by D. J. Butler
Temple sat in one of several upholstered chairs that faced the Parletts. He looked tired.
“Is it Sayle?” Thomas asked, deliberately adopting a flippant tone. “He is defeated, or he has lost his way entirely and found himself in Georgia instead. Though that doesn’t look like an imitation of Sayle’s face.”
“THIS IS DIRECTOR SCHMIDT, MY LORD PRESIDENT,” the Parletts said. “I HAVE SEEN NO SIGN OF SAYLE YET, BUT I DIDN’T EXPECT HIM THIS EARLY. THERE IS A DEVELOPMENT IN THE CITY OF CAHOKIA.”
“I expect you to handle all developments until Sayle arrives. Frankly, given how long we’ve been starving the Ohio already, I expect you may well resolve the siege before Sayle gets there, in which case you’ll go from being the commander in chief of the besieging forces directly to acting as the leader of the civil government.”
“I WOULD HAVE SAID THE SAME. HOWEVER, WE HAD INDICATIONS YESTERDAY THAT CAHOKIA HAD DISCOVERED A NEW AND UNORTHODOX FOOD SOURCE. I HAVE CHOSEN NOT TO REACH OUT TO YOU UNTIL I WAS ABLE TO GET INFORMATION FROM SPIES ON THE INSIDE, TO DETERMINE THE SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM.”
“What are you talking about?” Thomas laughed. “It’s an entire city. Unless they’ve corralled half their own people into slaughtering pens to feed the other half, how can they possibly have any food source large enough to be relevant?”
“TEN DAYS AGO, THE TREEWALL OF CAHOKIA SPROUTED LEAVES. YESTERDAY, IT SPROUTED FRUIT AS WELL. WE LOST A MAN IN THE PROCESS, BUT WE MANAGED TO OBTAIN SOME OF THE FRUIT—PERSIMMONS AND ALMONDS. EDIBLE.”
Thomas put his face in his hands. He would never expand Philadelphia’s overtaxed waste water system. He would die of old age bogged down by the impossible task of trying to dig a fifteen-year-old girl out of her tree fort, while Philadelphia slowly sank beneath an ever-expanding lake of shit.
“MY LORD PRESIDENT?”
“I’m still here.”
“IT’S WORSE. TODAY A SPY WE HAVE INSIDE THE CITY REPORTED THAT IT WASN’T ONLY THE TREEWALL THAT BLOOMED. IT WAS THE WHOLE CITY. IT GREW NEW TREES AND CROPS. ALL THE SPACE WITHIN THE WALLS BECAME A SINGLE ENORMOUS GARDEN, WE’RE TOLD. THE CITY HAS SPENT AN ENTIRE DAY HARVESTING FOOD, AND THE TREES AND BUSHES AND GRAINS LOOK LIKE THEY’LL GROW MORE.”
“Enough to feed the city perpetually.”
“MAYBE.”
“In which case, no siege can succeed.”
“THIS IS PRECISELY WHAT I FEAR.”
“Do we have any idea what caused this abominable multiplication of the persimmons?”
“Magic,” Temple Franklin said.
“Good Lord,” Thomas said, “but I am grateful to have such an insightful Machiavel in my employ. But for your insight, I might have guessed this was the work of Robin Goodfellow.”
“It is the sort of thing folk tales associate with Peter Plowshare,” Temple Franklin said. “Surprising fertility, impossible abundance.”
Thomas’s head throbbed. “If you tell me a folk tale, I shall kick you in the face. Even if I have to run at you horseback to do it.”
“I’ve summoned experts of the Imperial College. They’ll be here tomorrow to discuss.”
“Experts in what? Almonds? Peter Plowshare? Food magic, what would that be? I failed Greek at Harvard. Sitos? No, that’s wheat. Trophos-something? Trophomancy?”
“That would be the art of prophesying by food. Trophurgy would be the magical art of working in food, by analogy with thaumaturgy,” Temple Franklin said.
“It is an ugly neologism, and suits this ugly situation.” Thomas ground his teeth. “When they get here, let’s reach out to Director Schmidt again. I’ll wager you all of Johnson City that it will be at least three weeks before the College can reach a combined opinion, much less agree on a course of action.”
