“In the meantime, if you find any way to introduce
a plague of weevils into Cahokia, by all means do so.”
Chapter Four
No one told Dadgayadoh to keep an eye on the Sorcerer Robert Hooke, but you didn’t climb the Imperial Ohio Company ladder under Director Schmidt by sitting around waiting for the rain to fall, and Dadgayadoh was determined to climb. His first encounter with the Company had been as a boy, selling the furs of animals he’d trapped to Company agents at the headwaters of the Ohio. He’d envied their new long guns, the bright colors they wore, and the confidence with which they walked through the woods, and he’d decided he’d be one of them.
It had been easy enough; he’d acted as guide on a few journeys into Iroquois territory, Oranbega, among the Talligewi, and one small battle with the gloomy, slow-talking giants, in which he’d saved two agents’ lives by burying them, along with himself, in a bog for three days. When the victorious Talligewi had finally grown bored of looking for the missing agents and gone back their pole-borne houses, Dadgayadoh had pulled all three of them from the mud and led them home.
Even if he hadn’t known the name, it was obvious that there was something wrong with the fellow—a deathly illness or a curse—and Dadgayadoh was mistrustful. As it happened, he knew enough English history—learned from campfire songs, mostly—to know the name Robert Hooke, and to understand that the man was some sort of necromancer, a walking corpse.
When the Sorcerer left camp to ride around the besieged city, Dadgayadoh followed him. He made a point of leaving his silk top hat and his red blanket behind in his travel chest, wearing instead a nondescript gray wool coat such as you might see anywhere along the Ohio, on any person, or such as he might wear to hunt.
Hooke caught Dadgayadoh’s attention splitting wood. He did it himself, by hand, using something that looked like an obsidian wedge. The tool was sharp enough that it split the skin of the Sorcerer’s hands repeatedly, leaving smears of black ichor on his work and on the snowy ground.
Hooke asked for no help and accepted none; when two agents, evidently recognizing him from his interactions with Director Schmidt and seeking to curry favor, tried to offer the Lazar a long-handled ax, he took it from them and beat them both so severely with its handle that they spent the next three days moaning on their bedrolls.
Hooke started with a single trunk, a tall, straight pine that he felled himself. He didn’t seem to care about the bark, but he smashed off all the branches and kicked them aside, leaving the straight naked bole. Then, over the course of a day and a half, he reduced the trunk into two large lengths of timber and many small ones.
He did all this within the company camp. Dadgayadoh could pretend to be about various errands while keeping an eye on the Sorcerer.
Heaping all the unused branches and needles onto a canvas, Hooke lit it on fire. He stood watch through the night, warning off anyone who approached his blaze. Dadgayadoh drifted in and out of sleep in a small stand of pine beside the canvas wall of a commissary tent, always waking to find the black silhouette of the dead Englishman standing against the orange blaze. The next day, when the fire had finally died, Hooke collected the ashes in a basket.
He then piled all the cut timber in a wagon.
Dadgayadoh watched from the tent he and Schäfer shared with the Parlett children as Hooke finished loading the wagon, hitched it to two horses, and then rolled out of camp. He quietly saddled a horse without a light; the moon was just a tiny waxing sliver, but it was enough for Dadgayadoh, who grew up in the deep, tangled forests of Iroquoia looking for the marks of hoofprints in soft earth and shooting at distant deer.
Then he followed.
Hooke drove slowly. He sang in a language Dadgayadoh didn’t know, so it wasn’t Iroquois, French, or English. It didn’t sound like German, Dutch, or Talligewi, either. He drove the wagon with one hand, holding the other hand off the side constantly like the single wing of a cumbersome bird.
Puzzled, Dadgayagoh slipped ahead in a copse of trees to get a better look. The Sorcerer took a handful of ash from the basket and held it to one side, slowly letting the powder fall from his fingertips. When his hand was empty, he filled it with ash again.
He was leaving a trail of burnt wood.
A couple of miles from camp, Hooke stopped the wagon and climbed down. Taking two of the short lengths of wood, he pounded one stake, three feet long, into the ground. He then tied a second stake across it at a right angle; the second stake sat just inches from the ground and was as long as Dadgayadoh’s forearm.
He rubbed a line along each piece of timber with the pine ash.
When he was done, Hooke chanted more in his strange language, remounted the wagon, and continued his ride, leaving Dadgayadoh staring in puzzlement.
