Текст книги "Dominion"

Автор книги: Calvin Baker

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

Before it could be revealed, though, there was a ruckus outside that spilled immediately through the door of the tavern. Three highwaymen stood back-to-back-to-back, holding guns, and began moving through the room, taking purses from the patrons at the bar. When one of them saw the money stacked in front of the cards, and the golden pistol, he broke away from the others and went to take the bounty from the gaming table. As he held his hand over the pile of money, though, a shot rang out and he fell where he had stood.

Contrary to what Purchase had claimed, the bullet from the gun was made of lead. He and the woman then jumped from the table and rushed toward the door, as the other robbers fired randomly into the bar. In the melee Magnus searched for a way out, before finally discovering a back door and sneaking out into the hushed night air. The scene he left behind was of bloody carnage, and when he found his horse he whipped it into a frenzied gallop, not caring which direction he was going as long as it was away from that place, before he was shot or the authorities descended upon them.

The horse half obeyed and half did as it pleased, until Purchase rode up from the other direction and took the reins, as Magnus drooped in the saddle full of liquor. The jostling of the ride was awful on his head, and when they reached the road before Stonehouses, he climbed down and began walking the horse to the stable, unable to ride any longer.

“Who would have won?” Magnus asked, as Purchase helped him into the house.

“Hard to say,” Purchase replied. “But for the offer she made I would have gladly lost.”

“Not me,” Magnus told him. “Not for all the money that was piled on that table.”

“It wasn’t so much,” Purchase said.

“More than I’ve seen.”

“I would have given even more for her offer.”

“What about her white man?”

“I suppose that’s who would have lost.”

“Not with you paying through the nose for what you could have upstairs for a lot less.”

“I’ll have it later tonight for nothing,” he claimed.

“How so?”

“I left her where I can meet up with her.”

“You’ll stay in gunfights at this rate of living.”

“And you for stealing horses.”

“What horse did I ever steal?”

“The one you rode home on.”

“It was a mistake. I’ll return it first thing in the morning,” Magnus said, falling quiet. But he thought the woman from the bar reminded him of the wicked one in his dream. “I don’t think drinking is much for me.”

“Do you need help getting inside?”

“I’ll manage.”

Purchase watched as Magnus made his way inside, before turning and riding back to the room behind his workshop, where he had left the woman.

When he arrived he found she had gone without leaving any sign. He returned home alone not very long afterward, and in the days that followed he asked everyone what they knew of her. Try as he might, though, he could only gather bits and pieces of stories, each new one contradicting the last, so that all he knew for certain was that she had not waited and was gone from him.

four

He is a tiller of the soil with little interest in the affairs of other people, save the family that has taken him in, and no real bonds but to the air and the land that gives them sustenance. After his initial buffeting by the newness of the place around him he settles back into himself, keeping his own company and never complaining, but only occasionally imagining to himself other ways certain things might be done. At Sorel’s Hundred he engaged in the same idle wondering until it became a permanent ache and then a murderous craving he would have acted on, but for his mother. For her sake he held his hand patiently. After her he can be patient no longer.

* * *

At Stonehouses the days were more flexible and he worked as he saw fit, discounting, of course, the things Merian himself was rigid about and would broker no dissent or discussion over. He allowed Magnus a free hand with everything else, letting him, for example, experiment with the crops, if he pleased, but not on too large a scale, and even with his time – so long as all the work was done and no complaints from the men. Where he was rigid, though, he was hard as any overseer on the coast.

That second week he was on the land, after wages were paid out, Merian saw Magnus turn his money over to Purchase to cover his gaming loss from the week before.

“I told you it was for fun and my invitation,” Purchase said, refusing the money.

“You go ahead and take it,” Merian said sharply, startling the two of them, who had not seen him approach.

Under Merian’s watchful eye, Magnus paid from his wages the same number and kind of coins Purchase had given to him at the roadhouse.

“Now, how much do you have left out of what you just gave Purchase?” Merian asked, after the debt had been paid.

Magnus looked at the specie in his hand for a long time before answering. “Five shillings.”

