by D. J. Butler
In any case, Etienne’s men had not seen any gendarmes watching the Don’s family home. Nevertheless, it was too obvious a place to choose as a retreat. Instead, Etienne and his men and the Don himself stayed in a discreet apartment in a narrow alley not far from the opera house. The Don said nothing to the effect, but it was the sort of apartment where a wealthy man might meet his mistress.
“Who are they?” Etienne asked. “Who has left?”
“It is the chevalier.” Don Sandoval looked up from poring over an account ledger. His nephew had brought the book to him to allow the Don to learn what had happened in his enterprises during his period of confinement. “He has heard of my release, and now he flees in terror.” The old man’s bold words conflicted comically with his haggard and bone-thin appearance.
“Doubtless,” Etienne said.
“No,” Bondí said. “But you are closer than you might think. His Egyptians.”
“The mamelukes,” Etienne said.
Don Sandoval blinked.
Bondí nodded. “They have taken a Memphite barge northward, and they’ve taken the mambo with them.”
“Are you certain?” Etienne asked. “For weeks, I believed the same men were standing guard around my casino, and that turned out not to be true.”
Bondí nodded again. “When I learned they had booked passage, I waited to watch them board with my own eyes.”
“Good.” Though eyes could be deceived. “Perhaps they take the girl along with them to try to fetch their money again. Perhaps they think she will be an effective charm against fire.”
Bondí shook his head. “The girl wore her finery, boss. She carried a broom, and she had a snake in a basket.”
Don Sandoval scratched the tip of his nose with an ink-stained finger, leaving a black smudge. “I do not understand the meaning of this.”
“It’s a wedding, Don Sandoval,” Etienne said. “They’re taking the girl somewhere to be married.”
“I assume you are proposing to command this verloren hoop?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Luman stood beside Sarah at the foot of Wisdom’s Bluff. He’d never been here before, and the sheer size of the hill surprised him. Snow fell and blanketed the hill and its trees, but through the mantle of white Luman could still see the obvious line of a road that climbed the mountain.
The Verge Caníbal rode at anchor below the bluff, where the limpid waters of the Ohio poured into the muddy flow of the Mississippi. The pirate lieutenant Josep had cheerfully praised the clear lines of sight such a position would give him for his cannons, both downriver as well as up in two directions.
The navigator-gramarist Piet had gone below to sleep. He looked exhausted from the effort of bringing the ship to this point. Sarah, who looked even more exhausted, had gone ashore.
Montse, the smuggler captain, had come ashore with Sarah and Luman.
Luman carried two loaded pistols (a weapon with which he rarely fought, and used principally for magical purposes) and a loaded long rifle (a weapon he’d used as a boy to hunt wild hogs). He had no confidence in his ability to hit a target in any kind of motion at all, but he also felt exposed and vulnerable. He kept his right hand near the rifle’s trigger, ready to raise the weapon and quickly fire.
Sarah was sketching something in the snow at her feet with the tip of her staff. The expression on her face was one of concentration and distraction at the same time.
“Ten circles,” Luman said. “Cabalistic lore?”
Sarah’s head yanked up sharply. “You’re talking about Jewish magic?”
Luman nodded. “The cabala are the received things, in Hebrew. They’re passed down in a tradition, as the brauchers and the Memphites do, and everyone else, really. Cabalists are workers in that tradition, and if I’m not mistaken, they know a tree of life shaped much like the array of circles you’ve drawn there.”
Sarah’s eyes bugged open and she glared at Luman’s face. “You said tree of life.”
“Perhaps I’m remembering it wrong. I’m not a member of the tradition.” Or of any tradition, you fraud. Luman’s heart ached. “And there’s another name for it: the emanations. I think the Hebrew word is ‘sefirot.’”
Sarah looked up at the top of Wisdom’s Bluff. What was she seeing through that unnatural eye? “Did you know that the Ophidians build their libraries in just such a shape? And that they call them palaces of life?”
