by D. J. Butler
“I make it fifty fires,” Cal said softly. “Hard to tell, it bein’ so late, and lot of those fires’ve burned low. Iffen they’s ten men to a fire, that’s five hundred.”
“And if there are fifty, then twenty-five hundred.” Chikaak’s tongue lolled out of a toothy grin. “You can tell I’m a civilized beastman. I can do arithmetic.”
“Better’n I can,” Cal cracked. “I’d a said fifty times fifty is a passel.”
“To answer your question,” Chikaak said, “I think neither Peter Plowshare nor Simon Sword would find membership in your Empire any use at all.”
“Bein’ an Elector means you git to vote on taxes. And you’re gonna say the Heron King don’t pay any taxes now and why should he want to, and that’s right, but he’d git good roads and allies and a say in who the Emperor is.”
“Does the rain want good roads?” Chikaak asked. “Does the rising sun need allies? Does the hurricano care who sits on the throne in Philadelphia?”
“So when you agreed to follow Sarah…”
“My god asked me to,” Chikaak said. “And he warned me I may have to fight against him. And if that moment comes, I shall fight tooth and claw and do my futile best to strike down my god. As he commanded.”
“Jerusalem.” Cal’s head spun. “I reckon that makes somethin’ of a paradox, don’t it? Can you git yourself into heaven by fightin’ against God, if God commands you to do it?”
“There is no heaven,” Chikaak said.
“You die, what happens to you?”
“I return to the river.”
“As a fish?”
Chikaak shook his head. “I become one with the river.”
“Fore’er?”
“Someday, I return to the dry land again.”
“You had lives afore this one. You remember ’em?”
“There are few enough parts of this life that I remember, Calvin. But I know things that I cannot have learned here, knowledge deep down in my blood and under my nails. That is wisdom I earned in previous lives.”
“And iffen you’s good…righteous…I mean, let’s say you mount an especially ferocious attack against Simon Sword, like he told you. What, you git to come back as a bigger beastman? Or a higher kind of animal? Or you come back as a giant sloth, or somethin’?”
“There is no reward for my actions in this life. There is only the river, and the dry land.”
Cal scratched his scalp. Having stopped moving, he began to shiver from the cold, despite his long coat. “And what is it that makes you obey, then?” he asked. “What makes you willin’ to go attack your god?”
“I fill the measure of my creation,” Chikaak said. “I do it when my lord is Peter Plowshare. I do it when my lord is Simon Sword. I do it when my lady is Sarah Elytharias Penn.”
“Calhoun,” Cal muttered. He wanted to snatch Sarah back from this queer world of unthinking purpose and cosmic forces.
“I don’t think so, Calvin. I don’t think Sarah will ever again be a Calhoun.”
“Jerusalem.”
They were silent for a while.
“Your eyes are better than mine, Calvin,” Chikaak said. “Do you see banners? Or anything that would tell you who this is?”
Cal pointed down at a dark line that meandered through the camp and beyond it. “That there is a crick. Big crick, or a small river. And in it, I reckon I see boats.”
“I don’t see that far,” Chikaak said.
“Pretty sure they’re boats,” Cal said. “And it’s dark, but I’m thinkin’ they’re the kind of boats the Imperial Ohio Company loves.” He’d seen the company’s enormous canoes in Nashville on many market days. “Iffen only we could git a little closer, I might be able to tell if they’re blue or not.”
“Blue?” Chikaak’s eyes glinted. “Ah, the Imperial traders. But they come in much smaller numbers, twenty or fifty men to protect a trading post, or enforce a tariff.”
“I reckon we can wait until mornin’,” Cal said. “Then we’ll be able to see even from where we are.”
“You stay here, Calvin Calhoun,” Chikaak said. “Stay hidden. I’ll go look.”
To his surprise, Cal felt he could trust the beastman scout. “Lord hates a man as gets shot for no purpose, Chikaak. At least my lord does. Keep your head down.”
Chikaak chuckled. “Yes. Then the company men will mistake me for a stray dog.”
Cal held out a hand, catching a tiny crystalline burr of ice in his palm. “Is that snow?”
