The King's Beast

by Eliot Pattison

  A choked cry came from the fanged skull. “Coward!”

  They sat in silence, letting the fragrant smoke wash over the bodies. One of the men by the shaman began a low, mournful chant. After several minutes Boone and his companions rose and disappeared down the tunnel that opened into the chamber. Soon the crackle of a fire echoed down the tunnel.

  When Boone and his friends returned, they were carrying steaming mugs. When the Seneca had distributed the mugs with a solemn nod to each man, the shaman removed his fanged helmet, revealing a stern countenance wrinkled with age. His forehead was covered with an intricate pattern of tattoos. His eyes still glowed.

  “Europeans are blinded by their ignorance,” Catchoka declared as he extended his mug. “We see that you are a good man, a friend to the tribes. But you don’t understand, McCallum, that Ajoka died in a war, a war of hunters fighting in the shadows, shadows that will soon overtake you.” No, Duncan wanted to protest. Ezra’s killers only wanted Ezra, had killed him and fled. They had stopped his secret mission, not Duncan’s. He held his tongue.

  “If you don’t become one of those hunters,” Catchoka continued, “you will die too. The gods go with you now, into the world that killed Ezra. They will have to decide about that world, decide if they are with you or against you. There will be blood in the night. If you are weak, they will give up on you, and you will die forever.” The foreboding in his voice hung over the chamber like a dark cloud. The chieftain drained his cup. Duncan drained his own and tried to decide whether it tasted bitter because of the brew or because of the shaman’s words.

  Beside him Boone gave a low cackling laugh as Duncan found himself leaning back against the rock wall, his head swimming again. “Better pray we got it right, Highlander,” Boone said as Duncan’s vision blurred. “That nightshade be powerful stuff. It’ll put ye under for hours, but if we got it wrong ye’ll never wake again.”

  Chapter 3

  DUNCAN HOVERED IN A THICK fog. He struggled to recall where he was or how he had gotten there. He willed his limbs into motion and more than once he thought he had risen to his feet only to discover that he was still on his back, blind and unable to move. His world was dark and stifling. The only things that reached him from beyond the miasma were a musty stench, rhythmic sounds of men marching, and, between their short marches, dull thuds as from a club striking something. Prison. He was in prison again. In Scotland, in his first prison years earlier, the guards had marched, then stopped frequently to open and shut heavy cell doors.

  Nightmarish visions seized him. He was running, chased by furious, fantastical beasts with huge tusks and fangs. He stumbled into a bog, sinking in the mud as the monsters swarmed ever closer. With his final breath he realized these must be the old, vengeful gods. A giant bone pinned him in a pool of water and he was drowning, drowning for what seemed hours, but never dying. He watched from above as Conawago and Sarah stood mourning at his grave. His grandfather’s ketch sailed toward him on a black sea and the old man, flesh hanging off his dead bones, welcomed him to purgatory. An aged tribesman wearing a fanged helmet ate dinner with a jovial, bespectacled gentleman as little lightning bolts flashed over their heads. The tribesman pointed at Duncan and spoke in an apologetic voice. “There will be blood in the night.”

  Sometimes he heard his name called from down a long tunnel. He tried to answer but could not move his jaw. Then Sarah came. He was in the schoolhouse where he had first taught her to renew her English after being raised by the Mohawk, and where she had first taught him about the Iroquois ways. He was walking hand in hand with her amid blooming apple trees and she played the impish Iroquois maiden by running and hiding. She would pounce on him from a tree and they rolled in the grass, laughing, until fangs grew out of her mouth and she bent to rip his flesh.

  More vivid images came. He recognized them as memories. His mother and sisters danced around a Beltane fire. A beautiful woman lay dead in a chamber of bones. He slipped deeper into his fog, all sense of reality gone. A lanky woodsman in buckskin grinned at him, then looked up at a severed head impaled on his rifle barrel. The jovial man who had dined with the shaman shot lightning out of his palms. An urgent but garbled message about murder, liberty, and King George gnawed at the back of his mind.

