“He’s not a hypocrite. And many love him.”
Chapter Two
Monsieur Bondí sang.
L’évêque s’en va-t-en guerre
Mironton, mironton, mirontaine
L’évêque s’en va-t-en guerre
Ne sait où dormira
Ne sait où dormira
Il dormira par terre
Mironton, mironton, mirontaine
Il dormira par terre
Où dans la Pontchartrain
Où dans la Pontchartrain
Etienne set down the hot pepper he was gnawing and laughed; to his own surprise, the song brought a lightness to his heart.
“Yes, that is the tune I heard. Poor John Churchill,” he said, “that a beggar such as I should steal his glory second hand.”
The two men sat in a dark room in the Onu Nke Ihunanya, a hotel within sight of Etienne’s casino. Only a few days earlier, the chevalier’s mamelukes had launched an attack on Etienne from this very room, with the assistance of a captive mambo.
The irony gave Etienne grim amusement, but it was the direction of the Brides that brought him here. Through slitted shutters, he and Bondí watched as those same mamelukes stood watch on the street outside the casino. They were hidden in shops and taverns, no longer dressed in their scarves and black pourpoints, but Etienne knew them by their beards and their lean, staring faces.
They watched for Etienne.
“You aren’t stealing it.” Bondí shook his head. “The people are giving it to you. And you know what they are calling the song?”
“It should be ‘L’évêque s’en va-t-en guerre,’ no?” Etienne suggested. “As the original is ‘Churchí s’en va-t-en guerre’?”
A third voice joined the conversation unexpectedly. “They call it ‘Le sou de l’évêque,’” Onyinye Diokpo said, her eyes twinkling like the eyes of a grandmother on Christmas morning. “The Bishop’s Penny. It is the penny you give them in lieu of the taxes the chevalier demands.”
“Say rather that my father gives it to them.” Suddenly, despite the fire the peppers stoked and the constant alluring susurrus of the Brides, Etienne felt exhausted. “They loved him.”
“But he is dead,” Diokpo said, “and you are fighting. He may be a saint, but only you can be a leader. Only you can wear the Big Crown—or be it.”
Etienne laughed out loud at the hotelier’s literal translation of his name. Etienne came from Greek stephanos, which was a crown; he knew no Greek, but his father, as former theology student, then as deacon, and finally as bishop, had repeatedly told him the name’s meaning, urging his son to seek Paul’s crown of rejoicing every day and after death, Peter’s crown of glory.
It had been his mother, a mambo devotee of the loa Ezili Danto and Ezili Freda, and frequently their horse, who had never given up her faith, who had told him that the other name he had from his father—Ukwu—meant big. “Be big, Etienne,” she had whispered to him as he sat on her lap in services in which his father officiated as deacon, “be great.”
“Stephen Big.” He chuckled. “Don’t tell the Irishmen. They’ll never let me hear the end of it.”
“How long?” Onyinye asked. A member of New Orleans’s City Council, she had joined the revolt against the chevalier’s taxing authority; in response, the chevalier had ordered the council disbanded. Now Renan DuBois and Holahta Hopaii increasingly stayed away, avoiding New Orleans entirely, leaving Onyinye and Eoin Kennedie effectively as the City Council, working with Etienne clandestinely. “How long do you think the chevalier will allow the casino to continue to operate?”
Etienne shook his head. “He won’t shut it down. For the moment, he hopes to flush me from hiding. When he gives up on that, he’ll be too anxious for revenue to destroy the casino. He’ll try to take control of it instead.”
“Also,” Onyinye said by way of concurrence, “he won’t want to offend the casino’s clientele.”
Etienne ruminated on that thought.
“You’re not going to let him have that money, are you?” Bondí said.
“You could move the gaming activities into my hotels,” Diokpo suggested. “I do not fear the chevalier. My god is as great as his.”
“It is not a question of gods,” Etienne said. “The only thing that protects your wealth from the chevalier right now is that he can’t be sure which hotels belong to you. As it is, how many has he discovered and seized?”
“Too many.”
“Too many. Let us not attract attention to the others by setting up casino operations in their foyers.”
“Or, for that matter,” Onyinye said, “mass.”
“Tents and street corners will suffice for church services,” Etienne said. “But we control the rebuilding of the cathedral.”
Bondí grunted agreement. “We’ll want to make sure that whoever does the accounts of the casino reports to us.”
“A corrupt accountant,” Etienne said. “St. Bernardo de Pacioli forbid.”
Bondí chuckled. What neither of them said, because Onyinye Diokpo didn’t know it and didn’t need to know it, was that an underground passage connected the casino and the cathedral. If Etienne could control the accounting of the casino, he could easily smuggle cash out through the church.
“This is a savage game,” Onyinye said. “Who will starve to death first, the chevalier or the bishop?”
“Oh no,” Etienne corrected her, “it is considerably more savage than that. The chevalier and I each have a hand on the other’s throat and we are crushing each other’s windpipes. His hand is brutal force, exercised in the name of good order; my hand is corruption, fostered under the auspices of heaven. One of us will die of suffocation sooner or later.”
