Council of Fire Read online

  “Look,” Skenadoa said to Joseph. “Konearaunehneh. They have called forth Floating Heads.”

  Joseph squinted at the trees; he could see the five horrid things, moving against what looked like a stiff breeze; thin, almost ethereal cords extended up from the earth to their bases.

  “We need to cut their cords,” Joseph said.

  “Huh.” Skenadoa scowled. “Not with your bare hands, young chief. But will a tomahawk slice through them, even if a warrior could see to cut them?”

  “I can see,” Joseph answered. “But no, I don’t think so. It would need a special sort of tomahawk.” He paused, and then he nodded. “Where is An-De-Le?”

  “There is no guarantee that the tools of the Little People will work, but . . . they are closer to the Great Spirit. Still, it is a dangerous task.”

  “It may take some convincing.”

  “Oh, I know how to convince them, young chief. I will tell them that they are too weak and cowardly to do it.”

  Clear of the trees, it became apparent that the large figures were made of stone. Edward remembered the ones he had seen in western Pennsylvania colony, weeks earlier. These looked similar—perhaps a little smaller, but about the same number, about two dozen.

  And we’re simply out of Highlander ghosts, he thought.

  But the resourceful colonials had produced a number of coils of stout ropes almost the width of his wrist: the sort of thing that would be found on the deck of a Royal Navy ship. It had taken some time for the Stone Coats to emerge from the trees and line up: perhaps they had not quite awoken from their sleep or were unused to the sunlight.

  At his orders, the ropes were uncoiled and held at waist height at each end by several brave, stout colonials, across the most level paths the Stone Coats might take toward the army’s position. He had directed them to drop the ropes and run if the creatures veered toward them. He wasn’t about to have them give up their lives for no reason.

  But they didn’t turn; they continued to march—and as they came up against the ropes they strained to move forward, and three in the front rank actually toppled over as Edward had hoped they would. But the others continued in their progress, eventually tearing the ropes out of the hands of the men who held them. The three that had fallen simply got back on their feet and continued to advance.

  Looking toward the Mohawk, Onondaga and Oneida warriors, Edward saw that they clearly had no intention of engaging the Stone Coats. He felt like cursing them for a lot of cowards, but his more rational side understood perfectly well that their Iroquois allies were simply better informed than he had been. They knew of no way to stop the monsters any more than he did—except that they’d known that from the start.

  The French were ready with bayonets fixed, but the natives opposite seemed to be waiting for the monsters above to descend—they were unwilling to advance until the Floating Heads did so. But the things were not descending; it was as if they were unable to gain control of their movements.

  While Lévis waited with his men, two natives came up to him. An older, dignified chief and a young man full of energy and light on his feet. And just behind he saw a group of the small warriors, with their hatchets drawn.

  “You command here?” the older native said.

  “I am the Chévalier de Lévis,” he answered. “I act on behalf of the Marquis de Montcalm.”

  “We are here to deal with that,” the man said, pointing toward the Floating Heads. “I am Skenadoa; this young chief is Joseph.”

  “The Little People are connected to the earth,” Joseph said. “I can see where they are bound, and we are going to cut that connection.”

  “Surely the natives will not let you simply wander among them for this purpose,” Lévis said.

  “The connections are in the field in front of us,” Joseph said. “But we will need you to protect us while we do this.”

  “Unless you are afraid of fighting,” Skenadoa said, his voice level.

  “You gain nothing by insulting my honor,” Lévis said. “Unless that is the true reason you are here.”

  “It is not,” Skenadoa said. “Perhaps later. In the meanwhile, Joseph and the Jo-Ge-Oh have work to do.”

  Without a further word, the young native and the tiny warriors dashed out ahead of the French troops. After scarcely a moment’s hesitation, Lévis raised his sword and the French charged forward as well.

  Joseph remembered the first time he had seen a Floating Head, at Canajoharie when the Council Fire had been extinguished. He could see, when no one else could see, the long, sinuous string that descended from the creature to the ground. He saw them once again—but this time he had no intention of grasping it as he had before. His hands twinged where that action had burned them, and though there had been a great vision as the result of his foolhardy deed, he did not want, or need, to experience it again.

  Instead, he drew back his bow and fired into the ground where the string came to earth. The Jo-Ge-Oh ran forward and cut through the air above where the arrow was located, and their tomahawks—no ordinary weapons, but rather what the whites might call enchanted—cut through the string, causing bright, scintillating light to stream forth. No one could see it but him—but everyone, the charging French infantry, the native warriors dashing forward to meet them, and the Jo-Ge-Oh moving from one grounded arrow to the next—could hear the hideous screams of pain from the Floating Head as it lost its contact with the earth and sped upward until it was out of sight.

  Catherine LaGèndiere slumped over the keyboard of the concatenator for a moment, gasping for breath. Messier was at once by her side, solicitous and concerned.

  “My dear girl—”

  “No time,” she said. “Someone has done something to the Floating Heads. Now . . . ” her voice, which seemed to emerge from a parched throat, trailed off into silence.

  “I will get you some water. But Catherine—you must conserve your strength.”

