A Breath of Snow and Ashes (88 page)

“I came,” Brianna said shortly. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Trying to get close enough to talk to your mother.” He glanced uneasily over his shoulder; there were slaves in the kitchen garden, their voices audible. “I hid out with the Cherokee for a while, then I figured to come down and talk to her at Fraser’s Ridge when it was safe, but the old lady there told me you were all down here. Heck of a long way to walk,” he added, looking vaguely resentful.

“But then that big black dude ran me off twice, when I tried to get in before. Guess I didn’t meet the dress code.” His face flickered, not quite managing a smile.

“I been sneaking around for the last three days, trying to catch a glimpse of her, find her alone outside. But I saw her talking to you, out on the terrace, and heard you call her Mama. Seeing how big you are, I figured you must be . . . well, I figured if you didn’t pick up on the song, no harm done, huh?”

“So ye want to go back where ye came from, do ye?” Ian asked. Plainly he thought this was an excellent idea.

“Oh, yeah,” Donner said fervently. “
Oh,
yeah!”

“Where did you come through?” Brianna asked. The shock of his appearance was fading, subsumed by curiosity. “In Scotland?”

“No, is that where you did it?” he asked eagerly. Scarcely waiting for her nod, he went on. “Your mother said she came and then went back and came again. Can you-all go back and forth, like, you know, a revolving door?”

Brianna shook her head violently, shuddering in recollection.

“God, no. It’s horrible, and it’s so dangerous, even with a gemstone.”

“Gemstone?” He pounced on that. “You gotta have a gemstone to do it?”

“Not absolutely, but it seems to be some protection. And it may be that there’s some way to use gemstones to—to steer, sort of, but we don’t really know about that.” She hesitated, wanting to ask more questions, but wanting still more to fetch Claire. “Ian—could you go get Mama? I think she’s in the kitchen garden with Phaedre.”

Her cousin gave the visitor a flat, narrow look, and shook his head.

“I’ll not leave ye alone wi’ this fellow. You go; I’ll watch him.”

She would have argued, but long experience with Scottish males had taught her to recognize intractable stubbornness when she saw it. Besides, Donner’s eyes were fixed on her in a way that made her slightly uncomfortable—he was looking at her hand, she realized, at the cabochon ruby in her ring. She was reasonably sure she could fight him off, if necessary, but still . . .

“I’ll be right back,” she said, hastily stabbing a neglected brush into the pot of turps. “Don’t go anywhere!”

I WAS SHOCKED, but less so than I might have been. I had felt that Donner was alive. Hoped he was, in spite of everything. Still, seeing him face to face, sitting in Jocasta’s morning room, struck me dumb. He was talking when I came in, but stopped when he saw me. He didn’t stand up, naturally, nor yet offer any observations on my survival; just nodded at me, and resumed what he’d been saying.

“To stop whitey. Save our lands, save our people.”

“But you came to the wrong time,” Brianna pointed out. “You were too late.”

Donner gave her a blank look.

“No, I didn’t—1766, that’s when I was supposed to come, and that’s when I came.” He pounded the heel of his hand violently against the side of his head. “Crap! What was
wrong
with me?”

“Congenital stupidity?” I suggested politely, having regained my voice. “That, or hallucinogenic drugs.”

The blank look flickered a little, and Donner’s mouth twitched.

“Oh. Yeah, man. There was some of that.”

“But if you came to 1766—and meant to”—Bree objected—“what about Robert Springer—Otter-Tooth? According to the story Mama heard about him, he meant to warn the native tribes against white men and prevent them colonizing the place. Only he arrived too
late
to do that—and even so, he must have arrived forty or fifty years before you did!”

“That wasn’t the plan, man!” Donner burst out. He stood up, rubbing both hands violently through his hair in agitation, making it stand out like a bramble bush. “Jeez, no!”

“Oh, it wasn’t? What the bloody hell
was
the plan, then?” I demanded. “You did have one.”

