“He might a wept, but He ain’t sent no Electors.”
CHAPTER THREE
Calvin Calhoun wasn’t frightened by guns. He’d been around guns every day of his life and was a good shot with the long rifle—but the sight of the pistol in the preacher’s hand made him freeze.
He was afraid for Sarah, from his long red hair to his big, bony feet. Sarah Calhoun was stubborn enough to go and get herself shot by some Yankee preacher just for the sport of it, and he didn’t want her getting hurt.
After all, she was his aunt.
Most of the crowd gasped or ducked when the gun came up, but a man beside Cal muttered instead—“pallottolam averto,” Cal thought he heard—and brushed his hand as if swatting a fly. Cal recognized the sound of Latin from the many hours he’d heard the Elector marching Sarah through her amo-amas-amat.
Cal turned to look, and was startled by what he saw: beside him the man’s face, unfamiliar and instantly forgettable, slipped off him like shadows in a changing light and revealed underneath the fair complexion and dark hair of the little foreign monk who had wanted to see the Elector.
The Ohioan priest was a wizard. Wizards were rare—even honest-to-God hexers like Sarah were rare enough, though plenty of folk pretended they could hex and were happy to take your copper bits in trade for a bit of pointless mumbo jumbo when you were in love. It wasn’t a coincidence that the man Sarah had taunted in Market Street was now here in the tent.
He was following her.
“You’re sure enough a stranger to these parts,” Sarah called out to the preacher, and Cal snapped his head back around to focus again on the gun. “’Round here, boredom ain’t a mortal sin. And our preachers ain’t so much in the habit of shootin’ their congregations.”
The crowd tried to back away, to the edges of the tent and even out the door—none of these folks saw the drama playing out as any of their business. There were too many people for anyone to easily get away, however, and the throng milled about, poised to explode.
“Mister, we’s jest funnin’ you,” Cal said, raising his voice and stepping forward to try to defuse the situation. That put the wizard into his peripheral vision and almost out of sight entirely, which made him nervous, but you have to pick your battles and the Martinite had a gun.
The Yankee stared at him from the pulpit.
“It’s a kind of a game we play,” Cal tried to explain, “funnin’ priests. No need to get fussed, you can jest consider it your welcome to Appalachee and be grateful ain’t nobody stole your horse yet.”
“Step aside.” The tall priest’s voice was cold. “I’m taking that girl with me.”
“Whyn’t we go across the road to the Town Hall?” Sarah suggested. “It’s tall enough, we could re-enact the Defenestration of Prague, help you relive the glorious roots of your order using the streets of Nashville and your Martinite buttocks.”
“That isn’t funny, child.”
Cal thought it was, and he almost laughed despite his fear.
“Oh, it’s funny, all right,” Sarah disagreed, “only it might not be fair. I heard as the two fellers those Bohemians threw out the window in 1618 were the Martinite Jaroslav and Ferdinand’s tax collector. Anyone as has read the Bible knows how partial Jesus is to tax collectors, and you gotta wonder if mebbe, on his own, that old Martinite might not a bounced quite so well.”
“Silence!” The Martinite stepped to the edge of the platform, his pistol trembling.
The pale monk moved up quietly, joining Cal in the line of fire. “You make very bold, Ezekiel.” His voice was calm. “But you aren’t in the Covenant Tract, or in Thomas Penn’s Philadelphia, and there are many people here. Why don’t you put the pistol down?”
Cal thought the gun-wielding priest’s eyes glazed over for a moment, but then he squinted hard and shook his head. Cal heard cursing behind him as the priest’s heavy announcer struggled with the crowd, trying to get into the tent.
“You’re a traitor, monk,” Angleton replied. “You should have stuck to saying prayers over your dead mistress. But my errand isn’t to deal with you. I’m here for the girl, and I’m wiling to take her with me as a corpse.”
Sarah pushed past Calvin and planted herself squarely in front of the Right Reverend Father, hands on her skinny hips.
“Sarah—” Cal tried in vain to stop her. Fool girl!
“Shoot me, then, you filthy Yankee!” She spat.
“Hold on,” Cal said. The priest wouldn’t possibly really try to kill anyone in front of a crowd in broad daylight. Surely someone would step in, or the threat of the town watch’s involvement would stop things before they went any further.
Angleton aimed at Sarah’s chest, his face a dispassionate mask, and squeezed the trigger.
Bang!
“No!” Cal threw himself forward into the acrid blue jet of gunpowder smoke.
The preacher couldn’t possibly miss at that range, but somehow, incredibly, he did. Cal heard a soft thump! over his head as the bullet went high and wide—yards high and wide—and buried itself in the pole that served the preaching tent as ceiling beam.
There was a moment’s pause, during which Cal noted the look of disbelief and irritation on Father Angleton’s face.
And then the tent fell sideways.
Young Andy must have missed his cue, but yanked the lariat when he heard the gunshot. The poles on the left side of the tent all had their bottoms jerked out from under them and slid away beyond the white canvas.
The congregation stampeded, pulling down the tent supports with them.
