“Kanawha is lost. What makes you think you can find it?”
Chapter One
A week’s journey from Montreal, with the valleys of Quebec behind them and surrounded by rocky, snowcapped peaks, the giant Chu-Roto-Sha-Meshu, son of Shoru-Me-Rasha, let Tim Dockery go.
The eight-foot-tall redheaded man, known to both his prisoners as Mesh, stood at the edge of the light thrown by their tiny fire, leaning against the flank of one of his mastodons and stroking it with his left hand as he stared through thick pines at the darkness below and behind them. “Very good, Dockery,” he boomed. “You can leave now.”
Dockery was startled from his reverie. He’d been contemplating escape. He and Kinta Jane Embry had been contacted in Montreal by the giant, and had taken him for an ally, until the giant had killed the third member of their party and taken them prisoner.
“Go where?” Dockery spat tobacco juice. “We’re in the hinterland of Acadia now, there ain’t a settlement within days of walking.”
The giant grinned, his enormous teeth shining in a horizontal line that nearly split his head open. “There are settlements in the Outaouais. Even a tracker as poor as myself should be able to locate a hunting party within a few hours, and possibly a village.”
Mesh pointed his spear at Dockery. Taking that to be a command, Dockery stood. He shrugged, adjusting the wool pullover frock on his shoulders to center it and straightening the badger pelt on his head. “You…hungry?”
The giant squinted, the firelight flickering around the clay-colored skin of his face and making his eye sockets look cavernous. “I have had enough of you. You are no longer welcome at my fire.”
Kinta Jane stood, alarm on her face. Mesh whistled sharply and both his dogs, each the size of a small pony, lunged forward to seize Kinta Jane’s match coat in their teeth and pull her back to the ground. They did this without uttering a sound; dogs couldn’t bark at all in Kinta Jane’s presence—she claimed that she had a dog’s tongue in her mouth, and Dockery hadn’t pressed for more explanation.
“Why?” Kinta Jane demanded.
Mesh pointed his spear head at the woman, but turned his eyes to Dockery. “I will not explain myself to either of you. Dockery, leave now, or I kill Kinta Jane.”
Dockery choked. “No,” he said. “No, I’m going.” Mesh was right. Dockery would be able to survive in the cold, even if he might not immediately find a hunting party. Kinta Jane was from New Orleans, and suffered from the winter weather.
“Take your rifle.” Mesh smiled.
Dockery scooped up the long weapon—his Missouri war ax and knife were still on his belt—and stumbled into the cold darkness.
He owed Kinta Jane no debt of love, though she was, practically at least, his superior in the Conventicle. Thinking of her receiving a spear wound filled his heart with too many dreadful images: Gert Visser, dying impaled by that same spear on a tree; Julia Stuyvesant, once Dockery’s lover, carrying Dockery’s unborn child to a wedding with the Emperor Thomas Penn, and the horrifying void that was all Dockery could call to mind when he tried to imagine that child’s eventual fate.
In moments, the yellow light of the fire was gone, and Dockery was plunged into moonless darkness.
The snow was thick and crusted with a thin shell of ice, no new flakes having fallen in two days. While he gathered his thoughts, he marched quickly and kept to their trail—the mastodons, or shu-shu, as Mesh called them, cleared a broad and manageable trail with their bodies, and since they had zigzagged up a steep incline to reach their camp, retracing their steps had the added virtue of quickly putting Dockery out of Mesh’s line of sight, in case the giant decided to shoot him in the back with his enormous bow.
What was Mesh doing? He had held them prisoner by their own fear of violence rather than by any explicit threat, and claimed to be taking them to his people. Dockery and Kinta Jane had gone along out of fear, looking for an escape opportunity that had not yet materialized. They had also gone along because they had been looking for an ancient ally among the giants, someone or some group called Brother Anak. Mesh knew about Brother Anak and the secret alliance, so traveling with Mesh, they seemed to be at least close to being on the right track.
But why cast Dockery out now?
Surely, Mesh wanted Kinta Jane to himself.
