by D. J. Butler
The pink-faced Dutchman pounded one fist into the other hand’s palm. “Yes, dammit, for money!”
“And you admit it!”
Stuyvesant roared suddenly to life. “It is easy for you to condemn me for doing something for money, when you are a man alone in this world! You can eat earth and drink air and never sleep because of Franklin’s Vision that burns within you, but where are the children whose lives depend on you, Isaiah Wilkes? Where is your wife who did without a new dress for twenty years while you were making your fortune? Where are the employees who can only light their lamps and mend their roofs if you give them work to do? Where are the citizens of the Republic whose walls you are entrusted to defend, though you struggle to arm a single regiment or caulk the hull of a single warship, because of the rising cost of lead and tar! Do not talk to me of your disdain for money! It is cheap moralizing, coming from a man who has been so selfish as to live alone.”
Wilkes recoiled as if he had been struck. “I was not always alone,” he said slowly. “And I do not choose to be alone now.”
Both men stood in silence.
Kinta Jane was baffled. What had happened?
“I keep my obligations,” Stuyvesant said. “All of them, including my oath of office as Elector and my contracts with the Hudson River Republic Ohio Company. I can do this without corrupting myself, Isaiah. And I will give my daughter the choice.”
“And if she says no?” Wilkes asked.
“Then perhaps the company declares bankruptcy. Perhaps the Republic sells land to the Penns, or to Acadia.”
“And will she know what the risks are when you offer her the choice?”
Stuyvesant said nothing.
“I see. We’re leaving, Adrian. We need to find Brother Odishkwa.”
“Delay a few hours. I need you to help me.”
Wilkes shook his head slightly.
“Please.”
“What help do you need?”
“Take Dockery and the canoes. And take Julia’s fiancé with you.”
“What? Why? This is a bad way to distract a man whose heart you’ve just broken!”
Adriaan sighed. “Gert Visser is a good man. His family are burghers, cloth merchants. But Gert is something of a hothead. And he’s something of a bigot, and deeply in love. If Julia ends their engagement in person, he’ll make trouble.”
“This is not my problem, Adriaan.”
“Imagine Gert Visser tracking down Temple Franklin and clobbering him with his big-knuckled fists. Or worse, imagine him and his friends tarring and feathering the Emperor’s envoy.”
“Still not my problem. And don’t tell me that I have to help you or the bastion of Franklin’s plan falls. Franklin’s plan never depended on the Hudson River Republicans being able to wear silk.”
“Gert Visser is a brother.”
Isaiah Wilkes took a deep breath. “Of the Conventicle?”
Adriaan nodded. “He was to marry my daughter. She and he had been…spending time together at the cliff house late one night, and he walked in on a meeting with me. I had to kill him or bring him in.”
“So he could indeed make trouble. If not in person, how will you ask Julia to end her engagement?”
“By letter. Which I will consign to you. And I will ask you to give it to him at Ticonderoga.”
“At which point, if he reacts as a hothead, I will have to deal with him.”
“At which point, if he reacts as a hothead, I ask that you kill him.”
* * *
“Who were those men?” Nathaniel asked. He felt ill and weak.
They had emerged from the star-strewn landscape into which Nathaniel had taken Jake and back into Ambroos’s attic. As he considered his answer, Jake packed his gear into his bag. “Isaiah Wilkes and Adriaan Stuyvesant, you mean. I don’t know. They might be friends.”
“They don’t seem even to be friends with each other.”
“No, but they’re brothers of some kind. I think they’re in Franklin’s Conventicle together.”
“I look forward to finding out that some horrible folktale or ridiculous bugaboo or improbable rumor I heard as a child isn’t true,” Nathaniel said. “So far, I seem to be living in a nursery story.”
“I’ll ask Ambroos to bring together his community and attempt an exorcism on the way back,” Jake said. “Right now, I want to get to your sister. As soon as possible.”
