“I cannot decide if you are the empire’s best bootlicker, or its worst.”
Chapter Five
“Virgo rises in the spring, yes,” Temple Franklin said. “But Virgo rises every spring. Surely, with the influence of Mars collected to your benefit…”
“Shut up, Franklin,” Thomas Penn said.
“Am I mistaken?”
“Virgo rises with the equinox, Temple. The equinox was six weeks ago. She is risen, so to speak. Shall I now wait until the next equinox, to see her setting?”
“I defer to Your Imperial Majesty.” Temple doffed his hat, a tall affair with a brim that curved up over Franklin’s ears. “You are Philadelphia’s great astrologer.”
“Now you’re being obsequious. And what is that godawful hat you’re wearing?”
The two men rode horseback to the Walnut Street Prison. Temple had suggested a coach, one built of thick oak, reinforced by spells of the wizards of the College. Thomas had insisted on being more visible to his people, and he waved to them now.
Someone in the crowd sang as Thomas and his Machiavel rode past.
Lord Tom went a-courtin’, he did ride
Sing-song, Mississippi, Ohio
With a sword and a pistol by his side
Sing-song, Mississippi, Ohio
Princesses came, one, two, three
To the lord of Philadelphi-ee
And the chairman of the Dutch Company
Sing-song, Mississippi, Ohio
Others joined in. The song was a novelty, having sprung up in Philadelphia taverns the day after Thomas’s engagement to Julia Stuyvesant was announced. Thomas had been pleased until Temple Franklin admitted to having paid a poet to compose the song himself.
“Just don’t have the man killed to keep the secret,” Thomas had grumbled, and had thereafter pretended to be displeased. As he rode now, though, he tapped his own thigh in time with the music.
He rode ’til he reached the Hudson’s shore
Sing-song, Mississippi, Ohio
And he swore that he would ride no more
Sing-song, Mississippi, Ohio
Julia was the daughter fair
Sing-song, Mississippi, Ohio
Of the very wealthiest Dutch meneer
Sing-song, Mississippi, Ohio
The singers sang the name Julia as if the girl had been named by Pennslanders, rather than the YOO-lia of the Hudson River Republic. And Adriaan Stuyvesant was far from the wealthiest citizen of the Hudson River Republic, but his colleagues of the Dutch Ohio Company had been motivated enough by the thought of trade peace with Thomas’s Imperial Ohio Company to come up with a staggeringly good dowry.
“It’s a postilion hat, Thomas,” Franklin said.
“You look liked a damned coachman.”
“Yes, that’s why they call it a postilion hat. Postilions wore them once, but the gentle classes are wearing them now, as well. The hat is very au courant, I assure you.”
“And I suppose you must also wear the stock tie and the white gloves?”
The Lightning Bishop’s dissolute grandson smiled. “It is the height of fashion for a successful professional man in Philadelphia, or a man of landed wealth, to dress in a fashion indistinguishable from the fellow who drives his coach.”
“This is why you wished to ride in the carriage—so that the conveyance would complement your hat?” Thomas guffawed. “You planned to ride up front and crack the whip, did you?”
Miss Julia wore her dancing shoes
Sing-song, Mississippi, Ohio
She’d dance whatever tune he’d choose
Sing-song, Mississippi, Ohio
“Let the barrel organ and the squeeze-box play!”
Sing-song, Mississippi, Ohio
“We’ll dance until the break of day!”
Sing-song, Mississippi, Ohio
The details of the song were picaresque and charming. Thomas resolved to dance with Julia as soon as possible.
Temple Franklin smiled softly. “Your Majesty has advantages of personal beauty and grace that I, alas, do not. I am only attempting to make myself sufficiently presentable so as not to undercut the splendor of Your Majesty’s presence.”
“I cannot decide if you are the empire’s best bootlicker,” Thomas said, “or its worst. You are certainly its most incorrigible.”
“I am thoroughly committed to all my duties. But I was saying, I have taken steps to gather all the influence of Mercury that I can—”
“And I was telling you to shut up. Any man who has read his Picatrix knows that the faster planet produces the weaker effect. Therefore, Mars and Venus when applicable, yes, but Jupiter at all times.” Thomas cleared his throat. “Jupiter at all times.”
