Original Death (33 page)

“Our friends took poorly to the weather,” the ranger observed,
nodding to the hatch, where the Iroquois were filing out. Sagatchie looked as if he had fought a battle. Kassawaya's hands were shaking. The Iroquois elders gathered around Hetty, who seemed not to notice them. Her eyes, aimed toward the distant shoreline, were empty and unfocused. Two dead seagulls lay at her feet.

The captain, so fatigued he seemed to have trouble climbing down to the main deck, nodded his gratitude as Duncan offered a hand to steady him. “That blow was as good as two days' sailing. We'll be entering the Saint Lawrence by tomorrow afternoon,” the bearded officer declared in a hopeful tone, then he turned to call on his men to raise more sail.

Hetty groaned like an injured cat. “No, no, no!” she screeched, and they turned to find her gazing in anguish at them. She seemed not to notice Sagatchie, who was untying her, but she had clearly heard the captain's report.

“I would have thought you joined the others in wishing for dry land,” Duncan said, but then he saw the snakeskin entwined around the woman's hand and suddenly understood why she had come on deck. She had not been trying to banish the storm, she had been encouraging it. “Where would you have us go, Hetty?”

The Welsh woman produced a small wooden cylinder from the folds of her dress and clutched it tightly in her hand. “Away,” she murmured forlornly. “Away from all that must be. Away from the hole in the world, where death awaits.” Suddenly she looked up at Duncan as though just seeing him, and she thrust her hand behind her. As he reached out, she moved with surprising speed, ducking down and twisting past Duncan and Woolford, darting to the ship's rail.

Duncan leapt as she raised her hand, but too late. She threw the object in a long arc over the water.

He reacted without conscious thought, dropping his waistcoat and slipping off his shoes as he climbed the rail. Ignoring Hetty's wail of protest, Ishmael's fearful cry, and Woolford's angry curse, he launched himself over the side.

Even before he reached the water he heard the captain shouting frantic orders. He did not look back to make sense of the hurried activity on deck, just kept focused on the little speck of brown on the surface forty feet away. A few powerful strokes brought the wooden object into his grasp. He treaded water, staring in confusion at its ornate carved symbols. By the time he looked up the ship was over a hundred yards away and picking up speed. He would soon be alone on the wide inland sea.

“I seem to recall,” came a voice from behind him, “this is not the first time you have thrown yourself off a ship. At least you waited for the storm to pass this time.” Duncan turned to see Woolford standing with a bemused expression in the bow of the ship's dinghy.

Ishmael stared at him wide-eyed as he climbed over the ship's rail. “How could you do . . .” The boy seemed to have trouble finding words. There was more fear than wonder in his voice. “All that water. A man should be lost in it. You must be fish.”

Duncan hesitated over his strange wording then saw that the boy was clutching his amulet. He glanced back at Conawago on the raised aft deck. The old Nipmuc was listening. Duncan had begun to realize that it was unsettling to the Indians, especially Conawago, that he had grown so close to them, in many ways become one of them, but had not embraced a spirit protector. “No Ishmael, there is no spirit of trout or pike inside me.”

“A mighty sturgeon perhaps,” the boy ventured.

Duncan offered an uncertain grin. “Nor sturgeon.”

The boy studied Duncan with the eyes of a wise old man, then spoke with disappointment in his voice. “But anyone can see it, the thrill of a spirit touching you, pushing you, as you parted the water. Another man would have been pulled into the depths.”

Duncan looked back to Conawago, half suspecting that the old Nipmuc had put the words in the boy's mouth. He did not know why he was so reluctant to admit the truth of Ishmael's words, for he indeed felt something thrill inside him when in the water.

“At the old hearths an uncle or shaman would present you your amulet
when you came of age.” Ishmael spoke like a patient kinsman. “Those close to your heart would know your spirit animal, though none would say its name for fear of frightening it away.” There was an odd melancholy in the boy's words now, though Duncan did not know if it was for him or for the loss of the old hearths.

