They’d taken off their coats and were sitting at the small table in the center of the room.
“Fitz?” Duncan asked, filling a glass from the bottle in front of him.
Fitzcairn nodded. Duncan filled a second glass, sliding it across the table. He downed it in one swallow.
“Swill,” he said, making a face. He slid the empty glass back. “More, if you please. If we’re to have a proper Irish wake for Danny, we’ll just have to ignore the quality of the whiskey.”
They sat silently as the level in the bottle gradually lowered. The room had been filled with such silences for the whole of the winter, filled with the things that they were not talking about.
“I never told you about my first student,” Duncan said, staring into his glass.
“The Frenchie with the fancy name? You most certainly did.”
“No, not Jean-Phillipe,” Duncan said. “My first student. His name was Devon Marek. When I found him, I was so pleased to have the chance to—well, to be Connor for another of our kind—” He paused.
“He was an evil man, Fitz. He took the best that I could give him and used it in the worst way possible.” Duncan drained his drink. “It nearly came to a Challenge between us, but he ran.”
“Danny O’Donal wasn’t a bad man, MacLeod,” Fitz said flatly. “It’s not considered good form to speak ill of the dead at the wake, you know.” His bright blue eyes were dangerous.
“No,” Duncan said, hastily. “That’s not what I meant.” He spoke haltingly, choosing his words with care. “There were things driving Danny that you couldn’t know, Fitz. Just as I couldn’t know the terrible dark heart of Marek. Or,” he added wryly “the thick head of Jean-Phillipe.”
He faced Fitzcairn squarely. This man was his oldest friend. They had waged a war of words for centuries, but at the core of it, Duncan knew no one that he would want at his side more than Hugh Fitzcairn.
He had killed his friend’s friend, his student. That would be forever between them. But it could be lived with, if they could get past the silences.
“If there had been any way, Fitz, any way at all. But—he’d gone mad at the end.”
Fitzcairn looked up at Duncan, anguish on his face. “Is that the truth of it? It’s surely what I want to believe …”
“Didn’t you see it in his eyes when he was standing over you?” Duncan asked softly.
Fitzcairn slammed his empty glass down so fiercely that it broke, cutting his hand. “Yes, by God, I did. But why didn’t I see it sooner? I kept making excuses, telling myself that he was sick from hunger and cold and exhaustion.” He held up his hand, watching the blood run down from a deep cut in the palm.
“If I had only …” he whispered.
Duncan reached across the table to examine his friend’s hand. The cut was already closing.
“We may be Immortal, but we’re only human, Fitz. We have no special powers to see into another’s soul. We take the measure of a man in the same way as any mortal would.”
Fitz pulled his hand back. He ran his thumb over the thin line of blood that was all that remained of the cut.
“You saved my life, Duncan,” he said. “Even if I’d had my blade, I don’t know if I could have—” He paused. “This Marek you spoke of—would you have taken him?”
“I don’t know, Fitz. I ask myself that still. To fight your own student …”
“I will say an Ave for you, Highlander, that you never need to answer that question.” His eyes filled and he swallowed.
“Pass me the bottle, MacLeod,” He said with a catch in his voice. “Let’s drink together. To having all the time in the world. And to losing it.”
They drank then, finishing one bottle and starting another. Fitz shared memories of Danny, and drew Duncan out further on the sore subject of Marek. Then the two talked of Connor and Henry Fitz, and of the stories Connor had told of his teacher Ramirez.
An hour had passed when Fitz rose abruptly. He took a few unsteady paces to the bunk beds on the back wall. Raising the thin mattress on the top bunk, he fetched out the small sack they had carried from the cave.
“Ah, well, MacLeod,” he said. “It’s past time to face up to it—we both know one thing that was driving Danny.” He threw the sack on the table.
“It was driving us all, of course,” he added as he sat down. “But you had the right of it from the beginning—the fever burned far too high in him.”
“All that glitters …” Duncan murmured.
“Had we been as wise as bold,” Fitz continued. “Or at least as wise as old …” He hiccoughed. “I should warn you, laddie. I may be a wee bit drunk.”
Duncan smiled, and filled his glass again. “Had we but listened to Claire,” he added.
“Yes. Indeed. The lovely Miz Benét. I’ve been thinking of her quite a bit, as a matter of fact.” Fitz poked the sack with one finger. “Would my part of this be enough to enable her to be rid of her ‘uncle,’ I wonder?”
