Bone Rattler (36 page)

The thought of Evering caused him to lift his head toward the river. He returned the belt to the cairn, then stepped toward the water. Duncan kept learning from Evering, long after his death, as if
the scholar were speaking to him from the spirit world. He found himself on the riverbank, gripping his fear, and stepped into the water.

The crooked face of the effigy seemed to be staring directly at him when he arrived under the hemlock on the island. Almost nothing had changed since his first visit, except the crown of antlers was in front of Evering now, with several feathers leaning against it. In one of the professor’s twig hands was a little stick, four inches long, with a single strand of beads attached to one end. Several notches had been cut into the stick. With mounting fear Duncan lifted the stick and its beads away. With a shudder he discovered what it was that was frightening him even more than on his first visit. Evering’s watch was ticking.

He backed up several steps and examined the beads on the stick. They were white and purple, arranged in a pattern of two purple and one white, the same as in the strand around the new bundle in the cairn; the same, he suddenly realized, as one of the oval lines drawn by Jacob the Fish in his dying message. The old Mahican had been sending a wampum message, without the beads.

An hour later Duncan sat on the school steps, making notes in the late afternoon sun, when suddenly a figure erupted from behind the cooper’s shed, stumbling, steadied by an older man who was pushing him forward. They walked along the wall of the building, disappearing around its far side. When they reappeared, Duncan put down his papers and stood, stealing along the shadows for a better look.

It was McGregor and the other Company prisoner who had been brought back, the man still wearing the same mindless, numb expression he had worn when he had appeared from the forest. On the third round, Duncan realized the two men were making a
deiseal
circuit around Arnold’s makeshift church.

“What was his sin?” Duncan asked a Company man who watched the ritual uneasily.

“Killed a snake with an ax,” the man replied in a perplexed tone. “Old Fitch had a fit. Broke off the ax head and tossed it in the forge to melt. McGregor said he knew a way to make things right.”

Duncan waited for McGregor and his companion to finish their circuits, then reached the old Scot as the two men, finished, stepped to a drinking trough. “What happened out there with Hawkins?” he asked.

The old Scot swallowed hard before answering. “We came upon a farm where everyone had been killed, days earlier. Blood everywhere, the bodies in pieces, picked by the crows. That night we stayed with a Welshman who sold us rum, who told us tales of the heathen, said if we kept going upriver the Huron would take us home and hang us up alive for meat, slicing off pieces for their stew pots.”

“But that was where Hawkins was taking you? Upriver?”

“I don’t know. Yes. They’re not coming back. Over there, in the forest, it’s like being thrown into the ocean not knowing how to swim. For four days, this one,” he said, indicating the younger convict with him, “never slept. ’Tain’t right, McCallum, ’tain’t for people like us to—” The Scot’s voice trailed off as the younger man wandered away into the makeshift chapel. “Hawkins, he left the boy on the trail, weeping like a babe, so weak he couldn’t walk. I told Hawkins the boy was Ramsey property, that he couldn’t be wasted like that without accounting to the great laird.” McGregor shook his head. “He sneaks into the chapel when e’re he can. I’ll have to drag him out again, a’fore Reverend Arnold hears.”

“Hears what?”

“His prayer, always the same prayer.
May I die soon,
he says,
may I die quick.”
With a sigh McGregor stepped toward the chapel.

Duncan returned to the schoolhouse steps, keeping an eye on the men who walked along the muddy paths of the town until he spied a compact, sinewy figure in green. Fitch entered the barn and was sharpening his hand ax on a grindstone when Duncan approached and silently took over the turning of the handle. The sergeant nodded and continued working the blade with grim determination. A Company worker appeared with a spade to grind, and backed away as he saw Fitch. The men treated the sergeant like some kind of wild beast that sometimes prowled in their midst.

“The Indians use codes in their beads,” Duncan said after a minute. He extended the strand of beads on the stick with his free hand. “Jacob used the same code.”

Fitch paused, testing his blade with a callused thumb, glancing at the beads. “This used to be their land. Even if Ramsey offered to pay for it, which he didn’t, they wouldn’t understand. Their brains can’t fit around the idea that men can own land.”

“Who exactly uses such codes?”

