Original Death (3 page)

As Conawago drew a pattern with ocher on the feather, Duncan settled onto a boulder and studied the little collection of log structures half a mile below them. So late in the afternoon he would have expected to see more activity. As Duncan tried to recall what day of the week it was, his gaze settled on a square structure in the center of the settlement, marked by a timber cross fastened above its roof. The inhabitants were no doubt in church.

His friend was changing his shirt when Duncan turned around, wincing as he struggled to pull the bloodstained one over his shoulder. Duncan sprang to his side to help, then held the little mirror they shared, suffering Conawago's warning glances, as if the old Indian dared him to comment on his unusual show of vanity in wiping the grime from his face and straightening his long greying hair.

At last Conawago wrapped the precious eagle feather in a piece of doeskin, hitched the hand of his injured arm into his belt, and with an eager grin led Duncan down the narrow path. His journey of five decades had come to an end.

“A handsome creature,” Conawago declared of a draft horse grazing in the pasture where the trail met the road. “A noble village, Duncan,” he added, gesturing toward the sturdy houses they approached. He was going out of his way to show pride in the settlement, where more Nipmucs lived than anywhere else on the planet. It was indeed a tidy, well-kept community, the hands of craftsmen evident in the construction of its dozen buildings. Firewood was stacked neatly by each house. A well with a long sweep for dipping buckets stood near the little church. Smoke threaded lazily out the chimney of what looked like a smithy.

“An animal to treasure,” the Nipmuc said of a large brown cow that called out as they passed. He said nothing about the expectant way the cow stood beside the large barn. Its swollen udders meant it was overdue for milking.

Their heads snapped up at movement at the far end of the village. Two dogs were tussling, each pulling an end of a small red scrap. Duncan's contentment began to wane. He glanced uneasily into the trees. A flock of crows watched the buildings.

“We can wait outside the church,” Conawago suggested. “No need to disturb them.”

But when they reached the building its door hung open, a solitary shoe on its side at the threshold. When Conawago hung back, Duncan stepped past him to enter the little structure. The chamber was empty. He approached the simple altar and turned to face the rough-hewn benches. On one, two prayer books lay open. On another, knitting needles had been dropped on top of what appeared to be a child's sock. Four wide-rimmed black hats occupied the row of pegs along the back wall.

With new foreboding he stepped out the door and discovered that Conawago had disappeared. Tightening his grip on his rifle he ran out into the road. He jogged to the far end of the little community, seeing nothing but the two dogs, now fleeing into a patch of pumpkins, and then he turned and quickly paced back down the road. The doors of the houses he passed were open. The cow called out her discomfort. The crows stared at him.

At first Duncan thought the sound he heard was a rustle of wind, but he saw no leaves moving. He began running, glancing into the empty barn, then stopped to survey the buildings again. The sound, now an anguished moan, grew louder—a human moan. He quickened his pace and followed it toward the building with the smoking chimney. Two wide bay doors on the side hung open. He reached the entrance and froze.

Conawago had collapsed onto the floor, the bloody head of a man in his lap, the mourning chant of his people coming from his throat in sobs. Before him was a line of bodies that extended into the shadows. The gentle folk of Bethel Church had all been killed.

Chapter Two

C
onawago took no notice as Duncan inched toward the nightmare. His legs were leaden. His gun fell from his hand. He gasped suddenly and realized he had not been breathing.

He forced himself to the closest body, a girl no older than fifteen, whose long black braids draped over her calico dress. She lay straight on her back as if she had just lain down for a rest. He bent to lift her wrist, but he knew from her dull unseeing eyes he would find no pulse. He moved on to the next body, and the next, futilely touching wrists and necks. Two middle-aged men in tattered homespun clothes. Three tall women approaching middle age, each wearing a pewter cross around her neck. A strapping man who appeared to be in his thirties. None had a visible wound, and all had died with strangely serene, almost reverent expressions. He knelt at the last body in the line, that of a teenaged youth, and saw the dark pool on the packed earth under his head. The back of his skull had been crushed. He looked about the smithy. A heavy wooden spoke lay on the earthen floor, stained red at one end. The smith's hammer that lay on the anvil still held a sheen of blood.

Duncan closed the youth's eyes then stood. Eight dead, plus the man in Conawago's lap. They were all of the woodland tribes, and all but the
man Conawago embraced were dressed in European-style clothes. He bent over each again, seeing now that every head had the same pool of blood under it. The blood was not yet dry, meaning the killings had taken place less than two or three hours earlier. With a chill he realized they had not died at the same time but in sequence. They had waited in line, with no trace of fear or alarm on their faces as, one by one, their skulls had been crushed from behind.

Only the man with Conawago was different. He was clearly older than the others and wore deerskin leggings gartered with strips of rabbit fur. The sleeveless waistcoat that he wore over his worn linen shirt had small bits of fur sewed into it. His long black hair was tied at the back. A bright bloom of blood leaked over his heart. His dead, defiant eyes were fixed on a carved wooden medallion on the earthen floor beside him. Down his left cheek was a vertical line of four small, intricately worked tattoos. A fish, a deer, a bear, and a snake, in a distinctive style Duncan had never seen except on Conawago, who bore identical images, in the same sequence, on his neck and shoulders. Conawago had found Hickory John.

Duncan's heart seemed to rip out of his chest as he watched Conawago rock with his dead nephew in his lap. For the first time in half a century he embraced someone of his own flesh and blood, and the flesh was now growing cold. There were no words to say. The grief sliced deep into the Nipmuc's soul. This was a wound that would never heal.

