And if he did not wish to mislead him and was correct in what he said … William swallowed, his mouth sticky and dry. Then he had had a narrow escape. What might have happened, had he walked into a nest of rebels, in such a remote place as Dismal Town, and blithely revealed himself and his purpose? They’d hang you from the nearest tree, his brain said coldly, and toss your body into the swamp. What else?
Which led to an even more uncomfortable thought: how could Captain Richardson have been so mistaken in his information?
He shook his head violently, trying to shake his thoughts into order, but the only result was to make him dizzy again. Murray’s attention had been attracted by the motion, though; he looked in William’s direction, and William spoke, on impulse.
“You are a Mohawk, you said.”
“I am.”
Seeing that tattooed face, the eyes dark in their sockets, William didn’t doubt it.
“How did that come to be?” he asked hurriedly, lest Murray think he was casting aspersions on the other’s truthfulness. Murray hesitated visibly, but did answer.
“I married a woman of the Kahnyen’kehaka. I was adopted into the Wolf clan of the people of Snaketown.”
“Ah. Your … wife is …?”
“I am no longer wed.” It wasn’t said with any tone of hostility, but with a sort of bleak finality that put paid to any further conversation.
“I’m sorry,” William said formally, and fell silent. The chills were coming back, and despite his reluctance, he slid down, drawing the blanket up around his ears, and huddled against the dog, who sighed deeply and released a burst of flatulence but didn’t stir.
When the ague finally eased again, he lapsed back into dreams, these now violent and dreadful. His mind had taken hold somehow of Indians, and he was pursued by savages who turned into snakes, snakes who became tree roots that writhed through the crevices of his brain, bursting his skull, liberating further nests of snakes who coiled themselves into nooses …
He woke again, drenched in sweat and aching to the bones. He tried to rise but found his arms would not support him. Someone knelt by him—it was the Scot, the Mohawk … Murray. He located the name with something like relief, and with even more relief, realized that Murray was holding a canteen to his lips.
It was water from the lake; he recognized its odd, fresh-tasting bitterness, and drank thirstily.
“Thank you,” he said hoarsely, and gave back the empty canteen. The water had given him strength enough to sit up. His head still swam with fever, but the dreams had retreated, at least for the moment. He imagined that they lurked just beyond the small ring of light cast by the fire, waiting, and determined that he would not sleep again—not at once.
The pain in his arm was worse: a hot, stretched feeling, and a throbbing that ran from fingertips to the middle of his upper arm. Anxious to keep both the pain and the night at bay, he had another try at conversation.
“I have heard that the Mohawk think it unmanly to show fear—that if captured and tortured by an enemy, they will not show any sign of distress. Is that true?”
“Ye try not to be in that position,” Murray said, very dry. “Should it happen, though … ye must show your courage, that’s all. Ye sing your death song and hope to die well. Is it different for a British soldier, then? Ye dinna want to die as a coward, do ye?”
William watched the flickering patterns behind his closed eyelids, hot and ever-changing, shifting with the fire.
“No,” he admitted. “And it’s not so different—the hoping to die well if you have to, I mean. But it’s more likely to be a matter of just being shot or knocked on the head, isn’t it, if you’re a soldier—rather than being tortured to death by inches. Save you run afoul of a savage, I suppose. What—have you ever seen someone die like that?” he asked curiously, opening his eyes.
Murray reached out one long arm to turn the spit, not answering at once. The firelight showed his face, unreadable.
“Aye, I have,” he said quietly, at last.
“What did they do to him?” He wasn’t sure why he’d asked; perhaps only for distraction from the throbbing in his arm.
“Ye dinna want to know.” This was said very definitely; Murray was not by any means teasing him into further inquiry. Nonetheless, it had the same effect; William’s vague interest sharpened at once.
“Yes, I do.”
Murray’s lips tightened, but William knew a few things about extracting information by this time and was wise enough to preserve silence, merely keeping his eyes fixed on the other man.