A black windowless coach waited a few lengths up the street from the prison’s steps. Despite the cool, moist air of the May morning, Thomas smelled a fetor when he came within fifty feet of the coach. Atop the coach hunched a tall man in a peaked black hat, maggot-white skin showing through multiple holes in his tattered brown cloak.
That was Ezekiel Angleton, or it was the Lazar that had once been Ezekiel.
Within the coach would be Oliver Cromwell, in his child body, stolen from one of the College’s Parletts. The Lord Protector still seemed to be able to hear everything said in the presence of any of the still-living Parlett brothers, here or in the Ohio, with Director Schmidt. Ezekiel had taken to acting like Cromwell’s body servant, driver, and personal guard.
Thomas had asked Angleton to invite the Lord Protector to join them here.
The warden was a thin man who stood curved forward like a question mark on the steps of the prison, wrapped in nankeen knee breeches and waistcoat under a coat of black velveteen that had been worn to a high polish. He wore a neat white perruque, a short and unelaborated nod to fashion. His solitary presence boded ill, Thomas feared. It meant the damned fellow was likely to want to talk.
“Captain,” Thomas said, “you and your men will wait here with the horses.
The crowd around the prison was thick—families who had heard that the Emperor Thomas would be releasing prisoners today, as acts of clemency for his imminent wedding. The Philadelphia Blues, the reconstituted company of dragoons who acted as Thomas’s bodyguard, pushed the crowd back from the steps and the front wall of Walnut Street. Thomas handed the captain his reins and approached the steps.
“Your Imperial Majesty.” The warden bowed low. His high forehead was bald over a hawklike nose, and iron-gray hair falling down three sides of his skull was gathered into a green ribbon at the nape of his neck.
Thomas had to make an effort to remember the man’s name. “Mr. Cavendish.”
“Lord Thomas,” the warden continued, “I have come to beg you, in the name of the memory of your illustrious ancestor William Penn, to remember the great traditions of this prison.”
Thomas nodded and tried to show patience with a smile. “Sleeping naked in a common room? Solitary confinement for the lucky few? Flogging for the obstinate?”
“The first Landholder abhorred executions,” Cavendish said. “Your grandfather built this prison to honor that sentiment and continue the Penn tradition of mercy.”
“Thy grandfather,” Thomas said, chiding the warden for his slip.
“Thy grandfather.” Cavendish blushed.
“Yes.” Thomas waved to the crowd of people waiting beyond the cordon of dragoons; they cheered. “I am here to continue the Penn tradition of mercy, myself. I shall be pardoning and releasing prisoners, and the people of Philadelphia know it.”
“Prisoners who have sufficient wealth,” Temple Franklin murmured.
“But thou hast also instructed me to build gallows,” Cavendish said.
Thomas nodded, letting his face grow solemn. “I shall be emptying out your prison today, warden.”
Angleton arrived. He moved with long, lurching steps, and black worms writhed in black gel around his eyes, which had gone completely white. Thomas nodded at the Lazar who had been his friend and servant at Harvard.
What dark path have you walked since, my Roundhead friend?
He didn’t have the stomach to ask what dark path he himself might be on.
Behind Ezekiel came Cromwell, in the pale dead flesh of a young boy.
The warden frowned. “You’ve come to free them all?” Then realization spread across his face like a sudden dawn. “No. Those you don’t free, you will hang.”
Yaas. As a first step.
Ezekiel Angleton’s voice broke into Thomas’s mind like the crackle of dried leaves, or the snapping of an autumn bonfire.
The warden straightened his back, rising from a question mark into an exclamation point. “Then I must tender my resignation immediately.”
“You didn’t build the gallows, I take it,” Franklin said.
Never mind, Ezekiel said.
Would the Lord Protector insist that the designated men die? And if so, would he insist that Thomas himself do the deed?
“But you have arranged the wagons?” Thomas asked Franklin.
“Naturally.” Franklin smiled.
“A canal would be convenient,” Thomas said. “Once we’ve finished the sewers, we should think about building canals to send boat traffic west.”
“Noted.” Franklin bowed.
“You may resign,” Thomas said to the warden, “but do not leave. When I am done here, the Walnut Street Prison will have at least one occupant.”
Cavendish’s pale complexion grew gray, but he bowed and said nothing.
“Surely,” Franklin said, “the good warden has assembled the prisoners who are to be released. As an act of mercy.”
