by D. J. Butler
“You look tired.” Cal unfolded himself out of his bedroll. “You sleep at all?”
“I couldn’t,” the monk admitted. “I believe there is something out there in these hills hunting us.”
“They found us already?” Sarah snapped, getting up, alarmed.
“Not Angleton and his lackeys,” Thalanes said. “Something else. Whatever it is, it hasn’t found us yet, and I’m doing what I can to throw it off our trail. Still, we need to drink this and get going.”
“You sure it ain’t found us?” Cal asked. “Mebbe it jest ain’t attacked us yet.”
Sarah’s own natural nerves took the baton from the monk, and she began looking over her shoulder and through the skeletal trees, wondering what could have been stalking them in the night. The clay things, maybe? Something worse?
They packed quickly, then poured the hot brown brew into three cups, and Thalanes muttered a little Latin over it: “pedes accelero crures augeoque.”
That seemed easy enough; was the Latin more effective than the songs and rhymes Sarah hexed with? Was that all there was to gramarye? Just Latin? She drank the plain black coffee and felt warmth and strength flow into her legs and feet.
“New Orleans is this way, boys,” she said to them, and turned back toward the Trace.
They sped all that day at a fast walking pace, and Sarah’s legs never tired. Thalanes’s spell was a good one, then. Her feet hurt less than expected, too.
“I reckon we could swap stories,” Calvin suggested, a few minutes out of their camp. “It’d make the walkin’ easier. Lessen you think there’s somethin’ so close on our trail we shouldn’t ought to talk at all.”
“I’ve told my story,” the monk said. “Does that make it your turn, or Sarah’s?”
“Mine,” Sarah jumped in, and she didn’t wait for agreement. “Once upon a time there lived a barber. I say once upon a time, because I think this is a made-up story, but old Bishop Franklin made it up, so it’s probably a good one. This barber lived in a small town, it might have been in Pennsland or the Covenant Tract, and I guess he was a good barber, because he got rich.”
“How rich can a barber git?” Calvin asked.
“Rich enough,” she explained, “that he traded under the sign of the silver shears. Sometimes he even cut with them, too. And one night his son comes into the shop and says ‘give me my inheritance early, for I’ve found a lass and I wish to marry and set up in business as a brewer and the thing I can’t do without in this world is money.’”
“This story is a little dark,” Thalanes said softly. “Could we hear a happier tale?”
Sarah pushed ahead. She was glad to make the monk uncomfortable. “But the barber couldn’t do without his money either. So the barber and his son fought like cats in a sack, and the son jumped on his horse and ran away. In the dark, the barber’s son rode too fast, his horse stumbled, he was thrown from its back and he broke his neck. Folks ran to the barber for help, but when he arrived his son was dead.”
“I reckon I heard this one afore,” Calvin said. “It’s one of the Poor Richard Sermons, ain’t it?” Sarah shot him a stern glance and he wilted. “Well go on, I didn’t say stop, I love to hear Poor Richard.”
Thalanes looked at the ground and said nothing.
Sarah pressed on. “The son’s fiancée was a witch and possessed of a dark and vengeful mind. Three days after his burial, in the dark of night, the barber heard clawing at the door. He tried to ignore it, but the clawing continued and then turned into howling, too, and finally he answered.
“And there was his son. Dead.”
“But walkin’,” Cal pointed out.
“‘What do you want, my son?’ asked the barber, who was a brave fellow.
“The son said nothing. He just whined and groaned and rumbled.”
“Grumpy feller,” Calvin observed. “I guess he would be, when he was about to git hisself married and jest up and died instead.”
“‘I see you’re still anxious to marry and become a brewer,’ the barber said. ‘Come with me to the shop. In three days, your hair and nails have grown long enough to need trimming, and at the shop I’ll give you your inheritance, my most prized possession.’ Then the father led his son to his shop, and sat him in the chair, and took out his famous silver shears.”
“Stab him!” Cal whispered, trying to give advice to the barber.
