Original Death (22 page)

“He is a Delaware,” Sagatchie said, as if that explained much. “His tribe has lost its hearth. He is brave, but a stick standing by itself will always break.”

The tale of the Lenni Lenape, the Delaware tribe, was often told at wilderness campfires. They had once been a mighty foe of the Haudenosaunee, ruling the lands of the mighty river for which they were named, but in the last century they had been decimated by disease and colonial encroachment on their traditional lands. When a few drunken subchiefs had signed away huge tracts of land to settlers, the Haudenosaunee had been furious, claiming the lands lay within their federation and threatened to exterminate the remaining Lenape if they did not acknowledge the supremacy of the Council and settle in towns under Iroquois rule like Shamokin.

Some of the Delaware had left their clans, choosing independent lives along the fringes of settlement. They were powerless against the tribes, for alone they had no strength. Tribal orators were fond of holding bundles of sticks as they spoke of how warriors standing alone were like single sticks that could be shattered but those who acted together, bound like a bundle, were unbreakable.

Duncan watched in torment as a spasm of pain shook the Delaware's body, triggering new trickles of blood from half a dozen wounds on his torso. With a deep groan the man lost consciousness.

“I'm sorry,” Duncan said, turning to Sagatchie. “I didn't mean for you to—”

Sagatchie interrupted. “You wanted to get to the half-king's camp.” There was not even a hint of fear in his voice. “Kassawaya made certain we did.”

“Kassawaya?” Duncan asked, straining at his bindings to look at the woman, tied to a post on the other side of the ranger. She did not return his gaze, but he did not miss the tiny grin that flickered on her face.

Sagatchie waited for a guard to walk by before replying. “If they found us coming by stealth, we would have been attacked and overwhelmed, killed in the forest. We survived because we were seen as harmless. The young girl I knew was ever the prankster. They had been following us for nearly an hour.”

Duncan stared at the Mohawk in disbelief. Ever the prankster. They were facing hideous deaths, but Sagatchie wanted him to know he had forgotten his disapproval of Kass the warrior and was getting reacquainted with the girl he had run with in the forest as a boy. The fight in the mud had been staged.

It was early evening when the straps that bound Duncan and his companions were loosened, and they were escorted by half a dozen warriors to a stream to wash away the dried mud that still clung to them. They were being prepared for something, Duncan knew. Most likely it was the gauntlet, the alley of torture in which prisoners were shoved down a path lined with enemy warriors who lashed at them with their weapons. Prisoners did not always reach the end alive.

As Sagatchie straightened, still standing in the stream, the tall Huron named Scar appeared, studying the Mohawk with a sneer then flinging more mud on him, striking his face. Sagatchie snarled a curse, and Duncan was certain he would have leapt at the well-armed man had Kass not put a restraining hand on his arm. Scar laughed and lifted his necklace into the faces of his prisoners, shaking the sticks that hung on it. With a gasp Duncan realized they were not sticks but human fingers, freshly amputated.

“Take our hands and we will hit you with our arms! Take our arms and we will kick you with our legs!” It took a moment for Duncan to realize Kass had spoken the defiant words.

The Hurons laughed. Some made lewd gestures at the woman, others smiled coolly and looked in the direction of a small raised flat at the edge of the abandoned town. The tent that had been raised on the flat was unlike any of the others scattered around the old town site. It was a large white canvas box of a tent with scalloped flaps, the kind used by the French military for high officers. Its white canvas had been painted with a grey pattern to give it the appearance of a stone cabin.

They were being prepared for an audience. He watched in alarm as Sagatchie again seemed about to leap at his captors. The Mohawk had been beaten with a spear shaft on their journey to the camp. His ribs would crack with more blows. Duncan moved to step between him and the Huron who goaded him, but Kass was there first, drawing up her body in a way that seemed to unsettle their captors.

They motioned their prisoners forward, not toward the ornate tent but up a worn trail that led out the far side of the abandoned town. After a quarter hour of steady climbing, they passed between two nearly symmetrical conical hills that were strangely devoid of trees. As they reached the shadows between the hills, they were met by half a dozen somber warriors in fur robes who carried heavy spears as their only weapons.

“Follow,” the tallest of the warriors commanded. Duncan realized he had spoken in the Haudenosaunee tongue. The Hurons had given them to Mingos, the western Iroquois.

They ascended the narrow cleft and emerged into an eerie, otherworldly scene. The wide bowl they entered was scorched and charred, its only trees the twisted burnt offspring of the huge oaks that grew on the slopes below. There was still enough light left for Duncan to see that the high barren bowl was pockmarked with lightning strikes. They were at the place where lightning gathered, the ancient shrine whose secret Hickory John had been tortured for. Bizarre rock formations, most scorched and
cracked by heat, surrounded a central formation lit by torches. Their escort had the air of robed monks, the torchlit bowl that of a pagan temple. The long rounded formation at the center of the bowl, covering what appeared to be a cavern, had the appearance of a stone lodge.

A solitary man wrapped in a blanket sat before a smoldering fire at the entrance to the Lightning Lodge. As they were taken closer, stopping a hundred feet away, Duncan made out other figures, perhaps twenty in all, sitting against rocks arranged in a half circle around the man as if paying homage to him.

As he took another step closer and saw the arrows in several of the figures, realization stabbed Duncan like a cold blade. He sprang forward to grab Kass's arm as she gasped. She too now understood, and he was terrified she would react. Those against the boulders were dead. The Iroquois Council had sent its best warriors to protect the old spirits, and they had been killed by the half-king. Among the dead in front of them were Kass's father and brother.

The seated man spread his arms to point out his handiwork.

