“I see I’ve gone mad. Was it the whippings, or the whisky?”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Bill awoke in near-complete darkness, his head pounding and his throat dry, tongue swollen like a wad of cotton. He needed whisky.
He rolled around, discovering that he was chained, wrists and ankles. He had a bump on the back of his head the size of an egg and tender to the touch, but the real pain was inside his skull.
Whisky.
He groped with trembling fingers and found water in a metal bucket. He forced himself to drink it, though the taste was stale. He felt like throwing up, and he was dimly relieved that Charles would never be able to see him in this wretched state.
Surely, he would die here.
He could smell the Pontchartrain’s salty tang and feel the curving of one wall; he was still on the hulk. The back left part of the ship, or aft and port, as he thought sailors would say—he’d never been on anything bigger than a riverboat, himself. Bill had always fought on land and ridden to his battles on a horse.
Bill explored his chains and found them anchored to the ribs of the ship. He heard breathing in the darkness, and Bill called out “hello!” in the hope of initiating a conversation.
Nothing.
“Bonjour!” he tried, in vain.
“Buenos días,” he tried again, “como está? Están? Quantos…er…”
Bayard heard him.
The traitorous weasel came stumping through the belly of the ship with an oil lantern in one hand and a cat o’ nine tails looped in the other. In the yellow puddle of light Bayard dragged with him, Bill briefly saw his fellow prisoners: emaciated, broken creatures, chained in their own filth and barely breathing, only a few of them conscious enough to even raise their heads.
Were these men awaiting trial, or just the final mercy of death? Or did the chevalier keep this hulk in the Pontchartrain for the permanent detention of prisoners, like a medieval dungeon, an oubliette-on-the-sea?
Beelzebub’s bedpan, this is a dark place.
Bayard brought with him three guards in blue vests. Two of them were bulky men who spoke French with the former Philadelphia Blue. Their voices were thick and their eyes dull—simpletons. Still dangerous, but it gave Bill hope to see that Bayard was assisted by idiots. Hope, and curiosity.
At first it seemed to Bill that the third guard spoke no French, as Bayard continually tapped him on the shoulder and told him what he wanted done with a great deal of exaggerated pointing and gesturing and pantomiming of actions. Then, however, Bayard uncoiled and cracked his whip—
Snap!
Though the third man stood just a few feet away with his back turned to his master, he didn’t flinch at the sound.
The man was a deaf-mute. He dressed like a Dutchman, in knee-length brown trousers, white stockings and a brown coat of a very simple cut over his blue uniform waistcoat. His shoes shone dully in the lamplight with large brass buckles.
“Have you brought me whisky, gentlemen?” Bill asked.
The frog simpletons ripped his shirt from his back and Bill offered no struggle. They snagged his manacles onto hooks that hung from the ceiling and Bayard flogged him, cursing in French. Bill didn’t count the blows, focusing his will on not crying out, on showing no weakness.
He was almost successful.
When they laid Bill again on the floor, on his side, Bayard and his idiots looked smug, but the deaf-mute appeared troubled. Or at least, not triumphant.
He slept again. When he next awoke, he still wanted whisky, the craving so strong it made his hands shake. It must have been daytime, because white light blazed through chinks in the hulk’s hull like shafts of lightning.
He crawled to his water pail, begging God to repeat and even outdo the miracle of the feast of Cana, but unable in his utter weakness to curse his luck when God saw fit not to change the water into Kentucky bourbon. If only he had more faith and said his prayers a little more often. Still, he sucked the metallic-tasting liquid down and felt better. This time, at least, he didn’t want to vomit.
After drinking, he lay a while and tried to feel nothing. He failed, and found to his surprise that of all his feelings—despair, rage, impotence, and all the others—the one that swelled his heart to bursting was that he missed Charles. Shooting the chevalier’s son, he felt as if he’d shot his own.
Don Sandoval had said he had a son, too; what was the Spaniard’s boy like?
With the filtered daylight Bill resolved to explore his surroundings. This turned out to be a quick project—he was able to see in slightly more detail the rows of insensate wretches stretching away down the length of the ship, chained each a few feet from the next. The extra detail he saw (weeping sores, scaled skin, puddles of urine) only told him the prisoners suffered. Bill did see that he had many more square feet than the others, almost a room to himself—the better to whip him, likely.