His people had fiercely rejected the preaching of Anne Hutchinson and every other preacher Christendom had thrown at them since. Still, he had seen enough of the Ohio to know that a cross—two pieces of wood joined at a right angle, with the downward-pointing length longer than the other three—marked a Christian place of worship, book, or image.
What did an upside-down cross mean?
Hooke was English. Maybe this sign meant something to the followers of Thunor and Herne. Dadgayadoh had never been to the Crown Lands, and what little he knew of the Cavaliers and their gods had come at second hand.
The Lazar rode a slow circuit around Cahokia, planting the small upside-down crosses at regular intervals and connecting them all with faint trails of ash.
As dawn approached, Dadgayadoh rode behind a long screen of trees to get ahead of the magician, fearing to be spotted if he continued to trail. He rode along Cahokia’s shattered wharves and under the eyes of the defenders on its walls, stopping only twice to be sure that Hooke continued his method of planting the queer crosses. He planted two along the river, both tightly against large poles sunk into the bank to support docks. That positioning made the crosses harder to see, and maybe protected them against traffic.
Beastkind slunk among the ruined docks. Dadgayadoh’s rifle was loaded, and he kept his long knife bare and in his hand. The misshapen, monstrous semi-people of the Great Green Wood left him alone. An otter the size of a bear, with a reptile’s eyes and tail, came close, but Dadgayadoh hissed at it and brandished the knife, deliberately trying to catch the light with the blade. Whatever the otter-crocodile saw, it was enough. It turned and crept away under the smashed hull of a keelboat.
Strange barriers, the walls of Cahokia. His people knew the Firstborn of the eastern Ohio, who built differently—mounds and thatched buildings. This palisade was something else. It had appeared to be made of the trunks of dead trees, branches and all, when Dadgayadoh had first arrived with Notwithstanding Schmidt. A few days later, on the day the Company and its traders and militia had all been driven out of the city, the wall had sprouted leaves.
Now, its branches were thick with fruit.
Dadgayadoh rode ahead and secreted himself in an irrigation ditch halfway between the river and camp. At this point, he was watching only for the sake of confirmation. Hooke did as expected, pounding two more of his upside-down crosses into the ground.
Dadgayadoh thought, as Hooke was hammering into place the last of the small crosses, a mile or so from camp, that the Sorcerer looked up and stared in his direction.
Dadgayadoh froze in place and shivered. He sneaked two fingers to the ornately beaded charm that hung around his neck on a snakeskin thong. It had always served him against witches. Would it be strong enough to defend him against the Sorcerer?
At a tiny knoll just outside the company camp, Hooke poured out the remainder of the ashes. There he finally took the two large timbers from the wagon and used them to build one final upside-down cross. This was iidentical to the others n shape and proportion, but was significantly larger, jutting straight up from the earth perhaps nine feet, with a six-foot crossbeam.
Dadgayadoh cared nothing for either Christians or Wodenists and their respective piety, but the Sorcerer Robert Hooke had put an enormous amount of work into this arrangement of upside-down crosses. Whatever purpose he tried to imagine the crosses might serve, Dadgayadoh felt unsettled.
He resolved to tell Director Schmidt. She would see the large cross anyway, but at least she would know that there was more than that most obvious portion of the arrangement.
Also, she would know how diligent Dadgayadoh had been. A hard worker, a self-starter, a real Company man.
* * *
Sarah awoke to the smell of incense. It was a cinnamon-like smell, not the citrus and evergreen scent of Eden. She also smelled thyme and something that wasn’t very familiar, but might be basil or oregano.
Oil lamps burned faintly within niches sunk into plain stone walls. She lay on a flat bed, firm almost to the point of being hard, under a sheet that felt like cotton to her fingertips.
Her Eye of Eve was unbound, and through it her surroundings all glowed a faint blue. The scene had the sort of aura that suggested it was located within the flow of a ley line.
Her mortal eye would not have noticed for the gloom, but her Eye of Eve clearly saw two women sitting on stools beside the room’s single entrance: Alzbieta Torias and Cathy Filmer. Cathy’s aura shone with the bright white of the children of Eve—in this setting, she was the striking thing, the thing that stood out.
“Am I inside the Temple of the Sun?” Sarah asked.
“If you’re thinking this is a crypt, be at ease,” Cathy said. “You’re alive and well. Alzbieta neglected to tell you that there are sleeping chambers underneath the temple.”
“But Alzbieta did tell me that my father’s people bury their dead in jars.” Sarah pivoted to the edge of the bed and dropped her feet to the floor. The stone was cool to the touch, despite the warm air. “With live snakes.”
