by D. J. Butler
Though he had seen it only briefly, Cahokia gave Chigozie the impression that it had sprung from the earth like a plant. In the case of its Treewall, literally. Etzanoa gave the impression that it had been built by an alien hand, perhaps a demonic one.
Men stood on the walls of the city. They wore red and black and held the same long spears Naares’s riders had, but there was something odd about them. At first, Chigozie thought they wore helmets without visors. When he got close enough, he realized what it was.
“Why are they facing inward, toward the city?” he asked Naares.
“There has been a death.” Naares’s mouth was set in a grim line. “Someone mighty has left us.”
“You’re saying they’re watching a funeral procession?”
“No. A powerful ghost has been driven out of the city. The city’s defenders turn their backs outward, because they fear their faces would present a familiar sight and welcome the ghost back. They wish to convince the ghost that its home is on this side of the wall now.”
Kort snorted, the hot breath from his nostrils melting a thousand snowflakes on the wing.
“How long will they stand like that?” Chigozie asked.
“It depends on the ghost,” Naares said.
“And if they are attacked while they stand thus?” Kort rumbled.
“They will turn and fight. And when they have cut their foe to pieces, they will again sacrifice to feed the ghost, again lead it outside the wall, and again stand with their faces averted.”
“I would say that you are curious folk,” Chigozie said, “only…” He thought of his own father, also buried outside the wall, evidently with Vodun rites. He thought of his brother Etienne, who had used his father’s funeral as an attack spell against the dead man’s murderer.
And he realized that in his own heart, he did not entirely disagree with what Etienne had done. Was this what had driven him into the wilderness? Was this what had led him to make common cause with penitent beastkind? A need to reject his brother’s choice, deny that part of him that silently approved? Did he need to prove he was different from his brother? Superior to his brother?
Did he need to exorcise from his own soul the spirits his brother served?
“Only you in New Orleans build palaces for your dead, and that is far stranger,” Naares said.
Kort laughed.
“Palaces?” Chigozie asked.
“I have been to New Orleans. Your living huddle crowded in buildings of wood and plaster, buildings that rot and are carried away in heavy rains. Your dead sleep in stone mansions, beyond the grasp of time and its corruption. You worship your dead. You are ruled by them. Yours is a city of the dead, in which the living are only guests. Etzanoa is a city of the living, from which we have driven out the dead.”
“Can we enter this city of the living?” Kort asked. “The gates are shut. I presume to keep out the ghost.”
They stood in front of one of the city’s gates. A steep-walled, V-cut moat surrounded the wall, containing only a thin sliver of ice in its depths. The drawbridge that would give access to the city over it had been drawn up. Shattered muskets and spears and crushed helmets gave testimony of recent battle around the city. Piles of black ash flashed white glints that might have been bone.
Naares cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed words Chigozie didn’t understand.
There was instant reaction on the wall. Still with their backs turned to the outside, two men together took a long horn and blew a ragged, deep, humming note that began in Chigozie’s ears and then seemed to pierce the fabric of the world, resonating in his bones and in the earth and in the stars at the same time.
The drawbridge dropped and a portcullis behind it rose at the same moment.
The long horn note continued as Naares limped across the drawbridge and the others followed, Chigozie came last. Behind him the drawbridge rose and the portcullis fell. When the gate was finally shut again, the horn stopped.
“The horn was to scare the ghost away while the door was open,” Kort said.
“Not to frighten it,” Naares said. “But to make the city alien to it, so it would seek its home outside.”
“Why do you fear the spirits of the dead?” Chigozie. “Many would welcome a meeting with a dead loved one, for advice or a final farewell.”
Naares shot a stern look at Chigozie. “There are ghostmasters in Etzanoa who can provide such a meeting. But their work is forbidden as well as cursed. The spirits of the dead eat the souls of the living. That brings sickness, fatigue, despair, and madness.”
“If you drive all the ghosts into the forest, then,” Kort said. “The forest must be a terrifying place.”
