by D. J. Butler
René couldn’t protect her from everything, and Pritchard didn’t protect her from anything at all, so Kinta Jane Embry walked the streets with Papa Legba. New Orleans was the meeting place of two armies of gods, as she saw it. Jesus and His saints came down to it from the heavens, and Papa Legba and his mystères crawled up to it out of the ground and the forests and the cemeteries and the swamps.
Where Kinta Jane worked and lived, she was closer to the swamps.
She took her lantern and went back out onto the creaking deck of the hulk. The idiots were nowhere in sight—it was late, they were likely all asleep, and the only one who had been interested in any of Kinta Jane’s ministrations had already had his petty favors and paid for them—but the blond man, the deaf-mute, stood by the side of the ship’s ladder.
Kinta Jane shrugged deeper into her shawl against the night’s chill. She smiled and nodded at the deaf-mute; he had always seemed oblivious to her, though he nodded and waved politely enough.
He smiled back and she moved to pass him.
“May I ask a service of you?” the deaf-mute said in an unfamiliar lyrical accent.
She could say nothing in return—she had voluntarily had her tongue removed, when the Conventicle judged that it was necessary—but she had grown up speaking and still had verbal reflexes. Out of sheer surprise she grunted, a sound of which she was immediately embarrassed.
She touched the beybey through the thin material of her blouse and nodded.
The deaf-mute held up two folded letters. “Will you please deliver these for me?” Then he produced a coin.
Kinta Jane took the letters and examined them. They were clearly addressed, in French, in the same elegant hand, to the chevalier and to the bishop. This was an easy commission, so she nodded. The deaf-mute handed her the coin, spun on his heel and walked away into the darkness.
She climbed down the ladder and got in the boat. As the boatman pulled at his oars to drag them from the hulk to the shore, Kinta Jane opened her hand discreetly and looked down at the coin she had just taken.
The letters were strange enough; the coin was positively exotic. In the light of the full moon it glowed large and gold, like a Louis d’or, but it bore no letters or numbers. She had never seen its like. On its obverse was stamped the clear image of a plow, and on the reverse a sword.
She knew who minted coins like these, and the sight of it chilled her. The time had come, she mused, looking back for another glimpse of the deaf-mute as the lights of shore drew nearer.
Franklin’s terrifying vision was coming true again.
Peter Plowshare must be dead.
Another god had come to New Orleans.
“Lord hates a man as can’t laugh.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“I thought they’s river pirates,” Cal said. “What’s with the horses?”
He stood with Sarah and Thalanes in the Place d’Armes, a broad cobbled square in the center of the Quarter, staring up at an enormous bronze statue. They had been deposited by the melodious Germans at the Mississippi docks at midday, hearing the deep ringing of church bells even as they walked up the long wharf, and had made their way here; Thalanes was familiar with the city, and the distance between the Mississippi River and the Place d’Armes was short.
The two beastkind had held back at the gate to the Place d’Armes.
“We will await you outside,” Picaw had sung.
Cal had never been to a city as large as Louisiana’s metropolis—there were lucrative cattle markets much closer to Calhoun Mountain. He found New Orleans fascinating, with its iron balconies, its hanging greenery, its boardwalks, and its motley population. He’d only heard three or four snatches of English spoken since they’d arrived, and they’d been wading constantly through a bubbling sea of humanity.
Sarah had seemed not to be paying attention to any of it, as if her mind were elsewhere. She would periodically take the improvised patch off her face and gaze upriver, and doing so always left her looking troubled and tired.
Cal was not enthusiastic about the idea that they were being stalked by dead men—Sarah had told him of her vision—but he stayed calm. He kept his eyes open, and the Elector’s gun loaded with a silver ball.
The Place d’Armes roiled with people. Tarock readers with thumb-worn wooden folding tables, a turban-wearing hedge witch clutching a chicken under one arm and offering curses and love charms at cut rates, jugglers with batons and glass balls, a sword-swallower with a two-edged serpentine appetizer halfway down his gullet, and a ragged, shuffling band comprised of banjo, horn, lute, and three battered copper pots competed against two gesticulating friars and a university man publicly declaiming his thesis on the inevitable cycles of history, all to the jeers, catcalls and hoorahs of a shifting Babel. Cal even caught a glimpse of beastkind, a couple of shuffling anteater-headed things dragging their long snouts close to the ground.
