Dominion (16 page)

After dinner the following day, Magnus was still trying to puzzle out the dream when Purchase asked him whether he would not like to go for some amusement.

“What is there at this hour?”

“I thought you might fancy a game of cards.”

“I don't have money, but I'll join you for company if you don't mind.”

Magnus was not generally one for drinking and the concomitant sins, but he appreciated the offer from Purchase, and thought it might do him well to go out in the air. The two brothers went to the stable then, where they saddled horses and went off in search of entertainment.

The town where Purchase took Magnus was not Berkeley, though. Rather, they rode some five miles in the opposite direction to a small building set off in the woods with nothing else around it. Inside men and women of all stripes and countries milled around, and it was easy for Magnus to see what kind of place he had been brought to, even if he had never been to one before. It was also immediately plain that Purchase spent a great deal of time here, for the proprietor seemed to know him well.

The two brothers ordered drinks from the bar and sat alone with each other, not speaking very much but watching the room in silence. When two men sitting at a card table went off with a pair of the harlots, who had procured their attention beyond what the cards could, a place at the gaming table was free for the first time.

“Would you care to play?” Purchase asked.

“I don't have money.”

“It is my invitation.”

They sat down with the four already present: a Creole and an Indian, who didn't seem to know either each other or anyone else there. In addition there was an Englishman and an African woman, who seemed to be partners of some sort or other. When they sat, the woman began the deal, but neither the Creole nor the Indian had very good cards and soon put down their hands. Purchase proceeded to bet with abandon,
studying the African woman very carefully, as the Englishman made friendly talk with Magnus. When there were as many coins stacked on the table as he had ever seen, Magnus had sense to put down his cards and watch the other players, knowing that the monies he had already lost were not his but Purchase's.

Purchase, though, did not seem to care about the coins and continued to put more into the stack in the center of the table, until the Englishman also withdrew and there was only Purchase and the woman left in the game.

By now the men who had sat there earlier were finished with their business and took seats at the bar to watch the card game unfold. “She'll have his very skin before long,” one of the men said, looking at the cards on the table. At this Purchase cut his eyes menacingly and pulled a pistol from his belt. “Not before I've had yours if you keep flapping,” he answered, leaving the gun on the table pointed at the other man. The man who had been threatened was quiet after that, as much from fear of Purchase as the fact that the gun was made of unmixed gold. “It will put a golden bullet in you too,” Purchase said, looking steadily at his cards.

Magnus could tell very little about who had the better hand from the cards that showed on the table, but when the next one was revealed, he saw Purchase's face slump and the woman begin to glitter. “It's all right, Sugarloaf,” she said to him. “If you lose I'll let you stay the night with me in my room.” The Englishman who had been her partner was not pleased to hear her talk so saucily, but he held his tongue, waiting for the last card to be turned over.

Before it could be revealed, though, there was a ruckus outside that spilled immediately through the door of the tavern. Three highwaymen stood back-to-back-to-back, holding guns, and began moving through the room, taking purses from the patrons at the bar. When one of them saw the money stacked in front of the cards, and the golden pistol, he broke away from the others and went to take the bounty from the gaming table. As he held his hand over the pile of money, though, a shot rang out and he fell where he had stood.

Contrary to what Purchase had claimed, the bullet from the gun was made of lead. He and the woman then jumped from the table and rushed toward the door, as the other robbers fired randomly into the bar. In the
melee Magnus searched for a way out, before finally discovering a back door and sneaking out into the hushed night air. The scene he left behind was of bloody carnage, and when he found his horse he whipped it into a frenzied gallop, not caring which direction he was going as long as it was away from that place, before he was shot or the authorities descended upon them.

The horse half obeyed and half did as it pleased, until Purchase rode up from the other direction and took the reins, as Magnus drooped in the saddle full of liquor. The jostling of the ride was awful on his head, and when they reached the road before Stonehouses, he climbed down and began walking the horse to the stable, unable to ride any longer.

“Who would have won?” Magnus asked, as Purchase helped him into the house.

“Hard to say,” Purchase replied. “But for the offer she made I would have gladly lost.”

“Not me,” Magnus told him. “Not for all the money that was piled on that table.”

“It wasn't so much,” Purchase said.

“More than I've seen.”

“I would have given even more for her offer.”

“What about her white man?”

“I suppose that's who would have lost.”

“Not with you paying through the nose for what you could have upstairs for a lot less.”

“I'll have it later tonight for nothing,” he claimed.

“How so?”

“I left her where I can meet up with her.”

“You'll stay in gunfights at this rate of living.”

“And you for stealing horses.”

“What horse did I ever steal?”

“The one you rode home on.”

“It was a mistake. I'll return it first thing in the morning,” Magnus said, falling quiet. But he thought the woman from the bar reminded him of the wicked one in his dream. “I don't think drinking is much for me.”

“Do you need help getting inside?”

“I'll manage.”

Purchase watched as Magnus made his way inside, before turning and riding back to the room behind his workshop, where he had left the woman.

When he arrived he found she had gone without leaving any sign. He returned home alone not very long afterward, and in the days that followed he asked everyone what they knew of her. Try as he might, though, he could only gather bits and pieces of stories, each new one contradicting the last, so that all he knew for certain was that she had not waited and was gone from him.

He is a tiller of the soil with little interest in the affairs of other people, save the family that has taken him in, and no real bonds but to the air and the land that gives them sustenance. After his initial buffeting by the newness of the place around him he settles back into himself, keeping his own company and never complaining, but only occasionally imagining to himself other ways certain things might be done. At Sorel's Hundred he engaged in the same idle wondering until it became a permanent ache and then a murderous craving he would have acted on, but for his mother. For her sake he held his hand patiently. After her he can be patient no longer.

