Eye of the Raven

by Eliot Pattison

  Duncan glanced about, looking for the sturdy Quaker. “Sir, I pray you. Let me speak to Bythe,” he urged. “I will gladly assist him.”

  “He is gone, since before dawn. He sat with your friend Van Grut and went through his journal last night. Afterward he asked for a small, sharp knife and said he knew what had to be done now.”

  It was nearly noon, and the two of them were sitting on a ledge rock watching the convoy descend onto a river valley floor when suddenly Conawago pointed out a mounted figure galloping from the east. Even from the distance they could make out the scarlet uniform of a military dispatch rider. The soldier did not gallop past the head of the caravan as expected but reined to a halt, speaking with the lead teamsters.

  “Let us go, Duncan,” his friend said. “It will not be welcome news for us.” There was a boundary tree they meant to investigate, not more than a mile away, at one of the places where the Warriors Path ran close to the road. Conawago had pointed out the likely location, close to the head of the river, where the road made a sharp horseshoe curve beneath a narrow waterfall.

  But Duncan kept watching. The messenger was clearly seeking out Brindle. He looked to the big Conestoga wagon with its escort of McGregor’s squad and braves. The Virginians, not far ahead of the wagon, were carrying their muskets in front of them, as if ready for action. The night before, mischief had been afoot in their camp, with flour sacks slit open, shoes cut apart, dirt thrown into the frizzen pans of muskets. Their patience with Quaker justice was growing thin. Duncan was gripped with foreboding, and a new helplessness. None of them wanted his help, none seemed to sense the explosion of violence that he was certain approached.

  “We have other business in the forest,” Conawago reminded him, as if now proposing to abandon the convoy entirely.

  Duncan sighed in frustration, then rose and turned toward the north. With a few steps off the road he could be back in the life he had grown to love, roaming the forest with the serene old Indian, who still had so much to teach him.

  Suddenly frantic cries rose up from the valley floor. Every wagon stopped. From front and back men were running toward the center of the convoy.

  Conawago pulled at Duncan’s arm, then saw the determined expression on his companion’s face and grimaced. “Ten minutes, no more,” he said, and he gestured Duncan down the road.

  They found Brindle sitting on a log by the stream that tumbled from the cliff above in a waterfall at least thirty feet high. The army dispatch rider had joined McGregor in pushing back the onlookers that were for some reason gathering.

  The magistrate gestured sternly with the envelope he held. “I have orders to arrest you,” he declared in a hollow voice as Duncan approached. “One of Philadelphia’s leading citizens has sworn out a warrant against you.”

  “Philadelphia?” Duncan asked in disbelief.

  “Do not dishonor me, McCallum, by pleading ignorance of your indenture to Lord Ramsey.” Brindle seemed strangely weary, as if he hadn’t the strength to rise. “There is a bounty on your head of thirty pounds. What, pray tell, did you do to him?”

  Before replying Duncan gauged the distance to the thicket at the base of the cliff, taking a step closer to it as he eyed the soldiers. “I caused the loss of his New York estate. I caused his daughter to sever ties with him.”

  “The bounty is greater than any I have ever heard, even for a murderer.”

  “I wounded Ramsey’s pride,” Duncan said, knowing that had been his greatest crime of all.

  Duncan now saw something unexpected in Brindle’s eyes as he looked up. It appeared to be despair. He realized the Quaker was struggling to control his emotions. “But divine Providence has other plans,” the magistrate slowly said.

  Duncan hesitated, not certain he had heard correctly. “I’m sorry?”

  Even when Brindle pointed at the center of the waterfall Duncan did not comprehend, did not at first grasp the oddly rhythmic movement of the round rock in the center of the current, not until Van Grut, shielding his eyes from the sun, gave a gasp of alarm.

  Duncan stepped out of the sunlight and looked up again at the strange shape in the waterfall. It was Henry Bythe, the magistrate’s brother-in-law. His body, thrown into the stream above, had been caught in the rocks in its descent so that the head protruded out of the rushing water. Wedged there, buffeted by the cascade, the dead Quaker was nodding at them.

  “Go,” the magistrate instructed Duncan in a haunted voice. “Go to Shamokin and bring me back your terrible truth.”

