Witchy Eye

by D. J. Butler

  “The Right Reverend Father, huh?” she repeated slowly, balling her free hand into a fist on her hip. “Well, if you’s talkin’ about a churched man, that’s another kettle of fish altogether. I guess they’s two Zeke Angletons in this ol’ world, who’d a thunk it?” She kept her face straight, but her eye was laughing at him. Many in the crowd snickered, and some openly guffawed.

  Obadiah’s cheeks burned. He was used to yelling out announcements to large gatherings, and he was not accustomed to being heckled in the process. “Do you ’old then that if a man be a priest, ’is opinions be wrong, no matter what?” That should recover some of the ground he’d lost.

  “Oh, I ain’t no swoonin’ Barton Stone enthusiast,” she shot back. “I reckon a priest’s as good a man as many, and maybe even better’n most, when it comes to the business of preachin’. I’m jest interested in honest advertisement, seein’ as how we’re at the Fair.”

  “Aye, ’e be churched,” Obadiah admitted, because in effect he had already said as much. He needed to win the crowd back. He needed a little theater. “But that don’t mean ’e ben’t a mighty preacher. I’ve ’eard ’im shake the very walls with the righteous sound of ’is voice alone!” Obadiah churned the air with his fist for emphasis. “I’ve seen soldiers weep to ’ear ’im preach!”

  “Soldiers? Is the Right Reverend Father Zeke Angleton an army preacher, then?” The girl’s face mocked innocence. “Who e’er heard of a chaplain takin’ to the tent?” Most of the crowd was laughing now, and the ugly girl’s comrades were laughing hardest of all. In a flash in his mind’s eye Obadiah saw himself seizing the tallest of them, a lanky, unhandsome lad with long red hair, and smashing his head into his own cart, over and over again, bloodying the brown tobacco leaves and throwing the body under the wheels on Market Street.

  Obadiah tried to focus, but he was flailing. In his building anger, he had a hard time concentrating, and he groped for a dramatic, inspiring image, something to get him out of being ridiculed and to again excite the mob to hear the Right Reverend Father. Not that he gave a tinker’s damn whether any of them listened to the priest, much less were saved by his preaching, but Obadiah wanted to keep his job.

  He fell back on a polished pitch he’d made in many a street of Boston and Philadelphia. It was a good pitch, full of high drama, and it had never failed him. “Not since St. Martin Luther nailed the skin of the Eldritch ’eretic Cetes to the church door in Wittenberk an’ cried ‘’ere I stand!’ ’as such powerful preachink been ’eard by Christian ears, I trow!”

  He saw immediately that he had made another misstep.

  “Oh, he’s a Martinite!” The girl’s visible eye danced with glee. “Everybody hide your fairies!” The crowd roared.

  Obadiah struggled to remember Father Angleton’s instructions. He was to have kept it simple, addressed the crowd as the Children of the New Light, invited them to hear preaching and prophesying, and make no mention of the Church, Father Angleton’s titles, or the fact he was a member of the Order of St. Martin Luther. That was the path Obadiah had started down—how had he gone so far wrong?

  It was the girl with the bad eye. She was malicious, maybe even evil. She was still keeping a straight face, but the loud laughter all around him seemed to Obadiah to be her laughter, and it humiliated him.

  His instructions didn’t tell him what to do now. Obadiah wanted an incisive remark, something that would stamp out the wicked spark in the ugly girl and show the crowd he was master. His mouth gaped and his jaw worked, but before he could form any words, the girl shrugged and walked on, leading the mule and cart and the sharp-elbowed, snickering gaggle of Appalachee runts behind her.

  * * *

  Calvin Calhoun was laughing pretty hard inside, but he didn’t let it show—that would have ruined Sarah’s joke. Of course, he knew in some sense the joke was on her, and it was an ironic one.

  The hillfolk around Nashville would walk twenty miles and stand up to their knees in mud under a lightning storm to hear a New Light preacher, or at least the Christians would. There were plenty of people in the hills, decent folks even, who followed after the strange old gods of wood and creek, worshipping in the high places and the groves, and those were the ones who most agitated the really enthusiastic New Lighters. There were also more than a few residents of Free Imperial Nashville who’d come from the Crown Lands, and called on John Churchill’s English Gods, Woden, Wayland, and Herne.

