by D. J. Butler
Not with Hooke chasing her.
“Stop here.” She’d made her mind up. “Follow me,” she told the others, and she stalked off the side of the road toward a grove of weeping willow trees on the edge of the river.
She got to the trees first, dismounted and started stripping off her clothing. “Calvin,” she snapped at him when he arrived, “stop starin’ and git to choppin’.”
He dropped off his horse, keeping his wide-eyed head turned awkwardly away from her. “I don’t understand. Choppin’ what? You want a fire?”
“I want the best likeness of me as you can make,” Sarah told him, “chopped out of wood, jest like the Elector’d do it. Don’t worry so much about the hair, I’ll git that part. Time to show me you got the Calhoun gift for woodwork.”
Cal nodded and scratched his scalp. “I ain’t the Elector, but I reckon I can make you a person-shaped hunk of wood.”
“I need it soon as you can do it,” she added. “Fifteen minutes’d be soon enough.”
He pulled his tomahawk from his belt and wandered in search of a log, keeping his back carefully turned to Sarah.
“Life-sized!” she called after him.
Sir William also kept his eyes averted. “Your Majesty,” he began, and then trailed off awkwardly. “I…”
He needed a task. “Stand watch!” Sarah directed him. “Iffen anyone takes us by surprise and I’m nekkid, it ain’t gonna go well for me.”
Sir William bowed, checked his pistols and took a position a few paces away with his back turned.
“Are you well, Sarah?” Cathy asked.
“Better’n I been in days, thank you very much. You got Circulator training, don’t you? Ain’t you the one as pulled bullets out of Sir William?”
Cathy nodded, a worried look on her face.
“Perfect,” Sarah said. “I’m gonna need you to bleed me, as much as you can without killin’ me.”
“It can be hard to know how much bleeding is safe,” Cathy pointed out softly.
“Err on the side of more blood spilt,” Sarah directed. “Only that’s gonna be the last thing. First, the hair.”
She pulled out Chigozie Ukwu’s silver blade and then thought better of it. “You got a knife I can borrow?”
By the time Calvin returned, Sarah was totally naked and had shaved off her hair, setting it in clumps on top of the puddle of her clothing, along with the bit of his shell that Grungle had given her. The earth of the little grove was low near the river and marshy, and she stood with wet feet in a cold afternoon breeze and shivered, her bare skin prickly with gooseflesh. She was sheltered from the sky and the river under the drooping green arms of one of the trees, but whatever sliver of modesty it might have provided her, it didn’t keep out the cold at all.
“That’s a fine doll, Calvin,” she said, “and jest the right size for what I need. Now help me git it dressed, and then we’ll need some withies cut, and I got a piece of tortoiseshell I need chopped in two. I reckon you’re the feller to do the job, so I’m promoting you to apprentice gramarist. Apprentice to an apprentice, I know that ain’t grand, but we all gotta start somewhere.”
“I can help with the clothing.” Cathy promptly began dressing the log doll.
Cal tried hard not to look.
“I’s ugly afore, remember, Cal?” she prodded him. “Now I’m jest ugly and bald.”
He shook his head. “You ain’t ugly, Sarah,” was all he managed to say. “You ain’t e’er been ugly.”
“Please,” she said to him. “Help me.”
* * *
“It is time I revealed to thee my plan.”
The harsh, jangling-metal voice tore Ezekiel from uneasy sleep, and he found himself lying on his back, staring into the night sky. He froze; in the night he’d kicked his own blanket off—for a week, his dreams had tortured him—and as bleary sleep pooled and slipped from his eyes, the stars above looked like a glittering skull, with cavernous eye sockets black as the void and a vast swinging jawbone of fire.
“Cromwell,” Ezekiel murmured.
His vision cleared and the skull dissolved into the shining veil of an ordinary autumn night, but Ezekiel still felt a presence, a shadow in his heart. He tried to sit up and could not.
“I am accustomed to being addressed as My Lord,” the cacophonous voice asserted placidly. “Manners are important, Father.”
