Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

“Mrs. Zettlemeyer,” Duncan turned to address the woman in a level voice. She looked up from her Bible. “When the skin turns yellow because he has walked on it too soon, then you must take him to the woodshed and have one of the boys chop the leg off.” Duncan leaned over to the cool water in the stone trough at the head of the springhouse, moistened his fingers, and touched the moist earth. “Right here will do,” he said, and with faint marks of mud drew a broken line on the man’s skin above the knee.

His patient’s face turned white as he tried to squirm backward, out of Duncan’s reach. The woman’s hand closed around his good leg and he moved no more. “If you think that was painful,” Duncan said, “wait until the ax. By then you will scream in agony each time someone touches the skin of your leg. There will be unbearable pain for a couple hours, then you will likely die anyway.” He turned to the sturdy German woman. “Dig his grave by those of his friends the rangers.”

The Scot moved no more, just gazed abjectly at the line drawn on his skin.

“Were you at Ticonderoga?” Duncan asked.

The man accepted a drink of water from Mrs. Zettlemeyer. “All the regiment was at Ticonderoga,” he replied sullenly. “I was a sergeant. It’s sergeants who run the battle.”

“Who was on the ridge above?”

“Onondagas. Then we saw the Hurons on the ledge above them, where they could destroy the old man and the other Iroquois with five minutes of musketry.”

“Tashgua? Tashgua’s band was there?”

The Scot nodded.

“You mean the Hurons were preparing to attack Tashgua’s band?”

“That’s what we thought, that’s why we ran up there. But they weren’t attacking, they were waiting.”

“If Tashgua wasn’t there to fight, why was he there?”

The Scot’s thin mouth twisted. “You wouldn’t understand. None of us really understood for months.”

“Try me.”

“Gods get new faces.”

“Do not speak in riddles of such important things. I must know!”

It was Reverend Zettlemeyer who answered, from the shadows where he had hovered. “It is what old Tashgua does,” he said in an already strained voice. “He stands between his people and their gods, to explain to his people the demands of their spirits. If he fails, the spirits will abandon them, and the people will die. But he knows that spirits can change, just as men can change.”

Duncan searched their faces. “I still don’t understand.”

“Everyone says the French won that day,” the deserter said in a bitter voice, “with nigh on two thousand British lying dead and wounded, and no more than one-tenth that on General Montcalm’s side. But not to old Tashgua, not to all the Iroquois chiefs who came with him. To them, the British and French gods were battling it out on that field, and they had never seen anything like the British one. What else could explain thousands of men willingly throwing themselves to the cannons? He had never imagined such a powerful god. He was so shaken, his daughter had to lead him away.”

“That’s when he began doubting himself,” Duncan said.

“That’s when-Mother of Christ!” the man gasped, raising his knife again. “Look at you!”

Duncan stared in confusion. Nothing had changed about him, except he had stepped closer to the full sunlight cast by the chamber’s small window. Outside, during the surgery, the man had been blindfolded. For the first time he was seeing Duncan’s countenance in direct light.

“Step further into the light!” the man demanded. “Do it, or I swear I’ll rip your stitches out of my leg.”

Duncan took an uncertain step forward, into the pool of light.

“He said he had a brother,” the Scot declared in a suddenly wrathful voice, “an English doctor who sold out their clan, betrayed an old uncle to the gallows to please his lacy lairds.”

Duncan’s mouth went dry as tinder. “Where is he? Where is Jamie?”

The man seemed to have forgotten his pain. He studied Duncan with a cool, thin smile. “Many a night I’ve sat and listened to him recount the ways all traitors must be dealt with. Last time he said his brother the doctor would have a medical kit with cutting tools. He vowed to use each one on you before you breathed your last.”

Duncan felt the cold scalpel in his heart already. “It isn’t like that. They traced my uncle to me. I never-”

The man lurched upright and launched a hand at Duncan, hitting his chest before collapsing in pain.

Through his own agony, Duncan saw the man had ripped the tartan sash from inside his shirt.

“You’ll not use this for your lying and cheating of true Scots.”

“I am the eldest of the Highland McCallums, I-”

“There be no English boots to lick here. Save your song for when you’re tied to the post. He’s learnt a thing or two from the tribes, about making men sing.” The deserter stuffed the plaid inside his own shirt, then seemed to brighten. “My nurse this afternoon told me ye be a Ramsey slave. The river’s up, high enough for Ramsey canoes to journey here in a day or two, with Major Pike not far behind. Ye got nowhere to run but into the arms of y’er heathen brother.” Despite the obvious pain it caused him, the man burst into a harsh, wheezing laughter.

A hand was suddenly on Duncan’s shoulder. Reverend Zettlemeyer was at his side. Duncan let himself be led out of the springhouse like one of the living dead.

A goat tied to a tree. Woolford’s words from the night on the Hudson echoed in Duncan’s mind as he sat on the bench where Zettlemeyer had led him. He had thought he could escape that fate, even save Lister and Sarah in doing so. But now his brother wouldn’t come for him because the army dangled Duncan like bait; he would come because he hated Duncan as much as Duncan hated the English aristocrats. Either way his brother would die; either way Duncan would be powerless to save his friends. The deserter in the springhouse was right. He didn’t deserve the piece of tartan. He was an arrogant fool to even playact as a clan chief. The Ramseys and Pikes of the world were destined to win, would always win. He would wear an iron collar around his neck for years, and every time he touched it he would think of Lister and his brother rotting in their graves, because of him.

A low, throaty rumble disturbed the still evening air. The sound of an angry ox. Duncan was on his feet before he heard the second sound, the hissing rhythm of a switch being jerked through the air. He did not pause as he reached the shed, did not hesitate as he launched himself at the Welshman, seizing his uplifted arm as it was about to slam the stick onto the boy’s back again. He thrust his foot against the man’s knee, spinning him violently backward against a post.

Quickly turning to examine Alex’s injuries, he lifted the boy’s torn shirt and froze. The ox’s tether was stretched tight, its nostrils were flared, its eyes bulging. With another ounce of effort the massive creature could snap the line and, in its current temper, could destroy anything in its path.

But Alex, without even a glance at Duncan, darted to the ox and began stroking its neck. Instantly the tether went slack and the animal’s angry breathing quieted, replaced by the gasping of the Welshman, whose breath had been knocked out of him.

Duncan ventured a step closer. The boy spread his arms and the ox buried its mighty head in them. As Duncan paused, unwilling to disturb the embrace, a slab of firewood struck a painful, glancing blow on his shoulder. A second blow knocked Duncan to the ground, and the Welshman charged forward, switch in hand. He landed another two strikes on the boy’s back before the ox hurled him aside with a thrust of its horn, then Duncan reached him, seizing his free arm, pulling it behind him, bending it until the man cried out in pain. Learning the treatment of injuries at the pugilist matches in Yorkshire also meant he had learned their causes.