by D. J. Butler
Montse found the door she sought, a door she’d known for many years. She could almost imagine that the indentation at her shoulder height had been pounded into the wood by her knuckles alone, over time, but that wasn’t really true. Still, she threw her fist against the worn spot now, thumping out the announcement of her arrival.
“Jo sóc la Montse!” she called again, though of all the people she might visit in the bayou, this one likely did not need to be told her name.
“Endavant!” an old woman’s voice cried from within.
Montse hesitated. Something in the tone of the voice; something in the way Carles hadn’t wanted her to see his hands.
She pointed to a shadowed corner between two nearby huts. “Allà,” she whispered. Just in case.
Margarida was quick enough to sense there might be a problem. She raised her eyebrows in question at her aunt, but did as she was bid.
“And stay calm, no matter what happens.”
The pirate stepped off the walkway. The ground was muddy, but firmer with the October chill in the air than it would have been in July. Please, Mother Maria, do not let me step on a sleeping basilisk.
The mud was why she wore her tall, thigh-high leather boots. She couldn’t run as fast, but her legs were the most protected part of her body. This was important for a woman who made her living jumping in and out of bayous at night.
She thought she was far enough away that Carles wouldn’t see her. She hoped her intuition about him was wrong, but she’d start with the most pessimistic assumption possible. She began creeping around the outside of the hut.
“Endavant!” the old woman’s voice called again. The voice belonged to Cega Sofía, the seeress Montse had come to see, as she did every month. She came to learn whether her lady and friend Hannah yet lived, and whether she had been restored, so that Montse could return to her her child.
But Cega Sofía was choking as she called. Whoever was forcing her to call Montse was relaxing a grip around her throat only enough to let her yell endavant.
Montse looked back to Margarida or, as her mother had named her, Margaret. The girl held still where she had been told and peered out from her hiding place with large eyes.
Montse finally got to a large enough crack in the shack’s wall that she could place an eye to it and peer through. Within she saw the fortuneteller in her brightly colored silks, seated. Two men in blue uniforms stood beside her, one at each shoulder. One held a pistol to Sofía’s head.
From a nail on the opposite wall hung an oil lantern, lit and full.
Montse looked closer at the uniforms; their blue was not the Imperial blue, but the blue with gold fleurs-de-lis of the Chevalier of New Orleans.
Customs men? Gendarmes?
They must be here for Montse.
Montse looked back toward Carles and saw no movement. She waved an arm in Margarida’s direction and was pleased the girl promptly slipped across the walkway and into the mud to join her.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Montse whispered to her neboda. “But you’re about to have an adventure. When I shoot, you run that way—” she pointed, “and you’ll find moored boats. Not our boat, but others. Take one, and wait for me only for a minute. If I don’t join you within a minute, flee. You know where to go.”
“Back to La Verge Caníbal.”
Montse nodded.
“Montserrat!” Cega Sofía howled. “On ets?”
Montse drew one pistol from her coat pocket and sighted along the barrel through the crack. She squeezed the trigger—
bang!—
Margarida ran—
somewhere in the darkness, Carles cursed—
and the lantern exploded as her bullet struck it, throwing flaming oil up and down the wooden wall on which it hung.
Montse replaced the empty pistol in her pocket and drew her second. Pressing her eye to the crack again, she saw the larger of the chevalier’s two men dragging Cega Sofía to her feet and pressing a pistol to the old woman’s temple. The smaller man turned to face Montse, and was staring at the wall…looking for her.
She cocked her pistol and shot the larger man, immediately afterward throwing herself to the side. She heard his cry of pain and the muffled crash as he fell, and then the sound of answering gunfire from within the seeress’s hut. She heard the snaps of the wall’s wood giving way to two bullets that would have hit her had she not dodged.
Then she ran into the trees after Margarida.
The fire would force the chevalier’s men out, and it might give Cega Sofía a chance to flee. Maybe someone else in the village would help her run.
