Timewatch (25 page)

Caleb straightened up and took deep breaths of the intoxicatingly fresh air. A recollection stirred in him of the time when his mother had taken him to visit an elderly aunt of hers. Lost in a labyrinth of dreams, the frail old lady sitting in her wheelchair had looked at him with faded blue eyes and patted his hand. She began whispering, so low that he had to bend to catch her words, “Caleb, bold one.”

He'd often thought of that encounter. Once again, he felt that fate had placed him in difficult circumstances where he had to live up to the expectation inherent in the meaning of his name. He hoped that he had carried out his part of the mission, which was to save Church's life.

CHAPTER 27

In preparation for this day, Kiontawakon had fasted and meditated. Now, sitting cross-legged with only the moon and a small fire for light, he closed his eyes, relaxed his muscles, and began taking slow, regular breaths. Years of practice allowed him to quickly enter a trance, which ushered him into that magical place that was his alone, a place of comfort and safety, where he could begin his scrying.

He opened his eyes, took a deep breath, and looked into the bowl of water in front of him. A mist began forming over the surface, then condensed into an image, the face of the hated Englishman, Benjamin Church. The wily Church, who converted Indians to his religion and his cause and accepted them into his loyal band of followers, this man was by far the most dangerous of the white men, because he had that gift for making men, even the proudest of Indian warriors, love and follow him.

Why couldn't the tribal chiefs see that this white man with his honeyed words would be the instrument to destroy the New England Indians? Once they were reduced to living in a few miserable villages, they would disappear. Once they were gone, how long would it take before the Iroquois League itself would be in deadly peril?

It should be clear, even to an idiot, that Church must be destroyed, and soon.

After the festival of the ripening of strawberries had come news of the Wampanoag attack on Church and his men. Twenty white men had evaded a force of 300 warriors. Truly, Church must be a man favored by the spirits!

The chiefs in power over Church were not so wise. Metacom had slipped out of their grasp and put to the torch many of their towns. If Church could be stopped, the unwary English could be dispatched.

That meant that the Morgans who were helping Church had to be thwarted. Kiontawakon knew that words of reason would not be enough to persuade the Morgans to stop their meddling. Other means would be necessary. The Stone Person had told him that another Morgan beside the Jason spirit was about to interfere.

Ignoring the cool wind that blew off the lake, Kiontawakon began drumming softly, slipping as in a dream from the Middle World of ordinary reality into the Lower World, where he would ask—as he had many times before—the Great Horned Owl, his power animal, for help.

But as the fire burned down, no answers came. Never had the shaman dared to impose his will on the spirits but tonight, as he felt the power of those dark, primitive forces he had consulted earlier flooding through him, he sent his consciousness in search of his power animal. Finding it, the shaman thrust his will into the bird, directing its path into a great, swooping rush toward his enemy.

CHAPTER 28

Dan squinted at the ground covered by a powdering of fresh snow sparkling with a jewel-like brilliance in the sunshine. Letting his horse pick his own way over the rugged terrain, he shivered and hunched down farther into his inadequate coat. And he'd thought Minneapolis a deep freeze in the winter. Oh, for a down-filled parka and warm boots!

He'd spent the last week being alternately terrified and outraged, although there were times when he acknowledged to himself that it was better than the life he'd been leading for the past six months. However, any romantic illusions he might have had about serving in a colonial army had been quickly dispelled when he'd landed in the body of Captain Prentice. For a 55-year-old man, the guy was in great shape, lean and hard-muscled.

The Captain's memories kept welling up like some damn stream of consciousness thing: memories of fighting under Cromwell in the English Civil War, then coming to Massachusetts Colony with his wife and daughter (the Two Graces he called them for they were both named Grace) and trying to build a life in this new country where everything was unfamiliar.

