The Wolves of Andover

CHAPTER 19

HAMMETT CORNWALL LEANED against the rock and closed his eyes. He was tired and content to sit awhile, letting the old woman do her work beside him. The long illness and the weeks following, traveling through the unsettled nowheres, had sapped his vital spirits. At the outset, he had had profound reservations about killing the landlady; she had ever been kind and, if not for her bustling care, he was sure both he and Brudloe would have ended as fodder for maggots. But the necessities of clandestine travel had supported it, and he had mostly forgotten her since departing Boston.

The biggest worry plaguing him was that, at some point in the past few weeks, lost and trampling through endless thickets, he had also lost his voice, as though all the puking and retching, first on the ship and then in the sickbed, had stripped him of the instrument of speech. He’d known a man once who’d had his throat cut and lived, but forever after, the man could not utter so much as a word, not even a whisper. The man’d had to gesture and point, like the idiot cabin boy on the ship. The thought of the black time on the ship made his breathing labored, and the old woman made placating noises. He couldn’t understand her words, but the tone seemed to say, “Soon, soon.”

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to speak. At first he’d found the infirmity taxing in the extreme; but, try as he might, he couldn’t seem to talk. Brudloe had believed it was belligerence that kept him silent, and had berated him and hounded him until he had shown Brudloe his fist, and the smaller man was then quiet. But now the silence had come to be comforting to Cornwall. He was sick unto death of all their straightforward plans unraveling, their repeated blundering into uncertain circumstances. Now, at least for a brief time, there were no expectations, no bothersome queries and laborious decisions to be made; only walking in companionable silence.

Because of their weakened condition, he and Brudloe had briefly considered taking horses when they fled Boston but, being street-bred, and he being so large for even a plow horse, they set out to Salem on foot as originally planned. They had met their contact in Salem and, after a few days’ time, were given a map and pointed towards Billerica to take their man, outfitted with flintlock, powder, tethers, and a butchering ax.

It was on the way to Billerica that they had come upon the Indian. Through a stand of tightly cross-grown birch trees they saw a figure of a man standing stock-still. His shirt and leggings were the color of bark, his black hair blending into the shadows. Only a gentle trembling of the leaves in front of his face betrayed his living presence. If he, Cornwall, had not approached the edge of the path, loosening his breeches to take a piss, he never would have seen the savage face-on. He stood astonished, his mouth open, his prick in his hand, staring at the motionless figure as though a tree fairy had appeared. Unable to speak, Cornwall waved his hands in circles at his side, as though swimming through a heavy tide.

By the time Brudloe had seen the man himself, the Indian had drawn his club, bringing it with full force onto Cornwall’s jaw. He was knocked down but remained conscious, able to witness Brudloe’s panicked misfire of the flintlock and the club smashing against Brudloe’s skull, knocking him also to the ground. The Indian had moved, not so much with speed as with an economy of motion that made Cornwall, with all his size, almost envious.

Ululating screams erupted out of sight, and the undergrowth disgorged a dozen more forest men, each carrying a club and knife. The men stood over Cornwall, kicking him, flicking him with their knives, shattering one wrist as he buried himself defensively behind his arms. He could see Brudloe, his head profusely bleeding, thrashing wildly about. Brudloe managed to reach his own knife and, pulling it from its scabbard, viciously slashed at the jabbing limbs surrounding him. He connected with the muscle and bone of a warrior not agile enough to leap out of the way until he was bludgeoned senseless. Brudloe was then lifted and dragged into the brush, and Cornwall felt a noose being fitted around his own neck and tightened until his hands were securely bound with a leather strap. He was herded off the path and dragged a few hundred yards into a clearing.

Cornwall was thrown down next to Brudloe, the noose around his neck tightened still more, so that his breath wheezed through his throat. The warriors hunkered down, examining the flintlocks, hefting the weight of the ax, ignoring their captives as they spoke quietly in their own tongue. Cornwall looked at Brudloe, a blackened knot rising up over one temple, uncertain he was still alive until he saw Brudloe’s chest heaving beneath his shirt. Cornwall brought his bound hands up to his chin, gently feeling inside his mouth. Several bottom teeth were loose and they fell, like kernels of corn, into his gently probing fingers. His jaw was cracked, perhaps in several places, and he knew when the shock wore off, there would be pain. His wrist was badly broken, but at least there were no bones showing through the skin.

The Indians seemed content to wait until Brudloe began to stir, moaning and cursing. As soon as he had regained his wits, both he and Cornwall were heaved up and, prodded and kicked, forced along through the woods heading north, following no discernible path. The pace, rapid and unrelenting, brought them across hilly, rough-scrabble terrain strewn with boulders and choked with bracken and dense fern. After a few hours of stumbling progress, Cornwall decided that there was no fixed route to their forced march; rather, their captors were taking, in a crisscrossing, arbitrary fashion, sudden directional changes, as a flock of wary, migrating starlings would do.

