Witchy Winter

by D. J. Butler

  Nathaniel considered. “I may be able to do something. But it will take time.”

  Ma’iingan swung his axe through the air to emphasize his words. “I’ll get you time, God-Has-Given.”

  Nathaniel crossed to the corner of the barn and collected a double handful of dried asemaa leaf. Ma’iingan watched him sit cross-legged beside the last tongues of the fire inside the tiny sweat lodge and lay leaves one at a time across it, blowing on the leaves as their crinkly edges ignited.

  Nathaniel took his drum and began to pound out a rhythm and sing.

  Ma’iingan tore his attention away and peered through the cracks. Beside him, he felt George Isham do the same.

  “What do you mean, the spirits of the dead?” George asked. “I see men walking out there. Surely, it’s the Chief Godi’s soldiers. They’ve realized their mistake and they’ve come back to get me. Or perhaps some of my father’s own men.”

  “No,” Ma’iingan said.

  “Look, I will…I’ll tell them to let you go. My father’s men will listen to me. His men, and the Chief Godi’s men, too. You can go. Nathaniel and Landon can go if they want, or they can come home.”

  “That is how you dress your soldiers, na?” Ma’iingan asked. “Or your godi, his men wear such clothing?”

  “How I dress…what?” George pressed his face flatter against the barn wall to get a better look.

  Behind them, Nathaniel’s song rose to a crescendo.

  The nearest of the approaching people crossed a stray puddle of starlight. He was dressed as no soldier of Johnsland dressed, Ma’iingan was certain. He wore simple white trousers and a white shirt; a long shroud was wrapped around his head and neck and trailed behind him. As Ma’iingan and George looked on, that strip of cloth caught on a branch, and the end of the cloth tore off. The fabric was rotten. It was falling off the body now, but it had once been wrapped around him to prepare his body for burial.

  “Ing and Erce,” George Isham muttered. “Herne’s bloody horns.”

  “Henh,” Ma’iingan agreed. “We need more fire.”

  They had minutes, but likely no more. Together, he and George rushed to snap off whatever dry wood they could find in the barn. The tobacco-curing racks were an obvious place to start.

  Ma’iingan was hesitant to steal fire from Nathaniel, for fear he might disrupt the boy’s ritual. “You can make fire, na?” he asked George Isham.

  George snorted. “Of course.”

  “Torches,” Ma’iingan told him. “Get torches lit.”

  He grabbed his axe and ran to the barn’s small door. Leaping, he grabbed the top of a tall drying rack and pulled it down with all his weight, scattering a tangle of timbers in front of the opening and hopefully slowing the progress of anyone who tried to enter thereby.

  He reached the barn’s larger door just as two of the attackers did. They were both women, and the first looked lively—her skin pale but elastic, her step sure, her eyes clear. She was naked, but for a long white shroud wrapped around her from head to toe. For a moment Ma’iingan thought maybe she was someone who had been disturbed in her sleep by the noise of shots, and he hesitated.

  That nearly cost him his life. The first woman jumped for him with mouth gaping, and the fetid stench that washed from her open maw into Ma’iingan’s nostrils was the stink of decaying flesh. She was dead, walking dead, a horror his people had never had to deal with directly and for which they had no name of their own.

  He’d heard of such things from traders who came from the mouth of the Michi-Zibii, though. Zaambi, they called them there. And the Germans of Chicago called them draug, and burned their dead on ships or sealed them in stone chambers underground to prevent them from returning in this fashion.

  The first zaambi knocked Ma’iingan down. He raised a defensive arm, and she sank her teeth into it, midway between wrist and elbow. The pain was far worse than it should be, but Ma’iingan didn’t scream. Instead, he straightened his arm and swung it left, hurling the draugar from him and slamming it to the ground flat on its back.

  The teeth sank deeper into his flesh. This time, he screamed.

  Behind him, within the barn, he smelled and heard gunpowder burning, and then the room became much more brightly lit.

