Tucked away in a tangle of fishing nets and old barrels, beneath a broken crane, Jack found him. Até was in the shadow of the upright, his bearskin on the planking before him.
‘What are you doing here, Até?’
The Mohawk stepped back into the shadows, drawing Jack in. ‘Watching them,’ he said, gesturing back to the wharf, to the Abenaki still engaged in their search.
‘What are they looking for?’
‘Segunki.’
Jack felt a quickening at the name. He might not have suffered from their slavemaster as long as Até. But the memory of being handicapped like a horse, of fighting like a dog in a pit … He looked to Até’s belt. ‘Where’s his scalp?’
‘On his head.’
At his puzzlement, Até pointed to the bearskin at his feet. Now Jack looked closer, he could see the crown of a head poking out. There was a slight shifting, a muffled moan.
‘You have not killed him yet?’
‘I have not.’ Até peered out to the wharf. The Abenaki were leaving it, their gestures indicating that they were going to search elsewhere.
‘You are saving him for … something else?’ Suddenly a vision came, of a body hanging naked from a rock wall, like a bear carcass stripped of skin. Até had hung like that, exposed to this man’s knife. The idea made Jack a little queasy. Vengeance was something he could understand well. Indeed, since his sight of Craster, his own heart was full of it. But he’d heard many a dark tale in their winter cave of how prolonged vengeance could, should be. He had a feeling that Até had spared his enemy’s life for such purposes – and that he would want to involve Jack in them.
‘Something else, yes.’ Até appeared distracted, by more than the departing Abenaki. Suddenly he turned back. ‘Jack,’ he said, which was unusual enough in itself. ‘I was thinking of Hamlet.’
Jack groaned. ‘Fuck, Até, not now, please.’
‘Yes, now!’ He had to raise his voice above a wind now whistling hard. ‘Hamlet doesn’t kill Claudius when he can. He doesn’t take revenge.’
It was only the absurdity – and a certain gratitude for Time pausing – that made Jack take part in the discussion. ‘He does. He kills Claudius—’
‘But later! Only when he has to, when his uncle tries to kill him again. He doesn’t, like the other wants to, “cut throats in a Church”. He chooses … to accept fate, “the fall of a sparrow”. And then fate gives him his enemy.’
An unconscious warrior at his feet. A pass to England in his pack. A blood enemy walking away, unpunished. Why not discuss a play? Why not?
‘And fate has given you … him.’
‘But now I can choose. Like Hamlet. Kill for vengeance. Slit his throat like a racoon in a snare. Take his scalp. Or …’
‘Or?’
Até thrust his head into the icy wind, sniffed. ‘You smell it? Winter comes. The snow that buries.’ Suddenly, that rare smile came, transforming the Mohawk’s face. ‘And Grandfather Bear will just have gone to sleep.’
Suddenly Jack saw and the lethargy that had settled upon him as he contemplated Time, the numbness that had descended when he’d had the man he’d vowed to kill within the swing of his tomahawk and he’d done nothing, both left him. Six months alone with the man before him meant he needed few words to clarify.
‘Where?’
‘We cannot take him to the cave, for he has been there and will find his way out. But my people have hunting grounds also … there.’ Até gestured to the south.
‘How far? By water or land?’
‘Not far. By land.’
Jack looked into a sky swirling with snow. Até was right. Even Jack could recognize that a storm was gathering. And night was close. ‘Then I will meet you at the horses at midnight.’ Leaning forward, he pulled Até’s ironwood war club from his belt. ‘And I will borrow this.’
‘Daganoweda?’ Até called. But Jack was gone, the wind to his back now. It would blow him once more into the city. It would sweep him to his revenge.
In the six months since Jack had last supped rum in this tavern only a little had changed, the main difference being in the colour of uniforms, for the white of France had been replaced by the red of England. But the same half-caste landlord dispensed liquor and ejected troublemakers, the same whores disappeared to dispatch customers in the alley, the doors barely closing upon them before they were back, shrieking against the cold. Jack was sure that the English counterpart of Hubert sought solace this night with sailor or savage. And if there were less of the latter about, there were still enough, for Amherst had brought his Native allies, mainly Mohawk, north; enough top-knots and tattoos for Jack to remain unnoticed by the man he’d tracked to this place. Yet he need hardly have worried. Craster Absolute was noticing little save for the filling of his tankard and the groping of the maid who filled it.