They came to a stream, and Cornwall was pushed facedown into the water, which he took to mean that he was to drink. As his hands were tied in front, he could cup the water and take his fill, whereas Brudloe, his hands tied behind, had to lap up water like a dog. They were kicked to the other side of the stream, and Brudloe started up a steady, low cursing that continued angrily for hours until dark, when they stopped to make camp. They were thrown a biscuit each, but Brudloe’s demands and gestures to be untied went unheeded, and he had to rely on Cornwall to feed him like an infant. Cornwall then broke apart tiny pieces of the hardened biscuit, which he shoved through swollen lips, dissolving them on his tongue to be swallowed with his spit. The warrior that Brudloe had slashed with his knife sustained a deep gash in his leg, and when he peeled off his blood-soaked leggings, the wound hung open and fleshy on his thigh, like the mouth of a corpse. In good humor, with no grimacing or spectacle, he packed the gaping wound full of leaves, which he took from a bag tied at his waist. Taking up a bone needle and a hair plucked from his own head, he commenced to sew up the ragged flesh. The Indians made no fire that night, nor any night, until they had traveled, to Cornwall’s reckoning, a week in a general northwesterly fashion.

The pain of his injuries was terrible, especially at night. But in the daylight hours the rhythm of the ceaseless walking and the studied quiet of their captors, uttering only what sounded to be abrupt, cautionary warnings, brought a kind of settled acceptance to Cornwall’s mind. Apart from their initial thrashing, the Indians had not mistreated them, feeding them little, but no less than they themselves ate. After a few days, Brudloe was retied, with his hands to the front, but he was also leashed with a noose like Cornwall’s that tightened at the slightest bit of resistance from him. The only burden to Cornwall’s sense of ease was Brudloe’s ceaseless scheming and raving about escape and how he would murder each one of the “fuckin’ black whoresons of Satan.” But the astonishing thing, at least to Cornwall, was that the Indians were not black, as he had long believed; they were a golden color, lithe and oiled, their skin flexing over sinewy muscles like eels over rocks. They were in stature small, but as with the fabled cairn people from his own native country, they did not so much travel on the land as through it, their feet leaving no mortal tracks in the mud to speak of their passing.

Cornwall had heard about Indians from the New World. He had even paid a penny to see one exhibited in the Tower in London a week before he and Blood had robbed the king’s jewels. The specimen was dead and stuffed like a partridge, of course, but he looked nothing like the men who walked with resourceful vitality through the forest in front of him day after day. The preserved figure, propped up in a dark, squalid cell, was as short as a child, with opaque blackish-gray skin and a broadened nose with thick lips. The figure was naked except for some rings of brass around its ankles and arms, and its eyes were sewn shut with coarse thread. Their Indian captors spent their time, while not walking, grooming themselves and one another, painting their skin with ocher and red clay, braiding shells and feathers into their forelocks, plucking out or scraping off with an oyster shell the rest of the hair on their heads. He would have considered it womanish if not for the grave, ritual-like manner in their ablutions.

After the first week, small groups would veer off into the bracken, returning hours later with the carcass of a deer or smaller animal. Then the evening fires would be built, spitting cuts of flesh and bone with branches to cook over the flames. The captives were given their portions, and when Cornwall could not chew with his shattered jaw, he thought he would go mad with the desire to gnash the charred flesh between his remaining teeth. One of the warriors squatted down next to him, handing him bits of meat he had first chewed to a soft pulp. Without reservation, Cornwall gratefully accepted the meat, sucking on the juices before swallowing each piece.

Brudloe, grimacing distastefully, muttered, “How can you feed off ’im like that? You’ll be wormy in a month.”

After another week they came upon a village of conical dwellings made of shingled wood and animal skins, with clustered gardens of corn and beans. They were met and escorted by a guard of young warriors, whooping in triumph as he and Brudloe were led to the largest dwelling. Their fiery escort made Cornwall almost exuberant, and he could not help but smile at the old women and children who walked next to him, examining his clothes and skin as though he were a prized stallion. Brudloe took exception to the handling and kicked out and spat at the people when they came too close.

The young women were exceptionally comely to Cornwall’s eye, with the same fluid skin as their brothers’, their breasts partially bare, high and mounded, dotted with dark brown nipples. To his dismay, he found himself becoming aroused, and the women good-naturedly mocked and teased him for it when his member tented the front of his breeches.