The warden nodded. “They stand waiting within the doors.” He hesitated. “Shall I bring them out?”
Temple Franklin adjusted his absurd hat and smiled at Thomas. “Perhaps the emperor would like to address the rejoicing families.”
“Fewer words are better in these situations, I think,” Thomas said.
Franklin bowed his head. “The magnanimity of the deed will speak almost entirely for itself. Almost.”
“I’ll release the men when you’re ready,” Cavendish said.
Temple Franklin smiled blandly. “The ninety-seven men. I’ll be counting them carefully.”
Thomas climbed the steps halfway and turned to face the crowd. Behind and above him rose the prison’s bell tower with its narrow cupola. To either side of him, stone guardhouses framed the steps and connected them with the walled-in prison yard below. The crowd had grown during the course of his ride, and the dragoons held back perhaps as many as a thousand Philadelphia burghers, along with their wives and children, along Walnut Street. Smoke drifted across the mass of people, bearing with it the smell of bread and bacon, and a low sun in the east cast long shadows.
He heard Ezekiel’s voice again in his mind: Ani magbir et hakol. Since no one else reacted, Thomas guessed the words were only for him. Since they were in a language other than English—and in good Roundhead tradition, he had always known Ezekiel to perform his castings in Hebrew—he assumed Ezekiel was performing some act of gramarye.
He smiled at his former fellow student. Ezekiel smiled back, revealing teeth that were long, yellow, and pointed, like the teeth of a hound, sprouting from gums so red that his mouth appeared to be full of blood. The Yankee had pinched a corner of his cloak into a cone, and was holding the cone near his mouth.
Thomas managed not to shudder, and addressed the crowd.
“Neighbors,” he said, and his voice boomed at an unnaturally loud volume. Ezekiel’s work? “Citizens of the Empire of the New World. Fellow dwellers on the great Penn Land Grant, and beneficiaries of the broad-minded generosity of William Penn.”
The crowd cheered. Too many words already, but Thomas felt he had to officially give a reason for his largesse.
“I am to be wed.” More cheering. “In consideration of my nuptials, I am today releasing ninety-seven inmates of Walnut Street Prison. Every man released is pardoned of all prior crimes. Let us welcome them back into our society with open arms.”
The crowd cheered a final, sustained time, and some of them broke out into more verses of the wedding ballad:
The fairies raised an urchin queen
Sing-song, Mississippi, Ohio
The ugliest you’ve ever seen
Sing-song, Mississippi, Ohio
The beastkind rampage in the west
Sing-song, Mississippi, Ohio
With all that racket, Tom can’t rest
Sing-song, Mississippi, Ohio
Cavendish had retreated to the double doors at the top of the stairs. He now opened them, and men emerged. Cavendish had at least followed Thomas’s instruction that the men were to be fed well for the three days prior to their release, and bathed this morning. They blinked at their freedom, and some walked as if they were drunk, but they rushed forward, deloused and scrubbed, into the arms of women and children. The sound of joyous weeping warmed Thomas’s heart—this was why the empire needed a strong ruler, so that freedom and health, not to mention functioning sewers and canals, could be rained down upon its deserving peoples.
Thomas retreated from the crowd without ceremony, into the prison, and found Cromwell, Angleton, Franklin, and the warden waiting for him. “There is a gate in the back, I presume,” he said to Cavendish. “I would hate to disrupt the celebrating families with the sight of less-fortunate prisoners being sent off to a different fate.”
“There is.” Cavendish’s voice was bitter. Crossing through the central hall of the prison building, he pointed out through the yard. The prison was shaped like the letter U, surrounding a central yard on three sides. On the fourth side, opposite the prison’s front door, was a high stone wall. Set into the center of the wall, piercing it through a thick barbican tower, was a gateway.
“The wagons are ready when you are,” Franklin said.
“Have you segregated out the Children of Eve?” Thomas asked.
Cavendish’s shoulders slumped. “I have done everything you…thou asked, except build the gallows.”
Cromwell laughed, a sound like crockery exploding.
“Commanded,” Thomas said. “I did not ask anything, I commanded it.”
Cavendish nodded.
“Give your signals,” Thomas said, gesturing to both Cavendish and Franklin.