“Skinned him,” Murray said at last, and poked at the fire with a stick. “One of them. In bitty pieces. Thrust burning slivers of pitch pine into the raw places. Cut away his privates. Then built up the fire about his feet, to burn him before he could die of the shock. It … took some time.”
“I daresay.” William tried to conjure a picture of the proceedings—and succeeded much too well, turning away his eyes from the blackened muskrat carcass, stripped to bones.
He shut his eyes. His arm continued to throb with each beat of his heart, and he tried not to imagine the sensation of burning slivers being forced into his flesh.
Murray was silent; William couldn’t even hear his breathing. But he knew, as surely as if he were inside the other’s head, that he, too, was imagining the scene—though in his case, imagination was not necessary. He would be reliving it.
William shifted a little, sending a hot blaze of pain through his arm, and clenched his teeth, not to make any noise.
“Do the men—did you, I should say—think how you would do, yourself?” he asked quietly. “If you could stand it?”
“Every man thinks that.” Murray got up abruptly and went to the far edge of the clearing. William heard him make water, but it was some minutes longer before he came back.
The dog wakened suddenly, head lifting, and wagged its huge tail slowly to and fro at sight of its master. Murray laughed softly and said something in an odd tongue—Mohawk? Erse?—to the dog, then bent and ripped a haunch from the muskrat’s remains, tossing it to the beast. The animal rose like lightning, its teeth snapping shut on the carcass, then trotted happily to the far side of the fire and lay down, licking its prize.
Bereft of his bed companion, William lay down gingerly, head pillowed on his good arm, and watched as Murray cleaned his knife, scrubbing blood and grease from it with handfuls of grass.
“You said you sing your death song. What sort of song is that?”
Murray looked nonplused at that.
“I mean,” William fumbled for clearer meaning, “what sort of thing would you—would one—say in a death song?”
“Oh.” The Scotsman looked down at his hands, the long knobbed fingers rubbing slowly down the length of the blade. “I’ve only heard the one, mind. The other two I saw die that way—they were white men and didna have death songs, as such. The Indian—he was an Onondaga—he … well, there was a good deal in the beginning about who he was: a warrior of what people, I mean, and his clan, his family. Then quite a bit about how much he despised u—the folk who were about to kill him.” Murray cleared his throat.
“A bit about what he’d done: his victories, valiant warriors he’d killed, and how they’d welcome him in death. Then … how he proposed to cross the …” He groped for a word. “… the—it—the way between here and what lies after death. The divide, I suppose ye’d say, though the word means something more like a chasm.”
He was quiet for a moment, but not as though he had finished—more as though trying to recall something exactly. He straightened himself suddenly, took a deep breath, and with his eyes closed, began to recite something in what William supposed to be the Mohawk tongue. It was fascinating—a tattoo of “n”s and “r”s and “t”s, steady as a drumbeat.
“Then there was a bit where he went on about the nasty creatures he’d encounter on his way to paradise,” Murray said, breaking off abruptly. “Things like flying heads, wi’ teeth.�
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“Ew,” said William, and Murray laughed, taken by surprise.
“Aye. I wouldna like to see one, myself.”
William considered this for a moment.
“Do you compose your own death song ahead of time—in case of need, I mean? Or just trust to the, um, inspiration of the moment?”
Murray looked a little taken back by that. He blinked and looked aside.
“I … well … it’s no usually talked about, ken? But aye—I did have a friend or two who told me a bit about what they’d thought of, should there ever be need.”
“Hmm.” William turned on his back, looking up at the stars. “Do you sing a death song only if you’re being tortured to death? What if you’re only ill but think you might die?”
Murray stopped what he was doing and peered toward him, suspicious.
“Ye’re no dying, are ye?”
“No, just wondering,” William assured him. He didn’t think he was dying.
“Mmphm,” the Scot said dubiously. “Aye, well. No, ye sing your death song if ye’re sure ye’re about to die; it doesna matter why.”
