by D. J. Butler
But other boats, or their passengers, had clearly been attacked.
The captain of one such vessel was willing to drop anchor and lay alongside the Ohio Germans’ keelboat for half an hour to tell what he’d seen, why his vessel was stuffed with elegant furniture, and why his passengers were all bandaged and stared constantly upriver behind them, as if fearing pursuit.
Beastmen.
Beastkind were rampaging in the Missouri.
Before any of her Ohio Germans had even muttered Simon Schwert, Kinta Jane knew what was happening. This was Franklin’s vision, this was why he had founded both the Conventicle and the Compact. It might even have something to do, she thought, with his construction of the Lightning Cathedral.
Because Peter Plowshare always dies, sooner or later.
And because Simon Sword is always a reaver.
The Germans muttered more prayers to their queer saints as they continued upriver, but they didn’t stop requiring Kinta Jane’s services. “Die Beruhigung des Ohio,” Johannes tried to explain to her when she managed to communicate her curiosity. His breath was sweet, but Kinta Jane didn’t understand German and he spoke virtually no English.
Maybe that made them a good match.
Though it meant he couldn’t explain what Stolze Marie meant. Marie was Mary, but the hodge-podge of languages spoken daily in New Orleans included little German.
The Ohio Germans were picky about where they moored the boat at night, sometimes engaging in lengthy debates as they pointed alternately upriver and down to discuss possibilities. Kinta Jane followed all this only in part, but she noticed they tended to avoid the Imperial Ohio Company’s trading posts. From time to time they also pulled into difficult-to-spot streams flowing into the river, even going so far as to cut branches off trees and bushes growing alongside the creek and use them to cover the riverward end of their keelboat.
And those posts were hives of activities. The fact that soldiers camped outside them in tents, though winter was fast coming on, suggested that the three trading posts Kinta Jane saw were all full beyond their capacity of Company militia.
And then one overcast night, having left the trading post behind them and moving up the Ohio River mostly by the power of poles and German back muscles, the boat was hailed by a voice out of the darkness.
“Halt, who goes there?” cried one voice.
“Halt, wer da?” called a second.
Baskets were raised, revealing torches on two immense canoes. Gold-painted insignia on their blue hulls marked them as Imperial Ohio Company vessels, and the Company’s men wasted no time in leveling a row of guns, long and short, at the Germans. The Company soldiers looked like irregulars, without a consistent uniform or weapon, but the range was close enough that they couldn’t miss.
“Are you Hansa?” demanded a Company officer with a sword from the bow of one vessel. “Dutch Ohio Company? Traders?”
“Nicht, nicht, nicht!” The Germans tried to explain in slow, accented English and rapid German that they were only locals moving from one town to the next, by night because their appointment was urgent. They were laborers, they had a school to build, or was it a church? They were smooth enough in their falsehoods, but the Company officer wasn’t having any of it.
“No stamped passport? I’m afraid I have no way to tell you from customs-evading criminals. Don’t you support the Pacification?”
“Ja, natürlich,” Johannes said.
The Germans all grinned.
“Good. Then you’ll be happy to pay the thirty percent tariff on all goods you’re carrying. Prepare to be boarded.”
* * *
Nathaniel ran across the earl’s field, trying to get inside the outbuilding where he slept. Two scrawny Irish boys looked up from digging a ditch.
“Lookit Mad Chapel run!” the one squealed.
“He’s got the fear of Herne on him, hasn’t he?” squawked the other.
“Run, Chapel!” they cried together.
Nathaniel didn’t fear Herne, not exactly. He knew that the men who rode across the earl’s land and through the surrounding villages were only men, and their leader a man wearing a Herne mask. But he also knew that when night fell on All Hallows’ Eve, the voices he heard—the voices no one else could hear, and with them the shrieking of the wheels of heaven—would explode.
Nathaniel had encountered an itinerant peddler, a book-cadger, crossing the earl’s fields. He’d become distracted not by the few volumes the man carried on his back, but by the lengthy catalogs of books he claimed he could bring down from Richmond, upon order. Now Nathaniel raced against the sun.
