replied.

“How are you called?” came the weak voice.

“Sagatchie of the Wolf clan of the Mohawk.”

“I am Osotku of the Beaver clan, though few of my clan yet survive.”

“Where is your hearth, Osotku?”

“In Pennsylvania along the Forks of the Delaware . . .” The phrases came piecemeal, punctuated by groans of pain. “Near Nazareth. My wife waits in our cabin with our four children. Some damned European said the land was given to him by his government. He said I had to pay him eight pounds or he would drive my family out. I went for furs so my family would not be slaves. I had enough to pay for the land, but these dogs who follow that Mingo butcher said the furs were theirs. I said they do not own
the animals, that the furs belong to the one who does the work for them.” Another agonized groan cut off the words, and Osotku's head slumped onto his chest. “I am coming home,” he moaned.

“They do not own what the spirits have provided,” Sagatchie agreed.

The voice from the shadows came ever more slowly, in struggling breaths. “It took fifty of these damned Huron and Mingo dogs to kill me.”

A warrior's glint suddenly lit Sagatchie's eyes. “Hurons? Do you know the clan of these Hurons?”

“Porcupine clan, and Fox clan.”

“You have not seen the Wolverine?”

Duncan glanced in surprise at his friend. In the solemn moment of the Delaware's death he wanted to speak of tribal clans.

Osotku seemed to welcome the question. Sagatchie and he were speaking as two fellow warriors. “They were the dogs who took me on the lake, but when the oracle with the great hound arrived, they went north. The one with the iron head took my furs and my ears with him. His name is Paxto. You know his clan?”

Sagatchie spat the name like a curse. “Paxto! He was the one who attacked our council fire and destroyed it many years ago,” Sagatchie explained. “Our blood feud with the Wolverines goes back to my father's father's time.”

Osotku seemed to fade in and out of consciousness, in and out of reality, for he raved now, speaking names none of them knew, of stalking animals in the forest and of other events of his too-short life. “Black angel came last night,” he murmured, “fluttering about with a laceback. Come to see the handiwork. A fine son,” he groaned after a moment, then, “this cabin will be ours forever.” Later came, “I knew the crossed boys in the Ohio years ago. They liked games of chance. They always cheated.”

His words died away. He coughed, and a dark smear of blood oozed out of his lips. Duncan clenched his jaw at the thought of the agony the man was suffering. Slices from his flesh. Amputations. Spikes of wood driven into his torso. Yet there was no hint of self-pity or fear from the
warrior. Duncan would not serve as the half-king's pawn, but he doubted he would ever be able to show such courage or endure such prolonged pain. His medical training told him there would be ways for him to end such torment early.

“They say there's murder on the other side now,” Osotku said suddenly. “Europeans have found their way in and are killing the first men. I don't know what to believe. I will find out soon. Don't tell my family . . . about that story. I don't want . . . them to be frightened when they cross over.” The man fell silent, then after another minute the song started anew. “I am coming home, Mother. Make the sky clear. I am coming home on wings.” The words grew fainter and fainter until at last Duncan did not know if he was only hearing the song in his own mind.

Duncan was going to die just as the Lenape died. A great emptiness grew inside him. He felt shame at knowing he could never die so nobly.

“May the old ones embrace you. May the old ones sing your name in the dawn.” The whispered chant was taken up again not just by Sagatchie but also by Kassawaya now. Duncan gazed at the moon for a long time, eventually realizing he too was whispering the mourning chant.

The moon was high overhead when Duncan was awakened by a shower of dirt. Sagatchie had twisted about so his legs faced Duncan, and he was kicking towards him. “The guard ran away,” the Mohawk reported. “You said Conawago lies in that lodge at the top of the village. There is a disturbance up there.” As he spoke, frantic voices were raised. Torches were being lit. He turned to the sound of running feet, and to his horror he saw three warriors speeding toward them, one with a torch and two with scalping knives drawn. He began pushing himself upright against his post, intending at least a few well-placed kicks before he succumbed. But they were on him too quickly. Before he could make sense of their intentions, they had cut his bindings and were urgently pulling him toward the lodge on the hill.

At least a hundred figures stood outside the small structure, watching it in nervous silence. Duncan was led past them and escorted inside, to the low platform where Conawago still lay.

Only the oldest of the native women who had tended him earlier was still there. She took Duncan's hand. “He called out from the other side. He said, get the Scot with the yellow hair. Give him his pack so he can rally the spirits, he said. You must call the gods, he said, because they are confused and fleeing!” She gestured to one of the guards, who dropped Duncan's tattered pack at his side.