The statue around which all this sweating, exerting, exhorting humanity swarmed was colossal. Rising from a square marble platform, it depicted two mustachioed men on horseback, each armed with a long pistol. One horse reared as its rider sighted and fired into the distance, west and upriver; the other plunged forward at a right angle toward Decatur Street and the Mississippi, its rider spurring its flanks and waving his gun in the air.
“I’m not surprised that in Appalachee they’re known as pirates,” Thalanes said. “But of course the people here are happy that Andrew Jackson’s ambitions were thwarted by Jean and Pierre Lafitte. Louisiana thinks of the Lafitte brothers as respectable militiamen and heroes. I believe Pierre owns a blacksmith shop, and Jean is still, as they say, on the account.”
“You mean he’s a pirate,” Sarah interpreted.
“But a respectable one,” Cal added.
“Well,” Thalanes said, “as I hear it, he mostly steals from the Spanish.”
“The Calhouns and plenty of other Appalachee folk are perfectly content that the Lafittes stopped Andy Jackson from crowning himself king of the Mississippi,” Sarah pointed out. “We’re mostly opposed to people declaring themselves kings.”
“I imagine that’s true,” Thalanes conceded. “Mostly.”
“Lord hates a man as gets too big for his britches,” Cal said.
“Would you like to see him?” Thalanes asked. “You could look at the fit of his britches yourself.”
“You mean Jackson?” Sarah frowned. “Isn’t he dead?”
“Ain’t they somethin’ famous about their pistols, though?” Cal tried to remember. “Weren’t they magic, or some such?”
“They were blessed.” Sarah knew everything.
“They were consecrated by the bishop before the battle,” Thalanes told them. “After the battle, the Lafittes laid the pistols on the altar in gratitude for their victory. I think they may still be in the cathedral.”
They walked on, past two stump speakers, hollering at each other from three feet apart on separate barrels. The two men were a study in contrasts, one short, plump, blond, and handsome, and the other dark, long in the leg, gangly, and scowling. They yelled to be heard over the crowd, but Cal found their words surprisingly droll.
“But Your Honor speaks very harshly of Wisdom,” the tall one shouted, “even, some might say, to the point of defaming Her. Was She not the serpent that Moses raised on a pole in the desert, that healed the children of Israel?”
Cal heard a few scattered hand-claps in the crowd.
“No, sir,” the short man rejoined, “I have not heard that She was. I have always understood, however, that there was a serpent in the garden, and that our first parents—or should I say rather, my first parents—took great harm therefrom.”
There were loud guffaws in response, and a low hissing boo when the man said ‘my first parents.’
“Damn right!” yelled a dirty man in a slouch hat, leaning on a long rifle.
The gangly fellow grinned. “Oh, that is an old chestnut.” He somehow managed to shout and sound mild at the sam
e time. “Even Paul knew to warn the Corinthians that Old Scratch may appear as an angel of light.”
More subdued laughter. They were past the debaters and moving on, and Cal heard just one last retort from the smaller man.
“I might be more persuaded,” he bellowed, “if the serpent’s children didn’t insist on filling the Ohio with their thousand Babel towers, cluttering up the place like some blighted plain of Shinar!”
Then the two men were gone and the St. Louis Cathedral stared down at Cal, its three slate steeples frowning in disapproval. The tall, thin windows of the cathedral, rounded at the tops, its stacked columns and its plain, workaday clock face gave it the appearance of the palace of a stern king in some fairyland.
The cathedral was flanked by two stone mansions. They looked identical to Cal, or nearly so, each showering two rows of stone arches upon the Place d’Armes, mounted underneath a sloping mansard roof and a-glitter with glass windows.
“It jest ain’t right that a bishop’d live in such a fancy place,” he grumbled. “The buildings on this square reek of money.”
