Blood of the Oak: A Mystery Read online

  The vest would have been useless in a closer battle with guns but the ball aimed at Woolford had come from afar, as if the captain had anticipated such an attack. Although it had smashed through the vest, he saw amidst the splinters of wood and bone the metal gleam of the bullet. The vest had kept it from reaching a vital organ.

  More troublesome was the tomahawk blow Woolford had taken to the head. The strike had been a glancing one, as if the ranger captain had been struggling, but the gash was deep and had nearly taken off his ear.

  Duncan lifted an eyelid. The pupil did not respond. He whispered Woolford’s name as he poured water over the gash on his head. A patch of bright white, his friend’s skull, gleamed through the ragged tissue. Death hovered over the ranger.

  A stone rolled on the path and Duncan looked up to see the Iroquois boy staring fearfully at Woolford. Duncan pointed to a little stream twenty paces away. “He lives. Get me moss from that bank,” he ordered the boy in the Iroquois tongue. “Then find some spiderwebs.”

  The boy seemed not to understand. Duncan tried again, more urgently. “What is your tribe, boy?” he finally asked, in English.

  “’Cadian,” the boy replied in a low voice, as if wary of being overheard.

  Reminding himself that the boy was of the Canadian Mohawks, who sometimes spoke a different dialect, he explained in English what he needed.

  Half an hour later Duncan had done what he could to staunch the bleeding and clean the wounds. The needle with silk thread and the sterile bandages he needed would have to wait until Edentown. For one short moment Woolford stirred toward consciousness. He reached up, grabbing Duncan’s arm, though he showed no sign of recognizing his friend. “They’re all going to die! Every last man will die!” he uttered with desperate effort, then collapsed.

  A terrible chill rose along Duncan’s back. “Edentown is less than eight miles away,” he said to the boy. “Down the southern trail. You’ll see its cleared fields and barns to the east after the trail passes a high waterfall. I want you to help tie the captain onto my back then run for the town. Take my pack, they will recognize it there. Go to the great house and tell them Captain Woolford is hurt bad. Bring four strong men and a litter.”

  “But Red Jacob—” the young Iroquois protested.

  “We have to tend to the living, boy.” Duncan saw the anguish on his thin face. “But we can set his body in repose, lay down some cedar to attract the spirits.”

  The boy gave a solemn nod, then pushed the flour sack looped over his shoulder to his back, and bent to help lift Woolford.

  As they walked, Duncan, bent under the weight of his unconscious friend, pointed out strands of ground cedar, which the boy retrieved as Duncan explained how he should place a ring of the fragrant plant around the warrior. The youth ran ahead as they approached the log where the Oneida had died, and had begun the task when he cried out and backed away.

  Red Jacob’s left arm was gone. The eater of bones had returned.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The big Philadelphia clock in the downstairs sitting room struck four in the morning as Duncan finished the sutures on Woolford’s head. He had been grateful his friend had not regained consciousness while he had plucked the splinters and ball from his broken ribs and reset the bones, but now he was getting worried. The ranger captain had not stirred since that first troubling moment in the forest. Duncan had no way of knowing how gravely his brain was injured.

  “Mr. McCallum, surely you need some refreshment.” He turned to see Jessica Ross, the young Scottish woman recently brought by Sarah from Pennsylvania as the manor’s cook. She held out a tray with a cup of tea and a piece of buttered bread.

  Duncan glanced back at his unseeing friend, then reluctantly rose and nodded his gratitude. “It’s late,” he observed.

  “Oh nae, t’is early,” Jess grinned. “A new day. There’s fires to be lit and cows to be milked.”

  Returning her smile he quickly drained the teacup then consumed the bread on the way to the smithy. As he reached the low-roofed building he paused, extending his hands over the dull heat of the smoldering forge as he gazed uneasily at the body on the workbench.

  “It’s not that cold, Duncan,” came a deep voice from the shadows. The big black man who sat on the stool in the corner would have been invisible but for his tan waistcoat. Crispin had come with the litter for Woolford but had continued up the trail with the boy for the Oneida’s body, and had not left it since.

