Witchy Kingdom

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Witchy Kingdom Page 25

by D. J. Butler


  “There’s your man Kennedie,” Monsieur Bondí said. Fires had appeared abruptly all along the Pontchartrain wharf. You didn’t get flame that large and that sudden from a torch—you had to use oil, and maybe bring fire in a closed container to begin with. Monsieur Bondí looked through a telescope. “It’s him in person, not just his men. I recognize the limp.”

  “I understand the man was hurt in the war,” Etienne said.

  “And there go the chevalier’s men. All the more reason for him to stay home and let his underlings do the dirty work.”

  “You’re saying I should stay home, is that it?”

  “Yes.” Bondí put away his telescope and signaled to the sailors. The Igbos raised sail and anchor, and the ship pulled slowly across the Pontchartrain, toward the hulks. “If you stayed home, I could stay home, and I’m just an accountant. I’m really doing Armand’s job, following you around to keep you safe.”

  “I feel safer for your concern.” Etienne took the telescope and watched events on the shore. “Tell me where home is, with the cathedral burned, my father’s apartments given to the Polites, the bishopric given to another man, and my casino under constant observation by those mussulman assassins.”

  “Home could be wherever you want it.” Bondí grunted. “Right now, I guess home is with me.”

  “That’s how I think of it, too.” As the chevalier’s guard vessels sailed in close to the wharfs, the Irish fighters turned from smashing windows and lighting docks on fire to hurling flaming bottles at the ships.

  The Bonne Chance laid quietly alongside the hulk lying farthest from shore. Onyinye’s men leaped quietly from the yacht to the larger ship, then swarmed over the side, long ropes coiled over their shoulders. Etienne and the hôtelière had agreed to use her men because they were all Igbo. That gave them a shared language their target would not understand. Etienne’s men were New Orleans mongrels, Creoles, and men of all nations.

  “Boss,” Monsieur Bondí cajoled, but Etienne ignored him. He kicked his boots off to free his toes—the better to climb with—and went up over the side after Onyinye’s cousins.

  One great disadvantage to the chevalier of staffing his prison hulks with deaf-mutes and idiots was that they were spectacularly easy to take by surprise, and pitifully bad at spreading any kind of alarm. The Igbo dragged the guards to the planks, held them immobilized, gagged them, and tied them up, backs to the stump mast rotting in the center of the deck.

  The other advantage of using Onyinye’s men is that the Igbo were famous wrestlers. Etienne’s men would have killed the deaf-mutes; letting them live was an outcome much more consistent with the image of the wronged and righteous bishop fighting the tyrannical chevalier.

  Etienne took a lantern from the iron nail where it hung, fixed to the mast, and went belowdecks. He found a ring of keys on a table in what had once been the captain’s cabin of the former warship, and he set about freeing the prisoners.

  “I do this to follow the words of St. Paul,” he called loudly, over and over. “‘And that they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil, who are taken captive by him at his will.’ I am Bishop Ukwu, and I am here to set you free.”

  All the prisoners were men. A few had lost their power of speech during their stay on the hulk, and could only wail piteously as they scampered up to see the night sky. Most thanked Etienne courteously, in all the various languages of New Orleans.

  The chevalier only kept prisoners of value in the hulks; other enemies and criminals he simply had killed. That meant that many of the men Etienne freed were wealthy and powerful, or had wealthy and powerful connections.

  “I am Bishop Ukwu, and I am here to set you free.”

  He almost missed the final prisoner, an old man lying in the shattered aft cabin of the hulk. Etienne was returning to the steps to exit the ship when he heard the prisoner’s cracked but vital voice calling out in Castilian, “Señor! Señor! No me abandone aquí, yo le ruego!”

  The man was more skeleton than flesh. Unlocking his manacles, Etienne knelt to help the prisoner stand.

  “Je suis l’Évêque Ukwu. Je suis venu pour vous libérer.”

  “You’re not Chinwe Ukwu,” the old man said as they hobbled toward the stairs together. His French was quick and polished. “Chinwe was murdered, the very night I was arrested.”