Duncan raised an eyebrow. One of the silences had been about the gold. They’d not talked of it at all. They’d not filed a claim nor made any attempt to return to the cave.
“I had a notion or two along those lines myself,” he admitted. “I may well deliver the last of my dispatches to her personally.”
“Well, I’ve no doubt that my consideration of her well-being greatly anticipated yours,” Fitzcairn asserted.
Duncan smiled. “Indeed. I should know after so long a time that I canna possibly outdo Hugh Fitzcairn in gallantry.”
“That’s the bloody truth, all right,” Fitz said. “And it’s a further bloody truth that all Englishmen are gallant by nature. For a Scot, such an attribute is mere artifice. Like—like a sheep wearing trousers.”
“A sheep in men’s clothing?” Duncan said. “I don’t know if I should be offended or not.” He felt absurdly happy. It was the first time in many weeks that Fitz had insulted him. It was a lame insult to be sure, but nonetheless welcome.
“Sheep—Scots—it makes sense to me.” Fitz shrugged. “Perhaps you’d better understand silk purses and sows’ ears, then?” he suggested, blue eyes wide.
Duncan sputtered, pretending great offense. Fitz laughed, and he joined in.
The sound of laughter had also been in short supply the last few months. It was also very welcome. Duncan was reluctant to break the mood, but he felt he had to ask.
“About the gold, Fitz.” He gestured at the sack. “Are you saying that you want none of it?”
Fitz stared at it, sitting in the midst of the empty bottles and shards of broken glass. He seemed suddenly completely sober. He reached over and opened the sack, spilling out a fraction of the contents.
The gold gleamed in me light of the single lantern that hung on the wall in the windowless room.
One by one, he counted out five good-sized nuggets. Then he reached into the pocket on his shirt and took out a square of white linen, edged in lace.
He unfolded it and placed the five nuggets in the middle. Tying up the ends, he returned it to his pocket.
“Nothing gained,” he said, quietly. “And a great deal lost.”
The sack lay between them.
“The rest—the claim,” Duncan said. “I should try to find Sam’s people. And I did promise Amanda …”
“Do what you will, MacLeod.” Fitzcairn shook his head. “I’ve seen enough of the Northern Lights. I’m set on seeing the lights on London Bridge. The sooner the better.”
At his feet, Vixen thumped her tail. Fitz ruffled her ears.
“I know a buxom wench, a flower girl in Covent Garden.” Turning toward Vixen, who sat up attentively, he cupped her face in his two hands. “She’s always been dotty over dogs. This sweet beastie will make her eyes sparkle, I’ll wager.”
“If she’s still there, Fitzcairn,” Duncan said. “Even you can’t expect every mortal woman you’ve ever known to wait forever.”
Fitz chuckled. “Her grandmother was there, and her mother before her. So if she’s not there, her daughter will be.”
“But—” Duncan began a protest.
“They think I’m my own grandfather, you see. Or is it grandson? Oh, you know how it goes.” He waved his hand vaguely in the air.
“Put the gold away for now, laddie.” He got to his feet. “We’ll talk more of this later. At the moment, we’d best hurry, or we’ll miss what the cook so aptly calls ‘evening mess.’”
“Go on, Fitz. I’ll be along shortly.” Duncan went to the door and watched as his friend disappeared in the darkness, the brown-and-white dog close by his side.
Then he donned his coat and walked some distance to the entrance of the fort. Slipping through the gates, he stood alone in the night.
The full moon was up, casting a midday luster on the landscape. The sky was pocked with stars, shining like gold dust thrown onto the cold ebony of the sky.
The still-white expanse of emptiness stretched away before him. He could hear, but not see, the cracking of the ice on the Peel as it flowed on northward, emptying finally into the frigid waters of the Arctic Ocean.
Three hundred. Seven hundred. Two thousand, like Darius and the others of the ancients.
Such were the spans of Immortal years, infinite compared to ordinary men. Good men, like Sam and his brother. Bad men, like Smith and Foster.
And a brief candle compared to this ancient, untamed wild.
Mortal or Immortal, it mattered not. This was a land that tested men to destruction.
Mortal or Immortal, it mattered not, some failed that test. Duncan thought of ashes scattered on the snow, of a fresh-dug grave in the fort behind him.