“If neither of you manages to stab the other in the belly first,” Onyinye concluded.
“And we definitely intend to stab the chevalier in the belly. I am, after all, houngan asogwe of the Société du Mars Vengeur. Vengeur, not Mars Danseur or Mars Frivole. But speaking of savage games, Onyinye…I have had a question about you in my mind for a few days now.”
Onyinye arched an eyebrow of acknowledgement. “Tell me.”
“Your man who died in this hotel,” Etienne said. “He had his throat slit, as if by ambush. And yet, the ambush was ours, perpetrated upon the mamelukes?”
“Are you asking whether I killed my own cousin?” Onyinye smiled.
“Yes.”
“In that case, I have a question for you, Stephen Big.”
Etienne nodded his consent.
“The Synod appointed you bishop very quickly upon your father’s death. And I have heard it said that they were doing your bidding.”
“Are you asking whether I was seeking the office while my father was still alive?” Etienne asked.
“Yes.”
Etienne smiled. He didn’t want to explain that his mother, his gede loa, had urged him to do it even while his father was alive. He didn’t want to reveal his connection with her, or with the Brides, unless necessary.
So instead, he laughed. Onyinye laughed with him.
“So we both have questions,” Etienne said. “How goes your work with the pawnbrokers, Monsieur Bondí?”
“It goes,” he said. “We must choose our candidates carefully.”
“But you have good prospects?” Etienne asked.
“I like a certain Frenchman. And I think there’s a Jamaican who might do. He certainly has the enthusiasm for the job. It’s still far too early to tell.”
Etienne nodded. “The pious, I think, are with me.” He felt the Brides stirring within him. “Ironically. They are for me because they were for my father. I should like to have more of the wealthy on my side.”
“Perhaps you should think about establishing another casino, then,” Bondí suggested. “We could keep it secret. Or we could put it in a tent, as well. Or outside the city, on a boat.”
“I think you had it right the first time,” Etienne said. “I think it’s time for me to think about who is sleeping in the Pontchartrain.”
* * *
“Party from Philadelphia for you,” Schäfer said. He was a good agent, a Youngstown German with a keen eye for quality in beaver pelts. Behind him in the open tent door stood Dadgayadoh, a Haudenosaunee tracker who wore a red blanket over his shoulders and a silk top hat on his head. Director Notwithstanding Schmidt trusted these men more than she trusted the militia under her command; they were Company men, and had been with her for years.
They’d been with her longer than Luman Walters, the magician she had briefly made her aide-de-magie, before the combination of his impatience and her desire for a stronger wizard had driven him away. She had gotten her stronger magician, in the form of the walking corpse Robert Hooke.
Whom she trusted least of all.
“Courier?” She set aside her quill pen and carefully placed her hands to either side of the book of accounts, so as not to smudge the ink.
Dadgayadoh shook his head. “Hotgö’.”
“Wizards,” Schäfer added, rather more helpfully.
“Earlier than I expected.” Schmidt stood and strode from her tent.
Her men were accustomed to her brusque pace. Schäfer immediately pointed in the direction of the Imperial arrivalsaway from the Mississippi and the alien Treewall of Cahokia. Both traders paced the director step for step, one on either side of her.
Schmidt had learned two lessons early in her days with the Imperial Ohio Company. The first was that she must give direction early and often, and ask for it almost never; the second was that she must move quickly and show energy at all times. If she failed to do those two things, men saw her as a heavy woman and expected her to be slow, torpid, and passive.
If she succeeded in doing those two things, she took men by surprise. She much preferred taking men by surprise.
Always.
In a way, it was a lesson she had first learned from her father. After attaching himself to one charismatic prophet too many, he’d been disfellowshipped by the Ministerium. He promptly began redistributing the pain he felt from the separation, inflicting it on his wife and daughter by physical beatings. His wife had faded, died inside, and taken the beatings with little complaint. Her daughter had resisted the beatings and being called knothead in grim silence for years before she tried to run away.
He’d chased her and brought her back once, and then a second time.
The third time he chased her to bring her back to more pain and insult, he’d found her camped along the banks of the Wabash with a man named Joe Duncan. This time, Notwithstanding had stolen all the money she could on her journey and had hired Duncan, a man of no morals or fixed abode, to be her bodyguard. At her instruction, Joe Duncan had taken her father by surprise and killed him, sinking an Arkansas Toothpick into his belly.
That same night, when Duncan had tried to force Notwithstanding to submit to his lecherous attentions, she had surprised and killed him in turn. She’d hit him in the head with a horseshoe, something she never could have brought herself to do to her father.
She had buried the two men in a single muddy grave.
Notwithstanding Schmidt called her canoe the Joe Duncan as a perpetual reminder. Freedom was necessary. Power was necessary.
Even if the purchase price was a crime.
