Original Death (46 page)

Then suddenly there were no more tormentors. He let the unconscious body fall from his shoulders and collapsed onto his knees, gasping, blood running down his arm and jaw.

He became aware of a pair of well-polished black shoes near his face, and he looked up into the stern face of Colonel Cameron.

“Well played, McCallum,” the colonel said with a cool smile. His grenadier guards rushed to stand over Duncan.

It seemed to take all his strength to turn and sit on the ground, facing the line of Wolverines. Some of the warriors stared at him in disbelief, others in fury. Several swung their clubs as if about to attack him. Savage cries broke out.

It took a moment for Duncan to realize they were coming from others in the camp, dozens of Scots and Indians who had been watching. They were cries of amusement, of laughter. A brawny Scot doused him with a bucket of water and helped him to his feet as others rushed forward. He ignored the pain of the congratulatory slaps on his shoulders as he watched Conawago and Sagatchie herd the Iroquois around the edge of the camp, joined now by the schoolmaster. To buy them time, he began to murmur acknowledgment to those who swarmed around him and accepted swigs of ale from several offered flasks. It was a quarter hour before the crowd began to break up, the Wolverines still glaring at him as he tried to inconspicuously make his way to the beach.

The elders and the children were already halfway to shore when he climbed into a canoe. He froze, paddle in his hand, as he saw the tall warriors of the Revelator's guard gathering with several Scots at the far end of the beach to land the boat with the powder kegs. The Revelator had used the gauntlet to gain time to reach the kegs. Duncan watched in horror as a
keg was handed down a chain of men and a hand ax slammed into its top. His paddle cut into the water as the first confused curse echoed across the river. Furious orders followed, and more kegs were opened, all revealing nothing but gunpowder. Duncan put all his strength into his paddle, and his canoe shot forward.

“McCallum!” came the half-king's furious roar. A musket barked, and another. Balls plucked at the water around him, and then he was out of range.

He started shouting to his companions on the shoreline when he was still a hundred yards away. They stared in confusion, not understanding his desperate calls for them to run. On the far side of the high tongue of land, half a mile away, Woolford waited with his rangers.

“They opened the kegs!” he shouted as he leapt out. “They know why we are fleeing!” He pointed behind him. A dozen canoes were rapidly following them, filled with enraged warriors.

Chapter Fifteen

D
espite Duncan's desperate urgings, the escape of their weary band was agonizingly slow. They stumbled through an abandoned pasture then encountered thickets of brush covering the steep slope up the open ridge they had to cross to reach Woolford's camp. The elders and the children were weak from their long ordeal. Tushcona and Bedford carried the youngest on their backs but were nearly spent before they were halfway up.

By the time they reached a vantage point at the top of the ridge, their pursuers milled along the riverbank, searching for their trail. Duncan and Conawago exchanged worried glances, knowing that as soon as they began to run across the open-faced ridge, they would be spotted.

Sagatchie helped the last of their party climb over the ledge marking the top of the slope then joined them to gaze down on the open field below. Duncan did not at first understand the sigh of satisfaction that came from the big Mohawk, then he followed his gaze to the solitary figure that stood on a boulder, staring up at them. His metal helmet was unmistakable.

“Wolverines,” Duncan heard himself say. A chill ran down his spine. The blood feud between the Iroquois and the Wolverine clan was like a festering wound, and Duncan had rubbed salt into it by shaming the Hurons
at the gauntlet. The half-king had sent those he knew would be most likely to bring back all the scalps of those who had deceived him.

“Run!” Kass shouted at the children and the elders, urging them desperately across the top of the ridge toward the safety of the rangers. Bedford scooped up one of the children, and Kass threw another onto her back as she ran.

Sagatchie eyed the ledge rock that jutted upward a few feet away, making something of a parapet overlooking the pasture below. A great calm seemed to settle over him. He laid his rifle on the ledge, along with his powder horn and cartridge box.

Duncan now saw Conawago staring at the Mohawk. A melancholy pride burned in the Nipmuc's eyes as he lowered his own rifle onto the rock parapet and helped Sagatchie remove his pack then extracted the little wooden container that warriors always carefully guarded on their travels. Tushcona, carrying their only other rifle, rushed to their side as Kass, Bedford, and the children ran headlong across the open ridge. Without a word she began checking the priming in the pans of the guns.

A serene smile lit Sagatchie's face. “This is what the spirits always intended,” he declared in a level voice. “I know now they have not forgotten me.”

Duncan followed his gaze toward the Wolverine Hurons, and his heart wrenched. He had trouble making his tongue work. “No . . .” he protested. “God no, Sagatchie. Please don't. I beg you . . .”

Sagatchie seemed not to hear him. He turned one cheek, then another as Conawago dipped a finger into the little wooden cylinder and painted the red stripes of war on his face. When the warrior looked up to the sky, he had his war ax in one hand and his knife in the other. “Hear my call! My name is Sagatchie, of the Wolf clan of the Mohawks!” he shouted toward the clouds, pressing his protector amulet tightly against his heart. “The strength of the wolf is in my arm! The speed of the wolf is in my legs!”

When he finished he turned to Duncan, who found no words as the Mohawk lay his forearm along Duncan's own in the warrior's grip.
He nodded at Duncan, still smiling, then launched himself down the slope with a joyful whoop.

