Witchy Kingdom

by D. J. Butler

  Instead, he looked up and forward.

  Luman didn’t need to turn to know what the old man was fixed on. He was staring at the Basilica.

  Luman retreated ahead of the old man, keeping an eye on his forward progress. Sarah, he noticed abruptly, had descended from the wall, but he couldn’t see where she’d gone.

  The old man trembled and left streaks of blood behind him in the snow. Could he even reach the Basilica?

  The crowd closed in around him, nevertheless leaving a straight, narrow aisle ahead. They knew where he was going.

  Who was he?

  Could this be the mentor Luman was hoping for?

  Crossing a plaza, the old man’s knees slid out from under him on a patch of ice. Hands reached out to elevate him and he pushed them away. Unsteadily, he rose to all fours…waiting, breathing hard as a frozen breeze snatched the tatters of his robe away, revealing a sunken chest that was also frozen blue…and then dragged himself to his knees and advanced again.

  With the last coins of his Imperial salary, Luman bought a half-full cup of watered-down beer at a tavern. He asked for a crust of bread as well, but the drooping man behind the bar only frowned and shook his head. Luman then positioned himself at the foot of the Basilica Mound, holding the cup before him.

  Watching the crowd mill about him, thickening the walls of the pilgrim’s aisle, he found Sarah Elytharias again. She and the two women stood on Cahokia’s other sacred mound, in front of the Temple of the Sun, watching.

  From the conversation about him, Luman gleaned the pilgrim’s name: Father Tarami. He was a priest of the Basilica, and he was returning from a long pilgrimage, something called the Onandagos Road.

  When Tarami reached the foot of the mound, he sat back on his own heels and looked up. Luman tried to catch his eye with a smile and a flourish of the cup, but Tarami ignored him. The old man’s breath came with effort, his lips were cracked, and Luman could hear the rumbling of his belly.

  Tarami began to climb.

  With each ponderous movement forward, the priest muttered some prayer under his breath. Luman heard the syllables clearly, but didn’t know the language and had no charm to decipher it. Throwing a sharp elbow into the belly of a tall, black-bearded Ophidian with sooty hands, Luman turned and seized the position immediately behind Tarami. Muscling his way with each step and pushing away other enthusiasts, he held the spot.

  All together, like ants swarming a hill in their queen’s wake, the crowd climbed the hill with the old man.

  His steps grew more labored. He left more blood behind on the stones. Luman saw the old man lose two large toenails when his foot struck a step at a bad angle.

  And then, a few steps from the top, the old man collapsed.

  Weeping erupted from the crowd. Luman feared they might riot. In defense of his own life as well as that of the priest, he pushed the mob back.

  “Let him breathe!” he shouted.

  Sarah Elytharias must see his actions. What would she think of them?

  What would the pilgrim think?

  He knelt beside the old man, feeling his feeble breathing scarcely disturb the air and watching his eyelids and blue lips flutter.

  “You’re almost home,” he said to Father Tarami. “Drink this.”

  The old man shook his head.

  “Come now.” Luman smiled as gently as he knew how. “Even our Lord took a cup of wine at the end. Or the beginning, as it were.”

  The priest’s eyes opened and his chest heaved. Luman feared he was suffering a heart attack, but then the old man’s cracked lips split into a grin and Luman recognized laughter for what it was.

  “Mixed with gall,” Tarami wheezed.

  “Yes, well, once you’ve tasted this, you might wish you were drinking vinegar, too.”

  Tarami’s smile grew wider, revealing bleeding gums and sores on his tongue. Luman put an arm under the old man and raised him to sitting position, allowing him to slowly drain the contents of the cup.

  The mound-climbing crowd stared.

  Missourians, clustered around the front door of the Basilica, beneath its sculpted vine, thick with cooing doves, watched with wide eyes.

  Luman tucked the cup into one of his many pockets and lowered himself onto his knees. “I would carry you as the Cyrenian carried our Lord, but I think you will not have it.”

  Tarami turned and knelt. “If you would accompany me, I will not turn you away.”