“The Six,” the sergeant said toward the trees, then turned to Duncan. “Each of the Six Nations has its own bead pattern, to identify it in messages. Four strands, with two purple and one white, that be Onondaga. They are the central tribe, the keepers of tradition, the ones charged with watching over sacred things. The ones with the most powerful shaman.”

“Tashgua, you mean.”

“He was born Onondaga. But he lives apart now, away from the Iroquois towns, with his own band, has for years. Like a band of roaming warrior priests, protecting the old ways.”

“But there are soldiers here. Surely hostiles won’t move about with the soldiers so close.”

“Gone, with the last of the settlers, worn out by Ramsey hospitality. There was a farmer named William Wells, with a place not many miles north. Killed and scalped two days ago, but his place wasn’t burnt, so those settlers went there. And the troops were just a small patrol, due to go back soon.”

Duncan examined the stick again. “It has ten notches. What does that mean?”

“It’s a council stick, lad. A religious council. An Indian shaman wants to talk. Ten notches means in ten days.”

“Are you saying it’s an invitation?”

“If ’twere given to an Indian, that’s what it would be.”

“Where? Where is this council?”

“If you have to ask that,” Fitch replied, “then I reckon it ain’t intended for you.” He rose and pushed the tomahawk into his belt.
“Given recent events, I reckon ’tis the last place any sane Christian wants to be.”

Duncan put a hand on his arm as the sergeant took a step away. “Adam Munroe was supposed to be with the Company. He would have known how to read the beads.”

Fitch looked away. “Aye,” he confirmed in a reluctant tone.

“Because he was a ghostwalker,” Duncan ventured. “Because he was a prisoner of the Indians,” he added in a questioning tone.

Fitch frowned. “Ghostwalker’s just a name for the pitiful souls who are brought back, not Indian but no longer exactly European either. Most of them move about without purpose, having lost the way of themselves.”

“How long was he a prisoner?”

“There was an expedition of Pennsylvania militia three years ago. He was one of those who did not come back,” Fitch added, then hurried away.

Adam had trusted Duncan with the stone bear, he had said, because Duncan was becoming a ghostwalker. For a horrible instant he thought Adam meant he was to be captured by the savages, then he understood. Duncan was between worlds, too, able to see certain true things because his true people were lost. He looked down at the notched stick.
It ain’t intended for you,
Fitch had said. But maybe it was. The old Ramsey tutor had given it to a new one.

 

 

It was dusk when Duncan returned to the schoolroom. Dropping the paper with the drawing of the belt onto the table with his other clues, he stared at them all, arms folded on the table, until his head dropped into his arms and he slept.

When he awoke, a nearly full moon had risen. He unlatched the door and sat on the stone step, watching the sky, his thoughts constantly drawn toward the old Scot in the makeshift cell. Finally he rose and stepped inside to his bedchamber. Pulling out the sea bag he had brought from the ship, he extracted the clothing and reached
into the bottom, removing the tattered, stained muslin bag that held his most precious possession. Holding the bag tightly to his chest, he stepped outside. He studied the forge a moment, then stepped away from it, walking hurriedly over the open ground, slowly finding his way through the laurel thicket until he reached the overgrown cemetery. As he reached into the sack, his heart gave a sudden lurch, and he stood unmoving, overwhelmed with emotion. The intricately crafted pipes had been handed down through his family for at least two hundred years, but they had been lovingly cared for, left to him by the old uncle who had sought refuge with Duncan, secretly kept for him by one of his Scottish professors who had visited him in prison and then appeared in the courtroom when he had been sentenced to transportation.

Slowly, methodically, sitting on one of the ruined cabin walls, Duncan prepared the instrument, flooded with memories of his grandfather playing and teaching him with the same pipes. Finally, the bladder bulging with air, the reeds wetted and reset, the drones tuned as best he could manage, he clamped the blow-stick in his teeth and grasped the chanter. He was out of practice, but the fingering came back quickly. His grandfather had taught him many lonesome ballads of the Highlands and the seafaring island folk, and Duncan played all he could recall, each song releasing him further from the guilt and hopelessness he felt in the Ramsey compound. Long-dead scenes opened in his mind, of his mother dancing with him in the kitchen as his father played small music, of his grandfather offering a solemn
pibroch
to bless the fishermen each spring before they set out on the treacherous Hebrides waters. His heart thundered, and a new energy reached his piping. He was rowing with his grandfather on a calm sea as the old man piped to the whales and seals. He was at one of the joyful Highland weddings, where men who smelled of heather and peat piped all night by a bonfire and girls danced over swords.

