“Everybody hide your fairies!”
CHAPTER ONE
It was red, puffy, shiny and swollen. Like some obscene overripe fruit from Jamaica, her eye bulged in its socket, useless, sealed shut, and glinting with a hint of pus. Was it twitching at him? Obadiah shuddered.
“Witchy eye,” he muttered. “’Erne’s ’orn, that’s a blighted phiz, poor chick.”
The gnarled Appalachee crawled like a pot of fire ants, boiling out of their secret holes in the hills and trickling down their winding trails to the Tobacco Fair. They never quite managed to form up into lines until they got to Nashville’s gates and the solid Imperial stone forced them to.
With them had come the rickety mule-pulled cart, the gaggle of whipcord-thin waifs jangling about it, and this ugly, smash-faced girl pulling the lead rope.
Even without the eye, she would have been no great beauty. Her hair was thin, black, and ragged, her skin so pale it was almost white, and she was filthy. Obadiah knew it was a trick of the mind, but he thought he could smell her stink cutting through the fetid miasma of the crowd from fifty feet away. She had a wool shawl over her shoulders—purple, with smiling golden suns woven into it—but it covered nothing. The shawl was more a defiant spit in the eye of the coming winter than an actual garment. Under the wool she wore the tight shirt—forearms bare—and slatternly high skirt of Appalachee, clothing that would have been scandalous in Philadelphia or in New Amsterdam.
Not that Obadiah would have minded seeing a little flesh; on the contrary, he enjoyed looking at a woman, as long as she had meat on her bones.
And two good eyes. He looked again at the Appalachee’s swollen face and cringed.
Around Obadiah, Market Street—the wide, stone-cobbled way that led from the Charlotte Pike Gate to the Cumberland River—teemed with life. The emperor’s Revenue Men guarded the heavy iron portcullises of the gate, dour-faced but shining with their breastplates, steel bonnets and long Brown Bess muskets. On the towers, Pitchers watched the road outside town and polished their big guns. The gate was of recent construction, like the walls. It was only—Obadiah scratched his belly and did the math—thirty-odd years ago that the Philadelphia Compact had set aside the Imperial Towns as revenue sources for the emperor. Thirty-one years, this being the Year of Our Lord eighteen hundred fifteen. Old John Penn, no fool he, had got right down to building walls and gates and, of course, setting taxes.
The Revenue Men couldn’t do much off Imperial land, so they did as much as they could where they were allowed. Today they assessed on each entering vehicle the lawful Fair Toll, thruppence per wheel, payable in whatever coin the party could scrape together. Louisianan sols, Ferdinandian pesos, German thalers, and copper duits from the Hudson Valley rattled around in the Revenue Men’s iron box alongside the more familiar pennies struck in the Philadelphia Mint or the Tower of London. Obadiah had a similar chaos of currency in his wallet, as did any traveling man, but mostly he carried the Imperial and Ohio Company coins in which he was paid.
The bustle of activity on Market Street clustered around the canvas tents of the great tobacco buyers. The tents and stalls varied wildly in appearance, and Obadiah knew that each look was carefully cultivated. A white, washed canvas, stiff and upright with the pennant of its merchant house flying was a signal to sellers that this was a prosperous buyer, who would likely pay the best rates. A tent that sagged and was gray with the history of the road told the Appalachee the buyer might be somewhat down on his luck, and not to get too demanding on price. A disordered stall was a trick, a feint that pretended that the stall’s owner was distracted or inattentive, and was a ready victim for sharp haggling. It was all show.
The bulk of the buyers spoke with the soft drawl of the southern Crown Lands, Georgia and Carolina, but Obadiah recognized the nasal twang of dour-faced Roundheads, the bouncing verbal roll of tall, blond Dutchmen and the crisp, happy tones of brown-skinned Igbo Free City men in the chuckling Babel around him. There were Geechees in the market crowd, too, and Haudenosaunee, and Frenchmen. No beastfolk that Obadiah had seen (not that he would have been troubled to see beastkind—a woman with a bitch’s head, or a nanny’s legs and tail, was still a perfectly serviceable woman), only one or two of the Soulless and a single Jew of Araby, looking ready to freeze to death in his bright silks and turban.
A stream of wagons oozed down the street from the gate. The canny hillfolk drove two-wheeled vehicles if they could manage to cram their piles of cured brown leaves into a cart that small (the poorest of the poor growers carried their leaf on their backs to avoid the toll entirely), and four-wheeled only if absolutely necessary. Every cart or wagon was overburdened almost to the point of collapse, in the interest of minimizing the taxes paid to Obadiah’s master’s master, the Emperor Thomas Penn. The tobacco growers crouched on their conveyances with ears cocked, listening to queries and bids whooped at them on every side until they heard one they would accept, at least as a basis for beginning negotiations. Obadiah heard snatches of Castilian, Dutch, and French, but the business of Nashville was mostly conducted in English.
“Two pounds, I’ll give ye!”
“What’ll you take for it by the hank, sir?”
“Is that Brightleaf, son, or Fire-Cured?”
Nashville’s Tobacco Fair, like any market day, was doubled in size by the addition of swarms of people who neither bought nor sold pipeweed but sought instead to profit by catering to the needs of the tobacco traffickers. Apart from doing his job, this was the part of the fair that interested Obadiah. Less savory entertainments (quite savory enough, to Obadiah’s taste) would be offered later, but even this early in the morning every scrap of cobblestone not occupied by a buyer’s tent or a seller’s wagon was home to a juggling act, an ale-seller, a puppeteer, a shifty-eyed poet, a bellowing news-paperman, or a hawker of rolled cigarettes.
Obadiah disliked trade; his father had been a cooper in London, more or less successful, and it was a damned life. Too much getting up early, too much risk of failure, too much counting of pennies and scrimping to buy more stock and tools for the business. His was not the life Obadiah wanted.
Obadiah wanted steady money, drink, and women.
When he’d left his father’s shop he hadn’t gone far, at first—he’d just walked down to the marshes of Woolwich, to train for the cannon. That had seemed promising at the time. The coat of arms of the House of Spencer sprang into Obadiah’s mind’s eye, a griffin rampant over the Cross of St. George, horn sinister and hammer dexter. Only later…later he’d decided he needed to leave England entirely. Obadiah’s own tongue tasted bitter to him and he grimaced.
