“The bastard’s opening his gun ports!” Sinclair shouted.
“He’ll aim high,” Duncan explained. “He won’t try to sink us at first, just disable us.” He exchanged a worried glance with Sinclair. They both knew that being disabled in such a gale would likely mean the end of the sloop.
Both ships lurched violently, and as they recovered, lightning flashed, illuminating a solitary figure gripping the shrouds of the brig, watching them. Horatio Beck seemed to take no notice of the storm as he shouted at the men on his deck. Behind him, clutching a stay, was Sergeant Mallory.
The ships were a hundred yards apart, then fifty, and as Duncan turned the tiller to momentarily confuse the enemy helmsman, the eight guns on the brig’s port side fired. Sinclair shouted a desperate warning, then paused and laughed. All but one of the guns offered only a puff a smoke. The last gun sputtered, and her ball flew out a few yards. “Damp powder!” Sinclair shouted in glee, then faced Duncan. “The storm-demon chooses sides! He’s spiked those guns with nails of rain. There’ll be no cannon play this day.”
Beck was screaming at his crew, so loud they could hear him above the din of the storm. Mallory had a musket now but was having difficulty priming it in the heavy weather.
“Now, Mr. Sinclair,” Duncan said with a bitter grin, “let us come about while they are confused.” Perhaps indeed the storm-demon would see them through.
Minutes later, after a flurry of action by the Osprey’s steadfast crew, they left the brig in their wake as they angled northward. Duncan’s hope was to make enough progress in what remained of the night to be able to lose the brig among the northern islands.
Duncan gave Sinclair the difficult task of raising enough of the fore and aft canvas to give them maximum speed without capsizing. In all his experience on the open sea, Duncan had never known such a nightmare. The prudent course for the brig would have been to reduce its straining load of canvas and ride out the weather. But Beck had made clear his intentions to brig and sloop alike. As his brig heaved away after misfiring her guns, Beck had aimed a pistol at the man at the wheel. “Ram her, damn you!” he had screamed. “Ram her!”
Duncan was left to navigate the Osprey along what was by nautical standards a long alley between two treacherous shores, through violently rolling waves and torrents so thick he could sometimes barely see the bow of the sloop. All the while, lookouts kept watch for the brig, which could materialize out of the gloom at any moment to run them down.
They were in the widest part of the lake, but even that was less than fifteen miles, and Duncan’s breath caught as a great lightning burst illuminated the jagged, ship-killing rocks of the shore only a few cable lengths away. It became impossible to measure the passage of time, nearly impossible to measure their passage back up the lake, though more than once a flash from the skies showed a landmark they had passed the day before.
Finally—it may have been midnight or it may have been four in the morning, Duncan could not tell—he became aware of Sinclair and Woolford speaking to him. Woolford pried away his fingers, which were clenched around the helm, and led him to the aft cabin. His friend produced a horn cup filled with an amber liquid and ordered Duncan to drink.
Duncan jerked upright as the liquor inflamed his throat, slamming his head against a low ceiling beam. “Mother Mary!” he spat, suddenly much revived.
“Sinclair says he has been saving the whiskey for a special occasion,” Wool-ford said. “Corporal Longtree says to give you this,” he added, dropping a small bundle of scarlet and blue feathers on the table. It was a Mohawk token, given to victorious warriors.
“We haven’t won anything yet,” Duncan said as tendrils of warmth crept into his limbs. He felt as if he had been waging a running battle for hours.
“You kept us alive. The storm lessens. Noah said it was the storm-demon’s gift to you.”
“Felt more like a curse.”
Woolford turned the feathered bundle over, studying it. He, like Duncan, had deep respect for the words of the natives when they spoke of nature. “But for the maelstrom, we would have been at the mercy of those guns, and the storm made possible our escape. Noah says it was your baptism, that now you are bonded to the ancient one of the lake.”
Duncan had trouble moving his stiff fingers as he lifted the feathers. His entire body was shaking. Woolford stepped into the gangway and returned with a plate of bread and cheese. “Eat and sleep. Rufus and Sinclair have the sloop now. We’ll be threading the islands soon. We’ll wake you when we need you.”
