Original Death (26 page)

When Macaulay woke it was hours later. He stared up at the gibbous moon. They both knew he would not see the sun again.

“I remember sailing into Stornaway harbor with a boat full of halibut,” Duncan said, raising a weak smile on the big Scot's face. “My grandfather would trade the fish for tweed from the islands. There would always be women in the square working the cloth, singing the waulking songs,” he said, referring to the ancient rhythmic chants used by groups of island women as they kneaded the hard fibers on planks. “It was magical. He had to drag me away when they were singing.”

“Aye, my mother used to make me sing them with her as we chopped peat out of the moor,” Macaulay remembered. As Hetty wiped his brow, Macaulay tried to sing in a faltering voice, but the effort ended in a spell of ragged coughing.

“I'm sorry, lad,” the deserter said after a long silence. He fixed Duncan with a weak but steady gaze.

“Not your fault,” Hetty replied, stroking his head as though he were her little child. Ishmael held the corporal's hand.

“That's not what he means,” Duncan said.

The corporal gazed toward the moon. “T'is a grand notion, is it not? Raising the colors of the clans on this side of the sea. Think of the gatherings we'll have. The flash of the plaid as we dance the swords, the singing of
the lasses.” His weakened hand opened and revealed a worn knot of white ribbon that had been pressed tight in his palm. It was the white cockade of the Jacobite rebels. “Take it, lad.”

Duncan stared at the ribbon but made no move to lift it from Macaulay's palm. “I had an old uncle who was a riever,” Duncan said, referring to the highwaymen of Scotland. “He said there was no dishonor in taking a man's cows if he were fool enough to let you, but you never killed a man for them.”

“We're not talking cows, Clan McCallum.” Macaulay pointedly used the form of address for clan chiefs. “We're talking about taking back what was taken from us, setting the scales in balance. I seem to recall a lot of cannons and nooses used against us.”

“Innocent men and women were slaughtered at Bethel Church. They had no stake in that cause.”

“It's war, lad.”

“When were you going to perform your act of war, Corporal?” Duncan asked. “While we slept? A quick blade to the throat?”

Hetty's hand, about to wipe the man's brow again, stopped in midair. “Duncan, do not speak such nonsense,” she said in a tight voice.

“Sagatchie said the patch on the canoe that pulled away had been pried at with a blade to loosen it. It would have been the easiest way, to have all three witnesses from Bethel Church drown.”

Macaulay gazed up at the sky without responding. He was past lying.

“When we were in the iron hole, you asked about the settlement where MacLeod died. It was only much later when I realized I hadn't said anything about a settlement. You were not guilty of insubordination. You were sent in there to watch the boy.”

The hell dog paced around the dying man, sniffing at his limbs, then pushing Hetty away with its muzzle.

“The half-king spoke of a letter taken to the general,” Duncan continued, “a supposed message from me to the French. The conspirators didn't even know I existed until the day I was shoved into the prison hole in
Albany. You disappeared after we escaped. You told them about me, and they saw that I could be their perfect pawn. That's when they laid their plans for the forged letter. The deserters who attacked Sagatchie were looking for us, following us, just as Hawley was, but Macaulay's dirk in his back stopped that.”

Duncan spoke to Hetty now. “When Macaulay went ahead with you, it was to let the half-king know I was coming. But you interfered with his plans, Hetty, when you made sure we would be going to the Iroquois Council. The half-king was furious but he could not stop it. There could be only one reason Corporal Macaulay came with us. The Revelator gave him a mission, a special task.”

The brawny Scot turned his head toward Duncan, his eyes full of melancholy. “I protested, lad, said you were harmless.” His words were labored.

“But the half-king insisted,” Duncan said. “He is at war. He received word from the North, word about the children that somehow made him confident that he would win over the Council even without us. He had to let us go because the oracle demanded it in front of his followers. But we could do more damage than good to his cause, so he told you to kill us. It had to be you, since you were the only one in his camp who could get close to us.”

Macaulay did not disagree.

“How many Scots take orders from him?”

When Macaulay did not reply, Duncan tried another tack. “Tell me this, then, Corporal. Did you come with us out of the iron hole to escape or because I showed an interest in Ishmael?”

“You have it wrong, lad. I was not following the half-king's orders when I went into the hole.”

Duncan hesitated. His gaze drifted back to the white cockade still in Macaulay's hand. He had thought the big man's talk about the clans rising was his fever talking, but now he was not so sure. “You're saying it was a Scottish officer who sent you? Who, Macaulay, who ordered you into the iron hole? They killed you by doing so.”

Macaulay looked away, throwing his arm over his fevered brow. Duncan sat, waiting for him to speak, but soon realized he had lost consciousness again.

It was after midnight when Conawago found Duncan where he kept watch by the river. “He asks for you. I think he has little time left.”

When Macaulay reached out for Duncan's hand, his grip was as weak as a bairn's. “It's all in secret, lad. There's white cockades all over the regiments now. I ne'er heard a word about killing women and children. I don't know where it starts. Someone near the top. If I knew I'd tell ye so ye can trade for yer life when the general takes ye. I did wrong by ye. I kept hoping ye would give me reason to dislike ye.” A fit of rattling coughs seized the big Scot. His lungs were filling with fluid. When he spoke again his breathing was labored. “Back home in Stornaway, a priest would come at the end and listen to the dying man's confession.”

“I am here, Corporal.”

