With a quick, crablike motion Duncan moved out of reach, then followed the trapper’s gaze. Hawkins looked not toward Conawago, who still held the ax that had impaled his arm, but toward a round, shimmering thing that floated in the moonlight.
It was an image of a raven, black against yellow. It was Adam Munroe’s medallion, stolen by Duncan’s attackers the day he had left Edentown.
“Drop the blade,” Conawago said in a cool, fierce voice. “McCallum wants an answer about a murder.”
The knife did drop, but Hawkins did not speak. For a moment he had the look of one of the doomed animals that thrashed in his traps. Then his hollow, cold-blooded gaze returned. With impossible coolness, he pulled his arm free of the ax spike. His muscles coiled. He seemed about to leap at the shadowy figure with the medallion. But when he launched himself, it was backward, out onto the flats.
Duncan grabbed his knife and raced toward the canoes, a step in front of Conawago, thinking Hawkins was intent on stealing one. But when they reached the vessels, none were missing, and they could see a dark figure raising silver water as he hurried across the waist-deep river.
When they returned to the trail, the one who had been holding the medallion was sitting on a moonlit boulder, staring forlornly at the black bird in his hand.
“Sarah said you knew my brother,” Ravencatcher said to Duncan.
“Adam Munroe was your brother?”
“The husband of my sister is my brother,” Tashgua’s son explained. He cradled the medallion in his fingers. “You were there, when he died?”
“He died strong. He died for your sister.”
“I gave this to him, on the day they became husband and wife.”
“I lost it, the day I left Edentown.”
“And I found it,” explained Conawago, “on the dead man lying against the tree at the cabin.”
Duncan stared in the direction Hawkins had fled, then slowly tuned back toward Ravencatcher. “You should keep it,” he said.
“No. It is right that you have it, McCallum,” said the Iroquois. “Adam would wish it so. My second sister would wish it so,” Ravencatcher added, then thrust the quillwork medallion into Duncan’s hand and slipped away into the shadows. His second sister. He meant Sarah.
“Don’t go back to the camp,” Conawago warned. “Tashgua’s men are all at the embers of the old tree, with his body, which is where Ravencatcher and I go now. Ramsey woke to find Woolford gone, and untied his men.”
But Duncan knew the only way he could return to Edentown was in Ramsey’s chains.
A bright fire was burning as he entered the camp, with Ramsey and his head keeper standing beside it. A new fury had risen on Ramsey’s face. He had revived, and had spoken with Cameron.
The patron stepped toward Duncan as soon as he saw him. Something wild and hot had grown in Ramsey’s eyes. With surprising speed he lifted an arm and slapped Duncan, hard.
“Sedition!” Ramsey hissed. “I curse the day the good reverend laid eyes on you!” He turned to Cameron, standing in front of the remaining Company men. “Seize him!”
Cameron glanced toward the ridge path, then leapt forward. He held Duncan at both sides as Ramsey slapped him again, and again. “You were the one who encouraged her. You were the one with the impudence to defy me, to steal my trust. You were the one who destroyed my charter!”
Duncan’s head swam, his vision blurred. The Company men swarmed around him. He was vaguely aware of movement at his back, of something cold on his shoulder. By the time he understood and tried to resist, it was too late. One of the hinged iron collars was on his neck, with a small, bent hook fastened in the holes at the rear.
“Your hot Scottish blood blinds you to the simplest of facts,” Ramsey hissed. “The Ramsey Company requested your transportation to America. The Ramsey Company can rescind its request. You, sir, will be shipped back to England in irons with a long list of new crimes, signed by myself as magistrate. I vow to you, McCallum, you will rot away the rest of your miserable life in a moldy English cell.”
A figure appeared beside Ramsey, and a hand seized the patron’s arm as it rose to slap Duncan again. Woolford was instantly surrounded by Cameron’s men.
“And you, Captain Woolford, will be mucking barracks stables in India by the time I finish with you.”