He checked his person and made an inventory of his possessions. It was a short list: one pair of breeches, one tattered pair of stockings. The gendarmes had relieved him of his hat. His belt and boots he had lost, he did not know when. Grand Jacques’s shirt had been torn to shreds. Even the claim ticket with which he might repurchase his saber and pistols from Hackett was gone.
Bayard came belowdecks to flog Bill again, once more with a pair of idiots and the unhappy-looking deaf-mute. They again dangled Bill from the ceiling like butcher’s meat, and Bill had enough strength to taunt his tormentor.
“Bored, Bayard?” he called over his shoulder. “Or are you out of sorts because you’re still losing at cards to the geniuses with whom you surround yourself these days?”
The answer came in nine tails, and hurt.
Bill lost track of time. He was fed once or twice, crusts of bread and rough, sticky porridge with unidentifiable clots of gristly protein. His hands stopped shaking, but he still awoke craving whisky every time.
Bayard came to whip him a third time. The idiots hung Bill from his hooks and took the opportunity to handle him roughly, plucking and scratching at the torn skin of his back. The extra insult and injury annoyed Bill, and in turn he goaded Bayard more than before.
“Hell’s Bells, Bayard! You can whip me to death if it’ll impress your imbecile friends, I don’t care! You’ll still be a worm and a murderer and a foresworn man!”
Bayard beat him into unconsciousness.
More than once, in his first few days in the hold of the hulk Incroyable, Bill dreamed Bayard sat beside him in the darkness, drinking, talking nonsense, and weeping.
When he awoke next, it was to find his cheek pressed against the rough, foul-stinking planks of the floor and a flickering light overhead shining into one eye. As sleep crept from his skull, he saw a shoe standing before him, a brass-buckled black shoe, and a stocking within it, and baggy brown knickerbockers above.
It was the deaf-mute.
“Sweet Bayard,” Bill called out mockingly, “is it my whipping time again already?”
The Dutchman set a square bottle of brown liquid on the floor in front of Bill’s face, so that Bill could read the black paper label.
Elijah Pepper’s
Finest Kentucky Bourbon
Straight ~ 96 Proof
Bill lurched to a sitting position, groaning as scabs on his back tore. His hands again shook as he fumbled out the cork and slurped like a dog at the bottle’s mouth.
The deaf-mute stood watching him for a moment, and then sat down crosslegged. He set his light source, a short candle, to one side on the floor, and looked at Bill intently. His face was open and fair, nearly beardless although it didn’t look particularly boyish, with blue eyes under a mop of straight blond hair.
“Honor,” Bill croaked reflexively, “in defense of innocence.”
Bayard was not to be seen.
The sudden burning in his throat and belly pushed back Bill’s demon thirst, and he offered the bottle to his benefactor. “I gather you’re a deaf-mute, suh, so it can matter but little what I say to you or even what language I say it in. I find this strangely liberating. Thank you very much. Would you care for a drink?”
“I am not a deaf-mute today.” The blond man’s accent was not Dutch. It wasn’t anything else that Bill recognized, either, just a pleasant voice, clear and foreign-sounding in no identifiable way.
Maybe a little reminiscent of the many Ohioans he had known.
Bill considered this while he took another swig. “I see I’ve gone mad.” He felt quite calm. “Was it the whippings, or the whisky?”
“You have not had whisky for several days,” the man observed.
“I see,” Bill agreed. “It was the sobriety that did it.”
“You are William Lee,” said the foreigner.
“Yes, suh, I am.” Bill held out his hand. The stranger took it briefly, looking amused, as if he enjoyed the novelty of a handshake. “I’m more commonly known in New Orleans as Bad Bill.”
“You are not the man I expected,” the blond man said.
“I don’t understand enough of your meaning to know whether I should be flattered or offended, and I don’t care enough to make the inquiry. I accept the fact that you expected something other than a fat old drunkard lying half-naked and crusted in his own gore. Since I expected a deaf-mute, perhaps we’re even.”
“Perhaps.” The non-deaf-mute looked delighted.
