"Y'er friend has killed our captain!" hissed the voice at his ear.
Duncan gazed at the dead officer. His eyes were already glazing, his skin growing waxy and pale. "We found him like this. We were trying to help."
"To hell you say! This savage was leaning over him with a bloody knife! Fixing to lift his hair."
"We are scouts for the rangers!" Duncan repeated, his own anger rising now.
"In that case we won't kill him here," the sergeant shot back. "We'll take him to the fort and have a proper trial before we kill him."
As the pressure of the blade on his throat relaxed two men roughly seized Duncan's arms, holding him tightly as the militia men went back to work on Conawago, with boots and heavy sticks. As the old Indian collapsed to the ground Duncan begged them to stop, cursed them in English then Gaelic, shouted at them, twisted violently to shake his captors off. Then one of the clubs slammed against his own skull. He fell to his knees, his arms still pinioned, unable to cover his head against the second blow. The last thing he saw was Conawago's precious little ceramic god, as old as time itself, being shattered against his breastbone.
CHAPTER TWO
Duncan became aware of the pinpricks of pain on his forehead first, then on his shoulder, and in his confusion thought he was back on his prison ship from Glasgow, where the rats had worked on his flesh while he slept. He smelled the filth and decay of the ship, sensed the slime of the moldy walls. A loud screech stirred him, a second caused his head to roll over, then new spikes of pain pushed open his groggy eyes.
A dead hand, gray with decay, was on his chest, being fought over by several blackbirds as others pecked at his own flesh.
Duncan's cry of horror came out as a dry, rasping croak. He pulled himself up, grabbing a club to pummel the scavengers, then cried out again as he saw the thing in his hand was no log but the lower half of a decaying human leg. He scrambled out of the shallow pit he had been thrown in, scattering the birds with a handful of dirt, not stopping until, his chest heaving, he pressed his back against a heavy palisade wall.
Quickly, still gasping, he took stock of his surroundings. He was at a large fortress built on a hill above earthworks, where blueuniformed artillery officers drilled their men around field guns. The garbage and days-old detritus of a surgeon's table had been thrown into the pit through a narrow opening in the wall near his head. As he fought a wave of nausea he realized his captors had sought out the pit, had planted the rotting hand on his chest, had, he saw now, knocked down a makeshift scarecrow that had kept the birds away. He closed his eyes, fighting another tremor of nausea, then stepped along the wall until he came to a gate, searching his memory of the military landscape of the western forest. He and Conawago had been less than a day's march from Fort Ligonier, the second biggest of the western fortifications after Fort Pitt.
The scarlet-coated sentry, a British regular, gave him a chilly nod as he slipped through the western gate. Spotting a well a hundred feet away, he waited until an Indian woman in a calico dress finished filling her gourd container then lowered the bucket and drank deeply, rinsed his hands in the remaining water, and emptied it over his head. Beginning to feel alive again, he found a perch in the shadows, leaning against a post of the porch that ran along the front of a long one-story building from which he could survey the grounds.
Small artillery pieces were mounted on swivels along the walls, sentries stationed at each corner. Opposite him men in artillery blue and infantry red wandered in and out of a second long building with several doors, all of the men wearing the small brass gorgets over their breasts that were the sign of rank in the British army. A handful of Indians, the Stockbridge scouts often used by the army, squatted beside a painted animal skin, tossing the white pebbles used in their games of chance. A solitary brave, wearing his hair in the narrow scalplock favored by the Iroquois, sat under a chestnut, slotting small iron arrowheads onto newly fletched shafts. Squads of infantry drilled to the sharp, impatient commands of their sergeants. All around him was an atmosphere of order, discipline, and fear. Although with the fall of Quebec the tide in the bloody war had turned at last in the favor of the British, the fighting was far from over in the wilderness.
"It isn't their knowledge of the spheres as such that impresses me most," came a refined voice from beside him, "it's that they possess it so intuitively."
Duncan turned to see a well-dressed man sitting on a keg by the wall of the building, gazing at the solitary Iroquois. "I'm sorry?"
"The aborigines. All the secrets of the natural world reside within them, yet they express their wisdom not through their words but through their actions. Their knowledge of natural philosophy is instinctive. We barbarians have to have it pounded into our skulls."
The extraordinary words came from an extraordinary-looking man. The stranger was in his midthirties, perhaps ten years older than Duncan. Over a fine linen shirt he wore a waistcoat in whose pockets hung the fobs of not one but two pocket watches. His long brown hair was tied at the back Indian fashion, with a strip of the dyed eelskin used by the river tribes for decoration. Around his neck hung both a small brass snuff box and an amulet wrapped in what looked like mink fur. His hands were unadorned but for a ring of oak leaves tattooed around one wrist like a bracelet. Over his woolen britches was a pair of leggings like those worn by rangers, though his were of doeskin decorated at the top with beadwork. On his feet were the heavy leather shoes worn by soldiers.
"I expressed my admiration for the archery skills of that bronzed Shawnee gladiator this morning as he was casually shooting squirrels out of a high oak. He explained that the force was in the wood of his bow and the accuracy in the lines of the shaft, that all he does is say a prayer to the spirits that loaned him the power of the wood, then point. A more perfect scientific explanation I could not expect from any number of learned professors." He looked up with a bright, curious expression at Duncan. "I am composing algebraic equations that explain the force of the arrow," he declared, tapping a linen bag that hung over his shoulder. "I could show you if-"
He was interrupted by a stocky man in an apron who briefly appeared in the doorway behind them to toss him a plug of tobacco with a quick utterance of thanks.
The stranger glanced at Duncan self-consciously. "Everyone's a friend when you pay off your debts."
"Haudenosaunee," Duncan said.
"Sir?"
"Not Shawnee. He is of the Haudenosaunee. It means people of the longhouse."
The man's eyes went round with excitement. "The Iroquois! The noble empire of the north! I have journals from my dialogues with the Lenni-Lenape, the Susquehannocks, the Shawnee, the Stockbridge, all but a prelude for studying the Iroquois. My studies inexorably lead me toward the heart of their inner kingdom. Might you be an emissary of sorts? Is it true they have ten words for bear, depending on the age?"
Duncan might have found himself grinning at the stranger's odd combination of zeal, intellect, and naivete were it not for his worry for Conawago. "I seek an old Indian brought in today, under arrest." He paused as he saw a new uneasiness on the man's face, and he extended his hand. "Duncan McCallum," he ventured, "formerly of the Medical College of Edinburgh."
The man's countenance instantly lit, and he pumped Duncan's hand vigorously. "Johan Van Grut of the Hague. Formerly of the university at Louvain and Yale College in the Connecticut colony."
"My friend carries himself like an old monk, wears his hair in long braids in the traditional style, though he was long educated by Europeans."