by D. J. Butler
There was a moment’s pause, during which Cal noted the look of disbelief and irritation on Father Angleton’s face.
And then the tent fell sideways.
Young Andy must have missed his cue, but yanked the lariat when he heard the gunshot. The poles on the left side of the tent all had their bottoms jerked out from under them and slid away beyond the white canvas.
The congregation stampeded, pulling down the tent supports with them.
The Yankee, wide-eyed in surprise, lurched around his pulpit and staggered to the attack. He raised his pistol over his head like a club—
and Calvin Calhoun cold-cocked him with a hard ball of knuckles to the jaw. The blow sent the tall priest sprawling into the upright barrel and across his preaching stage. “Can’t take a punch any more’n he can take a joke,” Cal muttered, and then the sky fell.
Cal batted at the descending canvas to keep it away from his face, but it was a losing battle and soon he couldn’t see at all for the dirty white shroud over his entire body. He fought to where he thought Sarah had stood, knocking knees and elbows with the hollering crowd, and found her gone.
“Sarah!” No answer. “Grandpa’s gonna kill me,” he muttered, and waded as quickly as he could, pushing and kicking and cursing when he had to, to climb out from under the tent.
“Not one word outta you, d’you ’ear me?” Cal heard as he emerged. The priest’s burly Englishman had one hand tangled in Sarah’s hair and the other covering her mouth while he pinned her arm with his elbow. He was easily three times her size, and though Sarah struggled, red-faced and wiggling, she was pinned. “You bide ’ere wiff me until I’ve sorted this out wiff the Right Reverend Father, you ill-faced wee witch.”
“Let her go, muttonhead!” Cal wished he had brought his rifle to town this morning. He thought of his boot knife, but it was too far to reach in the short instant he had.
The Englishman’s eyes widened. “You be the one what ’it ’im!”
Cal charged.
The Englishman reached for his pistol, freeing Sarah’s mouth and arms—
“Damned limey!” Sarah yelled as she elbowed the Englishman in the belly—
and Cal grabbed the pistol, still on the belt, with both his hands to the Englishman’s one. They struggled, grunting and spitting, for control of the weapon, but the heavier man had the fingers of one hand still entwined in Sarah’s hair, pulling her neck back at an uncomfortable angle, and Calvin slowly gained the advantage, wrapping the fingers of one hand around the trigger guard and the thumb of the other onto the pistol’s hammer.
Sarah twisted and tore herself free, leaving a clump of black hair in the heavy man’s mitt. She punched the big man’s side. Unfazed, the Englishman turned his freed hand to Calvin—he gripped the entire right side of Calvin’s face in his greasy paw and pushed his thumb into the skin under Cal’s left eye.
Cal had a sudden vision of losing his eye. He pulled back the pistol’s hammer and squeezed the trigger.
Bang!
“Aaarrawaaargh!” The fat man tumbled back and to the ground. Blood spattered his gray stocking and welled out a neat little hole in his scuffed black shoe.
Cal threw the pistol away and became aware that the paved street was a sea of yelling faces. Had the little monk made it out of the tent? He’d almost seemed like an ally during the confrontation, though Cal couldn’t figure out why he would be. Maybe because he was the Elector’s friend? But Sarah had told him that she was a Jackson.
“Sarah, you all right?” he called.
She kicked the yelping Englishman and spat on him. “Lost me a little hair is all.” Cal saw blood in her scalp.
The heavy man stumbled to his feet and staggered away, leaving bloody tracks.
Calvin looked past the Englishman up Market Street toward the Charlotte Pike Gate, a quarter mile away. Half a dozen men in blue and gold uniforms ran toward them, long Brown Besses in their hands, the Imperial ship, shield, and eagle, with horses on each side on their chests marking them as the town watch.
The preacher’s man ran right toward the Imperials, yelling, “officers! officers!”
“Jerusalem,” Cal muttered. Young Andy and the other Calhoun younguns were beyond the Watch, pulling the Elector’s cart away toward the gate at a measured pace, but Andy watched the commotion around the tent over the braided leather looped on his shoulder. Andy had bungled the timing, but at least he hadn’t lost Cal’s lariat.
