Eye of the Raven (41 page)

"We have not," came the German's unhappy answer. "But Sister Leinbach has been appearing in my dreams. She calls me from a distance, as if in a long tunnel. As if," he added, "she has unfinished business." Macklin gazed up at the evening sky a moment then said unexpectedly, "It is why I asked those Scottish guards if I might speak with you."

"But I know nothing-"

Macklin held up his hand. "I have heard of the terrible end of that Shawnee in Philadelphia. He and Ohio George were the worse of a bad lot. Old Belt brought back his kit, from that barn where he was sleeping."

"I saw it," Duncan said. "A deck of cards. Some of those Shamokin nails. Ribbons."

"And a cross."

Duncan nodded as he remembered. "A simple gold cross on a strand of beads."

"He showed it to us because it seemed a missionary's cross. The sisters have confirmed it was hers, from her last mission with the Seneca. Sister Leinbach was wearing it when she left here nearly three years ago."

"I'm sorry." Duncan puffed on his pipe and looked over at the two Indians. Skanawati was looking up at the sky again as he listened to Moses speak in low, quick tones in their native tongue. "Red Hand gambled. On the frontier such a valuable could have changed hands twenty times in a month." Skanawati leaned back. Duncan followed his gaze toward a circling hawk. He was, Duncan realized, looking for his raven.

"But whom did he gamble with?"

Duncan lowered his pipe. "His band. Ohio George. Some Hurons they sometimes ran with in the wilds."

"And if I understand what Mr. Hadley has explained to me, someone from Philadelphia. A person who knew the comings and goings of Philadelphia surveyors. Suppose such a person," the Moravian said gravely, "also knew the comings and goings of our missionaries. I believe Samuel Felton was brought back to his family three years ago."

The kernel of truth in Macklin's words began to take hold. Duncan nursed his pipe a moment as he contemplated the genteel Moravian town. "In Pennsylvania, if a European youth is freed from the Indians, might he come here, for the transition home?"

"It is not only possible, it is almost certain. The governor favors us with the task, knowing we have our feet in both worlds. Our schools have many children orphaned in raids, more than a few rescued from Indian raiders."

Duncan leaned toward Macklin with new interest. "Would your Sister Leinbach have worked with them?"

"Of course. It was, one might say, her speciality. The elders prescribe a regimen for all students that teaches them about the tribes. The Indians learn from us English and German, and returnees often need to be taught the same. It takes one who has lived among the tribes to truly understand the returnees. Sister Leinbach's husband was with the Seneca when smallpox hit them. He died tending to them, and she insisted on carrying on his work."

"Are there records showing which recovered captives were here, at the time she departed?"

"We are Germans," Macklin reminded him. "Of course there are records, in great quantities. I can probably find out which night three years ago the brethren were served shad, and which night dumplings."

As the two Moravians retreated, Conawago appeared, holding Mokie's hand. She wore the long dark dress of a house servant. Duncan instantly shot up, hands on the girl's shoulders, knowing the guards could take him inside at any moment. "Tell us true, girl, what did you find that night at the raiders' camp? We saw the guard you knocked down with a stone."

Mokie winced, like a schoolgirl caught in mischief. "Mama and I needed food. There's always food at those camps. If ever we saw one, Mama would hide and I would go borrow some."

"My God! You were stealing from the Huron raiders?"

"From anyone we saw on the trail."

Duncan shook his head in wonder. "What did you take that night?"

"That one I knocked down had an old pouch with a little dried meat and some cornmeal, is all." She reached into the folds of her dress. "And this. Mama said I could keep it." She raised the glass ball in her fingers so that it reflected the red light of the dusk.

Duncan stared in disbelief. "I think it would be safer with someone else, Mokie. Conawago will protect it for you. And you mustn't speak about it, or about seeing Indians that night. And go nowhere alone."

The girl frowned, clutched the ball close to her breast for a moment, then sighed and extended it to the old Nipmuc.

Duncan did not have the heart to tell her she had stolen one of the tokens Ramsey handed out to his murderers or that they too had worked out that she had secretly visited them the night before Burke's murder. As she walked away he revisited his memory of that night, and realized he had misunderstood everything about the moonlit camp at the ochre bed.

