“You speak ill of the dead.”
Chapter Three
Luman Walters was hungry.
Not metaphorically hungry. Not hungry with the desire for knowledge, which was part of what had driven him to leave his mostly effective and reasonably comfortable working relationship with Notwithstanding Schmidt and slip within the walls of Cahokia, just before the gates had all been raised.
He was physically hungry.
There was food within the Treewall, but very, very little. Private stores were being rationed out. Animals were kept indoors by their owners, until those owners themselves were prepared to slaughter them.
Children, as yet, were permitted to be outdoors. Given the snow that blocked the streets, most of them stayed inside. Those who were outside traveled in ragged gangs. Luman did his best to avoid them…just in case.
Luman felt guilt at the thought of taking food from any Cahokian mouth. He had no right to be here. He had resolved that he would both fight to defend the city, when the time came, and also not consume its resources.
He had eaten one rat, trapping it himself with a bit of braucherei. It had a sour flavor, but Luman was hungry enough that he’d have done it again, if he’d seen any more rats.
He hadn’t.
Instead, he repeatedly sang a short braucher prayer that was supposed to ease hunger, thirst, and sleep. It mostly worked, though Luman found himself growing thinner.
He slept on the cot in The King’s Head, paying for the room by performing minor magic for the landlord, a slow-talking Talegan with obvious Lenni Lenape features named Zo’es Collins. Spells to stop fire. Spells to secure income. Before the milk gave out, Luman had carefully placed the Collins’s Bible atop his full butter churn, to keep the butter from going bad. But he spent most of his waking time either in the Basilica, helping Mother Hylia and the secular priests there care for the refugees, or in the streets of Cahokia, watching the actions of the city’s strangest and most fascinating inhabitant, her would-be queen, the half-Eldritch, half-Pennslander, all-Appalachee witch who stared at the world through mismatched eyes. The refugees knew Luman as the stranger who had driven the marauding beastkind from the church; they didn’t know how he had done it. A few of the younger Missourians, more wildly afflicted with inflamed imaginations, whispered that he was a gunfighter, or that the pockets of his long coat were full of exotic weapons. Regardless, his word became authoritative, and Luman found himself settling disputes and easing fears.
The rat had been an occupant of the Basilica. Luman calculated that the rat’s death was only just punishment for the pages of the hymnals the rodent had apparently eaten. He’d roasted it over a fire made from the splintered rood screen. Holy wood, holy fire, holy meat. On crude but undeniable magical principles, he’d felt as if the flesh of the rat were some sort of consecrated host.
He eyed the white doves that flocked on the high roof of the Basilica, but they were too hard to catch by hand, and Luman wasn’t yet hungry enough to actually shoot one of the church’s birds. It felt too impious, too close to shooting an angel.
But if I am hungry enough…
The witch Sarah Elytharias—no one in Cahokia called her by the name Penn—knew Luman, so he was careful not to come too close to her. He didn’t want to be taken for an Imperial spy. But her movements were often accompanied by an entourage of priestesses, ministers, and even beastkind soldiers, so he could watch much of what she did from the slopes of the Basilica Mound, peering through his spectacles and even sharpening his eyesight and hearing by minor charms, when occasion suggested.
He would like to get closer to her. He needed his next magical mentor, some access to an initiatory path, a new source of power. None of the priests in the Basilica would admit to any such thing even existing, and Mother Hylia maintained her diffident evasions, no matter how many times she saw Luman play the Good Samaritan with the wounded travelers of the Missouri.
He stood on a bright morning in early January on a large east-west avenue, the road that most directly connected the large eastern gate with the Great Mound and the Basilica. The witch Sarah stood atop the eastern wall looking intently at something outside; whatever it was also captured the attention of the wardens and Pitchers and other warriors on the wall, because they stared and murmured.
Before Luman could recite any spells to hear what Elytharias and her two female advisors were saying to each other, the gate opened. The iron grill rose, and the iron-studded wood on the other side slowly dropped. Luman saw first the Imperial camps—larger than they had been a few days earlier—then the militia, then the trenches and earthworks.
And then a single man with long white hair and beard, lurching forward on his knees.
Long-cloaked Cahokians standing all around Luman on the avenue gasped as one.
