Witchy Eye

by D. J. Butler

  “Mon père!” He cut at his own chest with a small knife.

  One of Etienne’s men, unmistakable in the simple black waistcoat and white sleeves, pressed along the boardwalk where Kinta Jane stood watching, recruiting participation in the procession.

  “Sou pour qui porte le deuil,” he whispered, loud enough to be heard on the boardwalk but not loud enough to distract those in the funeral parade. “Penny for a mourner.”

  Kinta Jane shook her head, refusing the money. Then she stepped off the boardwalk, wrapping her shawl around herself and joining the procession anyway. The bishop had been a good man. And anyway, these mourners were her people.

  Behind Etienne came the black coffin, carried by six of Etienne’s men.

  Musicians followed the pallbearers. There were fiddles, banjos, horns, and men with drums slung from their shoulders, and they played music that was slow and sweet and a little cacophonous, all following the same modal melody, but only more or less. Singers joined them, wordless and howling, and Kinta Jane opened her mouth and found that, for the first time in years, she could join the choir.

  Behind the musicians came mourners, and they were legion. Some marched in small cadres behind cross-hung, forward-facing banners showing that they marched for the Veterans of the Spanish War, the Stevedores Guild of New Orleans, or the Grand Lodge of Louisiana. Most of the marchers wore red sashes around their waists or from shoulder to hip, but some wore other colors.

  These people were not the great and good of New Orleans, but they were the many.

  And beyond them, and behind them, came the shadows. Dark things that moved in darkness and that Kinta Jane couldn’t clearly see flitted from rooftop to rooftop, or crowded out of the mouths of the alleys, following behind and shuddering along parallel to the marchers and sometimes seeming to rise directly out of the wet earth of New Orleans.

  The mystères. Even the loa mourned the death of the saintly bishop.

  The Faubourg sloshed up against the eastern wall of the city of New Orleans, cluttering the space around the Franklin Gate. At this late hour, the gate should be shut and guarded, but it lay wide open.

  The night air was warm and heady. The torches filled the air with a strange perfume, a stink of smoke and life and death at the same time. Some of the mourners, broken by the singing and by the thick incense, collapsed before they ever got out of the city.

  Kinta Jane picked up a tambourine from a fallen ululatrix and walked through the Franklin Gate. Gendarmes in the uniform of the chevalier stood on the parapet with lowered guns and bowed heads as the bishop’s coffin passed.

  Beyond the gate lay a few farming villages, nestled among thick groves of oak heavy with silvery-green Spanish moss and hemmed in by the bayous, with their sluggish, fetid water, their alligators and their cottonmouth snakes. And there was a cemetery.

  The cemetery was formally named after St. Vincent de Paul. St. Vincent had been a great preacher to the poor in his life and the Congregation of the Mission continued his work. When the Vincentians had approached Count Galvéz, at the time sole ruler in Louisiana, about setting aside land for the burial of the poor of New Orleans, the count had happily given them a plot…outside the city.

  Upon their return to power, the Le Moyne family had made no move to relocate the funeral, and so St. Vincent de Paul looked to the burial of the poor in a large field on a low hill outside the eastern wall of New Orleans, mostly marked with temporary grave identifiers of wood, cloth, or even paper. Burial cost only a copper penny, payable to the Congregation, and when the family of the deceased couldn’t afford it, the Bishop of New Orleans paid instead.

  The penny for the burial of an executed criminal was almost always paid by the bishop. And now, in death, he was going to join the men for whom he had performed this final act of charity.

  St. Vincent and his Congregation of the Mission looked to the poor, but the poor didn’t look only to St. Vincent. They also looked to the mystères.

  The men with torches and the weeping women moved between two pylons with defaced images of St. Vincent and out into the moonlit meadow of the cemetery. A square pit had been dug, in a corner of the field away from other burials, beside a mound of excavated dirt and several long-handled shovels. The procession formed a ring around it, waving torches, wailing, and tearing clothing.

