by D. J. Butler
He missed Sarah. He thought of his night on Calhoun Mountain, when he’d kidnapped her and then fallen in love. He knew he’d been hexed, but the effects of the spell had long since ended.
What remained, what haunted his journey along the Jackson Pike and kept him awake at night, was love. It had to be love. Obadiah’s heart was cold and rusty in love’s ways, but he knew how he had felt with her. He knew he wanted that feeling back. He cringed inside, thinking she must hate him, but he dared to dream he could persuade her of his worth. And even if he couldn’t, now his life had meaning. For the first time in years, Obadiah cared about something beyond his appetites.
For the first time, really, since Peg had broken his heart.
He drank less, limiting himself mostly to water. He ate less, too, though that was mostly a matter of his being distracted by thoughts of Sarah. He was becoming thinner. He wanted some other method of self-improvement and found he had none to hand, so he turned to his Bible.
It was an old book, and unread. Obadiah’s father had been a Christian from his youth in the Duchy of Monmouth, one of the dwindling and secretive minority in England under the Spencers. He’d wordlessly given Obadiah the book as a gift, the day Obadiah had gone off to Woolwich. Obadiah had opened it twice at the Academy, and hadn’t read it since, carrying it around in his personal belongings like a talisman. Obadiah furtively read his father’s Bible now, though he found he had to separate some pages with his knife. He read in the mornings, while the Blues struck camp, and in the evenings, while he stirred the pot. He tried to be discreet, but in a camp this small, others were bound to notice and talk, and they did.
Even Father Angleton had noticed, he now knew.
Obadiah read the Psalms and the Gospels, because Father Angleton quoted from them a lot. He tried to read the Old Testament, too, which was much harder. Genesis was interesting, with lots of women in tents, and Obadiah lay in his own small tent, when he wasn’t in some flea-bitten ordinary’s cot, and shivered at the thoughts that came to him. Exodus was full of storm and drama, with its plagues and God appearing in the mountains, but then there were long hard stretches Obadiah couldn’t bring himself to look at.
The part Obadiah found with astonishment and then kept coming back to was the Canticles. Her eyes are as the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters, he read, washed with milk, and fitly set, and he thought of Sarah.
Turn away thine eyes from me, for they have overcome me, he read, and he remembered her standing by the Charlotte Pike Gate in Nashville wearing her purple shawl with gold suns, looking at him with her blessed eye, challenging him to open his heart.
Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?
* * *
“May we see it, Your Majesty?” Duckface’s voice was hushed, almost reverential.
They sat in a corner booth in the nicest tavern in Natchez-under-the-Hill, the Fitzroy. Unlike most of its local competitors, the Fitzroy actually had a signboard, painted to depict the great herald and jongleur with his long dark hair and his lips in the rounded O of emitting some ineffable golden note. He strummed a long-necked lute.
Walter Fitzroy had written over four hundred songs. The tunes in his Elector Song Cycle were the best known, not because they were the best songs, but because they were pounded into children all over the empire to teach them who voted to select a new emperor, or a remove a bad one. Calvin had seen the signboard and immediately broken into song, his voice sweet and melodic. Sarah had great affection for Calvin Calhoun, but, objectively speaking, it was astonishing that such a sweet voice could come out of such an ugly face.
The Free Cities of the Igbo
Have one Elector each, no more
Birmingham, Montgomery, Jackson
And Mobile on the shore
“Calvin,” she’d whispered, “we ain’t in Igbo territory.”
“Give a feller a little credit,” he’d agreed, ducking under the low, heavy wooden door frame, “I been here afore, and I ain’t forgot that Natchez is in the Cotton League. Only I ain’t ever cared much for that melody.”
The same image of John Penn’s court troubadour hung in an oil-painted canvas behind the Fitzroy’s bar, or rather, almost the same image. Sarah looked with curiosity at the lute in the painting—on its fretboard, partly obscured behind its many strings, were inlaid distinct images: a key at the fifth fret, a cup at the seventh and two coins at the ninth. At the twelfth fret was inlaid a lightning bolt. Sarah had seen a few instruments in her time, but never one with decoration that fancy. Was the signboard painted in a simpler fashion because it hung outside, and required more frequent repainting?
