Eye of the Raven (25 page)

Conawago sat cross-legged on a blanket, rocking back and forth, chanting prayers to sanctify the new grave. Duncan slipped onto a boulder in the shadows of a sassafras tree and watched, the Nipmuc seemingly oblivious to his presence. The gentle voice worked like a salve to his tired, aching body. He did not know how he would find the strength to continue down his treacherous path without Conawago at his side, but at least for now his friend was where he belonged, standing in for Skanawati, the father the village had lost.

At last he retreated down the path, realizing he was famished. He ate heartily of the eel and cornbread, then helped the villagers finish wrapping the last of the bones in swathes of fur as Van Grut completed the last of his sketches.

He heard a new pitch in the conversations, a new strain in several voices, and looked to see that the Indians were now addressing bundles of bones, saying farewell as the bones were covered for a last time, slipping the sketches done by the Dutchman into the bundles before tying them tight. Tears were flowing freely, and several women clutched small bundles to their breasts, whispering the last words of a mother to her child.

Finally the slow procession began up the path to the grave overlooking the river.

"I am grateful to you, McCallum," came a quiet voice by his shoulder. Moses was solemnly watching the single file of mournful villagers. "Every European I have known who encountered this practice has been revolted by it, condemned it as barbaric. I have always thought it very civilized. I know Christians who bless new homes, but it has always seemed better to me to bless the homes of the old ones. If we do not respect those who have gone before, how can we respect ourselves?"

Duncan, nodding in agreement, recalled another cemetery, that of his clan, which had been dug up and ravaged by English raiders. They had hung the corpse of an uncle branded as a traitor, then destroyed most of the markers. But his parents and grandparents had banished the horror by digging new graves and summoning the clan for a gathering-illegal under English law-to reconsecrate them.

It was not the time to ask the questions he so wanted to ask the villagers. It would not be for hours.

"Where will they go?" he asked Moses. "I mean, where is their new village?"

The Moravian's eyes narrowed in warning. "Do not ask them. There are hidden valleys, in uncharted land. Skanawati wants them far from English rum, far from English traders. He asked me to visit them, with some of Rideaux's Delawares, to teach his people how to write sounds on paper. He wants his village to record all the old stories, the names of all the old spirits."

"Do you believe with Rideaux, that those of the tribes have uncorrupted hearts?"

Moses considered the question a long time. "I believe many Europeans have lost the way of their hearts."

"They have lost their true skins." The words left Duncan's tongue unbidden.

Moses nodded. "You have had a good teacher."

Duncan looked up the trail to the new grave, where Conawago still chanted. In that moment he wanted more than anything to steal away with the old Nipmuc to one of their mountain hideaways and leave the rest of the world behind.

When he finally returned to the new grave, behind the slow, murmuring procession, Stone Blossom was seated beside Conawago. As each bundle was placed in the wide pit, lined with fur and moss, those carrying it spoke, raising the bundle toward the sky and calling out the name of the dead, sometimes twice, even three times before setting it down and arranging the gifts that would be buried with it.

He saw the old woman reach for the bundle of white fur that had been used to wrap the first set of bones he had cleaned, one with heavily tattooed skin. He found a place behind her and sat to listen as she lifted the bundle and spoke. Her words brought the sound of new lamentation among the villagers, many of whom offered their own short prayers. When she finished, ready to place the bones on a bear fur at the center of the mass grave, she raised them one last time and called to the sky.

"Skanawati! Skanawati! Skanawati!"

A chill ran down Duncan's spine. He looked about, trying to understand. Skanawati was in the hands of the magistrates, waiting to be hanged. Skanawati had been in the Shamokin and lands north for the past six months, yet Red Hand had insisted he had been in the western lands, killing a surveyor. And now Skanawati was being buried, having died months earlier.

As the village arranged the pots, blades, and combs that were the final gifts to the dead and began filling the grave with soil, Duncan turned to Moses. "I ask you, my friend. Explain to me how Skanawati can be in so many places."