  But precious few people of any persuasion in Appalachee would spit in the mouth of an ordained Christian cleric, even if he was dying of thirst. It wasn’t that he was a follower of St. Martin Luther—in general, people around Nashville didn’t care one way or the other whether the Firstborn had souls or not, had no opinion on the Serpents War in the Old World or the Moundbuilder Kingdoms in the New—it was just that he was a priest.

  Sarah had exposed the Right Reverend Father Ezekiel Angleton as an outsider and a priest, which was good fun and he was fair game, having set up as a public preacher. Rightfully her mockery should have dried his listening audience—of hillfolk, anyhow—right to zero…except that now people would expect her to come to the tent and engage the preacher as she had engaged his hard-faced herald. Baiting preachers, especially foreign preachers, was popular sport, and she had probably just increased the Right Reverend Father’s audience. Did she plan to show them she was up to the challenge? Knowing Sarah, she probably did.

  Young Andy broke into sing-song. “Twelve Electors, nary a crown,” he sang, “one from each Imperial town.”

  “Good as far as it goes,” Cal judged, “and you jest about hit the melody perfect. Of course, the hard part’s the list.”

  “Andy never gits past Chattanooga,” one of the other younguns said.

  “How far do you git?” Cal took all music seriously, but in particular he reverenced the Elector Songs. It was important to know how the emperor was chosen, because that was how he was kept under control, too. And the Elector Songs were new, just a little older than Cal himself, so they weren’t stuck deep down in everyone’s memory like most of the best songs were.

  “Asheville,” she admitted, and looked at her feet.

  Cal cleared his throat and sang.

  Youngstown, Chattanooga, Trenton

  Blacksburg, Akron, Scranton

  Knoxville, Johnson City, Asheville

  Cleveland, Providence, Nashville

  Twelve Electors, nary a crown

  One from each Imperial Town

  It wasn’t a great song, more of a chant, really, with no real melody despite what he’d said to Young Andy, but it told the tale it was supposed to tell. There were lots of Elector Songs, all of them written by John Penn’s old minstrel Walter Fitzroy, because the empire was made up of lots of different powers, so it was best to learn them young.

  “Trenton,” Young Andy sighed in exasperation. “Why can’t I ever remember Trenton?”

  “Keep tryin’,” Cal encouraged him.

  “Cal!” Sarah jerked her thumb at a buyer over her shoulder, “I b’lieve I heard a shillin’ two per hank from that skinny meneer back there. Whyn’t you go have a jawin’ session with him?” Sarah’s eye was hideous, but Cal had known her all his life and thought nothing of it. She was his auntie, and when they were in town to trade she was the leader.

  Cal would handle the coins. He was tallest, and oldest—notwithstanding that Sarah was technically his aunt, the very late and youngest daughter of his grandfather—and he was nearly always sober, which was more unusual than one might imagine. Everyone liked to hear the New Light preached. Tear down the high places, burn the groves, and stay away from all their ungodly trappings: the fornicating, the liquor, the wild dancing, and the priests. Prayer and faith and the Bible, that’s what a man needed to get through the strait and narrow gate. Everyone liked it as preaching, but not very many people took it as seriously as Cal did. He had no use for priests at all, and no use for liquor. Well, almost no use. Lord hates a man as can’t make me
rry once in a while, and didn’t David dance before the Ark?

  But no wild dancing, and no drunkenness. Drunkenness got Noah into trouble.

  Sarah herself would have done a fine job with the cash, of course, but she tried to handle money as little as she possibly could. Cal didn’t really know why—Sarah was much better at adding and subtracting than he was. She could read, write, and cipher even with big numbers, and she knew languages; Calvin could rope, brand, shoot a rifle, and throw a tomahawk. His learning was a man’s, but hers wasn’t a woman’s, not exactly. It was something extraordinary, and it was a mark of the fact that her father, Cal’s grandfather, the Elector Calhoun, doted on her.

  “Aunt Sarah,” Young Andy Calhoun called, peeling himself out of the bubbling knot of the Calhoun younguns. Young Andy was David Calhoun’s oldest boy, and David was Sarah’s oldest brother. Young Andy was almost Sarah’s age, but he was Young Andy because her father the Elector was also Andy Calhoun. Not that you would ever call her father Old Andy or Old Man Calhoun to his face, nossiree, Cal had made that mistake once years ago and the cheeks of his buttocks still stung him just to think about it. He was Elector Calhoun or, if you knew his military exploits in the Spanish War and the Pontiac Uprising and even as far back as the Ohio Forks War, and you were a friend, you might call him Iron Andy. Behind his back, you might call him a lot of things, and people did. The Elector knew it and laughed.