The Fitzroy was the nicest tavern in town because it reeked of tobacco smoke and ale more than of urine, and also because it had actual booths around the walls of its common room, permitting some semblance of privacy.
Sarah sat on one side of such a booth and the beastkind sat opposite her, giving the three of them the most concealment from prying eyes. She still had seen no sign of the Philadelphia Blues in Natchez-under-the-Hill, but there was no sense being anything less than cautious. Cal sat in the corner, warily watching the common room with his tomahawk cradled in his lap. Thalanes sat quietly beside Calvin, seeming to concentrate on something other than the table conversation. Was he cloaking them with gramarye? Watching for enemies? The little man generally looked tired, and Sarah now understood why—it had been weeks since he’d had any respite from constant spell-casting.
She took a sip of her small beer, slightly darkened with molasses.
“Why?” she asked.
She refrained from saying all that was on her mind, such as: my eye ain’t none your business, I’ll take off my patch when youins take off your robes, and what in tarnation you want from me, you foreign, animal-headed freaks? She had adopted a sort of regal position with respect to Thalanes, and acting too paranoid or standoffish now might weaken her authority.
Also, she felt she had to at least try to be a good queen.
“Forgive us if we ask too great a boon, Your Majesty,” Tortoise-Head rumbled, dipping his wrinkled cranium in submission. “We know thou art the queen we seek, and we do not ask for a sign. It is only that our master has prophesied much of thee and thy great silver eye. We would see it, if we may. We would be witnesses to thine advent.”
Advent? That didn’t even sound like queen-talk anymore, it sounded like prophecy and religion. Sarah hated hearing herself talked of like this, and she wasn’t even sure she preferred worship to fear and revulsion. Part of her longed to push the beastfolk away, beat them down.
“Jerusalem, Sarah.” Cal snorted. “They make you sound like a regular King Andy Jackson. Keep your eye out for them Lafittes.”
“Hush,” Thalanes urged him, snapping out of his reverie. “If you had seen how Jackson ended, you wouldn’t compare him to Sarah even in jest.”
Sarah shared Cal’s instinct to puncture all the high-toned flimflam the beastkind were throwing at her. Still, she wanted to play the part of queen, so she slipped the patch off over the top of her head and gazed upon the beastkind. Again she saw them as shimmering mud-green clouds. She looked closely at their features with her witchy eye, and was intrigued to find that with her Second Sight they appeared both as completely human and simultaneously as completely animal. She couldn’t have said whether she was looking at a woman and a man or a tortoise and a duck.
“Whyn’t youins tell me your names?” she suggested to them, and then cringed at the Appalachee sounds coming out of her own mouth. So much for her Court Speech.
“Grungle.” The beastman bowed until his forehead grazed the scarred tabletop.
“Picaw.” The beastwife stooped similarly.
“Picaw and Grungle,” Sarah said slowly, ironing her words into something more eloquent than their natural state. “Witness, then. Tell your master what ye have seen here.”
She replaced her patch. Calvin smiled
at her warmly. Thalanes once again had his attention elsewhere.
“Your Majesty,” Picaw said in her flute-like voice. “Peter Plowshare is dead.”
“I understand,” Sarah lied. No need to show any weakness to the beastkind.
“Our master, the Heron King, conveys his congratulations upon the occasion of thy return,” Picaw continued. “He supports thy claims, and he would be thine ally.”
“Thank you.” This was was getting stranger by the minute, and Sarah felt as if she were acting in a play to which everyone but her knew the script, while these queer ultra-Mississippians were in deadly earnest. Wasn’t the Heron King a character of folklore? And yet here were two emissaries claiming to be in his service and bringing her messages. She had stepped with one foot into a fairy tale, while the other remained in solid, rough and tumble Natchez-under-the-Hill.