  They finished the climb together. The combined crowd of Cahokians and Missourians widened the aisle to accommodate both of them. By the time they reached the Basilica door, where Mother Hylia stood waiting, Luman’s knees hurt. The cooing of the doves overhead sounded like a taunt.

  How had this old man crossed the entire city?

  And how far had he come before that? Luman thought he had heard someone in the crowd mention Oranbega, but that was hundreds of miles away.

  The rubble left by the beastkind assault a few days earlier had been cleared away, but the damage to the rood screen and the pews was still very visible. Father Tarami ignored it, as he ignored the people clustered to either side of the nave, and focused on the altar in the apse.

  His movements became more vigorous, each knee forward reaching farther than the one preceding. Luman found himself racing to keep up.

  As the two men approached the altar, Luman held back. The assembled crowd seemed to hold its breath; Luman had rarely heard a more complete silence, despite the hundreds of people crowding the nave.

  Abruptly slowing again, the old man stretched himself out on the paving stones in cruciform shape: arms extended to his sides, feet together and straight back, face pressed to the floor. He lay there long enough that Luman was beginning to wonder whether the old man had arrived at his destination and died, but abruptly he moved, raised his face slightly from the floor, and kissed the stone.

  Crawling forward, he kissed the stone of the altar, too.

  Then dragging himself up, Father Tarami stood on his two feet. He wobbled unsteadily and sucked air into his lungs with a look of surprise on his face, but he remained standing.

  To Luman’s astonishment, the crowd broke into song:

  Crown of iron, heart of flesh

  Shaker’s Rod and feet of clay

  Lord of harvest, ere you thresh

  Send a light to guide our way

  Chariot rider, god of war

  Mankind’s father, son of peace

  Shelter us from foes of yore

  From all trial grant surcease

  Should he imitate the pilgrim and throw himself on the floor? Should he kiss the altar? If he did, surely others in the crowd would follow him. Would the priest himself regard that as presumption?

  But Luman did neither of those things, and the moment passed.

  A metallic ringing harsh as thunder cracked the air inside the Basilica, and Maltres Korinn stepped into view from the apse. He leaned on a black wooden staff with a metal horse’s head at the upper end and a metal cap on the bottom; it was the staff whose noise rang so loudly. Korinn had been the Regent-Minister, but after siding with Sarah Elytharias during the tumultuous events on the night of the solstice, he had emerged as Vizier. He still wore black and carried the staff without other sign of office, except that if anything his facial expression had become even more dour.

  “Zadok Tarami,” Korinn said.

  The old man spread his arms wide. “I am returned from my journey.”

  “You are summoned to the throne.” Korinn looked to Luman. “You’d better come too, Imperial.”

  * * *

  Sarah was good at keeping her composure, but to Cathy’s experienced eye there had been signs of increasing agitation as the pilgrim Zadok Tarami had crossed Cahokia and ascended the Basilica. Those signs would have looked like anger on another person—narrowed eyes, less mobility in the mouth, the twitch of a jaw muscle. In Sarah, they betrayed cussedness, and mentally digging in.

  Which suggested she felt the need to
dig in.

  Maltres Korinn was shrewd enough to limit the priest’s ability to make further spectacle. He neither chained nor dragged the man, but simply descended one mound and ascended the other with as little ceremony as possible.

  With them came the Imperial wizard, the man with eyeglasses and a long coat.

  At Sarah’s instruction, Cathy stood to one side with Yedera the Podebradan. Sarah stood directly in the open doorway of the Temple of the Sun. On her left hand stood the eight slaves who had once been Alzbieta’s palanquin bearers, and now that she walked on the earth like a normal woman, still followed her around as a bodyguard. On Sarah’s right stood the spell-less Polite wizard Sherem, Alzbieta herself, and, once he’d regained the height of the mound, Maltres Korinn.

  Cathy didn’t know the logic of the arrangement, though she noticed that it made an array of twelve people.

  Zadok looked small even beside the Imperial wizard, who was a man of average height. The two men stood, breathing hard from their climb.

  Sarah said nothing.

  It was a raven that finally broke the silence with a single baritone croak.

  “You’re Elytharias’s daughter,” Tarami said. “God has told me of your coming.”