IT WASN’T A CREWMEMBER THAT woke him, but the call of a gull. Soft, diffused light came through the stern window. The ship had stopped rolling but seemed to be making little headway.
The pearl-white fog was so thick he could not see the far end of the sloop. He stepped around sleeping bodies on the deck to find Noah and Conawago at the bow, keeping watch. They nodded their greetings and turned back toward the fog with worried expressions.
“We should anchor,” Duncan said when he reached the helm. “I’d hate to have saved the sloop from the storm only to lose her to a fog.”
Sinclair looked at his gaunt companion, Rufus—who seemed shaken and soberer than Duncan had ever seen him—and shook his head. “That bastard will catch us if we do, sure as eggs. If I can just get us into the passage between the last islands and drop you in Massaquoit Bay by noon, you’ll be set for St. Francis and I’ll still have a chance to go back up to the fort at the north end of the lake. There I will report that Mr. Woolford had to have a rapid transport to the Montreal road for secret Indian business.”
“If you don’t make it there before Beck?” Duncan asked.
“Then he’ll catch out the lie. Won’t be enough rope in Ticonderoga to hang us all.”
They moved with agonizing slowness through water as still as glass, the eerie silence sometimes as nerve-racking as the gale they had endured the night before. A gull called from somewhere in the gloom. A large fish twisted the surface and was gone. Sinclair watched Rufus, who seemed to navigate by some sixth sense, following marks that were invisible to Duncan. The land was seldom seen, the sun indicated only by an occasional brighter smudge in the fog. At times the lake itself was so obscured that they glided along as if in some sky-bound cloud. Only once did Sinclair or Rufus show alarm, when for a few heartbeats the shroud thinned to show a rocky shore a cable length away. Sinclair muttered a Gaelic curse and leaned hard into the helm.
Conawago beckoned Duncan forward and continued his lookout as Noah sketched a crude map on the blank frontispiece of his pocket Bible. “No swamp this time,” the old Abenaki said, referring to the ordeal Robert Rogers and his men endured when they had eluded pursuers in 1759 by hiking through a massive miles-wide swamp to reach St. Francis. “We’ll go around,” he explained, penciling a short arc, “and should reach the river above town by dawn on the third day.” It was beginning to sound like a ranger raid.
Duncan studied the tribal elder, trying to decide if he felt more or less comfortable with the man now that he knew he was an Abenaki. “You told Munro that this was the battle that was destined to take place. What did you mean?”
Noah touched the spirit pouch that hung beside his cross. “The struggle between king’s men and”—he paused to carefully choose his words—“those who are not king’s men.”
Duncan was tempted to ask if Noah himself had received a letter from Rogers, but he worried that the question might offend the enigmatic elder. “I’m just helping the men who died in Boston,” Duncan said.
“No,” Noah replied with conviction, and he fixed Duncan with one of the stares that seemed to belong uniquely to tribal elders, a gaze at once searching and challenging, wise, and somehow lonely. “You are shaping the war that is to come.”
“Not so,” Duncan insisted. “I am all done with war. I am just helping some murdered souls find peace.”
A sad, apologetic grin twisted Noah’s mouth. “You will have no choice, McCallum. It will come to
all the land, to all the known world.”
Before Duncan could press him for an explanation, Conawago and Hayes frantically extended poles to fend the sloop off a boulder, and Noah leapt forward to join them at the bowsprit.
16
THE OSPREY’S LITTLE BOAT HAD to make three trips to ferry their party and its supplies to the north shore of the bay the natives called Massaquoit. Rufus, Sinclair, and the crew seemed forlorn to see their new friends leave. Rufus leaned closer to whisper in Duncan’s ear.
“Yes, Rufus,” Duncan replied, trying to match the solemnity of the request, “if the beast of Champlain ever approaches you, you may assure it you are a friend of mine.” He hesitated, then added, “But never again call him the beast. Call him the keeper of the lake.” Rufus pumped his head and nodded energetically.
