“The Blooddancer was here,” Duncan said, and explained what he learned of the murder of Peter Rohrbach and his Delaware wife.
“I had an old uncle who would fill the winter nights with tales of the trickster Blooddancer,” Tanaqua recounted. “As a young boy I buried myself in furs against the wall of the lodge and laid awake half the night in fear. Later when we fought in the wars together I asked why he did such a thing. He said there were many things to learn along the path to being a warrior but the most important thing was fear. He said a man without fear is a danger to all those around him, that I had to learn there were indeed many things to fear in this world and the next.”
The Trickster. The strange symbol messages, Duncan realized, were the work of a trickster. “The killers move downstream ahead of us,” he said. “Is that what Woolford feared, that nineteen men would be torn apart by an Iroquois demon?” He answered his own question. “It can’t be. He came from Johnson Hall, running south. He would not have known about the missing mask.”
“Colonel Johnson sent for Red Jacob. I was with Red Jacob when he read the message. Life or death. Come now, it said. That was the day after the mask was stolen. Sir William knew. Messages run between Onondaga and Johnson Hall almost every day.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”
“It had nothing to do with the Blooddancer. You look for missing men. I look for a missing god.”
“Then why did the Blooddancer kill Red Jacob? First Red Jacob, then the man on the river. Now two Moravians here at Shamokin. The Blooddancer is going south.”
Tanaqua frowned, as if Duncan had insulted the god. “The Trickster does not even know Europeans exist. He is an Iroquois god.”
“He knows enough to kill them. You said before, he infects those around him with his bloodlust.”
Tanaqua did not reply. After a long silence he lifted a handful of the sandy soil by the rock and sprinkled it on the ledge, then made the image of a stick man with the head of a fish on his neck. “He knew how to tame angry spirits. The half king.”
“The half king was half a man?”
“All the leaders at the edge of the League’s territory are called half kings. But this is his particular sign. When he traveled he would cut that shape in trees or scratch it in rocks along his path. When I was a boy my uncle took me to see some, the fish men carved on trees. We found old shrines near every one of the signs.” Tanaqua somehow seemed angry with himself.
Finally he turned to Duncan. “The dead man on the river. The arm with the string. He had ripped away his shirt and scratched letters on his flesh.”
“You mean the killer did.”
“No. Under the fingernails of his other hand there were still pieces of his own skin and flesh.”
Duncan now recalled how the Mohawk had hesitated over the body and lifted the second hand for a moment. “What did it say?” Duncan asked, then saw by the flash of embarrassment on Tanaqua’s face he had asked the wrong question. “I am sorry. What were the shapes of the letters?”
The Mohawk leaned over to claw up a handful of sandy soil, dropped it between them, and spread it flat. With a twig he made the letters he had seen.
A chill crept down Duncan’s spine as he read them. Fi Fo Fum.
He shuddered at the thought of the man’s last moments, probably left for dead, an eye hanging out, the shrieking agony of the mutilations wracking his body. Yet he had ripped his shirt, tied the old family heirloom to himself to protect it, then clawed at his own flesh to send a message. The urgent message left by the Philadelphia gentleman, his last desperate words, were the same unlikely words carried by the dead Oneida.
“Watch the woman on the left,” Tanaqua said. Duncan followed his gaze to a middle-aged woman who stood apart from the others. “At the end of each of her racks she lays down half a fish, for the river spirits. Only her racks.” Duncan glanced at the others and saw his companion was right. The Mohawk turned to him with an expectant look and when Duncan did not react he raised his brows. “She is Lenni Lenape. The only one I have seen today,” he said, then pushed off with his hands, gracefully dropping from the low ledge onto the flat where the woman worked.
Lenni Lenape. A Delaware. By the time Duncan reached them she was in earnest conversation with Tanaqua. The woman not only knew Rachel, she was her aunt. “I promised to look after her while her mother went to the Ohio country in search of her husband, who never came back from the war.” As she raised her hand with another fish, Duncan saw a fresh cut on the back of her hand, and remembered the blood at Rachel’s grave. It was an old, nearly extinct, part of tribal burials, slicing one’s flesh to express grief.
“Had you seen your niece this week?” Duncan asked.
The woman kept working as they spoke, and Tanaqua began lifting the gutted fish from her basket and stretching the rich layers of flesh before handing them to her for the rack. She nodded. “Three days ago I took a rabbit stew to them. Rachel was sewing a little quilt for the baby. Peter was talking to those Philadelphia men, so I sat with her and helped for an hour.”
“Philadelphia men? Do you know their names?”
“No names. Friends of Peter’s from Philadelphia.”
“What did they talk about? Did they argue?”
“Not argue. Hushed, very serious. Something important. Like when men go on a warrior’s path, though those two men were no warriors. When they left, Peter had to call out to tell them they were going in the wrong direction to reach town.”
“Did they say anything to you? Have you seen them here in town?”
“Nothing to me. Not like Peter’s other friend who came with him from Philadelphia. Very kind man. He could speak Iroquois like he had been born in a lodge. But they argued that time. Peter said the Bible, the captain he say Shake-a-speare,” she said, adding a syllable that lent it a tribal whimsy.
Duncan looked at her with a dumbfounded expression. He knew only one captain who would speak of Shakespeare on the frontier. “Woolford. Patrick Woolford.”
The woman shrugged, and swung a horsehair whisk at the gathering flies. Later there would be smoky fires lit along the rows of racks that would keep away the insects. “He made Rachel laugh. Graves in the rain. Worms in the dust. He made Peter recite it again and again. No write, no write, the captain say. A book would come. No write. But later Peter write, and he made the show for Rachel.” Tears trickled down the sturdy woman’s cheeks. “What do I tell her mother? There is no one to make babies in our family ever again.”
Duncan had no answer to her question. As Tanaqua took the woman’s hand and began speaking in low comforting tones, Duncan backed away. He climbed the path to the town, once more aiming for the church. He walked slowly, trying to piece together what he had heard. He realized he should not have been surprised that Woolford had been at Shamokin. Over the years he had learned that the process of solving the puzzles of deaths was like painting on a blank canvas, filling in a tree, a cloud, a house, a flower, a road, then eventually vague human forms who, with the final strokes, at last assumed faces. But here all he had before him was a fog. Of course Woolford might have had business in Shamokin, which had become a common shore onto which the flotsam of war and lost causes drifted. But what business could the captain have had with a reclusive Moravian and his wife? For that matter, what was Woolford’s business? Conawago had spoken of secretive missions in the wilderness. But Woolford had disappeared for months the year before. Duncan had not known his whereabouts until a parcel had arrived from London, enclosing a newly published work on medicine, with a letter that spoke of family and weather, its only hint of his purpose there being references to too many trips to Whitehall and Greenwich, where high officials and military leaders met behind closed doors. Woolford had a mission, one that included nineteen men, one that was taking him to Virginia. But why would the captain have not sent Duncan to the military in Albany for help? It was as if he no longer trusted the military. Duncan still could not see through the murk on his canvas. But he knew that Woolford had trusted Peter Rohrbach with a deadly secret and, disobeying Woolford, Rohrbach had written it down.