To offer her a secret bargain? To beat information out of her about the Conventicle, or about its great enemy, Simon Sword?
To eat her?
Dockery stopped. He shivered from the cold creeping up under his pullover frock and around the edges of his badger-pelt hat.
He had to rescue Kinta Jane. This was the opportunity they had been waiting for, or at least, Dockery could turn it into that opportunity. With fingers growing stiffer by the moment, he checked the firing pan of his rifle and then turned to look back up the hill. The fire was a distant twinkle, a mere Biblical jot.
He could leave her. Dockery had the skills to return to Montreal on his own. He’d been raised by hill folk outside Pittsburgh, counterfeiters who preferred making their own trails to taking William Penn’s tollways, and he’d lived for years with Wild Algonks. He owed Kinta Jane Embry a duty by their mutual association with the Conventicle, but that was all.
Surely, that shouldn’t be enough duty to hold him.
And yet his feet didn’t go anywhere.
She was a woman, and in danger.
“Dammit, Dockery,” he growled.
“Do not move,” an unknown voice behind him whispered. “Or I will kill you.” At the same moment, a razor-thin wedge-end of cold metal touched Dockery’s neck.
Best to believe the voice.
“If you snuck up on me and I didn’t hear you,” Dockery said, “you’re an Indian. Up here, I’m going to guess some kind of Algonk. Cree? Or could be, what, Mi’kmaq or Mohawk?”
“Lay down the musket,” the voice said.
“Your English is good, anyway. Méti?” Dockery obeyed, pushing the butt of his musket down into the snow and leaning the barrel against the nearest pine trunk. “I’m friendly. Out here on a matter relating to three brothers.” He was holding his breath.
The other man hesitated. Was that surprise? Confusion? “I have two brothers,” Dockery’s new captor finally said. “We each came from a different mother and father.”
Dockery let out a sigh of relief. “Such brothers would be a marvel to remember until the end of days.” He turned, but the grin that had been forming on his face melted—the other man was indeed an Algonk; he wore a fringed shirt and leggings much like Dockery’s, and he still held a long knife to Dockery’s neck. In his other hand he held a short carbine, barrel now pointed at Dockery’s belly. A blanket over his shoulders might have been dyed gray and red, but it was hard to be sure, in the darkness.
The Algonk had his head cocked to one side and his eyes narrowed.
“I ain’t saying I expect hospitality,” Dockery said, “but this is starting to feel downright hostile.”
“Shh.”
Silence. Dockery smelled pine and some animal musk he couldn’t identify.
The Algonk pursed his lips and whistled two notes, following them with a tut-tut clicking of tongue against teeth.
The Algonk wasn’t alone. Whoever he was signaling, though, made no response.
“Listen,” Dockery said. “We’re being held prisoner—”
An enormous spear appeared suddenly, as if it had sprouted in the center of the Algonk’s throat. Blood spurted in all directions, a hot whip of it slashing across Dockery’s cheek. At the same moment, a dark mass crashed from the pines. It knocked Dockery aside and threw the Algonk into the snow, and then it pounded into a screen of pine trees on the other side.
Dockery heard a gunshot, and the twang of a bowstring, and then cursing in Algonk. “Skanak!” “Skunagoose!” Another man in a fringed leather shirt and pants took three long steps forward out of the trees, a musket clutched in both hands, but no head on his shoulders. At the end of the three paces, the man stopped, stood on tippy-toes and raised his hands as if trying to place the musket on a high shelf. A single jet of blood lanced upward from the short stump of a neck that remained, and then he fell forward into the snow, disappearing into the bank beside Dockery.
More screaming kept Dockery from staring too long—he grabbed his musket and knelt, watching the trees. Silver starlight danced on dark green boughs as they shook from violence hidden by the trees for a few more seconds, and then were still again.
Dockery heard chopping and tearing sounds, and then Mesh emerged from the trees. He dragged a man with one hand around the fellow’s throat; the prisoner was taller than Dockery, but he dangled like a puppet in the giant’s grip. The captured man wore leathers, and in a splash of starlight, Dockery saw paint on his cheeks and a topknot of long black hair.
