“I’s ugly afore, remember, Cal? Now I’m jest ugly and bald.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Sarah felt as if the river itself were flowing through her. She lay across one of the seats of the ruined carriage, her muscles taut, and she thought she might even be weeping, but her body seemed far away.
And on fire, and floating in a sea of ice.
Her soul (or was it her spirit? her psyche, or her pneuma?) she held stretched open, like a funnel, and the green light of the Mississippi ley line poured through her, lifting her and her entourage. She did not feel the passage of time, but she was aware of distance. She knew it not as riders or walkers know it, the stretching of the road to the horizon, the fields and woods connecting one hamlet to the next, nor even as sailors, landmark and star, astrolabe and compass, but as the river itself knew it. She sensed the thick sheets of mud slide about her as she flew, and catfish, alligators, snakes, and darker, unknown things crawled over her soul and left her feeling slimy and wet.
She could not keep this up long, and was determined to get as far from New Orleans as she could before the Mississippi burned her out. She turned with the bends of the river. She knew it was cold, and she was aware that Calvin and Cathy covered her with one of the prince’s furs. She tried to grasp Cal’s hand in gratitude, but in her power-whelmed and distracted state, she barely managed a scratching claw at his thigh.
Finally, her body and heart on the verge of being torn into shreds by the raw power of the experience, Sarah brought the coach down. She remembered her physical surroundings as she did so, and realized she needed to see.
“The window,” she croaked. “Help me to the window.”
Cal and Cathy bore her gently, and Sarah looked outside. Under a thick blanket of stars, both banks of the river were dotted with the evening lights of human habitation, which helped clear her head and give her a more distinct sense of the distance she had come—since the west bank was not swallowed yet by the Great Green Wood, they must still be somewhere over the Cotton Princedoms.
That could even be Shreveport off to the left, though Monroe might be closer—the dizzying heights gave her vertigo, and she couldn’t clearly remember the Elector’s maps.
“Lord hates a man as won’t try new things from time to time,” she heard Cal say, “but I think this flyin’ is like to make me sick.”
“Sir William and Obadiah?” Sarah asked. “Are they with us?”
“Yeah,” Cal said. “Bill’s got the both of ’em strapped to the coachman’s seat.”
Below and to the right Sarah saw cultivated fields. Inhaling deeply, she willed the coach to slow, to fall, to turn to the side—
“Hold on!” Cal shouted—
and the carriage plowed to rest into neat rows of yellow cotton stubble. Her insides felt liquefied and hot and the air around her froze her at the touch. Sarah lurched to the carriage door, battering it open and throwing herself onto her belly, just before she started to vomit.
She threw up again, blind from tears and exhaustion, while Cal sat and tried to hold her. As she retched for the third time bringing up nothing but bile, and noticed that the bile tasted of blood, mercy claimed her and she passed out.
* * *
Bill and Cal threw stones over Obadiah Dogsbody to make a rough grave. He lay in a natural depression beside Long Tom Fairfax’s dagger, which Bill had placed there as a trophy, and with a shawl from one of the Bantu ladies wrapped around his face to hide the loss of his eye.
Sarah lay face down in the reeds at the edge of the Mississippi, both hands dangling in the water. Occasionally she splashed her own arms or face, and Cal kept interrupting his share of the labor to look over at her.
Cathy sat on a fallen tree and read, translating the letter from French as she went, leaving Bill as much in awe of her culture and sophistication as he was enraged by the letter’s contents.
“To Monsieur Gaspard Le Moyne,” she read, “Chevalier of New Orleans, et cetera. Dear Sir.”
“What does ‘et cetera’ mean?” Cal asked.
“It means Bayard knows the man has other titles,” Bill grunted, settling a long, flat stone over Obadiah’s chest. “That’s not the important part. Listen.”
Cathy continued. “I write this, at your request and for your records, to confirm what I’ve already told you in person. A few weeks ago, on the borders of the Ohio, I killed with my own hand Kyres Elytharias, the Imperial Consort and King of Cahokia. I was able to do this because I was in his service as a soldier of the Imperial House Light Dragoons.”
“Traitor,” Bill growled.
Cathy kept translating. “I didn’t act alone. In killing Elytharias, I acted under the orders of my superior officer, Lieutenant Sir Daniel Berkeley, and he acted under the orders of Colonel Lord Thomas Penn, younger brother of the empress herself.”
“Son of a bitch!” Bill yelled.
“Which one?” Cal asked.
“Berkeley!” Bill spat. “That’s what he was on and on about in the cathedral. Had I been the one who told the bishop, he wanted to know. I had no idea what he was talking about. If I’d known, I’d have killed him then and there.”
He kicked the nearest tree.
“May I continue?” Cathy asked.
“Go on.” Bill crossed his arms over his chest.
“I give you this letter, sir, with some fear. I don’t wish you to think that you can now dispose of me, because you have my testimony in writing. Know, then, that I have yet another secret. After I had slain the King of Cahokia, I took his famous regalia—the crown, the orb and the sword, all three—and I buried them where only the moon can see, in a location known only to me. Yours, Bayard Prideux.”
