And from lunsa rose Nanih Waiyah the greater, a much larger, round hill. The smaller mound had been built by human hands, carrying basketloads of dirt. The greater Nanih Waiyah had been built by no human hand.
“Hashtali, whose eye is the Sun,” one of the Bone Men intoned. “When the world was all quagmire, when all of the world was the water of the darkening, Hashtali reached down, and with his hand he pulled up the mud and spread it out. He spread it over the realm of the snakes, and the White People of the Water, over the fish and worms. He pulled it up here, and Nanih Waiyah is the mark of his hand. It was open like a crawfish hole; and, like crawfish, he found creatures of mud inside. Some saw the light and climbed up, curious to see it. Some of those could not bear it and went back down, but some continued up, and their skins dried and split, and they crawled out into the sun as human beings.
“More came, and more, and with them, hidden among them, the evil ones, the accursed. So Hashtali put down his hand again and pressed the earth shut, here, at Nanih Waiyah. That is all I have to say.”
And he fell silent, without finishing the story. The silence stretched until Red Shoes guessed it was expected for him to say something.
“They are our ancestors, down there, those things that are not men. They are our cousins and our aunts.”
“And at times,” the Bone Man said, “one must be chosen to consult with them. Are you that one, Red Shoes?”
“You say that you are,” Bloody Child mocked. “If you are, you can go in and return. The guardians of this place will not harm you. But if you lie—”
“You know nothing of the mysteries,” the Onkala priest snapped suddenly, cutting Bloody Child off. “Only we know what will happen if Red Shoes fails.”
Bloody Child bowed his head and fell silent, but his face remained unrepentant.
“Must I do this?” Red Shoes asked. “War is coming. You cannot avoid it, whatever happens to me.”
“But we must decide what to do,” Minko Chito said. “I must know whether to join the Sun Boy or fight him. I must counsel my people one way or the other. You claim to be our war prophet, our seer. You claim to speak the truth. Go into Nanih Waiyah. Return. We will know what to do, or so the Bone Men tell me.”
Don't do this, Red Shoes wanted to say, remembering again the burning village of the Wichita, the people the angry power in him had caused him to slay. I am a snake trying to remember he is a man, he wanted to tell them. I am an accursed being trying to do good before his soul unravels and has no choice. This will hasten my end, if not end me. And then there will be no war, for what I will become will devour you and scorch your nation from the Earth.
But he could not speak. They might try to kill him on the spot if they knew what he was thinking, what he could do. Instead, he faced the great mound, bounded on the right by the still water of the Darkening, by cypress that made a cave of the sky; on the left by the shadowed forest. And there, at the point where the mound met the earth, waited a small, dark opening, just large enough for a single man.
He squared his shoulders and stooped into it.
It went down, a tunnel cut not through stone but through a hard, slippery clay. It descended into water—first to his ankles but quickly to his waist, his shoulders; and then only his head was out. The gray light behind him faded, and then the roof of the cave came down into the water.
He held his breath and ducked under. After an arms-breadth, the roof went up again, and he had air once more.
But no light, no light at all.
Should he make a shadowchild for light? No. He must not attract attention here. He must not. He must keep his shadow-children close, and quiet.
The tunnel continued, narrower and narrower. Though the roof in this section seemed very high, now Red Shoes had to turn sideways to squeeze forward.
He stopped to catch his breath, and above in the darkness he heard something like the legs of a very large spider brushing.
And music. The soft, distant pung pung pung of a water drum. The faint chanting of voices.
Inside him, the coiled snake stretched, and Red Shoes felt his bones, rods of lightning ready to burn out of his skin. He trembled there for a long moment in the dark, trying to remember who he was.
I am Red Shoes. Choctaw. I am not accursed. I am not the feathered snake.
He remembered his friend Tug, the sailor who had saved his life in Venice, who had become his companion these last ten years. Tug, his friend.
Tug, who ran from me. Who still runs from me.
But Tug had reason.
He remembered Grief, her quiet anguish, her fierce lovemaking.
He remembered the old man he had known as a child, who had battled the spirits and lost. His eyes as vacant as pumpkin seeds, his drooling mouth, not even able to feed himself.
I am Red Shoes. Not accursed. Not yet.
The trembling stopped, and he went on.
The roof drooped again, and once more he had to hold his breath and swim in the dark. But this time the tunnel slope did not rise again. It continued, until his lungs ached, and he suddenly realized he was swimming down, toward the bottom of the Earth, to the place where his people had come from. To where some still lived.
But then he found the skin of the water and cut through it, and was born again into darkness.
Or near darkness. But there was singing, and a small glimmering light, and a vast cave that could never fit into the hill of Nanih Waiyah. Song echoed about him, and the tapping of the water drum was like thunder.
From the darkness walked a woman. She appeared neither young nor old, though her hair had streaks of silver. She looked Choctaw, but her skin was pale, as if she had been in this place for a very long time. Her face was tattooed in the old fashion, around the mouth and her arms were strung with the twisting forms of serpents, and water panthers, eels, and garfish. She wore a breechcloth and a white feather mantle upon her shoulders. She stopped singing and regarded him.
