by D. J. Butler
No, a drinking horn, like something they’d pass around the banquet hall in Chicago.
“The Drunkard,” she said. “The Highway, the Drunkard, the Bird.”
Luman said nothing. His expression was both astonished and pleased.
“Or birds, rather,” Sarah said. “But I reckon that’s okay, since the highway don’t look too much like the card, either.”
She heard a faint burbling sound. Looking, she saw a trickle of water emerging from a spring. It flowed from the ground between the leftward and rightward paths, crossed the track, and then disappeared into the pine forest. A pair of antelope stood drinking from the water; as Sarah looked at them, they noticed her and bounded away into the forest.
“Go to hell,” the man leaning against the barrel said. “I’m not drunk, I’m wounded.”
“There’s not a wounded man in the deck, is there?” Sarah asked Luman.
He shook his head.
“What wounded you, then?” Sarah asked the man on the ground.
“The monsters in the forest,” he said.
“What monsters?”
“Haven’t you read?” he pressed. “Cherubim and a flaming sword.”
“To keep me out of Eden.” A shiver ran down Sarah’s spine. “And did you encounter the cherubim and the flaming sword down one of these paths, then?” She looked down both; within a few paces, each path twisted and threw itself out of her sight.
“I did.”
“Which one?” she asked.
He glared at her with a sour eye. “It hardly matters.”
She felt it did matter, immensely. “Will you try to stop me if I walk down one of these paths? Or both?”
“Do I look like cherubim and a flaming sword?”
“No.” Sarah stood and considered. “Luman,” she said. “What can you tell me about the Drunkard in the Tarock?”
Luman answered immediately. “The picture looks like him. Complete with barrel and horn.”
“Anything else you can tell me about that card?”
“There’s another object in the image,” Luman said. “It looks metallic, copper. Maybe it’s a coin or a nugget.”
The Drunkard snorted.
Sarah frowned. Luman seemed to be right, and the path she was walking—into the spiritual space inside the Temple of the Sun—was in some way marked by Franklin’s Tarock. Surely, then, the Drunkard was here for a reason. “If you won’t try to impede my progress,” she said to the man leaning against the barrel, “are you here to help me? Will you tell me which path to take?”
“Why should I help you?” The Drunkard sneered.
Sarah nearly took her bag off her shoulder to batter him with it, out of sheer irritation.
Only then she noticed his choice of words. The Drunkard hadn’t said no, he’d asked a question. Why should he help her, indeed?
“I could command you,” she said.
“If you are walking this path, then you are not yet queen.” He smiled, a hint of sorrow in his eyes. “And you may never become queen.”
“I bear my father’s sevenfold crown!” she snapped. “I could command you, queen or not!”
“Your father’s crown.” The Drunkard nodded. “Once, the crown belonged to Onandagos himself. But on me, even the mighty Onandagos would have no hold. Not on me, and in here, not on anyone.”
In her heart, Sarah knew he was telling the truth. Whatever he was, the Drunkard wasn’t a man. Wasn’t a person, not in the ordinary sense of that word.
If I am walking the Onandagos Road, am I Onandagos?
“Would you trade with me?” she asked. “Can I give you something?”
“What could you possibly give me?”
Her heart sank. “Would you please help me?” Sarah forced her voice to sound as humble and polite as she could. It cracked with the effort.
The Drunkard looked at her and blinked.
Sarah’s chest felt tight and her eyes stung as if she were about to cry, and then she realized she had almost missed it.
What could you possibly give to me?
Again, the Drunkard hadn’t said no.
He had asked a question.
What could she possibly give to him?
Slowly, Sarah knelt beside the drunk man. His eyes met hers. They were deeply familiar, though she couldn’t place them. She took the horn in both hands.
It was empty, of course. Lying as it had on his belly, any liquid in it would have spilled out immediately.
What she could give the Drunkard was wine.
“I have no wine,” she murmured.
The Drunkard said nothing.
“I also have no wine,” Luman said.