Dockery aimed his musket at the giant’s chest and pulled back the hammer. “That’s our friend.” His hand trembled, but only slightly.
“Hmm.” Mesh scratched his chin with his free hand. Where were the dogs? Keeping Kinta Jane pinned? “He’s my prisoner now.”
“And us?” Dockery asked. “Are we your prisoners, too?”
Mesh chuckled softly. “Do we have to say these heavy words, Dockery? Even a worm of such lowly intelligence as I am can sometimes understand a thing without speaking it.”
“Kinta Jane and I are leaving,” Dockery said.
“No.” Mesh stepped forward—
Dockery aimed at the center of the looming giant’s chest and squeezed the trigger—
click.
Mesh punched him in the face, bowling him into the snow. Ears ringing, blood rushing to his face, breath coming in ragged gasps, Dockery heard the giant mutter, “I urinated into the barrel of your musket this morning. If you didn’t notice that, all I can think is that you must have an even poorer sense of smell than I do.”
Dockery lost track of the world for a time. When he had mastered his senses and pulled himself up into a sitting position, he was shuddering violently from cold and pain. Mesh stood looking at him; the captive Indian was tied hand and wrist and slung over one shoulder, and Mesh held his spear in his hand, tip aimed generally in Dockery’s direction.
A large sack was tied to Mesh’s belt.
“Come,” Mesh said. “Pick up your gun and return to camp.”
“You pissed into my gun.” Dockery hurt. His body felt far away.
“It’s a stupid weapon.”
It took Dockery three tries to stand, and longer to find his firearm where it had fallen in the snow. “Maybe you’d just like to kill me, right here and now.”
“I don’t want you to die,” Mesh said.
Dockery took his first stumbling steps back up the hill. “If you thought we were being followed, you could have asked my help. You didn’t have to trick me into being bait.”
“I didn’t think we were being followed,” the giant said. “I knew. And I didn’t trick you, I just didn’t tell you what you were doing.”
And what he had been doing was luring their pursuers into the open so that Mesh could deal with them. And those pursuers included men who had given Dockery at least the initial watchwords of brothers of the Conventicle.
Perhaps they were the men he and Kinta Jane had been trying to contact.
Perhaps the Algonks, the forces of Brother Odishkwa, had come to rescue them.
Dockery’s blood froze in his veins as he lurched up the slope.
He felt as if the bones in his legs might shatter as he stepped back into the small yellow ring of warmth, fenced in by thin pines and sunk into a slight depression in the side of the hill. Mesh’s two enormous dogs sat staring at Kinta Jane. The giant had tied her hands and feet all together behind her back and bound a rag into her mouth, so she lay on her side with a blanket tossed over her.
To hell with the giant, Mesh could kill them at any time. Dockery knelt and removed Kinta Jane’s gag, then untied her.
“I would have yelled,” she told him when her mouth was freed.
“I guess he figured as much.”
Mesh appeared between two trees that were only slightly shorter than he was. Stooping, he rolled the Algonk onto a snowbank on his back. The man’s eyes were open, and he stared at the Talligewi furiously.
The giant sat on a large stone, as tall as Dockery’s chest height. He wrapped both fists around his spear and leaned on it thoughtfully, staring back and forth at his prisoners. “Perhaps,” he rumbled, “this is a puzzle that will require a greater intellect than my own to solve.”
“Let us go,” Dockery said.
The Algonk looked back and forth between the others and said nothing.
The giant teased at the inside of one ear with a finger. “I feel that a more clever man than I would be able to resolve this with a single question. You may perhaps be familiar with the sorts of question I have in mind—you, Algonk, what would Dockery say if I asked him about so and so. And the cleverness of the question would lie in eliciting an answer that would show me which of you to trust, if any.”
“Who are you?” the Algonk asked.
“Me?” Mesh seemed surprised. “I am just a poor hunter, really. A Misaabe is what your people call me, I believe. Talligewi. Anak. A poor hunter of no account, with inadequate brains.”
“Let us go,” Dockery said.