They knew the man.
Luman watched the old fellow creep forward. His knees were scabbed and callused, his once-white robe tattered, his skin blue from the cold. A thousand eyes stared at him, but he didn’t look back, not at a single face.
Instead, he looked up and forward.
Luman didn’t need to turn to know what the old man was fixed on. He was staring at the Basilica.
Luman retreated ahead of the old man, keeping an eye on his forward progress. Sarah, he noticed abruptly, had descended from the wall, but he couldn’t see where she’d gone.
The old man trembled and left streaks of blood behind him in the snow. Could he even reach the Basilica?
The crowd closed in around him, nevertheless leaving a straight, narrow aisle ahead. They knew where he was going.
Who was he?
Could this be the mentor Luman was hoping for?
Crossing a plaza, the old man’s knees slid out from under him on a patch of ice. Hands reached out to elevate him and he pushed them away. Unsteadily, he rose to all fours…waiting, breathing hard as a frozen breeze snatched the tatters of his robe away, revealing a sunken chest that was also frozen blue…and then dragged himself to his knees and advanced again.
With the last coins of his Imperial salary, Luman bought a half-full cup of watered-down beer at a tavern. He asked for a crust of bread as well, but the drooping man behind the bar only frowned and shook his head. Luman then positioned himself at the foot of the Basilica Mound, holding the cup before him.
Watching the crowd mill about him, thickening the walls of the pilgrim’s aisle, he found Sarah Elytharias again. She and the two women stood on Cahokia’s other sacred mound, in front of the Temple of the Serpent, watching.
From the conversation about him, Luman gleaned the pilgrim’s name: Father Tarami. He was a priest of the Basilica, and he was returning from a long pilgrimage, something called the Onandagos Road.
When Tarami reached the foot of the mound, he sat back on his own heels and looked up. Luman tried to catch his eye with a smile and a flourish of the cup, but Tarami ignored him. The old man’s breath came with effort, his lips were cracked, and Luman could hear the rumbling of his belly.
Tarami began to climb.
With each ponderous movement forward, the priest muttered some prayer under his breath. Luman heard the syllables clearly, but didn’t know the language and had no charm to decipher it. Throwing a sharp elbow into the belly of a tall, black-bearded Ophidian with sooty hands, Luman turned and seized the position immediately behind Tarami. Muscling his way with each step and pushing away other enthusiasts, he held the spot.
All together, like ants swarming a hill in their queen’s wake, the crowd climbed the hill with the old man.
His steps grew more labored. He left more blood behind on the stones. Luman saw the old man lose two large toenails when his foot struck a step at a bad angle.
And then, a few steps from the top, the old man collapsed.
Weeping erupted from the crowd. Luman feared they might riot. In defense of his own life as well as that of the priest, he pushed the mob back.
“Let him breathe!” he shouted.
Sarah Elytharias must see his actions. What would she think of them?
What would the pilgrim think?
He knelt beside the old man, feeling his feeble breathing scarcely disturb the air and watching his eyelids and blue lips flutter.
“You’re almost home,” he said to Father Tarami. “Drink this.”
The old man shook his head.
“Come now.” Luman smiled as gently as he knew how. “Even our Lord took a cup of wine at the end. Or the beginning, as it were.”
The priest’s eyes opened and his chest heaved. Luman feared he was suffering a heart attack, but then the old man’s cracked lips split into a grin and Luman recognized laughter for what it was.
“Mixed with gall,” Tarami wheezed.
“Yes, well, once you’ve tasted this, you might wish you were drinking vinegar, too.”
Tarami’s smile grew wider, revealing bleeding gums and sores on his tongue. Luman put an arm under the old man and raised him to sitting position, allowing him to slowly drain the contents of the cup.
The mound-climbing crowd stared.
Missourians, clustered around the front door of the Basilica, beneath its sculpted vine, thick with cooing doves, watched with wide eyes.
Luman tucked the cup into one of his many pockets and lowered himself onto his knees. “I would carry you as the Cyrenian, but I think you will not have it.”
Tarami turned and knelt. “If you would accompany me, I will not turn you away.”