  Chapter Seven

  THE PENNSYLVANIA WILDERNESS unfolded mile after mile, the steep, repetitive ridges finally yielding to the broad Susquehanna, the vast river that had served as the region’s north-south thoroughfare for centuries. They paddled relentlessly now through the shallow waters, past the river’s hundreds of tiny wooded islands, their canoes aimed like arrows at the heart of the Iroquois nation.

  In his infrequent rests from the paddle Duncan found himself gazing at the silent, determined men in breechcloths who accompanied them. When the others had met Duncan at the boundary tree above the waterfall, where he studied its freshly cut symbols, Van Grut had explained that Conawago had adamantly refused Brindle’s offer of Pennsylvania militia as an escort. The old Iroquois chiefs had a suggestion more to Conawago’s liking. Johantty and the young Onondagas who had assaulted Duncan, only to later be transfixed by his piping, had intercepted them an hour later, leading them back onto the Forbes Road ahead of the convoy, where Felton waited with fresh horses. The bucks seemed to have aged somehow, grown more solemn, the rough ways displayed earlier replaced by a wary determination. Their elders had spoken with them, and now they were on a path of war against an unseen enemy.

  “You run with death,” Brindle’s nephew had warned Duncan as he handed over the horses. “Sleep with one eye open if you value your hair. Henry Bythe died because he did not understand the depths of the treachery afoot.”

  Duncan studied the wary way Felton watched their escort. “Surely you do not suspect these Iroquois now. Bythe was convinced it was the French behind the murders.”

  “And what got him killed was his failure to see that the line between the two has blurred. The Iroquois lie between us and the French. More than a few are married into French families. Skanawati is Iroquois,” Felton reminded Duncan. The Quaker paused to watch the cloud of dust as the others trotted away. “Shamokin is a nest of vipers. What do you hope to find there?”

  “I don’t know. A clock. A rifle.”

  “Burke’s rifle? That is gone, friend. I saw it, in the hands of an Iroquois fur trader headed into the deep Ohio forest.”

  Duncan looked at the Quaker with new interest. “You did not question the man?”

  “I saw him with the gun, a memorable piece, but did not know what I had seen until I heard the Virginians describe the carving on the stock. He was gone by then.”

  “What did the chiefs say of this man?”

  Felton grimaced. “Why would I tell the Iroquois?”

  “Because they have suffered murders too. Similar murders, ritual murders.”

  “Nonsense. If that is what they tell you, they toy with you. Everything those Iroquois chiefs do is about negotiation, another move on some great chess board. Their truths are like quicksilver.”

  “Was Bythe’s murder a move on that board?”

  “God rest his soul, yes. Bythe meant to root out the French sympathizers among the tribes, to strengthen the alliance. I have vowed to my uncle that we will even the score before this war is over.”

  “Bythe’s murder was almost identical to Burke’s,” Duncan observed. “Skanawati was in chains at the time.”

  “Skanawati has confederates,” Felton replied. “And while one murder might mean a personal feud, more than one surely means it is part of the war. The Iroquois begin to glimpse that English expansion will be unfettered if the French lose. Have you not wondered why the army has found no signs of the raiding party you yourself rep
orted?” The Quaker did not wait for Duncan’s reply. “Because the army scouts are all Indians allied with the Iroquois. The army has gone blind and doesn’t yet realize it.”

  Duncan considered Felton’s words. “Did Bythe understand that?”

  “Of course. Which is why I have been his trusted eyes and ears these many months.”

  Duncan mounted his horse. Felton rode alongside for a moment. “I admire your courage, Scotsman. Murderers in front of you and bounty hunters behind.”

  “Lord Ramsey is in Philadelphia,” Duncan countered.

  “His money reaches far beyond the city. News in the wilderness spreads like it has wings,” Felton said as he wheeled his horse about. “Every teamster in the convoy will know by tonight. You’ll have a few days at most before word of the bounty reaches Shamokin. Thirty pounds is enough to tempt even the most saintly of Christians. Whether they take you for the bounty or kill you to stop you finding their treachery, either way they will be fighting over scraps of your hide by the end of the week.” The Quaker pressed his heels to his mount and was gone.

