“Soldiers will be coming,” Conawago reminded him.
Duncan found himself on his feet. Canoes were already shoving off, heading downstream, some paddled by the warrior Scots. He quickly waded through the thigh-deep water to the far bank, shaking a hand here, offering a word of encouragement there, accepting from one of the Iroquois warriors a bundle of feathers wrapped with a strip of fur. Tashgua’s son was there, arranging large leather pouches that Duncan suspected held the ceremonial masks. Ravencatcher soberly lifted a leather necklace from his neck and placed it around Duncan’s neck. A claw of a bear hung from it. “In all your life,” the Indian said, “you will never need to fear a bear again.” He turned and stepped into a canoe.
Suddenly a small, round face was in front of him.
“You can stay here, Alex,” Duncan said. “Study in the schoolhouse.”
Alex seemed to have lost years from his once weary countenance. He was no longer a ghostwalker. He was a boy. He nodded. “She made me promise to come back in a year. Sarah says that I must learn the drawing of words, that I must become a bridge between peoples.”
“And with oxen perhaps,” Duncan said with a grin.
Sadness crossed the boy’s face for a moment. “Before I left the mission, I cut all his bindings. I told him a strange Scottish man had come to save us. I asked him to come with me. He followed me for a few steps and stopped and gazed at me with those huge eyes of his. Then he turned and walked down the road to the bark mill.”
They stood in silence, struggling for words. Adam Munroe was there, beside them, between them.
Someone called out the boy’s name. Alex’s new mother was gesturing him toward a canoe.
Duncan suddenly searched his pockets for something, for anything. He loosened his belt and slid off the sheath with the ranger knife, pushing it into the boy’s hand. Alex solemnly accepted the gift, then backed away several steps, his eyes locked on Duncan’s, before turning and darting to the canoe.
Conawago waited for him on the other side. They watched in silence as the last canoe disappeared down the river, an emptiness building inside.
“He would not go like that,” the old Indian said after a long moment.
Duncan had met many men in America who could expertly decipher the signs of the forest, but only one who could always read the tracks of his heart.
“He waits.”
“Where?”
“There is a place where people from different worlds go to find words for each other.”
He ran. With no thought except that he would be too late, he ran.
But Jamie was there, sitting on a log, staring at the lichen-covered cairn, his gun and pack beside him. He did not turn when Duncan stopped at his back.
“There was an old pantry in the rooms I let in Edinburgh,” Duncan said after a long moment. “He stayed in there with a cabinet pushed across the entry to hide it. At night we spoke about the old times. I was trying to find a ship for him to Holland. I was going to buy him passage and give him what little money I had. But one morning he said it was his birthing day, and he wanted a jar of whiskey. I never knew what exactly happened when he was alone that day. There was a pounding on the door after I returned. The magistrate’s men knocked me down with their staffs, began beating me. I woke up in a cell. At the trial my neighbors testified they heard Highland singing from my rooms. He got drunk and sang. He survived all those battles, all those storms, and in the end it was the old songs that killed him.
“They took me in chains to the hanging. He spat in the eye of his hangman. The hangman was so mad, he broke his arm. He shouted out the name of our clan. They broke his other arm. He sang one of his songs until he had no breath left.” Duncan’s heart felt like a vise was closing around it. “I was a coward. I should have sung with him.”
“They would have broken your arms, too,” Jamie said, still facing the cairn of the old tribes.
“I should have sung with him,” Duncan repeated. After a moment he sat on the log beside his brother. “You’re going west. You mean to go to the Iroquois towns.”
“No. Tashgua understood before he died. The old ones there understood.”
“Understood what?”
“Do you know how many settlers there are in the English colonies?”
“A hundred thousand, perhaps two.”
“Hundreds of thousands, nigh a million, and increasing every day. There’s maybe thirty thousand Iroquois, far fewer of the Lenni Lenape and other tribes. Every year another twenty or thirty miles of forest is taken. Tashgua understood it. Conawago understands it. Woolford understands it.”
“What exactly?”
“About the future. The tribes all look to the future as a time when white men and red men live beside one another. But the white men, they assume that in the future there will be no more Indians.”
The words raised an unexpected pain. Duncan buried his head in his hands a moment. “The army, Jamie. We can explain things. You have a future-”
Jamie reached into his pocket and pulled out a well-worn letter. “Woolford found this on Pike. It cautions me about trusting the king and the king’s army. It reminds me of what the army did in the Highlands, and to the Highland way of life. The one who wrote it suggests that naught but disaster comes when men without conscience take on the mantle of command.”
Duncan stared at the ground. It had taken many weeks, and it had gone through many unintended hands, but the letter Duncan had written the night before Evering’s death had finally reached his brother. “You mean to go far,” he said at last. He was having trouble making his tongue work. He had waited years to speak like this, brother to brother, and now Jamie was leaving.
“There are places beyond the Ohio that will see no settlers for two or three more generations at least. If there had been such lands back home, we would have done the right thing long ago.”
“So you’ll do it now for a few Scots and some of the Iroquois.”
“We’ll do it for all Scots, and all Iroquois.” Jamie stood and, as Duncan watched, opened his pack, pulling out an inch-wide strip of wampum. He placed it over his wrist and finally looked into his brother’s face. “We wish you to come with us. There is a place for the McCallum clan out there, away from the world.” He bent and pulled something from behind the cairn. It was Duncan’s own pack.
It was Duncan who broke his brother’s earnest gaze, looking out into the dark forest as he struggled for words. “You forget who I am. A transported convict with a warrant to send me back to prison.”
“Run. You would not be the only wanted man among us. The wilderness is wide. The king is far away.”
“The war will be over in a year or two. The army will turn toward Europe and Asia and the Caribbean. They will forget you. But Ramsey will never forget me. He would hire more men like Hawkins to find me. And once they did, your secret would be lost.”
Jamie silently paced around the old cairn, his hand on the top stone, then reached into his pack and extracted a tattered piece of wool. “I took leave once from the barracks in Chester, told them I was going to Glasgow. But instead I went back to the old house. It was all in ruins, with gorse and heather growing out of the crumbled walls. But I found this under the remnants of a smashed chest.” He unfolded a piece of tartan, a foot wide and two feet long. It was the brown-and-green plaid favored by the McCallum clan. He handed it to Duncan. “The chief of my clan should have this.”
Duncan’s hand trembled as he reached for the wool. He had never expected to see the plaid again.
“In the shards of the chest were small stockings and britches,” Jamie added in a brittle whisper. “Mother was saving it for him, for when he grew older.”
“Angus,” Duncan whispered back, a new pain rising in his heart. Angus, their younger brother, who had not survived the bloodbath after Culloden.