They finished the climb together. The combined crowd of Cahokians and Missourians widened the aisle to accommodate both of them. By the time they reached the Basilica door, where Mother Hylia stood waiting, Luman’s knees hurt. The cooing of the doves overhead sounded like a taunt.
How had this old man crossed the entire city?
And how far had he come before that? Luman thought he had heard someone in the crowd mention Oranbega, but that was hundreds of miles away.
The rubble left by the beastkind assault a few days earlier had been cleared away, but the damage to the rood screen and the pews was still very visible. Father Tarami ignored it, as he ignored the people clustered to either side of the nave, and focused on the altar in the apse.
His movements became more vigorous, each knee forward reaching farther than the one preceding. Luman found himself racing to keep up.
As the two men approached the altar, Luman held back. The assembled crowd seemed to hold its breath; Luman had rarely heard a more complete silence, despite the hundreds of people crowding the nave.
Abruptly slowing again, the old man stretched himself out on the paving stones in cruciform shape: arms extended to his sides, feet together and straight back, face pressed to the floor. He lay there long enough that Luman was beginning to wonder whether the old man had arrived at his destination and died, but abruptly he moved, raised his face slightly from the floor, and kissed the stone.
Crawling forward, he kissed the stone of the altar, too.
Then dragging himself up, Father Tarami stood on his two feet. He wobbled unsteadily and sucked air into his lungs with a look of surprise on his face, but he remained standing.
To Luman’s astonishment, the crowd broke into song:
Crown of iron, heart of flesh
Shaker’s Rod and feet of clay
Lord of harvest, ere you thresh
Send a light to guide our way
Chariot rider, god of war
Mankind’s father, son of peace
Shelter us from foes of yore
From all trial grant surcease
Should he imitate the pilgrim and throw himself on the floor? Should he kiss the altar? If he did, surely others in the crowd would follow him. Would the priest himself regard that as presumption?
But Luman did neither of those things, and the moment passed.
A metallic ringing harsh as thunder cracked the air inside the Basilica, and Maltres Korinn stepped into view from the apse. He leaned on a black wooden staff with a metal horse’s head at the upper end and a metal cap on the bottom; it was the staff whose noise rang so loudly. Korinn had been the Regent-Minister, but after siding with Sarah Elytharias during the tumultuous events on the night of the solstice, he had emerged as Vizier. He still wore black and carried the staff without other sign of office, except that if anything his facial expression had become even more dour.
“Zadok Tarami,” Korinn said.
The old man spread his arms wide. “I am returned from my journey.”
“You are summoned to the throne.” Korinn looked to Luman. “You’d better come too, Imperial.”
* * *
Sarah was good at keeping her composure, but to Cathy’s experienced eye there had been signs of increasing agitation as the pilgrim Zadok Tarami had crossed Cahokia and ascended the Basilica. Those signs would have looked like anger on another person—narrowed eyes, less mobility in the mouth, the twitch of a jaw muscle. In Sarah, they betrayed cussedness, and mentally digging in.
Which suggested she felt the need to dig in.
Maltres Korinn was shrewd enough to limit the priest’s ability to make further spectacle. He neither chained nor dragged the man, but simply descended one mound and ascended the other with as little ceremony as possible.
With them came the Imperial wizard, the man with eyeglasses and a long coat.
At Sarah’s instruction, Cathy stood to one side with Yedera the Podebradan. Sarah stood directly in the open doorway of the Temple of the Sun. On her left hand stood the eight slaves who had once been Alzbieta’s palanquin bearers, and now that she walked on the earth like a normal woman, still followed her around as a bodyguard. On Sarah’s right stood the spell-less Polite wizard Sherem, Alzbieta herself, and, once he’d regained the height of the mound, Maltres Korinn.
Cathy didn’t know the logic of the arrangement, though she noticed that it made an array of twelve people.
Zadok looked small even beside the Imperial wizard, who was a man of average height. The two men stood, breathing hard from their climb.
Sarah said nothing.
It was a raven that finally broke the silence with a single baritone croak.
“You’re Elytharias’s daughter,” Tarami said. “God has told me of your coming.”
“The goddess told all Her children,” Sarah said slowly.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Tarami said. “You’re the answer to my prayers, as I can be the answer to yours.”
“What prayers?” Sarah asked him.
