by D. J. Butler
“Etienne does indeed have much on his hands.” Again Chigozie kept his gaze focused on his plate.
The rice was heavy with peppers and onions and Calvin had never eaten anything with so much flavor. He wolfed it down and tried to listen.
“I’ve long owed you a friendly visit, Chinwe,” Thalanes said, “and, sadly, this isn’t it. I come to you in need and in strange circumstances, with evil at my heels. But if I can be of any assistance to you in your pastoral travails, please tell me how to do so.”
The bishop chuckled. “My old friend, you cannot poke beehives with a stick and then complain when the bees come after you.”
Thalanes smiled ruefully. “There may be someone in this world who can teach me the art of leaving beehives alone, but it isn’t you, Chinwe. I fear, though, that you won’t be pleased to see the bees I’ve stirred up.”
“No?” the bishop asked. “Then let me tell you first about my bee.”
“Only one? A solitary bee hardly seems worth the attention of a beekeeper of your prowess.”
“One is enough if it is the right bee. Only one bee troubles me, but he is a very large bee, with many drones. He is a great, fat bee who feeds…from a golden lily.”
Some information had passed from the bishop to the monk, but Cal had missed it. Thalanes’s head snapped up from his rice and his eyebrows shot to the top of his forehead.
“Why does this bee trouble you, Chinwe?” Thalanes continued after a moment.
The bishop set down his fork and knife. “I have received a confession of one of the bee’s drones,” he went on. “A written confession, which in itself is strange. The content of the confession is troubling, too; it tells me the bee of the golden lily is a thief. For many years, he has been stealing honey from another beehive. A very important beehive, rich with honey and peopled by bees with mighty stings. And now, I fear, it is my duty to confront the great, fat bee, and remind him of the walls where his own hive ends.”
Thalanes knotted his fingers together and raised his eyebrows. “How may I help you, Chinwe?”
“Your presence alone fortifies my will, and in the end it is not such a very large thing. Just a simple conversation between a beekeeper and a bee. Ha!” The bishop picked up his utensils again and resumed eating. “Tell me about your bees, and what an old bee-man like me can do to help.”
“I have two needs, Chinwe,” Thalanes said. “The first is this: I am looking for a man.”
“Can you not use your gramarye to find this person?” Chigozie asked. “My father speaks often of your skill at magic.”
Thalanes shook his head. “I haven’t seen this man for years, I don’t know where he is, and I have nothing of his to use in a scrying. Gramarye in this case would be scarcely more useful than simply walking about and using my eyes, and it would be much more tiring.”
“If your vision is insufficient,” the bishop asked, his dark eyes glittering in his lined face, “what about hers?”
Cal rocked back on his chair. Sarah and Thalanes both had surprised looks on their faces.
“She has a great gift, it’s true,” the monk said slowly, “but I believe it’s beyond her to find this man.”
“How did you know?” Sarah asked the bishop. “Are you a wizard, too?”
The little old man bowed his head. “I have no gift of gramarye. I am just a parish priest who sometimes dreams, when times are troubled. Recently, I have dreamed of a one-eyed queen who can see the entire Mississippi. I think I am not the only one to dream of her.”
“Perhaps you’ve also dreamed of the man I’m looking for?” Thalanes wondered.
“I doubt it. Tell me who he is, old friend. Perhaps he is a parishioner. Perhaps I can take you directly to him.”
Thalanes nodded. “I’m looking for a man I knew as Captain Sir William Johnston Lee. He was a soldier, an officer, a gentleman, a great servant to Empress Hannah and her husband. He distinguished himself in the Spanish War, in Texia, and at the Siege of Mobile. He has been in New Orleans, I believe, for a long time.”
The bishop shook his head. “I think I would remember such a person.”
“I believe Captain Lee has fallen on hard times. He may not be recognizable as the man he once was. And I think he may be using the name Bad Bill.”
“Bad Bill? Bad Bill?” Chigozie’s eyes widened in surprise.
“Do you know this man?” the bishop asked his son.
Chigozie shook his head. “I do not know him, but I have heard of him. He is…he is not the sort of man my father is likely to know.”