Ezekiel strained again to sit, and then to roll, but could not move a muscle. His heart beat violently. What did the Necromancer want with him? He heard the crunch of heavy boots in sand and then a shadow fell across him, and he saw again the man in plate armor and white neck cloth, looming over him like judgment.
“Yaas, My Lord,” Ezekiel whispered. The stone of his limbs became flesh again and he sat up.
Cromwell regarded him without expression. “Walk thou with me in the garden.” The Lord Protector turned and paced slowly out of the camp, and Ezekiel rose and followed.
Ezekiel was used to waking from his tormented sleep several times a night, always finding some dragoon alert and tending the fire, or men talking, playing at cards, or cleaning and polishing weapons. Now they all lay still, breathing deep and regular breaths, faces innocent under the waning moon.
The Lazars did not sleep, but sat at the edge of camp unmoving, paralyzed.
The sentries slept, too; the sleep must be Cromwell’s doing. From the orange-lit and slightly fire-warmed camp, he passed in the Necromancer’s wake into a bone forest of denuded cottonwoods. Dried branches leaped to claw at Ezekiel’s face; he batted them away with his hands and struggled to keep pace with the armored specter.
“Thou servest thine emperor,” Cromwell asserted, turning slightly to speak to Ezekiel. He slowed his step, apparently to let the mortal catch up to him. “Thou huntest the Witchy Eye at his bidding, to bring her to Philadelphia in chains, and if thou cannot, then to kill her.”
“Yaas,” Ezekiel acknowledged.
“I commend thee for this,” the Lord Protector nodded. “Also, thou hast no great love for the Ophidians. Thou art a follower of St. Martin, who refuses them all rites and ordination.”
“They simply have no souls,” Ezekiel explained. “I bear them no ill will. One might as well baptize a fish.”
“Nor do I bear them evil will,” agreed Oliver Cromwell. “Indeed, I am grateful for them. They are a gift of God to us.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
The Lord Protector smiled and nodded. “Know thou that Thomas Penn is also my servant, though he may not always fully understand as much.”
Ezekiel stumbled and nearly fell. “Penn serves you?”
Cromwell nodded serenely. “Many serve me. More than are aware of their service.” He stopped walking. They stood in a clearing. Bone-dry trees menaced them in a circle around the patch of sandy soil, and in the center squatted a thick stump, waist high and stripped of all bark and branches. Ezekiel had seen judicial beheadings carried out on stumps just such as this in the Covenant Tract, and he shuddered.
“What do you want from me?” he asked.
“Understanding.” Cromwell reached a hand out to touch the stump. He murmured something that Ezekiel didn’t hear, as if talking to the wood, and then faced Ezekiel again. “Man must die, because Adam fell.”
Ezekiel gasped. As if its outer layer were a swarm of ants, previously sleeping and now suddenly pricked into motion, the stump began in his vision to crawl. Its skin writhed, and then cracked into ridges that rose, grew, thickened, and became hard—the dead stump was growing bark before his eyes.
“God’s Eldest has worked a great salvation, it is true,” Cromwell conceded. “But only some men are saved, and even they are only redeemed after great suffering and distress, and after facing the blind horror of death.”
“The elect.” Ezekiel’s theology sounded useless and dwarfed in his own ears.
The stump was stretching now, inching upward as Ezekiel watched it. Cromwell ignored the tree and continued to talk to
Ezekiel Angleton.
“Another sacrifice is wanted,” he continued in his grating crash of a voice, “a more perfect act. Know thou this, my servant Ezekiel—death can be overcome. In my body, it is overcome already. I am no haunt, touch me.”
Cromwell pulled his right hand from its mailed glove and held it to Ezekiel, palm up. Fearfully, Ezekiel took the Lord Protector’s hand in his own and touched it. It felt like flesh, living, though perhaps slightly cool. Ezekiel trembled and fell to his knees, still clutching Cromwell’s hand. He looked to the stump and saw it was as tall as a man now, and branches began to shoot out its sides.
“There is no mumbo-jumbo here, no wonder, no ineffable mystery.” Cromwell turned his hand palm down and gripped Ezekiel’s fingers tightly. His eyes were calm and rational, Ezekiel thought, not at all the eyes of a madman. “I can end death for every son and daughter of Eve alive today. It is mere gramarye, magic worked according to the laws God Himself established. The limitation, the challenge, is simply power.”