“It ain’t obvious to me how we’re a-gittin’ outta here,” Sarah said.
Cal looked the other way, toward the Jonathan Edwards Bridge, and saw four more men of the Watch. They were having a heated conversation with the pair of tall wagoneers from the tent, and the wagoneers repeatedly pointed in Sarah’s direction. He looked up again, met Andy’s gaze and shook his head.
“It ain’t obvious to me, either,” he admitted. Andy nodded and turned away, continuing his innocent plod up Market Street. “But I’d sure feel a sight better iffen I’d brought my tomahawk to town.”
“Shh,” urged a gentle voice, and suddenly the monk was standing with them. “Back under the tent with me.”
Calvin stared dumbly, and Sarah looked plain obstinate.
“Please,” he added. “I can help.”
Cal lifted up a piece of the canvas—a knot of former spectators still struggled under the heavy cloth, some trying to get out and some simply attempting to stand—and tented it up over the three of them as they pushed into hiding.
“Thank goodness you’re so tall,” the monk observed. “If I had to play tentpole, you’d both be blind.”
“Who are you?” Sarah jutted out a suspicious jaw.
“No more tricks.” Cal kept his eye fixed squarely on the little man.
“No more tricks,” the monk agreed, and for once he wasn’t smiling. “As I told you, I’m a friend of your…father’s. We have no time.” Reaching up with both hands, he touched each Calhoun on the cheek simultaneously and spoke again in Latin. “Facies muto.”
“What are you doin’?” Then Cal turned to look at Sarah and nearly jumped out of his skin. Where Sarah had been standing, and wearing her purple-and-suns shawl, was a pudgy woman with graying hair and two good eyes. “Jerusalem!”
Wizardry, indeed. That explained the Latin.
And the Right Reverend Father’s impossible miss.
And whatever spell the little man had cast on himself before to change his own face, he had now cast on Sarah.
“What you lookin’ at, beanpole?” the graying woman demanded sternly in Sarah’s voice. Then she looked doubtful. “Cal? Is that you?”
“What do I look like?” he asked.
“You look handsome,” Sarah told him. “I can’t hardly b’lieve it’s you!”
“No one will recognize either of you.” The little monk suddenly seemed tired. “Now we should leave the tent separately, one at a time, and make our way up the street. We’ll meet by the stall of the Dutchman who bought your leaf.”
Calvin ambled out first, hands in the pockets of his breeches, feet held to a steady, scuffing gait. He’d had plenty of experience walking innocent, but none quite this brazen; he strolled straight at the gaggle of Watchmen and the limping preacher’s assistant, nodding a lazy salute in complete reliance on the monk’s spellcraft. Cal didn’t know any of the Watchmen’s names—they were townsfolk—but he recognized their faces and he wondered what they saw when they looked at him. Apparently, a handsome man. He chuckled softly at Sarah’s barbed wit.
“Old man,” one of them barked, “we’re lookin’ for a couple hillfolk kids, a tall redheaded feller and a girl with a real bad eye.”
Cal almost walked past before he realized the Watchman was talking to him. He clattered to an awkward stop. “What? Sorry, I…I ain’t deef yet, but I’m a-gittin’ there.”
“’E can’t ’elp us, let ’im go.” The Englishman smiled sourly at Cal as Cal continued past and on up Market Street.
* * *
He was irked that Father Angleton had left Philadelphia ahead of him, and more than a little impressed that, for all their hard riding on the best-kept roads in the empire, Berkeley and his men had been unable to overtake the priest before reaching Nashville. It must be Angleton’s gramarye. He knew from experience the Martinite wasn’t a strong enough wizard to speed up the entire corps of the Philadelphia Blues, or ease their fatigue, or make them fly. Angleton was a priest, first and foremost, and only secondarily a magician.
Angleton accompanied the dragoons for the purpose of hearing confessions, administering last rites and saying prayers when the occasion required. Funeral prayers, for instance, might theoretically be important to a combat unit like the Blues, though it had been several years since any of them died in active duty. If from time to time he managed a small, moderately helpful bit of magic, so much the better.
Tomorrow Berkeley would overtake him. Him and the girl with the bad eye old Iron Andy Calhoun was hiding.
