The Queen of Swords

by R. S. Belcher

  The water receded grudgingly. Anne, on her knees, choked and coughed as she found the deck beneath her again. She looked up and saw the angry elemental preparing to strike the ship again. In her waterlogged ears she thought she heard Curran shouting orders. A horrible thought stabbed at her, and she reached into her wet shirt and felt where she had placed the cloth and the gem from the bone case. Both were still tucked snug against the now-soaked wrap she was forced to wear. Both were still there, and to her astonishment, the cloth was completely dry.

  She touched the ancient cloth that was currently the only dry thing for probably a hundred miles. The name the giant was calling out, she had heard it before. From a Haitian woman, dressed in red and white, Anne had met in Cap-Francais. The woman said she was a witch, had said that name—Mmuommiri—was old, a name from the homeland, from Africa. “A powerful spirit of the water,” she had said. “She is a guardian of prosperity, a healer, an avenger. She can be many things, as the sea can be many things to those who travel her. Sailors court her and curse her. Here, we call her Mami Wata, and as a sailor, you would do well not to anger her.…”

  “Hell!” Anne shouted as she scrambled across the tumbling deck toward Curran’s cabin. “Damn it all to hell!” The watery fist came crashing down, water surging everywhere, as Anne tumbled into the dark cabin along with the rushing waters. The ship almost capsized again, tipping dangerously close to the water’s surface. The ocean tore into the room as the aft windows exploded. It hurried across the floor, retreating some as the ship righted itself. Anne reached the symbol-covered box and put her hand on it. It was dry, untouched by the water.

  There was a terrible creaking—the sound of wood straining to its limit—and Anne was certain that the Lough Sheelin couldn’t take much more pounding. She pulled out the still-tightly-wrapped cloth and the flawless ruby and slid them back into their bone case. She heard shouting outside but ignored it and quickly sealed the bone tube. She laid it back into its bed of ancient dust.

  “My most sincere apologies, Mami Wata,” Anne said in French, as she slammed the box shut. There was a rumble outside, the spirit’s eerie voice full of anger and frustration, fading as if it were being pulled apart by the very wind that carried it. Waves broke and ran over the deck, and the ship shuddered from the relatively mild impact, but the hull held, and she did not capsize. Some water streamed through the open door onto the cabin floor. Not a drop dared to come near the painted box.

  Anne slumped onto the wet floor, coughing, sniffing and then, quite uncontrollably, giggling. Finally, she lay still and listened to the sound of voices out on the deck, the gentle rocking of calm waves lapping against wood and the sound of her own heart, still thudding away in her chest.

  Curran, silhouetted in the door of his cabin by the now-returned starlight, spoke softly into the darkened room. “We just lost eight good men. I’ll get you to the slave coast as we agreed, Annie,” he said. “Then we’re quits, you and I. I’ll keep that abominable box in the middle passage hold, below, and you will not touch it again until you, and it, are far, far from my ship. Do you understand? I don’t want any treasure, I don’t want anything that comes from such dark sorcery, anything with such a high price.”

  Anne rolled onto her back with a splash, her eyes closed. She softly patted the side of the marked box. “If you say so, Willy” she said. “More for me.”

  6

  The Moon

  Charleston, South Carolina

  March 10, 1871

  The letter from Golgotha arrived at Grande Folly. Maude had been at the mansion for some time, planning her campaign to reclaim Constance and her fortune. Isaiah brought the letter to her as part of a packet of correspondence. Maude had been making numerous inquiries seeking information and potential allies in her upcoming action against her father and his rather formidable resources.

  The letter was in a simple brown envelope, the handwriting partly obscured by the ink of the postal stamps. Her heart stopped listening to her brain; instead it hammered in her chest faster, like she was running for her life. It was a lovely feeling to just let your heart beat as it wished, just like everyone else.