  “The goddess told all Her children,” Sarah said slowly.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Tarami said. “You’re the answer to my prayers, as I can be the answer to yours.”

  “What prayers?” Sarah asked him.

  “Surely, you pray for wisdom. You pray to know what you should do in this situation, and you are surrounded as never before by a bewildering confusion of conflicting information.” Tarami smiled. “The fact that you are the daughter of Kyres Elytharias doesn’t give you any great gift of inborn knowledge, does it? One thing you will learn, if you haven’t learned it already, is that being Kyres’s daughter means that there are many people who are very willing to tell you lies.”

  The wizard looked as if he’d been struck.

  “You’ve been traveling, priest,” Sarah said. “How’s the weather in the rest of the Ohio?”

  “Cold.” Tarami’s voice was a bass drone, a surprisingly deep sound to come from such a thin frame. “Our people starve. Not just in Cahokia, but all our people. They need leadership, too. They need righteous kings, Cahokia needs a righteous king, to guide it through the narrows. Thomas is misguided, he may even be wicked, but God will give a penitent king the wisdom and the power to bring peace.”

  “Bring peace?” Sarah laughed, a shrill wedge that pierced the bass wall. “That’s what Thomas says he’s up to. Isn’t that right, Balaam?”

  At the name, the wizard started. “My name isn’t Balaam…my lady.”

  “You may call her Beloved,” Alzbieta said.

  “Beloved,” the magician repeated. “Director Schmidt called me Balaam to mock me. My name is Luman Walters.”

  “She has a name, too,” Tarami said. “To call her Beloved is to give credence to her pagan nonsense, which I know you cannot believe.”

  “To tell truth,” Sarah said, “I’m not all that comfortable with the title myself. For now, how about I call you ‘Luman’ and you call me ‘Sarah’?”

  Walters nodded acquiescence.

  Sarah removed her eyepatch, fixing her witchy eye on the Imperial magician. “Tell me why you came here, Luman.”

  Walters stepped back, looking surprised. “I came with Director Schmidt.”

  “I know that. Tell me why you came here.”

  “It was my job. I worked for the Imperial Ohio Company. But I’ve walked away, I’ve quit.”

  “I know that too, Luman. This is your last chance, now, so I think you need to tell me the truth. All of it, the hard part, the truthiest truth you don’t want to tell me right now. Why did you come here?”

  Luman Walters took a deep breath. “I came here to steal.”

  Zadok Tarami put a hand on the wizard’s shoulder. “There are thieves in paradise, my son.”

  “There’s the truth,” Sarah said. “But that leaves me with at least two riddles, Luman.”

  Luman Walters shook his head, looking chagrined. “I’m pleased not to be entirely transparent, Sarah.”

  “One,” Sarah said, “you’re a thief and you know it, but you have the most earnest soul a thief ever had. How is that?”

  Walters shrugged and looked at his feet.

  “And two, you’ve got a pocketful of angels. What on earth is that?”

  Walters straightened up his back. “I’m a wizard, Sarah. I’m not some Philadelphia gramarist or a Polite scholar, I’m what you might call a hedge wizard. In a place like Youngstown or Knoxville I might make a decent living reading palms and hexing cattle against the murrain. Here…well, I will trade you. I will tell you all about my pocketful of angels in exchange for the knowledge you have.”

  “I can see you want to be my apprentice, Luman.” Sarah’s voice was gentle. “Only I don’t know very much myself. And as I learn more things, I expect I’m not going to able to talk about most of them. That seems to be the way of things around here.”

  “These are not the ways of God,” Zadok Tarami protested. “God is openness and light.”

  “The gods are light, alright. Is that why you went to Oranbega, Father? To follow the ways of God?” The way Sarah said the word Father made it sound almost like an insult.

  “I walked the Onandagos Road on my knees,” Father Tarami said. “Not your allegorical Way of Adam, not your mystical nonsense and mumbo-jumbo allusions to a road that exists only in your head, but the real road, with roots and stones and all. I did it begging at every step that God would send salvation to my people, and He has done it. Here you are, a wizard, a seer even, of great power. God brought you here, and He gave everyone in the city to know of your arrival, as He informed me. You are the answer to my prayers, Sarah Elytharias, and the answer to the prayers of all our people. I will guide you, I will clarify for you your own experience. Yes, I went to Oranbega for the ways of God. For myself, and also for you.”

