by D. J. Butler
Was that actually a stain he saw on the throne’s seat?
A priestess of the day’s sept approached him; other priestesses approached the other ten witnesses. She held a length of burning cord in her hand, flame downward. She swung the cord slowly in circles to keep it from burning her hand.
Like a flaming serpent, and a handler who didn’t want to get bitten.
The other ten women held similar flaming cords.
She wasn’t old, but in the half-light inside the temple, Maltres wasn’t sure she was young, either. In the shifting shadows, the woman’s face was ageless.
And serpentine.
She lit his lamp and then kissed his face, once on each cheek and once on the forehead. Then she withdrew.
“O Serpent Queen of the Cosmos, O Firstwomb, O Mother of All Living,” Alzbieta intoned, lifting her lamp. “We bring you an offering of light. Hear our plea.”
The oil was perfumed, and the heady smell of the burning lamps made Maltres’s eyes sting. “Hear our plea.”
They proceeded from the Temple of the Sun. Alzbieta walked first, with Maltres to one side and behind her, and Sherem to the other side. Behind the two men came two short files of former bearers.
Maltres had published his proclamation, signed by seven Notaries. The faces he saw on the lower reaches of the Great Mound, the eyes that stared at him all along the avenues as he walked to the Sunrise Mound, were informed eyes and knowing faces. Some looked angry—followers of Zadok Tarami? Others, many more, looked apprehensive, confused, or in pain.
But they knew what he was doing.
Maltres chased the thoughts from his mind. Alzbieta was singing an old modal tune, something somber and priestly that he didn’t know. His own German and English were better than his Ophidian. He couldn’t make out all the words, so he hummed, creating a supporting drone under the priestess’s harmonies.
They arrived at the Sunrise Mound. Alzbieta knelt in muddy snow and placed her lamp on the ground in front of her. Then she pressed her forehead into the snow. The rest of the procession did the same.
“O Mother!” This time her voice was louder. She wasn’t performing, exactly, but if the crowd standing about the Sunrise Mound was to be included in the liturgy, they would need to hear the words. “We were witnesses to your choice: three and eight, and the one who stood apart!”
Calvin? No, she meant the Podebradan Yedera. Maltres realized that Yedera stood at the edge of the mound now, watching quietly. Why include the Unborn Daughter? Was it to make the number of witnesses come to twelve? But of course, whatever Yedera had seen, Calvin had seen as well, in which case there were thirteen witnesses.
Perhaps Calvin didn’t count if he wasn’t named.
“We are witnesses now to our own grave sin!”
Was she going to name Zadok Tarami and the graverobbers?
“We sin!” the other witnesses cried, and Maltres echoed them.
Alzbieta glossed over the details of the sin. “We are mortal and fall short, O Mother of Life! We ask thee to forgive us our failures, to give us life and health, to rescue us from our oppressor!”
“Rescue us!” Maltres and the others echoed in chorus.
“Thou art more precious than rubies: and all the things we can desire are not to be compared unto thee. Length of days is in thy right hand; and in thy left hand riches and honor. We beg thee to open thy hands, O Mother, and receive the men we laid up in thy womb unto thee!”
“Open thy hands!” Maltres was no scriptorian, but he recognized that Alzbieta had built her plea on one of the Psalms. Or a passage from Proverbs, perhaps.
“Thy ways are ways of pleasantness,” Alzbieta continued, “and all thy paths are peace. Thou art a tree of life to them that lay hold upon thee: and happy is every one that retaineth thee. Lay hold upon us as we lay hold upon thee, O goddess, and retain us as we seek to retain thee, now and forever, amen!”
“Amen!”
The crowd murmured along with the witnesses. Alzbieta pressed her forehead to the ground, and the witnesses followed. First one or two, then in the dozens, and then most of the crowd followed.
Maltres felt his heart beat in his chest. Would the goddess hear?
If She heard, She gave no sign. There was no angel choir, no perfume of Eden. Nothing happened, that Maltres could see.
“And forgive me, O Great Lady of the Garden,” Alzbieta intoned, “for my deceitful and withholding spirit, for my failures with thy Beloved and her companions!”