The thought made her stride falter. Where was everyone else in the village? Sofía didn’t live alone. This wasn’t a prosperous place, but there was an inn and there were several family homes. Other than in Sofía’s shack, Montse hadn’t seen a light.
She redoubled her pace, and when she caught up with Margarida, she almost knocked the girl down.
Margaret Elytharias Penn, known to herself and to the world as Margarida, stood at the edge of the bayou and wept. The wooden walkway here also ended in a rickety dock extending out into the water, but there were no boats.
Instead, there were bodies.
In the darkness, Montse couldn’t see faces. She was grateful, because that meant the girl couldn’t see faces either, and the faces of the dead can haunt one’s dreams.
As Montserrat had reason to know.
“No time to weep!” Montse grabbed her ward by the elbow and dragged her away from Cega Sofía’s cabin and deeper into the woods. “Breathe deeply!”
The seeress’s shack burned like a hundred torches, throwing light out into the swamp. The chevalier’s men—four of them now, no, five, surrounded Sofía herself on the walkway. Montse dragged Margarida behind a large cypress, shushing her with a finger over the girl’s mouth, and crouched to watch.
Clearly visible now in the light of the fire, Carles swaggered up the walkway toward the chevalier’s men. His thumbs were hooked in his broad leather belt, and his unshaven face cracked into a lopsided grin.
Carles said something Montse couldn’t hear.
Sofía spit at him, and he laughed.
Then one of the chevalier’s men pointed a pistol at Carles’s head and fired. The Catalan sentry dropped, hit the walkway, and bounced off into the mud.
“Montserrat!” Cega Sofía wailed. “Mata-me!”
Margarida looked at Montse, startled. “What, she asks to be killed?”
“Yes,” Montse muttered. She pulled her powder horns and other tools from her pockets and began to reload both her pistols.
“Are you going to do it?”
The fortuneteller clawed at one of the chevalier’s men. He held her off with a hand to her forehead, laughing.
Montse sighed. “If I were alone, yes. With you…I don’t know yet, let me think.”
“Why does my presence make a difference?” Margarida’s face looked angry in the dim light.
Montse did not want Margarida to get angry.
“It does, neboda. Shh. And be calm.”
Bang!
Montse looked up, caught by surprise, just in time to see Cega Sofía fall to the ground, dead. She felt ill at the sight. Monthly at least, for the last fifteen years, the old witch had given Montse the best news she could get about her friend and lady Hannah. Sofía had been her strongest connection to the Imperial household, and now the seeress was gone.
Margarida’s hair was beginning to twitch, switching back and forth like the tail of an agitated horse.
“Shh,” Montse whispered. “Calm.”
“I’m trying.” The girl took a deep breath.
“Come.” Montse pocketed her pistols, took Margarida by the elbow, and stood—
facing into a thicket of heavy pistols.
Four men stood with their guns trained on her and on her ward. There was nowhere to run.
“Nous nous rendons,” she said. “We surrender. Don’t shoo
t.”
“Call no man harmless until he is dead. My education
ended early, but I believe I remember that much of Aristotle.”
CHAPTER THREE
“Fire!” Bill yelled.
Chikaak, the scout with the head of a coyote, discharged his Paget carbine immediately. Several of the others fired with him. Then, in a ragged volley, the rest did the same, until every beastkind warrior capable of holding a firearm—eighteen, slightly more than half—had shot.
Of the row of bark targets Jacob Hop had propped up on the log at the far end of the meadow, only two had fallen.
Jake thought he’d have done better than the beastfolk, but he was very careful in how he handled guns around Bill. Captain Sir William Johnston Lee, as his full name and titles would call him, had agreed that Jake could be his aide, or squire, or sergeant. On the other hand, Jake knew from the sidelong glances Bill still threw at him that the Cavalier was not fully convinced Jake was now free of possession by the Heron King.
“Bill, dat is better than before, hey?” he called from where he stood to the side of the drilling warriors.
Chikaak yipped his enthusiasm.
