The Crafters Book Two (33 page)

But, as it turned out, that was precisely what he should have done. Because the storm came in minutes later with an impressive crash of thunder and skirmish of lightning, and it was the mother and the father and perhaps even the granddaddy of all storms seen in that area since men could remember. Afterwards there was argument over just where it had begun. Some said it had been brewed in the Great Lakes. Others claimed it blew in from the far Pacific. Wherever it came from, it was more like a tornado than a summer storm. The rain fell in sheets, and those sheets came down in long, slanted lines. It was an amazing display of water, and it drowned out over half of the farms in the neighborhood, beat in many roofs, tore down a lot of fences, and in general played merry hell with the course of life. The farmers got their rain, but they had to replant anyhow because the storm washed the seeds out of the earth. And when it was all done, Nat was something of a hero, but also under suspicion. For even though he denied having anything to do with the rainmaking, his denial carried more of a sense of complicity than any degree of assent would have done.

* * *

The summer days wore on. Occasionally there were rumors of Indian war parties on the nearby frontier. A lot of tribes were on the move. It was said that the Comanche, displaced by pioneers entering Texas and beyond, were gathering on the Missouri-Kansas borders. Although the Comanche and Kiowa, fiercest of the plains fighters, made up most of the war parties, there were a lot of others as well: displaced Cheyenne and Sioux, disenfranchised Shoshone and Blackfoot. They had all come under the power of a single man, and this itself was an unprecedented event in the life of the Indians. This shaman was named Two Coyotes, and it was said that he was Kiowa-Apache. By all accounts he was a big man, barrel-chested, and well into middle age. He had a broad broken beak of a nose, a steel slab of a jaw. His eyes were dark, unblinking. It was said he could go into a trance and remain there for long hours, and in this trance he could travel to far places without his body, and could see the results of future actions.

The Government expressed concern over Two Coyotes. But there was nothing to do about him. He hadn’t caused any trouble yet. And even if he did, short of an outright attack on a town or settlement, there was no law that said Indians couldn’t organize.

These concerns were far from Nat’s mind, however. New Indian leaders were always coming up, holding forth for their little hour upon the stage of history, and then vanishing back into the shadows. There hadn’t been a strong Indian leader for a long time now. Everyone knew the Indians were too independent, too fragmented, to successfully organize against the white man. In this year of 1834 the tribes didn’t pose as much of a menace to a place like Oak Bluffs, Missouri, which had been settled country for more than fifteen years at this point.

Nat was out in the field above the farm, plowing a field with a team of mules which the widow had rented from the livery stable. It was another fine day. The mules plodded along, pulling the plow. Nat had trouble holding the thing steady. It would take him time to learn how to plow a straight furrow. But he was learning. There was a blackbird singing in the nearby bramble bush that afternoon. Was it trying to tell him something? What portent was it? Because the essence of magic is that suddenly a time comes when everything is a sign and a portent, but you don’t realize that until later.

And so the blackbird’s song. And then the plow made an odd sound; it struck something solid. Something that was not stone. It was—wood? Nat stopped the team and got down into the furrow and began digging in the soil. The earth was sunbaked again. Nat took off his coat. He had to work hard to break up the clods and force the spade deeper into the soil. Funny, this was well-tilled soil, yet it resisted his spade. At last something seemed to give way, like a barrier crossed, and the digging became easier. As he scooped out a few more spadefuls, his nose wrinkled in disgust. Phew! There was something ancient here, and ugly, and evil.

Nat straightened up, half-deciding to dig elsewhere. Then his expression hardened. There might be something wrong with this place, but he couldn’t walk away from it. That was the worst thing to do. The smell fascinated him at the same time as it repulsed him.

He dug deeper, taking out the earth with increasingly careful movements so as not to break anything that might lie beneath. Soon he came to a bone, unmistakably human, its rounded end just peeking through the brown earth. Carefully sweeping around it with his hat, he uncovered more bones. And then something came into sight that took him a moment to recognize. It was a deer’s antlers, stained reddish-brown by the mineral-rich soil. A little further down he came upon a human skeleton, interpenetrated by the antlers so that the whole thing looked like a single chimerical beast, a deer-man or a man-deer.