She looked about as she crossed her camp. On three sides of Cahokia, she and her Imperial forces had besieged the city. Its gates were shut. Its gray-caped defenders glowered down from the tops of its wooden Treewall, their cheeks pitted by hunger. A hundred yards of mud- and blood-stained snow surrounded the city’s wall, and beyond that lay the trenches Schmidt’s men had dug.
Warfare of any kind was not Schmidt’s métier. She had had the trenches dug after the turncoat Imperial artillerists within the walls had demonstrated their ability to kill her men with impunity. Within the trenches, huddling in shadow during daylight hours, were corpses. Walking dead. Not Lazars like Robert Hooke, who seemed preserved and was articulate, but shambling, moaning draug who rotted, festered with worms, and fell apart. Their preference for avoiding direct sunlight meant they drove all but the strongest-willed and -stomached of her men from the trenches during the day; at night, the draug dragged themselves about the base of the city’s walls, groaning and scratching like homeless burrowing beasts.
Behind the trenches were tents, and in the tents, milling restlessly about, were the Imperial Ohio Company militia. The best of these men were used to protecting markets in border towns and guarding caravans from Wild Algonk or Comanche depredation, and had never participated in anything like a siege.
The worst of them had been prisoners only two months earlier and could hardly be kept from knifing each other over the bad roll of a sheep’s knucklebone. They were far better put to use as marauders and looters in the seven sister kingdoms.
The only reason the Cahokians hadn’t broken the siege was that they themselves were few and poorly organized, a town watch or the private bodyguards of the city’s wealthier citizens. Also, on the fourth side, the city faced the river. The river and its banks teemed with braying and howling beastkind. What had once been an ordered and thriving array of wharves lay shattered like split kindling, obscured by the steam rising from the bodies of slinking beasts.
Because of the marauding beastkind, Imperials had to approach their camp overland. Schmidt had commandeered and then expanded the docks of a fishing village five miles downstream, protecting it with one of her best militia corps; she now reached the head of the path that led to that village and found the arrivals from Philadelphia.
“I had expected gramarists,” she said. “University men. Who are you?”
Three young men—no older than sixteen, and maybe not that old—gazed serenely at her. Their heads were all shaven and bore the same swirling tattoos in bright blue ink. They wore a uniform that was unmistakably Imperial without bearing any insignia whatsoever: Imperial blue breeches, waistcoats, coats, stockings, and shirts.
Their faces were identical.
Then they opened their mouths and spoke in unison. “WE ARE THE PARLETT QUINTUPLETS. LORD THOMAS SENDS US.”
Behind the three young men stood a squad of Imperial soldiers. They looked as nonplussed as Schmidt felt. Their officer, a long-limbed man with thick eyebrows and a high, nearly vertical forehead, stepped forward. “Are you Director Schmidt?”
Schmidt nodded.
“Captain Onacona Mohuntubby.” The captain saluted. “I’ve brought the Parletts here safely, and I’m ordered to place myself under your command.”
“Cherokee?” Schmidt asked. It paid to recognize names, kinships, and peoples of the Empire. Those were the unofficial and invisible networks of capital and power that lay alongside the more formal structures of courts, companies, and Electors.
Mohuntubby nodded.
“Quintuplets means five,” Schmidt said. “Looks to me like you lost two of them.”
“WE ARE TWO IN PHILADELPHIA,” the Parletts announced. “AND THREE IN THE OHIO.”
“You are the means by which My Lord President will communicate to me?” Despite the heavy blue coat over her shoulders, the winter chill bit into Schmidt’s flesh. She resisted the urge to shiver by sheer force of will.
The three Parletts abruptly changed facial expression, the vacant serenity replaced by a grimace that would have looked more at home on the face of an old curmudgeon. “DIRECTOR SCHMIDT,” they growled, their voices changing tone as well, “THIS IS TEMPLE FRANKLIN. DO YOU REMEMBER ME?”
Captain Mohuntubby took an abrupt step backward and dropped his hand to the sword hilt at his belt.
Schmidt nodded. “I remember you.” Franklin had no official title or form of address; he was Thomas Penn’s éminence grise, his Machiavel.
The Parletts laughed, a sound like a rusted hinge swinging slowly. “THE PARLETT QUINTUPLETS WERE GIVEN BY THEIR PARENTS TO THE IMPERIAL COLLEGE OF MAGIC AT BIRTH.”
“I’m not good at dealing with children,” Schmidt said. “I can never remember their names.”
“THE PARLETTS DO NOT HAVE INDIVIDUAL NAMES. I AM INFORMED BY COLLEGE GRAMARISTS THAT THEY DO NOT EVEN HAVE INDIVIDUAL SOULS. THEIR SHARING OF A SINGLE MIND IS WHAT WILL ENABLE OUR COMMUNICATION OVER THE GREAT DISTANCE THAT SEPARATES US.”
“And I will deal with Lord Thomas through you?”
“OR THOMAS HIMSELF MAY SPEAK WITH YOU THROUGH THE PARLETTS. THEY ARE IN A SAFE PLACE, A PLACE TO WHICH ONLY HE AND I AND A FEW TRUSTED SERVANTS HAVE ACCESS.”