“The serpent is a creature that can travel between worlds,” Alzbieta said. “As you have cause to know. Also, it’s a creature that is perpetually reborn, and it belongs to our goddess.”
“I ain’t sayin’ it ain’t an interestin’ practice,” Sarah cracked. “I’m jest sayin’ iffen you buried me alive by mistake, I’d expect to wake up curled into a ball, with a snake ticklin’ my bum.” She pondered for a moment her father’s burial, but before she could fully articulate any idea, Cathy interrupted her thoughts.
“Does Zadok Tarami approve of jar burials?”
“We call such an interment a burial to life,” Alzbieta said. “And no, I think he must not. Sarah’s grandfather, at the direction of the Basilica priests in his day, dug up all the kings of Cahokia from the field of life and buried them again in box-shaped coffins, and in a different place.”
“And without the snakes, presumably,” Sarah said. “In a better world, I’d add that to my list of wrongs to correct. In this world, that’s such a tiny problem, it doesn’t rate. The fact of there being two warring priesthoods who don’t even believe the same set of facts about God might not even be worth my attention. I have a siege to break, a people to rescue, and land rights to reclaim. And hell, the only reason I came here was to rescue my siblings, one of whom is still lost.”
“But one is found,” Cathy said.
“I ain’t sayin’ I’m a total gump.”
“Speaking of warring priesthoods,” Alzbieta continued. “There’s a petitioner to see you.”
Sarah stood. Her legs quivered, but held. She felt parched. “Tell me it’s not the Metropolitan.”
“He is locked up in the Hall of Onandagos,” Cathy said.
“Same place I was locked up?”
“Same place.” Alzbieta nodded.
Sarah sighed. “That can’t possibly be a good idea.”
The other women said nothing.
“Well, tell me about this petitioner, but get me something to drink, too. Water will do in a pinch, but if possible, I’d love to have something with a kick to it. Coffee, fruit juice, small beer. How long have I been asleep?”
Cathy slipped from the room.
“Not long,” Alzbieta said. “The remainder of the day and most of the night. It’s not yet dawn. And you’re in one of the chambers beneath the Temple of the Sun. There are living quarters for one sept of priestesses at a time, and for the monarch. Ordinarily, only priestesses are allowed here.”
“I appreciate you making an exception for me and Cathy.”
“You are not an exception. You’re the Beloved of the goddess. And Cathy…at the moment, the Temple is unconsecrated. Defiled. It is no trespass against the sacred for anyone to be in these chambers now, though it is a breach of tradition.”
Cathy returned, a cup in her hands. Sarah smelled coffee and thought with a pang of her lost friend and mentor, Thalanes. “You two still at war?” she asked them.
Neither said anything. She sighed. Cathy handed her the cup and she drank.
“Alright, then. The petitioner—who is it?”
“You’ve met her. She’s the Lady Alena, a priestess of the order.”
“Vow of silence.” Sarah remembered. “Talked through a eunuch, a real mouthy sack of toads.”
“She broke her vow of silence the night of the solstice,” Alzbieta said. “She comes asking you to renew it.”
“She certainly has my permission to shut up,” Sarah said. “Her eunuch has my permission to shut up, too. In fact, I’d kind of like to command him to close his mouth. I don’t see that it concerns me at all.”
“You are the Beloved,” Alzbieta Torias said. “You are the footprint of the goddess upon the earth. You are the seal upon every binding vow, your word binds the goddess on earth as in heaven, you—”
“Stop!” Sarah abruptly felt very old, and very small. She finished the coffee, sipping it slowly and blowing on it to avoid burning her tongue, and then handed the cup back to Cathy. “Where are my things?”
Cathy pointed. Sarah’s vision had adjusted to the low light enough that even her natural eye now saw a high-backed chair beside her bed and, hanging from the back, her shoulder bag.
She stretched to limber up her arms and legs, then took the bag and slung it over her shoulder. She wished she were wearing something more elaborate than a shift, but the women had seen fit to undress her before tucking her into bed.
So be it. She’d just have to be priestly in other ways.
Sarah straightened her back and nodded.
“Where shall we see her?” she asked. “Is there a traditional place? A reception room?”
Alzbieta shook her head. “In the Hall of Onandagos there is. And maybe in the Basilica.”
“Lady Alena waits in an anteroom just down the hall,” Cathy said.
“We’ll do this here. Bring her in.”
