Читать книгу A Dark and Promised Land - Nathaniel Poole - Страница 7

The Indians silently approach the survivors on the beach. As the Europeans become aware of the strangers, they stumble away. The tallest of the newcomers approaches Lachlan. His shadowed eyes travel over the Orkneyman and glance at the burning wreck. The cries for help are dying away; the flames still growing. The Indian gestures to Lachlan and turns away.

Lachlan grabs the officer sitting on the beach, and hauls him to his feet.

“I think they mean for us to follow them. Quickly, man, there is not a moment to lose.”

“What? Oh, yes …” says the officer, seeing the departing Indians for the first time. “Come along everyone, we must follow the Savages. Smartly now!”

One by one, the colonists fall into line. Moans and soft cries can still be heard. A dark line of them forms off the beach; not all who leave the water’s edge make it as far as the tree line before collapsing. A few hold back in fear, but, after the flames find the ship’s magazine, the Intrepid explodes with a great detonation, the icy water of the Bay instantly rushing in and consuming the hulk. A great hiss goes up, followed by roiling clouds of steam.

Absolute darkness and the silence of the dead chase the last stragglers from the beach, following as best they can, stumbling over the occasional body in the darkness.

The Indians had not waited, and, almost as soon as the Europeans enter the forest, they become lost in the tangled, scrubby trees. They stand together crying for help in God’s name, when they find the Indians amongst them again, eyeing them like mouse shit found in the pemmican.

Rose clings to her father as they stumble over half-seen bushes and branches in the dark, snow dusting them. Her awareness has diminished to a small, shrinking core.

The path to the Indian’s camp is mercifully short, and soon they come upon a collection of five conical tents of hide stretched over poles; a pale yellow they glow, a weird and unearthly light flickering like a will-o-the-wisp. Dogs bark and flaps are thrown open as they approach.

The widowed women commandeer a tipi for themselves and the orphaned children. Once inside they sprawl about, several almost naked. The tipi is too small, and those with the strength sit leaning against each other. A few sobs for those who died, and more for those who survived.

Indian women bring in armloads of wood and throw them on the fire. Sparks and a smoky haze, miasma of wet wool, and the sour spice of filthy, lousy bodies engulfs the tipi. The temperature soars. They sit in a huddle separate from the Europeans, and a sheen of sweat appears on their dark faces. They set a copper pot to boiling and toss in a handful of small, hairy leaves. One of them fills tin cups and carries the tea to the survivors. Perhaps a dozen are capable of responding.

She brings Rose a cup, and, propping up her head, holds it to her lips. The scent is earthy and fragrant, but the taste bitter. She softly speaks words that Rose cannot understand, but there is no mistaking the tenderness in the woman’s voice. She chews several of the tea leaves and places them as a damp poultice on Rose’s cut hands. Rose smiles at the touch and looks into the kind woman’s face. The Indian returns her smile, her brown fingertips tracing with wonder along Rose’s white arm. She wraps the cuts in soft cloth.

Another presents Rose with a ribbon of dried meat from a skin bag. While she had never really believed all the ghoulish stories she has heard about these people — stories of infant sacrifice and cannibalism — when confronted by this piece of anonymous flesh, Rose thanks her, and surreptitiously pushes it out under the edge of the tent where it is wolfed down by one of the dogs.

The Indians give them a few blankets and robes in which to wrap themselves, and those who are able, turn away from each other and pull off their sodden clothes. The Indians watch with wide eyes.

“I’ll take a cane to your eyes, any o’ thee that look upon me,” says an old woman in a voice high and weak, her thin jaw quivering. “’Tis not Christian to be seen like this, not afore the heathen.” She pulls off her rags, revealing pale, sagging buttocks covered in veins and blue blotches. The Indians attempt to suppress their giggles as they chatter to each other in their own language.

“Look at the udders on her; like a nursing buffalo.”

“They are so pale, like a pike’s belly.”

“Pike with hair, you mean; see the thatch on the old one!”

The wind rattles the stiff hides against the poles, and Rose feels a cold draft wrap around her legs like a snake. There are nowhere near enough furs for all the Europeans and they are forced to share; chilled, naked bodies press against one another in great embarrassment.