“If I told you I was going to give you another five shillings, how would that figure up?”

Magnus thought hard, carefully imagining the coins in his palm before answering. “Ten shillings.”

“Now tell me the number of pence in that.”

Magnus was silent.

“What about parts of a pound?” Merian continued, as Magnus began to grow hot with embarrassment.

“You don’t have to make a fool of me,” he said finally, glaring at Merian.

“I’m not trying to embarrass you,” Merian answered. “I’m trying to help you get on better than you got on before. For that you need to know proper ciphering. A man can always trust somebody else to read something out for him, without too much worry over it, because what’s important here ain’t written down, unless you count the Bible – and there’s whole legions of preachers tripping over each other to do that for you – but if a man can’t cipher he can’t trust nobody to make up the balance or tell him what it is. Purchase is your brother, so he won’t cheat you out of your shillings. Then again he might. Do you trust him not to?”

Magnus thought about it, before answering, “I don’t think he would.”

“Well,” Merian said, “I’ve known him a bit longer than you, and he is dear as life to me, but I’ll count my own silver.”

Every day after that, when he left the fields, Magnus had to sit with either Merian or Sanne and practice arithmetic for hours on end, until he went to sleep at night with his brain aching from pondering figures and symbols. Still, he stuck with it every night that entire season and all the way into the next, until eventually he could count as well as a Dutchman.

When he found arrows out in one of the far fields, though, it did not take arithmetic to figure out there were three of them, all deadly.

At first Merian thought they were only old arrows that had been held in the ground for a long time, since the last hostilities with the Catawba, but he soon saw they were new and still bore the markings of being cut from their source. There had not been Indian troubles around Berkeley since before Merian settled there, but he knew immediately that the caravans pressing westward must have gone far enough out that the Indian was beginning to press back the other way.

He did not say anything else but gave Magnus an old musket to carry with him from then on, when working in the more distant fields.

“Can you shoot?”

“I can,” Magnus said, taking the gun.

“Good. If you see anything that looks like it needs to be shot, you do it.”

The next day as he worked out there again, with the gun slung over his shoulder, Magnus saw something approaching from the westward country and stood up to investigate. It looked to him like a wild animal of unusually large proportions, but as it grew closer he saw it was a man carrying pelts and skins for the market. It wasn’t until the man was almost right up on him that he saw that the pelts were human scalps, strung together and wrapped around his shoulders like sashes.

In addition to the scalps he also wore a double necklace of fingers, ears, and what Magnus finally figured out were noses. Other than that gruesome vesture he was stone naked.

In his arms he carried a large unadorned box, which he protected very carefully as he made his way up the road

When the man saw Magnus staring, he stopped at a distance and pointed at the articles on his person. “Any one of them will make you a good medicine,” he said.

When Magnus failed to reply, the man set down the box and opened it. “I have the vitals too, if that’s your aim: red, negro, white, whichever you want.”

Magnus looked into the box and saw a collection of grisly organ parts, and in the middle of it an intact human head. He turned away his face and looked back up the road.

“Well, I thought neggers liked such things for their doctoring. The one in the box was very powerful. Very good medicine.” The man closed his parcel of death and took it back up in his arms.

“Who is he?” asked Magnus, who had not spoken since seeing what the man was.

“I thought you could hear and talk,” the Indian agent replied. “I said to myself as I stopped here, Lacey, you done seen many things ye never thought ye would, and it’s fair you’ll see one or two more, but a mute Ethiop with a rifle, that you will never witness.”

The man seemed almost sad that this should be the case, making Magnus wonder briefly what else he had seen out there gathering scalps. “Him, his name was Kasatensera. You would rather fight any six other men. With his enemies he and the Negro sorcerer he worked with liked to have splinters of wood inserted in every little pore of their skin, until they stood out like frightful wooden hairs, and then set them all afire. Nasty stuff. Very powerful. If you were the type for it, very good medicine, I imagine.” He lingered over the word medicine, waiting to see whether Magnus would not change his mind. “Well, no matter. The governor is said to be paying thirty shillings a scalp, and more for this one, I wager. What would you reckon?”