“The son couldn’t talk, but groaned like he was full of complaints the whole time. The barber listened attentively and trimmed his dead son’s nails, first one foot, then the other, now the left hand and at last the right. Finally, after the barber’s son had told his bellyaches to his father, the father said, ‘yes, son, I understand you, and I am very sorry to have caused you grief.’ Then the barber cut his son’s hair, kissed his son on the cheek and laid him back in his grave. And the dead man never returned again to trouble his parents.”
She ended the story. Leaves fell gently around her as she walked.
Thalanes looked thoroughly disquieted. “I’m with Calvin. He should have stabbed the son with the shears.”
“Aw, but you left out the best part,” Cal protested. “It’s a Poor Richard Sermon, you gotta have a moral.”
“I don’t care about the moral,” Sarah said. “I just want to tell a story. Stick your own damn moral on it if you want, Calvin Calhoun.”
“A soft ear turns away wrath,” Thalanes suggested.
“No, you gotta say ‘Poor Richard Says,’ and it’s somethin’ stranger than that,” Cal said. “Don’t remember me, I think I can git it…somethin’ like ‘Poor Richard Says: family love survives the grave. So does a family quarrel.’ That sound right?”
“If it makes you happy,” Sarah conceded, “I bless your moral.”
“Thank you.” Cal grinned.
Calvin was smiling, but Sarah felt a pall over the party. She didn’t know exactly what had caused it, but she felt she was to blame.
“I have another story I’d like to share after all,” Thalanes said. “It’s a little different in tone.”
“You mean happy?” Cal asked.
“It’s Scripture,” Thalanes said. “Though not in the Bible as you probably know it.”
“What does that mean?” Sarah found that she’d put herself out as much as she’d put out the monk with her story, and now she was relieved the others were talking. “Like those strange books that are read by Christians in the lands of the Turk?”
“Yes,” the monk agreed, “like the Book of Enoch, or Jubilees, or the Shepherd of Hermas. I’m impressed you know about those. They’re not your usual pulpit fare in Appalachee.”
“I don’t know about ’em.” Cal squinted sidelong at Sarah, but his feigned suspicion dissolved into a grin. “Ain’t no accounting for foreigners, I reckon.”
“Think of it as a book like the Bible,” Thalanes explained, “to be read along with the Bible. Only this is a book of Scripture that belongs to the Firstborn. It’s not the only one, but it’s one of my favorites, because it talks about the Creation, and is beautiful.”
“Shoot,” Cal told him.
“It’s called The Song of Etyles the Preacher,” Thalanes started. “‘And God spake, and said, Shall we not give unto Man a companion? And God said, Yea. And God made for Man a companion, of starlight and river rock and foam of the sea. And God named her Wisdom, for she was more subtle than any beast of the field, and breathed upon her, and she arose and shone. And she bare unto Man daughters and sons, and the starlight was within them all the days of their lives.
“‘And when the days of Wisdom were fulfilled and the light left her, her daughters and sons digged the earth and raised stones and built for her a place of vision and light that would be forever.
“‘And God spake, and said, Shall Man be alone in his age? And God said, Nay. And God made for Man a new companion, of the rib of Man, for she would bear him up under his shoulder in his infirmity. And God named her Life, for her strength was new life to Man, and
breathed upon her, and she arose and lived. And she bare unto Man sons and daughters, and they began from the first to slay each other.’”
Thalanes finished, and they kept walking.
Cal whistled. “Well,” he admitted, “that’s pretty. It ain’t clear to me as it’s any happier’n Sarah’s Poor Richard Sermon, and I don’t claim to understand it, but I reckon I like it anyway. Is it about Eve?”
“The Firstborn believe that Eve was Adam’s second wife,” Thalanes said. “His first was a great lady whose name is only spoken in secret, but who is sometimes called Wisdom, and who is known by many signs, including the Tree and the Serpent. This is a short account of her marriage to Adam, the great progenitor of all the human race.”
Neither Sarah nor Calvin had anything to say to that, and they fell again to walking in silence.
To Sarah’s relief, the pall was gone.
Late in the morning they stopped and ate bonny clabber. Sarah had been looking forward to watching the little foreigner try to eat the sour congealed milk; the monk made a displeased face as he chewed it, but it wasn’t displeased enough, and she suspected it was an act for her benefit, which only put her in a grumpy mood. He knew the Elector, she realized, so he’d probably eaten clabber before. For all she knew, he loved bonny clabber.