He stood watching the yard below through a wide glass window. The gate opened and thirteen long prison wagons rolled in, driven and accompanied by keepers in Imperial blue. The prison’s staff brought out a long line of prisoners, who were loaded into the wagons, where they leaned against iron bars or huddled on straw that would soon become filthy. Many gazed up at Thomas, but few looked at him for long.
He, on the other hand, forced himself to stare at them. These were sacrifices he was making, and they would not be the only sacrifices. He must make them—he had no choice—but the honest way, the noble way to make sacrifices was to acknowledge and accept the cost.
He tried to look at each face separately, for at least a moment.
When the wagons were full and locked, Thomas and his retinue descended into the yard. The morning sun was fully in the sky now, turning the moist air into a thick, unpleasant stew, rich with the scent of sweat and tooth decay. The Walnut Street jailors stood in disarray around the wagons, slouching, picking their teeth, and grinning.
“Do we need these men?” Thomas asked the Lord Protector. The jailors stared in awe at the sight of their emperor talking with a naked boy.
We do not.
Thomas nodded. “Men,” he said, “the Walnut Street Prison is closed, at least for now. If you lack employment, I invite you to seek it with the Imperial Army, or with the Imperial Ohio Company, both of whom need experienced, hard workers to carry out the Pacification of the Ohio, as well as the continued struggle against the Cahokian upstart. But whatever you do, you must leave the prison grounds. Now.”
They left.
Cavendish remained. “I assume I am not dismissed.”
“You are not.” Thomas turned to the Lord Protector. “There is no gallows.” He wanted to suggest waiting, but he doubted Cromwell would accept that suggestions. “I am, however, wearing my sword.”
The strange child-man body that carried the Lord Protector within it looked frail and short, but the voice that came out was an aural attack. Thou shalt not require thy sword, my son. I have a wedding gift for thee.
Thomas nodded, unsure whether he should feel dread or relief. “Direct me.”
Kneel. Give me thy hands.
Thomas did as instructed. Cavendish stepped back, breathing hard. Temple Franklin showed admirable self-control, but he watched closely. Ezekiel Angleton grinned like a wolf.
The Lord Protector took Thomas’s hands. He pressed his thumbs into the center of Thomas’s palms, and the pressure went immediately from firm to painful. Thomas gritted his teeth and didn’t cry out.
I give thee first this warning, my son. Thy banns are published, thy bride cometh. Thou mayest touch her to lie with her. Do not touch her otherwise.
Thomas bowed his head, stunned. He felt no loss at the instruction not to touch Julia Stuyvesant—his wedding was a political and financial arrangement, and not a love match—but he felt confusion. What was happening?
Thy touch shall be death, the Lord Protector continued. To all. From this moment on.
The Lord Protector’s forefingers and thumbs abruptly pierced Thomas’s hands, sinking physically into his flesh. Thomas grunted, feeling a sensation of burning or acid, but didn’t move. When Cromwell stepped back, there was a small hole, half an inch across and blackened all around the edges, drilled through each of Thomas’s palms. Thomas could see the gravel of the prison yard through his own hands.
He rose to his feet. Feeling that his will was forced, but feeling no despair in that, he turned to face the prison’s warden.
Cavendish dropped in turn to his knees. “Your Imperial Majesty,” he said. “Lord Thomas. Please. Please, I beg thee.”
The men in the prison wagons, and the men in Imperial uniform who were to drive them west, stared.
Thomas reached forward with a trembling hand. He felt as if he were reaching forward to touch the consecrated host, or perhaps extending his hand to grip a lightning rod in the middle of an electrical storm, and his hand shook.
He wrapped his fingers around Cavendish’s throat and squeezed.
The flesh where he grabbed the prison warden immediately turned black. Spidery lines of black, like cracks, or veins, spread out from where Thomas touched the man, and all his color seemed to be drawn into those black lines and then disappear. As the last color drained from the warden’s face, his eyes turned milky white and his body slumped in death.
And Thomas felt alive.
Alive and strong.
An awed silence fell over the yard. Thomas broke it by casting Cavendish’s corpse to the ground with a thud.
“If Cavendish had family,” he said to Temple Franklin, “let’s give his widow a pension.”
Franklin nodded. “I will have it done.”
“After all, we are cash-rich again. And I’m going to need to borrow those gloves of yours.” Thomas turned to face Oliver Cromwell. “First, I shall deal with all the Children of the Serpent who are still in the prison.”
You will find them delicious and nourishing, the Lord Protector said into his mind. And so will I.