Jack shifted as the door opened again, turning gratefully to the frosty air. The tavern was the usual fug of heat and smoke and Jack was wearing all his clothes. The scalplock and bearskin proclaimed him an Iroquois. But underneath it his skin was getting used again to the rub of linen and wool. It was uncomfortable yet he bore it; he needed his hands free.
He had waited and watched for an hour. Craster drank and groped and sang and drank more, yet showed no inclination to move outside. Jack was wondering if his bladder was unfillable. Yet it was another of his cousin’s organs that gave Jack his desire. For one of the night-ladies had noticed Craster’s constant touching of the tavern wenches. She had moved in, offered herself, been accepted and he was even now moving towards the door, passing within a foot of Jack, a dull gleam in those set-together eyes, a smirk on the lips.
The night air brought relief. The wind had dropped, the temperature gone up to just this side of freezing. Clouds were rolling over a half-moon. He could smell the coming snow. He stood staring up into the night sky, waiting. Sounds came from the alley, muttered curses, a woman’s whimper of pain swiftly suppressed, a high-pitched groan. Then the whore emerged from the alley, shoving a coin away under her dress with one hand. She didn’t seem startled to see a Mohawk there. ‘Con!’ she said, with a jerk of her head the way she’d come. The doors swung open and sucked her inside.
Most noise was cut off by their closing; he could just hear someone commence another verse from ‘The British Grenadiers’.
Come, come my brave boys, let’s away for the town,
Where the drums they do beat, and the trumpets shall sound.
Our bridge shall be laid, in order to storm ’em;
If they’ll not surrender, so bravely we’ll warm ’em.
Jack was softly humming it as he stepped into the alley. Craster, silhouetted against its end, his piss a stallion’s spray in the moonlight, was humming too. Jack reached him before they’d finished the second verse.
He had thought of all the things he would say, in a speech born of a thousand cruelties, crafted over a lifetime. He had thought of recounting all his cousin’s crimes from child to man, dwelling most on the most horrible of them all, the ravishing of Clothilde Guen. He had thought how he would make Craster feel some of the girl’s terror in the moments before he revealed to the punished just who the punisher was. He had thought he would say and do all that.
Instead, he just hit him with the war club.
Até had said their destination was nearby, in a valley where he had hunted; but Jack had come to realize that the Iroquois had a very different relationship to both distance and time. So he was greatly relieved when Até dismounted towards evening of the third day of hard riding with a gesture to show they’d arrived. The driving snow had hindered and the swaying, hooded men riding before them had added to the exhaustion of all. They had little enough food, only what they’d gathered in their hasty leaving of Montréal and what they’d scavenged and traded for from sparse settlements along the way; not really enough for four young men. They also rationed that little because they’d need some for the return.
The two prisoners had remaine
d under hoods fashioned of oat sacks, even to eat, to shit, to sleep, their hands bound. Now, in the clearing that Até indicated was their destination, having re-secured their hands around the trunk of a beech, Jack and Até simultaneously jerked the headpieces clear.
Both Craster and Segunki emerged gasping, their faces red and chafed from the material’s rubbing, their lips rimed in the pemmican that had been their main diet. Both sported near-identical bruises where war clubs had struck them, though Craster’s had a crust of blood at its centre. His gold hair was akimbo, a disordered profusion compared to the part-shaved scalp of the Abenaki, while Segunki’s face-paint had been smeared into some indeterminate colour. Both, however, wore identical expressions of fear and outrage.
It was the latter that manifested itself first in the Englishman. ‘How … dare you treat an officer of the Crown in such a manner? You will be punished for this, unless you return me instantly to my regiment! Instantly, do you hear?’
