Macaulay eyed the boy uneasily before quickly laying more wood on the fire.
“Surely not a decaying one with a leaky roof,” Duncan pointed out, forcing a grin.
“A new one would make you suspicious,” came Ishmael’s sober reply. The boy’s hand gripped the amulet that hung from his neck.
Duncan left his companions to stand at the entry, surveying the landscape. Iroquois lodges were built in bottomlands and were abandoned when the soil in their maize and squash fields was depleted. The lodge should have overgrown fields nearby, but there were none.
As the daylight faded Duncan went to search for more firewood, leaving Macaulay to coax heat into their little pot of corn mush and berries as Ishmael absently drew with a stick on the dirt floor. The rain had subsided to a soft drizzle.
He carried an armful of wood into the lodge and left again, slipping into the thick growth at the edge of the clearing. Duncan kept telling himself that the uneasiness he felt was because of Ishmael’s strange behavior, nothing more, but he also remembered now a night on a mountaintop with Conawago when the northern lights had been eerily dancing across the sky. The old Nipmuc sage had spoken of places where the spirit world intersected with this world, where beings from the other side might slip across on missions from the spirits. He was angry at himself for letting the skittishness of his companions affect him, but he had also learned such things, and such places, were often metaphors for Conawago, that they were ways of speaking of things that otherwise would be too painful to discuss directly.
The forest around the lodge was unnaturally quiet. The air seemed unsettled, and he suspected more severe weather was coming. He would have expected that birds would be flying in the lull between storms, that in the dusk deer and other small mammals would be active. But there were no birds, no deer, no fox, no squirrels. He circuited the site in increasingly wide circles, walking along the riverbank then stealthily cutting back into the forest. On his third circuit he halted above a low open swale overgrown with brush and small trees along its sides. He realized that it was a less used continuation of the path from the river. The lodge had not been the original focus of the path, only a waypoint, as though it had been built after the passageway. He followed it toward a waist-high mound, perhaps ten paces in diameter, built in a circle of trees. In its center was a post with leather straps. Some were old and rotting, others were fresh. He backed away as he realized he had seen such a post before, in Pennsylvania. It was a gaondote, a prisoner’s post, where captives were tormented and sometimes put to death. As his spine pressed against a tree, he turned to look into the eye sockets of a human skull embedded in the wood. He clenched his jaw, forcing himself to study the adjoining trees despite his pounding heart. Half a dozen held skulls of large forest creatures. The mound was a place of ritual, and of death.
He continued to scout until he found a campsite near the riverbank that had been used only a week or two earlier by a party that had chosen not to sleep in the old lodge. Crude hoops made from branches tied in circles with leather straps hung along the edge of the clearing. He lifted one and smelled the wood, noting the leaves and bundles of berries. Mountain ash, or rowan in the Old World. There were several hoops of ash, but also oak and alder. They were not skin-stretching hoops as he first thought, they were charms against evil spirits, charms he had seen as a child. They were not made by Iroquois but by those who had learned to fear demons in the wild and ageless Highlands.
He paced about the campsite, noting how close it was to the water. Soldiers of the northern campaigns had been trained by American rangers not to camp so close to bodies of water for fear of being trapped against them. The Scots who had been here had not been under the discipline of an officer. A small patch of red in a bush caught his eye, and he plucked it from the branches. It was a crude human figure, made of dried corn husks in the fashion of the dolls he had seen in Iroquois villages. But as he lifted it he saw it was no doll. It wore a little red coat and sported a tuft of grey squirrel fur gathered at the back with a length of red thread like a miniature wig. It was a British officer. Jammed between its eyes was a little arrow. It was a campsite of deserters.
As Duncan threw the figure down, more thunder rumbled in the west. He began picking up dried branches. They would need a lot of firewood that night.
Ishmael was attentive but subdued when Duncan returned, and he joined without argument when Duncan asked him to help retrieve more wood. It was Macaulay now who was withdrawn, silently eating his hot mush, then standing at the entry to look into the falling night. As he turned to retire to his blankets, he made the sign of the cross on his chest.
Later, after Duncan made a sentinel’s circuit around the lodge, Ishmael sat with him across the fire, studying Macaulay’s now sleeping form. “The way he marked his chest,” Ishmael said, “it is the way of the black robes. But the British do not follow those ways.”
Duncan hesitated. Calvin’s reformers had ravaged the monasteries and cathedrals of the lowlands, but the Church of Rome had a centuries-old grip in the Highlands and the Hebrides. The sign of the cross had been so common in his boyhood he had thought nothing of the Scot’s gesture. But the boy was right. The British had driven out all the vestiges of Catholicism, banned priests from serving with the army, banned mass among the troops. “It is a thing from western Scotland,” he offered, staring at the big infantryman. The Jacobites, the Scottish rebels who supported the exiled Stewart prince, were ardent Catholics, but the army dealt severely with anything hinting of their old enemies.
“They do it against devils,” Ishmael said.
“An invocation of God.”
“Against devils,” Ishmael repeated. “Dark things of the night. My grandfather helped me join with my protector,” he explained, touching the little amulet pouch that hung around his neck over the medallion that was now inside his shirt. “Also against devils.”
“You have been raised an Anglican,” Duncan reminded him.
“Grandfather said I would never understand Europeans if I did not understand their god, that I would never be able to truly speak with some Europeans unless I know how to speak to their god.” He fixed Duncan with a challenging stare. “But when my grandfather took me alone into the woods, to the old worship trees, to the boneyards of our people, he would tell me never to forget I had no cross in my blood.”
Duncan chewed on the words. “He meant all your blood is Nipmuc.”
“The only young one left in all the world, he told me. Once we watched a newborn fawn taking its first steps. If that was the last fawn ever to live, he asked, what should the life of that fawn be?” Ishmael fell silent. The boy clearly struggled for an answer.
“It would be for the fawn to keep alive the essence of the deer,” Duncan suggested, knowing that they were not speaking of deer but of Nipmucs, and that words would never be enough.
Ishmael gazed into the flames. “It is for me to keep the stories and the prayers of our people alive. When I was only six he began telling me them in cycles, different ones every night for a month, then when the moon shifted we would start over, until I could repeat them all.”
Duncan too stared at the fire. He knew it was irresponsible at a camp in the wilderness, that doing so would hurt his night vision should trouble come, but somehow he could not leave the boy, could not stop from trying to see what the boy saw in the flames. “We went to a burial ground in the mountains above Bethel Church,” he said softly. “The maples around it were all bloodred even though other trees had no color yet. A stream flowed by with silver water. A Mohawk named Sagatchie was with me, who read the stories on his skin. The animals of the forest paused to watch when we lifted Towantha onto his burial platform.”