“What sort of man is he?” Cal felt uneasy.
“He is the sort of man my brother would associate with,” Chigozie said, after some hesitation. “You should speak with Etienne. He has…he does much business in the Vieux Carré.”
“Thank you,” Thalanes said.
The bishop shrugged. “What else, old friend?”
The monk hesitated. “As I seek my former comrade, Captain Lee,” he finally said, his voice heavy, “so I in turn am sought, by a former enemy.”
The bishop looked worried. “Who is this enemy?”
Thalanes sighed. “I fear there may be a very old enemy, indeed, behind the curtain. Our footsteps are dogged by dead men, my friend. By Black Tom Fairfax and the Sorcerer Robert Hooke.”
Chigozie dropped his fork and it clattered on the table. “Did I hear you say the Lazars are following you? Thomas Fairfax, the Scourge of the Low Countries? And Hooke, Isaac Newton’s Shadow? Were they not destroyed, more than a century ago?”
“You heard me correctly,” the monk agreed. “Black Tom and the Sorcerer were not destroyed by John Churchill’s Glorious Revolution, only driven out of England. And two days ago, I saw Hooke and Fairfax both in a vision. They were coming this way.”
“Can you not mislead them, or hide your tracks, with your craft?” the bishop asked.
“I’ve done what I can,” Thalanes said. “Still they come. Either they have some other way of knowing where we are, or Robert Hooke is simply a more powerful wizard than I am. Both possibilities are grim. Both are likely.”
“I saw them this morning,” Sarah said softly.
“In New Orleans?” the bishop asked her.
She shook her head. “Not yet. But soon. Maybe as soon as tomorrow.”
There was a terrible silence. Cal was suddenly very aware of the lightness of his belt and the fact that his weapons were all in the other room.
When the bishop spoke again, his words surprised Cal. “I have seen my own death. God has shown it to me, and the face of the man who will kill me. I didn’t know the face, but I saw that he wore a hat and fired a gun. He had the eyes of a doomed man, so doomed I felt compassion for him. Perhaps it was a Lazar.”
The room felt very, very small.
“I’m sorry, my friend.” Thalanes’s voice was strained. “I knew evil was at my heels, but I didn’t understand how great an evil it was.”
“God’s will.” The bishop ruminated for a few moments. “I do not think I have any weapons I can give you.”
“What about the Lafitte pistols?” Calvin asked.
The bishop smiled. “Well,” he said, “they are there behind the altar, but I do not think they will help you. They are very ordinary pistols, and are not regularly maintained. Do you need pistols?” He stood, and rummaged in a drawer under the kitchen counter.
“I ain’t much of a shot with a handgun, anyways.” Cal shrugged. “I jest heard they’s special.”
The bishop turned back to face the table with a small purse in his hand. “They are special pistols. But they are not magical. Take this; at least I can help you purchase supplies.” He handed the purse to Calvin. “I assume you are the one handling the silver in this group?”
“Yessir, I reckon I am.” Cal took the money.
“Thank you,” Thalanes murmured.
“Excuse me,” Chigozie said. He stood up from the table and walked out.
“So how do we find Etienne?
” Cal asked—it seemed like the practical question that needed answering.
“Chigozie will help you,” the bishop told him. “Chigozie!” he called.
The younger priest came back into the kitchen, holding a small knife in a leather sheath. “Yes,” he agreed. “I will take you to Etienne’s…office. I have some duties in the cathedral this afternoon, though, and in any case, Etienne works late. May I take you tonight? Perhaps you would care to rest here for a few hours in the meantime.”
“We have other errands in New Orleans,” Thalanes demurred. “Maybe we can come find you here again this evening, and you could take us to find Ofodile…Etienne?”
“Of course, as you wish.” Chigozie held up the little knife, and Cal saw that its sheath was elaborately tooled, and that its hilt was wrapped in leather. “I wish I had a better weapon to offer than this,” he said, and he pulled it from its sheath. “It is a letter opener—the Bishop of Miami sent it to me as a gift upon my ordination—but if it were sharpened to a finer edge, I believe it would be meaningful as a weapon.”