Woolford surveyed the hungry faces of the men around him. The ranger had only a handful of his own men to back him up, and once they were out of the wilderness, the world belonged to Ramsey. As Duncan watched, Woolford cast a glance toward the path to the sacred valley. They both knew it would take little encouragement for some of the Scots there to deal permanently with Ramsey. But if they let him be killed, none of them-neither Duncan, nor Woolford, nor Jamie-could ever face Sarah again. The ranger dropped his hand and retreated, pulling Sarah with him.
Ramsey watched as the ranger faded into the shadows, then turned toward the post and spat a quick command. Duncan saw the motion of a thick piece of firewood being swung through the air. It knocked him to his knees. As he fought for his breath, a second blow connected with his skull and flattened him against the ground.
When he regained consciousness, Duncan had been untied from the post and a rope had been fastened to the collar. He watched as if from a distance as Cameron strung the rope over a limb and heaved, tightening it so that Duncan had to stand on the balls of his feet. They left him there in the chill autumn air and returned to their blankets. By the time someone loosened the knot, in the small hours of the night, he was so wracked with pain, he could only collapse onto the ground.
At dawn he was awakened with cold water on his face as the Company men made ready for travel. Cameron pulled Duncan to his feet in time to see Ramsey throw his pack into the underbrush, then the keeper led him down the trail to the river like a leashed dog, out of the now-abandoned Iroquois village.
Duncan stared at the earth as he walked, reliving a memory of his long-ago day on the mast. A black wave was speeding toward him again. Ramsey was pushing him into it, and afterward he would have no life.
Suddenly Cameron spat a warning and lifted the club in his hand, then relaxed as Woolford stepped onto the trail, followed by Sarah, in a green dress, her hair neatly combed, her face scrubbed. “The rangers are taking Major Pike downriver,” she announced in a flat voice. “We have readied more canoes. If we leave now, with so many men to help with the portages, we can be at Edentown tomorrow afternoon.”
“This escapee,” Ramsey said, with a gesture toward Duncan, “receives a hundred lashes when we reach Edentown. And I have decided that two days after we return, the old man hangs.”
“You cannot!” Duncan’s protest came out so loud every man turned toward him. “The governor must approve first.”
“I have decided to ask his forgiveness,” Ramsey explained in an imperious tone, “rather than his permission. I will explain the crisis of law and order that we face and the need for a speedy resolution. He will understand when I explain that our town is populated with Scottish convicts. But before we hang him, McCallum, we will bind him to the scaffold and make him watch as we flay the skin from your back.”
Sarah and Woolford turned down the trail without reply. On one of Woolford’s shoulders hung Duncan’s haversack; on the other, an extra rifle. Duncan’s rifle.
Three strangers waited at the first of the ranger’s canoes, all wearing Highland bonnets and dark plaid kilts, their top half naked save for sleeveless waistcoats and chest straps. Not strangers, Duncan realized with a start. Jamie and two of his men, having scrubbed off their paint and shifted to a semblance of European dress, were traveling with them. His brother offered no acknowledgment as Duncan caught his eye before being dragged toward a canoe, did not seem to notice as Cameron shoved him downward to soak his clothes, assuring he would shiver in the cool air.
The river was faster than Duncan could have imagined. The canoes shot downstream until sunset, then the party stopped to camp on an island, where two fires were lit
-one for the Ramsey men, the second for Woolford and the others. Duncan, tethered to a tree, was given a strip of dried meat to chew and otherwise ignored as his captors covered themselves for sleep. Then a shadow appeared at his side. Sarah arranged a blanket over his legs, then rolled herself in another blanket, to sleep beside him, though they did not sleep at first, only leaned against the tree, her head nestled in his shoulder. There were no words between them, not simply because the others might hear, but because he knew it was the not the way of Sarah or the Iroquois who had raised her to give words to what rose in their hearts, only to show it. And in these moments he felt their roles reversed, as if he were the wild deer about to bolt.
He only spoke when the moon was high, when he was certain the Company men all slept. “They were going to use you as bait to attract Tashgua,” he said. “You realized it, and with Adam and Evering gone, you did not know how to stop it. It’s why you made the ritual at the compass, then went out on that mast in the storm.”