Mesh ignored him. “I suppose,” the giant said to the Indian prisoner, “we had better begin by dispelling any false notions you might have of rescue.”
A light flashed in the Algonk’s eyes.
“Yes, there it is. You came with companions, and you are convinced that some of them will storm the camp at night, or perhaps that they will go for aid. You are not alone, are you? Others among your people are part of your…conspiracy?”
“Others know of…the matter relating to three brothers,” the Algonk said.
Mesh snorted and waved a hand. “We are past that now. What I must know is…well, wiser men than I have told me I must take all things in their proper order. So first, about rescue.”
“Let us go,” Dockery said.
“Your people have from time to time taken the scalps of their enemies,” Mesh said to the Indian. “For various purposes.”
“And had our own taken,” the Algonk said.
“Yes,” Mesh agreed. “For the medicine, for the power, that is in the scalps. And to mark territory. And to terrify an enemy.”
“Yes.” The Indian’s face was impassive.
“And to count. Though with hands as large and ungainly as mine, it is difficult to take only the hair.” Mesh reached into the large sack hanging from his belt and produced a man’s head. He raised it by its long black topknot, allowing blood to drip from the cleanly severed neck to the trampled snow. “I count one.”
Kinta Jane vomited. Dockery’s own stomach turned, but he held it in check. The Algonk’s face was impassive.
“One is not very impressive,” Mesh said. “If you had come here as a pair, like a Wandering Johnny and his hired porter, the sight of your companion’s head would let you know that you were alone. But you did not come here in a pair, did you?”
The Algonk said nothing.
“No,” Mesh said, “you don’t need to tell me. I raided your camp, and I tracked you in Quebec, and I’ve been watching you for days. You didn’t come here in a pair.” He set the severed head neatly on the earth, upright, eyes facing his prisoners. “You didn’t come here in three, either.”
He pulled a second head from his bag. “This fellow’s name is Segenam. He loved to suck on dried meat, never chewed it, just sucked on it for hours on end, didn’t he? Mind you, a lowly barbarian such as I has no comment to offer on another man’s eating habits. I am merely sharing what I observed. Oh, and I forgot to introduce your first companion. He was called Chogan. Chogan loved horses; he always lingered to look whenever he encountered one. But then, you know both their names, don’t you, Etchemin?”
Cree names.
The Algonk still kept a calm expression on his face. “You know my name too, giant. What of it? Do you threaten me?”
Mesh shrugged. “I merely wish you to appreciate your situation.”
“I am not afraid.”
Dockery, though, felt a thin cold lance of fear stabbing up through his belly and along his spine.
“What names do you know of my people, I wonder?” Mesh reached out with his spear butt and tapped Etchemin on the forehead. “Do you know my name? Do you know the names of any of my kin?”
The Cree said nothing.
“Why are you following me?” the giant asked.
“You kidnapped these people,” Etchemin said.
“And you are rescuers?” Mesh frowned. “Rangers sent by Champlain?”
“You know we are not.”
Mesh nodded. “I know. And I grow weary of counting.” He stretched the drawstrings of the bag and overturned it. Three more heads bounced onto the earth. One rolled so close to the fire that its topknot fell across the coals, and the stink of scorched hair filled Dockery’s nostrils.
Kinta Jane vomited again.
“Mukki,” the giant said. “Wematin. Hassun.”
For the first time, Etchemin looked nervous.
“Yes,” the giant said. “You came in six. Don’t waste time either denying or confirming it, you and I both know it’s true. One thing you should know about me is that I have little imagination. Poetry is wasted on me, and so is bluffing.”
“I’m not afraid to die,” Etchemin said.
“I didn’t say I planned to kill you.”
The Cree’s eyes narrowed. “What then?”
Mesh stood. “I have killed my own cousins, Algonk. I have killed the very uncle who initiated me into the ways of manhood and I have killed my brother, and I have done these things to be able to take the places of those men. I would seize the power of Kanawha and restore my people to their ancestral lands and might.”
Something like a smile crept over Etchemin’s face.
“What do you say, Cree?” the giant asked. “You were willing to be my uncle’s ally? Will you be mine instead?”
