Original Death amoca-3

by Eliot Pattison

  “Then I will learn to weave with my feet.”

  Duncan took a step toward the woman, ready to take the blow.

  “When the truth finally finds you, it will be your death,” Tushcona coolly declared.

  Duncan saw the amused cruelty in the half-king’s eyes as he surveyed the scene. He was assessing the witnesses, thinking of killing the matriarch. Just as frightening was the certainty that Tushcona was willing to die.

  “Kill the Council’s weaver, and you kill all hope of an alliance,” Duncan said.

  The half-king gave an exaggerated grimace. “But you so make me feel the need to kill someone. You have not learned to take me seriously. Just a small death for now. One child.” He muttered a low command, and one of his guards handed him a pouch from his belt. The half-king upended the pouch, and black-and-white pebbles, gaming pieces, spilled onto the ground. With deliberate slowness he selected three white pebbles and one black, then pointed to a deep shadow under the rocky ridge that might have been a cave. Two warriors stood on either side of the shadow. The half-king dropped the four stones back into the empty pouch. “The one who draws the black dies. If my belt has not been started in an hour, we will play the game again. You-” he pointed to Tushcona, “will hold the pouch as they draw, so they will know it is you who kills them.” The half-king’s frigid grin faded as his gaze moved over Duncan’s shoulder.

  “The colonel desires to honor our guests,” reported a stern voice. Duncan turned to see a grenadier sergeant, flanked by half a dozen fully armed men. “There is tea,” the solder said with a bow to the Iroquois.

  The aristocratic officer stood ramrod straight at the entrance to a large tent beyond the Highland campfires. Beside him stood a field table on which an orderly was arranging a surprisingly elegant tea service. The colonel greeted each member of their party with a courteous nod and gestured them to the steaming tea.

  The arrogance Duncan had seen before on Colonel Cameron’s face was gone, replaced with lines of worry. He offered no greeting to Duncan, only studied him with an uncertain expression until his shoulder was tapped by a grenadier. The colonel stepped several feet away and followed the man’s pointing arm to a newly arrived long boat from which casks of rum were being unloaded.

  “Whose are they?” Cameron snapped. “I do not recognize them.”

  “From Montgomerys,” the grenadier reported. “And they all wear the white cockade.”

  Cameron gave a slow, reluctant nod. “But I said no spirits!” he snapped, then he cursed as a swarm of Highlanders and warriors alike descended on the casks.

  “There’ll be no stopping it now, sir,” the grenadier declared.

  Cameron grimaced, then dismissed the soldier and turned back to Duncan. “After our first encounter in the general’s quarters in Albany,” he declared, “he said you were a damned difficult person to understand. He said you spoke like a foe but acted like a friend.”

  “In contrast to one who but talks like a friend.’

  Color rose into Cameron’s face. “When I have committed to a mission, I do not shy from its consequences, however uncomfortable they may be. I have stood with my troops in many a battle, beside the British colors.”

  “When I lived in Edinburgh, Colonel, I made a point of reading everything I could about the uprising of ’46. Camerons held huge estates in the Highlands. At Culloden, there were Camerons on the western flank, not far from the McCallums. Scores lay dead of English lead and steel at the end of the day. But soon you offered to raise more troops for the king that had killed them.”

  The words clearly stung the man. He motioned Duncan inside his tent and stepped to another field table, then poured a glass of sherry and downed it before answering. “It was a time for hard choices. I had friends in Edinburgh who had already taken the king’s colors, who begged me to help my people. Estates that had been held by our clan for centuries were about to be seized, every male about to be put to the butcher’s blade or rope, their women and children subject to unthinkable horrors. Scores of men, hundreds of women and children. If it was in your power to stop that horror, what would you have done, McCallum? Hard bargains had to be struck. It took more than mere begging for mercy to win the reprieve.” Cameron stared at the little glass as he rolled the stem in his fingers. “I drank myself to sleep every night for a year. By then the army had reduced the Highlands to rubble. There was nothing to go back to even if I wanted. But my people were allowed to leave, marched past bonfires into which the army threw their pipes and every article of clothing made of plaid.” He stepped to a narrow, tattered banner that hung from a tent rope and lifted it. “You can read Latin, McCallum?”