“I didn’t know either of those things.” Luman inclined his head respectfully. “I’m from Haudenosaunee territory, Your Majesty. Though I’ve wandered in this life, it’s mostly been east and south.”
“Once, a…” Sarah started, but then looked thoughtful. “I was about to say a wise man, but that isn’t right. It isn’t that Jacob Hop is wise, it’s more that he sometimes seems a borderline idiot, maybe on account of his having been deaf and dumb most of his life. Only, then once in a while he says the most insightful things.”
“He sounds like a useful friend to have,” Montse said. The pirate captain wore a long wool coat, and of the three of them seemed to be suffering the cold the worst. Despite burrowing deep into the wool, she shivered and her teeth rattled.
“He is,” Sarah agreed. “And he once pointed out that the map of a palace of life makes a sort of tree.” With the tip of her staff, she connected the circles with a central line and then with three branches on either side of it.
“Not just any sort of tree,” Luman said, “but a seven-branched tree of life, as the Serpent Throne is a seven-branched tree on which the Mother of All Living sits. And there is a seven-branched tree echoing the throne in the apse of the Basilica.”
“There is?” Sarah looked surprised.
Luman nodded. “As there are seven planets: the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.”
Sarah granted. “If you’re counting the moon as a planet, you’re talking astrology.”
“Say rather cosmology,” Luman said. “And all magic is cosmology. How can you produce effects in the world, if you don’t know the world’s structure and its laws? A planet is a ‘wanderer’ in Greek, a visible object in the sky that changes its position against the background of the stars.”
Sarah nodded. “Arcturus is always in Boötes. But Mars moves.”
“I am also reminded of the creation in Genesis.”
Sarah stared at her own drawing, and then shook her head. “How?”
“Your ten circles make a tree with seven branches. In the first chapter of Genesis, God makes ten creative utterances, and the result is seven days of creation. What makes you draw this now?” Luman asked. “Do you think there’s a connection with what you’ve come to learn?”
Sarah sighed. With the dark sleep circles under her eyes, she looked like a much older woman. “I dunno, wizard. I’d like there to be, I guess. I’d like to see more and more connections, and fewer and fewer strange surprises. I reckon if that started about now, I might actually understand the world before I die. Just for once, I’d really like someone else to know the answers, and to be happy to tell them to me.”
Luman examined the sefirotic tree. “I must repeat that this is not my tradition. Neither what the Jews hand down, nor what the Firstborn know. But if I were to read this tree as an initiatic map…”
“There it is,” Sarah said. “Read the map and tell me what you think it’s saying.”
Luman reflected. “There are surprising commonalities across initiatic traditions. One of them is the number three, especially manifesting as three worlds. Or, in old Solomon’s temple, three chambers.”
“Lack of imagination?” Sarah asked.
Luman chuckled, and then shrugged. “Perhaps they share sources. Perhaps they commonly derive from the structure of the universe. I haven’t read it, but Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy are three precisely because he believes that there are three worlds. I have heard it whispered that the book itself, for one who reads with open eyes, constitutes an initiatory path through the three
worlds, leading the reader to become the philosopher’s stone.”
“Did you mean possess the stone?” Montse asked.
“If you prefer.” Luman shrugged. “There many things that are…Hebraic about the Firstborn ways. Shared scriptures, a temple that looks like Solomon’s might have looked, shared deities. In Hebrew heaven is ‘shamayim,’ which is a grammatical dual. Literally, it means ‘the two heavens.’ For Jacob there were earth and two heavens above it, reached by a ladder, just as apparently there were for Henry Cornelius Agrippa. Looking at what you’re showing me now, I’d have to guess that for old Onandagos as well, a threefold world would not be surprising.”
Sarah whistled. “Luman Walters, I knew there was something I liked about you.”
“You wish to ascend the throne,” Luman continued. “The throne is a tree. This map is a tree.”
“Every library in Cahokia is a map,” Sarah said.
“Apparently.” Luman reflected on the map. “You likely see three levels here. You start at the base of the tree and wish to climb. There are three levels you will ascend.”