Duncan felt Kass tense, sensing her anguished fury. Then Sagatchie appeared on her other side, pulling her backward, and she relented, a sob escaping her throat as her gaze settled on two bodies at the near edge of the half-circle. Duncan stood at the front alone, straining his eyes, desperately searching for, and just as desperately hoping not to see, the body of Conawago.

Their robed escorts signaled for them to turn around. This was all the audience they had intended. The prisoners had seen the dead, had seen the sacred shrine, and, Duncan suspected, they had seen the Revelator.

They were taken back to their posts, but when the guards had finished tying Sagatchie and Kass, they led Duncan away, toward the flat with the stone-painted tent, and they ordered him to stand alone by a smoldering fire. He sensed many eyes watching him from the darkness. After several minutes, a familiar figure approached. Macaulay acknowledged Duncan with a silent, chagrined nod then offered him a gourd of water.

“Do whatever he asks, lad,” the big Scot advised. “Say ye want to be one of his Highland warriors and he may let ye live.”

“There's an old man named Conawago,” Duncan said. “Do you know where he is?”

Macaulay cocked his head toward the elevated flat at the center of the village and seemed about to speak when a stone struck his shoulder. He retreated into the shadows, where guards were watching.

Duncan watched the constellations rise, losing track of time but not daring to move. Finally a tiny ringing sound rose from the darkness. Something small and metallic jingled and stopped, jingled and stopped, the sound gradually getting louder.

“In the Ohio country my people were fascinated when a British trader first introduced these,” came a voice from the shadows. Had Duncan not known better he would have thought a well-educated European was addressing him. “They would pay a full beaver pelt for just one.”

The silhouette of a tall, lean man moved toward him, not from the tent but from the direction of the sacred place above the town. The low flames reflected off a small silvery bell that the man tossed from one hand to the other. “Women and men alike braided them into their hair. One of our women traded her daughter for ten such bells.” More shapes became visible, guards holding spears and muskets. A woman slipped out of the shadows to dump an armload of wood onto the dying fire.

“Later I discovered they were called hawk bells.” The man's precise, articulate words held the faint trace of a French accent. “They tie them to their hawks and falcons in your world.”

“Not in my world,” Duncan said, his voice calmer than he felt.

“The ones who rule your world do so.”

Duncan offered no disagreement.

“At first that discovery made me sad. But later it made me angry. A man has no right to do such a thing. It is an insult to hawks. It spits in the eyes of the hawks and the gods they serve. These are the same people who
take our land. These are the people who would destroy our tribes and put bells on the few who survive.”

The dry wood burst into flame so abruptly that the man in front of him seemed to have taken shape out of thin air. He wore a sleeveless waistcoat over his painted torso and one of the army's new shorter field kilts over deerskin leggings. The Revelator's strong chiseled face might have seemed handsome were it not for the line of tattooed snakes that ran up from his neck over his cheek and onto his scalp, disappearing into long brown hair that was bound at the back into the kind of tight braided knot favored by British seamen. The fur of a fisher fox was draped over one arm, the head of the animal perched on his shoulder. The white beads that had been sewn into the eye sockets gave it the look of a beast from the other side. The half-king extended his hand over the fire and let the bell fall into the flames. “What do you desire of us?”

“You make it sound as if we came willingly.”

The Revelator sighed disappointedly. “Your name is Duncan McCallum, chieftain of one of the Highland clans that have been so sorely tested by fate.” He paused as he realized Duncan was pointedly gazing past his shoulder. “You wait for someone else perhaps?”

Duncan looked into the man's deep eyes. “The Revelator is a great Mingo warrior who strikes terror in all he approaches. But you speak like one of the Presbyterian ministers who used to troll for souls along the coast where I was raised.” Duncan was indeed confused by the European affectation of the man.

The man's smile was as cold as ice. “My father left me at a Jesuit mission when I was young.” As he took another step forward, the fire lit his face. His eyes glowed like black jewels.

“Jesuits teach in French.”

The man shrugged. “I can always
parle français
with a new friend.”

“I come because I am a friend of Conawago of the Nipmucs,” he said. “I chose my friends based on who they are, not what they are.”

“Which makes you a very bad soldier.”

“I am no soldier.”

“But we are all soldiers,” the half-king said, taking in the camp with a sweep of his hand. “It is the great mistake of the tribes. They have been bears, slumbering in caves, roaming aimlessly in the forests. Now is the time for wolves. Wolves reign supreme in their lands because they stand together. The bigger the pack, the greater their power. Their world is absolute. Once they choose a prey, it must always die.”

“We had wolves in the hills where I grew up,” Duncan replied. “Men with guns would bait them with raw meat then shoot them while they ate. They died because they were so predictable.”

The Revelator shrugged. “I thought Scar had showed you what we do with those who oppose us. And you would be hard pressed to predict what I am capable of.”

Duncan became aware of others beyond the half-king's guard, figures arriving to sit in the shadows as if in hope of hearing the half-king's words. “I was told the Revelator was a visionary who spoke for the gods. Instead I find just another savage who plays with knives. A whole camp of your soldiers against a single Delaware tied to a post.”

The Revelator's cool smile did not dim as he produced a clay pipe from a pouch and bent to light it from a flaming stick. “You are indeed from the Highlands?” he asked as he coaxed smoke out of the tobacco.

Duncan nodded slowly, more confused than ever about this Mingo from the West who spoke like an educated European yet behaved like the most violent of savages.

“The English tried to extinguish the clans there. What would you do if certain English soldiers tortured and killed your family and you found those same foul creatures under your control years later?”

The words stabbed at Duncan's heart so painfully that several moments passed before he could speak. “This is not about Scottish tribes. It is about the woodland tribes.”

The man's eyes flared. “Then you know nothing! It is about the Mingoes and the Mohawks and the Hurons and the Onondaga and the
Scots and the French
métis
of the north country! It is about the deaths of all our people, here and on the other side!”