* * *
The Treewall flourished. This was no surprise; it had sprouted into verdant growth again on the day of the equinox, when Sarah Elytharias had entered the walled city of Eden in that strange space that was and also was not within the Temple of the Sun atop Cahokia’s Great Mound, and Luman Walters had almost entered with her.
Almost.
He did not regret his choice to remain outside. Something—he believed it was Cahokia’s goddess—had given Luman the gift of gramarye that day. He believed that he would not have received the gift, if he had tried to enter Eden without an invitation.
He took the gramarye as a gift, and as a message.
You too, Luman, can be approved by the powers of Heaven. You are imperfect, and you are not yet standing in the center.
But you can be approved.
The Treewall had survived the earthquake on the day of the queen’s collapse, and two further earthquakes since. Each quake cracked the wall, but the wall knit itself together again afterward.
A mighty enough tremor, it was clear, might shatter the wall entirely.
In addition to the Treewall, the Gun Trees flourished. There were twelve of them, arrayed in a semicircle on Cahokia’s landward side, and each held an enormous cannon high above the ground, gripped within its very trunk. The guns had each been named after one of the apostles, and the trees had acquired the names of the guns in turn. A week after the repulsion of the Imperial besiegers, the first intrepid pair of Cahokian lovers had picnicked in the branches of the apostolic cannon trees.
A third set of trees had sprouted, not on the morning of the equinox, but late that same day, and they were scattered around the city. Some had grown up within the holes pounded through the Treewall by Imperial cannons, and Luman—and others—had at first taken them to be the Treewall’s attempt to repair itself. And indeed those trees had sprouted, and within days the regrowing Treewall itself, weaving into the branches of the new growth, filled in the gaps in the Treewall as if they had never existed.
But the new trees sprouting elsewhere around the city did not grow into the Treewall, or come to resemble it. Instead, they sprouted separately and grew within days into full-sized trees. They were strange trees in appearance, with white bark and leaves of such pale green that the leaves, too, appeared white from a distance. Their trunks were thin, and remained smooth and branchless until seven or eight feet above the ground, at which point they sprouted broad, leafy branches that reminded Luman of nothing so much as palm branches. The Cahokians had named them Ashtares.
They smelled sweet, of citrus and cinnamon.
The thickest stands of Ashtares grew about the height of the Great Mound itself.
He stood on a wet morning in May beside one particular Ashtar. It grew in an avenue, between a spot where Imperial guns had breached the Treewall, and the Great Mound. Luman could think of no reason why the spot should be significant, and no reason why this tree in particular should speak to him.
But it did.
He brushed the smooth, wet bole with his fingertips. He knew no braucher or Memphite incantation that would tell him anything, but he had brought a dowsing rod with him. He’d carved his name into the split hazel rod and sung appropriate psalms over it as he’d created the instrument, and now he was prepared to ask it questions.
Foot traffic passed, and donkeys, and the occasional cart, sloshing through puddles. He didn’t love the idea of someone eavesdropping, but then again, he didn’t love the idea of creeping out at night to attempt this divination. It seemed too much like skullduggery, and he wanted to be done with that sort of trade.
And he definitely wanted to attempt this divination in the presence of the Ashtar in question.
He pressed his divining rod gently against the tree’s trunk, massaging both bits of wood up and down until he couldn’t feel the difference, and the two seemed to have become a single tree. He incanted the rodsman’s psalms over them as he did so.
For good measure, he essayed a bit of gramarye at the same time: “Virgam facio,” he murmured over the rod. “Virgam ex arbore facio.”
Curious how similar the words virga, rod, and virgo, virgin, were.
He walked in a circle around the tree, and then he began to ask the rod questions.
“Am I Sarah Calhoun?”
Nothing.
“Is this the month of December?”
Nothing.
“Is my name Luman Walters?”
The rod bobbed.
“Is this particular Ashtar connected with me somehow?”
The rod bobbed, but that was such a broad question that it was nearly useless. All it confirmed was that Luman wasn’t imagining things.
“Did I plant this Ashtar?”
Nothing.
“Did this Ashtar grow here because of some deed of mine? Was this Ashtar caused to grow by some object I once owned? Did a spell of mine cause this Ashtar to grow?”
Nothing.
Luman hesitated. “Does the serpent goddess want me to do something with this Ashtar?”