Horse Hall? But it didn’t matter. “I assume you have two of the quintuplets?”
“WE BELIEVE THAT IF ONE DIES, THE OTHERS WILL SURVIVE AND REMAIN IN CONTACT. WE HAVE KEPT TWO HERE TO GIVE US A MARGIN OF SAFETY, IF SOMETHING SHOULD HAPPEN TO ONE OF THEM.”
“And I get three because the Ohio is the more dangerous end.”
“CONSIDERABLY MORE DANGEROUS, DIRECTOR. AND IF THE MIMICRY OF THE PARLETTS IS TO BE BELIEVED, YOU ALSO HAVE A CONSIDERABLY MORE MELODIOUS VOICE THAN I.” The Parletts twisted their faces into something that might have been a leer.
Schmidt laughed. “Then they are liars through and through, Franklin, and you had better come up with another means to stay in touch.”
The Parletts bellowed their raucous imitation of Temple Franklin’s laughter.
“LORD THOMAS IS SENDING THE PROMISED REINFORCEMENTS.”
“More than this one squad, I hope. Competent as Captain Mohuntubby appears, I think he’ll have his hands too full protecting the Parletts to be able to effectively besiege Cahokia.”
“INFANTRY AND MOLLY PITCHERS.”
“Good. We have a wall to batter down.”
“THE MILITARY WILL BE UNDER THE COMMAND OF GENERAL SAYLE.”
“The Roundhead? The cannoneer? I hate a fanatic.”
“SAYLE IS NOT A FANATIC. YOU WILL HAVE DIRECTION OF THE CIVIL GOVERNMENT ONCE CAHOKIA CEASES ITS REBELLION AND SURRENDERS.”
Schmidt managed not to sigh. Sayle was a fanatic; if not for a saint, then for a strategy. “The company has the experience to manage that.”
“AND YOU HAVE THE EXPERIENCE, DIRECTOR SCHMIDT. LORD THOMAS BIDS ME TO TELL YOU THAT HE IS PLEASED. AND ALSO THAT…HE DOES NOT BELIEVE THE COMPANY TRULY NEEDS FIVE DIRECTORS.”
Schmidt kept a calm face, though her heart leaped. “I understand.”
“DO YOU NEED ANYTHING ELSE FROM US AT THIS TIME?”
“No,” Schmidt said. Should she mention her connection with Robert Hooke and his shuffling undead soldiers? “Nothing that can’t wait. I assume I can contact you through the Parletts at any time?”
“SOMEONE WILL ALWAYS BE LISTENING ON THIS END. PLEASE ARRANGE THE SAME ON YOUR SIDE.”
“Understood.” Schmidt turned to her own men. “Schäfer, Dadgayadoh—put the Parletts in a tent adjoining mine, and make sure they have all the necessaries. Food, clothing, cots and blankets…dolls, hoops, pull-horses, whatever they need. If you need to send marauders back through the lands we’ve sacked looking for toys we left behind, do so. I’ll want one of you with them at all times. If they start talking as they did just now, I want to know about it immediately. Captain Mohuntubby, I’ll leave it to you to provide for security.”
Shouts from the direction of the besieged city’s eastern gate caught her ear. She turned as the Cherokee officer and his men followed her two traders back toward camp. At the militia barricade over the eastern road milled a knot of people in robes that had once been white but had been stained gray and brown by winter and travel. A blue cordon of Imperial uniforms held back the knot, which seemed to be trying to make its way into the city.
Schmidt approached the scene at her usual brisk pace.
She counted an even twelve robed travelers, all on foot, all men. None of them younger than forty, by her guess. Eleven of them stood, leaning on walking sticks. Their backs were bent by fatigue, but the light of conviction burned in their eyes.
The twelfth knelt.
He had been kneeling for some time, by appearances. His robe had been torn to shreds by walking on his knees; the knees themselves were purple and covered with skin so thick and callused that they wouldn’t have looked out of place on a camel. His eyes were sunken into deep wells flanked by bony cheeks and gnarled brows; both ears and nose looked half again too large for his face. Long gray hair and a gray beard hung back over his shoulders, presumably so he wouldn’t pull his own face into the frozen mud by kneeling on the hairs of his chin.
Schmidt sighed.
She whistled sharply around her fingers as she stomped up, which was enough signal for the militiamen to clear a space for her. The mud-spattered apostles in white cleared a space opposing, and she abruptly found herself looking down at the filthy old man kneeling in the snow. All twelve men in white were unarmed.
“You don’t look dangerous,” she said. “If you’re hungry, I can arrange for you to get a meal.”
The old man laughed slowly. “I look like a beggar.” His eleven companions laughed with him.
“Yes,” Schmidt said flatly.
“I don’t want your crusts and pottage.” The old man pointed at the Treewall. Gray-caped shoulders and shining sallet helmets visible over the ramparts suggested Cahokian interest in the conversation. “I only want passage.”
“I am besieging the city.”