Calvin Calhoun the Appalachee was cleaning up the pots from their bacon breakfast (the beastkind generally preferred to forage for themselves in the woods, though Chikaak had happily eaten several lightly cooked strips) and packing the horses. As he had promised Queen Sarah he would, Bill was taking this opportunity to train her troop of soldiers.
“Reload!” Bill removed his floppy black hat and slapped it against his thigh. Again, Chikaak and a few others promptly began reloading. When he saw the look of exasperation on Bill’s face, Chikaak barked—two high-pitched yips and a long, low yodeling sound—and the other beastkind carabineers grabbed their powderhorns.
The remaining beastfolk warriors, the ones who lacked the fingers or the proper eye placement to be able to effectively use firearms, crouched in a row in front of their fellows. They held carbines too, but they had bayonets fixed to their weapons, and they pointed the blades toward the mostly unharmed plates of bark.
Each of the beastkind wore a shoulder strap from which hung one of the cartridge boxes taken from the Imperial House Light Dragoons Sarah and her company had defeated two days earlier on Wisdom’s Bluff. The boxes were wooden blocks with holes drilled in them, and in each hole rested a paper cartridge containing powder and shot. Bill’s idea, which he had explained with delight to Jake the evening before, was that each beastkind carabineer could empty first the cartridge box of the fighter in front of him and then his own, giving each shooter access to a large supply of ammunition. The shooters now reached forward to snatch cartridges from the boxes in front of them, mostly successfully.
“Pikemen, stand!” Bill shouted.
Nothing.
Chikaak barked again, this time a tone in the middle of his range that peaked sharply in pitch at the end. Without meaning to, Jake found himself imitating the sound in his head, and humming it slightly under his breath.
Jake had been born deaf and mute in the Hudson River metropolis of New Amsterdam. His parents hadn’t wanted him, so he’d knocked about with a merchant uncle on voyages up and down the Empire’s shores until a bad night in New Orleans and a run-in with the gendarmerie had left him half-prisoner, half-employee on the chevalier’s prison hulks on the Pontchartrain Sea. He had some ability to read lips, if the speaker used Dutch or French—both languages he could puzzle out a bit in writing—but mostly Jacob Hop responded to gestures and kicks.
At least, that was the life Jake thought he remembered. If he focused on it, the threads of his past disappeared into chaos, but if he relaxed and thought about nothing, he remembered snatches of experience. Stitching those rags together over time, he more or less remembered his youth.
He also remembered fragments of a life that was clearly not the life of Jacob Hop. He remembered racing at the head of a horde of animal warriors to shatter walls and bring kingdoms to their knees. He remembered the blood sacrifice of thousands of men on an altar raised to him, and he remembered marriages—not one, but several, over millennia—to glittering serpentine goddesses. He remembered the births of sons, and the humiliation of having to either defeat or be routed by his own spawn.
Because, for a few weeks, Jake had had a god in his body.
Simon Sword, the wrecking and reaving incarnation of the Heron King of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, had filled Jake’s body with his enormous soul. The soul had been too big for Jake’s frame, and the sheer spiritual pressure had burst out Jake’s nostrils, his ears, and his mouth—he had no better way to describe it—giving him the sense of hearing and the gift of speech he’d never had.
Washed by a flood of new sounds, Jake had found himself imitating them. When birds sang, he whistled back to them. He groaned softly to imitate the creak of harness. As he heard others speak, he subvocalized their words, even when he didn’t know their meaning.
And then he found that, very quickly, he did know their meaning. The god in his body had spoken lots of English, with Bill and with Sarah and with others, and upon the god’s departure, Jake was able to speak. Within minutes, he had found he could construct simple English sentences, too.
De gave van tongen, his preacher cousin Ambroos would have called it. The gift of tongues.
Though Ambroos might not have approved of the source of Jake’s gift.
Even Jake’s companions seemed to shift in and out of his memory, so that there were moments when he looked at Bill and couldn’t remember who the man was. The sole exception was Sarah. She was fixed and permanent, and she shone for Jacob Hop like a star.
Unevenly, the front row of beastkind lumbered to their feet.
“Hell’s Bells!” Bill roared. “Dismissed! We march in ten minutes!”
