Original Death (17 page)

“Why did we come to this place, Ishmael?” he finally asked.

“You saw the canoe turned into the bank on its own. The spirit wind made us come here,” Ishmael stated, then shrugged. “My grandfather taught me that there are places that attract spirits and radiate great power, just like Christian places where saints performed miracles.” When the boy turned to Duncan he spoke in the somber tones of confession. “A witch can speak to the other side without a messenger.” He reached back into the shadows and produced his spear, then threw it into the fire.

Duncan did not speak for several minutes. “Why did the dead woman's son have a different name?”

“She is dead and she is not dead.”

Duncan tried to ignore the unsettling words. “But what did she know, why did you go see her?”

“She knew and did not know.”

“She lived among the Ohio tribes. She had a message belt. They had banished her as a witch, but someone in the tribes needed her. Why? What did she know?” Duncan asked again.

“I think what she knew,” he continued when Ishmael did not reply, “hurt too much for her to speak it.” Somehow the image of the raving woman in the hut was no longer fearful to Duncan. She had become in his mind the tormented Welsh ghostwalker who had something vital to tell the world but had not known how to say it.

Ishmael turned back to the flames. “My grandfather explained to me about witches. They are humans turned inside out. Once when he was out showing us the stars, Mr. Bedford said witches like his mother wound up as constellations. The others laughed but I remembered he talked about throwing snakes. I thought she could tell me about the flint knife.”

The air seemed to take a sudden chill. Duncan threw another log on the fire. “Who is the Revelator, Ishmael?” he asked.

The boy looked out into the dark night. “A shaman,” he said, “A warrior chieftain. A sorcerer. A saint.”

Duncan shook his head in frustration and threw a stick on the fire, sending sparks into the air. “Why, when I go in search of murderers, do I hear the name of a saint?”

“Terrible things may be done in the name of terrible truths.” The boy sounded like an old, tired man.

“Like the killing of your grandfather?” Duncan said. “Like the massacre of the men and women of Bethel Church?” The boy looked back into the flames without reply. He was fingering the medallion Duncan had recovered from Hickory John. “Did your grandfather know of the Revelator?”

Ishmael spoke toward the medallion. “People came to my grandfather to tell him things they would not tell others. There were stories from the West, more stories each time a new traveler from the tribes stopped at the smithy. Grandfather asked me not to spread the tales, not to tell the others in our village. They disturbed him, even frightened him, though I had never seen him frightened before. He asked Mr. Bedford to stop speaking of him.”

“The schoolmaster spoke of the Revelator?”

“He drew an image of a warrior with angel wings on a slate and propped it against the wall. He said it was no sin to be proud of who we were and only weakness to let others tell us who we must be. When my grandfather found it, he wiped the slate clean and shouted at Mr. Bedford, told him no more, told him not to meddle in affairs of the tribes. In all my life I think it was the only time I heard him raise his voice.”

Frogs sang. An owl called. “John the Apostle was the first revelator,” Ishmael said, nearly in a whisper. “Who was he?”

“A man who spoke for God.” Duncan replied.

“Have you read the book of Revelation? It is full of terrible things.”

“It was his particular vision,” Duncan offered uncertainly.

“Of the end of the world?”

It was Duncan's turn to remain silent.

“And what if Saint John was born in the forests of this world?” the boy with the deep, wise eyes pressed. “What if he grew up with his people always offering the pipe of peace to outsiders from another world but the outsiders always mocked them, bringing them disease, killing them, taking the animals and lands given them by their gods? What would his particular vision be then?”

Ishmael seemed to forget Duncan. He cupped the wooden medallion in his hands and pressed it close to his mouth as if whispering to it.

“Your grandfather was an artist with wood,” Duncan observed. He was not sure the boy heard him.

“You found this in the schoolhouse, on my bench?” Ishmael eventually asked. “It is where I left it that morning.”

“Not in the school. In the dirt in front of your grandfather. He was staring at it when . . .” Duncan's voice faded.

Ishmael looked up in confusion. “You mean in the smithy, where they tortured him.” Tears suddenly welled in his eyes.

At first Duncan thought the boy was just grieving for his grandfather. Then the realization stabbed like a cold blade. They had broken his
fingers and beat him, then killed his friends, and still Hickory John had not yielded his secret. The medallion had broken him. Ishmael had seen the truth first, and Duncan hated himself for inflicting new pain on the boy. Hickory John had finally revealed his secret because his captors had made him believe they had Ishmael and would kill him next.

AS HIS COMPANIONS slept, Duncan sat against the center post at the front of the lodge, watching as the new wave of storms reached them. Lightning shivered across the sky. The wind snapped at the trees, tearing leaves from their limbs. Duncan knew storms well, and from an early age he had taken a solemn joy in experiencing them closely, yet this one was somehow different. Macaulay's unnatural fear and the boy's strange talk had unsettled him. He could not escape the sense that they were being watched by someone, or something. Several times he rose and checked the powder in his rifle, which he had left close to the fire, until finally he blew out the powder in the pan and freshened it against the damp.

He was eager for first light, and he prayed the storms would be finished so they could leave the uneasy place behind. If indeed it was a place of the forest gods, the gods did not want him there.