  The second zaambi lurched in through the door, and this one only bore a faint resemblance to a living person. Flesh hung in tatters from long bones, and flesh and clods of frozen earth fell to the ground in the creature’s wake. Threads protruding from upper and lower lip, and a bit of the upper that had remained fixed to the lower, exposing bony gums and dull yellow teeth, showed that the woman’s mouth had been sewn shut when she was buried. Similar torn threads pierced and clung to the zaambi’s ankles. Had she been executed for a crime? Or was such stitching a defensive measure against hostile spirits or magic?

  Perhaps a measure meant to prevent just such a case as what had actually happened, revival as a draugar.

  Keeping the fresher zaambi pressed to the floor with his left arm, with his right Ma’iingan swung his axe. With one blow, he smashed through both the attacker’s ankles, toppling her to the floor. Swinging the axe around, his second blow crashed downward through the zaambi’s neck, completely severing its head and biting into the wood of the floor.

  The draugar’s head bounced three feet away and stopped, eyeless sockets staring and nearly fleshless jaws working open and shut, as if anxious still to bite Ma’iingan.

  Footless and headless, meanwhile, the zaambi’s body dragged itself to its knees and groped toward Ma’iingan.

  “George!” he yelled.

  “Soon!” George Isham called. Ma’iingan hoped he could depend on the young man.

  He swung his axe twice more in quick succession. The first blow snapped off one of the riper zaambi’s arms at the shoulder, dropping it sternum-first to the floor. With the second, he chopped through the neck of the zaambi biting his arm.

  He stood, a woman’s head still gnawing on his forearm. He took a step toward George, to see how the fire-starting efforts were coming, and hands grabbed at his ankles. Looking down, he found the headless zaambi with both hands around his left foot, and the disembodied arm of the other draugar clutching his right.

  Smash! Smash! Smash!

  He chopped through the hands at the wrist, causing the finger bones to fall apart uselessly and freeing himself. Feeling woozy, he looked down at the head chewing on his arm and found the flesh of his arm, around the undead teeth sunk into it, marbled white and black.

  He found Nathaniel; the boy lay prone and apparently unconscious on his back, drum clutched to his belly. Under his breath, the boy chanted a droning melody.

  “George!” he cried, unable to see the young man, either because the drying barn was filling with smoke or because his vision was failing. “Where’s your fire?”

  As answer, a lattice of flame rushed toward Ma’iingan from the back of the barn. How could so much flaming wood move so fast?

  The Phaeton! George Isham had turned the Phaeton into a flaming chariot.

  Ma’iingan threw himself aside and could just make out George as the young man hurled a good portion of the frame of a tobacco drying rack, now on fire and piled onto the light coach, through the open doorway.

  The frame burst apart as it hit, filling the doorway with fire and scattering flaming wood against the walls around it. The coach rolled on, forcing two more zaambi, about to step through and into the barn, back several steps. Scattering flaming brands as it went, the Phaeton struck a ditch or a fence at the end of its path and overturned, wheels spinning in the smoke.

  Beside the Phaeton stood a man. Ma’iingan hesitated and took a long look; he was Zhaaganaashii, tall, and even in the firelight Ma’iingan could tell he was unnaturally pale. Dead? He wore a tall, peaked cap and dull colors, such as Ma’iingan had seen before on Zhaaganaashii travelers from Massachusett lands. And he wore a long cloak, so tattered that at its fringes it almost seemed to discompose itself into brown spider’s web. />
  “Brother Ephraim sold his cow,” George Isham sang, “and bought him a commission.”

  Ma’iingan didn’t know the song, but he thought he’d heard the tune before. It was shockingly jaunty, given the scene.

  The Zhaaganaashii raised something long and thin to his mouth and tore a piece out with his teeth.

  It was a forearm.

  The forearm of a child.

  George stopped singing.

  “Wiindigoo!” Ma’iingan shouted.

  He staggered back from the door, shaken and cursing. He waved his arm, and the biting head didn’t fall off. The dead woman’s eyes stared up at him with hatred and she worked her jaws, digging deeper into his flesh. He felt the corpse’s poison and corruption flowing through his veins.

  “More fire,” he murmured.

  The zaambi head on his arm groaned.

  “The witch’s child!” the wiindigoo groaned through the doorway of fire. “The rest of you may live, but give me the witch’s child!”