Irritated, she made a point of starting first every time they set out after that and never calling for a stop, letting Thalanes or, more often, Calvin ask to be allowed to rest. She wanted to talk to the monk about magic, but she could wait—even at their accelerated pace, it would be two weeks or more before they reached New Orleans.
They were moving fast, though. They passed travelers on the road going both directions. Most of the travelers were either Appalachee hunters or long-shirted Igbo traders, but there were Bantu from the Cotton League (Sarah was disappointed that they didn’t dress like pirates), Spaniards from Ferdinandia (who sort of did look like pirates, with floppy hats, earrings and pointed beards), four beguines who claimed they’d come all the way from Pennsland on business to a sister cloister in the Free Cities, Crown Land Cavaliers who rode fast and didn’t look back, caramel-colored Memphites in layers of silk (whose trundling wagons, pulled by multiple yokes of sweating and cursing Draft Men, were so slow Sarah wondered how it could possibly be worth it to be pulled by slaves), a scrawny Wandering Johnny from Youngstown with his bundle of primers strapped to the back of a jenny mule heading to the frontier, a pair of Sons of St. Robert Rogers coming back the other way in their buffalo robes (their walking sticks notched to record baptisms of Texians, Comanche and, they claimed, New Muscovites), several genuine Texian leatherstockings, and even a small gaggle of Firstborn, traveling from the Ohio.
With these last in particular, Sarah watched them and the monk closely, half-expecting to see some coded exchange between them, but Thalanes simply offered a cheerful greeting and returned to his walking.
They passed stands every five or ten miles as they walked, little ordinaries on the side of the road, usually built of stone for safety, but often enough mere log cabins, horses tethered in barns or stables and almost invariably a dog sleeping on the porch.
They bought bread and pork stew for lunch from a humorless skillet-faced innkeeper in such a stand, and Sarah expected they would stop for the night in one of them. As Thalanes gave no indication, however, and she was in no mood to make any concessions, Sarah herself kept them marching past dark, and when the monk’s spell had faded and she was dead on her feet, there were no lights in view, so she simply led them off the road into a thick knot of pine and crashed into sleep.
She was vaguely aware, as she sank into oblivion, of someone draping a bedroll over her and covering her with fallen leaves.
In the morning, Calvin and Thalanes both looked tired; they must have alternated watches. It was coffee-and-gramarye again, and the rest of the bonny clabber, and this time Thalanes looked genuinely disgusted. Sarah let Cal set the pace.
They continued to pass travelers throughout the day, marching in their beeline among the skeletons of deciduous trees and a sprinkling of piney woods toward Louisiana. After a lunch of apples stolen from the corner of an orchard, Sarah broached the subject of gramarye with the monk: “Why Latin?”
He knit his brows and considered. “Why Latin what? Why Latin diplomacy? Why Latin scholarship? Why the Republic of Rome?”
“I mean, when you work gramarye, you do it in Latin?”
“Ah.” He smiled. “Gramarye is simple. It’s no different from hexing. They’re the same kind of magic.”
“What do you mean, other kinds of folk do different kinds of magic?” Sarah asked. “Like what, like beastkind, you mean?”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” he agreed. “Or Lullian alchemy. Cabala. Runes. Shamanism. Angel summoning. Brauchers’ prayers. At a fundamental level, they may all be identical—opinions differ—but hexing and gramarye are definitely the same art.”
“You’re wrong,” she begged to differ. “They aren’t the same. Hexing is easy.”
“Is it?” he asked. “That’s an extraordinary opinion. Tell me what you mean.”
“It ain’t easy,” Calvin contradicted her, too. “I can’t do it a lick, and it ain’t for lack of tryin’. Nor can most folks do it, neither. And the ones as can, it leaves ’em broken and twisted. Sarah’s got a special gift, she jest ain’t comfortable admittin’ it.”
Sarah shrugged. “Not everybody has the talent for hexing, but folks that do have it to different degrees. It comes easy to me, so lucky me, I guess.”