  The cloth took Duncan’s breath away. He stared at it without speaking, stepping closer to read the words over the image of a pelican feeding its young. “Virescit vulnere virtus,” he recited. “Courage grows strong at a wound.” The pelican was sometimes called the Jesus Bird, for it was thought to prick its own breast to feed its blood to its young. It was a powerful and sacred image, well known in the Highlands.

  “When this was first brought to me in secret, I thought it had to be a craven joke. A banner from Rome, the crest of the royal Stewart himself. Impossible, I thought. It was beyond my wildest dreams that the cause of the white cockade could be resurrected. But the banner was real, bearing bloodstains from Culloden. From the moment that spark of hope presented itself, I was duty bound to keep it alive,” he said, a hint of challenge in his voice.

  Duncan stared at the solemn Scot. “Who? Who brought the banner?”

  “It wasn’t only the banner. There was a letter from Rome, the affirmation that the one true prince is willing to take to sea, vouchsafed by the prince’s own royal ring.” Cameron spoke the words with the religious fervor of the old Jacobites, and as he spoke he touched the white cockade pinned to his lapel, much as one of the elders would touch his amulet. He leaned closer to Duncan. “Did you bring the Iroquois Council?”

  “I brought enough of the Council to make a difference,” Duncan stated.

  Cameron nodded, as if taking Duncan’s word as an affirmation, then pointed to the large chart on his table. It showed a section of the broad river with recent pencil marks depicting the new British batteries.

  “Amherst has no appreciation of our coppery friends,” Cameron said in a conspiratorial tone, “and his plans overly depend on artillery. He is quite right that these batteries will prevent French access to miles of river on either side of Montreal. What he does not expect, what he has not protected against, is two hundred savages rushing each battery from the rear. We will take them so fast they will never be able to spike the guns, without even time for messengers to raise the alarm to Amherst. We will let the transport ships stretch out in front of us before opening fire. With no room to maneuver, they will have no chance.”

  The colonel’s words sank in with slow, sickening realization. “That’s five thousand men at least, sir.” Duncan’s voice was almost a whisper.

  Cameron’s voice was as cold as ice. “Five for each Highlander slaughtered by British guns at Culloden. The wound we inflict will make them cower in London. They will know they have wakened the Jacobite beast, and they will not venture down this river again, not for many years.”

  From behind the curtain panel came a rough, dry coughing. Cameron pulled Duncan’s arm to stop him from investigating. “Here, lad,” he said, rolling up the chart to reveal another underneath. “We’ll not forget your part.”

  “My part?”

  Cameron quickly stepped to a trunk then extended a small dirk to Duncan. “You should have this,” he said as Duncan accepted the knife. It was the finely worked Highland dirk he had taken from the dead dispatch rider. “You kept the general confused over the theft. You slowed his western advance. You bought us time with the Iroquois League. The half-king reached the Saint Lawrence without any attempt to stop him. We need good men, educated men. Five hundred acres at least.”

  “Sir?”

 
“You’ll always be an outcast among the English.” Cameron gestured to the chart. “Take a look.”

  The chart contained a larger view of the entire river valley, stretching for dozens of miles on either side of Montreal. Cameron pointed to large plot penciled in along the vast lake beyond the river. “I will have twenty thousand acres and will build the biggest castle in the New World. You can take five hundred alongside, or one of the large islands if you prefer. Find a maiden. Start your clan anew.” Cameron turned to Duncan, expecting gratitude.

  Duncan stared in disbelief. This new life kept presenting itself, as if it was his destiny. It was not a dream in the night, but here and now. He could point to the map, and an estate would be his. “You are betting with hundreds of lives,” he said. “Who brought you the prince’s banner?” he asked again.

  The coughing started again. Cameron made no effort this time to stop Duncan as he lifted the hanging canvas that walled off the back of the large tent.

