“I had hoped for at least a chicken gizzard, or some John the Conqueror Root.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
They took Bill’s hat away.
They were rough about it, punching him, smashing him down with heavy boots, and shouting in French. They also took his coat.
Bill had never been arrested before, and had only the vaguest idea of what to expect next—and that was nothing good. The gendarmes of New Orleans didn’t generally bother to arrest people, at least not in the Quarter. They weren’t part of any judicial process, they were rabble control, and their job was to arrive after the commission of a crime, rough up a few people on the scene—ideally, but not necessarily, the guilty parties—and leave everyone duly admonished to stay on the chevalier’s good side and stick to the Quarter.
For crimes committed elsewhere in New Orleans, people got arrested. Bill understood there were actual investigations, and even trials, though he’d never seen anything of either. He knew prisoners sat and rotted in the Hulks on the Pontchartrain Sea while they were being investigated and tried and he knew that most prisoners were found guilty.
Bill also he knew that there were essentially two punishments: payment of a large fine (the Chevalier’s Ransom, la rançon du Chevalier, as some thought such payments had created the chevalier’s proverbial wealth) and death by hanging (commonly called the Bishop’s Penny, le sou de l’évêque, after the amount that the executed paid for the privilege of being buried in the potter’s fields owned by the bishopric).
Bill half expected the gendarmes simply to shoot him on the boardwalk. Instead, they bound his hands together, tied them to a short lead rope behind one of their horses, and led him stumbling through the Quarter. Somewhere along the way a knotted noose was thrown around his head, and Bill struggled to keep from tripping over the length of line that dangled down his chest.
A good portion of that run was nothing but a blur of mocking faces to Bill, which was merciful. With great clarity, though, he observed Grissot’s as he was made to trot past. He watched Cathy come out the door to join the jeering crowd on the boardwalk, and he saw her turn her head and look away.
Bill thought the shame might kill him.
They rode him right out of the Quarter and tossed him into the back of a cramped two-wheeled cart. Bill had never seen New Orleans from quite this vantage point, sky rattling over his face, teeth rattling against his jaw, the tops of tall buildings rattling past, and the warped wooden sides of a cart rattling in a frame around it all. Bouncing under the befouled and lichen-begrimed stones of one of the city’s gates, Bill recognized it as the St. Louis, between the cemeteries.
They were bound for the Pontchartrain Docks, one of New Orleans’s two commercial ports.
That meant the Hulks.
The gendarmes jerked him from the cart at the docks and kicked him into a splintering rowboat. In his still-oscillating vision, Bill saw the rows of tall warehouses, the wagons, the ships, the crowds of merchants and their servants, all staring. Two gendarmes climbed into the boat, before Bill and behind, and then the filthy boatman began to row.
“Merci,” Bill managed to force through his teeth, with a smashed purple grin.
The boatman nodded.
“I must warn you, suh. I have no cash with which to offer a gratuity.”
The gendarme Bill faced pulled two pistols, cocked their hammers and trained them both on Bill. Bill assumed the man behind him was similarly armed and occupied, and four guns were enough to keep Bill in line. He was battered and broken, his head swam, he could barely see, he felt like retching, and his hands were tied. It took a Herculean effort on Bill’s part to sit up; that, and the tiniest amount of repartee, were all he could manage.
He focused on the small details of the gendarme’s uniform to keep from vomiting. They wore blue and gold, which were also the Imperial colors, so the gendarme looked like a constabulary version of a member of Bill’s old unit, the Philadelphia Blues. The fleur-de-lis was not nearly as handsome as the Penns’ ship-and-eagle, but he would have been willing to wear it, in better circumstances.
Bill had in fact tried, shortly after his arrival in New Orleans fifteen years earlier, to get a post as a gendarme, or in the chevalier’s house. He had thought that the combination of his military experience in the area and his Imperial credentials would make his acceptance inevitable, but he’d been mistaken. The recruiters had spoken only French, and had laughed at him until he’d given up and left.
The whole city was the same—no French, no Castilian, no work. Even the smugglers wouldn’t take him on, without a little Igbo or some Catalan. And so Bill had found himself at the arse end of the empire, hiding from Thomas Penn’s wrathful eye, unable to get work consistent with his station and forced to turn for his daily bread to low violence.
If only he’d been a Frenchman, it would have gone so much better for him. He would certainly be free now, and he might even be rich.
On the other hand, then he’d be a frog.
Bill’s vision began to calm down and he looked past the gendarme before him to the front of the boat, at the Frenchman rowing. He was big-chested and long-armed, with the large, knuckly hands of a fighter. His visage was a fighter’s too; he lacked one ear and the opposite side of his face had been badly burned.
Damn me. He probably couldn’t even get work rowing the boat out to the Hulks, with his tiny smattering of French. How had he lived so long in this town and not learned the language?
The Frenchman eyed Bill, and Bill felt himself blush. Making a show of bravado, Bill sneered back at the man, eyes lingering deliberately on his burns and scars.
A gendarme cuffed him on the shoulder and the pain nearly knocked Bill to the bottom of the boat.