“No,” Duncan said, though the word pained him. “It was not the way at the hearths of my clan.” He looked down at the strange talisman in his hand, the object Hetty so desperately wanted no one to see. The images carved around the cylinder were intricately crafted. A leaping deer, a beaver with a branch in its mouth, a songbird, a horse, a cow, a bow, a hayfork. Tribal images and farming images. He scanned the deck. Hetty was nowhere to be seen.

“She took that off Rabbit Jack,” Woolford stated as he looked over Duncan's shoulder. “You saw the way she pounced on him, like she was possessed. She tore at his waistcoat and belt pouches and pulled away a small wooden thing. We were so busy dealing with the provosts I forgot about it until now.”

Duncan shook the cylinder and heard a rattle inside, then twisted it. One end moved along a nearly invisible seam. He pried it loose and upended the tube. Four small silver links tumbled onto his palm, pieces of a finely worked necklace or bracelet. He held one up to the sunlight and realized he had seen identical links, in the bowl at the gaming shed in Oswego and with the painted woman at the tavern.

“Grandfather's.” Duncan looked up to see Ishmael at his side. The boy stared at the cylinder with haunted eyes. “My grandfather carved that.”

“That can't be,” Duncan said in confusion. “Hetty just took it at Oswego.”

“Look at the bottom,” the boy said.

Duncan turned it over. On the bottom was an elegant mark carved into the wood, the letters H and J between a spreading tree.

He looked back at the hatch where Hetty had fled. Which had she so desperately wanted him not to see, the silver links or the carving from Bethel Church?

FOLLOWING THE STORM the night sky was like crystal. A thousand stars beckoned. The wind had slackened, the clouds had vanished, and the reflection of the moon stretched for miles over the still black water. Duncan stood at the rail with Conawago, who fingered the wooden tube carved by his kinsman. He had no words to ease the old Nipmuc's troubles. The bodies lined up in the smithy of Bethel Church would haunt their sleep as long as they lived. But just as real to Conawago were the killings on the other side reported by the half-king's followers. Spirits were not supposed to die, and if they did they would face nothing but interminable blackness until the end of time. But that was not the unspeakable horror that kept the old Nipmuc's face clouded and his tongue uncharacteristically silent. The words of Black Fish had stabbed at Conawago's heart. When all the original spirits died the gates of the other side would close forever, Black Fish had testified to the Council, holding the truth beads in his hand as he repeated the words of the dead. Then the people of the forest would become no more than dust. They would be no more forever. The looming end of the tribal world had weighed heavily on Conawago for years, but he seldom spoke of it, and when he did it was of events in a possible future, a future that might yet be avoided. But suddenly messages about that ending were coming from the other side. It had become real, happening before them.

“I never meant for you to die, Duncan,” Conawago said suddenly, still facing the water.

“Two lives to stop the Revelator and save the gods seems a fair price.”

Conawago offered no reply.

“I told you,” Duncan said, struggling to keep emotion out of his voice. “My family has been calling me. I never expected to my life to be finished.”

Conwago turned. “Finished?”

“Polished over decades like the gemstone that is your life.”

The Nipmuc slowly shook his head. “Not a life to be envied. A slow torture, watching first your family then your entire world be destroyed over decades.”

“But I have bested you, my friend. I managed to accomplish all that in a few short years.”

Conawago's eyes narrowed. “In all of the time I have known you, I have never before heard words of self-pity from your lips. They dishonor the clan leader who lives within you.”

It was Duncan's turn to stare out over the water. “You are right. I am sorry,” he replied after a moment. “In all the time I have known you, I have never feared for you so much. Do not let me believe you would give up life so easily.”

“Our gods are tired. I am tired. I begin to feel as though the bones of my soul are broken.”

“The gods,” Duncan said, “have much to answer for.”

The words brought another brooding silence.