Nothing.
Luman shook his head in frustration. What could it be?
“Have I seen this Ashtar in some other form?”
The rod bobbed.
“Did I see its seed? Did I see its fruit? Did I see its planting?”
Nothing.
Luman looked down along the avenue, at the scattered arrangement of the Ashtares. He looked up the other way, toward the Great Mound, and saw its pale green mantle of newly sprouted trees, shrouded in the rain and in the low clouds. Running from the former location of the breach in the wall up to the mound where the Imperials had finally assaulted Sarah—and Oliver Cromwell and the Lazar Robert Hooke had broken through into the Temple of the Sun and attempted to assault its goddess—the trees reminded Luman of nothing so much as an invading army.
“Did I see this tree when it was a person?”
The rod bobbed.
A chill ran up Luman’s back.
“Was this tree a child of Adam before it became a tree?”
The rod bobbed.
Luman Walters tried not to think about the strangeness of that answer. He focused instead on whom he might know, who could have become a tree. One of Cahokia’s defenders? One of its assailants?
“Was this Ashtar once Notwithstanding Schmidt? Sherem…” he couldn’t remember a surname, “Sherem the Polite? Alzbieta Torias? Robert Hooke?”
Nothing.
He tried to think of stranger possibilities. “Was this tree once Sarah Elytharias?”
Nothing.
“Was this tree once…Luman Walters?”
Nothing.
He heaved a sigh of relief.
“Hey, hetar,” a voice called, “what are you doing?”
Hetar was an Ophidian word. It meant something like friend, and was informal. Luman turned around and found he was being watched by a group of young Firstborn, none of them older than fifteen. They wore broad hats that kept the rain off their heads, and a combination of oilpaper slickers and wool cloaks.
“I’m trying to figure out something about this tree.” He smiled, then pointed at his dowsing rod. “This is an old technique for getting answers. It’s called a dowsing rod, or a Mosaical rod, because Moses and Aaron had rods in the Bible.”
“Dowsing rods find water.” The young woman who said this looked like she could have been Sarah’s cousin, pale skinned and blotchy, with stringy black hair and eyes full of curiosity. She lacked Sarah’s hard edge, though. “Are you trying to find out whether there’s water in this tree?”
Luman shook his head. “I feel drawn to this tree. I feel as if, well, it’s embarrassing to say because it makes me feel a bit silly, but I feel as if this tree wants to talk to me. I don’t suppose you know anything about this tree, do you?”
They all shrugged and shook their heads.
“You should start a college of magic,” the girl with stringy hair said. “Cahokia doesn’t have one.”
“If I did,” Luman said, smiling, “would you sign up?”
“Yes,” she said immediately.
“Really? Even though I’m not Cahokian myself?”
“You’re Queen Sarah’s wizard,” the girl said. “If you taught classes on how to use a dowsing rod, I’d go.”
“Queen Sarah made the trees grow,” one youth said.
“They sprouted the night the Imperials got through,” another added.
“Do you live near here?” he asked them. “Were you here on this avenue on the night the Imperials got through the walls?”
They all nodded.
“What happened here, that night?” Luman smiled at the children. He wished he had candy or something to offer them, though they looked too old to be bribed with sweets.
“There was the wagon with the sick people,” a red-haired girl volunteered.
A child with a thick growth of freckles in a saddle across her nose pointed at the wall. “There was the Spaniard lady. She threw the cannon down off the wall and smashed the draug. And then she came over here and killed another draugar.”
Several of the children nodded.
“The Indian draugar,” the freckled child clarified.
Luman frowned. “Indian? What kind of Indian?”
The children all shrugged.
Luman felt a growing suspicion like a tickling sensation in the pit of his stomach. “Was he wearing a tall hat? A tall hat and a red blanket?”
The freckled child nodded.
Luman took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Then he stepped back to make room for the operation of the rod, gripped its fork with his two hands, and pointed its shaft out, parallel with the ground. “Was this Ashtar once a Haudenosaunee named Dadgayadoh?”
The rod bobbed.
Luman felt light-headed. Dadgayadoh had been a good trader, an ambitious Company man from the Ohio Forks. He had become a draug…and then a tree.
Luman wanted to sit down. He almost wanted a drink to steady himself, but he had sworn off alcohol to his Memphite initiator, years earlier.