He dismissed the train of thought from his mind. Suffice it to say, Obadiah was no bazaar tentman, and he was more interested in the entertainment than in the buying and selling going on about him. Also, he suffered from a fierce thirst for a mug of good ale. Herne’s hoofs, even bad ale would do. He just needed to get a little work done first.
He finished the circuit of Market Street with his gaze and came again to the witchy-eyed girl. She had stopped and stood still, glaring at him. He glared back, willing her to move along. Her one good eye squinted in his direction, looking devious and infernal alongside its slick, monstrous mate.
No, he was no merchant, Obadiah told himself, even if he too had come with his master to meet the needs of participants in the Tobacco Fair. His employer was no merchant, either, though he shared a high-pitched nasal accent with the Roundhead traders, what Obadiah in his youth would have called a Norfolk whine. The Right Reverend Father Ezekiel Angleton would take money, but he took it as offerings from a collection plate, and he took it, Obadiah recited as if it were a table of numbers learned by rote, because taking it allowed the givers to have the blessing of a voluntary act of sacrifice.
Obadiah snorted to himself. A man said what he had to say to earn a living, and Ezekiel Angleton had to earn a living the same as anyone else. Obadiah didn’t care. There might or might not be a Heaven, just like there might or might not be a Herne the Hunter or a Wayland Smith. In any case, this life and its pleasures were enough for Obadiah, and if there were a Hell, Obadiah calculated that working for a priest covered his bets. In any case, Father Angleton didn’t charge listeners a fee for his sermonizing. He had a stipend from the emperor, and Obadiah had his room and board and a silver shilling a week from Father Angleton, which was good money for being man of all business to a priest, and none of the worry and hassle of being a tradesman. The travel meant that Obadiah’s women always had new faces.
It was a little strange they had come here, though. They’d been to Imperial Towns before—Providence was fine, good pies and plenty of available womanflesh, and Youngstown hadn’t been too bad, though that was awfully close to the Eldritch Kingdoms and Angleton got antsy if he saw too many of their pasty faces—but they had never been as far south as Nashville. For that matter, it was strange that they would travel at all, without the Blues. He didn’t know why they had left Philadelphia and come all the way to this forsaken place. Oh, even these stunted cracker goblins were children of God, he knew Father Angleton would say if asked, but there were plenty of children of God to minister to in Pennsland. The Right Reverend Father still held, he had assured Obadiah several times on their journey south and east, his very worthy and useful post as chaplain to the emperor’s House Light Dragoons, the famous Philadelphia Blues—so why not stay with the dragoons, then? Obadiah thought he would prefer a trip with those hard-riding soldiers to any festering pit in the empire to spending any more time with these cross-eyed, gap-toothed wretches.
Cross-eyed—at least Witchy Eye (as Obadiah began to name her in his mind) had been spared that blight. He chuckled. She might be gap-toothed, though—he looked at her again, still not moving, her stare growing angrier and more intense by the minute. Did she think he was staring at her? The girl’s mule was skin and bones and her two-wheeled cart was piled high with cured brown leaf. Half a dozen red- and black-haired beggar-looking wretches surrounded the cart, dirty, unkempt, and wild. Obadiah wrinkled his nose.
Not that Obadiah would object to a few minutes behind a tent flap with one of their older, plumper sisters later in the day, if the occasion offered. A few minutes behind a tent flap, and then get quit of Appalachee.
Obadiah cleared his throat. “Ladies an’ gents,” he croaked. His voice was rough and loud; it was his greatest professional asset. At Woolwich, he’d been told he might make sergeant on the strength of his voice alone, and now he imagined he was mustering a line of pikemen into formation to stand against the Caliph’s hordes. A few heads turned, including the ugly girl’s. “Ladies an’ gents, ’ark all, this be a great day in the ’istory of Nashville Town!” He raised his hands high above his head, but most of the spectators looked away again and went about their business.
He’d already gotten it wrong, and he scratched himself in mild frustration. Habit. He cleared his throat once more and did it the way the Right Reverend Father had told him to. “Children of the New Light, ’ark ye! A mighty preacher be come amonk ye!” Heads were turning back his way. He reminded himself to make no mention of the Right Reverend Father’s being a priest. New Lighters hated the Old Gods, the pagan gods they called them, but they had no real affection for priests of any kind, even Christian ones. “Ezekiel Angleton be ’is name,” he bellowed, “an’ ’e’ll be preachink free times today! First sermon to start in one hour’s time! Preachink an’ prophesyink!”
“Where?” shouted one of the buyers, and Obadiah knew he had his hook in.
“By the Town ’All.” Obadiah pointed with one arm, and enough heads turned that he calculated his work was done—he’d move on and make his announcement again elsewhere. Might be time for a pint before the first sermon.
“You don’t mean that old codger from over Bum Tickle Crick way, do you?” yelled Witchy Eye in a shrill and surprisingly loud voice. “Iffen that’s the one, I done heard him preach and prophesy once already, and it weren’t worth a coon’s bark.” There was scattered laughter in the crowd.
Obadiah forced himself to squeeze out a merry rolling laugh and a smile. He didn’t care much for Father Angleton’s dignity—the priest could fend for himself—but he didn’t like feeling personally attacked. “Nay, my wee lass, I don’t intend no old codger. Why don’t you come alonk an’ ’ear ’im? You brink your wee friends, an’ you’ll ’ear preachink you’ll tell your own whelps about.” There, that should do it. He turned to go.
“I’m pretty sure Zeke Angleton was his name, though,” the ugly girl insisted loudly. “Runtiest lookin’ feller you e’er laid eyes on? Talks to hisself a lot, dribbles out the mouth? You sure that ain’t him?”
“The Right Reverend Father does not dribble out ’is mouff!” Obadiah wheeled on the pustule-faced girl, and when he saw the triumphant gleam in her one good eye he knew he’d made a mistake.
“The Right Reverend Father, huh?” she repeated slowly, balling her free hand into a fist on her hip. “Well, if you’s talkin’ about a churched man, that’s another kettle of fish altogether. I guess they’s two Zeke Angletons in this ol’ world, who’d a thunk it?” She kept her face straight, but her eye was laughing at him. Many in the crowd snickered, and some openly guffawed.
Obadiah’s cheeks burned. He was used to yelling out announcements to large gatherings, and he was not accustomed to being heckled in the process. “Do you ’old then that if a man be a priest, ’is opinions be wrong, no matter what?” That should recover some of the ground he’d lost.