"There has always been a Skanawati," Moses said enigmatically. Then he saw the tormented way Duncan looked at the bundle of white fur as it disappeared under the soil. "Perhaps there is something you must learn about the high chiefs of the Grand Council. When a man is raised to a seat of the council he takes its ancient name."

Duncan considered the words for a moment. "You are saying the Skanawati held by the magistrate has only had the name for a few months?"

"Less than a year. The old chief died of the pox, and the title was given to his nephew, who had trained to take on that burden for many years."

Duncan's mind raced. The chief awaiting hanging could not have killed the first surveyor, Townsend, but the prior Skanawati could have. "What was he like, the last chief?"

"A great and noble warrior, as was his duty. Stone Blossom says there is an essence that passes from one Skanawati to the next."

Duncan at last understood the most important question. "And who was the foe of this last warrior chief?"

Moses did not reply, but looked to the old woman, who, Duncan now saw, had been following their conversation.

"We met Skanawati on the old trail," a familiar voice interceded. With an uneasy glance at Duncan, Conawago settled on the other side of the woman. "We spoke and we listened."

The woman's eyes lit with something like joyful anticipation. "I only knew you were wise in the ways of the old prayers. Johantty did not tell me you were also the one my son met on the trail!"

Duncan did not at first understand when she gestured to Conawago's shoulder, but his friend did. Loosening his buttons, he slid his shirt off his shoulder. She stared at the sign of the dawnchasers in silence, wonder rising on her face as it had on Skanawati's when they had first met him on the trail.

Jiyathondek!" she suddenly cried, loud enough for all to hear. Hearken! In moments a dozen villagers had crowded round, looking at the tattoo with the same awed expressions. The woman called out Johantty's name, and the drumming faltered a moment as the drummers changed. "Johantty and his uncle, Johantty and Skanawati, found what they think is the beginning of the dawnchaser path," she declared, glancing again at Conawago's tattoo with the excitement of a great discovery.

His uncle. In the Iroquois world, a boy's maternal uncle played a much bigger role in his life than his father. Johantty had been at the chiefs side at Ligonier and had played a role at every stage of the violent drama since. Skanawati had been preparing him.

"Tell them," the woman said to the youth.

"Rocks like a-" he turned and asked a quick question of Conawago, who offered a whispered reply, "-like a chimney. Signs of animals carved in the rocks, below a sign of the rising sun."

"A giant cottonwood at the opposite side of the clearing," Conawago put in, and Johantty nodded excitedly.

"Skanawati was like a boy when he returned that day," the woman continued. "It was a sign. He went to the Grand Council in Onondaga," she explained, referring to the capital of the confederation. "He said we could say no to the Europeans now."

"No?" Duncan asked.

"No. No to everything."

It was, he realized, the beginning of the chiefs efforts to return his people to their own traditions. "What happened?"

The woman shrugged. "He spoke for hours that night, won many chiefs over. But the next day British traders arrived with new guns and rum and bolts of red wool. When he came back he said he had misunderstood, that the sign was meant just for our village. That is where we are moving, to be close to the old shrines."

As Johantty bent with his wooden shovel to toss on a final scoop of loose soil, the objects around his neck swung outward, an amulet pouch, and on a separate strand something else Duncan had not fully seen before. He remembered the feeling of long hairs dangling on his neck the night Johantty had jumped him and had assumed they were bundled with his amulet. Now Duncan plainly saw the separate object, a piece of wood with threads, not hairs, fastened to it. He had seen an identical one the day before, in Ohio George's horde of stolen objects.

When Johantty finished Duncan gestured to the strange necklace. "Did you make that?"

The youth shook his head. "Magic spider. Dances in winter."

Not comprehending, Duncan tentatively reached out. Johantty let him touch it, lift it. It was incredibly light. He saw now that the wood was a small oval cork, the threads silk. "Where did you get this?"

It was Stone Blossom who replied. "His uncle brought it back from the settlements. A friend there gave it to him to be remembered to Johantry, as a gift."

"Settlements? You mean Shamokin?"

She shook her head. "The Quaker city."