“So?” the girl who resembled Sarah asked. “Are you going to start a college of magic?”
Luman laughed at the incongruity, and then smiled. “You know what? Maybe I will.”
* * *
“I have not felt at home in many years,” Bill said.
“I regret that I was not able to make New Orleans a more accommodating place for you.” Cathy smiled at her betrothed. “I did try.”
They rode horses through the streets of Cahokia, he would not say to where. They crossed many-sided plazas and passed building after building in a state of partial construction; many had been shattered or burned by the Imperials or the beastkind, and more had been knocked flat by earthquakes. Cathy shielded herself from the rain with a baleen-framed umbrella that Bill had given her, while Bill relied on his coat and hat.
Bill laughed. “My lady, but for you, New Orleans was a hell on earth. But that is not what I mean. I am a soldier, and a cavalryman, and my life has been lived in saddle, tent, and hotel room. I am a man of Johnsland, but it is many years since I spent any significant time there. I need a home.”
He stopped his horse and Cathy stopped beside him. She reached out to touch his hand, big and muscular, and wet with cold rain. “I have felt the same.”
Bill nodded and took her hand. “I hoped you would say that. I hoped you might feel that this could become our home.”
She smiled at him. “Cahokia is our home, Bill. But truthfully, I would spend another twenty years in tent and saddle, so long as I could be with you.”
“Heaven’s finials, Cathy, I am so tickled at your words that I can scarcely bring myself to point out that you misunderstand me.”
Cathy’s heart skipped a beat, but her long practice at concealing uncertainty served her well, and her smile remained in place. “Whatever can you mean, my knight?”
“This.” Bill released her hand and gestured, and for the first time, Cathy really noticed the building beside which they had stopped. It was a low mound, of the Cahokian residential style—its first floor was half-sunk in the earth, with additional stories built atop it. Only this mound was wrecked and burned, its timbers askew in the mud and its thatch only vaguely remembered in tufts of scorched straw lying here and there. “I had hoped this could become our home.”
Cathy gasped. She tried to say something elegant, and couldn’t find words.
“I want roots again,” Bill said. “I want them to be with you. And Sarah gave me…gave us this house. I shall have to build, but for you I will build, even if it means building a mound. For you, I will build a thousand mounds.”
Should she tell him about Landon Chapel?
Cathy looked at the ruined house and saw possibilities. She saw timbers raised and a thatched roof above them, or perhaps a flat roof for stargazing. She looked at the nearby houses and saw neighbors and shops. She saw children, flashing across a puddled street, and imagined that they were hers.
She should tell Bill.
But not yet.
“It is perfect, my love,” she said.
* * *
Achebe Chibundu asked for the Eze-Nri’s blessing before he left. He waited until they were alone, in the Palais.
The Eze-Nri, whose god within had demonstrated itself mightier than the god within the city’s old chevalier, immediately understood. “You wish to undertake something dangerous, Achebe?”
“I wish to avenge the death of your father.” Achebe knelt before Etienne Ukwu. “With your god and my god assisting me in a righteous cause, surely nothing can be dangerous. But first, I need to get past the serpents.”
Ukwu smiled solemnly. “My god has been working to find a means to avenge my father’s death.”
“My god and I accept.”
The Eze-Nri took a small powder horn from his belt and sifted grains of gunpowder into Achebe’s hair. Then he rested a hand on the wrestler’s brow. “Maitre Carrefour,” the Bishop of New Orleans said softly, “go with this man. Bring the Rainbow Serpent to ward him against the basilisks of the Mississippi and against all venomous things. Choose his paths for him so that he may find what he seeks and may find his way of return. Open every door before him, and shatter every manacle that binds. Make him truly Lucifer, the Adversary and the Morning Star, the venomous fang of justice.”
Achebe nodded his agreement and rose. “I do not do this to rob you of your vengeance. I do this to be your vengeance.”
The Eze-Nri nodded. “Go.”
Achebe carried nothing with him; he was going to an army, and would find what he needed when he arrived. He wore a loincloth and a short tunic. He walked, singing songs of revenge and justice.
He walked to Bishopsbridge, though he had no intention of using the bridge itself; that would only attract attention. Instead, once the Barbican rose into sight above the oaks above the river, Achebe turned right and walked ten more minutes. Then he dropped down the bank, onto the mud of the river.