Sarah nodded. “Anything else?”
“Three levels and three worlds should mean three guides,” Luman said. “Moses, Elijah, and the Lord.”
“You mean like the Mount of Transfiguration?”
“Or Malachi.”
“Guides. You said that before once,” Sarah said. “Why do I need guides?”
Luman pointed with the butt of his rifle. “If this is a map, it shows not only three levels, but alternate roads. More than one road implies that you can make a misstep. Fall into the abyss, enter the open mouth of hell, get lost in mists of darkness, and so on. Or maybe the three lines forward tell of three guides, while the three horizontal levels speak of three worlds.”
“Three guides.”
“Also, three gates. A passage to enter each new world. Perils along the road. Secret teachings to be delivered by the guides. Commitments. Judgments.”
“This feels like an awful lot to do, just to be able to sit on the throne.” Sarah cracked a bitter grin.
Luman took a step back. “For you to sit on a throne, you have to become the kind of being that sits a throne. And a heavenly throne, at that. This road is no formality, but a process of changing the person you are in order to become…a better person. A more powerful person, a more permanent person.” He caught a sob in the back of his throat and wrangled it into a cough, turned his head away to hide the mist in his eyes. “A road such as the one I see mapped here also reveals the structure of the cosmos and gives those who walk it models for their behavior in everyday life.”
Sarah looked down at the sefirotic tree. “You’re awfully ambitious for those ten little circles.”
Luman shrugged. “I could be wrong.”
“I think you told me more in ten minutes than my priestess cousin told me in ten weeks. And candidly, maybe more than she knows.” Sarah looked up the bluff. “How do you feel about a little walk, Luman?”
* * *
The leaves of the trees on Wisdom’s Bluff had been red and gold when Sarah had seen them. Now they had fallen and either had blown away or else lay clumped under the piles of snow carpeting the hill.
Other than the leaves on her tree. The tree that had sprouted from the acorn Sarah had carried in her eye socket the first fifteen years of her life, the tree that had delivered to her the Cahokian regalia, the tree that in some sense was her father. That tree still looked like an invincible spring oak sprouting from the eye of the Serpent Mound, its leaves bright green and free of snow, the ground beneath and around it in a broad ring also clear.
“I didn’t expect this,” Luman Walters said.
Montse saw the green blaze of the tree and knelt, crossing herself in the snow. Sarah knelt beside her and Luman followed. They rested a moment, looking at the tree.
Through her Eye of Eve, Sarah also saw the bright blue-white presence of the Serpent lying within the mound. Now it seemed familiar to her; something in its color or in the pitch at which it hummed remind her of the goddess, something of the smell of the hill reminded her of Eden.
Some of the cloak of fatigue she bore, heavy on her neck and shoulders, fell away. She breathed in deeply, and then exhaled.
“Luman,” she said. “I would like to contact my father.”
Luman nodded.
“You’re not telling me that that’s necromancy.”
“You don’t need me along to say stupid and obvious things to you, Your Majesty.”
“Do you know any spells for speaking with the dead?”
Luman shook his head. “I think I could doctor one up. Or I could put together a charm that would let you speak with your father in dream.”
Sarah put a restraining hand on the magician’s forearm. “Don’t trouble yourself with it, Luman. My brother can help, I believe.” She looked at each of her companions in turn. “Will you two defend me while I make the attempt?”
They both nodded.
Rising, they walked to the tree. Sarah knelt in the tall, soft grass growing within the Serpent’s eye, over the roots of her father-tree. The earth was warm. She laid the Elector’s staff beside her and took the Orb of Etyles into her hands.
Luman Walters laid a pistol in the grass to either side of her. Then he stepped back and stood on the ridge of the Serpent’s eye. He held the rifle in his left hand, butt on the earth, as if it were a staff. He reached his right hand within his long, many-pocketed coat, reciting something Sarah didn’t know. Greek?
Montserrat Ferrer i Quintana stood beside Luman, naked saber in one hand and an elegant pistol in the other.
