He sat inside the entry, waiting for the flying shadows. Finally they began flapping. The bats cast a spell over the prisoners, the men watching them with something like envy. Duncan studied them as they swooped out of the low arch. Most went right, up the tunnel, but several went left. He grinned. He understood the boy’s lunacy.
The evening meal came, a watery oxtail broth with bread that was as hard as naval biscuit. Duncan checked the condition of his patients and listened as the other prisoners complained of the provosts, the army, the French, and the bloodthirsty Hurons who were allied with the enemy. The army seemed to be in worse shape than Duncan would have thought, with regiments depleted and morale low despite the recent string of English victories. Several of the men had been in the Americas for years. Some had suffered the fevers of the Indies, one had survived the terrible massacre in which General Braddock and much of his army had been destroyed near Fort Duquesne. Most had been in the horrible bloodbath of the first battle at Ticonderoga in which the Black Watch had lost two thirds of their men.
Duncan retired to his blanket and tried to sleep but spent much of his time drawing a map in his mind of the region around Albany and the Iroquois towns beyond. He found his gaze drifting toward the arch that led to the tunnel. His life hung by a thread. When the bats returned, the provosts would come for him soon after. A handful of officers would be rising, their orderlies adorning them with stiff collars and lace cuffs for the solemn words that would mean his death.
He waited until every man was sleeping, then rose and stepped into the forbidden corridor. There was no sound, no movement from the guard station at the top of the tunnel. He turned and slipped into the gloom below.
The tunnel narrowed and turned as it descended, the slow-burning pitch torches spread far apart now so that he could barely see where he placed his feet. He had grown to tolerate the fetid odor of the first cell, but that in no way prepared him for the reek that reached him. It was the smell of decay, of suffering, of death. For a moment he gazed back up the tunnel. Nothing but the king’s noose waited in that direction. He turned toward the death he did not know.
Dante’s hell needed nine levels to capture all the aspects of human suffering. The iron hole of the English only needed two. The chamber he stepped into echoed not with the sounds of slumber but of misery. Five men lay on filthy straw. Two were moaning and clutching their bellies. A man with a filthy bandage over his shoulder stared at the floor and murmured the same short prayer, over and over. A man who looked more like a skeleton than a living creature stared with vacant eyes at one of the cell’s two candles.
With a sinking heart Duncan saw there was no one else in the cell, no boy, no refugee from the massacre of Bethel Church.
He retreated a step, reflexively wanting to be away from the squalor and suffering, then looked again, more slowly, at the prisoners. For a moment he sensed Conawago at his side, so intensely that he thought he smelled the sweetfern sprigs the Nipmuc kept in his pockets, and he saw in his mind’s eye the opened, extended hand that always meant he expected something of Duncan. He clenched his jaw then knelt by the first of the prostrate figures. The man was ghostly pale and hot to the touch despite the chill of the air. Duncan saw a rag hanging on a bucket of water and made a compress for his forehead. The next man was much the same but did not even respond to his touch. Duncan gazed in horror at the black splotches on the face of the third. The fourth man, a soldier with long blond locks not much older than Duncan, gazed at the candle but did not see. He had been dead for hours.
Duncan studied the pathetic souls of the cell. There was almost nothing he could do for them. He approached the man with the bandaged shoulder, whose gaze was now fixed on the shadows at the back of the cell. The prisoner winced when Duncan pulled at the bandage but did not stop him from unwinding it. The long piece of linen had been applied by an experienced hand, probably by a regimental surgeon, but it should have been replaced long before. Duncan threw the foul cloth into the shadows and examined the long ragged wound. It was dirty but not festering. He retrieved the bucket with its wooden ladle and sluiced water over it.
“Huron tomahawk,” the prisoner declared in a hoarse voice. “I killed the bastard. Now he kills me.”
“The flesh is not mortified,” Duncan replied. “You just need to keep it clean.”
The man glanced at the prisoners on the straw and cast a bitter grin at Duncan, seeming to indicate that Duncan was only saving him for a worse fate. Duncan began ripping a strip from his shirttail. When he had the bandage ready, he took a cartridge-like container from a belt pouch and poured out its contents, a dark brown powder, over the wound. “A wise old healer makes this,” he explained. “He speaks words over it which his people think give it great power.”
“You mean a witch or an Indian?” The man asked, wincing as Duncan tightened the bandage over the wound.
“They say the people of the forest hold secrets that go back to the beginning of the earth.”
“And they send their lads deep into the earth to dig more secrets out,” the man said. He gazed again into the deepest shadows.
With a rush of hope Duncan called out toward the darkness. “Ishmael?”
There was no response. “Shay kon,” he said, trying the greeting of the Mohawks, then added, “Ojiwa of the Nipmucs? I come from your uncle.”
The movement was barely noticeable at first, a shadow moving across darker shadow.
Duncan straightened and repeated the Iroquois greeting, in a near whisper. When Ishmael stepped forward, he wanted to embrace the boy but instead stood still very still, as he might before a wild creature of the forest.
“They would never put children in here, so I was sure he had to be a ghost when I first saw him,” the wounded soldier said. “Suddenly he was just standing there, all pale and silent, staring at us like he had come to escort one of us across to the other side.”
Although the boy wore a shirt, it was unbuttoned. Duncan could see the traces of whitewash on his skin. But this was not the angry world breaker who had left the Pritchard farm, this was just another forlorn prisoner.
The boy studied Duncan warily, keeping himself slightly bent, as if ready to leap away at any second.
“I am the particular friend of Conawago, elder of the Nipmuc tribe,” Duncan declared, and he reached into his waistcoat pocket. “Kinsman of Hickory John.”
“Towantha,” the boy replied, using his grandfather’s tribal name.
“Towantha,” Duncan repeated, and he pulled out the wooden medallion he had found in front of the dead Nipmuc.
The boy’s eyes went wide. He took one step forward, then another.
“A twine?” the soldier interrupted, pointing at Duncan’s sleeve. “You’ve been marked with a damned twine? You’re bound for the gallows?”
Duncan just nodded, not taking his gaze off the boy. “I’ve been looking for you, Ishmael,” he said.
The youth darted forward and grabbed the medallion, clutching it against his heart. After a moment he looked up and studied Duncan with uncertain but intelligent eyes. “They would hang you for looking for me?” His English was slow but fluent, his voice heavy with fear.