Jack Absolute (19 page)

Of course.
Hell.
He was in hell, the place to which countless teachers, commanders, former lovers, and present enemies had often condemned
him. He had only to listen –
another sense –
to the voices that surrounded him, voices that could only come from demons about their hideous work. Guttural grunts, expectoral
explosions, curses in tongues long dead.
So all the tales were true.
And if his ears now worked so, presumably, would his eyes. If he could force them open no doubt he would see what these satanic
imps were about, what further horrors they prepared for him to add to the steady crushing of his lungs, the bands of metal
squeezing his head, the jagged pain at his neck and shoulder …

Someone – something – grabbed him there, squeezed. He had no true desire to add sight to the terrible sounds he was witnessing.
He was sure the torments would come to him whether he looked or no. But the sudden surge of agony caused his eyes to fly open,
to focus on the demon’s face before him. It was huge, flat, as red as anything that could be expected in Hades, broken blood
vessels and curling rust hair rippling across the expanse. And yet … hadn’t he seen it before? Confusion temporarily displaced
fear.
He recognized the face.
If hell existed, this man was as likely a candidate for it as any, but Jack was confused as to why he should have preceded
him there.

‘MacTavish?’ he croaked.

‘Aye. Some Dogone has leeft thee in this unco sair state, nae right?’

Jack, of course, had no idea what the man had just said. Furthermore, he could not understand how he, whom he’d last seen
being herded towards the lake with the other prisoners, was before him now. Yet these rapidly became secondary considerations
to more pressing realizations. Not least, that he was alive. This became clear when he discovered his hands were free and
he made use of them now to raise one towards his injuries. His throat was grotesquely swollen, yet he managed to squeeze one
further word through it.

‘Snake.’

The Scotsman nodded. ‘Timber rattlesnake.
Corachulus Majores
, tha’ ken. Thy neck’s ower pluffy, but if th’art chancy, there’s plantain in this scrog. My boumen seek it oot. Ah …’ As
he spoke, two young men came through the undergrowth. Jack recognized them as those others he had also saved from the Native
vengeance, as scrawny as MacTavish was vast, yet equally rubicund. They dropped bundles of a broad-leafed plant before their
leader. He picked up a handful, shook it. Dirt fell from the roots.

‘Plantain. So th’art chancy, reet enough. If we found thee in the nick.’

For the first time in an age, Jack felt a little hope. He didn’t know the word ‘plantain’ but the Iroquois called this plant
‘mahtawehaseh’.
He had seen it used on snake bites before. Some survived, some didn’t. He had, once before. Much depended on how quickly
it was administered to the victim after the attack, how weak they were. When a man was bitten, his skin would blacken, and
blood would flow that no amount of staunching could stop. Shoulder and chest were already soaked in his. But he watched MacTavish
spit on two stones, begin to pound the leaves between them, saw the sap bursting forth, and his hope continued to rise.

At a nod, one of the other men used some water from a canteen to wash some of the blood away, then this same man began to
squeeze first the shoulder wound, then the one at the neck. Torment, blood, and a foul-smelling yellow discharge flowed at
each touch. Jack felt an urge to strike out, to push this demon away. But he bore it, near silently, then watched MacTavish
approach. He had wrapped the mash in two of the leaves and these he now pressed to Jack’s wounds. Strips of cloth were bound
around and a shirt was taken from his knapsack, pulled over him, buttoned up. Then he was lowered till his head rested on
a pile of leaves swept up for the purpose. Instantly, though the pain appeared not to diminish, a desperate urge to sleep
took him again.

He struggled against it. ‘MacTavish …’

The huge face loomed over him. ‘Wheesht, man. Naw tha’ must thole. Either tha’ll live or nae. But tha’art bucksturdie, ah
can tell. Weel watch thee till the morn. Wheesht!’

‘MacTavish,’ Jack muttered, as his eyelids closed, ‘I wish you’d speak bloody English.’

Jack was watched ‘till the morn’ and well past it. The sun was
already above the trees when arguing voices woke him. The same guttural sound had awoken him the day before, yet they filled
him with no fear now. He knew he was not dead. Indeed, he could feel that the poison that had brought him to the very brink
had now largely left his body. He felt weak, but he was most definitely alive.

His stirrings caused the argument to cease. When he opened his eyes, that huge red face was once more before him, studying
his intently.

‘Aye,’ MacTavish nodded, ‘th’art as yellow as a potatoe-bogle and twice as ugly, but I ken th’all live. And th’all be wishin’
soomat to slocken thy thirst.’

