The skeleton men hopped and leaped about Matthew, gibbering in what might have been their own language or the language of the mad. He was pulled along by the leather cord, and though he tried to address them in both English and French his voice was half-choked by the binding and no good came of it.
By the moonlight he saw a few other white men, dripping wet from the River of Souls, similarly neck-bound and being dragged along through the swamp. “God’s mercy! God’s mercy!” one of them croaked, but no mercy was shown and Matthew thought God kept His distance from this accursed place. Was there any purpose in fighting the cord? In dropping to his knees and trying to scrabble away into the thicket? He decided no, if he wished to keep his head…and in so keeping his head, he might yet have time to think himself a way out of this.
Someone sobbed brokenly, like a woman, to Matthew’s right. Matthew’s mind was inflamed with both terror and the need to plot some kind of escape, but as he was being pulled roughly along he wondered how many boats and canoes from Jubilee had gotten past this village of the damned before the torchlight had alerted the Indians and brought them, as Quinn Tate had said, to the river like flies on dead meat. Most likely Abram, Mars and Tobey had gotten past, and the first group of boats as well. Would that have included Royce and Gunn? Probably the Indians hadn’t been waiting too long before they attacked, which meant that many of the boats further ahead had gotten through.
He didn’t have much longer to ponder such questions, for suddenly he and the others were pulled from the wilderness into a clearing where multiple torches burned and a bonfire illuminated dwellings that obviously had been constructed by members of different tribes: some made of stones, some of logs, some of woven grass and treebranches, and some of stretched animal hides. The commonality among these dwellings, Matthew noted, was that they were all decorated with alligator skulls and bones, as if these elements from the River of Souls bound the outcasts—the criminal, the insane, and possibly both, if Quinn Tate was correct in the questionable lucidity of her own mind—together as one tribe.
Came the inhabitants of these huts out to watch the arrival of the hunters, and to themselves dance and caper around the white men stained by river mud. They were young and old, male and female, nearly naked, their bodies painted with garish hues of red and blue but scarred in some way or deformed by a hunchback or with withered arm or leg…outcasts, all. Matthew was brought by the skeleton men into a parade of eight other whites being pulled, poked and prodded along a dirt path toward another area ringed by torches. It was a grassy field, Matthew saw. At each end there were open nets fashioned of river reeds, and it seemed that the entire populace of this damned village were gathering around the field as if to watch a sporting exhibition.
Two of the skeleton men passed by on their way to the field carrying between them a basket that dripped blood. Matthew had an instant to see what he wished he had not seen, that the basket held several of the heads that had been lopped from their necks. One of the other white men saw it, too, and instantly gave a cry of horror and fell to his knees. Matthew recognized him as the broad-shouldered, brown-bearded Zachary DeVey, who wore a sweat-damp red kerchief tied around his bald scalp and who had lifted his pistol and declared himself able and willing to put a ball through any spirit, ha’int or demon up the river for the promise of thirty pounds. His pistol was now lost, probably to the belly of the river. DeVey looked up with renewed horror, his face puffed by insect bites and blood gleaming at his nostrils, as one of the skeleton men swung the scythe-like weapon and the edge of sharpened flint sliced through flesh and cracked against neckbone. A second swing finished the job. Blood sprayed into the air. The body remained, trembling, on its knees as some of the other Indians rushed up to catch the gore in their hands as if from a fountain and smear it over their faces and bodies with cries that could only be the joy of destruction. Then the body collapsed and the head with its sightless eyes and open mouth was picked up by the beard and put into the basket along with the others. The parade, including the dazed and arrow-struck Matthew Corbett, was pulled onward.
They were made to stand still while the cords around their necks were tied and knotted together, captive to captive, and then they were pushed down to sit along one side of the field, where they received the taunts and spittle of both their captors and the audience. The Indians shrieked with delight when two teams of five skeleton men were daubed with blood, one team upon the forehead and one upon the chest. The teams took up short but stout wooden poles with oar-like paddles on the ends. They ran to opposite ends of the field and waited there, all down on one knee, as a corpulent Indian covered with black tattoos plucked a head from the basket and waddled out to plant it at the field’s center. Then he waddled back again, and when he held his fleshy and tattooed arms up the audience did the same, and they all clapped their hands together with a noise like rolling thunder.
To the blast of excited screams and chattering that followed, the two teams leapt up and ran for the head at the center of the field. One of the chest-daubed warriors reached it first and gave it a smack with his paddle toward the opposite net, but it rolled only a few feet before the paddle of an opposing player stopped its progress and struck it a blow for the bloody foreheads. Back and forth the head was struck, as Matthew and the men from Jubilee watched in dreadful fascination.
It took perhaps fifteen minutes for the tattered head to be struck a keen blow by a cunning bloody forehead who got it past an opponent’s gory paddle and into the net. Then both teams retreated to their sides to take their knees again and the corpulent Indian repeated the ritual, this time with Zachary DeVey’s head. After the communal clap of thunder, the game went on.
It was a quick round, the brown-bearded and battered head rolling into the net guarded not too well by a bloody-foreheaded skeleton man after about six minutes of play. A third head was selected, as the other two heads were allowed to remain in the nets. The game continued, with much joyfully deranged noise.
Matthew, fighting pain and shock, knew what would happen when all the heads from that basket found their way into a net, for behind the captives were positioned two skeleton men wielding the deadly scythes. His arms were unbound and his legs free, but the leather cord knotted one man to another made escape if not impossible then highly unlikely. The arrow in his shoulder was taking its due. To remain still and frozen in this posture of defeat, though, meant certain death. To stand and fight…certain death. So for the moment Matthew was caught between deaths with no way out except to Heaven or Hell, according to the will of his Maker.
To emphasize the predicament, the wizened and mud-splattered old man to Matthew’s right gave a cry of either panic or desperation and tried to fight to his feet. Before he got there, he was knifed several times in the back by one of the skeleton men while the other one used his scythe to create another bloody ball for the game. Much to the delight of the Indians who viewed this decapitation, the grizzle-bearded head was placed into the basket and the body dragged away so that a number of children could use their child-sized flint knives on the still-shuddering torso.
Matthew realized the leather cord between himself and the next man on his right was now unconnected, having been severed by the scythe. The game was continuing on with a new head, and presently both teams were being thwarted by the other. Matthew figured there were perhaps forty or fifty Indians here in this mad village, almost all of them shouting and screaming for their team of favor, their attention fixed on this gruesome game.