Nathaniel put on his backward hat and shrugged into his coat. His drum was heavier than ever, but he managed to hoist it onto his shoulder. “What’s changed?”
They descended the stairs, Jake leading quickly and Nathaniel faltering behind, leaning heavily on the wall. The house was empty. Snowflakes blew across the boardwalk as they checked the acorn, turned, and walked north again.
“Thomas is in motion,” Jake said. “Of course he is. He’s not sitting around waiting for Sarah to surrender to him, he’s trying to kill her. Kill us. And the Dutch are about to give him a large pile of money, and more influence in the Assembly. And none of that is really new, but it’s new information to me. And a good reminder not to sit around. And not to complain about a few headaches.”
At the word headaches, Nathaniel rubbed his temples. “Now that you mention it, I’ve developed a splitting one.” He felt he might pass out, and took deep breaths.
“Too much time in…that place?”
“I don’t think so,” Nathaniel said. “I think…I think my gift is not meant for use in spying.”
Jake laughed. “You don’t usually hear a strong man say his arms weren’t meant for lifting or throwing, or a clever woman claim her intelligence wasn’t made for a puzzle. What makes you think your gift has a purpose?”
Nathaniel was quiet for a few minutes. They passed beyond the stone buildings and into fenced farmland, furrows hidden beneath a blanket of white snow and the steam of animals’ bodies rising from sheds and stables. “The manner of my getting it. Also, it felt wrong today. I felt wrong.”
“You mean you have to be honest?” Jake asked. “The same way you have to wear your hat backward?”
“No, I think I can lie. But I left my body to be healed, and I can leave it to heal. Leaving it to do something else today…hurt my head.” He didn’t mention the sensation that he was on the verge of collapse.
“Too bad,” Jake said. “I was beginning to think you’d be a terrific spy.”
“I can do it, but it hurts. I wouldn’t want to do it long, or often.”
There was something in Nathaniel’s hesitation that told Jake he was leaving something unsaid. “What else is bothering you, friend Nathaniel?”
“I’m also nervous about Robert Hooke.”
Jake snorted. “Good. He should make you nervous. He makes me terrified.”
“But we’ll tell Sarah about those people. The Conventicle.”
“We’ll tell her.”
Nathaniel pulled the acorn from its box again. To Jake’s surprise, it rolled in Nathaniel’s palm and pointed due east.
“She’s moved,” Nathaniel said. “Or we’re arriving.”
The next turn east was a broad lane that cut through more farms. Nathaniel kept the acorn in his palm and they watched it, only taking their eyes away to step out of the path of horses and the occasional sled.
The road took them to a village whose signpost identified it as HAARLEM. The acorn led them northward through the village, to a sprawling Dutch-style house atop a low, rocky hill.
“I supposed I could enter the starlit plain again.” Nathaniel put on a cheerful smile, but it was forced.
“Your head still hurts?”
Nathaniel nodded.
“I have a different idea,” Jake said. “You say you think you’re able to lie?”
“My name is Randolph,” Nathaniel said. “I’m from Georgia and I’m a horse trader. I come to New Amsterdam and Haarlem all the time, and I hate that fellow Jacob Hop.” He shrugged. “I feel fine.”
“Very good. Let’s put that to a
harder test.”
“This is magic we are talking about, after all,
and not hydraulics.”
CHAPTER NINE
Chigozie and the Merciful left their hill the same day, in case Naares Stoach decided to bring his riders back early. There was no vote about what they should do, and very little discussion.
Shortly after the riders left, Kort asked Chigozie, “Where shall we go?”
“North of us are the plains of the Free Horse People,” Chigozie said. “East lies Cahokia, which in better days might have been a place of refuge.” Left unsaid was: But in these days, the Heron King and his minions, your former brethren, devastate that land.
“South of us is the City of White Towers. Etzanoa,” Kort rumbled. “They’ve made their intentions toward us clear.”
