Witchy Eye

by D. J. Butler

  After drinking, he lay a while and tried to feel nothing. He failed, and found to his surprise that of all his feelings—despair, rage, impotence, and all the others—the one that swelled his heart to bursting was that he missed Charles. Shooting the chevalier’s son, he felt as if he’d shot his own.

  Don Sandoval had said he had a son, too; what was the Spaniard’s boy like?

  With the filtered daylight Bill resolved to explore his surroundings. This turned out to be a quick project—he was able to see in slightly more detail the rows of insensate wretches stretching away down the length of the ship, chained each a few feet from the next. The extra detail he saw (weeping sores, scaled skin, puddles of urine) only told him the prisoners suffered. Bill did see that he had many more square feet than the others, almost a room to himself—the better to whip him, likely.

  He checked his person and made an inventory of his possessions. It was a short list: one pair of breeches, one tattered pair of stockings. The gendarmes had relieved him of his hat. His belt and boots he had lost, he did not know when. Grand Jacques’s shirt had been torn to shreds. Even the claim ticket with which he might repurchase his saber and pistols from Hackett was gone.

  Bayard came belowdecks to flog Bill again, once more with a pair of idiots and the unhappy-looking deaf-mute. They again dangled Bill from the ceiling like butcher’s meat, and Bill had enough strength to taunt his tormentor.

  “Bored, Bayard?” he called over his shoulder. “Or are you out of sorts because you’re still losing at cards to the geniuses with whom you surround yourself these days?”

  The answer came in nine tails, and hurt.

  Bill lost track of time. He was fed once or twice, crusts of bread and rough, sticky porridge with unidentifiable clots of gristly protein. His hands stopped shaking, but he still awoke craving whisky every time.

  Bayard came to whip him a third time. The idiots hung Bill from his hooks and took the opportunity to handle him roughly, plucking and scratching at the torn skin of his back. The extra insult and injury annoyed Bill, and in turn he goaded Bayard more than before.

  “Hell’s Bells, Bayard! You can whip me to death if it’ll impress your imbecile friends, I don’t care! You’ll still be a worm and a murderer and a foresworn man!”

  Bayard beat him into unconsciousness.

  More than once, in his first few days in the hold of the hulk Incroyable, Bill dreamed Bayard sat beside him in the darkness, drinking, talking nonsense, and weeping.

  When he awoke next, it was to find his cheek pressed against the rough, foul-stinking planks of the floor and a flickering light overhead shining into one eye. As sleep crept from his skull, he saw a shoe standing before him, a brass-buckled black shoe, and a stocking within it, and baggy brown knickerbockers above.

  It was the deaf-mute.

  “Sweet Bayard,” Bill called out mockingly, “is it my whipping time again already?”

  The Dutchman set a square bottle of brown liquid on the floor in front of Bill’s face, so that Bill could read the black paper label.

  Elijah Pepper’s

  Finest Kentucky Bourbon

  Straight ~ 96 Proof

  Bill lurched to a sitting position, groaning as scabs on his back tore. His hands again shook as he fumbled out the cork and slurped like a dog at the bottle’s mouth.

  The deaf-mute stood watching him for a moment, and then sat down crosslegged. He set his light source, a short candle, to one side on the floor, and looked at Bill intently. His face was open and fair, nearly beardless although it didn’t look particularly boyish, with blue eyes under a mop of straight blond hair.

  “Honor,” Bill croaked reflexively, “in defense of innocence.”

  Bayard was not to be seen.

  The sudden burning in his throat and belly pushed back Bill’s demon thirst, and he offered the bottle to his benefactor. “I gather you’re a deaf-mute, suh, so it can matter but little what I say to you or even what language I say it in. I find this strangely liberating. Thank you very much. Would you care for a drink?”

  “I am not a deaf-mute today.” The blond man’s accent was not Dutch. It wasn’t anything else that Bill recognized, either, just a pleasant voice, clear and foreign-sounding in no identifiable way.

  Maybe a little reminiscent of the many Ohioans he had known.

