The Shadows of God

by J. Gregory Keyes

  “My apologies,” he said. “I was overcome.”

  “I also apologize,” the tsar said. It sounded like it hurt. “King Charles—you want satisfaction from me. When the appropriate time comes, you shall have it.”

  Charles nodded. “We shall discuss it again.” He smiled grimly. “Though I must say, I have received some satisfaction already.” He rubbed his bloody knuckles.

  Oglethorpe coughed quietly. “If we are all quite ready, there is a war to fight, and I would greatly appreciate the advice of generals more experienced than I.”

  As Franklin faced the sorceress for the second time, he tried to put his feelings where they belonged—nowhere. His head understood everything he had been told about her. His heart did not, probably would not. That was the way it ought to be, he supposed, like good English government. A Parliament to check the king, a king to check the Parliament.

  He did not know whether his heart was king or Parliament, but it had already had its say.

  “You see, I come unarmed this time,” he remarked, as jovially as he could.

  She did not take it so lightly. He was struck again by her beauty and by the serious lines of her face, by her enigmatic little smile that seemed to mean nothing. “When I was a young girl,” she said, “no gift would have been greater to me than meeting for one minute Sir Isaac Newton. I read his works over and over—in secret, you understand, so no one would know that a woman had the impertinence to— Well, that's beside the point. I worshipped Newton and his philosophies. I lived for the beauty, the elegance of his mathematical demonstrations. I took a place as a transcriber in the French Academy of Sciences just to be near those who discussed his theories.” Her eyes were lamps of darkness, empty of pleading or argument. She was just talking, as she might to herself.

  “And in the end, I killed him. He wasn't the first man I killed; he wasn't the last. I understand how you must feel, but I think we must talk, you and I. We share something.”

  “If you mean a love for Newton, I hardly see how—”

  “No.” Her voice sounded strange. “No. You see, we have met before.”

  “At Venice.”

  She shook her head. “You were in Boston—I was in Paris. You called yourself Janus. I called myself Minerva.”

  A tingle like a thousand needles crept across his face and down his limbs. His heart tripped oddly, and the room seemed to blur at the edges.

  “What are you telling me?”

  “I was the amanuensis of a man named Fatio de Duillier. Mr. F. I watched his aetherschreibers. He was working, I knew, on some sort of weapon for the king, but I did not know what. It was a great secret, and a key element was missing. Fatio … could not find it. Since the problem was even more a cipher to me, I did not either, nor did our English colleague, Mr. S. But then I got a letter signed Janus, which made strange claims: that he had found a way to tune an aether-schreiber, that he also had a solution to part of Fatio's problem. And there was an equation. I took it, hid it, worked on it in my room, corrected it, then rewrote it as if Mr. S—”

  “Stirling,” Franklin said. “Stirling.”

  “Stirling? Well, I never knew— In any event, it was the answer Fatio was looking for. It was only later that I understood what he was doing, what I had done. And much, much, later that Vasilisa Karevna told me the story of a young boy named Benjamin Franklin, come to London from Boston because he feared he had given the French an awful secret.”

  Franklin put his head in his hands. “I didn't—I was only fourteen. I wanted to make my mark in the world early, to show—”

  “And I only wanted to solve an equation. And yet look what our ambitions did together.”

  “No,” Franklin said. “No, no!” He leapt up, started to pace, pounded the wall with his palms instead. “No! No! This was not how it was supposed to be! By God!” He whirled on her. “Do you know? Do you know how long I've imagined finally meeting the Frenchman who called down the comet? Do you? I knew him, knew him in my heart. An evil, corrupt man, a man who would do anything, who cared no more for human life than a horse cares for the fly it swats! A terrible man, a sick man, a twisted bastard of science and Satan. And now you tell me—you rob me—” He couldn't go on. He didn't know what he was saying.

  “Fatio was a pathetic creature,” Adrienne said, “but even he wasn't evil. I think, in the end, he only wanted to show Newton that he was worthwhile, after Newton broke with him.”