“UNDERSTOOD.” The expression on the Parletts’ faces was solemn. “I HAVE MY BEST MEN WATCHING THE PARLETTS AT THIS END.”
“The Ohio Parletts,” Thomas said.
“THE OHIO PARLETTS. I’LL BE INFORMED IMMEDIATELY, ONCE YOU’RE READY.”
“Very good. In the meantime, if you find any way to introduce a plague of weevils into Cahokia, by all means do so.”
* * *
Luman was poring over one of the books in the Basilica’s library when Zadok Tarami appeared at his shoulder.
“Do you read our language?”
The priest hadn’t changed his clothing. He smelled like a pilgrim, sour with sweat and crusted with filth. In his white robe torn to shreds below the thigh he looked like a beggar. His straight back and unassuming smile communicated power and confidence, though. He had a comfort in his own skin that Luman had seen in the best of the company’s leaders, including Notwithstanding Schmidt.
A comfort that Luman himself had never felt.
Luman had discovered a small library of books at the back of the apse while cleaning up the wreckage of the beastkind attack. They had been stored in a locked cabinet that had been shattered in the incident. Once the Missourians saw they were only books, they lost interest. Mother Hylia and the secular priests didn’t object to Luman examining them.
Sadly, he wasn’t able to learn much.
“No,” Luman admitted, running his finger over a golden swirl at the center of the page. “That’s why I picked the one with pictures.” The book was illuminated. Like other medieval manuscripts Luman had seen, the initial letters were larger and picked out with gold and scarlet paints; strange figures and miniature scenes filled the margins. Occasionally, an entire half-page was dedicated to illustrating a story.
Unlike old Greek, Latin, and German texts he’d seen, the Eldritch book’s writing started at an apparently random point on each page and spiraled out in large swirls of looping and knotted lines, swarmed by dots, swoops, and dashes on either side. Some of the illustrations followed the spiraling text, and a single story seemed to circle up from the depths of the page.
“Many of our books have been translated into German. There is a story that the Winter Queen translated all of them into English at Heidelberg, but if she did so, most of that translation was lost in the Serpent Wars. Perhaps the translation was part of the cause of the wars. Who can tell? A conspiracy is a terrible way to bring a book to light. Fragments of the so-called Heidelberg Bible turn up from time to time, but outside of universities, there is little interest. The Firstborn have never been much for proselytizing.”
“I have seen copies of The Law of the Way in the stock of traveling pedlars,” Luman said. “Many copies, actually. It’s an easy book to come by. I’ve seen none of the others, to my knowledge.”
Tarami smiled a knowing smile. “You bought a copy of the Law because you knew it was an Ophidian text and you hoped it would contain spells.”
Luman coughed. “Actually, I stole a copy.”
Tarami laughed.
“I was poor at the time,” Luman said. “I tried to make it up later with extra kindness to other book pedlars.”
“I’m not sure that’s how it works.”
“I’m pretty sure it isn’t.”
“And what magic did you learn from The Law of the Way, then?”
Was the priest taunting him or testing him? “If there are spells in the Law, my eyes are not opened to see them.”
“Mother Hylia told me this about you.”
“That my eyes aren’t opened?”
“That you hope they will be.”
Luman closed the book carefully. “I think it’s wrong to covet riches. I think it’s wrong to covet power and seek to scratch the itches of the flesh and flaunt your wealth in clothing. I do not believe it is a sin to seek knowledge. I seek knowledge above all other things. And if the Law says it is a sin, I missed that passage.”
“You’re teasing me, wizard. We are commanded to seek knowledge, and you know it. Indeed, your words are nearly a paraphrase of the passage that commands it.”
Luman smiled.
“Nearly,” the priest said. “Here are the words of the prophet-king Onandagos, in his final testament, as recorded
in the twenty-eighth through thirtieth chapters of the Law: ‘Seven things it is wrong to seek, and the seeking thereof shall lose a man his soul: power, unless it be to do justice; wealth, except that wealth must be sought to clothe the naked; the satisfaction of the flesh, except that it is commanded to enjoy the flesh for the expression of love and for the generation of life; the life of another, except that it is given to you to take life in defense of the life of your people; loud singing, only you must raise your voices in acknowledgement of your debts to God; fine clothing, except it be the fine clothing you must wear for the giving of glory to God; and knowledge, unless it be true knowledge of the way of God and His creation, which you must seek above all other things.’”
