by D. J. Butler
“No!” Chigozie struggled to his feet, his weary muscles strengthened with the sudden conviction that this was his purpose. “No, it is not a question of my lord and your lord, but of the Lord, the god of heaven and earth and all who are in it.”
“Your god is weak,” Kort rumbled.
“Weak!” Aanik hissed again and moved closer to Chigozie, sidling past Kort’s shoulder as his lamprey mouth full of teeth swung from side to side.
“There is only one god!” Chigozie cried.
“There is the Heron King,” Kort said.
“He is a spirit,” Chigozie insisted. “A creature. A monster.”
Kort shrugged. “Call him what you will. I served the monster who was the father, who bade me roam the Great Green Wood in peace. Now I serve the monster who is the son, and he bids me rampage. We feed upon the Missouri, and then we feed upon Cahokia. If he is a monster, then the monster who is the Heron King is mightier than your god.”
Chigozie pulled the cross from his neck and held it up to ward off Kort’s words. “Take it back!”
A beastwife struggling up the slope against the tide of her kind, a giant with a cow’s head, saw Chigozie’s cross and stopped.
Kort shrugged. “My god leads me to crush his enemies. Your god led you to kill your own women. In your heart, you know it must be true.”
“I killed those women to show them mercy!” Chigozie yelled, barely hearing himself or Kort above the tumult of the beasts.
Kort bellowed. “In that case, my god commands me to give mercy to the people of Cahokia! In the name of the mercy you adore so much, I’ll kill every man, woman, and child in that place!”
Aanik hissed and lunged forward. The lamprey mouth splayed wide, revealing rows of teeth, and the creature hurtled toward Chigozie—
Kort caught Aanik by the tail and yanked, slamming the other beastman to the ground.
Aanik hissed in protest.
Kort laughed.
“What is it?” Chigozie asked.
The cow-headed beastwife moved closer. She dragged a club nearly as long as Chigozie was tall. Chigozie edged away from her, mistrustful of any beastkind he didn’t know.
“I challenge him,” Aanik hissed. “If his god is mighty, his god will protect him.”
Kort looked to Chigozie.
Chigozie hesitated. “God can indeed do anything.”
“Can your god save you, a weakling with a tender heart and no weapons, from this ferocious beast?” Kort sounded amused.
“God can do anything,” Chigozie repeated.
“You understand that Aanik wishes to eat you.”
Aanik hissed.
He couldn’t win. Chigozie knew that. And Aanik did want to eat him.
But God could do anything. Had not God made the sun stand still for Joshua? Had not Samson slain the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, by the power of God? Had not God brought down the walls of Jericho?
And if God had brought Chigozie here, it was for a reason. God would see him through.
But what if the reason God had brought Chigozie here was so that Aanik would eat him? What if Chigozie’s value to God was as a martyr and a witness? What if God’s plan required Chigozie to die? Maybe his death at the hands of a merciless beast would show Kort and the others the value of mercy. Maybe by his death, Chigozie could save lives.
To his surprise, the thought strengthened Chigozie’s resolution.
“God can do anything.” He brandished his cross. “If I fight Aanik and I live, then will you believe?”
“It would take an intervention of your god,” Kort said.
“An act of God,” Chigozie said. “A miracle. If I fight Aanik and live, it will be a miracle, and you will believe in God.”
“I will believe in your god,” Kort agreed, nodding his shaggy bison head. “And if you die, I’ll tell every child of Adam I meet for the remainder of my life about the fool I once knew who believed his god would save him, and who instead was eaten by beastmen.”
“Beastmen?” Chigozie hesitated.
“I’ll eat of your flesh myself,” Kort added. “As you eat of the flesh of your strange, merciful, weakling god.”
Chigozie’s heart pounded like a blacksmith’s hammer in his ears.
“Very well.” He raised his cross. “A challenge.”
Aanik hissed, long and low.
Kort stepped back, crossing muscular arms over his chest. Any faint and unexpressed hopes Chigozie might have had that Kort would act as his protector disappeared instantly.