  Something struck his cheek, then again, harder. “Duncan!” came a pleading voice. Someone was violently shaking his shoulders.

  Suddenly his eyes opened. “Ishmael!” he gasped.

  The young Nipmuc took Duncan’s hand between both his own and pressed it. “Thank the spirits, at last!”

  Duncan slowly took stock of his surroundings. He was lying on the stern deck of the Arabella. The captain and half his crew were staring at him, some with obvious disappointment. A long rope was bound around Duncan’s body.

  “The captain was going to drag you behind the boat,” Ishmael explained in a sour tone as he untied the rope.

  “Praise the Lord!” the Reverend Podrake declared as he bent to help Ishmael, “Our worshipful vigil has been rewarded!” Ishmael grimaced.

  “Drag me?” Duncan asked as Ishmael helped him to his feet.

  “With the best of intentions, McCallum,” the captain said in his own defense as he extended a dipper of water to Duncan. “The waters of the Ohio are known to have restorative powers.” He nodded toward Pierre Dumont, standing by the cabin hatch with a relieved smile on his narrow face. “Either that or the monsieur said we must hang ye up by yer heels.”

  Duncan looked over the stern of the boat, then into the sky as he drank from the dipper. It was nearly noon. “We left at daybreak?” he asked.

  Ishmael and the captain exchanged an uneasy glance. “Boone and his friends carried you to the boat. We left at daybreak. Yesterday,” the captain said.

  Duncan stared in disbelief. “I have been asleep for a day and a half?”

  “Not sure it was sleep,” the captain, an austere, hard-driving man of Cornwall, replied. “More like dangling a foot in your grave,” he added, then turned to his crew. “No one gave you leave to gawk! Poles in the water, boys! Ain’t getting to Fort Pitt by wishing it so!”

  The captain, wary of encountering drifting logs and snags in the night, ordered camp to be made under one of the river’s massive sycamores. After pitching their tents, the rivermen encircled the huge tree, joining outstretched arms to measure its circumference. It took six of them to span the trunk and one of them quipped to Duncan that it was old enough to have seen his great monsters when they still had flesh on their bones. The other men hooted with laughter but Ishmael fixed the man with a withering gaze. “It is a grandfather tree,” the Nipmuc declared. “All the wisdom of the forest flows from such trees. At night, if you know how to listen, you can hear their whispers.”

  The men stared uneasily at Ishmael, then backed away from the tree. One of them hesitated, then patted the tree and muttered an apologetic “no offense intended, old man.” Another, who had been gathering dead branches from under the tree, carefully lowered the branches to the ground, crossed himself, and retreated.

  The captain had not left the boat while his crew made camp. As the sun was setting, he summoned Duncan up the plank that had been laid between the Arabella and the riverbank. He pulled a piece of charred wood from the little brazier they sometimes used for midday meals, then knelt and drew on the deck. First he inscribed an arc indicating the big bend in the river they had rounded before mooring the boat, then a large island ahead of them that defined a channel along the southern bank. “That’s our route,” he said. “Without that southern channel, we have to go out into midstream and fight the stronger current. Means we lose at least half a day.”

  “So we will take the channel,” Duncan said, not understanding the captain’s anxious expression.

  The captain handed Duncan his telescope and pointed to the mouth of the channel. In the sun’s setting rays he could see a tree that had fallen, blocking the channel.

  “Damn them to hell,” the captain growled. “No g
oing around that.”

  Duncan focused on the bank and made out the jagged stump. “You suggest it was felled to keep us from the shortcut?”

  “Aye, this very afternoon, I wager. Look at it. The foliage is still fresh. It’s no coincidence. ’Twas the Muskrat, God rot them!”

  Duncan realized he meant that the obstacle was the work of the keelboat ahead of them. He had been trying to convince himself that Ezra’s killers had no interest in their precious cargo, but the tree could be evidence otherwise. “I wager, Captain, that the same boat bears away Ezra’s killers.”

  “Maybe yay, maybe nay,” the gruff Cornishman replied. “But blocking that passage be a grave enough sin. When we find them Muskrats at Fort Pitt they will get a thrashing they’ll not soon forget.”

