At last there seemed no point in continuing. The mutilated body on the post looked like those left on battlefields after cannonballs turned men inside out. No one spoke.
“You will die. You will die hard for this.”
It took Gabriel a moment to realize the vow had come from Tanaqua, still tethered in front of him. He raised his whip, then froze as an ungodly din rose from across the field.
The tribes from the far shore of the ocean had been watching. Just a stone’s throw away over a hundred Africans were in a line, pounding their tools against buckets, sticks, and slop bowls, ignoring the overseers who shouted and slapped their backs with their short whips. Ursa was at the center, banging his hoe against the blade of a shovel. The sound was shockingly loud, with a treacherous, determined quality to it. The Africans’ overseers backed away. When their tribe faced battle, Kuwali had explained to Duncan, pounding weapons on shields was a common way of terrifying an enemy, just as the Viking ancestors of the Scots had once done long ago.
Gabriel retreated several steps, calling for his pharaohs to surround him. Kincaid frantically ordered his men into a defensive formation and they too began retreating toward the road. No one stopped Winters as he stepped forward to cut Jaho’s bindings. He dropped to his knees beside the old man’s limp body.
Duncan took a step forward, then another. As Gabriel and his men reached the road, Duncan and the tribesmen rushed to the yard, releasing Tanaqua.
Duncan saw the bloodthirsty way Tanaqua eyed the superintendent but Murdo reached him first, gripping his shoulder. “This is not what he would want, my friend,” the big Scot said. “Do not throw your life away.”
“This is the hour of the half king’s death,” Tanaqua stated in an anguished voice.
Duncan’s throat tightened. His voice cracked as he spoke. “Aye, it is the hour of Jahoska’s death.”
“He did not go to Hobart last night. It was not Jaho who took the viper into that room.”
“But he was honored that you did, and that you placed the dead woman’s medallion in his unconscious hand. This was the day he was going to die, Tanaqua. He just chose the hour. Kincaid’s accusation of murder was his redemption, don’t you see? Hobart’s death was the beginning of the restoration of the lost god. The torture at the post was nothing compared to the torture of thinking the ancient Blooddancer would be gone forever, and all those deaths for naught. By being accused of the murder he knew what had happened, knew with certainty that the guardian of the god would not fail.” He knelt by the old man and felt for a pulse before giving a mournful shake of his head. “You gave him a great gift, Tanaqua.”
The Iroquois rangers formed a circle around Jahoska and began a mourning chant, one of the songs used to summon the spirits to greet a great soul. Tanaqua joined in for a moment but then his words choked away as Winters covered the dead Susquehannock with a blanket.
Duncan led him away to the water barrel.
The Mohawk dipped his face in the water, then gripped the sides of the barrel with his hands and stared at his reflection. “I would have taken him away had I known who he was earlier,” he said.
“He would not have gone,” Duncan replied.
“I do not understand,” the Mohawk said. “Jaho knew he would just feed Kincaid’s fury but he broke away to—” he searched for words, “perform that strange dance.”
“He knew death was close. It was going to be the last thing he did,” Duncan said, struggling himself to understand the last desperate movements of the half king.
“The blows to his head,” Tanaqua suggested. “His wits were scrambled.”
Duncan looked at the stable door and then at the patch where Jaho had halted, trying to reconstruct what he had seen. Jaho had stopped where he would be conspicuous to Duncan and his friends. The devout follower of the forest gods had offered a Christian prayer. He had made a pantomime with his hands to his head. He had offered a plant to the reviled English officer. Duncan nodded. “His wits were scrambled,” he echoed in an empty voice, though he was not entirely certain that what they had seen was the result of a concussion.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The moon was behind the clouds as Duncan slipped out of the stable to follow the tracks of the mule in the damp soil. By the time he reached Winters, the young overseer was already climbing the hill. A spade was on his shoulder and the body on the mule was wrapped with what appeared to be a linen tablecloth.