A serpentine body slithered across his upper arm, and he felt feathery wings slap his face. “Serpent,” he said in his native tongue, “I am your brother. I shall fly like you, and move unseen as you move, and like you I shall kill with one bite.”
The basilisk left him alone.
Achebe’s heart beat faster. Another basilisk bumped into his thigh and a third struck him in the back, but he did not fear.
“Maitre Carrefour,” Achebe murmured. “Chukwu, and all other gods who may hear the Bishop of New Orleans, go with me now.”
He did not pray to his own god, his chi. Onye kwe, Chi ya ekwe, his father had told him many times—if a man agreed to a thing, his chi agreed to it as well, and a man’s destiny was in the care of his personal guardian god. The chi connected a man to Chukwu, the sun.
Achebe waded into the cold waters.
Other things slithered across his legs as his toes squelched mud between them, but he did not fear. Once he was waist-deep, he dove neatly forward into the water and swam.
He didn’t worry that the water might wash away the gunpowder anointing he had received; the power of the Eze-Nri was in Achebe now, not in the grains of powder. He could feel the power in his limbs as they swam, and in his lungs as they inhaled the warm, humid night air, and then blew it out underneath the water in great bursts of bubbles.
Without meaning to, he took the long parade steps of the first minutes of a wrestling match up the bank of the river. He inhaled deeply, watching starlight shimmer off the scales of the swarming basilisks, and flexed the muscles of his chest, arms, and shoulders. With those muscles, he had lifted horses off the ground and broken men’s legs.
He walked through the forest toward the Spanish camp.
The Spanish army was impossible to miss. Their fires and torches ran parallel to the river for several miles, but set back far enough so that their sentries wouldn’t be bitten by the basilisks, and the force was vast.
Lusipher stalked his prey silently through the woods. He looked for the silhouettes of men, listened for breathing, searched for the glint of starlight on a metal helmet. Finally, he smelled tobacco.
Guards.
“Buenos días,” he said in a loud voice. “Buenos días. Etufuola m okporo uzo.” I have lost my way.
“Quien va allá?” A sentry loomed closer in the darkness, grabbing Achebe by the shoulder and shoving a pistol against his belly.
“Buenos días! Etufuola m okporo uzo!”
A second man detached himself from the shadow of an oak tree; this one held a musket, and sucked the stump of a cigarette. “No ves que es uno de los africanos?”
“Si, ahora lo veo.”
“Tiene armas?”
“No. Es casi nudo.” The first Spaniard shook Achebe. “Qué haces aquí? What you do here? Qu’est-ce que tu fais ici?”
“Buenos días! Etufuola m okporo uzo!” Achebe said again. “Agua! Agua!” If he gave any indication that he really understood Castilian, he’d only have to tell more complex lies.
“Dónde está su acampamento, los africanos?” Pistol asked Smoker.
“Están por allá.” Smoker waved an arm. “Distante, pero. Al lado de los japoneses.”
“Allá!” Pistol mimicked the gesture, waving his weapon. “Me oyes? Allá! Distante!”
Achebe bobbed his head up and down. “Buenos días!” he cried one last time, and then he walked in the direction indicated.
He had no interest in finding los africanos, of course. He preferred not to talk to anyone who could interrogate him. He stole a pair of trousers and a long white shirt from a laundry line at the periphery, and then walked into the camps.
His hopes for a place to hide were quickly dashed. If he had understood the rhythms of this army—why and when men were driven from their beds to stand watch or drill, and what the patterns of traffic were—then he might have been able to situate himself somewhere unseen, and with a strong vantage point. As it was, he feared that at any moment, if he stopped moving, someone would challenge him or try to assign him a task.
He passed a sleeping unit of Mexican warriors with stone flakes set into their clubs and a banner made of a jaguar pelt. He passed lancers sleeping very close to their horses, each man lying alongside his barbed lance. He passed pale-faced men he thought might be Germans, with large blond mustaches and short, wide-mouthed guns.
He was passing a quartermaster’s wagon, laden with dried meat and beans, when he noticed the messengers.
A steady trickle of men moved about among the units, dressed in white and wearing white caps. They carried papers, and Achebe slowed his pace to watch one deliver a paper to a man at the quartermaster’s wagon, and then stand and wait as a reply was written out.
When the man turned and jogged the other direction clutching his new message, Achebe followed.