Savage Liberty

by Eliot Pattison

  Mog seemed to glow in the moonlight, an otherworldly demon in his warrior’s garb and paint that colored half of his face and his bared torso red, the other half white. He lifted a thin leather strap, the end of which had been shredded into narrow strips like a cat-o’-nine-tails. When he reached Conawago at the end of the row, he abruptly swung it at the Nipmuc’s face, leaving long red slashes that began seeping blood. He quickly administered the same violent blow to Munro, but when he raised the whip over Ishmael’s head, a black fury lunged out of the shadows, grabbing Mog’s arm in her jaws. Molly dragged the surprised chieftain to the ground, but Mog’s warriors swarmed over her, kicking and pounding their clubs into her, raising yelps from the big dog and anguished cries from Ishmael; then she limped away, uttering low cries with each step.

  Mog slashed at Ishmael’s face, but as he turned his whip to Corporal Brandt, the wiry ranger twisted and caught the strap in his teeth, yanking it from Mog’s hand and spitting it onto the ground, which earned him two furious blows when Mog recovered it. Duncan returned Mog’s glare and did not flinch when the lash struck him. More rivulets of blood streamed down his cheeks, dripping onto his waistcoat.

  The chieftain had struck Hayes once and was about to hit the tinker again when a banshee shrieked and something small and brown launched itself at Mog, landing on his back. Sadie scrambled onto his shoulders and savagely bit the war chief’s ear, then shrieked again. Mog seemed confused, even frightened for a moment, and Duncan recalled the night in Hancock’s warehouse when Munro had reported that the Abenaki intruder had not seemed intimidated at all by the human defenders and had fled only when the monkey screamed at him.

  A flicker of shame appeared on the war chief’s countenance, which only enraged him more. He seized the capuchin in his hands and squeezed it violently, apparently trying to choke it to death, but then Sadie twisted, bit his hand, and squirmed out of his grip. “Take it!” Mog shouted to his warriors. “I will roast it on a stick for my supper!”

  As the crowd breathlessly watched, Sadie squirmed and swerved around the outstretched hands, then raced up a tree that leaned far out over the water. She crept out on a long, thin branch and began screeching at Mog again.

  “No!” Hayes moaned as Mog grabbed a musket, and threw himself toward the Abenaki. Mog kicked him to the ground, aimed, and fired at the capuchin. The bullet missed Sadie but severed the thin branch. With a strangled groan from Hayes, she tumbled head over tail into the river, screaming now in fear.

  “Sadie!” Hayes moaned. He had lost his wife and now lost all he had left of a family.

  A murmur rose from the crowd, and it parted to reveal the suffering Molly struggling to her feet. The big dog limped at first as she headed toward the riverbank, but as she neared it, she seemed to gain strength, running at a crooked gait.

  “Molly girl, no!” Ishmael cried in torment as he realized what she was doing. As he spoke, she leapt off the bank and with a huge splash disappeared into the dark, fast-moving waters. From somewhere midstream came a small, terrified cry.

  Mog gave a satisfied laugh, then turned with a gloating expression to his captives. “First your beasts die, then you!” he shouted, stepping to a basket filled with slender, stripped willow branches, and he offered a short speech about the glory of Abenaki warriors before inviting children to take up the switches. Duncan saw him pause for a moment, distracted by something in the shadows between two houses; then he released the assembled children to badger the captives. Although three of the children were pulled back into the crowd by their parents, the rest uttered squeals of delight as they energetically applied the switches to the arms, backs, and faces of the prisoners.

  Duncan shook at the first blow but remained still as two girls struck him repeatedly with their stinging canes. He ignored the blows, instead watching Mog approach two men in the shadows, urgently motioning them toward the river, where canoes waited. As they hurried away, they passed through a pool of moonlight, giving Duncan a glimpse of their faces. Father Tremblay was rushing away with a warrior escort.

  As Mog returned, he muttered an order, and one of his painted men ran to each of the death posts. Before each prisoner he swung his war ax, a treacherous weapon that ended with a skull-crushing knob of wood on one side of the head and a skull-piercing iron spike on the other.