Pushed to the edge of a robe, the skinny feet and legs of an emaciated and filthy girl stick out. Rose opens her blanket and the child mechanically slides over. Pressing her cold, knobby frame against Rose, she immediately falls asleep.

Rose too needs to sleep, and wishes her father is with her. She curls up on the bed of prickly conifer boughs and wraps her arms around the child, surprised at how cold and hard she is: utterly without animal warmth, like a tree root. A flea bites her, and mechanically she scratches at the place. She wonders where they are and whether it is near the end of their journeying. Her father said something about Red River. Perhaps this is the same place.

When she closes her eyes, scenes from that night’s horror intrude: screams of the dying, wooden feel of corpses that they pushed past on the trail. The smell of the burning frigate. She clenches her teeth, squeezing her eyes against the tears. Her body shakes.

Beside her, the Indians stare into their snapping fire while Vega glimmers down through the smokehole. Out in the forest, a nighthawk chuurs and Rose thinks she hears a wolf howl, but it might be a dream.

The next morning dawns cloudy and grey, the light in the Indian’s tipi broadening in the dull morning. The child beside Rose is stiff and cold. Rose had cried many tears in the long night, and, looking at the girl, all she feels is an empty sorrow. She pushes the matted hair aside and closes the eyes, muttering a brief prayer.

The air in the tipi is thick with smoke and the low-tide smell of the colonists. Rose vaguely wishes she still had the perfumed handkerchief she had often pressed against her nose while aboard the close, foul ship.

She sees one of the Indian women nursing an infant. They are comely enough, she decides, despite their bizarre colouration. High cheekbones, small, flat noses, and full lips. Black hair rolled up on either sides of their heads, held in place by a strip of leather and a bone pin. White paint and red ochre cover their arms, and white woollen blankets ringed with twin indigo stripes serve as coats. Soft leggings of skin, decorated with beadwork in colourful patterns. Their feet are dressed in slippers of a similar material, likewise decorated. They are very exotic, Rose decides.

“We be forsaken,” moans an Orkneywoman from beneath a heavy fur robe. Limp hair hangs in her swollen red face. She jostles her huddled neighbors. “The heathen be eatin’ us for certain.”

The nursing woman gives her an angry look. “If that was our wish, you already be dead,” she says, her comprehension of their language startling the colonists. An uncomfortable silence follows.

An old Indian woman — with hair as long and white as her robe and with a face the texture and colour of old boot leather — leans sideways and farts. She opens a toothless mouth in a broad grin. Everyone begins giggling.

Rose turns to the woman with the infant and hesitatingly introduces herself. The child suckles with great vigour. Its mother stares into the fire. After a long pause she replies, “I am Isqe-sis.”

“Thank you for helping us, Isqe-sis. We would not have survived on the beach.”

Isqe-sis looks up at her. “No good you die there. Tomorrow take to fort. Much …” she thinks a moment, “gifts for your lives: knives, pots, blankets. This why we do.”

“You mean a reward?”

The woman nods.

“I see.” Rose frowns. “Is this fort very far?”

“No far. One day’s journey.”

Rose thinks the utilitarian motives for the Indian’s help far from Christianlike, and though it gives her a vague sense of being a hostage, she realizes their value is in being kept alive, therefore it is unlikely that any of them will be murdered or eaten. She had expected to see scalps hanging from the poles of the tipi and is surprised that there is only a few ermine, a white goose, and a pair of skin bags containing the dried meat and the strange tea. Despite herself, she feels vaguely disappointed at how crudely prosaic it all seems.

“Rose? Is that you?” Her father taps on the outside of the tipi.

Standing outside, huddled in their borrowed skins and blankets, they stare with fear at the encircling forest. Twisted black spires leaning this way and that, hung with pale green epiphytes that flutter like nightmarish cobwebs in the thin wind. Shadows lie heavy beneath the trees. The bright skulls of slaughtered animals hang on several boughs, and the clearing looks even more disturbing by day than it had by night.

Another fire had been started, and the old Indian woman walks over to a carcass hanging from a tree. She saws off chunks of meat, impales them on willow twigs, and places them over the fire. The roasting smell is glorious.

The colonists gather around, ravenous. Lachlan asks how Rose is feeling, and she affirms that she is well enough, all things considering.