They were approaching the Hulks, and Bill squinted to get a better look. There were six of them, large sailing ships that had once prowled the seas against New Spain, or up the river after those Bantu who hadn’t surrendered their ancestral occupation of piracy and settled down to the raising of cotton, or east along the coast of the Caribbean after Igbo and Catalan smugglers. Louisiana was a small territory, but its Chevalier was a wealthy and powerful man, and he cast a large shadow in the region.
After their years of service, the ships had been brought through the deeper-dredged channels of the sea and run aground here, then demasted and ballasted with rock to keep them permanently anchored. Bill saw shattered timbers in the forecastle and aftcastle of some of them, well above the waterline; those must be scars of the ships’ final engagements, not worth repairing at the end of the great beasts’ lives. They were green-ribbed and moldy, necrotic leviathans of wood breaching the surface of the water to feed.
The boatman directed the vessel toward one of the hulks, and Bill peered at its hull to try to read the gold-lettered name through the caked green: Incroyable. That sounded good, whatever it meant. It sounded tough. If Bill was going to be imprisoned on a ship, he preferred it to have a good, soldierly name. No Queen Henrietta for him, thank you, or Adela Podebradas, however much he admired the lady’s verve.
On their slowly-rotting decks walked men in simpler blue uniforms, consisting of mere waistcoats—not gendarmes, but prison guards, still in the service of the chevalier but with much less dignity.
Bill wished he had a coin with which to tip the boatman, and tried to think of some other gesture of gallantry. Hatless and with hands tied, he couldn’t even execute a proper bow. Well, he would do his best. He concentrated, summoning his most polished French phrases.
The boat bumped against a ladder on the side of the Incroyable and the boatman steadied it with one hand. Bill stood and bowed to the boatman.
“Merci beaucoup, Monsieur,” he said, and he was pretty sure that this far, he was on solid ground. “Je me presente. Je suis le célèbre Bad Bill, Mauvais Guillaume, du Vieux Carré.” He was reasonably sure that those were his name and the name of the Quarter in French.
The frog seemed to appreciate Bill’s gesture. He stood and turned to Bill, still holding the ladder with one hand, and then he, too, made an uncomfortable bow, after which he jabbered some French. Bill tried to smile, and then submitted to the goading of his captors and went up the ladder.
Bill made it to the deck of the hulk with great effort and pain. He hauled his weight with his one good arm, the injured one flapping uselessly tied to it. All his strength and will would not have sufficed regardless, but for the constant pushing of a gendarme’s shoulder below him.
When he staggered onto the deck he felt sick, tired, and weak, and his shoulder was howling at him. He leaned over to rest his elbows on his knees, panting and staring up close at the boards under his feet, the cloth and caulking between them fraying frighteningly. How old was this ship?
Bill stood upright, still breathing heavy, to face three prison guards in blue vests, hefting cudgels, and their leader, an ill-looking man Bill knew, but hadn’t seen for fifteen years.
Was it possible, after all this time?
And here?
The man was thin and curved, with eyes too close together and lips too large for his face. Lank, greasy black hair fell to his shoulders. He wore the blue vest of his fellow guards, but, in what looked like an indication of superior rank, he also wore a blue cap and blue trousers, one leg of which ran down to a canvas shoe, while the other was knotted in a slovenly fashion around a wooden dowel.
“Captain William Lee,” the peg-legged man sneered. “’Ow I would like to say zat I ’ave missed you.”
Anger and lust for revenge welled up in Bill like a river in flash flood, but he forced himself to be cool. “I’m surprised to see you looking like this, Bayard,” he said, pointedly addressing the other man familiarly. “I thought reptiles’ legs grew back.”
“You should not imagine zat it was you zat wounded my leg so,” the Frenchman responded. “I broke it in ze fall.”
Bill shrugged.
“God moves in mysterious ways, Bayard,” he said. “Perhaps someday you’ll fall again, and break the rest of you.”
Bayard Prideux.
It had been fifteen years, and Bill’s mind flowed with images. Kyres Elytharias, the Lion of Missouri, king of the great Ohioan kingdom Cahokia and Imperial Consort, dead of multiple stabbing wounds among the red oak trees, Prideux standing over him, a chase in the rain, a sword battle. Bill had wounded the traitor, but he had disappeared in the lightning and the trees. Escaped, flown over the cliff as if he were a bird. They’d never found a body, and Bill had always hoped the man had drowned in the Ohio.
How long had he been in New Orleans? Had the two of them been in the same town all this time? Hell’s Bells.
Bill really needed to learn French.
“You will not enjoy your new life, Captain Lee,” Prideux informed him gleefully. “I am ze warden ’ere.”
“I’m glad you’ve found your station,” Bill snarled. “I have long thought you belonged among condemned men.”
“I am a personal friend of ze chevalier.” Prideux’s haughty tone clashed with his grubby uniform. He said chevalier the Frog way, shuh-VOL-yay. “It is no accident ’e ’as given you to me.”
Could that possibly be true? “I suppose that means that you’re going up in the world, Bayard,” Bill drawled. “Shame you aren’t smelling any better.”
“’E ’as made me promise not to kill you,” Prideux told Bill.
“The chevalier is a gentleman.”
“Of course, ’e ’as also insisted zat I make you suffer as much as I possibly can.”
Something hard smashed onto the back of Bill’s skull and he collapsed.