The old man raised his arms. “My name is Zadok, though most call me Metropolitan Tarami, or simply Father. Do I look like a threat to your siege?”
Schmidt hooked her thumbs into her broad leather belt. “Not all threats are visible. Who are you?”
At that moment, Robert Hooke arrived. The eleven standing men in white shrank from his presence; the militiamen, freed murderers, road agents, and rapists, by and large, grinned in appreciation.
He stinks of piety, the Lazar’s voice rang in Schmidt’s mind, but not of gramarye.
She had no way of knowing whether others could hear Hooke’s words, so she kept her nod discreet.
“I am the kingdom’s ranking priest,” Zadok Tarami said. “Or ranking secular priest, at least. I preside in the Basilica and, when they are Christian, I hear the confessions of the kings and queens of Cahokia.”
When they are Christian? Schmidt refrained from laughing out loud, thinking of the wild paganism of Cahokia’s temple. The serpent-tree behind the open veil, the star mosaics. “Does the Metropolitan of Cahokia ordinarily travel about on his knees, in winter? I understand the Moundbuilder kingdoms are impoverished in these sad times of revolt and Pacification, but I thought they could at least afford feet.”
“I return from pilgrimage,” the priest said. “I have come the entire road of the great Onandagos, from the borders of the Talligewi to the hill where the prophet finally pinned the serpent and stole its crown.”
“Your sense of geography is confused, cleric,” Schmidt said. “This is the flattest place on the continent.”
“God tells me that you will admit me. Your heart is touched, I can see.”
Schmidt frowned. “Did you travel the entire road on your knees?”
Tarami nodded. “I have seen all seven kingdoms. I have lain quartered twice on the crosses of the earth itself. I have done this not for myself, but begging heaven for its blessing upon my people.”
He can only hurt the serpent’s daughter, Hooke whispered into her mind. It does no harm to admit these fools. At the very least they are more Firstborn mouths to feed.
Unexpectedly, Schmidt found herself missing Luman Walters. Hooke’s advice rang true, but it bore a hard edge of arrogance. Also, it completely lacked the warmth and humor of her banter with Walters.
Whither had her Balaam gone? In the confusion of the beginning of the siege, Notwithstanding Schmidt hadn’t followed the magician’s movements. He might have gone upriver or down or across the water into the Missouri, or even into the city itself for all she knew.
She could ask Hooke, but Luman’s whereabouts seemed none of the Sorcerer’s business.
“You eleven,” she said, addressing the standing men. “I will give you your bowl of curds, and then you must leave. Take any road you like, but go away.” The men looked relieved; had they expected her to kill them on the spot?
“And I?” Zadok Tarami asked.
“No pottage for you,” she said. “But if the Cahokians will take you in, you are welcome to enter the city.”
* * *
Flanked by Alzbieta Torias and Cathy Filmer, Sarah looked down from the height of the Treewall. The soldiers in blue retreated into their trenches—which also crawled, she knew, with dead abominations no less repulsive than Robert Hooke himself, though mute and rotting—or into their tents beyond. A single figure in gray was left on the road.
Kneeling.
On his knees, he then continued his approach alone.
“Who is that?” Sarah raised the bandage from her Eye of Eve and saw the soul of the approaching man as the shining blue aura of one of the Firstborn, the children of Wisdom.
Only she now knew that Eve and Wisdom were the same person.
Or did she know that, after all?
The more she learned, the more the world seemed an insoluble enigma.
“That can only be one man.” Alzbieta’s voice was sharp. “He undertook a difficult journey, and I was beginning to be optimistic that it had killed him.”
“An enemy of yours?” Cathy’s voice was always cold when she spoke to Alzbieta.
“An enemy of Kyres Elytharias,” Alzbieta said.
Sarah looked quickly at the priestess and found honesty visible in her soul. “A pretender?”
Cathy laughed. “No, that would be Alzbieta Torias.”
“A priest. A rebel.” Alzbieta lowered her head humbly. “Your grandfather…your father’s father…became king at a very young age. He fell under the influence of certain thinkers, men who were powerful and…dissatisfied.”
“Dissatisfied how?” Sarah asked. If this was some would-be rival, at least he was approaching on his knees. She could have him shot easily, if she had good reason for doing so. “You alluded to this once, as we rode to Cahokia together. You said my father’s father tried to eradicate priesthoods and secrets.”
“Dissatisfied with the goddess. Dissatisfied with the constitution of the kingdom. Dissatisfied with the spiritual life of Cahokia. Dissatisfied with the way the tale of the great prophet-king Onandagos had always been told. Dissatisfied with the differences separating us from the children of Eve.”
“These men were priests?” Sarah asked.
“Some of them, yes. Including the leading priests of the Basilica, which to this day continues to harbor and train more priests who think this way. But some were also wealthy men, men with land, men in the royal family. Philosophers. Poets. And there were influential men in the other six Sister Kingdoms who felt the same way. We were drawing closer to the Cavaliers and the Roundheads and the Ferdinandians and others in those days. Appalachee was becoming less a barrier and more a highway. The ghosts of the Kentuck were fading into oblivion. It seemed likely that some sort of close alliance was going to come to pass, perhaps even union, and it was felt that our differences might stand in the way of that consummation.”