  Kinta Jane smelled the sweet rotting fecund stink of the bayou below.

  Etienne stood beside the pit while his men lowered the black coffin into the ground. When the coffin was down the others stepped away, leaving him alone by the grave. He shrugged out of his silver-embroidered vest and let it fall to the earth.

  Could that really be the bishop’s body in the black coffin? Would the bishop’s other son have permitted such a burial? Would the bishopric?

  Had Etienne stolen his father’s corpse?

  The wailing did not diminish, other than by the absence of Etienne’s own voice. If anything, it got louder, and Kinta Jane wailed along.

  Etienne took two things handed to him by a follower. Kinta Jane was close enough to see that they were a short-necked bottle, of the sort usually filled with rum, and a powderhorn. Etienne Ukwu uncorked the bottle of rum, tipped gunpowder into it, corked the bottle again, and shook it up.

  His motions were slow and deliberate, and when he had finished he threw the powderhorn to the ground.

  Stepping to one of his twelve torch-bearers, he took the light from the man and moved to the edge of the open grave.

  “Papa Legba! Here I stand at the last great crossroads, and I invoke you!” His words were in French, and shouted loud enough to be heard over the crowd.

  He passed the torch once over the open grave. Kinta Jane saw dark shapes, faceless and impossible to pin down with the eye, writhing in the cemetery beyond the crowd.

  “Baron Samedi!” he continued. “Here I stand in the palace of the dead, and I invoke you!”

  He passed the torch again over his father’s grave in a swoosh of red flame. Kinta Jane thought she heard a new note join and mingle with the howling of the human throats, something different, animal, alien, wild.

  “Maitre Carrefour!” Etienne shouted, and now his face twisted into a mask of fury. “Here I stand where a wrong has been committed, and I am in need of vengeance! Maitre Carrefour, I invoke you!”

  He waved the torch a third time over the grave, and all the torches flared.

  Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!

  With a collective shriek, the women mourners nearest the center of the circle fell to the ground. The torch-bearing men, other than Etienne, staggered as if they had been hit by unseen hammers and sank to their knees.

  The wailing hushed.

  Behind the mourners, the shadow things towered tall and black, blotting out the stars and hanging a veil of darkness through which Kinta Jane could scarcely see the oak trees surrounding the field. They emitted a low, wailing moan that made her bones ache.

  She cowered and raised a hand to protect her face. Papa Legba have mercy upon me, she thought. Eleggua hide me, and get me out of here.

  The mystères.

  Etienne uncorked his bottle of gunpowder-infused rum and raised it in one hand. He looked over the mourners, at the groaning shadows.

  “This I swear!” he shouted. “I will know the men who slew my father!”

  He filled his mouth with the rum-and-gunpowder mixture and spat it into the grave. The mystères trembled and wailed.

  “This I swear: I will have them in my power!”

  He filled his mouth and spat again. The shadows spun, agitated. Kinta Jane shrank even lower to the cold earth.

  “And this I swear: I will destroy them!”

  Etienne filled his mouth a third time, and this time he spat into the torch. Flame gouted from his mouth and rose to the sky in a bright red column. The shadows rose with the fire, until they covered the entire meadow with a thick dome of darkness that blotted out the night sky, moon and all.

  Etienne threw the uncorked bottle down
into the grave pit, and the torch after it.

  Above the red flames that rose out of his father’s grave, Etienne Ukwu took his small knife and cut the palm of his own hand. The flames showed no signs of dying down as he dripped his red blood into them.

  “This I swear!” he shouted one last time, and the mourners exploded into howling.

  The shadows still surrounded the funeral procession, writhing and groaning, when Etienne took a long-handled shovel in his bloody hand and dropped the first dirt onto his father’s coffin.

  * * *

  The next morning Sarah woke up in seven kinds of pain. She was tempted to say “dolores mitigo” to ease her saddle-soreness, but saddle-soreness was a lesser evil than the husklike, burnt feeling she got as she prepared to enact even that modest bit of gramarye. She waited until the others were ready, then dragged herself into the saddle.