Saving her personal guilt for last? And what exactly had Alzbieta done that troubled her so?
But still, no response.
Would the goddess only respond if Sarah were present? Was that her role, the attraction of the goddess’s attention or presence? Maltres missed Sarah with a sudden painful twinge in his heart.
Or was it possible that the goddess hadn’t responded on the solstice, either? Was it possible that Sarah herself had created the manifestations Maltres had seen?
Was it possible there was no goddess?
Maltres chased away the thought.
And if the goddess was indeed a demon, as Zadok Tarami preached?
Maltres took a deep breath to steady the sudden trembling of his hands. He knew what he had seen and felt, and he would bear witness of it still. And if Sarah was such as mighty sorceress that she had created the illusion of Eden and touched the heart of every person in Cahokia and caused the Treewall to sprout, then he longed for her return in her own right.
And if the goddess was a demon, then he hoped She was a demon who could save his city.
Maltres stayed kneeling in the mud a long time. When he finally raised his face, the crowd had gone. Sherem sat back in the mud, knees up and arms crossed over his knees. Alzbieta still lay on her face, softly weeping.
* * *
Two days after Sister Serafina Tate cut away the dead flesh from his side as Calvin read out of the Psalms, Olanthes Kuta awoke and asked for water. Polly Calhoun and Red Charlie gave him water and a thin beef broth, and Cal finally took Sister Serafina back down the mountain.
She had spent the entire two days at Olanthes’s side, muttering prayers and monitoring his progress. Cal’s grandpa had spent much of that time with her. At first Cal thought it was because he was waiting for the messenger to awaken, so Iron Andy could get more information out of the man. But when Olanthes woke up, the Elector made no hurry to speak with him.
He concluded that his grandfather was passing time with Serafina.
As Cal and the Circulator rode the small horses down the ridge, he ventured a query. “Which steps was Dancin’ Andy Calhoun most famous for, exactly?”
“He’s a fine buck dancer, but I most liked to see him dance flat foot,” Sister Serafina said. “I ne’er heard as he was a clogger, but I wouldn’t put it past him. He had a way with the ladies, and dancin’ was key to his mystery. Ladies love a man as can dance. You remember that, young Calvin.” She cackled.
“You knew him when he was a young man, then?”
“Knew him? Hell, iffen the war wouldn’t a called us in opposite directions, I’d a been your grandmama.”
And then she would say no more, but sank into the cocoon of blankets with the pot of embers at their center that kept her warm.
After depositing the Circulator at her convent, Cal rode to another address the Elector had given him. He had a sealed letter and a name. When he arrived at the building, he found it to be in an elegant neighborhood several streets away from the river, where the buildings were stone houses two stories tall, with hitching posts standing in front of each house. The name on a brass plate screwed into a heavy black-painted door above a brass knocker read:
LOGAN HUBER, ESQ.
Cal hitched his beasts. Then he knocked and stepped back to show respect. He knew that ESQ. meant esquire, which was a lawyer. Though Iron Andy hadn’t explained the errand he was sending Cal on, Cal now realized it was something serious.
The man who answered the door was
nearly seven feet tall and thin as a stick bug. He wore a waistcoat and trousers both of somber gray, and both polished by wear to a high shine. His face drooped like a tear, from a high, pointed, hairless forehead, down to trembling jowls.
“You ain’t got an appointment,” the man in gray said.
“No, I ain’t,” Cal admitted. “But I’ve got a letter for you, from the Elector Calhoun.” He handed over the folded sheet sealed with a blob of wax.
The man in gray stared at the name written under the blob and frowned. “It ain’t for me.”
“Brown!” bellowed a voice from within the building. “What is it?”
“A messenger!” Brown looked back at Calvin and sniffed. “From Calhoun!”
“Take the message and give the man a gratuity!”
“I’s told I’d have to bring back a response,” Cal said.
Brown sniffed again, looked down a long nose whose tear shape matched the shape of the face around it, and shut the door.
