Ethan Gage Collection # 1

by William Dietrich

  We easily filched food and powder, given that half the company was unconscious and the rest inebriated past the point of caring, and I tried not to think too much about plunging into the dark woods alone.

  “How are we going to find the spot that has Thor’s symbol without a guide?” Magnus asked, as he became more awake.

  “That’s why we need to find Namida and Little Frog. We’ll steal a canoe, slip down the lake, and have them help us find a way inland. Once we get close, it’s up to you to tell us which way Vikings would go.”

  “Not Vikings—Norsemen and Templars.”

  “And Welsh, woolly elephants, the lost tribes of Israel, copper miners from Atlantis, and Spaniards looking for El Dorado. It should be so crowded we’ll see their lights for miles.”

  He smiled despite himself. “And of course, having been played a fool by one woman, you can’t wait to link us to another.”

  “I’m a little desperate, Magnus. Besides, she asked me to save her and told me her tribe has a stone tablet with mysterious writing. It could be a clue.”

  “Stone tablet? You didn’t tell me of this.”

  “You’re too excitable.”

  “Whereas you are proceeding with deliberate decorum.”

  “She’s a damsel in distress with a critical cipher. We kidnap her, escape, go home to her tablet, and finish your crazed quest.”

  “What if we run into Aurora and Cecil?”

  “They were at the north end of the Rendezvous and Red Jacket’s camp is at the south. All we have to do is hurry. I’ve thought it all through, I assure you.”

  “Thought it through? An hour ago, all you cared about was Aurora Somerset!”

  He was, as I said, annoyingly corrective. “I’ve reformed.”

  We stole a small canoe and paddled a few yards offshore to where I estimated Red Jacket’s band was camped. Here, presumably, is where Namida would be held. Hopefully most of the braves were off carousing. If we could stealthily pry the women away we should be able to keep ahead of any chase. In the last few weeks both Magnus and I had become quite the master paddlers, thanks to Pierre.

  I’d miss the French voyageur, but it wasn’t fair to embroil him in my troubles. There was no time for good-bye, either, but when we had the hammer and ruled the world, or were rich as Croesus, or whatever, I’d send him a letter.

  Song still echoed across the water as we glided into Red Jacket’s camp and crept ashore, I with my rifle, Magnus with his ax. “Put a hole in their canoe when we leave,” I whispered. We crept like assassins.

  Much to my relief there were just two Indian sentries curled in their blankets by a fire, apparently asleep. This lack of vigilance was explained by the fact that two smaller figures, upright and hooded with blankets, who sat with their backs against a tree a dozen paces further, were tethered to the trunk by a leather rope around their necks. The slaves had been tied up. I crawled near.

  “Namida!” I whispered in French. “I’ve come to save you!”

  She straightened at her name.

  I sawed through the tether, pulled back the blanket, and leaned in to kiss her.

  Instead, I found myself staring into the muzzle of a pistol pointed at my nose.

  “You’re even stupider than I thought,” said Aurora coolly, auburn ringlets cascading to her shoulders as the blanket fell away. “It’s boring to be so predictable.”

  Tarnation. She was wearing her Indian blanket over a thin white chemise, and looked as voluptuous as ever. If it wasn’t for the pistol, the look of cold contempt, and her coupling with her cousin, I’d have been confused all over again. “Well, I can’t say that about you, can I?”

  The other tied figure proved to simply be more blankets, stuffed and propped, that fell apart when Magnus reached out to free Little Frog.

  There was a cock of hammers as Indians came up behind. A musket bore pushed into the joint between my skull and neck. Magnus was pinned to the ground with a buck’s knee on his backbone and a tomahawk poised above his temple. Cecil Somerset stepped into view, too: coatless, sleeves tied back for fencing, his unsheathed rapier glowing in the moonlight. He looked lean and dashing.

  “I actually prefer that you’re predictable, Mr. Gage. We assumed that if you weren’t playing the dunce for Aurora, you’d be after that pretty squaw.”