"Why?" Duncan asked urgently, knowing he was touching again on the mysteries of the boundary trail. "Why did the chief of the Grand Council go to Philadelphia?"

Stone Blossom looked back over the new grave. "I like the sound of the river from here. It makes a singing over the rocks."

She was as inscrutable as an old monk, Duncan thought to himself. He gazed at the villagers as they retreated toward their houses. He saw sadness but no despair. All about him, in this town that was the most removed from European influence of any he had ever known, was a harmony such as he had not experienced since leaving the Highlands. The matriarch rose and began walking toward the stockaded town, as Johantry joined a half a dozen children sitting on the slope below town and began speaking to them with gestures toward the sky. The sun was fast sinking.

"Skanawati made that young one spend a year at the seat of the Grand Council," Moses said over his shoulder. "Hours every day Johantty sat with the old men and women to learn all their stories, the rituals, the names of chiefs long dead. Skanawati places great hope in him."

The village quieted as the sun disappeared, the inhabitants gathering near their hearths, a small group at the central fire pit continuing the prayers to the spirits, led by Stone Blossom. It was two hours later, the evening meal finished, the other villagers retired to their pallets, when Duncan approached her at the fire, dropping an object from his pack onto the ground in front of her.

The matriarch did not react at first when she saw the soiled, crushed moccasin in front of her. It had the look of a beautiful thing that had died, a dead flower of the forest.

"She was killed with her new husband at the boundary tree by the bloody water," Duncan began. "I think she had started to clear away the debris that would show it to be one of the ancient shrines."

"My grandmother's grandmother," the woman said at last, and all the grandmothers before, taught that such places were what rooted our people into the earth, like the-" she looked to Moses, sitting nearby, for help, "-the heavy weight that holds boats safe."

"An anchor," Moses offered.

"Like the anchor that keeps us safe in all weathers. For centuries the old shrines were maintained and our people lived as one with the spirits of the land. I am to blame, and my brothers and sisters, for it was in our lifetime that the shrines were forgotten, that the children and grandchildren lost interest and stopped tending them."

"You sent your adopted daughter to clean the shrine," Duncan said.

"She was one of the few who bothered to learn the old ways." The old woman looked down at the moccasin with a desolate expression. "It is time we moved on. Too many of our buds shrivel before they can blossom." She turned to Duncan. "They had a Christian marriage in Shamokin, for her husband's sake, after a bonding ceremony here in the village. There was a great celebration. It was then that Skanawati and I learned she was going with her husband to that far end of the Warriors Path." The woman looked up, first at Moses, then to Conawago, before turning to Duncan with apology on her face. "If we could open the old root shrines, let the Grand Council know they had been discovered again, we thought all the great chiefs would have the strength to stop selling our lands."

Stone Blossom lifted the shoe, futilely rubbing at the stains on the pale doeskin. "I made these for her, in the winter. I would get out of my blankets in the middle of the night and work on them so she would not see. By a fire in the snow I whispered old songs over them to bring her good luck." A tear rolled down her cheek and landed on the moccasin.

Duncan looked into her haggard face. "Grandmother," he asked after a moment, "how many of your village did you send to find the old anchor shrines?"

"Three. The three who had spent the most years learning the old ways. Then my daughter went with her husband. All gone now. When my son told me of the first two dying I said the spirits must have needed them on the other side more than we needed them here. He said that could be true, but it also could mean someone was trying to keep the old shrines from being reopened along the Warriors Path. He and I did not believe what all those fools said about those lumps of metal being the remains of their souls. He said we owed condolences, to reach them on the other side."

But condolences were given by the guilty party. Duncan knew better than to push the old woman to explain. As he struggled to understand her meaning, a familiar voice solved his dilemma.

"Skanawati is both war chief and peace chief," Conawago reminded him. Duncan did not know how long he had been there listening. "Our Skanawati has more of the peace in him. Perhaps his uncle had more of the war." Something about his day with the dead had calmed his friend. He was still distant, but the anxiety, the strange longing, was gone from his eyes.