“Yeah. Yeah, we did.” He dropped his hands, glancing round as though fearing to be overheard. He licked his lips.

“Bob did want to do what you said—only the rest said, nah, that wouldn’t work. Too many different groups, too much pressure to trade with the whiteys . . . just no way it would fly, you know? We couldn’t stop it all, just maybe make it better.”

The official plan of the group had been somewhat less ambitious in scope. The travelers would arrive in the 1760s, and over the course of the next ten years, in the confusion and reshuffling, the movement of tribes and villages attendant upon the end of the French and Indian War, would infiltrate themselves into various Indian groups along the Treaty Line in the Colonies and up into the Canadian territories.

They would then use such persuasive powers as they had gained to sway the Indian nations to fight on the British side in the oncoming Revolution, with the intent of insuring a British victory.

“See, the English, they act like the Indians are sovereign nations,” he explained, with a glibness suggesting this was a theory learned by rote. “They won, they’d go on doing trade and like that, which is okay, but they wouldn’t be trying to push the Indians back and stomp ’em out. The colonists”—he waved scornfully toward the open door—“greedy sons o’ bitches been shoving their way into Indian lands for the last hundred years;
they
ain’t going to stop.”

Bree raised her brows, but I could see that she found the notion intriguing. Evidently, it wasn’t quite as insane as it sounded.

“How could you think you’d succeed?” I demanded. “Only a few men to—oh, my God,” I said, seeing his face change. “Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ—you weren’t the only ones, were you?”

Donner shook his head, wordless.

“How many?” Ian asked. He sounded calm, but I could see that his hands were clenched on his knees.

“I dunno.” Donner sat down abruptly, slumping into himself like a bag of grain. “There were like, two or three hundred in the group. But most of ’em couldn’t hear the stones.” His head lifted a little, and he glanced at Brianna. “Can you?”

She nodded, ruddy brows drawn together.

“But you think there were more . . . travelers . . . than you and your friends?”

Donner shrugged, helpless.

“I got the idea there were, yeah. But Raymond said only five at a time could pass through. So we trained in, like, cells of five. We kept it secret; nobody in the big group knew who could travel and who couldn’t, and Raymond was the only one who knew all of ’em.”

I had to ask.

“What did Raymond look like?” A possibility had been stirring in the back of my mind, ever since I’d heard that name.

Donner blinked, having not expected that question.

“Jeez, I dunno,” he said helplessly “Short dude, I think. White hair. Wore it long, like we all did.” He raked a hand through his knotted locks in illustration, brows furrowed in the search for memory.

“A rather . . . wide . . . forehead?” I knew I oughtn’t to prompt him, but couldn’t help myself, and drew both index fingers across my own brow in illustration.

He stared at me in confusion for a moment.

“Man, I don’t remember,” he said, shaking his head helplessly. “It was a long time ago. How would I remember something like that?”

I sighed.

“Well, tell me what happened, when you came through the stones.”

Donner licked his lips, blinking in the effort of recall. It wasn’t just native stupidity, I saw; he didn’t like thinking about it.

“Yeah. Well, there were five of us, like I said. Me, and Rob, and Jeremy and Atta. Oh, and Jojo. We came through on the island, and—”

“What island?” Brianna, Ian, and I all chorused together.

“Ocracoke,” he said, looking surprised. “It’s the northmost portal in the Bermuda Triangle group. We wanted to be as close as we could get to—”

“The Ber—” Brianna and I began, but broke off, looking at each other.

“You know where a number of these portals are?” I said, striving for calm.

“How many are there?” Brianna chimed in, not waiting for his answer.

The answer, in any event, was confused—no surprise there. Raymond had told them that there were many such places in the world, but that they tended to occur in groups. There was such a group in the Caribbean, another in the Northeast, near the Canadian border. Another in the Southwestern desert—Arizona, he thought, and down through Mexico. Northern Britain and the coast of France, as far as the tip of the Iberian peninsula. Probably more, but that’s all he’d mentioned.