  She did not respond, but instead made some minute adjustments to the knobs above the main keyboard.

  Edward watched as the Stone Coats continued to advance. He had heard the story of how they had attacked Fort Duquesne, tearing it apart until there was scarcely one stone lying atop another. He didn’t know what would happen when they reached the Colonial lines.

  “Perhaps we can knock them over,” Gridley said. “Enough blows with axes or hammers—”

  “And if they get hold of any of the men, they will tear them apart.”

  “What do you propose, then? That we retreat?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “There is no place to run, Your Highness. There are hundreds of us and fewer than twenty of them. If it takes a dozen of us to bring one of those monsters down, then that is a price we must pay.”

  “I cannot ask you to do that.”

  “You are not asking,” Gridley said.

  And then, as they watched, a most curious thing began to happen. As the remaining Stone Coats crossed the ground toward the Colonial lines, they began to slow down. The ground itself was becoming soft and muddy beneath their heavy bodies.

  Gridley looked baffled by the sudden change. He squinted at the bright sky, which was completely absent of clouds. The heat of the day was coming on.

  The Stone Coats’ advance had become much slower, as they were already knee-deep, slogging slowly forward as the ground became more and more soft beneath them.

  “I don’t understand,” Gridley said.

  “I think I do,” Edward answered, looking toward the hill where Amherst and Montcalm watched—and where, he knew, the Frenchwoman was operating her mysterious alchemetical concatenator. Whatever was happening, it had to be her doing.

  In essence, she’d turned the formerly solid soil into quicksand. A normal human could not drown in quicksand; once they sank waist-deep their buoyancy held them up. What killed people so trapped was exposure. But the Stone Coats were much heavier and denser and Edward thought they would sink completely below the surface. H
e had no idea if that would kill them—were the Stone Coats alive at all?—but it would certainly immobilize them.

  The main force of enemy natives began to rush from the tree cover now, charging at the British regulars deployed on the elevated ground below the hill. Another portion of them charged toward the Mohawks, Onondaga and Oneida warriors, who came forth to meet them.

  The British troops knew not to waste volleys on them, but instead met them with bayonets and the butt ends of their muskets, fighting in fierce hand-to-hand combat against the fury of the enemy natives. Occasionally, as the generals watched, one or another soldier would simply collapse, seemingly untouched by an attack—but near an elaborately-dressed native who held one hand outward.

  “Those bastards are dangerous,” Amherst said to Montcalm. “Wolfe knows what he’s dealing with.”

  “What are they?”

  “They call them Dry-Hands. I believe the native word is Oniate. Some of them have actually cut their hand off to have a sort of enchanted hand attached. Prince Edward was almost killed by one at the last battle.”

  “Your troops should shoot for the head.”

  “You have an elevated opinion of any soldier’s ability to hit anything. Massed fire hits the largest targets, as you know. Trying to hit a few individual heads—waste of ordnance.”

  With the battle swirling around them, Joseph and the Jo-Ge-Oh rushed forward toward the place where further Floating Heads were anchored. The French regulars had been warned about the presence of the Little People, and they worked hard at protecting the little group as it made its way toward the tree line.

  As they approached the next of the strings connecting a Floating Head to the ground, Joseph could feel tingling in his hands. It was almost as if he wanted to touch it again—but he tamped down the thought and gestured for the Jo-Ge-Oh to do their work.

  As he hoped, the Little People’s closer connection to the Great Spirit empowered them to attack the strings, even though they could not see them. But they, along with everyone else, could hear the screams of the monsters as their connection with the earth was severed. Joseph saw an effect that looked like the striking of steel and tinder—making him wonder what those things were made of, if it was any substance that he could understand.

  As the French troops and their native allies charged forward, the enemy retreated. Cutting the Floating Heads off from the earth and destroying them frightened the Indian warriors—they may have thought the tide was turning. When the last string was cut, the Jo-Ge-Oh danced in a circle, whooping and shouting.

  It may have been the noise they made that masked the sound of a single arrow whistling through the air from the retreating natives. It caught in the throat of An-De-Le in mid-whoop. He fell onto his back, where he looked up toward the sky with an empty gaze and his hands spread wide.

  For Joseph, it was as if time had suddenly stopped. He looked, astonished, along the straight line that the arrow had taken from its origin to the Jo-Ge-Oh chief. It was as if every obstacle along that path had vanished, and he could see a Seneca warrior, whose hand was still on his bow. With speed that he could not have expected, he drew his own bow, nocked an arrow, and shot back at the assailant.

  When the arrow struck home, the weird timeless fugue ended as abruptly as it began, and the sounds of the battle returned with a rush. Joseph knelt beside the Jo-Ge-Oh chief whose eyes looked upward toward a sky he could no longer see.

  Chapter 59

  Words that no white man could understand

  As the Stone Coats thrashed in the mud, now sinking rapidly, Edward saw that the natives beyond seemed to have no interest in trying to cross the treacherous ground to reach their colonial enemy. He looked across the battlefield. The French had charged forward toward the woods, while a large contingent of natives was surging toward the hill where Amherst and Montcalm stood.