  So recently? From the state of his physique, Etienne would have guessed the man had been a prisoner for years. He refrained from making that observation. “No, I am his son.”

  “Ah, but you are not Chigozie Ukwu, either. Chigozie is taller, though perhaps not so handsome.”

  Etienne continued to hold the old man as they inched up the stairs. “I hope you are willing to be rescued by Chigozie’s brother Ofodile.”

  “I thought Chigozie’s brother was named Etienne. And he was…an owner of gaming establishments, among other things, in the Vieux Carré.”

  “I am that same man.”

  “And now you are bishop? And rescuing me at night from the chevalier’s Pontchartrain dungeon?” The old man began to laugh. “The chevalier must be shitting his trousers.”

  “I can only hope, Don…”

  “Don Luis Maria Salvador Sandoval de Burgos,” the old man said. “My family and I ship cotton and silver, principally. More recently, I put a knife to the throat of the chevalier.”

  Interesting.

  They emerged on deck. Etienne looked to the shore for signs of the chevalier’s guard ships and saw them all burning, wrecked against the land. He turned to the other hulks and saw their staff’s backs as they pressed against the far rails to stare at the fires.

  “Fais attention!”

  A body slammed into Etienne, knocking him to the ground.

  He tried to grab his knife, but the man who had knocked him down had managed to sit on his chest to pin both arms. His attacker was large and stank; he howled like a wordless beast as he raised a great splinter of wood over his head to stab Etienne in the face—

  another man grabbed the attacker’s wrist.

  The newcomer was one of Onyinye’s Igbo fighters. He neatly hooked the deaf-mute in his nostrils with two fingers. As the brute wailed, the wrestler pulled him backward and off Etienne. It looked like gentle motion, but the bigger Frenchman shrieked in discomfort and then wiggled like a fish trying to escape as the wrestler sat, embraced him from behind, cradled his head in two strong arms, and choked the man into unconsciousness.

  The wrestler stood and helped Etienne to his feet. “I’m sorry,” he said in Igbo. “I tied a weak knot.”

  Etienne straightened his clothing. “But you imposed a strong grip. What’s your name?”

  “Sometimes, I wrestle for the French and the English under the name Lusipher. You may have seen me with red paint on my face and chest.” The wrestler grinned. “But I am more truly named Achebe Chibundu.”

  “I have seen you elsewhere, haven’t I?”

  Etienne gazed at the man’s face until it came to him. “When I first saw you, I took you for a bartender. You were present at the death of the beadle.”

  Achebe nodded. “I was there to protect Onyinye, if necessary. She’s my great-aunt. And when I first met you, I took you for a criminal. It’s only since that I have learned you are a man of many gods, a man whose own god is mighty.”

  Etienne furrowed his brow. “This is what people say about me?”

  Achebe smiled. “They do. And what they ask, but do not know for certain, is whether you might be Eze-Nri.”

  Etienne considered. “I’m the Bishop of New Orleans, at least, and I have lost a bodyguard,” he said. “If I speak to Onyinye, would you be willing to consider taking his place? I warn you, it’s a dangerous position. When I say I lost my bodyguard, let me be clear—Armand was murdered by my enemies.”

  Achebe’s eyes widened. “For the Bishop of New Orleans? Yes, of course, I would be honored!” He dropped to his knees.

  Etienne helped Achebe up. “Excellent. I will speak with
my friend Onyinye. In the meantime, we have another half-dozen hulks to clean out. Once we’ve liberated the chevalier’s prisoners, we need to put his men ashore and then burn the ships.”

  “All New Orleans will see it, Eze-Nri.”

  Etienne nodded. “That is the point.”

  He resolved that he would ask Onyinye what this Eze-Nri business was.

  * * *

  Ferpa and Kort, without any appointment or title, became Chigozie’s assistants. He deliberately strove to shun all the trappings of leadership: he did not choose who would pray, he dictated no meal times, he waited until others spoke before speaking, he did not assign himself any right to preach.

  But the Merciful asked him to speak, requested his advice, and came to him to settle disputes.

  Very well. If he was to be the Shepherd, he would be the Shepherd who only led by example, and from the center of the flock.

