Witchy Kingdom

by D. J. Butler

  The only reason the Cahokians hadn’t broken the siege was that they themselves were few and poorly organized, a town watch or the private bodyguards of the city’s wealthier citizens. Also, on the fourth side, the city faced the river. The river and its banks teemed with braying and howling beastkind. What had once been an ordered and thriving array of wharves lay shattered like split kindling, obscured by the steam rising from the bodies of slinking beasts.

  Because of the marauding beastkind, Imperials had to approach their camp overland. Schmidt had commandeered and then expanded the docks of a fishing village five miles downstream, protecting it with one of her best militia corps; she now reached the head of the path that led to that village and found the arrivals from Philadelphia.

  “I had expected gramarists,” she said. “University men. Who are you?”

  Three young men—no older than sixteen, and maybe not that old—gazed serenely at her. Their heads were all shaven and bore the same swirling tattoos in bright blue ink. They wore a uniform that was unmistakably Imperial without bearing any insignia whatsoever: Imperial blue breeches, waistcoats, coats, stockings, and shirts.

  Their faces were identical.

  Then they opened their mouths and spoke in unison. “WE ARE THE PARLETT QUINTUPLETS. LORD THOMAS SENDS US.”

  Behind the three young men stood a squad of Imperial soldiers. They looked as nonplussed as Schmidt felt. Their officer, a long-limbed man with thick eyebrows and a high, nearly vertical forehead, stepped forward. “Are you Director Schmidt?”

  Schmidt nodded.

  “Captain Onacona Mohuntubby.” The captain saluted. “I’ve brought the Parletts here safely, and I’m ordered to place myself under your command.”

  “Cherokee?” Schmidt asked. It paid to recognize names, kinships, and peoples of the Empire. Those were the unofficial and invisible networks of capital and power that lay alongside the more formal structures of courts, companies, and Electors.

  Mohuntubby nodded.

  “Quintuplets means five,” Schmidt said. “Looks to me like you lost two of them.”

  “WE ARE TWO IN PHILADELPHIA,” the Parletts announced. “AND THREE IN THE OHIO.”

  “You are the means by which My Lord President will communicate to me?” Despite the heavy blue coat over her shoulders, the winter chill bit into Schmidt’s flesh. She resisted the urge to shiver by sheer force of will.

  The three Parletts abruptly changed facial expression, the vacant serenity replaced by a grimace that would have looked more at home on the face of an old curmudgeon. “DIRECTOR SCHMIDT,” they growled, their voices changing tone as well, “THIS IS TEMPLE FRANKLIN. DO YOU REMEMBER ME?”

  Captain Mohuntubby took an abrupt step backward and dropped his hand to the sword hilt at his belt.

  Schmidt nodded. “I remember you.” Franklin had no official title or form of address; he was Thomas Penn’s éminence grise, his Machiavel.

  The Parletts laughed, a sound like a rusted hinge swinging slowly. “THE PARLETT QUINTUPLETS WERE GIVEN BY THEIR PARENTS TO THE IMPERIAL COLLEGE OF MAGIC AT BIRTH.”

  “I’m not good at dealing with children,” Schmidt said. “I can never remember their names.”

  “THE PARLETTS DO NOT HAVE INDIVIDUAL NAMES. I AM INFORMED BY COLLEGE GRAMARISTS THAT THEY DO NOT EVEN HAVE INDIVIDUAL SOULS. THEIR SHARING OF A SINGLE MIND IS WHAT WILL ENABLE OUR COMMUNICATION OVER THE GREAT DISTANCE THAT SEPARATES US.”

  “And I will deal with Lord Thomas through you?”

  “OR THOMAS HIMSELF MAY SPEAK WITH YOU THROUGH THE PARLETTS. THEY ARE IN A SAFE PLACE, A PLACE TO WHICH ONLY HE AND I AND A FEW TRUSTED SERVANTS HAVE ACCESS.”

  Horse Hall? But it didn’t matter. “I assume you have two of the quintuplets?”

  “WE BELIEVE THAT IF ONE DIES, THE OTHERS WILL SURVIVE AND REMAIN IN CONTACT. WE HAVE KEPT TWO HERE TO GIVE US A MARGIN OF SAFETY, IF SOMETHING SHOULD HAPPEN TO ONE OF THEM.”

  “And I get three because the Ohio is the more dangerous end.”

