by D. J. Butler
Crash!
The left side of the coach smashed against the wall, and Bill felt both the left wheels shredded instantly into toothpicks. “Hell’s Bells!”
The axles screeched against the stone and kept the coach upright on two wheels as it plunged through the gate, but this was the end. Once out of the tunnel, the carriage would collapse, and within seconds they would be overtaken.
He looked back at Obadiah. The Englishman had pulled the blade that killed him out of his chest and lay in a pool of his own gore, breath rattling thick and hard in his throat. He caught Bill’s gaze with his bloody, one-eyed stare and managed something that was almost a jaunty grin. “Tell my poppet,” he wheezed, “I mean, tell ’Er Majesty, I was a brave man in ’er service, at the end. Please.”
Bill nodded. “You were indeed, suh.”
Obadiah closed his remaining eye and breathed deeply. “An’ tell Peg I always loved ’er,” he added, and then expired.
Peg?
The end of the gate loomed before Bill, the horses emerging from the tunnel to pound down the gravel slope toward the river and its wharves. He tightened his grip on the reins and prepared to battle with the animals against the coach’s collapse.
Instead, to his utter astonishment, the lead horses lifted off the ground and into the air.
And then the second team followed, and the third.
And then the coach burst from the outer mouth of the Mississippi Gate and took flight, rising into the cool night air. The reins hung slack in Bill’s hands. The carriage ascended and turned and above the Mississippi River it climbed, as if the river itself were a great black highway on which it alone of all coaches knew how to travel.
Bill reached back to grab Obadiah’s body, to keep him from falling off the carriage. He looked down, thankful he’d never been afraid of heights, and both amused and slightly disturbed to see Berkeley and the other Blues, pouring en masse down onto the Mississippi wharves and pointing up in his direction.
Shots were fired, but it was too late. Even as its horses realized they were no longer pulling any burden and stopped moving their legs, the Prince of Shreveport’s coach rose, picked up speed, and slid away into the night, shedding its other two wheels with faint splashes into the water below.
Hell’s Bells, Bill thought. I could really use a shot of whisky.
“I’s ugly afore, remember, Cal? Now I’m jest ugly and bald.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Sarah felt as if the river itself were flowing through her. She lay across one of the seats of the ruined carriage, her muscles taut, and she thought she might even be weeping, but her body seemed far away.
And on fire, and floating in a sea of ice.
Her soul (or was it her spirit? her psyche, or her pneuma?) she held stretched open, like a funnel, and the green light of the Mississippi ley line poured through her, lifting her and her entourage. She did not feel the passage of time, but she was aware of distance. She knew it not as riders or walkers know it, the stretching of the road to the horizon, the fields and woods connecting one hamlet to the next, nor even as sailors, landmark and star, astrolabe and compass, but as the river itself knew it. She sensed the thick sheets of mud slide about her as she flew, and catfish, alligators, snakes, and darker, unknown things crawled over her soul and left her feeling slimy and wet.
She could not keep this up long, and was determined to get as far from New Orleans as she could before the Mississippi burned her out. She turned with the bends of the river. She knew it was cold, and she was aware that Calvin and Cathy covered her with one of the prince’s furs. She tried to grasp Cal’s hand in gratitude, but in her power-whelmed and distracted state, she barely managed a scratching claw at his thigh.
Finally, her body and heart on the verge of being torn into shreds by the raw power of the experience, Sarah brought the coach down. She remembered her physical surroundings as she did so, and realized she needed to see.
“The window,” she croaked. “Help me to the window.”
Cal and Cathy bore her gently, and Sarah looked outside. Under a thick blanket of stars, both banks of the river were dotted with the evening lights of human habitation, which helped clear her head and give her a more distinct sense of the distance she had come—since the west bank was not swallowed yet by the Great Green Wood, they must still be somewhere over the Cotton Princedoms.
That could even be Shreveport off to the left, though Monroe might be closer—the dizzying heights gave her vertigo, and she couldn’t clearly remember the Elector’s maps.
“Lord hates a man as won’t try new things from time to time,” she heard Cal say, “but I think this flyin’ is like to make me sick.”