  Ma’iingan heard the voice in his mind as well as in his ears.

  He could only mean Nathaniel, God-Has-Given.

  The healer whom Ma’iingan’s own manidoo had given him in order to join Giimoodaapi to the People.

  Ma’iingan stooped to pick up a flaming brand and shoved the burning end into the zaambi’s eyes. He felt the searing heat on his own arm, but the draugar opened its mouth to shriek in rage and pain—

  and fell off his arm, hitting the floor and rolling several feet toward the opening.

  Ma’iingan felt lightheaded, but he wasn’t incapacitated yet. Taking three steps, he kicked the woman’s head like a ball, straight through the open door and into the night. The wiindigoo stepped to one side, but not fast enough, and the hurtling head struck him in the knee.

  He growled.

  “More fire!” Ma’iingan called again.

  * * *

  Cathy held the mirror-on-a-stick in her left hand, and a loaded, primed, and cocked pistol in her right. She reached out with the mirror and probed the shadows on the other side of the street through the large window.

  She was rewarded with three powder flares, three bangs in quick succession, and three bullets whizzing narrowly over her head.

  She answered with a shot of her own.

  Bang!

  “It is doubtful I hit anything,” she said. “The Lafitte pistols may be consecrated, but they’re not especially accurate.”

  “I rather fancy I saw your shot go home.” Bill leaned against the earth wall of the mound. One advantage of their position had turned out to be that the dirt walls of the lower floor were so thick that they stopped all incoming bullets cold. Having repulsed two waves of attacks, Bill and his beastkind were beginning to run low on ammunition, and now they crouched behind solid dirt walls and waited for the dawn.

  “I only wish it had gone home into the face of that liar Torias.” Cathy reloaded. “I knew from the start she wasn’t to be trusted.”

  Bill grunted.

  “Does this window face east?” she asked.

  “It does, ma’am. You should see dawn as a lightening of the horizon over there.”

  “The solstice morning.”

  “The shortest day of the year.”

  “Sir William, shall we live to see Christmas?”

  Bill chuckled. “I would not wager a large sum on my own life at the moment, ma’am. This, however, is not the first moment in my life when I would have said that. You in any case shall live for all eternity, even if only in my heart.”

  “Your gallantry lightens my soul at this dark moment, my love.”

  She hadn’t meant to say it, but there it was. My love. Suddenly, she felt more naked than she had ever felt in all her years in New Orleans.

  He hesitated, but only for a moment.

  “My lady,” he said, his voice sounding more gravelly than ever. “I would that I were sufficiently gallant to remove your every care forever.”

  She rested a light hand on his forearm, feeling the hard muscled beneath the bristly hair. “You are my hero.”

  Time passed.

  “Sir William,” she began again, having cleared her head of the distraction. “Would you be so good as to tell me why the sun is rising in the west of the city? Have we entered some enchanted Firstborn space in which the directions are not what they seem, so that the sun rises in the west and sets in the south, while the Big Dipper revolves in a six-sided star-shaped movement around the celestial east pole?”

  Bill chuckled. Then he gasped. “Hell’s Bells, but you’re right! That direction is west and the river!”

  “Are you certain of it?” Cathy pressed him.

  He hesitated. “I haven’t seen the stars for some time, but I am quite sure.”

  “Then that light?” Cathy asked. “Is it possibly the indication of our arriving reinforcements?”

  Bill laughed out loud. “Other than on the day on which I met you, my lady, I have never been that fortunate.”

  Chikaak sniffed the air. “Fire.”

  “The light is behind us, at least,” Cathy said. “Is that not what a pistolero desires most?”

  “Usually with respect to the sun, my lady, but yes. I suppose a large fire at my back would be nearly as useful.”

  “Let us make use of it, then.” Cathy leaned out from cover just a moment, firing at a tight-capped skirmisher in a fur vest. She could see the man clearly with the western glow, now clearly an orange color, shining in his face, but he likely couldn’t see her.

  Her shot took him in the center of his chest, right where she’d aimed, and he crumpled forward.

  She returned to cover and reloaded.

