Original Death amoca-3

by Eliot Pattison

  As Sagatchie straightened, still standing in the stream, the tall Huron named Scar appeared, studying the Mohawk with a sneer then flinging more mud on him, striking his face. Sagatchie snarled a curse, and Duncan was certain he would have leapt at the well-armed man had Kass not put a restraining hand on his arm. Scar laughed and lifted his necklace into the faces of his prisoners, shaking the sticks that hung on it. With a gasp Duncan realized they were not sticks but human fingers, freshly amputated.

  “Take our hands and we will hit you with our arms! Take our arms and we will kick you with our legs!” It took a moment for Duncan to realize Kass had spoken the defiant words.

  The Hurons laughed. Some made lewd gestures at the woman, others smiled coolly and looked in the direction of a small raised flat at the edge of the abandoned town. The tent that had been raised on the flat was unlike any of the others scattered around the old town site. It was a large white canvas box of a tent with scalloped flaps, the kind used by the French military for high officers. Its white canvas had been painted with a grey pattern to give it the appearance of a stone cabin.

  They were being prepared for an audience. He watched in alarm as Sagatchie again seemed about to leap at his captors. The Mohawk had been beaten with a spear shaft on their journey to the camp. His ribs would crack with more blows. Duncan moved to step between him and the Huron who goaded him, but Kass was there first, drawing up her body in a way that seemed to unsettle their captors.

  They motioned their prisoners forward, not toward the ornate tent but up a worn trail that led out the far side of the abandoned town. After a quarter hour of steady climbing, they passed between two nearly symmetrical conical hills that were strangely devoid of trees. As they reached the shadows between the hills, they were met by half a dozen somber warriors in fur robes who carried heavy spears as their only weapons.

  “Follow,” the tallest of the warriors commanded. Duncan realized he had spoken in the Haudenosaunee tongue. The Hurons had given them to Mingos, the western Iroquois.

  They ascended the narrow cleft and emerged into an eerie, otherworldly scene. The wide bowl they entered was scorched and charred, its only trees the twisted burnt offspring of the huge oaks that grew on the slopes below. There was still enough light left for Duncan to see that the high barren bowl was pockmarked with lightning strikes. They were at the place where lightning gathered, the ancient shrine whose secret Hickory John had been tortured for. Bizarre rock formations, most scorched and cracked by heat, surrounded a central formation lit by torches. Their escort had the air of robed monks, the torchlit bowl that of a pagan temple. The long rounded formation at the center of the bowl, covering what appeared to be a cavern, had the appearance of a stone lodge.

  A solitary man wrapped in a blanket sat before a smoldering fire at the entrance to the Lightning Lodge. As they were taken closer, stopping a hundred feet away, Duncan made out other figures, perhaps twenty in all, sitting against rocks arranged in a half circle around the man as if paying homage to him.

  As he took another step closer and saw the arrows in several of the figures, realization stabbed Duncan like a cold blade. He sprang forward to grab Kass’s arm as she gasped. She too now understood, and he was terrified she would react. Those against the boulders were dead. The Iroquois Council had sent its best warriors to protect the old spirits, and they had been killed by the half-king. Among the dead in front of them were Kass’s father and brother.

  The seated man spread his arms to point out his handiwork.

  Duncan felt Kass tense, sensing her anguished fury. Then Sagatchie appeared on her other side, pulling her backward, and she relented, a sob escaping her throat as her gaze settled on two bodies at the near edge of the half-circle. Duncan stood at the front alone, straining his eyes, desperately searching for, and just as desperately hoping not to see, the body of Conawago.

  Their robed escorts signaled for them to turn around. This was all the audience they had intended. The prisoners had seen the dead, had seen the sacred shrine, and, Duncan suspected, they had seen the Revelator.

  They were taken back to their posts, but when the guards had finished tying Sagatchie and Kass, they led Duncan away, toward the flat with the stone-painted tent, and they ordered him to stand alone by a smoldering fire. He sensed many eyes watching him from the darkness. After several minutes, a familiar figure approached. Macaulay acknowledged Duncan with a silent, chagrined nod then offered him a gourd of water.