Later, at the start of King Philip's War, Prentice had been appointed Captain of the Horse after a plea from the colonists for protection from Metacom's forces, who were burning their homes and killing settlers. This came in June of 1675 after one of the colonists in Swansea had shot and wounded an Indian who had been shooting his cattle and trying to burgle his house. When Prentice and his men had hurried to Swansea, they'd been ambushed. After a brief shoot-out, the Indians had disappeared.

Since then, Captain Prentice had been chasing the Indians without much luck. The enemy knew how to slip away over trails that led to their hiding places in forests and swamps. With the guns that they had bought from the English, they were deadly and experienced fighters.

How ironic was it that he should find himself in December of 1675 in charge of a troop of cavalry! For starters, he'd hated horseback riding ever since a horse had thrown him when he was a kid. His latest experiences hadn't changed his mind. His mount, a rangy coal-black mare, seemed to know that he wasn't really her master and was becoming a damn nuisance, even trying to buck him off. His men were starting to make sniggering comments about the situation. Still, it was probably better than walking like most of the other poor guys. Each foot soldier lugged a heavy musket and carried a snapsack, which consisted of six feet of fuse, a leather belt holding a dozen or more boxes of powder, a bag of bullets, and a horn of priming powder.

He'd have felt a lot better, too, about going into hostile Indian territory if he had a decent gun, like his .30-30 Winchester that he used to take out hunting, not this poor excuse for a weapon, which misfired occasionally and took forever to load.

However, nothing seemed to bother their leader Church, who was a strange mixture of piousness and toughness and a natural at guerrilla warfare.

Dan remembered how, only a day after arriving in the captain's body, he'd found himself agreeing to go with Church. Their leader hadn't any trouble finding men to go with him. They seemed to think he led a charmed life and were willing to follow him anywhere. So Dan had moved out quietly that night with the rest of the troops marching at wide intervals while scouts looking for Indians fanned out on both sides and in front.

They'd been about an hour marching with only a crescent moon to light the way over narrow frozen trails, through woods blanketed with snow, when they'd come to a steep embankment. His mare pulled up of her own accord and whinnied as she stamped her feet. He watched as the other riders, slipping and sliding as they went, carefully edged their mounts down the slope. Then it was his turn; only his mount didn't want to move. There was one way to fix that.

Amazing what a taste of his spurs could do. His mare began moving smartly down the incline, avoiding the small bushes looking stark and bare of leaves.

Some instinct made him look up. Silhouetted against the moon, a Great Horned Owl was diving straight for him. His mare must have sensed something, too, because she neighed in panic and tried to turn sideways. Then Dan was falling, and tufted talons like steel spikes were slashing at his coat. For an instant of time, in the owl's huge black eyes rimmed in gold, Dan thought he detected a human presence. Throwing up his arms, he lashed out at the bird. Suddenly, as if released from a spell, the owl flapped its enormous wings and sailed off soundlessly into the night.

“Stupid bird! Did you see how it spooked my horse and tried to peck out my eyes?”

“Yes, 'twas passing strange, Captain Prentice. Are you hurt?” Bending over him was Church himself, wearing a concerned expression on his face.

Swallowing his anger—you had to be careful about cussing around Puritans—Dan said, “I guess I'll live.” He scrambled awkwardly to his feet and dusted the snow off his pants and jacket.

“Your mittens,” said Church, handing him a pair of red mittens that had fallen on the ground.

“You keep them. I've got another pair.”

“I give you thanks,” said Church, stuffing them into the pocket of his pants.

“I wonder what got into that damn bird. I've never seen anything like it, an owl diving at a man like that.”

An Indian listening to their conversation—one of the praying Indians converted to Christianity—shook his head and said, “Bird was sent by spirit to kill you.”

As if things weren't bad enough already!

Half an hour later they surprised an Indian encampment. After a brisk but short fight, they killed some and took another 18 of them prisoner.

The general had been pleased with Church's success and sent two young Native American boys as a present to Boston.

Sanctimonious hypocrites. They could quote Scripture by the hour, but didn't mind cheating the natives out of their lands and making slaves of them. He could appreciate how the Indians must have felt being turfed out of their homes. He remembered how he'd felt when a judge had awarded his ex-wife their house.