“Hell’s Bells,” Bill swore. “Miserable rotten murderous traitor Berkeley. Melodramatic little frog Bayard. Thought he was so damned clever.”
He spat and threw the last stone on Obadiah Dogsbody’s grave.
“I reckon you must a drunk enough for Gideon and all three hundred of his men by now, Sarah,” Cal called. “They’s only so much water in that river, you know.”
In reply, she groaned.
“Bayard kept winking at me.” Bill tried to explain his train of thought to Calvin. “He was lonely and perhaps losing his mind, and when he told me he’d stolen the regalia—which ought not to have been any great surprise, since there had been no one else there to steal it, though when I caught him in the woods, I didn’t see any sign he had it—he winked at me, over and over.”
“Like he was sharin’ a secret?”
“I think he was.” In Bill’s mind, he reenacted the events of the night of the murder, and the geography of the place where they happened. “The spot where Kyres was murdered, you see, it has a…well, what might be a giant eye. I think Bayard was hinting to me that that’s where he buried the regalia. Under the eye.”
Cal squinted. “It’s a moon’s eye? Only the moon can see it?”
Bill wiped sweat from his forehead. “Well, no, it’s a big snake that has the eye. But I think the snake and the moon are the same.”
Cal scratched his head. “I can’t say as I see how.”
Bill struggled. “This is out of my area of expertise,” he said finally, “but I understand that the serpent and the moon are both important totems to the Firstborn. They were important to Kyres, anyway.”
“The moon changes its phases like the snake changes its skin,” offered Cathy, who had been listening intently. “Like trees that shed their leaves in the winter and then bud again, they are icons of changeful life. They’re all womanly images, symbols of Wisdom, of Adam’s first wife. As told by the Firstborn, anyway.”
“Why, Mrs. Filmer,” Bill said to her, smiling, “I knew you to be a woman of many gifts, but I confess I didn’t know you for a scholar.”
“Why, Sir William,” she answered with an arched eyebrow, “though I esteem you above all men, I’m not surprised you see this matter only as through a glass, darkly. Some things are best understood by women.”
“I have no doubt, ma’am.” Bill chuckled. “Let us hope the chevalier is as impaired as I am in this matter, and less familiar with the geography of the Ohio.”
“I do not believe the site of the King’s death is general knowledge,” Cathy said. “Your personal experience is our advantage, Sir William.”
“You hearin’ all this?” Calvin called to Sarah again.
Sarah levered herself up slowly on the palms of her hands and turned to face them. She looked exhausted, small, and frail. Like a woman grown old before her time, like a corn husk doll.
And Bill thought he felt tired.
“I heard.” Her voice rattled in her throat, and she fingered a small, moon-shaped brooch pinned to her shirt. Bill hadn’t noticed the brooch before, but observing it now, he recognized it as Thalanes’s.
“Moons and trees and mysterious lady things,” Cal said.
“Berkeley,” she rasped. “The serpent’s eye that is also the eye of the moon. And it ain’t the water I’m drinkin’.”
“Berkeley,” Bill agreed, “and the eye of the serpent.”
He was ready to act as soon as she was. They would have to abandon the carriage, but Bill had unhitched the six horses and tethered them to the trees. He had expected the animals to be exhausted from their ride, but once they got over their panic they seemed weirdly exhilarated. The party would have to ride bareback, but they could ride tonight, as soon as they had formulated a plan.
“What are your directions, Your Majesty?” Bill asked. “I apologize if the question is abrupt, but whatever head start you’ve given us is almost certainly already being eroded.”
“Obadiah Dogsbody deserves a prayer.” Sarah tried to climb to her feet, wobbled, and then sank back to the ground. She coughed and spat a thin stream of blood into the reeds.
“Jerusalem, Sarah,” Cal muttered.
“Is any of us able to say one?” she insisted.
There followed an awkward silence.
Bill scratched his bare, stubbly scalp—he hadn’t said any kind of prayer in years, unless you counted swearing. Indeed, Obadiah had been the sort of fellow who might not mind a good hard cursing and drinking session over his grave, but that didn’t seem to be what Sarah was suggesting.
“For that matter,” Sarah added, “we’ve said no prayer for Father Thalanes, or for Bishop Ukwu.”
“Amen,” Bill said, but that wasn’t a prayer, it was just agreement that there ought to be one.
“We have many losses to grieve,” Sarah finished quietly.
She tried to stand again and this time Bill rushed to her side to help. Her skin burned at his touch, and felt crisp, like paper, or like the skin on a roasted fowl. He smiled at her.
“I ain’t got much gift for talkin’. What about a song?” Cal offered, and Sarah nodded. Bowing their heads, Sarah, Cathy, and Bill all gathered around the pathetic barrow of stones. They stood quietly and, after a moment, Calvin lifted his voice and in a clear, certain tenor, sang. Bill was pleased to hear Cathy join in after the first measures, singing a close harmony over the Appalachee’s melody.
Alas! and did my Savior bleed
And did my Sovereign die?
Would He devote that sacred head
For such a worm as I?
At the cross, at the cross where I first saw the light,
And the burden of my heart rolled away,
It was there by faith I received my sight,
And now I am happy all the day!