It was several minutes before either spoke. “The Judas slaves are required to remain in their quarters at night,” Winters finally muttered.
“And you are supposed to be letting Gabriel stage a performance tomorrow,” Duncan replied, “to demonstrate what happens to those who won’t bend to his will.” The Judas slaves had already been told to expect an assembly after breakfast at the base of the knoll.
“Gabriel gave orders to hang Jaho from the new gibbet in the morning,” the overseer said in a brittle voice, then paused and looked at Duncan. “I could whistle right now and the dogs would come running. The pharaohs find great sport in turning a runaway into a meal for their hounds.”
Duncan ignored the half-hearted threat. “He was my friend too, Jamie. May I call you that? That’s how Alice calls you. Did she give you the linen?” Duncan rested a hand on the body. “If you hadn’t taken him away I would have, whatever the cost.” He reached out and Winters let him take the spade. The moon emerged from the clouds and Duncan saw that his face was streaked with tears.
“We’re not going to the cemetery,” Winters declared, then pulled on the lead rope and clucked for the mule to move faster.
They passed the flat clearing with the wooden grave markers and continued up the narrow path where old Jaho had disappeared the day they had buried Devon. After a quarter hour they reached a tall, steep bluff, the highest point for miles, that offered a broad view of not only the plantation but also the silvery ribbon of the river winding away to the east and the shadowy bulk of the Blue Ridge mountains in the opposite direction.
Duncan helped Winters untie the body and set it in a sitting position against a tree, then the overseer lifted the spade and stepped out onto the flat grassy clearing above the cliff. To Duncan’s surprise he loosened a handful of soil then sprinkled it in each of the cardinal directions before dropping a few particles over his head and rubbing the remainder between his palms. It was a native purification gesture.
Winters gazed at the corpse. “I was only six when he first brought me here,” he said. “My father was the pastor for the little settlement old Mr. Dawson started here. Mr. Dawson, he was a man of the Christian God, not a man of the forest, but he trusted Jahoska like a brother. Jaho had always been here, like the Chuga dog. Once I joked that maybe there had always been a man named Jaho here too, like Chuga. My father didn’t laugh, just said because we worshipped the Old World God didn’t mean we should make light of New World gods. My father sometimes called him Saint Francis of the tribes. I think now my father envied him, for his closeness to his gods and the effortless way he had with nature.”
Winters turned to look out over the sweeping landscape. “In the autumn we would watch huge flights of ducks and geese flying along the edge of the bay. The passenger pigeons would fly overhead in flocks stretching from one horizon to the next. He would call out to them in his old tongue and they would fly lower as if they understood him, so low we could not hear ourselves speak for the sound of their wings. I was spellbound. I thought he was some kind of gentle wizard, for the way he understood nature and could coax wild animals to approach us. He always knew what nights to climb up here to show me meteor storms.” Winters looked up at Duncan. “I will never forget those nights, and I will never fathom how he could know what nights the stars would fly like that. It was as if the pulse in his body came from the earth itself.” As he spoke a huge owl swooped out of the darkness and landed on a limb above the dead Susquehannock. The bird cocked its head at Winters. Winters cocked his head at the bird. “He left speci
al instructions for the burial hole,” he explained, then started digging.
An hour later they had finished the peculiar grave that Jahoska had asked Winters to dig years earlier, a slanted hole that put his feet three feet deeper than his head, which itself was to be only a forearm’s depth from the surface.
“He knew he would be here,” Winters said.
“It’s where he could see his land the best,” Duncan ventured, then watched in surprise as Winters reverently unwrapped the cloth around the old man’s head.
Tears streamed down the young overseer’s cheeks. “I could have stopped it,” he declared in a choked voice. “I let the gentlest, wisest man I have ever known be flayed alive by the cruelest man I have ever known.”
“No,” Duncan said. “You would have just gotten yourself killed. And that would have ruined the reverence of his death.”
“Reverence? I saw only butchery. Gabriel will surely burn in hell.”
