by D. J. Butler
“We’ll work out further signals over time,” Bill said to Chikaak, whose tongue hung out of his head and dripped on the dark earth of the trail. “For now, we only want to experiment with three signals. Three tones each, three short melodies, if you understand my meaning.”
“Three words,” Jake explained.
“Given the weather,” Uris said, “something not involving loading or firing muskets.”
Late in the morning, it had begun to rain. The water was cold and came down in a miserly drizzle, but it was enough to confound marksmanship. Cal had been drafted into the effort to show the beastkind musketeers how to wrap the locks of their guns and plug the bores against the rain.
“We shall begin with advance, retreat, and halt,” Bill said.
Chikaak barked several times. “That will do for advance.” Then he barked differently. “And that is halt, or nearly enough, as I would say it to my kind.” A third time: “retreat.”
It took multiple attempts, but Bill found a combination of notes on the Heron King’s horn that came close to Chikaak’s sounds for advance, retreat, and halt, and he did it using only three notes: high, middle, and low. Then he explained the sequences to Jacob Hop, who took the horn to try and got them right the first time.
Uris leaned to whisper to Cal. “Your Dutchman is quite the learner.”
“Yeah,” Cal agreed. “Remembers me of a baby in that way, starin’ wide-eyed at the world and takin’ it all in with no effort.”
Uris raised his eyebrows in thought.
Then the beastfolk had to be taught. They stood gathered in a clearing a hundred yards from the trail, snorting and hooting and pawing at the moist earth, as Chikaak yipped and growled, then pointed to Bill, who hadn’t dismounted, and said in English, “advance.”
Bill blew the notes for advance.
The beastkind lumbered forward in a mob.
Bill blew halt, and they stopped.
“Again!” Bill cried. “Impress upon our men, Chikaak, the importance of moving in lockstep. Left foot together, then right, then left, you understand?”
Chikaak herded the beastmen back across the clearing, barking and snarling at them as he did so. The coyote-headed warrior pantomimed marching, then stepped aside. “They’re ready to try again.”
Bill blew advance.
Unevenly, jostling, but more or less together, the beastkind advanced. Bill laughed with glee astride his big gray horse, the beast prancing from side to side until the beastfolk were about to overtake him.
Then he blew halt, and the beastfolk warriors stopped.
“Hell Bells, Jake!” Bill roared. “You’ve done it! And Chikaak! I’d promote the both of you on the spot, only then we’d have two officers and no sergeant, and Freiherr von Steuben would have me whipped.”
“By the Serpent’s breath,” Uris murmured. “He’s learned to talk to the beasts.”
“Yeah,” Cal agreed. “His English is startin’ to sound almost natural, too.”
Through Chikaak, Bill dismissed the beastkind warriors to eat, and Cal found himself rushing after Uris to talk to Bill.
“You have accomplished the miraculous, Sir William!” the counselor cried.
“You mistake me, suh.” Bill leaned forward and rested on his saddlehorn. He looked peaked after just the morning’s ride. “I am no miracle-worker. I will admit, however, to having two surprising fellows in my employ.”
Uris grabbed Bill’s saddle like he wanted to climb up onto the horse with him. “But Sir William, please allow me to expand your vision even further.”
“Further than walking forward and stopping? By all the gods, suh, you must resist the mad ambition that seeks to swallow you.”
Uris laughed aloud. “You plan a combined force of pikes and muskets, yes? Or at present, muskets and bayonets?”
“It is what I have,” Bill said. “I shall follow as best I can in the footsteps of old John Churchill, who taught us that infantry is the thing that advances to the enemy and shoots him to bits.”
“Tonight, let us examine your warriors’ gear and mine,” Uris said, “and reapportion some of it. I can give you real spears, for instance, rather than short carbines fixed with bayonets.”
Bill stroked his long mustache. “That would be an improvement.”
“What about the horses?” Uris asked.
“Hey!” Cal objected.