Duncan tried to make small talk with Conawago, pointing out the shimmer on the horizon he took to be the northern lights, even offering to borrow Woolford's lens so they could look at the mountains on the moon.

“We will find a way,” Duncan said at last. “We have to find a way to survive, for Ishmael's sake.”

The desolate expression with which Conwago answered his words chilled Duncan to his heart. His friend felt honor-bound to die, despite the terrible cost to Ishmael. After several more minutes of painful silence, he wandered toward the stern, where Woolford, doing his best to help the elders forget the torment of the storm, had persuaded the Iroquois to sit and listen to him recite his favorite bard.

The ranger captain had just completed a soliloquy from one of Shakespeare's comedies, to the obvious enjoyment of the elders, and he began a dialogue from
Romeo and Juliet
, engaging the grinning captain as the officer stood with one hand on the wheel. It warmed Duncan to hear Custaloga, Tushcona, and Adanahoe laugh.

As the cook brought mugs of hot tea to the Iroquois, Woolford enthusiastically began his favorite soliloquy from
Hamlet
. “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Well into the famous passage he slowed his
tempo for dramatic effect. “To sleep, perchance to dream, ay there's the rub, for in the sleep of death what dreams may come.”

“This Hamlet,” Custaloga interrupted, suddenly very sober, “he had trouble on the other side too? So after he died, what dreams did come? What were the visions in the death he spoke of? What did his people do about them?”

Woolford reacted at first with the impatience of the actor interrupted. “It was just Shakespeare's way of expression.”

“But this Shakespeare is from the place of your birth. Have you not asked him?”

“He crossed over more than a century and a half ago.”

Custaloga nodded, as if it somehow proved his point. “Then he must have powerful dreams from the other side, to make you speak his words today.”

Woolford looked to Duncan as if for help. Neither was inclined to argue.

“Speak more of his dreams tomorrow,” Adanahoe said as she rose and stretched, ready for slumber. “Tell us what the spirits told him. Tell us of the time of night when the graves gape wide.”

The woman's words seemed to surprise Woolford. He stared at the woman as she stepped toward the ladder that led to the cabin hatch. Conawago stepped out of the shadows, looking at the ranger with intense curiosity.

Tushcona yawned and followed Adanahoe. “Did he speak of the beasts with wings?” she asked as she passed them.

Woolford seemed to grow uneasy. “Why would you ask that?”

The woman seemed not to hear as she disappeared down the ladder. “They are creatures of the spirit world,” Custaloga explained. As he stepped across the moonlit deck, he looked into the sky as if he might glimpse the creatures, then spoke in afterthought before descending the ladder himself. “The four beasts had each of them six wings, and they were full of eyes and did not rest night and day.”

Woolford grabbed Conawago's arm, as it to keep the Nipmuc from leaving. “Where did they get those words?” he asked in an urgent tone. Sagatchie, who had been watching the water, turned in confusion toward them.

Conawago shrugged. “The elders are famed for their memories of speeches. It is how the culture of the Iroquois is passed down. They are Black Fish's words, from his dream, from his visit to other side . . .” The old Nipmuc hesitated as he felt Duncan's intense stare.

“You never told me,” Duncan said.

“I did not translate every word. I told you there were beasts guarding the original spirits.”

“And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him and they were full of eyes within, and they rest not night and day,” Woolford recited.

Conawago cocked his head. “You were at one of the other villages where Black Fish told his dream?”

“It is from the Bible, Conawago. A passage about the end of the world.”

Conawago began to shake his head as if in disagreement, then paused as he saw the way his companions gazed at him. “What book?” he asked the ranger in an uneasy voice.

“Revelation.”

“Revelation,” Conawago repeated in a whisper. His face clouded as he looked at Duncan. “I am sorry. I am an Old Testament man.” He seemed to grow weaker, and he lowered himself onto the stern bench. “The graves gape and let forth ghosts,” he said.