“Surely, you pray for knowledge. You pray to know what you should do in this situation, and you are surrounded as never before by a bewildering confusion of conflicting information.” Tarami smiled. “The fact that you are the daughter of Kyres Elytharias doesn’t give you any great gift of inborn knowledge, does it? One thing you will learn, if you haven’t learned it already, is that being Kyres’s daughter means that there are many people who are very willing to tell you lies.”
The wizard looked as if he’d been struck.
“You’ve been traveling, priest,” Sarah said. “How’s the weather in the rest of the Ohio?”
“Cold.” Tarami’s voice was a bass drone, a surprisingly deep sound to come from such a thin frame. “Our people starve. Not just in Cahokia, but all our people. They need leadership, too. They need righteous kings, Cahokia needs a righteous king, to guide it through the narrows. Thomas is misguided, he may even be wicked, but God will give a penitent king the wisdom and the power to bring peace.”
“Bring peace?” Sarah laughed, a shrill wedge that pierced the bass wall. “That’s what Thomas says he’s up to. Isn’t that right, Balaam?”
At the name, the wizard started. “My name isn’t Balaam…my lady.”
“You may call her Beloved,” Alzbieta said.
“Beloved,” the magician repeated. “Director Schmidt called me Balaam to mock me. My name is Luman Walters.”
“She has a name, too,” Tarami said. “To call her Beloved is to give credence to her pagan nonsense, which I know you cannot believe.”
“To tell truth,” Sarah said, “I’m not all that comfortable with the title myself. For now, how about I call you ‘Luman’ and you call me ‘Sarah’?”
Walters nodded acquiescence.
Sarah removed her eyepatch, fixing her witchy eye on the Imperial magician. “Tell me why you came here, Luman.”
Walters stepped back, looking surprised. “I came with Director Schmidt.”
“I know that. Tell me why you came here.”
“It was my job. I worked for the Imperial Ohio Company. But I’ve walked away, I’ve quit.”
“I know that too, Luman. This is your last chance, now, so I think you need to tell me the truth. All of it, the hard part, the truthiest truth you don’t want to tell me right now. Why did you come here?”
Luman Walters took a deep breath. “I came here to steal.”
Zadok Tarami put a hand on the wizard’s shoulder. “There are thieves in paradise, my son.”
“There’s the truth,” Sarah said. “But that leaves me with at least two riddles, Luman.”
Luman Walters shook his head, looking chagrined. “I’m pleased not to be entirely transparent, Sarah.”
“One,” Sarah said, “you’re a thief and you know it, but you have the most earnest soul a thief ever had. How is that?”
Walters shrugged and looked at his feet.
“And two, you’ve got a pocketful of angels. What on earth is that?”
Walters straightened up his back. “I’m a wizard, Sarah. I’m not some Philadelphia gramarist or a Polite scholar, I’m what you might call a hedge wizard. In a place like Youngstown or Knoxville I might make a decent living reading palms and hexing cattle against the murrain. Here…well, I will trade you. I will tell you all about my pocketful of angels in exchange for the knowledge you have.”
“I can see you want to be my apprentice, Luman.” Sarah’s voice was gentle. “Only I don’t know very much myself. And as I learn more things, I expect I’m not going to able to talk about most of them. That seems to be the way of things around here.”
“These are not the ways of God,” Zadok Tarami protested. “God is openness and light.”
“The gods are light, alright. Is that why you went to Oranbega, Father? To follow the ways of God?” The way Sarah said the word Father made it sound almost like an insult.
“I walked the Onandagos Road on my knees,” Father Tarami said. “Not your allegorical Way of Adam, not your mystical nonsense and mumbo-jumbo allusions to a road that exists only in your head, but the real road, with roots and stones and all. I did it begging at every step that God would send salvation to my people, and He has done it. Here you are, a wizard, a seer even, of great power. God brought you here, and He gave everyone in the city to know of your arrival, as He informed me. You are the answer to my prayers, Sarah Elytharias, and the answer to the prayers of all our people. I will guide you, I will clarify for you your own experience. Yes, I went to Oranbega for the ways of God. For myself, and also for you.”
“I believe in God,” Sarah said. “But the one I saw was a goddess. I saw Her and Her realm in a vision of glory, and She chose me.”