The other two men turned to look at him quizzically, and he realized he didn’t have a good reason to protest their use of the animals he’d been leading. “Only I reckoned we might could sell some of ’em, or trade ’em for food.”
“Uris is right, Calvin.” Bill’s eyes gleamed. “If we can mix some of his men in with the beastkind, we can mount the others. That gives us pike, musket, and horse. The pike protects the musketry as it advances up to the enemy as close as it may, and as it retreats. The horsemen are held in reserve, either to quickly move to meet flanking attacks, or to drive forward when the enemy is in disarray, cutting him down with sword.”
“A few weeks, Sir William,” Uris said, “and you are ready to go to war.”
Bill chuckled. “A very small war, suh. All together we may have seventy fighters.”
“Gideon defeated the Midianites with only three hundred.”
“Pray, suh, let us not test how our warriors drink. I would be afraid to be any fewer than we are.”
“Advance, retreat, and halt were a good choice to start,” Jacob Hop said. “What other commands do we need, Captain?”
“Left face, right face. Double-time advance, full retreat, charge.” Bill tugged at his own chin as he considered. “Load muskets, fire. Cavalry charge and withdraw. That should be enough to get us started, and we can devise more as we develop more complex movements. Ideally, I’d like to be able to communicate more precise commands in relation to the firearms: poise, cock, half-cock, aim, and separate commands for each step of reloading the weapon is how the blue book has it. Though naturally, we do not wish to become too elaborate. Discipline and victory are generally better served by simple commands that are hard to misconstrue. Please tell me, counselor, that your Firstborn warriors are not tone-deaf.”
“On the contrary,” Uris said. “We are a people with a great musical tradition. What we don’t have long traditions of, though, is horsemanship.”
* * *
“Tell me how it is you come to have a claim on the Cahokian throne.” Sarah watched Alzbieta’a aura react as she heard the question, tightening, changing shade slightly, vibrating at a different frequency. Turmoil. Fear?
“Your Majesty.” Alzbieta looked down at the ground. “I support your claim.”
True.
“I don’t question it. I only want to understand your right.” Sarah laughed. “I want to understand my claim.”
Alzbieta still hesitated, and now she looked past Sarah at Cathy Filmer.
Cathy looked back with hard eyes.
The three women, together with the Podebradan Yedera, waited on a low rise while Sir William put his beastkind through their three-commands-only paces a little more. Forward and back, forward and back they went. In the meantime, Jacob Hop went among the Firstborn spear- and swords-men defending the knoll and whistled short tunes to them.
Sarah’s servants trained her warriors. Excellent. With seventy men she couldn’t attack her uncle’s legions in Philadelphia, but she might be able to take a town if she needed to, or a cadre of the chevalier’s soldiers.
Or a pack of berserk beastmen in the service of Simon Sword?
The Polite Sherem hadn’t recovered. Sarah looked at him now, curled at Alzbieta’s feet inside the divan, counting his own fingers and toes. She saw clearly in his aura the absence of guile, the open reactions, the childlike curiosity, and the slow processing that marked him as an idiot.
Was it her fault? Any objective analysis would surely say yes, in part.
But also, her alternative had only ever been to surrender, to give up on her father’s throne.<
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And on her sister and brother.
And where were they now? And were they in danger? And from whom?
So she refused the guilt her own mind offered her. The wizard had made his choices, and now he suffered for them. That was less morally offensive than Sarah’s own suffering for the choices of her uncle, for instance, or for the choices of her more sinister enemy, the Necromancer Oliver Cromwell. It was less burdensome to Sarah, in the end, than the suffering she knew she was putting Calvin through by refusing to treat him as her lover.
Thinking even fleetingly of Cromwell reminded her of the Necromancer’s servants for whom there had never been a proper accounting. Where had the Sorcerer Robert Hooke ended up? Sarah had last seen him through her witchy eye, torn away in the current of the Mississippi River, but not destroyed. And Ezekiel Angleton, the Covenant Tract preacher who had entered into some unholy pact with Cromwell that had become manifest on Wisdom’s Bluff, had simply disappeared.