Magnus, in the time he stood there, had counted fifty-two scalps on the man’s sash and quickly figured that he had 1,560 shillings, or 78 pounds sterling, worth of human flesh and profit wrapped around him, but he did not say anything.

“If you’re not interested, I better be moving on,” the agent said to him, taking up his awful box as if they had been carrying on any normal conversation.

When Magnus told Merian later what had happened, Merian told him to prepare for the worst of it. “No one takes a scalp but a war party,” he said. Sure enough, word began to come to them in the days that followed of settlers farther out on the frontier being attacked and one settlement being razed entirely. The governor had sent a dispatch of soldiers out to hunt down the offenders, but it disappeared without ever reporting back.

The rest of the spring and summer the road was filled with regular troops going out, and after that a party of allied Cherokee from the tidewater, who had licensed on to fight their sworn enemies. When that particular conflict was over, the flow of people across the road would be much larger, but its increase brought death down its whole length.

They were working the August harvest as usual at Stonehouses when one of the hired men yelled out “Fire!” at the top of his voice. Magnus looked into the western distance, where he saw thick oily smoke rising up. He climbed a tree and saw that a farm down in the far country of the valley was all ablaze.

He ordered two of the men to go over to investigate. When they returned both of them shook with fright, as they reported that their neighbors were well beyond helping.

That night the sky was still lit with the smoldering embers from the farm that had burned down, when another one, even closer to them, went up in flames. No one had to climb anything to see the resulting inferno, as it reflected ethereally off the clouds and stars, it was so bright and near to them.

Merian himself went over this time to see what help could be offered, and on the way a boy climbed out of an embankment of weeds and stood in the middle of the road when he heard the sound of wheels. Merian stopped the carriage and lifted the child up. When he had had a drink from Merian’s flask, he told of being attacked by a band of Catawba warriors. “They killed everybody where they slept,” he said. “The only reason they missed me is cause I climbed into the well and hid.” The bottom of his feet were bloody and raw from where he had pressed them against the rock, scrambling out.

When he heard this story, Merian turned the carriage around and went back to his own place, where he gave the child to Sanne to look after until more permanent shelter could be found for him. He then assembled all the men working there for the harvest and handed out what weapons there were to the most trusted among them. One group he sent on patrol to keep lookout, others he posted as watchmen from the edge of the land to the front porch. Everyone else he barricaded inside, where they passed the night in vigil and fear of death.

Merian, Purchase, and Magnus each kept watch on horseback at a different corner of the yard out front of the house, coming together every once in a while to report anything they had seen. This went on until morning was well advanced and they finally decided they were safe for the time being, as the Indians were known to attack only at night. They then went to take breakfast.

As they sat and ate they suddenly heard a great thundering of horses’ hooves off in the distance. Purchase jumped up and led Magnus and two other men up a rise to see what it was. What they saw was yet another detachment of soldiers marching out toward the valley.

That night another farm was put to the torch, and from his porch Merian could see just how much of the county had been brought under cultivation since the time he moved there, so that one would hardly know it for the same land. “This used to be a peaceful spot,” he told his two sons. “Not so, now that the governor aims to have full war with the natives and drive them right off of it.”

In the morning, Magnus and Purchase went to see what damage had been done during the night. Three farms lay in complete ruin and all their inhabitants dead. Neither of them said anything about what they saw at the time, but as they rode back to Stonehouses they came upon a long spike that had been driven into the ground. At the top of it was a half-rotten human head.

“His name was Lacey,” Magnus said, examining the work that had been done to it. “He had made almost enough money to go back to Scotland.”

Purchase asked how he knew this, and Magnus told him of meeting the man almost a week before. “He tried to reach for too much,” was Purchase’s only reply. “He might have made it to where he was headed instead of back down this road if he hadn’t tried to go for so much.”