Cal looked around the Nashville street. Snowflakes hung in the hair, but not enough to conceal him. A cartload of hides rolled past. Women and men both walked up and down the uncobbled road. He wanted to smash the door open with his tomahawk, but he’d be seen.
“Jerusalem,” he muttered. “Why is everythin’ always so difficult?”
He tried the doorknob, and it turned. Shaking the snow off his shoulders, Cal screwed his best smile into place and walked in.
A long hallway with a hardwood floor ran straight back through the building. Cal shook his feet to throw snow off onto the rag rug that lay inside the door, then marched ahead. “Squire Huber?” he called out.
The man named Brown reappeared in the hallway, his mouth open in an O of shock and disapproval. “Now look here, I took your message!”
“You did,” Cal agreed. “Only I reckon you thought to keep the gratuity to yourself.”
He grabbed Brown by the front of his waistcoat and held him tight. He didn’t want to hurt the man, but he didn’t want him to go for a hidden knife or a gun over the mantel, either. “Squire Huber!”
“He isn’t a squire.” Brown squirmed and looked wretched. “What do you think this is, Camelot?”
“Mebbe.” Cal dragged the man in gray into a wide room—with several elegant sofas for sitting and a tall bookshelf full of tall books whose spines bore mysterious titles like The Philadelphia Reporter and The Imperial Tribunal Gazette—and then back again into the hall. “I mean, I thought esquire meant a lawyer. On the other hand, those look like collections of news-papers. I guess I can’t say I know jest exactly what kind of place I’m in. But I aim to talk to your Squire Huber. Or Mr. Huber, as the case may be.”
“Mister!” bellowed the third voice.
It came from above and behind. Cal released Brown, stepped back into the hallway and looked up. He saw a man in a red wool waistcoat leaning on a dark wooden railing and looking down at him. The man was thick without looking fat, and had a face that was blocky without appearing slow. He projected strength, and the abundant whiskers curling down from his ears and halfway along his jaws made him look vaguely animal. In thick fingers he held a smoldering cigar.
“You don’t have to call me mister,” Cal said. “Jest Calvin will do.”
The blocky man snorted. “I meant you can call me Mr. Huber, and Mr. Huber will certainly do until we get better acquainted. Do you and I have business, Calvin?” He stuck the cigar into the corner of his mouth and chewed on it. His accent was not Appalachee, but might be Pennslander.
“I don’t rightly know,” Cal admitted. “I come bearin’ a message from my grandpa. Your feller Brown here took the message, but he also turned me away, and seein’ as my grandpa told me I’d have to wait for a response from you, I jest couldn’t accept that.”
“I admire determination in a man,” Huber said. “Have you considered a career as a process server?”
Cal had a vague idea that Huber was referring to some sort of officer of the court, like a sheriff or a constable. “No,” he admitted. “I kinda got recruited to be a sticks and stones man, once.”
Huber laughed, a sound like the bark of an angry dog. “Give me the message, Brown. Let’s not make the man wait.”
The man in gray snorted his disapproval, then took Cal’s letter from a basket Cal hadn’t noticed, sitting on a shelf just inside the door. He trooped around a corner of the hallway, reappearing moments later beside Huber. The lawyer popped open the Elector’s plain seal and his eyes fairly shot across the page. When he finished, he glared down at Calvin.
“If you had told me your name was Calhoun,” Huber said, “we could have saved some time.”
Cal shrugged. “Up in the hills, Calhoun’s a name as’ll carry a lot of weight. Down here in Free Imperial Nashville, it ain’t everybody who knows us.”
“Well, I know you. The Elector’s been a client for years. Brown, get the coach.”
“I brung horses,” Cal said.
“Good, we’ll need them to get up that pile of rock your grandfather calls his home.” Huber called his words over his shoulder as he rattled down the stairs, collected a coat from a rack in the corner of the hallways, and pulled a tall beaver-skin hat down over his ears. “But Andrew Calhoun is an important man, and as far as it’s in my power, I’m going to call on him in style.”
“I understood you’d jest send back some kinda paper with me,” Cal said. “Iffen I bring back an actual lawyer instead of a lawyer’s letter, I might could disappoint the old man.”