Nat bent low over this thing, and the bad smell came up to strike him. He was frozen for a moment in fascinated horror that was almost pleasurable. Then he tried to straighten up, but was pulled short by something attached to the skeleton in the shallow grave. He realized later that it was his neckerchief, which had caught in the creature’s bones. He tried to pull free, but the bones resisted. He tried harder. The neckerchief would not break loose. Instead his pull brought the entire skeleton to an upright sitting posture, the skull grinning into his face, the antlers rearing above the ruined head. Nat became aware in that moment that something was not so much attacking him as playing with him. He wrenched the neckerchief free, and with a blow broke the skeleton apart, bones scattering every which way, the skull rolling to his feet. Moved by some obscure compulsion, he picked up the skull and put it back with the rest of the bones.

“Thanks very much,” the skull said.

“You talk!” said Nat.

“Good afternoon to ye, Nathaniel. You play pretty rough when you wrestle, I can tell you that.”

“Did I hurt you?”

“No, you did not, Nat. We dead spirits are pretty immune to the trials of the flesh. Though we do permit ourselves the one in order to feel the other.”

Nat had now recovered his poise. He sat down on the edge of the shallow grave and said, “You don’t talk much like an Indian.”

“That’s because I’m not.” The skull then proceeded to tell Nat a story. He said his name was Propertius. He had been a centurion in the time of Marcus Aurelius. He had been serving at Cadiz in the 4th Dalmatians. He’d received his orders to proceed to Britain. He’d sailed his ship just beyond the gates of Hercules when suddenly a great storm had come up. He and his men had been blown many miles out to sea. If they were not to die of thirst, they knew that they had no choice but to continue on across the western ocean, to a great and mysterious land that the Romans had recently discovered.

This land they called Atlantis. It was a great continent, and it was populated by red men who wore feathers in their dark hair and were very fierce. Marcus Aurelius kept his knowledge of this land a secret. There was no reason to disturb people about it yet. More exploring was needed before a public announcement. Already Marcus Aurelius had rough maps of the place. It was a huge land, much larger than all of Iberia. And it was there for the taking. Only primitive Indian tribes inhabited the place. If the Germans pressed Rome too hard, there was the new continent to retreat to. But the key to taking it was logistics. Through his mapmakers, Marcus Aurelius was aware of two rivers; the ones now called the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi. The question was, did they connect?

The centurion Propertius wanted to find out about this for the emperor. He and his men started inland from the site of present-day Baltimore.

“I had half-a-dozen sailors,” he told Nat, “and a squad of Thracian recruits, the only survivors of our ocean crossing. On the southern Atlantean coast I collected some more men. There was a Roman colony in Charleston in those days, but they were few in number and a miserable bunch. The emperor always said he’d send reinforcements. He was never able to.

“We marched inland through a thousand perils. I would have succumbed over and over to one or more of these dangers if it had not been for my amulet. It was very old, that amulet, Babylonian work, and Marduk, the spirit who resided in it, watched over me. We marched inland, searching for the great southern-flowing river. One by one the Indians took their toll of us, and still we hadn’t reached the river. At last we came to this place. And here a great company of Indians fell upon us. We fought like furies, and each man killed his tens and twenties of the red men. But success was not to be ours that day. I asked Marduk,
Why have you forsaken me?
And Marduk said,
It is written in the stars that you should not see another dawn. There is nothing I can do in this regard, for it is so written by Ananke, the Necessity that rules our lives. I have come to prepare you for the end.

“The next day, just as he foretold, I was killed. My bones have lain here ever since. My spirit cannot be released until they are buried. Stranger, if you bury me, and cast the eagle buried with me into a great river, I will tell you where to find the amulet.”

Nat did as the centurion asked him, and laid Propertius to his final rest with an impressive Latin prayer. Then Nat asked, “Where is the amulet?”

“Tomorrow go into the fields and search for it. I will ensure that you find it,” a voice answered from the grave.