The Yankee, wide-eyed in surprise, lurched around his pulpit and staggered to the attack. He raised his pistol over his head like a club—
and Calvin Calhoun cold-cocked him with a hard ball of knuckles to the jaw. The blow sent the tall priest sprawling into the upright barrel and across his preaching stage. “Can’t take a punch any more’n he can take a joke,” Cal muttered, and then the sky fell.
Cal batted at the descending canvas to keep it away from his face, but it was a losing battle and soon he couldn’t see at all for the dirty white shroud over his entire body. He fought to where he thought Sarah had stood, knocking knees and elbows with the hollering crowd, and found her gone.
“Sarah!” No answer. “Grandpa’s gonna kill me,” he muttered, and waded as quickly as he could, pushing and kicking and cursing when he had to, to climb out from under the tent.
“Not one word outta you, d’you ’ear me?” Cal heard as he emerged. The priest’s burly Englishman had one hand tangled in Sarah’s hair and the other covering her mouth while he pinned her arm with his elbow. He was easily three times her size, and though Sarah struggled, red-faced and wiggling, she was pinned. “You bide ’ere wiff me until I’ve sorted this out wiff the Right Reverend Father, you ill-faced wee witch.”
“Let her go, muttonhead!” Cal wished he had brought his rifle to town this morning. He thought of his boot knife, but it was too far to reach in the short instant he had.
The Englishman’s eyes widened. “You be the one what ’it ’im!”
Cal charged.
The Englishman reached for his pistol, freeing Sarah’s mouth and arms—
“Damned limey!” Sarah yelled as she elbowed the Englishman in the belly—
and Cal grabbed the pistol, still on the belt, with both his hands to the Englishman’s one. They struggled, grunting and spitting, for control of the weapon, but the heavier man had the fingers of one hand still entwined in Sarah’s hair, pulling her neck back at an uncomfortable angle, and Calvin slowly gained the advantage, wrapping the fingers of one hand around the trigger guard and the thumb of the other onto the pistol’s hammer.
Sarah twisted and tore herself free, leaving a clump of black hair in the heavy man’s mitt. She punched the big man’s side. Unfazed, the Englishman turned his freed hand to Calvin—he gripped the entire right side of Calvin’s face in his greasy paw and pushed his thumb into the skin under Cal’s left eye.
Cal had a sudden vision of losing his eye. He pulled back the pistol’s hammer and squeezed the trigger.
Bang!
“Aaarrawaaargh!” The fat man tumbled back and to the ground. Blood spattered his gray stocking and welled out a neat little hole in his scuffed black shoe.
Cal threw the pistol away and became aware that the paved street was a sea of yelling faces. Had the little monk made it out of the tent? He’d almost seemed like an ally during the confrontation, though Cal couldn’t figure out why he would be. Maybe because he was the Elector’s friend? But Sarah had told him that she was a Jackson.
“Sarah, you all right?” he called.
She kicked the yelping Englishman and spat on him. “Lost me a little hair is all.” Cal saw blood in her scalp.
The heavy man stumbled to his feet and staggered away, leaving bloody tracks.
Calvin looked past the Englishman up Market Street toward the Charlotte Pike Gate, a quarter mile away. Half a dozen men in blue and gold uniforms ran toward them, long Brown Besses in their hands, the Imperial ship, shield, and eagle, with horses on each side on their chests marking them as the town watch.
The preacher’s man ran right toward the Imperials, yelling, “officers! officers!”
“Jerusalem,” Cal muttered. Young Andy and the other Calhoun younguns were beyond the Watch, pulling the Elector’s cart away toward the gate at a measured pace, but Andy watched the commotion around the tent over the braided leather looped on his shoulder. Andy had bungled the timing, but at least he hadn’t lost Cal’s lariat.
“It ain’t obvious to me how we’re a-gittin’ outta here,” Sarah said.
Cal looked the other way, toward the Jonathan Edwards Bridge, and saw four more men of the Watch. They were having a heated conversation with the pair of tall wagoneers from the tent, and the wagoneers repeatedly pointed in Sarah’s direction. He looked up again, met Andy’s gaze and shook his head.
“It ain’t obvious to me, either,” he admitted. Andy nodded and turned away, continuing his innocent plod up Market Street. “But I’d sure feel a sight better iffen I’d brought my tomahawk to town.”
“Shh,” urged a gentle voice, and suddenly the monk was standing with them. “Back under the tent with me.”
Calvin stared dumbly, and Sarah looked plain obstinate.
“Please,” he added. “I can help.”
Cal lifted up a piece of the canvas—a knot of former spectators still struggled under the heavy cloth, some trying to get out and some simply attempting to stand—and tented it up over the three of them as they pushed into hiding.
“Thank goodness you’re so tall,” the monk observed. “If I had to play tentpole, you’d both be blind.”
“Who are you?” Sarah jutted out a suspicious jaw.
“No more tricks.” Cal kept his eye fixed squarely on the little man.