“Tell me about it,” Thalanes encouraged her.
“It’s like this,” she said. “I sing a song. The older the song, the stronger the hex. If I can, I use a bit of something solid to make the hex stick. Dirty things, body things, are better than others—blood is best of all, but spit or hair, or sometimes other stuff, depending on the hex. Eggs, or twigs, or…you know, it depends.”
“Can you hex without using any material thing to make the hex stick?” Thalanes asked.
“Sure,” she said, “everyone knows that, only it’s a lot harder.”
“Can you hex without words?”
“Yes,” she allowed slowly, remembering her love-hexing of Obadiah. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Calvin. “And that makes it harder, too.”
“So what are you really doing when you hex?” he pressed her. “What’s the part you can’t hex without?”
“Why Latin?” Cal asked. “Why rhymes and songs?” Sarah was grateful for the interruption, because she didn’t know how to answer the monk’s question. “I ain’t no hexer, never had the gift, so this might could be jack-assery on my part, but iffen you gotta say somethin’, why not jest say it in English? Why not ‘hey, boulder, git outta my way’ instead of ‘o thou boulder, amo-amas-amat’?”
Thalanes laughed. “It isn’t jack-assery at all, Calvin. In fact, you could use everyday English. Everyday English would be more powerful in magic-making than saying nothing at all, because it’s helpful to have a medium, a channel to get the power out of you and realized as a spell, but it turns out words from old languages, especially dead ones, or words that are ritualized, that have had their meaning killed by being fixed into, for instance, a song, carry more power. That makes them better channels for transferring magic from within the magician to the outside world.”
Cal considered. “Remembers me of what you said about ley lines. It’s like how a lot of use leaves a trail of power in the ground, and likewise, a lot of use leaves a trail of power in a language. So I reckon mebbe someday, when enough folks have spoke it for a long enough time, English’ll be a language of power too.”
“Excellent!” Thalanes beamed. “Are you sure you don’t have the gift for it yourself, Calvin? You did corn readings, after all.”
“Tolerable sure,” Cal affirmed.
“Perhaps you just need to try. If you have the gift for wizardry, it would be a shame to miss out on the calling.”
“A corn rea
der ain’t nothin’ but a body as knows how to read. Besides, yesterday you were worried as I might miss out on my callin’ to be a preacher,” Calvin said. “Tomorrow I reckon you’ll want me to go into politickin’.”
Thalanes laughed. “Whatever you do, Calvin Calhoun, don’t go into politicking. When Aristotle told us that man is a political animal, it was a warning, with the proper emphasis on the word animal.”
“Will,” Sarah said. “Mind. Wish. Choice. I don’t know what to call it. The part of the hex I can’t do without is the part where I focus and try to bring to pass the thing I want.”
“Very good.” The monk nodded enthusiastically. “Hexing and gramarye are the same—at their heart they are simply the application of will by a person with the rare talent for it. The wizard, the hexer, the thaumaturge, burns energy from some source, most often himself, and exerts the force of his mind. Words help, words of power, because they’re a good channel through which to move energy, from yourself or from some other source into your spell. Stuff, or, as a formally trained wizard might say, material components, serves the same function—and it works better, the more connection or similarity your components have to the subject of your spell—and so do gestures with your hands, for some of us. But at bottom, it’s always a question of talent, will, and power.”
“What Latin?” Sarah asked. “I never learned any Latin nursery rhymes.”
“Any Latin is pretty effective,” the wizard said. “I try to stick to very basic indicative sentences myself, and maybe once in a while a command. I just describe in simple Latin what I want to happen. Short and simple means easy to use in a pinch.”
“Short and simple is better than the alternative,” Sarah agreed.
“The advantage of using a dead language over songs and nursery rhymes,” Thalanes said, “is flexibility. I find it’s usually easier to say a simple sentence that suits my spell than to think of a rhyme that matches it.”
Sarah nodded. It seemed obvious, as he explained it. “I admit I’m disappointed. I’d thought the only bright side to leaving home like this was no more drills from my father…from the Elector. Now it sounds like I have a lifetime of Latin ahead of me.”