  “No,” Duncan admitted. “I’m just soul weary, my friend. Too much blood. Will there never be an end to it?” In the dim light Duncan saw that Crispin, freed slave and now schoolmaster of the village, held one of the long hickory staffs that were waiting to be fixed by the smith to a shovel or hoe head, and he realized that the big man was not just keeping vigil, he was standing guard. Like Duncan, he was loath to spread an alarm but knew the killing meant danger could be lurking nearby. Duncan clenched his jaw and stepped to the workbench.

  A pot of smoldering cedar, flanked by candles, lay near the head of the dead Oneida. The old man who sat beside Red Jacob was murmuring a tribal song for the dead, to ease the journey to the other side. Duncan found another high stool and sat opposite Conawago, the corpse between them.

  He remembered the quiet Oneida from one of the elders’ feasts in Onondaga. Red Jacob had sat beside him as they ate and spoken with surprising passion of his children, then of long journeys as a ranger around the inland seas and the great falls of Niagara. But when the sacred pipe had been passed around the circle, signifying the beginning of the elders’ orations, Red Jacob’s face had become as solemn as a monk’s. The next day Duncan had seen him at the riverside carrying a young girl on his shoulder and joyfully encouraging a boy of eight or nine as he caught frogs. Their laughter had filled the forest.

  “It’s enough,” he whispered as he gazed into the strong face of the Oneida. “I have laid out the bodies of too many good men of the tribes. When will it end?” he asked the dead man.

  He had not intended for Conawago to hear, but he realized the singing had stopped. “When all the good men are gone,” the old Nipmuc said in a matter-of-fact voice. Their eyes locked in a painful gaze. Conawago had given up on his decades-long search to find his people, lost to him as a boy after he had gone with the Jesuits to be educated in Europe. Duncan increasingly sensed that despite his stout heart, his friend was beginning to feel, like many other warriors of the rapidly shrinking tribes, that his one goal in life was to find a good way to die.

  Conawago broke away and gestured to the corpse. “The Death Speaker has work to do. Do not let me disturb you.”

  Death Speaker. It was what the Iroquois sometimes called Duncan. Once he had aspired to be a doctor, had nearly completed medical school in Edinburgh before being arrested for harboring his aged uncle, an unrepentant Jacobite rebel. Unlike many of the natives, he was not afraid to touch the dead. He also had learned much of Conawago’s native healing arts. But among the tribes he was known not so much for his healing as for his ability to learn from the dead, to coax the truth out of unexpected corpses.

  Duncan saw that Conawago was staring at his chest and looked down to see that his hand was clutching the small quillwork pouch that hung from his neck. Duncan was a man of two clans, Conawago sometimes told him. Highland blood may course in his veins but the tribes and their totems, like that in the pouch, had a claim on his spirit.

  He stood and whispered a prayer of his Catholic mother as he paced around the corpse. On the Oneida’s feet were moccasins of thick elk hide soles fastened to doeskin with intricate quillwork, probably the gift of his wife or mother. The dark brown trous that covered his legs were of thick sailcloth, a fixture of British sailors borrowed by the rangers during the war with the French.

  “Was he in the war then?” Duncan asked.

  Conawago nodded. “One of Woolford’s sergeants. He still carries the medallion,” he added, referring to the little bronze discs inscribed with a tree that W
oolford issued to the men, European and native alike, who served with him. If he still carried the disc then he was among the handful of elite rangers who remained on active duty, engaged on Woolford’s cryptic missions.

  Duncan lifted the pouch tied to Red Jacob’s waist and upended it onto the bench. The ranger’s disc, a flint, a length of knotted twine, a square piece of quillwork, two spotted feathers, and one cube from a pair of gaming dice. Or rather a piece of a dice, for the little bone cube had been crushed and half was missing.

  Conawago paused with a worried expression over the four slash marks on the man’s cheek, then indicated a tattoo on the left side of the warrior’s neck. “The fish with the arrow through it,” he offered, “is from the villages along Ontario, the inland sea. Probably his mother’s people.”