Ezekiel’s mind raced. Cromwell’s aspirations were vast, his vision out of reach and bordering on madness. This must have something to do with the Witchy Eye and Ezekiel’s pursuit of her, but he couldn’t imagine what. Buds were forming on the branches of the tree beside him.
“God in His wisdom, however, gives us no challenge which he does not also give us the means to overcome. Here, on the shores of the great Mississippi River, He has given us the solution to this problem, the source of power I need to be able to undo Adam’s Folly, and give instant and painless eternal life to every child of Eve.”
“The…the ley?” Ezekiel asked, hesitantly. Above him, the sprouting tree had hit its full height, and now it shot its branches out into a bud-covered canopy.
The Lord Protector shook his head. “Sanctify unto me all the firstborn, both of man and of beast: it is mine.”
Ezekiel knew the quotation instantly, and the implications spun his head around. “Exodus?”
“In whom we have redemption through blood, even the firstborn of every creature,” Cromwell continued.
“The Epistle to the Colossians,” Ezekiel said. “The serpentspawn, they…they have a magical energy about them. It is what they possess in place of a soul, and it’s released when they die, because they are not permitted into Heaven. Is that…?” An idea of what the Lord Protector’s plan might be, grand and horrible, coalesced in his head. The branches above him rustled with newly-sprung leaves.
“Thou shalt not delay to offer the first of thy ripe fruits,” Cromwell answered. “The firstborn of thy sons shalt thou give unto me.”
“Exodus again.” Ezekiel felt that he had to be the one to say it out loud, that his statement committed him. “You would kill the serpentspawn. You would kill some number of them because you could use their deaths to fuel your gramarye.”
Blossoms burst forth upon the tree’s many limbs.
Cromwell pulled Ezekiel to his feet. “Not mine. Ours. All of ours. God has given us all the gift of the death of the Firstborn. We will undo Adam’s Fall. Thou, Ezekiel Angleton, shalt never die.”
Ezekiel’s knees shook and his breath was quick and shallow; he could barely stand the immensity of the thoughts that burned through him. “How…how many?”
A family? No, that was too small a scale entirely. A city? A kingdom?
“All of them,” the Necromancer said, his eyes clear and free of doubt.
Ezekiel was stunned almost beyond speech. So many deaths…but then, the end of death…Finally, he mustered one more question. “And the Witchy Eye?”
“I would,” the Lord Protector said slowly, “that the Cahokians not have a queen to lead them.”
Ezekiel could only nod, seeing the terrible logic in all its cold beauty. He tried hard not to think of her, but before his mind’s eye he kept finding the smiling face of Lucy Winthrop.
“My good servant Ezekiel,” Cromwell broke him out of his reverie. “I have a gift to give thee.”
Ezekiel bowed his head, unable to think of any other appropriate reaction. The Lord Protector reached down and touched him. With one hand Cromwell pinched Ezekiel’s earlobe, and with the other he pulled down the Martinite’s chin, opening his mouth, and then gripped Ezekiel’s tongue.
Cromwell’s hands were cold.
And then he squeezed with his fingers, and they burned.
“These images are all quite barocco, Your Majesty.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Sorcerer Hooke spurred his horse on ahead and Angleton followed. Daniel Berkeley kept up with them as a point of honor, which was easy on the Andalusian gray, but he kept one hand near his pistols.
Hooke sniffed his little bird’s nest of hair and then the breeze over and over again. Berkeley didn’t trust the Lazars—he had only Hooke’s words and the word of the Martinite priest that the Lazars served Thomas Penn as he did, and besides, they seemed like the personification of the evil fortune that had overtaken Daniel Berkeley and threatened to sweep him away.
Also, he was unimpressed by the hairball. He didn’t need magic to tell him where the renegade Will Lee was taking the girl, it was obvious. They were making a beeline for the Serpent Mound.
The pre-morning gloom was dissipating into sunshine when the three men reined their mounts in on top of a low rise and looked down on a grove of weeping willows. The trees grew right down to the water’s edge on a shelf of land that was more than half surrounded by the Mississippi River.