* * *
In the morning, Thalanes unveiled to Sarah and Calvin the mystery of his satchel, which turned out to contain a sack of roasted coffee beans and a small pot. When they awoke, they found the monk already up and a handful of the beans smashed between two rocks and boiling in water.
“I’m disappointed,” Sarah admitted. “I’d hoped for at least a chicken gizzard, or some John the Conqueror Root.”
“This will do us much more good,” Thalanes assured her. “The potion will be ready momentarily and then we should go.”
“You look tired.” Cal unfolded himself out of his bedroll. “You sleep at all?”
“I couldn’t,” the monk admitted. “I believe there is something out there in these hills hunting us.”
“They found us already?” Sarah snapped, getting up, alarmed.
“Not Angleton and his lackeys,” Thalanes said. “Something else. Whatever it is, it hasn’t found us yet, and I’m doing what I can to throw it off our trail. Still, we need to drink this and get going.”
“You sure it ain’t found us?” Cal asked. “Mebbe it jest ain’t attacked us yet.”
Sarah’s own natural nerves took the baton from the monk, and she began looking over her shoulder and through the skeletal trees, wondering what could have been stalking them in the night. The clay things, maybe? Something worse?
They packed quickly, then poured the hot brown brew into three cups, and Thalanes muttered a little Latin over it: “pedes accelero crures augeoque.”
That seemed easy enough; was the Latin more effective than the songs and rhymes Sarah hexed with? Was that all there was to gramarye? Just Latin? She drank the plain black coffee and felt warmth and strength flow into her legs and feet.
“New Orleans is this way, boys,” she said to them, and turned back toward the Trace.
They sped all that day at a fast walking pace, and Sarah’s legs never tired. Thalanes’s spell was a good one, then. Her feet hurt less than expected, too.
“I reckon we could swap stories,” Calvin suggested, a few minutes out of their camp. “It’d make the walkin’ easier. Lessen you think there’s somethin’ so close on our trail we shouldn’t ought to talk at all.”
“I’ve told my story,” the monk said. “Does that make it your turn, or Sarah’s?”
“Mine,” Sarah jumped in, and she didn’t wait for agreement. “Once upon a time there lived a barber. I say once upon a time, because I think this is a made-up story, but old Bishop Franklin made it up, so it’s probably a good one. This barber lived in a small town, it might have been in Pennsland or the Covenant Tract, and I guess he was a good barber, because he got rich.”
“How rich can a barber git?” Calvin asked.
“Rich enough,” she explained, “that he traded under the sign of the silver shears. Sometimes he even cut with them, too. And one night his son comes into the shop and says ‘give me my inheritance early, for I’ve found a lass and I wish to marry and set up in business as a brewer and the thing I can’t do without in this world is money.’”
“This story is a little dark,” Thalanes said softly. “Could we hear a happier tale?”
Sarah pushed ahead. She was glad to make the monk uncomfortable. “But the barber couldn’t do without his money either. So the barber and his son fought like cats in a sack, and the son jumped on his horse and ran away. In the dark, the barber’s son rode too fast, his horse stumbled, he was thrown from its back and he broke his neck. Folks ran to the barber for help, but when he arrived his son was dead.”
“I reckon I heard this one afore,” Calvin said. “It’s one of the Poor Richard Sermons, ain’t it?” Sarah shot him a stern glance and he wilted. “Well go on, I didn’t say stop, I love to hear Poor Richard.”
Thalanes looked at the ground and said nothing.
Sarah pressed on. “The son’s fiancée was a witch and possessed of a dark and vengeful mind. Three days after his burial, in the dark of night, the barber heard clawing at the door. He tried to ignore it, but the clawing continued and then turned into howling, too, and finally he answered.
“And there was his son. Dead.”
“But walkin’,” Cal pointed out.
“‘What do you want, my son?’ asked the barber, who was a brave fellow.
“The son said nothing. He just whined and groaned and rumbled.”
“Grumpy feller,” Calvin observed. “I guess he would be, when he was about to git hisself married and jest up and died instead.”
“‘I see you’re still anxious to marry and become a brewer,’ the barber said. ‘Come with me to the shop. In three days, your hair and nails have grown long enough to need trimming, and at the shop I’ll give you your inheritance, my most prized possession.’ Then the father led his son to his shop, and sat him in the chair, and took out his famous silver shears.”
“Stab him!” Cal whispered, trying to give advice to the barber.
“The son couldn’t talk, but groaned like he was full of complaints the whole time. The barber listened attentively and trimmed his dead son’s nails, first one foot, then the other, now the left hand and at last the right. Finally, after the barber’s son had told his bellyaches to his father, the father said, ‘yes, son, I understand you, and I am very sorry to have caused you grief.’ Then the barber cut his son’s hair, kissed his son on the cheek and laid him back in his grave. And the dead man never returned again to trouble his parents.”
She ended the story. Leaves fell gently around her as she walked.
Thalanes looked thoroughly disquieted. “I’m with Calvin. He should have stabbed the son with the shears.”
“Aw, but you left out the best part,” Cal protested. “It’s a Poor Richard Sermon, you gotta have a moral.”
“I don’t care about the moral,” Sarah said. “I just want to tell a story. Stick your own damn moral on it if you want, Calvin Calhoun.”