Sarah sat a horse with Cathy on another mount to one side of her, and Alzbieta in her sedan chair, carried by her eight uncomplaining slaves, to her left. Beyond Alzbieta, Yedera stood with feet apart, hand resting on her scimitar’s hilt.
“You may speak in the presence of Mrs. Filmer,” she said.
“No, Your Majesty. Some things I may not speak in the presence of Mrs. Filmer. Other things I may not speak in your presence, not yet. And other things still I simply may not speak here.”
Cathy’s eyes got even harder.
Sarah almost bawled the priestess out, but caught herself. “I had a counselor, too. He was also my mentor in the arcane arts. A Firstborn, like you and me.” She peered through the palanquin’s veil and saw the priestess’s soul let slip a flash of indignation. So Alzbieta Torias didn’t fully accept Sarah as one of her people. Not yet. “His name was Thalanes, and he was a monk of the Order of St. Cetes. One of the monastic orders particular to the Firstborn.”
“I know well who St. Cetes is.” Alzbieta’s sentence began haughtily, but finished in self-imposed abnegation. “Of all the Firstborn saints, Cetes is very much on our minds these days.”
“Of course you know him. Please have patience with me, cousin Alzbieta.”
Alzbieta looked up in surprise.
“I am used to being the one who knows…well, if not everything, then an awful lot. And now I’m coming into a situation in which I know very, very little. I’ll need your instruction, but I’m afraid I’m poorly suited to being a student. The only three people who have ever been able to teach me were a one-armed old man I thought was my father, who was stubborn enough to stare down the emperor himself, and this monk, Father Thalanes, and Cathy Filmer. I don’t think any of them enjoyed it very much, but of the three, Mrs. Filmer has been the most gracious. I beg you to be gracious with her, in turn.”
Cathy smiled, warmly but with steel in her teeth.
“Tell me more about Thalanes,” Torias said.
“What I was going to say is that he told me once, late at night on a lonely road, after we’d been attacked by demonic emissaries of the Necromancer Oliver Cromwell—” she noted with satisfaction Alzbieta’s shudder of fear, “that my father possessed something Thalanes called ‘royal secrets.’ Secrets that might, for instance, relate to the meaning and use of Cahokia’s regalia. Whatever these secrets were, Thalanes couldn’t know them, though he was my father’s confessor. And he thought my father might have taught them to me, had he lived.”
Alzbieta said nothing.
“So if you tell me you can’t speak here, or you can’t speak in the presence of my trusted companion, I assume that must be because the answer to my question is such a secret as those.”
“Not all secrets are royal. Understand this.” Alzbieta held a palm up, facing Sarah, and she drew a tight circle in its center with her finger. “Imagine that this ring contains the royal secrets. Secrets about succession. About regalia. About language. About the throne itself. About sacred spaces. About marriage.”
Marriage?
“Go on,” Sarah said.
Alzbieta drew a larger circle in her palm, completely surrounding the first. “This larger circle contains the secrets of the priesthood. Calendar secrets. Ritual secrets. Magical secrets, maybe, for those who are gifted in that way.”
Which Alzbieta was not, Sarah could tell from her aura’s tint as she said the words. A hint of disappointment. Self-loathing?
“All royal sacred knowledge is priestly, though not all priestcraft has to do with the throne.”
“Kingship…or queenship…is a kind of priesthood. Not only do I know things I cannot tell you here, or now, or in the presence of others, because they are sacred, but there are things I do not know.”
“Royal secrets.”
Alzbieta looked down again. “Also, there are things I should not tell you, because I am not supposed to know them, though I do.”
Intriguing. Was Alzbieta about to confess to a misdeed? “Part of your claim is that you are my father’s kin.”
“True. Another part of my claim is that I’m a priestess.”
“The Handmaid of Lady Wisdom, you said.”
Alzbieta nodded. “The Mother of All Living.”
“Eve?” Sarah was puzzled.