  Duncan watched Felton gallop away, puzzling over the threatening tone that had risen in his voice, then turned to catch up with his friends. But suddenly he reined his horse around to watch Felton disappear down the road. Bythe had told the magistrate that Burke’s rifle was headed north with a renegade from a smaller tribe. Felton, Bythe’s trusted eyes and ears, who seemed to be urging Duncan to flee, insisted it had vanished with an Iroquois into the west. Either the dead provincial official or the zealous Quaker scout had lied.

  As they climbed the ridges he pushed down his fear of bounty hunters by revisiting the murders in his mind. It was easy to assume the murders were a consequence of the war, but Duncan’s every instinct said otherwise. Bythe had started out thinking he knew those responsible, had assured the Pennsylvania government he would expose the French agents behind the murders. But that had been wishful thinking, since such a solution would have avoided enmity between the tribes and the English. After Burke’s murder what Brindle and Bythe had hoped for was a solution that would show that Skanawati had been manipulated by the French, allowing them to declare him their mutual enemy’s unknowing victim. But there had been no signs of a French raiding party at the tree where Bythe was attacked, only tracks of two men in moccasins in addition to Bythe, and no one outside the convoy could have known Bythe would be going to the tree. The Quaker emissary had paid for his misjudgment with his life.

  Duncan found himself wondering why the dead Quaker had so abruptly decided to go to the boundary tree. He recalled his conversation with Brindle. Bythe had seen Van Grut’s journal, after which he told Brindle he understood what had to be done. He had discovered new information in those pages that changed his perspectives on the murders. The code. What he had seen on those pages, Duncan now realized, had been the code. Bythe had recognized the code, had known its workings, and had gone to the tree with a borrowed knife to use it.

  Above a patch of blood on the tree had been four symbols and an incomplete one, all with slash marks through them, with another, longer set of complete ones carved overhead. Based on Van Grut’s sketches the Pennsylvanian had thought he had found a way to leave a message for the killer. But what he found at the tree had been the killer himself, who recognized that Bythe, though no surveyor, had learned enough to be dangerous.

  There had been a hole in the bloody tree, three feet from the ground. Bythe had struggled, ripping out the nail that had fastened his hand. Duncan had followed the path of blood to the stream above the waterfall. The Quaker had stumbled to the water, where the killer had finished him, then had returned to carve his death message on the tree.

  The four warriors accompanying them set a merciless pace. They insisted on paddling at night under the bright gibbous moon as the others slept in the bottom of the two large canoes. When Duncan tried to join them, he struggled to maintain their rhythm, but finally surrendered and lay back on the packs. It was one of the most beautiful nights he had experienced in years, and it put him in mind of moonlit sails among the Hebrides taken with his grandfather as a boy. The two sturdy canoes, readily offered to them when they had reached an Indian village at the river’s western bank, were like creatures of the night, the water singing at their prows, the silver ribbons of their wake pointing ever north.

  For long, calming moments, Duncan thought not of the terrible mystery that drove their journey, but only of the deeper mysteries that animated the strong, silent people of the wilderness. He had come to realize that the poetry in the souls of Conawago and Skanawati, even of the four braves in the canoes, was something that would forever elude the logic of Europeans. The most Duncan could hope for was to experience it, the way an artist experienced the impossible crimson and gold of a sunset.

  “When he sleeps,” an unsteady voice said near his ear, “the chief keeps the skin of a snake pressed close to his heart.”

  He turned to see Mokie’s face in the moonlight. She was frightened. “You mean Skanawati.”

  The girl nodded. “Near scared mama to death when she first saw it.”

  Duncan gestured the girl closer. “The tribes consider the birds to carry messages to the gods,” he explained. “But snakes are especially sacred. Snakes bring dreams, and in dreams, the tribes say, you visit the spirit world.”

  “You mean he talks to ghosts?” There was now more curiosity than fear in the girl’s voice.

  The words gave Duncan pause. He had almost forgotten Skanawati’s words from the first day they had met him. He had embarked on the Warriors Path to speak with ghosts, not just to speak with them, but to be told how the Iroquois would leave the servitude of the English king.

  “I was talking to ghosts that night with my pipes,” Duncan said.

  The girl nodded again, yawning. “I think it was them who brought me back from that dark place.” She nestled into Duncan’s shoulder to sleep. “I hope they take him where he needs to be.”

