Murray was looking upward too, a look of distance on his tattooed face.
William lay back, half-propped against the log, trying to think. What was he to do next? He was still trying to absorb the news that Henry Washington and thus, presumably, the rest of his Dismal Town contacts were rebels. Was this odd Scottish Mohawk right in what he’d said? Or did he seek to mislead him, for some purpose of his own?
What would that be, though? Murray could have no notion who William was, beyond his name and his father’s name. And Lord John had been a private citizen when they had met years before, on Fraser’s Ridge. Murray could not tell, surely, that William was a soldier, let alone an intelligencer, and could not possibly know his mission.
And if he did not wish to mislead him and was correct in what he said… William swallowed, his mouth sticky and dry. Then he had had a narrow escape. What might have happened, had he walked into a nest of rebels, in such a remote place as Dismal Town, and blithely revealed himself and his purpose? They’d hang you from the nearest tree, his brain said coldly, and toss your body into the swamp. What else?
Which led to an even more uncomfortable thought: how could Captain Richardson have been so mistaken in his information?
He shook his head violently, trying to shake his thoughts into order, but the only result was to make him dizzy again. Murray’s attention had been attracted by the motion, though; he looked in William’s direction, and William spoke, on impulse.
“You are a Mohawk, you said.”
“I am.”
Seeing that tattooed face, the eyes dark in their sockets, William didn’t doubt it.
“How did that come to be?” he asked hurriedly, lest Murray think he was casting aspersions on the other’s truthfulness. Murray hesitated visibly, but did answer.
“I married a woman of the Kahnyen’kehaka. I was adopted into the Wolf clan of the people of Snaketown.”
“Ah. Your… wife is…?”
“I am no longer wed.” It wasn’t said with any tone of hostility, but with a sort of bleak finality that put paid to any further conversation.
“I’m sorry,” William said formally, and fell silent. The chills were coming back, and despite his reluctance, he slid down, drawing the blanket up around his ears, and huddled against the dog, who sighed deeply and released a burst of flatulence but didn’t stir.
When the ague finally eased again, he lapsed back into dreams, these now violent and dreadful. His mind had taken hold somehow of Indians, and he was pursued by savages who turned into snakes, snakes who became tree roots that writhed through the crevices of his brain, bursting his skull, liberating further nests of snakes who coiled themselves into nooses…
He woke again, drenched in sweat and aching to the bones. He tried to rise but found his arms would not support him. Someone knelt by him—it was the Scot, the Mohawk… Murray. He located the name with something like relief, and with even more relief, realized that Murray was holding a canteen to his lips.
It was water from the lake; he recognized its odd, fresh-tasting bitterness, and drank thirstily.
“Thank you,” he said hoarsely, and gave back the empty canteen. The water had given him strength enough to sit up. His head still swam with fever, but the dreams had retreated, at least for the moment. He imagined that they lurked just beyond the small ring of light cast by the fire, waiting, and determined that he would not sleep again—not at once.
The pain in his arm was worse: a hot, stretched feeling, and a throbbing that ran from fingertips to the middle of his upper arm. Anxious to keep both the pain and the night at bay, he had another try at conversation.
“I have heard that the Mohawk think it unmanly to show fear—that if captured and tortured by an enemy, they will not show any sign of distress. Is that true?”
“Ye try not to be in that position,” Murray said, very dry. “Should it happen, though… ye must show your courage, that’s all. Ye sing your death song and hope to die well. Is it different for a British soldier, then? Ye dinna want to die as a coward, do ye?”
William watched the flickering patterns behind his closed eyelids, hot and ever-changing, shifting with the fire.
“No,” he admitted. “And it’s not so different—the hoping to die well if you have to, I mean. But it’s more likely to be a matter of just being shot or knocked on the head, isn’t it, if you’re a soldier—rather than being tortured to death by inches. Save you run afoul of a savage, I suppose. What—have you ever seen someone die like that?” he asked curiously, opening his eyes.
Murray reached out one long arm to turn the spit, not answering at once. The firelight showed his face, unreadable.
“Aye, I have,” he said quietly, at last.
“What did they do to him?” He wasn’t sure why he’d asked; perhaps only for distraction from the throbbing in his arm.
“Ye dinna want to know.” This was said very definitely; Murray was not by any means teasing him into further inquiry. Nonetheless, it had the same effect; William’s vague interest sharpened at once.
“Yes, I do.”
Murray’s lips tightened, but William knew a few things about extracting information by this time and was wise enough to preserve silence, merely keeping his eyes fixed on the other man.
“Skinned him,” Murray said at last, and poked at the fire with a stick. “One of them. In bitty pieces. Thrust burning slivers of pitch pine into the raw places. Cut away his privates. Then built up the fire about his feet, to burn him before he could die of the shock. It… took some time.”