“I’d gladly take such a maelstrom to hear ye play the pipes, McCallum,” the mate from Caithness declared with a wide grin. “I’ll be hearing those echoes for months.” Sinclair extended his hand. “Fare thee well, lad. Try to keep a step ahead of the king’s rope.”
They ran hard, at the woodsman’s pace, letting Noah lead them along moose trails at the edge of the great bog, sometimes taking turns carrying Will on their backs. The sun had set, the light of day nearly extinguished before they finally collapsed in a grove of hemlocks. As Duncan sat against a thick trunk, sapped of energy, he marveled at the energy of the two old tribesman as they collected wood and lit a fire. Noah and Conawago had grown much closer since Ticonderoga, and sometimes it seemed to him that they shared great secrets, like two old wizards who watched the world from afar. His admiration for them, however, was marred by an increasing sense that both men had begun to devalue their long, rich lives, that they were becoming resigned to finishing their days without fulfilling their lives. He saw Woolford studying them as well and realized that his friend shared the same worry. They had both seen it happen to too many tribal elders, had seen the light gradually fade from their eyes. A pain rose in his chest to think of it. For reasons he knew he could not put into words, he suspected that of all the people he had ever known, these two lives might be the most valuable of all. He despaired over it, not just because he felt powerless to change the fate of the old tribesmen, but also because in this, the most vulnerable of times, he had dragged them into the treachery that had stalked him from Boston.
They ate their meal of corn mush and ham with little conversation, for everyone in their party was exhausted, and they had to wake Will, who had collapsed onto Molly, to force him to eat. Munro insisted on keeping watch, and Duncan volunteered to relieve him in two hours.
He woke abruptly, jabbed by some inner alarm. Sitting upright in the darkness, he surveyed their camp. The fire had ebbed to glowing embers. Will and Molly lay curled up together beside it, with Hayes lying an arm’s length away. There was no sound but that of the water in the nearby creek and the chatter of night insects. Duncan could smell tobacco mixed with the sharp, sweet scent of spicebush and sassafras. It was a mixture Conawago used at council fires.
Duncan followed the scent to a ledge that opened onto a long view of rolling hills glowing under a brilliant moon. The two old tribesmen were on the ledge, nursing long-stemmed clay pipes. As Duncan approached, they made room for him, forming a small half circle, in the center of which more tobacco smoldered, stacked over coals brought from the campfire. The spiraling smoke was an invitation to the spirits.
As was the custom in councils, Duncan would not speak until he was asked to do so. He watched the silvery thread rise to the stars. A barred owl called in the distance, answered by one in the trees below them. Noah began a rhythmic chant, so low that Duncan could not understand the words, if indeed there were words. Conawago did not join in, only watched the Abenaki with what seemed a worried curiosity; then he finally nodded and shifted his gaze to the immense sweep of country before them, puffing on his pipe.
Gradually Duncan comprehended that Noah was speaking to the gods of his people. He was an Abenaki medicine man, a sachem, and he wanted them to know that he was returning from his long self-exile, if they would permit it. How long had it been, Duncan wondered. Twenty years? Thirty? Even more? Would his tribe welcome him? Would they shun him? Would any still know him?
Stars had shifted in the sky before Noah finally stopped. He renewed the tobacco in his pipe, relit it, and handed it to Duncan. The Abenaki elder waited for Duncan to take several puffs before he spoke. “You do not know the place you seek, McCallum.”
Duncan was not sure how to answer. “All I know is a map in a Bible,” he offered, and saw the slight uplift of Noah’s lips.
“The St. Francis I knew was like an oasis,” Noah recalled. “A sanctuary town where the living came easy. Always fish in the river, always venison in the forest. But that was a long time ago. Now many have moved away to the far western country, more going every few months, I hear. It’s different, has been different for many years because of the wars. It’s a place divided—between those who yearn for the peaceful days and those who stand with the war chiefs, with the Jesuits in between.”
“Did you leave as a boy?” Duncan asked.