“You swam very deep,” she said.
“I swam until I found air,” Red Shoes replied.
“Most never find it. Others find it quickly, far short of this place. Only a few can come this far.”
She stepped closer, and he felt the snake in him again—a sudden anger, a flare of vicious hatred that was in no way human.
“Ah, I see,” she said. “You have the scent of one of my children about you. I did not know mortals could do that. Be careful with him; he sleeps in you, but is not dead.”
“Your children? Who are you?”
“Give me a name. I am a mother to many things. I bear them in darkness. Some even say I bore you, you human beings, down here in my dark womb. I think perhaps I did, before Hashtali took you from us, dressed you in that clay. Mother Dead. That is what I have been called.”
“You summoned me here.”
“Perhaps I did. I felt you coming, and was curious. These are strange times, even for me, who has been here for so long I no longer remember what is real and what isn't.”
“What are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I have kept company with many shamans from other tribes. I have spoken with the philosophers of Europe. All of us, when we come here, to this place behind the world, we see something different. We see what our eyes are accustomed to seeing.”
“Yes. Your eyes are clay, and can see only clay, or the image of clay. But there is the spark in you that is more, that came from us, else you could never come here at all. What am I? What I said: a mother. Not a thing made of flesh and blood— no more than my son, whom you swallowed, was a snake. We are the eldest, those Hashtali sent into the world to create it. And once here, we took it from him. He made you to get it back. That is why we really fear you, you know—my brother, my children and nieces and grandnieces—he clothed you in clay to take you from us, to let you work where we could not, after he turned the world inside out and made us ghosts.”
“Must we fight, then, as I fought your son?”
&
nbsp; “No. Let Hashtali have the world back. I wish to be free of it. I wish—there is a human word, redemption. That is what I wish. But what you must understand, Red Shoes, is that I am nearly alone in that. My brother is my enemy, and all of his children. And most of my own have turned against me as well. Things go badly for me.”
“The Sun Boy?”
“Yes. He is the key, though even I cannot say exactly how. He is doom or salvation.”
“But is he my enemy? And are you my friend?”
She shrugged. “I cannot answer that. I want the Choctaw to live and multiply. I want to preserve humanity in all its varied forms.”
“How can that be done?”
“The sky must be broken and mended. The world must be turned upside down again.”
“But that is what the Sun Boy wants. It is what your son, the Antler Snake inside me, wishes.”
“Yes. And no. I do not know the final answer, Red Shoes, only the vague shape of hope. You creatures of clay are the ones made to find it.”
“I will find it then. But you—are you in danger, Mother Dead?”
“I am hidden where they cannot find me. I wait. Only you and one other have found me, and both of you are mortal. Given time, my enemies will find my spoor, follow my trail, and then I will die. I stay quiet here, waiting, hoping, watching. Giving what help I can. Some of my children are still loyal, but they fall even as we speak. They plunge from the heavens like burning stars, and I can only weep.”
She turned her back on him. “Go. Leave no trail.”
“Can you tell me nothing more?”
“Only that I will be there if I can, when the time comes. That is all. Now go.”
Red Shoes reluctantly returned to the water; the trip back seemed longer. When finally he reemerged in the dark tunnel, he was bone weary, shivering, as weak as if he had just run for seven days and nights.
Painfully, he went forward to where the others were waiting. The passage narrowed, as before, then dipped underwater again.
When he emerged, there was no light, and there ought to be. The entrance should be only a short distance away.
Perhaps night had fallen while he spoke with Mother Dead.
But then his groping hands encountered fresh dirt and clay, and he understood the truth. While he had been beneath, his companions had been busy. They had entombed him in the mound.
“Have the years struck you dumb, Benjamin?” Vasilisa asked, a laugh somehow threaded through the sentence.
She was more beautiful than he remembered. There was silver in her otherwise onyx hair—a streak of it, pulled fetchingly down one side of a face which did not otherwise seem to have aged. It still looked like polished ivory, her eyes gently slanting jewels, her nose small and upturned, like that of a girl in the earliest year of womanhood.
But he knew very well that the slight frame beneath her jade dress was that of a full-grown woman. He had tasted it, loved it, reveled in it, when he himself was barely more than a child.
“What shall I say?” he managed. “Shall I say I am happy to know you are alive? I suppose I am. Shall I say I am pleased to see you? I cannot say that with the same surety. You betrayed me, Vasilisa.”
“Benjamin! I saved your life. Are you so quick to forget that?” She reached for his hand with both of hers, and so paralyzed was he that she managed to catch it. Her skin was warm, her fingers smooth, uncalloused. “I know that it is difficult for you to forgive me. But it was best for you—you must admit it.”
He withdrew his hand. “What are you doing here, Mrs. Karevna? You still serve the Russian tsar, I presume, and so once again, I think we are enemies. Are you with Sterne?”
She smiled somewhat unconvincingly and stood. He realized with a shock how short she was, for when last he had seen her, he had been only fourteen. She looked suddenly vulnerable in a way he had never imagined she could. “Sterne—I never met him until I arrived here. Who I serve has become rather … complicated. Russia is no longer ruled by the tsar, as such. I find myself … confused.”