  “You always know the greatest cowards among the tribes,” he announced to his onlookers, “because it is their tribes that are extinguished first. The worst are those who pretend to be like Europeans, for they deny their true blood!” He spun about and with a catlike leap landed in front of Conawago, tapping his head with the side of his ax as his feet hit the ground. It was a carefully placed blow, intended to stun. As Conawago sagged, Mog threw dirt at him; then, with another word from the war chief, the children ran to other baskets and began throwing eggs and horse manure at the old Nipmuc.

  A roar of protest escaped Duncan’s throat, and he tried to stand, only to be clubbed down by the warrior behind him.

  “The rangers are coming!” someone shouted from the crowd. The words caused the children to abandon their baskets and run to their parents.

  “Who comes to kill! Who comes to kill!” crowed Brandt, earning himself another blow.

  “Who comes to kill! Who comes to kill!” came an echoing cry from the shadows. Duncan recognized with a shudder the voice of Will Sterret. If Mog discovered the boy, he would not hesitate to kill him.

  Mog shouted what sounded like an Abenaki curse, then lifted the strap that hung from his waist and extended it toward the moon. “Est-ce que je ne prends pas les cheveux des gardes-frontières?” he screamed.

  Despite the hot pain on his back and shoulders, something icy seemed to grip Duncan’s spine. Do I not take the hair of rangers? Mog was displaying the scalps of the rangers he had killed in Massachusetts. Duncan watched in agony as the war chief shook the scalps toward his captives, then ordered his men to begin the final act of his ceremony. Conawago, unconscious now, was dragged to the first post and tied to it. The old man had survived more than eighty years only to be burned alive by an Abenaki madman.

  “It is you who must burn, Mogephra!” a voice boomed from the crowd. “It is you who betray the Abenaki by your unholy alliance with the French king! It is you who is the coward, killing men in the night from ambush!” The speaker stepped forward into the light of the bonfire. It was Noah, Totokanay of the Abenaki. He wore a long ceremonial robe of feathers, a robe he had said his father once wore. “You do not have the wisdom to lead our people. You are nothing but a vessel of hate! You are lost to the ancient gods.”

  “I spit on your words, old man!” Mog shot back, but he did not race toward Noah with his weapon raised, as Duncan expected. He was wary of the newly arrived elder. “Anger me further and you will be tied to a post.”

  “No,” came a woman’s stern voice. An old woman in tribal dress appeared at Noah’s side.

  “No,” repeated another woman, then a third and a fourth. They all stood at Noah’s side, all of them old and weary but all fiercely determined. The true leaders of most woodland tribes were the matriarchs.

  Mog hesitated for a moment, then spat in their direction and turned his back on them. He stepped to Duncan with a businesslike air. “You will die after the burnings, McCallum,” he hissed. “You will die for many hours after listening to your friends scream as their blood boils!” He moved on to Munro, hesitating as he spotted the shining brass 42 on his breast, then roughly seized the Scot’s hair and pulled it back to reveal the wide scar he had received on the battlefield of Ticonderoga. “I love these English farmers,” he called mockingly. “They learned how to grow a second crop of hair for my pole!”

  His men replied with jubilant war cries, waving their axes in the air. Munro’s struggles against the men who seized him lasted only moments, and they soon had him tied to the second post. It came to Duncan that Sarah, daughter of an Iroquois prophet, had seen this in her dreams. I see you beaten and bleeding befo
re a fire of death, she had said. I see men bathed in blood and men burning.

  “Before they burn,” Mog ordered the men who were stacking more brush around the first two poles, “take their hair.”

  “The rangers are coming!” another voice called from the crowd. Mog pretended not to hear. He was growing tired, Duncan saw, limping more noticeably. He stepped to Ishmael, who raised his lashed and bloody face in defiance.

  Mog was about to strike him again when Duncan called out, loud enough for the crowd to hear. “Who put that ax in your leg? I was there. It was a Mohawk woman!” he shouted. Mog spun about, his fury as hot as the bonfire now. “The great Mog was maimed by a woman!” Duncan shouted. “And you ran from her!” he taunted. “Who are you calling a coward?”

  The war chief sprang to Duncan, whirling his ax overhead. “The Mohawks are rangers too,” Duncan shouted defiantly. “Is that why you fear a Mohawk woman?”

