by D. J. Butler
Sarah pointed down at the crawling figure. “And that man? Is he a man of conscience?”
Alzbieta was slow to answer. “He’s not a hypocrite,” she finally said. “Many love him.”
“And what’s the difficult journey he undertook?”
“The Onandagos Road. It’s a sunwise path that crosses all seven Sister Kingdoms, beginning at the far edge of the Talega lands in the north and east, and touching at points where important events are believed to have taken place in the life of the great prophet. It finally enters Cahokia through the eastern gate—the Ohio Gate, though before your grandfather’s time, it was more commonly called the Onandagos Gate. The true final length of the Onandagos Road travels from the Onandagos Gate to the Temple of the Sun, though I think he will not finish his pilgrimage that way.”
“No?” Sarah asked.
Alzbieta shook her head. “He will go to the Basilica. The comfortably pious make that journey on horseback. The path is not straight, and travels some eight hundred miles, weaving north and south as it pushes continually westward. Only the truly religious do it on foot.”
“And am I to understand that this man traveled the Onandagos Road on his knees?” Sarah asked.
“He’s not a liar,” Alzbieta said.
Sarah watched the crawling man crossing the last thirty yards to the Ohio—or Onandagos—Gate. “What’s his name?” she asked.
“Zadok Tarami,” Alzbieta said. “Father Tarami. He’s the Metropolitan of Cahokia. The Basilica is his church. Tradition would have him your confessor. He would have been your father’s confessor, only your father insisted on his Cetean friend, in defiance of his father.”
“Zadok doesn’t sound like a Firstborn name.”
“It’s a Hebrew name. The name is that of David’s priest in the Old Testament. He took the name on his ordination to the priesthood. Many of his party take old Hebrew names. The names of priests and prophets—Josiah, Jehu, Hezekiah, Elijah—are all popular.”
“The breakers of idols,” Cathy murmured.
“It is how they see themselves.”
“He’s not old enough to have been tearing down veils in my grandfather’s time,” Sarah said.
“He’s of the generation that came after. More compassionate, maybe. No less principled or dogmatic.”
“The generation my father fought against?”
“Yes. Your grandfather was chosen as the Beloved as a child, but later the goddess abandoned him. It was a shocking thing, unheard of.”
Sarah’s heart hurt even imagining such a loss. “She abandoned him during the rebellion?”
“Because of the rebellion, some said. Others convinced themselves that there had never been such a thing as the Beloved, that it was only a silly old idea they had all believed in because their fathers told it to them.”
“And the subsequent Beloved must have been a woman,” Sarah said. “She alternates in Her choice, does She not?”
Alzbieta nodded. “Your grandfather was followed by a cousin of yours. She was a learned and kind Handmaid of the goddess, who after becoming the Beloved lived out her life in fear and seclusion. All Cahokia—all Cahokia that still believed—knew she was the Beloved, and it availed her nothing. She lived in darkness and died a failure. She never wore the crown.”
Alzbieta’s voice was wounded.
“Did you know her?” Cathy asked.
Alzbieta hesitated. “She was my mother. From a young age, I never left her side and we never left the temple. When she died, she was mad. Some whispered of poison, but I think that seclusion would have been enough.”
Sarah blinked back sudden tears in the corners of her eyes. “And then the goddess chose my father. Unexpectedly.”
“He was young and reckless. Some regarded him as a fool and an adventurer, a dashing younger son who might make a good career as a soldier but could never be a statesman. Some expected the goddess’s choice to fall on an older brother. Others expected that there would be no more Beloveds. But Kyres proved them all wrong. He became Beloved and king.”
“He didn’t drive out the rebels against his goddess.”
“He drove them from Her temple. And his virtue and prowess silenced them. Who would raise his hand against such a king, a dealer of justice and a hero in war, a man who could ride to far Philadelphia and marry an empress? And then he was gone.”