  Bill considered this while he took another swig. “I see I’ve gone mad.” He felt quite calm. “Was it the whippings, or the whisky?”

  “You have not had whisky for several days,” the man observed.

  “I see,” Bill agreed. “It was the sobriety that did it.”

  “You are William Lee,” said the foreigner.

  “Yes, suh, I am.” Bill held out his hand. The stranger took it briefly, looking amused, as if he enjoyed the novelty of a handshake. “I’m more commonly known in New Orleans as Bad Bill.”

  “You are not the man I expected,” the blond man said.

  “I don’t understand enough of your meaning to know whether I should be flattered or offended, and I don’t care enough to make the inquiry. I accept the fact that you expected something other than a fat old drunkard lying half-naked and crusted in his own gore. Since I expected a deaf-mute, perhaps we’re even.”

  “Perhaps.” The non-deaf-mute looked delighted.

  Bill took another swallow and realized he was drinking it too fast. The level of the whisky was getting low, and he pounded the cork in with the heel of his hand to try to save some for later, though he didn’t know where he would hide it.

  Inside the water pail?

  “But you haven’t introduced yourself, suh,” he observed.

  “Forgive me,” said the blond man, “I am not yet accustomed to your ways, and sometimes I forget that you do not know who I am.” He was silent for a moment, as if thinking.

  “My ways.” Bill chuckled. The whisky helped.

  “My name is Jacob Hop.” He said it YAH-cobe HOPE, and he sounded like a Dutchman when he said it.

  “Your name sounds pure Hudson River,” Bill noted, “if you’ll pardon an observation. Your accent, however, I cannot identify.”

  “I have no doubt my accent is strange,” Hop said. “I am an insatiable traveler.”

  “And yet here you are, aboard a ship incapable of taking you anywhere.” Bill laughed. “What an ironic sense of humor the gods must have.”

  “What do you want, William Lee?” Hop abruptly asked.

  Bill was taken aback by the directness of the question. “What do I want? Mr. Hop, what do you want? I’m in chains, and you’ve come to me. My desires seem beside the point.”

  “Yes, of course,” Hop replied. “It is a strange question. And of course you want to be free. But if you were free this moment, William Lee, what would you want? What would you do?”

  Bill looked around him warily. He didn’t think anyone else was listening in the dark hold of the ship. It seemed to be night. Then he shrugged. Hell’s Bells, he was most likely hallucinating in any case, and what if Bayard were listening?

  What did he care?

  “Justice, suh,” he said. “I would avenge myself upon my keeper, Bayard Prideux. He owes me a life. His death, however painful and prolonged, cannot possibly be enough to extinguish the debt of his crime against me, and against all this land. But it will be a start. If I were free, Mr. Hop, Bayard Prideux would be a dead man.”

  Hop nodded, his face solemn but his eyes sparkling in the candlelight. “It is a good start.”

  Bill chuckled. “I’m glad you approve. The whisky, the encouragement, even your very name cause me to take heart, Mr. Hop. Is it possible that you’re about to hand me the key to my chains?”

  “I am not, William Lee.” Hop smiled. “But take courage. I will help you any way I can, though I am far away, and am not powerful upon the sea. And then, the queen is nearer than you know.”

  “In what sense are you far away, suh?” Bill asked. “Are you not here before me?”

  “Yes,” agree
d Jacob Hop. “Yes, I am.”

  Then he picked up his candle and was gone.

  “What queen?” Bill asked the darkness, but there was no answer. It was the same damned thing the beastkind had said to him, standing beside Bishopsbridge in the middle of the night. It had made no sense then, and it still made none.

  “What queen?”

  * * *

  Obadiah grabbed four stones and spread them out around the rectangular board counterclockwise, one stone per scooped-out hole. He tried to do it quickly, like the iggy bastard across the board did, but he felt big and awkward.

  The board and stones were nothing special, just a plank with its edges smoothed and depressions scooped out of it and a fistful of polished pebbles from the river. It was the speed at which the Igbo played that made the game impressive, a whirl of sparkling color and nimble brown hands.

  Except when Obadiah played.

  “Take.” Obadiah snatched three stones off his opponent’s side off the board.