  As they traveled parallel to the river, Sarah began to see Memphites. Both Amhara and Oromo inhabited the Kingdom of Memphis, and Sarah thought she saw both the long faces of the latter and the pointed chins of the former (also notable for their fairer coloring) on the road. Memphis was rich, and those of its citizens who were personally wealthy or important enough to travel showed it in their silk dress, gold ornaments, and elaborate face painting. Above all, they showed it in their slaves. The wealthy of Memphis were carried on litters, or rode in chariots or carriages pulled by Draft Men, or sailed the rivers on galleys that overcame missing or unfavorable winds by multiple banks of chained rowers.

  The Memphites spoke Amharic, so Sarah and her party could only bow as they passed. In return, they occasionally got hand waves but more often got nothing.

  When she could do so without slowing their progress, Sarah began to fill Thalanes’s satchel. Another confrontation with her enemies loomed, and she was determined to be prepared. She exercised her imagination, looking for objects that she could carry that would be effective material components for interesting magic. She gathered feathers, pine gum, poison ivy leaves (carefully wrapped in a swatch of cloth), a small rodent’s skull and—her prize find—a tangled robin’s nest, complete with three eggs. Eventually, she took the acorn from inside her clothing and slipped it, too, into the satchel.

  Increasingly, Sir William and Cathy Filmer rode side by side, chatting, while she rode with Calvin. Cal again proved his worth as a hunter and a woodsman, killing game to supplement their purchased stores, preparing it on small fires, and locating discreet, defensible, reasonably comfortable campsites.

  Though the two of them were often sufficiently alone for private conversation, and though Sarah knew that Calvin longed to be told that she loved him, she found she couldn’t say it. She smiled at him as often as she could remember to do so, and got many shy, sometimes slightly rueful, grins in return.

  Sarah rode with her ash staff across the bow of her horse’s saddle, a charm against evil spirits and a weapon if they were attacked. The feel of the carved wood reassured her. She imagined she was the Elector’s carved knight now, making good time by leaping over her enemies.

  At night, Sarah peeped in again on her enemies—for a moment only—and found them drawing nearer. Would she reach the great junction, and then Cahokia, ahead of her foes? Would the regalia be weapons she could turn against her pursuers?

  Before falling asleep, Calvin sang. Sarah figured he was trying to cheer her up. It worked, partly because his enthusiasm and affection came through in the music, and partly because of the songs he chose. Among other things, he sang about Sarah’s father.

  The wild beasts of the Great Green Wood

  The bison, the sloth, and the wolf

  Learned to hear his footstep and light out in a hurry

  His blade was sharp, his arm was strong

  His eye was keen and his shot was long

  The Lion of Missouri

  St. John’s Knights and the Viceroy’s men

  The Hessian, the Greek, and the Turk

  Felt the white-hot fire of the young Cahokian’s fury

  His word, his heart and his aim were true

  His iron will and his soldiers, too

  The Lion of Missouri

  Against sorcerers and highwaymen

  Lawyers, land agents, and banks

  He rode as hangman, circuit judge, and jury

  His horse was fear, his cloak was awe

  His look was death and his word was law

  The Lion of Missouri

  After another morning of riding, fueled by coffee and gramarye, they were within the bounds of the kingdom proper, and all the farmers they passed were Memphite serfs. These did not dress as richly as their overlords, and their only cosmetic was dirt. The great cotton, corn, and tobacco fields along both sides of the road had already been harvested, so the serfs Sarah saw tended vegetables in truck-patches or cared for cattle, chicken, or goats. They wore rough cotton clothing, with corte-du-roi jackets against the evening’s chill, and they kept their heads down. The buildings that housed the serfs and made up their villages were built of mud brick. Such royal buildings as Sarah and her companions saw, toll houses that waved them past because they weren’t merchants and carried no goods for sale, were carved of stone.