  The chamber was bigger than he expected. The tattered carpet that covered its earthen floor showed faded hints of hunting scenes. On a field table sat a bright oil lamp. The robed monk looked up in surprise.

  “Brother Xavier.” Duncan nodded to the Jesuit, who rose and solemnly returned his nod. “He was too weak to come by himself,” Xavier explained. “I wanted to be with him when. .” his voice drifted away, and he shrugged, then left the chamber.

  The man on the cot was noticeably weaker than when Duncan had left him in Montreal. His eyes had sunken even deeper. His hands seemed but skin and bone.

  “Lord Graham,” Duncan offered in greeting, then he quickly stepped to the cot. He realized his question about the source of the banner was answered.

  It seemed to cause Graham great effort to raise his hand and move it back and forth as though to correct Duncan. He was about to speak when another spasm of coughing seized him. Duncan sat by the bed and lifted the man’s wrist. His pulse was light as a feather. Every breath was a wheezing struggle. The smell of death was settling around him.

  “Cameron’s a good lad, son,” Graham finally said. “He has been battered by his times.”

  “Like the rest of us.”

  Graham offered a weak smile. “Tribes and clans alike.”

  Duncan pulled the blanket back and loosened the black robe over the man’s chest, pausing as his effort exposed a fine linen shirt underneath. Hanging over it was an elegant golden chain, at the end of which was a heavy golden ring set with a seal. A ring had been sent from the prince.

  “And royal families in Rome,” Duncan added. “There was never a conspiracy of the western tribes,” he said after a moment.

  “Not at first. I decided-” Graham’s words were cut off by a paroxysm of coughing. The linen cloth he held to his mouth came away bloody. “I decided the world was big enough to allow battered peoples a place of their own.”

  “A noble idea,” Duncan agreed.

  “If only I had lived to see the dream fulfilled. I’d give my right arm for a few more weeks. But in his infinite wisdom, God has decided to take me to the threshold and no further. You would have been one of the strong backs I would have leaned on. Cameron always wants to speak of castles. I am more interested in churches and schools and infirmaries. A factory to allow the tribes to process their own furs-now that would be something!”

  Before Duncan could reply, Lord Graham reached with bony fingers to extract a piece of rich brown fur that had been entwined in the links of his gold chain. “It wasn’t going to keep me alive forever,” he whispered. His breath came in short raspy gasps now. As he rubbed the fur, a small white patch appeared on it.

  “King otter skin.” The words came from Duncan’s tongue unbidden, as if a door had creaked open in the back of his mind.

  Graham dropped the fur into Duncan’s palm.

  The old Highlanders from Duncan’s youth had always insisted the king otter, the largest of the species, was impervious to death except by a wound to the tiny patch of white on his chest. Even a small scrap of its fur was said to protect the one who carried it from any danger. “I had an uncle who kept a piece close to his heart,” Duncan said. “It protected him for eighty years, but not from the English rope that took him in the end.”

  “It saved me from English bullets at Culloden, from vengeful arrows on the Ohio,” Graham explained. “Harpoons on the shore of Hudson’s Bay, a rapier in Paris, even a stiletto in Rome. But it ne’er promised immortality.”

  Graham coughed and pointed to the solitary bottle by his bed. There was only one medicine left for him. Duncan uncorked it and poured out a dram of whiskey.

  “There had to be an emissary from the Vatican,” Duncan said as the laird drank. “There had to be a go-between with the Stewart prince. There was a Scottish trader who filled the boy named Regis with such bold ideas he became the Revelator. I just never thought they could be the same man.” Duncan had found the missing link in the chain, the man who tied everything together.

  “Lord Andrew Graham. Father Andre,” the old man said in a whimsical tone. “And many years ago, the western tribes called me the Red Bear, for the red beard I wore as a trader. I have been rich in names and adventures, in wives and friends.”

  “And ambitions.”

  Graham motioned for more whiskey. “What I have done is for my people, all my people.”