Até turned and said, in Iroquois, the only tongue they had spoken in the entire trip at Jack’s instigation, ‘He must indeed have your blood, Daganoweda, for he does not whine and beg but shouts.’
Jack nodded. ‘I never called him a coward. He’s too stupid to be one. But every other name I have given him is also true. He is a brute and a rapist and I cannot remember a time when I did not hate him.’
Something in the tone caused Craster’s next tirade to abort. Instead he stared at Jack, studied the tattoos, the scalplock. Then he obviously shook the preposterous idea from his much-abused head and was about to embark on another rant when Segunki spoke. Jack had only picked up a few Abenaki words in his time at St Francis and the speed with which they poured out now admitted no understanding. The tone was clear, as Até rapidly confirmed.
‘This one does not have your cousin’s fire. He whines and begs and bargains.’ Até uttered a short sentence in Abenaki before continuing, ‘I have told him to rest easy. He will know his fate soon enough.’
Ignoring both plea and threat, they rose from their squat, the Mohawk leading Jack around the small valley, pointing out its suitability. Water there was, under a fresh sheet of ice created by winter’s harsh return. New snow revealed deer tracks and, in one place, the unmistakable five-toed print of a bear.
‘Good,’ said Jack at the sight. Indeed, all was well. If there was no cave, there was balsam and hemlock a-plenty, assuming the Abenaki knew how to craft them into a shelter. Snow scraped up revealed the clover-like minty leaves and their red berries Jack had eaten before and, in a bog on their route in, Jack had noticed cattails thrusting up feathery leaves. There was just enough to survive on. Just as much, anyway, as he and Até had had.
The snow had started to fall again, heralding the long-anticipated big storm. Até was impatient to be away. He led the horses up to the last ridge they’d descended, then came back to Jack. Swiftly cutting two hemlock boughs, he handed one over. ‘To sweep over our tracks,’ he said. ‘Don’t want them to follow us out.’
When all was ready, they went and stood in front of the two bound men. The increasing cold had removed much of Craster’s bluster, frozen Segunki’s pleas. They stared numbly up at their captors now, eyes following as Até moved behind them, untied Craster, to his very temporary relief for he was swiftly rebound to the same tree as the Abenaki, their fingers almost conjoined. When he was done, Até once more took his place beside Jack and nodded.
Jack turned back to the captives. His voice was soft. ‘Craster Absolute,’ he said.
The gaze leapt to him. ‘Eh?’ he muttered.
‘Do you not know me?’
The thought that had come before, that had obviously been dismissed as a phantasm, madness following suffering, now returned. The eyes narrowed into a stare of disbelief. ‘No. No! It cannot be. Cannot be …’
Jack leaned down. ‘It is. Exceedingly strange to you, I am sure. But true.’
For a moment, Jack wondered if he’d inadvertently spoken in Iroquois, so lacking in comprehension did Craster’s face appear to be. Then suddenly he had it and something else came with it. Hope.
‘Jack! My dear cousin! I am … amazed! You live.’
‘I do.’
‘By all that is holy!’ Craster was nearly in raptures. ‘Your mother, my aunt, will be so pleased. She asked me to look out for you before I embarked, she …’ A memory of Lady Jane came that obviously didn’t tally with the vision of family he was trying to create and Jack suspected why. His mother knew everything about the brute’s behaviour. But Craster rallied. ‘She will be delighted when I take her the news.’
‘And why will you be the bearer of such tidings?’
Incomprehension, hope, still gripped him. ‘Egad, Jack, you are in the right. We will take her the news together.’
‘And do you think,’ Jack spoke still more softly, ‘that I have brought you here just to let you go?’
Craster’s face, strained by its assumption of fellowship, slipped into more customary grooves. As Jack had told Até, his cousin was every kind of villain but a coward. ‘Then why have you brought me here, sir? To kill me? It would be just your sort of poltroon’s trick. Then why don’t you get on with it, you turd? Our family shall know of it somehow and then, by God, you’ll pay.’
If it was coming from anyone else, Jack might have been amused by the bluster. But Craster had never had the ability to make his cousin laugh.
‘You raped Clothilde Guen.’