Sarah limped over to the cairn, leaning on Bill and Calvin both. She tied her purple shawl to a stick and shoved its butt end deep into Obadiah’s pile of stones.
“Justice will come to Daniel Berkeley.” She trembled on her feet, but she stayed upright. “But we’re in no shape to see to him tonight. We ride north, to the junction of the great rivers.”
“You can’t ride,” Cathy objected. “A doctor would never let you out of bed.”
“Jest watch me!” Sarah snapped. She pulled away from Bill and Calvin and took two tottering steps toward the nearest horse.
“The regalia?” Bill’s first choice would have been to kill Daniel Berkeley, but he understood Sarah’s decision, and in any case, he respected it.
“The regalia.” Her eyes glittered. “As Sarah Calhoun, Berkeley may be beyond my grasp. As the Queen of Cahokia, I shall have him.”
Sarah hadn’t managed to refill her own energy reserves from the Mississippi (she had to let the power seep in slowly, because it hurt her if she let it in any faster), but she shared Sir William’s suspicion that pursuit was imminent. She let herself get bundled up onto a large white horse and they rode into the night, mounted bareback, wearing a motley assortment of their own clothing and the ball attire of the princely family of Shreveport.
They found a worn wagon road and Sarah dozed as they plodded along it, the chill of the night warning her of the coming winter. When daylight came and Sir William proposed to make camp off the road, Sarah reached inside herself and found she’d recovered enough to take a different tack. They had no fire to boil water, so she recited the coffee endurance spell, passed each member of the party a few beans to chew, and then used the power she had to fill all their legs, including the horses’, with renewed strength.
Not much, because of her exhaustion.
She couldn’t make them go any faster, but she kept them going.
And she herself felt worse for the effort.
They rode that day up along the Mississippi, seeing Igbo merchants (in their round brimless caps and long embroidered tunics) and Bantu farmers (with shaved heads, earrings, and stubbornly undecorative straight shirts and trousers, sometimes under wide-brimmed straw hats) on the road and in small villages. Near a crossroads they met an Indian wearing a buffalo-felt hat with horns and leading three ponies laden with buffalo hides. Behind him rode three Indian women who stared proudly and said nothing.
“Comanche,” Bill said when they had passed. “Fierce fighters. Their constant warfare leaves them few men, so their women share.”
“I can think of worse things,” Cathy murmured in response.
At a chinked-log trading post late in the afternoon, Cathy produced a few gold coins from her stitched leather shoulder bag, which turned out to be enough (with some haggling by Cal) to buy saddles, blankets, and other basic supplies, including a couple of long-handled shovels and a half-inch bore hunting rifle. At Sarah’s urging, they rode late into the night. Sarah dozed, Cal repeatedly catching her and holding her on her saddle, until they made camp in a grove of trees on the bank of the river.
“Hostes video,” Sarah murmured, huddled in a blanket by a tiny fire. She drew energy from the Mississippi’s ley and sent her vision down along it, wincing from the stinging of her eye and the crackling burn throughout her entire body; in the short moments of sight she permitted herself, she saw the Blues, haggard and hard-ridden, but bedded down to camp on the road north of New Orleans. At the fringes of their fire stalked the Sorcerer Hooke, and she instantly shut down her vision before she could see any more, and before he could see her.
* * *
The Faubourg Marigny was full of fire and stalked by the mystères.
Kinta Jane saw the torches first. A dozen men marched in two lines, holding high torches that blazed an unnatural red, a bright red with white and pink in it, more like a firework than a fire. With and around them came men and women drinking and tearing their clothing. The torchbearers and the drinkers alike wailed and beat their chests.
The Bishop of New Orleans was dead.
Behind the torches there was an empty space, and in it staggered Etienne Ukwu, the bishop’s son. Etienne was ordinarily an immaculate man, but tonight he looked as if he’d been savaged by wild dogs. His black and silver waistcoat was torn open, buttons ripped off. His red sash, marking his loyalty to the great mystère of the crossroads, the keyholder Papa Legba, was knotted around his neck like a cravat. His black trousers were torn, white lining sprouted out the ruined pockets, and his white shirt was stained with blood.
“Mon père!” He cut at his own chest with a small knife.
One of Etienne’s men, unmistakable in the simple black waistcoat and white sleeves, pressed along the boardwalk where Kinta Jane stood watching, recruiting participation in the procession.
“Sou pour qui porte le deuil,” he whispered, loud enough to be heard on the boardwalk but not loud enough to distract those in the funeral parade. “Penny for a mourner.”
Kinta Jane shook her head, refusing the money. Then she stepped off the boardwalk, wrapping her shawl around herself and joining the procession anyway. The bishop had been a good man. And anyway, these mourners were her people.
Behind Etienne came the black coffin, carried by six of Etienne’s men.
Musicians followed the pallbearers. There were fiddles, banjos, horns, and men with drums slung from their shoulders, and they played music that was slow and sweet and a little cacophonous, all following the same modal melody, but only more or less. Singers joined them, wordless and howling, and Kinta Jane opened her mouth and found that, for the first time in years, she could join the choir.