They were quiet then, from the thickness of tobacco smoke that clung in the valley air, sweet and oily, like the inside of a colossal pipe bowl. Smoking was a luxury Magnus had scarcely been able to afford in his previous existence, and the few times he tried it he coughed violently upon inhaling the smoke and never found any pleasure in the experience. Purchase, though, closed his eyes and breathed deeply of the fragrant air, relishing the taste, now of old tobacco carefully cured; now of bitter green leaves just off the stalk, both of them suffused with the headiness of that plant’s hypnotic powers. He inhaled again, savoring the taste and sensation of the smoke in his lungs, then exhaled and eased back into the gentle ride they were on. He laughed, however, when he turned and saw how sickly Magnus looked. “You’re not a big one for pleasure, are you?” Purchase asked him.

“Not this kind. Not especially,” Magnus answered, quelling the nausea that was sweeping over him and yoicking his horse toward the high ground above the smell of smoke.

When they arrived at Stonehouses, Content and the chandler, Pete Griffith, were there on the front porch with Merian, as Merian told what had been happening out where they were. At first Magnus was greatly concerned to see the two strangers there, as he had made it his business to avoid contact with anyone outside of Stonehouses, and thought at first to run, but, when Merian bid him, he entered in the circle with the other men.

Content was friendly and relaxed with him, and warm in the way he was well known for, but he also studied the new man intently, trying to see exactly what sort of character he had. He was tall and well made – only a half head shorter than Purchase – and seemed to keep his mind to himself. On the whole, Content was reminded not unfavorably of Merian when he had first met him all those years ago, but the younger man was not so bold as Merian himself had been. This last thing, though, was not necessarily negative. He sensed the man was capable enough but thought in general that men, especially those born in the colonies, were becoming less hardy than those who had traveled the ocean to get here, whether from England or from Africa. He did not attribute any of this to the fault of Merian’s grown sons, both of whose strength and vigor was obvious, but simply notched it as the sign of his own years.

“The governor has sent a party to sue the Indians for peace,” he said, going back to his conversation with Merian and giving the news he knew they would be most anxious to hear. “Some of the frontier people pushed deeper than the treaty permitted, and the Indians grew irate at it. But everyone thinks they’ll take new terms, so things should get back to normal soon enough.”

They all looked at Merian, waiting for his reply, but he made none, and Content could see then how the last several days had made his friend’s age show in the lines of his face, especially about the eyes. “It will never get back to what it was,” he said finally, moving to the window. “This used to be a quiet country, Content.”

“I know,” Content answered. “No one can argue there.”

He also knew, however, it was possible the two of them had merely been fortunate enough to be born in a time that had not known the full pressures and deprivation of war.

Merian was so shaken by the last week, wherein he had nearly lost everything, that he told them all he no longer wanted to speak about it but instead began to relate the story of a heroic ancient king who blinded himself and went into exile because of crimes he had unknowingly committed. They were crimes he could not help, he explained, because they were in the design of his people’s gods. “In ancient times was a king who the gods marked for greatness,” he said. “It was a terrible thing.”

When he had finished the story, Magnus and Purchase were both very still and pensive. Content, meanwhile, had grown cold at his fingertips and looked through the window with a grievous expression on his face.

“I would have named my own house Colonus,” Merian said, as he stood and went to the window that Content peered through. “But I thought by now they surely must have heard of that place. I called it Stonehouses instead, in hopes it might keep them off us awhile.”

five

It was several weeks after the Aborigines’ siege that Magnus was in town on an errand and met Purchase afterward to go to Content’s. As the two of them sat there looking out onto the square, an uncovered wagon drove up to the door and stopped directly in front of it. Two men then climbed out from the front and came into the bar. In the bed of the wagon was a cage, where another man was tied and bound.

When the men entered the bar they made it loudly known that they were out on official business: one of them a bailiff for the court in Edenton, the other his assistant. “We’ll take two whiskeys,” the bailiff commanded, as they sat down and began to talk about how unruly that part of the world was, and the dangers of their work.

“Why, the one out there is wanted for murder, sorcery, and a whole host of other crimes. There is a bounty for him big as a king’s ransom.”