He scooped up the medallion on the floor and backed away. Duncan was still numb as he retreated out of the building and stood gazing vacantly at the little settlement. Finally he was stirred out of his paralysis by the caws of the gathering crows. A long sobbing shout left his throat and, suddenly enraged, he hurled stones until the birds flew away. Slowly his eyes focused again, studying the village with cold deliberation. Lifting his gun from where he had dropped it, he began exploring the other structures.

The sparsely furnished houses were empty, with no evidence of the day's horror. A loaf of bread stood on a table in the first, waiting to be sliced. A bowl of peeled apples sat beside a piecrust in the kitchen of
another. Little corn cakes made in the Iroquois fashion lay charred on a flat stone by a hearth, the ashes in the big fireplace cool to the touch.

He paced along the road, studying the tracks now. It was the supply road to the British forts, the only road west of the lake, carved out of the wilderness shoreline after hostilities with the French had broken out. The ruts of wagons pulled by horse and ox teams were crusted into the road, some of the tracks less than a day old. Faintly visible were the prints of the studded footwear favored by heavy infantry, several days old.

Set back from the road was a building he had taken to be a small barn. But he saw now the worn path that led to it and the stone chimney that rose up from the far side of its shake roof. Well-tended beds of blooming asters and daisies flanked its narrow entry. The door was ajar. He pushed it open with his foot and saw four benches with narrow rough-hewn tables in front of each, facing a larger table at the back. Small slates lay on the smaller tables. It was a schoolhouse.

He counted eight student slates on the tables. Two held Bible verses transcribed in neat hands, two showed numbers and simple stick figures, two more had crudely formed letters, another a careful drawing of a coach. Two of the dead had probably been of school age, certainly no more than two, and both were older than Hickory John's grandson. On the wall were eight drawings, each with a different name. Six children of Bethel Church, including Ishmael, were unaccounted for.

The cow lowed again, in obvious distress. As he left the schoolhouse he glimpsed the two dogs, once more tugging over the red object he had seen from a distance. They did not notice his approach until he was nearly upon them, then they looked up with startled expressions and fled, dropping their prize.

The bloody piece of fur was so mutilated that he held it in his hand for a long moment before he recognized it. It was a badger-hair sporran, the pouch in which Highlanders kept their valuables. But this one was ripped into shreds and half covered with blood. The large numeral 42 was stamped onto its black leather cover. He touched the dirk he had taken
from the dead man in the lake. The 42
^nd
Regiment of Foot, the Black Watch, wore black and green tartan. The soldier in the lake had worn a different plaid.

He kept a tight grip on the sporran as he searched the other buildings, finding all of them empty. The cow bleated again, and he turned toward the barn. It was a large structure, built to accommodate at least two wagons in its long center aisle. The floor of the first stall was covered in straw bedding, with a milking stool in the corner. The walls of the next stall were lined with careful rows of woodworking tools hanging on pegs, with the body of a small wagon under construction resting on trestles. The third chamber was dark, its window shuttered. He opened the shutter and gazed outside a moment at the mare pacing skittishly along the side of the pasture. As he turned away he tripped on something, falling to a knee, then gasped. The face of a dead man stared back at him.

The soldier had fought, taking several bruises and slices on the back of his hands and cheek before receiving the wound in his chest that had killed him. His right hand still held his broadsword. He had been in his thirties and, judging from the scars across his jaw and hands, was the veteran of more than one battle. The tartan of his kilt was black and green, that of the Black Watch, renowned as the toughest, most seasoned troops in America. The sight of another dead Scot seemed to sap Duncan's strength. The deaths suddenly bore down on him with a crushing weight. Despite all their efforts, he and Conawago had stumbled into the war. He had to pull Conawago away, had to flee into the mountains. But instead he found himself kneeling in front of the dead Highlander. Something inside Duncan seemed to find familiar features in the dead man. He did not know the man, but he knew the long craggy features, the aquiline nose and unkempt blond hair with a red ribbon twisted into its braid. The man was the image of so many who had visited his family's croft and danced at their gatherings. His gaze paused on the man's dirk, whose hilt bore the embossed image of a bull between two flags, and his heart grew yet colder. The man was a MacLeod, the largest clan of the islands and coasts where Duncan had been raised.

He was so weary of death, so weary of it always taking the ones the world needed the most. His eyes misted and his hands rose in a strange pantomime, reaching out to touch the man's wounds as if he might yet save the Scot. He did not know how long he knelt, desolate and numbed, probing the wounds without conscious thought. Suddenly a whistle broke the stillness of the dead town.

“
Allons
!” someone shouted from the road. The French command triggered a cold fury inside him. He grabbed his rifle and was rising when he heard the hammer being pulled back on a gun and spun about.

“
Mon Dieu
! T'is a fine gory mess ye made of the place.” The man who spoke was in the shadows, but the barrel of his pistol was not.

“If this is how you wage your war,” Duncan snapped, “then the sooner Montreal falls the better.” He began shifting his weight back and forth, readying to throw his gun and leap, praying he could make the man shoot wild.

“If we was French, lad,” the man said, “we wouldn't be having this entertaining conversation. Ye'd be dead already. We shout a little Frenchie just to flush out bastards like ye.”

Duncan tensed for his jump then froze. The blade at his neck seemed to come from nowhere, pressing against his skin. He instinctively pulled away, only to be jerked back by someone gripping his shirt. As he turned a gasp escaped his throat.