Should she wear the Sevenfold Crown? That didn’t feel quite right, in that she wasn’t queen…not fully…yet. Sarah took the Orb of Etyles from the bag and held it in her right hand.
The tall, white-haired Alena entered slowly, with hands clutched together before her and head bowed. The wide-hipped man with serpents painted on his face followed in the same posture. They both wore plain white tunics and kilts, which made them look like supplicants.
She was glad they hadn’t crawled in on their knees.
Sarah groped for an opening line. Good morning didn’t feel quite right. “Welcome, Lady Alena,” she finally said.
“I apologize and I beg forgiveness,” Alena said, not looking up. “I didn’t know—”
“Enough,” Sarah said. “Accepted.” Her eye caught the light of the oil lamp as she spoke, and something completely unexpected nearly made her choke on her own words: within the oil-fed flame crouched a salamander. She had seen such a flaming lizard at the feet of the Mother of All Living, in Her Eden. Were there salamanders in every fire, and she simply hadn’t noticed before? Or only special fires, like the fires in the Temple of the Sun? Was she seeing the salamander now because she was the Beloved? Did the salamander bring her a message? As Sarah spoke words of acceptance and mercy, the salamander danced as if for joy. “You are forgiven,” she managed to say.
Alena continued. “I humbly ask—”
“Wait.” Sarah turned to the eunuch. “What about you?”
“Me?” The eunuch’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “I am but a mouthpiece.”
“No,” Sarah said. “Sometimes, you’re pretty clearly a mouth. Are you a mouth with nothing to say for itself?”
“I—I—I also, I beg forgiveness.”
“Remember one thing, eunuch.” Sarah raised a warning finger.
The mouthpiece stared. “What’s that?”
“I can make ’em grow back.”
Now the eunuch did fall to the floor, groveling. Sarah was happy to let him cower.
“Beloved,” Lady Alena said softly. “I humbly ask to reinstate my former vow of silence.”
“Tell me what you do,” Sarah said. “Your sacred duties.”
“With my sept, I attend the throne. I dust it; I light the lamps.”
“If the veil were closed, would you be allowed behind it?”
Lady Alena nodded. “I and I alone, on the day of my tendance. The day also known as Monday. And because I am allowed behind the veil, in certain circumstances, I…dress the goddess.”
She looked at Sarah piercingly for a moment, and then looked away.
“She means you,” said a voice that was bass and yet feminine. “She would dress you at the four corners of the year, if they happened to fall on her cohort’s day.”
Sarah looked into the oil lamp and realized that the salamander was speaking to her.
None of the other people in the room responded to the voice.
“I understand.” Sarah kept an eye on the salamander to gauge its reaction. She also reached through the orb into the Mississippi’s ley and drew mana from it, filling her words with energy and destiny. “Lady Alena, this land is riven by enough dissension and threatened by more than sufficient foes. May the priesthood of the goddess be strong, stable, and powerful, and a force for the healing of ills rather than for inflicting them.
“I restore all things to you.
“Your oath, for good and ill, binds you again.
“You resume your responsibilities and your authorities all as formerly. Between you and me, there is peace. If there is any cause for strife between you and me, you will come to me promptly to resolve it. Understood?”
Alena knelt and touched her forehead to Sarah’s bare feet. The salamander leaped in a graceful circle inside the fire.
“By our lives and by the life of the goddess,” the eunuch said. “We so swear.”
Sarah hadn’t intended to make this an oath. After her experience with Alzbieta and the beastkind, she wanted to avoid the swearing of oaths. But so be it.
She reached down with her free hand and raised the Lady Alena up. Tears streamed down the older woman’s cheeks and she smiled.
* * *
“Lord Thomas, the Parletts are speaking!”
Thomas barely heard the words. Philadelphia’s network of brick-lined sewer tunnels, built by John Penn and the old Lightning Bishop, had become inadequate, and it was up to Thomas to find a solution for the pools of fetid wastewater now settling into filthy ice in three Philadelphia crossroads. He stood at a table in his personal library, with a stack of papers and a heart full of doubts.
He pored over plans the Imperial Engineering Corps had delivered to him, plans that required the construction of a pumping station at a hill called Faire Mount. This looked like a considerably more expensive proposition than the alternative proposal, which involved the Imperial College of Magic constructing something that would allegedly strain all the filth from the waste water. On the other hand, Thomas was nervous that any solution to the city’s cloacal problem that depended on a wizard could be fickle, subject to dispelling by the interference of a rival wizard, or simply too good to be true. And what if a stray shilling were to come in contact with the proposed runic inscriptions?