Sarah stood and looked around her. The forest was dark, and again she heard the echo of hooting and snorting in the trees. Cherubim and a flaming sword, the Drunkard had said. Was she meant now to enter the forest, braving the monsters that lurked therein to find wine for the Drunkard?
Was she meant to leave the path and return, bringing wine? Sarah looked back the way she’d come. If she did leave, would she be allowed to return? And if she did return, could she bring such a mundane object as a bottle of wine with her?
She doubted it.
She sighed.
She was the Beloved. She was supposed to be here, on this path, making this climb to the Serpent Throne and Unfallen Eden. If this was a riddle, it was a riddle she was meant to solve.
She was the Beloved.
There was water.
Sarah knelt beside the spring. This felt like a sacramental act, so she moved slowly. She knelt in a posture that was as dignified as she could manage, and pressed her knees into pine needles and mud.
She filled the horn and stood.
Looking down into the horn, she saw sparkling, clear water.
She needed something more. She needed an incantation.
“What have I to do with thee?” she asked. The words were from the Gospel of John, and they came out of her almost automatically. “Mine hour is not yet come.”
Energy flowed through her, but it didn’t come from her, and it didn’t come with the burning feeling of a ley’s power. Instead, the mana seemed to flow from the trees all around her and from the path, and it flowed into the horn.
The spring water changed color and became dark. The sharp, fruity smell of wine filled Sarah’s nostrils.
She turned and knelt again, offering the horn to the Drunkard. He took it and drank, and then he held it out to her.
Sarah took the horn and sipped from it. As she drank, the Drunkard’s face and disheveled traveling clothing seemed to fall away like a fog whipped off by the wind. The person Sarah saw was someone else entirely.
She saw her father.
But then she swallowed, and the Drunkard returned.
He stood, all the languor and torpor gone instantly from his body, and smiled at Sarah.
“Tell me your name,” he said.
“Sarah.”
The Drunkard nodded. “I have two things to give you, Sarah. The first is a warning.”
Sarah’s limbs trembled. “I’m listening.”
Luman Walters was also listening. His face shone with excitement and he leaned in close.
He held the Drunkard’s horn in his hands. Had Sarah handed it to him without meaning to?
Had he drunk from it?
“One road leads to great danger, Sarah,” the Drunkard said. “One road leads to Eden.”
Sarah listened in silence for a moment longer, thinking the Drunkard had more to say, but he had finished. She refrained from cursing. “That’s the warning?”
The Drunkard nodded.
“And what’s the other thing you have for me?”
The Drunkard stooped and picked up the barrel against which he had been leaning. In his hands it suddenly seemed to be a small cask, almost a little basket, like a music box. When he opened it, Sarah saw a flash of copper.
Inside lay a metal disk like a coin. The Drunkard pressed it into Sarah’s hands. “Here is a
token for your journey.”
Sarah looked down at the token. It was smooth around the edges, like an old-fashioned stamped coin, before they became milled to prevent shaving. On one side was a horse’s head and on the other a circle. The sun, maybe?
She looked up from her hand to ask the Drunkard, but he was gone.
“Did you see him leave?” she asked Luman.
Walters shook his head. “I…no, Your Majesty. I’m sorry.”
Sarah snorted. “Don’t be sorry. Luman Walters, I think you’ve figured this trail out. Or part of it, at least. Does this token mean anything to you?”
She rotated it, showing him both the obverse and the reverse sides. He shook his head.
“At least you didn’t say you’re sorry this time.” Sarah grinned at the wizard. “What do you make of his warning?”
“There are two paths,” Luman said. “One leads to danger, and the other leads to Eden. You have to pick the correct path.”
Sarah tucked the copper token into her shoulderbag. “Hmm.” She stepped forward and into the center of the fork, looking at length down the right and then down the left. “A dove and a raven. Like the Basilica and the Temple of the Sun.”
“Are you being asked to choose between those two?” Luman suggested.