“No more tricks,” the monk agreed, and for once he wasn’t smiling. “As I told you, I’m a friend of your…father’s. We have no time.” Reaching up with both hands, he touched each Calhoun on the cheek simultaneously and spoke again in Latin. “Facies muto.”
“What are you doin’?” Then Cal turned to look at Sarah and nearly jumped out of his skin. Where Sarah had been standing, and wearing her purple-and-suns shawl, was a pudgy woman with graying hair and two good eyes. “Jerusalem!”
Wizardry, indeed. That explained the Latin.
And the Right Reverend Father’s impossible miss.
And whatever spell the little man had cast on himself before to change his own face, he had now cast on Sarah.
“What you lookin’ at, beanpole?” the graying woman demanded sternly in Sarah’s voice. Then she looked doubtful. “Cal? Is that you?”
“What do I look like?” he asked.
“You look handsome,” Sarah told him. “I can’t hardly b’lieve it’s you!”
“No one will recognize either of you.” The little monk suddenly seemed tired. “Now we should leave the tent separately, one at a time, and make our way up the street. We’ll meet by the stall of the Dutchman who bought your leaf.”
Calvin ambled out first, hands in the pockets of his breeches, feet held to a steady, scuffing gait. He’d had plenty of experience walking innocent, but none quite this brazen; he strolled straight at the gaggle of Watchmen and the limping preacher’s assistant, nodding a lazy salute in complete reliance on the monk’s spellcraft. Cal didn’t know any of the Watchmen’s names—they were townsfolk—but he recognized their faces and he wondered what they saw when they looked at him. Apparently, a handsome man. He chuckled softly at Sarah’s barbed wit.
“Old man,” one of them barked, “we’re lookin’ for a couple hillfolk kids, a tall redheaded feller and a girl with a real bad eye.”
Cal almost walked past before he realized the Watchman was talking to him. He clattered to an awkward stop. “What? Sorry, I…I ain’t deef yet, but I’m a-gittin’ there.”
“’E can’t ’elp us, let ’im go.” The Englishman smiled sourly at Cal as Cal continued past and on up Market Street.
* * *
Old ghosts troubled him, and Captain Sir Daniel Berkeley badly wanted to cast his Tarock. He’d foregone his customary morning casting along with breakfast; they were within a day’s ride of Free Imperial Nashville, and he wanted to catch up to his chaplain.
He was irked that Father Angleton had left Philadelphia ahead of him, and more than a little impressed that, for all their hard riding on the best-kept roads in the empire, Berkeley and his men had been unable to overtake the priest before reaching Nashville. It must be Angleton’s gramarye. He knew from experience the Martinite wasn’t a strong enough wizard to speed up the entire corps of the Philadelphia Blues, or ease their fatigue, or make them fly. Angleton was a priest, first and foremost, and only secondarily a magician.
Angleton accompanied the dragoons for the purpose of hearing confessions, administering last rites and saying prayers when the occasion required. Funeral prayers, for instance, might theoretically be important to a combat unit like the Blues, though it had been several years since any of them died in active duty. If from time to time he managed a small, moderately helpful bit of magic, so much the better.
Tomorrow Berkeley would overtake him. Him and the girl with the bad eye old Iron Andy Calhoun was hiding.
If it had been Berkeley alone in pursuit, on his Virginia-bred gray Andalusian, he would have overtaken the parson days ago.
The girl was a ghost, a tattered remaining shred of a banner Berkeley had believed torn down and destroyed. He had served the King of Cahokia, in his day, but Berkeley’s lord and master was His Imperial Majesty Thomas Penn now, and no fondness for men long dead, nor ghostlike daughterly apparitions, would sway him from his course. Berkeley would do his duty.
Subject, as everything was, to the capricious whims of fate.
Berkeley was not a superstitious man. His mother had obsessed over her stars, as did the emperor, and his father had spent long hours in young Daniel’s hearing debating the numerological secrets of the Apocalypse of St. John, but Daniel Berkeley had grown up convinced that he was free.
War, though, changes one’s perspective. Before his first battle, a border skirmish with a regiment of Virginia volunteers against some cracker encroachers, he had scoffed to see the older men polishing lucky medals, saying prayers and tucking rabbit’s feet and crosses into secret pockets. After the battle, after young Daniel had watched the cloud of musketballs capriciously take one man here and another there, with no apparent rhyme or reason, no respect for skill, age or wisdom, he hadn’t been so sure.
Before his second battle, Daniel Berkeley had cast the Tarock for the first time.
The Blues now cantered over the crest of a hill, and Berkeley saw down another length of stone-paved Imperial pike, surrounded by the piled orange and brown detritus of autumn. “Break! Check arms!” Berkeley called, and while they stopped to rest their horses and confirm that their pistols and Paget carbines were loaded and primed, he discreetly slipped his Tarock into his hand. It was a costly set, sturdy cards, and on the back of each they bore an elaborate scrolled portrayal of Franklin’s Shield, the letters TCB with a lightning bolt crashing through them.
He drew the top three cards.