Questions piled into Sarah’s mind, but most of them would have to wait. “And Tarami. Why did he travel the Onandagos Road?” she asked.
“The Law of the Way says ‘Blessed is he that walketh the sunwise road of the king, for he shall be given the grip of peace.’”
“He wrecked himself like that…for scripture?” Sarah found the idea hard to believe.
Alzbieta shrugged. “Who can guess what’s in a man’s heart? A pilgrim making such a journey accrues fame and experience and may make interesting alliances on the road. Perhaps he hoped his pilgrimage would re-ignite the fires of rebellion, or at least inspire others to follow him. I can tell you that on his departure, he prayed publicly that God would lift the Pacification.”
“Don’t let him in,” Cathy Filmer said. “Men of too strict principle are dangerous.”
“I agree,” Alzbieta said. “Zadok Tarami is not your friend. With the Imperials camped around the city, you have every reason to bar his entry. For all you know, he could have been corrupted by your Uncle Thomas. He could be a spy, or a traitor.”
As he reached the great eastern gate of the city, Zadok Tarami reached forward to touch the wood. Losing his balance, he fell on his face in the snow and the mud.
Sarah raised her arm and gestured to the men in the barbican. “Open the gate!”
* * *
New Amsterdam sprouted like a disordered hedge along the opposite shore of the Hudson River. Kinta Jane Embry shivered, huddling deep into the wool cloak around her shoulders. As the ferry bumped against the wood of the dock, the yapping beagle on its broad deck fell silent. It stared at Kinta Jane with wide eyes, wrinkled its nose as if smelling something offensive, and then bolted to the far side of the vessel.
“Are we in Pennsland still?” she asked Isaiah Wilkes in a whisper.
They both wore disguises, of a sort. Wilkes had stained the skin of his face and hands a reddish brown, and for days he had responded to all attempts to communicate with him by grunting and shaking his head. It worked; even real Indians took him for members of some tribe they didn’t know and left him alone after an attempt or two. Kinta Jane, meanwhile, wore a false beard made of horsehair the actor had given her, and pretended she was deaf and mute.
It was an easy charade.
They stood now on a boardwalk over the ice-choked Hudson with the flow of traffic disembarking from the ferry out of earshot. Still, they looked out over the river so no one could see their mouths move and they spoke in low voices.
“Farther up, starting at the Tappan Zee, the Republic straddles both sides of the river. Here, you and I still stand on this land at the sufferance of Lord Thomas. It was not far north of here that William Penn, on a day dictated by the stars, began his miraculous walk that convinced the Lenni Lenape and others that the land grant to him was ordained of heaven, as well as by the ruler of England.”
“Lord Thomas.” Kinta Jane grunted. “Whom you called Brother Onas.”
Isaiah Wilkes turned slightly to her and smiled. “You’ve been patient.”
“Was it a test?” she asked. “If so, it was an easy one. You know I was trained not to ask some questions.”
“You experienced Franklin’s Vision,” he said. “Do you remember much of it?”
“Mostly the sensations,” she admitted. “Chaos and doubt at the return of Simon Sword, fear of death, a world turned upside down and then destroyed before it can be reborn.”
Wilkes nodded. “Many remember less than that. Let me tell you the story of Brother Onas.”
Kinta Jane waited.
“Once there were three brothers,” Wilkes beg
an. “They were neighbors as well as brothers, and they all lived on land that belonged to the same landlord.”
Kinta Jane frowned. “Not the Penns.”
Wilkes snorted. “Not the Penns. The landlord was a kind and benevolent ruler. When one of the brothers arrived from a distant land, he brought illness with him. The illness would have struck down the other two brothers, but the landlord was a magician of serious power, and he healed them.”
“What kind of brothers were these, if one came from a distant land?” Kinta Jane asked.