“It is indeed,” Naares said.
They exited the gate into the city. Everywhere he looked, Chigozie saw white stone. The buildings seemed built with no central scheme—he saw houses beside gardens beside inns beside armories beside palaces. Within the wall, there was an open space that would presumably allow soldiers to march and maneuver in defense. Other than that…
“Are there no streets?” he asked.
“None that are straight,” Naares said. “A boulevard is an invitation to an enemy to march to the palace and seize the king. The streets of Etzanoa are built according to a careful scheme, and every child is taught to know that scheme by heart. Any child of ten who is native to the city can take you where you want directly. To an invader, the city is a maze.”
Naares led them. The city’s streets were paved with stone, and square gutters ran along each side of every street. The gutters ran with water and poured into grate-covered openings every fifty feet or so, but the waste water wasn’t sewage and didn’t stink.
Etzanoa was clean and white.
More than half the people Chigozie saw wore iron collars. Some of them looked as he imagined slaves would. They wore tattered rags and performed heavy labor, repairing damaged streets or dragging carts of waste. But many dressed and walked and behaved like a free person.
“Your city’s fashions are strange,” Kort growled.
At first, Chigozie thought the beastman was referring to the collars, but then he realized his mistake. The Etzanoans wore clothing inside out. Not all of it, but each wore one piece, conspicuously, reversed. Some a cloak, some a hat, some a pair of breeks.
“It isn’t fashion,” Chigozie guessed. “It’s to fool the dead person.”
“It’s to fool the ghost,” Naares agreed. “I understand you may find us strange, but at least this is a harmless precaution.”
“What sort of precaution wouldn’t be harmless?” Chigozie asked.
“Once slaves were owned by individual masters,” Naares explained, “rather than by the kingdom. At a man’s death, all his slaves were also killed. Their bodies were buried outside the walls, so the dead man wouldn’t hear their voices and return. Later, when we had given up executing such slaves, for a period we exiled them into the forest instead. Most likely died as a result.”
“Only slaves?” Kort asked.
“What do you mean?” Naares looked uncomfortable.
“If the voices of a man’s slaves would call back his ghost, what about the voices of his women and his children?”
“There are stories that suggest that, at least among our royalty, living queens once followed dead kings onto their funeral pyres.”
“Like the Chicago Germans,” Chigozie said.
“But not children?” Kort pressed.
“Not children,” Naares said. “Killing the children of a dead man would be madness. You would destroy the kingdom in a single generation.”
The center of the city was a loose ring formed by the white towers. A second wall, higher than the first, ran from tower to tower, but this gate was open. These guards faced outward. The men in black wooden armor and red cloaks were reinforced by a dozen thick-shouldered hounds with spiky hair and wolflike ears.
Naares saluted, was recognized, and passed through.
In the center o
f Etzanoa was a complex of white stone buildings. Without going inside, Chigozie couldn’t tell what happened in these buildings, but guessing by the clothing of the people moving around within the inner wall, he’d have said the buildings included a palace, a barracks, and one or more temples.
Naares stopped to talk to a man standing within the gate. The man could have been Naares’s double, with his dusky complexion, broad nose, and blond hair. He wore the same armor and uniform, too, though Naares had lost his cloak and looked the worse for wear. This man was polished.
“English, Dolim, if you don’t mind,” Naares said, indicating Chigozie’s presence with a sweep of his arm.
“Welcome back,” Dolim said. “You’re timely. The seven days of mourning end tomorrow, and we are preparing to mount a counterattack on the Heron’s beasts. Your men are wanted.”
“My men are dead, save these two,” Naares said. Then he looked at Chigozie and Kort slyly. “Though I may have replacements. Wait…did you say seven days?”
Dolim nodded.
Naares grew pale. “Who has died, then?”
“Who else? Lord Turim Zomas the second. The city is now ruled by Turim Zomas the third.”
“Who still wears a dress as he is dandled on his mother’s knee. Who will be regent?”