  “Do whatever he asks, lad,” the big Scot advised. “Say ye want to be one of his Highland warriors and he may let ye live.”

  “There’s an old man named Conawago,” Duncan said. “Do you know where he is?”

  Macaulay cocked his head toward the elevated flat at the center of the village and seemed about to speak when a stone struck his shoulder. He retreated into the shadows, where guards were watching.

  Duncan watched the constellations rise, losing track of time but not daring to move. Finally a tiny ringing sound rose from the darkness. Something small and metallic jingled and stopped, jingled and stopped, the sound gradually getting louder.

  “In the Ohio country my people were fascinated when a British trader first introduced these,” came a voice from the shadows. Had Duncan not known better he would have thought a well-educated European was addressing him. “They would pay a full beaver pelt for just one.”

  The silhouette of a tall, lean man moved toward him, not from the tent but from the direction of the sacred place above the town. The low flames reflected off a small silvery bell that the man tossed from one hand to the other. “Women and men alike braided them into their hair. One of our women traded her daughter for ten such bells.” More shapes became visible, guards holding spears and muskets. A woman slipped out of the shadows to dump an armload of wood onto the dying fire.

  “Later I discovered they were called hawk bells.” The man’s precise, articulate words held the faint trace of a French accent. “They tie them to their hawks and falcons in your world.”

  “Not in my world,” Duncan said, his voice calmer than he felt.

  “The ones who rule your world do so.”

  Duncan offered no disagreement.

  “At first that discovery made me sad. But later it made me angry. A man has no right to do such a thing. It is an insult to hawks. It spits in the eyes of the hawks and the gods they serve. These are the same people who take our land. These are the people who would destroy our tribes and put bells on the few who survive.”

  The dry wood burst into flame so abruptly that the man in front of him seemed to have taken shape out of thin air. He wore a sleeveless waistcoat over his painted torso and one of the army’s new shorter field kilts over deerskin leggings. The Revelator’s strong chiseled face might have seemed handsome were it not for the line of tattooed snakes that ran up from his neck over his cheek and onto his scalp, disappearing into long brown hair that was bound at the back into the kind of tight braided knot favored by British seamen. The fur of a fisher fox was draped over one arm, the head of the animal perched on his shoulder. The white beads that had been sewn into the eye sockets gave it the look of a beast from the other side. The half-king extended his hand over the fire and let the bell fall into the flames. “What do you desire of us?”

  “You make it sound as if we came willingly.”

  The Revelator sighed disappointedly. “Your name is Duncan McCallum, chieftain of one of the Highland clans that have been so sorely tested by fate.” He paused as he realized Duncan was pointedly gazing past his shoulder. “You wait for someone else perhaps?”

  Duncan looked into the man’s deep eyes. “The Revelator is a great Mingo warrior who strikes terror in all he approaches. But you speak like one of the Presbyterian ministers who used to troll for souls along the coast where I was raised.” Duncan was indeed confused by the European affectation of the man.

  The man’s smile was as cold as ice. “My father left me at a Jesuit mission when I was young.” A
s he took another step forward, the fire lit his face. His eyes glowed like black jewels.

  “Jesuits teach in French.”

  The man shrugged. “I can always parle français with a new friend.”

  “I come because I am a friend of Conawago of the Nipmucs,” he said. “I chose my friends based on who they are, not what they are.”

  “Which makes you a very bad soldier.”

  “I am no soldier.”

  “But we are all soldiers,” the half-king said, taking in the camp with a sweep of his hand. “It is the great mistake of the tribes. They have been bears, slumbering in caves, roaming aimlessly in the forests. Now is the time for wolves. Wolves reign supreme in their lands because they stand together. The bigger the pack, the greater their power. Their world is absolute. Once they choose a prey, it must always die.”

  “We had wolves in the hills where I grew up,” Duncan replied. “Men with guns would bait them with raw meat then shoot them while they ate. They died because they were so predictable.”