Aanik leaped to the attack, his forelegs’ cat-claws extended, his hind legs’ claws rising as he jumped, his mouth open and teeth splayed. Aanik would land in a hurricano of tooth and talon that would reduce Chigozie to ribbons of flesh in an instant.
God of my father, help me.
A beastkind warrior sprang over the edge of Chigozie’s boulder and rammed head-first into Aanik’s side. The lamprey-cat spun sideways, yowling, and landed rump-first against a jagged tree stump.
The intervening beastwife was the cow-headed creature who had been watching Chigozie’s earlier pleading. Now she stood perched in a crouch on the boulder, huffing and snorting and staring down at Aanik through slitted eyes.
Aanik hissed.
“Is this collusion?” Kort roared. “Who are you, cow?”
The cow bellowed back, with no words Chigozie could understand.
Chigozie raised his cross higher. “God of my father,” he said aloud this time, “help me!”
Aanik sprang forward again, and the cow-headed warrior leaped at the same moment. They collided shoulder to shoulder in mid-air, then fell to the ground with a heavy thud. The cow head-butted the lamprey and then battered it with her club, but then the lamprey’s hind legs slashed at the cow’s belly, inflicting long red gashes.
The cow staggered away, and Aanik jumped at Chigozie again.
“I’d give a great deal just now to be
able to lob flaming beehives at the enemy.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Do you think His Holiness Bishop Planchet cuts a more striking figure than I do as bishop?” Etienne clenched his mother’s locket in his fist and looked through the nearly shut blinds of the hotel room.
The building belonged to Onyinye Diokpo, though apparently through such a tangle of Philadelphia joint-stock companies and at least one partnership headquartered in New Amsterdam that it would take, Onyinye had cheerfully assured Etienne, Robespierre himself, the greatest legal luminary of the Old World, and a hundred hand-picked deputies, a century to find the true ownership.
Etienne had gratefully pointed out that he wouldn’t need a century. On the other hand, if the chevalier once got it into his head that hotel owners in general were in opposition to him, or was in doubt as to which hotels might belong to Onyinye, he might take action by burning them all down.
Onyinye was a tough woman. She hadn’t batted an eye at the loss of one of her employees, a distant relation, in the Onu Nke Ihunanya. She’d known about Etienne’s planned raid to snatch the chevalier’s mambo, and that thought gave Etienne even more pause: had Onyinye deliberately sacrificed one of her own cousins? How much must the Igbo hôtelière hate the Chevalier of New Orleans?
After the raid, she had summoned some large, cheerful cousins from Montgomery and Jackson. Eoin Kennedie had, without being asked, supplemented the Igbo fighters with a clan or two of bent-nosed, cursing Irishmen.
Add to that the rising number of gendarmes in the chevalier’s service, and New Orleans felt on the verge of explosion.
August Planchet stood on the steps of what had been, until recently, the St. Louis Cathedral. Now it was a ruin that had only stopped smoking two days earlier. The Bishop of Miami, who had so nervously anointed Etienne himself not so long ago, now settled the episcopal mitre on the former beadle’s head.
“I think you don’t truly care,” Monsieur Bondí said. “It amuses you to have people regard you as vain. Perhaps they take you
less seriously when they believe you’re a peacock. But I know you better than that.”
“And still you stay with me.”
Bondí grunted.
“Armand is dead. We don’t even have his body, so there can be no decent funeral. And still you stay.”
“You pay me. And where else would I have this much fun?”
“A lunatic asylum, perhaps?” Etienne suggested. “A whorehouse staffed by syphilitics? A sinking ship in a tropical storm?”
“No,” Bondí answered. “This is more fun than any of those. For instance, the very minute I learned the cathedral was on fire, I knew what opportunities for graft there would be in the reconstruction, and how much you would want that contract. And to win that bid, I got to create two new joint-stock companies and have the legs of four men broken.”
“You’re a good man, Monsieur Bondí.”
“Also, I have five other companies submitting fraudulent insurance claims for property damaged in the fire.” Bondí grunted. “I’ll say this one thing, since we’re discussing how entertaining it is to be in your employ.”
“Tell me.”
