Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

His lack of sleep the night before drove Duncan to his bed in the afternoon. He collapsed onto his pallet and was aware of nothing until a hand shook his shoulder. It was past sunset, and Crispin stood at his side. Sarah hovered shyly in the doorway, holding a lantern. She had tied her hair into plaits that hung from either side of her face.

“We have brought you something,” Crispin said as Duncan swung his feet onto the floor. Resting against the door frame was a small pack, made of canvas, with leather carrying straps, like those he had seen on the shoulders of Woolford and Fitch. “A blanket, a hand ax. A flour sack with dried meat and biscuit for two weeks. A loaf of bread wrapped tight in a cloth. A hand-drawn map to the Scottish settlements from Charleston, and another of the route to the Delaware from here. There is a downed tree at the edge of the old cemetery. I will place it there and cover it with bark. It will be there when the time comes. I knew men in the south who kept such things hidden, sometimes for months or years. Just having it kept their hope alive.”

“Crispin says he will teach me after you leave,” Sarah blurted out. She bit her lower lip and stared at the floor.

“At nighttime,” Crispin said solemnly as he positioned himself at the door, like a sentry. “Like my mother did for me. Until a new teacher comes.”

“I could believe you wish me gone,” Duncan said.

The words seemed to hurt Sarah. “I wish you free, sir.” Her voice, though strong, swirled with emotion. He had begun to understand something about her. Pushing against her emotion, her restless spirit, was what drew out her strength. “Free and safe, and in search of the truth. Crispin and I have both known what it means to be a slave. It is in our power to make it not so for you.” She looked up and met his eyes. “I know of no other way to repay you. You must let me repay you or I will bear dishonor. A life for a life. Mr. Lister, too, insists you must go. Crispin and I have discussed things. When you arrive in the Carolinas, you must write to the name on the map. The name is a settler a few miles north of here, a kind man who will know what to do with the letter. I will have news to write you then. We can find ways to delay the trial. Perhaps Lord Ramsey will lose interest. No matter what happens, you must promise to leave.”

Duncan looked up in alarm. “What is going to happen?”

“This is the edge of the woods. The place between worlds. I died here once before.”

The casual way she spoke the words made the hairs stand on Duncan’s neck. “You mean you were taken away before.”

“My parents buried me,” Sarah said, speaking very slowly now, as if English were again causing her difficulty. She looked into her hands and murmured to herself in her other language, the soft, swishing tongue of the forest people. “I existed only in their past. I was dead. It is the way of things for me. I die and become something else, like I did on the ship. I was once a little girl. I was once a prisoner. I was once a ghostwalker. I once lived only in dreams for two months. I lose mothers. I lose fathers. You are a Gaidheal, surely you understand what it is to be cut from your root.” She cupped her hands, her fingers slowly rising, like something growing, then she collapsed them and made a sharp slicing action with her hand.

Duncan glanced at Crispin and saw the same unsettling confusion he himself felt. The fear he felt from her words was unlike anything he had ever known. Something deep inside him seemed to be trembling. She was out on the mast again, and this time he knew not how to save her.

“Promise me, Duncan McCallum.” Her voice cracked, and she pressed her fist against her lips, her eyes closed for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice was somber and insistent, her cheeks were flushing. “In all my life, I have never asked a thing of a man. Do me this one honor. If you value your life, if you value my soul, do this. Wherever Lord Ramsey wants you, there you must not be. If you stay or cross into the forest, he will use you. He will use you and destroy you.” He had heard almost the exact words before, from Adam. “Give me your oath you shall escape to the south.”

When Duncan finally spoke, his own voice cracked. “I promise.”

“There will be killing,” she added in an absent, weary tone. “I want you out of the killing. For me it is just the way of things. I want you never to mourn me.”

Duncan stared, so numbed by her matter-of-fact announcement that he did not resist as Sarah picked up his hand and with a sad, awkward smile shook it. “Do not lose your true skin,” she whispered, then gathered her skirt and slipped away.

“In her room,” Crispin said in a thin, frightened voice, “I found these, maybe twenty, spread out under her pillow and under the bed.” He handed Duncan several familiar slips of paper, the slips he had written words on for Sarah. But she had used them again. On the backside of each she had drawn two squiggling lines, connected at the ends. Sarah had been retreating back into her spirit world. “She stopped and clamped my arm like a frightened kitten when we were coming here. She looked back at the great house with a tear rolling down her cheek and said they meant to cut her father into pieces and scatter them in the forest.”

When sleep came again it was full of nightmares, jumbled images of his grandfather and Lister, of Sarah and the savages he had seen at the army headquarters, of screaming animals and arms reaching up out of graves. By the time the waking nightmare began, he did not at first trust his senses. The screams were distant, the frightened neighs of horses much like the cries of the creatures that inhabited his dreams. But then, through the black night, he saw the flames of the cabins at the far side of the fields and heard the first musket shot.

A spine-wrenching howl came from the woods as he opened his door. Much closer was a second cry, from a Company man cowering at the corner of the building. “Indians!” he moaned, shaking so hard he dropped the ax from his hand.

In an instant Duncan threw on his clothes and was out the door, running not toward the fires but toward the great house. The compound was in chaos. Men ran in every direction, some screaming in panic, some grabbing hayforks and shovels for weapons, others running with buckets to battle the fire. Ramsey appeared on the porch in nightshirt and cap, shouting for Woolford and Fitch, then another war screech from the woods caused Ramsey to clutch his heart and press against the wall.

As Duncan reached the porch Ramsey grabbed him, pulling Duncan in front of him as if he expected an arrow at any moment. More shouts came from the river, followed by victorious cries of men shouting that they had killed one, then another, of the attackers. At the door of the carpenter’s shop, Duncan saw Cameron distributing muskets and powder horns. Ramsey had allowed his secret arsenal to be opened.

Some men fumbled with the heavy weapons, others quickly huddled in a group and fired volleys into the woods, then, as Cameron pointed out a dark shape behind them, turned and fired toward the open field past the barn. Sparks flew high in the sky. Terrified animals brayed from their stalls. Ramsey disappeared into the house. As Duncan stumbled from the porch, someone put a bucket in his hand and he headed toward the fires at a slow, dazed jog.

One new barracks cabin was consumed in flames, which now licked at the unfinished palisade wall. Twenty men with brooms and wet blankets beat at the flames that had reached the second cabin. Duncan ran fifty yards to the river and filled his bucket, returned and tossed it on the flames, then picked up a smoldering broom and began beating at a tongue of fire spreading toward the hay fields. The night became a blur of frenzied work against the sparks and flame and breathless runs to the river, punctuated by terrified moments when he and his companions lay on the earth as shots whistled over their heads.