“Indeed?” Lachlan replies. “Well, my neck’s very sore. But after last night, praise the Lord that we are still drawing breath.”

Rose agrees with him, though she has no idea where they are and is still uncertain of the outlandish people who have rescued them. With a lowered voice, she informs Lachlan that they spoke English. He looks at her with arched eyebrow, but does not respond.

The wind seems to pass through her robe. She doesn’t need to climb a tree to know that the ranks of brush and bole go on for endless leagues. There is something about the chill of the wind, the immutability of it that gives the impression that the surrounding forest is breathing, and is a beast of unimaginable size.

There were the odd winter days in Stromness when the weather turned to the south and the thermometer almost burst in the sudden warmth; she could smell the lush green of distant tropical lands on that breeze, hear the chatter of brightly plumed birds as they swooped from palm to palm.

The air now moving past has that sense of space and distance, but unlike that delicious equatorial ghost, this air whispers of barrenness, speaks of a land cold and empty of anything warm.

After a breakfast in which Lachlan watches the Indians closely, but does not address them beyond a cautious “Thank you, ma’am,” when he is handed a spear of meat, the survivors don what remain of their rags and the Indians give Rose a stained capote and a pair of moose-hide leggings. They are much too large for her and she is required to cinch them high up under her breasts with a length of hemp. The Indians have no moccasins to spare, and she is forced to tie rotten and discarded pieces of hide around her feet.

Several colonists return to the beach. Wreckage is scattered far down the strand, and there are many bodies half-buried in gravel or shrouded in kelp. Of the two ships that accompanied them, there is nothing to be seen.

Rose stands listening to the hush and roar of surf. On the blurred horizon, the grey water blends with the equally sombre sky, making her feel enveloped on all sides by the same empty waste. Somewhere out there is her home, countless leagues east. The ship that had died on these shores had been her only connection with everything she has ever known, and it feels as if a part of her has perished with it.

She feels a sudden tumble of emotion — grief, fear, and anger at her father for bringing them to this terrible place. She had been awed by the enormity of the Northern Sea, and struck dumb by the mountains of blue-green-grey ice through which the Intrepid had attempted to navigate, but any sense of adventure she carried with her from Orkney — a delicate bird it had proved to be — had perished on the night’s killing strand.

Most of all she feels overwhelmed by the emptiness. Her life has been a safe one; she had the time and comfort to believe in adventures filled with courage and extravagant heroism. But their arrival in Rupert’s Land changed everything: wonder and hope becoming meaningless, ignoble death. There is no page to turn or cover to close; she is trapped within a story not of her choosing, facing a future utterly beyond her control. Even now, the men gather to decide the course of action, her voice unimportant and unwanted.

“Damned, unnecessary tragedy,” her father says, standing beside her in his wrinkled coat and breeches. She is startled to see how gaunt he looks, with shadowed cheeks and purple fans below his eyes. His hands tremble. “That captain was a fool,” he says.

“It was an accident, was it not, Father?”

“Yes, Rose, but preventable — ah, look at that damned whitemaa there. Get, get, I say!” He runs waving his hands at a gull that had approached a corpse. The bird spreads its long white wings and floats off, screeing down the beach.

“We must bury these poor folk,” Lachlan says.

“Aye, but with what?” someone replies.

“York Fort will have the tools that we need.”

“Perhaps the other ships, they will find us?”

“They have been scattered by the tempest. But perhaps they will take us south.” Lachlan waves a hand at the Indians.

“Aye,” replied a grizzled Orkneyman. “Ah spoke with their chief, the big buck standing there. He says they can paddle some o’ us down the coast to the fort. It’s nae far, he says, though I dinna much trust him.”

“Pray, lower your voice, sir, they understand English.”

“So kin me dog, but I dinna worry about it.” Several men share a nervous chuckle.

Lachlan looks down at the body. A middle-aged man, naked but for a wrapping of polished green seaweed over his belly and legs. He is on his back, eyes open and staring. Tiny puddles of seawater had collected over his shrunken orbits, and he appears to be studying the sky through spectacles. Lachlan wonders if he had met the man, had spoken to him. He does not remember the face. He reaches over and closes the eyes, wiping his wet fingers on his breeches.