The Merciful within earshot all nodded and made braying, mewing, growling, or hissing sounds of agreement. They spent the morning and early afternoon gathering everything they could from the castle of the former Baron McClane and bundling it within furs and blankets. Each Merciful beastwife or beastman shouldering a bundle, they turned and trudged west.
Chigozie regretted leaving behind the buildings, even ruined as they were, as well as most of the furniture.
The beastkind weren’t impervious to the cold, but they resisted the stinging northern blasts better than Chigozie did. His clothing had torn in climbing through brambles and on sharp rocks, it had frozen and snapped, and it had worn to threads rubbing on the ground, or on the wooden boards on which Chigozie slept. He had replaced it with a pair of wool trousers from the Baron’s castle, supplemented with furs wrapped around his legs and held in place with leather strips. He wrapped a wool matchcoat about his shoulders and a long fur muffler that must have belonged to a fine lady around his neck. With all the fur on his body, other than the broad-brimmed beaverskin hat, he might have been a beast.
He might have been one of the Merciful, and that suited him just fine.
The blessing of the storms was that the snow must surely cover their tracks, so after two days of walking, Chigozie began to feel safe.
They stayed away from the Missouri River, because Chigozie feared the traffic that might travel on it. Instead, they followed its course in the hills above, sticking to the forests and avoiding towns.
Most of the settlements they passed were burned and trampled. The few that weren’t bristled with muskets and the fiercely staring eyes of starving people.
The Merciful sang while they walked and fell asleep promptly once they were still. Chigozie had more difficulty getting to sleep. He thought of the last words he’d heard from the Zoman outrider: I’m a merciful man, but I’m willing to kill.
Chigozie had killed in the name of mercy, cutting short the lives of two women who were being ravaged by Kort and his troop, before they had returned to become the Merciful. As he thought back on those pulse-pounding moments, he was unsure what exactly he had seen in their faces at the last.
Gratitude at the cutting short of their suffering?
Anger that Chigozie should join their tormentors, rather than rescue the women?
Simple fear?
Chigozie Ukwu slept poorly.
On the fifth day, they found a place to stay.
The first sign Chigozie noticed was a reaction among the Merciful. Muzzles that had hung low and drooping shoulders began to raise. A low murmur of wonder and questioning ran through the line of marchers.
Then he saw steam rising from what appeared to be the flat ground. “Could that be a cave?” he asked Ferpa, pointing. “Don’t caves stay warmer than the surface in winter, as they are cooler in summer?”
Ferpa’s negative answer sounded like the lowing of a tired cow.
“I smell water,” a hound-headed beastwife said, immediately bounding forward into the snow.
Shortly thereafter, Chigozie found himself shrugging out of his furs and throwing the matchcoat over one shoulder as he climbed down a crack in the rock into a narrow valley. The valley had stone walls that rose sharply on all sides, as if some cosmic giant had created it by cleaving the range of hills in two with a sword. Several paths led up the cliffs, but for Chigozie they all looked like tricky footing and a strenuous climb.
The beastkind looked unfazed by the roughness of the trails.
Water flowed out of the valley through a crack in the walls barely wider than the stream, and not wide enough to ride two horses abreast or drive a wagon. The water wasn’t frozen because it bubbled up beneath a rock overhang and beside a stone shelf in a hot spring. The spring was the source of the steam. As he climbed down into the valley, Chigozie noticed over the musky reek of the Merciful and the stink of his own sweat that the water smelled heavily of sulfur.
“We’re grateful for what we have, Lord,” he murmured. “We have nothing of our own merit, and everything of Thy bounty.”
Above the spring and along the stream before the canyon narrowed grew several copses of trees and thickets of berry bushes.
Chigozie’s legs burned and his knees wobbled with the effort of the last few steps down. To help keep his balance on the wet stones, he picked up a long, slightly curved piece of wood and leaned on it like a staff. Crossing the stream to the bench of stone, he threw down his furs and coat and stood above the spring.