‘Who?’ He struggled with memory. ‘What? That … that chit? I most certainly did not.’
Jack raised a hand. ‘Take care.’
Craster gave, just a little. ‘And if I did! She asked for it, the hussy. Enjoyed it, too, I’ll be bound. Besides, society scarce notices such a thing. A child like that is not a woman.’
Até, who had watched soundless, now grunted in disgust. But Jack it was who went on. ‘I noticed. She … noticed.’
‘It ain’t a hanging offence,’ Craster blustered. ‘So you can kiss my arse, Jack Absolute. Go on! Murder me, and have done with it.’
Jack leaned down, his voice near a whisper now. ‘I could. I long to. To repay you for every kick you gave me, every slap and every switch your father laid upon my back. Most of all for what you did to that poor girl. By doing that, you changed all our lives. You did indeed turn me into a killer. Yet these hands,’ he raised them and they shook slightly, ‘have enough blood on them for now. Stained by worthy opponents and in fair fights. I do not intend to disgrace their memory by adding your blood to them.’ For a long moment, Jack gazed into his cousin’s eyes, Craster staring back. Then he rose, turned to Até. ‘Ready?’
Até nodded, went to the edge of the clearing, fetched what they’d brought for the purpose; as he laid each item down, Jack named it. ‘Pemmican,’ he said, pointing to the ball of grease. ‘Enough for two days if you’re not too greedy. A flint, a kettle, a length of rope and a knife.’
His cousin stared at the items dully. ‘And what am I meant to do with these?’
Jack took his time before he said it. ‘Survive.’
Craster’s jaw went slack. ‘You … you mean to leave me here? With these trinkets and … a savage?’ On Jack’s silence he continued, ‘But what will we live on?’
‘The savage will know. You’ll just have to trade him something to share his knowledge.’
As he said this, Jack moved away to the faint outline of the path head. Até, who had bent once to whisper something into Segunki’s ear, now joined him. ‘You forget something, Daga-noweda?’
Jack stared at his friend for a moment, then remembered. ‘Of course.’ He went back to Craster whose mouth was now opening and closing, no sound emerging. He reached inside his bearskin. ‘I do have one last thing for you.’
Craster’s eyes flickered with a little hope. ‘A pistol?’
‘Oh no,’ Jack said, ‘far, far better than that.’
And he dropped Hamlet upon his cousin’s chest.
As they climbed from the clea
ring, Jack and Até were laughing so hard they could barely sweep the hemlock boughs across the path to obliterate their tracks.
*
A day and night found them at a junction of two valleys, one heading roughly east, the other southerly. There, as the snow eased again and a pale sunset shone through a rent in the clouds, they set up a night camp. While Até conjured fire from damp wood and constructed a birch-bark shelter, through the ice of a pond Jack had some luck with perch. These, and the last of their pemmican, made their meal.
At every halt, they laughed still about the men they’d left.
‘How long will they take to free themselves?’
‘With my knots?’ Até smiled. ‘If they work together … an hour. If they pull each their own way they could still be there when spring comes.’
Jack chuckled. ‘And once free? Will they live? Die? Kill each other? Who would win that fight?’
Até shrugged. ‘Fate decides. Not you or me. “If it be not now, yet it will come.”’
Jack sighed. ‘Do you think they’ll read the play?’
Até, busy with wood, looked up. ‘I think they will eat the pages one by one.’
That made them laugh again, then fall silent, staring into the heart of the fire they’d built between them. Both knew what was unspoken across it. Both had recognized what the two valleys – one going east, one south – meant.
‘Até,’ said Jack at last. ‘Tomorrow—’
The Mohawk interrupted him briskly. ‘Tomorrow we return to our own worlds, our own wars.’
‘Unless you came with me,’ Jack leaned forward, suddenly eager. ‘You said you wanted to see England.’
‘The land of Hamlet?’ Até’s briskness was replaced by a softness, a stare.
‘Well, Shakespeare. Many other things too.’ He stared across the flames. ‘I could show them to you.’
The Blooding of Jack Absolute Page 33