“We cannot leave them here to the whitemaa or be washed out to sea. If we have no means to bury them then we must bring them above the tide, cover them with boughs, and stand watch. This much must be done.”

“But which of us will go with the heathen?”

“I shall go. And my daughter shall go with me as she has lost her habiliments. The Company officer will know from whom at York Fort we should procure assistance. I do not know whom else. You, perhaps.”

The man, a muscular Highlander with a black scraggly beard and weary eyes, nods at him.

The task of gathering the dead is a grisly one, as scavengers have already defiled some of the corpses. At least half of the ship’s complement has died, though most are not accounted for in the pale forms scattered on the beach.

As the day lengthens, the clouds begin to dissipate and a weak sun gradually emerges. The breeze dies and biting insects flow down from the wall of trees the way a cool air flows from a height with the coming of night. The Indians start a smudge fire of seaweed, but it doesn’t help much against the onslaught.

The men carry the bodies to a spot above the high-water mark as far from the forest as possible, the Indians warning that there are animals who will and can walk off with a corpse or part of one at the turn of a back: bear, lynx, wolf, marten, wolverine, and lion, plus a host of small and furtive beasts happy to snatch a mouthful of carrion.

The women take axes and cut spruce boughs to cover the bodies, the beach echoing with the sound of distant chopping. Although she is not expected to work, Rose feels she would be remiss to not contribute. She stands in a bog and hews at tough, pitch-covered spruce branches while mosquitoes and blackflies crawl over her hands and face. It is more difficult than anything she has experienced, and sweat runs into her eyes. With each step, she sinks ankle-deep into wet peat. Moss hangs from overhead branches, dragging through her hair, and coating it in cobwebs and pine needles.

The axe handle suddenly shatters, the ricocheting head scoring her forehead. Blood quickly begins flowing. She stumbles and sits heavily in the peat, weeping. Isqe-sis yanks the broken handle from her hand and throws it into the forest.

“This what you Êmistikôsiw, you Whites trade with us, this …” and she begins a long diatribe, not a word of which Rose understands, although the anger is unmistakable. Still cursing, the woman presses a handful of the moss to Rose’s wound.

“In winter such axe could kill a man or his family,” she says. “Bad guns, bad axes, sick clothes …”

Rose cannot help but feel that although Isqe-sis is tending her, the Indian would just as rather leave her to bleed. She feels a rising indignation; what has she done to incur this person’s wrath? Was not she the offended party? She sees a small, silver crucifix peeking from a fold in Isqe-sis’s capote.

“You are baptized? You are Christian?” Rose asks, surprised. Isqe-sis nods.

“How…”

“There is camp of the Black Robes.” Isqe-sis waves her arm southward. “Port Nelson. My father had the water magic for me. In the name of Jesus they save my spirit.”

Black Robes, Rose thinks. She must mean Jesuits. So she’s a Papist.

“Are many of you are Christian?”

“Not so many. Most Home Guard, yes, rest Cree, no.”

“Home Guard, what is that?”

Isqe-sis frowns. “We are poor people, needing White man’s trade.” She spits in the direction of the axe handle. “Live York Fort. Not now, not since White sickness come.”

“White sickness? What is that?”

Isqe-sis looks away. “Sickness come from Whites. Fever, then death. Sometimes sores on face, hands. Sometimes not. But always fever and death. This why we no longer live at York Fort.”

Sitting in the slender vessel and clutching the gunwale, Rose is ill at ease. The boat is several feet long and constructed of woven bark. One man in the bow and another in the stern propel it with short, carved paddles. Her father sits in front and behind her, the big Highlander, Declan Cormack, looking thoughtful as he watches the Indians at their work. Behind him, the Company officer sits in the stern, scowling whenever Rose turns and looks at him.

She feels the movement of the sea through the slight material of the craft and it seems as if they are perched on a feather. They glide up one wave and slide down another in a gentle, regular rhythm. She watches the man in the bow, the pumping of his thin, muscular arms. Red ochre covers the faces of these men, their heads shaved except for a single topknot wrapped in hide.

Each stroke of the paddle is short and sharp; stroke following stroke. No words, no rest, no complaint, and Rose is reminded of an oxen tied to a mill wheel, doomed to forever circle the same spot.