“Oh, I ain’t no swoonin’ Barton Stone enthusiast,” she shot back. “I reckon a priest’s as good a man as many, and maybe even better’n most, when it comes to the business of preachin’. I’m jest interested in honest advertisement, seein’ as how we’re at the Fair.”
“Aye, ’e be churched,” Obadiah admitted, because in effect he had already said as much. He needed to win the crowd back. He needed a little theater. “But that don’t mean ’e ben’t a mighty preacher. I’ve ’eard ’im shake the very walls with the righteous sound of ’is voice alone!” Obadiah churned the air with his fist for emphasis. “I’ve seen soldiers weep to ’ear ’im preach!”
“Soldiers? Is the Right Reverend Father Zeke Angleton an army preacher, then?” The girl’s face mocked innocence. “Who e’er heard of a chaplain takin’ to the tent?” Most of the crowd was laughing now, and the ugly girl’s comrades were laughing hardest of all. In a flash in his mind’s eye Obadiah saw himself seizing the tallest of them, a lanky, unhandsome lad with long red hair, and smashing his head into his own cart, over and over again, bloodying the brown tobacco leaves and throwing the body under the wheels on Market Street.
Obadiah tried to focus, but he was flailing. In his building anger, he had a hard time concentrating, and he groped for a dramatic, inspiring image, something to get him out of being ridiculed and to again excite the mob to hear the Right Reverend Father. Not that he gave a tinker’s damn whether any of them listened to the priest, much less were saved by his preaching, but Obadiah wanted to keep his job.
He fell back on a polished pitch he’d made in many a street of Boston and Philadelphia. It was a good pitch, full of high drama, and it had never failed him. “Not since St. Martin Luther nailed the skin of the Eldritch ’eretic Cetes to the church door in Wittenberk an’ cried ‘’ere I stand!’ ’as such powerful preachink been ’eard by Christian ears, I trow!”
He saw immediately that he had made another misstep.
“Oh, he’s a Martinite!” The girl’s visible eye danced with glee. “Everybody hide your fairies!” The crowd roared.
Obadiah struggled to remember Father Angleton’s instructions. He was to have kept it simple, addressed the crowd as the Children of the New Light, invited them to hear preaching and prophesying, and make no mention of the Church, Father Angleton’s titles, or the fact he was a member of the Order of St. Martin Luther. That was the path Obadiah had started down—how had he gone so far wrong?
It was the girl with the bad eye. She was malicious, maybe even evil. She was still keeping a straight face, but the loud laughter all around him seemed to Obadiah to be her laughter, and it humiliated him.
His instructions didn’t tell him what to do now. Obadiah wanted an incisive remark, something that would stamp out the wicked spark in the ugly girl and show the crowd he was master. His mouth gaped and his jaw worked, but before he could form any words, the girl shrugged and walked on, leading the mule and cart and the sharp-elbowed, snickering gaggle of Appalachee runts behind her.
* * *
Calvin Calhoun was laughing pretty hard inside, but he didn’t let it show—that would have ruined Sarah’s joke. Of course, he knew in some sense the joke was on her, and it was an ironic one.
The hillfolk around Nashville would walk twenty miles and stand up to their knees in mud under a lightning storm to hear a New Light preacher, or at least the Christians would. There were plenty of people in the hills, decent folks even, who followed after the strange old gods of wood and creek, worshipping in the high places and the groves, and those were the ones who most agitated the really enthusiastic New Lighters. There were also more than a few residents of Free Imperial Nashville who’d come from the Crown Lands, and called on John Churchill’s English Gods, Woden, Wayland, and Herne.
But precious few people of any persuasion in Appalachee would spit in the mouth of an ordained Christian cleric, even if he was dying of thirst. It wasn’t that he was a follower of St. Martin Luther—in general, people around Nashville didn’t care one way or the other whether the Firstborn had souls or not, had no opinion on the Serpents War in the Old World or the Moundbuilder Kingdoms in the New—it was just that he was a priest.
Sarah had exposed the Right Reverend Father Ezekiel Angleton as an outsider and a priest, which was good fun and he was fair game, having set up as a public preacher. Rightfully her mockery should have dried his listening audience—of hillfolk, anyhow—right to zero…except that now people would expect her to come to the tent and engage the preacher as she had engaged his hard-faced herald. Baiting preachers, especially foreign preachers, was popular sport, and she had probably just increased the Right Reverend Father’s audience. Did she plan to show them she was up to the challenge? Knowing Sarah, she probably did.
Young Andy broke into sing-song. “Twelve Electors, nary a crown,” he sang, “one from each Imperial town.”
“Good as far as it goes,” Cal judged, “and you jest about hit the melody perfect. Of course, the hard part’s the list.”
“Andy never gits past Chattanooga,” one of the other younguns said.
“How far do you git?” Cal took all music seriously, but in particular he reverenced the Elector Songs. It was important to know how the emperor was chosen, because that was how he was kept under control, too. And the Elector Songs were new, just a little older than Cal himself, so they weren’t stuck deep down in everyone’s memory like most of the best songs were.
“Asheville,” she admitted, and looked at her feet.
Cal cleared his throat and sang.
Youngstown, Chattanooga, Trenton
Blacksburg, Akron, Scranton
Knoxville, Johnson City, Asheville
Cleveland, Providence, Nashville
Twelve Electors, nary a crown
One from each Imperial Town
It wasn’t a great song, more of a chant, really, with no real melody despite what he’d said to Young Andy, but it told the tale it was supposed to tell. There were lots of Elector Songs, all of them written by John Penn’s old minstrel Walter Fitzroy, because the empire was made up of lots of different powers, so it was best to learn them young.
“Trenton,” Young Andy sighed in exasperation. “Why can’t I ever remember Trenton?”
“Keep tryin’,” Cal encouraged him.
“Cal!” Sarah jerked her thumb at a buyer over her shoulder, “I b’lieve I heard a shillin’ two per hank from that skinny meneer back there. Whyn’t you go have a jawin’ session with him?” Sarah’s eye was hideous, but Cal had known her all his life and thought nothing of it. She was his auntie, and when they were in town to trade she was the leader.