“Doesn’t it snow in your mountains, Calvin Calhoun?”
“It snows in Nashville,” Cal said. “Only the snow don’t generally stick.”
* * *
The loss of Mrs. Meeks the mule hurt when the snow began to fall.
Kinta Jane had turned northeast, and was heading for Youngstown on foot. If the real Mrs. Meeks hadn’t already sent a sheriff or a bounty hunter after her, she wasn’t going to do so now. She’d hidden under a bridge when a marching company of Firstborn warriors passed her going the other direction. She thought they might be Adenans, but she’d never learned the heraldry of the Seven Kingdoms. She lay flat on her belly shivering in a knot of pine trees when ten marauders raced the other way on horseback, stopping only to hurl flaming oil into a barn and shatter the gate of a sheep pasture.
Her remaining coins went quickly. And with one arm in a sling, men who ordinarily might have thrown her a couple of shillings for a few quick minutes off the side of the trail now turned their noses up in disgust. As her wounded shoulder began to fester, the noses turned up all the quicker.
The loss of the mule meant the loss of the sewing needle and thread, as well.
She considered robbing a traveler, but couldn’t bring herself to do it.
She did steal pumpkins from a bulging barn outside a village called Circleville, which had insane amounts of the squash stored in root cellars and warehouses. The name of the farmer she’d burgled was du Pont, and he had so many pumpkins he couldn’t possibly miss the three she took.
She roasted the orange squash over small fires and ate them with her stiletto.
A band of traveling Sauk Algonks took pity on her and gave her a few handfuls of dried venison.
And she wasn’t really dressed for winter. Even wearing a wool blanket she’d stolen from a drying line didn’t protect her against the cold wet wind blowing against her knees and down her neck.
Cold wind and now snow. And every shock of cold summoned an answering stab of pain from her wounded shoulder and her cracked ribs. She checked her bandage when she could, but as she ran out of clean cloth and saw the bandage become clotted black and yellow with blood and pus, there was little she could do.
She carried the carbine under her blanket to keep it dry, but it became heavier with every mile that passed beneath her feet.
When the snow reached the height of her knees, her legs became numb. The air grew thick with flurries of fat flakes and she knew she was a day’s walk, or maybe two, from Youngstown. Soldiers marched and countermarched in the snowstorm around her, and she took to smaller and smaller roads to stay out of their way. She was too afraid, after her assault in Adena, to try to seduce any of the marching men. Instead, she staggered along, freezing and half-blind, looking for a warm, dry place to sleep.
Until she tripped on a tree root and fell into a drift of snow.
Trees rose up all around her, blocking out the sky. Where had the path gone? Somehow, she had wandered from it. The numbness had engulfed her wounded shoulder and spread now to her neck and face.
She was going to die.
She could almost reconcile herself to the fact. It had been a hard life, marked by two great sources of happiness: her brother René and their joint service to Franklin’s Vision. For those two goods, she’d willingly given up her tongue and ground out a dangerous and sometimes painful existence in the Faubourg Marigny. Now that René was dead, what did she have left?
Nothing.
Only…she knew that wasn’t true.
She had Franklin’s Vision.
She had the Conventicle.
She had a mission in life.
Kinta Jane needed to get to the dead drop in Philadelphia and tell the Conventicle what had happened, that René was dead, and that Simon Sword was active again on the Mississippi.
Wouldn’t there be other messengers who would bring the same message?
Maybe, and maybe not. But Kinta Jane had agreed that she would bring it. And in her mind’s eye she saw fire in the Ohio and the Kentuck, beasts of war unleashed upon the pyramids of Memphis and the fields of the Cotton League.
She rose to her feet, and then she saw the wall.
The trees grew so close to it, and the top of the wall was so jagged with the sharpened ends of its logs, that she almost took the barrier for part of the forest. But she blinked snow from her eyes and saw the palisade starkly, if not clearly, a dark patch against the white of the snow.
She stumbled forward and caught herself on the wall. The logs were still clad in scabby pine bark, and she scraped her hands. The sight of blood welling up from grated skin focused her mind.
If there was a wall, there must be a door.