  She ignored the other mail and all her papers, all her tactics and goals. She held the letter in her hands. Sunshine filled her chest and her face, flushing her cheeks, as she read her name written with a careful but unpracticed hand. She knew who it was from before she even opened it. One of the most disciplined human beings on the planet found it hard to draw a breath as she slit the envelope open with her razor-sharp fingernail. She unfolded the pages. It was dated February fourteenth. It read:

  Hey Maude,

  It’s me, Mutt, but then I figure you already ciphered that out, didn’t you? If there are any mistakes in this here letter, blame it on Jim and Jonathan, cause they’re the ones who helped me with the words and the spelling.

  Maude laughed. Mutt had written “fuck ups” and then crossed it out and replaced it with “mistakes.” She could hear Mutt’s deep voice, moving between smooth and sarcastic, an occasional rumbling growl at times. She saw his crooked grin, yellowed teeth and sharp, straight incisors. Something older than the Devil danced in his dark eyes. Mutt wasn’t what you would call a handsome man, but there was something in his appearance that made him striking. He had taken the worst life had to throw at him and never compromised himself along the way, never let the world beat him down. Maude thought he was beautiful.

  … The town is pretty much back to normal, or what passes for normal in these parts. Malachi Bick hired up a bunch of those Chinese laborers who got cut from the railroad to work on repairing the mess from that little war we had with the cult of cannibals back in November. There was a spot of trouble during the clean-up and rebuild, of course there was, right? I’ll tell you about that in a spell.

  They did a bang-up job of getting the buildings that got wrecked fixed up and pretty as a picture. Bick’s got them working on new construction projects now too, trying to build up the town even more. I don’t like it, but I’m not sure if that’s because it’s more people here—more people that can end up dead or crazy—or if I don’t like it because it’s what Malachi wants.

  Auggie Shultz is working for Bick now, if you can believe that. He’s running both the store on Main Street and the mining company store and acting as Malachi’s … what the hell did he call it, oh yeah, “business manager.” Sounds pretty highfalutin, you ask me, but Auggie’s still Auggie and he’s actually managed to convince some people that Bick isn’t a complete son of a bitch. I’m pretty damn sure that was why Bick hired him in the first place, son of a bitch. Sorry, Jim said not to cuss too much in a letter to a lady.

  The Shultzes are expecting. Gillian Shultz told me to tell you hey. Auggie’s so proud he bust a few of them buttons off his new fancy vest bragging. She’s due in September, according to the doc.

  Speaking of the doc, that would be Clay Turlough these days. Yeah, I know, it’s hard for me to get my head around that notion, too, but Clay’s done hung out a shingle and everything, and let’s face it, anyone’s a step up from the last sawbones we had in these parts. Clay’s come up with some tonic that’s been helping folks all over. He fixed up Emily Bick with it, got her out of that wheelchair, and it actually caused those scales on old Mrs. Whateley’s neck to fade away, which has done wonders for her social life.

  If that isn’t rattle-snake crazy enough for you, Clay’s got him a lady friend these days, and she’s living and breathing to boot … at least I’m pretty sure she is. Her name is Shelly Wollstone, and she’s been doing work as a seamstress around town the last few months. I get a queer feeling about her, Maude, but then I keep thinking, for a body to take up with Clay, she’d have to be a bit peculiar, anyway, right?

  Golgotha’s still booming. Hell, now we got people coming from all over just to see Clay and get some of his snake oil. Folks from as far away as Hazen, Nightvale and even Desert Bluffs have been showing up. Harry Pratt is making hay all about how fast
Golgotha is growing. He’s cooking up some kind of a scheme with the railroad to get a dog-leg off the main transcontinental line here. Harry’s up for reelection soon for mayor, and he’s got competition this time, Daaron Bevalier. That’s that old stone-ass Rony’s son. I figure Harry thinks getting the railroad here will be a nice feather in his cap and keep him in the mayor’s job for a spell longer. Who knows? Crazy white people fighting over who gets to run the asylum.

  All that boom is, of course, keeping Jonathan, Jim, Kate and me busy. You figure one sheriff and three deputies would have their hands full most places with this many people, but especially here in Golgotha. You, better than most, know it ain’t just drunks having a go, or some cattle-puncher who decides to slap leather with a gent in the saloon. Nope, we got that special kind of trouble that only seems to pop up here.