Duncan turned back to the old man again, his body in ruin but his face so calm in death it seemed he was only sleeping, then after a moment gestured Winters toward a log near the grave. “Sit,” he said, and lowered himself onto a flat boulder. “Tell me more, Jamie. Tell me more about your time with Jahoska as a boy.”
Winters drew a long breath and nodded, as if welcoming the invitation. “He was always here, on the banks of the great river, here when there was nothing but forest and the ruins of some old lodges, here when my grandfather built the first cabin near the bank, long before the elder Mr. Dawson came and Miss Alice’s family built their farm upriver. He never objected, never complained about Europeans taking his land. My grandfather said that, back then, old Jaho had a wife and two children but they were all carried off by smallpox decades ago, before I was born.
“My father remembered how in those early days Indians from the northern tribes would come visit, greeting him like he was some kind of royalty. They would speak with him of problems among the tribes of the confederation and he would offer advice. Sometimes he would disappear for weeks at a time, but he always came back. He was always alone but never lonely. There was often an animal of some kind at his side. Never did I know any creatures but other men to shy away from him. He knew all the herbs and medicines from plants, could cure any disease known to his people. But smallpox was a European disease.” Winters’s words cut off with a sharp intake of breath at a sudden movement on the trail. Chuga emerged from the shadows, glanced at them, then probed the body with his nose.
The overseer nodded, then explained how, when his grandfather had sold the struggling farm, the elder Mr. Dawson had promised to always give them gainful employment on his new debtors’ work estate, and had even encouraged Winters’s father to join the clergy and build a church for the workers. “Even as his precious forest had been leveled for sotweed fields old Jaho had stayed. My ma would say he was not so much a normal human as a land spirit in human form.”
Chuga emitted a low, mournful cry, then sat beside the corpse, on guard.
“He wasn’t just the wisest man in my life,” Winters continued, “he was the strongest, and the best spoken. He always knew just what to say, and could say it with fewer words than any man I’ve ever known. Like a poet. Always so deliberate, so observant. It broke my heart to see him raving like some drunken fool out in the field.”
The pantomime still haunted Duncan. He did not believe Jaho had lost his mind but his actions had indeed seemed deranged.
“Before he was the wise man of the river, he was a warrior,” Duncan said, and spoke of Jaho’s legendary prowess and the tales told of him at Iroquois fires. “If he had stayed in the north,” Duncan concluded, “he would have become chieftain of all the tribes.”
The last of the clouds blew away, leaving the world below glowing in the light of the moon.
“There were some little cedars down the trail,” Duncan said. “We should burn fragrant wood. You can bring some while I spark a fire. Then we will lower him into the earth.”
He cleared a circle of bare soil, grabbed some twigs, and extracted his flint, soon coaxing small flames to life. He looked back at Jahoska, keeper of the ancient secrets, then rose and extracted the fossil he had brought from Shamokin and dropped it into the old man’s pocket.
Winters returned and they lit the cedar, waiting for the scent to fill the air before lifting the body.
“This was the day he was going to die,” Duncan said after they had settled the body in the grave. “The day he intended to die.”
Winters looked up from his grief as Chuga settled beside the grave. “He couldn’t have known that Kincaid would drag him to that post.”
“Of course he did. He taunted them, and knew they would take vengeance for Hobart’s death once he taunted them with the medallion, knew he was not one of those who had to be preserved for the hangings. His body was failing him, so he chose his day. It is the way of the true warriors, the ones following the old ways, to make their deaths mean something, to fill their last acts with honor.”
Winters gazed into Jahoska’s face. The old man seemed to be listening. “I understand nothing.” From somewhere below, a whippoorwill called, its lonely cry echoing down the slope. The overseer’s voice cracked as he spoke. “How can you find honor in this?”
Duncan pushed down another tide of emotion. The words were painful. He had known others like Jahoska. Most were now dead, but Conawago was still among the living. “Remember how he would say he knew of no man left like him, a man of no mixed blood, a pure Susquehannock?”