Duncan did not know how long he played, how long he had been transported to the country, and clan, of his youth, but when
he had finished, he brimmed with unexpected tranquility, a lightness of heart he had not known for months, perhaps years. He returned the pipes to their sack, then carefully laid the bag inside a hollow log by Sarah’s stone, stuffing the end with moss. He entered the night-still paths of Edentown boldly, buoyed by his unexpected contentment, and had begun to circle the barn, hoping to come up on the back of the forge so he might whisper to Lister, when a murmur abruptly stopped him.

His heart seemed to shudder. Impossible, he told himself. A trick of the mind. The lack of sleep, or perhaps the lingering effect of the piping affected his senses. He pushed a hand against his temple to drive away the strange working of memory and guilt that had overtaken his brain. The voice of mad Flora had entered his mind and would not leave. He shook his head sharply once, twice, then drew in a deep breath before taking another step. The voice faded but came back, stronger, and unmistakable. Flora was speaking to him, using the alien, sibilant language that had so mesmerized him on the ship. But Flora was gone, hundreds of miles away, back on the high seas by now.

He moved through the shadows as if in a dream, until he saw a candle lantern that had been hung from a peg in the center aisle of the barn. Impossibly, the phantom was there, sitting cross-legged in the pool of light with her back to him; the heads of the horses extended beyond their stall doors, and the animals seemed to be listening attentively. It was all a dream. He had to be dreaming. His consciousness had surrendered to his guilt. Her long, dark hair flowed down the blanket she had wrapped around her shoulders. The way she spoke the strange syllables, which echoed in his memory every night, left no doubt. The phantom was Flora, his murderess, whose hand he had held in the dark.

“Haudenosaunee! Haudenosaunee!”
came the chant.
“Ohkwari!”

She seemed to be addressing someone, though she spoke toward the oak plank wall. Her head bent lower and lower, as if she were falling into a trance, and Duncan ventured closer, fifteen feet away, then ten, and still she spoke her strange tongue without seeming to notice him. Finally the Flora of his nightmares would have a face.

But as he took another step, a hand closed around his arm. He turned to see Crispin beside him, wearing a haunted, frightened expression. The big man gripped him so tightly it hurt, pulling him backward, not making a sound. Suddenly the chanting stopped and the woman turned, shot upright, lifting the blanket over her head, and fled into the shadows. But in that instant Duncan had glimpsed her face.

“Sarah!” he gasped.

A shadow appeared at the opposite end of the barn and intercepted the girl, pulling her toward the fields. Duncan, too, felt himself led away, his mind roiling with contradiction. He found himself seated on a low stool in one of the oak-planked tool rooms at the back of the barn, lit by a solitary candle, and looked up into the tortured countenance of Crispin.

“I’ve been so blind,” Duncan groaned, sinking his head into his hands. His slender certainties were in ashes. Everything he had concluded about the murders, everything he had done since the storm on the ship, had to be reconsidered, every piece of the puzzle dismantled. “It’s her grave out there after all,” he said. “But she didn’t die.”

“They thought so,” Crispin whispered. “They truly thought so, for a dozen years, and her mother mourned her every day, had the children pray for her soul. The bodies had been mutilated, many burnt to the bone.”

“Instead, she was taken.”

“Sometimes they make slaves of children,” Crispin’s voice cracked as he spoke.

Duncan felt again the despair he had first experienced at the grave, only deeper now. He felt as if he would weep at any moment, as he thought of the beautiful, gentle girl Sarah must have been as a six-year-old, and the horror she must have suffered with the savages, wrenched away from the world, deprived of all mercy, love, and hope. “A ghostwalker,” Duncan said with a chill, and the word had an odd, biting texture on his tongue. Sarah’s sickness had a name after all. She was one of the wretched souls who had returned from the purgatory of captivity, having lost all connection to the civilized world.