But to build the pumping station and the expanded tunnel system would require money. His mines and farms didn’t generate enough.
Why could people not see that if they simply gave him the power, he could make their lives better?
Why, especially, could the stubborn Electors not see it?
“Lord Thomas, the Parletts are the children who put us in contact with Director Schmidt.”
Thomas shook off his reverie. His valet Gottlieb stood holding the door open, an urgent expression on his face.
“Ah.” Thomas set down the plans and followed Gottlieb, who led him up a nearby staircase toward the usually vacant rooms in Horse Hall where the Parlett boys had been housed. “Temple wishes me to see his device.”
“I understand it’s more than that,” Gottlieb said. “I believe there is news.”
“Either unusually good or bad,” Thomas said, “or Temple would handle it himself and inform me later, to make all the Empire’s great accomplishments sound like minor feats he nonchalantly accomplished without assistance.”
Gottlieb had no comment.
The two Philadelphia Parletts lived in two adjoining chambers, a bedroom behind a sitting room. They stood in their identical blue uniforms (made from a single roll of felt, Temple had assured him proudly, which appeared to be part of the web of connections that kept the Parletts constantly in contact with each other), backs straight and mouths turned down at the corners. They appeared to be mimicking a jowly person, and they spoke to Temple Franklin.
Temple sat in one of several upholstered chairs that faced the Parletts. He looked tired.
“Is it Sayle?” Thomas asked, deliberately adopting a flippant tone. “He is defeated, or he has lost his way entirely and found himself in Georgia instead. Though that doesn’t look like an imitation of Sayle’s face.”
“THIS IS DIRECTOR SCHMIDT, MY LORD PRESIDENT,” the Parletts said. “I HAVE SEEN NO SIGN OF SAYLE YET, BUT I DIDN’T EXPECT HIM THIS EARLY. THERE IS A DEVELOPMENT IN THE CITY OF CAHOKIA.”
“I expect you to handle all developments until Sayle arrives. Frankly, given how long we’ve been starving the Ohio already, I expect you may well resolve the siege before Sayle gets there, in which case you’ll go from being the commander in chief of the besieging forces directly to acting as the leader of the civil government.”
“I WOULD HAVE SAID THE SAME. HOWEVER, WE HAD INDICATIONS YESTERDAY THAT CAHOKIA HAD DISCOVERED A NEW AND UNORTHODOX FOOD SOURCE. I HAVE CHOSEN NOT TO REACH OUT TO YOU UNTIL I WAS ABLE TO GET INFORMATION FROM SPIES ON THE INSIDE, TO DETERMINE THE SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM.”
“What are you talking about?” Thomas laughed. “It’s an entire city. Unless they’ve corralled half their own people into slaughtering pens to feed the other half, how can they possibly have any food source large enough to be relevant?”
“TEN DAYS AGO, THE TREEWALL OF CAHOKIA SPROUTED LEAVES. YESTERDAY, IT SPROUTED FRUIT AS WELL. WE LOST A MAN IN THE PROCESS, BUT WE MANAGED TO OBTAIN SOME OF THE FRUIT—PERSIMMONS AND ALMONDS. EDIBLE.”
Thomas put his face in his hands. He would never expand Philadelphia’s overtaxed waste water system. He would die of old age bogged down by the impossible task of trying to dig a fifteen-year-old girl out of her tree fort, while Philadelphia slowly sank beneath an ever-expanding lake of shit.
“MY LORD PRESIDENT?”
“I’m still here.”
“IT’S WORSE. TODAY A SPY WE HAVE INSIDE THE CITY REPORTED THAT IT WASN’T ONLY THE TREEWALL THAT BLOOMED. IT WAS THE WHOLE CITY. IT GREW NEW TREES AND CROPS. ALL THE SPACE WITHIN THE WALLS BECAME A SINGLE ENORMOUS GARDEN, WE’RE TOLD. THE CITY HAS SPENT AN ENTIRE DAY HARVESTING FOOD, AND THE TREES AND BUSHES AND GRAINS LOOK LIKE THEY’LL GROW MORE.”
“Enough to feed the city perpetually.”
“MAYBE.”
“In which case, no siege can succeed.”
“THIS IS PRECISELY WHAT I FEAR.”
“Do we have any idea what caused this abominable multiplication of the persimmons?”
“Magic,” Temple Franklin said.