Purchase and Magnus said nothing to either of the newcomers, but continued to drink. When Purchase later turned and looked out at the man in the wagon, he found the other man also looking at him steadily, as though he had been awaiting his attention. What passed between them then was the recognition of kindredness, if not necessarily kinship. There was no witness to anything that happened after that, but the man was gone from his jail before midday and the cage left untouched as if the key holder had let him out himself, which was not possible since the bailiff had the only key and he carried it in a pouch around his neck. Both, the key and his neck, were still upon him as he went about cursing that afternoon.

Late that evening, the one who had been released from the cage showed up at Stonehouses. Merian was very happy to see him, but Sanne, when she saw what state he was in, was alarmed almost to the point of despair.

“You don’t have to live your life like this, Chiron,” she said. “Merian, tell him he doesn’t have to live like this.”

Merian agreed with what his wife was saying but knew his old acquaintance was on some path that none could sway him from. Still, he offered him the same spot for a house he had offered once before.

“I would accept if I could,” Chiron told his friend, as the men drank from the cask Content had given Merian on his birthday, which seemed never to reduce in the amount that was present. “Tell me anyway how everything has been with you here, besides that the liquor has gotten better.”

Merian talked of the hostilities with the Indians, boasted on how Purchase was the best smith in the colonies, how Magnus came upon the land, and how he himself had once set out to grow rich but settled for more modest expansion when he learned the cost of labor. He also showed Chiron the sword Purchase had forged, and Chiron alone among men who were not in that family was able to lift it up. He was also the only one, even among those who were its owners in the future, who could see everything that the legend on the blade contained. It was marvelous to him, as he held it aloft and examined the finely balanced steel.

“Aye, it is the right one,” he said to Purchase, who had not known who he was when he saw him earlier that day, but only that he was a man who was being held as no man ought to be. Then he put the sword down and said to Magnus, “You don’t remember me, but I knew you when they called you Ware and you lived with your mother in a room at Sorel’s Hundred.”

He looked at the marks on his wrists and bid Magnus follow him outside, where they went a short way into the woods. There the older man pulled a spiky weed from the ground and broke the stem open until it oozed white with nectar. He rubbed this onto the scars on Magnus’s arms, and took a rock to slough away the dead skin, then added another anointing of the nectar. “It will heal the scarification,” he said, “so you will not be so vulnerable.” When he finished they went back to the house, where everyone talked until late into the night, because, other than perhaps Content and Dorthea, he was the most welcome visitor Stonehouses ever knew.

In the morning he was gone again when the house awoke, and Merian did not look to see what he had left or taken from the storerooms. He only hoped his friend would not be hunted down out there in the frigid wilderness but would make it to wherever he was headed on that path only he knew.

Nor were these the only disturbances that autumn on the land. The other, Magnus was first to see, as they sat in Content’s the day after Chiron had gone. It was then that the woman from the gambling house in the woods, and her partner, entered and took seats at a table. Instead of drinks, though, they asked only that supper be brought out to them immediately.

Jannetje, one of the lasses who worked for Content and Dorthea, brought the pair plates of stew and mugs of cider, and they began eating and talking together calmly, though it was strange to see a woman in the bar. When they had finished eating, the two stood and left to go back out, never once having acknowledged Purchase or Magnus. At the door, however, the woman turned to them and brazenly winked at the two men. When they asked Content later who the two were who had just left, he replied that they were traveling preachers, unattached to any kind of formal congregation. “It is scandalous to have a woman preaching, and even more than that for what the two of them have to say,” he opined, which was unlike him, because he usually tolerated or suffered all equally.

That night Magnus and Purchase went again to the roadhouse in the outlying country, Magnus only to keep Purchase company, Purchase because he was intent on finding the woman.

When they entered the room it was unchanged from how they had last seen it. The card players were arranged around the tables, and those there for other pleasure lined up against the bar as the women came in and went out in their costumes. There was a subterranean quality to the light that made it seem later in the night than it actually was, and the din from the crowd when someone either won a large amount of money or when a familiar customer came in, gave the room a depressed feeling that made Magnus uncomfortable. Purchase, on the other hand, enjoyed this about the place, finding that it built up whatever sensation he was already feeling.