Cal would handle the coins. He was tallest, and oldest—notwithstanding that Sarah was technically his aunt, the very late and youngest daughter of his grandfather—and he was nearly always sober, which was more unusual than one might imagine. Everyone liked to hear the New Light preached. Tear down the high places, burn the groves, and stay away from all their ungodly trappings: the fornicating, the liquor, the wild dancing, and the priests. Prayer and faith and the Bible, that’s what a man needed to get through the strait and narrow gate. Everyone liked it as preaching, but not very many people took it as seriously as Cal did. He had no use for priests at all, and no use for liquor. Well, almost no use. Lord hates a man as can’t make merry once in a while, and didn’t David dance before the Ark?
But no wild dancing, and no drunkenness. Drunkenness got Noah into trouble.
Sarah herself would have done a fine job with the cash, of course, but she tried to handle money as little as she possibly could. Cal didn’t really know why—Sarah was much better at adding and subtracting than he was. She could read, write, and cipher even with big numbers, and she knew languages; Calvin could rope, brand, shoot a rifle, and throw a tomahawk. His learning was a man’s, but hers wasn’t a woman’s, not exactly. It was something extraordinary, and it was a mark of the fact that her father, Cal’s grandfather, the Elector Calhoun, doted on her.
“Aunt Sarah,” Young Andy Calhoun called, peeling himself out of the bubbling knot of the Calhoun younguns. Young Andy was David Calhoun’s oldest boy, and David was Sarah’s oldest brother. Young Andy was almost Sarah’s age, but he was Young Andy because her father the Elector was also Andy Calhoun. Not that you would ever call her father Old Andy or Old Man Calhoun to his face, nossiree, Cal had made that mistake once years ago and the cheeks of his buttocks still stung him just to think about it. He was Elector Calhoun or, if you knew his military exploits in the Spanish War and the Pontiac Uprising and even as far back as the Ohio Forks War, and you were a friend, you might call him Iron Andy. Behind his back, you might call him a lot of things, and people did. The Elector knew it and laughed.
“What is it, Andy?” she asked.
“You see this?” Young Andy held up a dirty, creased sheet of paper.
Sarah took the sheet from her nephew and Calvin crowded to look over his shoulder. “Why, this ain’t nothin’ but a news-paper,” she explained. Young Andy knew his letters well enough, but the only combination he knew how to put them into was A-N-D-R-E-W-C-A-L-H-O-U-N. If pushed by someone with real willpower, he was sometimes willing to admit also to knowing A-N-D-Y. He resisted all attempts at further education on the grounds that those letters were sufficient to identify either him or his grandpa, that was right powerful and to the purpose, thank you very much, and he didn’t see no point in learning any more. Cal was sympathetic. “I hope you didn’t let no slick-talkin’ Nashville news-paper-man trick you out of a penny, Andy Calhoun.”
Cal squinted to see the words—he was a workaday reader at best, but while Sarah and Andy were joshing around, he managed to puzzle out the head-line and the main story. The scrap was indeed a news-paper, the Nashville Town Imperial Intelligencer, and it was today’s issue:
EMPEROR’S SISTER DIES! POWERS MOURN
Philadelphia. Sing, ye Mournful Seraphs!!! Our former Empress Hannah, beloved of her Family, every Pennslander & every Heart Beating in the Empire of the New World East of the Mississippi, has Succumbed! after fifteen Long Years of Struggle, to her Broken Heart. HIS IMPERIAL MAJESTY, THE EMPEROR THOMAS PENN Has Laid her to Rest in Franklin’s Lightning Cathedral, gathered to the Dust of her Illustrious Ancestors!! Ambassadors from every Power of the Empire & from the Great Kingdoms of the Old World, England, Spain, the Low Country Protectorates, the Caliphate of the West, &cetera, Attended to DO HIM HONOR & Sang her to her Eternal Sleep.
People and places so far away, they might as well be fairy tales. Cal didn’t have much of an emotional reaction to the news of Mad Hannah’s death, except a vague feeling that it was probably a mercy; she’d been locked up since her husband died, and that was as long as Calvin could remember.
“No I did not. I jest saw this here paper on the ground and reckoned as you might like it. Knowin’ you was sweet on paper, and all.” Young Andy grinned at her. “You’re as sweet on paper as Calvin is sweet on you!”
“You jackass.” Sarah took a good-natured swipe at her nephew. “Well?” she prompted Calvin.
“Jumpin’ Jerusalem, Sarah!” he cursed, smiling. “I ain’t forgot the Dutchman, I’s jest readin’ me a little news. Can’t a feller try to elevate hisself a bit without you gittin’ mad at him?”
She smiled. If he’d been younger, she might have put him in his place for that bit of wise-assery, but he was one of the oldest grandchildren, several years older than she was, and they were peers. Peers and friends, to Calvin’s great delight.
Cal took a hank of the cured tobacco from the Calhoun cart and loped over through the jostling crowd to confirm the price Sarah had heard from the meneer, whistling. He wished he had his tomahawk with him, but walking into town with a war axe dangling from your belt wasn’t civilized behavior, so he consoled himself by running his fingertips along the braided leather lariat that hung tied beside where the tomahawk would usually be. Like every man living on Calhoun Mountain, Cal was a cow thief, and he happened to be a good one. He was quiet, he had a sense for animals, and he could throw a rope as accurately as any man. In a pinch, the lariat would do for a weapon, as would the knife in Cal’s moccasin boot.
“Graag,” Calvin said to the Dutchman, trying to gargle his Gs like the Hudson River Republicans did. It was the only Dutch he knew, but that hardly mattered. He hadn’t met a Dutchman yet whose English wasn’t at least as good as Cal’s, though they sounded funny. The Dutch were famous traders (and sometimes smugglers, like the Catalans and the Hansa), and wherever they went, they spoke the language—the traders of the Dutch Ohio Company probably did their haggling in Ophidian. Cal’s Graag was meant to show polite interest and respect.
“Graag to you, dank u wel,” the Dutchman said. He was a skinny fellow like Cal, but shorter and older, with hair that had gone totally gray and eyebrows that were black.
Cal hefted the leaves in his hand. “One shillin’, tuppence a hank, I reckon I heard you call out?”
The Dutchman nodded and pulled out a leather wallet, finely tooled with an image of a spouting whale and held shut with ivory snaps. “Ye-e-es,” he said, in that round fashion the Dutch had. “How much do you have?”