“Good Lord,” Thomas said, “but I am grateful to have such an insightful Machiavel in my employ. But for your insight, I might have guessed this was the work of Robin Goodfellow.”
“It is the sort of thing folk tales associate with Peter Plowshare,” Temple Franklin said. “Surprising fertility, impossible abundance.”
Thomas’s head throbbed. “If you tell me a folk tale, I shall kick you in the face. Even if I have to run at you horseback to do it.”
“I’ve summoned experts of the Imperial College. They’ll be here tomorrow to discuss.”
“Experts in what? Almonds? Peter Plowshare? Food magic, what would that be? I failed Greek at Harvard. Sitos? No, that’s wheat. Trophos-something? Trophomancy?”
“That would be the art of prophesying by food. Trophurgy would be the magical art of working in food, by analogy with thaumaturgy,” Temple Franklin said.
“It is an ugly neologism, and suits this ugly situation.” Thomas ground his teeth. “When they get here, let’s reach out to Director Schmidt again. I’ll wager you all of Johnson City that it will be at least three weeks before the College can reach a combined opinion, much less agree on a course of action.”
“UNDERSTOOD.” The expression on the Parletts’ faces was solemn. “I HAVE MY BEST MEN WATCHING THE PARLETTS AT THIS END.”
“The Ohio Parletts,” Thomas said.
“THE OHIO PARLETTS. I’LL BE INFORMED IMMEDIATELY, ONCE YOU’RE READY.”
“Very good. In the meantime, if you find any way to introduce a plague of weevils into Cahokia, by all means do so.”
* * *
Luman was poring over one of the books in the Basilica’s library when Zadok Tarami appeared at his shoulder.
“Do you read our language?”
The priest hadn’t changed his clothing. He smelled like a pilgrim, sour with sweat and crusted with filth. In his white robe torn to shreds below the thigh he looked like a beggar. His straight back and unassuming smile communicated power and confidence, though. He had a comfort in his own skin that Luman had seen in the best of the company’s leaders, including Notwithstanding Schmidt.
A comfort that Luman himself had never felt.
Luman had discovered a small library of books at the back of the apse while cleaning up the wreckage of the beastkind attack. They had been stored in a locked cabinet that had been shattered in the incident. Once the Missourians saw they were only books, they lost interest. Mother Hylia and the secular priests didn’t object to Luman examining them.
Sadly, he wasn’t able to learn much.
“No,” Luman admitted, running his finger over a golden swirl at the center of the page. “That’s why I picked the one with pictures.” The book was illuminated. Like other medieval manuscripts Luman had seen, the initial letters were larger and picked out with gold and scarlet paints; strange figures and miniature scenes filled the margins. Occasionally, an entire half-page was dedicated to illustrating a story.
Unlike old Greek, Latin, and German texts he’d seen, the Eldritch book’s writing started at an apparently random point on each page and spiraled out in large swirls of looping and knotted lines, swarmed by dots, swoops, and dashes on either side. Some of the illustrations followed the spiraling text, and a single story seemed to circle up from the depths of the page.
“Many of our books have been translated into German. There is a story that the Winter Queen translated all of them into English at Heidelberg, but if she did so, most of that translation was lost in the Serpent Wars. Perhaps the translation was part of the cause of the wars. Who can tell? A conspiracy is a terrible way to bring a book to light. Fragments of the so-called Heidelberg Bible turn up from time to time, but outside of universities, there is little interest. The Firstborn have never been much for proselytizing.”
“I have seen copies of The Law of the Way in the stock of traveling pedlars,” Luman said. “Many copies, actually. It’s an easy book to come by. I’ve seen none of the others, to my knowledge.”
Tarami smiled a knowing smile. “You bought a copy of The Law because you knew it was an Ophidian text and you hoped it would contain spells.”
Luman coughed. “Actually, I stole a copy.”
Tarami laughed.
“I was poor at the time,” Luman said. “I tried to make it up later with extra kindness to other book pedlars.”
“I’m not sure that’s how it works.”
“I’m pretty sure it isn’t.”
“And what magic did you learn from The Law of the Way, then?”
Was the priest taunting him or testing him? “If there are spells in The Law, my eyes are not opened to see them.”
“Mother Hylia told me this about you.”
“That my eyes aren’t opened?”
“That you hope they will be.”
Luman closed the book carefully. “I think it’s wrong to covet riches. I think it’s wrong to covet power and seek to scratch the itches of the flesh and flaunt your wealth in clothing. I do not believe it is a sin to seek knowledge. I seek knowledge above all other things. And if The Law says it is a sin, I missed that passage.”