Bill took another swallow and realized he was drinking it too fast. The level of the whisky was getting low, and he pounded the cork in with the heel of his hand to try to save some for later, though he didn’t know where he would hide it.
Inside the water pail?
“But you haven’t introduced yourself, suh,” he observed.
“Forgive me,” said the blond man, “I am not yet accustomed to your ways, and sometimes I forget that you do not know who I am.” He was silent for a moment, as if thinking.
“My ways.” Bill chuckled. The whisky helped.
“My name is Jacob Hop.” He said it YAH-cobe HOPE, and he sounded like a Dutchman when he said it.
“Your name sounds pure Hudson River,” Bill noted, “if you’ll pardon an observation. Your accent, however, I cannot identify.”
“I have no doubt my accent is strange,” Hop said. “I am an insatiable traveler.”
“And yet here you are, aboard a ship incapable of taking you anywhere.” Bill laughed. “What an ironic sense of humor the gods must have.”
“What do you want, William Lee?” Hop abruptly asked.
Bill was taken aback by the directness of the question. “What do I want? Mr. Hop, what do you want? I’m in chains, and you’ve come to me. My desires seem beside the point.”
“Yes, of course,” Hop replied. “It is a strange question. And of course you want to be free. But if you were free this moment, William Lee, what would you want? What would you do?”
Bill looked around him warily. He didn’t think anyone else was listening in the dark hold of the ship. It seemed to be night. Then he shrugged. Hell’s Bells, he was most likely hallucinating in any case, and what if Bayard were listening?
What did he care?
“Justice, suh,” he said. “I would avenge myself upon my keeper, Bayard Prideux. He owes me a life. His death, however painful and prolonged, cannot possibly be enough to extinguish the debt of his crime against me, and against all this land. But it will be a start. If I were free, Mr. Hop, Bayard Prideux would be a dead man.”
Hop nodded, his face solemn but his eyes sparkling in the candlelight. “It is a good start.”
Bill chuckled. “I’m glad you approve. The whisky, the encouragement, even your very name cause me to take heart, Mr. Hop. Is it possible that you’re about to hand me the key to my chains?”
“I am not, William Lee.” Hop smiled. “But take courage. I will help you any way I can, though I am far away, and am not powerful upon the sea. And then, the queen is nearer than you know.”
“In what sense are you far away, suh?” Bill asked. “Are you not here before me?”
“Yes,” agreed Jacob Hop. “Yes, I am.”
Then he picked up his candle and was gone.
“What queen?” Bill asked the darkness, but there was no answer. It was the same damned thing the beastkind had said to him, standing beside Bishopsbridge in the middle of the night. It had made no sense then, and it still made none.
“What queen?”
* * *
Obadiah grabbed four stones and spread them out around the rectangular board counterclockwise, one stone per scooped-out hole. He tried to do it quickly, like the iggy bastard across the board did, but he felt big and awkward.
The board and stones were nothing special, just a plank with its edges smoothed and depressions scooped out of it and a fistful of polished pebbles from the river. It was the speed at which the Igbo played that made the game impressive, a whirl of sparkling color and nimble brown hands.
Except when Obadiah played.
“Take.” Obadiah snatched three stones off his opponent’s side off the board.
The Igbo grinned under his little cap, rounded and brimless and embroidered with a wreath of interlocking green leaves. He might have been fifty, but his curly hair didn’t show the slightest trace of gray and only a few deep lines around his smile gave him away. Obadiah thought his name was Udo, but he insisted on being called Michael. He was a cacao trader, he said, which probably meant he was a smuggler.
Most of the Igbo were smugglers. If they weren’t evading the emperor’s men, they were sneaking past the chevalier or the Dons of Ferdinandia or New Spain. They were old hands at it, as a people; it was said that the great John Hancock himself learned the arts of forged custom stamps, fraudulent bills of lading, and systematic graft from the Igbo. This traditional occupation didn’t make the Igbo too different from the Dutch, really, except that the Igbo seemed to do everything in organized families or towns, whereas the Dutch were every man for himself.
The Igbo apparently gambled in families, too. Obadiah wouldn’t have minded so much the circle of brown faces around him staring at the game and cheering on the plays, except he couldn’t shake a deep-seated feeling that he was about to lose. Again.