  Slowly I began to rise, but Red Jacket snapped an order and two warriors grasped my arms to keep me pinned, a third yanking away my rifle and a fourth trussing my hands behind my back. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any chocolates this time.

  “You seem to have forgotten I’m on a mission of diplomacy.”

  “And you seem to have forgotten there’s a difference between being a diplomat and being a spy and a Peeping Tom.”

  “It’s just that you and your cousin seemed so occupied that I thought I should hire a different guide. Namida has less peculiar tastes.”

  “Aurora is not my cousin, Mr. Gage.”

  “Ah. So is anything about the pair of you true at all? Are you even aristocrats?”

  “She’s my sister.”

  I heard Magnus gasp and then grunt as someone kicked him.

  “That’s disgusting!”

  “So they said in England, but then ordinary mortals know nothing of the power of true love. Half-sister, actually. Is it so strange that we’d share tastes and an attraction? Our dissolute father had strange perversions of his own, and we allied against the monster even as we were seduced by him. We think he may have poisoned both our mothers and rutted indiscriminately with all manner of creatures when he wasn’t gambling away our inheritance. Inevitably, our sibling alliance against him was empowered by real affection. Society condemns us for it, but Cagliostro’s Egyptian Rite understood and encouraged it. Here, in the wild, we can indulge it. You’ll understand that we don’t announce it casually on first acquaintance.”

  “It’s incestuous! Illegal! Contemptible!”

  “It’s holy, by the pagan rites of ancient pharaohs, kings, and druids. Holy because we alone know our love is true, and because we’ve had to risk everything, including this exile, to live it. You have no idea what depth of feeling is. Yes, I heard how you let the Egyptian woman go, idiot. Now you’ll suffer alone.”

  “Even the wilderness has morals, Cecil. You’ll regret telling us this.”

  “Not if you’re dead.” His sword tip danced a little in the cool air.

  “You host us, bring us here, and then kill us?”

  “As you killed Alessandro Silano, mindless dilettante. Did you really think we’d forget? I thought the payback would be in Italy, or in Mortefontaine with the Danes we financed, or in New York. You have curious endurance, but gamblers know that even the luckiest streak must eventually end.”

  “The only reason we ever befriended you,” Aurora added, “was to learn what your mission really is. Since you won’t confide—after I gave you every chance and promise of ample reward—it comes to this.”

  “You’ll die the slowest and most horrible death imaginable, courtesy of Red Jacket and his Indians,” Cecil forecast. “You’ll tell us everything you know anyway, and then things you hope we might want to know, and then nonsense no one will even begin to believe, and in the end none of it will do you any good. First you’ll talk, and then you’ll beg, and then you’ll scream until your throat is raw, and finally get to the point where you can barely make any sound at all. You’ll feel the torment of the damned, I’ve seen it. Girty taught me well. And the remarkable thing is that even then, after you’ve told us everything through agony that you could simply have shared in Aurora’s bed, your torture will have only begun. The Indians are remarkable scientists. They can make the torture extend for days. They’ll revive you from unconsciousness a hundred times.”

  “It’s their dread and their sport,” Aurora said. “The need to escape torture gives them courage. Preparation for its possibility gives them stoic invulnerability to pain.”

  “Then I’ll tell you everything now,” I sa
id reasonably. If they wanted to go trooping after mythical hammers and nonexistent elephants, fine by me. I’m no coward, but the prospect of being a week-long experiment for Red Jacket and his minions had me trembling, and what did I really care for Bloodhammer’s quest? I’d been recruited by accident.

  “I’m sorry, but that option has been closed, Ethan,” Cecil said. “First, we wouldn’t believe you because you have a certain…inventiveness. And second, one of the things Aurora and I most enjoy, when we’re not coupling, is watching our enemies in pain. It’s electrifying—may I use that word?—how arousing the agony of others truly is. Our passion is always at its highest right after their suffering. We were hoping, the entire voyage here, that you’d make it necessary.”

  “You’ll forgive that I’m not all that happy to oblige.”

  “Your unhappiness is the best part!” said Aurora.

  “I’ll cry out if you don’t let us go!”

  Aurora brought out a gag.