Duncan was not aware of falling asleep, only of abruptly awakening, his heart thumping. There had been a terrible screeching sound, an unnatural sound. Or had it been in one of his nightmares? Wide awake now, he stood. There was an ebb in the storm, even a patch of stars high overhead. He lifted one of the branches gnarled with knots of pitch and lit it, then picked up his rifle and stepped out of the longhouse.

He had made another complete circuit of the lodge, watching warily, when he heard the wrenching sound again. It could have been a dying animal. It could have been an anguished human. He followed the sound, finding himself in the tunnel of trees that led toward the ring of skulls. The wind began to rise. Rain began to fall again. He forced himself forward, thrusting his torch ahead.

He was nearly at the mound when a massive stroke of lightning lit the sky. He gasped and stepped backward, dropping the torch. Sitting on the mound, staring straight at him, lit by the jagged flashes, was the massive brown dog that had died with the witch in Albany.

Chapter Seven

“W
e must go and present ourselves to him,” Ishmael insisted as soon as Duncan told him of the dog. It was dawn and the storms had blown themselves out, bringing cool autumn air to the river valley.

Duncan was not certain why he felt so compelled to take the boy's lead, but he picked up his rifle again and gestured Ishmael toward the tunnel of trees. Macaulay grabbed a sturdy branch, brandishing it like a club, and followed.

Ishmael was standing on the mound when Duncan arrived. There was no sign of the dog, but the top of the prisoner post was split and charred from a lightning strike. Ishmael warily touched the post then looked back at Duncan and slowly nodded, as if it confirmed his expectation. His hand still on the post, the boy spoke solemnly to the skulls in the trees, then tilted his head toward the side of the hill beyond.

At first Duncan thought the object the boy stared at was just another log. Then the end of the log rose up, and two black eyes stared at them.

Ishmael leapt toward the dog but abruptly stopped, tottering as if off balance. A moment later Duncan was at his side, pulling the boy back from the edge of a small crevasse concealed by undergrowth.

“It is one of the places where they come across!” the boy declared. “Just as my grandfather said! A crack in the earth where lightning dwells.”

Duncan's breath caught as he followed the boy's gaze. At the bottom lay the body of a woman smeared with mud. On her breast was coiled a rattlesnake.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Macaulay said at Duncan's shoulder. “It's the witch! The viper has taken the witch!”

Duncan was about to tell his companions that the woman had died in a fire in Albany, but as he studied the frail body, the ragged greying hair, and the square chin that jutted out from mud and hair, he realized it was indeed Hetty Eldridge. It could not be. Duncan had seen the ruins of her cabin, had seen the bones. A witness had insisted she had been inside when it burned, that she had laughed as the flames consumed her.

Ishmael knelt at the edge of the deep crack in the slope. There was no fear on his face, only fascination.

“Why should she come here to die?” Macaulay asked in a tight voice.

“She had already died in Albany.” Duncan did not realize he had spoken the thought aloud until he saw the alarmed way Macaulay stared at him.

“It explains the storms,” Ishmael solemnly stated. “It explains the mound and the strange lodge and the lightning.”

Duncan looked at the boy, once again unsettled by his words. He watched in silence as Ishmael retrieved a long stick and then bent to gently tap the snake. The serpent slithered away to a pool of sunlight at the opposite end of the crevasse.

The dead witch sat up.

“God protect us!” Macaulay cried as he stumbled backward, desperately crossing himself.

Ishmael's face glowed with excitement.

“The snake was just there for the warmth of her body,” Duncan explained, though there was no certainty in his voice. “She must have fallen into the pit during the storm.” He followed Ishmael as he climbed down to help the woman.

HER EMPLOYER IN Albany had spoken of Hetty the witch, Hetty the rum-soaked ghostwalker, Hetty the exceptional seamstress. Duncan had no idea who was with them now. The woman who sat before them in the lodge was more of an old Welsh grandmother. Ishmael tended to the woman with surprising gentleness, spooning hot broth into her mouth as Macaulay watched from ten feet away. The big Scot seemed not so much scared of Hetty now as resentful of her.

Duncan slipped away from the lodge and returned to the clearing where they had found her. The snake basked in the sun at the head of the little gully. There was no sign of the woman's presence, no camp, no blanket, no gathered firewood. It seemed impossible that she could have arrived by herself, even more impossible that she could have traveled so far upriver, against the current, except in a canoe propelled by powerful arms.

He covered the grounds systematically, searching for something, anything, that might lend sense to the events, and finally he paused at the post. Something had been added since the day before, a small mud-spattered grey bundle lashed to the bottom. He knelt, pushing the bundle with a tentative finger. He was loath to disturb what may have been placed as an offering for the gods. For a long moment he looked up at the human skull that gazed from the trees. “Forgive me,” he murmured to the skull, then cut the straps around the bundle.

He should have known better than to try to make sense of anything found at such a place. First he saw a short straight stick like a baton painted with stick figures of men and animals, then a heavily worn silver Spanish coin pockmarked with little indentations. A square piece of thin, finely worked doeskin folded in a square. A worn linen handkerchief folded over a ring made of bone carved with leaping animals. He lifted the ring on his palm and studied it, realizing it was not bone but ivory and the figures were elaborately carved dragons. It was not an object of the tribes, it was European, something that the Welsh traders who called on the ports of his youth would have sold to local nobility.