Michael’s long-fingered hand scooped up stones and whizzed around the board. “Take!” he rejoined, and then frowned deeply. “But woe, I take a mere two stones. Are you sure, Mr. Dogsbody, that you did not grow up in England playing Okwe as a boy?”
There was scattered clapping and cheering among the spectators.
Michael dropped his two taken stones into his pile. His pile and Obadiah’s seemed to be the same size, but Obadiah knew Michael was still one ahead, because he kept track in his head. When he wasn’t drunk, Obadiah was a good gambler.
He just wasn’t good at this game. He’d only barely learned it.
They sat at a table in a large, one-story building with a high-peaked roof thatched with fronds and no walls at all. The roof rested on four round pillars that might have been tree trunks growing right out of the ground, with the floor built around them. The sturdy wood floor was scattered with reeds, just like the biggest buildings of the Academy had always been.
The platform might be some sort of market building or town hall; Obadiah had seen similar constructions in the other Igbo communities, and such buildings were always in the center of town, beside a large open square with a wide road leading to the pike. It seemed to Obadiah that all the Igbo towns were laid out identically, and they had all been planned by traders.
Obadiah didn’t like the Igbo. He didn’t like their thatched houses in their tidy little villages just off the highway—fifty feet off the highway, no doubt, and therefore not subject to direct Imperial taxation. He was unimpressed by the nudity of their children, by their little round hats, and by the knee-length tunics their men and women alike wore, no matter how ornately embroidered they were. He was positively irritated by the constant chatter of buying and selling and of a bustling daily life that assailed him among them—it gave him the strong and unpleasant impression the Igbo were determined to be happy. He hated banjo-picking, and he couldn’t bear the taste of rice and yams. He disliked the unfailingly happy sound of their accent—how could an entire people sound happy all the time? It was impious.
He had agreed to sit down at the Okwe table because he thought he could still get a little entertainment from a game of chance, even if it meant he had to learn to play something he’d never played before. He was sorely disappointed.
Like everything else, Obadiah found Okwe hollow. Also, he couldn’t quite see how, but he had the distinct impression that he was about to lose. He eyed the pile of coins to the side of the board: Michael’s Ferdinandian pesos against his own Imperial shillings, a decent sum.
“Shall I point out to you your legal moves at this juncture?” Michael’s polite and cheerful voice made Obadiah want to punch him.
Some of the crowd made less polite noises that sounded a lot like jeering.
Obadiah growled and spun stones around the board.
Michael moved; neither of them had taken. A player took when he ended his turn on the other man’s side with two or three stones in the hole, and the game would end when there were four stones or fewer on the board in total.
Obadiah squinted, saw his opportunity, moved. “Take.” Two. He was up one.
“Oooooooh,” groaned the spectators in suspense.
Michael moved. “Take, and to my joy it is three.” He grinned.
Applause.
The leftmost depression in front of Michael held one stone, and the third from the left held two. Obadiah’s side of the board was empty except for three stones at his right.
Obadiah grinned.
He only had one legal move, but it was a winner. He picked up his three stones and plunked them, one, two, three, in front of Michael.
“Take,” he rumbled, and snatched away the three stones, tossing them into his pile. “Four stones left means that the game be over, Udo.” He used the man’s Igbo name on purpose and said it with a bit of a sneer. He reached for the pile of winnings—“ooooooooh,” said the crowd—and Michael grabbed his hand.
“’Ere now, Michael,” Obadiah said slowly. “The game be over.”
“Yes, the game is over, friend Obadiah,” Michael said, the smile not leaving his face. “But we must calculate our scores.”
“I’ve been calculatink,” Obadiah growled. “I win by one point.”
Michael nodded at the board. “You are forgetting the stones still on the board,” he suggested.
Obadiah looked at the board. Michael was right. Stones left on the board went to the player whose side they were on. That was three more points for Michael, and that meant that he won by two.
“’Erne’s bloody ’orn!” Obadiah spat, and staggered to his feet.
Michael’s family and neighbors cheered and laughed. Obadiah rushed away but Michael’s laughter followed him, and the sound of Michael scraping coins into his purse. Served Obadiah right. He should have stuck to games he knew.
It was time to go, anyway. The Blues were saddling up.