“I think it’s highly ironic that you made that petty criminal Planchet an honest man, and now the chevalier is using him to replace you.”
“It makes a great deal of sense, if the chevalier is anxious to retain control over the money. Planchet knows where it all is, whereas if the chevalier brings a stranger into the parish, he risks being robbed blind. Indeed, the appointment makes so much sense, I wonder whether it was the chevalier who initiated that conversation, or Planchet. Also, this is New Orleans. The thief replaces the thief with a thief.” Etienne shrugged and smiled. “I replaced Bishop de Bienville as criminal long before I replaced him as priest. So it goes, in this city at least.”
Monsieur Bondí snorted.
The Bishop of Miami began to recite the words of one hundred and ninth Psalm: “Dixit Dominus Domino meo sede a dextris meis donec ponam inimicos tuos scabilum pedum tuorum.” I will make thine enemies thy footstool.
Would heaven do that for the new Bishop Planchet, and for his master, the Chevalier Le Moyne?
May it not be so, my son. Take this power yourself.
Etienne stepped out of his shoes and spread his feet.
“Boss?” Monsieur Bondí only looked perplexed.
The Bishop of Miami knelt to anoint Planchet’s feet from a small cruse of sanctified oil. Etienne detected the presence of the Brides, unseen as always. Their power swelled within him and he felt their tears and hair upon his bare feet.
He sighed deeply.
Monsieur Bondí stepped back a few feet. “Etienne?”
“Virgam fortitudinis tuae emittet Dominus ex Sion dominare in media inimicorum tuorum.” Miami anointed the palms of Planchet’s hands and pressed into them the episcopal scepter.
Etienne’s Latin, like his Greek, was modest, but he knew enough.
Virga was the bishop’s rod. And it was so close to virgo, a virgin.
He placed his mother’s locket in his waistcoat pocket and stood with hands open, palms up. He felt the Brides, the Virgins, anoint his palms with their kisses. Then he filled his own hand with his mother’s softly vibrating locket.
“Populi tui spontanei erunt in due fortitudinis tuae in montibus sanctis quasi de vulva orietur tibi ros adulescentiae tuae.” Among sacred mountains, as if from the womb.
Reborn. Delivered by his mother from the wombs of his own two Brides.
Etienne sucked air into his lungs like a newborn babe and squeezed it out again, stretching his back and shoulders and staring at the plastered white ceiling. He felt the weariness of his struggle leave him and new life enter.
The remaining words of the Bishop of Miami came to him on the wings of a melody with no source, and spoke truth directly to his soul. Etienne closed his eyes and listened.
Iuravit Dominus et not paenitebit eum
Tu es sacerdos in aeternum secundum ordindem Melchisedech
Dominus ad dexteram tuam percussit in die furoris sui reges
Iudicabit in gentibus implebit valles percutiet caput in terra multa
De torrente in via bibet propterea exaltabit caput
“Monsieur Bondí,” he said. The room looked lighter.
“Boss?” Monsieur Bondí’s voice was tentative.
Etienne looked, and found his accountant cringing in the corner. “What’s wrong?”
“Etienne…you’re glowing.”
Etienne laughed. “Then it’s time.”
Bondí appeared to relax, but not much. “For what?”
“Tonight.” Etienne turned away from the window. “Tonight, I must address my people.”
“Shall I send a message inviting…your people?”
“No. The Brides are summoning them already.”
* * *
Jacob Hop lived on Sarah’s enchanted coffee.
He found that it had more effect, the less food he ate. True, he became jittery and nervous, and more than once he found himself jumping at shadows or whipping around to fire his pistol at a branch swaying in the breeze. The woods around him seemed to ring sometimes with the shouts of Dutch children skating on the canals of New Amsterdam, and sometimes with the strangled cries of the murdered and the sacrificed.
But he also walked at a pace he would ordinarily have described as running.
He learned to ignore the hunger pains.
Eating very little, and stopping only to lie on his back and raise his feet in the air, leaning them against tree trunks to allow the blood to drain, Jacob also slept only one night in two. It added to the slippery feeling he had behind the eyes, as if increasingly the world he was looking at was not the real world, but the creation of his own shaky mind.