  Give you a for instance. Like I mentioned before, in late January, the construction and clean-up crews around Golgotha started having men disappear without a trace. Me and Jonathan looked into it and discovered something peculiar in the debris of all the busted-up buildings. They looked like some kind of nests. They were big enough to hold something larger than a man and made out of shredded wood chips—like something had chewed up the wooden beams and spit them out. The whole mess was held together by some kind of glue-like sludge. Whatever the hell that stuff is, it stinks worse than a carcass out in the sun, and it glows in the dark, to boot.

  The nests we found had shredded clothing and personal belongings of the missing men and cracked and brittle bones. Clay said it looked like something had drilled into the bones and sucked every last bit of marrow out of them. In a few of the nests we found dried husks of skin, like when a snake sheds. To make a long, nasty story short, we found the thing. It was about the size of a bear but moved like it was made out of a greased cloud. Fastest, quietest damn thing I’d seen since that Xiuhcoatl thing slithered into town. It looked kinda like a porcupine mixed with a duck and a lizard. Its bill was real long, narrow and pointed, sharp as hell too. The thing had a second mouth under the bill that could open about as wide as a wagon wheel and was six rows deep in fangs dripping some kind of poison glue.

  The only thing that would keep the ugly son of a bitch down was wood from a yucca tree—don’t ask how the hell Clay sussed that one out. He said it had something to do with the oils from the woods that it used to make its nests compared to the ones it just nibbled on. So we were finally able to kill it. Clay said the thing was kin to some kind of critter called an “echidna,” odd little S.O.B. that lives in Australia. Remind me to never go to Australia.

  Me and Jon got out of the scrap with the duck-billed marrow-sucker about how we usually do, banged up but alive. Jim ran things for a spell while me and Jon healed up, and I have to say that boy is a hell of a lawman. Jon thinks so too. He’s growing like a weed. He asks after Constance damn near every day, so watch out. If I ever had a pup of my own, I’d want him to be like Jim Negrey. He’s a good person, all the way through.…

  Maude noticed that Mutt had started the next paragraph numerous times and marked each attempt out with slashes of ink. Finally, he seemed to find the words he wanted.

  … I guess you can tell by all the small talk, which you know how damned much I enjoy, I’m hemming and hawing about what I want to say. I asked Jonathan, and he said to just say it plain, like how I cuss out the mayor or Bick, but plain-speaking with you about some things is more frightening to me than facing down a whole gaggle of bear-sized, duck-billed marrow-suckers. Is gaggle right, there? Maybe passel?

  “You’re stalling,” Maude said to the paper, arching her eyebrow.

  … Yeah, I’m stalling. Well, okay, here we go. Last week, we had a curse running around town that made everyone tell the truth. People were catching the damned thing like it was the sniffles. A place like Golgotha, secrets keep the peace as much as the law does, maybe more. We had sixteen brawls break out, five attempted murders, and two that got the job done. We also ended up with twelve new marriages out of it, and Jon and I have a bet going about how many babies we see show up.

  We managed to trace it back to a fella who came in on the coach a few weeks back. He was originally from Poland and had this trinket on him that his grandma had given him. It was this bottle with these lights floating around in it. He said the lights were something called a vjeestica, apparently some kind of witch, and his grandmother had given it to him to guard when she passed. We wrangled the vjeestica back into its bottle. Everyone got back to lying to one another like usual and peace and quiet was restored. I think that lasted about two days.

  During all the scraping, at one point, I caught the damn curse. I had some straight truth come out of my mouth, truths I keep to myself, for a lot of reasons. Some of them truths were about you, Maude.

  You know I grew up without a name, which never meant much never mind to me, really. A person is what they do, not some handle. My mother had a name that she called me, and I picked my own when I was older. My people hated me and my mother, on account of who my dad was, and because they were a bunch of hypocritical assholes. Sorry about the cussing, dammit. They hated us so much, they eventually chased us away.