The first card was the Priest. The painting on Berkeley’s deck was of a tonsured fat man in a long friar’s robe and sandals. He carried a walking staff on his shoulder that finished in a cross on top, and he held a bag or a wallet in his other hand. Encircling the Priest, as on every card of the Tarock, was a flowing frame of interlaced knots. The Priest meant consecration and commitment. Was that Angleton? The Martinite wasn’t fat and he wore boots, but he was a priest and he wore his hair in a tonsure. The picture on the card rather resembled a Spaniard, one of the Conquistador Fathers who had razed the Aztecs’ spiritual empire as Cortés had toppled the political one. What was the cross, then…a burden to bear? A holy mission? A grudge? And the bag could be anything. It could be money, a collection for the poor. It could be Aztec loot. Judas had held the bag, hadn’t he, among the disciples? Did Ezekiel Angleton plan some betrayal? Or maybe the bag was a thing obtained or a mission achieved…maybe it signified that Angleton had accomplished his task, and already had the girl in his possession.
Berkeley needed more information.
He turned the next card up: the Drunkard. The Drunkard on this card was a thin man with red eyes, unshaven. He guzzled from a horn like a Viking, and was captured in the moment of tripping over his own toes and falling forward onto his face. Angleton was no drinker. Berkeley drank, as a gentleman did, but he was not a drunk. Angleton’s servant Dogsbody drank to the point of being ridiculous. The Tarock’s image didn’t resemble the Englishman, though. If anything, it looked like it might be meant to portray an Appalachee, in one of their long shirts. On the other hand, the Englishman was a pagan, and the drinking horn painted onto the card looked as pagan as you could get. Didn’t the vitkis of the Mississippi Germans use a horn along with their sacred knives in making magic? There was something in the background that resembled a barrel, too, and another object. Those didn’t look particularly English or pagan. Could the object be a copper pot? Was the Drunkard a moonshiner? The Drunkard indicated accident, catastrophe, failure. Had Angleton, the consecrated man, had the girl in his hands, and then tripped and lost her?
The third card was Simon Sword.
Simon Sword was always painted as a child, and in this picture he held an enormous blade in both his hands, one of those long crushing and slicing weapons the Scots called claymores. He had floppy blond hair and a childlike grin, and his giant sword sliced off the heads of three men simultaneously.
Blazes. Simon Sword was a portentous card to draw at any time, indicating violence, trial, change, war, and judgment. Berkeley shook his head. He didn’t think the Priest could refer to him, and the Drunkard was not much more likely. Nor could either of them mean the girl, unless the cracker habit of corn whisky had gotten to her earlier than usual. The cards didn’t seem to be telling his story at all.
Who, then, was to be on trial?
Once past the watch, Sarah picked up her pace. Calvin was ahead of her, though she’d lost track of him in the press of people, and she wanted to catch him and get out of town before the monk found them again. The little man had helped them out of a tight spot, but she still preferred to let him find his own way to Calhoun land, even if he really was the Elector’s friend.
And if he wasn’t the Elector’s friend, she preferred that he disappear.
She was disappointed, therefore, to reach the Dutchman’s stall and find Calvin standing beside it, chatting with the little monk. Cal had his own face back, so she assumed she did, too. When had it returned? Calvin looked uncomfortable, but that might just be because the monk stood closer to him than any human being had any business standing to another person, unless they had love on their minds, or knives in their hands.
“Welcome, Sarah,” Thalanes said to her. “Calvin was just telling me you know Latin.”
“Calvin’s got a big mouth sometimes,” she said grimly, “and you got surprisingly quick feet, monk.” She kept walking, toward the gate, looking for Young Andy and the cart. Cal and Thalanes followed.
“You have some education. I expect you know the Elector Songs pretty well,” the monk speculated.
“Oh, that’s too easy for Sarah,” Cal said. “Jerusalem, I can sing you those iffen that’s all it takes to impress you.”
“Any child knows one or two,” Sarah conceded. Why was it any of this man’s business that she knew Latin, or whether she could recite the Electors?
“Sing me one,” he asked. “Please.”
She squinted at him with her one good eye and chanted out a rhyme in nasal Appalachee sing-song. “Louisiana sends two Electors, that’s clear: the Bishop of New Orleans and the chevalier.”
Calvin laughed.
Thalanes laughed too, merrily, making the wrinkles around his eyes jump and dance. “Jesus wept,” he said.
“He might a wept,” Sarah said with a scowl, “but He ain’t sent no Electors.”
“Of course.” The monk smiled. They were in sight of the Charlotte Pike Gate now and Sarah saw the Calhoun younguns and their mule-cart, creeping out through the gate and onto the Imperial Highway. “Many years ago, when I first became a novice, my preceptor, a gruff old warhorse named Palindres, insisted I memorize a verse of Scripture every day. ‘Jesus wept’ was my first day’s work.”
“John eleven,” Sarah told him. Might as well let the monk know she was no gump.
“Yes, I saw that you know Scripture.” He never stopped smiling. “I expect you know all the Elector Songs, don’t you?”
“I expect it ain’t really your business, Father Thalanes of the Order of St. Cetes!” she snapped. “You Eldritch, Father?”