She thinks of the distance between her and her old life back in Stromness, in the Orkney Islands. Their house in Stromness was small and cold, with a solitary hearth inadequate for the job. Built of stone with dark, walnut doors and wainscotting and tiny windows painted closed to fend away the unhealthy night air.

Rooms were usually closed tight to conserve heat in main living areas, and her father’s library (her favourite room) grew innumerable moulds. Many dismal afternoons had been spent engrossed in distant worlds, while against the window an ancient and gnarly crabapple tree tapped when the wind blew from the sea, scattering hard knobs across the courtyard in the autumn. The damp, musty smell of books had whispered freedom to her.

At first Rose had found the written world to be preferable to the lived, in part due to the regime that her father imposed on the household, their lives neatly bookended by fears of God and personal anarchy. Simple foods and unpretentious clothing has been her lot, although they could afford far more.

But as womanhood arrived and with it a sense of her own desire and will, she learned to explore ideas with others. The relationships people wove amongst themselves lit a candle in her imagination, and in a city like Stromness, with a busy port and entire populations passing from somewhere to another where, it was possible to explore the meaning of many an intriguing concept with any number of strangers.

It was not excitement that she sought, but the young adult’s earnest need to decipher the paradox of what the world presented with a sly wink on one hand, while condemning it with the other. To her, moving anonymously through the city was like rolling over a large stone to uncover the secret, mysterious world inside an ant’s nest.

Like one of her fictional heroines, she wrapped herself in stranger’s clothes and went down to the taverns along the waterfront and met life head-on. Power especially interested her — the various forms it took, the disguises it embraced. She saw it manifest as physical strength and as a dour uniform, as money and a flashing blade. What really surprised her was how often it rested in a look and a powdered décolletage.

When not fascinated by the struggles of man against man, she often wandered the labyrinths of love. In her stuffy tomes, the poets and philosophers waxed at length on the meaning of that ineffable beast, and she refuted them both. The first was too wild-eyed earnest while the latter too removed from anything that pumped hot blood. As Leeuwenhoek glared down his glass and trumpeted on the unseen nature of things, she felt his ilk no closer to expounding on love’s mystery than the contents of a chamber pot.

Sometimes these back-room truancies were hard and brutal, at other times they recalled the delicacy of a chrysalis.

Things could become complicated. One time a Mr. Wells, post captain in the British Navy, was one with whom she had explored the more esoteric and violent forms of passion. He was short and fat, with bright, hard eyes and a face almost as scarlet as the Royal marines that guarded his quarterdeck. Upon receiving his admiralty packet commanding him to India, he informed Rose that he desired her company on the long voyage. Wells had not reached his station by deferring to another’s will, and her careful, coquettish demurrals moved him not a whit. He would not be put off by a mere girl, and once word reached her ear that he had commanded she be brought to his ship, in irons if need be, she refused to leave her home.

Although a studious woman, Rose was no church-mouse and this sudden reluctance to go for air or visit her friends raised Lachlan’s concerns; he noticed an unhealthy pallor and soon called for a bleeding, a process she loathed as much as being trapped in their home.

But of course, Wells was not aware of who Rose really was or where she lived, and the sailors and press gangs searched high and low for her to no effect. At last, in a great rage, he was forced to sea without his love’s interest to warm his bed. Rose felt relieved to see his sails on the horizon, and thought it a miracle that the city was not bombarded as a token of his thwarted passion.

After the danger of Wells, Rose kept much closer to home. But the unrelieved routine of their life quickly grated on her spirit and the old ache, once masked by curiosity and excitement, soon returned. Her father’s concern remained high; her complexion did not improve and neither did her mood. She was short with the servants and himself, and a veritable parade of physicians marched through their home poking and prodding her, asking veiled questions regarding her woman’s functions.

Rather than seek an explanation within her own soul, she blamed her ennui on the ritual of walking her father to the school each morning and the afternoon tea with her friends. There was the constant turning away of the boorish suitors that every mother in Stromness seemed to send to her door; the banality of the middle class was hers and she would not, could not take to it. It was not long before she found herself once again in unfamiliar alleys and hallways.

Not all of her quests were lascivious in nature. Far from it. She had quickly learned that the bodily passions, while interesting in their own right, left little in their wake besides messy hair and possessive lovers. She was driven by something deeper, more innate. Curious and insatiable was how she described herself when musing on her odd and dangerous behaviour with her friends (some of whom thought her much like a goddess); life was short and living was truly made for the young, and best to just get on with it.