“Yes,” the Algonk said.
“What the hell are you doing, Mesh?” Dockery blurted out.
The giant ignored Dockery. Taking a long knife from his belt, he stooped to cut the Indian’s bonds with it. Then he tossed the blade to the ground beside the Algonk and resumed his position leaning against the boulder, hands wrapped around his spear.
“These two southerners are faithful to the vision of William Penn,” he said to the Indian. “Kill them, and you and I will plot how we shall share power.”
Kinta Jane lurched to her feet. Vomit was still splashed on her lips, but she was faster than Dockery, who was rising to his knees as she stood. The Cree, though, was faster than both of them. He snatched up the blade and sprang into the air, hurling himself at Dockery—
but Mesh swung the butt of his spear and caught Etchemin midair, cracking him in the forehead with the heavy wood.
The Algonk dropped to his back beside the tumble of severed heads, all the air leaving his lungs in a single whoosh, and then the giant fell upon him, driving his spear downward with both hands, through the dead center of the man’s belly. Dockery heard the wet tearing of flesh and the crack of Etchemin’s spinal column and finally the muted thud of the earth receiving the spearhead, all rolled into a single split second of sickening sound.
This time, Dockery vomited.
“What are you doing?” Kinta Jane brandished her stiletto. It was a ridiculously tiny weapon.
Mesh left his spear pinning the dead man to the ground and withdrew a pace, leaning again against the stone. “This man was your enemy and mine. All these men were.”
“You couldn’t just tell us that?” Dockery asked. “You had to stage all this…theater?”
“You wanted to test them,” Kinta Jane said.
“No,” Mesh said. “I had been stalking them for weeks, and I knew their mettle.”
“You wanted to test us,” Dockery guessed. “You wanted to see if we were in league with them. I was bait to lure them out of physical hiding, but they were bait to see if I would come out of…another kind of hiding.”
Mesh nodded.
“I wasn’t hiding,” Dockery said.
“Did we…pass?” Kinta Jane asked.
“You are alive,” Mesh said.
“Did you really kill your uncle, and those others?” Dockery felt sweat cooling on the back of his neck.
Mesh nodded. “I did not wish to, but when I learned the evil they were attempting, I had no choice. Even a worm such as I must from time to time straighten as if it had a spine, and take righteous action.”
“Now what?” Kinta Jane asked. “Now do you tell us what all that meant, about Kanawha? And why did you kill your uncle? And who are you really, and what are we doing here?”
“First, you may leave if you wish.” Mesh gestured at the two shu-shu. “Take Uchu or Shash if you like, either one. I think they’ll obey you now, and I know Dockery is enough of a woodsman to get you safely back to Montreal. I am not your captor any longer. I apologize for holding you as I did, I beg your forgiveness, and I give you your freedom.”
Dockery frowned. “Do you want us to leave?”
“No.” The giant’s voice was firm. “I want you to stay. I need allies. And I will tell you why, but only if you choose to remain with me.” He smiled, but somehow the sight of his horselike teeth was less frightening now. “As friends.”
“You killed Gert Visser,” Kinta Jane said.
The giant frowned. “That was an error of judgment. When he sneaked into my camp, I believed I had been outwitted. I jumped to the conclusion that he, and you, were my enemies. I know now that I was mistaken.”
“That was no error,” Dockery muttered. “Bastard deserved it.”
Kinta Jane ignored his comment. “What is Kanawha?”
“I have many things to tell you,” Mesh said, “if we are friends and allies. If you are merely going to leave me, then you must direct your questions to a book-cadger.”
“You aren’t Brother Anak,” Kinta Jane said. “You lied when you said that you were.”
“I never said that I was Brother Anak,” Mesh said. “Groveling and mealymouthed worm that I am, I did intend to mislead you on that point. But what should be more interesting from your point of view is that I can become Brother Anak.”
“I guess you better explain that,” Dockery said.
“The three brothers have failed.” Mesh leaned forward to pluck his spear from Etchemin’s belly, wiping blood from the blade in the snow. “Onas has become too interested in his own power. Anak and Odishkwa have formed an unholy alliance to abandon their oaths and join with the monster Simon Sword, rather than to resist him.”