His smile faded slightly; now she had him back on his heels, the nosy little foreigner. She knew all about St. Cetes, the Mayor of Wittenberg who was too sanctified even to stand up for himself when Martin Luther plotted against him, and she wasn’t impressed. Firstborn or not, any fool knew enough to take his own side in a fight.
They passed through the gate and onto the broad, hard-packed Charlotte Pike, the monk looking thoughtful and the blue-and-gold-wrapped guards waving them through. The pike marched south and west through smallhold farms and fields belonging to townsfolk of Nashville and was already carrying away some of the traders at the fair. The first Toll Gate wasn’t for miles, so the hillfolk happily used the short stretch of the pike closest in to town.
“Yes.” The monk’s voice was quiet and submissive. “I’m Firstborn. Are you?”
Sarah Calhoun snorted. “Hell, no! My pa is the Elector Calhoun.”
“I see.” The Eldritch monk contemplated her gravely. “Is he allergic to silver, like you?”
Sara felt her bad eye might pop open from sheer surprise. “You peepin’ into my thoughts, wizard? I’m allergic to silver ’cause my mamma was an Injun woman. Everybody knows a lot of Injuns are allergic.” She saw Cal staring at her and the monk both, bewildered.
“They are,” Thalanes agreed. “There’s Eldritch blood in most tribes, and a few tribes have quite a bit of it. Such as the Lenni Lenape. And of course, some people have gifts and vulnerabilities that defy explanation.”
“Huh,” Sarah said.
“Do you know your mother, then?” the Cetean priest asked. “Is she Shawnee?”
“I reckon that’s personal, monk,” she rebuffed him. “Lessen you want to tell me about your mother first.”
“Did your mother also give you your lily white complexion, as white as mine, as white as any Moundbuilder’s?”
Sarah was stunned. She wished she could shut the monk’s mouth, but a part of her—more than a small part—found him making sense. She never had met her mother, and had just taken it on faith from her father that she was an Indian. And silver did blister her skin on prolonged contact. Sarah deepened her scowl.
“I know what comes after twelve,” she said stubbornly.
The barb only made him chuckle. “And did your manifest talent at hexing come from your Indian mother, too?”
“My pa’s the Elector,” Sarah insisted, and then she decided to shut the monk up with a lie. “My mamma’s Shawnee, lives a ways down on the Cumberland.”
He shook his head patiently, his smile looking like an amused frown. “Why do you feel you must dissemble, Sarah?”
“Don’t know what you mean,” she dissembled.
He laughed out loud and then fell silent.
They had passed the farms now, and Sarah relaxed slightly. The highway was Imperial territory, of course, but fifty feet off it to either side was now Calhoun land. She expected His Imperial Majesty Thomas Penn probably did have officers somewhere who would be willing to try to exert their authority in Calhoun territory—his Foresters, maybe—but it wouldn’t be any of the boys in Nashville. She looked at Cal, expecting to see him looking calmer, too, but he had an expression on his face that combined astonishment, wariness, fear, and…something else. Hope, maybe, though that seemed an odd emotion for the circumstances.
They overtook Young Andy with the cart and the younguns, and he delivered his report. “I never did hear you give the signal, Aunt Sarah, there was so much noise. I heard the gunshot, all right, and I reckoned it was time to pull that ol’ tent down, so we done it. One pull.”
He handed Cal the lariat and grinned, looking for Sarah’s approval.
She gave it to him. “Well done, Andy. You done fine.”
“You decide to bring this feller home?” Andy pointed at Thalanes. “I reckoned him for a foreigner.”
“He is a foreigner.” Sarah glared at the monk. “He’s from a country called Grinland, where they ain’t got but the one facial expression and everybody dies of boredom.”
“You a Wanderin’ Johnny?” Andy asked the monk.
“The Poor Disciples of St. John Gutenberg do an important work,” Thalanes said, smiling again. Damn fool. “I’m not one of them. I’m a storyteller. May I tell you a story?”
“How about a song?” Young Andy suggested instead.
“Do you know your Elector Songs?” Thalanes asked with a smile.
“He loves those Elector Songs,” Sarah grumbled.
Young Andy shot a sidelong glance at Cal and blushed. “How about Cal sings something?”
“I think I’ve had jest about enough of the Elector Songs for the day, though,” Cal said. “What iffen I sing ‘O Listen, Ye Fathers’?”
A couple of the younguns hooted. “That’s a song about the emperor,” Andy told the foreigner.
“Believe me, I know,” the monk said, his mouth a flat line.
Cal unleashed his fine tenor voice and sang:
The first time I saw him was in eighty-one
We rode the Ohio, with sword and with gun
The Serpents would see him, they’d turn and they’d run
One flash of his saber, the battle was won
O listen, ye fathers, from far and from near
Ye’d best hide your daughters, Lord Thomas is here
There never was fairer a lord among men
He was stout with his saber and bold with his pen
And the ladies would follow, o’er moor and through fen
For one look at the locks of fair Thomas Penn
O listen, ye fathers, from far and from near
Best lock up your daughters, Lord Thomas is here
Cal stopped, a bashful look on his face. “It’s got a nice tune. And it’s kind of a love song.”
