Original Death

Начало книги

The dead Highlanders lined the road for as far as Duncan McCallum could see, swaying from the English gibbets as crows pecked their flesh. He recognized the lifeless, sunken faces as he stumbled along in the chill grey dawn, seeing his grandfather, his uncles, then the bayoneted bodies of his mother and sisters heaped on the ground below a gallows lit by a solitary shaft of sunlight. From it his father raised a skeletal arm to point an accusing finger at him, then shouted angry words Duncan could not understand.

The cold water hit him like a violent slap. He sat up, gasping, looking into the worried, weathered countenance of his friend Conawago. The old Nipmuc Indian extended a hand to help Duncan to his feet. “You were crying out again. Your clan?”

Duncan, his heart still thundering, managed a short, sober nod. For years he had suffered nightmares of the English slaughter of his clan, but after arriving in the New World they had subsided until he had been nearly free of them. Suddenly, as soon as Duncan and Conawago had set out on their northern quest two weeks earlier, his dead family, some killed in battle, others executed as Jacobite rebels, the remainder brutally murdered by English plunderers, had come back, the nightmares growing more and more frequent. Conawago, revered among the tribes as a reader of dreams, had declared that his family on the other side was telling him it had unfinished business with him. As they moved ever closer to the bloody battlefields of the North, however, Duncan could not shake the nagging sense that they were summoning him to join them. Dreams were always messages from the other side, the people of the forest believed, and those messages had to be obeyed.

Читать дальше →