  The Igbo grinned under his little cap, rounded and brimless and embroidered with a wreath of interlocking green leaves. He might have been fifty, but his curly hair didn’t show the slightest trace of gray and only a few deep lines around his smile gave him away. Obadiah thought his name was Udo, but he insisted on being called Michael. He was a cacao trader, he said, which probably meant he was a smuggler.

  Most of the Igbo were smugglers. If they weren’t evading the emperor’s men, they were sneaking past the chevalier or the Dons of Ferdinandia or New Spain. They were old hands at it, as a people; it was said that the great John Hancock himself learned the arts of forged custom stamps, fraudulent bills of lading, and systematic graft from the Igbo. This traditional occupation didn’t make the Igbo too different from the Dutch, really, except that the Igbo seemed to do everything in organized families or towns, whereas the Dutch were every man for himself.

  The Igbo apparently gambled in families, too. Obadiah wouldn’t have minded so much the circle of brown faces around him staring at the game and cheering on the plays, except he couldn’t shake a deep-seated feeling that he was about to lose. Again.

  Michael’s long-fingered hand scooped up stones and whizzed around the board. “Take!” he rejoined, and then frowned deeply. “But woe, I take a mere two stones. Are you sure, Mr. Dogsbody, that you did not grow up in England playing Okwe as a boy?”

  There was scattered clapping and cheering among the spectators.

  Michael dropped his two taken stones into his pile. His pile and Obadiah’s seemed to be the same size, but Obadiah knew Michael was still one ahead, because he kept track in his head. When he wasn’t drunk, Obadiah was a good gambler.

  He just wasn’t good at this game. He’d only barely learned it.

  They sat at a table in a large, one-story building with a high-peaked roof thatched with fronds and no walls at all. The roof rested on four round pillars that might have been tree trunks growing right out of the ground, with the floor built around them. The sturdy wood floor was scattered with reeds, just like the biggest buildings of the Academy had always been.

  The platform might be some sort of market building or town hall; Obadiah had seen similar constructions in the other Igbo communities, and such buildings were always in the center of town, beside a large open square with a wide road leading to the pike. It seemed to Obadiah that all the Igbo towns were laid out identically, and they had all been planned by traders.

  Obadiah didn’t like the Igbo. He didn’t like their thatched houses in their tidy little villages just off the highway—fifty feet off the highway, no doubt, and therefore not subject to direct Imperial taxation. He was unimpressed by the nudity of their children, by their little round hats, and by the knee-length tunics their men and women alike wore, no matter how ornately embroidered they were. He was positively irritated by the constant chatter of buying and selling and of a bustling daily life that assailed him among them—it gave him the strong and unpleasant impression the Igbo were determined to be happy. He hated banjo-picking, and he couldn’t bear the taste of rice and yams. He disliked the unfailingly happy sound of their accent—how could an entire people sound happy all the time? It was impious.

  He had agreed to sit down at the Okwe table because he thought he could still get a little entertainment from a game of chance, even if it meant he had to learn to play something he’d never played before. He was sorely disappointed.

  Like everything else, Obadiah found Okwe hollow. Also, he couldn’t quite see how, but he had the distinct impression that he was about to lose. He eyed the pile of coins to the side of the board: Michael’s Ferdinandian pesos against his own Imperial shillings, a decent sum.

  “Shall I point out to you your legal moves at this juncture?” Michael’s polite and cheerful voice made Obadiah want to punch him.

  Some of the crowd made less polite noises that sounded a lot like jeering.

  Obadiah growled and spun stones around the board.

  Michael moved; neither of them had taken. A player took when he ended his turn on the other man’s side with two or three stones in the hole, and the game would end when there were four stones or fewer on the board in total.

  Obadiah squinted, saw his opportunity, moved. “Take.” Two. He was up one.

  “Oooooooh,” groaned the spectators in suspense.

  Michael moved. “Take, and to my joy it is three.” He grinned.

  Applause.

  The leftmost depression in front of Michael held one stone, and the third from the left held two. Obadiah’s side of the board was empty except for three stones at his right.