“It ain’t a love song,” Sarah disagreed.
“Kind of,” he repeated.
“I love history,” Young Andy said.
“Is that what that song is?” Thalanes asked. “History?”
Sarah wondered whether he might be offended. “Sorry,” she said.
Thalanes waved off her concern.
Young Andy was undeterred. “And I might could tell you a story. Do you know the tale about how the archwizard Sir Isaac Newton defeated the Necromancer”—he spit over his left shoulder—“at the Second Battle of Putney? Not to mention Black Tom Fairfax, the Sorcerer Hooke and their legions of marching dead?”
Calvin knuckled Andy gently on the arm. “Don’t spit.”
Young Andy was showing off for the other younguns, but none of them acknowledged his excellence—they continued to rattle and gripe at each other in a hubbub just a few notches short of an outright brawl.
“I do,” the monk said, and Sarah warmed to him a little for taking Young Andy seriously. “He worked mighty weather gramarye and flooded the Thames, washing out his pontoons and splitting Cromwell’s New Model Army in two. Make no mistake, though, it was John Churchill’s mixed pikemen and musketeers that then smashed Cromwell’s forces in Kensington, including the Lazars, and forced the Lord Protector to surrender. Wizards can’t do everything all by themselves, even powerful ones.”
“And everyone knows John Churchill had to git help from dark powers, hisself,” Young Andy supplied cheerfully. “His men were the Unbaptized. He turned England back pagan.”
“Exceptin’ the Duchy of Monmouth,” Sarah pointed out.
“Yeah, But the rest of it went back to blood sacrifice and druids, to beat the Necromancer.” Young Andy spit over his shoulder again.
This time Cal knuckled him hard. “I said stop it, Andy!”
“You want the Crooked Man to git me?” Young Andy asked.
“The Crooked Man ain’t gonna come git you jest on account of you mentionin’ some evil power,” Cal explained. “And iffen he was, I don’t reckon spittin’ at him would help you much.”
Andy hung his head.
“Now that tale is history,” Thalanes said to Young Andy. “Your knowledge is impressive. May I tell my story now?” The compliment was generally jeered at by the younguns.
Andy, both proud and abashed, agreed that he could and settled into a comfortable listening lope. Sarah watched the monk’s face closely as he gathered his thoughts; his expression was both remote, as if he were trying to remember the tale, and at the same time deeply mournful, as if it were a story the pain of which he could never forget.
“Once upon a time…” Andy prompted him.
“No,” Thalanes contradicted him. “No, not once upon a time. ‘Once upon a time’ means fairies under mushroom caps and trolls in the hills, and this story happened in a time of gunpowder and three-masted sailing ships. It took place…let us say for now that it took place a few years ago.
“A few years ago, a powerful king rode his bounds. A king must travel, you know, to be seen by his people and to see them, and in particular a king must travel the border of his kingdom, to maintain its integrity, to know his lands and to pray for their blessing.
“This king was a wizard also.” The monk met Sarah’s gaze. “He was Firstborn, and the lord of one of the Ohio kingdoms. And he was married to a queen of another land, an empress, and together they were wealthy and powerful and loved, but they had no children.
“They were loved by most, but not by all. The empress had a brother, who thought the empire should be his, and so he hated his sister and even more he hated her husband, because he was a stranger and he was Eldritch and because he sat upon the imperial throne as the empress’s consort. Do you know what a ‘consort’ is?”
The question was directed at Young Andy, but Sarah intervened. “It means he was the empress’s husband, but he wasn’t the emperor. She stayed in charge.”
“Very good,” Thalanes murmured. “So the king rode the bounds of his kingdom, away in the west, with a few chosen companions and his personal troop of soldiers for his defense. And one terrible night, there was a grave accident, and the king was left wounded and dying.
“The king couldn’t be saved by all the art of his companions—his wounds were too terrible—but he didn’t die immediately. As he lay bleeding, he saw that he was sheltered under an oak tree, and he asked that three acorns be brought to him. He instructed his companions to take the acorns to his wife the empress, and then with his own blood and his dying breath he anointed them and pronounced upon them his blessing.”
“Ewww,” Andy said.
“His companions buried him and they returned to the empress. She grieved, tearing her dress and shattering her crown upon the floor. Her brother shut her away her and pronounced her mad. An election was called, and her brother came to sit upon the Imperial Throne.”
“Mad Hannah,” Sarah said, almost whispering. For the first time, she felt sad for the broken empress whose death notice she had read that morning. “And so the king must have been her husband, the Imperial Consort Kyres Elytharias.”
“Who’s that?” Young Andy asked.
“He was a sort of knight, I reckon,” Calvin offered.
“Like a Teutonic Knight?” Andy asked. “Like a Savoyard, fighting the Turk?”
“King of Cahokia,” Thalanes said. “The Lion of Missouri. He belonged to an order called the Swords of Wisdom. Some of them fight the Turk, but they fight many enemies.”