Water was produced, fresh from the nearby stream. Jack drained a canteen of it; then some more was splashed into a wooden
bowl that contained oats.

‘Drammach,’ MacTavish said, pointing. ‘’cos we’ll no light a fire to make parritch. There’s reepons mean us harm in these
woods, ye ken?’

Though Jack was still not understanding all the words directed at him, he could now make out most of what was being said,
partly because the huge Scotsman was speaking slowly, as if to a child or simpleton. While Jack consumed a second bowl of
the drammach – he’d discovered his hunger was as fierce as his thirst – MacTavish squatted beside him, explaining that when
Jack awoke, he and his two men, Alisdair and Gregor, had been arguing as to what to do with him. They had set out for the
disaster at Oriskany three weeks before and God only knew what havoc war was wreaking on their homes, their kin. The others
were for abandoning him, pressing on.

‘But Angus MacTavish is nae one for inhonestie.’ He was scratching shapes into the mud before them with a hefty walking stick,
carved from the same Ironwood that the Iroquois used for their war clubs. ‘Yon man saved oure lives,
I seid. I’ll stay by him till I’m sartin the favour has been returned.’ He rose. ‘Ochone! We canna bide mere. We must be tenty,
flit and flit fast. The Heathen are fighting each other the noo and we can never ken which we’ll meet. But what to do with
thee, eh? Th’art still the enemy, officer of the tyrant we fight, life-saver or nae. Th’art oor prisoner noo, as I once was
thine. But can thee e’en walk, laddie?’

The Scot reached down an arm and Jack grasped it, pulled himself up. He tottered a step, another. He was weak, there was no
doubt. He had lost a lot of blood.

‘I can walk, if I can borrow that shillelagh of yours, and perhaps an arm over rougher ground.’

MacTavish handed over the heavy piece of wood. Its solid ball-head fitted Jack’s palm perfectly. ‘And, as my prisoner, wilt
thou gie me a gentleman’s word that thou’ll not try to fly?’

Jack squinted up into the broad face. ‘Did you not give such a word at Stanwix?’ He received a grudging nod. ‘Yet here you
are.’

For the first time, Jack saw the Scotsman’s face transformed by a smile. ‘Ah did. But then again, ah never laid any claim
to being a gentleman. And the circumstances changed a muckle.’

Jack returned the smile. ‘Well, there are many who do not consider me a gentleman either – including the man who left me to
this fate. A man I desire greatly to meet again.’ Jack glanced at the cedar to which he’d been bound, the bloodied cords lying
at its base, and shuddered. ‘But I have no desire to be left in these woods. And I presume you are bound up the valley, to
Tryon County?’

‘To Tryon, aye. To oor homes.’

The direction he needed to travel. Up the Mohawk, to Canajoharie, his rendezvous with Até and on to the Hudson, to Burgoyne.
‘Then I will rest your contented prisoner at least
till we have reached them. And until circumstances change –
a muckle.’

There was a moment’s study before the smile came again and a huge hand reached out to pump Jack’s with reckless vigour. ‘A
deal made, till Tryon at the least. I’m relieved, I tell thee. T’would seem a dour act to save thee then pike thee with my
dirk straight after.’ Finally releasing Jack’s hand – to his great joy – MacTavish turned to his men and yelled, ‘Let us link!’

While they gathered what little they had managed to grab from the rout at Stanwix, Jack, with the support of the stout stick,
tested his legs. Maybe it was the relief of being alive. Maybe the thought that the man who had left him thus to die was ahead,
seeking to wreak further mischief upon Burgoyne’s campaign. But they seemed a little stronger with every step.

As they walked, they talked. First Jack asked by what luck he’d been discovered. MacTavish informed him it was luck indeed
because, having escaped the British in the chaos of the march from Fort Stanwix to Lake Ontario, they’d just come up to the
place of Jack’s ambush when the Germans set out from it.

‘And them callants are nae woodsmen, ken. The noise they made through the scrog! We went to bide off the path … and there
ye were.’

They talked more and through the day. MacTavish was of ‘auld Jacobite stock’, English haters to a man, his clan driven from
their homes in the aftermath of the ’45. Fifteen when he reached the Colonies, his family had immediately pushed to the farthest
boundaries, clearing the Frontier land, planting corn, raising cattle as they had done in the Highlands, yet here free of
the threat of the despised Redcoats and the control of the Crown.

‘Until seventy-five, ye ken.’ MacTavish had dropped the
formal ‘thou’ and ‘thee’ now he had shaken Jack’s hand and each had acknowledged that they owed the other a life. ‘Dod! I’d
no come so far, and strived so hard, to submit again to dowie tyranny.’ He spat expansively off the path, then continued.
‘I rallied with the first, marched with that great looby Benedict Arnold, and nearly died with him before the walls of Quebec.’

