The Left-Handed Twin by Thomas Perry

Author:Thomas Perry [Perry, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781803284859
Publisher: Head of Zeus

18

Jane got on Route 90, intending to take the Massachusetts Turnpike west to the Hudson River at Albany. It occurred to her that in the old days some of her Haudenosaunee grandfathers must have followed the same route to get home from scouting missions to the coast. The Haudenosaunee followed the policy of keeping track of what was happening as far north as James Bay in northern Canada and as far south as the countries of the Cherokees, Catawbas, and others at the southeastern end of the Appalachian Mountains, and as far west as the Hurons and Ojibways in the western Great Lakes. Groups of three or four men would travel hundreds of miles by canoe and on foot, remain invisible, and watch the people who lived in those distant places. Some of them were perennial enemies in the endless wars of the forests, and others were people who might be either enemies or potential allies. The best way to know was to watch and wait. Sometimes the warriors watched and waited alone outside foreign villages for a year or two before their role was determined. They might become unexpected emissaries or unexpected attackers.

The things that Jane had spent her adult years doing had seemed to her to be simply logical responses to the situations she encountered. She would learn that someone was being hunted by people who were a credible threat to murder him. The obvious response for a person like Jane, who had figured out how to hide people, was to do it. This involved taking him from a place where he was in danger to a new place where nobody knew him, manipulation or replacement of the governmental and commercial records that existed about him to make him hard to find, teaching him how to be a new person, and turning him loose.

What she hadn’t realized at the time was that the idea for what she did must have been composed from pieces of the information that had passed from generation to generation from her remotest ancestors to her. For hundreds of years Seneca and other Haudenosaunee nations were engaged in the wars of the forests. The fighting was terrible and caused huge and constant casualties. The five—later six—nations were all engaged in replenishing their numbers by taking in and adopting refugees from distant wars, fugitives, captives, even at times whole bands who had come to them for safety, and even runaways from the English, Dutch, and French colonies. The way this was done was to give the new person the place of a deceased Seneca. He would inherit that person’s family, friends, and clan members, and gradually take on his responsibilities. He would, to the extent that he could, live his namesake’s life and be absorbed into the people. Jane realized now that what she’d been doing was performing almost exactly the transformation her tenth great-grandmother had probably done—taking the endangered person out of existence and making him into a new person with a second chance at life.

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