  Watching him, Ferpa and Kort adopted similar behaviors. In a military organization, one might have called them Chigozie’s aides-de-camp, and in an ecclesiastical one, his suffragans. Among the Merciful they had no title at all, but the other beastkind looked to them for inspiration and example.

  Whether explicitly or not, they arranged that one of them would always be at his side, asleep or awake. The presence of a cow’s or bison’s head made Chigozie think of the Merciful as a kind of herd, notwithstanding the presence of part-canine and part-reptile members.

  The one who wasn’t with Chigozie was inevitably working.

  The Merciful built a screen at the mouth of their canyon. It wasn’t a wall, not a defensible structure of any kind, but a hedge of brush and dead trees that further hid the existence of the canyon. They destroyed trails that led close to the Still Waters, and were careful to follow a ridge of rock themselves in coming and going, so as not to create a new trail.

  They brought timber from miles away, again in order not to attract attention to the Still Waters. With the timber, they built. A springhouse protected the springs and also sluiced water out the rock seeps above the springs to make it convenient to drink. Chigozie grew to love the smell and even the taste of the water.

  His sleep grew worse. He dreamed of the women he’d killed, begging him not for mercy, but for life. He felt less rested each morning he awoke.

  A barracks provided a communal sleeping place. When the Merciful built Chigozie a hut near the waters themselves, he declined, and instead asked that a member of the herd who was then ill be moved into the hut instead.

  Organized parties hunted and foraged. A guard was posted above the canyon at all times, and another below the canyon along the stream that flowed from it. Chigozie preached often the necessity of turning the other cheek and not resisting violence with violence, and he was prepared to flee with the Merciful at the first appearance of an attacker.

  Ferpa returned from a foraging party with three wounded children of Adam. Chigozie was reciting passages from Isaiah to the Merciful when she arrived—the large amount of holy writ he’d committed to memory at the urging of the Bishop of Miami now proved to be extremely useful. She descended one of the steep entry trails, carrying a man in her arms.

  To his astonishment, Chigozie knew the man. He was Naares Stoach, soldier of Zomas, the man who had chased the Merciful out of their first chosen home. There was no sign of either his horse or his hound.

  Ferpa laid Stoach down on the much-trampled grass at the edge of the springs and stepped back. The two Merciful with her laid down two other men; all wore the red and black of Zomas, with the cuckoo and crown, over wooden breastplates. All were battered and wounded and unconscious.

  Ferpa cleared her throat. “This child of Adam struck me on one cheek.”

  “He struck us all,” Kort said.

  A rumble passed through the Merciful. Chigozie saw surprise, anger, and fear on the faces he’d learned with difficulty to read. He also saw something else.

  Groaning, Naares Stoach opened his eyes and sat up. He probed the clotting blood in his blond hair with his fingers and squinted at Chigozie. “It stinks. Am I your prisoner?” he looked at his two fellow-soldiers. “Are they dead?”

  “They aren’t dead,” Ferpa lowed.

  “We need to decide what to do with you.” Chigozie surveyed the Still Waters—most of the Merciful were present.

  “I hereby impress you all,” Stoach said. “You now serve Turim, Lord Zomas.”

  Kort laughed, a long, low rasp.

  “He is bold,” Ferpa said.

  “Friends, we must decide.” Chigozie addressed the Merciful. “Let us consider some possibilities. We could kill these men. We could tell ourselves that we were only doing it to prevent the loss of another home, that their deaths would not be an act of revenge or anger.”

  The Merciful watched Chigozie quietly. Ferpa snorted.

  Naares Stoach reached for the hilt of his sword and found his scabbard empty.

  “We could show mercy,” Chigozie said. “We could let these men live and leave our Still Waters alive. To show our generosity, we could even send them away with food and water.”

  “We could guide them back to their lands,” Kort added.

  The Merciful still watched in silence.

  “Or we could embrace them,” Chigozie said. “As long-lost brothers. We could give them food and shelter here, and tend to their wounds, and only when they had recovered and wished to go, we could take them back to the towers of Etzanoa.”

  “Like the Good Samaritan,” Ferpa murmured.