“Differences such as…?” Cathy pressed.
“The goddess,” Sarah said. “Or really, the throne. It’s one thing to read the Bible in a private way and tell each other that Wisdom or the Spirit or the Serpent refer to your goddess. It’s something else to have a golden serpent in a temple.”
Sarah had done much thinking about that throne.
Cathy nodded.
“It is indeed…something else.” Alzbieta’s face was grave and her voice quiet. “These would-be reformers thought we would be seen like Odin-worshippers of Chicago and Waukegan, pagans and unbelievers. They felt shame, perhaps. Fear. Lack of confidence.”
The kneeling figure had covered a third of the ground from the trenches to the gate. Soon, Sarah would have to make a decision.
Were those streaks of blood behind him in the snow?
She looked to the barbican tower over the gate and saw the men within it gazing back at her, waiting for a signal.
“But the Serpent Throne still stands,” Sarah said. “No one tore it down. No one burned down the temple.”
“Not for want of trying. This was before my day, of course, but I heard the stories. Men with torches and pry bars assaulted the temple. Its groves were uprooted and burned to ash, the ashes trampled underfoot. Cahokia’s two great priesthoods—the one serving Father and Son, and the one serving the Virgin—split as they had never split before. Blood was shed. Women of great honor were humiliated and enslaved.”
“The veil,” Sarah said.
“The great veil was torn down,” Alzbieta agreed. “Your father later hung a new one in its place. For whatever reason, he never closed it. Presumably, the goddess told him not to.”
“Why would She do that?” Sarah asked.
“Perhaps we are not yet ready for Her presence.” Alzbieta shook her head. “Perhaps this is what you can accomplish here, Beloved.”
“But the…rebels,” Sarah continued. “They couldn’t deny the goddess, surely? Where do they think they come from?”
“Most men don’t experience their gods as you have been privileged to do, Beloved.” Alzbieta spoke slowly, and her use of the title Beloved underscored the fact that Sarah too was a priestess of Alzbieta’s goddess, a goddess they both had seen.
A priesthood about which Sarah knew practically nothing. But something about Sarah’s priesthood, her status as the goddess’s Beloved, or her vision of Eden, had changed her.
Sarah’s stomach turned at the mere thought of meat, and she could not bring herself to touch it. And, no matter how tired she became, she could only sleep atop the Great Mound.
What had happened to her?
“Then…the stories you told me of the great migration west, the building of the temple and the church side by side?”
“The rebels tell another story, about a flight west plagued by a demonic serpent. About a race of men descended from the serpent, who bear its mark on their very souls to this day, and whose blood boils because of the serpent’s corruption still flowing within them. About a king who slew the serpent and sat upon her to crown himself, not as a sign of solidarity and kinship, but as a mark of conquest and redemption from his corrupted birth. About a line of kings whose great triumph is to keep serpents at bay. About a people who had outgrown the serpent throne, and all their former private, sacred things.”
“That makes the rebels sound heroic,” Sarah said. “A little like Moses, breaking up the golden calf and forcing the sinners to drink it.”
“But Moses raised the serpent,” Alzbieta pointed out.
“Maybe a little like the New Light,” Cathy added, her voice softening.
Alzbieta shrugged. “The Campbells and Barton Stone may have taken some inspiration from the rebels against the goddess of Cahokia. I don’t know. But the children of Adam have never had a shortage of men who wish to tear down all that prior generations have built, in the name of freedom, or virtue, or progress, or conscience. And in that tearing down, Peter Plowshare was pushed away and the truths we knew about him were forgotten. Our children were taught the language of William Penn, rather than the language of Onandagos. And many important things were lost.”
Sarah pointed down at the crawling figure. “And that man? Is he a man of conscience?”
Alzbieta was slow to answer. “He’s not a hypocrite,” she finally said. “Many love him.”
“And what’s the difficult journey he undertook?”
“The Onandagos Road. It’s a sunwise path that crosses all seven sister kingdoms, beginning at the far edge of the Talega lands in the north and east, and touching at points where important events are believed to have taken place in the life of the great prophet. It finally enters Cahokia through the eastern gate—the Ohio Gate, though before your grandfather’s time, it was more commonly called the Onandagos Gate. The true final length of the Onandagos Road travels from the Onandagos Gate to the Temple of the Sun, though I think he will not finish his pilgrimage that way.”
“No?” Sarah asked.
Alzbieta shook her head. “He will go to the Basilica. The comfortably pious make that journey on horseback. The path is not straight, and travels some eight hundred miles, weaving north and south as it pushes continually westward. Only the truly religious do it on foot.”
“And am I to understand that this man traveled the Onandagos Road on his knees?” Sarah asked.
“He’s not a liar,” Alzbieta said.