  The ax blow that came down on Duncan would have split his skull, but at the last instant Mog twisted his arm, and the spike slammed into the moist earth.

  “Who comes to kill? Who comes to kill?” Brandt hooted. “Burn it, burn it all, boys!” he shouted, as if back in the October dawn nine years earlier.

  Mog shrieked and struck a blow to Brandt’s head that stunned the old ranger. Straddling him, Mog slapped him viciously and began ripping away his clothes. He paused as he lifted Brandt’s powder horn. For a moment Duncan wondered how well Mog could read, but the inscription was simple enough. ST. FRANCIS OCTOBER 9, 1759.

  The war chief’s eyes flared with bloodlust. “Loosen him!” he ordered his men. “Before he burns, we will take his fingers; then I will eat his heart!” His words were lost in an outcry from the crowd.

  “They are here!” someone screamed as everyone pointed toward the edge of town. A house was in flames.

  “Burn it, burn it all!” Brandt crowed.

  With blinding speed Mog spun about and buried the spike of his ax in Brandt’s arm. In the same instant, the crisp crack of long rifles split the night air. Two of Mog’s men collapsed to the ground. A man marched past the burning house, a rifle in one hand and a tomahawk in the other. He wore the green uniform of a ranger. Woolford had not abandoned them. Mog shouted, pointing to figures running from tree to tree toward them. Woolford’s Mohawk rangers had old blood scores to settle with the Abenaki.

  The chieftain raised his arms as if in celebration and uttered a long, ululating shriek of war. As he took a step forward, a wiry figure sprang onto his back. Blood streamed down Brandt’s arm, but he seemed to take no notice of his wound. “T’is Mog the war chief, Major!” he shouted in his high-pitched voice as his hands gripped Mog’s neck. “Who comes to kill, who comes to kill?” he repeated, laughing, then gave a piercing cry that almost matched that of the war chief.

  Duncan, his hands still bound at his back, struggled to his feet and slammed into Mog, trying to knock him down, but the Abenaki slammed an elbow into his belly, causing Duncan to stagger backward. With a great twisting jump, the war chief threw the still-laughing Brandt onto the ground, then buried his ax spike into his chest. The old ranger groaned as he took the blow, but laughed again even as blood welled up out of his mouth, and he held up his little knife. Mog saw the blood on the blade and hesitated, then put a hand to his neck. It came away soaked with blood, which now began sheeting down his painted chest. Brandt had sliced open his throat. Mog slammed the spike of his ax into Brandt again. Still the old ranger laughed. The ax struck again, and this time the old ranger gasped and looked up into the night sky. “Corporal Brandt, First Company, reporting!” he called out before his mouth filled with blood and he spoke no more.

  Mog staggered and dropped to his knees. He raised his ax with great effort; then it fell from his hand and he collapsed onto Brandt.

  Duncan, sobbing, struggled with his bindings, twisting, trying to reach the old ranger. A hand closed around his arm.

  “They’re done, Duncan,” Patrick Woolford said as he unsheathed his knife to cut the bindings. “The Abenaki fight no more.”

  Duncan knelt at the corporal’s body. Brandt had sensed it from the beginning, Duncan knew. He believed that his destiny was tied to St. Francis. The death of the infamous war chief completed the mission Robert Rogers had started nine years earlier.

  Two of Mog’s warriors were dead. The others had laid down their weapons. One was being led away by an old woman who was pummeling him with one of the willow switches.

  “You burned someone’s house, Patrick,” Duncan pointed out. It wasn’t like his friend to be so callous to tribal families.

  “Actually, no. She did it. She said they could not turn back, so we should use it to frighten Mog.”

  “She?” Duncan asked, but then he saw the answer.

  Hayes’s former wife stood near the fading bonfire, looking at the Jewish tinker. It was not proper for a tribal wife to touch a male outsider, but she was directing her two sons to help the tinker, one offering him water as the other cut his bonds. The tinker ran to the river as soon as he was freed, standing at Ishmael’s side as they forlornly stared over the moonlit water.

  “The priest Tremblay was an agent for the French king,” Duncan said.