“Surely, if that’s the choice, then it’s an easy one. I have to choose the Temple of the Sun, as it’s the building I’m standing inside.”
“Hmm.” Luman rubbed his chin.
“You’re thinking that’s the obvious choice, and therefore the wrong one.” Sarah blew air past her teeth. “So am I, Luman.”
“But choosing the dove seems just as wrong, doesn’t it? Could you really come here into the goddess’s temple and choose the chapel instead?”
“What was it you called it? Mystery-logic? Choosing the left hand, which appears to be the wrong answer, but is in fact the right answer for some non-obvious reason?”
“Yes,” Luman agreed. “Only I’d feel much more comfortable if I could see what the non-obvious reason was. I really do not relish the thought of you and me being attacked by cherubim with a flaming sword.”
“You and me?” she challenged him. “I left you asleep at the door, Luman.”
“Are you sure about that?” His smile was gentle. “I think if a flaming sword cut you in half right now, the damage done to my coat—the coat you’re wearing—would be done to my body.”
“I’m sorry, Luman,” she said. “You’re right.”
“You never have to apologize to me,” he said. “I’ve chosen you for my queen.”
Sarah looked down both forks again. “Maybe we’re not thinking about this the right way. What does the card show?”
* * *
“What does the card show?” Luman asked.
“Which one?” Isaiah Wilkes held all three in his hand. “The Highway, the Drunkard, or the Bird?”
Something was bothering him about the cards, and he wasn’t quite sure what it was.
“Any of them,” Luman said. “We need a hint, an indication. Which fork does Sarah need to travel down: left and the raven, or right and the dove?”
“We’re turning left, sunwise, around the palace of life,” Jacob Hop pointed out. “Maybe it’s that simple. Maybe the answer isn’t in the cards at all. Turn left.”
“What, constantly?” Wilkes shook his head. “That doesn’t sound right. Besides, here the sun is directly ahead of us. And look, the Highway in the picture goes right.”
“Nonsense,” Nathaniel said. “It goes both directions. No road only goes one way.”
“But look at the travelers painted on the card.” Wilkes touched them one by one with his fingertip. “They’re all traveling to the right.”
“That seems like a thin reed,” Hop said.
“Besides,” Nathaniel added, “Maybe this is Luman’s mystery-logic. Everyone in the normal world goes to the right, so Sarah should travel left.”
“That’s a thinner reed,” Hop said.
“The bird is a dove,” Luman said. “Can the answer be that simple?”
There was a dreadful silence as they all contemplated the question.
“But look,” Wilkes said, pointing. “The dove isn’t above a path. If Sarah is meant to walk a path to the dove, shouldn’t there be a picture of the path in the painting?”
Was that what troubled him?
Nathaniel took the Tarocks from him and tried to lay them out together, aligning the Highway so that it pointed at the Bird. The action revealed nothing.
Luman stared at the Bird. “The Bird isn’t over a path. It perches on a branch, but it perches over a stream.”
But that wasn’t what was bothering Wilkes; suddenly, he realized what had niggled at him so.
“No, that’s not what’s wrong with the picture. Look at it closely. That Bird isn’t a dove at all. It’s a raven, but it’s been painted white.”
“A misprint?” Jacob suggested.
“The raven is white,” Luman said.
* * *
“The raven is white,” Luman said, and Sarah knew the answer.
“What was it you said about the two paths?” she asked him again.
“One leads to danger, and the other leads to Eden.”
Eden. The bird in the Tarock was over a spring, not over a path.
“And a river went out of Eden,” she said.
“What?”
Sarah laughed. “Only that isn’t what the Drunkard said. He never said ‘the other road.’”
“No?” Luman looked taken aback.
Sarah shook her head. “He said, ‘One road leads to danger, one road leads to Eden.’”
Luman narrowed his eyes in thought. “I don’t understand.”
“Luman Walters,” she said. “There is only one road.”
“But which…” He stopped and nodded.