  “CONSIDERABLY MORE DANGEROUS, DIRECTOR. AND IF THE MIMICRY OF THE PARLETTS IS TO BE BELIEVED, YOU ALSO HAVE A CONSIDERABLY MORE MELODIOUS VOICE THAN I.” The Parletts twisted their faces into something that might have been a leer.

  Schmidt laughed. “Then they are liars through and through, Franklin, and you had better come up with another means to stay in touch.”

  The Parletts bellowed their raucous imitation of Temple Franklin’s laughter.

  “LORD THOMAS IS SENDING THE PROMISED REINFORCEMENTS.”

  “More than this one squad, I hope. Competent as Captain Mohuntubby appears, I think he’ll have his hands too full protecting the Parletts to be able to effectively besiege Cahokia.”

  “INFANTRY AND MOLLY PITCHERS.”

  “Good. We have a wall to batter down.”

  “THE MILITARY WILL BE UNDER THE COMMAND OF GENERAL SAYLE.”

  “The Roundhead? The cannoneer? I hate a fanatic.”

  “SAYLE IS NOT A FANATIC. YOU WILL HAVE DIRECTION OF THE CIVIL GOVERNMENT ONCE CAHOKIA CEASES ITS REBELLION AND SURRENDERS.”

  Schmidt managed not to sigh. Sayle was a fanatic; if not for a saint, then for a strategy. “The company has the experience to manage that.”

  “AND YOU HAVE THE EXPERIENCE, DIRECTOR SCHMIDT. LORD THOMAS BIDS ME TO TELL YOU THAT HE IS PLEASED. AND ALSO THAT…HE DOES NOT BELIEVE THE COMPANY TRULY NEEDS FIVE DIRECTORS.”

  Schmidt kept a calm face, though her heart leaped. “I understand.”

  “DO YOU NEED ANYTHING ELSE FROM US AT THIS TIME?”

  “No,” Schmidt said. Should she mention her connection with Robert Hooke and his shuffling undead soldiers? “Nothing that can’t wait. I assume I can contact you through the Parletts at any time?”

  “SOMEONE WILL ALWAYS BE LISTENING ON THIS END. PLEASE ARRANGE THE SAME ON YOUR SIDE.”

  “Understood.” Schmidt turned to her own men. “Schäfer, Dadgayadoh—put the Parletts in a tent adjoining mine, and make sure they have all the necessaries. Food, clothing, cots and blankets…dolls, hoops, pull-horses, whatever they need. If you need to send marauders back through the lands we’ve sacked looking for toys we left behind, do so. I’ll want one of you with them at all times. If they start talking as they did just now, I want to know about it immediately. Captain Mohuntubby, I’ll leave it to you to provide for security.”

  Shouts from the direction of the besieged city’s eastern gate caught her ear. She turned as the Cherokee officer and his men followed her two traders back toward camp. At the militia barricade over the eastern road milled a knot of people in robes that had once been white but had been stained gray and brown by winter and travel. A blue cordon of Imperial uniforms held back the knot, which seemed to be trying to make its way into the city.

  Schmidt approached the scene at her usual brisk pace.

  She counted twelve robed travelers, all on foot, all men. None of them younger than forty, by her guess. Eleven of them stood, leaning on walking sticks. Their backs were bent by fatigue, but the light of conviction burned in their eyes.

  The twelfth knelt.

  He had been kneeling for some time, by appearances. His robe had been torn to shreds by walking on his knees; the knees themselves were purple and covered with skin so thick and callused that they wouldn’t have looked out of place on a camel. His eyes were sunken into deep wells flanked by bony cheeks and gnarled brows; both ears and nose looked half again too large for his face. Long gray hair and a gray beard hung back over his shoulders, presumably so he wouldn’t pull his own face into the frozen mud by kneeling on the hairs of his chin.

  Schmidt sighed.

  She whistled sharply around her fingers as she stomped up, which was enough signal for the militiamen to clear a space for her. The mud-spattered apostles in white cleared a space opposing, and she abruptly found herself looking down at the filthy old man kneeling in the snow. All twelve men in white were unarmed.

  “You don’t look dangerous,” she said. “If you’re hungry, I ca
n arrange for you to get a meal.”

  The old man laughed slowly. “I look like a beggar.” His eleven companions laughed with him.

  “Yes,” Schmidt said flatly.

  “I don’t want your crusts and pottage.” The old man pointed at the Treewall. Gray-caped shoulders and shining sallet helmets visible over the ramparts suggested Cahokian interest in the conversation. “I only want passage.”

  “I am besieging the city.”