  “I believe in God,” Sarah said. “But the one I saw was a goddess. I saw Her and Her realm in a vision of glory, and She chose me.”

  Tarami shook his head. “I pray it isn’t so. She is an old deceiver, and this land is the land of those who have conquered Her.”

  Alzbieta Torias stepped forward. “I entered Eden Unfallen, the eternal home of Wisdom. There I saw the goddess and heard Her voice, and She chose Sarah Elytharias Penn as Her true Beloved.”

  “No,” Tarami groaned.

  The Polite Sherem stepped forward, shoulder to shoulder with Alzbieta. “I, too, entered Eden, and I, too, am witness. The Mother of All Living chose Sarah.”

  Maltres Korinn joined them. “I entered Eden. I saw the goddess and heard Her voice. Sarah is Her Beloved daughter.”

  “You are deluded!” Tarami cried. “You share a madness, but it’s madness still. This is blasphemy! This isn’t a goddess, it’s a demon that has been bound in hell, and yet has never ceased to plague this land, this city, and the descendants of Onandagos. It seeks all our destruction as its revenge! Korinn, I expected better from you!”

  As one, Alzbieta Torias’s eight slaves advanced a step.

  Tarami threw his hands skyward. “What, you too? Am I to hear that a gang of chained laborers went to this impossible non-place, Unfallen Eden, and met the goddess?”

  “We did not go Eden,” one of the ex-bearers said. “We stood at the foot of the Sunrise Mound in the snow on the morning of the solstice. We saw light in heaven. We heard the angel choir. And we heard the voice of the Mother of All Living, declaring that Sarah Elytharias was Her Beloved daughter.”

  If Sarah had arranged these witnesses, Cathy had had no advance hint. Or had Cahokia’s goddess done this?

  “But do you see what you are doing?” Tarami’s words were urgent, but he wasn’t yelling. He pleaded with Sarah. “You were not raised among us, and may not know all our books, but you must know Matthew. ‘Ye shall know
them by their fruits,’ the evangelist wrote. ‘Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?’ Well, then? What does your pretended goddess give you thus far? The grapes and figs of prosperity and freedom, or the thorns and thistles of siege and starvation?”

  “I accept.” Sarah’s words and her face were calm, but Father Tarami staggered back as if struck.

  “You accept what?” he asked.

  “The test,” she said simply. “Ye shall know them by their fruits. It is a fair test. It should be a test acceptable to you, since you quote it to me as scripture.”

  “It is God’s test,” Tarami said.

  Sarah reached into her satchel, the satchel that had once belonged to her mentor monk, Father Thalanes, and removed from it the Heronplow. Zadok Tarami and Luman Walters both gasped.

  “What is that?” Walters asked.

  Tarami seemed to recognize it, and feel fear.

  Sarah set the Heronplow to the frozen ground and leaned heavily onto it. With all the weight of her small body, she pushed until the tooth of the plowshare bit just a little into the frozen soil of the moundtop.

  “It will take more than an act of magic to convince me,” Tarami told her.

  “Fear not. I will show you more than an act of magic.” Sarah held the dull iron Orb of Etyles cupped in her left palm and knelt, placing her right hand on the Heronplow. Taking a deep breath, she shouted an incantation: “Maxima mater! Rogo ut hoc aratrum pelleas!”

  The Heronplow started forward.

  Cathy had heard from others—Sherem and Maltres, since she couldn’t bring herself to talk to Alzbieta as friends—about the Heronplow’s activation of the Treewall on the solstice. What she saw sounded like the tale she’d received. The plow sank into the earth and sped back and forth across the flat top of the mound. The land here was already plowed, and the Heronplow followed the existing furrows. It broke the ice and snow, which melted into living water instantly in its wake. The water sank into the furrows, and scant feet behind the Heronplow as it progressed, green shoots sprang from the earth.