  The Revelator shrugged. “I thought Scar had showed you what we do with those who oppose us. And you would be hard pressed to predict what I am capable of.”

  Duncan became aware of others beyond the half-king’s guard, figures arriving to sit in the shadows as if in hope of hearing the half-king’s words. “I was told the Revelator was a visionary who spoke for the gods. Instead I find just another savage who plays with knives. A whole camp of your soldiers against a single Delaware tied to a post.”

  The Revelator’s cool smile did not dim as he produced a clay pipe from a pouch and bent to light it from a flaming stick. “You are indeed from the Highlands?” he asked as he coaxed smoke out of the tobacco.

  Duncan nodded slowly, more confused than ever about this Mingo from the West who spoke like an educated European yet behaved like the most violent of savages.

  “The English tried to extinguish the clans there. What would you do if certain English soldiers tortured and killed your family and you found those same foul creatures under your control years later?”

  The words stabbed at Duncan’s heart so painfully that several moments passed before he could speak. “This is not about Scottish tribes. It is about the woodland tribes.”

  The man’s eyes flared. “Then you know nothing! It is about the Mingoes and the Mohawks and the Hurons and the Onondaga and the Scots and the French métis of the north country! It is about the deaths of all our people, here and on the other side!”

  Duncan went still. “What do you know of death on the other side?”

  The leader of the rebel tribes grew solemn. “I have walked on the other side,” he declared, stirring murmured chants among those who sat behind him. “I know everything about death. My people are the blessed guardians of death.”

  “We have the oracles!” a woman in the shadows cried out. “We know we are the true humans because the oracles have come to say so!”

  The Revelator paced around the fire, working his pipe, pausing by his guards, who began clearing away the onlookers, then stepped in front of Duncan. “You will carry messages back to the general,” he stated. The spiritual leader seemed to have disappeared. The half-king had become a military tactician.

  “The general will not listen to me. I am done with generals,” Duncan replied.

  “We are the true humans!” an acolyte cried out, as if the words were part of a liturgy.

  The Revelator ignored the woman. “The general will be certain to listen to you. Such a man may not believe what he is given, but he always believes what he takes.”

  “I am too weary for riddles.”

  “You are going to be taken to Albany as a prisoner. The general will have received an intercepted letter in which it is revealed that the murder committed by the fugitive McCallum was just part of a greater effort to assist the French army. He will interrogate you and discover from you that a large French army is making its way for a surprise attack on Albany along the west side of the mountains.”

  “I never wrote such a letter!”

  The Revelator shrugged. “Your name is signed to it. I believe that is all that matters. The general so wants to believe you are a traitor. But you must take a beating first, so he believes you.”

  “I refuse.”

  “Of course you do. But if you do not agree, you will all die. If you agree but don’t play your part satisfactorily, your friends will die in exquisite pain,” he said. “I will crush every bone in their bodies like shells under my feet, and the old Nipmuc will be sent to the other side permanently,” the Revelator declared, then he turned away from the fire.

  Strong hands seized Duncan, pulling him toward the retreating figure of the half-king.

  They arrived at a small lodge on the knoll at the center of the former tribal town, past two dozen fires, each a camp for fifteen or twenty figures. The half-king’s force was far larger than Duncan had realized. The structure was set apart, on the highest point of the town, with small smoky fires outside each corner and torches flanking its entrance. Garlands of small skulls reached to the ground from either side of the entry. The Revelator disappeared inside, and his guards shoved Duncan after him.

  The long low platform in the center was surrounded by tallow lamps. Women clad in ornate doeskin shifts were on their knees, surrounding the altar, chanting in low tones. As one moved aside to admit the half-king, Duncan froze. The platform held the body of an old man draped in a ceremonial robe of feathers.

  “Conawago!” Duncan gasped, springing forward.

  As he reached out to touch his friend’s face, two warriors leapt from the shadows to seize him but were stopped by the half-king’s upraised hand.