  “I know,” Woolford replied. “Father LaBrosse explained.”

  “The missing French treasure was here.”

  “I know. Father LaBrosse explained,” Woolford repeated.

  The Mohawk rangers pulled away Mog’s body and covered Brandt’s with a blanket. Several of the Abenaki had hurried to release Father LaBrosse. Others had cut Munro and Conawago loose and were now prying the posts out of the ground, throwing them on the bonfire.

  “One assassin is dead,” Woolford said as they watched the priest run down to a man who was pulling a canoe onto the bank. “Maybe that should be enough. Come back with me to the Mohawk Valley. No one will find you.”

  “There’s only one place left,” Duncan said. “One place where all the answers await us.”

  “Not a chance!” Woolford protested. “Montreal is where Beck is, where the French spies are, where a regiment of infantry sleeps with your bounty broadside on their barracks door. Stop trying to throw your life away, Duncan. Give it time. In two or three months Beck will retreat back to London. I have friends in Montreal, some of them French. We can visit in the fall to pick up the scent of the spies. Go to the Iroquois villages and meet my new son. I will send for Sarah.”

  Duncan did not remember ever feeling so soul-weary. He knew Woolford was right. He barely had the strength to stay on his feet. He needed to be with Sarah. He needed to rest. There was a grave to dig in the morning, and he needed to make his decision with a clear head.

  But suddenly Father LaBrosse ran up to them from the landing. “A messenger from Montreal!” he breathlessly reported. “Major Rogers is to be tried and hanged within the week!”

  As the priest spoke, Ishmael cried out, and at first Duncan thought it was in response to the news, but then the young Nipmuc darted into the water, followed closely by Hayes and Will. Several of the Abenaki crowded in, then stepped back with exclamations of wonder, some of them crossing themselves. Ishmael and Hayes were supporting Molly as she staggered the last few steps out of the water. The big dog collapsed onto the sand, Sadie’s long arms clenched around her neck.

  19

  MONTREAL LAY LIKE A THREATENING warship against the darkening sky, its river wall punctuated by cannon ports along the top and its lighted windows lined up like a row of portholes below. Duncan had been filled with foreboding the first time he surveyed the city eight years earlier. Then it had been filled with French soldiers who would have killed him and his companions had they been discovered infiltrating its walls. This time it was British soldiers who would seek his death.

  Conawago touched his arm, and he followed his friend’s gaze toward the file of canoes that hugged the south bank of the broad St. Lawrence. They had traveled with the Abenaki refugees from St. Francis for the past two
days, and had waited on the island for darkness to fall before parting for their respective journeys. Theirs had been a surprisingly difficult farewell, for in their time together, the emigrating Abenaki and Duncan’s party had grown unexpectedly close. According to Conawago, the natives who went west to avoid further contact with colonials were the “true tribes,” and the old Nipmuc was impressed by their quiet determination to carve out a new, free life in an unknown land. They were undaunted by the terrible rigors of their long trek or by the threat of the hostile nations they would encounter before finding their new homeland. The forces of change they were fleeing would inevitably catch up with them, but their odyssey would keep one more generation safe from the influence of these forces. The women encouraged the children to sing harvest festival songs, and when they were not singing, the dozen Abenaki men chanted the old songs used to synchronize their long, powerful paddle strokes.

  Hayes, still much diminished, his gaze often so distant it seemed he might not be aware of his surroundings, had stayed in the rearmost canoe with Noah and the injured Conawago, wordlessly doing his duty with the paddle. He did not react when, twice on the first day, Conawago had kindled a bundle of herbs and washed him with the healing smoke. At one point Duncan was so chilled by the abject way Hayes stared into the water that he pulled his own canoe close for fear the moribund tinker was going to leap in.

  It was the wise Sadie who finally thawed Hayes’s heart. At the camp the night before, Will and one of Rebecca’s sons were playing fetch with Molly when Sadie grabbed the stick and ran with it to the solitary Hayes, pushing it under his leg as he sat staring over the water. Molly and the Abenaki boy raced to the tinker and, arriving at the same time, crashed into him. The boy was laughing so hard he seemed not to notice it was Hayes underneath him. Then suddenly he gasped with fear.