This was Obadiah’s first journey this far south in the New World, and he rode with the Blues—at the rear of the troop, leading baggage horses and mules—along the Imperial Highway between Birmingham and Jackson. Beyond Jackson lay New Orleans, whither they were bound and where Obadiah’s heart lay.
He didn’t understand why they were going to New Orleans—sometimes it seemed it was because Father Angleton had had a vision, and sometimes it seemed it was because Captain Berkeley had read his Tarock, and often the two men quarreled over which was the important reason—but they all agreed that Sarah was on her way to New Orleans. Obadiah didn’t trouble himself too much about the decision-making process. At least Obadiah was with the main force of the Blues, traveling along the highway, and not one of the handful whose task had been to rush down the Natchez Trace at breakneck speed.
The road he traveled, the Jackson Pike, ran through the heart of the Free Cities territory, where the Igbo dominated. Obadiah had distrusted them even before his first footstep into their territory, and his Okwe losses had made him dislike them more.
The Blues were lining up to leave the little village where they’d quartered for the night, four to a bed in an ordinary called the King Stephen Nzekwu at what the Igbo proprietor assured Captain Berkeley were special rates for Imperial officers. Obadiah scrambled into his saddle and took the mule string’s lead rope in hand in time to see the Right Reverend Father riding in his direction.
“Here,” Angleton said. “You’re so fond of reading now, read this. See what’s at stake here.” Then he turned back and rode to rejoin Captain Berkeley.
While the men ahead of him coiled slowly onto the Pike, Obadiah uncrumpled the sheet of paper and looked at it. It was a news-paper.
SERPENTSPAWN DEPREDATIONS
~ The Pacification of the Ohio Continues ~
Cahokia. Good men and true in the service of HIS IMPERIAL MAJESTY, THE EMPEROR THOMAS PENN, are murdered! Honest men have died with their throats cut in their sleep!! their bodies torn as if by Animals!! Insurgents ~ such as the Much Despised Ophidian Knights ~ claim that the crimes are the acts of feral Beast-Kind, who have recently been very Agitated, but loyal citizens are not fooled, & HIS IMPERIAL MAJESTY is said to be sending further troops from Free Imperial Youngstown & from Pittsburgh to Reinforce the Forces of order & good administration.
Obadiah frowned. Why was this at stake? They pursued Sarah because she was some relative of Thomas Penn, and maybe intended to make a play for the throne. That was what the Blues whispered around the campfire, anyway, and it made sense of the journey so far.
Was she an Ophidian?
And what did that say about the emperor if she was?
Obadiah’s horse clopped onto the Pike. The next Toll Gate was miles away—the emperor’s men would be waved through, but others would be charged a toll for any traffic other than those traveling strictly on foot—so Obadiah had time to think.
He missed Sarah. He thought of his night on Calhoun Mountain, when he’d kidnapped her and then fallen in love. He knew he’d been hexed, but the effects of the spell had long since ended.
What remained, what haunted his journey along the Jackson Pike and kept him awake at night, was love. It had to be love. Obadiah’s heart was cold and rusty in love’s ways, but he knew how he had felt with her. He knew he wanted that feeling back. He cringed inside, thinking she must hate him, but he dared to dream he could persuade her of his worth. And even if he couldn’t, now his life had meaning. For the first time in years, Obadiah cared about something beyond his appetites.
For the first time, really, since Peg had broken his heart.
He drank less, limiting himself mostly to water. He ate less, too, though that was mostly a matter of his being distracted by thoughts of Sarah. He was becoming thinner. He wanted some other method of self-improvement and found he had none to hand, so he turned to his Bible.
It was an old book, and unread. Obadiah’s father had been a Christian from his youth in the Duchy of Monmouth, one of the dwindling and secretive minority in England under the Spencers. He’d wordlessly given Obadiah the book as a gift, the day Obadiah had gone off to Woolwich. Obadiah had opened it twice at the Academy, and hadn’t read it since, carrying it around in his personal belongings like a talisman. Obadiah furtively read his father’s Bible now, though he found he had to separate some pages with his knife. He read in the mornings, while the Blues struck camp, and in the evenings, while he stirred the pot. He tried to be discreet, but in a camp this small, others were bound to notice and talk, and they did.