  “At least spare Magnus. I was the one who insisted we go with you. He’s just a harmless Norse dreamer.”

  “Spare a man who wants to claim North America by pretending his ancestors were here first? I think not. Besides, we want to hear him bellow. He’ll sound like an ox.”

  “I’ve a letter from my president, the sponsorship of Bonaparte, and McTavish himself has met me! If you murder us, it will be avenged!”

  “On the contrary. You stole supplies and a canoe, slipped into the wilderness without a word, and were never heard of again. We’ll mount a valiant rescue effort, finding, incidentally, whatever it is you’re really looking for. Then we’ll send condolences to Jefferson who, I’m sure, is actually expecting very little.”

  “You’ll unleash Ragnarok, Englishman!” Magnus said from the ground.

  “I don’t believe in fairy tales, bumpkin,” he said, pinking the Norwegian’s cheek with the point of his blade, “I’ve unleashed only the end of you.”

  And the gags were bound round our heads.

  Chapter 29

  AT LEAST WE DIDN’T HAVE TO PADDLE.

  We were trussed like hogs and thrown in the bottom of Red Jacket’s canoe and the one we’d just stolen. A third canoe bore the Somersets with more Indian paddlers. A fourth included Namida and Little Frog. The two Indian women looked at us gloomily. They’d seen what happens to captives.

  This flotilla shoved off at dawn, the fort silent except for roosters and dogs, and soon we were out of sight. Except for rough handling as they tied us and dragged us, we were unmolested, since they were saving us for their village. I worked a while at the rawhide thongs but only succeeded in sawing my wrists. The Indians were better at trussing prisoners than my assailants at Mortefontaine.

  Our captors paddled all through that day and night, arriving the next morning at their home village on the western shore of Lake Superior. If it was any consolation, I judged by the sun and my memory of maps that the shoreline continued to lead us southwest. Unwittingly, we were a good hundred miles nearer our intended destination on Bloodhammer’s map.

  Gunshots and whoops announced our approach, and even from the bottom of the canoe I could hear the excited shouts of those waiting, no doubt trading torment tips and taking bets on how long before we screamed, fainted, or died. Somehow it was worse not being able to see yet, staring hopelessly up at the sky. Then the splash of paddlers leaping out, a dozen hands reaching to heave me up like a sack of flour, and finally I was ashore where my ankles were cut free so I could stand awkwardly, blood rushing painfully back to my feet. My hands stayed bound. Bloodhammer was propped up as well.

  I blinked, dizzy from anxiety. In front, a howling mob of perhaps two hundred Indians faced Magnus and me. Men, women, and children alike were armed with a stick or club and looking as excited as an orphanage at Christmas. A couple of rocks sailed out to sting us, but there was no serious barrage. You don’t open your present until its time.

  I tried to be philosophical. Magnus had dreamed that men who lived in virgin wilderness would be born with natural nobility and secret insight. Yet what I saw when civilization was absent was raw human savagery stripped of any restraint. Nature was cruel, not benign, and that cruelty would now be turned on us.

  I looked at my companion. “I’m sorry, Magnus.”

  There was nothing to reply. He was looking at his tormenters with a Viking scowl that would give Tamerlane pause. Many men would collapse and weep at this point, praying against whatever horrors were planned—I had half a mind to do just that myself, if it would do any good—but Magnus was simply taking his enemies’ measure. If he ever got loose of his bonds, he’d be Samson at the pillars. So how to free ourselves?

  I glanced about. Aurora had claimed my longrifle, I saw with annoyance, angling it across her chest like a sentry. Some painted buck was shaking Bloodhammer’s double-bladed ax. Our stolen provisions had disappeared—probably eaten by our captors on the paddle here—and I realized I was ravenously hungry and desperately thirsty. Well, I’d lose my appetite soon enough.