  That night, Sarah got too confident and very nearly made eye contact with the Sorcerer Hooke. The sight of his face, bone-white and grinning, chilled her, and she decided not to scry again, at least not for the time being. The Blues were gaining on her party, and might catch her before she reached the junction.

  Above all the others, Hooke terrified her. She had to do something about Robert Hooke.

  Sarah began to scheme.

  On the fourth day, they passed through the city of Memphis. It took all day, because the city was large, because it was built within concentric rings of immense stone walls, and also because they walked, leading the horses rather than riding them. They stopped with bowed heads every time a wealthy Memphite passed in his or her litter, which was a frequent occurrence. They did this together with the mass of ordinary Memphites and most outsiders, and at Cathy’s insistence.

  “But Sarah’s a queen,” Cal objected. “I been bowin’ to Memphites for days now, and it ain’t ever got us nothin’. It ain’t like they ever show any gratitude for it.”

  “A Memphite of noble blood,” Cathy explained, “believes himself to be of the line of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and also descended from the Pharaohs of Egypt. This is divine ancestry and it makes him chosen, very special indeed, and much superior to ordinary mortals, including queens.”

  “Superiority does beg to be humbled,” Sarah said.

  “Lord hates a man as is superior,” Cal agreed.

  “In the interest of speed, Your Majesty,” Cathy pleaded, “I suggest that we not try to humble the Kingdom of Memphis today.”

  “Isn’t your husband buried somewhere here, ma’am?” Sir William asked, looking about the crowded square of carpet-sellers where they stood as if just behind one of their striped and awning-fronted tents might lie one of Memphis’s fabled necropolises. The crowd was a jumble of nationalities, and Sarah wondered what a man might look like who was strong enough to be married to Cathy Filmer. “The schoolteacher? Also, the Beguine cloister that took you in for a while?”

  “I had to choose the Beguines or the Pitchers,” Cathy said. “And the emperor’s lady artillerists have such a fame for being slatterns.”

  On the north side of Memphis they camped on the shores of a large ox-bow lake made and abandoned by the river, and in the morning they again found themselves on a dirt road, trotting north.

  “I don’t understand,” Sarah complained to Calvin. “We’re ridin’ the line of some major cities—New Orleans, Memphis, Cahokia, the German Duchies—and the roads ain’t any better than the Natchez Trace, and they ain’t half so good as the Charlotte Pike.”

  Calvin nodded slowly. “Yeah, I’s a bit wondered about that, too, but next time we git the river in sight, try countin’ the boats on it.”

  S
arah felt foolish. “The traders go by the river.”

  “Yeah. Soldiers too, I reckon, and anyone else as has to move a lot of people or a lot of things. I b’lieve these roads we’re ridin’ are mostly traveled by the locals. I reckon that’s why we keep seein’ so many farmers and small traders.”

  “I should have known that,” Sarah said. “I reckon the Elector taught me more politics than he did trade.”

  “I reckon so,” Cal agreed with a smile, “though often enough, those two can be the same thing. You’re Queen of Cahokia, Sarah. That there river—” he gestured vaguely off the west, over forest and a low hill that blocked the Mississippi from their view, “belongs to you.”

  Sarah laughed. “To me, the Chevalier of New Orleans, the King of Memphis, the Hansa towns, Catalan and Igbo smugglers, the Bantu princes, the Wallenstein family, and maybe Simon Sword!” The thought had seemed funny in her head, but when she heard the words coming out of her mouth she felt daunted.

  Calvin laughed, too, but weakly, and Sarah spent the rest of the morning brooding, hoping the Cahokian regalia were indeed things of power, praying her enemies continued to follow her by road and hadn’t taken to the river, and asking herself whether she could possibly survive to claim her throne and rescue her brother and sister.

  She thought of her siblings, wondering whether they were well and where they were, knowing she could ask Sir William and he would tell her, but fearing even her own mind might not be safe. Like her, they had been disfigured infants; were they mutilated now? Had those disfigurations given them any usual gifts, as hers had given to her? The acorn in her pouch felt very heavy, and she doubted she could carry it as far as she needed to.