~Kill the child! Kill the child!~
~Drink its blood!~
~Come to us! The water down here is so cold, so lovely. Sleeeeep!~
The heavenly squeal pierced his ear like a lance, and Nathaniel collapsed against the doorframe of the outbuilding, falling down into the dirt.
~Eat him! Eat him now, before he can stand!~
“Help me!” he gasped.
Then hands did help him, lifting him up and pushing him through the door. His vision held, though he couldn’t decide whether that was a mercy or not. A seizure at this moment might spare him an evening of pain.
He collapsed onto his sleeping plank, and a blanket was thrown over him.
“Thank you, Charles,” he mumbled.
“You’re welcome, Nathaniel.” It wasn’t Charles. Nathaniel’s head echoed too much with strange voices and the grinding howl of the world to be able to open his eyes, but he thought the voice might be Jenny Farewell’s.
“Thank you,” he said again, and burrowed deeper under the blanket.
He huddled in darkness, willing time to pass and trying to ignore the bloodthirsty howls, cries for mayhem, and threats that crowded into his cursed ear. He couldn’t tell how much time at passed, or even if time was passing at all.
And then he heard a gunshot.
He was accustomed to phantom voices and shrieks. He’d never heard a phantom firearm.
It was enough to spur his curiosity and chase away the other noises. Nathaniel crawled from his plank, hearing a second gunshot. The fire in the outbuilding was down to embers—the other men and boys he shared it with would be out all evening on the Wild Hunt, or at a dance, or otherwise celebrating the mad god of the Weald.
Afraid to open the door, he crept to a chink in the logs that he’d stuffed with a rag to block the wind. Pulling out the rag, he pressed his face to the gap, looked past the smithy, and saw the earl’s stables. There stood five men masked and cloaked in black; four of them had simple cowls hiding their faces, but the fifth wore Herne’s head, the neck and muzzle of a stag that added two feet to the wearer’s height, crowned with a regal spread of antlers. Each of the five members of the Wild Hunt held a torch—the other lights of the manor had been dimmed already.
Between the Hunt and the stables stood the godi Wickens, leaning on his spear of office and holding up a warning hand.
Had the gunshots been a warning?
“No Yule log!” the old sheep-killer cried. “No Wild Hunt!”
“You defy Herne!” the man in the Herne mask roared. The mask had something in its mouthpiece that amplified and distorted the voice, but Nathaniel still recognized George Isham.
“No.” Wickens chuckled. “I defy the puke-child whelp of a pathetic madman. Your horses will not leave the stables tonight. The earl’s lands will not know the Wild Hunt. You will console yourself as pleases you, boy.”
George-Herne raised a hand to strike the godi, but one of his companions caught his wrist. They grappled briefly, and then George stepped away.
“Ill luck from killing a priest of Woden,” George agreed. “But not, I think, from simply moving him.”
With no ceremony, he knocked aside the godi’s spear, then picked the man up and hoisted him over the rail fence into the horses’ yard. The priest splashed into a trough of drinking water and came up coughing.
“Ing and Erce!” th
e godi shrieked.
The laughter of the Wild Hunt was cut short when the stable doors swung open. Standing within were the eight soldiers in Old One Eye’s black uniform, muskets raised and pointed at George Isham.
Wickens cackled as he dragged himself up by the rails of the fence. “No Wild Ride tonight! And no log for Yule, boy!”
George’s companions dragged him away, cursing.
~Ride, Herne! Ride!~
The shrieking returned and Nathaniel collapsed.
* * *
“This is too much, even from you.”
Etienne turned from examining the preparations for mass and found his brother Chigozie. Chigozie, unsurprisingly, looked angry. The black and white of his priestly garb stripped away his individuality and reduced him to a mere face, which had the effect of magnifying that face’s expression of rage.
Etienne resolved to remember that, for use on a later occasion.
They both stood within the cathedral’s chancel.