Not all of the portals were marked with stone circles, though those in places where people had lived for a long time tended to be.

“Raymond said those were safer,” he said, shrugging. “I dunno why.”

The spot on Ocracoke hadn’t been bounded by a full circle of stones, though it
was
marked. Four stones, he said. One of them had marks on it Raymond said were African—maybe made by slaves.

“It’s kind of in the water,” he said, shrugging. “A little stream runs through it, I mean. Ray said he didn’t know about water, whether that made any difference, but he thought it might. But we didn’t know what
kind
of difference. You guys know?”

Brianna and I shook our heads, round-eyed as a pair of owls. Ian’s brow, already furrowed, drew further down at this, though. Had he heard something, during his time with Geillis Duncan?

The five of them—and Raymond—had driven as far as they could; the road that led down the Outer Banks was a poor one, which tended to wash away in storms, and they were obliged to leave the car several miles away from the spot, struggling through the scrub pines of the coastal forest and patches of unexpected quicksand. It was late fall—

“Samhain,” Brianna said softly, but softly enough that Donner was not distracted from the flow of his story.

Late fall, he said, and the weather was bad. It had been raining for days, and the footing was uncertain, slippery and boggy by turns. The wind was high, and the storm surge pounded the beaches; they could hear it, even in the secluded spot where the portal lay.

“We were all scared—maybe all but Rob—but it was way exciting, man,” he said, beginning to show a glimmer of enthusiasm. “The trees were just about layin’ down flat, and the sky, it was green. The wind was so bad, you could taste salt, all the time, because little bits of ocean were flying through the air, mixed with the rain. We were, like, soaked through to our choners.”

“Your what?” Ian said, frowning.

“Underpants—you know, drawers. Smallclothes,” Brianna said, flapping an impatient hand. “Go on.”

Once arrived at the place, Raymond had checked them all, to see that they carried the few necessities they might need—tinderboxes, tobacco, a little money of the time—and then given each one a wampum necklet, and a small leather pouch, which he said was an amulet of ceremonial herbs.

“Oh, you know about that,” he said, seeing the expression on my face. “What kind did you use?”

“I didn’t,” I said, not wanting him to wander from his story. “Go on. How did you plan to hit the right time?”

“Oh. Well.” He sighed, hunching on his stool. “We didn’t. Ray said it would be just about two hundred years, give or take a couple. It wasn’t like we could steer—that’s what I was hoping you guys would know. How to get to a specific time. ’Cuz, boy, I’d sure like to go back and get there
before
I got messed up with Ray and them.”

They had, at Raymond’s direction, walked a pattern among the stones, chanting words. Donner had no idea what the words meant, nor even what the language was. At the conclusion of the pattern, though, they had walked single file toward the stone with African markings, passing carefully to the left of it.

“And, like—pow!” He smacked a fist into the palm of his other hand. “First guy in line—he’s
gone,
man! We were just freaked out. I mean, that’s what was s’posed to happen, but . . . gone,” he repeated, shaking his head. “Just . . .
gone.
”

Agog at this evidence of effectiveness, they had repeated the pattern and the chant, and at each repetition, the first man to pass the stone had vanished. Donner had been the fourth.

“Oh, God,” he said, going pale at the memory. “Oh, God, I never felt anything like that before and I hope I never do again.”

“The amulet—the pouch you had,” Brianna said, ignoring his pallor. Her own face was intense, blazing with interest. “What happened to that?”

“I dunno. I maybe dropped it, maybe it went someplace else. I passed out, and when I came to, it wasn’t with me.” The day was warm and close, but he began to shiver. “Jojo. He was with me. Only he was dead.”

That statement struck me like a knife blow, just under the ribs. Geillis Duncan’s notebooks had held lists of people found near stone circles—some alive, some dead. I hadn’t needed anything to tell me that the journey through the stones was a perilous passage—but this reminder made me feel weak in the knees, and I sat down on Jocasta’s tufted ottoman.