  The girl’s last words strangely disturbed Duncan. He could not shake the feeling that the truth he so desperately sought was indeed bound up between Skanawati and his ghosts.

  When he looked away from the sky again he saw that Conawago was awake, half-turned to look behind the canoes. More than once in their voyage Duncan had seen him looking over his shoulder. “Are we being followed?” Duncan asked.

  “I feel it, yes. But it is a busy river. I could be mistaken.”

  “The killer has only struck on the Warriors Path,” Duncan reminded his friend.

  “The killer,” Conawago countered, “makes ritual murders on the trail. Off the trail he may not need to be so fastidious.”

  By the time they landed below Shamokin the next morning, Mokie had repeated, without Duncan’s bidding, what she and her mother had been instructed to do were they to reach the Indian town alive. Find the trail that rose above the southern edge of the town, they’d been told, and go to the fort that was not a fort, then ask again for the great bear.

  “Was it Captain Burke who gave you those instructions?” he asked.

  “On a piece of paper from Captain Burke,” the girl confirmed. “We had to burn it after, he said. Captain Burke, and Mr. Hadley, they teach mama and me how to read and write. Captain Burke, he would say that he would see we would always have jobs in the house, not out in the weather.”

  “Why, then,” Duncan asked, “did he change his mind? What made him help you flee?”

  “Don’t know. We couldn’t make the sense of it. He just took us into the summer kitchen and said we deserved better, that he had a way to help us, help everyone. Mama made him swear on a Bible he was not tricking us.”

  “Help everyone? What did he mean by that?”

  But the child only shrugged.

  As Van Grut and Hadley disembarked, Duncan stood on the bank and stared with foreboding in the direction of the settlement, its existence marked by the many plumes of smoke rising over the low ridge before him. In English he recited Moki
e’s instructions for all to hear. The declaration brought a stifled laugh from Johantty, who translated it for his companions, raising more laughter.

  “Do you know this bear?” Duncan asked.

  Johantty raised a hand and pointed further down the ridge. “The bear’s den is on the ridge,” the young Iroquois declared then, exhausted, curled up for sleep on a bed of moss.

  Duncan had been to Iroquois villages with Conawago, and at Shamokin expected something similar, on a larger scale, long bark houses with fields of corn, squash, and pumpkins stretching out from them. But it was no metropolis of longhouses he saw as they crested the ridge. The town seemed to consist of pieces borrowed from several different communities, haphazardly jammed together. Close to the river, on the long, curving flat at the junction of the north and west branches, there were indeed several longhouses, though half appeared abandoned. Here and there were clusters of log cabins, connected by muddy byways and most surrounded by primitive snake-rail fences that kept in milk cows. Scattered about were more prosperous-looking cabins, with even a few substantial stone houses standing out amid rich fields of bottomland. A small stone church stood by a graveyard. Beyond everything, just above the fork, was a log palisade structure, the fort used by the militia.

  The hammer of a smithy by the river rang out, near which several men labored over a new bargelike vessel resting in a log trestle. Kegs were being rolled from one of the heavy cargo canoes that plied the river. Duncan watched their progress, spying a substantial cabin against which more kegs were stacked. A tavern. Two familiar figures emerged from the trees and walked toward the church. Van Grut and Hadley had agreed to explore the town as Duncan and Conawago escorted Mokie to her mysterious rendezvous.

  When he first looked down on the compound below the laurel thickets, Duncan thought they had found another military fort, then saw that the structures were old and in disrepair, placed not for defense of the river forks but more for a view of the town. As he approached he saw that not all was tumbledown. The central gate had been recently rebuilt, and the dominant building appeared to have been created by constructing a hall against an older structure with the appearance of a church. Years earlier, he suspected, the compound had been built as a mission. Now it was alive with industry, men in buckskins and breechcloths counting and tying furs in bundles, others operating one of the heavy wood-screw presses used to compress stacks of hides for shipment. Several Indian women were hanging fish on long drying racks. On the wall of the new construction he saw a huge bearskin. Fighting a fresh foreboding, wishing he had not left his gun at the landing place, Duncan turned to tell Mokie to remain with Conawago while he explored further. But she was gone. He looked frantically about and spied her running through the open gate with Conawago trotting to catch up with her.