“He would even,” Grungle continued, “enter into discussions with thee about the prospects of a dynastic alliance. About the possibility, Your Majesty, of marriage.”
“What!?” Calvin spat out the word in astonishment, and Thalanes, too, snapped abruptly to attention.
Sarah felt all eyes on her and blushed. Suddenly, the fairy tale she had stepped into became a yawning chasm beneath her feet.
“Thank your master for the message of support,” she said, “and for the invitation to discuss. I expect we shall be conversing of many things over the coming years. I am young, yet, to contract a marriage, and I ain’t yet…I am not yet come into my throne.” She tried and failed to let herself be drawn naturally into the cadences of Court Speech.
Her discomfort with the whole situation made it difficult.
Sarah wanted to avoid angering the beastkind, and from their smiles and nods, she thought she had succeeded, but she also wanted to avoid crushing Calvin by promising them too much. She looked at him closely, and he looked away. He thought he loved her still, then. He would get over it someday.
He was gallant and brave, and he would get over it.
Thalanes smiled at her.
“Your Majesty,” Picaw said tentatively, “we were sent with a message to New Orleans, which we delivered. We have come to find thee here as an act beyond our errand, because Simon Sword despises a slothful servant, and because it appeared that the recipient of our message had been detained, and might not meet thee on the road.”
Simon Sword? The fairy tale yawned beneath Sarah’s feet again. “I see.” Who had the recipient of the beastfolk’s message been? And why had they expected that person to meet her?
“We would go still further beyond our errand,” the beastwife continued. “We beseech thee to come with us, across the great river, into the forest, to the hall of our master. It is not many days from here. We would bring thee to meet him, to treat with him, and to seek his aid.”
Sarah felt all eyes on her again, and especially the eyes of the little monk. She met his gaze, and saw therein gentle pleading as well as nervousness. She knew his plan was to find Sarah’s siblings—Nathaniel and Margaret—and hide them again, at least for the time being, to keep them all safe from her uncle. She knew he wanted her to continue with his plan; she resisted the impulse to tear her patch from her head and stare into his aura, to try to gauge the depth of his feelings.
But the beastmen were promising her aid. Assistance from magical, legendary figures—it was as if the Three Wise Men or the Pharaoh of Egypt had appeared and promised to help her. What if they could make good on their promises?
Cahokia had no king, and had had no king since the death of her father. Her father via the acorn he had strangely blessed, and the acorn she had hidden away in her dress pulled at her with the heavy weight of destiny. If there was a Heron King, and he was the mighty wizard of folklore, might he not help her fill the empty throne? Might he not help her recover the lost Cahokian regalia, the things of power Thalanes had told her about?
If Sarah found Nathaniel and Margaret now, weak as she was, she might only draw misfortune upon their heads—shouldn’t she do everything she could to become powerful, so she could take her siblings under her protective wing?
And as Queen of Cahokia, possessor of things of power, couldn’t she also contest for her inheritance of the Penn wealth? Could she not have justice for her father and her mother?
Might she not, in fact, become empress?
But she didn’t know whether she could trust the beastkind. They didn’t have the sorcerous black auras of the Mockers, but their souls looked alien enough that she was unsure how to read them. She could as soon tell the mood of the Mississippi as discern whether Picaw and Grungle were lying. They might, after all, be agents of the emperor.
Or they might be insane.
Or the Heron King might not be the powerful figure about whom she’d heard so many whispered campfire tales, so many moralistic sermon-stories.
Or the Heron King might decide he didn’t want to help her after all, or he might demand too high a price. She couldn’t really see herself, in the end, married to a fairy tale creature.
And Thalanes…Thalanes had a plan, and it didn’t include thrones, regalia, or fairy tale alliances. Not yet, anyway.
Surely he was right. The safest course was the simplest, and the humblest.
She smiled at all the staring eyes. “I am on an errand of grave import to me and to my family that draws me to Louisiana. I thank you again and I ask you to thank your lord. When I have resolved my errand, I shall come see him in his hall. Or he may come see me in mine.”