“The more credit to you, though,” William suggested, “if you do it whilst having burning splinters stuck into you?”
The Scot laughed out loud, and suddenly looked much less like an Indian. He rubbed his knuckles across his mouth.
“To be honest … the Onondaga … I didna think he did it so verra well,” Murray blurted. “It doesna seem right to criticize, though. I mean, I canna say I’d do better—in the circumstances.”
William laughed, too, but both men fell silent then. William supposed that Murray was, as he was, imagining himself in such case, tied to a stake, about to suffer appalling torture. He gazed up into the void above, tentatively composing a few lines: I am William Clarence Henry George Ransom, Earl of … No, he’d never liked his string of names. I am William … he thought muzzily. William … James … James was his secret name; he hadn’t thought of it in years. Better than Clarence, though. I am William. What else was there to say? Not much, as yet. No, he’d better not die, not until he’d done something worth a proper death song.
Murray was silent, the fire reflected in his somber eyes. Watching him, William thought the Scottish Mohawk had had his own death song ready for some time. Shortly he fell asleep to the crackle of fire and the quiet crunching of bones, burning, but brave.
He was wandering through a haze of tortured dreams involving being chased by black serpents across an endless wobbling bridge over a bottomless chasm. Flying yellow heads with rainbow eyes attacked him in swarms, their tiny teeth, sharp as a mouse’s, piercing his flesh. He waved an arm to beat them off, and the pain that shot through the arm at the motion roused him.
It was still dark, though the cool, live feel of the air told him the dawn was not far off. The touch of it on his face made him shiver, prompting another chill.
Someone said something that he didn’t understand, and still entangled in the miasma of fever dreams, he thought it must be one of the serpents he’d been talking to earlier, before they started chasing him.
A hand touched his forehead, and a large thumb pried up one of his eyelids. An Indian’s face floated in his sleep-bleared vision, looking quizzical.
He made an irritable noise and jerked his head away, blinking. The Indian said something, questioning, and a familiar voice replied. Who … Murray. The name seemed to have been floating by his elbow, and he recalled dimly that Murray himself had accompanied him in his dream, rebuking the serpents in a stern Scotch burr.
He wasn’t speaking English now, though, nor even the peculiar Scotch tongue from the Highlands. William forced his head to turn, though his body was still convulsed with chill.
A number of Indians were crouched round the fire, squatting to keep their backsides from the dew-wet grass. One, two, three … six of them. Murray was sitting on the log with one of them, engaged in conversation.
No, seven. Another man, the one who had touched him, leaned over him, peering into his face.
“Think you’re going to die?” the man asked, with a faint air of curiosity.
“No,” William said between clenched teeth. “Who the devil are you?”
The Indian seemed to think this an amusing question and called to his fellows, apparently repeating it. They all laughed, and Murray glanced in his direction, rising as he saw that William was awake.
“Kahnyen’kehaka,” the man looming over him said, and grinned. “Who the devil are you?”
“My kinsman,” Murray said shortly, before William could reply. He nudged the Indian aside and squatted beside William. “Still alive, then?”
“Evidently.” He scowled up at Murray. “Care to introduce me to your … friends?”
The first Indian went off into gales of laughter at this and apparently translated it to the two or three others who had come to peer interestedly at him. They thought it funny, too.
Murray seemed substantially less amused.
“My kinsmen,” he said dryly. “Some of them. D’ye need water?”
“You have a lot of kinsmen … cousin. Yes, if you please.”
He struggled upright, one-armed, reluctant to leave the clammy comfort of his dew-wet blanket but obeying an innate urge that told him he wanted to be on his feet. Murray seemed to know these Indians well, but kin or not, there was a certain tenseness to Murray’s mouth and shoulders. And it was plain enough that Murray had told them that William was his kinsman because if he hadn’t …
“Kahnyen’kehaka.” That’s what the Indian had said when asked who he was. It wasn’t his name, William realized suddenly. It was what he was. Murray had used the word yesterday, when he’d sent away the two Mingos.