Behind the musicians came mourners, and they were legion. Some marched in small cadres behind cross-hung, forward-facing banners showing that they marched for the Veterans of the Spanish War, the Stevedores Guild of New Orleans, or the Grand Lodge of Louisiana. Most of the marchers wore red sashes around their waists or from shoulder to hip, but some wore other colors.
These people were not the great and good of New Orleans, but they were the many.
And beyond them, and behind them, came the shadows. Dark things that moved in darkness and that Kinta Jane couldn’t clearly see flitted from rooftop to rooftop, or crowded out of the mouths of the alleys, following behind and shuddering along parallel to the marchers and sometimes seeming to rise directly out of the wet earth of New Orleans.
The mystères. Even the loa mourned the death of the saintly bishop.
The Faubourg sloshed up against the eastern wall of the city of New Orleans, cluttering the space around the Franklin Gate. At this late hour, the gate should be shut and guarded, but it lay wide open.
The night air was warm and heady. The torches filled the air with a strange perfume, a stink of smoke and life and death at the same time. Some of the mourners, broken by the singing and by the thick incense, collapsed before they ever got out of the city.
Kinta Jane picked up a tambourine from a fallen ululatrix and walked through the Franklin Gate. Gendarmes in the uniform of the chevalier stood on the parapet with lowered guns and bowed heads as the bishop’s coffin passed.
Beyond the gate lay a few farming villages, nestled among thick groves of oak heavy with silvery-green Spanish moss and hemmed in by the bayous, with their sluggish, fetid water, their alligators and their cottonmouth snakes. And there was a cemetery.
The cemetery was formally named after St. Vincent de Paul. St. Vincent had been a great preacher to the poor in his life and the Congregation of the Mission continued his work. When the Vincentians had approached Count Galvéz, at the time sole ruler in Louisiana, about setting aside land for the burial of the poor of New Orleans, the count had happily given them a plot…outside the city.
Upon their return to power, the Le Moyne family had made no move to relocate the funeral, and so St. Vincent de Paul looked to the burial of the poor in a large field on a low hill outside the eastern wall of New Orleans, mostly marked with temporary grave identifiers of wood, cloth, or even paper. Burial cost only a copper penny, payable to the Congregation, and when the family of the deceased couldn’t afford it, the Bishop of New Orleans paid instead.
The penny for the burial of an executed criminal was almost always paid by the bishop. And now, in death, he was going to join the men for whom he had performed this final act of charity.
St. Vincent and his Congregation of the Mission looked to the poor, but the poor didn’t look only to St. Vincent. They also looked to the mystères.
The men with torches and the weeping women moved between two pylons with defaced images of St. Vincent and out into the moonlit meadow of the cemetery. A square pit had been dug, in a corner of the field away from other burials, beside a mound of excavated dirt and several long-handled shovels. The procession formed a ring around it, waving torches, wailing, and tearing clothing.
Kinta Jane smelled the sweet rotting fecund stink of the bayou below.
Etienne stood beside the pit while his men lowered the black coffin into the ground. When the coffin was down the others stepped away, leaving him alone by the grave. He shrugged out of his silver-embroidered vest and let it fall to the earth.
Could that really be the bishop’s body in the black coffin? Would the bishop’s other son have permitted such a burial? Would the bishopric?
Had Etienne stolen his father’s corpse?
The wailing did not diminish, other than by the absence of Etienne’s own voice. If anything, it got louder, and Kinta Jane wailed along.
Etienne took two things handed to him by a follower. Kinta Jane was close enough to see that they were a short-necked bottle, of the sort usually filled with rum, and a powderhorn. Etienne Ukwu uncorked the bottle of rum, tipped gunpowder into it, corked the bottle again, and shook it up.
His motions were slow and deliberate, and when he had finished he threw the powderhorn to the ground.
Stepping to one of his twelve torch-bearers, he took the light from the man and moved to the edge of the open grave.
“Papa Legba! Here I stand at the last great crossroads, and I invoke you!” His words were in French, and shouted loud enough to be heard over the crowd.
He passed the torch once over the open grave. Kinta Jane saw dark shapes, faceless and impossible to pin down with the eye, writhing in the cemetery beyond the crowd.
“Baron Samedi!” he continued. “Here I stand in the palace of the dead, and I invoke you!”
He passed the torch again over his father’s grave in a swoosh of red flame. Kinta Jane thought she heard a new note join and mingle with the howling of the human throats, something different, animal, alien, wild.
“Maitre Carrefour!” Etienne shouted, and now his face twisted into a mask of fury. “Here I stand where a wrong has been committed, and I am in need of vengeance! Maitre Carrefour, I invoke you!”
He waved the torch a third time over the grave, and all the torches flared.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!
With a collective shriek, the women mourners nearest the center of the circle fell to the ground. The torch-bearing men, other than Etienne, staggered as if they had been hit by unseen hammers and sank to their knees.
The wailing hushed.
Behind the mourners, the shadow things towered tall and black, blotting out the stars and hanging a veil of darkness through which Kinta Jane could scarcely see the oak trees surrounding the field. They emitted a low, wailing moan that made her bones ache.
She cowered and raised a hand to protect her face. Papa Legba have mercy upon me, she thought. Eleggua hide me, and get me out of here.
The mystères.