The young man from Ronaldsay was the not her first aboard, but almost certainly the last. It was an impulse fired as much by risk as any real interest on her part; her father had been nearby and that was a true novelty for her as he knew nothing at all of her trysts. She rarely gave her companions much thought; they simply amused her. At best, her feelings went so far as a benign complacency, the way one might offer a stray dog an uncertain pat on the head.

But though her need had not been sated in Stromness, she at least enjoyed the luxury of her unhappiness. Though occasionally placing herself in various compromising positions, she had always enjoyed the luxury of sneaking home for a bath in the small hours (and if by unhappy chance the servants encountered her in the hall or stairwell, they discreetly looked through her in a manner she found quite unnerving, as if she had become a ghost). Father and daughter had been toppled from a comfortable station in Orkney to break bread with the wild and the savage awaiting in Rupert’s Land, and she did not much like it: hers was a sensitive heart, one that should not have to endure such trials.

After several hours of following the coast, the Indian in the bow pulls up his paddle and shouts, “Wapusk, wapusk!” They crane to look; there is something in the water, swimming parallel with them. A wedge-shaped head leaves a trailing wake.

The Indians veer closer, Rose spotting a large, pale body, indistinct beneath the blue of the water. A black nose and small, dark eyes.

“’Tis an Arctic bear,” Lachlan says in awe.

The Indian in the bow nods. “Wapusk.” He brings out his trade musket or fuke and directs them alongside the swimming animal. They see the great paws swinging as it dog-paddles; it turns towards them, but the Indians veer away, maintaining a careful distance.

“Sometime they jump at you,” the Indian says. “And then …” he makes a slashing gesture across his throat.

They follow alongside for several minutes with Rose leaning over the gunwale, admiring the animal. The bear turns to them again, and the Indian in the bow raises his fuke again; a sharp report and water fountains beside the bear’s head. The animal thrashes about, throwing blood and spray. A pall of gun smoke drifts over the canoe.

They paddle up to the bear, and the Indian pulls out a knife as long as his forearm from under his jacket. His grinning teeth white in his scarlet face, he leans over the gunwale and saws at the quivering white neck while the water blossoms red.

The sudden violence shocks Rose. She turns toward her father. Lachlan offers her a damp handkerchief.

“You have blood on your cheek,” he says. The Indians tie the floating carcass to the canoe and return to their former course.

After a couple of hours of a rhythm under which it is difficult for the passengers to keep awake, they pass a long, flat point and the Europeans are surprised to find themselves in the mouth of a large river. As they nose into the current, they see that countless scores of waterfowl inhabit these marshes: the air is shrill with the whistling of duck wings, and massive flocks of geese rise at their approach and settle in the scrub behind them. Small shorebirds wheel and circle along the shore like a moving shadow.

The bank deepens until they come upon a peeled-log wharf and a long gangway on piles leading from the high shore; the upper edge of a palisade and a tall flagstaff is just visible. The Indians turn toward shore, their keel sliding into the muddy bank.

Rose steps out of the canoe and into the cold, peaty water of the river. She sinks into the mud, feeling it squelch beneath her hide-wrapped feet. Her ankles protest the cramped seating and once on firm shore she bends down and rubs them. Her leather leggings are dark with the river.

Above them, a gull sails on the breeze, dipping and rising, but making no headway. The Highlander hurtles a rock and the gull drifts away, disappearing toward the distant, opposing bank.

Their Indians pull the bear to shore. They squat in the mud beside it, the animal’s yellow-white hide now fouled by the slime of the riverbank. They mutter something in their tongue, as if praying; one of them brings out tobacco and offers it to the animal.

“What is this?” Rose asks, pointing.

The officer from the frigate barely glances at the Indians. He is tall and thin, with sparse red hair and a large nose covered with spidery veins. He stands with his hands thrust in his pockets, eyeing the distant palisade with a gloomy look. When he speaks, his Adam’s apple seems to struggle for release.

“It is some manner of heathen ritual,” he says. “When a Savage kills an animal, he must ask it for forgiveness, or some such rot. Pay them no mind.”