He wished for the woman who had run away from him, after they were there last, and tried to channel that desire into a game of tarok, but the cards were unable to siphon his mood and he eyed the door expectantly whenever someone entered.

Magnus, surveying the crowd, began to think Purchase had only gotten himself wound up over something he was not to have. Still, as the night wore on he sat there in order to watch over his brother if he could.

When he had lost as much at the cards as he could stand, Purchase rose from the table, walked around the room, picked up one of the girls’ hand, and let her lead him to the back. She was not an attractive woman, and he had looked past her a hundred nights without seeing her. Tonight he wanted her in the ambiguous manner of wanting everything and nothing specific at all.

In the back room a lantern burned very low at the wick and he pulled his pants down, and pushed the woman to the mattress. He mounted on top of her without ceremony, letting her guide him inside, then began thrusting until he had finished.

The woman she lay there neither damning nor redeeming him but simply giving off a few moans for surprise and pleasure and doing what she had been paid for, which was to bear his weight in the darkness for a spell.

It was very quick satisfaction, and when he finished he pulled his pants back up and left the room with the feeling of having done a low thing. His sex and wanting, though, were sated, no longer gnawing at the inside of his brain like a untamed animal.

For the first time he noticed just how dingy the entire establishment was, and wondered how many hours of his life had passed there without finding the satisfaction he came in search of. What he also asked himself, and did not know, was whether it was more satisfaction than he would otherwise have known.

As they rode back home he felt a whistling emptiness and did not know whether it was caused by missing the one he sought or lying down with one he ought not have had. He was surprised that this last thing should occur to him, for it was something he had gotten away with a hundred times in the past.

Magnus rode alongside Purchase with a half smile on his face but tried hard to suppress it when he saw how the other was feeling. “If she is a preacher now, you’ll be hard pressed to find her in a place like that,” he said finally.

“You might be right, but I wish you had said something before,” Purchase replied.

“Don’t throw salt on me,” Magnus returned. “It was your notion.”

“Do you think I’m mean for what I did?”

“It is a funny sort of reckoning that takes one woman to get over another. It might work, but no one will ever explain how.”

“Well, it seemed like the natural place to look.”

“To look for a preacher?”

“That is where they were before. Where else do you think we should have gone?”

“You might have tried the church.”

In the end they did find her in church, though not the one in town but rather in an outdoor tent that had been set up in a field outside of Berkeley, on the road that ran past Stonehouses. It was Sanne who suggested they go, saying it would do them all good to hear some new voices mixed in with the old ones they had been hearing their whole lives. As she grew older she had become increasingly concerned with the keep of her family’s salvation, and she liked to believe that praying for people made up part of the way for them who did not pray enough themselves. Still, she knew this only made a small difference, so if she could get Merian and Purchase to pray any kind of way she would be happy. As for Magnus, she had no idea what condition his soul was in but would bet it needed upkeep as well.

On top of these other reasons she had never heard of a woman preacher before and was keen to know what she would have to say that might be different from what the other preachers promised and claimed about the state of the world.

Merian had never had much use for any of them and told her it would be the same as the rest, only set in a woman’s mouth instead of a man’s. “You might think its something different on account of the novelty, but I wager there won’t be anything new in it.”

“Since when have you been listening to so many preachers as to be an expert?” Sanne challenged. “Anyway, what’s different is that it is a woman. That itself is something new, in my mouth anyhow.”

In the end it was this that compelled all of them to get out of bed before the sun that Sunday, to get good seats under the tent, which had been pitched in the middle of a muddy field for what had been promoted in the area as a Revival and Awakening.

As the four Merians looked around, they were surprised both by the number of people who had come out for the event and the general number that lived within walking or riding distance of Stonehouses. It was perhaps a hundred fifty souls, but all gathered together they seemed legion. Their own seats were midway back, and they could see very clearly when the first preacher, the Englishman Magnus and Purchase had played cards with at the roadhouse, came onstage. He was dressed smartly in a purple robe, with golden thread at the sleeves and a red sash he wore over his neck, along with a great golden cross.