The young overseer slowly nodded. “I found him up here once, at night. He had made a little fire of cedar, just like this one, and was talking with his ancestors about it, about what becomes of a tribe when there is only one left. I couldn’t understand much, for he mostly spoke in his old tongue, but he explained that I was welcome as long as I stayed silent. Afterwards he said we had a duty to those who came before.”
“That’s what we saw today. The death of a noble tribe. He gave their lifeblood to us.”
Winters gave a bitter snort. “Us? An overseer who hates himself and a bunch of slaves?”
“A man like that looks for a good death. The people of the woods are at the end of their time, knowing they were not bred to succeed in the new European world. They are not scared of death. They are scared of becoming beggars, of being cast off as rubbish in some settlement, their scalp taken in some alley to pay for a few pots of ale.”
“He died because of Gabriel’s temper. He died for nothing.”
“Don’t ever say that!” Duncan shot back. “He died for us.”
“Died for us? I am the overseer. You are the slave.”
“No. I am not a slave. I am a prisoner. And you are one of us, Jamie. I know that even if you don’t. He gave his lifeblood to us.”
“You mean for us.”
“No. This was something different. Something happened today such like I have never witnessed. He was transferring something, passing something on to us.”
The owl gave a soft call, answered by another on the adjacent hill. Duncan stared back over the landscape and his heart leapt as he made out the wide strip of silver to the east that had to be the mighty Chesapeake.
“I still don’t understand.”
“He was saving us.”
“You’re still a slave.”
“Not like that. Remember how he reacted to that fossil? It gave him great comfort. He said it was proof that ages rise and ages fall, but that always there will be a next age, and the new age owes its existence to the one before. He knew he had arrived at an ending of the age of the tribes and of people who live close to nature, the age of the forest. But the wonderful thing about Jahoska was that he refused to mourn that age. Instead he rejoiced that he was present for the birthing of the new age. He saw something important in the Judas slaves. The freedom men, he called us. He had decided we had to survive, even at the cost of his life. He gave us hope. Today he gave us strength.”
“I d
on’t feel strong.”
“Did you not see the fire in his eyes as he was being ripped apart? It spread through the company as they watched him die. The strength and the knowledge of the link between his world and ours. Freedom isn’t something created in books or laws. Freedom was in his veins. If there is any word to describe the way of the wild, it is freedom. That’s what he gave us. That is what we must stand for, he was telling us.”
“Surely you are not saying that opposing the stamp tax is the same as keeping his Council fire alive?”
Duncan hesitated. “Maybe I am,” he said, then rose and began covering the dead man’s feet.
Winters stopped him. “He asked me to do two things,” the Virginian whispered, then extracted a large acorn from his pocket. “He gave me this weeks ago. He said this was the perfect one.” Winters held it out between two fingers for Duncan to see, then extended it toward the moon, as if Jahoska would have wanted it to approve. “I asked him why and he wouldn’t say, just that I was to keep it safe. Then last week he told me what to do with it when the time came. I laughed then, and he just smiled and said he trusted me.” Winters looked down at the corpse in the slanting grave. “It’s why he wanted to be buried like this, with his head near the surface.” As he held the acorn over Jaho’s head his hand started shaking. “How could I do this? It’s a nightmare . . .”
Somehow Duncan understood. He knelt and gently stroked the old man’s hair, as he had seen Iroquois matrons do in mourning their dead. “I will sing a song in the forest tongue,” he said to Winters, “and you will fulfill his wish.”
Winters stared, transfixed, as Duncan began a low mourning chant of the Iroquois, calling first to the spirits to come and greet the dead, then for the forest animals that served the great gods. Finally, with trembling hands, Winters opened the last Susquehannock’s jaw and placed the acorn in his mouth.
When he spoke, Winters’s voice held a tone of wonder, as if he finally understood Jaho’s intention. “He’s going to become a tree,” the overseer whispered, “with the roots following down his remains for nourishment.”
Blood of the Oak: A Mystery Page 32