“You’re teasing me, wizard. We are commanded to seek knowledge, and you know it. Indeed, your words are nearly a paraphrase of the passage that commands it.”
Luman smiled.
“Nearly,” the priest said. “Here are the words of the prophet-king Onandagos, in his final testament, as recorded in the twenty-eighth through thirtieth chapters of The Law: ‘Seven things it is wrong to seek, and the seeking thereof shall lose a man his soul: power, unless it be to do justice; wealth, except that wealth must be sought to clothe the naked; the satisfaction of the flesh, except that it is commanded to enjoy the flesh for the expression of love and for the generation of life; the life of another, except that it is given to you to take life in defense of the life of your people; loud singing, only you must raise your voices in acknowledgement of your debts to God; fine clothing, except it be the fine clothing you must wear for the giving of glory to God; and knowledge, unless it be true knowledge of the way of God and His creation, which you must seek above all other things.’”
“That sounds like a prohibition.” Luman smiled. “You said we were commanded to seek knowledge.”
“But what is knowledge of the way of God and His creation, if not the knowledge of all things? And if the exception enjoins us to seek the knowledge of all things, then what is the prohibition?”
“You’re certainly doing very well on the clothing part of the commandments,” Luman said.
Zadok Tarami snorted, then laughed.
“Why is it so easy to come by copies of The Law in English?” Luman asked.
“We have made it easy.” Tarami was still chuckling. “The Law and its contents are the thing we most wanted John Penn and Ben Franklin and their Electors to know of us.”
“Was it Elizabeth who translated it?”
Tarami’s laughter ended in a sigh. “No, she didn’t possess it.”
“Because it was a new world document?”
“In part, perhaps. The Law of the Way was dictated by Onandagos at the end of his great career, other than a codicil at the end that simply notes who took dictation and that Onandagos died and was buried. The book recounts his great journey west, including lists of his enemies and his allies. It tells his battle with the serpent of our people, and how he finally defeated it. It defines the bounds of the seven kingdoms of the Ohio, and the two places where four kingdoms meet. It gives final commands and prohibitions, and then a prophecy about the fate of The Law itself.”
“What is the fate of The Law?” Luman in fact had little interest in ideas about the end of the world, but if the priest was a member of an esoteric brotherhood, anything he said might contain clues, so it was valuable to keep him talking about his sacred things.
“The Prophecy of The Law’s Rebirth has in fact already been fulfilled,” Tarami said. “Again in his final testament, Onandagos said: ‘In that day the serpent shall be reborn. My very words shall be eaten by the serpent and forgotten, and the children of my people shall fall into a deep sleep, in which sleep they shall dream great dreams of sin. They shall again scar their bodies as of old, and worship the serpent who seduced their father. But in the heart of the city whose foundations I have laid, the children of my people shall find again my words. My words shall restore them to the true way of God.’”
“You say this prophecy came true already.” Luman’s head was spinning. He had never cared much to learn about the cult practices and beliefs of the Firstborn, and now he was finding it considerably more complex that he could have imagined.
“For centuries, The Law of the Way was lost, and the children of the people of Onandagos languished in sin. The worship of the serpent returned.”
“They scarred their bodies?”
“Circumcision,” Tarami said. “A gleeful reminder of the days when the serpent-demon demanded that all men in Her service be castrated.”
“Jesus was circumcised,” Luman said.
“An old lie whispered by a djinn into Luke’s ear.” Tarami smiled ruefully. “Paul knew better. As did Onandagos.”
“And then, what did you say? In the heart of the city?”
“In the days of Sarah Elytharias’s grandfather,” Tarami said. “He ordered renovations in the Basilica. There was found a hollow space within the wall, a place into which sacred texts had been discarded, to avoid desecrating them by destruction after their pages had moldered and their ink faded. Most of these were texts we had long possessed, but we also found The Law of the Way.”
“How did people take it?”
“The king, for all his youth, grieved. He tore his hair to realized how sinful his people had become. He ordered the Temple of the Sun torn down, and the serpent’s priestesses slain.”
Luman raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Those things didn’t happen.”
Tarami shook his head sadly. “There was war in the streets. A great number of the people of Cahokia, and especially of the people of the land—peasants, farmers, slaves, ordinary people—refused to surrender their goddess. But in the compromise that the king forced on the serpent’s daughters, they agreed to tear down their veil and lay open their secrets. And even Kyres Elytharias, for all his wicked attempts to bring back the cult of so-called Wisdom, never re-veiled the serpent throne.”