“Sir William and Obadiah?” Sarah asked. “Are they with us?”
“Yeah,” Cal said. “Bill’s got the both of ’em strapped to the coachman’s seat.”
Below and to the right Sarah saw cultivated fields. Inhaling deeply, she willed the coach to slow, to fall, to turn to the side—
“Hold on!” Cal shouted—
and the carriage plowed to rest into neat rows of yellow cotton stubble. Her insides felt liquefied and hot and the air around her froze her at the touch. Sarah lurched to the carriage door, battering it open and throwing herself onto her belly, just before she started to vomit.
She threw up again, blind from tears and exhaustion, while Cal sat and tried to hold her. As she retched for the third time bringing up nothing but bile, and noticed that the bile tasted of blood, mercy claimed her and she passed out.
* * *
Bill and Cal threw stones over Obadiah Dogsbody to make a rough grave. He lay in a natural depression beside Long Tom Fairfax’s dagger, which Bill had placed there as a trophy, and with a shawl from one of the Bantu ladies wrapped around his face to hide the loss of his eye.
Sarah lay face down in the reeds at the edge of the Mississippi, both hands dangling in the water. Occasionally she splashed her own arms or face, and Cal kept interrupting his share of the labor to look over at her.
Cathy sat on a fallen tree and read, translating the letter from French as she went, leaving Bill as much in awe of her culture and sophistication as he was enraged by the letter’s contents.
“To Monsieur Gaspard Le Moyne,” she read, “Chevalier of New Orleans, et cetera. Dear Sir.”
“What does ‘et cetera’ mean?” Cal asked.
“It means Bayard knows the man has other titles,” Bill grunted, settling a long, flat stone over Obadiah’s chest. “That’s not the important part. Listen.”
Cathy continued. “I write this, at your request and for your records, to confirm what I’ve already told you in person. A few weeks ago, on the borders of the Ohio, I killed with my own hand Kyres Elytharias, the Imperial Consort and King of Cahokia. I was able to do this because I was in his service as a soldier of the Imperial House Light Dragoons.”
“Traitor,” Bill growled.
Cathy kept translating. “I didn’t act alone. In killing Elytharias, I acted under the orders of my superior officer, Lieutenant Sir Daniel Berkeley, and he acted under the orders of Colonel Lord Thomas Penn, younger brother of the empress herself.”
“Son of a bitch!” Bill yelled.
“Which one?” Cal asked.
“Berkeley!” Bill spat. “That’s what he was on and on about in the cathedral. Had I been the one who told the bishop, he wanted to know. I had no idea what he was talking about. If I’d known, I’d have killed him then and there.”
He kicked the nearest tree.
“May I continue?” Cathy asked.
“Go on.” Bill crossed his arms over his chest.
“I give you this letter, sir, with some fear. I don’t wish you to think that you can now dispose of me, because you have my testimony in writing. Know, then, that I have yet another secret. After I had slain the King of Cahokia, I took his famous regalia—the crown, the orb and the sword, all three—and I buried them where only the moon can see, in a locatio
n known only to me. Yours, Bayard Prideux.”
“Hell’s Bells,” Bill swore. “Miserable rotten murderous traitor Berkeley. Melodramatic little frog Bayard. Thought he was so damned clever.”
He spat and threw the last stone on Obadiah Dogsbody’s grave.
“I reckon you must a drunk enough for Gideon and all three hundred of his men by now, Sarah,” Cal called. “They’s only so much water in that river, you know.”
In reply, she groaned.
“Bayard kept winking at me.” Bill tried to explain his train of thought to Calvin. “He was lonely and perhaps losing his mind, and when he told me he’d stolen the regalia—which ought not to have been any great surprise, since there had been no one else there to steal it, though when I caught him in the woods, I didn’t see any sign he had it—he winked at me, over and over.”
“Like he was sharin’ a secret?”
“I think he was.” In Bill’s mind, he reenacted the events of the night of the murder, and the geography of the place where they happened. “The spot where Kyres was murdered, you see, it has a…well, what might be a giant eye. I think Bayard was hinting to me that that’s where he buried the regalia. Under the eye.”