“That sounds like a prohibition.” Luman smiled. “You said we were commanded to seek knowledge.”
“But what is knowledge of the way of God and His creation, if not the knowledge of all things? And if the exception enjoins us to seek the knowledge of all things, then what is the prohibition?”
“You’re certainly doing very well on the clothing part of the commandments,” Luman said.
Zadok Tarami snorted, then laughed.
“Why is it so easy to come by copies of the Law in English?” Luman asked.
“We have made it easy.” Tarami was still chuckling. “The Law and its contents are the thing we most wanted John Penn and Ben Franklin and their Electors to know of us.”
“Was it Elizabeth who translated it?”
Tarami’s laughter ended in a sigh. “No, she didn’t possess it.”
“Because it was a new world document?”
“In part, perhaps. The Law of the Way was dictated by Onandagos at the end of his great career, other than a codicil at the end that simply notes who took dictation and that Onandagos died and was buried. The book recounts his great journey west, including lists of his enemies and his allies. It tells his battle with the serpent of our people, and how he finally defeated it. It defines the bounds of the seven kingdoms of the Ohio, and the two places where four kingdoms meet. It gives final commands and prohibitions, and then a prophecy about the fate of the Law itself.”
“What is the fate of the Law?” Luman in fact had little interest in ideas about the end of the world, but if the priest was a member of an esoteric brotherhood, anything he said might contain clues, so it was valuable to keep him talking about his sacred things.
“The Prophecy of the Law’s Rebirth has in fact already been fulfilled,” Tarami said. “Again in his final testament, Onandagos said: ‘In that day the serpent shall be reborn. My very words shall be eaten by the serpent and forgotten, and the children of my people shall fall into a deep sleep, in which sleep they shall dream great dreams of sin. They shall again scar their bodies as of old, and worship the serpent who seduced their father. But in the heart of the city whose foundations I have laid, the children of my people shall find again my words. My words shall restore them to the true way of God.’”
“You say this prophecy came true already.” Luman’s head was spinning. He had never cared much to learn about the cult practices and beliefs of the Firstborn, and now he was finding it considerably more complex that he could have imagined.
“For centuries, The Law of the Way was lost, and the children of the people of Onandagos languished in sin. The worship of the serpent returned.”
“They scarred their bodies?”
“Circumcision,” Tarami said. “A gleeful reminder of the days when the serpent-demon demanded that all men in Her service be castrated.”
“Jesus was circumcised,” Luman said.
“An old lie whispered by a djinn into Luke’s ear.” Tarami smiled ruefully. “Paul knew better. As did Onandagos.”
“And then, what did you say? In the heart of the city?”
“In the days of Sarah Elytharias’s grandfather,” Tarami said. “He ordered renovations in the Basilica. There was found a hollow space within the wall, a place into which sacred texts had been discarded, to avoid desecrating them by destruction after their pages had moldered and their ink faded. Most of these were texts we had long possessed, but we also found The Law of the Way.”
“How did people take it?”
“The king, for all his youth, grieved. He tore his hair to realized how sinful his people had become. He ordered the Temple of the Sun torn down, and the serpent’s priestesses slain.”
Luman raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Those things didn’t happen.”
Tarami shook his head sadly. “There was war in the streets. A great number of the people of Cahokia, and especially of the people of the land—peasants, farmers, slaves, ordinary people—refused to surrender their goddess. But in the compromise that the king forced on the serpent’s daughters, they agreed to tear down their veil and lay open their secrets. And even Kyres Elytharias, for all his wicked attempts to bring back the cult of so-called Wisdom, never re-veiled the serpent throne.”
Luman felt exhausted. “And your pilgrimage…you asked God to overthrow the serpent?”
Tarami turned a shocked face to him. “No! Understand me, I have prayed every day of my awakened life for the end of the serpent’s cult. I have done that since I first learned to pray, as a child rescued from the slavery of the goddess by the learned Metropolitan Father Ahijah, and of course on my pilgrimage I continued to remember the blight that scars my land.