Tarami shook his head. “I pray it isn’t so. She is an old deceiver, and this land is the land of those who have conquered Her.”
Alzbieta Torias stepped forward. “I entered Eden Unfallen, the eternal home of Wisdom. There I saw the goddess and heard Her voice, and She chose Sarah Elytharias Penn as Her true Beloved.”
“No,” Tarami groaned.
The Polite Sherem stepped forward, shoulder to shoulder with Alzbieta. “I, too, entered Eden, and I, too, am witness. The Mother of All Living chose Sarah.”
Maltres Korinn joined them. “I entered Eden. I saw the goddess and heard Her voice. Sarah is Her Beloved daughter.”
“You are deluded!” Tarami cried. “You share a madness, but it’s madness still. This is blasphemy! This isn’t a goddess, it’s a demon that has been bound in hell, and yet has never ceased to plague this land, this city, and the descendants of Onandagos. It seeks all our destruction as its revenge! Korinn, I expected better from you!”
As one, Alzbieta Torias’s eight slaves advanced a step.
Tarami threw his hands skyward. “What, you too? Am I to hear that a gang of chained laborers went to this impossible non-place, Unfallen Eden, and met the goddess?”
“We did not go Eden,” one of the ex-bearers said. “We stood at the foot of the Sunrise Mound in the snow on the morning of the solstice. We saw light in heaven. We heard the angel choir. And we heard the voice of the Mother of All Living, declaring that Sarah Elytharias was Her Beloved daughter.”
If Sarah had arranged these witnesses, Cathy had had no advance hint. Or had Cahokia’s goddess done this?
“But do you see what you are doing?” Tarami’s words were urgent, but he wasn’t yelling. He pleaded with Sarah. “You were not raised among us, and may not know all our books, but you must know Matthew. ‘Ye shall know them by their fruits,’ the evangelist wrote. ‘Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?’ Well, then? What does your pretended goddess give you thus far? The grapes and figs of prosperity and freedom, or the thorns and thistles of siege and starvation?”
“I accept.” Sarah’s words and her face were calm, but Father Tarami staggered back as if struck.
“You accept what?” he asked.
“The test,” she said simply. “Ye shall know them by their fruits. It is a fair test. It should be a test acceptable to you, since you quote it to me as scripture.”
“It is God’s test,” Tarami said.
Sarah reached into her satchel, the satchel that had once belonged to her mentor monk, Father Thalanes, and removed from it the Heronplow. Zadok Tarami and Luman Walters both gasped.
“What is that?” Walters asked.
Tarami seemed to recognize it, and feel fear.
Sarah set the Heronplow to the frozen ground and leaned heavily onto it. With all the weight of her small body, she pushed until the tooth of the plowshare bit just a little into the frozen soil of the moundtop.
“It will take more than an act of magic to convince me,” Tarami told her.
“Fear not. I will show you more than an act of magic.” Sarah held the dull iron Orb of Etyles cupped in her left palm and knelt, placing her right hand on the Heronplow. Taking a deep breath, she shouted an incantation: “Maxima mater! Rogo ut hoc aratrum pelleas!”
The Heronplow started forward.
Cathy had heard from others—Sherem and Maltres, since she couldn’t bring herself to talk to Alzbieta as friends—about the Heronplow’s activation of the Treewall on the solstice. What she saw sounded like the tale she’d received. The plow sank into the earth and sped back and forth across the flat top of the mound. The land here was already plowed, and the Heronplow followed the existing furrows. It broke the ice and snow, which melted into living water instantly in its wake. The water sank into the furrows, and scant feet behind the Heronplow as it progressed, green shoots sprang from the earth.
Tarami tore at his beard and wept.
Luman Walters fell to his knees.
Corn and beans and squash raced skyward in intertwined vegetable towers. Wheat exploded to maturity, heavy heads pulling the stalks downward before they had even reached full height. Peaches, apples, and grapes ripened in the space of a few breaths as Cathy watched.
She heard a grunting sound and looked to Sarah. The young woman’s eyes were closed and she was sweating despite the cold. Cathy rushed to throw her arms around the girl and held her.
“It’s enough,” Cathy whispered.
“Not…yet…” Sarah ground through clenched teeth.