It also meant he covered great distances at very high speed. Wrapped against the bitter cold in furs over his blue Imperial coat, he must have looked from a distance like a monster.
When he lay on his back to rest, he checked the slate. From time to time, words appeared there, written by Sarah. With a lump of white chalk she’d given him, he wrote back to inform her of his progress by identifying town signboards he’d seen and highways he’d crossed.
The bricks from which his mind built the world were memories from two different lives, and the life of Simon Sword was much longer. He found that, being alone, he was immersed more and more in the memories of the violent manifestation of the Heron King, so much so that at times he was unsure where Jacob Hop ended and Simon Sword began. When words didn’t appear on the slate, he took to thumbing through his Tarocks. The pasteboard, wetted multiple times by snow and worn from travel, was beginning to split and pull apart, but he couldn’t stop playing with the cards. He did it to remember his friends: the Horseman was Bill, especially since his recent injures; the Hanged Man, Uris; the Serpent, Sarah, because he needed the Virgin to be Yedera; the Priest was Alzbieta and the Widow was Cathy and the Drunkard was the head-wounded Polite Sherem, but Jake could find no easy match for Calvin in the Major Arcana. Instead he assigned Calvin to be a character who appeared in numbered cards of the suits of Shields and Swords, a buckskinner in fringed leather garb with a long rifle. The hair was the wrong color, but the narrow, homely face was just about perfect.
Seeing his friends in the Tarock helped. It brought the Jacob Hop memories to the fore, and kept Simon Sword in the dark recesses.
There was a Beastkind card, but since it showed a creature like a minotaur, with a bull’s head and tail, Jake had a hard time thinking of it as Chikaak.
First, he memorized the knots—the Ophidian letters entwined around the images of the Major Arcana. Later, he fixed into his mind the images on the cards themselves, Major and Minor Arcana both. The Major Arcana were more interesting at first sight, containing the more baroque and sometimes grotesque images, but he soon realized that the images of each of the four suits could be read to tell a story. Four separate stories, two about a man, the frontiersman who resembled Cal, and two about a woman.
And did the four stories intertwine?
Little details from the Major Arcana were sprinkled throughout the Minor Arcana, as well, as if the named cards wanted to intrude into the tales.
And then he found his mind trying to insert him into the stories.
And, perhaps because of the coffee and the sleep deprivation, he learned that he could in his mind insert facts—stations along his road, numbers of steps taken, number of days traveled, and more—into the images on the cards, and the images held the facts in place, and held them in order.
He filed that trick away for future use.
When he slept, he dreamed of running.
At all times, he marched holding the Franklin medallion, the one given to him by the chevalier’s dying Seneschal atop the Serpent Mound. He was to give it to Franklin, the dying man had said. He’d said it after trying to get assistance from Jacob, as if Jacob were a Freemason, which he wasn’t.
Should he become one?
And who was Franklin?
He avoided the forces of the Pacification. This was difficult because Imperial militia or Company men or occasionally Imperial soldiers held all the major crossroads. He eluded them by following old tracks, sometimes even animal trails. These paths were more deeply buried in snow, but only rarely traveled, except by the occasional Sauk or Shawnee.
Several times, at night, he saw masked parties of armed Firstborn racing through the forest. The Firstborn groups were small, and they looked always looked hungry, so when Jacob saw them carrying sacks of grain or squashes, or with weapons soiled with (presumably Imperial) blood, he cheered them silently, in his heart.
Without deviating from his course; Jacob Hop was bound for Johnsland.
* * *
Chigozie threw himself from the rock. It was awkward and off-balance, but he landed more or less on his feet and rolled away without injury.
Aanik’s lunge missed, and the lamprey-cat sailed over the spot where Chigozie had stood, landing in a bramble of wild berries.
Chigozie rose and found himself beside a dead tree. Seizing a branch the size of his arm in both hands, he leaned against it with all his weight and snapped it off. The branch had a long smooth stretch that could accommodate both Chigozie’s hands, and ended in a gnarled knot of wood where it had once sprouted from the tree’s trunk. And it was heavy; it would make a serviceable club.