They had four rifles, and Tushcona stood by to reload as Conawago and Duncan fired. When they dropped the first two Hurons who had begun to run across the pasture, the others at the edge of the field answered with screams of war. Their enemy had shown themselves, and the battle was joined. The Hurons fired their own rifles, the bullets ricocheting off the rocks around Conawago and Duncan, then tossed them aside and drew out their war axes.

Two more Hurons fell to their rifles, but Duncan's shot at the helmeted chieftain missed. The advancing warriors stopped abruptly as Sagatchie appeared out of the thicket, shouting at them, waving his war ax in challenge. Suddenly a second figure, grey and bent, scrambled out of the undergrowth to join him, swinging his own ax.

Duncan spun about to see Adanahoe, tears streaming down her face. She was holding Custaloga's pack and shirt. The eighty-year-old chief, survivor of the razing of Ononadagoa Castle by the Wolverines decades earlier, was a warrior once more and was finally facing his enemy.

Duncan and Conawago fired again, and there were only a dozen Huron left, facing the two Iroquois across thirty yards of grass. It was the old sachem who moved first, shouting out his war cry and charging directly at the Huron chief, Sagatchie a step behind.

An anguished cry broke the eerie stillness as Duncan and Conawago lowered their rifles. Kass was running at them, flinging off her pack and jacket, lifting her bow. She broke away when Duncan grabbed her arm, then leapt past them into the undergrowth of the slope.

They watched helplessly as the two chiefs danced with their axes, slashing and backing, chopping with vicious strokes. It was Custaloga who landed the killing stroke, but as Paxto fell, the aged Iroquois was covered with Huron assailants. Sagatchie leveled two of the attackers and was pulling his ax from the leg of a third when four more leapt on top of him. A mournful moan escaped Duncan's lips as his Mohawk friend fell.
Kass appeared in time to put an arrow in the Huron who raised a knife to scalp the fallen Mohawk.

Suddenly a warrior at the edge of the field shouted frantically, and the war party froze, following his raised arm toward the river. With cries of alarm they backed away, carrying the body of the pot helm chief with them.

A call from behind broke the brittle silence. Duncan turned to see Woolford and several rangers running from the far side of the point. He did not wait for them but started down the slope with Conawago at his side.

Bodies lay strewn about the field, six downed by rifle shots, seven by blade and ax. Singing a low, melancholy chant, Kass dragged away the Huron dead heaped by Sagatchie's body, then stood over the dead Mohawk. He had been sliced in a dozen places, but the blow that had taken him had been from the ax in the back of his skull. Kass said nothing as Duncan bent to remove the weapon, but as the blade came free, dripping Sagatchie's lifeblood, she seemed to lose all strength. She sagged, collapsing into Duncan's arms, then slowly, leaning on Duncan, lowered herself to her knees by the body.

Duncan turned and walked toward the rangers that emerged onto the field.

“We came as soon as we heard the shots!” Woolford gasped.

“A few minutes more and we could have made it to you,” Duncan said in a hollow voice.

“The Hurons paid the butcher's bill,” Woolford muttered as he surveyed the dead. “Where's . . .” his question died away. The mournful death song started by Kass was all he needed to know.

“Dear Jesus, no!” he moaned and rushed past Duncan to where Kass knelt. He dropped to the ground and buried his head in his hands.

More death songs rose as the elders arrived. Duncan and Conawago laid out the body of Custaloga beside that of Sagatchie.

“The bastards fled,” Woolford said in a tight voice. “Why?”

Duncan looked about the field, realizing he had no answer. The two men quickly made their way to the river and mounted a high, flat boulder.

“That is why!” Duncan said, pointing to a long line of objects floating downstream. Woolford extracted his telescope. “Canoes and long boats,” he reported in an uncertain tone.

Duncan took the glass and quickly saw the reason for the ranger's confusion. There were at least fifty canoes on the river, and they were all empty, adrift in the fast current. Ahead of them were long boats strung in a line, being towed by a lead boat in which half a dozen men feverishly worked the oars.

IT WAS EARLY evening before they began to climb over the ridge that jutted into the river. The Iroquois rangers quickly disposed of the enemy dead, but they would not move the bodies of Sagatchie and Custaloga, would not leave them alone, until long songs had been sung and long chants spoken to console their spirits.

Woolford was shaken badly by his friend's death. He had fought at Sagatchie's side for years. “He was the best,” the captain said in a breaking voice when he returned to the Mohawk's body again. “The best of all of us.”

Duncan studied his friend and realized that Woolford had long known what the rest of them had learned, that Sagatchie had been unbowed, that he had fervently kept the old ways alive even while bridging the worlds of the tribes and Europeans. He had been pure, never touching rum or whiskey, steadfast in the ancient ways of his people, his long rifle the only compromise he made to European technology.

When Adanahoe announced where their burial scaffolds would have to be erected, her companions were surprised but they did not argue. Woolford just nodded and sent one of his men for blankets to wrap the bodies.

Kass seemed to find new strength in reciting the death chants, yet she seemed inconsolable. The tears did not stop flowing down her cheeks as she cleaned Sagatchie's body and murmured the sacred words. As Duncan approached her, Conawago touched his arm. “The song she sings now,” the old Nipmuc said. “It is not one of mourning.”

Duncan backed away. “I don't understand.”

“It is not a death song, it is a love song, one of courtship.”

It was another half-hour before Duncan knelt beside her and explained that they would have to leave for the rangers' camp.

She seemed not to hear. “He will be strong.” The tracks of her tears were plain on her face. “He is going to run like a stag in the forest and hear his father's voice in the wind.”

“He was very strong,” Duncan said as if to correct her.