* * *

At Stonehouses the days were more flexible and he worked as he saw fit, discounting, of course, the things Merian himself was rigid about and would broker no dissent or discussion over. He allowed Magnus a free hand with everything else, letting him, for example, experiment with the crops, if he pleased, but not on too large a scale, and even with his time—so long as all the work was done and no complaints from the men. Where he was rigid, though, he was hard as any overseer on the coast.

That second week he was on the land, after wages were paid out, Merian saw Magnus turn his money over to Purchase to cover his gaming loss from the week before.

“I told you it was for fun and my invitation,” Purchase said, refusing the money.

“You go ahead and take it,” Merian said sharply, startling the two of them, who had not seen him approach.

Under Merian's watchful eye, Magnus paid from his wages the same number and kind of coins Purchase had given to him at the roadhouse.

“Now, how much do you have left out of what you just gave Purchase?” Merian asked, after the debt had been paid.

Magnus looked at the specie in his hand for a long time before answering. “Five shillings.”

“If I told you I was going to give you another five shillings, how would that figure up?”

Magnus thought hard, carefully imagining the coins in his palm before answering. “Ten shillings.”

“Now tell me the number of pence in that.”

Magnus was silent.

“What about parts of a pound?” Merian continued, as Magnus began to grow hot with embarrassment.

“You don't have to make a fool of me,” he said finally, glaring at Merian.

“I'm not trying to embarrass you,” Merian answered. “I'm trying to help you get on better than you got on before. For that you need to know proper ciphering. A man can always trust somebody else to read something out for him, without too much worry over it, because what's important here ain't written down, unless you count the Bible—and there's whole legions of preachers tripping over each other to do that for you—but if a man can't cipher he can't trust nobody to make up the balance or tell him what it is. Purchase is your brother, so he won't cheat you out of your shillings. Then again he might. Do you trust him not to?”

Magnus thought about it, before answering, “I don't think he would.”

“Well,” Merian said, “I've known him a bit longer than you, and he is dear as life to me, but I'll count my own silver.”

Every day after that, when he left the fields, Magnus had to sit with either Merian or Sanne and practice arithmetic for hours on end, until he went to sleep at night with his brain aching from pondering figures and symbols. Still, he stuck with it every night that entire season and all the way into the next, until eventually he could count as well as a Dutchman.

When he found arrows out in one of the far fields, though, it did not take arithmetic to figure out there were three of them, all deadly.

At first Merian thought they were only old arrows that had been held in the ground for a long time, since the last hostilities with the Catawba, but he soon saw they were new and still bore the markings of being cut from their source. There had not been Indian troubles around Berkeley since before Merian settled there, but he knew immediately that the caravans pressing westward must have gone far enough out that the Indian was beginning to press back the other way.

He did not say anything else but gave Magnus an old musket to carry with him from then on, when working in the more distant fields.

“Can you shoot?”

“I can,” Magnus said, taking the gun.

“Good. If you see anything that looks like it needs to be shot, you do it.”

The next day as he worked out there again, with the gun slung over his shoulder, Magnus saw something approaching from the westward country and stood up to investigate. It looked to him like a wild animal of unusually large proportions, but as it grew closer he saw it was a man carrying pelts and skins for the market. It wasn't until the man was almost right up on him that he saw that the pelts were human scalps, strung together and wrapped around his shoulders like sashes.

In addition to the scalps he also wore a double necklace of fingers, ears, and what Magnus finally figured out were noses. Other than that gruesome vesture he was stone naked.

In his arms he carried a large unadorned box, which he protected very carefully as he made his way up the road

When the man saw Magnus staring, he stopped at a distance and pointed at the articles on his person. “Any one of them will make you a good medicine,” he said.

When Magnus failed to reply, the man set down the box and opened it. “I have the vitals too, if that's your aim: red, negro, white, whichever you want.”

Magnus looked into the box and saw a collection of grisly organ parts, and in the middle of it an intact human head. He turned away his face and looked back up the road.

“Well, I thought neggers liked such things for their doctoring. The one in the box was very powerful. Very good medicine.” The man closed his parcel of death and took it back up in his arms.

“Who is he?” asked Magnus, who had not spoken since seeing what the man was.

“I thought you could hear and talk,” the Indian agent replied. “I said to myself as I stopped here, Lacey, you done seen many things ye never thought ye would, and it's fair you'll see one or two more, but a mute Ethiop with a rifle, that you will never witness.”

The man seemed almost sad that this should be the case, making Magnus wonder briefly what else he had seen out there gathering scalps. “Him, his name was Kasatensera. You would rather fight any six other men. With his enemies he and the Negro sorcerer he worked with liked to have splinters of wood inserted in every little pore of their skin, until they stood out like frightful wooden hairs, and then set them all afire. Nasty stuff. Very powerful. If you were the type for it, very good medicine, I imagine.” He lingered over the word
medicine,
waiting to see whether Magnus would not change his mind. “Well, no matter. The governor is said to be paying thirty shillings a scalp, and more for this one, I wager. What would you reckon?”

Magnus, in the time he stood there, had counted fifty-two scalps on the man's sash and quickly figured that he had 1,560 shillings, or 78 pounds sterling, worth of human flesh and profit wrapped around him, but he did not say anything.

“If you're not interested, I better be moving on,” the agent said to him, taking up his awful box as if they had been carrying on any normal conversation.

When Magnus told Merian later what had happened, Merian told him to prepare for the worst of it. “No one takes a scalp but a war party,” he said. Sure enough, word began to come to them in the days that followed of settlers farther out on the frontier being attacked and one settlement being razed entirely. The governor had sent a dispatch of soldiers out to hunt down the offenders, but it disappeared without ever reporting back.