Etienne uncorked his bottle of gunpowder-infused rum and raised it in one hand. He looked over the mourners, at the groaning shadows.
“This I swear!” he shouted. “I will know the men who slew my father!”
He filled his mouth with the rum-and-gunpowder mixture and spat it into the grave. The mystères trembled and wailed.
“This I swear: I will have them in my power!”
He filled his mouth and spat again. The shadows spun, agitated. Kinta Jane shrank even lower to the cold earth.
“And this I swear: I will destroy them!”
Etienne filled his mouth a third time, and this time he spat into the torch. Flame gouted from his mouth and rose to the sky in a bright red column. The shadows rose with the fire, until they covered the entire meadow with a thick dome of darkness that blotted out the night sky, moon and all.
Etienne threw the uncorked bottle down into the grave pit, and the torch after it.
Above the red flames that rose out of his father’s grave, Etienne Ukwu took his small knife and cut the palm of his own hand. The flames showed no signs of dying down as he dripped his red blood into them.
“This I swear!” he shouted one last time, and the mourners exploded into howling.
The shadows still surrounded the funeral procession, writhing and groaning, when Etienne took a long-handled shovel in his bloody hand and dropped the first dirt onto his father’s coffin.
* * *
The next morning Sarah woke up in seven kinds of pain. She was tempted to say “dolores mitigo” to ease her saddle-soreness, but saddle-soreness was a lesser evil than the husklike, burnt feeling she got as she prepared to enact even that modest bit of gramarye. She waited until the others were ready, then dragged herself into the saddle.
As they traveled parallel to the river, Sarah began to see Memphites. Both Amhara and Oromo inhabited the Kingdom of Memphis, and Sarah thought she saw both the long faces of the latter and the pointed chins of the former (also notable for their fairer coloring) on the road. Memphis was rich, and those of its citizens who were personally wealthy or important enough to travel showed it in their silk dress, gold ornaments, and elaborate face painting. Above all, they showed it in their slaves. The wealthy of Memphis were carried on litters, or rode in chariots or carriages pulled by Draft Men, or sailed the rivers on galleys that overcame missing or unfavorable winds by multiple banks of chained rowers.
The Memphites spoke Amharic, so Sarah and her party could only bow as they passed. In return, they occasionally got hand waves but more often got nothing.
When she could do so without slowing their progress, Sarah began to fill Thalanes’s satchel. Another confrontation with her enemies loomed, and she was determined to be prepared. She exercised her imagination, looking for objects that she could carry that would be effective material components for interesting magic. She gathered feathers, pine gum, poison ivy leaves (carefully wrapped in a swatch of cloth), a small rodent’s skull and—her prize find—a tangled robin’s nest, complete with three eggs. Eventually, she took the acorn from inside her clothing and slipped it, too, into the satchel.
Increasingly, Sir William and Cathy Filmer rode side by side, chatting, while she rode with Calvin. Cal again proved his worth as a hunter and a woodsman, killing game to supplement their purchased stores, preparing it on small fires, and locating discreet, defensible, reasonably comfortable campsites.
Though the two of them were often sufficiently alone for private conversation, and though Sarah knew that Calvin longed to be told that she loved him, she found she couldn’t say it. She smiled at him as often as she could remember to do so, and got many shy, sometimes slightly rueful, grins in return.
Sarah rode with her ash staff across the bow of her horse’s saddle, a charm against evil spirits and a weapon if they were attacked. The feel of the carved wood reassured her. She imagined she was the Elector’s carved knight now, making good time by leaping over her enemies.
At night, Sarah peeped in again on her enemies—for a moment only—and found them drawing nearer. Would she reach the great junction, and then Cahokia, ahead of her foes? Would the regalia be weapons she could turn against her pursuers?
Before falling asleep, Calvin sang. Sarah figured he was trying to cheer her up. It worked, partly because his enthusiasm and affection came through in the music, and partly because of the songs he chose. Among other things, he sang about Sarah’s father.
The wild beasts of the Great Green Wood
The bison, the sloth, and the wolf
Learned to hear his footstep and light out in a hurry
His blade was sharp, his arm was strong
His eye was keen and his shot was long
The Lion of Missouri
St. John’s Knights and the Viceroy’s men
The Hessian, the Greek, and the Turk
Felt the white-hot fire of the young Cahokian’s fury
His word, his heart and his aim were true
His iron will and his soldiers, too
The Lion of Missouri
Against sorcerers and highwaymen
Lawyers, land agents, and banks
He rode as hangman, circuit judge, and jury
His horse was fear, his cloak was awe
His look was death and his word was law
The Lion of Missouri
After another morning of riding, fueled by coffee and gramarye, they were within the bounds of the kingdom proper, and all the farmers they passed were Memphite serfs. These did not dress as richly as their overlords, and their only cosmetic was dirt. The great cotton, corn, and tobacco fields along both sides of the road had already been harvested, so the serfs Sarah saw tended vegetables in truck-patches or cared for cattle, chicken, or goats. They wore rough cotton clothing, with corte-du-roi jackets against the evening’s chill, and they kept their heads down. The buildings that housed the serfs and made up their villages were built of mud brick. Such royal buildings as Sarah and her companions saw, toll houses that waved them past because they weren’t merchants and carried no goods for sale, were carved of stone.