“But I did not crawl the Onandagos Road to fight against the serpent. I begged God at every step to raise the Pacification of the Ohio. I undertook the pilgrimage to beg for peace with the Emperor Thomas Penn.” Tears trickled down the old man’s cheeks.
“Of course, forgive me. I was so caught up in your tale of apostasy and restoration, I simply forgot.” Luman hesitated. “I don’t wish to sound impertinent, but…did it ever occur to you that maybe Father Ahijah, or whoever was Metropolitan before him…?”
“Yes?” Tarami asked.
Luman struggled to find a way to articulate his doubt without offending the priest. “No one had ever heard of The Law of the Way. No living person, I mean. And then, who should find it but priests, who use the book to push for change.”
“Repentance and reform,” Tarami said. “What are you suggesting?”
“I’m asking…how can you be sure Onandagos wrote the book? How can you be sure it wasn’t someone like Father Ahijah who wrote The Law of the Way to put forward his own ideas, but then claimed Onandagos had written it?”
“What, so people would pay attention?”
“It doesn’t sound insane to me.”
“He was the Metropolitan. People already heeded his word.”
“Not everyone,” Luman pointed out. “Even with Onandagos to back him up, not everyone agreed with him. And from what little I’ve heard, even just from what I’ve heard from you, it sounds like the…serpent-worshippers, let’s call them, have different ideas about Onandagos than you do.”
“The Law of the Way is completely consistent with everything we know about Onandagos.” Tarami’s voice was stiff.
Luman realized that his curiosity had led him away from his objective. If he offended the Metropolitan, the odds the man would invite him into any esoteric tradition of which he was a member declined to zero. “I’m sure you’re right.”
Tarami continued. “Of course, the serpent-worshippers claim otherwise. They have written themselves an Onandagos in their own image, a worshipper of the serpent rather than its foe.”
“What about Moses?” Luman asked cautiously. “I only want to be instructed, Father Tarami. Didn’t Moses raise a brass serpent on a rod?”
“To show the serpent’s defeat!” Tarami snapped. “And with the defeat of the serpent, the children of Israel were healed!”
“I see.” Luman nodded, careful to avoid smiling. He was afraid any smile would look like a doubter’s smirk.
“I understand you did the Basilica a great service on the night of the beastkind’s assault,” Tarami said.
Luman shrugged. “
I did what anyone would have done. I was lucky, and the beastkind thought I was more dangerous than I am. They fled before they could do any serious damage.”
“I have no secrets to offer you, Luman Walters,” the Metropolitan said. “I am no wizard, and Father Ahijah taught me no grips or passwords. The only Onandagos Road is the one I have walked, and God’s commandments are all light and openness. But I am grateful for your defense of the house of God. And I am happy to satisfy any curiosity you have, about The Law of the Way or anything else. And you are welcome to sleep here, with me and the other refugees.”
Luman was hesitant to ask, but his curiosity got the better of him. “Might you tell me how you read the windows of the Basilica?” he asked. “I seem to see two different versions of the creation, and two versions of the story of Adam and Eve, spelled out in one church. And one version of the creation shows a goddess, exhaling angels.”
Tarami smiled patiently. “Ah, you touch on the deep things of Christian philosophy.”
Does he mean esoterica? “I’d be grateful for whatever you could tell me.”
“You know from the Bible that God created man in his image, male and female.”
Luman spoke carefully. “Wouldn’t some say that suggests there is a goddess?”
Tarami shook his head. “The Law of the Way is quite clear on this. ‘Woman is in the image of God, and so is man. God is neither man nor woman, but is life and spirit, and all flesh is in the image of God.’”
“The image of the creating woman is…an allegory?”
“A reminder that we should not think of God as an old man, looking down on us from the heavens. And the twin stories of Adam and Eve are there to remind us that we can tell that story with great sorrow and regret, but we can also tell it with joy and gratitude.”
“Nor is God an old woman,” Luman added.
“Nor a serpent.” Tarami smiled.
“Priests. Shoot me now.”