He could feel her nod against his shoulder. “Adam was arranging for Evering to help me escape,” Sarah whispered. “Evering would meet Conawago in New York town, and Conawago would take me away.”
“But Adam and Evering died,” Duncan said, weighing her words. “You ran away from the inn to the mission. You could have gone into the forest. Why did you go to Edentown?”
“Because of you, Duncan, and what happened to Mr. Lister. When I heard about that, at the inn, I knew Lord Ramsey would destroy you both.”
“Why the barn, Sarah?” he asked after weighing the puzzles of the past ten days.
Her reply, slow in coming, sent a shudder down his back. “Because Lord Ramsey and Hawkins share the same skin,” she said in a cracked voice.
He touched her cheek. It was soaked with tears.
Duncan gazed at the moon a long time, mentally reciting the list of the McCallum clan chiefs, then asked her to find Woolford. She returned with the ranger and a god. The Indian wearing the spirit mask gazed at him with hollow eyes as Duncan explained the battle to come.
Chapter Sixteen
The gallows was nearly complete when they arrived at Edentown, a whipping post with an iron ring already sunk into the ground beside it. The men of the Company would not look Duncan in the eye as he stumbled along the main street, pulled on his leash by Cameron. He resisted as he passed the smithy, and though the jerk of the rope nearly knocked him off his feet, he paused long enough to make out the silent shadowy form in the charcoal crib, and to see the bony fingers that gripped the slats. Lister, looking like a ghost, was watching the finishing touches on his gibbet.
Ramsey’s spirits had risen steadily as they approached the town, and by the time he climbed onto the bank near his massive barn, he was snapping orders, calling for men to clear the desks from the schoolhouse, to line the classroom with benches, to straighten a fence rail here, clean a harness there. He completed his promenade when he reached Duncan, now tied to the hitching post at the schoolhouse steps.
“I shall bathe and take a large meal,” he announced airily as Crispin arrived with a cup of tea, “then we shall have our justice. Mr. Lister will be tried for murder, and you, McCallum, shall be tried for theft. We shall-” Ramsey paused, looking at a group of strangers huddled at the cooper’s shed-a dozen men, women, and children, their clothing torn and soiled. “Who are these trespassers?” he demanded.
“More settlers, sir,” Crispin explained. “Burned out of their cabins. Some escaped the Huron, fled as soon as they heard the cries in the night.”
Ramsey surveyed the ragged group with a frown, then his gaze was captured by movement on the riverbank. Sarah had arrived, and was being helped ashore by Conawago. Ramsey silently pointed her toward the great house and waited to enter until she had disappeared inside. Moments later Crispin returned to the schoolhouse with food, drink, and a basin to wash Duncan’s wounds.
By the time the patron emerged more than an hour later, bewigged and dressed as if for church, Jamie and his two men were moving among the Company workers, several of whom uttered small sounds of joy at the sight of their kilts. Wherever they touched the ranks, the men dispersed, fading away behind the barn. Ramsey, busy positioning and repositioning his freshly powdered wig, noticed their actions only as he climbed the schoolhouse steps.
“Fools!” he snapped at the keepers, who now held Lister, so weak he had to be supported, at both shoulders. “Summon the men back! The trial commences!”
But the keepers did not move. Their eyes, wide and worried, were focused on the new rank of strangers who, as if by magic, had appeared along the riverbank.
They were larger than life, huge bronzed men-some adorned only with paint, leggings, and loincloths, some in britches and boots wearing remnants of uniform tunics. Three wore kilts; two, incongruously, wore swords. All were armed, with rifle, war ax, or bow. Their faces were solemn, their spines rigid and straight. The remainder of Tashgua’s band had arrived, and stood as if ready for battle.
At the center, beside Tashgua’s son, was Woolford, freshly shaven and in a spotless uniform, wearing, for the first time since Duncan had known him, the brass gorget of rank at his neck. The ranger stepped forward. “The trial commences,” he repeated in a loud voice.
“Do not mock me, Woolford,” Ramsey growled.