  The other side of the Oneida’s neck was in ruin. Duncan had once stood with his grandfather on a dock in the Hebrides as a dead sailor had been carried ashore. The man had endured storms and pirates sailing from the West Indies only to die in the harbor when a lightning bolt had severed a backstay, which had whipped down and with dreadful fortune snapped his neck. “Mark it boy,” the old Scot had said, “each day our lives hang by inches.”

  In Red Jacob the difference had been an inch exactly. His assassin’s ball had only snagged the outer inch of his neck. But in that span of flesh had been a vital artery.

  “The shot came from the back,” Duncan said, showing Conawago the clean entry at the rear and the eruption of tissue and dried blood that marked its exit.

  “He died running down one of the old war trails,” Conawago observed.

  Duncan hesitated. “The Iroquois are no longer at war.”

  “Nonsense. One way or the other the tribes have been at war ever since the first European stepped off a boat.”

  The words pained Duncan. The gentle man he had befriended five years earlier would never have spoken so harshly. He unfastened the top buttons of the Oneida’s waistcoat, exposing the tracks of a life well lived. Over a dozen small tattoos, each a badge of honor or mark of great achievement, ran in an arc between the dead man’s shoulders. Duncan recognized several. A shooting star, a crescent moon, and an upraised hand each signified completion of a ritual ordeal, all of them excruciating to the body but cleansing of the spirit. A bear, an elk, and an eagle signified the touching—never the killing—of a massive grandfather of each species, one of the prime, proud specimens said to embody important forest gods. A canoe bearing several stick figures with an arrow over it marked the remarkable, inhumanly fast ranger expedition that had been dispatched from the New York colony to force the surrender of Fort Detroit at the end of the French war. Woolford too wore the symbol on his chest.

  Conawago pulled away the cloth that covered the Oneida’s left arm and looked up expectantly. Duncan had seen dismemberments before, had even participated in dissection of the dead at his medical college, but somehow the severing of Red Jacob’s forearm deeply unsettled him. He had been with the body on the trail before the dismemberment. He sensed he had somehow failed the Oneida, by leaving his body to the butcher who had killed him. Mutilation of a warrior’s corpse was a grave sin, an affront to the dead and the living alike. Red Jacob would arrive in the next world without his entire body, and would not be able to tell his ancestors that he had nobly lost his arm in battle. Some in the tribes would say the spirit of such a corpse could still feel the pain of such a wound, that it would even disrupt the journey to the next world.

  Duncan, who normally maintained a doctor’s reserve when examining the dead, had to clench his jaw, mastering his emotion as he gazed at the stump.

  Conawago seemed to sense his discomfort, and started for him. “No sign of bleeding. He was already dead.”

  Duncan lifted the lantern closer and probed the flesh with his fingers. “It came off in three—no, four slices from a sharp, wide blade, wider than most war axes, more like a hand ax for timber.”

  “He had a tattoo on the arm,” Conawago said, pointing to the spidery lines that started on the bicep and led toward the missing limb. “When I saw him last autumn he had no such markings.”

  Duncan searched his memory, picturing in his mind his first hurried glimpses of the dead man. “Curving and jagged lines that went around his arm and ended on the back of the hand,” he recalled. “Not an animal, not a symmetrical design. A random adornment.” He pressed a finger against the remaining lines above the elbow, then with new purpose grabbed a rag, dipped it in the bucket of water by the forge, and rubbed at the lines.

  “Not a tattoo,” he declared in surprise, indicating the smudge he made. “Just ink, India ink. It might have stayed for weeks if he did not scrub at it. Ink,” he repeated in a confused tone.

  “A charm then,” Conawago offered. “A protection.”

  “Not from the one who eats the bones of men,” Duncan whispered. He looked up, sensing a new chill in the air.

  The old Nipmuc seemed to have stopped breathing. His voice cracked as he spoke. “Why would you say such a thing?”