Wilkes continued. “Their names were Onas, Anak, and Odishkwa. They were brothers, though they shared no father and no mother. One day, their landlord’s wife died, and in grief he went mad. He tore up the brothers’ paths and shattered the boundaries between their lands. He planted hatred between them and brought them to blows. He drove one brother into the swamps, the second to the frozen lands of the far north, and the third deep into the woods to hide. The brothers and their families skulked separately, eating carrion and berries and hoping the landlord would die.
“But he didn’t die. Instead, he grew more and more terrifying. He took the brothers’ women. He ate their children, after sacrificing them on stone altars to himself, and he engulfed all his land in a perpetual storm so great that it made the very earth tremble.”
“Well, now he doesn’t sound like one of the Penns,” Kinta Jane said.
“Rivers ran uphill. Fire froze and water burned. The air was too heavy with smoke to breathe, and the ash was so thick on the ground that nothing would grow. Finally, one of the brothers saw that the landlord would have to be confronted. He set out in the blighted world and after many obstacles he managed to gather his two brothers to his side again.”
“Which brother was it?” Kinta Jane asked.
Isaiah Wilkes chuckled. “The story is told three different ways, so maybe it is all the brothers. For our telling’s sake, let us say it was Brother Onas. And Brother Onas’s great insight was that the landlord could be calmed again if he were to remarry. Only the landlord was of noble birth and couldn’t marry just anyone; he had to marry a princess of the same lineage as his first wife.
“While two of the brothers fought the landlord to distract and delay him, the third brother—we shall say it was Brother Onas—crept into the halls of the landlord himself. There he found imprisoned a princess of the lineage to which the landlord was bound. Freeing her, he brought about the landlord’s marriage, and the landlord regained his sanity.”
“In a ruined world,” Kinta Jane pointed out.
“But you are forgetting what a great magician the landlord was,” Wilkes said. “By his art, the brothers’ wives rose from the dead, and their children sprang whole and unsacrificed from the altars. The land was healed and reborn. Some even say that such a death and rebirth is necessary for the land, just as a death and rebirth is necessary for the children of Adam.”
“Do you mean baptism?” Kinta Jane was surprised to hear religious talk from the Franklin.
“That’s one possibility,” Wilkes said. “And so the brothers, fearing the return of the landlord’s madness, swore an oath. The brother from a distant land—Brother Onas—was granted by the other two as much land as he could walk in a day. Fortified by the restored landlord, he walked a great distance. The brothers agreed they would tell their sons the tale of the landlord’s loss, illness, and redemption, in such a manner that if the landlord went mad again—and some say it was inevitable that he would do so—there would always be a Brother Onas, a Brother Anak, and a Brother Odishkwa with the lore and the will to restore the natural order.”
“Franklin’s Vision is the landlord’s madness,” Kinta Jane said.
“And Brother Onas has forgotten his lore and his will.”
“Are Brother Anak and Brother Odishkwa in New Amsterdam?”
“No, they are north and west of here.” The Franklin’s face softened into a smile. “There is a meeting place, at the edges of the Acadian city of Montreal. Beneath a column of rock shaped like a centaur is a hidden chimney, and through that chimney lies a cave where the three brothers meet. We are going to that cave, Kinta Jane, and we will signal Brothers Anak and Odishkwa that we wish to meet. But our way lies through the Hudson River Republic. If we are fortunate, we may find allies to help us.”
“Why on earth do you need me?” she asked, feeling small in the face of these strange stories. “You know the lands and the tales and the people. You are a master of disguise. What can I possibly do to help?”
“For one thing,” Isaiah Wilkes said, “you speak French.”
“You speak ill of the dead.”
CHAPTER THREE
Luman Walters was hungry.
Not metaphorically hungry. Not hungry with the desire for knowledge, which was part of what had driven him to leave his mostly effective and reasonably comfortable working relationship with Notwithstanding Schmidt and slip within the walls of Cahokia, just before the gates had all been raised.
He was physically hungry.
There was food within the Treewall, but very, very little. Private stores were being rationed out. Animals were kept indoors by their owners, until those owners themselves were prepared to slaughter them.