A man wrapped in a mantle of bleached deerskins stepped from the dwelling and stood blinking at the captives. He had the face of an Old Testament prophet and was supported on both sides by two young women perhaps not past their girlhoods. When the prophet’s eyes came to rest on Cornwall, the Londoner grinned, wanting to reach out and touch the leathery skin, exploring with his fingers the striated shells and bones fringing the ancient man’s cloak. Cornwall looked around at the glistening, naked children, the old women with their gentle probing hands, even at the warriors painted and poised like exotic birds, and he thought, Fairies. They’re like fairies.

The old man shuffled closer to Cornwall and said something clipped and guttural. He gestured towards one of the warriors, who brought him a pipe. The pipe was lit and the old man puffed smoke at Cornwall’s shoulders, at his face, his feet and groin, until the smoke had gathered around him like a garment. Cornwall grinned wider, breathing in the acrid, woody scent, laughing in delighted expectation. It was the first sound he had made in weeks and he looked into Brudloe’s eyes, expecting to see a mirror to his own mirth. But Cornwall saw in Brudloe’s face an expression beyond alarm, something closer to panic.

They were soon led to a small hut, fed and watered, their neck nooses slipped free. And though they were still tethered by their wrists, they were able to move freely about the village. Day by day they watched the gathering in of more warriors, bringing their own women and children, carrying baskets or freshly killed game, and Cornwall anticipated a festival or feast of some sort. Despite Brudloe’s ceaseless hissing plots for escape, at times throughout the night—“You hold the guard, I’ll slit his throat” and so on—Cornwall had no great desire to leave.

As the days passed, they were allowed to watch the warriors’ games: nets on sticks which hurled a ball of rawhide back and forth to opposing teams, and even a kind of dicing with carved bones painted in colors. Once, Brudloe’s bonds were cut, and to his great surprise, he was given a knife. He stood staring at the weapon until he realized he was to fight a group of young warriors who called and pointed to him encouragingly to take his ground. When he didn’t fight, the blade was simply taken from him without a struggle, and the warriors instead admired the scars on Brudloe’s head and face. They later led him to a clearing and painted his forehead and shaved the bristle on his scalp, leaving a patch for a topknot to grow.

When evening came, they were separated, Brudloe taken into the larger dwelling, where the prophet lived, and Cornwall propped up against a large boulder, his restraints tightened. He was brought meat, which the old woman chewed for him like the warrior had done, gently placing the pap on his tongue with her fingers. Even though her eyes were black and slanted over high, angled cheekbones, she put him in mind of his mother. She once grinned at him, her teeth worn down and mulish-looking, and so he closed his eyes, content to rest while she sat with him, whittling pine branches to sharp points.

The people continued to gather, the women bringing wood for the communal fire, piling it close to Cornwall’s feet. They addressed him solemnly in a language that sounded to him like the gentle rattling together of beads, and he nodded to them, grateful for their care and for sharing their feast.

The night sky was clear and he watched the stars emerge randomly, untidily. He followed the thread-thin path of a comet racing towards the North Star. His bindings began to chafe his wrists and he shifted uncomfortably. There were smaller fires burning, dotted around the village, and the people began to sing, chanting and beating their feet on the ground, already packed solid with the movement of generations. Soon, he imagined, they would release his bonds and bring him into the large hut as they had done Brudloe, scraping his scalp clean, stripping away the filthy, louse-ridden rags he had worn since getting off the ship in Boston, letting him inhale the perfumed smoke of the long pipe the prophet had waved before his face.

He thought he caught a glimpse of Brudloe standing in the riptide of dancing bodies, his painted face underlit by firelight, but the transformation was so complete, Cornwall couldn’t be sure it was he. The chanting had taken on a new urgency, with cries and mimicry of wild woodland things: the leap of stags, the frilled threatening shuffle of badgers. Cornwall shifted restlessly, bringing his arms up to show the old woman he was ready to be cut loose and join the feast. A group of women had joined her, their faces expectant, close to feral as they lit the kindling at Cornwall’s feet. He was taken again by their beauty, the sharp angles of their faces shining like mica freshly planed. He suddenly remembered as a young man seeing, on a raised stage in London, a rendering of a fairy folk tale. The fairy queen had been bewitched and fell to lusting after a man with the head of an ass. He remembered how he had howled with the absurdity of it, his laughter carried up with the voices of the other watchers to the uppermost tiers. He guffawed out loud with the memory of it. “Fairies,” he said, surprised and elated to hear the sound of his own voice again. “Fairies,” he said again and again, repeating the word with increasing desperation as the villagers first pierced his flesh with the pine shafts and then set them on fire, so that like a living flame he ran the gauntlet of warriors wielding clubs; and then with terror as they pushed him into the charred kindling, until he had burned beyond the ability to speak.