The Heronplow touched the end of the final furrow on top of the Great Mound and sank into the earth out of sight.
All eleven of Sarah’s witnesses gasped.
Luman Walters spun on his heel and stared down at the side of the mound.
And then the plow broke from the earth on the east-facing slope of the temple and raced downward. It paralleled the steps in its course, and as it traveled, trees grew in its wake. They were impossible trees, trees that couldn’t grow in the cold Ohio, much less in its winter—persimmons, oranges, dates, bananas, olives…and figs.
It was nonsense as a garden or a forest, a luxuriant glossolalia of vegetation.
As an act of fertile power, it was shocking.
A cry of astonishment and joy rocked the mound from below.
“This doesn’t come from your demon, child!” Tarami cried. “This comes from heaven. This is an act of God! This is how the Lord answers my thousand miles, my bloodied knees, my hundred thousand prayers, the million prayers of his children! Abundance means peace! May He bless Lord Thomas and his house as gloriously as He now blesses us!”
“No,” Sarah croaked.
Tarami ran down the steps of the mound.
Luman Walters sat, breathing rapidly and burying his face in his hands.
“Stop him!” Sarah fell forward onto one forearm, clutching the Orb of Etyles to her breast. “Stop the priest!”
The others looked at each other in surprise, but Maltres Korinn sprang forward. “Stop, Father!” he bellowed.
Cathy quickly lost the ability to make out the words of the vizier or the priest under the tumult of yelling that rose from the city. She could see the movement of the Heronplow around Cahokia by the growth of vegetation that rose from the ground in its wake, filling the avenues and plazas, turning every mound into an island of snow surrounded by a sea of fruit-bearing plant life.
Shouts of joy mingled with weeping of relief.
She watched Father Tarami move through the crowd that parted for him, crossing to the Basilica Mound. There he stood on the mound’s lowest steps and shouted, waving his arms and leaping as if in dance. He fell to his knees and had his arms stretched heavenward as if he were personally calling down rain when Maltres Korinn and half a dozen of Cahokia’s gray-caped wardens seized him.
The crowd tried to free the priest.
“No,” Sarah groaned, trying to drag herself forward and failing.
The wardens beat the mob back with their batons, but not before two of their number were knocked to the ground. The crowd picked up sticks and stones and was gathering to charge again when the priest Tarami threw up his arms to stop them.
Cathy couldn’t hear his words, but whatever he said, the crowd stepped back. They dropped their weapons and merely stared at the vizier as he dragged the old man away under guard.
Cathy took a deep breath.
“This is the most astonishing thing I have ever seen,” Luman Walters said.
“He’ll need help.” The Polite Sherem, jolted out of paralysis, descended the mound.
The entire city had become a garden.
“People won’t need instructions to feed themselves,” Walters said. “But they should be organized to collect all the food they can and store it.”
“Why?” Alzbieta said. “Wisdom has provided this. And Her Beloved. Don’t you trust them to provide again?”
Sarah collapsed to the ground.
* * *
Maltres Korinn locked Zadok Tarami into the same cell deep in the Hall of Onandagos that had held Sarah and Calvin Calhoun a few days earlier. Tarami was no magician, as far as Maltres knew, but the silver-bound construction of the cell would help prevent any magical rescue attempt from the outside.
He stationed a dozen wardens to watch the prison cells. When Sherem produced two Polites in red as volunteers to join the guard—a sleepy-eyed woman with short graying hair and a thin man with surprisingly heavy jowls—he promptly accepted, asking them to take turns, so as to always leave a gramarist on duty.
Later, under cover of darkness and perhaps with the assistance of the Polites, Maltres planned to relocate the priest to a more secret cell.
The Imperial hedge wizard Luman Walters also volunteered. Maltres sent him away.
What to make of the exchange between Walters and the Beloved? That Walters was a thief, but earnest and with angels in his pockets?
It was Zadok Tarami who prevented any real violence in his arrest. After telling the crowd that God the Father and his Son Jesus Christ, as revealed by the prophet in his true book, The Law of the Way, had sent this heavenly bounty to sustain the people of Cahokia and turn their hearts toward peace, he had submitted to arrest. He had begged the Cahokians to set down their sticks and stones and submit as well, telling them that Korinn and Sarah Elytharias were only misinformed, and that the miracle of food had been sent for their benefit as well, to convince them of the error of their ways.