Even Father Angleton had noticed, he now knew.
Obadiah read the Psalms and the Gospels, because Father Angleton quoted from them a lot. He tried to read the Old Testament, too, which was much harder. Genesis was interesting, with lots of women in tents, and Obadiah lay in his own small tent, when he wasn’t in some flea-bitten ordinary’s cot, and shivered at the thoughts that came to him. Exodus was full of storm and drama, with its plagues and God appearing in the mountains, but then there were long hard stretches Obadiah couldn’t bring himself to look at.
The part Obadiah found with astonishment and then kept coming back to was the Canticles. Her eyes are as the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters, he read, washed with milk, and fitly set, and he thought of Sarah.
Turn away thine eyes from me, for they have overcome me, he read, and he remembered her standing by the Charlotte Pike Gate in Nashville wearing her purple shawl with gold suns, looking at him with her blessed eye, challenging him to open his heart.
Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?
* * *
“May we see it, Your Majesty?” Duckface’s voice was hushed, almost reverential.
They sat in a corner booth in the nicest tavern in Natchez-under-the-Hill, the Fitzroy. Unlike most of its local competitors, the Fitzroy actually had a signboard, painted to depict the great herald and jongleur with his long dark hair and his lips in the rounded O of emitting some ineffable golden note. He strummed a long-necked lute.
Walter Fitzroy had written over four hundred songs. The tunes in his Elector Song Cycle were the best known, not because they were the best songs, but because they were pounded into children all over the empire to teach them who voted to select a new emperor, or a remove a bad one. Calvin had seen the signboard and immediately broken into song, his voice sweet and melodic. Sarah had great affection for Calvin Calhoun, but, objectively speaking, it was astonishing that such a sweet voice could come out of such an ugly face.
The Free Cities of the Igbo
Have one Elector each, no more
Birmingham, Montgomery, Jackson
And Mobile on the shore
“Calvin,” she’d whispered, “we ain’t in Igbo territory.”
“Give a feller a little credit,” he’d agreed, ducking under the low, heavy wooden door frame, “I been here afore, and I ain’t forgot that Natchez is in the Cotton League. Only I ain’t ever cared much for that melody.”
The same image of John Penn’s court troubadour hung in an oil-painted canvas behind the Fitzroy’s bar, or rather, almost the same image. Sarah looked with curiosity at the lute in the painting—on its fretboard, partly obscured behind its many strings, were inlaid distinct images: a key at the fifth fret, a cup at the seventh and two coins at the ninth. At the twelfth fret was inlaid a lightning bolt. Sarah had seen a few instruments in her time, but never one with decoration that fancy. Was the signboard painted in a simpler fashion because it hung outside, and required more frequent repainting?
The Fitzroy was the nicest tavern in town because it reeked of tobacco smoke and ale more than of urine, and also because it had actual booths around the walls of its common room, permitting some semblance of privacy.
Sarah sat on one side of such a booth and the beastkind sat opposite her, giving the three of them the most concealment from prying eyes. She still had seen no sign of the Philadelphia Blues in Natchez-under-the-Hill, but there was no sense being anything less than cautious. Cal sat in the corner, warily watching the common room with his tomahawk cradled in his lap. Thalanes sat quietly beside Calvin, seeming to concentrate on something other than the table conversation. Was he cloaking them with gramarye? Watching for enemies? The little man generally looked tired, and Sarah now understood why—it had been weeks since he’d had any respite from constant spell-casting.
She took a sip of her small beer, slightly darkened with molasses.
“Why?” she asked.
She refrained from saying all that was on her mind, such as: my eye ain’t none your business, I’ll take off my patch when youins take off your robes, and what in tarnation you want from me, you foreign, animal-headed freaks? She had adopted a sort of regal position with respect to Thalanes, and acting too paranoid or standoffish now might weaken her authority.
Also, she felt she had to at least try to be a good queen.
“Forgive us if we ask too great a boon, Your Majesty,” Tortoise-Head rumbled, dipping his wrinkled cranium in submission. “We know thou art the queen we seek, and we do not ask for a sign. It is only that our master has prophesied much of thee and thy great silver eye. We would see it, if we may. We would be witnesses to thine advent.”