  Franklin gritted his teeth. It sounded right. How often had he felt the same way, when he was Newton's apprentice?

  “Louis XIV was a sick old man who thought he was saving his country. He was deceived, too.”

  “Someone is to blame. Someone!” Franklin shouted.

  “Besides the two of us, you mean? Then blame the mala-kim, for in the end it was their wish we fulfilled. Quite the opposite of what the legends say—we are their djinni, not they ours. As for me, I cannot fool myself. My silly curiosity and girlish game of secrecy ruined the world.”

  “Ah, God!” Franklin collapsed into the chair, hands clenching and unclenching. “How can you be so —” He was going to say “calm” and “remorseless,” but then he met her gaze again, and her misery struck him like an ocean wave, clogging his throat and stinging his eyes and cold, so cold he shivered. It struck him dumb, and he realized that there was nothing mysterious about this woman at all. He understood her to the core, had since the instant he saw her—and then locked that knowledge away, because to face Adrienne de Mornay de Montchevreuil, he had to face himself, and he had avoided that for many years.

  “I hope,” he managed, when he could again form words not too sawn at the edges to be understood, “that you have some purpose in reminding me of all of this.”

  “I do. I want you to share penance with me. I want you to help me make things right.”

  “That's what I'm trying to do, with your friend Vasilisa, and Red Shoes, and your students.”

  “I do not trust Vasilisa or the Indian. Do you?”

  He hesitated. “No, I don't. There is something in their purpose that feels … odd. I keep dismissing it.”

  “As you dismissed any suspicions that you might be helping the wrong people, those years ago in Boston?”

  “Now that you mention it. But—forgive me—why should I trust you? Or you me?”

  “Because we are damned by the same love, the same mistake, the same sin. I trust you because we crave the same redemption.”

  He frowned. “What if this is all a lie? You could have learned anything you just told me from Vasilisa.”

  “You know it isn't a lie,” she said.

  And, of course, he did.

  So he dragged the words out of himself. “Where do we start, then?”

  “We start with a story,” Adrienne said. “It's about my hand …”

  Oglethorpe listened for a moment to the cannon fire in the distance. The inhabitants of the Taensa village heard it, too, and the women began packing up what few possessions they valued enough to take with them. A small knot of old men sat around the fire chanting—whether merely singing a song or working at some magic, he had no idea.

  The cannon boomed again. “That'll be the German company,” he said. “I had a report an hour ago that they were on hand to engage the enemy as they unloaded their ships. I think we shall have a hot breakfast, my friends—powder and ball.”

  “Thank God and Benjamin Franklin we have those Swedenborgian airships,” Nairne said. “At least now we see how the country lies.” He poured each man at the table a glass of Madeira, then raised his own. “To our wizard, Benjamin Franklin!”

  They clinked glasses and drank, the five of them— Oglethorpe; Nairne; and their majesties Philippe, Charles, and Peter. The latter two hesitated before touching their glasses, but Charles completed the motion.

  “I also had word from Unoka,” Oglethorpe went on. “He and the Choctaw worked their way north to devil them from the rear. Less than fifty of ‘em left, but even a gadfly sho
uld be help to us now.”

  “To them,” Charles said. They drank again.

  “I do not ordinarily drink,” the Swedish king explained, “but these are not ordinary times. Moreover, I am getting old, and find myself often doing things I would never have dreamed of in the past.” He glanced conspicuously at the tsar.

  “To —all of us here. Win or lose, this is a fight they shall never forget.”

  Peter shook his head. “Not true. If we lose, there shall be no one to remember it.”

  “Then we must win. I want them to remember that I finally settled my score with you.”

  Peter's face twitched, but to Oglethorpe's surprise, the remark didn't seem to anger the tsar. “It may be that our foe will settle it for us.” His face grew longer. “I come here a pauper. I have few men in arms, and those mostly belong to my daugh-ter's guard. I have no cannon, not even weapons of my own. I wish—I wish one of you would ask me to fight with your company. I will not beg, however.”