“A soft ear turns away wrath,” Thalanes suggested.
“No, you gotta say ‘Poor Richard Says,’ and it’s somethin’ stranger than that,” Cal said. “Don’t remember me, I think I can git it…somethin’ like ‘Poor Richard Says: family love survives the grave. So does a family quarrel.’ That sound right?”
“If it makes you happy,” Sarah conceded, “I bless your moral.”
“Thank you.” Cal grinned.
Calvin was smiling, but Sarah felt a pall over the party. She didn’t know exactly what had caused it, but she felt she was to blame.
“I have another story I’d like to share after all,” Thalanes said. “It’s a little different in tone.”
“You mean happy?” Cal asked.
“It’s Scripture,” Thalanes said. “Though not in the Bible as you probably know it.”
“What does that mean?” Sarah found that she’d put herself out as much as she’d put out the monk with her story, and now she was relieved the others were talking. “Like those strange books that are read by Christians in the lands of the Turk?”
“Yes,” the monk agreed, “like the Book of Enoch, or Jubilees, or the Shepherd of Hermas. I’m impressed you know about those. They’re not your usual pulpit fare in Appalachee.”
“I don’t know about ’em.” Cal squinted sidelong at Sarah, but his feigned suspicion dissolved into a grin. “Ain’t no accounting for foreigners, I reckon.”
“Think of it as a book like the Bible,” Thalanes explained, “to be read along with the Bible. Only this is a book of Scripture that belongs to the Firstborn. It’s not the only one, but it’s one of my favorites, because it talks about the Creation, and is beautiful.”
“Shoot,” Cal told him.
“It’s called The Song of Etyles the Preacher,” Thalanes started. “‘And God spake, and said, Shall we not give unto Man a companion? And God said, Yea. And God made for Man a companion, of starlight and river rock and foam of the sea. And God named her Wisdom, for she was more subtle than any beast of the field, and breathed upon her, and she arose and shone. And she bare unto Man daughters and sons, and the starlight was within them all the days of their lives.
“‘And when the days of Wisdom were fulfilled and the light left her, her daughters and sons digged the earth and raised stones and built for her a place of vision and light that would be forever.
“‘And God spake, and said, Shall Man be alone in his age? And God said, Nay. And God made for Man a new companion, of the rib of Man, for she would bear him up under his shoulder in his infirmity. And God named her Life, for her strength was new life to Man, and breathed upon her, and she arose and lived. And she bare unto Man sons and daughters, and they began from the first to slay each other.’”
Thalanes finished, and they kept walking.
Cal whistled. “Well,” he admitted, “that’s pretty. It ain’t clear to me as it’s any happier’n Sarah’s Poor Richard Sermon, and I don’t claim to understand it, but I reckon I like it anyway. Is it about Eve?”
“The Firstborn believe that Eve was Adam’s second wife,” Thalanes said. “His first was a great lady whose name is only spoken in secret, but who is sometimes called Wisdom, and who is known by many signs, including the Tree and the Serpent. This is a short account of her marriage to Adam, the great progenitor of all the human race.”
Neither Sarah nor Calvin had anything to say to that, and they fell again to walking in silence.
To Sarah’s relief, the pall was gone.
Late in the morning they stopped and ate bonny clabber. Sarah had been looking forward to watching the little foreigner try to eat the sour congealed milk; the monk made a displeased face as he chewed it, but it wasn’t displeased enough, and she suspected it was an act for her benefit, which only put her in a grumpy mood. He knew the Elector, she realized, so he’d probably eaten clabber before. For all she knew, he loved bonny clabber.
Irritated, she made a point of starting first every time they set out after that and never calling for a stop, letting Thalanes or, more often, Calvin ask to be allowed to rest. She wanted to talk to the monk about magic, but she could wait—even at their accelerated pace, it would be two weeks or more before they reached New Orleans.
They were moving fast, though. They passed travelers on the road going both directions. Most of the travelers were either Appalachee hunters or long-shirted Igbo traders, but there were Bantu from the Cotton League (Sarah was disappointed that they didn’t dress like pirates), Spaniards from Ferdinandia (who sort of did look like pirates, with floppy hats, earrings and pointed beards), four beguines who claimed they’d come all the way from Pennsland on business to a sister cloister in the Free Cities, Crown Land Cavaliers who rode fast and didn’t look back, caramel-colored Memphites in layers of silk (whose trundling wagons, pulled by multiple yokes of sweating and cursing Draft Men, were so slow Sarah wondered how it could possibly be worth it to be pulled by slaves), a scrawny Wandering Johnny from Youngstown with his bundle of primers strapped to the back of a jenny mule heading to the frontier, a pair of Sons of St. Robert Rogers coming back the other way in their buffalo robes (their walking sticks notched to record baptisms of Texians, Comanche and, they claimed, New Muscovites), several genuine Texian leatherstockings, and even a small gaggle of Firstborn, traveling from the Ohio.
With these last in particular, Sarah watched them and the monk closely, half-expecting to see some coded exchange between them, but Thalanes simply offered a cheerful greeting and returned to his walking.
They passed stands every five or ten miles as they walked, little ordinaries on the side of the road, usually built of stone for safety, but often enough mere log cabins, horses tethered in barns or stables and almost invariably a dog sleeping on the porch.