Mortal or Immortal, some passed the test. The man who returned to Skagway for Minnie Dale was one.
Fitzcairn was another.
And he, Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod, had survived, his head and his wits intact. He felt no pride in this. Only a vast relief, and a wonder at it all.
On the horizon, the Northern Lights began their play. Like Fitz, Duncan had no more desire to see them. He turned and walked back into the fort.
As he did, it began to snow, a spring snow of large wet flakes.
By morning, five inches of white covered everything. In the corner of the fort that was holy ground, icicles hung from the rough-hewn cross above the newest grave. In the golden light of dawn, they sparkled like the finest, most delicate, most fragile crystal.
A cold wind gusted. The crystal broke, fell, and was lost in the whiteness.
All fiction is lies, they say. But historical fiction has some obligation to tell the truth, as much as possible …
On the evening of August 16, 1896, a man named George Washington Carmack, panning a small tributary of the Klondike River called Rabbit Creek, found a thumb-sized lump of gold. In short order, he found more—much, much more. Canadian law only allowed one claim per man, so after Carmack and his two Indian partners staked their claims, they spread the word.
Rabbit Creek was renamed Bonanza Creek, and men who had been prospecting the Klondike for years all rushed to the area.
But the Yukon winters are hard, and although fortunes were taken out of the ground in the next few months, it wasn’t until the following spring, when the ice broke up on the rivers, that any news reached the outside world.
That news was reinforced in the most dramatic way possible. In mid-July 1897, the
Excelsior
docked in San Francisco and the
Portland
in Seattle, bearing men from the Northland. Men who were carrying with them literal tons of gold.
Within days, the Last Great Gold Rush was on.
Short, intense, and unprecedented in scope, the Klondike phase was essentially over by the summer of 1899, when it was discovered that the beaches of Nome, Alaska, were covered with gold dust. Those who still cherished the dream turned their attention west. (One hearty soul left Dawson City by bicycle. His departure—pedaling gamely across a snow-field—was captured on film.)
But before then, by some estimates as many as a million people from all over the globe, headed for the Klondike. (Although many, if not most, did not even know where it was.) Approximately a hundred thousand actually made it far enough to be “on the trail.” Of those maybe forty thousand reached “the Eldorado city of Dawson.”
Of those forty thousand a number did indeed make their fortunes—by opening stores and hotels, laundries and restaurants, sawmills and whorehouses.
Only a few thousand found gold, and of those, only a few hundred in any quantity.
For purposes of this book, Duncan and his friends are numbered among that few hundred, despite the enormous odds against them. The valley in the Mackenzies isn’t on any map, though the theory of “looking where the rivers used to be” was a popular one among some of the prospectors.
Most of the rest of their journey, however, is as close-to-life as I could make it. In the Seattle/Skagway/Wilderness chapters, names of hotels, bars, ships, newspapers, restaurants, mountains, lakes, rivers, forts and some people are real. (Claire and her “Uncle,” however, are not.)
The story of Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith is all true. Under me guise of an upright businessman, Smith ran a con on the honest citizens of Skagway and the thousands of argonauts who chose to travel the White Pass, for nearly a year. He had men—like Slim Jim Foster—steering hapless newcomers directly into the clutches of his thugs. He controlled the law, (what there was of it) at least one of the churches and a number of saloons and gambling houses, besides the Parlour. He amassed a fortune and on the Fourth of July in 1898, actually joined the governor of Alaska in leading the town’s Independence Day Parade!
Four days later (as Duncan predicted) the good citizens of Skagway did come for him. A man named Frank Reid, head of a vigilante committee formed in March to stand against Smith and his gang, shot it out with Soapy on Juneau Wharf. Smith lost. His grave lies on a hill above Skagway. Frank Reid, who was mortally wounded in the fight, died a day later. He’s buried nearby, under a monument praising him as the savior of Skagway.
I’ve taken two liberties in my story. The first is allowing Our Heroes to actually reach Dawson City before the winter. In reality, only a handful of the aforementioned forty thousand got through in 1897—many didn’t because they were traveling without sufficient provisions. The vast majority of the gold seekers were stopped by the weather on the shores of Lake Bennett. They wintered there in an ever-growing tent city. The amazing flotilla—seven thousand boats of all descriptions—didn’t take to the water until the end of the following May.