“Join with him?” The word sprang from Dockery’s startled lips without his bidding. “How do you join with a force of nature?”
“You offer him aid and sacrifice, in exchange for things you want. Just as you join with any other sort of power.”
“But would Simon Sword honor such a bargain?” Kinta Jane asked. “Could he honor such a bargain?”
Mesh rubbed his large chin. “When I was a boy, I believe my uncle would have told me no. He would have said that Simon Sword does not have a will as you or I, he rushes with all his force and rage along the path that lies before him. But my uncle became corrupted, and his men, including my cousins, came to believe that they could regain Kanawha by making a bargain with the destructive demon of the Ohio.”
“And with Odishkwa,” Dockery said.
Mesh nodded slowly. “And I believe the men carrying on the Algonk tradition of the three brothers must have become similarly corrupted. It is easy to imagine how—in exchange for, say, the wealth of Pennsland, many men would change alliances, or sell their country’s honor.”
“You know the story of the three brothers,” Kinta Jane said, “because it was taught to you.”
“My family knew the secret,” Mesh said. “My grandfathers met with William Penn, and his son, and his son’s son. When I was a boy, my uncle met with Hannah, when she was Sister Onas and I was newly initiated.”
“And when did you learn that your family had lost its way?” Dockery asked.
Mesh’s face darkened. “Last year. My two cousins, whose short names were Kush and Toru, took me down to the shores of the Michi-Gami, as your Ojibwe cousins call the sea on which my people live. They told me that I had gained in wisdom and stature, and that it was time to tell me the true nature of our tradition, which was that it was a plan to retake our lost land of Kanawha, and that with our Algonk allies, we would destroy Brother Onas and share his land.”
Kinta Jane looked stunned. Dockery felt dizzy.
“How did you react?” Kinta Jane asked.
“Kush and Toru are bad liars.” Mesh’s face was impassive. “I killed them both, and I buried them in the dirt, touching no stone.”
“And you brought your uncle to justice,” Dockery suggested.
“My uncle accused me of secret murder,” Mesh said. “His men bore false witness, and I was cast out. But it is true what I have told you of myself—I am a hunter. I lay in wait on the fringes of my people’s lands, watching my uncle’s movements and the movements of his men, until it was clear that they were coming to meet with Brother Odishkwa and Brother Onas, and then I followed them.”
“The larger snowshoes you had,” Dockery murmured.
Mesh continued his story as if uninterrupted. “I killed my uncle, but he has many allies who yet live. I thought I had killed their Algonk allies, but other men followed me—tonight, you yourself have seen those men die.”
“And you thought perhaps you could not trust us, either,” Dockery said.
“I did not know,” Mesh admitted.
“Does that mean the end of the three brothers?” Kinta Jane asked.
Mesh shrugged. “Are there more Talligewi or more Algonks who know the story, and carry on the tradition?” He shrugged again.
“Are we part of the same organization?” Dockery wondered out loud. “Somewhere, are there children of Adam and Misaabe who know each other and who jointly pass down the story of the three brothers? Are there members of the Conventicle who are Misaabe and Algonk? Are there cells of the Conventicle prepared to intervene in the case of the failure of Brother Anak?”
“I do not think your Bishop Franklin had influence among my people,” the giant said. “I believe that he feared the failure of Brother Onas, and prepared a remedy. John Penn must have told him the watchwords.”
“The Franklin might have known the answers to these questions,” Kinta Jane said. She didn’t look at Dockery, quite conspicuously, but he felt her words like a dagger to his heart.
It was his fault that the Franklin had died.
“Maybe John Penn feared his son Thomas,” Dockery suggested. “After all, he made his daughter Hannah the landholder, and Sister Onas.”
Kinta Jane sat silently a moment before answering. “Maybe we will one day know the answers to these mysteries. But if you intend to become Brother Anak, Mesh, and lead your people to stand against Simon Sword, then I am with you. It is for this end that my brother René brought me into the Conventicle. I have seen Franklin’s Vision, and I have taken his oath.”