The heat from the spring told him that the water bubbling up was quite hot. The sulfur was oddly sweet in his nostrils. He tried to raise his arms to address the Merciful, but he couldn’t get his hands above his shoulders, and he gave up. Instead, he hugged his new walking stick and leaned on it.
He was more tired than he’d realized.
The beastkind who followed him—no, who shared his journey—stood ranged about the canyon. They had energy in their stance and excitement on their faces. Chigozie wanted to say something profound, but could think of nothing. He contented himself with quoting the Bible.
“The Lord is my shepherd,” he said. “I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul; He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
“Amen,” the Merciful bellowed.
“These are the still waters,” Kort said gravely. “Here we shall give great mercy.”
“Amen.”
“And Chigozie Ukwu shall be our shepherd.”
“Amen!”
Chigozie had no strength left to resist. Besides, shepherd was a more modest title than king or priest.
Hadn’t David been a shepherd? Didn’t the kings of Memphis still carry the shepherd’s crook as one of their staffs of office? And wasn’t Christ himself the Good Shepherd?
The title had humility, but also antiquity and meaning.
“Amen.” He bowed his head low. When he raised it again, he saw a hundred glittering eyes fixed on him. “Let us find food. And then let us build.”
* * *
As they walked up the path to the front door between snow-shrouded flowerbeds, Nathaniel closed his fingers around the acorn and listened.
He heard the voices of the Lenni Lenape pining for their lost land. He heard the soft whispers of the sleeping trees and the heart-wild cry of animals who had died, killed by bullet, arrowhead, or claw. He heard the cheerful songs of hard-working Dutch traders and sailors.
And he heard a voice that sounded familiar. ~Who am I? Where am I? Why do I know nothing?~
“She’s here,” he said. “There’s something wrong.”
“Is she a prisoner?” Jacob asked. “Is she injured?”
“I can’t tell. But she doesn’t know who she is.” Maybe that was why he had been unable to hear her
before, when he had listened on the starlit plain.
“Do you know who you are?”
Nathaniel grinned. “I’m your deaf-mute lackey.”
“Lackey, a very harsh word. You are my trusted body servant.”
“Does that sound less harsh?”
“It does in Dutch. Remember to keep quiet, and don’t react to sound.” Jacob Hop thumbed through his Tarocks with shaking hands, looking at three cards in quick succession without laying them out.
Nathaniel nodded.
Standing on the wide porch, Jake knocked. Nathaniel examined the whitewashed boards, the red brick chimneys, the rough-hewn wooden bench and rocking chair sitting on the porch. At Jake’s second knock—Nathaniel remembered to betray no sign that he actually heard the rapping—the door opened.
“Ja, wie gaat daar?”
Jake launched into a fervent conversation in Dutch. He sounded friendly and polite, and he also sounded as if he were begging. Nathaniel reminded himself to pretend not to hear the conversation, which was easy enough, since he couldn’t understand it.
He smiled at the man behind the door and got a bare grunt in return. The man was squat and wide and wore an orange and gray uniform of thinning flannel that had been made for a taller, more slender man. The waistcoat looked stretched around his belly and about to lose buttons, and the sleeves of his jacket rucked up in tight wrinkles at the elbows.
The leafless trees at the foot of the plowed fields looked like skeletal arms. Beyond them, Haarlem puffed thin tendrils of gray smoke into a slate-gray winter sky.
He listed for the voice he thought belonged to his sister. ~I’ll do it, this doesn’t hurt me. Who are these men?~
Suddenly Jake grabbed his elbow and shook him. Nathaniel barely managed to avoid asking, “What?” At the last moment, he remembered to put on an oblivious grin and shake his head.
Jake said something in Dutch and pointed toward a dull red barn squatted at the other end of a field west of the house, just beyond a ditch. He pointed again several times, said something loud in Dutch, and then kicked Nathaniel in the seat of his pants.
Nathaniel stumbled away, turned—
and saw himself.