  Duncan’s half-hearted effort to convince the captain they could move the tree was interrupted by a sharp whistle from Ishmael. He turned to see the young Nipmuc on the bank pointing downriver, where in the dying light a canoe with three men was rapidly approaching their camp. The buckskin-clad man in the bow raised a hand and pointed to a small sandy beach fifty yards from their camp.

  Daniel Boone hesitated as Duncan emerged from the forest behind the bank. Duncan offered no greeting, just silently approached the woodsman and slammed a fist into his belly. Boone collapsed onto the sand, gasping, but held up a hand to restrain his two native companions from leaping onto Duncan.

  “Your damned brew almost killed me!” Duncan snapped.

  “Can’t see as yer suffering,” Boone said as he braced himself with his long rifle to regain his feet. “Damned tricky proposition,” he said, rubbing his abdomen, “trying to translate the measures given by that old Shawnee grandmother. My Shawnee ain’t good enough yet so they had to go from the Shawnee tongue to Seneca to English.” He shrugged. “Came out to me as a dram of the nightshade juice. Afterward I found out she meant enough to fill the cap of an acorn.” Boone rubbed his belly. “Hell, the long sleep left ye no weaker, McCallum.”

  “It was no sleep. It was nothing but nightmares for a day and a half! I should—” Duncan paused as Boone reached inside his tunic and produced a piece of paper.

  “Ezra’s killer was trying to intercept this.” the woodsman announced.

  Duncan’s anger evaporated. He reached for the paper but Boone gestured him to sit on a nearby log. The woodsman muttered to his native companions and they began gathering firewood. As they worked, Ishmael appeared out of the brush. Producing his flint and striker, he soon coaxed flames out of the kindling.

  “The tribesmen are right quiet about their private affairs,” Boone declared. “And Catchoka weren’t there in his bone chamber to speak of family. He was there to speak for the Ancient Ones. But yesterday, after the bodies were readied for burial, he said I must find you. What he didn’t tell you was that his granddaughter was going back with Ezra. After he finished his job for the Sons,” Boone said, nodding to the paper, “he was going to his old plantation to introduce her to his African clan before returning to the Shawnee lands to live. They were going to build a cabin at one of the river landings.” Duncan eyed the paper, which Boone still gripped tightly. “She had this wrapped in doeskin and tied around her waist.”

  “You mean she was carrying it for Ezra. Hiding it for him.”

  “Maybe if they had found it they wouldn’t have had to kill,” Boone suggested. “When they didn’t find the message, they had to kill the messenger. But they never searched her,” he said and extended the paper to Duncan. “Those who don’t know the tribes always underestimate the women. It was Ezra’s task, so it was her task too.”

  Duncan chewed on the words. Ezra’s task. The paper no doubt reflected his separate mission for Benjamin Franklin, a mission kept secret from Duncan.

  The fire had become bright enough to read by. It was a heavy, expensive paper, rare to see on the frontier, and it was not a letter but a map, an intricate map of the great river system from Fort Pitt to New Orleans. Four circled Xs were scattered along the map, each with a mark or a signature, the northern two of which were labeled St. Louis and Kentucky. The Kentucky signature, in a stiff but legible hand, was that of Catchoka. At the bottom right the paper was marked AGREED, with the signature of someone named A. O’REILLY. It had nothing to do with the Lick or the bones.

  Duncan pointed to the marks. “A series of confirmations along a map of the passage to New Orleans. Why would Ezra die for this?”

  “Ain’t for you and me to cipher out,” Boone said, raising an inquiring glance from Duncan. “It’ll mean something to the one it’s meant for. He was to take it to Fort Pitt.”

  “It meant something to those who killed him,” Duncan pointed out. “And surely Catchoka must know something about it if he signed it.”

  “He said it was something very important Ezra had asked him to do, about assuring the safety of certain riverboats.”

  “Who brought it to Ezra?” Ishmael asked.

  “Two men in a fast canoe brought it to Catchoka, to sign and give to Ezra. The chief gave it to his granddaughter, for she would be the first to see her husband. The couriers came from the west, from downriver.”