  That was greeted with silence, for no one could say, really, that they trusted the tsar against troops that were in part Russian. Finally Philippe said, “But of course, sir, it would be my honor if you would ride with the French.”

  “No.” They all turned to Charles. His fingers had gone white, gripping his glass. “No. Let him ride with me.”

  They all stared at him, as he turned with deliberation to the tsar. “If you fear it, I swear to you this is no ruse to put you in front of my gun. I need not resort to that—I know, as do you, that if we duel with swords I will win. I am far the better swordsman, and God is also on my side. No contest of arms between us can be fair. So this is my challenge to you, sir. We shall face the guns of the enemy side by side and—as you say—we shall let the enemy settle our differences. In the meantime, it will give me great pleasure that you see my soldiers—who have undergone such misery on your account—for the incomparable warriors that they are, and that you should ride with them against the same men who once fought for you. One of us must live, and one of us must die—that seems certain. I am content to let God choose.”

  The tsar looked down at his wineglass, and a slow smile spread across his face. “That is a challenge worthy of a tsar,” he said. “And it is to my liking.”

  And so they all drank to that, and Oglethorpe knew for a fact that the world would never see such a thing again. They belonged to another age, these men: an age of titans. Whatever happened, their epoch was past, and they knew it.

  As Oglethorpe predicted, by morning the lines were more or less drawn. The German company and other Indian-style fighters had done what they could to slow the advancing troops, but sooner or later—as they once said in Holland— the water reaches the dike.

  The dike around New Paris was the series of redoubts, protected by devil guns, a zone of unbreathable air created by yet more Franklin devices, some new inventions that were supposed to halt the worst of the diabolic weapons if they ever came to bear—and themselves, the army of the continent.

  It was a dike that would not hold for long. It was too long and thin, with too many holes in it. Once it was breached, there would be nothing for it but to fall back to New Paris itself.

  Oglethorpe had no intention of letting that happen. He met with the other commanders the next morning.

  “’Twill take them a few days, at best, to cut through our line somewhere. When they have us all forced back to New Paris, they'll emplace their long-range guns and pound the city to bits. They may even grow bold enough to put their airships high over the city and drop grenados.”

  “I doubt it,” Peter said. “The lesson of Venice is still remembered in Russia.”

  “Granted, but they seem in a desperate hurry in this matter, so they may try it. Even foundered, a fully laden airship crashing into New Paris would wreak plenty of havoc.”

  “Still I doubt it. Mademoiselle de Montchevreuil and her companions tell me the devil's army lost the bulk of their airships battling her and the Choctaw. They will protect those that remain.”

  “You may be right,” Oglethorpe conceded. “Indeed, though I raised the question, I am counting on that being the case. After unloading artillery, the airships withdrew some two leagues from here, where they are grounded, presumably from fear that we might manage—as we have in the past—to slip close with a devil gun. I propose that those ships should be the target of a powerful and decisive attack. Once we have wrecked them, we'll have cut their supply line. We can then clean up any devils who remain in the field.”

  “How are we to do that?” Charles asked. “Suppose we mass and strike for their ships. How can we keep them on the ground? As we fight our way to them, they will simply fly away—that is their beauty, as mobile fortresses.”

  “I've asked some people to speak on that,” Oglethorpe replied. He raised his voice. “If it would please the lady and gentlemen to step into the tent?”

  The flap rustled, and in walked Benjamin Franklin, wearing his raccoon hat and a plain brown suit. With him were the Choctaw Red Shoes, Vasilisa Karevna, and Leonhard Euler.

  “Mr. Franklin!” Charles said, briskly rising to shake the young man's hand. “Come to save us all again, I see.”

  Franklin smiled wanly. “We must all do our part, Your Majesty. And it is good to see you again.”

  “Yes—hang together or hang separately, I heard you said. By heaven, let that be our battle cry. Well, what magic do you have for us, Mr. Franklin?”