  “Like the father of the prodigal son,” Kort added.

  A murmur of approval ran through the Merciful. Chigozie found that he wanted to test them a little more. “We will put ourselves at risk if we do this,” he said. “The warriors of Zomas may attack us. May follow us back to our home. May enslave us and force us to fight against the warriors of Simon Sword.”

  “Seventy times seven,” Kort said.

  “We turn the other cheek,” Ferpa said.

  Chigozie looked to the Merciful and found them nodding in agreement. He nodded as well, and then he offered a hand to Naares Stoach. “We turn the other cheek.”

  “Is this all there is to the joke?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “I’ve seen him heal others,” Jake said. “And people in Johnsland told me he healed himself once.”

  Margarida had awoken from her collapse, but felt in need of some healing herself. Or at least some solid rest. “Is that why you’re burning the tobacco? You think it will help him?”

  Hop twisted his fingers together and stroked them. He seemed to be fidgeting with a nonexistent object, or remembering toying with something small. Nathaniel—Margarida’s brother—lay mumbling and sweating on a pallet in the New Amsterdam house of a Dutch clergyman named Ambroos. Beside him was a china teacup in which smoldered a pile of dried tobacco leaf. From time to time, Jake picked the leaf up and blew on it to keep the flame going.

  “Say that I hope, rather than that I think. I have been with Nathaniel in his healing trance, but I understand it very little. But the first time he did it—when he did it and healed himself—he was in a great cloud of tobacco smoke.”

  “Do you think—or hope—that he’s in that trance again now?” Margarida was only half-convinced that this unconscious boy was her brother. In any case he had rescued her. She felt attached.

  Jake shook his head. “I don’t even hope it.”

  “Not even hope?”

  Jake shook his head again. “There’s no bear.”

  “The deacons are all here.” The voice was Lotte’s speaking from the door of the room. “I’ll keep an eye on your friend, Jacob.”

  “Dank je, Lotte.”

  Margarida trailed the Dutchman downstairs and into his cousin’s study. In such a room in the French and Catalan homes she knew, she’d expect to see pictures of saints hanging from the walls. You couldn’t always tell a saint from her face, but you knew you were looking at a painting of a saint by the other strange it
ems in the picture. In a picture, St. Peter always had a key, St. Paul a sword, and St. Martin a hammer and nail. These weren’t pictures of saints, but there was something oddly familiar about the images anyway. One man chased pigs into the sea. Another man touched the eyes of a blind man beside a fountain. A third man chased merchants from the portico of a church. In all the paintings, the figures had Dutch faces and wore Dutch clothing.

  The deacons were five serious-faced people. The youngest was middle-aged, and they were a mixed-sex group: three women and two men. With Ambroos, if he was also to be counted as a deacon, they were half and half. They all wore sober black coats and black knickerbockers, and the men wore tall hats with flat brims.

  “Should I lie on the floor?” Jake asked. “Or hold a holy wafer in my mouth or something?”

  One of the deacons beckoned Jake forward into the center of their circle. Margarida held back, standing beside the door. The deacon, an old man with a twinkle in his eye, handed Jake a large sheet of paper.

  “What is this?” Jake asked.

  Another deacon, a woman whose blond hair was knotted into a tight bun at the nape of her neck, and who might have been the youngest of all of them, began to read from a large, leather-bound book. Everyone in the room was speaking Dutch, and Margarida understood them perfectly. Nevertheless, the woman’s reading had the rote quality of an incantation. Her pronunciation of the words was deliberately archaic; the words felt to Margarida more like deeds, each syllable an act. “En toen zij bij de schare gekomen waren, kwam iemand tot Hem, knielde voor Hem neder, en zeide.”

  “It’s a writ of divorce,” the old man said. “Write your name here.”

  Another deacon presented a bottle of ink and a quill pen. Jake wrote.

  The woman kept reading. “Here, heb medelijden met mijn zoon, want hij is maanziek en hij is er slecht an toe: want dikwijls valt hij in het vuur en dikwijls in het water.”

  It was the story of one of Jesus’ exorcisms, from the Bible.

  “And here, write the name of the other party.”

 

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