Cal grinned. “I got me a fair pile. ’Course, I ain’t surprised you ain’t payin’ but one-and-two, seein’ the sickly lookin’ leaf you got stacked here. Let me show you a leaf that’ll git you wantin’ to pay me a shillin’ five, on account of the price you’ll be able to get outta your own customers.” He sniffed the leaves and smiled.
Sarah and the other Calhoun younguns kept an eye on the cart while Cal finished his conversation with the Dutchman, and Cal watched them. People who knew the Calhouns—and locally, that was a lot of folks—nodded without ceremony as they passed. She nodded back. Townspeople (who saw her only rarely) and outsiders looked at her face and almost all of them reacted. It was her eye that got their attention, her eye that had never opened and never healed. Sometimes it got a small, controlled response, a slight raising of the brows and then a turning of the head away as if the person looking had been pinched. Sometimes it earned a look of revulsion or fear. Calvin had seen pure disgust all over the face of that preacher’s hawker, and he had no doubt that was why Sarah had stopped to harass him. Well, to hell with the Englishman.
To hell with all of them. Calvin would stand with Sarah. She was so stubborn she embarrassed the mules, but she stuck up for her own, and she was funny.
Cal closed with the Dutchman and returned to the cart, smiling just enough for Sarah to know he’d gotten a good deal for Old Man Calhoun’s tobacco. He jingled his purse as a further signal, then tucked it into the pocket of his breeches. Unlooping the two rawhide thongs that hung the gate of the cart vertical on the cart’s rear posts, he dropped the gate open. Then he grabbed an armload of crinkling, aromatic tobacco leaves as an example for the other boys.
“Pardon me,” said a man’s voice, so gentle Cal almost took it for a girl’s, “may I ask for your assistance?”
Cal turned and saw Sarah facing the questioner with a face full of hostility and just a hint of surprise. The man addressing her stood very close, so close Calvin felt uncomfortable, but what surprised him more was that he was smiling at Sarah, looking her full in the eyes with an expression that was unspeakably…kind. Cal reckoned Sarah had never received such a look from anyone who wasn’t kin, and precious few such looks from those that were.
“What you want?” Sarah stepped back from the stranger.
“Pardon me again,” the man said. “I’ve been told many times that I stand too close for others’ comfort. Please forgive me.” He was of middling-to-short height, thin, with very pale skin and expressive eyebrows under his mop of dark hair. His eyes wrinkled deeply as he spoke, but otherwise his age was hard for Cal to guess. Over his shoulder he had slung a leather satchel. He wore a simple gray robe, belted with rope, and a crescent moon-shaped brooch of white stone on his breast. Calvin knew a lot of the monastic orders had adopted insignia to mark their folks, but he didn’t remember who used the moon. It wasn’t the Rangers or the Circulators, he was sure of that. And the man didn’t seem to be carrying any books, so he wasn’t a Wandering Johnny.
Then again, it needn’t be a monastic order. The fellow could be a knight, or in the service of some Power. The Elector songs told you who voted for emperor, but, like it or not, they didn’t list flags and coats of arms, and that was the kind of thing Cal didn’t have a very good grasp of.
Sarah would know.
“I don’t recognize your accent,” she said to the stranger. “But you ain’t from these parts.” Cal watched intently. He was aware that the other Calhoun younguns, though they pretended they were still jostling each other and playing at having an adventure in the big town, were watching her conversation closely, too. Sarah was oldest, and she was leader, so it was on her to show the younguns how to act in town, and around foreigners. Calvin had the same obligation, for that matter, and he was proud he’d wrangled the meneer’s price up a couple of pennies, more for the principle than for the sum. Take advantage of foreigners before they take advantage of you, that was a basic precept of Calhoun family schooling.
“I’m not. I’m from the Ohio. My names is Thalanes, and I’m a priest.” The little man smiled and bowed, and Cal noted that a bald circle—was it called a tonsure?—had been shaved into the top of his head. He said his name THAH-lah-nace, and it was very foreign-sounding, even more so than Ezekiel Angleton. “I was hoping I could ask you directions.”
“Where you wanna git to?” Sarah asked.
“I’m looking for Andrew Calhoun.” Thalanes still smiled. “The Elector.”
“You of the Craft?” Sarah asked. “Iffen you’re lookin’ for a lodge, I reckon they’s one right here in town as’d be easier to find.”
“I’m not a Freemason,” the little man said. “I’m a priest.”
“You can be both.” Sarah shrugged. “Freemason’s got to believe in God, don’t he?”
“I know where Calhoun’s cabin used to be, years ago, but I’ve been up there early this morning and it’s gone.” The little man peered closely into her face, searching, and Calvin wondered whether Sarah felt uncomfortable. He considered intervening, but held himself back—she wouldn’t appreciate his coming to her rescue unless she really needed it.
Cal rested his fingers on his lariat and wished again he’d brought his tomahawk. He wondered about the Elector’s cabin—it hadn’t moved in Calvin’s memory. Did that make this man a liar, or a friend who hadn’t been to visit in the last decade or more? As for that, the Elector wasn’t hardcore New Light, but he was New Light enough that it was odd to think of him being friendly with a monk. Of course, two decades ago, nobody was New Light. Maybe this monk was someone the Elector knew from the Spanish War.
“Oh yeah?”
“I was hoping you might be going that way, now that you’ve sold your leaf, and that I might be able to follow.”
“That’s jest the thing about a cabin,” she told him. “You git uncomfortable where you are, you jest up sticks and move. Best home is a mobile home. Youins might oughtta give it a try out there in the Ohio, instead of them big dirt piles.” Calvin let himself chuckle out loud. Score a point for the Appalachee girl—tell the foreigner nothing, and mock him at every opportunity. He looked at the younguns, and saw they were drinking it up. This was a more entertaining lesson than trying to remember the names of the twelve Free Imperial Towns.
“The Mounds. Yes, they would take more than a couple of hours to rebuild.” The monk laughed gently, and Cal felt puzzled. Sarah was trying to drive the outsider away with hostility and ignorance, but the man kept grinning as if he was her favorite uncle and they were enjoying a private joke. Whatever Sarah felt, she kept it inside, more credit to her. “So, can you take me to where the Elector lives?”
“Not exactly,” she lied. “I ain’t no kin of his.” Another lie. “Besides, we ain’t goin’ home right now, we’ll be around town for a few hours.” That at least might be true; they often lingered in Nashville after a market day, and Sarah may well have resolved that she would heckle the Martinite preacher, or do worse to him. She might feel her honor depended on it. She might reckon the Elector Calhoun’s honor was at stake.
