The Mohawks of Quebec, Conawago had told him, were all Christians. There was something strangely poignant about the little chapel built by Christian natives in the crumbling Jesuit outpost. In the lands of Duncan’s youth, the violent Reformers of Calvin had torn down chapels, even entire cathedrals, but on some nights his grandmother had taken him to a tiny chapel in a cavern overlooking the sea where an aged defrocked priest had presided.
He stared through the window at the black sky over the blacker river. The apocalyptic destruction of the Highlands had broken the faith of many Highlanders. It had been years since he had been in a church. He looked out at a bright star rising over the water. “Ave Maris Stella.” The words left his tongue unbidden. The old priest had been a fisherman and often opened his nighttime rites at the mouth of the cavern with an invocation toward the ocean. Hail, Star of the Sea.
Despair crept into his heart. He could not remember ever feeling so broken, so adrift, so filled with foreboding. Murderers who lied about gods and thieves who stole treasure and children roamed the wilderness, and try as he might he could not pierce the mysteries that connected them. Armies waited ahead, lusting to soak the land in blood for the sake of distant kings. His companions expected him to lead them to the truth, to an end to the violence and a restoration of the old ways, but he could not shake the feeling that he was only leading them to their deaths.
As the moon rose over the black rim of the horizon, he extinguished his candle and faced the little birch cross, glowing silver in the moonlight. He was head of a dying clan, companion to a dying tribe. The monks of Saint Ignatius had vowed to bridge the peoples from different sides of the sea, and when they failed they had calmly prayed as they were thrown over the cliff.
“Ave Maria,” he whispered, then continued more loudly. “Gratia plena, Dominus tecum.”
He did not know how long he prayed, but the moon had climbed well clear of the horizon when he looked back out the window. The overgrown field was bathed in soft light. Suddenly he saw movement along the low ridge, two slow figures who stopped and bent at intervals along the crest. He shot up and silently slipped down the stairs.
The rocks at the northern end of the ridge provided cover as he ascended, rifle in hand. The two figures were less than fifty paces away when he reached the top. The amorphous shapes glided over the silver landscape. This was the Island of the Ghosts, and this was their hour.
He gasped as he stepped around a boulder to find another phantom. Kassawaya sat as still as a statue, her bow in her lap, an arrow nocked and ready. She showed no surprise at Duncan’s appearance, and he realized she had probably been watching him since he left the abbey.
“I have heard of this place all my life,” she whispered. “Be good or you’ll be sent to the Isle of the Ghosts, my aunts would say. No one ever comes back from the Isle of the Ghosts, my mother said once when I broke a favorite pot of hers. I had to go away to a hut for five days when my first moonblood came on me. At night I had visions of a place where lost, weeping souls wandered aimlessly. I thought it must be this island.”
Duncan gazed uncertainly at the Oneida woman. Her words seem to come from someone vulnerable, even frightened. But the countenance he saw was of someone else. Her playful strength, her strong will, her energetic nature were so dominant they often eclipsed her comeliness. In the moonlight, as unmoving as the rock she sat on, bow in hand, she could have been a statute of wild Artemis, goddess of the hunt.
Her gaze shifted, from the ghosts on the crest of the ridge to its far side, to a small, dark valley that the rising moon had not yet lit. Her expression grew hard, and sad, and when Duncan asked what was there, she offered no reply.
He moved on, warily approaching the two phantoms, grateful for the rifle in his hand. They were moving toward him, stopping every few feet at large rocks along the crest and bending over the rocks before continuing their strange passage. Duncan dropped to one knee and waited for the ghosts. The nearest was ten feet away when it raised an arm to throw back the cowl that covered it.
“Tushcona, is it you?” Duncan asked, confused to see the old woman.
She put a finger to her lips then gestured to her companion, who reached into a sack and extended a small object to the Iroquois elder. A small loaf of cornbread. Duncan looked at the line of rocks behind them and saw now that each held one of the small loaves. He had thought they had baked the loaves for their journey, but instead they were giving them to the Isle of the Ghosts.
The two grey figures remained silent when they reached the last rock, only a few feet from the unmoving Kassawaya, then turned to walk back along the crest. They passed Duncan without a word and continued, Duncan a step behind, until they reached a large flat boulder that marked a trail leading down into the shadowed valley.
“I don’t know who I am,” the old woman suddenly replied. Her companion sat on a rock on the opposite side of the path and removed the cowl of her monk’s robe. It was Hetty Eldridge. Duncan, feeling like an intruder, took a tentative step backward, but Tushcona gestured for him to sit on the ground between the two women.
“I was born to a Shawnee clan,” the weaver of the Council belts confessed. “But my parents were killed in a Huron raid when I was in my eighth summer. They captured over twenty of us, children, young women, and several of our warriors. They brought us here for the trading. Other war parties came in with European prisoners.”
As she spoke moonlight began to filter into the valley beyond. Duncan’s heart leapt, and he grabbed his gun as he saw the rows of upright figures.
Tushcona showed no alarm. “I thought we would stay a day or two when they tied us to those terrible posts. But we had to wait for the market. More parties came in, from the North and the West, to buy new slaves. Every post was used, many with two prisoners tied back-to-back. I was there,” she pointed to a tall grey shape midway down the nearest row.
Posts. Duncan was looking at gaondote posts, prisoner posts sunk in the ground in two long rows separated by a wide avenue. There were a least two dozen in each row.
“It became like a festival for the war parties and slavers. They were on the way home, with prizes of war. There was rum. I was tied with an English boy, a good boy who sang songs and began teaching me my first English words. His father and mother were there too and would sometimes call out to him, though they always paid for it with a blow from a club. On the tenth night they tied his father to a long pole and hoisted him over a fire while they danced. They roasted him alive to celebrate their victory. He screamed and screamed, and when the boy screamed back they knocked him unconscious.
“The next day some Abenaki came, friends of the Huron. They paid in pelts for all the surviving English children, over a dozen, but they never untied them. One by one they slit their throats, in revenge for some raid English soldiers made on their camps. Only after the bodies began to smell did those Hurons untie them and throw them over the cliff.
“For generations war parties have come here with captives. So many children died. Scores of children, hundreds even. We could have done more to stop it. We should have done more.”
Duncan stood and looked out over the flat with its ranks of posts. It was a torture ground where unimaginable suffering had been inflicted, the blood of so many lives spilled. And it had become a worm eating into the souls of the old Iroquois, who could have stopped it and hadn’t. He walked along the nearest posts, touching each one with only his fingertips, thinking of the belt, the elders, and the night in front of the Council. This dark place of torture was the hole in the world. But he had not understood the connection until that moment.