They bought bread and pork stew for lunch from a humorless skillet-faced innkeeper in such a stand, and Sarah expected they would stop for the night in one of them. As Thalanes gave no indication, however, and she was in no mood to make any concessions, Sarah herself kept them marching past dark, and when the monk’s spell had faded and she was dead on her feet, there were no lights in view, so she simply led them off the road into a thick knot of pine and crashed into sleep.
She was vaguely aware, as she sank into oblivion, of someone draping a bedroll over her and covering her with fallen leaves.
In the morning, Calvin and Thalanes both looked tired; they must have alternated watches. It was coffee-and-gramarye again, and the rest of the bonny clabber, and this time Thalanes looked genuinely disgusted. Sarah let Cal set the pace.
They continued to pass travelers throughout the day, marching in their beeline among the skeletons of deciduous trees and a sprinkling of piney woods toward Louisiana. After a lunch of apples stolen from the corner of an orchard, Sarah broached the subject of gramarye with the monk: “Why Latin?”
He knit his brows and considered. “Why Latin what? Why Latin diplomacy? Why Latin scholarship? Why the Republic of Rome?”
“I mean, when you work gramarye, you do it in Latin?”
“Ah.” He smiled. “Gramarye is simple. It’s no different from hexing. They’re the same kind of magic.”
“What do you mean, other kinds of folk do different kinds of magic?” Sarah asked. “Like what, like beastkind, you mean?”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” he agreed. “Or Lullian alchemy. Cabala. Runes. Shamanism. Angel summoning. Brauchers’ prayers. At a fundamental level, they may all be identical—opinions differ—but hexing and gramarye are definitely the same art.”
“You’re wrong,” she begged to differ. “They aren’t the same. Hexing is easy.”
“Is it?” he asked. “That’s an extraordinary opinion. Tell me what you mean.”
“It ain’t easy,” Calvin contradicted her, too. “I can’t do it a lick, and it ain’t for lack of tryin’. Nor can most folks do it, neither. And the ones as can, it leaves ’em broken and twisted. Sarah’s got a special gift, she jest ain’t comfortable admittin’ it.”
Sarah shrugged. “Not everybody has the talent for hexing, but folks that do have it to different degrees. It comes easy to me, so lucky me, I guess.”
“Tell me about it,” Thalanes encouraged her.
“It’s like this,” she said. “I sing a song. The older the song, the stronger the hex. If I can, I use a bit of something solid to make the hex stick. Dirty things, body things, are better than others—blood is best of all, but spit or hair, or sometimes other stuff, depending on the hex. Eggs, or twigs, or…you know, it depends.”
“Can you hex without using any material thing to make the hex stick?” Thalanes asked.
“Sure,” she said, “everyone knows that, only it’s a lot harder.”
“Can you hex without words?”
“Yes,” she allowed slowly, remembering her love-hexing of Obadiah. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Calvin. “And that makes it harder, too.”
“So what are you really doing when you hex?” he pressed her. “What’s the part you can’t hex without?”
“Why Latin?” Cal asked. “Why rhymes and songs?” Sarah was grateful for the interruption, because she didn’t know how to answer the monk’s question. “I ain’t no hexer, never had the gift, so this might could be jack-assery on my part, but iffen you gotta say somethin’, why not jest say it in English? Why not ‘hey, boulder, git outta my way’ instead of ‘o thou boulder, amo-amas-amat’?”
Thalanes laughed. “It isn’t jack-assery at all, Calvin. In fact, you could use everyday English. Everyday English would be more powerful in magic-making than saying nothing at all, because it’s helpful to have a medium, a channel to get the power out of you and realized as a spell, but it turns out words from old languages, especially dead ones, or words that are ritualized, that have had their meaning killed by being fixed into, for instance, a song, carry more power. That makes them better channels for transferring magic from within the magician to the outside world.”
Cal considered. “Remembers me of what you said about ley lines. It’s like how a lot of use leaves a trail of power in the ground, and likewise, a lot of use leaves a trail of power in a language. So I reckon mebbe someday, when enough folks have spoke it for a long enough time, English’ll be a language of power too.”
“Excellent!” Thalanes beamed. “Are you sure you don’t have the gift for it yourself, Calvin? You did corn readings, after all.”
“Tolerable sure,” Cal affirmed.
“Perhaps you just need to try. If you have the gift for wizardry, it would be a shame to miss out on the calling.”
“A corn reader ain’t nothin’ but a body as knows how to read. Besides, yesterday you were worried as I might miss out on my callin’ to be a preacher,” Calvin said. “Tomorrow I reckon you’ll want me to go into politickin’.”
Thalanes laughed. “Whatever you do, Calvin Calhoun, don’t go into politicking. When Aristotle told us that man is a political animal, it was a warning, with the proper emphasis on the word animal.”
“Will,” Sarah said. “Mind. Wish. Choice. I don’t know what to call it. The part of the hex I can’t do without is the part where I focus and try to bring to pass the thing I want.”