“Well, that explains all the crazy acorn nonsense.” Even as he thoughtfully digested this story, Andy shifted from one foot to the other and couldn’t stop moving. “I always heard the Kings of Cahokia was wizards, and they don’t know how to count to eleven.”
“Thirteen, you mean,” Sarah told him.
“Do I?” Young Andy was confused. “All I recollect is as they count in twelves, not in tens.”
“That don’t seem right,” Calvin said. “A man’s got ten fingers, in Nashville and in the Ohio both.”
“True,” Thalanes admitted. “The question is, because man has ten fingers, should he look around him and force everything else into systems counted by ten? Or should he look for order in the world around him, and number things as God has numbered them in the cosmos…for instance, by twelves?”
“It’s man as has dominion over the beasts,” Sarah grumbled. “If horses could count, I reckon maybe they’d do it by fours.”
“Twelve houses of the zodiac,” the monk pointed out. “Twelve points of the compass. Twelve months of the year.”
“Months are made up,” Sarah said. “They could jest as easily be ten, or thirty, or two, or no months at all. Same for points of the compass.”
“Twelve cycles of the moon to each cycle of the sun, then.”
“Not exactly.”
“Anyway, that ain’t the way I heard the story,” Cal observed.
“No,” the monk agreed, “it is not. You heard that the Empress Hannah went insane and was immured for her own good. By her brother, Thomas Penn, who rides the Ohio with his flashing sword and his irresistibility to women.”
Cal looked embarrassed. “Yeah, I guess that’s jest about what I heard of the matter. And I heard Cahokia ain’t had a king since. It’s been under the Pacification.”
“Also at the hand of the Emperor Thomas Penn.”
“Bonuses paid for friend recruited!” one of the younguns chimed in, and Young Andy elbowed him aside.
“Crown’s lost and all,” Cal added more soberly.
“The crown and the other regalia of the kingdom. Things of power.” Thalanes let a silence settle for a few moments before he continued. “The consort’s companions delivered the acorns to the empress. Alone with a few trusted servants in her Philadelphia cage, she treasured those seeds of the mighty oak. She carried them about on her person, she caressed them, spoke and sang to them as if to children, and even gave them names.
“And then, one day, she ate them.”
“So she really was mad.” Sarah felt both revulsion and compassion.
Thalanes ignored her. “The empress conceived. Do you know what ‘conceived’ means, Andy?”
Andy snickered. “It means a sow and a boar make shoats. ’Round these parts, conceivin’ is one thing we know all about. I’m from a litter of seven myself, and Calvin there is the oldest of nine. Sarah, what are you, the Elector’s thirteenth, ain’t you? Some folks reckon thirteen’s a bad luck number, and that explains Sarah’s eye.”
Thalanes shook his head and laughed. “I don’t think the number thirteen explains Sarah’s eye at all. Nor do I think she’s bad luck. Nor do you, the way you take her lead.”
“I reckon not,” Andy agreed affably.
Sarah found herself warming to the little priest again. She steeled her heart.
“The empress conceived,” the monk went on. “And in time, she bore three children—triplets.”
“Conceived of who?” Andy asked. “I know it’s the woman as conceives, but she conceives of somebody, most generally a man, or she don’t conceive at all. The king was dead, right?”
“It’s just a story,” Sarah objected.
“She conceived of the acorns, apparently,” Thalanes explained.
Cal whistled low. “Are you tellin’ us this is a true tale?”
“The children were born…marked. Disfigured, some would say. They were taken at birth by loyal servants. They were ridden to far corners of the empire and hidden, and nothing was said of their birth to the new emperor.”
“It figures an oak whelp couldn’t e’er be normal,” Andy reasoned. “Did they have little barky caps with stems on their heads? Hard, shiny faces?” His grin made it clear he had decided not to take this story seriously.
Thalanes walked in silence.
“Then what?” Cal asked. “Is that the end? That don’t sound like the end of no story to me.”
“Years passed. The empress believed she was dying, and longed to know more of her children,” the monk continued slowly. “Of the three loyal servants, only one had returned, her dead husband’s chaplain and father confessor and now her confessor also, and she importuned him for information. In his weakness, he finally succumbed. He told her only about one child, the oldest, the one he had hidden. He told the empress where he had placed the child, and he told her about the baby’s mark. The empress’s oldest child was born with one eye swollen shut and inflamed, and in all the time the father confessor had traveled with the baby, that eye had never healed or opened.”
“She had a witchy eye, then. Was it much like Sarah’s?” Young Andy wanted to know.
“Yes,” Thalanes replied. “It was just like Sarah’s.”
There was a terrible, terrible silence.
“That still ain’t the end of any story,” Cal repeated.
“No, it ain’t,” Sarah jumped in, “but it’ll have to do for now. Time to leave the emperor’s road.”
Turning the cart was no complicated operation and didn’t particularly require special attention, but Sarah wanted to end the story. The rest of the Calhouns took her lead and didn’t press Thalanes for any more of the tale. She felt the monk’s eyes resting heavy on her as she took the mule’s lead rope and walked it off the Pike onto a narrow dirt track.
