As the ship lurched again, he glanced behind to confirm that the captain still firmly held the wheel, then he saw a new shape clinging to a line. With a gasp he released his hold and sprang across the slippery deck.
“Ishmael!” he cried above the din. “This is no place-” Another wave crashed over the deck, choking away his words. He dove for a line to keep from washing overboard and grabbed the boy with his free arm.
“The elders say the gods are angry at us!” the boy cried. The wind slammed a gull against the mast, and its lifeless body dropped to the deck. The boy looked at the dead creature, then at Duncan, as if it proved his point.
“No, Ishmael!” Duncan shouted into the boy’s ear. “This storm is driving us to where we need to be. The gods aren’t trying to kill us, they are just seeing if we are up to the task they gave us.”
Ishmael gazed uncertainly at Duncan, then a determined grin grew on the boy’s troubled face. They remained motionless, not speaking, as the wind and water lashed at them.
“You can hear her,” Duncan said when the wind ebbed for a moment. “Every ship has her song in a storm.”
Ishmael cocked his head, then slowly nodded, telling Duncan he understood. The wind had reached such a velocity that the taut lines and fittings of the masts were resonating with a low hum.
“This is one of the real things, isn’t it?” the boy declared.
Duncan nodded. A wild and unexpected joy pulsed through his heart. They were, together, hearing a voice of nature, the voice of gods, as some natives would say. For a moment he was his grandfather, standing with a young boy witnessing the rawness of the earth, humbled by the power of what the natives would call the real world.
“What she does is real too,” Ishmael said, and Duncan glanced at the boy uncertainly before making out a sound of higher pitch. He missed the woman when first scanning the deck behind them, finding her in the wind-driven spray only when her chant grew louder.
Hetty Eldridge had wedged herself between the low cabin wall and a post of the port rail. The repetitive Haudenosaunee words she spoke were fast and slurred, but he could make out enough to understand. They had been the first Iroquois words he had ever heard, invoked in a raging storm of the north Atlantic. She was speaking to the black snake wind, the spirit who brought storms.
His heart wrenched. Surely she was too weak to hold on much longer, but he didn’t dare release the boy. It seemed as though the strength of her spirit alone was keeping her in place. Her face was a terrible mixture of defiance and fear. He watched with increasing desperation as her hand lost its grip on the railing. He had seen a man washed off a deck. One moment the sailor had been darting for a loose stay, the next a wave had reached out and he was gone. The black snake wind could be a prankster, Conawago had once told him. It delighted in bursting the arrogance of humans. Duncan cursed it now for making him choose between the old woman and the young boy. He unwound his arm from the rope that held him and showed Ishmael how to twine his own arm around it.
Before he could move, another wave, bigger than those before, crashed over the bow. He doubled over, holding Ishmael close. The captain was having trouble keeping the rudder straight. The ship shifted dangerously into a wallow between waves, and as the officer struggled to regain control, another wave hit the ship broadside.
“Hetty!” Duncan cried out as the woman lost her grip and slid across the shifting deck. With an anguished groan Duncan began to release himself, then a figure darted out of the cabin hatch, scooped up the woman with one arm, and seized the mainmast with the other, pressing her tight against it as another wave hit.
Woolford offered a grim nod to Duncan, then pulled a length of rope from his waist and quickly bound the woman to the mast. Hetty, looking dazed, did not protest her restraints, even silently accepted the gag that Woolford tied around her mouth before retreating into the cabin. The words of the Welsh witch, Duncan realized, had been disturbing the elders.
A quarter hour later the sun broke out of the dark clouds, and the angry water subsided to low rolling swells. Woolford reappeared to take a dazed, sodden Ishmael from Duncan. Two sailors sped to the stern, where they relieved the exhausted captain.
“Our friends took poorly to the weather,” the ranger observed, nodding to the hatch, where the Iroquois were filing out. Sagatchie looked as if he had fought a battle. Kassawaya’s hands were shaking. The Iroquois elders gathered around Hetty, who seemed not to notice them. Her eyes, aimed toward the distant shoreline, were empty and unfocused. Two dead seagulls lay at her feet.
The captain, so fatigued he seemed to have trouble climbing down to the main deck, nodded his gratitude as Duncan offered a hand to steady him. “That blow was as good as two days’ sailing. We’ll be entering the Saint Lawrence by tomorrow afternoon,” the bearded officer declared in a hopeful tone, then he turned to call on his men to raise more sail.
Hetty groaned like an injured cat. “No, no, no!” she screeched, and they turned to find her gazing in anguish at them. She seemed not to notice Sagatchie, who was untying her, but she had clearly heard the captain’s report.
“I would have thought you joined the others in wishing for dry land,” Duncan said, but then he saw the snakeskin entwined around the woman’s hand and suddenly understood why she had come on deck. She had not been trying to banish the storm, she had been encouraging it. “Where would you have us go, Hetty?”
The Welsh woman produced a small wooden cylinder from the folds of her dress and clutched it tightly in her hand. “Away,” she murmured forlornly. “Away from all that must be. Away from the hole in the world, where death awaits.” Suddenly she looked up at Duncan as though just seeing him, and she thrust her hand behind her. As he reached out, she moved with surprising speed, ducking down and twisting past Duncan and Woolford, darting to the ship’s rail.
Duncan leapt as she raised her hand, but too late. She threw the object in a long arc over the water.
He reacted without conscious thought, dropping his waistcoat and slipping off his shoes as he climbed the rail. Ignoring Hetty’s wail of protest, Ishmael’s fearful cry, and Woolford’s angry curse, he launched himself over the side.
Even before he reached the water he heard the captain shouting frantic orders. He did not look back to make sense of the hurried activity on deck, just kept focused on the little speck of brown on the surface forty feet away. A few powerful strokes brought the wooden object into his grasp. He treaded water, staring in confusion at its ornate carved symbols. By the time he looked up the ship was over a hundred yards away and picking up speed. He would soon be alone on the wide inland sea.
“I seem to recall,” came a voice from behind him, “this is not the first time you have thrown yourself off a ship. At least you waited for the storm to pass this time.” Duncan turned to see Woolford standing with a bemused expression in the bow of the ship’s dinghy.
Ishmael stared at him wide-eyed as he climbed over the ship’s rail. “How could you do. .” The boy seemed to have trouble finding words. There was more fear than wonder in his voice. “All that water. A man should be lost in it. You must be fish.”
Duncan hesitated over his strange wording then saw that the boy was clutching his amulet. He glanced back at Conawago on the raised aft deck. The old Nipmuc was listening. Duncan had begun to realize that it was unsettling to the Indians, especially Conawago, that he had grown so close to them, in many ways become one of them, but had not embraced a spirit protector. “No Ishmael, there is no spirit of trout or pike inside me.”