“Now, how much do you have left out of what you just gave Purchase?” Merian asked, after the debt had been paid.
Magnus looked at the specie in his hand for a long time before answering. “Five shillings.”
“If I told you I was going to give you another five shillings, how would that figure up?”
Magnus thought hard, carefully imagining the coins in his palm before answering. “Ten shillings.”
“Now tell me the number of pence in that.”
Magnus was silent.
“What about parts of a pound?” Merian continued, as Magnus began to grow hot with embarrassment.
“You don’t have to make a fool of me,” he said finally, glaring at Merian.
“I’m not trying to embarrass you,” Merian answered. “I’m trying to help you get on better than you got on before. For that you need to know proper ciphering. A man can always trust somebody else to read something out for him, without too much worry over it, because what’s important here ain’t written down, unless you count the Bible — and there’s whole legions of preachers tripping over each other to do that for you — but if a man can’t cipher he can’t trust nobody to make up the balance or tell him what it is. Purchase is your brother, so he won’t cheat you out of your shillings. Then again he might. Do you trust him not to?”
Magnus thought about it, before answering, “I don’t think he would.”
“Well,” Merian said, “I’ve known him a bit longer than you, and he is dear as life to me, but I’ll count my own silver.”
Every day after that, when he left the fields, Magnus had to sit with either Merian or Sanne and practice arithmetic for hours on end, until he went to sleep at night with his brain aching from pondering figures and symbols. Still, he stuck with it every night that entire season and all the way into the next, until eventually he could count as well as a Dutchman.
When he found arrows out in one of the far fields, though, it did not take arithmetic to figure out there were three of them, all deadly.
At first Merian thought they were only old arrows that had been held in the ground for a long time, since the last hostilities with the Catawba, but he soon saw they were new and still bore the markings of being cut from their source. There had not been Indian troubles around Berkeley since before Merian settled there, but he knew immediately that the caravans pressing westward must have gone far enough out that the Indian was beginning to press back the other way.
He did not say anything else but gave Magnus an old musket to carry with him from then on, when working in the more distant fields.
“Can you shoot?”
“I can,” Magnus said, taking the gun.
“Good. If you see anything that looks like it needs to be shot, you do it.”
The next day as he worked out there again, with the gun slung over his shoulder, Magnus saw something approaching from the westward country and stood up to investigate. It looked to him like a wild animal of unusually large proportions, but as it grew closer he saw it was a man carrying pelts and skins for the market. It wasn’t until the man was almost right up on him that he saw that the pelts were human scalps, strung together and wrapped around his shoulders like sashes.
In addition to the scalps he also wore a double necklace of fingers, ears, and what Magnus finally figured out were noses. Other than that gruesome vesture he was stone naked.
In his arms he carried a large unadorned box, which he protected very carefully as he made his way up the road
When the man saw Magnus staring, he stopped at a distance and pointed at the articles on his person. “Any one of them will make you a good medicine,” he said.
When Magnus failed to reply, the man set down the box and opened it. “I have the vitals too, if that’s your aim: red, negro, white, whichever you want.”
Magnus looked into the box and saw a collection of grisly organ parts, and in the middle of it an intact human head. He turned away his face and looked back up the road.
“Well, I thought neggers liked such things for their doctoring. The one in the box was very powerful. Very good medicine.” The man closed his parcel of death and took it back up in his arms.
“Who is he?” asked Magnus, who had not spoken since seeing what the man was.
“I thought you could hear and talk,” the Indian agent replied. “I said to myself as I stopped here, Lacey, you done seen many things ye never thought ye would, and it’s fair you’ll see one or two more, but a mute Ethiop with a rifle, that you will never witness.”
The man seemed almost sad that this should be the case, making Magnus wonder briefly what else he had seen out there gathering scalps. “Him, his name was Kasatensera. You would rather fight any six other men. With his enemies he and the Negro sorcerer he worked with liked to have splinters of wood inserted in every little pore of their skin, until they stood out like frightful wooden hairs, and then set them all afire. Nasty stuff. Very powerful. If you were the type for it, very good medicine, I imagine.” He lingered over the word medicine, waiting to see whether Magnus would not change his mind. “Well, no matter. The governor is said to be paying thirty shillings a scalp, and more for this one, I wager. What would you reckon?”
Magnus, in the time he stood there, had counted fifty-two scalps on the man’s sash and quickly figured that he had 1,560 shillings, or 78 pounds sterling, worth of human flesh and profit wrapped around him, but he did not say anything.
“If you’re not interested, I better be moving on,” the agent said to him, taking up his awful box as if they had been carrying on any normal conversation.
When Magnus told Merian later what had happened, Merian told him to prepare for the worst of it. “No one takes a scalp but a war party,” he said. Sure enough, word began to come to them in the days that followed of settlers farther out on the frontier being attacked and one settlement being razed entirely. The governor had sent a dispatch of soldiers out to hunt down the offenders, but it disappeared without ever reporting back.
The rest of the spring and summer the road was filled with regular troops going out, and after that a party of allied Cherokee from the tidewater, who had licensed on to fight their sworn enemies. When that particular conflict was over, the flow of people across the road would be much larger, but its increase brought death down its whole length.
They were working the August harvest as usual at Stonehouses when one of the hired men yelled out “Fire!” at the top of his voice. Magnus looked into the western distance, where he saw thick oily smoke rising up. He climbed a tree and saw that a farm down in the far country of the valley was all ablaze.
He ordered two of the men to go over to investigate. When they returned both of them shook with fright, as they reported that their neighbors were well beyond helping.
That night the sky was still lit with the smoldering embers from the farm that had burned down, when another one, even closer to them, went up in flames. No one had to climb anything to see the resulting inferno, as it reflected ethereally off the clouds and stars, it was so bright and near to them.
Merian himself went over this time to see what help could be offered, and on the way a boy climbed out of an embankment of weeds and stood in the middle of the road when he heard the sound of wheels. Merian stopped the carriage and lifted the child up. When he had had a drink from Merian’s flask, he told of being attacked by a band of Catawba warriors. “They killed everybody where they slept,” he said. “The only reason they missed me is cause I climbed into the well and hid.” The bottom of his feet were bloody and raw from where he had pressed them against the rock, scrambling out.