It was near dusk of their second night’s march before Jack had regained enough strength to interject occasionally into MacTavish’s
monologues.

‘And you believe that your way lies only in total separation from England? Many would have the rights you claim but still
remain loyal to the Crown.’

MacTavish snorted. ‘The only King I might acknowledge is the one across the water.’ The Scotsman circled a fist before him,
as Jack had seen many a Jacobite do over beer mugs in taverns from London to Boston when the King’s health was pledged. ‘But
braw Charlie had his fling and lost the jing-bang at Culloden. And there’s muckle Palatine Germans, Dutch, Swedes, and Poles
here who have nae knowledge of the Bonnie Prince.’ MacTavish sighed and spat again. ‘He’ll come no more.’

Further nostalgia was prevented by a cry from Gregor who had loped ahead. He appeared a moment later, pulling at the nose
ring of a reluctant, bellowing cow. Jack took the chance to fall on to the ground, his back to a black walnut, while a swift
and hot conversation was conducted, of which he understood maybe every tenth word. Some nuts from the tree lay scattered about
him and he was endeavouring to crack one of these – the endless diet of oats and cold water had long since wearied him – when
MacTavish squatted down.

‘A coo in a forest, alone. S’not a good sign, ken. And we are only half a day’s march from our own lands.’ He sighed. ‘Too
far to gang tonight, in the gloaming, on empty stomachs.’ He
reached down, put two nuts into his palm, cracked them with an easy squeeze and handed half the proceeds to Jack. His face
brightened. ‘Still now. We’ll feed oor bellies with nuts … and some meat!’ He nodded towards the cow.

‘You’ll slaughter her in the forest?’ Jack had lain fully back, relieved that his day’s march was over.

‘Slaughter a milch coo? You’re no farmer, Mr Absolute!’ MacTavish smiled. ‘Nae, look there.’

Gregor had been busy sharpening his dirk. Now, he crouched by the cow’s foreleg, muttering gentle words while the other young
man, Alisdair, held the cow’s nose ring. Then the knife was jabbed swiftly in. So sharp was the point, so swift its insertion,
that the cow barely flinched. But blood flowed, caught by Gregor in a wooden bowl. When he had enough, he smeared some spit
and mud on to the wound and moved to his sack where four further bowls were filled with oats and the blood poured evenly on
top of them. Two were borne across to Jack and MacTavish.

Jack grimaced. ‘You jest.’

MacTavish hooted. ‘Would’na the fine Sassenach gentleman eat a blood sausage?’

‘Heartily. But a sausage is cooked.’

‘Weel, it was oft too wet to cook on the droves to market in Edinburgh or Aberdeen. This is how we survived. If I had disdained
the blood in my drammach, I’d have ended up a scrawny wee thing like ye.’

Jack laughed. And despite another lurch of his stomach, hunger overcame his scruples. He ate, gagged, then ate on.

The Scot nodded approvingly. ‘Aye. Eat hearty, Captain. For the morn will bring us to Tryon County and our farms. And let
us hope yon coo is just a stray and not a portent of something disemal.’

It was not only farms that lay ahead. Canajoharie, the village appointed as his rendezvous with Até, was also there.
Realizing his waxing strength needed still more support, Jack took the advice and tipped back the bowl.

They were on the path with the earliest glimmer of light. And an hour’s walking brought them the first sign that the wandering
cow was indeed the harbinger of hard times.

The farmhouse was smashed like an egg, burnt walls stoved in, the huge, solid logs once so laboriously raised into place now
mere charcoal ghosts. Singed cedar shingles lay scattered where the flames had flung them. Their cow, now chewing at one of
the few patches of grass not blackened, had been lucky; for four of her sisters lay around, bellies swelling in the muggy
heat, clouded by flies, legs stiffened and pointing straight out.

At their first sight, the lad, Gregor, had run forward with yelps of anguish despite Angus’s shouted caution. Indeed, as soon
as he entered the still-smoking ruin, the one wall left standing cracked ominously and swiftly collapsed, sending up a pall
of dust, smoke, and sparks. They had each started forward at that, but Gregor emerged almost immediately, a black version
of himself, sooted from crown to toe. In his left hand he clutched a rag poppet, a sister’s plaything, and as he muttered
what he’d seen inside to Angus, he twisted the little doll’s head back and forth between his fingers till it finally detached.
Seeing this, a tear carved a channel down his blackened cheek. Angus patted him on the shoulder and moved over to Jack.