It had to be a trading post. They built log palisades such as this, to protect the company’s goods against theft.
She turned left, keeping a hand against the wall. Good, company merchants. Imperial or Dutch, it didn’t matter. They’d have no reason to kill her, and indeed would be able to offer her a warm place to sleep and some food. Company traders must eat well enough, and Kinta Jane had things to offer them that they would want.
At the end of the wall she kept walking, not realizing that her fingers now trailed along empty air, and imagining her belly full of hot food.
But three steps later she caught herself. Turning, she found the corner of the palisade again and clung to it.
Stay lucid. Stay awake.
Her whole body was numb.
She found the door by its great iron hinge. Groping, nearly blind now, she found the center of the door and began hammering on it with her fist.
There was no answer.
She banged again.
Nothing.
She turned the carbine around and shifted the blanket out of the way so she could slam the weapon’s butt against the gate. She lost count of the number of times she knocked.
No answer.
Kinta Jane shook her head, trying to clear it of the fog that crept in. She couldn’t feel her feet. The carbine was loaded and primed—there was little point in carrying it unless she kept it ready to fire—so she turned it around again.
What if the trading post had been abandoned? What if the Adenans had driven the traders out in revenge for the burned town?
Lifting the carbine’s muzzle from under her blanket-cloak, she aimed it away from the palisade wall and fired.
In her weakened state and with bad footing, the recoil of the weapon knocked her down. She let go of Mr. Meeks’s old militia weapon and lost it somewhere in the wet snow.
No help would come.
She prepared herself to die.
Hands grabbed her suddenly, and she smelled smoke. And wine.
“Wobomagonda,” she heard, “give me now the strength of the bear.”
A person on each side lifted her to her feet and dragged her, toes barely touched the snow and earth, through a gate that was suddenly open.
I can pay, she mumbled. Or tried to mumble, having forgotten that she lacked a tongue.
The person on her right grunted with effort. Behind them, a loud thudding sound might have been the gate swinging shut.
Kinta Jane fumbled for her purse. It was empty, but at least she could show good faith by showing she had no money.
Her fingers numb, she dropped it.
A plank door in a stone wall loomed up before Kinta Jane Embry and then gave way, admitting her into a blaze of heat and light. She smelled smoke again, and with the smoke the greasy food-smells of bacon, butter, and bread. She saw a long wooden trestle table, a fire with a bubbling stewpot, a bread oven, and women.
Women in aprons making food. Women in coveralls cleaning the floor. Two tall women wearing bear and bison furs who had carried her in from the cold, and now lowered her gently onto a broad wooden chair near the fire. Women in white dresses who stripped away her cold things, pushing her into a plain linen shift and then piling a buffalo robe around her shoulders. Another woman in a white dress who began checking each of Kinta Jane’s toes in turn—Kinta Jane could see what she was doing, though she felt nothing—and then looked at her wounded arm.
Elsewhere in the big room, women laughed. Were they laughing at her?
A warm mug of cider was pressed into her fingers by a woman who didn’t let go of the mug herself, helping Kinta Jane hold onto it. Warmth spread into her chilled fingers, and then she was able to raise the liquor to her lips, smelling and tasting the cinnamon with which the cider had been spiced.
Kinta Jane groaned.
“Hush now, spare your voice.” Kinta Jane couldn’t see the speaker, but the voice was a woman’s.
“You’re wondering, are we nuns. Sometimes it seems like it,” said the woman peeling away Kinta Jane’s bandage. “Especially the way Sister Erikson runs things.”
“This won’t be a house for slatterns,” called a different voice out of Kinta Jane’s field of vision. “You want a man? Have a man. But you leave the cloister.”
“We don’t serve any saints,” said one of the big women who had hauled Kinta Jane in. “Or rather, everyone chooses her own saints. I try to walk the forest path of Wobomagonda.”
“I was almost a Circulator,” said the woman tending Kinta Jane’s wound. “I’m Sister Lamb.” She leaned in close to whisper. “You can call me Elsie.”