“Do not mock the king,” Woolford shot back as he approached. He paused at the water trough, filled a ladle, and handed it to Lister, who ravenously gulped it, then marched to the foot of the steps. “This is a theater of war. I am a captain in His Majesty’s army. I have records showing that one of your defendants is enrolled as a ranger in my own company. There is the murder of my sergeant to resolve. There is evidence of a crime committed by a king’s officer.”
Ramsey had the look of a hungry predator whose fresh meat was being threatened. “You cannot have McCallum.”
“You mistake me, sir. A court-martial is required, but I respect your desire for efficiency in the administration of justice. So we shall proceed with two judges.”
Ramsey glared at the ranger. “I am aware of military procedure, Captain. You have no authority.”
“In the wilderness,” Woolford said in a treacherous tone, “in the midst of war, we are all used to asking forgiveness rather than permission. Major Pike has been relieved of command. Until countermanded by a more senior officer in the regular army,” he said, “I speak for the military.”
“I am colonel of the Edentown militia. If you wish to exercise authority, then you may clamp James McCallum in chains, Captain.”
“A regular army officer is not beholden to the militia,” Woolford declared in an even tone. “And we shall try one McCallum at a time.”
Ramsey paused and glanced at Duncan. The patron’s temper seemed about to erupt anew when he saw five figures emerge from the house. Sarah was attired in a dark blue dress trimmed in lace, one Duncan had not seen before, with her hair pinned back, giving her the look of a woman several years older. Flanking her were Crispin and Conawago, each holding the hand of one of the younger Ramsey children. Sarah stepped forward and curtseyed to the patron. But for the leather pouch that hung beside the gold chain on her bodice, she would have been a match for any young woman of elegant breeding on any promenade in London. The dress had a French flair to it. It was, Duncan realized, most likely borrowed from her mother’s closet. Her appearance struck Ramsey dumb.
“We shall convene in the barn,” Woolford announced, and he turned without waiting for a reply.
Sarah, Crispin, and Conawago followed the ranger into the huge structure that dominated the town-Ramsey’s precious Palace of Husbandry. The patron watched in confusion for a moment, then darted inside the school, returning with an ornate gavel and his copy of Plato, and followed, gesturing for the keepers to bring their prisoners. Duncan took a step toward Lister, who, leaning on a makeshift crutch to relieve his broken ankle, seemed about to topple at any moment. But with a satisfied grunt, Cameron pulled back on Duncan’s coll
ar, then shoved him toward the barn.
Two wide planks had been placed on trestles, nearly spanning the center aisle. Two stools were placed behind this improvised bench for the judges, and a third at the end of the table, for witnesses. Ramsey, scowling, was about to sit when he froze and pointed above their heads. “Remove that monstrous thing!”
Old Crooked Face had been shifted within the loft, so that the Iroquois spirit mask hung on a barn post directly above the judges’ bench, as portraits of the king hung in English courtrooms.
When Cameron stepped to the ladder, Jamie was there first, blocking his way. “There was a great debate, Your Highness,” Jamie said to Ramsey in an exaggerated Scottish burr, “about whether an Iroquois should sit as judge, given the crimes committed against them. It would be one of the older women most likely, since they are often deemed the wisest among the tribes.”
“The king’s justice,” Ramsey replied in a chill tone, “will never bend so far.”
“But my aboriginal friends agreed,” Jamie continued, “that we need not have a third justice beside you, so long as there is one listening overhead. Perhaps we might borrow a wig for him?” Two of his band appeared overhead, in the loft, flanking the mask as if to guard it. “He is a grand god, you know. Old Crooked Face. He was working in the skies, helping create the world, when he began frolicking with the other deities-racing, as it were-and got a wee bit carried away. In his excitement, he fell against a mountain and smashed his face. The Iroquois love him. I think it is for his honesty. He still goes out in the world and admits his ugliness. He lets the world know that sometimes the almighty can go too far.”
Ramsey’s eyes flared again. “I want him-I want that thing in the smithy furnace,” Ramsey demanded, turning to Crispin. Duncan glanced at the forge. The furnace had been lit. When the trial was over, the smith would drive a hot bolt into Duncan’s iron collar and crimp it permanently down, sealing his fate.
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