Dockery saw in his mind’s eye, for just a moment, an image of the face of Julia Stuyvesant. In his mind’s eye, she was screaming, not in fear or from a wound, but in the moment of giving birth. Julia screaming, and then Julia handing a child to her husband. To Dockery.
And the child was beautiful.
Then his heart tumbled. If there ever was such a birth, if such a child were ever permitted to come into the world, it would never know Dockery at its father.
“I’m with you, too,” Dockery said. “I’ve severed all my ties.”
“I said nothing about leading,” Mesh clarified. “A poor near-imbecile such as myself, with modest talents at hunting and warfare, can scarcely hope to lead a nation as mighty as the one I with great temerity claim as my own. At most, I can hope to beg some small amount of assistance. Indeed, I think the most likely outcome is that I return to my home and am executed on sight, for the deaths of my cousins and my uncle, or for the new killings with which I have more recently bloodied my hands.”
“Well, now I feel cheerful,” Dockery said.
“You should know the risks.”
“What is Kanawha?” Kinta Jane asked.
The giant’s expression flattened instantly, into something that looked like reverence, or maybe awe. “Ah,” he said. He pulled a wide-bladed copper knife from his belt, a blade Dockery had never seen before, and began to examine it.
“You called it a land,” Kinta Jane continued. “I’ve heard stories that the Ohio was once inhabited by giants.”
Mesh nodded. The dagger’s blade was pocked with lines of dots, forged into the metal. “So long ago that many years fails as a description. We were lords of the Ohio so long ago that the stars were different. The children of the Serpent had not yet come to the Ohio when my people ruled it.”
Dockery frowned. “They came in the Serpentwar, didn’t they? Richelieu and Wallenstein and Adela Podebradas?”
“Wallenstein led an exodus from the Old World,” Mesh said, “but long before him, a sorcerer-king named Onandagos came. My people tell that it was against him that they fought and lost, though they name him Ona-Tagu in the ballads.”
“And is Kanawha your people’s name for the Ohio, then?” Kinta Jane asked.
Dockery shook his head. If Mesh wanted to dominate the entire Ohio, how did that make him any different from the uncle and cousins he claimed to have defeated? Besides, the name Kanawha struck him as familiar.
“No,” Mesh said. “Kanawha is a river, and the land it flows through, and perhaps also the mountain where the river has its head. It is an old name and its meaning is shrouded in mystery. It may mean the greatest waters, but it may also mean the river of evil spirits, in the same way that the greater land surrounding Kanawha bears a name that may mean land of tomorrow, or cane and turkey lands, or the dark and bloody ground.”
“The Kentuck,” Dockery said. “Holy shit. Kanawha is in the Kentuck?”
Mesh nodded.
“That’s ghost country,” Dockery said. “I don’t mean ghost country like ‘my cousin knew a fellow who told him that he saw a ghost,’ I mean that I’ve seen ’em myself. Three separate occasions, and none that I’d especially like to talk about. The Kentuck is haunted.”
He squinted, trying to force out of his mind images that angrily crowded in: a weeping woman gliding across the water of a beaver pond, holding in her arms a child whose arms and legs had been severed; an angry face shouting from the hollow of a dead tree; and five dead Indians whose paint and dress he’d been unable to puzzle out, who had followed him wordlessly, day and night, across that entire blasted land, spoiling his appetite and his sleep alike.
“The land is full of ghosts because it was the site of a mighty war,” Mesh said. “There were Indian allies on our side and on the side of Ona-Tagu and his usurping warriors. The songs say that each captain fell with his ten thousand at his side.”
“Ten thousand is a lot of men,” Dockery said.
Mesh cracked a faint smile. “Perhaps we can allow for a little exaggeration, or for a poetic use of the number. But many died, over many years, as Ona-Tagu and our war-queen, Eru-Jay, daughter of Chaku-Me-Setu-Ro, drove each other back and forth across the land. Ona-Tagu was a mighty wizard, but Eru-Jay was invincible with her fighting staves. She was said to stride the land three miles to a step, and to swing batons made of whole tree trunks, and if our people have no wizards, as you know them, we have always had mighty Spirit Riders. Alongside Eru-Jay fought Nika Pe-Shu-Re, who was said to have as her spirit guides the rivers themselves, so that with each attack of Eru-Jay’s wands, the Ohio itself drove home the blow.”