If it had been Berkeley alone in pursuit, on his Virginia-bred gray Andalusian, he would have overtaken the parson days ago.
The girl was a ghost, a tattered remaining shred of a banner Berkeley had believed torn down and destroyed. He had served the King of Cahokia, in his day, but Berkeley’s lord and master was His Imperial Majesty Thomas Penn now, and no fondness for men long dead, nor ghostlike daughterly apparitions, would sway him from his course. Berkeley would do his duty.
Subject, as everything was, to the capricious whims of fate.
Berkeley was not a superstitious man. His mother had obsessed over her stars, as did the emperor, and his father had spent long hours in young Daniel’s hearing debating the numerological secrets of the Apocalypse of St. John, but Daniel Berkeley had grown up convinced that he was free.
War, though, changes one’s perspective. Before his first battle, a border skirmish with a regiment of Virginia volunteers against some cracker encroachers, he had scoffed to see the older men polishing lucky medals, saying prayers and tucking rabbit’s feet and crosses into secret pockets. After the battle, after young Daniel had watched the cloud of musketballs capriciously take one man here and another there, with no apparent rhyme or reason, no respect for skill, age or wisdom, he hadn’t been so sure.
Before his second battle, Daniel Berkeley had cast the Tarock for the first time.
The Blues now cantered over the crest of a hill, and Berkeley saw down another length of stone-paved Imperial pike, surrounded by the piled orange and brown detritus of autumn. “Break! Check arms!” Berkeley called, and while they stopped to rest their horses and confirm that their pistols and Paget carbines were loaded and primed, he discreetly slipped his Tarock into his hand. It was a costly set, sturdy cards, and on the back of each they bore an elaborate scrolled portrayal of Franklin’s Shield, the letters TCB with a lightning bolt crashing through them.
He drew the top three cards.
The first card was the Priest. The painting on Berkeley’s deck was of a tonsured fat man in a long friar’s robe and sandals. He carried a walking staff on his shoulder that finished in a cross on top, and he held a bag or a wallet in his other hand. Encircling the Priest, as on every card of the Tarock, was a flowing frame of interlaced knots. The Priest meant consecration and commitment. Was that Angleton? The Martinite wasn’t fat and he wore boots, but he was a priest and he wore his hair in a tonsure. The picture on the card rather resembled a Spaniard, one of the Conquistador Fathers who had razed the Aztecs’ spiritual empire as Cortés had toppled the political one. What was the cross, then…a burden to bear? A holy mission? A grudge? And the bag could be anything. It could be money, a collection for the poor. It could be Aztec loot. Judas had held the bag, hadn’t he, among the disciples? Did Ezekiel Angleton plan some betrayal? Or maybe the bag was a thing obtained or a mission achieved…maybe it signified that Angleton had accomplished his task, and already had the girl in his possession.
Berkeley needed more information.
He turned the next card up: the Drunkard. The Drunkard on this card was a thin man with red eyes, unshaven. He guzzled from a horn like a Viking, and was captured in the moment of tripping over his own toes and falling forward onto his face. Angleton was no drinker. Berkeley drank, as a gentleman did, but he was not a drunk. Angleton’s servant Dogsbody drank to the point of being ridiculous. The Tarock’s image didn’t resemble the Englishman, though. If anything, it looked like it might be meant to portray an Appalachee, in one of their long shirts. On the other hand, the Englishman was a pagan, and the drinking horn painted onto the card looked as pagan as you could get. Didn’t the vitkis of the Mississippi Germans use a horn along with their sacred knives in making magic? There was something in the background that resembled a barrel, too, and another object. Those didn’t look particularly English or pagan. Could the object be a copper pot? Was the Drunkard a moonshiner? The Drunkard indicated accident, catastrophe, failure. Had Angleton, the consecrated man, had the girl in his hands, and then tripped and lost her?
The third card was Simon Sword.
Simon Sword was always painted as a child, and in this picture he held an enormous blade in both his hands, one of those long crushing and slicing weapons the Scots called claymores. He had floppy blond hair and a childlike grin, and his giant sword sliced off the heads of three men simultaneously.