That night, Sarah got too confident and very nearly made eye contact with the Sorcerer Hooke. The sight of his face, bone-white and grinning, chilled her, and she decided not to scry again, at least not for the time being. The Blues were gaining on her party, and might catch her before she reached the junction.
Above all the others, Hooke terrified her. She had to do something about Robert Hooke.
Sarah began to scheme.
On the fourth day, they passed through the city of Memphis. It took all day, because the city was large, because it was built within concentric rings of immense stone walls, and also because they walked, leading the horses rather than riding them. They stopped with bowed heads every time a wealthy Memphite passed in his or her litter, which was a frequent occurrence. They did this together with the mass of ordinary Memphites and most outsiders, and at Cathy’s insistence.
“But Sarah’s a queen,” Cal objected. “I been bowin’ to Memphites for days now, and it ain’t ever got us nothin’. It ain’t like they ever show any gratitude for it.”
“A Memphite of noble blood,” Cathy explained, “believes himself to be of the line of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and also descended from the Pharaohs of Egypt. This is divine ancestry and it makes him chosen, very special indeed, and much superior to ordinary mortals, including queens.”
“Superiority does beg to be humbled,” Sarah said.
“Lord hates a man as is superior,” Cal agreed.
“In the interest of speed, Your Majesty,” Cathy pleaded, “I suggest that we not try to humble the Kingdom of Memphis today.”
“Isn’t your husband buried somewhere here, ma’am?” Sir William asked, looking about the crowded square of carpet-sellers where they stood as if just behind one of their striped and awning-fronted tents might lie one of Memphis’s fabled necropolises. The crowd was a jumble of nationalities, and Sarah wondered what a man might look like who was strong enough to be married to Cathy Filmer. “The schoolteacher? Also, the Beguine cloister that took you in for a while?”
“I had to choose the Beguines or the Pitchers,” Cathy said. “And the emperor’s lady artillerists have such a fame for being slatterns.”
On the north side of Memphis they camped on the shores of a large ox-bow lake made and abandoned by the river, and in the morning they again found themselves on a dirt road, trotting north.
“I don’t understand,” Sarah complained to Calvin. “We’re ridin’ the line of some major cities—New Orleans, Memphis, Cahokia, the German Duchies—and the roads ain’t any better than the Natchez Trace, and they ain’t half so good as the Charlotte Pike.”
Calvin nodded slowly. “Yeah, I’s a bit wondered about that, too, but next time we git the river in sight, try countin’ the boats on it.”
Sarah felt foolish. “The traders go by the river.”
“Yeah. Soldiers too, I reckon, and anyone else as has to move a lot of people or a lot of things. I b’lieve these roads we’re ridin’ are mostly traveled by the locals. I reckon that’s why we keep seein’ so many farmers and small traders.”
“I should have known that,” Sarah said. “I reckon the Elector taught me more politics than he did trade.”
“I reckon so,” Cal agreed with a smile, “though often enough, those two can be the same thing. You’re Queen of Cahokia, Sarah. That there river—” he gestured vaguely off the west, over forest and a low hill that blocked the Mississippi from their view, “belongs to you.”
Sarah laughed. “To me, the Chevalier of New Orleans, the King of Memphis, the Hansa towns, Catalan and Igbo smugglers, the Bantu princes, the Wallenstein family, and maybe Simon Sword!” The thought had seemed funny in her head, but when she heard the words coming out of her mouth she felt daunted.
Calvin laughed, too, but weakly, and Sarah spent the rest of the morning brooding, hoping the Cahokian regalia were indeed things of power, praying her enemies continued to follow her by road and hadn’t taken to the river, and asking herself whether she could possibly survive to claim her throne and rescue her brother and sister.
She thought of her siblings, wondering whether they were well and where they were, knowing she could ask Sir William and he would tell her, but fearing even her own mind might not be safe. Like her, they had been disfigured infants; were they mutilated now? Had those disfigurations given them any usual gifts, as hers had given to her? The acorn in her pouch felt very heavy, and she doubted she could carry it as far as she needed to.
Not with Hooke chasing her.
“Stop here.” She’d made her mind up. “Follow me,” she told the others, and she stalked off the side of the road toward a grove of weeping willow trees on the edge of the river.
She got to the trees first, dismounted and started stripping off her clothing. “Calvin,” she snapped at him when he arrived, “stop starin’ and git to choppin’.”
He dropped off his horse, keeping his wide-eyed head turned awkwardly away from her. “I don’t understand. Choppin’ what? You want a fire?”
“I want the best likeness of me as you can make,” Sarah told him, “chopped out of wood, jest like the Elector’d do it. Don’t worry so much about the hair, I’ll git that part. Time to show me you got the Calhoun gift for woodwork.”
Cal nodded and scratched his scalp. “I ain’t the Elector, but I reckon I can make you a person-shaped hunk of wood.”
“I need it soon as you can do it,” she added. “Fifteen minutes’d be soon enough.”
He pulled his tomahawk from his belt and wandered in search of a log, keeping his back carefully turned to Sarah.
“Life-sized!” she called after him.
