He paced about the stone platform and then, feeling like a violator in a temple, slid the stone from the top. He stared inside the compartment, then studied the forest, his heart thumping again. The wampum belt was there, but beside it someone had lain a bundle of feathers and fur tied with a single string of beads. His heart rose up in his throat as he surveyed the forest around him again. An Indian had been there, half a mile from his own bed, in the past twenty-four hours, and now he was intruding into that Indian’s secrets.
Extracting the paper, Duncan began to carefully replicate on it the shapes on the belt he had first examined with Woolford. A square at either end; figures of men holding axes; a large tree topped by a man in the center; several small X shapes with the top of each X connected, alternating with animal shapes. The figures were meaningless to him. But they meant something to someone at the settlement. When he finished, he extracted from his waistcoat the pages he had taken from Evering’s journal and read every line again, attempting to decipher even the many lines that been crossed out. The pages were mostly filled with Evering’s maudlin verses, some further describing Sarah as she slept, others reflecting what seemed to be Evering’s growing unease about landing in America. Duncan kept returning to several lines that seemed to be premises for poems never written. If dreams transport you to the other world and you dream two months without waking, would you not try to stay on the other side forever? the professor had asked. Then, under a series of X’s meant to obliterate the words, Evering’s chilling version of an old children’s rhyme. There was a crooked man who climbed a crooked tree. He found a crooked promise and kissed the crooked sea.
The thought of Evering caused him to lift his head toward the river. He returned the belt to the cairn, then stepped toward the water. Duncan kept learning from Evering, long after his death, as if the scholar were speaking to him from the spirit world. He found himself on the riverbank, gripping his fear, and stepped into the water.
The crooked face of the effigy seemed to be staring directly at him when he arrived under the hemlock on the island. Almost nothing had changed since his first visit, except the crown of antlers was in front of Evering now, with several feathers leaning against it. In one of the professor’s twig hands was a little stick, four inches long, with a single strand of beads attached to one end. Several notches had been cut into the stick. With mounting fear Duncan lifted the stick and its beads away. With a shudder he discovered what it was that was frightening him even more than on his first visit. Evering’s watch was ticking.
He backed up several steps and examined the beads on the stick. They were white and purple, arranged in a pattern of two purple and one white, the same as in the strand around the new bundle in the cairn; the same, he suddenly realized, as one of the oval lines drawn by Jacob the Fish in his dying message. The old Mahican had been sending a wampum message, without the beads.
An hour later Duncan sat on the school steps, making notes in the late afternoon sun, when suddenly a figure erupted from behind the cooper’s shed, stumbling, steadied by an older man who was pushing him forward. They walked along the wall of the building, disappearing around its far side. When they reappeared, Duncan put down his papers and stood, stealing along the shadows for a better look.
It was McGregor and the other Company prisoner who had been brought back, the man still wearing the same mindless, numb expression he had worn when he had appeared from the forest. On the third round, Duncan realized the two men were making a deiseal circuit around Arnold’s makeshift church.
“What was his sin?” Duncan asked a Company man who watched the ritual uneasily.
“Killed a snake with an ax,” the man replied in a perplexed tone. “Old Fitch had a fit. Broke off the ax head and tossed it in the forge to melt. McGregor said he knew a way to make things right.”
Duncan waited for McGregor and his companion to finish their circuits, then reached the old Scot as the two men, finished, stepped to a drinking trough. “What happened out there with Hawkins?” he asked.
The old Scot swallowed hard before answering. “We came upon a farm where everyone had been killed, days earlier. Blood everywhere, the bodies in pieces, picked by the crows. That night we stayed with a Welshman who sold us rum, who told us tales of the heathen, said if we kept going upriver the Huron would take us home and hang us up alive for meat, slicing off pieces for their stew pots.”
“But that was where Hawkins was taking you? Upriver?”
“I don’t know. Yes. They’re not coming back. Over there, in the forest, it’s like being thrown into the ocean not knowing how to swim. For four days, this one,” he said, indicating the younger convict with him, “never slept. ’Tain’t right, McCallum, ’tain’t for people like us to-” The Scot’s voice trailed off as the younger man wandered away into the makeshift chapel. “Hawkins, he left the boy on the trail, weeping like a babe, so weak he couldn’t walk. I told Hawkins the boy was Ramsey property, that he couldn’t be wasted like that without accounting to the great laird.” McGregor shook his head. “He sneaks into the chapel when e’re he can. I’ll have to drag him out again, a’fore Reverend Arnold hears.”
“Hears what?”
“His prayer, always the same prayer. May I die soon, he says, may I die quick.” With a sigh McGregor stepped toward the chapel.
Duncan returned to the schoolhouse steps, keeping an eye on the men who walked along the muddy paths of the town until he spied a compact, sinewy figure in green. Fitch entered the barn and was sharpening his hand ax on a grindstone when Duncan approached and silently took over the turning of the handle. The sergeant nodded and continued working the blade with grim determination. A Company worker appeared with a spade to grind, and backed away as he saw Fitch. The men treated the sergeant like some kind of wild beast that sometimes prowled in their midst.
“The Indians use codes in their beads,” Duncan said after a minute. He extended the strand of beads on the stick with his free hand. “Jacob used the same code.”
Fitch paused, testing his blade with a callused thumb, glancing at the beads. “This used to be their land. Even if Ramsey offered to pay for it, which he didn’t, they wouldn’t understand. Their brains can’t fit around the idea that men can own land.”
“Who exactly uses such codes?”
“The Six,” the sergeant said toward the trees, then turned to Duncan. “Each of the Six Nations has its own bead pattern, to identify it in messages. Four strands, with two purple and one white, that be Onondaga. They are the central tribe, the keepers of tradition, the ones charged with watching over sacred things. The ones with the most powerful shaman.”
“Tashgua, you mean.”
“He was born Onondaga. But he lives apart now, away from the Iroquois towns, with his own band, has for years. Like a band of roaming warrior priests, protecting the old ways.”
“But there are soldiers here. Surely hostiles won’t move about with the soldiers so close.”
“Gone, with the last of the settlers, worn out by Ramsey hospitality. There was a farmer named William Wells, with a place not many miles north. Killed and scalped two days ago, but his place wasn’t burnt, so those settlers went there. And the troops were just a small patrol, due to go back soon.”
Duncan examined the stick again. “It has ten notches. What does that mean?”
“It’s a council stick, lad. A religious council. An Indian shaman wants to talk. Ten notches means in ten days.”
“Are you saying it’s an invitation?”
“If ’twere given to an Indian, that’s what it would be.”