“I assume we are at York Fort, Mr. …?” Lachlan trails off.

“Turr. Yes, it is York Fort, and the factor shall be in a hellfire rage at the manner of our arrival. We must get on.”

They leave the Indians to their prayers and begin the ascent up the bank. After so many hours cramped aboard the canoe, it proves hard going for all of them but the Highlander, who scrabbles up like a rat on a mooring line. He reaches the top long before the rest and peers down at them with a grin.

“I think there be three lasses following hard on me, nae one lass and two men.”

“I say!” Turr replies as he scrambles over the bank, his face red. “You affront me undeservedly, sir. This is a wretched climb.”

“Nae affront intended, Mr. Turr.”

They follow the path from the gangway to the gates of the fort. After so many weeks at sea, the exercise is hard going for Rose and she breathes heavily, covering her mouth with her hand. They pass a pair of ancient and rusting field pieces overlooking the river. Turr pats one as he passes.

“These would have been fired in honor of our arrival if fate had been kinder to us,” he says with a sigh.

A line of clouds, heavy with the threat of rain, hurry from the west as they approach the fort. They quicken their steps. Heaps of garbage are scattered about the stockade and a skinned ox carcass has been dumped just outside the fort gate. Felled by some strange disease, not even the Home Guard has touched it. The smell of carrion and smoke fills the air. A pair of ravens flap away croaking as they approach.

Several tipis squat outside the palisade. Rose points them out to Turr. “The Home Guard,” he says with hardly a glance.

“I have heard the term before. What does it mean?”

“It refers to a blackguardly band of thieves and miscreants who, when not thieving, murdering one another or lost in drink, provide the fort with meat, especially in the hungry winter months. I say, it is beginning to rain. We must hurry.”

A high stockade of sharpened spruce sunk into the boggy ground surrounds the fort. The main building — known colloquially as “the octagon” — can only be entered through an archway that faces the main gate of the stockade. They approach on a path of rough boards, a bridge over the soft muskeg. A torpid stream runs beneath them, and bugs glide on its slow surface, their long legs dimpling the water. In some places the boards sink into the peat and brown water gurgles up around their feet. As they near the gate, an emaciated cur bolts at them. Turr gives it a resounding kick and it turns away with a yelp.

The Company coat of arms has been painted on the archway of the octagon: Pro Pelle Cutem. Lachlan frowns. “‘Skin for skin.’ Is it not the words of Satan himself, questioning our Lord? ‘Skin for skin; yea, all that a man hath, will he give for his life.’”

“I doubt that is the correct interpretation. You are very well acquainted with the Bible, sir. A chaplain, perhaps?”

“No more than all good Christians should be, Mr. Turr.”

They follow Turr inside and Rose and Lachlan are surprised that “The Grand Central Station of the North” is such a shoddy affair: frost has shattered much the stone and brick foundation and the siding is falling off. The archway is warped and twisted, and many of the timbers are cracked. The smell of sewage and rotten garbage is thick inside the walls.

“Like a bit of old Glasgow,” the Highlander says, beaming and clapping his hands to his breast. The sound of an organ carries through a wall.

“They will all be in church, I’ll wager,” Turr says.

Lachlan looks at him with surprise. “You mean it is Sunday?”

“So it would seem. Well, no point in disturbing them. We can find ourselves something to eat. I doubt I have eaten in days.”

They find a long, dark mess, with many tables, a stone hearth, and a massive, black iron stove. Turr lights an oil lamp with a coal from the hearth. He disappears for a few minutes and returns with a cut of fresh moose meat wrapped in a cloth. After banking the fire, he rolls pieces of the meat in flour and fries it in a black skillet.

After they have eaten, they lean back in their chairs, listening to the foraging of mice in the ceiling, and feeling more satisfied than they have in a long time. The Highlander leaves them on a quest for drink.

“We best inform someone about those poor folk back on the beach,” Lachlan says.

“It can wait,” Turr replies. “This is the first I have felt at peace for many days and I intend to enjoy it a little longer. There is time and plenty to send a boat for the others.” He settles deeper into his chair and closes his eyes.

Lachlan is about to reply when the cook hurries into the mess and stops, staring at them in amazement.

“Oh, bloody hell,” Turr mutters to himself.