Among the trees were low, snarled bushes and Berkeley saw a snatch of something, sheltered under a willow, that might be dirty white fabric.
There! Hooke jumped forward at a trot.
Berkeley grabbed Angleton’s arm and stopped him from doing the same.
The priest stared at him. He must not be sleeping well. He he was sweating far too much given the cool temperature of the morning and he had one ear blackened as if by soot. For that matter, the inside of his mouth was black, as if he’d eaten charcoal. Had the Martinite rolled too near the campfire in the night?
“Don’t touch me,” Angleton snarled.
“Patience, Father.” Berkeley adopted a conciliatory tone. He owed the dead man nothing, but Angleton was a fellow servant of the emperor, and Berkeley didn’t want to have to account to Thomas Penn for any mishaps.
Something about the situation smelled wrong.
“Don’t you see? She’s down there!” Angleton pointed frantically.
Berkeley wanted to cast his Tarock. “Then she’ll still be there in a minute, Father, and unless Robert Hooke plans to devour her whole, I’m sure you’ll be able to get a piece.”
“I hadn’t taken you for a coward,” the priest said.
“And I am not one,” Berkeley agreed. “Nor am I a fool.”
Ezekiel Angleton nodded slowly. “Yaas.”
Berkeley sent his men to set up a cordon around the low-lying grove, and then he and the Martinite rode down, the other two Lazars and the Philadelphia Blues at their backs.
Hooke’s horse splashed into shallow water yards ahead of them, an ankle-high flood submerging the little grove, and something caught Berkeley’s eye, something at the level of the animal’s hooves. Berkeley raised a hand to stop his men and this time the company’s chaplain cooperated without complaint. Black Tom Fairfax and the third Lazar also stopped to watch.
Berkeley dismounted to look at the ground with a soft splash.
It’s not her! Hooke shrieked in rage.
A chain of withies, each forked and splinted and wrapped to the next with strips of green bark, lay low in the water and the wild grass. The water moved; the ground was low enough and the river high enough that the willows stood in running water, in the river itself, though in a shallow edge.
Berkeley paced alongside the withies, to see how long the chain was. They formed a loop all around the landward side of the willow grove.
He looked up and called to Hooke. “You’d better come back out. I don’t know what this grove is, b
ut something has been done here by craft, and the place isn’t what it appears.”
The Lazar stood over a log that lay underneath one of the willows. Curiously, the log wore a white dress. Also, it appeared to have black hair pasted to the head end of it, and it was spattered in something dark and brown that might have been blood.
They have thrown us off the track, Hooke called back in his crackling leaf voice. But we shall find her again.
He scraped a clump of the hair off the big, clumsy doll and sniffed it. Then he bent to the dressed log and picked something else up. Berkeley couldn’t see what the object was, but it was small and brown and shiny, like a river-polished bit of stone.
“Come back!” Berkeley took two steps back himself.
Stop that! Robert Hooke suddenly shouted, and slapped at the air.
His horse neighed and reared beside him, splashing down hard with its hooves in the shallow current.
“Get back!” Berkeley shouted to his men.
He didn’t care what the Lazars did at this point, but he sloshed through the water, grabbed the reins of Ezekiel Angleton’s horse, and dragged it with him a few paces out of the flood, to where the ground was higher and dry. Angleton didn’t stop staring at Hooke. Berkeley mounted his own horse, then drew and cocked one pistol. He scanned the higher ground around them for signs of an ambush, but saw nothing.
The other Lazars stared at Hooke too, but didn’t cross the withy chain.
Unhand me! Hooke danced a strange sort of jig, swatting at nothing with both his hands and kicking the air with his feet.
Berkeley withdrew another twenty feet, and the Blues with him.
Hooke’s horse whinnied again, reared back, and this time it fell into the water with its entire body.
Berkeley cared nothing for the Lazar Robert Hooke, but he did feel bad about the horse.
The wind picked up.
No, it wasn’t the wind. But something…something else…was moving through the air, following the current of running water from the sluggish primary mass of the Mississippi, over the grove of willows and back into the river again.