“You, confused? It is difficult to believe, Mrs. Karevna.”
“Once you called me Vasilisa. You did when we met just now.”
“Once I was a boy with a tender heart. Thanks much to your influence, I am no longer that boy.”
“I never meant to hurt you, Benjamin, that much is true. I think you know it is.” She cocked her head. “Your hand calls you married.”
He touched his wedding band. “Indeed. Some ten years now.”
“I congratulate the woman. She is American?”
“She is Czech, actually.”
Vasilisa smiled broadly. “You seem to have acquired a taste for Slavic women, my dear.”
That brought a blush he didn't think he had left in him. “It is good to know you are alive,” he said, a bit of the bluster leaving his voice. “I thought, once, that I saw you on a Russian ship—”
“When you fell from the sky with the Swedish king and laid waste to the Russian fleet over Venice? Yes, I was there. It was a glad moment for me, to know you were alive—but, as you remember, there was not much time or opportunity for a reunion. But seeing you then is, in part, why I am here in America. I assumed you would gather importance and therefore be easy to find.”
“Not in this colony.”
“My duty brought me to this colony, from quite a different direction as your Pretender and the Russian traitors with him. My heart would have brought me, eventually, to seek you out, to offer my apologies.”
“That, I cannot believe,” Franklin replied, forcing some of the hardness back into his voice. “You were never in love with me.”
“No, but I did love you. And I wronged you. There comes a time when one wants to set things right, to make life over.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, and there is more. I need your help.”
“Which makes more sense to me.”
Now her smile grew even wider. “Benjamin, you have indeed grown up. You are more cynical than ever I was. I'm not sure I like it on you, this rough and prickly suit.”
“You helped pick it out.”
She laughed, and it was the laugh he remembered, pure and musical. “In that case, let me be plain and businesslike, yes, Benjamin? I can help you against Sterne and his Pretender. But I need your help as well—help of a scientifical nature.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Our real enemies—you know who I mean, I think— gather themselves. Certain philosophers in the Russian empire have given them new muscles, which soon we shall see flexed. We must stop them, Benjamin, or all the world will burn.”
“You wish me to think you traitor to the tsar?”
“The tsar is probably dead, but I serve him yet,” she said heatedly, her voice actually quavering. “Did I ever tell you how I came to meet the tsar?”
“You never did. Why should I care?”
“He saved my life. More than that, he gave me a new one, a better one. No man—no person—has ever done such a thing for me. You must believe me when I say I loved the tsar and despise those who have taken his country. And the masters they serve—those creatures Sir Isaac once called the malakim—they will be done with all of us. We are on the same side, Benjamin. Do not let your bitterness toward me obscure that. It will not serve either of us well.”
“You've always been a great talker, Vasilisa, but you were never shy of turning the truth front to back, and for all I know have made practice perfect these twelve years gone. Can you offer any proof of what you say?”
“You called me Vasilisa again,” she said softly.
“Can you prove what you say?” he repeated insistently.
“I think so. We will speak again.”
“I would rather have it now.”
“All I have to offer you now is my word and myself,” she said simply. “If either will do, take them. If not, then you must wait a bit.”
“I cannot wait too long,” he cautioned. “But I will give you time to
prove your case.”
“You will not regret it.”
He left, and the page showed him to a small, damp, drafty apartment. It made him almost yearn for their camps on the forest trails, which at least gave one a view of who might be coming.
He had scarcely seated himself on a hard stool when a rap came at the door.
“And how is the ambassador?”
“Evening, Robin. I'm afraid I can't really say. The afternoon has left me somewhat … bewildered.”
“Well, we ain't under arrest as I can tell, so things seem better here than at our Coweta congress.”
“Or perhaps just strung out longer. Sterne is here, as we suspected, pressing his case. The king says it does not please him, but I seem to make him no happier.” He wondered if he should tell Robert about Vasilisa, but he needed to know what he himself thought about that little matter before taking an-other's counsel.
“To tell you the honest truth, Robin, I think this was all a tragic mistake. This diplomacy is proving a dry well, and now I think it was water we never even needed. If we had won the Coweta and the French, what would we have? A thousand more soldiers—maybe. I've been preaching that our real foe are those in the aether, and yet what have I done to attack them? Not a thing.”
“Yet wasn't that what brought you here? The need for such supplies as the French might have?” Robert asked.
“Who knows what they have? Or whether I'll ever be able to use it?”
“Y'couldn't have known.”
“Couldn't I? Where was our intelligence? How could we have known so near nothing about this place?” Franklin asked, exasperation touching his voice.
“Well, there I may be able to help you. I've met up with one of our French brothers.”
“A secret Junto member?”
“Indeed.”
“He is about?”
“No, he's bein’ high cautious. Actually, Penigault introduced us. It's the Du Pratz fellow, who wrote the history of the Natchez. He paid a call whilst you were in chambers. According to him, the king here has plentiful scientific stuff.”
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