Duncan took several long breaths, studying Conawago, trying to understand. Then he slowly nodded. “Everyone must leave,” he said. “Heap more cedar on the corner fires, then make a circle around the lodge and chant the mourning song until you hear my call.”

He stood silently over his friend when the chamber was emptied, pulling down the robe and gazing at the flint knife. Sagatchie would say the gods had given him the opportunity to perform the warrior's duty. Instead he pulled up the robe and took the old man's hand. “I will do this my friend, but I do it to call you back. You are still needed in this world. The children need you. Your nephew needs you.” Duncan's eyes misted. “I need you,” he whispered after a moment, and to his joy the leathery hand squeezed his.

A hundred voices began chanting outside.

He leapt up, unloading his pack to reach the bundle wrapped in old muslin at the bottom, the only thing of his old life that had come with him across the sea. He thrust the thin reeds in his mouth to moisten them as he reverently laid out the intricately carved drones and chanter. It was minutes before the drones were tuned and the bladder filled with air, but at last he clamped the blowstick in his teeth and fingered the chanter.

The first notes of the pipes always wrenched his heart. A door opened somewhere inside his mind and images flooded out, of his grandfather in his fishing dory, his mother laughing as lambs frolicked around her, his youngest brother riding on their father's broad shoulder. He paced slowly around the platform as he played, choosing the old solemn tunes, the music of Highland ritual. Before leaving the chamber, he extracted the snakeskin he had taken from the ashes of Hetty's hut and tied it around his head.
When he finally stepped into the entry, every torchlit face locked on him, wearing expressions of awe and, on some, fear.

As he began to circle the small lodge, walking through the scented smoke of the cedar boughs, the members of the Revelator's army dropped to their knees. Several Scots scattered among them raised their bonnets in salute. Macaulay, near the front, stood with half a dozen other Highlanders, his eyes clouding, his bonnet held tightly to his chest. On his second circuit the ranks parted to make way for the half-king and his guards.

“Enough!” he shouted. He had obviously been elsewhere, or asleep, not aware of the summons that had come through Conawago. “Enough!” he repeated as Duncan continued, staring defiantly at him. The half-king's eyes were wild with anger. Scar, at his side, lifted his war ax. Duncan played even more loudly. He would rather die like this, with his clan's pipes in hand, than tied to a post.

The Revelator grabbed the ax from his deputy and was advancing on Duncan when a high-pitched scream rose from inside the lodge. His pipes sputtered to silence.

The scream continued for longer than Duncan would have considered possible, a high ululation that uncannily seemed to match the sound of the pipes, as if it were some response from the other side. Those gathered nearest the entry suddenly shrank back as an otherworldly figure materialized out of the shadows inside. The half-king gasped and stepped behind his warriors.

The creature's hair was matted with thick red pigment, which ran down her bare shoulders. She was naked except for a cloth looped around her waist, her skin covered with dried moss and feathers of many colors and shapes. Where patches of skin showed there was only a slippery, slimy substance. Several of those nearest him looked back in alarm at Duncan as though they were convinced he had summoned the creature from the other world.

Not until she spoke did recognition dawn in Duncan.

“They are angry!” the woman cried out in a scratchy birdlike voice.
“The gods say you ignore the ways of the people!” Her pale eyes were wild. “The gods say treat with the Grand Council or be damned!”

“It's just the damned Welsh woman!” the Revelator growled, but no one seemed to hear him. It was indeed not Hetty Eldridge before them but Hetty the seer, Hetty the witch who had once frightened the tribes so much they had sent her back to the Europeans. The half-king could not eject her, for his disciples had embraced her as an oracle.

She did a strange dance now, a stuttering step of two paces forward and one back, bobbing her head like a bird all the while as she murmured words Duncan could not understand, waving long skeleton arms at the assembly. Not exactly arms, just femur bones extending beyond her hands that she gripped so tightly they seemed part of her body. She shouted the haunting words in a harsh, screeching voice, her head now raised to the moon, then every few paces she halted, lowered her head, and aimed her bones at the ranks of frightened onlookers. Nearly every Indian gripped his or her protective amulet. Then finally she swept her bone-arm around the assembly and stopped when it pointed to the Revelator. She spoke now in the tongue of the Haudenosaunee. “The gods say the Council must be respected!” she screeched, then she switched back to her alien tongue before taking up her jarring dance again. The Revelator tried to reach her, but she kept moving in and out of the crowd, which closed about her as she passed. The words were long mouthfuls of consonants, sounds that began to sound oddly familiar to Duncan.