Alzbieta said nothing.
Sarah decided to leave that one for later. “And it is part of your claim that you know secrets you are not supposed to know.”
“I nursed your father once, in an illness. He was not yet married then, and his mother was conferring priesthoods and secrets upon him as fast as he could bear, priesthoods and secrets his father had tried to eradicate. Kyres was winning his fame already as the Lion of Missouri, bringing hope and justice to the battered farmers of that wild land, but a battle with a sloth had left him badly injured, and his wounds became infected.”
“I hear the sloths get big in the Missouri.” Sarah cracked a grin. The mere thought of enormous sloths was a relief from all this talk of throne secrets, priesthood secrets, and so on. And what exactly had her father’s father been trying to eradicate?
“They’ve always been there,” Alzbieta said thoughtfully. “I think maybe they once roamed widely over this continent, and have been reduced to a mere remnant, holding on in the woods of the Missouri.”
“Because of…Peter Plowshare?” Sarah ventured.
“The Heron King?”
“The peaceful version of him, anyway. I don’t see Simon Sword going out of his way to save giant sloths, unless he could turn around and use them to attack someone else.”
“But Simon Sword and Peter Plowshare are the same person,” Alzbieta said. “Simon Sword is merely the war title of the Heron King, as Peter Plowshare is his title in times of peace. No?”
Sarah laughed.
“Seems Sarah has something to teach you, too, Your Holiness.” The look on Cathy Filmer’s face bordered on smug.
Alzbieta hesitated.
“Trust me,” Sarah said.
Alzbieta shrugged. “Maybe. Although maybe that land has some other special power. Maybe whatever it is that leads people to say that it is Eden has also preserved the giant sloths, the dire wolf, the aurochs, the large-toothed tiger, the tiny forest horses, and the others.”
“Somebody says Missouri is Eden?” Sarah shook her head. “You get outside Appalachee, folks believe all kinds of nonsense.”
“Others would say you carry your own Eden within you,” Alzbieta said. “Is that less nonsensical? Or what of those who say that Eden can only lie where the land is plowed, that after all the garden lay east of Eden? But Missouri is a wild land, untamed despite the children of Adam who live there. It’s a land of secrets, and of raw creation.”
“You were telling me about my father.”
“He was wounded, he was ill. My people found him and brought him to me, and so I nursed him. We were cousins, and friends from earliest childhood.”
“First cousins?” Sarah asked.
“No, the connection is more dis
tant. But we were friends. And…for a short while…a little more than friends. As my physicians applied unguents, balms, tonics, and poultices, as my chanters sang and my musicians played, and as my incense-priests sweetened the air about his bower, I stayed by his side. We talked when he was awake. When he was sleepy, I recited to him the lays about his ancestors who led our people here and founded the seven kingdoms. And in his sleep he dreamed, and sometimes talked.”
“He told you royal secrets.” Sarah was uncomfortable thinking that this distant cousin of hers had once been her father’s lover, so she forced herself not to dwell on it.
“I didn’t know it then. I took them for fables, or riddles, or sheer madness. He was near to death more than once, and delirious often. But then I saw that many of the queer things he told me matched images on the walls of the great sacred places in Cahokia, the Temple of the Sun and the Basilica, and I began to wonder.”
“If you know secrets you’re not supposed to know, are you forbidden to pronounce them?”
“I fear that I am. And of course, there are secrets I don’t know. Secrets I fear may not even be written down.”
“Is there a place and time in which you might be able to divulge what you heard from my father?”
“I hope so,” Alzbieta said. “Though I fear that my people…our people may have lost the ability entirely to create such places. At least, we seem to have lost the ability to create the most powerful places. But perhaps, by allusion, by the artful posing of riddles, by the casual juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated texts…I might be able to lead you to the answers.”
“I could command you,” Sarah said.
“I pray you don’t.”
“It’d be a shortcut. What you’re describing sounds like it would take years of prancing about in a well-stocked library before I’d figure anything out.”