  Obadiah grinned.

  He only had one legal move, but it was a winner. He picked up his three stones and plunked them, one, two, three, in front of Michael.

  “Take,” he rumbled, and snatched away the three stones, tossing them into his pile. “Four stones left means that the game be over, Udo.” He used the man’s Igbo name on purpose and said it with a bit of a sneer. He reached for the pile of winnings—“ooooooooh,” said the crowd—and Michael grabbed his hand.

  “’Ere now, Michael,” Obadiah said slowly. “The game be over.”

  “Yes, the game is over, friend Obadiah,” Michael said, the smile not leaving his face. “But we must calculate our scores.”

  “I’ve been calculatink,” Obadiah growled. “I win by one point.”

  Michael nodded at the board. “You are forgetting the stones still on the board,” he suggested.

  Obadiah looked at the board. Michael was right. Stones left on the board went to the player whose side they were on. That was three more points for Michael, and that meant that he won by two.

  “’Erne’s bloody ’orn!” Obadiah spat, and staggered to his feet.

  Michael’s family and neighbors cheered and laughed. Obadiah rushed away but Michael’s laughter followed him, and the sound of Michael scraping coins into his purse. Served Obadiah right. He should have stuck to games he knew.

  It was time to go, anyway. The Blues were saddling up.

  This was Obadiah’s first journey this far south in the New World, and he rode with the Blues—at the rear of the troop, leading baggage horses and mules—along the Imperial Highway between Birmingham and Jackson. Beyond Jackson lay New Orleans, whither they were bound and where Obadiah’s heart lay.

  He didn’t understand why they were going to New Orleans—sometimes it seemed it was because Father Angleton had had a vision, and sometimes it seemed it was because Captain Berkeley had read his Tarock, and often the two men quarreled over which was the important reason—but they all agreed that Sarah was on her way to New Orleans. Obadiah didn’t trouble himself too much about the decision-making process. At least Obadiah was with the main force of the Blues, traveling along the highway, and not one of the handful whose task had been to rush down the Natchez Trace at breakneck speed.

  The road he traveled, the Jackson Pike, ran through the heart of the Free Cities territory, where the Igbo dominated.
Obadiah had distrusted them even before his first footstep into their territory, and his Okwe losses had made him dislike them more.

  The Blues were lining up to leave the little village where they’d quartered for the night, four to a bed in an ordinary called the King Stephen Nzekwu at what the Igbo proprietor assured Captain Berkeley were special rates for Imperial officers. Obadiah scrambled into his saddle and took the mule string’s lead rope in hand in time to see the Right Reverend Father riding in his direction.

  “Here,” Angleton said. “You’re so fond of reading now, read this. See what’s at stake here.” Then he turned back and rode to rejoin Captain Berkeley.

  While the men ahead of him coiled slowly onto the Pike, Obadiah uncrumpled the sheet of paper and looked at it. It was a news-paper.

  SERPENTSPAWN DEPREDATIONS

  ~ The Pacification of the Ohio Continues ~

  Cahokia. Good men and true in the service of HIS IMPERIAL MAJESTY, THE EMPEROR THOMAS PENN, are murdered! Honest men have died with their throats cut in their sleep!! their bodies torn as if by Animals!! Insurgents ~ such as the Much Despised Ophidian Knights ~ claim that the crimes are the acts of feral Beast-Kind, who have recently been very Agitated, but loyal citizens are not fooled, & HIS IMPERIAL MAJESTY is said to be sending further troops from Free Imperial Youngstown & from Pittsburgh to Reinforce the Forces of order & good administration.

  Obadiah frowned. Why was this at stake? They pursued Sarah because she was some relative of Thomas Penn, and maybe intended to make a play for the throne. That was what the Blues whispered around the campfire, anyway, and it made sense of the journey so far.

  Was she an Ophidian?

  And what did that say about the emperor if she was?

  Obadiah’s horse clopped onto the Pike. The next Toll Gate was miles away—the emperor’s men would be waved through, but others would be charged a toll for any traffic other than those traveling strictly on foot—so Obadiah had time to think.