Sarah walked directly at the spring of water, bubbling from the woods at the edge of the path right where the road forked right and left. Luman followed her. She continued straight, ignoring the two paths, and stepped over the top of the bubbling water—
the pine trees seemed to reach for her with malevolent hands, the hooting in the forest ahead grew to abrupt sharp shrieks—
and her foot came down on a broad, flat path.
The woods around her were suddenly brighter, the trees deciduous. The wider path had a narrow grassy fringe. The trees that had moments earlier seemed to be about to wrap themselves about Sarah now stood several paces back.
She gazed back the way she had come. There was no path right and no path left, only a broad, smooth path that led straight back, as far as her eye could see. On a branch overhead perched a single bird—a white raven.
Sarah tapped the road at her feet with the tip of her staff. “Welcome to the Highway, Luman Walters.”
Luman whistled a low note of appreciation and nodded slowly. “Indeed. Only remember one thing, Your Majesty.”
“Yes?”
“If there is only one road, then you and I are walking into great danger, even as we approach Eden.”
“Cherubim and a flaming sword.” Sarah laughed. “Hell, Luman. Tell me something I don’t know.”
Together, they walked down the Highway. In the distance, above the trees and silhouetted against the perpetually dawning sun, Sarah saw low, forested mountains.
* * *
Though he hid in thick forest, crouched behind a bramble, Chigozie felt naked and exposed.
Naares Stoach and the mambo Marie were with him, along with Kort and Ferpa; the other Merciful hung back deeper in the forest. Are they more afraid to be seen?
Stoach also crouched, while Marie sat with her back propped against the trunk of a tree, holding her belly.
Had her belly grown since they’d brought her out of the Heron King’s land?
Chigozie felt horror at the implications of that thought, but he was plagued by greater horrors still.
The Merciful stood, but somehow, their presence i
n the forest seemed natural. Looking directly at them, Chigozie felt he almost didn’t see them, as if they were grazing deer, and could only be observed if you were looking for them and thinking of them consciously.
They were gathered on a long, low ridge. Below them was the white city of Etzanoa, the great city of Zomas, rebel sister of Cahokia, the only metropolis of the Missouri.
Under thick cloud cover, Etzanoa burned.
Even at this distance, Chigozie knew what the wailing and the smoke meant. Beastkind rampaged through the city of white stone, shattering walls and scattering fires across rooftops. He knew, because he had seen it in the Missouri. Rape, murder, and the eating of the flesh of mankind traveled in the wake of those fires. The thought made him shudder.
How much guilt did he bear for not stopping Kort when Kort and his band were doing the rampaging? He had put victims out of their misery and he had called it mercy, but it was a poor sort of mercy that could only offer death as a release from pain. Could he have resisted in some more effective way?
He should have tried.
He looked at Kort’s face. The beastman had the head of a bison, and Chigozie could read no emotion in it. Kort’s dark, glittering eyes were fixed unflinchingly on the destruction of Etzanoa.
Scattered bands of Firstborn fighters still resisted within the city’s maze. For every warrior in a lacquered breastplate, firing muskets or stabbing with long lances, Chigozie saw five men with wolf’s heads, or ox horns, or the tusks of elephants, ripping the city apart stone by stone.
“They have General Varem,” Naares Stoach said. Stoach’s face was drained of color and the lines of his mouth barely moved as he spoke.
Chigozie followed the Zoman’s line of sight and saw General Varem. Three beastkind so encumbered with animal parts that he could scarcely find any humanity in them dragged Varem from a collapsing alley into a broad square whose once-white stone was now painted red with blood.
They dragged him because he was missing a leg and an arm, both on the same side. From this distance, Chigozie could see no bandages; some magic, either of his own or of his captors, was keeping the man alive.
From a sagging gate, Simon Sword emerged. He towered over his minions and the sunlight scattered off his feathers like light through a crystal, shedding flecks of color on the city’s walls all about him. In his hand he held an enormous golden sword. As he spoke, the god alternately clenched and unclenched his empty hand, or swung the sword in great, emphatic arcs.