Maltres Korinn knew better. Whatever the priest could say, he had seen the Mother of All Living in her Unfallen Eden. He knew She lived, and had chosen Sarah Elytharias Penn as Her Beloved.
He would bear witness to those truths, and if need be, he would do it with the sword.
In due time, the Beloved would become Queen. And then, he hoped, the Duke of Na’avu would be allowed to return home.
Still, he was grateful that, for the moment at least, the people of Cahokia weren’t tearing each other to pieces in riots.
For the collection and storage of food, Maltres knew he’d need to deploy the wardens. Having been underfed for weeks, he feared his people might respond poorly to the sudden bounty. Deploying the wardens to oversee food collection would mean taking them off the Treewall, so Maltres sought out Captain Sir William Johnston Lee.
He found him on the wall, attended by the coyote-headed beastman named Chikaak. It was only on emerging from the wooden stairs encased within the living wood of the Treewall onto the ramparts that Maltres realized that the wall, too, had borne fruit. Not one kind only, but several: a nut like a chestnut, encased in a prickly shell; something that looked like a bright orange quince; clusters of green berries.
The wardens atop the wall had lain spears and rifles down and were stuffing fruit into their mouths as fast as they could. Maltres looked along the rampart and saw the same scene repeated each time.
The beastkind warriors on the wall, on the other hand, stood still and stared fiercely down at the Imperials below.
The Imperials—Maltres looked and saw men pointing at the wall. They saw, they knew.
What would they do about it?
“Sir William,” he said.
“Mmmm,” the Cavalier answered.
Maltres thumped the Earthshaker’s Rod on the wood under his feet. “Sir William, are you concerned about discipline?”
Chikaak made a small sound like a whimper.
“I am always concerned about discipline, suh,” Sir William said. “The children of Adam are by nature such unruly beasts.”
The Johnslander turned his face to Maltres and smiled. His eyes were oddly glassy.
“You could use some sleep, Sir William.”
“So could we all.”
“I need to borrow the wardens for at least a few hours, and maybe longer.”
“Outbreak of crime?”
“An outbreak of fruit!” Maltres thumped his staff again. “Haven’t you noticed? Look below you! Look at the Treewall! The goddess has blessed us, but I fear riots and theft will lead to violence if we don’t prevent it.”
Sir William shook himself and looked about. “Hell’s Bells, you’re right. The goddess, you say?”
“May I borrow the wardens?” It wasn’t entirely clear that Maltres had to ask; the wardens had been exclusively under his command until a few days earlier. Now, though, they were one of four more or less well-organized segments of Cahokia’s defense, the other three being the household troops of the Elytharias family and those of Cahokia’s other great families, the corps of Molly Pitchers that had defected to Cahokia, and Sarah’s personal retinue of beastkind. The wardens and household troops reported to Valia Sharelas and the artillerists to Jaleta Zorales, former rivals of Sarah for the Serpent Throne, who had given her their allegiance upon her being called as the goddess’s Beloved. At least while on military duty, they all answered to William Lee—the beastkind directly—and they called him General.
Many details were yet to be decided, but the organization worked. If the crisis holding them together passed, Maltres doubted the organization was yet solid enough to stand on its own.
Lee nodded. “We beasts shall hold the wall, suh! You may place your trust in us.”
Something was wrong, but Maltres didn’t have to time to find out what. He banged his staff on the floor a third time and raised his voice. “The next man I see putting fruit into his mouth gets hanged!”
That put a sudden end to the gorging. Grabbing the nearest officer, Maltres passed on clear, concise orders—the peace to be kept, all household to be entitled to one basket of produce of any kind per person, the remainder to be collected into the city’s storehouses.
As he descended the stairs, he heard the barked commands that heralded the beginning of his instructions’ implementation.
He returned to the Great Mound.
The Podebradan Yedera stood before the temple door.
“Where is she?” Maltres asked.
“Beneath. Where she can sleep. With the priestesses.”
“With the other priestesses, you mean.”
The Unborn inclined her head slightly.
“She lives?”
“She lives. She rests.”
