Eliot Pattison - Blood of the Oak

Conawago stared into the rising smoke a long time before responding to Duncan’s report. “The farther that god is taken from his home the angrier he will become. He is capable of terrible things”-he gestured toward Red Jacob-“of slicing humans apart for the sport of it. Blooddancer is a very old god, a vengeful god. He is the Trickster, and when his blood rage is on him he will slash men with the claws of his rattle, then rip them apart and put them back together like horrible puzzles.”

“She is dying, Conawago. But she says her spirit will linger near the sacred lodge until she knows Blooddancer has been returned.”

Conawago’s eyes filled with moisture, and when he rose he seemed to have become frail, stumbling as he returned to the dead man’s side. The old Nipmuc bent and murmured into the scarlet ear.

“We should find some breakfast,” Duncan said, but Conawago seemed not to hear. “It’s been a hard night. We both need rest.”

Without looking up, Conawago waved him away.

Duncan stepped out into the grey blush of early dawn, nodding to Crispin, who now sat outside the shed, his club on his lap. He dunked his head in the water trough by the barn and then lowered himself onto the stone mounting block beside it. He was not just bone weary, he felt strangely diluted, dissipated, as if his soul had been tapped and drained. He gazed into the blackened forest. A monster stalked the woods, the very demon he had promised to find. Blooddancer played with the dead the way children played with toys.

He looked back at the great house, reminding himself that he should check Woolford, and had taken a step in that direction when a voice, light as feathers, stopped him.

“Yesterday in the first light young fawns were playing with the lambs.”

The voice banished all fatigue. He turned to see a dim figure perched on a fence rail, stroking the nose of one of the Percherons.

“And what was the mistress of the estate doing in the pastures at dawn?” he asked as he approached Sarah.

“Watching the northern trail. You were overdue. I was thinking of taking a horse and riding a few miles north.”

He reached out and pulled her down, into his arms. They embraced for a long, silent moment. “Thank God you didn’t,” Duncan whispered into her ear.

“I didn’t want to disturb you in the forge. Crispin said the dead man was an Oneida. Why would he be here? Why would he be killed here?” she added, as if correcting herself.

“He was one of Woolford’s rangers. Ranger business,” he said, knowing it was no real answer.

“I saw the quillwork on his waistcoat. That was Adanahoe’s hand. She does that for those who serve the Great Council in some special capacity. I have heard she is dying, Duncan. We must go to her. When I was with the tribes she was like a grandmother to me. The wisest woman I have ever met.”

“She sent for me when I was in the north, Sarah. She has other plans for me.”

Sarah stiffened and pushed away. Duncan followed her gaze toward the forge, where a solitary candle showed Conawago bent over the corpse. He heard the low monotones of another death song.

Duncan led her into the barn, trying to leave the death behind. “The apple orchard at Brewster Creek shows great promise,” he reported, desperate to change the subject. As he led her down the broad aisle flanked by stalls he spoke of his travels. Sarah called him her traveling superintendent, her ambassador among the far-flung farms and tiny settlements started by the families to whom she had allotted land out of her family’s vast holdings. They could keep the land if they worked it for seven years, and meanwhile she offered them seed, tools, and Duncan’s advice, though more often than not his contribution was with an ax or shovel in his hands. One of their first priorities had been getting orchards started wherever possible, an enterprise with which the Iroquois, renowned for their own fertile groves, had often lent a hand.

The Westcotts’ milk cow had twin calves, he reported. The prize draft mare at Hay’s Landing had thrown a fine colt. Sarah played the game, asking about Mrs. Langer’s gout and the bear that had raided the Stoltz’s smokehouse. She pointed out a blazing meteor that passed over the southern woods, and pulled him to a stop, finger to her lips, so they could listen to the gobbling of the turkeys in the trees beyond the pasture. Duncan did not miss her anxious glances back toward the smithy.

Suddenly Sarah skipped forward, pulling him toward the stile that traversed the pasture fence as if she too recognized the need to shake off their dark spell. She led him along the edge of the field, staying in the deepest shadows, and finally halted when they heard a thin but joyful bleat.

At first Duncan saw only small shadows darting among the spring grass, but as the sky quickly brightened he could distinguish the shapes of sheep and deer. A dozen lambs and half as many speckled fawns leapt about, running in bouncing strides. The ewes lay watching from the center of the pasture, the does from the edge of the forest.

Sarah rested her head on his shoulder, her auburn curls spilling over his waistcoat. “A new box of books arrived from Philadelphia,” she whispered. “I have been reading the great philosophers.”

“ Ohskenonton .” Duncan pronounced the word slowly, as if just learning it. “It means deer.”

A smile bloomed on her face. Sarah had been another skittish creature of the forest when he had first met her, a prisoner of the tribes only recently recovered by the British. Duncan had started his seven-year indenture to her Scot-hating father as her tutor. She had been a reluctant student who had forgotten most of her English while being raised by the tribes, and he had coaxed her by having her teach him an Iroquois word for each English word he taught her. Crispin had taken over as teacher when Duncan had followed Conawago into the wilderness, and now Sarah Ramsey had what was no doubt the largest library on the frontier, other than in the Mohawk River manse of their friend William Johnson, Superintendent of Indian Affairs.

“The one I am reading says symbols are the signposts of human lives, that we rely upon and use them without knowing so.” She aimed her gaze back to the animals.

It took several breaths for Duncan to understand. “You mean the wild and the civilized can find a way to coexist.”

She shot him a peeved glance. “You know better than to speak in such terms.”

Duncan flushed. “I do.” They both had repeatedly experienced the ways in which the tribes were more civilized than the Europeans. “Better I say the creatures of the forest and the creatures of the settlements.”

“Those babes in the pasture make it look so simple,” Sarah said with a sad smile. She turned to look back at the smithy, where the mutilated corpse of an Iroquois lay. She could pass for another refined English lady if need be but her spirit would always be with the Haudensaunee, the tribes of the Iroquois. “You didn’t say what Adanahoe asked you to do.”

Duncan watched as one of the great oxen emerged from the shadows by the barn. “A sacred mask was stolen. It has to be returned.”

She seemed to sag. “So few words. You make it sound like she asked you to fetch some firewood.”

“Her grandson Siyenca died trying to recover it.”

Her fist pressed against her mouth as if to choke a sob. “A bright, energetic boy, the light of her life. And who was lost from the lodge?” The question came as a whisper.

“Blooddancer.”

A sound of alarm caught in her throat and she turned toward the shadowed forest as if to collect herself. “There are those who say the Confederation of the Iroquois is crumbling away, that it has no role in the world anymore. They will say that having a god abandon it is proof. Is someone trying to destroy the Iroquois?”