Cal squinted. “It’s a moon’s eye? Only the moon can see it?”
Bill wiped sweat from his forehead. “Well, no, it’s a big snake that has the eye. But I think the snake and the moon are the same.”
Cal scratched his head. “I can’t say as I see how.”
Bill struggled. “This is out of my area of expertise,” he said finally, “but I understand that the serpent and the moon are both important totems to the Firstborn. They were important to Kyres, anyway.”
“The moon changes its phases like the snake changes its skin,” offered Cathy, who had been listening intently. “Like trees that shed their leaves in the winter and then bud again, they are icons of changeful life. They’re all womanly images, symbols of Wisdom, of Adam’s first wife. As told by the Firstborn, anyway.”
“Why, Mrs. Filmer,” Bill said to her, smiling, “I knew you to be a woman of many gifts, but I confess I didn’t know you for a scholar.”
“Why, Sir William,” she answered with an arched eyebrow, “though I esteem you above all men, I’m not surprised you see this matter only as through a glass, darkly. Some things are best understood by women.”
“I have no doubt, ma’am.” Bill chuckled. “Let us hope the chevalier is as impaired as I am in this matter, and less familiar with the geography of the Ohio.”
“I do not believe the site of the King’s death is general knowledge,” Cathy said. “Your personal experience is our advantage, Sir William.”
“You hearin’ all this?” Calvin called to Sarah again.
Sarah levered herself up slowly on the palms of her hands and turned to face them. She looked exhausted, small, and frail. Like a woman grown old before her time, like a corn husk doll.
And Bill thought he felt tired.
“I heard.” Her voice rattled in her throat, and she fingered a small, moon-shaped brooch pinned to her shirt. Bill hadn’t noticed the brooch before, but observing it now, he recognized it as Thalanes’s.
“Moons and trees and mysterious lady things,” Cal said.
“Berkeley,” she rasped. “The serpent’s eye that is also the eye of the moon. And it ain’t the water I’m drinkin’.”
“Berkeley,” Bill agreed, “and the eye of the serpent.”
He was ready to act as soon as she was. They would have to abandon the carriage, but Bill had unhitched the six horses and tethered them to the trees. He had expected the animals to be exhausted from their ride, but once they got over their panic they seemed weirdly exhilarated. The party would have to ride bareback, but they could ride tonight, as soon as they had formulated a plan.
“What are your directions, Your Majesty?” Bill asked. “I apologize if the question is abrupt, but whatever head start you’ve given us is almost certainly already being eroded.”
“Obadiah Dogsbody deserves a prayer.” Sarah tried to climb to her feet, wobbled, and then sank back to the ground. She coughed and spat a thin stream of blood into the reeds.
“Jerusalem, Sarah,” Cal muttered.
“Is any of us able to say one?” she insisted.
There followed an awkward silence.
Bill scratched his bare, stubbly scalp—he hadn’t said any kind of prayer in years, unless you counted swearing. Indeed, Obadiah had been the sort of fellow who might not mind a good hard cursing and drinking session over his grave, but that didn’t seem to be what Sarah was suggesting.
“For that matter,” Sarah added, “we’ve said no prayer for Father Thalanes, or for Bishop Ukwu.”
“Amen,” Bill said, but that wasn’t a prayer, it was just agreement that there ought to be one.
“We have many losses to grieve,” Sarah finished quietly.
She tried to stand again and this time Bill rushed to her side to help. Her skin burned at his touch, and felt crisp, like paper, or like the skin on a roasted fowl. He smiled at her.
“I ain’t got much gift for talkin’. What about a song?” Cal offered, and Sarah nodded. Bowing their heads, Sarah, Cathy, and Bill all gathered around the pathetic barrow of stones. They stood quietly and, after a moment, Calvin lifted his voice and in a clear, certain tenor, sang. Bill was pleased to hear Cathy join in after the first measures, singing a close harmony over the Appalachee’s melody.
Alas! and did my Savior bleed
And did my Sovereign die?
Would He devote that sacred head
For such a worm as I?
At the cross, at the cross where I first saw the light,
And the burden of my heart rolled away,
It was there by faith I received my sight,
And now I am happy all the day!