“Very good.” The monk nodded enthusiastically. “Hexing and gramarye are the same—at their heart they are simply the application of will by a person with the rare talent for it. The wizard, the hexer, the thaumaturge, burns energy from some source, most often himself, and exerts the force of his mind. Words help, words of power, because they’re a good channel through which to move energy, from yourself or from some other source into your spell. Stuff, or, as a formally trained wizard might say, material components, serves the same function—and it works better, the more connection or similarity your components have to the subject of your spell—and so do gestures with your hands, for some of us. But at bottom, it’s always a question of talent, will, and power.”
“What Latin?” Sarah asked. “I never learned any Latin nursery rhymes.”
“Any Latin is pretty effective,” the wizard said. “I try to stick to very basic indicative sentences myself, and maybe once in a while a command. I just describe in simple Latin what I want to happen. Short and simple means easy to use in a pinch.”
“Short and simple is better than the alternative,” Sarah agreed.
“The advantage of using a dead language over songs and nursery rhymes,” Thalanes said, “is flexibility. I find it’s usually easier to say a simple sentence that suits my spell than to think of a rhyme that matches it.”
Sarah nodded. It seemed obvious, as he explained it. “I admit I’m disappointed. I’d thought the only bright side to leaving home like this was no more drills from my father…from the Elector. Now it sounds like I have a lifetime of Latin ahead of me.”
“What a blessing!” Thalanes grinned.
They stayed again in the woods that night, in a twisted ditch that hid them from prying eyes. Sarah took a four-hour watch, over the objections of both her companions, and she sat awake, listening to a hoot owl at the top of the hill and watching the Pleiades and then the Twins march westward.
She couldn’t be sure in the shadows, but she thought, more than once, that she saw Thalanes watching her.
On the third day they bought cheese and potatoes at a stand operated by two Igbo brothers and in the evening Cal shot a turkey that had had the temerity to squat on a moldering log in full view and gobble. Over roasted fowl and tuber and a few sips of the Crooked Man’s moonshine, Cal asked a question that Sarah realized he’d been holding back for days.
“Why do the Martinites care?” he asked. “Why did Martin Luther raise such a big ruckus about baptizin’ the Firstborn, and why does he still have followers today? What do they want? I ain’t no theologian, but it jest seems like such a silly thing to do, goin’ around tellin’ folks not to baptize the Eldritch.”
Thalanes finished his last mouthful of potato thoughtfully, looking across the fire at Calvin and considering his answer. “Do you remember, when I said there is a burst of energy, of magical energy, when any creature is born?”
“Sure do,” Calvin said. “It gits into the ley lines, jest like energy from the tides and the sunrise and such, you said.”
“Good memory. Do you know what happens when a Firstborn dies?”
Cal shrugged. “Heaven or hell, I guess, dependin’.”
Thalanes laughed. “Very good. And you may be right. But Martin Luther was convinced the Firstborn had no souls at all and therefore couldn’t go to either heaven or hell, but merely ceased to exist on death. You’ve heard the term Unsouled, I know—he coined it. Which is why he taught that it was no sin to kill one of the Firstborn, and in fact he killed a great many himself. He also preached that it was a grave error to baptize any Eldritch, much less ordain or marry them, in the same way that it would be a grave error, a sort of blasphemy, to baptize a jug of whisky or a rocking chair.”
Sarah felt embarrassed. She had used the term Unsouled before, even when talking with the Elector in front of Thalanes. She’d meant it jokingly, without thinking about what it meant. It had seemed a funny oddity; now it seemed deeply personal, both to Thalanes and to her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He paused to smile at her, and then continued. “But Martin Luther’s basic starting point was exegesis, it was how he read a certain verse in the Book of Genesis. In chapter one of Genesis, God creates man in His image, male and female, and then Genesis reports that ‘God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’”
“Sounds familiar,” Cal said. “I don’t git it.”
“Luther believed,” Thalanes explained, “that in this verse we see the Creator giving Adam and Eve and their children dominion over all other living things.”
“Including giving them dominion over the children of Adam and Adam’s first wife,” Sarah said, putting the pieces together. “The lady of the Serpent and the Tree. Wisdom.”
“Correct. So Luther saw any situation in which one of the Firstborn exercised ‘dominion’ over any child of Eve as an abomination. His personal mission, and the quest of the Order he founded, has been to remove the Firstborn from all positions of authority, in the church or out of it. Everything else followed after that, all the other theology and all of the killing.”
“Does that mean Luther believed Adam had a first wife, and you…we are descended from her?” Sarah asked.
Thalanes shrugged. “He believed it, or he knew that we believed it and he held our belief against us. Does it matter?”
“To him, I guess it might,” Sarah realized, “but not to me.”
“Well that jest seems stupid,” Cal objected.
“It gets stupider the more you think about it,” Sarah mused, digging deep into her memory and thinking about the Bible passages Thalanes was quoting. “Genesis one doesn’t name the people ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve,’ does it?”
“No,” Thalanes agreed with a faint smile, “it doesn’t. In Genesis chapter one, God creates ‘man,’ ‘male and female.’ In Genesis chapter two, God seems to create ‘man’ again, names him Adam, and then pulls a woman from his side. In Genesis chapter three, Adam finally names his female companion…possibly his second female companion…‘Eve.’”
Sarah had always realized that the Bible was a complicated affair. It was seeming more complicated by the moment.
“I reckon I’m missin’ the point,” Cal said.