He woke abruptly in the middle of the night, his senses telling him that something was amiss. He lay without moving, gazing into the deep shadows of the makeshift jail, then leapt up from his pallet. Skanawati was gone. Impossibly, the Indian was gone. Surely Duncan would have heard if the door had been opened, surely there was no other way for the chief to leave the sturdy little building. He tested the door, tested the window. Both were locked tight. Then he heard a tiny sound, of particles falling from the chimney into the massive fireplace that took up the end of the building. The sole chair in the jail was in the fireplace, leaning against the rear wall.

He stripped off his shirt then slowly climbed the chair, balancing precariously as he used the slats on the back like a ladder, pushing himself upward until he was in the confines of the chimney itself. Ignoring the pain from his still-healing injuries, he wedged himself into the narrow space, pushing with his hands, bracing with his back. To his surprise he found he could inch upward, pushing alternately with his arms and back. He was up a foot, then two, ignoring the painful scrapes on his bare skin when he slid back against the stone. Finally, his back screaming in pain, his arms cramping, he touched the outside rim of the chimney. With one final, frantic effort he snaked upward another few inches, grabbed the top of the chimney, and pulled himself up and out onto the roof.

Skanawati sat on the peak, looking calmly into the night sky. Duncan scanned the stars. It was perhaps two or three in the morning, and the town and adjoining camp lay in silent repose. There were no streetlights, only lanterns hung at the doors of the large Moravian residence halls. The Onondaga offered no greeting. Duncan leaned against the chimney, scanning the shadows around the jail. Surely the chief must be holding back on his escape because he had spotted some passing sentry.

"When my mother found that crack in the world," Skanawati said abruptly, "she wept for hours. When she went back a week later, it was wider. She told me I must go on retreat for a month to speak with the spirits."

"Which is where you were when you saw Conawago and me at the cave, why you couldn't follow."

In the moonlight Duncan saw the affirming nod. "She said if the old gods did not understand that we still embraced them in our hearts, then the crack would keep growing wider and drain the river dry." Skanawati turned to Duncan, as if for an answer.

"It was gunpowder that made it," Duncan said, though the words seemed empty. He felt small and inadequate before a man he had come to realize was one of the most spiritual beings he had ever met.

"When I first saw it," Skanawati remembered, "it felt like a gash across my heart."

They watched the stars in silence. There were no patrolling sentries, Duncan began to realize. A meteor soared overhead, so close they could see a trail of smoke behind it. When the chieftain raised his hand to point at it Duncan saw that his arm was wrapped in a snake skin.

"My nephew Johantty will have a difficult time in the world," his companion suddenly said. "Conawago said the two of you know the old trail of the dawnchasers."

"We walked along it, cleared away what debris we could." Duncan recalled their three days on the trail, and his wonder over the treacherous drops down cliffs, the crossing of chasms on old logs, the swamps and rocky debris fields the ancient runners of the sacred trail had to endure.

"Johantty needs to complete that trail," Skanawati said, "the people need to see one of the young ones with the tattoo of the old spirits."

"We shall show both of you, Skanawati. If I am not mistaken it is near the site you chose for your new village. You will leave Bethlehem a free man, I swear it. You shall guide your nephew yourself."

"I would like that, of all things," the chief admitted, and he looked back at the stars. "Tell me about it, McCallum. In my mind, let me run that spirit trail."

Duncan found a small, sad grin tugging at his mouth. He leaned on the roof beside the Onondaga. His heart expanded with the honor done him, and the responsibility. "There is a great cottonwood at the edge of the clearing where it starts," he began, "so large that four men could not join their arms around it. An eagle sat in the tree the day we were there."

Skanawati offered a murmur of approval, and Duncan continued, seeing in his mind's eye the trail as he and Conawago had traveled on it, taking Skanawati up and down mountains, across rivers, along cliffs, past drawings of giant bears under sheltering ledges. When the chief asked if he had perhaps seen a bear by a particular mountain or a white otter at a river crossing, Duncan thought carefully and described as best he could the animals that had watched them that day. Skanawati listened for over an hour, once interrupting Duncan to point out another shooting star.