“General Varem has taken control, at least for now.”
“That’s excellent news for the city,” Naares said. Then he turned to Chigozie. “But it’s terrible news for you.”
“I admire him, and now I am going to rob him.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
When Cathy arrived, Alzbieta Torias was weeping. The priestess knelt beside the ragged holes that comprised a perfect spiral beside the Sunrise Mound. Smashed pottery shards lay about the holes, and the snow had been trampled into mud.
Cathy stepped closer. The jars were shattered, the bodies within had been removed.
“How can the goddess permit this?” she asked Torias.
She had meant to say your goddess, but that wasn’t how the words came out.
“If the goddess stopped every attempt at desecration,” Torias said, her voice trembling, but containing a cold, hard edge, “we would have no words for blasphemy, impiety, and profanity.”
Bill hobbled up behind Cathy, arriving last. “No words for profanity would be a loss indeed, ma’am,” he said. “Some men would be rendered entirely mute. I, for one, would feel drained of half my color.”
They had received Maltres Korinn’s summons on the wall where Bill had paced, glaring at the swelling ranks of the Imperial besiegers. It was only a matter of time before their sheer numbers overwhelmed Cahokia. Unless help came, or Sarah returned having mastered the connection with the Serpent Throne she desired, Cathy knew Bill must inevitably be defeated.
How will I get him out of the city before it is sacked?
Cathy herself had been receiving a lecture from a team of Pitchers, rehearsing without powder and shot the actions necessary to load the wall’s defensive guns, lay them at a target, and fire.
“In better times, we’d be firing live rounds,” the Pitcher team’s sergeant had growled. “As it is, the Imperials will likely give us opportunity for better practice soon enough.”
Cathy wouldn’t leave Bill behind, which made their movement slow, and they arrived last. Alzbieta Torias and other priestesses appeared determined to provide the now-unearthed dead a second round of grieving; Sherem and Korinn stood glaring at the priest Zadok, who scowled back. The dark-skinned Firstborn, Gazelem Zomas, stared at the opened graves with a stunned expression on his face.
“As an initial response to this situation,” Bill suggested, “we must impose a consequence commensurate with the offense. We should hang the priest.”
“I didn’t do this!” Zadok Tarami stepped back, eyeing Bill fearfully.
“Do you disapprove the action, suh?” Bill said. “I shall happily accompany you to the pulpit to hear your denunciation of this crime.”
Tarami hesitated.
“I won’t hang a man without a trial,” Maltres said.
“But I will,” Bill shot back.
“You don’t disapprove,” Cathy said to the Metropolitan. “That’s obvious. Do you know who did it? Do you know where the bodies have been taken?”
“I assume whoever did this was influenced by my sermons.” Zadok straightened his back and looked her in the eye. “I am not sorry.”
“I regard that as a confession,” Bill said. “In peacetime, I would now turn him over to the constables and law-clerks. We do not live in a time of peace, Korinn. Let’s hang the bastard, right after we hang Voldrich.”
“I don’t intend to hang Voldrich.” Maltres Korinn looked exhausted. So did Bill, for that matter. The Cavalier looked gaunt, as well. “Not unless I have to.”
“He admitted to passing messages to the besiegers. He attempted to kidnap Sarah and hand her over the wall.”
“He attempted to kidnap a woman posing as Sarah.”
“I doubt even a Philadelphia lawyer would exculpate the viper on such a technicality.” Bill’s face twisted with rage, an anger Cathy knew was aggravated by the constant pain in both his legs. “And given that this blackguard has convinced his followers to uproot my dead soldiers from their graves, depriving them of their eternal rests and insulting their public honor, I regard the fact that he didn’t himself wield a shovel as an irrelevant detail.”
“They killed the snakes,” Alzbieta sobbed.
Cathy peered again into the pit beside which Alzbieta knelt. At the bottom, on shattered baked clay, lay a snake. The head had been neatly severed from its body.