  The old man raised his arms. “My name is Zadok, though most call me Metropolitan Tarami, or simply Father. Do I look like a threat to your siege?”

  Schmidt hooked her thumbs into her broad leather belt. “Not all threats are visible. Who are you?”

  At that moment, Robert Hooke arrived. The eleven standing men in white shrank from his presence; the militiamen, freed murderers, road agents, and rapists, by and large, grinned in appreciation.

  He stinks of piety, the Lazar’s voice rang in Schmidt’s mind, but not of gramarye.

  She had no way of knowing whether others could hear Hooke’s words, so she kept her nod discreet.

  “I am the kingdom’s ranking priest,” Zadok Tarami said. “Or ranking secular priest, at least. I preside in the Basilica and, when they are Christian, I hear the confessions of the kings and queens of Cahokia.”

  When they are Christian? Schmidt refrained from laughing out loud, thinking of the wild paganism of Cahokia’s temple. The serpent-tree behind the open veil, the star mosaics. “Does the Metropolitan of Cahokia ordinarily travel about on his knees, in winter? I understand the Moundbuilder kingdoms are impoverished in these sad times of revolt and Pacification, but I thought they could at least afford feet.”

  “I return from pilgrimage,” the priest said. “I have come the entire road of the great Onandagos, from the borders of the Talligewi to the hill where the prophet finally pinned the serpent and stole its crown.”

  “Your sense of geography is confused, cleric,” Schmidt said. “This is the flattest place on the continent. The only hills are the ones you people built.”

  “God tells me that you will admit me. Your heart is touched, I can see.”

  Schmidt frowned. “Did you travel the entire road on your knees?”

  Tarami nodded. “I have seen all seven kingdoms. I have lain quartered twice on the crosses of the earth itself. I have done this not for myself, but begging heaven for its blessing upon my people.”

  He can only hurt the serpent’s daughter, Hooke whispered into her mind. It does no harm to admit these fools. At the very least they are more Firstborn mouths to feed.

  Unexpectedly, Schmidt found herself missing Luman Walters. Hooke’s advice rang true, but it bore a hard edge of arrogance. Also, it completely lacked the warmth and humor of her banter with Walters.

  Whither had her Balaam gone? In the confusion of the beginning of the siege, Notwithstanding Schmidt hadn’t followed the magician’s movements. He might have gone upriver or down or across the water into the Missouri, or even into the city itself for all she knew.

  She could ask Hooke, but Luman’s whereabouts seemed none of the Sorcerer’s business.

  “You eleven,” she said, addressing the standing men. “I will give you your bowl of curds, and then you must leave. Take any road you like, but go away.” The men looked relieved; had they expected her to kill them on the spot?

  “And I?” Zadok Tarami asked.

  “No pottage for you,” she said. “But if the Cahokians will take you in, you are welcome to enter the city.”

  * * *

  Flanked by Alzbieta Torias and Cathy Filmer, Sarah looked down from the height of the Treewall. The soldiers in blue retreated into their trenches—which also crawled, she knew, with dead abominations no less repulsive than Robert Hooke himself, though mute and rotting—or into their tents beyond. A single figure in gray was left on the road.

  Kneeling.

  On his knees, he then continued his approach alone.

  “Who is that?” Sarah raised the bandage from her Eye of Eve and saw the soul of the approaching man as the shining blue aura of one of the Firstborn, the children of Wisdom.

  Only she now knew that Eve and Wisdom were the same person.

  Or did she know that, after all?

  The more she learned, the more the world seemed an insoluble enigma.

  “That can only be one man.” Alzbieta’s voice was sharp. “He undertook a difficult journey, and I was beginning to be optimistic that it had killed him.”

  “An enemy of yours?” Cathy’s voice was always cold when she spoke to Alzbieta.

  “An enemy of Kyres Elytharias,” Alzbieta said.

  Sarah looked quickly at the priestess and found honesty visible in her soul. “A pretender?”

  Cathy laughed. “No, that would be Alzbieta Torias.”

  “A priest. A rebel.” Alzbieta lowered her head humbly. “Your grandfather…your father’s father…became king at a very young age. He fell under the influence of certain thinkers, men who were powerful and…dissatisfied.”

  “Dissatisfied how?” Sarah asked. If this was some would-be rival, at least he was approaching on his knees. She could have him shot easily, if she had good reason for doing so. “You alluded to this once, as we rode to Cahokia together. You said my father’s father tried to eradicate priesthoods and secrets.”