  And, he knew, where Mademoiselle LaGèndiere was operating her alchemetical device—the clear cause of the flat land turning to non-navigable mud.

  As Edward watched, however, he saw a grey-brown cloud beginning to form over the advancing natives.

  “What’s going on?” Gridley asked.

  “I don’t know, Colonel,” Edward answered. “But the battle is there, and we’re going to join it.” He waved his sword and spurred his horse into motion. His colonials followed after him.

  Four Oniate remained among the native warriors. As the natives moved forward, the shamans stopped, turned, and began to walk toward each other. In the midst of the chaos of battle, the four men seemed to move, oblivious, as if controlled by some other agency. One of the four, in fact, was suddenly struck down by an errant swing of a native tomahawk; and he fell, lifeless, without even an outcry.

  When the three remaining Dry-Hands met, each raised his enchanted hand so that they touched and grasped. From this, a coil of greyish-brown smoke began to rise, pooling sixty or seventy feet above the battle. The cloud began to grow larger and thicker, casting an ominous shadow.

  Amherst stepped away from his vantage and walked quickly back toward where the Frenchwoman was operating her device. Messier saw him coming and stepped into his path.

  “Something is happening above the battlefield,” Amherst said. “Whatever the lady is doing, she should turn her attention to that.”

  “It occupies her attention already, General,” Messier answered. “It is the one thing that concerns her.”

  “What is it?”

  “I cannot say for sure,” Messier said. “But it shows that the native shaman is becoming desperate.”

  “Explain.”

  “He has brought the three Dry-Hands together, and they are doing some sort of sorcery.”

  “What sort of sorcery?” Amherst asked impatiently.

  “I am not sure, General. But it seems to be similar to something we saw previously when we were en route to New York. When Admiral Boscawen’s ship was in Jamaica, the negro shamans did a working like this.”

  “What was its result?”

  Messier shuddered. “The shamans . . . animated the dead.”

  “Preposterous.”

  “You dismiss things very easily, General. Look at the battlefield: there are summoned creatures drowning in mud; the Floating Heads have been severed from the earth and rendered powerless; and there are Dry-Hand shamans who were striking down your soldiers by simply touching them. If the Dry-Hands are being compelled to join their powers together, the native shaman is trying some great working that . . . feels . . . like the one we encountered in Jamaica.”

  “So they are trying to animate the dead,” Amherst said.

  “Or something worse.”

  “I can scarcely conceive of something worse than that.”

  Messier did not answer.

  “What do you propose that we do about this?”

  “Mademoiselle LaGèndiere is doing what she can. But in the meanwhile—those Dry-Hands must be stopped from completing their working.”

  Edward dismounted before his troops reached the British regulars’ position—a man on horseback was altogether too ready a target. Revere and a dozen others gathered around him as the colonials moved forward. He was still well back from the primary melee when he came up next to Wolfe, who was directing the advance of the regulars.

  “Highness,” Wolfe said. “I am surprised to see you here.”

  “Hopefully not disappointed.”

  “No, not at all. Do you know anything about that?” He nodded toward the growing cloud, now beginning to swirl in a disturbing spiral.

  “No, but I don’t like it.”

  Wolfe rolled his eyes very slightly, then seemed to think better of it. “The source appears to be over there—” he gestured ahead of him—“where there are three of the Dry-Hand scoundrels gathered together.”

  “Are they doing some sort of sorcery?”

  “That is not my area of particular expertise, sir.”

  “Yes, I’m aware of that. I believe we should focus on disposing of th
em above all else.”

  “That seems prudent, Highness,” Wolfe said. “Indeed, it is what the professional soldiers are attempting to do.”

  “My troops—”

  “I think we have it well in hand,” Wolfe interrupted. “I’m sure your colonials can find something to do.”

  Edward was ready to reply angrily, but instead looked aside to Richard Gridley.

  “Colonel, pick two dozen of your best men, and take care of those Dry-Hand bastards.”

  “Yes, sir!” Gridley answered, and as Wolfe reddened, Gridley pointed to several of his men, who grasped their muskets like clubs and moved forward into the fray.

  The cloud above the battle had begun to assume human form, with a great protruding head and wide-spread arms. Beams of greyish light sprung from the figure’s fingertips, arcing downward toward the battlefield, and each time a beam struck a native warrior, his face went blank and he turned toward the hill, moving forward heedless of obstacles or attacks.

  The beams of light struck more and more warriors; first a handful, then a few dozen, then—it seemed—every one of them. They fought with maniacal fury, continuing even after they were horribly wounded. They appeared to feel no pain.

  As Gridley’s men began to advance, Edward placed his hand on Paul Revere’s sleeve.

  “Stay here, sir,” he said.

  “Your Highness, I—”

  “No one questions your bravery, Colonel. But your duty is to remain by my side as my aide, and to subdue your passions. You should entertain no doubt that there will be danger right here as well.”

  The colonials began to confront the blank-faced natives as soon as they advanced. At first it was unnerving; in hand-to-hand combat, pain and injury wasn’t enough to drive the enemy back—it took the crushing of a native’s skull to bring him down.