“She has saved us. For now, at least.”
The Podebradan nodded again. “A doubter, such as Zadok Tarami, will say that she has destroyed us in the long run.”
“Do you doubt?”
Yedera shook her head. “I hold true to all the things of my mothers, Vizier. Their ways, their beliefs, their stories, their gods. It would take more than a desire to join any man’s empire for me to topple the Serpent Throne. It would take more than a fear of death for me to abandon the children of Wisdom.”
“I wish we had twenty thousand like you.”
“In this city, I doubt you have twenty. Perhaps not ten. Ours is not a society that organizes monthly meetings.”
“Each of you sworn to a different noble family?”
“I am the only Oathbound attached to the family of Alzbieta Torias and Sarah Elytharias.”
The Unborn Daughters of St. Adela Podebradas were elite warriors whose field of action was not generally war. They were named for the Serpentborn queen of the old world who had rejected her Imperial husband, a son of Eve, in divorce, and who had eventually been executed for her temerity; or rather, they were named for the daughters it was imagined she would have had. And their behavior in some ways suggested thwy were people outside the common sphere of descent from Adam. They didn’t marry; they ignored taboos and social conventions; they celebrated no feast days. During the recent Christmas celebrations, Yedera had stood apart in every meeting and refused all invitations. The seven Sister Kingdoms acknowledged and legitimated their setting apart, exempting the Unborn from taxes, military service, and other forms of mandatory contribution. They were bodyguards and temple defenders, they were paladins, they carried out sworn acts of vengeance and punishment, they were even assassins. They were fiercely loyal to their kind and sworn to serve a single family.
Battlefield warriors or not, Maltres Korinn wished there were more of them in the city.
“And if Sarah Elytharias required the death of a single troublesome person?” he asked.
She didn’t inquire whom he meant. “Inside or outside of these walls, I stay true to the things of my mothers.”
They stood awhile in silence.
“I take it I’m not to be allowed in?” he asked.
“Cathy Filmer tends Sarah with her healing arts. Alzbieta Torias is also in attendance.” Unexpectedly, Yedera cracked a lopsided smile. “Between the two of them, the Beloved may feel she is surrounded by more than enough noise already.”
Maltres leaned on his staff. His inclination was to look northward, toward his own estates. Instead, he looked westward to the river and the wooden shore beyond, teeming with bloodthirsty, maddened beastkind. The emissaries of the Heron King had promised him destruction, and his footsoldiers were certainly trying their hardest. Beyond the Great Green Wood, on the borders of the Missouri, lay Zomas. One of Maltres’s hopes in dealing with the claimants for the throne of Cahokia was that if Gazelem Zomas had won, the split kingdom might have been reunified, or at least reconciled. An ally on the Heron King’s other flank could have been very useful.
Perhaps he should talk to Gazelem anyway. Perhaps he still might be able to facilitate an alliance.
Maltres shook his head and shifted his stance, looking to the east.
“A heavy part, to wear a crown.”
“I wear no crown,” he said immediately.
“I agree, My Lord Duke,” Yedera answered, looking at his face intently. “And yet standing here, looking at our enemies on either side, you think the thoughts of one who does.”
“Say rather that I think the thoughts of one who would offer good counsel,” Maltres said. “I would be for the Beloved daughter of Wisdom what Uris was for your mistress.”
“An old man who talked too much, schemed too quickly, and died of his own mistake?”
“You speak ill of the dead.”
“I am a Podebradan.”
“Uris’s failure was mine. We both stood against Sarah Elytharias, not knowing that the goddess had chosen her.”
“Had the goddess chosen her? Or did the goddess choose her afterward, once she had defeated you and Uris?”
Maltres considered. “I don’t know whether it matters.”
“I don’t think it does, now. Either Sarah was always the goddess’s choice, and once the goddess made Her will known, you followed Sarah’s banner, or Sarah became the goddess’s choice, at which point you aligned yourself with her. The Virgin forgives. Either way, you’re with the goddess and Her Beloved now.”
“Or I’m on the side of a malevolent serpentine demon that plagues the descendants of the priest-king Onandagos and their people, seeking revenge for a primeval imprisonment.”
“Yes,” Yedera agreed. “Or that.”