* * *

“Whatcha looking for, Nat?” Billy asked. They stood in the upper pasture behind the farmhouse.

“I’ll tell you when I know,” Nat said.

They were walking through thick grasses along the bank of a small stream. Sycamore and hemlock grew near the edge. Something stimulated Nat’s witch-sense. That something was close, very close, almost within reach. Nat felt along the bank until his fingers encountered a small round hole. Carefully brushing the branches and leaves aside with his free hand, he drew a small object from the earth.

“Wow!” Billy said. “What’s that?”

“Indian medicine,” Nat said. He put the object into a rawhide pouch he carried on his belt. He secured the top of the pouch with a length of rawhide, and tied it with a large and complicated knot.

“Is it very strong medicine?” Billy asked.

“You could say so,” Nat said.

“Is this Indian magic?” Billy asked.

Nat didn’t answer. Billy had never seen the man quite so taciturn.

* * *

Late that night Nat lay on his bed in the front room. He’d put out the little oil lamp, because a three-quarter moon gave enough light to get around in. He lay on the ticking, hands locked behind his head, watching the shadows weave and turn and dance on the wall and ceiling. An elm tree near the house moved its branches up and down in the light breeze that blew in from the west. The wind carried a lot of smells. There was coyote and black bear in that breeze, and the subtler odors of Emma Hawkins and Billy. A sweet odor of grass and trees wafted in from the prairie. And there was another smell, and it didn’t take Nat long to recognize it: Indian. He was smelling the dream-smell of Indian.

He suddenly realized the smell had grown very strong.

Something was in the room with him. He could almost see it, there in the darkest tangle of shadows.

Aware of the danger, Nat slowly sat up on the bed. He couldn’t remember for a moment what he had done with the amulet. That’s what had drawn the thing to his room. He was annoyed at himself. He had only himself to blame. He had grown careless. He had forgotten that although he might be through with magic, magic might not be through with him. Where was it now? He looked around the room, dappled with leaf-patterned moonlight, and then he saw the charm, on the rough little table beside the pewter washstand. He reached for it. Something closed around his wrist.

People laugh at the notion of things that go bump in the night; but it’s not so funny when they’re bumping into you. Nat’s impulse was to tear himself free of that cold, dry, other-worldly grip. But Nat had spent years resisting fatal first impulses like that. It is well known that apparitions are powered by your own fear. Panic is the switch that turns control of your body over to whoever is panicking you. The man who would live through these night matters had better be steadfast, because nothing else will suffice.

Nat forced himself to remain motionless as the hand tightened around his wrist, increasing the strength of its grip gradually but inexorably until it took all of Nat’s resolve not to fight back. For a moment he wasn’t sure he could succeed. The urge to react was almost overwhelming, an instinct as old as man himself. But he resisted.

Gradually a hazy, luminous collection of green-blue lines began to form in front of him. They sketched out the ectoplasmic figure of a man, nearly transparent except where the lines terminated in the solid dark density of his hand. Nat knew that all of the spirit’s energy was concentrated into materializing and maintaining that hand. And already the crisis was passing. The spirit couldn’t maintain his grip for long. Already it was loosening.

Then, abruptly, the hand released its grip, but the fingertips remained in contact with Nat’s wrist. The disembodied hand, attached to nothingness by luminous lines of energy, crept up his arm, hunching itself up like a big tarantula. It crawled up his shoulder. A cold, ethereal forefinger poked at Nat’s eye. But it was an empty threat.

Nat could already feel the hand softening, dissolving back into substanceless ectoplasm.

* * *

In the morning, Nat called on the earth spirit.

“What is it now?” the earth spirit asked. “What happened last night?”

“I need to know what’s going on,” Nat said.

“Simple. The shaman Two Coyotes followed you by the dream-scent to the place where you were sleeping. He wants the amulet back. It was his, lost by mistake. He’s coming for it.”

“Where is he?”

“Nat, this is the last service I’m going to do. This one is above and beyond the call of duty. If you want this one, you have to promise to let me go at the end of it.”