Sarah watched the crawling man crossing the last thirty yards to the Ohio—or Onandagos—Gate. “What’s his name?” she asked.
“Zadok Tarami,” Alzbieta said. “Father Tarami. He’s the Metropolitan of Cahokia. The Basilica is his church. Tradition would have him your confessor. He would have been your father’s confessor, only your father insisted on his Cetean friend, in defiance of his father.”
“Zadok doesn’t sound like a Firstborn name.”
“It’s a Hebrew name. The name is that of David’s priest in the Old Testament. He took the name on his ordination to the priesthood. Many of his party take old Hebrew names. The names of priests and prophets—Josiah, Jehu, Hezekiah, Elijah—are all popular.”
“The breakers of idols,” Cathy murmured.
“It is how they see themselves.”
“He’s not old enough to have been tearing down veils in my grandfather’s time,” Sarah said.
“He’s of the generation that came after. More compassionate, maybe. No less principled or dogmatic.”
“The generation my father fought against?”
“Yes. Your grandfather was chosen as the Beloved as a child, but later the goddess abandoned him. It was a shocking thing, unheard of.”
Sarah’s heart hurt even imagining such a loss. “She abandoned him during the rebellion?”
“Because of the rebellion, some said. Others convinced themselves that there had never been such a thing as the Beloved, that it was only a silly old idea they had all believed in because their fathers told it to them.”
“And the subsequent Beloved must have been a woman,” Sarah said. “She alternates in Her choice, does She not?”
Alzbieta nodded. “Your grandfather was followed by a cousin of yours. She was a learned and kind Handmaid of the goddess, who after becoming the Beloved lived out her life in fear and seclusion. All Cahokia—all Cahokia that still believed—knew she was the Beloved, and it availed her nothing. She lived in darkness and died a failure. She never wore the crown.”
Alzbieta’s voice was wounded.
“Did you know her?” Cathy asked.
Alzbieta hesitated. “She was my mother. From a young age, I never left her side and we never left the temple. When she died, she was mad. Some whispered of poison, but I think that seclusion would have been enough.”
Sarah blinked back sudden tears in the corners of her eyes. “And then the goddess chose my father. Unexpectedly.”
“He was young and reckless. Some regarded him as a fool and an adventurer, a dashing younger son who might make a good career as a soldier but could never be a statesman. Some expected the goddess’s choice to fall on an older brother. Others expected that there would be no more Beloveds. But Kyres proved them all wrong. He became Beloved and king.”
“He didn’t drive out the rebels against his goddess.”
“He drove them from Her temple. And his virtue and prowess silenced them. Who would raise his hand against such a king, a dealer of justice and a hero in war, a man who could ride to far Philadelphia and marry an empress? And then he was gone.”
Questions piled into Sarah’s mind, but most of them would have to wait. “And Tarami. Why did he travel the Onandagos Road?” she asked.
“The Law of the Way says ‘Blessed is he that walketh the sunwise road of the king, for he shall be given the grip of peace.’”
“He wrecked himself like that…for scripture?” Sarah found the idea hard to believe.
Alzbieta shrugged. “Who can guess what’s in a man’s heart? A pilgrim making such a journey accrues fame and experience and may make interesting alliances on the road. Perhaps he hoped his pilgrimage would re-ignite the fires of rebellion, or at least inspire others to follow him. I can tell you that on his departure, he prayed publicly that God would lift the Pacification.”
“Don’t let him in,” Cathy Filmer said. “Men of too strict principle are dangerous.”
“I agree,” Alzbieta said. “Zadok Tarami is not your friend. With the Imperials camped around the city, you have every reason to bar his entry. For all you know, he could have been corrupted by your Uncle Thomas. He could be a spy, or a traitor.”
As he reached the great eastern gate of the city, Zadok Tarami reached forward to touch the wood. Losing his balance, he fell on his face in the snow and the mud.
Sarah raised her arm and gestured to the men in the barbican. “Open the gate!”
* * *
New Amsterdam sprouted like a disordered hedge along the opposite shore of the Hudson River. Kinta Jane Embry shivered, huddling deep into the wool cloak around her shoulders. As the ferry bumped against the wood of the dock, the yapping beagle on its broad deck fell silent. It stared at Kinta Jane with wide eyes, wrinkled its nose as if smelling something offensive, and then bolted to the far side of the vessel.
“Are we in Pennsland still?” she asked Isaiah Wilkes in a whisper.
They both wore disguises, of a sort. Wilkes had stained the skin of his face and hands a reddish brown, and for days he had responded to all attempts to communicate with him by grunting and shaking his head. It worked; even real Indians took him for members of some tribe they didn’t know and left him alone after an attempt or two. Kinta Jane, meanwhile, wore a false beard made of horsehair the actor had given her, and pretended she was deaf and mute.
It was an easy charade.
They stood now on a boardwalk over the ice-choked Hudson with the flow of traffic disembarking from the ferry out of earshot. Still, they looked out over the river so no one could see their mouths move and they spoke in low voices.