Luman felt exhausted. “And your pilgrimage…you asked God to overthrow the serpent?”
Tarami turned a shocked face to him. “No! Understand me, I have prayed every day of my awakened life for the end of the serpent’s cult. I have done that since I first learned to pray, as a child rescued from the slavery of the goddess by the learned Metropolitan Father Ahijah, and of course on my pilgrimage I continued to remember the blight that scars my land.
“But I did not crawl the Onandagos Road to fight against the serpent. I begged God at every step to raise the Pacification of the Ohio. I undertook the pilgrimage to beg for peace with the Emperor Thomas Penn.” Tears trickled down the old man’s cheeks.
“Of course, forgive me. I was so caught up in your tale of apostasy and restoration, I simply forgot.” Luman hesitated. “I don’t wish to sound impertinent, but…did it ever occur to you that maybe Father Ahijah, or whoever was Metropolitan before him…?”
“Yes?” Tarami asked.
Luman struggled to find a way to articulate his doubt without offending the priest. “No one had ever heard of The Law of the Way. No living person, I mean. And then, who should find it but priests, who use the book to push a platform of change.”
“Repentance and reform,” Tarami said. “What are you suggesting?”
“I’m asking…how can you be sure Onandagos wrote the book? How can you be sure it wasn’t someone like Father Ahijah who wrote The Law of the Way to put forward his own ideas, but then claimed Onandagos had written it?”
“What, so people would pay attention?”
“It doesn’t sound insane to me.”
“He was the Metropolitan. People already heeded his word.”
“Not everyone,” Luman pointed out. “Even with Onandagos to back him up, not everyone agreed with him. And from what little I’ve heard, even just from what I’ve heard from you, it sounds like the…serpent-worshippers, let’s call them, have different ideas about Onandagos than you do.”
“The Law of the Way is completely consistent with everything we know about Onandagos.” Tarami’s voice was stiff.
Luman realized that his curiosity had led him away from his objective. If he offended the Metropolitan, the odds the man would invite him into any esoteric tradition of which he was a member declined to zero. “I’m sure you’re right.”
Tarami continued. “Of course, the serpent-worshippers claim otherwise. They have written themselves an Onandagos in their own image, a worshipper of the serpent rather than its foe.”
“What about Moses?” Luman asked cautiously. “I only want to be instructed, Father Tarami. Didn’t Moses raise a brass serpent on a rod?”
“To show the serpent’s defeat!” Tarami snapped. “And with the defeat of the serpent, the children of Israel were healed!”
“I see.” Luman nodded, careful to avoid smiling. He was afraid any smile would look like a doubter’s smirk.
“I understand you did the Basilica a great service on the night of the beastkind’s assault,” Tarami said.
Luman shrugged. “I did what anyone would have done. I was lucky, and the beastkind thought I was more dangerous than I am. They fled before they could do any serious damage.”
“I have no secrets to offer you, Luman Walters,” the Metropolitan said. “I am no wizard, and Father Ahijah taught me no grips or passwords. The only Onandagos Road is the one I have walked, and God’s commandments are all light and openness. But I am grateful for your defense of the house of God. And I am happy to satisfy any curiosity you have, about The Law of the Way or anything else. And you are welcome to sleep here, with me and the other refugees.”
Luman was hesitant to ask, but his curiosity got the better of him. “Might you tell me how you read the windows of the Basilica?” he asked. “I seem to see two different versions of the creation, and two versions of the story of Adam and Eve, spelled out in one church. And one version of the creation shows a goddess, exhaling angels.”
Tarami smiled patiently. “Ah, you touch on the deep things of Christian philosophy.”
Does he mean esoterica? “I’d be grateful for whatever you could tell me.”
“You know from the Bible that God created man in his image, male and female.”
Luman spoke carefully. “Wouldn’t some say that suggests there is a goddess?”
Tarami shook his head. “The Law of the Way is quite clear on this. ‘Woman is in the image of God, and so is man. God is neither man nor woman, but is life and spirit, and all flesh is in the image of God.’”
“The image of the creating woman is…an allegory?”
“A reminder that we should not think of God as an old man, looking down on us from the heavens. And the twin stories of Adam and Eve are there to remind us that we can tell that story with great sorrow and regret, but we can also tell it with joy and gratitude.”
“Nor is God an old woman,” Luman added.
“Nor a serpent.” Tarami smiled.