  “Your friend is not one of us anymore,” the half-king stated. “The oracle roams on the other side but is bound to my people.”

  Duncan stared in torment at Conawago’s limp body.

  A thin smile rose on the half-king’s tattooed face. As he gestured Duncan forward, he began shaking a turtle shell rattle.

  Though the Nipmuc’s cheek was warm, he did not respond to Duncan’s touch. Without thinking he pushed the robe aside to take a wrist. One of the women hissed in warning, but another, the oldest of the attendants, pulled her away. His friend’s pulse was weak and slow, but discernible. Conawago was alive, barely.

  “What have you done?” he demanded. The women began chanting a prayer he did not recognize.

  “Done?” the half-king shot back. “Kept him alive when he was on his last breath! Enabled him to fulfill his glorious destiny!”

  Duncan looked at the sentinels and the attendants then at the elegant garment he had pushed away. He had heard of such robes of multicolored feathers, used for special ceremonies. Knots of cedar smoldered in small bowls, scenting the chamber. As he pushed the robe down, he saw his friend’s other hand lay on his belly, clutching the hilt of a knife. Not any knife, he knew immediately. It was the ornate knife Madame Pritchard had seen, the weapon that looked like it belonged on an altar. The hilt was carved with elaborate images and inlaid with bright stones. The blade was of flint. It had a look of great antiquity.

  As he rearranged the robe over Conawago, the old Nipmuc slightly stirred, and a hoarse, whispered chant rose from his throat. The women instantly stopped and leaned toward him.

  “You see now he is my bridge,” the Revelator declared when Conawago fell silent. “He was discovered by my men in a cloud of smoke after we took the Lightning Lodge from those foolish Iroquois. They knew he had just returned from the other side.” The half-king’s eyes narrowed, as if he was daring Duncan to challenge him. “Our first oracle declared him our sacred messenger, one of the walkers among the dead. A validation of our holy quest.”

  Duncan could see nothing but a frail old man. His friend seemed to have greatly aged since he had last seen him. “Your bridge?” he asked in a faint voice.

  It was the nearest of the old women who replied. “To the other side! The oracles, the two who travel between world
s, the ones who speak the pain of the gods.”

  Duncan’s heart was in his throat. Conawago was wasting away in some kind of coma. “He needs help. Medicine.”

  “We watch over him night and day,” the woman said, lowering her voice now. “I drip honey and water onto his lips, but it is not enough. It is unavoidable that he is weak. Part of him is gone over, wandering on the other side, and it has no interest in human nourishment. It is their way.”

  “Two oracles, you say?”

  “Her life wind is almost gone,” the woman said, and she gestured toward the back of the lodge. Through the thinning smoke Duncan saw now another platform against the wall. “We were wrong to cast her out. The gods have sent her back to help us. The god voice inside her told us this Conawago was a sacred one, told us he would have answers to the questions we will learn to ask. The gods painted their track on her.”

  Duncan understood even before he rose and saw the limp form lying on a bed of moss in the shadows. He had seen the track of her gods, under her shirt in Albany. Hetty had been known by the Mingoes, feared but also respected for her ties to the spirits. She had told them Conawago was a sacred one. She had saved him.

  “She won’t let go of the small one, says he is her only anchor left on earth.” As the woman spoke, another attendant, wrapped in a blanket, turned. Ishmael looked up at Duncan with fearful eyes. His hand was tightly gripped by Hetty.

  Duncan took a step toward the boy but was held back by one of the attending women. A low growl came from the shadows, and the woman quickly relented. Hetty had two attendants. The hell dog was there, and he did not object when Duncan put a hand on Ishmael’s shoulder. The boy nodded stiffly. He was terrified, but Duncan could do nothing to help him.

  Suddenly Conawago began speaking in a rough, hoarse voice, now in the tongue of his boyhood, the Nipmuc tongue Duncan had not learned. Others crowded into the longhouse, speaking in excited whispers. As Duncan was pulled out of the building, the words changed, and they were loud enough for him to hear outside.

  “Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris,” Conawago called out.