“I see,” the monk nodded, still smiling as if he were enjoying a secret jest.
“What you wanna do, though,” Sarah told him, “is head down thataway, cross the river, and then git on out through the Jefferson Pike Gate on the other side of town. I heard Old Man Calhoun has moved about thirty-forty miles on up the hills, so you’ll wanna jest keep goin’ and ask directions on the way.”
Cal was very careful not to laugh this time, which was hard. He buried his face in his armload of tobacco to smother any chuckling that got through. Sarah had just coolly directed the foreigner out the wrong side of town. Well, if he was going to act like there was some kind of secret joke going on, he couldn’t complain when he got one.
“Thank you,” Thalanes said, still smiling. “You haven’t told me your name.”
“Sarah Jackson,” she lied. Cal didn’t think he could lie so easily. Of course, if he had to pick an Appalachee name to pretend was his own, Jackson was the one every foreigner had heard of, thanks to Andrew Jackson and his crazy bid to make himself king.
“Thank you, Sarah Jackson. I believe I’ll enjoy some of Nashville’s entertainments before I go find my friend the Elector. I understand there’s a preacher in town.”
He smiled, bowed again, and then walked off toward the river in the direction Sarah had indicated.
The cart was empty now, and Cal jingled the purse again to get the others’ attention. “A shillin’ four.”
Young Andy whooped. “Small beer with lunch!”
The tobacco was all unloaded and on the Dutchman’s table. Cal closed up the back of the cart and looped it into place.
“Small beer it is!” Sarah agreed. “Was he wearin’ them wooden shoes like they do?”
“I b’lieve you jest sent that there foreigner off to the Kentuck.” Cal laughed. “And to my grave disappointment, no, that ol’ Dutchman’s boots were leather. No wooden shoes, and not even buckles. I graaged him good and hard, though, like you taught me.”
“He graag you back?”
Cal nodded. “Maybe next time it’ll be an Acadian and I’ll git to practice my bonjour.”
Sarah watched the little man walking away and shrugged. “If that fool gits all the way to the Kentuck afore he turns around, he deserves it. You reckon we made enough off that baccy so’s we can buy a little keg of whisky?”
“As if I’s the kind of feller as’d know the price of whisky.” Cal put on a fake look of reproach and winked.
“Calvin Calhoun,” she shot back, “you may not know the price of whisky, but I expect when it comes time to buy some, you’ll get it for half price. You’re tight as a Catalan, and you know it.”
“Why, Auntie Sarah,” he said, “I do my best. But ain’t the small beer enough for you? You plannin’ on gettin’ plastered already and it ain’t yet noon?”
“Not I,” she answered. “I’m fixin’ to go to church.”
Serve Your Emperor…
!! SUPPORT THE PACIFICATION OF THE OHIO !!
~ Join the Imperial Army Today ~
Dragoons : Musketeers : Grenadiers : Pikemen : Artillerymen
Bonuses Paid for Friends Recruited
Above the text was a striking woodcut of His Imperial Majesty Thomas Penn, tall, bold and handsome, slicing at a curtain of wriggling snakes surrounding him. Thalanes knew the emperor personally, had known him since he was a nervous eighteen-year-old boy rushing into the Spanish War with a commission purchased by his father, eager to prove himself, and the likeness was a good one. Thomas was dressed like the officer he had been, in a long coat, with a sash from shoulder to hip to hold a cavalry saber, but he wore an ornate crown. The crown had three tall points like the façade of Franklin’s Cathedral and had the Imperial horses, ship, and eagle carved into it in tiny detail. The image was nothing like any real crown Thalanes had ever seen, but it clearly communicated the emperor’s identity. More subtly worked into the crown was the seal of the planet Mars.
Mars for war.
Thalanes would have laughed at the recruiting sign, pinned with a heavy iron nail to the side of a cobbler’s shop, if it didn’t make him want to despair. He looked away and continued his amble down Market Street.
The little Cetean monk enjoyed walking through the Tobacco Fair crowd. He had come south and west from Philadelphia over eight hundred miles in a little over three weeks, on foot all the way. He was a good walker, and he had judiciously supplemented his natural speed with a little gramarye. He’d taken the Old Road West, through the Ohio, which had had the double advantage of being less traveled and lying along a strong ley line, but avoiding the Imperial Highways had added many miles to his journey and confined him to a rougher track.
Also, it had taken him through the Ohio, and he had seen the Pacification firsthand. He had been away from his homeland for years, tending to Hannah in her immurement, and he didn’t like seeing it again with Imperial garrisons at every town and crossroads, the Imperial hand in every pocket and the Imperial boot in every face.
Hannah would never have stood for such bald-faced evil, nor certainly Kyres. Nor would the young Thomas Penn, the aspiring military hero. But ambition, greed, and power had changed Thomas. He had the will, the means, and a pretext, and the Ohio was under his heel.
Never mind, Thalanes told himself. His errand was secret, of the utmost secrecy, and he had sped as quickly and as invisibly as he’d been able. Penn’s pet Martinite Angleton was in Nashville, but he didn’t yet have the girl. And he wouldn’t get her.
Thalanes would not fail his empress again.
You didn’t fail her before, he lied to himself. It wasn’t your fault. She insisted on knowing, and you only respected her will. Your position as her father confessor bound you to do that, to say nothing of the Rule of St. Cetes.
Thalanes enjoyed the crowd. Birdsong and rain had done very nicely for companions on his rushed march, but he was happy to smell again the thick, warm, sometimes sour aroma of mankind, the filthy stink of the rich Imperial Town, and the charred air of woodsmoke from its chimneys. He loved the burbling voices, the thump of the wagon wheels, the whinny of horses, and the clink of money changing hands.
He read the signboards of Nashville’s taverns as he walked. He saw the Heron King, a bird-faced man with an iron crown; the Benedict Arnold, with an image of the war hero, undaunted in the moment of having his horse killed under him by New Spanish lances; and the Oliver Cromwell, with a country gentleman’s face on one side of the board and a helmeted death’s head on the other. Thalanes crossed himself. Some of the children of Eve still adored the Lord Protector of the Eternal Commonwealth as a hero through John Churchill had unmasked him as the Necromancer and driven him from England. Oliver Cromwell had been particularly evil to the Firstborn, but he had killed plenty of ordinary Frenchmen, Dutchmen, and Germans.
