A stone rolled on the path and Duncan looked up to see the Iroquois boy staring fearfully at Woolford. Duncan pointed to a little stream twenty paces away. “He lives. Get me moss from that bank,” he ordered the boy in the Iroquois tongue. “Then find some spiderwebs.”
The boy seemed not to understand. Duncan tried again, more urgently. “What is your tribe, boy?” he finally asked, in English.
“’Cadian,” the boy replied in a low voice, as if wary of being overheard.
Reminding himself that the boy was of the Canadian Mohawks, who sometimes spoke a different dialect, he explained in English what he needed.
Half an hour later Duncan had done what he could to staunch the bleeding and clean the wounds. The needle with silk thread and the sterile bandages he needed would have to wait until Edentown. For one short moment Woolford stirred toward consciousness. He reached up, grabbing Duncan’s arm, though he showed no sign of recognizing his friend. “They’re all going to die! Every last man will die!” he uttered with desperate effort, then collapsed.
A terrible chill rose along Duncan’s back. “Edentown is less than eight miles away,” he said to the boy. “Down the southern trail. You’ll see its cleared fields and barns to the east after the trail passes a high waterfall. I want you to help tie the captain onto my back then run for the town. Take my pack, they will recognize it there. Go to the great house and tell them Captain Woolford is hurt bad. Bring four strong men and a litter.”
“But Red Jacob-” the young Iroquois protested.
“We have to tend to the living, boy.” Duncan saw the anguish on his thin face. “But we can set his body in repose, lay down some cedar to attract the spirits.”
The boy gave a solemn nod, then pushed the flour sack looped over his shoulder to his back, and bent to help lift Woolford.
As they walked, Duncan, bent under the weight of his unconscious friend, pointed out strands of ground cedar, which the boy retrieved as Duncan explained how he should place a ring of the fragrant plant around the warrior. The youth ran ahead as they approached the log where the Oneida had died, and had begun the task when he cried out and backed away.
Red Jacob’s left arm was gone. The eater of bones had returned.
CHAPTER TWO
The big Philadelphia clock in the downstairs sitting room struck four in the morning as Duncan finished the sutures on Woolford’s head. He had been grateful his friend had not regained consciousness while he had plucked the splinters and ball from his broken ribs and reset the bones, but now he was getting worried. The ranger captain had not stirred since that first troubling moment in the forest. Duncan had no way of knowing how gravely his brain was injured.
“Mr. McCallum, surely you need some refreshment.” He turned to see Jessica Ross, the young Scottish woman recently brought by Sarah from Pennsylvania as the manor’s cook. She held out a tray with a cup of tea and a piece of buttered bread.
Duncan glanced back at his unseeing friend, then reluctantly rose and nodded his gratitude. “It’s late,” he observed.
“Oh nae, t’is early,” Jess grinned. “A new day. There’s fires to be lit and cows to be milked.”
Returning her smile he quickly drained the teacup then consumed the bread on the way to the smithy. As he reached the low-roofed building he paused, extending his hands over the dull heat of the smoldering forge as he gazed uneasily at the body on the workbench.
“It’s not that cold, Duncan,” came a deep voice from the shadows. The big black man who sat on the stool in the corner would have been invisible but for his tan waistcoat. Crispin had come with the litter for Woolford but had continued up the trail with the boy for the Oneida’s body, and had not left it since.
“No,” Duncan admitted. “I’m just soul weary, my friend. Too much blood. Will there never be an end to it?” In the dim light Duncan saw that Crispin, freed slave and now schoolmaster of the village, held one of the long hickory staffs that were waiting to be fixed by the smith to a shovel or hoe head, and he realized that the big man was not just keeping vigil, he was standing guard. Like Duncan, he was loath to spread an alarm but knew the killing meant danger could be lurking nearby. Duncan clenched his jaw and stepped to the workbench.
A pot of smoldering cedar, flanked by candles, lay near the head of the dead Oneida. The old man who sat beside Red Jacob was murmuring a tribal song for the dead, to ease the journey to the other side. Duncan found another high stool and sat opposite Conawago, the corpse between them.
He remembered the quiet Oneida from one of the elders’ feasts in Onondaga. Red Jacob had sat beside him as they ate and spoken with surprising passion of his children, then of long journeys as a ranger around the inland seas and the great falls of Niagara. But when the sacred pipe had been passed around the circle, signifying the beginning of the elders’ orations, Red Jacob’s face had become as solemn as a monk’s. The next day Duncan had seen him at the riverside carrying a young girl on his shoulder and joyfully encouraging a boy of eight or nine as he caught frogs. Their laughter had filled the forest.
“It’s enough,” he whispered as he gazed into the strong face of the Oneida. “I have laid out the bodies of too many good men of the tribes. When will it end?” he asked the dead man.
He had not intended for Conawago to hear, but he realized the singing had stopped. “When all the good men are gone,” the old Nipmuc said in a matter-of-fact voice. Their eyes locked in a painful gaze. Conawago had given up on his decades-long search to find his people, lost to him as a boy after he had gone with the Jesuits to be educated in Europe. Duncan increasingly sensed that despite his stout heart, his friend was beginning to feel, like many other warriors of the rapidly shrinking tribes, that his one goal in life was to find a good way to die.
Conawago broke away and gestured to the corpse. “The Death Speaker has work to do. Do not let me disturb you.”
Death Speaker. It was what the Iroquois sometimes called Duncan. Once he had aspired to be a doctor, had nearly completed medical school in Edinburgh before being arrested for harboring his aged uncle, an unrepentant Jacobite rebel. Unlike many of the natives, he was not afraid to touch the dead. He also had learned much of Conawago’s native healing arts. But among the tribes he was known not so much for his healing as for his ability to learn from the dead, to coax the truth out of unexpected corpses.
Duncan saw that Conawago was staring at his chest and looked down to see that his hand was clutching the small quillwork pouch that hung from his neck. Duncan was a man of two clans, Conawago sometimes told him. Highland blood may course in his veins but the tribes and their totems, like that in the pouch, had a claim on his spirit.
He stood and whispered a prayer of his Catholic mother as he paced around the corpse. On the Oneida’s feet were moccasins of thick elk hide soles fastened to doeskin with intricate quillwork, probably the gift of his wife or mother. The dark brown trous that covered his legs were of thick sailcloth, a fixture of British sailors borrowed by the rangers during the war with the French.
“Was he in the war then?” Duncan asked.
Conawago nodded. “One of Woolford’s sergeants. He still carries the medallion,” he added, referring to the little bronze discs inscribed with a tree that Woolford issued to the men, European and native alike, who served with him. If he still carried the disc then he was among the handful of elite rangers who remained on active duty, engaged on Woolford’s cryptic missions.
Duncan lifted the pouch tied to Red Jacob’s waist and upended it onto the bench. The ranger’s disc, a flint, a length of knotted twine, a square piece of quillwork, two spotted feathers, and one cube from a pair of gaming dice. Or rather a piece of a dice, for the little bone cube had been crushed and half was missing.