A sudden urge gripped Sarah to check in with Maltres Korinn, but she set that aside for the moment. With her Eye of Eve, she gazed a long time at the tree, looking for the spirit of her father.
She saw the tree, which was the right color, but no sign of the man.
“Father?” she murmured.
No answer.
Nathaniel would help her.
Reaching into the orb, she drew energy from the Mississippi ley and channeled it into her eye. “Fratrem quaeso.”
Her vision raced along the Ohio River’s ley, past keelboats and Memphite barges. It abandoned the river for fainter leys on footpaths over the mountains, then raced along another large river Sarah didn’t immediately identify—
and found Nathaniel.
He sat tied in a wooden chair. The chair was nailed to the floor.
The floor belonged to the cabin of a ship. Late afternoon light shone in through glass windows. Sitting in another chair, also tied, was Jacob Hop.
Both Jake and Nathaniel slumped forward, heads lolling sideways.
Jake was covered in blood. Dead?
Sarah’s heart pounded. She took deep breaths to still her panic, knowing that Luman and Montse were staring at her.
“Nathaniel,” she whispered. “Nathaniel.”
He stirred and murmured without words.
“Nathaniel!”
His head jerked up and he stared about with wild eyes. The whites of his eyes were red and the skin around them was puffy from weeping.
Jake must be dead.
“Sarah?” Nathaniel asked.
“I need your help,” she said.
He laughed, but his laughter collapsed into a sob. “Sarah,” he said, “I can’t help anyone. I’m tied here.”
“I’ll untie you,” Sarah said. “I’ll help you escape.” She wasn’t sure she really had the ability to do that—just maintaining a visual and auditory link with her brother felt burdensome, never mind the effort it would require to sink a ship at that distance. “But I need you to connect me with our father.”
“Our father?” Nathaniel frowned. “But what…how…?” Realization dawned on his face. “He’s dead.”
“He’s dead,” Sarah agreed. “But I think he has things he wants to tell me.”
“Maybe I can help,” Nathaniel said. “If you can untie me.”
&n
bsp; “Luman!” Sarah called. Her eyes were entirely absorbed in her vision of Nathaniel aboard ship, somewhere in the east, so she couldn’t see Luman. She knew he was there, though, and she held out her hands. “You have a knife. Can I borrow—”
Before she could finish her request, the hilt of a knife was pressed into her hands.
“Thank you,” she murmured.
“I haven’t done anything yet,” Nathaniel murmured.
“Fratrem libero,” Sarah murmured. “Funem seco.”
She ran Luman’s blade along her wrists, miming cutting bonds away from her arms while at the same time projecting her will along the network of leys to where her brother was captured. She attacked the ropes at his wrists.
They slid off.
She repeated her words and mimed the same actions at her ankles. The last ropes holding Nathaniel in place dropped to the floor.
Nathaniel stood. Sarah didn’t see where it had come from, but suddenly there was a drum over his shoulder, primitive and simple-looking, though elegant. “Our father is near you?”
“I’m not sure quite what the concepts near and far mean in this manner of thinking,” Sarah said. “But I’m kneeling beneath a tree he made of his own blood and soul, so I think the answer is probably yes.”
“Can you wake our sister?” Nathaniel asked. “I think she’s on the same ship with me, and I believe she’s been drugged into unconsciousness. You should be able to see her now.”
“I’ll do that immediately,” Sarah said.
“I’ll get our father and bring him to you,” Nathaniel said. “And Sarah?”
“Yes?”
“Jacob Hop said there was something he had to tell you. Just before he died.”
The words yanked at Sarah’s heart. “Did he say what it was about?”
Nathaniel shook his head. “The Tarocks, maybe?”
That was unexpected. “I’ll see you soon,” Sarah said. “Sororem quaeso.”
This time her Eye of Eve found its object almost immediately, in a room that had to be adjacent to Nathaniel’s. She looked like their sibling, with pale skin and dark hair, except that where Sarah’s was still growing out from having been shaved a couple of months earlier, her sister’s was long and extravagantly curly.