“I daresay.” William tried to conjure a picture of the proceedings—and succeeded much too well, turning away his eyes from the blackened muskrat carcass, stripped to bones.
He shut his eyes. His arm continued to throb with each beat of his heart, and he tried not to imagine the sensation of burning slivers being forced into his flesh.
Murray was silent; William couldn’t even hear his breathing. But he knew, as surely as if he were inside the other’s head, that he, too, was imagining the scene—though in his case, imagination was not necessary. He would be reliving it.
William shifted a little, sending a hot blaze of pain through his arm, and clenched his teeth, not to make any noise.
“Do the men—did you, I should say—think how you would do, yourself?” he asked quietly. “If you could stand it?”
“Every man thinks that.” Murray got up abruptly and went to the far edge of the clearing. William heard him make water, but it was some minutes longer before he came back.
The dog wakened suddenly, head lifting, and wagged its huge tail slowly to and fro at sight of its master. Murray laughed softly and said something in an odd tongue—Mohawk? Erse?—to the dog, then bent and ripped a haunch from the muskrat’s remains, tossing it to the beast. The animal rose like lightning, its teeth snapping shut on the carcass, then trotted happily to the far side of the fire and lay down, licking its prize.
Bereft of his bed companion, William lay down gingerly, head pillowed on his good arm, and watched as Murray cleaned his knife, scrubbing blood and grease from it with handfuls of grass.
“You said you sing your death song. What sort of song is that?”
Murray looked nonplused at that.
“I mean,” William fumbled for clearer meaning, “what sort of thing would you—would one—say in a death song?”
“Oh.” The Scotsman looked down at his hands, the long knobbed fingers rubbing slowly down the length of the blade. “I’ve only heard the one, mind. The other two I saw die that way—they were white men and didna have death songs, as such. The Indian—he was an Onondaga—he… well, there was a good deal in the beginning about who he was: a warrior of what people, I mean, and his clan, his family. Then quite a bit about how much he despised u—the folk who were about to kill him.” Murray cleared his throat.
“A bit about what he’d done: his victories, valiant warriors he’d killed, and how they’d welcome him in death. Then… how he proposed to cross the …” He groped for a word. “… the—it—the way between here and what lies after death. The divide, I suppose ye’d say, though the word means something more like a chasm.”
He was quiet for a moment, but not as though he had finished—more as though trying to recall something exactly. He straightened himself suddenly, took a deep breath, and with his eyes closed, began to recite something in what William supposed to be the Mohawk tongue. It was fascinating—a tattoo of “n”s and “r”s and “t”s, steady as a drumbeat.
“Then there was a bit where he went on about the nasty creatures he’d encounter on his way to paradise,” Murray said, breaking off abruptly. “Things like flying heads, wi’ teeth.”
“Ew,” said William, and Murray laughed, taken by surprise.
“Aye. I wouldna like to see one, myself.”
William considered this for a moment.
“Do you compose your own death song ahead of time—in case of need, I mean? Or just trust to the, um, inspiration of the moment?”
Murray looked a little taken back by that. He blinked and looked aside.
“I… well… it’s no usually talked about, ken? But aye—I did have a friend or two who told me a bit about what they’d thought of, should there ever be need.”
“Hmm.” William turned on his back, looking up at the stars. “Do you sing a death song only if you’re being tortured to death? What if you’re only ill but think you might die?”
Murray stopped what he was doing and peered toward him, suspicious.
“Ye’re no dying, are ye?”
“No, just wondering,” William assured him. He didn’t think he was dying.
“Mmphm,” the Scot said dubiously. “Aye, well. No, ye sing your death song if ye’re sure ye’re about to die; it doesna matter why.”
“The more credit to you, though,” William suggested, “if you do it whilst having burning splinters stuck into you?”
The Scot laughed out loud, and suddenly looked much less like an Indian. He rubbed his knuckles across his mouth.
“To be honest… the Onondaga… I didna think he did it so verra well,” Murray blurted. “It doesna seem right to criticize, though. I mean, I canna say I’d do better—in the circumstances.”
William laughed, too, but both men fell silent then. William supposed that Murray was, as he was, imagining himself in such case, tied to a stake, about to suffer appalling torture. He gazed up into the void above, tentatively composing a few lines: I am William Clarence Henry George Ransom, Earl of… No, he’d never liked his string of names. I am William … he thought muzzily. William… James… James was his secret name; he hadn’t thought of it in years. Better than Clarence, though. I am William. What else was there to say? Not much, as yet. No, he’d better not die, not until he’d done something worth a proper death song.