“I have been anointed priest as well as bishop, brother,” he said. “May a priest not officiate at the mass? I have been reading the books closely, but I would certainly be pleased to have your assistance.”
“You were anointed both priest and bishop very quietly.”
“The Synod thought it best.”
“Liar. His Grace, the Bishop of Miami, felt obliged to tell me he was voting for you, after all the years of hinting he thought I would follow in Father’s footsteps. He told me that you would be seated as bishop, and that you would be installed quickly and quietly, as you directed. That was his word, and it was striking: you directed.”
“How could I direct the Synod?” Etienne shrugged. “I was not even a priest, much less a bishop, still less one of their number. I was a layman and, let us be honest, something of a scoundrel.”
“Indeed. You were a Vodun houngan.”
“I am a Vodun houngan. Whose mother was a mambo, and speaks to him still.”
Chigozie raised his hand as if to strike his brother, but held back. “Do not defile her memory.”
“I do not defile her memory, brother. I do as she bids, every day.”
Chigozie staggered away from the just-mended rood screed where Etienne stood, raising his arms to the stained-glass image of God the Father above and roaring. “Why?”
“Love, I suppose,” Etienne said softly. “A son’s love.”
“Oh? A son’s love? And it must have been a son’s love that made you steal the body of our father and bury it in the woods!”
“You are listening to what people in the Vieux Carré say. Good. There is wisdom in rumor, properly sifted. The voice of the people whispers in the streets, all their hopes and fears.”
“The rumor I have heard is that you buried our sainted father in a Vodun ceremony.”
“He is not sainted yet,” Etienne said. “Though I will seek that, too, eventually. But he was saintly.”
“Answer the question!”
“I did not hear a question,” Etienne said softly. “But yes, I gave him a Vodun funeral. Vodun was the spiritual tradition of our mother, who was the love of his life. And the ceremony I gave him kept his body out of the hands of foul necromancers, who might have defiled him in ways that would horrify you even more than you are horrified by what I have done, brother Chigozie. Instead, his limbs are burned and safely buried, and his soul is free. And now I will give him a good Christian service, my first service as a Christian priest, so that his many parishioners who were too Christian to mourn with me in the streets can come remember my father in his church.”
“God’s church,” Chigozie said.
“Yes,” Etienne agreed immediately.
“And in that casket there,” Chigozie said, pointing at the simple but elegant wooden coffin resting on a low raised platform before the rood screen, “there is nothing of our father. Not his body, not his ashes. Did you even put any of his clothing in the coffin, any possession of his?”
“I did not.”
“You will pray over and bury an empty casket.”
Etienne hesitated.
Chigozie’s brow furrowed. “Etienne, what is in the casket?”
Etienne looked up at the stained-glass windows, and specifically at St. Peter, with his key. St. Peter, who was also Papa Legba, the great loa of the crossroads Etienne served. “If I tell you, I fear it will be the final rupture between us.”
Chigozie gripped his own head between his hands. “Etienne, what have you done?”
“I would like you to stay,” Etienne told his brother. “Indeed, I would like you to serve with me in our father’s memory. Perhaps as a suffragan bishop.”
“One does not become a priest to serve a dead man!” Chigozie snapped. “One becomes a priest to serve the living God!”
“I am trying to find common ground with you, brother,” Etienne said slowly. “I would not fight you. I would have you here at my side, in the battle that is coming. I need your wisdom, your priestly acumen.”
“Etienne.” Chigozie stared, eyes and nostrils bulging. “What is in the coffin?”
Etienne consulted his mother’s locket. Tell him the truth. All of it.
He sighed. “A wax image of the Chevalier of New Orleans. It is dressed in clothing made from fabric cut from uniforms of the chevalier’s gendarmes and it holds in its hand a copper coin stamped with his grandfather’s likeness. Regrettably, the chevalier is a careful man, who has his hair clippings immediately burned and the contents of his bedpan poured into the Mississippi River, so it is an imperfect effigy at best. But it is all I can do at the moment.”
