Conawago paused with a worried expression over the four slash marks on the man’s cheek, then indicated a tattoo on the left side of the warrior’s neck. “The fish with the arrow through it,” he offered, “is from the villages along Ontario, the inland sea. Probably his mother’s people.”
The other side of the Oneida’s neck was in ruin. Duncan had once stood with his grandfather on a dock in the Hebrides as a dead sailor had been carried ashore. The man had endured storms and pirates sailing from the West Indies only to die in the harbor when a lightning bolt had severed a backstay, which had whipped down and with dreadful fortune snapped his neck. “Mark it boy,” the old Scot had said, “each day our lives hang by inches.”
In Red Jacob the difference had been an inch exactly. His assassin’s ball had only snagged the outer inch of his neck. But in that span of flesh had been a vital artery.
“The shot came from the back,” Duncan said, showing Conawago the clean entry at the rear and the eruption of tissue and dried blood that marked its exit.
“He died running down one of the old war trails,” Conawago observed.
Duncan hesitated. “The Iroquois are no longer at war.”
“Nonsense. One way or the other the tribes have been at war ever since the first European stepped off a boat.”
The words pained Duncan. The gentle man he had befriended five years earlier would never have spoken so harshly. He unfastened the top buttons of the Oneida’s waistcoat, exposing the tracks of a life well lived. Over a dozen small tattoos, each a badge of honor or mark of great achievement, ran in an arc between the dead man’s shoulders. Duncan recognized several. A shooting star, a crescent moon, and an upraised hand each signified completion of a ritual ordeal, all of them excruciating to the body but cleansing of the spirit. A bear, an elk, and an eagle signified the touching-never the killing-of a massive grandfather of each species, one of the prime, proud specimens said to embody important forest gods. A canoe bearing several stick figures with an arrow over it marked the remarkable, inhumanly fast ranger expedition that had been dispatched from the New York colony to force the surrender of Fort Detroit at the end of the French war. Woolford too wore the symbol on his chest.
Conawago pulled away the cloth that covered the Oneida’s left arm and looked up expectantly. Duncan had seen dismemberments before, had even participated in dissection of the dead at his medical college, but somehow the severing of Red Jacob’s forearm deeply unsettled him. He had been with the body on the trail before the dismemberment. He sensed he had somehow failed the Oneida, by leaving his body to the butcher who had killed him. Mutilation of a warrior’s corpse was a grave sin, an affront to the dead and the living alike. Red Jacob would arrive in the next world without his entire body, and would not be able to tell his ancestors that he had nobly lost his arm in battle. Some in the tribes would say the spirit of such a corpse could still feel the pain of such a wound, that it would even disrupt the journey to the next world.
Duncan, who normally maintained a doctor’s reserve when examining the dead, had to clench his jaw, mastering his emotion as he gazed at the stump.
Conawago seemed to sense his discomfort, and started for him. “No sign of bleeding. He was already dead.”
Duncan lifted the lantern closer and probed the flesh with his fingers. “It came off in three-no, four slices from a sharp, wide blade, wider than most war axes, more like a hand ax for timber.”
“He had a tattoo on the arm,” Conawago said, pointing to the spidery lines that started on the bicep and led toward the missing limb. “When I saw him last autumn he had no such markings.”
Duncan searched his memory, picturing in his mind his first hurried glimpses of the dead man. “Curving and jagged lines that went around his arm and ended on the back of the hand,” he recalled. “Not an animal, not a symmetrical design. A random adornment.” He pressed a finger against the remaining lines above the elbow, then with new purpose grabbed a rag, dipped it in the bucket of water by the forge, and rubbed at the lines.
“Not a tattoo,” he declared in surprise, indicating the smudge he made. “Just ink, India ink. It might have stayed for weeks if he did not scrub at it. Ink,” he repeated in a confused tone.
“A charm then,” Conawago offered. “A protection.”
“Not from the one who eats the bones of men,” Duncan whispered. He looked up, sensing a new chill in the air.
The old Nipmuc seemed to have stopped breathing. His voice cracked as he spoke. “Why would you say such a thing?”
“The boy said it. He was raving with fear, saying this was done by an ancient demon who eats the dead. He said the monster is coming for us, shaking his rattle, and that everyone who hears it will die. Some tale to keep children in their blankets at night.”
Conawago’s hand shot to the pouch holding his own spirit totem and he murmured a prayer in the tongue of his youth. “Children are not wise enough to be truly scared. It is the old chiefs and sachems who quake with fright when they hear of that rattle. He rages against men and revels in remaking their bodies so they will be as hideous as he is.”
“It’s not unknown for tribal enemies to take a body part as a trophy,” Duncan ventured.
Conawago was one of the bravest men Duncan knew, but he now watched as fear grew on the old man’s countenance. He shook his head as if disagreeing with Duncan and studied the body. The old Nipmuc bent four fingers and raked the air over the slash marks on the Oneida’s face, then pressed his fingers over Red Jacob’s abdomen, pausing over a little lump below the Oneida’s belly. Duncan loosened the remaining buttons of the waistcoat and pulled back the fabric.
Conawago groaned and jerked backward, holding his own belly as if he had been struck. Red Jacob’s amputated hand was reaching out of a hole in his abdomen.
“This monster has a name,” Conawago declared in a hoarse voice. “It is the Blooddancer.”
Conawago had been as distraught as Duncan had ever seen him, insisting that the body had to be cleansed again, with new prayers, and the old Nipmuc had hovered over Duncan as he had closed the incision in Red Jacob’s belly, cupping fragrant smoke over him as he worked with needle and thread.
Duncan worried that the news he had from the Great Council would only alarm his friend more, but he knew he could no longer delay telling him. “Adanahoe used that name. The Blooddancer mask had been stolen, she told me, and the Great Council is deeply disturbed,” he recounted as he tied off the suture and cut the thread. “Her grandson died in pursuit of the thieves. She said you and I were to track down the missing god. She saw it in a dream. I was going to tell you over breakfast.”
Conawago’s eyes flashed, then he fixed Duncan with a sober stare. “The mother of the tribes had a dream about us? And you wait to tell me?” To the tribes, dreams were important messages from the spirit world. He demanded every detail of Duncan’s meeting with the old matriarch, but not before he had moved their stools to the back workbench, and lifted the bowl of smoldering cedar to set it between them.
The old Nipmuc, who had been trained by the Jesuits and visited great cathedrals in Europe, solemnly listened, nodding with an increasingly forlorn expression. He had decided, for reasons he had once explained to Duncan while sitting under a meteor shower, that the Christian God deserved great respect but he was a European god. The gods of the sacred lodge were for the natives of the woodlands. There was nothing irreconcilable, he insisted, about two sets of gods and saints serving two different peoples.
Conawago stared into the rising smoke a long time before responding to Duncan’s report. “The farther that god is taken from his home the angrier he will become. He is capable of terrible things”-he gestured toward Red Jacob-“of slicing humans apart for the sport of it. Blooddancer is a very old god, a vengeful god. He is the Trickster, and when his blood rage is on him he will slash men with the claws of his rattle, then rip them apart and put them back together like horrible puzzles.”