Children, as yet, were permitted to be outdoors. Given the snow that blocked the streets, most of them stayed inside. Those who were outside traveled in ragged gangs. Luman did his best to avoid them…just in case.
Luman felt guilt at the thought of taking food from any Cahokian mouth. He had no right to be here. He had resolved that he would both fight to defend the city, when the time came, and also not consume its resources.
He had eaten one rat, trapping it himself with a bit of braucherei. It had a sour flavor, but Luman was hungry enough that he’d have done it again, if he’d seen any more rats.
He hadn’t.
Instead, he repeatedly sang a short braucher prayer that was supposed to ease hunger, thirst, and fatigue. It mostly worked, though Luman found himself growing thinner.
He slept on the cot in the King’s Head, paying for the room by performing minor magic for the landlord, a slow-talking Talegan with obvious Lenni Lenape features named Zo’es Collins. Spells to stop fire. Spells to secure income. Before the milk gave out, Luman had carefully placed the Collins’s Bible atop his full butter churn, to keep the butter from going bad. But he spent most of his waking time either in the Basilica, helping Mother Hylia and the secular priests there care for the refugees, or in the streets of Cahokia, watching the actions of the city’s strangest and most fascinating inhabitant, her would-be queen, the half-Eldritch, half-Pennslander, all-Appalachee witch who stared at the world through mismatched eyes. The refugees knew Luman as the stranger who had driven the marauding beastkind from the church; they didn’t know how he had done it. A few of the younger Missourians, more wildly afflicted with inflamed imaginations, whispered that he was a gunfighter, or that the pockets of his long coat were full of exotic weapons. Regardless, his word became authoritative, and Luman found himself settling disputes and easing fears.
The rat had been an occupant of the Basilica. Luman calculated that the rat’s death was only just punishment for the pages of the hymnals the rodent had apparently eaten. He’d roasted it over a fire made from the splintered rood screen. Holy wood, holy fire, holy meat. On crude but undeniable magical principles, he’d felt as if the flesh of the rat were some sort of consecrated host.
He eyed the white doves that flocked on the high roof of the Basilica, but they were too hard to catch by hand, and Luman wasn’t yet hungry enough to actually shoot one of the church’s birds. It felt too impious, too close to shooting an angel.
But if I am hungry enough…
The witch Sarah Elytharias—no one in Cahokia called her by the name Penn—knew Luman, so he was careful not to come too close to her. He didn’t want to be taken for an Imperial spy. But her movements were generally accompanied by an entourage of priestesses, ministers, and even
beastkind soldiers, so he could watch much of what she did from the slopes of the Basilica Mound, peering through his spectacles and even sharpening his eyesight and hearing by minor charms, when occasion suggested.
He would like to get closer to her. He needed his next magical mentor, some access to an initiatory path, a new source of power. None of the priests in the Basilica would admit to any such thing even existing, and Mother Hylia maintained her diffident evasions, no matter how many times she saw Luman play the Good Samaritan with the wounded travelers of the Missouri.
He stood on a bright morning in early January on a large east-west avenue, the road that most directly connected the large eastern gate with the Great Mound and the Basilica. The witch Sarah stood atop the eastern wall looking intently at something outside; whatever it was also captured the attention of the wardens and Pitchers and other warriors on the wall, because they stared and murmured.
Before Luman could recite any spells to hear what Elytharias and her two female advisors were saying to each other, the gate opened. The iron grill rose, and the iron-studded wood on the other side slowly dropped. Luman saw first the Imperial camps—larger than they had been a few days earlier—then the militia, then the trenches and earthworks.
And then a single man with long white hair and beard, lurching forward on his knees.
Long-cloaked Cahokians standing all around Luman on the avenue gasped as one.
They knew the man.
Luman watched the old fellow creep forward. His knees were scabbed and callused, his once-white robe tattered, his skin blue from the cold. A thousand eyes stared at him, but he didn’t look back, not at a single face.