“I’m Kahnyen’kehaka,” he’d said. “A Mohawk. They’re afraid of me.” He’d said it as a simple statement of fact, and William had not chosen to make an issue of it, circumstances being as they were. Seeing a number of what were plainly Mohawk together, he could appreciate the Mingos’ prudence. The Mohawk gave off an air of genial ferocity, this overlying a casual confidence entirely proper to men who were prepared to sing—however badly—whilst being emasculated and burnt alive.
Murray handed him a canteen, and he drank thirstily, then splashed a little water over his face. Feeling a bit better, he went for a piss, then walked to the fire and squatted between two of the braves, who eyed him with open curiosity.
Only the man who had pried his eyelid open seemed to speak English, but the rest nodded to him, reserved but friendly enough. William glanced across the fire and started back, nearly losing his balance. A long, tawny shape lay in the grass beyond the fire, the light gleaming on its flanks.
“It’s dead,” Murray said dryly, seeing his startlement. The Mohawk all laughed.
“Gathered that,” he replied, just as dryly, though his heart was still pounding from the shock. “Serve it right, if it’s the one that took my horse.” Now he came to look, he perceived other shapes beyond the fire. A small deer, a pig, a spotted cat, and two or three egrets, small white mounds in the dark grass. Well, that explained the Mohawks’ presence in the swamp: they’d come for the hunting, like everyone else.
Dawn was coming; the faint wind stirred the damp hair on his neck and brought him the tang of blood and musk from the animals. Both his mind and his tongue felt thick and slow, but he managed a few words of praise for the success of the hunters; he knew how to be polite. Murray, translating for him, looked surprised, though pleased, to discover that William had manners. William didn’t feel well enough to take offense.
Conversation became general then, accomplished for the most part in Mohawk. The Indians showed no particular interest in William, though the man beside him handed him a chunk of cold meat in a companionable fashion. He nodded thanks and made himself eat it, though he would as soon have forced down one of his shoe soles. He felt unwell and clammy, and when he had finished the meat, nodded politely to the Indian next him and went to lie down again, h
oping he wouldn’t vomit.
Seeing this, Murray lifted his chin in William’s direction and said something to his friends in Mohawk, ending with a question of some kind.
The English-speaker, a short, thickset fellow in a checked wool shirt and buckskin trousers, shrugged in reply, then got up and came to bend over him again.
“Show me this arm,” he said, and without waiting for William to comply, picked up his wrist and pulled up the sleeve of his shirt. William nearly passed out.
When the black spots stopped whirling in front of his eyes, he saw that Murray and two more Indians had come to join the first. All of them were looking at his exposed arm in open consternation. He didn’t want to look, but risked a glance. His forearm was grotesquely swollen, nearly twice its normal size, and dark reddish streaks ran from under the tightly bandaged poultice, down his arm toward the wrist.
The English-speaker—what had Murray called him? Glutton, he thought, but why?—drew his knife and cut the bandage. Only with the removal of its constriction did William realize how uncomfortable the binding had been. He repressed the urge to rub his arm, feeling the pins and needles of returning circulation. Pins and needles, bloody hell. It felt as though his arm were engulfed by a mass of fire ants, all stinging.
“Shit,” he said, through his teeth. All the Indians knew that word, evidently, for they all laughed, save Glutton and Murray, who were squinting at his arm.
Glutton—he didn’t look fat, why was he called that?—poked gingerly at the arm, shook his head, and said something to Murray, then pointed off toward the west.
Murray rubbed a hand over his face, then shook his head violently, in the manner of a man shaking off fatigue or worry. Then he shrugged and asked something of the group at large. Nods and shrugs, and several of the men got up and went into the wood.
A number of questions revolved slowly through William’s brain, round and bright like the metal globes of his grandfather’s orrery in the library of the London house at Jermyn Street.
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