Noah looked out over the landscape for several breaths before answering. “I was the son of a great chieftain who wore the feathered robe of our ancestors and kept our people proud to be Abenaki, not because we were feared warriors, but because we were a noble tribe. I was young and strong, and my parents had accepted that I should be a war chief in my early years, as a way of learning the responsibilities of the feathered robe. I was on a raid in the eastern lands that you call Maine. One day the sun suddenly went black. It lasted only minutes, but we were terrified. The Jesuit with us explained that it was an eclipse. No one was interested except me, the others just said the spirits were telling the English to go home, but the priest used round stones to show me what had happened with the earth and the moon. I thought he must be the wisest man in all the world, and after that I studied in his classroom whenever I could. The priests sent me to Quebec to study, though I returned every few months to St. Francis.
“After two years they insisted that I go to France, even Rome, to learn more. I was so intoxicated with the learning that of course I went. Two years became four years, then seven. By the time I sailed back up the St. Lawrence, all of my family had died of fever. My teachers consoled me by putting the black robe of a monk on me and sending me to the western lands, where we built missions, even traveling down to the Mississippi River settlements of the Acadians who had been evicted from Nova Scotia. But I kept asking myself why I was helping other people when the tribesmen of the north needed so much help. And I began to perceive the intolerance of the priests, who thought that gods spoke only to Christians. One day I went to get firewood, and I never went back. I just walked. For over a year I walked.” The old Abenaki’s voice faded away, and he seemed to have drifted into memories of those long-ago years. “Eventually I found an aged woman of the tribes who was living alone in a cave, one of the wise ones who knew the old ways. I stayed with her for a few years, until she died, and then I found Reverend Wheelock and Occom. They gave me a place where I could still learn about the spirits but keep my own counsel.”
Duncan looked at Conawago, who nursed his pipe and watched the horizon. The tale perhaps too painfully reflected Conawago’s own life.
Noah looked up and spread his arms. “Here is Totokanay!” he shouted to the stars.
A chill ran down Duncan’s spine. The man he had known as Noah had called in the spirits and was revealing himself after so many years of wearing another face. It was a solemn moment, a moment when hard and terrible truths might be revealed. The Abenaki elder would likely not want Duncan to use his tribal name, but he had decided to share this deep, vital secret.
Totokanay turned so that he faced Conawago and Duncan across the little smoldering pile. “There is death ahead,” he declared.
“There is a reckoning ahead,” Duncan replied.
“You don’t u
nderstand the place you go to.”
“I don’t understand the place I have been.”
“St. Francis is a place of old hatreds, old faiths, old hunts.”
Duncan hesitated over the Abenaki’s choice of words. “Old hunts?”
“Warriors who hate all English, who once would bring back captives so women and children could kill them slowly with sharp sticks and hot coals. And another kind of warrior, who hates the French king. St. Francis is as much a Jesuit town as an Abenaki one. A Jesuit hermitage, in a way. When the French King Louis outlawed them, several more came to evade his long arm. Montreal and St. Francis have become havens for broken priests.”
“The Jesuits,” Duncan repeated. “You said Jesuits were with you on that raid in Maine many years ago. Why?”
“The raids were their idea. My people were growing weary of war, but some—not all—of the Jesuits kept the bloodlust alive.”
Duncan weighed the words in silence. “Tell me something. Did the Jesuits befriend Major Rogers?”
“They were sworn enemies in the last war, but today—” The Abenaki shrugged. “Call them allies. There was too much bad blood between the militant Jesuits and Rogers for them to reconcile, but there is another Jesuit at St. Francis whom Rogers has known for years.”
“You mean Father LaBrosse?”
It did not seem that Totokanay had heard him. The Abenaki watched the glowing twists of smoke that connected them to the spirits. “They are all beginning to understand something in St. Francis. It makes them very dangerous.”
“Understand what, exactly?” Duncan asked.
The old Abenaki looked at Conawago before replying. His voice cracked when he finally spoke. “There are no clear words for it. How does an animal feel when it is caught in a trap and bleeding to death, knowing it can do nothing to change its fate? They have all seen that they are in their ending times.”
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