“The point,” Sarah explained, “is that you could read Genesis differently from Martin Luther. You could read it exactly opposite to him, in fact. You could think that Genesis chapter one is about Adam and his first wife, and that they were the ones that were given dominion. And then Eve only comes on the scene later, in Genesis chapter two.”
“You’re as smart as your mother ever was.” Thalanes sounded sad. “Be careful.”
“So remember me again what’s the name of your feller? Cetes? I guess Cetes must a been someone as read Genesis the other way?”
Sarah shook her head. “He wasn’t a theologian at all, was he?” Her words had the form of a question, but really she wanted Thalanes to know she was listening, and she understood, and she knew her history. “He was Lord Mayor of Wittenberg. And he refused to fight back when Martin Luther and his men came after him with pitchforks.”
Thalanes’s facial expression fell somewhere between pained and amused. “The Order would say he let Luther’s will be uncoerced.”
Sarah laughed. “The First Precept. Yeah, I bet they would. And I bet when the Order talks about the fact that none of Cetes’s people ever tried to bring Luther to justice, they’d cite the Second Precept. Only God can judge, or something like that, right?”
Thalanes looked away. “Later, there were the Swords of Wisdom.”
“Look,” Cal said, shaking his head. “In the first place, all of that Genesis one, Genesis two stuff ain’t a good enough reason to kill folks, with pitchforks or otherwise. A verse in the Bible, one danged verse? And in the second, what in Jerusalem gave him the idea the Firstborn ain’t got souls? You walk and talk and smile jest like anybody else. What’m I missin’?”
“You’re a good man, Calvin Calhoun,” Thalanes said. “That makes it hard for you to understand the evil of others. But even you kill the food you hunt, and I think if you had to, you would find that you could kill a man, for the right reasons. To defend your family, for instance, or your home. Or Sarah. But from Eve’s first sons on down, there have been men willing to kill each other for more trivial reasons. For differences of religion. Or for different politics. Different calendars, even. Envy of a successful sacrifice. And I think many of St. Martin’s followers act out of strict devotion to a principle in which they firmly believe.”
Thalanes walked in silence for a long time.
“As to why Martin Luther became convinced the Firstborn had no souls, well, he knew what I am about to tell you. When any child of Adam is born, it is born in a burst of magical energy. This is a good thing, as a midwife or someone else in a position to help can use that energy to ease the birth, heal the mother, console the child, and so on.”
“That’s true,” Sarah confirmed. “I’ve hexed many a newborn Calhoun into a happy smile and a mild first feed.”
Thalanes nodded. “When a daughter or son of Wisdom, one of the Firstborn, dies, there is a similar burst of energy, that is not present at the death of a son or daughter of Eve.” He paused to let that information sink in.
“Nope,” said Calvin, “I still ain’t seein’ it. So what?”
“Martin Luther became convinced, and convinced many other people, that that burst of energy represents the escape of the power that animates the Firstborn during their life. He taught that the Firstborn do not have immortal souls, but are creatures created by magic and destroyed at death. As such, their baptism is a blasphemy and their ordination is an insult to God.”
“Yeah, I recall that bit. So the Martinites ain’t so much angry at the Firstborn,” Cal summarized, “as opposed to the folks as let the Firstborn get baptized, be priests, or hold public office. Is that about the size of it?”
“At least on paper, yes,” the monk agreed. “In practice…well, the sons and daughters of Eve are accomplished haters.”
“Just the sons and daughters of Eve?” Sarah asked pointedly.
Thalanes laughed. “No. Of course not.”
Cal shook his head. “Well, then what is it? I mean, if Luther’s wrong, then what is the ‘burst of energy’ that pops outta the Firstborn when they die?”
Thalanes shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone really does.”
“The Memphites think a person has five parts.” Sarah was happy for every opportunity to show that she knew what she was talking about. “There’s the body, and the shadow, and the name, and two things that don’t make a lot of sense from a Christian perspective, the ka and the ba.”
“Crows and sheep,” Cal muttered. “What’s a ka and a ba?”
“It’s hard to say.” Sarah hid her ignorance behind an evasion. “They’re both kind of like the soul, as we know it.”
“Two souls?” Cal asked. “You’re right, that don’t sound Christian.”
“No?” Thalanes pushed. “But Paul says to the Thessalonians ‘I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless.’ That’s psyche and pneuma in Greek, two different things. He uses the same words again in chapter four of the Epistle to the Hebrews, psyche and pneuma, ‘the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow.’ St. Jerome translates them as spiritus and anima. Doesn’t that sound to you like a person has two invisible parts, a soul and a spirit? Do you think Paul wasn’t a good Christian?”
“You’re askin’ the wrong feller.” Calvin retreated into a shrug. “I’m jest a poor cattle rustler, and I don’t have the answers.”
“I’m just a poor monk,” Thalanes said, “and I don’t have any of the answers, either. But I hope that St. Paul is right, and that you’re right, too, Cal. I hope when I die, my ka or my pneuma will explode in a burst of energy, and my psyche or my ba will go to Heaven.”
“What if you’re wrong?” Sarah asked him. “Aren’t you kind of gambling your salvation on a guess?”
“Don’t we all do that, all the time?” Thalanes countered. “Do we have any other choice?”