Advent? That didn’t even sound like queen-talk anymore, it sounded like prophecy and religion. Sarah hated hearing herself talked of like this, and she wasn’t even sure she preferred worship to fear and revulsion. Part of her longed to push the beastfolk away, beat them down.
“Jerusalem, Sarah.” Cal snorted. “They make you sound like a regular King Andy Jackson. Keep your eye out for them Lafittes.”
“Hush,” Thalanes urged him, snapping out of his reverie. “If you had seen how Jackson ended, you wouldn’t compare him to Sarah even in jest.”
Sarah shared Cal’s instinct to puncture all the high-toned flimflam the beastkind were throwing at her. Still, she wanted to play the part of queen, so she slipped the patch off over the top of her head and gazed upon the beastkind. Again she saw them as shimmering mud-green clouds. She looked closely at their features with her witchy eye, and was intrigued to find that with her Second Sight they appeared both as completely human and simultaneously as completely animal. She couldn’t have said whether she was looking at a woman and a man or a tortoise and a duck.
“Whyn’t youins tell me your names?” she suggested to them, and then cringed at the Appalachee sounds coming out of her own mouth. So much for her Court Speech.
“Grungle.” The beastman bowed until his forehead grazed the scarred tabletop.
“Picaw.” The beastwife stooped similarly.
“Picaw and Grungle,” Sarah said slowly, ironing her words into something more eloquent than their natural state. “Witness, then. Tell your master what ye have seen here.”
She replaced her patch. Calvin smiled at her warmly. Thalanes once again had his attention elsewhere.
“Your Majesty,” Picaw said in her flute-like voice. “Peter Plowshare is dead.”
“I understand,” Sarah lied. No need to show any weakness to the beastkind.
“Our master, the Heron King, conveys his congratulations upon the occasion of thy return,” Picaw continued. “He supports thy claims, and he would be thine ally.”
“Thank you.” This was was getting stranger by the minute, and Sarah felt as if she were acting in a play to which everyone but her knew the script, while these queer ultra-Mississippians were in deadly earnest. Wasn’t the Heron King a character of folklore? And yet here were two emissaries claiming to be in his service and bringing her messages. She had stepped with one foot into a fairy tale, while the other remained in solid, rough and tumble Natchez-under-the-Hill.
“He would even,” Grungle continued, “enter into discussions with thee about the prospects of a dynastic alliance. About the possibility, Your Majesty, of marriage.”
“What!?” Calvin spat out the word in astonishment, and Thalanes, too, snapped abruptly to attention.
Sarah felt all eyes on her and blushed. Suddenly, the fairy tale she had stepped into became a yawning chasm beneath her feet.
“Thank your master for the message of support,” she said, “and for the invitation to discuss. I expect we shall be conversing of many things over the coming years. I am young, yet, to contract a marriage, and I ain’t yet…I am not yet come into my throne.” She tried and failed to let herself be drawn naturally into the cadences of Court Speech.
Her discomfort with the whole situation made it difficult.
Sarah wanted to avoid angering the beastkind, and from their smiles and nods, she thought she had succeeded, but she also wanted to avoid crushing Calvin by promising them too much. She looked at him closely, and he looked away. He thought he loved her still, then. He would get over it someday.
He was gallant and brave, and he would get over it.
Thalanes smiled at her.
“Your Majesty,” Picaw said tentatively, “we were sent with a message to New Orleans, which we delivered. We have come to find thee here as an act beyond our errand, because Simon Sword despises a slothful servant, and because it appeared that the recipient of our message had been detained, and might not meet thee on the road.”
Simon Sword? The fairy tale yawned beneath Sarah’s feet again. “I see.” Who had the recipient of the beastfolk’s message been? And why had they expected that person to meet her?
“We would go still further beyond our errand,” the beastwife continued. “We beseech thee to come with us, across the great river, into the forest, to the hall of our master. It is not many days from here. We would bring thee to meet him, to treat with him, and to seek his aid.”