Sarah limped over to the cairn, leaning on Bill and Calvin both. She tied her purple shawl to a stick and shoved its butt end deep into Obadiah’s pile of stones.
“Justice will come to Daniel Berkeley.” She trembled on her feet, but she stayed upright. “But we’re in no shape to see to him tonight. We ride north, to the junction of the great rivers.”
“You can’t ride,” Cathy objected. “A doctor would never let you out of bed.”
“Jest watch me!” Sarah snapped. She pulled away from Bill and Calvin and took two tottering steps toward the nearest horse.
“The regalia?” Bill’s first choice would have been to kill Daniel Berkeley, but he understood Sarah’s decision, and in any case, he respected it.
“The regalia.” Her eyes glittered. “As Sarah Calhoun, Berkeley may be beyond my grasp. As the Queen of Cahokia, I shall have him.”
Sarah hadn’t managed to refill her own energy reserves from the Mississippi (she had to let the power seep in slowly, because it hurt her if she let it in any faster), but she shared Sir William’s suspicion that pursuit was imminent. She let herself get bundled up onto a large white horse and they rode into the night, mounted bareback, wearing a motley assortment of their own clothing and the ball attire of the princely family of Shreveport.
They found a worn wagon road and Sarah dozed as they plodded along it, the chill of the night warning her of the coming winter. When daylight came and Sir William proposed to make camp off the road, Sarah reached inside herself and found she’d recovered enough to take a different tack. They had no fire to boil water, so she recited the coffee endurance spell, passed each member of the party a few beans to chew, and then used the power she had to fill all their legs, including the horses’, with renewed strength.
Not much, because of her exhaustion.
She couldn’t make them go any faster, but she kept them going.
And she herself felt worse for the effort.
They rode that day up along the Mississippi, seeing Igbo merchants (in their round brimless caps and long embroidered tunics) and Bantu farmers (with shaved heads, earrings, and stubbornly undecorative straight sh
irts and trousers, sometimes under wide-brimmed straw hats) on the road and in small villages. Near a crossroads they met an Indian wearing a buffalo-felt hat with horns and leading three ponies laden with buffalo hides. Behind him rode three Indian women who stared proudly and said nothing.
“Comanche,” Bill said when they had passed. “Fierce fighters. Their constant warfare leaves them few men, so their women share.”
“I can think of worse things,” Cathy murmured in response.
At a chinked-log trading post late in the afternoon, Cathy produced a few gold coins from her stitched leather shoulder bag, which turned out to be enough (with some haggling by Cal) to buy saddles, blankets, and other basic supplies, including a couple of long-handled shovels and a half-inch bore hunting rifle. At Sarah’s urging, they rode late into the night. Sarah dozed, Cal repeatedly catching her and holding her on her saddle, until they made camp in a grove of trees on the bank of the river.
“Hostes video,” Sarah murmured, huddled in a blanket by a tiny fire. She drew energy from the Mississippi’s ley and sent her vision down along it, wincing from the stinging of her eye and the crackling burn throughout her entire body; in the short moments of sight she permitted herself, she saw the Blues, haggard and hard-ridden, but bedded down to camp on the road north of New Orleans. At the fringes of their fire stalked the Sorcerer Hooke, and she instantly shut down her vision before she could see any more, and before he could see her.
* * *
The Faubourg Marigny was full of fire and stalked by the mystères.
Kinta Jane saw the torches first. A dozen men marched in two lines, holding high torches that blazed an unnatural red, a bright red with white and pink in it, more like a firework than a fire. With and around them came men and women drinking and tearing their clothing. The torchbearers and the drinkers alike wailed and beat their chests.
The Bishop of New Orleans was dead.
Behind the torches there was an empty space, and in it staggered Etienne Ukwu, the bishop’s son. Etienne was ordinarily an immaculate man, but tonight he looked as if he’d been savaged by wild dogs. His black and silver waistcoat was torn open, buttons ripped off. His red sash, marking his loyalty to the great mystère of the crossroads, the keyholder Papa Legba, was knotted around his neck like a cravat. His black trousers were torn, white lining sprouted out the ruined pockets, and his white shirt was stained with blood.