  “They left this paper and returned downriver?” Duncan asked. He did not miss the quick glance Boone aimed at his Seneca companion.

  “People come and go on this river,” Boone said. “Hard to say.”

  The Seneca gave a grunt as if in disapproval. “He speaks with the dead, Daniel,” the tribesman said, then nodded to Duncan. “I spoke with them, then followed them,” the Seneca said. “I offered them help but they declined, said they had survived the great Mississippi and had to report back to their leader. They just crossed the river and landed on the north bank. They abandoned their canoe there and took the old warrior trail to the northeast. They carried very little, just weapons and small pouches that probably held food, as if they expected to be running the forest for a great distance.”

  “That trail goes how far?” Duncan asked.

  “All the way back to the people,” Ishmael said.

  Duncan raised an eyebrow. The young Nipmuc meant the Iroquois. The man before them was an Iroquois, though of the oft-defiant Seneca clans. “They were from the League? Oneida? Onondaga?” he asked, referring to the two tribes most closely connected to the heartland of the Iroquois League.

  “A Mohawk can’t open his mouth without his tongue giving him away,” the Seneca said. “One Mohawk, the other Oneida.”

  “Why ask about Oneida?” Boone asked.

  “They are great wanderers. I have many friends among the tribe,” Duncan said, sharing a glance with Ishmael. Duncan’s particular friend Captain Patrick Woolford ran special, stealthy missions out of his office as deputy superintendent of Indians. Could he be the leader the couriers spoke of? His agents were nearly all Oneida, and those who weren’t were from the tribe of Woolford’s wife, the Mohawks. But Duncan had never heard of Woolford deploying his secret hunters such a great distance, and Patrick was on extended leave in England.

  “They each had a long rifle and a war ax,” the Seneca offered. “Probably good enough.”

  “Good enough?” Duncan asked.

  “On the southern bank a black-and-white boat was tied to a big willow. Not long after the two started up the Iroquois trail, a dugout pulled out from the shadows of that willow, in a great hurry. The three men in it beached their boat on the far bank and started up the trail, following the Iroquois. I asked about them in the river settlement and was told they were just some out-of-work trappers desperate for coin, that the night before two Englishmen came and spoke with them, and afterward those three bought a jug of rum and flashed a purse of coins. The Englishmen dressed like rangers from the old war, but they weren’t real rangers because they treated all the tribesmen like servants.”

  Duncan gazed out over the darkening land on the far bank. Days earlier there had been Iroquois there, perhaps some warriors he knew. If they had evaded capture by their pursuers, they would be ap
proaching the Iroquois lands by now. If not, they had probably died hideous deaths. He might have thought he had stumbled into some bloody frontier feud, and that the recent passage of the Iroquois was just a coincidence, but for two letters signed by Benjamin Franklin. He had come down the river thinking he was on some scholarly adventure. Now, going back up the Ohio, he knew he was caught in a web of violent intrigue that stretched into Iroquois country and across the Atlantic to Franklin in London.

  “When you met us at the river landing you said you came to help the Sons,” Duncan said to Boone.

  “Didn’t say which sons,” Boone replied with a grin. “Didn’t know if I was going to dig graves or make friends at first. The Shawnee held a war council, considering whether every man of ye should be put down if ye made a move toward the bones. Catchoka said no, because Ezra was one of the tribe and he would never choose to help evil men. And his granddaughter said Ezra was helping the Sons of Liberty, whose tree was on his chest. So I was dispatched to take a look-see and report back.”

  Duncan silently weighed the words. “I thought you were an ambassador for the English to the Shawnee. But it was the opposite.”

  Boone shrugged. “If I am going to make a new home in this land I have to get along with the Shawnee. And I keep thinking of something Catchoka said to me the day you arrived. ‘If the bones are moved, there will be a bloodletting.’ But neither of us thought the first blood would be that of Shawnee. That changed everything. The old chief took it as a message, and a rebuke.”

  “Rebuke?” Duncan asked.