  “We have, between us, devised some stratagems,” Franklin replied, “which we think will keep the airships on the ground. But I fear it is still the army that must carry the day.”

  “Don't worry about that,” Oglethorpe replied. “My lads are ready for anything.”

  “And mine!” Charles added.

  “The French will never shirk,” Philippe assured them.

  “I will not bore you with scientific details, gentlemen,” Franklin said. “May I simply tell it to you in logistical terms?”

  “Please.”

  “If we can get near enough to the ships, quickly enough and undetected, we can deprive them of the power to fly. Not for long—a day at best.”

  “You will use an invisible ship, as you did against me in Venice?” the tsar asked.

  “Yes, Majesty. But in that case, our intent was to capture one of your own ships. A desperate measure, and one which in fact failed. In this case, we need only get near.”

  “And once you have beached them, so to speak,” Charles said, “you may leave?”

  “No. We must remain close, to continue to prevent them from rising. That is why I can promise you only a short time— once they discover and attack us, our defenses will only last so long. If they destroy us before you arrive, they will fly.”

  “And you will die,” Charles pointed out.

  “True,” Franklin replied, “but that lies at the end of most of our roads, at the moment.”

  “Worry not,” Oglethorpe said. “Two leagues? I will be there in three hours, and heaven help anyone between here and there.”

  “Bah!” Charles said. “I will be there in two hours, camped in the wreckage when you arrive.”

  Philippe slapped his hands together. “I have a bottle of cognac,” he said, “of a particularly fine sort. So far as I know, it is the very last in the world. Whichever company reaches those ships first—Swedish, Commonwealth, or French— shall have the honor of drinking it.” He paused for a moment. “Or failing that, whosoever remains alive at the end of it all shall drink a toast to whoever reached them first.”

  “You have a bargain,” Oglethorpe said.

  “Well, my friends,” Franklin said to his scientific companions, “our future is assured by a bottle of cognac. Whatever confidence I lacked is now made whole.”

  “Indeed,” Philippe said, “for you shall hold the bottle yourself, and award it to the winner.”

  “Where are you going, Mademoiselle?”

  “Hello, Elizavet. You're up early,” Adrienne said.
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  She shrugged. “I had something of a— disappointment last night. I stayed up thinking about that, but then my mind went to other things. It would not stop.”

  “Did your disappointment have a name?”

  “Carl von Linné.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yes. He refused my favor—me—for that thick-waisted émilie.”

  “And that kept you up until morning?”

  Elizavet settled on a tabouret. “Where are you going?” she repeated. “You are still injured.”

  “That in a moment.”

  Elizavet sighed and examined her right palm, tracing the index finger of her left along the delicate lines there. “They say our fate is written here. I never thought I had much of a fate. I never thought I needed one. I'm the daughter of the tsar, after all. Yes, Linné refused me. A very rare thing, especially when the other woman is so far from me in beauty.”

  “But he is in love, Elizavet, and that makes a difference.”

  “I know,” the tsarevna said. “I did not believe that before, not in my heart. But the more I thought on it, the more I wondered why I ever wanted him. And it was because of her, Mademoiselle.” She knit her fingers in her lap.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, émilie is like you. Oh, not so beautiful, of course. But her mind, her thoughts—I cannot imagine them, as I cannot imagine yours. They are too far beyond me. And I— envy that. Desire it. It makes her better than me, and I tried to take Linné from her to prove that she was not. But I failed.”

  “Elizavet, there is nothing wrong with you.”

  “I'm just stupid—is that it? Naturally, like a beast?”

  “No. No, you are very bright. You've just never been interested in proving it. Why are you now?”

  “Why?” Her eyes grew large. “Because of you, of course. You have shown me what a woman might be. I love you, Mademoiselle, as I have never loved another woman, not even my mother. I—I do not wish to disappoint you. But there is nothing to do! Everyone else has something to give to this fight, everyone but me!”