  An answering volley came, which included two arrows that flew deep into the room and sank into the wood of a standing armoire belonging to Alzbieta Torias.

  When the hostile volley had finished, Bill carefully laid five guns on the sill beneath his window. He then slipped in front of the window and filled his hands with a pistol each. Cathy held out her mirror-on-a-stick to watch. Taking careful aim with one gun, he shot through an upended table, and Cathy heard a grunt of pain and surprise.

  Bill dropped the pistol and immediately took another…but didn’t take cover.

  Imperial Ohio Company men popped up from behind wagon beds and dead horses and low walls to fire back.

  Bang! Bang!

  Bill neatly dropped two before they could fire, one a big-shouldered German with a shiny long rifle, who fell with a sound like a sneeze, and the other some kind of Creole, part-Haudenosaunee, judging from the colorful shirt and feathers.

  As bullets and arrows whizzed toward him, Bill pressed himself against the side of the window well and took two more pistols into his hands. With the volley finishing, but before the Imperials could take cover again, he shot two more. A man wearing a conical raccoon cap and a fringed leatherstocking suit dropped clutching his throat with blood pouring between his fingers; a Cahokian longbowman fell forward onto his own bow, snapping the stave as well as his arrow in his collapse.

  Bill began to reload.

  The smoke smelled thicker. Chikaak sniffed the air again.

  Cathy heard a long howl, not far away.

  “Wolf?” she asked.

  “Wolflike,” Chikaak said.

  “Beastkind,” she said.

  Chikaak nodded. “They’re within the walls.”

  “Very good. Thou knowest thy fairy-stories.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Nathaniel’s horses caught him up easily this time, and bore him up the seven golden steps with a song on his lips.

  I ride upon four horses, to heaven I ride

  I ride the sacred smoke-path, drum at my side

  I walk the endless star-fields, my vision is wide

  I seek the land of spirits, to heaven I ride

  At the top of the stairs waited no manidoo and no golden path. Instead, Nathaniel stood upon a dark and trackless prairie, and overhead again he saw the inverted bow
l of star-signs in their new patterns.

  New, but now familiar. Now right.

  Cold winds blew across the plain, and Nathaniel stood for a time in thought, at a loss. Then he listened.

  On the wind, voices.

  And Nathaniel found that as he shifted his position, listening into the wind, listening down the wind, stepping along the prairie to find new winds to listen to, he heard voices.

  ~Wiindigoo!~

  He heard this word shouted in Ma’iingan’s voice, and it troubled him. Nathaniel didn’t know who or what a wiindigoo was, but the word was monstrous in his ear. It reeked of loneliness, despair, power, and the eating of forbidden flesh.

  Riding up that wind, Nathaniel found a thin trail. The trail led him down a steep hillside to a tobacco-curing barn, surrounded by picked fields, and under siege. The besiegers were women and men, but not entirely. Skeletons raged around the outside of the barn, banging on it with bony fists and feet. They moved with the rattle of iron, and Nathaniel quickly noticed that each was shackled at the ankle to a leather sack. From the sacks rose a mélange of vitriolic scents that nearly overpowered him.

  Within the barn burned fire. Where the fire burned wood, it appeared to Nathaniel as a low orange flame, like a Lucifer match lying on the floor, about to be snuffed out. Where it devoured instead the sacred asemaa, it rose like a wall of white morning, shutting out the dark night with the trumpets of dawn.

  Inside those rings of fire, Nathaniel saw Ma’iingan and George Isham, running about and throwing wood on the flames to feed them. Landon Chapel lay on the ground, sleeping. Something about Landon’s appearance struck Nathaniel as odd, and it took him a moment to realize what—though Nathaniel knew that Landon was physically wounded, the sleeping young man in this place looked well.

  Nathaniel approached and dismounted. One of the skeletons turned and groaned to him. “Help me!” He heard in her voice the physical beauty she’d possessed in life, and the lonely fears that had driven her to intimate betrayals and once, to hide those betrayals, to a tiny murder, a friend pushed down a well into darkness.

  Those passions and memories roiled about in the leather sack. Nathaniel knelt to slip the shackle from the skeleton-woman’s ankle, and hesitated.