And Nashville didn’t seem to have any taverns named the Wallenstein or the Queen Adela Podebradas, at least not on Market Street. Thalanes sighed. There was a Franklin, though, which was auspicious. The bishop’s famous seal, three letters around a bolt of lightning, was nailed into the frame of the tavern door on either side, in matching iron plates.
Thalanes spotted another Firstborn, a tobacco buyer with a string of sturdy ponies. He was a fellow Ohioan, Thalanes guessed from his long cloak, knee-high boots and tunic that came halfway down his thigh, but the nod he gave the other man was no greater and no less than the salute he gave everyone else. Thalanes loved all Adam’s children, in their colors and their smells and their busy motion and their relentless creative buzz of choice and free will.
He stopped at a board-built box, roofless but painted on its front with a rough image of a teacup full of black liquid. The man standing inside the stall wore a short-brimmed, boxy beaver hat, a doeskin vest over a yellow silk blouse, and red corte-du-roi trousers. He looked as stern as the sign, even inhospitable with his thin-bridged nose ending in broad flared nostrils, his high, bony cheeks and his nearly invisible upper lip, but his inhospitality was overpowered by the magnetic smell coming from his simmering pots.
Algonk of some kind. “Boozhoo!” Thalanes tried a greeting in Ojibwe, rubbing his hands together in anticipation.
“I savvy English, Padre,” the Algonk shot back. “You want to parley? To ballet? You want to chanty and hold hands and share feelings, or you want a cuppa?”
“Yes, please,” Thalanes said, chastened, “coffee. Black. And I’ll buy roasted beans, too, if you have them.”
Thalanes paid with a few Philadelphia pennies and tucked the little sack of beans into his satchel with his tiny pot. He stood by the coffee stall and smiled at its Algonk proprietor, sipping the hot restorative into his chest one life-instilling blow at a time. Soon he would feel himself again.
He noted that the Imperial Town had its peace kept by a substantial blue-uniformed watch, the presence of which was very visible. They were probably all on duty for the fair, he judged. The stone walls surrounding the small town were built like a castle’s, high and thick, with protection for defending musketeers and numerous mounting-poles for anchoring arquebuses in conflict. Big guns spaced along the walls were staffed by leather-caped cannoneers, many of whom were female; the Pitchers were famous for being the only Imperial military service to admit women.
All of Nashville gave the impression of thriving life and solid security, but Thalanes felt uneasy.
It was not your fault, he said to himself for the thousandth time. Let no will be coerced. Even the empress had to be allowed to choose.
He gave the empty cup back, thanked the coffee-man and ambled on his way down the street.
The Town Hall was a stone building of three stories, a chimney puffing merrily at each end on this busy day. The street was cobbled with small square stones right down to the river and the wide bridge spanning it, but across the street from the Town Hall was a grassy field, not quite shaped into a park and not quite left wild as a meadow, either. In the field stood the promised tent, large and dirty-white, and before the tent glowered Angleton’s servant, the scruffy Englishman.
Obadiah Dogsbody was thick about the head, neck, shoulders, chest and belly, and thin through the hips and legs. He was unshaven, his three-cornered hat, black coat and knee-length breeches were travel-stained, and he stank with an odor Thalanes didn’t enjoy—hard liquor, hard riding, and a hard heart. He stood in the tent door with one hand on the crosspiece of a broadsword and his other around the neck of a bottle of cheap rum. Tucked into his wide leather belt he also carried a new—and expensive—flintlock pistol.
Thalanes knew Obadiah from Philadelphia and wondered whether the factotum would recognize him. Best to take precautions. “Faciem muto,” he murmured, touching one finger to his brooch and one to his cheek. He felt the thrum of pulsating power within the brooch as he cast the spell, his own soul’s power, carefully hoarded and stored a bit at a time. Not a powerful spell, especially without any physical components, but a good one, and it should be enough to keep Obadiah or his master from recognizing the Cetean monk. The best spell was the one that accomplished its purpose without exhausting the caster, wrecking his body, or killing him.
Thalanes nodded at Obadiah, got an indifferent grunt in return, and ducked under the tent flap.
The stained tent canvas hung down from a horizontal pole like a roofbeam and was propped on further poles at each corner and along the walls. The inside of the tent was empty of furnishings other than a cask of water by the door, a low wooden platform with a barrel set up on its end as a pulpit, and a couple of dirty spittoons. Thalanes savored the fading taste of coffee while he looked at the crowd. Some of the people were residents of Nashville itself, dressed in the nicer shoes and newer clothes of the farmers and merchants who lived down in the valley, but many of the waiting spectators wore the short skirts and long hunting shirts that gave away a true Appalachee highlander. These people grinned with anticipation and the monk inferred that they knew very well that there would be no Barton Stone-style preaching. They had heard young Sarah harangue Obadiah and were here to see more of the show.
It promised to be quite a display. The girl had her mother’s wit, her father’s courage, and all the stubborn will of her adopted people. How ironic, to race nearly a thousand miles against Angleton to be the first to reach Sarah, and to arrive only to find her, as if by some unerring instinct attracted to self-destruction, harassing the Right Reverend Father.
Thalanes stationed himself beside the door. He didn’t think Obadiah would recognize her or else he would simply have grabbed her when they met on Market Street. Angleton must not trust his man much—still, better safe than sorry. Thalanes watched the door and the spectators flowing in, looking for the black-haired girl with the bad eye.
Why was Angleton preaching from a tent? He could think of only one reason, and it made him uncomfortable. Maybe he should have talked to Sarah more openly in the street, told her his purpose, rather than risking that Angleton might get to her first. He considered, and decided he had made the right move. He thought it was only fair to talk to the Elector first, for all he had done. And the girl was still safe and free, he was watching. Angleton’s mission surely could not be to kill her. Gentle persuasion was not his style, either, but he must be here to find the child, or at most capture her.
Of course, once in Philadelphia they would kill her, as they had finally killed her mother.
Still, Thalanes preferred to give her time, so she could learn to trust him. Every child of God chooses his or her own path. Let no will be coerced.
And it was not your fault.