  Red Jacket paraded up and down the beach, raising his arms, pointing at us, and orating in his native tongue. No doubt he was boasting how clever he was to have caught us, or explaining how foolish I was to try rescuing Namida. The girl and Little Frog were to one side of our party, shrinking from the shrieking assembly but in no danger themselves. Fertile women were too valuable to squander. Cecil was to the other side, hand on sheathed rapier, thoroughly enjoying his advisory role. He, I decided, would be the first to die. Then his half-sister, if that’s what she really was, the Siren. Yes, bitter revenge, just as soon as I got loose of two hundred agitated Indians!

  I tried to come up with a plan—electrical demonstrations, ancient spells, hidden weapons, predictions of a solar eclipse—and failed completely. It’s not easy to improvise when facing torture.

  Red Jacket had an idea of his own. He posed in front of us, hands on hips like the lord of the manor, and then speechified to the crowd again.

  They howled with delight. Cecil Somerset frowned, which I hoped was a good sign. Namida, I noticed, had glanced backward at something out of sight of the crowd but then quickly turned her attention again to me.

  A scraped deer hide was thrown on the ground between us. Red Jacket reached into one of his deep English pockets and pulled out a handful of what at first looked like pebbles. When he cast them onto the leather, I realized they were Indian dice, carved from the pits of wild plums. They were oval instead of square, in the Indian manner, and had just two sides: one side was carved with lines, circles, snakes, ravens, and deer; the other was blank.

  The Indians hooted and pranced. They loved gambling.

  And so did I, allowing myself a tiny wager on hope! Ten beans were placed on the hide as well.

  Red Jacket snapped something at Somerset and then jerked his head toward me. Cecil protested in the Indian tongue, but the chief would have none of it. He shook his head and barked at Somerset again.

  The Englishman finally shrugged. “He wants you to gamble, Gage. Apparently you have a reputation for it.”

  I swallowed. “I seem to be a little low on money.”

  “Gamble your life, of course.”

  “So if I win?”

  “You escape with your hair.”

  “And if I lose?”

  Cecil smiled. “Then you’ll run the gauntlet before being strapped to the stake, giving everyone a chance to take a swing at you.”

  “How sporting.” I knelt at the deer hide, wrists still bound. “How do I play?”

  “It’s a simple version. Red Jacket will put the chips in a wooden bowl and throw. If more of the plain white side land up than the decorated, the thrower wins a bean. If more of the decorated side land up, you win a bean. If the advantage is seven white to three decorated, then two beans. Eight is three, nine four, and if all ten die are white then Red Jacket gets five beans.”

  “What do I get?”

  “Conversely, if the majority is decorate
d you take beans at the same rate. The first person to take all ten beans wins the game.”

  “That’s even odds and could take a long time,” said Magnus.

  “At this point, friend, doesn’t that sound attractive?” I countered.

  “Precisely,” said Cecil. “But two consecutive throws of one color can end it in a moment. So this entertainment may prove brief, as well.”

  The swarm of Indians crowded around, excitedly betting among themselves on how I would do. Red Jacket scooped up the dice, put them in the bowl, waggled it like a sifter, and threw the dice against the hide. A roar went up, fading to a mutter. There were five white sides, and five decorated. Neither of us won.

  He scooped them up to throw again.

  “Wait, don’t I get a turn?”

  “Under the circumstances, Mr. Gage, I think it’s safer to keep you bound.”

  Red Jacket threw again and this time there were six white, four decorated. The crowd whooped as if it were a horse race! The chief took one bean.

  He threw again, and once more got six white. Delirium! Drumming and chanting!

  “By John Paul Jones, I don’t think anyone’s on our side. Be sure to cheer if we win a bean, Magnus.”

  “They’re just making sport of us.”

  “It’s better than the alternative.”

  Another throw, and this time seven decorated dice turned up. The crowd groaned in dismay. I got two beans to even our pile, and there was enough mourning to animate a Greek chorus. I’m lucky at gambling, so my spirits rose.

  Two more throws, each of us taking a bean, and then seven white for Red Jacket, giving him six beans for my three. There was one bean left in the middle. Luck seemed to be running the rascal’s way: hysteria among the onlookers.

  “I appear to be losing,” I told Cecil resignedly.

  “Not yet. You’ll play until you’re entirely bankrupt.”