Not until she spoke did recognition dawn in Duncan.
“They are angry!” the woman cried out in a scratchy birdlike voice. “The gods say you ignore the ways of the people!” Her pale eyes were wild. “The gods say treat with the Grand Council or be damned!”
“It’s just the damned Welsh woman!” the Revelator growled, but no one seemed to hear him. It was indeed not Hetty Eldridge before them but Hetty the seer, Hetty the witch who had once frightened the tribes so much they had sent her back to the Europeans. The half-king could not eject her, for his disciples had embraced her as an oracle.
She did a strange dance now, a stuttering step of two paces forward and one back, bobbing her head like a bird all the while as she murmured words Duncan could not understand, waving long skeleton arms at the assembly. Not exactly arms, just femur bones extending beyond her hands that she gripped so tightly they seemed part of her body. She shouted the haunting words in a harsh, screeching voice, her head now raised to the moon, then every few paces she halted, lowered her head, and aimed her bones at the ranks of frightened onlookers. Nearly every Indian gripped his or her protective amulet. Then finally she swept her bone-arm around the assembly and stopped when it pointed to the Revelator. She spoke now in the tongue of the Haudenosaunee. “The gods say the Council must be respected!” she screeched, then she switched back to her alien tongue before taking up her jarring dance again. The Revelator tried to reach her, but she kept moving in and out of the crowd, which closed about her as she passed. The words were long mouthfuls of consonants, sounds that began to sound oddly familiar to Duncan.
“The old ones say the piper and the Nipmucs speak for them! They must bring the truth of the Revelator to the Council!” she cried when she stopped again, then relapsed to the strange language.
Suddenly Duncan recognized the tongue, if not the words. Hetty was speaking Welsh.
“With the piper and the Nipmucs, we will reach across and bring them the truth of the Revelator!” she screeched, then she collapsed in a cloud of feathers.
The canoes sang the waters, the Haudenosaunee were fond of saying in describing swift water passages. For two days their narrow bark vessels did indeed sing. They had help from the half-king’s men over the ancient carrying place to the shore of the lake called Oneida, and their two canoes had then raced over the smooth waters and into the river that would take them to the central hearth of the Haudenosaunee at Onondaga Castle. Duncan and Macaulay, whom the Revelator had insisted would escort them, paddled the first canoe with Conawago lying on blankets, tended by Ishmael. Sagatchie and Kass, themselves representatives of the Haudenosaunee whom the oracle had said the half-king must respect, propelled the second with Hetty between them, nearly as weak as the old Nipmuc. She too had an attendant, who lay beside her, sometimes licking her like a docile puppy. The hell dog had leapt into the canoe when they had laid her inside, and no one had been inclined to resist him.
After nearly sinking when an old patch on the canoe had sheared away, Duncan insisted they make camp in the early evening to allow Conawago a hot meal and a comfortable night’s rest. They had pulled their vessels onto an island where a grove of pines provided a soft carpet of needles near a sandy beach. Duncan’s old friend had been rapidly improving, confirming his suspicion that his condition had been caused by something ingested, not physical injuries. When he had awakened in the canoe and realized who the youth at his side was, Conawago’s joyful cries had echoed over the lake.
Duncan and Ishmael settled Conawago against a tree. Then, as Ishmael sat at the old man’s side, Duncan followed a path down which Hetty, also much stronger, had disappeared. He found her kneeling beside the river’s edge, rubbing wet sand through her matted, tangled hair. Farther down the beach, Sagatchie and Kass were repairing the damaged canoe with fresh bark and pine pitch. The leak had started so abruptly Duncan had thought they had collided with a log. Had Duncan not quickly stuffed a blanket into the hole they surely would have sunk in the deep water.
“What you did at the half-king’s camp,” he said to her back, finding it oddly awkward to speak to the woman. “I’d be tied to a post missing parts of my body by now if you hadn’t. .”
“I warned you, son,” she said without turning. “You didn’t know how to speak to the Revelator.”
“Meaning I should have poured honey over my body and rolled in feathers and moss?”
The Welsh woman made a grunting sound that may have been a laugh as she rubbed sand on her skin. “That old Seneca woman who tended us knew me from years ago. She told me the half-king was feeding your friend mushrooms that kept him on his back and brought his visions. Everyone was talking about how he had just appeared in the Lightning Lodge, speaking in a tongue no one could recognize. If the half-king had been alone I’m sure he would have killed him, but his men were scared and insisted Conawago had come across for a reason. They would not touch the sacred knife he clutched, for they said it was a weapon of the old gods.”
Duncan cocked his head in surprise, not at the word of Conawago but at Hetty. She was speaking to him like some elderly aunt.
“I made her stop those mushrooms.” Hetty kept clearing the dried honey from her hair as she spoke. “He is one of the old ones who must be preserved. The knowledge of all the forest people resides in his heart.”
“I had a grandfather who kept our old ways alive,” Duncan said. “I would have given my life to preserve him. But the English army hanged him.”
Hetty glanced over her shoulder. “You weren’t going to preserve Conawago by taunting the Revelator. You were a fool to seek him out.”
“I wasn’t necessarily seeking out the half-king, Mrs. Eldridge. I was following you and Ishmael.”
“So you would throw your life away in pursuit of an old woman and an orphaned boy?”
“And five lost children captured with their schoolmaster. You are the one who sought the half-king,” he reminded her. “You expected the half-king to have your son. Did you see signs of him, or the children?”
The Welsh woman sluiced water through her long greying hair before finally turning to Duncan. “I have never had need of money, but I went to the settlements because those damned lawyers only respect money. All these years I stayed in that cramped town sewing lace so English prigs would look pretty at their dancing balls. I hate towns. I only did it for my son.” She grabbed a handful of hair and began wringing the water from it. There was no longer anything sinister about her. She was just a tired old woman.
Duncan hesitated, confused by the remorse in her voice. He realized he had missed the most important point. “The half-king also sought you. Why? How did he know you?”
She ignored his questions.
“Then why do this, why change your path? You should be going north, to the Saint Lawrence, that has to be where the raiders went, where your son and the children are. Runners came from the North with drawings from the children. They are alive. Henry Bedford is the strength of those children. He’s been keeping them safe, at God knows what cost.”
She did not reply. Something at the camp had changed her mind about where to search for her son or how to obtain his release. Her performance as the screeching oracle had been calculated to free them to go south.
“You must be very proud of him,” he ventured. “He’s very brave.” He could not bring himself to share what he had read on Hannah’s note. The schoolmaster was being tortured to save the children.
She found a piece of moss knotted in her hair and bent to untangle it.
He realized she would talk no more of her son. “When you spoke to me in Albany,” he tried instead, “you said White George stumbles. I did not understand then. You meant King George. You knew about the Revelator when no one else in Albany did.”