  “There was a man named Regis who became rich in names and ambitions,” Duncan said as he filled the glass again. Here before him, he knew, was the man who had laid the seeds of rebellion within the Revelator, who had cajoled the Jacobite prince into considering the possibility of starting fresh in the New World. Here too was the man who meant to beat down the English at last by using Indians as cannon fodder, who set wheels in motion that had caused untold deaths already, including those at Bethel Church. Duncan should hate him, should wish him dead. Andrew Graham had been larger than life, a war hero, an explorer, a spy, a diplomat, a man who would make kings. In another age he would have carved out his own kingdom. But the creature before him was a shrunken caricature of that man, another broken laird, the dying old Highlander who had made everything possible, given an honored place in the half-king’s camp.

  Another piece suddenly slid into place. “The half-king is your son,” Duncan declared.

  Graham drank deeply of his whiskey. When he spoke his voice was thin as a leaf. “I’ve had several sons,” he said, “but only Regis survives. His mother was a beautiful Mingo maid who lived among the French, and she had him baptized by them. Regis Thistle, so he would not forget his Scottish blood. When he was eight I left a bundle of furs with a Jesuit monk on the Ohio and told him to educate the boy.”

  “You should have made it two or three bundles.”

  Graham gave a bitter grin, and when he spoke his voice was steadier. “I find that one’s education adapts to one’s world,” he said. “This world needed to be shaken. He has become my flaming spear.” He began a raspy, whispered song, the Highland lament that had become the Jacobite anthem.

  Duncan waited until he quieted to speak again. “For years I could not hear the name of the British king without hate boiling up inside me. It was in his name that my mother and sisters and young brother were tormented and killed.”

  Graham cocked his head, not fully understanding.

  “Children of the Iroquois Council were taken,” Duncan said. “The Revelator threatens to enslave them, or worse.”

  Graham drank again. The whiskey strengthened his voice. “The ways of the savage are ever hard, lad. Tooth and claw have ruled the forest since before time.”

  “I was thinking more of your ways, the ways of the holy Jacobite cause and a virtuous prince who waits in the Vatican. Yet nine gentle souls were slaughtered at Bethel Church in the name of the half-king.”

  Graham’s face clouded. “I know of no such thing. There was no need for bloodshed at the settlement. The robbery was to be by subterfuge, never violence.”

  “It was there the children o
f the Iroquois Council were captured. If the half-king has his way, those children will die, all in the name of his vision. But a father’s last request cannot be ignored,” Duncan added. “It could be a gift, a tribute to the prince who waits in Rome. We just want to leave with the children.”

  A crooked smile grew on the dying Scot’s face. “Colonel Cameron!” he called in the voice of the laird he once had been. “Bring me Regis!”

  The four kilted grenadiers escorting them marched in silent formation, their military discipline as tight as on any parade ground. They passed the last of the military tents and kept marching, toward the cave beyond the camp where two sullen warriors stood guard. The soldiers flanked the guards, and the lead grenadier pointed into the cave.

  A short figure appeared, huddled under a blanket. As Duncan approached, the blanket dropped to reveal an Indian boy of perhaps ten. His arm was wrapped in a bloody bandage.

  “Jacob,” Duncan said in a soft voice as Conawago reached his side, “it is time to go home.”

  The boy looked at Duncan uncertainly, then turned to a larger figure who hobbled into the light, supported by a young girl. Adanahoe’s face was bruised, with one eye swollen shut.

  “I knew people who looked like you,” the old matriarch grinned, “but they would have to be dead by now.”

  There was no time for response, for the children broke into joyful cries as they saw the elders and Ishmael emerging from behind the soldiers.

  Embraces and tears quickly followed, but Duncan would not allow the reunion to be lengthy. He desperately wanted to be out of the half-king’s reach. He spoke urgently to the elders, who quickly quieted the children. They must circle the camp, he explained, staying on the fringe all the way to the canoes.

  They were less than a minute from the landing when a dozen warriors ran to block them.

  “Not so fast, McCallum!” the half-king shouted. He had not disputed Lord Graham’s command, though Duncan suspected it had not been so much due to the respect of a son as the judgment that he could not argue with the venerated old clan chief in front of so many Highlanders. But there were only tribal warriors around them now.