Chigozie’s stare, if anything, hardened. “You intend to perform a mass for the dead over this effigy?”
Etienne nodded, grateful at least for the fact that his brother had chosen to confront him alone, in this place, rather than in the street.
“You will tell the world that you are burying our father. In reality, you are burying an effigy of the Chevalier of New Orleans?”
Etienne sighed and nodded again.
“A mass for the dead, said for a living man. This is a curse, brother. You would turn our father’s funeral into an act of black magic?”
“Against the man who murdered him!” Etienne meant only to speak his words, but they came out in a guttural yell. “Yes, Chigozie, I will use this mass as a chance to curse our enemy. That he murdered our father strengthens his connection to this mass, gives the spell power. That our father was murdered in this very spot only adds to the power of the liturgy. That the cathedral will be full of heartbroken worshippers, singing songs of death under my direction strengthens the spell, don’t you see?”
Chigozie backed away a step. “I see.”
“I am led by our mother, Chigozie. I always have been. And now, I will take vengeance on the man who killed our father. I will destroy him, any way I can. This is not our father’s funeral. Our father is buried, and at rest, and with his wife. This is our father helping me take revenge.”
Chigozie backed away further. “Our father would not take revenge.”
“No,” Etienne agreed, “he would not. But our mother would.”
“And who are you, to be so certain the chevalier is guilty of our father’s death?” Chigozie asked.
“Who am I?” Etienne asked, and then suddenly he found himself shouting. “I am a man with eyes, brother! The chevalier’s gendarmes and his Imperial guests entered this cathedral by force! One of those men, an Imperial soldier who was sleeping at the Palais, shot our father! The murder was witnessed by many, and now our great chevalier, fearing retaliation, hires more soldiers! This thing was not done in a corner, brother! It was shouted from the rooftops!” He paused to catch his breath and felt the sudden surge of the Brides’ power within him; they felt his need and they answered. “And yes, I directed the Synod to act quickly…so the chevalier would not stop them. Who am I, you ask? I am my father’s son.”
Chigozie turned, his faltering steps becoming a brisk walk.
Chigozie Ukwu didn’t answer or look back.
Etienne’s heart hurt, but he couldn’t run after his brother; instead, he succumbed to the Brides.
Ezili Freda sang to him in lilting, lyrical French, though when he tried to focus on the individual words of her song they slipped through his hearing like water through the fingers of imperfectly cupped hands. Ezili Freda was an animal force as a Bride, and the sound of her voice told Etienne he was about to be ridden to exhaustion. Ezili Danto sang along at the same time, but her voice was a strangled staccato cry, the arrested song of a slave or a silenced woman. She was the maid, always watching Etienne through the eyes of every Virgin Mary he saw, and though she would come to the bed with her more riotous sister, she would come to oversee, to nurture, and to heal Etienne of his exertions when they were done.
He would have preferred to be in his bed, but there was no time. Etienne staggered down the stairs into the crypt beneath the St. Louis Cathedral. There, Ezili Freda seized him bodily and began to whip ecstasy from him in great lashings.
“My loves,” Etienne murmured, sinking to the cold stone floor. “My loves.”
“You get outside Appalachee, folks believe all kinds of nonsense.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Cathy was enjoying a quiet ride with Bill. Though she had done her best with his injuries and Sarah had augmented his body’s healing processes with gramarye, he couldn’t walk without support. Cal had dutifully hacked him a sturdy crutch out of a dogwood branch, but Bill’s injuries gave Cathy an additional reason to stay close.
Leaving Wisdom’s Bluff and entering the Ohio proper had stirred up memories Cathy wasn’t ready to face. The man—a husband, of sorts, an escort, a gaoler—dead at her hands had been a trauma at the time, but Cathy had seen so much death since, in New Orleans as an infrequent matter of course but especially on the trail with Sarah and her company, that the once-vivid memory of his pallid flesh and dying gasps, though it hadn’t faded, had lost its power to impress.