Cal was about to protest that he hadn’t held a knife so tiny since he got out of short pants, but then his eye caught the dull gleam of the blade and he realized why Father Chigozie was offering them his letter opener.
The knife was made of silver.
“Thank you.” He accepted the weapon.
* * *
The Heron King clubbed William Penn in the head. For the first time in many days, Obadiah laughed.
“But, sir,” cried the Penn puppet in a shrill, nasal voice, “I shall have this land whether thou wilt or no. My Germans, my Englishmen, and my Lenni Lenape desire a land where they may live in peace.” He wore a Pennslander’s hat, round-crowned, wide-brimmed, and black, and curly white hair fell to his shoulders. He was dressed all in blue, with conspicuous gold thread.
Thump, thump. More blows on Penn’s head.
“I am king here, Brother Onas,” the Heron King boomed back, “undying and unchallenged, and I regard thee not!” The Heron King puppet was a long-necked bird with a three-pointed brass crown on its head. Its puppet body consisted mostly of long legs ending in more or less birdlike claws, but it also had a pair of hands that held its club. “Fie upon thee for a knave and a trespasser!”
Obadiah watched the puppets have at each other upon their tiny wooden stage and laughed harder than the show deserved. The puppets were marionettes, innocent and childlike in all their exaggerated movements, they weren’t responsible for their actions. For puppets, there was indeed a higher world, and it was only two feet over their heads, pulling their strings. And no matter how much puppets pummeled each other with their little clubs, none of them was ever hurt.
The puppet show was the first thing that Obadiah had been able to find really engaging since the night he had failed to kidnap Sarah.
“An thou resist, thou spindle-shanked humbug, I shall be compelled to use main force, and shall take the land of peace from thee!”
William Penn produced a club and began thumping the Heron King back.
“Imbecile!” The Heron King dropped his club and fled off the stage.
“Booby!” Penn did a little high-kneed dance of victory, to the cheers and applause of the crowd. Obadiah patted his hands together, too.
Unexpectedly, the Heron King rushed back on stage, this time holding a much bigger club. “Varlet!” he roared, and set upon Penn with animal ferocity. He knocked away Penn’s club and pounded him to the ground, shrieking and whistling.
Penn raised a supplicating arm and waved it at the audience. “Help! Help! Oh Lord, is there no help for the widow’s son?”
Obadiah laughed harder.
Was this what the world was like for the gods? A cramped wooden stage, a cheap curtain, and millions upon millions of puppets on strings?
Maybe it was finally time, Obadiah thought, to get to know his father’s faith as other Christians knew it. In his mind’s eye a scene unfolded that had never taken place in real life—Obadiah and Father Angleton sitting at a campfire, leafing through Obadiah’s Bible together and discussing weighty matters of life, death, eternity, and love.
“Obadiah!” Father Angleton barked.
Obadiah jerked about and realized that he had come to a dead stop in the middle of the street to stare at the puppets. New Orleans sizzled with energy and behind him his string of mules drifted on its line, but he had been completely absorbed in the marionettes.
He had fallen behind. The Blues were gone, and Father Angleton was hissing at him in anger and frustration because he had had to come back to find his hired man.
“Obadiah!” the Right Reverend Father snapped again.
“Aye,” he said dully. “Sorry, Father. I…”
He had been distracted even before he had seen the puppets, thinking about Sarah, wondering when he would see her. He had forgotten he was leading the baggage train of the Philadelphia Blues, and it had been easy to let himself become entranced by the show.
“I was finkink, Father,” he said, “mayhap you an’ I could read some Bible together in the mornink. Discuss a wee bit of feology.”
“What?” Angleton’s eyes were incredulous and indignant.
“I asked the price of a pot, to replace the one what lost its ’andle,” Obadiah lied, changing the subject. “I fell behind.”
“I don’t have time for this, Obadiah.” Angleton rode away.
Obadiah held his tongue and followed his master.
With similar reluctance, the mules followed him in turn.