Sir William also kept his eyes averted. “Your Majesty,” he began, and then trailed off awkwardly. “I…”
He needed a task. “Stand watch!” Sarah directed him. “Iffen anyone takes us by surprise and I’m nekkid, it ain’t gonna go well for me.”
Sir William bowed, checked his pistols and took a position a few paces away with his back turned.
“Are you well, Sarah?” Cathy asked.
“Better’n I been in days, thank you very much. You got Circulator training, don’t you? Ain’t you the one as pulled bullets out of Sir William?”
Cathy nodded, a worried look on her face.
“Perfect,” Sarah said. “I’m gonna need you to bleed me, as much as you can without killin’ me.”
“It can be hard to know how much bleeding is safe,” Cathy pointed out softly.
“Err on the side of more blood spilt,” Sarah directed. “Only that’s gonna be the last thing. First, the hair.”
She pulled out Chigozie Ukwu’s silver blade and then thought better of it. “You got a knife I can borrow?”
By the time Calvin returned, Sarah was totally naked and had shaved off her hair, setting it in clumps on top of the puddle of her clothing, along with the bit of his shell that Grungle had given her. The earth of the little grove was low near the river and marshy, and she stood with wet feet in a cold afternoon breeze and shivered, her bare skin prickly with gooseflesh. She was sheltered from the sky and the river under the drooping green arms of one of the trees, but whatever sliver of modesty it might have provided her, it didn’t keep out the cold at all.
“That’s a fine doll, Calvin,” she said, “and jest the right size for what I need. Now help me git it dressed, and then we’ll need some withies cut, and I got a piece of tortoiseshell I need chopped in two. I reckon you’re the feller to do the job, so I’m promoting you to apprentice gramarist. Apprentice to an apprentice, I know that ain’t grand, but we all gotta start somewhere.”
“I can help with the clothing.” Cathy promptly began dressing the log doll.
Cal tried hard not to look.
“I’s ugly afore, remember, Cal?” she prodded him. “Now I’m jest ugly and bald.”
He shook his head. “You ain’t ugly, Sarah,” was all he managed to say. “You ain’t e’er been ugly.”
“Please,” she said to him. “Help me.”
* * *
“It is time I revealed to thee my plan.”
The harsh, jangling-metal voice tore Ezekiel from uneasy sleep, and he found himself lying on his back, staring into the night sky. He froze; in the night he’d kicked his own blanket off—for a week, his dreams had tortured him—and as bleary sleep pooled and slipped from his eyes, the stars above looked like a glittering skull, with cavernous eye sockets black as the void and a vast swinging jawbone of fire.
“Cromwell,” Ezekiel murmured.
His vision cleared and the skull dissolved into the shining veil of an ordinary autumn night, but Ezekiel still felt a presence, a shadow in his heart. He tried to sit up and could not.
“I am accustomed to being addressed as My Lord,” the cacophonous voice asserted placidly. “Manners are important, Father.”
Ezekiel strained again to sit, and then to roll, but could not move a muscle. His heart beat violently. What did the Necromancer want with him? He heard the crunch of heavy boots in sand and then a shadow fell across him, and he saw again the man in plate armor and white neck cloth, looming over him like judgment.
“Yaas, My Lord,” Ezekiel whispered. The stone of his limbs became flesh again and he sat up.
Cromwell regarded him without expression. “Walk thou with me in the garden.” The Lord Protector turned and paced slowly out of the camp, and Ezekiel rose and followed.
Ezekiel was used to waking from his tormented sleep several times a night, always finding some dragoon alert and tending the fire, or men talking, playing at cards, or cleaning and polishing weapons. Now they all lay still, breathing deep and regular breaths, faces innocent under the waning moon.
The Lazars did not sleep, but sat at the edge of camp unmoving, paralyzed.
The sentries slept, too; the sleep must be Cromwell’s doing. From the orange-lit and slightly fire-warmed camp, he passed in the Necromancer’s wake into a bone forest of denuded cottonwoods. Dried branches leaped to claw at Ezekiel’s face; he batted them away with his hands and struggled to keep pace with the armored specter.
“Thou servest thine emperor,” Cromwell asserted, turning slightly to speak to Ezekiel. He slowed his step, apparently to let the mortal catch up to him. “Thou huntest the Witchy Eye at his bidding, to bring her to Philadelphia in chains, and if thou cannot, then to kill her.”
“Yaas,” Ezekiel acknowledged.
“I commend thee for this,” the Lord Protector nodded. “Also, thou hast no great love for the Ophidians. Thou art a follower of St. Martin, who refuses them all rites and ordination.”
“They simply have no souls,” Ezekiel explained. “I bear them no ill will. One might as well baptize a fish.”
“Nor do I bear them evil will,” agreed Oliver Cromwell. “Indeed, I am grateful for them. They are a gift of God to us.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
The Lord Protector smiled and nodded. “Know thou that Thomas Penn is also my servant, though he may not always fully understand as much.”
Ezekiel stumbled and nearly fell. “Penn serves you?”