The sight of tears streaming down the priestess’s face softened something inside Cathy. “Would you tell me the significance of the serpent?” she asked.
“It is a deliberate desecration,” Zadok snarled. “Obviously.”
“The serpent passed between worlds,” Alzbieta said, “and therefore it could carry the soul of the deceased back to Eden and eternal life.”
“Which is obvious nonsense,” Zadok said. “A snake has been killed, nothing more. A symbol has been challenged. Aside from the fact that one does not return to Eden, mankind has been barred from Eden forever. Genesis could not be more clear.”
“Is it more obvious nonsense than your Christ crucified?” Cathy asked.
“Theology makes my teeth hurt,” Bill said. “Since the Metropolitan finds the shattering of symbols to be acceptable, I suggested we respond by breaking some of the precious furniture of his church. I haven’t been inside the place, so I’m open to suggestions as to which pieces.”
“The vine over the door,” Cathy said coolly. “The altar. The astral tree.”
“Astral tree?” Bill laughed. “And I thought you were a Christian, Tarami!”
The Metropolitan blushed. “It is a representation of the cross, in the manner of our ancestors. It is the cross as cosmic pillar.”
Bill snorted.
“I will break nothing, and I will hang no one.” Maltres stabbed a finger at Zadok Tarami. “But realize that Her Majesty may, for her part, feel differently. As your friend…or at least, as a man who is reluctant to see you hanged, Tarami…I advise you to ease up on your crusade. Moderate your rhetoric. Call back your people.”
“I will not.” Tarami crossed his arms over his chest.
“I’ve heard enough. Sergeant!” Bill roared.
Chikaak presented himself, hands on a pair of pistols tucked into his belt.
“Sir William!” Korinn shouted.
“Arrest the Metropolitan!” Bill’s face was an unhealthy blend of bright red and corpse-like gray.
Chikaak grabbed the priest by his robe. Tarami didn’t resist.
Maltres Korinn swung his heavy staff of office. Chikaak didn’t see the blow coming, and Maltres caught the beastman alongside his head. Chikaak staggered back, releasing the Metropolitan.
Bill slouched sideways, leaning on one crutch and dropping the other as he drew a pi
stol—
Korinn raised his staff like a club, as if he wanted to smash in Bill’s skull—
“Stop!” Cathy stepped between the two men.
“You would defend this worm?” Bill grunted.
“No,” Cathy said.
“Nor I,” Maltres added. “But…it is a grave thing to kill a man, Bill. The thought weighs on me.”
“Is it?” Bill chuckled. “Hell’s Bells, how is it that I am even able to stand, bearing such a mountain on my back as I do? And if I can bear all the deaths I carry now, I assure you I can bear the death of Zadok Tarami, as well. I’ll carry that burden for everyone, and gladly.”
No one answered him. Cathy moved to his elbow, prepared to catch him if his knees buckled.
“The serpent is no symbol.” Alzbieta’s tears had dried up, and her voice sounded like the crinkling of a dried corn husk. “Maltres, you have every reason to know that the goddess lives.”
“And if not,” the Polite Sherem said, speaking up for the first time in the conversation, “I can remind you.”
“I need no reminder.” Maltres leaned on his staff.
“Do you not see,” Zadok Tarami said, “that whoever took these men must have respected them as heroes, too?”
“I never desecrated the grave of my hero,” Bill drawled. “Barbaric customs your folk have.”
“There are more obvious symbols to attack, if one wished to express anger with the goddess and Her priests,” Tarami explained.
“The Great Mound,” Cathy suggested. “The Sunrise Mound. The Temple of the Sun. The Serpent Throne.”
Tarami nodded. “And the graves were not merely disturbed. They have been emptied.”
“What are you suggesting?” Korinn took a deep breath and stood straight, as if he had suddenly discovered hope.
“They have been reburied elsewhere.” Tarami pointed down at the gaping sockets in the ground. “Grateful for the sacrifice of these defenders of Cahokia, someone has interred them in holy ground.”