Sarah felt all eyes on her again, and especially the eyes of the little monk. She met his gaze, and saw therein gentle pleading as well as nervousness. She knew his plan was to find Sarah’s siblings—Nathaniel and Margaret—and hide them again, at least for the time being, to keep them all safe from her uncle. She knew he wanted her to continue with his plan; she resisted the impulse to tear her patch from her head and stare into his aura, to try to gauge the depth of his feelings.
But the beastmen were promising her aid. Assistance from magical, legendary figures—it was as if the Three Wise Men or the Pharaoh of Egypt had appeared and promised to help her. What if they could make good on their promises?
Cahokia had no king, and had had no king since the death of her father. Her father via the acorn he had strangely blessed, and the acorn she had hidden away in her dress pulled at her with the heavy weight of destiny. If there was a Heron King, and he was the mighty wizard of folklore, might he not help her fill the empty throne? Might he not help her recover the lost Cahokian regalia, the things of power Thalanes had told her about?
If Sarah found Nathaniel and Margaret now, weak as she was, she might only draw misfortune upon their heads—shouldn’t she do everything she could to become powerful, so she could take her siblings under her protective wing?
And as Queen of Cahokia, possessor of things of power, couldn’t she also contest for her inheritance of the Penn wealth? Could she not have justice for her father and her mother?
Might she not, in fact, become empress?
But she didn’t know whether she could trust the beastkind. They didn’t have the sorcerous black auras of the Mockers, but their souls looked alien enough that she was unsure how to read them. She could as soon tell the mood of the Mississippi as discern whether Picaw and Grungle were lying. They might, after all, be agents of the emperor.
Or they might be insane.
Or the Heron King might not be the powerful figure about whom she’d heard so many whispered campfire tales, so many moralistic sermon-stories.
Or the Heron King might decide he didn’t want to help her after all, or he might demand too high a price. She couldn’t really see herself, in the end, married to a fairy tale creature.
And Thalanes…Thalanes had a plan, and it didn’t include thrones, regalia, or fairy tale alliances. Not yet, anyway.
Surely he was right. The safest course was the simplest, and the humblest.
She smiled at all the staring eyes. “I am on an errand of grave import to me and to my family that draws me to Louisiana. I thank you again and I ask you to thank your lord. When I have resolved my errand, I shall come see him in his hall. Or he may come see me in mine.”
Calvin and Thalanes both looked happy with her words, and the beastfolk looked at least unperturbed. Maybe even satisfied.
She didn’t like being queen. At least, she didn’t like the decisions part.
“We thank thee, Your Majesty.” Grungle bowed his head.
Picaw also nodded. “May we assist thee in resolving thy current errand, then?”
“I do not see how,” Sarah answered evasively. She still had no wish to trust or rely on the alien beastkind.
“Perhaps we may, in ways thou canst not yet see,” Picaw suggested. “Dost thou seek the man William Lee?”
Sarah felt a cold stone in the pit of her stomach. “Pardon me?” She looked at her companions; Thalanes arched his eyebrows at her to indicate that he shared her surprise, and Calvin held his face in a carefully motionless expression, as he did when he played cards.
“Captain Sir William Johnston Lee,” Grungle joined in, slowly enunciating the name, as if he found it a difficult one to say. “He is in New Orleans. The Heron King sent us to him with our message. We know where he is.”
The beastkind knew way too much. “How’d youins find me?”
“The Heron King is a great prophet,” Picaw fluted. “Some of his servants bear a humbler touch of his gift.”
“We could not be certain that we would find thee in Natchez,” Grungle explained, “but we dreamed of thee here. From our dreams, we knew how to recognize thee.”
“The eye?” Sarah asked.
“Your Majesty is unmistakable for many reasons,” Picaw demurred gently.
Sarah’s head reeled. “Captain Lee was the recipient of your message?” She struggled to get back control of her dialect. “The one who was detained?”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” both beastfolk said.
“Where is he?”
“We do not know exactly where he is held,” Grungle amended his earlier statement. “He was taken by other men. But we know someone who will be able to help thee find him.”
“Tell me,” Sarah said.
The beastkind looked at each other. “Her name is Filmer,” Picaw said. “We cannot describe to thee the place where she is, but we can take thee there.”
Sarah met Thalanes’s gaze with her own and saw in his eyes the same cheerless resignation she felt in her own heart. She was going to have to trust the beastkind, after all.