Original Death (9 page)

“Wouldn't,” came a terse voice behind him. The speaker was a burly bearded man covered in sawdust who had just climbed out of the sawpit.

“Just admiring your animal,” Duncan offered. “I've seen many mastiffs and hunting hounds but few as magnificent as this beast.”

“Not my animal, nor any man's here. It just appeared two days ago. Will have naught to do with us. Won't take meat, won't take a bone. I've got Iroquois here who say that warriors killed in battle sometimes come back as such creatures for unfinished business.”

Duncan inched closer. The dog did not move its broad, heavy head, but a low rumble of warning rose in its throat. His expression was suddenly that of a fierce predator.

The man produced a rag from his pocket and began wiping his face. “It just stares like that. All day, all night as far as we know.” The man, Duncan realized, was frightened of the animal. “A boy threw a stone at it. The dog just gave him its eye and the boy fell back into the pit, broke his damned ankle. My men are calling it the hell dog.”

“Perhaps it waits for a boat, for some trapper to arrive,” Duncan suggested.

The man snorted. “That's what I thought at first. But someone pointed out that the Welsh witch has been inside there ever since he arrived. Yesterday two of my men refused to come to work. Today four more. I said I was going to shoot the damned beast, and one of the Oneidas said my wife would be a widow by the next moon if I did.”

With a chill Duncan now saw the dog stared not at the river but at a decrepit log hut near the bank.

The structure clearly survived from the town's early age, when Albany and before that Fort Orange had been centers for the fur trade. The logs at one corner were rotting, lending an unstable tilt to one side of the roof. The low roof had skulls scattered across it, of beaver, otter, hares, and other
small mammals. Several of the willow hoops used for stretching skins lay rotting against one wall. From the low uneven eaves hung the black-and-white furs of polecats. From a pole near the door feathers fluttered in the breeze, all of them from crows or ravens.

Duncan ventured several steps closer to the cabin then turned uneasily. The sounds of the work in the yard had stopped. The eyes of every man in the yard seemed to be on him. The rumble of the dog grew louder. A sharp complaint from the man who had spoken to Duncan sent the men back to work.

He approached to within six feet of the dog then dropped onto one knee, holding his rifle upright like a staff. He collected himself, looking down at the grass for several moments before addressing the animal with soft, respectful words in the Mohawk tongue, words he had heard Conawago speak to a bear that had walked into their campsite one night. When the dog did not react he tried them in English. “I honor the tooth and claw of your spirit,” he intoned. “I honor the beauty of your paw and know your greatest strength lies in not using it.”

A low growl came from the creature's throat, but it slowly shifted his eyes to meet Duncan's gaze as he repeated the words, shifting between the tribal and English tongues. He steadily lowered his voice, until it was a faint whisper, but stopped only when the dog stopped growling. From a belt pouch he extracted a small yellow feather he had found in the forest and set it on the ground in front of the animal. As the dog cocked its head at the feather, he slowly rose and backed away, toward the hut.

The door of the structure was ajar. He called out the woman's name, then slowly pushed the door open when no response came. A strange translucent veil hung over the entry. He advanced a step then froze as he realized it consisted of the skins of huge rattlesnakes, the heads pinned inside the lintel, the rattles hanging to betray the passage of any who entered. He clenched his jaw, pushed the skins aside, and stepped into the single room of the decaying cabin.

The air was thick with the smoke of cedar, used by the tribes to summon spirits. He stood still, letting his eyes adjust to the dimness, surveying
the strange chamber he found himself in. More animal skins, moth-eaten and tattered, hung on the walls. Woodcutting trestles supported rough planks for a low table, with a lopsided milk stool the only seat. The woman sat in a corner on a pallet of cedar boughs, her eyes fixed on the bottom of a green onion-shaped bottle she clenched in her hands. A piece of cedar wood smoldered in a bowl at her side.

Duncan leaned his rifle against the doorframe and settled onto the floor in front of her. Her hollow eyes slowly found him, and her lips curled into a lightless smile. When she turned the bottle he saw that her wrists were encircled with such heavy scars she seemed to be wearing bracelets of raised flesh.

“Poison snake take you home,” she suddenly declared. Her voice was dry as sticks.

A chill crept down Duncan's spine. “I am here about Henry Bedford,” he declared, and paused. He had made an assumption about the relationship of the woman who sent the letters and the schoolteacher, but it did not seem possible that this fearful crone could be the man's mother. “Mr. S.,” he tried. “And a student of his who may have come looking for him.”

She trapped some smoke inside the bottle and became so engrossed with it she seemed to have forgotten his presence. After several long moments her gaze shifted to Duncan's foot and slowly wound its way up his leg. She finally looked him in the face. Even then her only reaction was to cup some of the smoke in her hand and release it under his chin.

He noticed a crumpled paper that lay at her side, similar to the letter he had inside his shirt, and he fought the temptation to grab it. “The boy Ishmael. Has he been here?”

She leaned close to him, so close he could smell her sour breath. But she did not seem drunk. “You are one of them then.”

He paused, noticing now a pattern drawn on the earthen floor beside her, a parallelogram with two dots and a slanted line inside. “One of them?”

“The dead of Bethel Church.”

Duncan swallowed hard. “Madame, I am here, sitting in front of you in this world.”

“Then you know nothing.”

