Eliot Pattison - Blood of the Oak

The words shook Tanaqua. He abruptly rose, stepped down the pebbly beach to the water’s edge, and lowered himself to his knees. He reached into the river, cupped water in his hands and offered it to the moon, then held the water close to his face and murmured to it.

When the Mohawk did not move for several minutes Duncan cautiously approached and stood beside him.

“Not stolen,” Tanaqua said. “A kettle gets stolen. Captured. I only hope he was captured. Otherwise it means he fled.”

Something cold gripped Duncan’s heart. The Iroquois were glimpsing the end of their world. Conawago had shared a terrible secret with him months earlier. Several of the elders of the League suspected that the life had gone out of some of the sacred masks, as if the ancient spirits were abandoning the Iroquois.

“I should have gone on a purification ritual before I left,” Tanaqua whispered. “I should have summoned all the members. But there was no time. And there are only four of us left. The oldest of the guardians, my half brother, knows the words to be spoken for calling the ancient ones like the Trickster. He keeps vigil in the lodge of the bear god in the west hills, and is supposed to teach me when he returns.” He looked up with a forlorn expression. “To kill like that means the old Trickster is angry. Now that he has tasted blood he will keep shaking his rattle and killing. He will dance with the bodies of the dead everywhere he goes.”

Duncan struggled to understand. “You knew,” he said after a moment. “You knew about the stolen mask.” He heard a deep despair behind the Mohawk’s voice. He spoke as if he had some responsibility to the mask. Duncan’s breath caught in his throat as the strange words suddenly connected. He recalled the tattoo on Tanaqua’s forearm of snakes and birds, messengers of the gods. The Mohawk belonged to one of the secret Iroquois societies whose sacred duty was to protect the masks.

“Red Jacob was killed by a musket, fired by a man,” Duncan said. “Two guns were fired at Edentown. They were not held by a god.”

“If the Trickster passes close to a man it can seize him to do his work. Even among Christians I have heard of possession of a soul by an angry spirit.”

“The Blooddancer did not kill a young Scottish woman at Edentown.”

Tanaqua seemed not to hear him. There was nothing he could do to ease the Mohawk’s pain.

After several minutes Duncan stepped back to his blanket. He stood with his hands over the smoldering fire, remembering nights spent in the lodges of the Iroquois elders, witnessing rituals handed down over many generations that were meant to keep the link to their gods strong. As he knelt and pulled back his blanket, something like a ceremonial rattle sounded in his mind and he looked up, half fearful that the Blooddancer was approaching.

What happened next he remembered only as a blur of something long and sinewy. The huge rattlesnake coiled underneath his blanket lunged, aiming for the exposed flesh of his neck. The war club that knocked it aside was thrown from behind him, and Tanaqua followed it an instant later, grabbing the stunned snake by its head.

The serpent was nearly as thick as the warrior’s arm, and at least six feet long. Its head seemed cocked in curiosity, not anger, as Tanaqua stared into its eyes. The rattle in its tail slowed, then stopped.

Duncan spoke over his thundering heart. “If I had known this old grandfather wanted my bed I would have gladly yielded it.”

The warrior nodded. His toss of the club had had no force in it, and he had pounced on the snake as much to rescue it as to help Duncan. In the tribes there was no worse luck than that which came from killing a snake. The snake was not the only small creature that served as a messenger to the gods, but only the snake brought dreams, and dreams were the way the gods sent messages to humans. Conawago would have insisted the snake was beside him when he had dreamed of the Iroquois spirit lodge.

Duncan lifted a burning stick like a torch. “Up the trail,” he explained as the snake curled around Tanaqua’s arm, “I passed a field of boulders. He would find a dry bed there.”

They walked in silence to the boulders, then Duncan waited as Tanaqua held the serpent’s head close to his own and whispered in a comforting tone. As he bent to release it, Duncan touched his arm and extended his own hand. With a look of surprise Tanaqua let Duncan take the huge snake from his hands. Duncan steadied himself, knowing that if he slipped, the viper could end his life in an instant. He put the snake’s eyes inches from his own and it strangely quieted. He whispered in Gaelic, then repeated the words in English. “The spirit of my mountain and the spirit of my forest join in you. Find us life, not death before its time.” Tanaqua kept his gaze fixed on Duncan, not the snake, as he released it.

They walked silently back to the river and stood again by its edge.

“Bricklin said no travelers had passed us but that one family,” Tanaqua explained. “That is true but as we approached this camp today a canoe was pushing off. A man with yellow hair wearing black clothes was in it, with another who was laughing with him as they floated away. Talked like men who wore wigs. English gentlemen. Teague was waiting here when we landed.”

“The Irishman was waiting?”

“Waiting for Bricklin.”

“You mean he had brought those men the canoe.”

“A rendezvous of three men, two who left in the canoe. Teague greeted Bricklin like an old friend, and Bricklin told us to welcome the bull of Ireland to our company.”

“You too waited for Bricklin,” Duncan stated.

“I don’t understand.”

“You have an urgent mission to retrieve the sacred mask. In a solitary canoe you could have traveled faster. But you chose to come with Bricklin.”

“I saw the body of the boy who died. Siyenca, Adanahoe’s grandson. In his hand was this-” Tanaqua extracted from a pocket inside his waistcoat a flat six-inch piece of wood. In the moonlight Duncan could see the many notches cut into it. It was a tally stick used by traders to keep track of transactions or inventory. “The Trickster will never travel in a straight line. All I knew was that he was going south. He will never be where he is expected.” Tanaqua looked back at Bricklin’s dugout, where the Dutchman slept as if guarding the little chest destined for Dr. Franklin. “But spirits follow spirits. Spirits talk with spirits, even those in a box.”

Neither Duncan nor Tanaqua mentioned the snake in the morning but they stayed near each other as the canoes were loaded, and took the paddles of the same canoe as Bricklin gave the order for the convoy to push away.

The Dutchman, in his faster dugout, worked his way back and forth among the big cargo canoes as if herding them downstream, conspicuously pausing to watch Duncan as he worked the paddle in long, powerful strokes. He nodded his approval and sped forward, yelling at a pair of Welshmen to balance their canoe better.

It had been many months since Duncan had been on open water, and with a flush of excitement he touched the neck pouch with his spirit totem inside. As he did so he was drawn back to the days of his youth, sailing the waters of the Hebrides with his grandfather. The bright clear water kindled powerful memories of the old Scot laughing in the teeth of a gale, diving among seals, even once rolling out onto the back of a great basking shark just for the joy of it.

After two hours of steady progress down the river he became slowly aware of a lessening of movement, and saw that Teague, in the lead canoe, had stopped paddling. Duncan watched him in confusion, then became aware of a strange new sound, a soft liquid hissing. Suddenly the river was alive with movement, rising and churning as if it were one huge beast that had abruptly grown anxious. The surface began to boil and change to silvery tones.