New Orleans was nearly as large as Philadelphia and London, though less sprawling than either of those. It looked more like a Spanish or a French city than an English one, with its continental buildings and its exotic plants. There was greenery everywhere Obadiah looked, in myriad ferns, jasmine, wisteria, and lilies that crawled up the walls, hung from balconies and clotted the street corners. Outside the city walls, the countryside was a jungle of cypress, magnolia, walnut, hickory, and those eerie oak trees dripping with moss, like green-haired crones stretching out over the pike and muttering in the breeze of the horrible fates that awaited outsiders in Louisiana. New Orleans sounded French or Castilian too, in its hubbub.
Obadiah missed Sarah.
The pike had ended at a ferry, by means of which they had crossed the narrow mouth of the Pontchartrain Sea. On the far side of the Pontchartrain they had rejoined the squad of Blues that had split off to ride the Natchez Trace; they had made their discreet report to Captain Berkeley and Father Angleton, and then the entire company had ridden into and across New Orleans. Obadiah was impressed by Angleton’s confidence and knowledge of the city, even as he felt increasingly estranged from the Right Reverend Father.
But then, he felt increasingly estranged from himself.
They were passing out of the lively zone called the Quarter now, across a fantastically wide boulevard full of buying and selling humanity. They rode toward more genteel parts of the city on its western side, full of larger houses, iron-fenced homes with carefully manicured grass growing around them, and many edifices that looked like commercial or government buildings, still within the great stone walls that kept out pirates, Texians, and beastkind.
By force of being even more cantankerous than they were, Obadiah hauled the mules forward, brutal in his determination not to be left behind again.
Father Angleton set a brisk pace; soon they turned right around a solid brick building so large it occupied its own block, its doors guarded by men in blue and gold fleur-de-lis livery and marked with the legend City of New Orleans, and ran into the tail of the Philadelphia Blues. A receding column of horses’ rumps was the view of the Blues to which Obadiah had become accustomed, and as a matter of habit he slowed, but this time he followed the Right Reverend Father, mule string and all, to the front of the line. The Blues paid him with looks of complete indifference as he passed. But for the first time in two weeks, Obadiah was at the front of the company, and he felt wanted, or at
least visible.
Captain Berkeley raised his hand to stop the column. They had reached the chevalier’s palace.
The palace brooded in its gray stone between a tall iron fence and acres of green grass, the colonnaded portico surrounding it masked by groves of magnolia and sparkling fountains. Above the portico, further rows of columns sprang skyward, supporting tiers of balconies that piled jumbled up to the heavens, like a great stone wedding cake.
Obadiah imagined himself getting married with such a cake. A Christian wedding filled his head, rather than the sacrificial wedding feast of the followers of Herne and Wayland that he and Peg had once planned. He imagined himself, to his own surprise, as a squire, wearing a long-tailed coat with brass buttons and a shiny black hat, shaved and greeting all the county notables, walking cane inscribing elegant circles in the air or tucked insouciantly under his arm. Peg, walking a carpet of flowers with the traditional wedding horseshoe in hand. Sarah, rather. Signing the register. Gifting the parson. Vows outside the chapel door. Cutting the cake and serving it, but not the top, not the christening cake, that would be saved for the baptism of their first child. He looked up at the chevalier’s palace and tried to imagine which part of it would be the christening cake. He hoped their children got her looks.
Except for the eye.
They trotted across the street to a two-story gatehouse, wide enough for two carriages to pass through abreast. Its portcullis was up and a dozen men stood guard, again in the blue and gold, bearing the fleur-de-lis, armed with pikes and pistols.
Father Angleton reached under his tabard—he had changed into the formal hammer-and-nail suit this morning, in anticipation of reaching New Orleans—and produced a card, which he handed to the commander of the gate guard.
“I am Father Ezekiel Angleton,” he said, “Chaplain to the Imperial House Light Dragoons. This is Captain Sir Daniel Berkeley, Captain of the Dragoons. We have come to pay our respects to the Chevalier of New Orleans.”
The commander simply nodded and sent the card inside with one of his men. At Berkeley’s gesture, the Blues brought up their line into a more compact formation and stayed mounted. Obadiah pulled the mule string in close and shushed the beasts. They all stood in silence, inspecting each other.