* * *
It was in the afternoon of their fourth day on the Natchez Trace that Sarah finally put her foot down.
“Tonight,” she said, “I am going to have a bath.”
Cal wasn’t going to argue, but he thought for a moment the little monk might object. Thalanes hesitated, nodded, and finally said, “I think that’s an excellent idea. Do you want to choose an ordinary for us?”
Sarah selected a stand just on the other side of the next river, which turned out to be a long, low building, peppered with chimneys along its length, with walls of stone halfway up to the wooden roof and then timbers to finish. There was a well in the front yard, a two-doored outhouse behind, a stable, and a long sagging porch with scattered benches and chairs. Sarah walked up to a man in denim britches and a gray flannel shirt drawing water from the well and asked where she could find the innkeeper.
“This here’s Crowder’s Stand.” He heaved the wooden bucket out onto the lip of the well and spat tobacco juice in the dirt. “I’m Crowder.” He was paunchy and thick-legged, with a greasy forehead underneath a shiny bald pate, and he stared Sarah right in her bad eye. Calvin flinched, expecting a storm.
“I’m Sarah Carpenter,” Sarah lied smooth as butter. “We want us a room for the night, and a bath.” Cal could see that her fists were knotted tight and he knew that in her heart Sarah wanted to haul back and pop Crowder one right in his glossy face. “Payin’ in Imperial.”
“Sixpence,” Crowder said. “A shilling’ll get food for the three of you as well, clapbread and bacon for breakfast and whate’er you can git outta the missus for your supper, iffen you ain’t already et. I’ll bring a tub and a heatin’ pot around to your room and youins can warm the water yourselves.”
Calvin produced a shilling, which Crowder bit suspiciously and then pocketed before pointing out to them an empty room and the way to kitchen. A big-eared Bassett lazing on the porch lifted one droopy eyelid as they stepped over him into their room. They laid down their packs and then Thalanes suggested Calvin go to the kitchen for food.
“Just in case Angleton or others are trying to find us on the Trace,” he explained. “Sarah is distinctive, and I’m obviously a foreigner.”
“I could eat a horse,” Sarah said.
Cal patted his tomahawk and lariat, both hanging on his belt. “I jest about hope I do run into that Martinite again.”
He went to the kitchen. Mrs. Crowder was no more friendly than her husband, but she acknowledged in surprisingly expressive grunts that Cal and his companions were paying guests, and she reckoned as how he could help himself from the pantry and the icehouse. He chose a loaf of brown bread and a glazed clay bowl full of cold fried chicken and then shuffled back toward the room.
Sarah met him on the porch. “Come with me,” she said urgently. “I need to discuss something with you.” The Bassett hound crouched behind her on the porch, tail between its legs, whining.
Cal didn’t say anything, but now that the prospect of a bath was in view, he did think she smelled rather…earthy. Something about that bothered him, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. The bath would fix it. Jerusalem, he was sure he smelled worse.
Baths all around, it would have to be.
“Sure,” he said. “Jest let me go put this food in the room.”
“No!” She gripped his arm with surprising strength. “I need to talk to you now, and I don’t want the priest to overhear.”
Cal’s heart skipped a beat. Had Sarah tired of the monk, and was she now interested again in the original plan of running away with Calvin to be married? He followed her.
The melt-faced hound barked once, short and sharp, as Calvin left the porch.
“Want some chicken?” He bit into a modest-sized piece himself.
“No.”
“Thalanes say somethin’ put you off your appetite?” Cal asked, following her out of the inn’s yard and back through the woods toward the river they’d just crossed. He tossed the chicken bone, not caring too much this deep in the woods whether he might attract a raccoon, or an opossum, or even a black bear. “You was ravenous afore.”
Sarah crossed the narrow, rutted Trace and turned downstream at the large water-rounded rocks of the river’s edge. She looked determined. Her fire intimidated a lot of men, but Cal liked it. That indomitable will would help her survive, whatever life did to her, and if they were about to go off and set up a homestead somewhere, it would be a valuable asset to both of them.
He looked back over his shoulder and couldn’t see Crowder’s through the trees. “I reckon we’re far enough now the monk can’t hear you,” he told her. “Unless you Firstborn have magic hearin’ powers you ain’t told me about.”
She stopped at the riverbank, picked up a fist-sized rock and squared her shoulders to him, grim-visaged as a harpy.
“Sorry,” he apologized, feeling abashed and crestfallen. “I didn’t mean to sound insultin’, I’s jest funnin’ a bit. You shouldn’t ought to think I b’lieve anythin’ bad about you at all, Sarah. I think it’s jest terrific that you’re... you know…a Penn, and a Firstborn, and a daughter of Wisdom and all. Or part Firstborn, anyway. You know…well, I reckon you know how I feel.”
She crooked a finger at him. “Come here.”
He blushed. For the four days they’d been on the Trace, he’d spent the entire time hoping there was still a chance this journey would end in his marrying Sarah, and imagining their life together. He could take care of her, he could give her a life in which she’d be happy, and he figured Appalachee was big enough that the two of them could disappear and no Martinite would ever find them. Now it looked as if his dreaming was about to become sweet, thrilling fact.
He leaned in to hear what she had to say.
Sarah swung the rock at his head.