Cromwell nodded serenely. “Many serve me. More than are aware of their service.” He stopped walking. They stood in a clearing. Bone-dry trees menaced them in a circle around the patch of sandy soil, and in the center squatted a thick stump, waist high and stripped of all bark and branches. Ezekiel had seen judicial beheadings carried out on stumps just such as this in the Covenant Tract, and he shuddered.
“What do you want from me?” he asked.
“Understanding.” Cromwell reached a hand out to touch the stump. He murmured something that Ezekiel didn’t hear, as if talking to the wood, and then faced Ezekiel again. “Man must die, because Adam fell.”
Ezekiel gasped. As if its outer layer were a swarm of ants, previously sleeping and now suddenly pricked into motion, the stump began in his vision to crawl. Its skin writhed, and then cracked into ridges that rose, grew, thickened, and became hard—the dead stump was growing bark before his eyes.
“God’s Eldest has worked a great salvation, it is true,” Cromwell conceded. “But only some men are saved, and even they are only redeemed after great suffering and distress, and after facing the blind horror of death.”
“The elect.” Ezekiel’s theology sounded useless and dwarfed in his own ears.
The stump was stretching now, inching upward as Ezekiel watched it. Cromwell ignored the tree and continued to talk to Ezekiel Angleton.
“Another sacrifice is wanted,” he continued in his grating crash of a voice, “a more perfect act. Know thou this, my servant Ezekiel—death can be overcome. In my body, it is overcome already. I am no haunt, touch me.”
Cromwell pulled his right hand from its mailed glove and held it to Ezekiel, palm up. Fearfully, Ezekiel took the Lord Protector’s hand in his own and touched it. It felt like flesh, living, though perhaps slightly cool. Ezekiel trembled and fell to his knees, still clutching Cromwell’s hand. He looked to the stump and saw it was as tall as a man now, and branches began to shoot out its sides.
“There is no mumbo-jumbo here, no wonder, no ineffable mystery.” Cromwell turned his hand palm down and gripped Ezekiel’s fingers tightly. His eyes were calm and rational, Ezekiel thought, not at all the eyes of a madman. “I can end death for every son and daughter of Eve alive today. It is mere gramarye, magic worked according to the laws God Himself established. The limitation, the challenge, is simply power.”
Ezekiel’s mind raced. Cromwell’s aspirations were vast, his vision out of reach and bordering on madness. This must have something to do with the Witchy Eye and Ezekiel’s pursuit of her, but he couldn’t imagine what. Buds were forming on the branches of the tree beside him.
“God in His wisdom, however, gives us no challenge which he does not also give us the means to overcome. Here, on the shores of the great Mississippi River, He has given us the solution to this problem, the source of power I need to be able to undo Adam’s Folly, and give instant and painless eternal life to every child of Eve.”
“The…the ley?” Ezekiel asked, hesitantly. Above him, the sprouting tree had hit its full height, and now it shot its branches out into a bud-covered canopy.
The Lord Protector shook his head. “Sanctify unto me all the firstborn, both of man and of beast: it is mine.”
Ezekiel knew the quotation instantly, and the implications spun his head around. “Exodus?”
“In whom we have redemption through blood, even the firstborn of every creature,” Cromwell continued.
“The Epistle to the Colossians,” Ezekiel said. “The serpentspawn, they…they have a magical energy about them. It is what they possess in place of a soul, and it’s released when they die, because they are not permitted into Heaven. Is that…?” An idea of what the Lord Protector’s plan might be, grand and horrible, coalesced in his head. The branches above him rustled with newly-sprung leaves.
“Thou shalt not delay to offer the first of thy ripe fruits,” Cromwell answered. “The firstborn of thy sons shalt thou give unto me.”
“Exodus again.” Ezekiel felt that he had to be the one to say it out loud, that his statement committed him. “You would kill the serpentspawn. You would kill some number of them because you could use their deaths to fuel your gramarye.”
Blossoms burst forth upon the tree’s many limbs.
Cromwell pulled Ezekiel to his feet. “Not mine. Ours. All of ours. God has given us all the gift of the death of the Firstborn. We will undo Adam’s Fall. Thou, Ezekiel Angleton, shalt never die.”
Ezekiel’s knees shook and his breath was quick and shallow; he could barely stand the immensity of the thoughts that burned through him. “How…how many?”
A family? No, that was too small a scale entirely. A city? A kingdom?
“All of them,” the Necromancer said, his eyes clear and free of doubt.
Ezekiel was stunned almost beyond speech. So many deaths…but then, the end of death…Finally, he mustered one more question. “And the Witchy Eye?”
“I would,” the Lord Protector said slowly, “that the Cahokians not have a queen to lead them.”
Ezekiel could only nod, seeing the terrible logic in all its cold beauty. He tried hard not to think of her, but before his mind’s eye he kept finding the smiling face of Lucy Winthrop.
“My good servant Ezekiel,” Cromwell broke him out of his reverie. “I have a gift to give thee.”
Ezekiel bowed his head, unable to think of any other appropriate reaction. The Lord Protector reached down and touched him. With one hand Cromwell pinched Ezekiel’s earlobe, and with the other he pulled down the Martinite’s chin, opening his mouth, and then gripped Ezekiel’s tongue.
Cromwell’s hands were cold.
And then he squeezed with his fingers, and they burned.