Dockery whistled. “You’re saying this is the side that lost?”
“The final battle took place at Kanawha,” Mesh said. “Thousands fell, bloodlines were exterminated. Merely in the deaths of the singers who fell at Kanawha, we lost thousands of years of remembered history. We had gods once, until Kanawha.”
“What do you mean?” Kinta Jane asked.
Mesh’s face was expressionless, and nearly perfectly still. “People generally say that so many priests and priestesses died in that battle that we forgot how to serve our gods, and they therefore forgot how to care for us. But I have had it whispered to me, in a secret chamber upon the waters of the Michi-Gami, that the truth is darker still, that in those dark days, when sacrifices were required, we slew not only Eru-Jay and Nika, but indeed our very gods.”
Dockery’s mouth was too dry to curse.
“We were forced to the dread acts by our enemy,” Mesh continued. “Or rather by his new ally, for in the final battle Eru-Jay had the river turn against her. Ona-Tagu had made a sacrifice to the Ohio River, and the Ohio River rode to war in his retinue. When the Heron King took the field for the Firstborn, Nika Pe-Shu-Re’s arts failed her, and Eru-Jay’s mighty thews turned to brittle sticks. We fled, but we left behind our mightiest on the field.”
“They made your retreat possible?” Kinta Jane stared into the darkness.
“The sacrifice was terrible,” Mesh said, “but we lived. We lost, but we also survived, and a smaller nation, guided by fewer chieftains and protected by fewer Spirit Riders, fled north, to make our homes upon poles on the great inland seas. Before Kanawha, we dwelt upon the land, like ordinary men.”
“You live on water because of Kanawha?” Dockery asked.
Kinta Jane struggled with the same idea. “You live on the water because…because being on a different body of water gives you protection against the Heron King, who is your enemy.”
“It gives us some protection.” Mesh nodded.
Dockery took a deep breath. “Why do you want Kanawha back? Pride? Are you looking to recover the graves of your ancestors?”
“All of those things.” Mesh looked at the dead Algonk, suddenly reticent. “And…one thing more.”
Dockery found himself intensely curious, but also hesitant to provoke the giant.
“We can help each other best if we understand each other’s aims,” Kinta Jane said softly.
“The lost genealogies.” Mesh looked up. “The forgotten gods, with their liturgies and their strictures and their theologies. Our ancestral laws. Our uncorrupted language, before our tongues were broken. The secrets which once made our Spirit Riders the greatest magicians on the face of this continent. They are written down, and the book is buried at Kanawha.”
“If all of that is located at some mountain in the Kentuck,” Dockery said, “and has been there for thousands of years, just waiting, why haven’t your people gone after it?”
“Fear of the Heron King?” Kinta Jane asked.
“Do not dismiss that fear,” the giant said. “But nevertheless, over the centuries, many of our bravest have tried. They have failed because of the Heron King and his agents, or they have failed because the ghosts of the Kentuck have misled them or killed them or driven them mad, or they have failed because they could not find Kanawha, and returned with empty hands and wrecked ambitions.”
“You forgot the way,” Kinta Jane said. “You forgot the road to Kanawha.”
Mesh blinked slowly. “Along with everything else, yes.”
“So you’re willing to stand against the Heron King,” Dockery said, “and in order to do that, you want to return to this ancestral land and recover a lost book that no one has ever been able to find. That book will let you stand against the Heron King, and maybe also you think that writing should be your reward for standing against the Heron King.”
“Correct,” Mesh said. “Both.”
“But Kanawha is lost,” Kinta Jane said. “What makes you think you can find it?”
The giant Chu-Roto-Sha-Meshu, son of Shoru-Me-Rasha, smiled. He put the knife away in its sheath. “Because I have been there.”