Most of the beastkind stood dully until Chikaak barked again.
Jake looked back to their camp in a stand of trees to see what Bill must have already seen; Sarah, Catherine, and Calvin were all mounted. Calvin led a string of horses—they couldn’t be entrusted to beastkind, either as mounts or to be led, because the presence of the beastfolk made the horses skittish. All the children of Adam in the party now wore blue coats, cloaks, and hats taken from the Imperial House Light Dragoons, other than Bill; Bill still wore red.
Bill stomped to join Jake, Chikaak slouching at his side.
“I’m sorry for our bad aim,” Chikaak yipped.
“But it’s improved, hey?” Jake pointed out.
“The aim is not my great concern.” Bill ground his teeth. “Naturally, I would be pleased as Punch if our soldiers were able to hit a man-sized target from twenty paces. Indeed, that is not an unreasonable requirement to impose on a musketeer. But even more pressing is the problem that only one of my warriors in five is even able to understand my commands when I give them. If we fight like barbarians, we lose half our strength!”
Chikaak growled low in his throat. “I could repeat your orders.”
“Yes, that’s what we are doing presently. And we may have to formalize that arrangement, if we can do no better. But if our soldiers cannot obey their captain’s shouted order until one of their number has shouted it a second time, we lose precious seconds at every step.”
“Ja,” Jake agreed. “And what if Chikaak is killed?”
“God forbid.” Bill nodded. “Or Peter Plowshare forbid, or whoever.” He rested one hand on the butt of a pistol tucked into his belt, and the other on Simon Sword’s horn, hanging at his waist from a shoulder strap.
“Peter Plowshare was a good god.” Chikaak bobbed his head and shoulders up and down enthusiastically. “I follow Sarah Elytharias Penn now.”
Bill sighed. “Well, Queen Sarah forbid, then. But now you’d better go find our trail. We ride in five minutes.”
“I found the trail this morning.” Chikaak grinned, exposing a row of yellow coyote teeth. “I don’t sleep much. Others are preparing to travel ahead.”
Jake
abruptly remembered a massacre of Elfkind, under a star-bright sky, and an unrestrained dance of victory during which a thousand prisoners had been killed. He thought the memories were of the Ohio, which lay ahead of them on their journey.
They weren’t the memories of the deaf-mute Dutchman.
“I suppose,” Bill said, “I had better make you a sergeant as well. Jake, do you object?”
Jake shook his head.
“Very well, although I believe we are not quite following Freiherr von Steuben’s scheme, lacking both an officer and corporals. Allow me to consult Her Majesty as to the appointment. I think it’s unlikely she will disagree, but she is well-versed in a surprising range of subjects, and it is possible she has read the Freiherr’s blue book and has a view on the matter. Chikaak, please invite the…men to form up.”
Chikaak bounded away, tongue lolling out of his mouth, to carry out his instruction. He had a coyote’s head, and though he would have been a taller man than average if he stood straight, Chikaak never stood straight. He hunched forward, and every step was a leap, shoulders first. The reddish fur on his coyote head spread out along both shoulder and tapered down his back in a V-shape, before blooming again to cover his legs, which were also the (oversized) hind legs of a coyote. Bill sometimes described Chikaak as coyote-headed, but that wasn’t complete. Chikaak was a big, muscular coyote-satyr, but he had ten fingers, a quick wit, and the ability to speak English.
He’d be a good sergeant.
“May I join the scouts, Captain?” Jake asked Bill.
“You look contemplative, Jake,” Bill said. “I know you are a pond of much deeper water than I, and I’d be pleased to know what you’re thinking.”
Jake rubbed his chin. Bill’s jaw took only a day to go from clean-shaven to a full beard supporting his drooping mustaches, and even Calvin, who much younger than Jake, had stubble on his face. Jake was beardless. He always had been. “I’m not sure. Maybe my waters are deeper than even I know.”
Bill frowned and arched an eyebrow at him. “Keep an eye on those waters, Jake. We don’t want to be surprised.”