  “Dissatisfied with the goddess. Dissatisfied with the constitution of the kingdom. Dissatisfied with the spiritual life of Cahokia. Dissatisfied with the way the tale of the great prophet-king Onandagos had always been told. Dissatisfied with the differences separating us from the children of Eve.”

  “These men were priests?” Sarah asked.

  “Some of them, yes. Including the leading priests of the Basilica, which to this day continues to harbor and train more priests who think this way. But some were also wealthy men, men with land, men in the royal family. Philosophers. Poets. And there were influential men in the other six Sister Kingdoms who felt the same way. We were drawing closer to the Cavaliers and the Roundheads and the Ferdinandians and others in those days. Appalachee was becoming less a barrier and more a highway. The ghosts of the Kentuck were fading into oblivion. It seemed likely that some sort of close alliance was going to come to pass, perhaps even union, and it was felt that our differences might stand in the way of that consummation.”

  “Differences such as…?” Cathy pressed.

  “The goddess,” Sarah said. “Or really, the throne. It’s one thing to read the Bible in a private way and tell each other that Wisdom or the Spirit or the Serpent refer to your goddess. It’s something else to have a golden serpent in a temple.”

  Sarah had done much thinking about that throne.

  Cathy nodded.

  “It is indeed…something else.” Alzbieta’s face was grave and her voice quiet. “These would-be reformers thought we would be seen like Odin-worshippers of Chicago and Waukegan, pagans and unbelievers. They felt shame, perhaps. Fear. Lack of confidence.”

  The kneeling figure had covered a third of the ground from the trenches to the gate. Soon, Sarah would have to make a decision.

  Were those streaks of blood behind him in the snow?

  She looked to the barbican tower over the gate and saw the men within it gazing back at her, waiting for a signal.

  “But the Serpent Throne still stands,” Sarah said. “No one tore it down. No one burned down the temple.”

  “Not for want of trying. This was before my day, of course, but I heard the stories. Men with torches and pry bars assaulted the temple. Its groves were uprooted and burned to ash, the ashes trampled underfoot. Cahokia’s two great priesthoods—the one serving Father and Son, and the one serving the Virgin—split as they had never split before. Blood was shed. Women of great honor were humiliated and enslaved.”

  “The veil,” Sarah said.

  “The great veil was torn down,” Alzbieta agreed. “Your father later hung a new one in its place. He never closed it. Presumably
, the goddess told him not to.”

  “Why would She do that?” Sarah asked.

  “Perhaps we are not yet ready for Her presence.” Alzbieta shook her head. “Perhaps this is what you can accomplish here, Beloved.”

  “But the…rebels,” Sarah continued. “They couldn’t deny the goddess, surely? Where do they think they come from?”

  “Most men don’t experience their gods as you have been privileged to do, Beloved.” Alzbieta spoke slowly, and her use of the title Beloved underscored the fact that Sarah too was a priestess of Alzbieta’s goddess, a goddess they both had seen.

  A priesthood about which Sarah knew practically nothing. But something about Sarah’s priesthood, her status as the goddess’s Beloved, or her vision of Eden, had changed her.

  Sarah’s stomach turned at the mere thought of meat, and she could not bring herself to touch it. And, no matter how tired she became, she could only sleep atop the Great Mound.

  What had happened to her?

  “Then…the stories you told me of the great migration west, the building of the temple and the church side by side?”

  “The rebels tell another story, about a flight west plagued by a demonic serpent. About a race of men descended from the serpent, who bear its mark on their very souls to this day, and whose blood boils because of the serpent’s corruption still flowing within them. About a king who slew the serpent and sat upon her to crown himself, not as a sign of solidarity and kinship, but as a mark of conquest and redemption from his corrupted birth. About a line of kings whose great triumph is to keep serpents at bay. About a people who had outgrown the serpent throne, and all their former private, sacred things.”

  “That makes the rebels sound heroic,” Sarah said. “A little like Moses, breaking up the golden calf and forcing the sinners to drink it.”

  “But Moses raised the serpent,” Alzbieta pointed out.

  “Maybe a little like the New Light,” Cathy added, her voice softening.

  Alzbieta shrugged. “The Campbells and Barton Stone may have taken some inspiration from the rebels against the goddess of Cahokia. I don’t know. But the children of Adam have never had a shortage of men who wish to tear down all that prior generations have built, in the name of freedom, or virtue, or progress, or conscience. And in that tearing down, Peter Plowshare was pushed away and the truths we knew about him were forgotten. Our children were taught the language of William Penn, rather than the language of Onandagos. And many important things were lost.”