“I don’t know if they’re poisonous, but I wouldn’t feed them to anyone.” Assuming any of the Highlanders on the Ridge would try one. Having grown up in a food-deprived habitat where oatmeal was not just for breakfast, most of the older people were deeply suspicious of anything strange-looking or unfamiliar—particularly things of a vegetable nature.
“No,” the Sachem said thoughtfully. “Their blood is sticky—like real blood, you know—and I’ve seen that used to help seal small wounds, but I’ve never seen animals eat them. Not even pigs.”
“So you are familiar with them?”
“Oh, yes. It’s that, that I have never seen before.” Crouching beside me, he extended a long, knobbly finger toward an isolated patch of the mushroom. The caps had opened fully, like tiny umbrellas, but each one sported a tangled headdress of thin, slightly iridescent pale spikes, as though the cap had suddenly grown a crop of tiny needles.
I didn’t touch them, but took out my spectacles for a closer look.
The Sachem smiled at me. “You know the big owls?” he said, sticking his forefingers up beside his ears. “The ones who call Hoo-hoo, and then another answers Hoo? You hear them most in the early days of winter, when they breed.”
“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.”