Eliot Pattison - Original Death

Regis frowned as the two Iroquois matrons and Hetty closed around him. “The promise of a raid against a secret payroll wagon was what it took to guarantee French support,” Regis said. The half-king looked at Hetty and hesitated. “But I was hundreds of miles away when the raid finally took place. Someone else decided the witnesses had to die.”

Regis looked down, seeming to remember Ishmael, still pinned against him. The boy did not flinch as Regis pressed his blade under the boy’s jaw, lancing the skin of his chin. When he saw the rivulet of blood, Duncan began bending slowly, coiling to spring. “You can buy him back, McCallum. One keg of the king’s coins, and I give him to you with his heart still beating. Two kegs and he can keep his fingers. Three and he keeps his nose and ears.”

Ishmael squirmed, trying to reach for the knife, and Duncan struggled to keep from leaping on the renegade. Regis tightened his grip on the boy then paused and looked at his hand. Ishmael had not tried to seize his knife, he had placed a small belt of white wampum across his fingers. The boy’s eyes locked with Duncan’s. They burned with the same calm determination he often saw in Conawago.

“I sat with a dying old Scot two days ago,” Duncan said. “He said he had been blessed with many lives, many wives, and many sons. But only one son survived him. His flaming spear, he called his last son, destined to scour the earth clean. Regis Thistle. Your Mingo mother was fond of the French, but your father wanted you to remember your Scottish blood. He was proud of you, but his last wish was to keep you from killing more innocents.”

The words reached the renegade. He lowered his knife, and for a few heartbeats he seemed lost in memories. Duncan inched closer.

“He is dead, Regis. Your father is dead. It was his dream, born to the laird who had done battle in Scotland and given you breath in the Ohio country where he traded furs and took his Mingo wife. A former laird who had once lived in Paris and Rome, and who chose exile in America after the uprising, the trader who schemed with Jesuit missionaries and traveled to the Vatican to cajole the last desperate members of the Jacobite court. Lord Graham tied it all together.”

Regis stared at the beads in confusion, as if he could not understand how they had appeared there.

“There are those who say they will sear through your flesh if you lie,” Duncan pointed out.

Regis did not react.

Duncan began to glimpse another man beneath the hate and scorn of the Revelator, and through him he glimpsed a chain of similar men through the years. There had not only been the Scottish laird, lost in the rising and resurrected twice as a wilderness trader and secret Jacobite ambassador. There was the Jacobite prince himself, wasting away in the Vatican. And there was Brother Xavier, who could not adjust to a new world order.

“It was always the same war, he said,” Regis murmured. “The kings against the small people. Except we will finish it this time.”

“Your war is over. You have a chance to make things right. Give us the killer of Bethel Church.”

“Each of my men is as good as fifty soldiers,” Regis snapped. “We will leave people writhing in pain all the way to the ocean.”

As if on cue Scar stepped out of the building, dragging young Noah Moss under one arm.

Regis grinned.

Adanahoe pointed.

The arrow went through Scar’s throat so forcefully that its point came out the back of his neck. Hetty turned and kicked the warrior as he dropped to the ground.

Adanahoe silently stepped up to the body and pulled Sagatchie’s war ax from his belt.

Regis seemed to grow weary. He stared again at the beaded belt in his hand. “I did not tell them to kill at Bethel Church. He-”

“Ishmael!” Henry Bedford shouted as he leapt through the kitchen window, a pistol in his hand. The boy twisted, exposing Regis’s chest, and the gun fired.

Regis’s face went empty. He gave a long groan as blood blossomed over his heart. He sank to his knees, reaching a hand out as if to grapple with the schoolmaster, then collapsed to the ground.

Bedford’s own face was a blank as he stared at his work. The prophet, the fierce Mingo renegade who had nearly changed the world, lay sprawled on the ground, his life’s blood flowing onto the grass. There was movement at the windows above. The children were looking down at their dead tormentor.

As the elders gathered around the body, Adanahoe bent and draped the white beads over his lifeless mouth. No more would lies escape his lips.

Conawago’s head snapped up at the whistle of a lark. Duncan followed his gaze toward Kass, who had emerged from the ruins with her bow and was pointing toward the burial scaffolds. The half-king’s Mingoes were there, kicking at the loose dirt beneath the scaffolds.

“Tell them to stop, Simon,” Hetty said.

Duncan was not certain what surprised the schoolteacher more, to hear his true name or to hear his mother give him such an order. He seemed to have trouble focusing on her for a moment, then he darted to Hetty and embraced her. “The ordeal is over!” he exclaimed.

Hetty seemed uninterested in his embrace. “Tell them to stop disturbing our friends.”

Simon shrugged. “They are the Revelator’s men.”

“No,” his mother said. “I watched them leave the back of the house before you leapt out the window. You told them to do so. You should not need a string of white beads when talking with your mother.”

The schoolmaster frowned and backed away from Hetty, then turned and ran toward the Mingoes.

When Duncan reached him, Simon was reloading his pistol as the Mingoes pushed sticks into the loose soil around the scaffolds. The schoolmaster spoke with a new, plaintive tone. “Surely you understand, McCallum. I never planned to kill that man in Albany. It was a misunderstanding over a card game. He said I was cheating. I said he had no proof. He said he would get a constable. An English magistrate will condemn a Welshman or Scotsman as easily as putting an ax to a chicken’s neck.” Simon took a stick from one of the Indians and began probing the soil himself.

“That explains why you were hiding in Bethel Church,” Duncan said, “but not what you did there. And I might understand a death in the anger of the moment. But we had the report from the magistrate who condemned you. That man, your first victim, died hours later tied to a tree in the forest. His fingers on one hand were cut off. You said it must have been a Huron. But it was just what a young Mingo half-blood learned when he ran with Huron war parties. It became a mark of the poet of death. I should have known that first day at Bethel Church. There were almost no clothes in your room there. You had already packed, because you knew the raiders were coming. I should have asked myself earlier who would have known to use Ishmael’s medallion against Hickory John. I should have understood when I saw your mother’s reaction to the deaths of Black Fish and Rabbit Jack, to the way their eyes were cut out. I should have understood when Black Fish spoke of his dream. You liked to use the Bible and verses of poets in your classroom. Writing a script about the other side and the resurrection of your old friend Regis was a lark for you. The two of you must have had a good laugh when you decided he would become the Revelator and you the poet of death.”

The schoolmaster raised his pistol toward Duncan.

“There again I was blind. I did not understand the two of you had been raised together, had gone on war parties and learned to kill while you were still boys. From the same village, where Lord Graham used to call as a trader and kept a wife, where Xavier the Jesuit taught about the sins of the world. Osotku the Delaware warned us about Regis, said he knew him. What he actually said was that he knew the crossed boys. Two boys, two half-bloods who always cheated.”