  “What is it, Andy?” she asked.

  “You see this?” Young Andy held up a dirty, creased sheet of paper.

  Sarah took the sheet from her nephew and Calvin crowded to look over his shoulder. “Why, this ain’t nothin’ but a news-paper,” she explained. Young Andy knew his letters well enough, but the only combination he knew how to put them into was A-N-D-R-E-W-C-A-L-H-O-U-N. If pushed by someone with real willpower, he was sometimes willing to admit also to knowing A-N-D-Y. He resisted all attempts at further education on the grounds that those letters were sufficient to identify either him or his grandpa, that was right powerful and to the purpose, thank you very much, and he didn’t see no point in learning any more. Cal was sympathetic. “I hope you didn’t let no slick-talkin’ Nashville news-paper-man trick you out of a penny, Andy Calhoun.”

  Cal squinted to see the words—he was a workaday reader at best, but while Sarah and Andy were joshing around, he managed to puzzle out the head-line and the main story. The scrap was indeed a news-paper, the Nashville Town Imperial Intelligencer, and it was today’s issue:

  EMPEROR’S SISTER DIES! POWERS MOURN

  Philadelphia. Sing, ye Mournful Seraphs!!! Our former Empress Hannah, beloved of her Family, every Pennslander & every Heart Beating in the Empire of the New World East of the Mississippi, has Succumbed! after fifteen Long Years of Struggle, to her Broken Heart. HIS IMPERIAL MAJESTY, THE EMPEROR THOMAS PENN Has Laid her to Rest in Franklin’s Lightning Cathedral, gathered to the Dust of her Illustrious Ancestors!! Ambassadors from every Power of the Empire & from the Great Kingdoms of the Old World, England, Spain, the Low Country Protectorates, the Caliphate of the West, &cetera, Attended to DO HIM HONOR & Sang her to her Eternal Sleep.

  People and places so far away, they might as well be fairy tales. Cal didn’t have much of an emotional reaction to the news of Mad Hannah’s death, except a vague feeling that it was probably a mercy; she’d been locked up since her husband died, and that was as long as Calvin could remember.

  “No I did not. I jest saw this here paper on the ground and reckoned as you might like it. Knowin’ you was sweet on paper, and all.” Young Andy grinned at her. “You’re as sweet on paper as Calvin is sweet on you!”

  “You jackass.” Sarah took a good-natured swipe at her nephew. “Well?” she prompted Calvin.

  “Jumpin’ Jerusalem, Sarah!” he cursed, smiling. “I ain’t forgot the Dutchman, I’s jest readin’ me a little news. Can’t a feller try to elevate hisself a bit without you gittin’ mad at him?”

  She smiled. If he’d been younger, she might have put him in his place for that bit of wise-assery, but he was one of the oldest grandchildren, several years older than she was, and they were peers. Peers and friends, to Calvin’s great delight.

  Cal took a hank of the cured tobacco from the Calhoun cart and loped over through the jostling crowd to confirm the price Sarah had heard from the meneer, whistling. He wished he had his tomahawk with him, but walking into town with a war axe dangling from your belt wasn’t civilized behavior, so he consoled himself by running his fingertips along the braided leather lariat that hung tied beside where the tomahawk would usually be. Like every man living on Calhoun Mountain, Cal was a cow thief, and he happened to be a good one. He was quiet, he had a sense for animals, and he could throw a rope as accurately as any man. In a pinch, the lariat would do for a weapon, as would the knife in Cal’s moccasin boot.

  “Graag,” Calvin said to the Dutchman, trying to gargle his Gs like the Hudson River Republicans did. It was the only Dutch he knew, but that hardly mattered. He hadn’t met a Dutchman yet whose English wasn’t at least as good as Cal’s, though they sounded funny. The Dutch were famous traders (and sometimes smugglers, like the Catalans and the Hansa), and wherever they went, they spoke the language—the traders of the Dutch Ohio Company probably did their haggling in Ophidian. Cal’s Graag was meant to show polite interest and respect.