“The bishop shares your discomfort,” the monk told him, surveying the cathedral and its companions. “That’s why he only occupies a few rooms of his palace, and lets the Polites and the Gutenbergians have the rest. This way.” He ambled toward the mansion on the right.
“What’s in the other one?” Cal gestured left and loped easily into the monk’s wake.
“Polites…that’s St. Reginald Pole, isn’t it? Aren’t they alchemists, or something?” Sarah asked.
“The Polites promote Christian study of gramarye,” Thalanes answered, “in all its permissible specialties.”
“What’s a permissible specialty?” she asked. “Healing the sick, multiplying loaves and fishes, casting out devils, that sort of thing?”
“They’s a difference between magic and miracles,” Cal muttered.
“Views differ,” Thalanes said, “even among the Polites. But a Polite who started dabbling in necromancy or demonology, for instance, would quickly find himself expelled and probably excommunicated. Some alchemy is problematic. Summoning and binding angels or other powers of Heaven—what is sometimes called theurgy.”
“And the other one?” Cal repeated. “Who’s so fancy as he gets a buildin’ jest as big and shiny as the Polites?”
“Government,” Thalanes said. “The other palace holds the offices and meeting chambers of the City Council. The chevalier gives them impressive chambers instead of meaningful power.”
“Lucky for the Polites the bishop didn’t shack ’em up with a gang of Mattheans,” Cal quipped.
“You won’t find any followers of St. Matthew Hopkins in New Orleans.” Thalanes said. “I’d be surprised to see a Witchfinder anywhere south of Philadelphia, really.”
Cal grunted. Waste of a good joke. Lord hates a man as can’t laugh, and didn’t Abraham laugh when Sarah was with child? Come to think of it, maybe it was Sarah who laughed.
“Maybe that’s too bad,” Thalanes continued. “Maybe a few Mattheans would be just what we need.”
“What?” Sarah snapped. “You anxious to git yourself tried for witchcraft?”
“Matthew Hopkins persecuted spellcasters of all sorts,” the monk explained with a queer little smile. “Including Oliver Cromwell. Before Cromwell was ever the Necromancer, when he was just the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England and beginning to hunt down and kill England’s Firstborn, Hopkins opposed him and tried to prosecute him for sorcery. He failed, of course, and Cromwell had him executed on Tyburn Tree, but not before Hopkins had a lot of Cromwell’s minions hanged. He was demented and wicked, but he was the first rebel against an even more demented and wicked man.”
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend?” Sarah suggested.
“No,” Thalanes said. “They’re both my enemies. But I wouldn’t mind seeing them fight each other. Here we are.” He looked up and pointed.
A row of tall poles held suspended a series of iron cages, each exactly the size of a man. All held scraps of cloth, leather and bone, and a few held entire skeletons. Inside the cage Thalanes indicated was a corpse, face rotted beyond recognition and collapsing in decay. Bone showed through the split, leathery skin of the corpse’s face, and the hands were gone, fallen off if they hadn’t been cut off in the first place. It wore a blue military uniform, with tarnished brass buttons running down the chest in parallel rows, and the hair on its head was a thick white mane.
“What in Jerusalem’s that?” Cal felt a little uneasy at the sight.
“That,” Thalanes said, “is Mr. Andrew Jackson.”
“King Andy,” Sarah said softly. What was she thinking?
Thalanes walked on, and Sarah and Cal followed.
They approached the palace, and Cal looked at a clutch of men and women simmering under the arches, knitted together in brow-furrowing conversation. “I seen a few Wanderin’ Johnnies come through Nashville, and they ain’t never dressed in red. I guess mostly they jest carried books.”
“The adherents of the Humble Order of St. Reginald Pole wear red,” Thalanes said. “They have no other icon. The Gutenbergians have no official icon at all, though sometimes they use the image of an open book.”
“How many of them are there?” Cal asked. “That’s a big buildin’.”
“I suspect that most of the building is library, laboratory, and lecture hall,” Thalanes said. “The Polites are a small order.”