  When you’re alone all the time, you build up these calluses to keep you safe, to make you and everyone else believe that you’re fine being by your lonesome. My mother never complained once about being alone, never let me feel cut off or lonely when I was with her. She died in part out of loneliness, I think. She loved her family so much, they were such a big part of her, that when they were all gone, it killed her some and it did it slow.

  As a pup, I remember the older boys teasing me about having no father, during games. I can still remember the first time they beat the daylights out of me. I can scrap better than most, and I know how to take an ass-whooping; it’s in my blood. I took all that pain gladly, turned it into rage and anger and used it for a long time. Truth be told, I still use it, sometimes …

  Maude closed her eyes for a moment. She saw all the times Mutt had taken a beating to within an inch of his life, and come up laughing, grinning. It was the opposite of what she had been taught. To be that dangerously out of control, to let pure emotion drive you, was to let the enemy win. What Mutt called a strength she had always thought was a fatal weakness. Gran had tried to teach her balance between reserve and passion; Gran, herself, leaning to passion. Gran told Maude several times how leaping without looking had almost gotten her killed, time and again. It was hard to reconcile, because of all the people she had ever met in her life, the man called Mutt was, without a doubt, the strongest person she had ever known. She looked back to the page.

  … Worse than the beatings was the silence, like I wasn’t there at all. Those pained looks and then the quick glance away. I knew, I knew in my bones when I was young, I was going to walk by myself all my days and I callused up good and quick. I got real good at it too. Funny thing is I still see those looks, feel that silence. Don’t matter if I’m a boy in my village or a man in Golgotha, the world sees someone who don’t fit in, don’t belong, and they do their best to either break me down or erase me from their pretty world. Neither one seems to have taken.

  I can honestly say I didn’t give a damn what people thought of me. That worked out real well for me for a long time. Jonathan was the first—only white man, hell, only man, who I actually liked, actually respected—then Jim, and then you came along, Maude. You caught me completely off guard, turned me around like a weather vane in a storm. I didn’t see you coming at all, and you sure as hell weren’t expecting me.

  Most of the truths I was spitting out under that hex can wait until you’re done with all you have to do back East. I think truths should be told close up, share the same air. They can be fragile things sometimes. But the one truth I wanted to tell you, needed you to know now, when you’re far away and walking into a world of trouble, is that you tear all my calluses away. You make me care about something.

  In a world neither of us fits too good in—a
nd that sure as hell wasn’t made for folks like us—you make me feel … not alone. No, more than that. Damn, but words are hard, and clumsier than a three-legged mule.

  If I could show you the desert at night, let you look up at the moon and feel the blood thunder in your ears and that silver light sing in your body. The night makes you feel like everything is secret, and sacred, burning with the purest life. If I could share that with you, then maybe you’d know how you make me feel. I just wanted you to know you’re not alone, either; you’re never alone.

  You know as well as I do that sometimes, in a tough scrap, you have to use everything you have in you to stay alive, to keep fighting, to get back on your feet and put the other son of a bitch down. If the fight you’re fighting takes you to that place, I hope you’ll find me there. I always will be.

  Git home quick. We miss you. I miss you.

  Your friend,

  Mutt

  Maude held the letter for a long time. She read it again. She folded it carefully along the creases in the paper and slid it back into the envelope. Its presence in her hand gave her comfort and made her feel connected to him—the one man in this world who had never let her down, had never doubted her. The last time she saw him, he had wanted to go with her, willing to step away from his whole life just to support her cause. Maude had refused his help.

  “You think the courts there give any more of a damn about what a woman and an Indian think is right or wrong than the courts here do?” she had said. “And I will not steal my own daughter away in the night like some thief. No, Mutt. I’m going home, back to Charleston, and I’m going to get my daughter back and my inheritance back, and I’m going to make this right and make it fair.”

  Most men would have balked at this—Arthur or her father certainly would have—but Mutt was silent for a moment, holding her hand, then he said, “I trust you. I always have. Do what you have to do. If you need me, call and I’ll come running.”