  “The boy said it. He was raving with fear, saying this was done by an ancient demon who eats the dead. He said the monster is coming for us, shaking his rattle, and that everyone who hears it will die. Some tale to keep children in their blankets at night.”

  Conawago’s hand shot to the pouch holding his own spirit totem and he murmured a prayer in the tongue of his youth. “Children are not wise enough to be truly scared. It is the old chiefs and sachems who quake with fright when they hear of that rattle. He rages against men and revels in remaking their bodies so they will be as hideous as he is.”

  “It’s not unknown for tribal enemies to take a body part as a trophy,” Duncan ventured.

  Conawago was one of the bravest men Duncan knew, but he now watched as fear grew on the old man’s countenance. He shook his head as if disagreeing with Duncan and studied the body. The old Nipmuc bent four fingers and raked the air over the slash marks on the Oneida’s face, then pressed his fingers over Red Jacob’s abdomen, pausing over a little lump below the Oneida’s belly. Duncan loosened the remaining buttons of the waistcoat and pulled back the fabric.

  Conawago groaned and jerked backward, holding his own belly as if he had been struck. Red Jacob’s amputated hand was reaching out of a hole in his abdomen.

  “This monster has a name,” Conawago declared in a hoarse voice. “It is the Blooddancer.”

  CONAWAGO HAD BEEN AS DISTRAUGHT AS DUNCAN HAD EVER SEEN him, insisting that the body had to be cleansed again, with new prayers, and the old Nipmuc had hovered over Duncan as he had closed the incision in Red Jacob’s belly, cupping fragrant smoke over him as he worked with needle and thread.

  Duncan worried that the news he had from the Great Council would only alarm his friend more, but he knew he could no longer delay telling him. “Adanahoe used that name. The Blooddancer mask had been stolen, she told me, and the Great Council is deeply disturbed,” he recounted as he tied off the suture and cut the thread. “Her grandson died in pursuit of the thieves. She said you and I were to track down the missing god. She saw it in a dream. I was going to tell you over breakfast.”

  Conawago’s eyes flashed, then he fixed Duncan with a sober stare. “The mother of the tribes had a dream about us? And you wait to tell me?” To the tribes, dreams were important messages from the spirit world. He demanded every detail of Duncan’s meeting with the old matriarch, but not before he had moved their stools to the back workbench, and lifted the bowl of smoldering cedar to set it between them.

  The old Nipmuc, who had been trained by the Jesuits and visited great cathedrals in Europe, solemnly listened, nodding with an increasingly forlorn expression. He had decided, for reasons he had once explained to Duncan while sitting under a meteor shower, that the Christian God deserved great respect but he was a European god. The gods of the sacred lodge were for the natives of the woodlands. There was nothing irreconcilable, he insisted, about two sets of gods and saints serving two differe
nt peoples.

  Conawago stared into the rising smoke a long time before responding to Duncan’s report. “The farther that god is taken from his home the angrier he will become. He is capable of terrible things”—he gestured toward Red Jacob—“of slicing humans apart for the sport of it. Blooddancer is a very old god, a vengeful god. He is the Trickster, and when his blood rage is on him he will slash men with the claws of his rattle, then rip them apart and put them back together like horrible puzzles.”

  “She is dying, Conawago. But she says her spirit will linger near the sacred lodge until she knows Blooddancer has been returned.”

  Conawago’s eyes filled with moisture, and when he rose he seemed to have become frail, stumbling as he returned to the dead man’s side. The old Nipmuc bent and murmured into the scarlet ear.

  “We should find some breakfast,” Duncan said, but Conawago seemed not to hear. “It’s been a hard night. We both need rest.”

  Without looking up, Conawago waved him away.

  Duncan stepped out into the grey blush of early dawn, nodding to Crispin, who now sat outside the shed, his club on his lap. He dunked his head in the water trough by the barn and then lowered himself onto the stone mounting block beside it. He was not just bone weary, he felt strangely diluted, dissipated, as if his soul had been tapped and drained. He gazed into the blackened forest. A monster stalked the woods, the very demon he had promised to find. Blooddancer played with the dead the way children played with toys.