“Hoo,” I said gravely, and bent closer. Seeing in better focus, I could just make out tiny ball-shaped sporangia at the ends of the tiny spikes.
“I don’t know what it’s called, but it looks like a parasite—you know what a parasite is?”
He nodded gravely.
“I can see little … fruiting things … on the ends here. It might be a different kind of fungus that feeds off the larger ones.”
“Fungus,” he said, and repeated it happily. “Fungus. What a pleasant word.”
I smiled.
“Well, it is rather better than ‘saprophyte.’ That means a … they’re not quite plants … but growing things that live on dead things.”
He blinked and looked speculatively from the blood-spots to me.
“Do not all living things live on the dead?”
That made me blink.
“Well … I suppose they do,” I said slowly, and he nodded, pleased.
“Even if you were to swallow oysters—which are often alive when you eat them—they die in your stomach very quickly.”
“What a very disagreeable notion,” I said, and he laughed.
“What does it mean to be dead?” he asked.
I’d risen to my feet and crossed my arms, feeling just slightly unsettled.
“Why are you asking me?”
He’d stood up, too, but was quite relaxed. At the same time, something new had entered his eyes. They were still lively, and undoubtedly friendly—but there was something else behind them now, and my hands felt suddenly cold.
“Wolf’s Brother said to Thayendanegea that his uncle’s wife was a Wata’ènnaras. But he also said that you have walked through time and that you have walked with a Mohawk ghost. Wolf’s Brother does not lie, no more than his Quaker wife nor his virtuous mother, so I believe that he thinks this is a true thing that you have done.”
Under the circumstances, I wasn’t sure whether his belief was a good thing or not, but I managed a small nod.
“It’s true.”
He nodded back, unsurprised but still interested. “Thayendanegea told Wolf’s Brother to tell this to me, and he did. That’s why I said I would come with him when he returned here. To hear this from your own lips, and to know whatever else you can tell me.”
“Rather a tall order,” I said. I felt cold and breathless, and my inner ears rang with the aftermath of thunder. “Let’s … walk while I tell you. If you don’t mind.”
He nodded at once and offered me his arm, calico-shirted and ringed with silver bracelets, with as much style as Lord John or Hal might have done it, and I laughed, despite my unease.
“A story for a story. I’ll tell you what happened, and you tell me why you went to London.”
“Oh, that’s simple enough.” He handed me carefully over one of the small gravelly rivulets that ran down this part of the mountain. “I went because Thayendanegea went. He would need a friend to talk with in a strange place, someone who could counsel him, judge men for him, guard him in case of danger, and … perhaps offer another view of the things we saw and heard.”
“And why did he go?”
“The King invited him,” the Sachem said. “When a King invites you to go somewhere, it’s not usually a good idea to refuse, unless you already know you will make war against him. And that is not something we knew.”
“Sound judgment,” I said. It had been, on the King’s part, as well as Brant’s. The King—or at least the government—wanted to keep the Indians on their side, as help in suppressing an incipient rebellion. And Brant, naturally, would like to be on the winning side of that rebellion, and at the moment of going to press, the British undeniably looked like the best bet.
We had reached level footing, and I led the way onto a trail that wound gently down toward the small lake where we fished for trout.
“So,” I said, and took a deep breath. “It was a dark and stormy night. Isn’t that how ghost stories usually begin?”
“Do your people often tell such stories?” He sounded quite startled, and I looked over my shoulder. The trail had narrowed at this point, and he was walking behind me.
“Ghost stories? Yes, don’t yours?”
“Yes, but they don’t usually start that way. Tell me what happened next.”
I did. I told him all of it, from my being trapped in a storm at night on the mountain, to coming face-to-face with Otter-Tooth; what I had said to him, and he to me. And with some hesitation, I told him about finding Otter-Tooth’s skull, and with it, the large opal that he had kept as his ticket back—his token of safe return through the stones.
And then, of course, I had to tell him about the stones. It isn’t, in the nature of things, possible for a person possessing epicanthic folds to actually grow round-eyed, but he made a good attempt.
“And the reason why I knew that the ghost—I didn’t know his name until much later—why he was from … er … my time, was that his teeth had silver fillings: metal that’s put in the tooth to strengthen it after you remove a pocket of decay. That’s not done now; it won’t be done commonly until … I forget, but more than … say, two or three generations from now. But look …”
I opened my mouth and leaned toward him, hooking my cheek away with a finger so he could see my molars. He leaned down and peered into my mouth.
“Your breath is sweet,” he said politely, and straightened up. “How did you learn his name? Did he come back and tell you?”
“No. He left behind a journal that he had written, while living with the Mohawks near Snaketown. He wrote down who he was—his English name was Robert Springer, but he had taken the name ‘Ta’wineonawira.’ Do you read Latin?”
He laughed, which relieved the tension a little. “Do I look like a priest?”
That surprised me somewhat. “Aren’t you one? Or something like that? A—a healer?” I had vague memories of Ian telling me about the False Face Society, healers who would gather to offer prayers and songs over a sick person.
“Well, no.” He rubbed a knuckle lightly over his upper lip, and I thought he was—for once—trying not to laugh at me. But no; he’d only been making up his mind what to say.
“Do you not know what the word ‘sachem’ means?”
“Rather obviously not,” I said, a little miffed. “What’s it mean, then?”
He straightened up, half consciously. “A sachem is an elder of the people. A sachem might advise and lead a great number of his people. I did.”
Well, that accounted for his self-confidence.
“Why aren’t you a sachem anymore?”
“I died,” he said simply.
“Oh.” I looked around us. We had come to the trout lake, which was glimmering with a cold bronze light; the sun was coming down, and the forest surrounding us was mostly pine and birch trees, dark against the sky. There was no sign of any human habitation. I took a deep breath of the wind and the coming dark. I’d taken his arm coming down the hill; his flesh had been warm and solid; I’d felt the hardness of his bones.
“You’re not a ghost, are you?” I said, and thought, oddly, that I would have believed either answer.