“We’ve got sisters who favor Reginald Pole and John Gutenberg, too,” said the other woman who had carried Kinta Jane. She had a face like a meat slab, but delicate fingers. “Some of us who are godless. And some who won’t say, or who follow none.”
“And then there’s Sister Lopez.”
“Yes,” the would-be Ranger said. “Georgia Jew, down from the silver mines.”
Beguines. This was a beguine cloister.
Kinta Jane moaned, in relief and pain both.
“Shh,” Elsie said. “You really need to sleep now.”
So Kinta Jane did.
* * *
It wasn’t a long walk to the big house of the Earl of Johnsland. The healer God-Has-Given limped most of the way under his own power, but near the end, as they came through a cluster of buildings on hard-packed dirt alleys and the first flakes of snow began to fall, he leaned on Ma’iingan.
Ma’iingan was happy to help. Had he raised the healer laid low? He hoped he had, and that this young man would turn about and join his son Giimoodaapi to the Loon doodem, to Ma’iingan’s own family, to the People.
But looking at the young Zhaaganaashii, pale as snow from pain and blood loss despite all Ma’iingan and his simple medicinal arts could do, Ma’iingan doubted. What would this boy do?
Nothing. Nothing that Ma’iingan could imagine, at least.
Also, the young man continued with his strange outbursts and his scratching at his own ear. If he wasn’t mad, he was plagued by something like madness.
What more remained to be done, to make the young man a healer? What could be done?
It was enough to make a man doubt his own manidoo.
Nathaniel and Ma’iingan made it through the village without attracting notice. Then they turned down a long straight lane that ran between a large field of asemaa plants on one side and a pasture for horses on the other. The lane ended in front of a wide house, boxy and three stories tall. It was the single largest building Ma’iingan had ever seen. Who could possibly use so many chambers? Did an entire clan live in that house?
The presence of the asemaa made Ma’iingan giddy. What a treasure trove of sacred and magical power these Zhaaganaashii sat upon! But to them, it wa
s a mere filthy habit, a vice. He’d even heard it called weed, an astonishingly disrespectful name for the sacred herb.
Galloping hooves in the pasture made Ma’iingan and God-Has-Given both pivot to look. As they turned, a horse slowed to a walk just the other side of the rail fence enclosing the pasture, and Charles leaped down from the saddle.
“Nathaniel!” the older man cried. “I thought you were dead!”
Nathaniel slapped his ear and muttered. “Buried under turves. Sunk in the bog.”
Ma’iingan kept his hand near his tomahawk, just in case. “I found him out in the forest, Zhaaganaashii.” Best not to use the name Charles yet, and then have to explain how he knew it. “He was hurt, so I let him rest a few days.”
“Downriver?” Charles asked.
“Uphill.” Ma’iingan pointed, to be helpful. “Not too far from a pigsty.”
Charles frowned. He embraced Nathaniel roughly, and when Nathaniel yelped, Charles held him out at arm’s length, gripping his shoulder and examining him.
“You’ve been wounded,” Charles said.
“He fell,” Ma’iingan explained.
“Landon!” Nathaniel slapped his ear. “Landon did it!”
Ma’iingan was caught by surprise. He didn’t think Nathaniel would come back here to his people just to accuse Landon. It didn’t fit. And when he touched his ear, the boy said mad things.
Was he repeating words someone else said to him? Or some thing else?
Spirits?
Or just madness?
Hopefully, the boy heard spirits. A boy who heard spirits might indeed become the sort of healer who could connect Giimoodaapi to his people.
Charles caught Nathaniel’s slapping hand. “Landon did it?” He looked at Ma’iingan with fierce eyes. “Landon…what? Dropped you? Made you fall? Did he beat you?”
“I…” Nathaniel looked down at his feet.
Charles spat. “Get on the horse.”
Without waiting for any sign of agreement, Charles hoisted the younger man into the saddle. Nathaniel whimpered, but then clung to the saddle gratefully. Then the older man grabbed the beast’s reins and took off toward the big house at a brisk pace.
Startled, Ma’iingan ran to keep up.
“Landon!” Charles roared as they reached the end of the pasture. The soldier opened a gate, brought the horse through, and kept going.