Each time Duncan paused, he looked for guards again, wondering when Skanawati would finally slide down the roof to freedom. The chief had freed himself from the little jail but was making no other effort to make good his escape. He had by his actions given Duncan his own freedom. When the hour came, it would now be the simplest of things for them to slide down the roof, onto the ground, and disappear into the night. Duncan made up his mind to stay with Skanawati when he finally slipped away, to do what he could to protect the chief.

But Skanawati just kept watching the stars. When at last he stood, stretching, there was a faint, gray hint of dawn in the east. Instead of sliding down the roof shakes he stepped back to the chimney and lowered himself inside. Duncan watched in disbelief. In his mind's eye he was already running, free, over the laurel ridges beyond the town. With painful effort he inched toward the chimney, casting one more longing glance toward the forest, then followed the Iroquois back into their jail.

The rattle of the timber bar the next morning brought Duncan to his feet instantly. He was halfway to the door when something in the window caught his eye. He halted with a shudder. A small squirrel hung dead. A piece of twine had been tied in a noose, suspending it. He touched it. It was still warm. It was one of the nocturnal flying squirrels, considered by some in the tribes to be a messenger from the spirit world.

He untied the twine, letting the creature fall to the ground outside, just as Macklin stepped through the door, closely followed by Mokie carrying a covered tray. As the girl uncovered bowls of cooked oats, fresh bread, and tea, she turned to Duncan with a determined glint. "He will be fine, Mr. McCallum, Mama and I will see to it."

Duncan lowered the spoon in his hand. "Who is going to be fine, Mokie?"

"Mr. Hadley. They came for us last night again, when I was returning to Mama's room. He wouldn't let them take us."

Macklin touched Duncan's arm. "The Virginians insist that Hadley sit with them as part of the treaty delegation. He is part of the Burke family, they remind him. He has taken notes from his travels with you, and they insisted on seeing them. Then the Virginians made Hadley go with them to the women's quarters, but when he realized what they were about, he resisted. They gave him a good thrashing, nothing too serious because he is family. There is a doctor here," Macklin added quickly. "No broken bones. Mokie nursed him most of the night."

Duncan now saw that the girl glowed. "What else, Mokie?"

"Sometime in the night, when he told me I should get some sleep, I told him it was right I tended him, after the way you and he helped deliver our precious Penn. That's when he said it."

"Said what?"

"He had me lean over him so he could whisper." The girl grew very serious, her eyes wide. "He told me I was his sister. He told me no matter what it cost him, Mama and me were done being slaves."

Duncan grinned. At least some justice was being found along the tortured path of the treaty convoy.

Macklin pointed Duncan to a corner as Mokie, to the chiefs obvious amusement, presented Skanawati his breakfast with a curtsy. "I sat into the night reviewing the journal books in the Gemeinhaus, the main administrative building. Then later I found one of the teachers debating European politics at the Sun Inn down the street.

"There were four youths returned from tribal captivity that year. Sister Leinbach worked with all of them. Two eventually went on to Philadelphia, two were adopted by farm families. The names were Mueller, Rohrbach, Gottlieb, and Smith."

"No Felton?"

"I was as disappointed as you at first. No Felton at all for the past five years. But the teacher explained that those who were captured very young often forget their names. When that happens those who seem to remember some German get German names, those who seem English, English names. One of the boys, the one named Smith, was quite difficult. Rebellious, even violently so. The teacher recalls once Sister Leinbach gave him extra prayers to read as discipline, but," Macklin said in a tight voice, "the prayers were found the next morning impaled on an arrow, shot into the statue of the Holy Mother in our chapel. Still she was very patient with him, made him her special project that year. Improved his English tremendously, nurtured his soul, used the rod when she had to. Smith showed up at a Christmas service with stripes painted on his face.

"He had been brought back under duress from a Huron village by some trappers who thought a bounty would be paid for him. But no one knew who his family was, and they just left him here. It was only when Smith finally began to enjoy some of the pleasures of European life that he began to speak of memories as a small boy on a farm near Tulpehocken. They started to piece together the truth, although that took months. The elders came close to ejecting him many times. He would mock the Christian Indians, saying they had all been neutered by magic words out of a black book, he stole things from the kitchens. But Sister Leinbach persevered, as if the boy had become a spiritual test for her. Small mutilated animals would be found at her doorstep, once even in her bed. He seemed to nurture a particular hatred for her.