“Whisky!” someone said behind him, and Thalanes turned in surprise. There they were, Sarah and the lanky young man with long red hair tied behind his neck—now without his cattleman’s lariat. They had entered the tent and evaded Obadiah, and Thalanes almost laughed out loud at the simplicity of their means; they had pulled up a stake and crawled under the tent wall. Apparently they had rolled a small keg with them, and now they were setting it up beside the water barrel and prying off the lid.
While an appreciative highlander took the first sip from the whisky, Thalanes kept his eye keenly trained on Sarah. Very discreetly and, he was sure, unseen by anyone in the tent other than himself, she nicked her finger with a small belt knife and squeezed a little of her own blood—one…two…three drops—into the water barrel. At the same time, her lips moved slightly.
She’s hexing it, the monk realized, and again almost laughed out loud. O Kyres, my heroic, my tragic friend, what a daughter you have! Everyone entering the tent drank from either the whisky or the water, and some circled back to drink again; for the Right Reverend Ezekiel Angleton’s sermon they would all be either tipsy or hexed by Sarah Elytharias Penn.
Sarah Calhoun, he reminded himself sternly. Sarah Calhoun.
And what would the hex do?
* * *
The tent was full. Sarah lurked carefully behind a pair of burly wagoneers, keeping her face averted and her telltale eye tucked down toward her shoulder as she bled her finger into the water cask.
“He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not.” She chanted the child’s mantra once with each drop, and she could feel energy flowing out of her and into the water, through the blood but also through the words. She could hex without words if she had to, was counted a talented hexer by the few people on Calhoun Mountain who knew enough to judge, but putting the hex into words got it out of her and into the world easier.
She felt tired when the hex was done. She’d have laid down and gone right to sleep, if she hadn’t had more important things to do.
A flap in the tent wall behind the platform opened and the Right Reverend Father Ezekiel Angleton, Martinite, stepped in. Around the wagoneers impeding her view Sarah could see that he was long and straight in limb and face, cold blue eyes fixed close beside a hawkish nose beneath a high forehead. The tonsure he must have cut out of the top of his long hair, Sarah reckoned, was hidden by a tall black steeple hat, Yankee-style. He wasn’t wearing the black tabard of his order (the Martinites had something of a history as a military society, since they had begun as the thugs who went around Wittenberg enforcing Martin Luther’s commands and stealing all the property of the German Eldritch), but a simple white shirt and brown breeches. The Hammer and Nail of St. Martin Luther—the Elector had made her learn the insignia of all the common orders, preaching and otherwise—were nowhere in evidence.
Well, damn him if he thought he could come down here and treat Sarah and her family like fools. She didn’t care one way or the other about St. Martin Luther and his followers’ grudge against the Firstborn, and who in hell cared whether they had a soul or not, she never could understand. Still, a Yankee preacher within a few miles of her home constituted a foreign invasion. What was he doing here, anyway? Nashville didn’t have an Eldritch population any more than it had beastkind—just townsfolk and hillfolk, and everybody more or less Appalachee but the traders passing through.
The Martinite’s disappointment and boredom shone from his face like twin beacons of gloom. He looked once around the gathered crowd and his face became even further crestfallen. In his hand he held a heavy Bible, and he opened it as he stepped to the barrel pulpit and looked down at the printed pages.
“As you all may have learned by now,” he began, in a pinched drone that Sarah knew would never excite this congregation, “the Empress Hannah has been gathered to the angels.” What was this fool preacher playing at? Had he traveled to Appalachee just to preach a funeral sermon? Did he not care about the crowd? Then why had he summoned them here?
He continued. “Yaas, all Pennsland grieves, and we of Appalachee must grieve with them.” Angleton delivered his words in a dull monotone with the nasal twang of the Covenant Tract man he was.
We of Appalachee…Sarah almost laughed. Ezekiel Angleton could scarcely have looked more out of place had he lacked a head and been speaking from a face in his belly.
“My text this morning is from Isaiah fifty-eight.” The priest mumbled now, face-down in the Bible. Mutters of dissatisfaction were beginning to be voiced in the crowd. “Is not this the fast that I have chosen? To loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?”
Here we go. Sarah would mock the sanctimonious Yankee a bit, and then bring down the house like Samson. Only she’d try not to get crushed. “I might could suggest a different text!” she yelled.
“Hush!” Angleton barked, peering at the crowd. Sarah crouched low behind the wagoneers.
“How about Psalm thirty-nine?” Sarah continued. This was not her first preacher-baiting, and she had verses to hand. “‘I was dumb, I opened not my mouth’?” The crowd broke into laughter, but she kept a straight, pious face for the benefit of those that could see her.
“Who’s that causing a disturbance?” the preacher demanded in his sour Yankee whistle.
Someone grabbed at her arm, but missed, and Sarah didn’t see who it had been before she pushed through the wagoneers to reveal herself. “Whoo-wee, you’re purty!” someone shouted, but other spectators gasped in alarm. Well, they could go to hell right alongside the Right Reverend Father. She hoped one of the tentpoles fell on top of them.
Angleton dropped his jaw and his Bible, the latter slithering off the corner of the barrel and thudding hard to the floor.
“Or maybe Numbers twenty-five?” Sarah continued coyly. “‘Am I not thine ass’?” The audience erupted into a fit of laughter that did not die down when the Right Reverend Father Ezekiel Angleton flapped his arms in an attempt to calm it.
Time to end the show and get out, before the preacher or his fat servant came after her. She raised her voice, though the tent walls were thin enough that Young Andy ought to be able to hear her already. “Mebbe Genesis nine: ‘he was uncovered within his tent’?” Sarah stood bold and proud, feet planted apart and hands on her hips as she faced the preacher. Just disrupting this foreigner’s show wouldn’t be satisfying; she wanted him to see who had done it. She only wished the fat Englishman could see too, serve him right for the pig-eyed stares he’d given her.
Angleton’s lip curled into a sneer. “What’s your name, girl? And what’s wrong with that eye?” He squinted. “Are you fey?”
Come on, Andy, she thought. You missed your call. “I said,” she yelled louder, “‘uncovered within his tent’!”
Still nothing.
“Come here, child,” Angleton said quietly. “I want to talk to you.”
Sarah started to back away.
The Martinite preacher put his hand onto the top of the improvised pulpit and picked up something that had been lying there, invisible to the crowd, all along. It was a fine flintlock pistol, matching the one the Englishman carried, and he leveled its deadly mouth at her.
“Child,” Angleton repeated. “I said come here.”