He had to admire these early Americans who had worked so hard to make homes in the wilderness. No wonder they were plenty upset when Metacom's forces burned their homes and their crops.

General Sherman would similarly slash and burn his way through the South in the Civil War. Of course, if he and the other Morgans didn't stabilize the
window
that Jeremy had talked about, there would be no Civil War.

This brought him to the point: what was he supposed to be doing here? Jeremy had said that they had to stop the Indians from wiping out the colonies, but his chief concern had been to keep his butt from getting shot off and that same butt firmly in the saddle. It seemed a crazy way to run things, not to tell him what he was supposed to do.

Dan wondered anxiously where the kids were. Laney and J.J. were normal teenagers, competent in their own surroundings, with parents to watch out for them, but would they be able to handle other times and places where they'd be on their own and expected to act like adults? He'd kept his eyes open for both of them, but it was going to be next to impossible to find any of the Morgans because they were probably in different time frames.
Elsewhen,
Jeremy had called it.

Now, December of 1675 as near as he could figure and a few days after he'd been attacked by the owl, they were on the move again, two companies from Plymouth, six from Massachusetts, five from Connecticut, and some men from Rhode Island. All in all, about 1,000 men.

They'd captured a friendly Indian named Peter, who had told the militia where the Narragansetts, who had allied themselves with Metacom and his Wampanoags, had been hiding—in a swamp, inside a bloody big fort.

Dan had hardly slept that night, sleeping on the ground on a thin blanket. In the morning when they got up at dawn, they had only a little water and hardly any food to eat.

It was about to get worse: the wind picked up, becoming a blizzard. For eight hours his horse struggled through three feet of snow in the frozen hell. The one good thing about the day was that the cold had frozen the swamp solid so that they didn't have to worry about becoming bogged down in the quagmire.

They knew they were close to the fort when Narragansett sentries began firing on them.

Finally they saw the fort, built on about five acres on an island in the middle of the swamp. The fort was built out of logs surrounded by a hedge close to 16 feet thick. As if this wasn't enough protection, a moat surrounded the fort. Indians in the four watch towers at the corners of the fort began firing as soon as they saw the militia. There seemed to be only one way into the fort, over a large log that crossed the moat. That would give the Indians a fine opportunity to pick them off one by one.

Now the general was designating certain captains to take their men and try to gain entrance to the fort.

Lucky for him that he and his men weren't in the first wave to assault the fort. Dan was no coward—he had proved that in Vietnam—but he didn't want to find out what would happen to the English if they lost. There weren't any Geneva rules of conduct of war here. They had to win. Many of the men had lost relatives and friends and knew of someone who had been killed or taken captive in the Indian raids on English settlements. In the grim lines of their faces you could see that it was payback time.

Led by their captains, the men swarmed over to the fort. A deadly rain of fire wilted the advance. The English pulled back.

A burly man in an officer's uniform called him over. “Captain Prentice, take some of your men and look for another way in. We'll cover you.”

Dan nodded, got off his horse, and beckoned to his men, who eagerly volunteered. Most of them were only kids. They ducked and ran to the far side of the fort. Then he saw it: an unfinished section of one wall, about four feet high and wide enough for a few men at a time to climb over it.

They might be able after all, to get into this place. But could they do it without the Indians finding out?

Quietly, they ran back to their comrades. “Sir, we found a way in,” said Dan to the commander who had sent him out to scout out the defenses of the fort.

“Good,” said the Major. “Take your men and attack that section. At the same time, the rest of us will spread out around the fort and fire all at once.”

Dan and his men stole back to the section they wanted to breach. But no sooner had they run over the frozen moat and climbed over the low walls, than the Narragansetts began firing at them. Now it was every man for himself. In the desperate melee, Dan saw men falling under the withering fire. But the Indians were falling, too, as a few of the militia managed to run inside and fire some deadly shots.