The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [676]
Roger patted her knee, stopping her in mid-flow.
“Perhaps we can do the history a bit later,” he suggested. “What was it ye read about Robert Springer in the papers?”
“Oh.” Taken aback, she furrowed her brow in concentration. “He disappeared. They disappeared—the Montauk Five, I mean. They were all wanted by the government, for blowing things up or threatening to or something, I forget—and they were arrested, but then they got out on bail, and the next thing you know, they’d all disappeared.”
“Evidently so,” Young Ian murmured, glancing toward the journal.
“It was a big deal in the papers for a week or so,” Brianna went on. “The other activist types were all accusing the government of having done away with them, so that stuff coming out of the trial wouldn’t embarrass the government, and of course the government was denying it. So there was a big search on, and I think I remember reading that they found the body of one of the missing men—out in the woods somewhere in New Hampshire or Vermont or someplace—but they couldn’t tell how he died—and nobody turned up any trace of the others.”
“Where are they?” I quoted softly, the hair rippling on the back of my neck. “My God, where are they?”
Jamie nodded soberly.
“Aye, then; I think this Springer may well be your man.” He touched the page before him, with something like respect.
“He and his four companions all renounced any association with the white world, taking new names from their real heritage—or so he says.”
“That would be the proper thing to do,” Ian said softly. He had a new, strange stillness to him, and I was forcibly reminded that he had been a Mohawk for the last two years—washed free of his white blood, renamed Wolf’s Brother—one of the Kahnyen’kehaka, the Guardians of the Western Gate.
I thought Jamie was aware of this stillness, too, but he kept his eyes on the journal, flipping pages slowly as he summarized their content.
Robert Springer—or Ta’wineonawira—“Otter-Tooth,” as he chose henceforth to call himself had numerous associations in the shadow world of extremist politics and the deeper shadows of what he called Native American shamanism—I had no notion how much resemblance there was between what he was doing, and the original beliefs of the Iroquois, but Otter-Tooth believed that he was descended from the Mohawk, and embraced such remnants of tradition as he could find—or invent.
It was at a naming ceremony that I first met Raymond. I sat up abruptly, hearing that. He had mentioned Raymond in the beginning, but I had taken no particular note of the name, then.
“Does he describe this Raymond?” I asked urgently.
Jamie shook his head.
“Not in terms of appearance, no. He says only that Raymond was a great shaman, who could transform himself into birds or animals—and who could walk through time,” he added delicately. He glanced at me, one eyebrow raised.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought so, once—but, now, I don’t know.”
“What?” Brianna was looking back and forth between us, puzzled. I shook my head, smoothing back my hair.
“Never mind. Someone I knew in Paris was named Raymond, and I thought—but what in the name of anything would he be doing in America in nineteen sixty-eight?” I burst out.
“Well, you were there, aye?” Jamie pointed out. “But putting that aside for the moment—” He returned to the text, laying it all out in the oddly stilted English of the translation: Intrigued by Raymond, Otter-Tooth had met with the man repeatedly, and brought several of his closest friends to him as well. Gradually, the scheme—a great, audacious plan, stunning in conception—“Modest, isn’t he?” Roger muttered—had been conceived.
“There was a test. Many failed, but I did not. There were five of us who passed the test, who heard the voice of time, five of us who swore in our blood and by our blood that we would undertake this great venture, to rescue our people from catastrophe. To rewrite their history and redress their wrongs,