Calvin and Thalanes both looked happy with her words, and the beastfolk looked at least unperturbed. Maybe even satisfied.
She didn’t like being queen. At least, she didn’t like the decisions part.
“We thank thee, Your Majesty.” Grungle bowed his head.
Picaw also nodded. “May we assist thee in resolving thy current errand, then?”
“I do not see how,” Sarah answered evasively. She still had no wish to trust or rely on the alien beastkind.
“Perhaps we may, in ways thou canst not yet see,” Picaw suggested. “Dost thou seek the man William Lee?”
Sarah felt a cold stone in the pit of her stomach. “Pardon me?” She looked at her companions; Thalanes arched his eyebrows at her to indicate that he shared her surprise, and Calvin held his face in a carefully motionless expression, as he did when he played cards.
“Captain Sir William Johnston Lee,” Grungle joined in, slowly enunciating the name, as if he found it a difficult one to say. “He is in New Orleans. The Heron King sent us to him with our message. We know where he is.”
The beastkind knew way too much. “How’d youins find me?”
“The Heron King is a great prophet,” Picaw fluted. “Some of his servants bear a humbler touch of his gift.”
“We could not be certain that we would find thee in Natchez,” Grungle explained, “but we dreamed of thee here. From our dreams, we knew how to recognize thee.”
“The eye?” Sarah asked.
“Your Majesty is unmistakable for many reasons,” Picaw demurred gently.
Sarah’s head reeled. “Captain Lee was the recipient of your message?” She struggled to get back control of her dialect. “The one who was detained?”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” both beastfolk said.
“Where is he?”
“We do not know exactly where he is held,” Grungle amended his earlier statement. “He was taken by other men. But we know someone who will be able to help thee find him.”
“Tell me,” Sarah said.
The beastkind looked at each other. “Her name is Filmer,” Picaw said. “We cannot describe to thee the place where she is, but we can take thee there.”
Sarah met Thalanes’s gaze with her own and saw in his eyes the same cheerless resignation she felt in her own heart. She was going to have to trust the beastkind, after all.
“Hell’s Bells, suh, stop winking at me.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Bayard Prideux’s wo
oden leg drilled through Bill’s stupor and pried his eyelids apart.
He wanted the whisky so bad he almost crawled immediately over to his water pail, where he’d hidden the remaining quarter bottle of Elijah Pepper’s aqua vitae. He checked himself in time and instead trundled his carcass up into a sitting position. Time to be whipped.
The hold of the hulk was mired in the pitch black of night on the Pontchartrain. Bayard came alone. He lit his stomping path with the yellow wash from a stinking taper held high in his right hand; something heavier swung in shadow, clutched in the fingers of his left.
A pistol?
“Have you come to kill me, suh?” Bill called gamely.
Bayard stopped in his tracks. “You are awake.” His voice was slurred. The yellow light drew out his nose and made him look like a bird of prey, perched in a high eyrie from which it considered diving for Bill the hare.
Bayard sniffed.
He swayed, slightly, his eyes pools of shadow beneath his streaked and greasy forehead. He bent over and set the candle on the floor to one side. He shifted from foot to foot, hawked, and spat into the darkness.
He thrust his left hand forward, the thing he clutched sparkling amber in the candlelight. Bill flinched, expecting a shot or a blow—and instead, Bayard fell over.
By pure good luck, the candle landed upright, its flame still burning. The Frenchman smelled strongly of liquor and lay still. Bill lunged forward, gratifying images filling his mind, visions of tearing Bayard’s head from his shoulders, of strangling him with Bill’s chains, of beating his jailor to death—
the shackles pulled him up short.
He strained and pushed, but the chains stayed firmly anchored and Bayard remained safely out of his reach, snoring through a stupor of precious alcohol.
Bill wept. He shrank back against the curved belly of the whale that had swallowed him and shed hot tears of anguish and anger.