“On that much we agree,” he muttered. He saw now a belt of beads on her lap, not the shiny glass beads of European traders but the plain wampum shell beads of the tribes. His head snapped up. It was a message belt, used in the wilderness for communication between native villages, even between separate tribes. He had not seen many, but he knew they always conveyed vital, solemn messages. Belts might warn of epidemics or summon members of tribal councils to meetings. Black belts, comprised solely of dark purple shells, were used as a declaration of war. This one held a complex pattern of stick figure humans and animals. It made no sense that the woman in front of him, a Welsh seamstress with a taste for rum, would have such a belt.

Duncan saw now more beads, a single strand of white wampum laying on the pallet. He lifted it and conspicuously draped it over his open hand. The white strand was a warrant of truth among the tribes. No man could hold such beads and lie, though he was not certain what they might connote to a Welsh widow living in Albany.

“My name is Duncan McCallum,” he tried again, raising his hand with the beads. “I seek the boy named Ishmael, Ojiwa of the Nipmuc, who came here from Bethel Church after its people were massacred.” His free hand extracted the letter he carried and held it in front of her. “You know the schoolteacher there. You are his mother,” he ventured. When she did not object, he continued. “Ishmael was here because he believed you knew something of those who captured your son and his students.”

Her cackle was like a rattle in her hollow chest. “If he is gone he needed to be gone. The half-king stands tall. White George stumbles. Not long now. When the dead walk the living tremble. How many times can you die?” As she laughed again, Duncan glanced toward the entry, fighting a compulsion to flee.

“Where do they go to?”

“Beyond, and beyond.” The woman kept cackling, holding the bottle up to an eye and looking at Duncan through its bulbous translucent glass.

Duncan clenched his jaw in frustration. He gazed at the wampum belt, knowing that without Conawago he would never unlock the riddle of its beads. “Your son and his students. How do I find them?”

“People think there is forgiveness on the other side,” the Welsh woman croaked. “But that is where payment is made.”

“Damn it!” he snapped. “There's children to be saved, woman! Enough of your gibberish.”

She cocked her head toward a bear skull he had not seen before, suspended from a roof beam so that it seemed to float in the air. She seemed not to see him now. As he watched uneasily, she began to unbutton her soiled linen blouse. “Enough of your gibberish,” she echoed. With one quick movement she pulled the blouse down, below her small, pinched breasts. “Here is where they go!”

Her chest was covered with scars and tattoos, a maze of small deliberately inflicted scars and ink depicting stick figures of humans, a tree, and a bear. Around and through it all was a tattoo of a long snake, its head facing a sun rising over a vertical line. Her torso began to undulate, and the snake began to move. A small, fearful cry escaped Duncan's throat. She was a witch after all.

“You won't even know what to say when he finally speaks to you,” she said in a surprisingly level voice. It had the sound of an accusation.

As Duncan gazed at her hideous disfigured torso, his jaw moved up and down but no sound came out. “Whom must I speak to?” he finally asked.

“The Revelator,” she replied, her eyes wild again. As she laughed the snake writhed on her naked flesh. “The Revelator summons you! He will seize the heart from your chest and wring the truth out of your miserable life!”

He dropped the beads, grabbed the crumpled paper, and fled.

Chapter Four

“P
eople say Albany is at the edge of the world,” the man in the brown waistcoat observed. “But they're wrong. We live between the edges of two worlds. The pressing blade of European settlement and the sharper edge of the tribes.”

Duncan had found Thomas Forsey, one of the two brothers who owned the clothier, smoking a long-stemmed pipe on the back step of the big brick building. He nodded to his workers as they filed out, murmuring polite farewells, at the end of their workday. Duncan had told him he was a scout, looking for Mrs. Eldridge. “Her son is a schoolmaster. He and his students are missing.”

Forsey tilted his head and studied Duncan as if deciding whether to believe him. “Who did you find?”

“She was there, in that hut with the skins and skulls.”

“There is a fortune-teller who lives there,” Forsey said, taking another puff on his pipe. “‘The Welsh Oracle,' some in the taverns call her. People buy her a drink and ask when to plant their grain. For a whole bottle she'll tell you what to name your child and how you will die.”

“I thought I was going to meet Mrs. Eldridge.”

“When she is here, the meek Hetty Eldridge is the best seamstress we
have. There is also a drunk who lives in that hut, though thank God no man's ever been drunk like her. And there is the ghostwalker.”

A ghostwalker. It would explain much, Duncan realized. Inhabitants of the settlements used the term to refer to the uncertain souls who had been captured by the tribes and later released, usually after many years of living as a member of a tribe. “How long?”

“Who knows. Long enough. I remember Mr. Conrad Weiser of the Pennsylvania colony coming here many years ago, looking for signs of her. She had been taken in a raid on a farm in the Tulpehocken country long before, just after being married. There was a deal struck with some Mingoes ten or twelve years ago. They agreed to return captives to the army in exchange for some guns and blankets. She came back dragging a half-blood son with her.” For many captives the return to European society was more difficult than their original capture. It was why they were called ghostwalkers, for the way many never fit back in, for the way they stayed between worlds, often wandering aimlessly.

“She has her job here,” Duncan observed. “Why does she live in such squalor?”

“Hetty and I have a game we play. Every time she collects her monthly wage, I offer her a room in our attic. Every month she thanks me but refuses. She wants full wages, nothing deducted for room and board. But she never collects them. She worked hard to educate her son, but after he left her nest he went back out among the Mingoes for a few years. A month after he finally returned, he murdered some Dutch patroon's son over a card game. He escaped custody but he was still found guilty. She is convinced of his innocence and has me send every shilling to a barrister in New York town who is petitioning the crown for a pardon.”