“Farther up, starting at the Tappan Zee, the Republic straddles both sides of the river. Here, you and I still stand on this land at the sufferance of Lord Thomas. It was not far north of here that William Penn, on a day dictated by the stars, began his miraculous walk that convinced the Lenni Lenape and others that the land grant to him was ordained of heaven, as well as by the ruler of England.”
“Lord Thomas.” Kinta Jane grunted. “Whom you called Brother Onas.”
Isaiah Wilkes turned slightly to her and smiled. “You’ve been patient.”
“Was it a test?” she asked. “If so, it was an easy one. You well know I was trained not to ask some questions.”
“You experienced Franklin’s Vision,” he said. “Do you remember much of it?”
“Mostly the sensations,” she admitted. “Chaos and doubt at the return of Simon Sword, fear of death, a world turned upside down and then destroyed before it can be reborn.”
Wilkes nodded. “Many remember less than that. Let me tell you the story of Brother Onas.”
Kinta Jane waited.
“Once there were three brothers,” Wilkes began. “They were neighbors as well as brothers, and they all lived on land that belonged to the same landlord.”
Kinta Jane frowned. “Not the Penns.”
Wilkes snorted. “Not the Penns. The landlord was a kind and benevolent ruler. When one of the brothers arrived from a distant land, he brought illness with him. The illness would have struck down the other two brothers, but the landlord was a magician of serious power, and he healed them.”
“What kind of brothers were these, if one came from a distant land?” Kinta Jane asked.
Wilkes continued. “Their names were Onas, Anak, and Odishkwa. They were brothers, though they shared no father and no mother. One day, their landlord’s wife died, and in grief he went mad. He tore up the brothers’ paths and shattered the boundaries between their lands. He planted hatred between them and brought them to blows. He drove one brother into the swamps, the second to the frozen lands of the far north, and the third deep into the woods to hide. The brothers and their families skulked separately, eating carrion and berries and hoping the landlord would die.
“But he didn’t die. Instead, he grew more and more terrifying. He took the brothers’ women. He ate their children, after sacrificing them on stone altars to himself, and he engulfed all his land in a perpetual storm.”
“Well, now he doesn’t sound like one of the Penns,” Kinta Jane said.
“Rivers ran uphill. Fire froze and water burned. The air was too heavy with smoke to breathe, and the ash was so thick on the ground that nothing would grow. Finally, one of the brothers saw that the landlord would have to be confronted. He set out in the blighted world and after many obstacles he managed to gather his two brothers to his side again.”
“Which brother was it?” Kinta Jane asked.
Isaiah Wilkes chuckled. “The story is told three different ways, so maybe it is all the brothers. For our telling’s sake, let us say it was Brother Onas. And Brother Onas’s great insight was that the landlord could be calmed again if he were to remarry. Only the landlord was of noble birth and couldn’t marry just anyone; he had to marry a princess of the same lineage as his first wife.
“While two of the brothers fought the landlord to distract and delay him, the third brother—we shall say it was Brother Onas—crept into the halls of the landlord himself. There he found imprisoned a princess of the lineage to which the landlord was bound. Freeing her, he brought about the landlord’s marriage, and the landlord regained his sanity.”
“In a ruined world,” Kinta Jane pointed out.
“But you are forgetting what a great magician the landlord was,” Wilkes said. “By his art, the brothers’ wives rose from the dead, and their children sprang whole and unsacrificed from the altars. The land was healed and reborn. Some even say that such a death and rebirth is necessary for the land, just as a death and rebirth is necessary for the children of Adam.”
“Do you mean baptism?” Kinta Jane was surprised to hear religious talk from the Franklin.
“That’s one possibility,” Wilkes said. “And so the brothers, fearing the return of the landlord’s madness, swore an oath. The brother from a distant land—Brother Onas—was granted by the other two as much land as he could walk in a day. Fortified by the restored landlord, he walked a great distance. The brothers agreed they would tell their sons the tale of the landlord’s loss, illness, and redemption, in such a manner that if the landlord went mad again—and some say it was inevitable that he would do so—there would always be a Brother Onas, a Brother Anak, and a Brother Odishkwa with the lore and the will to restore the natural order.”
“Franklin’s Vision is the landlord’s madness,” Kinta Jane said.
“And Brother Onas has forgotten his lore and his will.”
“Are Brother Anak and Brother Odishkwa in New Amsterdam?”
“No, they are north and west of here.” The Franklin’s face softened into a smile. “There is a meeting place, at the edges of the Acadian city of Montreal. Beneath a column of rock shaped like a centaur is a hidden chimney, and through that chimney lies a cave where the three brothers meet. We are going to that cave, Kinta Jane, and we will signal Brothers Anak and Odishkwa that we wish to meet. But our way lies through the Hudson River Republic. If we are fortunate, we may find allies to help us.”
“Why on earth do you need me?” she asked, feeling small in the face of these strange stories. “You know the lands and the tales and the people. You are a master of disguise. What can I possibly do to help?”
“For one thing,” Isaiah Wilkes said, “you speak French.”