  “Graag to you, dank u wel,” the Dutchman said. He was a skinny fellow like Cal, but shorter and older, with hair that had gone totally gray and eyebrows that were black.

  Cal hefted the leaves in his hand. “One shillin’, tuppence a hank, I reckon I heard you call out?”

  The Dutchman nodded and pulled out a leather wallet, finely tooled with an image of a spouting whale and held shut with ivory snaps. “Ye-e-es,” he said, in that round fashion the Dutch had. “How much do you have?”

  Cal grinned. “I got me a fair pile. ’Course, I ain’t surprised you ain’t payin’ but one-and-two, seein’ the sickly lookin’ leaf you got stacked here. Let me show you a leaf that’ll git you wantin’ to pay me a shillin’ five, on account of the price you’ll be able to get outta your own customers.” He sniffed the leaves and smiled.

  Sarah and the other Calhoun younguns kept an eye on the cart while Cal finished his conversation with the Dutchman, and Cal watched them. People who knew the Calhouns—and locally, that was a lot of folks—nodded without ceremony as they passed. She nodded back. Townspeople (who saw her only rarely) and outsiders looked at her face and almost all of them reacted. It was her eye that got their attention, her eye that had never opened and never healed. Sometimes it got a small, controlled response, a slight raising of the brows and then a turning of the head away as if the person looking had been pinched. Sometimes it earned a look of revulsion or fear. Calvin had seen pure disgust all over the face of that preacher’s hawker, and he had no doubt that was why Sarah had stopped to harass him. Well, to hell with the Englishman.

  To hell with all of them. Calvin would stand with Sarah. She was so stubborn she embarrassed the mules, but she stuck up for her own, and she was funny.

  Cal closed with the Dutchman and returned to the cart, smiling just enough for Sarah to know he’d gotten a good deal for Old Man Calhoun’s tobacco. He jingled his purse as a further signal, then tucked it into the pocket of his breeches. Unlooping the two rawhide thongs that hung the gate of the cart vertical on the cart’s rear posts, he dropped the gate open. Then he grabbed an armload of crinkling, aromatic tobacco leaves as an example for the other boys.

  “Pardon me,” said a man’s voice, so gentle Cal almost took it for a girl’s, “may I ask for your assistance?”

  Cal turned and saw Sarah facing the questioner with a face full of hostility and just a hint of surprise. The man addressing her stood very close, so close Calvin felt uncomfortable, but what surprised him more was that he was smiling at Sarah, looking her full in the eyes with an expression that was unspeakably…kind. Cal reckoned Sarah had never received such a look from
anyone who wasn’t kin, and precious few such looks from those that were.

  “What you want?” Sarah stepped back from the stranger.

  “Pardon me again,” the man said. “I’ve been told many times that I stand too close for others’ comfort. Please forgive me.” He was of middling-to-short height, thin, with very pale skin and expressive eyebrows under his mop of dark hair. His eyes wrinkled deeply as he spoke, but otherwise his age was hard for Cal to guess. Over his shoulder he had slung a leather satchel. He wore a simple gray robe, belted with rope, and a crescent moon-shaped brooch of white stone on his breast. Calvin knew a lot of the monastic orders had adopted insignia to mark their folks, but he didn’t remember who used the moon. It wasn’t the Rangers or the Circulators, he was sure of that. And the man didn’t seem to be carrying any books, so he wasn’t a Wandering Johnny.

  Then again, it needn’t be a monastic order. The fellow could be a knight, or in the service of some Power. The Elector songs told you who voted for emperor, but, like it or not, they didn’t list flags and coats of arms, and that was the kind of thing Cal didn’t have a very good grasp of.

  Sarah would know.

  “I don’t recognize your accent,” she said to the stranger. “But you ain’t from these parts.” Cal watched intently. He was aware that the other Calhoun younguns, though they pretended they were still jostling each other and playing at having an adventure in the big town, were watching her conversation closely, too. Sarah was oldest, and she was leader, so it was on her to show the younguns how to act in town, and around foreigners. Calvin had the same obligation, for that matter, and he was proud he’d wrangled the meneer’s price up a couple of pennies, more for the principle than for the sum. Take advantage of foreigners before they take advantage of you, that was a basic precept of Calhoun family schooling.