“Yes, the Elector asks me to prepare a legal document. But what he wants is a document that needs to be witnessed and notarized, and I don’t think he realizes that. If I send you up the hill with the form he thinks he needs, either he’ll sign a piece of paper that is legally void, or he’ll send you back down the hill tomorrow to try again. Or worst of all, what he wants to accomplish might fail. Instead, I’ll come up with you now, we’ll get the document signed by all the witnesses and notarized by me, as a validly licensed notary public under the Notaries and Public Clerks Law of 1807.”
Brown had shrugged into his own coat, the thickness of which doubled the man in size, and was heading for a side exit. “Anything else I should bring, Mr. Huber?”
“Lots of extra blankets, brandy, some cold meat and bread.” The lawyer chuckled. “You may be sitting in the coach alone for the night. Iron Andy Calhoun doesn’t let just anyone up on his mountain. And you’re not of the Craft, are you, Brown?”
The doorman sniffed. “I have not been recommended, sir.” He exited.
Huber shook his head. “Hard to imagine why.”
“This is impressive client service, I reckon,” Cal said. “Only it seems an awful lot of ballyhoo. What was it my grandpa wanted?”
“Oh, you don’t know?” The lawyer laughed out loud. “Well, son, the Elector must like you, because he wants you to have his proxy.”
Proxy was a word Cal knew in various contexts. New Light preachers sometimes used it to talk about Christ and the Atonement, and Cal knew there were proxy weddings, which meant that one of the wedding parties wasn’t present, so instead a man might get married to his betrothed’s sister, or her hairbrush. He wasn’t quite sure what the word might mean in this context.
He must be staring blankly, because Huber clapped him on the arm. “He’s going to send you to the Electoral Assembly, Calvin. You get to go vote.”
“Jerusalem,” Cal managed to say. He thought of Bayard Prideux’s letter. Bringing it home, he had imagined Iron Andy Calhoun, war hero and Elector, standing in the Electoral Assembly and waving that letter, demanding justice.
What if it has to be me, instead? Am I up to that?
Brown sat in the front of the coach and drove, Logan Huber rode inside the coach under an enormous bearskin cloak, and Cal rode alongside. The clouds had cleared and the sky was a brilliant liquid blue that reminded Cal of Sarah’s natural eye. The white snow blanketing the hills was closer to the color of her unnatural eye. Cal
found himself thinking of her face generally, and wondering how Sarah was faring in Cahokia.
“You rustle cattle, Calvin?” the lawyer asked as the coach pulled out of Nashville.
“You see a herd of cows out in front of me, marked with another man’s brand?” Cal shot back. He was a little put out that he was being forced to return to the Elector empty-handed. “Or you jest imagine that I might be a rustler, seein’ as my name is Calhoun?”
“My name is Pennslander German,” Huber said. “But I’ve lived in Nashville nigh on twenty years now, and Andrew Calhoun has been my client that entire time.”
“You sayin’ you got us hill people figured out?”
The lawyer’s eyes twinkled and he adopted an Appalachee twang. “I’m a-sayin’ I’m an old friend of the family, a man you can trust, and I’m just tryin’ to make small talk.”
Cal laughed in spite of himself. “No, sir. If you was a-sayin’ anythin’, that’d make it somethin’ you intended to do in the future, and instead it’s a thing you already done in the past.”
“Are you a poet, Calvin?”
“Only iffen my grandpa asks me to be. Generally, I reckon the occasional reading out of the Bible or a bit of news-paper is enough literary work for me. But seein’ as you lived here so long, I reckon you know how it is. I live on the mountain, and precious few folks as live on the mountain can afford to do jest one thing. I hunt, I trade, I grow tobacco. Recently I took up what you might call…confidential errandin’, I suppose, for the Elector.”
“Like exercising his proxy.”
“No, that’d be new. I took his…daughter on a journey to the Ohio.”
“Your aunt.”
“Yeah.” Cal ached. “My aunt.”
“If he sent you across the dark and bloody ground of old Kentuck, the Elector must trust you.”