“Sorry,” Calvin said to the little monk. “I didn’t mean any offense, I’s jest singin’.”
“You have nothing to apologize for.” Thalanes put his hand on Calvin’s arm. “I like the song, too. Many great songs have words that are pure nonsense.”
They followed the trail into the woods, beginning to turn orange and yellow, and then up as the land rose beneath them and the path became the knife edge of a steep, forested ridge. The track was wide enough for the cart, but only barely.
The younguns resumed their jostling and Sarah wondered about Calvin, and about the monk. Cal was not a man of many words at any time, but he was normally conversational, and now he was sunk in a thoughtful silence. Was he feeling rueful, or embarrassed at his song choice? She smiled at him to show her support. When she caught his eye, he smiled back at her, but shyly.
That look made Sarah feel queer and uncertain of herself.
As for the monk…he seemed kind, but he was a foreigner and a painfully nosy one at that. He cared way too much about Sarah’s personal affairs, and the whole deformed-acorn princess story struck her as a ridiculous lie aimed to make her feel self-conscious.
Which she refused to do.
The ridge ended where the crown of the hill began; the track ahead rose up through a narrow stone canyon, leading up to the forested cap of the mountain.
Cal whistled, loud, hyoo-hyoo-hyoo-whee-up, a sort of birdcall that belonged to no bird but served as a recognition sign, and three young Calhoun men appeared, each casually carrying a long rifle. One slipped into view out a crack in the canyon wall ahead and two faded from the woods. They all wore the hunting shirts and breeches of Appalachee men.
“What you got there, Auntie Sarah?” one of them called, strolling from the trees. “That feller don’t look like no Calhoun to me.” He spat a squirt of brown tobacco juice into the leaves.
“I’m a friend,” Thalanes said immediately.
Young Andy took the lead rope and continued to drag the mule and cart uphill, younguns bouncing all around him like kernels of popping corn, while Sarah and Calvin stopped with the monk.
“He’s a priest, Shadrach,” Sarah added. “Claims he’s a friend of the Elector.”
“I don’t know if I can let him up, bein’ a priest.” Shadrach eyed Thalanes with suspicion.
“I’m unarmed.” The monk spread his arms wide.
“Arms ain’t the issue. I’m New Light,” Shadrach explained, a mocking edge to his voice, “and so’s the Elector. So’s James over there, and especially Red Charlie, that feller up the canyon, he’s really New Light.”
“I admire New Light Christians.” Thalanes was far too soft, too gentle. These rough Calhoun boys would tear the monk to bits like a tissue paper doll. Sarah had mixed feelings about that prospect. “I respect the choices of all God’s children, and I especially respect any choice of spiritual commitment.”
“I thank you, Father,” Shadrach said, executing an ironic little bow, “but our commitment ain’t the issue. The issue is that we like hard preachers up here in the hills, and we don’t much care for churches and priests.”
“I see,” the monk said.
“So I might could let you up the mountain, but only if you can convince me that you’re a hard preacher…” Shadrach raised his eyebrows, “who just happens to be a priest.”
“You want a sermon?” Thalanes clarified doubtfully. He was so mild in his manner, Sarah thought it had to be a trick. She half-expected him to raise his hand at any second and turn Shadrach into a toad.
“Hellfire and brimstone, Father.” The Calhoun sentinel spat a third time into the carpet of fallen leaves. “You give us a hellfire and brimstone sermon, and I’ll send you up. Otherwise, I don’t see as I can let you past, and I certainly can’t be responsible for the actions of Red Charlie. I consider myself a man of principle, but he has strong feelin’s.”
Thalanes smiled at Charlie and James. Sarah thought it was about even odds between the monk’s getting turned away and his getting outright shot. Either way, she’d be rid of him.
“Are you listening, Charlie?” Thalanes called up the canyon in a voice that surprised Sarah with its booming volume. “Here’s my sermon. ‘Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’”
Shadrach seemed caught off-guard and puzzled. “I told you hellfire and brimstone, monk.”
“Or else you go to hell.” The Ohioan snarled the last few words, then brushed past Shadrach and started up the canyon.
The Calhoun guards looked at each other, at a loss. Red Charlie Calhoun, face colored like a lobster and his copper hair down to his shoulders, took a half-hearted step to block the priest’s way.
“Did—did you jest tell me to go to hell, old man?” Shadrach hollered.
“Let him up!” yelled a voice from the top of the draw, and Charlie backed away. The Elector, Andrew Calhoun himself, towered at the end of the track, collar to toe in his customary black, waving with his one arm to call off the guards. Sarah and Cal stared from the bottom of the canyon.
“This absolutely has to be the strangest Tobacco Fair day I ever seen, Sarah,” Cal said to her as Father Thalanes disappeared up the top of the canyon. “What’s goin’ on?”
“I dunno,” she said, “but I think I jest saw my pa invite a priest up onto Calhoun Mountain. I b’lieve the whole world is about to turn upside down.”