“They jest ain’t that many hexers,” Cal agreed.
As he neared the Polites’ building the monk turned, guiding them around it and down the narrow street running along its left side, separating the palace from the cathedral. He marched up to a small, unmarked door in the palace’s wall and rapped on the wood.
“Remember me again what we’re a-doin’ here?” Cal felt ill at ease standing on the doorstep of a bishop, no matter how humble or pious the man might be. In fact, the reputation for humility and piety made it worse—Calvin preferred his bishops arrogant, worldly, and far away. It fit his preconceptions better. Calvin had put his question to Sarah, but he shot a sidelong look at Thalanes.
“It was my decision, Cal,” Sarah said, and Thalanes bowed his head.
There was an awkward pause and Cal regretted that he’d said anything. He tried to break the silence. “I don’t know for fancy houses, but ain’t this a servants’ entrance?”
“Yes,” the monk agreed with a small smile. “I rather think that’s the point.”
The door opened to reveal a slight, stooped man, with a deeply-lined brown face framed between the stiff white collar of his black priest’s shirt and the tightly-curled growth of white heather above his forehead.
“Thalanes!” The stooped man immediately embraced the monk. The little old man looked so benign that Calvin immediately felt embarrassed. He noticed that Thalanes was pulling his old trick of standing very close to a body, closer than Calvin would have been comfortable with, but the bishop didn’t object.
Priests just had no sense of personal space.
“Your Grace,” Thalanes said, disentangling himself from the hug and smiling. “May I present my traveling companions? These are Sarah and Calvin Carpenter.” Sarah curtseyed. Calvin made to bow, but the old man seized his arm in a tight grip and shook his hand.
“The Carpenters. Like the Holy Family.” The bishop took Sarah’s face in his hands and kissed her cheeks. “But in my house, you must call me Chinwe, because if you call me Your Grace or Father, my old friend Thalanes will insist on doing the same, and I could never bear such treatment.” He stepped back from the door and ushered them in. “You must forgive me if my English is rusty. We are accustomed to speaking French in this town.”
The apartment they entered was small and crammed full of books. Books marched in double file on the wooden floor along the baseboards of the hallway, books tottered on high shelves nailed haphazardly onto all the walls, tall piles of books swayed on top of every piece o
f furniture. Just when he’d almost felt himself warming to the bishop, the old man had to go and ruin it.
“That there’s a lot of books,” he complained.
“They are my great treasure,” the priest said, “which makes me a very poor Christian, for does not the Lord exhort us to lay up our treasures in Heaven? And yet mine are stacked upon the carpet, where the moth does indeed corrupt. Please,” he smiled, “lay your burdens down here.”
They dropped their gear and arms in a small room opening from the hallway.
“I am glad you are here, old friend.” The bishop ushered them all into a small kitchen where a cast-iron stove squatted on slates in the corner and the smell of spiced chicken and rice punched Calvin in the stomach. The walls were egg-yolk yellow, clean but bare, other than a simple wooden cross on one wall. “It is a wonderful surprise to see you. I have an unpleasant task ahead of me, and I need my resolve strengthened. Also, you are just in time to share our food. No fried basilisk or broiled sea serpent, but there is enough for everyone!”
A younger man with the same smile rose from a seat beside the stove. He, too, wore priestly black with the white collar. “I’ll set three more places, Father,” he said, and quickly plated up food for the new arrivals.
“You must ignore the way this one addresses me.” The bishop leaned in close to Cal conspiratorially. “His name is Chigozie, and he really is my son. Ha!”
They sat on mismatched stools around the small table. The five of them crowded the room to capacity; Cal ate with his elbows pinned to his sides and he ran a constant risk of bumping a shelf of crockery behind him.
“Where’s your other son, Chinwe?” Thalanes asked. “Is Ofodile not pursuing the family profession?”
“My brother has chosen a different occupation.” Chigozie didn’t look up.
“You may find him in the Vieux Carré if you are here long,” the bishop added. “We do not see him often; he is a man of business, and has much on his hands. But if you see him, you must call him Etienne—he goes by his second name now.”