Blazes. Simon Sword was a portentous card to draw at any time, indicating violence, trial, change, war, and judgment. Berkeley shook his head. He didn’t think the Priest could refer to him, and the Drunkard was not much more likely. Nor could either of them mean the girl, unless the cracker habit of corn whisky had gotten to her earlier than usual. The cards didn’t seem to be telling his story at all.
Who, then, was to be on trial?
Once past the watch, Sarah picked up her pace. Calvin was ahead of her, though she’d lost track of him in the press of people, and she wanted to catch him and get out of town before the monk found them again. The little man had helped them out of a tight spot, but she still preferred to let him find his own way to Calhoun land, even if he really was the Elector’s friend.
And if he wasn’t the Elector’s friend, she preferred that he disappear.
She was disappointed, therefore, to reach the Dutchman’s stall and find Calvin standing beside it, chatting with the little monk. Cal had his own face back, so she assumed she did, too. When had it returned? Calvin looked uncomfortable, but that might just be because the monk stood closer to him than any human being had any business standing to another person, unless they had love on their minds, or knives in their hands.
“Welcome, Sarah,” Thalanes said to her. “Calvin was just telling me you know Latin.”
“Calvin’s got a big mouth sometimes,” she said grimly, “and you got surprisingly quick feet, monk.” She kept walking, toward the gate, looking for Young Andy and the cart. Cal and Thalanes followed.
“You have some education. I expect you know the Elector Songs pretty well,” the monk speculated.
“Oh, that’s too easy for Sarah,” Cal said. “Jerusalem, I can sing you those iffen that’s all it takes to impress you.”
“Any child knows one or two,” Sarah conceded. Why was it any of this man’s business that she knew Latin, or whether she could recite the Electors?
“Sing me one,” he asked. “Please.”
She squinted at him with her one good eye and chanted out a rhyme in nasal Appalachee sing-song. “Louisiana sends two Electors, that’s clear: the Bishop of New Orleans and the chevalier.”
Calvin laughed.
Thalanes laughed too, merrily, making the wrinkles around his eyes jump and dance. “Jesus wept,” he said.
“He might a wept,” Sarah said with a sco
wl, “but He ain’t sent no Electors.”
“Of course.” The monk smiled. They were in sight of the Charlotte Pike Gate now and Sarah saw the Calhoun younguns and their mule-cart, creeping out through the gate and onto the Imperial Highway. “Many years ago, when I first became a novice, my preceptor, a gruff old warhorse named Palindres, insisted I memorize a verse of Scripture every day. ‘Jesus wept’ was my first day’s work.”
“John eleven,” Sarah told him. Might as well let the monk know she was no gump.
“Yes, I saw that you know Scripture.” He never stopped smiling. “I expect you know all the Elector Songs, don’t you?”
“I expect it ain’t really your business, Father Thalanes of the Order of St. Cetes!” she snapped. “You Eldritch, Father?”
His smile faded slightly; now she had him back on his heels, the nosy little foreigner. She knew all about St. Cetes, the Mayor of Wittenberg who was too sanctified even to stand up for himself when Martin Luther plotted against him, and she wasn’t impressed. Firstborn or not, any fool knew enough to take his own side in a fight.
They passed through the gate and onto the broad, hard-packed Charlotte Pike, the monk looking thoughtful and the blue-and-gold-wrapped guards waving them through. The pike marched south and west through smallhold farms and fields belonging to townsfolk of Nashville and was already carrying away some of the traders at the fair. The first Toll Gate wasn’t for miles, so the hillfolk happily used the short stretch of the pike closest in to town.
“Yes.” The monk’s voice was quiet and submissive. “I’m Firstborn. Are you?”
Sarah Calhoun snorted. “Hell, no! My pa is the Elector Calhoun.”
“I see.” The Eldritch monk contemplated her gravely. “Is he allergic to silver, like you?”
Sara felt her bad eye might pop open from sheer surprise. “You peepin’ into my thoughts, wizard? I’m allergic to silver ’cause my mamma was an Injun woman. Everybody knows a lot of Injuns are allergic.” She saw Cal staring at her and the monk both, bewildered.