Duncan recalled that there had been two strips of delicate ermine fur on her cross. One was for Rachel, the other for the unborn infant.
A tear rolled down the woman’s cheek and fell onto her folded hands. “Poor Peter was in pieces. His fingers had been cut away and jammed into holes pierced in his neck so they were like some hideous necklace.”
“The Blooddancer.” Duncan did not realize he had said the word aloud until he saw the woman shudder.
“An old Iroquois myth, boy. Speak not of such things in the House of our God.”
“There was no sign of a struggle?”
“Only footprints in the blood. Made by shoes with heels.”
“And have there been strangers in town?”
“What, apart from you and the twenty traders today, and more coming and going every day? The town may be crumbling but it is still at the intersection of many paths, on water and land.”
A tall native wearing a black waistcoat over his torso but only buckskin leggings and loincloth below entered the chapel and tended to the flickering lamp. He paused when he saw Duncan, then pulled up a stool and sat before them. He studied Duncan in silence before speaking in slow, carefully measured English. “It is the hand of God, Mother, that this man comes to us today.”
“This man?”
“You sit with the Death Speaker.”
The woman paled and inched away from Duncan, but the Christian Indian continued. Duncan realized he had met the man once, among missionaries along the Finger Lakes. “This is McCallum, brother to Sagatchie, comrade of Chief Custaloga, and the one who guided the great Chief Skanawati along his final path.”
It was Duncan’s turn to shudder as the native spoke of great men he had known, all Iroquois, all dead.
“Companion to Conawago,” the man continued, “and to the daughter of the shaman Tashgua.”
Mother Brumbach let out a breath. “The Death Speaker,” she repeated in a steadier voice, then rose and gestured Duncan into a small chamber at the rear corner that served as something of a rectory office. Against the wall was a small table, spotted with ink stains, which held dog-eared song sheets, quills, and several liturgical books. Above it were shelves bearing bundles of candles, little wooden crosses, and a battered wooden box.
Mother Brumbach set the box on the table, opened it, and lowered herself into the chamber’s only chair. “The cabin had been ransacked so God alone knows what was taken. But this”-she lifted out a muslin pouch-“was stuffed under the roof in the loft. His valuables.” She anticipated the question in Duncan’s eyes. “It’s where the Mission Society teaches us to hide our few valuables.”
Inside was another cryptogram, if it could be called such, written in the style of the message at Peter Rohrbach’s grave. A clever, artful hand had drawn first a rendering of a deer, a pea pod, a toe, and single syllables interspersed with a saw, a star with a tail, and what looked like several human eyes, closing with an oval from which several vertical lines extended, one with a fat cap at the top. At the bottom was a hasty postscript in plain text. Colonel Barre has offered encouraging words from London.
Below the odd missive was a child’s Bible bearing the dead man’s name in crude block letters; two feathers, one red and one white, bound together with a thin strip of fur; a quillwork bracelet with the names Peter and Rachel skillfully rendered with dyed quills. Duncan upended the pouch and a small black stone tumbled out. As he gazed at its coils and seams, he at first thought it was a stone expertly carved into the shape of a snail-like creature, then he suddenly realized he had seen such a stone before, in an Edinburgh display of natural curiosities. The luminaries had not all agreed on what to call it. A mortified beast, one had said. An alchemist stone. An Aristotle rock, some insisted, because the ancient Greek had been the first to describe them. But Duncan had settled on the term used by one of his more modern professors. A fossil.
“Was Peter a natural philosopher?” he asked.
Mother Brumbach was clearly uncomfortable with the little stone. “He always had an active mind.”
“Enemies?”
“Seldom would you meet a kinder soul this side of heaven. I never heard him raise his voice. Except once,” she added a moment later, “when a man from Philadelphia came through a few months ago. He had a starched collar and a ledger book. He said when the new counties were organized there would be land taxes owed and he was taking note of homesteaders. Asked to see Peter’s deed. I would not have credited it if I had not been there to witness it. Our gentle Peter raised an ax handle and declared that no far-off official had the right to tell him where to raise his family or take his hard-won earnings when giving nothing in return. ‘But I represent the governor,’ the man protested, and Peter said he never signed on to be the governor’s slave. Rachel came out with the dog, half wolf he was, and when he showed his teeth that fool from Philadelphia turned pale as a ghost. He must have run all the way back to town.”
He looked up to see Mother Brumbach holding a cross in her hand now. “Should I call in all our flock to stay in town?” she asked in a tight voice. “I am not ready to dig more graves.”
“This didn’t happen because he was a Moravian. Was he perhaps a friend of rangers? Of some Iroquois?”
She shook her head. “His darling wife was a Delaware, with a face like a spring flower.” The words, soft and delicate, seemed out of place on the tongue of the big-boned woman. She wiped a tear and turned away.
Duncan returned the items to the pouch, holding the black stone for a moment. It looked like a small stone nautilus. Mother Brumbach reached out and closed his fingers around it. “Take it. The thing unsettles me. There is something dark about it, something that has no business in a church. An old Dutchman said there were once ancient monsters whose breath turned every living thing to stone. One of the Senecas said he has seen a place in the mountains, a clearing where nothing grows, where the ground is littered with such stones. He said his old sachem told him it was the place where gods go to die.” She looked up forlornly. “Why would my Peter have such a thing?”
He wandered into the three taverns left in the town, all of them unclean, decaying places that stank of stale ale and unwashed men. There was no sign of rangers, or men who might once have been rangers. As he stood by the corner bar cage in the third, a man called out for a cup of dice. As the tavernkeeper reached for one of five shaped leather cups on a shelf above him, Duncan saw that five small printed rectangles had been pinned to the shelf below the cups.
The barman followed his gaze. “All the way from Philadelphia they come,” he groused, “just to reach into my purse to exchange my hard-won coin for little slips of paper.”
Duncan recalled seeing such rectangles fixed to the back of news journals. “I thought the stamp tax was only on gazettes and legal documents.”
“And playing cards. And dice, damned their eyes. The innkeeper next door refused to pay and they burned his cards and crushed his dice with a pestle.”
Duncan fingered the broken cube in his pocket as he left the tavern. Both Woolford and Red Jacob had carried broken dice, though he was certain neither was a gambling man.
He sat on a ledge overlooking the river and watched a dozen native women hanging splayed shad to dry on racks, some singing to babies on their backs. He tried to piece together the sequence of the deaths. The man on the river had died no more than two days earlier. The Moravian and his wife had died less than twenty-four hours earlier. The demon killers were still working their way south.
A shadow moved across him and Tanaqua silently lowered himself onto the rock.