A bitter grin twisted Macaulay's face. “I'm sorry for the sixteen men I've killed in battle,” he said after a few struggling breaths. “I could have just wounded most of them, but I chose not to. I'm sorry for the two men I've killed in anger. I'm sorry I have not written me precious mother these four years past. I'm sorry for the wenches I've abandoned and the profane words I have spoken. I'm sorry I did not believe me mother when she said me grandmother was a selkie, kin to the seals.” He turned away in another fit of coughing, then reached out and pulled Duncan closer. “Look past the savages to the good the cause can do. Ye can make a good life in the North, with yer own people.”

The effort of speaking seemed to have sapped the little strength the Scot had left. Macaulay reached out for Duncan's hand, and when Duncan looked down, the white cockade was in his palm.

It was a long time before he opened his eyes again. “It's time to call them in,” he whispered in Gaelic, and for a moment Duncan thought it was just a fevered rant. “Can you reach them from so far away, lad? I worry that being so deep in the woods I'll just drop into the heaven of the tribes.”

“I can reach them,” Duncan promised, and when he turned Conawago was extending his pack to him.

An owl returned the call when he piped his first few notes. He started with one of the odes to Bonnie Prince Charlie, then tunes the island clans used when sending boats out to sea. Conawago sat at Macaulay's side and gripped one of his hands, while Macaulay's other hand clutched his dirk. Sometime during a haunting ballad for selkies or a call to battle, the tormented Highlander crossed over to the other side.

Chapter Ten

“N
ai raxhottahyh!
” the old man intoned over the fire of the Grand Council of the Iroquois. “Hail my grandfathers, hearken while your grandchildren cry to you, for the Great League grows old!”

Duncan sat in the shadows behind Conawago, watching, trying to catch the Haudenosaunee words as they were spoken. Conawago had warned him that nothing in the town that was the heart of the Iroquois world would be as it seemed. It would be simpler and more complex than Duncan expected, uglier and more beautiful, the old Nimpuc had declared. Any notion of a grand woodland palace had quickly disappeared when they reached the Onondaga village. Onondaga Castle on its face appeared to be just another worn palisaded town, not much larger than others he had seen. In fact it was not as well protected as many since its population was scattered outside the walls in small lodges and cabins along the riverbank. Only now as Duncan began to relax, grateful for the simple pleasure of warm tea and a safe, soft place to sit, did he begin to notice the subtle differences, the hints that something greater lay hidden beneath the surface.

Cedar smoke wafted from several large, shallow bowls along the perimeter of the central plaza, the scented air calling in the spirits. There
were poles arranged around the clearing, many of them intricately carved with turtles, beaver, bears, and other signs of the Haudenosaunee clans. The plaza itself was in fact a shallow bowl of packed earth, with flat tiers rising like concentric rings broken by an aisle that led directly into the largest of the longhouses. It was the simplest of amphitheaters, perfectly designed for public speaking. Duncan had met an old Dutch trader months before who spent an evening speaking with him of his years with the woodland tribes. The Iroquois leaders were not feared warriors, the Dutchman had declared, but feared orators, known for breaking entire woodland nations with the force of their words.

There was a rigid liturgy in all Council meetings, Conawago had explained to him. There would be no business conducted until the members had expressed respect to the spirits and gratitude for what was known as the Iroquois Peace. Deceased chiefs, some gone for centuries, would then be praised, and the ancient laws of the League invoked, the most sacred of which was that war may never be fought among tribes of the League. It was on this last point that the speakers now lingered, Conawago explained in a whisper. The Mingoes were, in the view of the Council, a subordinate tribe of the federation, yet under the self-proclaimed half-king they were acting apart, without the blessing or authority of the Council. As the old chiefs began the second hour of oration, a wiry, leather-faced elder dominated the discussion, an Oneida named Custaloga. He was one of the few on the Council who had served as a war chief, decades earlier, then become a peace chief, now second ranking on the Council. The old man, easily as old as Conawago, had a noble, refined air about him, and those on the Council and those who sat behind them listened in rapt silence as he spoke of past glories of the League.

“Hearken while your grandchildren cry.” Duncan did not understand all the words the wise old sachem spoke, but he knew those and recognized them again and again in Custaloga's speech. The sachems who made up the council, and the old matrons sitting behind them, with whom the
sachems frequently conferred, were clearly distraught. The federation, so powerful for hundreds of years, was starting to show age and decay.

There was a strange fierceness in the old man's voice, and Duncan saw now that whenever he paused he glanced at an aged woman sitting close by. In the last century, the League had been hit hard by enemies from the North. Entire Iroquois settlements had been annihilated, and the French and northern tribes had laid ambushes that had killed scores of Iroquois warriors. The town where they sat now was not the original Onondaga Castle. Another one, another capital town, had been destroyed, most of its inhabitants massacred, in a surprise attack by the Hurons. Custaloga and the senior chief, Atotarho, had been there, had witnessed the near toppling of the federation. Over half of the Haudenosaunee population had been lost, entire towns obliterated, many loved ones captured and taken into slavery by Huron and other enemy tribes.

Nearly every member of the Council spoke, and as they entered into the third hour, with the sun sinking low, Duncan found his gaze wandering, seeing now Ishmael walking with Kass along the palisade wall, where sentries armed with muskets walked. The big braziers that burned cedar, lit whenever the Council was convened, were being supplemented with more fires and pinepitch torches. Young braves carried firewood inside the adjacent lodge, where the main Council fire, the perpetual hearth of the League, was kept burning. Their day's labor finished, Iroquois families were filing in through the gate, settling in the growing shadows around the Council ring. The faces of young and old alike seemed fixed with the same expression of solemn anxiety.