Witchy Winter

by D. J. Butler

  Ma’iingan now noticed that the fourth boy was continually worrying his left ear. He cringed at each new demand or accusation from George, as if he could only barely keep from running away at a full sprint. His left ear jutted out obliquely from his head, barely visible under a large three-cornered hat, and it burned a dark, angry red. The boy’s coat was too large for him, and he seemed to be constantly shrinking into its folds, as if trying to hide.

  “Run fast, run free!” Then the fourth boy turned and Ma’iingan saw his face; this was the healer. He was the youngest of the three, maybe as old as fifteen winters, and he looked as if he were about to burst into tears.

  “George,” Charles said. “We all love you and respect you. I, for one, will be happy to fight under your command, when the time comes. And though they are not stags, I see two rabbits running up that patch of sandy earth over there—would you like to take the first shot?”

  “What are you saying, that you think George will miss?” Landon nearly shouted this, pushing so close to Charles they almost butted noses.

  The healer struck his own ear repeatedly. “Don’t let them shoot me!”

  “I think George will hit the rabbit,” Charles said. “And if he doesn’t, he won’t be the first excellent marksman to fail to take a target.”

  “I want Landon to take the shot.” Even from the top of the tree, Ma’iingan could see George’s vicious sneer.

  “I can hit it,” Landon said after a moment.

  “Of course you can,” Charles said.

  “Of course you can.” George was still sneering.

  The healer, who must be named Nathaniel, fell slowly behind. He whimpered softly.

  The rabbits in question had moved on, but there was another target. “I’ll shoot that raccoon over there,” Landon suggested. “The one trying to hide under the dogwood.”

  “That’s a long shot,” Charles said.

  “He can hit it,” George said.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Charles agreed. “I don’t think I could, but you’re both better shots than I am.”

  Ma’iingan listened to the three young men talk about their raccoon, but his eyes were on the healer. The young man—boy, really—stood thirty feet from his friends, bending over his own knees and breathing deeply.

  What was wrong with him?

  Landon raised his musket. The weapon was of high quality, perhaps not quite as high as Ma’iingan’s German gun. Landon’s aim wavered slightly, but the raccoon was not so very far away. Ma’iingan considered shooting the animal with his bow, and relished in his imagination the looks of surprise on the youths’ faces as an Anishinaabe hunter stole their prey from under their noses, right out of the sky.

  But he didn’t do it. Mostly because, with all the tension among the three oldest, they might respond by shooting him instead.

  Bang!

  Landon’s gun went off and the raccoon lived, scampering away beyond the dogwood tree and disappearing farther up the slope.

  “Damn you!”

  “Theology has never been my forte, but I believe neither my father’s godar nor Parson Brown contemplate the possibility of either damnation or salvation for raccoons.” George delivered this speech with a smirk that made Ma’iingan want to climb down out of the tree and punch the young man in the mouth. “They’re vermin.”

  “No, I don’t mean…not the raccoon!” Landon shook his gun in a vaguely threatening gesture.

  “Oh?” George asked. “If the raccoon is not to be damned, then who is?”

  Landon looked trapped, but then he swung his weapon like a club at Charles’s head. “You!” he shouted. “Damn you, Charles Lee!”

  Charles sidestepped the attack. “Hell’s Bells, Landon, stop it, you’re embarrassing yourself in front of the beaters.”

  Ma’iingan looked to the people who had been driving game from the bushes with sticks. They had indeed stopped, and were looking at the three young men with a mixture of fear, surprise, and amusement.

  “It’s your fault. You made me take that shot!” Landon swung his gun at Charles’s head.

  This time the older, bigger youth simply caught the weapon. He yanked it from Landon’s hands and threw it aside, then pushed his attacker to the ground with a single shove.

  “You are too old to give in to your temper like that, Landon Chapel,” Charles said gravely. “And you do not have the station to protect you from the consequences when you do.”

  “No?” George said drily. “And who would have such station?”

  Charles snorted. “Do you never grow tired of this game, George?” Without waiting for an answer, he took the healer under his arm and walked away downhill. Nathaniel pawed at his ear repeatedly as they went.

  Giimoodaapi’s healer was indeed laid low by illness, and Ma’iingan still had no idea how to help him.

  “Why? Have you cheated a Hansard recently?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “These are Tawa lands,” Alzbieta said.

  Cal knew the name Tawa. He sang:

  Koweta, Tawa, Adena in the south

  Talamatan in the north looks like Germany

  Oranbega with its towers on the St. Lawrence mouth

  And Talega, full of Lenni Lenape

  One Elector each per Eldritch throne

  Seven is Cahokia, always alone

  Evening approached, and the shadows grew long. Ahead of them marched Alzbieta Torias’s soldiers, with their blue cloaks, gray tunics, and the little steel head-gear Bill called sallet helmets, and at the rear came Sarah’s beastkind. The scout Chikaak paced nimbly alongside the Firstborn warriors in the brush, watching the entire column intently with his glittering black eyes.

  “The Elector Songs.” Uris was the senior member of Alzbieta’s party, an old soldier and now her advisor, he’d said. On the march, one of the soldiers carried the priestess’s banner and Uris walked with his hands free. He and Alzbieta’s other two free companions—Sherem the Polite wizard and the scale-mail-clad Yedera, who had introduced herself as “Unborn, an oathbound Podebradan”—insisted on walking, notwithstanding the long string of horses Calvin led. The wizard seemed dazed, occasionally wandering off the path and needing to be called back. “And why is Cahokia ‘alone’?”

  “I always reckoned it was because the words rhymed,” Cal admitted. He’d sung the ditty as a way to show off his knowledge, and now instead risked exposing his utter ignorance. “Old Walter Fitzroy had to write a whole lotta songs, they can’t all be works of genius.”

  “Mmmm,” the counselor said noncommittally. “But unless Fitzroy meant something by it, I expect him to use meaningful words and good grammar.”

  “That ain’t a grammar point at all,” Cal said. “Grammar is knowin’ to say ‘how did my herd git stolen’ and not ‘how did it git stole.’ That’s jest you bein’ grumpy about a perfectly decent Elector Song.”

  “I understood that Wisdom’s Bluff was Cahokian land,” Cathy said. “Was I misinformed?”

  “You were not, ma’am,” Bill said. “Cahokian land, if designated on a map of the Ohio, would present a rather calico appearance. When I remarked upon it to Kyres, I sometimes teased him for being the leopard of Missouri, spotted here and there as his inheritance was.”

  Alzbieta laughed. “That is true. Certain sites—sacred places—were retained by old Onandagos of Cahokia when he and his brother kings shared out the lands of the Ohio, according to the old songs.”

  “The St. Lawrence is the passage that runs past Acadia to the Atlantic Ocean,” Jake said. “Is Oranbega land also spotted?”

  Uris laughed.

  “Not generally,” Alzbieta said. “But the Oranbegans were given the task of keeping the seaways open as the Serpentwars began in the Old World. They purchased land from the Champlains of Acadia, and there at the mouth of the St. Lawrence they to this day maintain watch towers.”

  “Though jest about everybody’s come across as is gonna come across,” Cal said. “The way I heard it.”
<
br />   “Perhaps,” Alzbieta admitted. “Still Oranbega watches.”

  “You can’t always tell who’s Firstborn, just by looking at them,” Sarah said. “There may still be Children of Wisdom at the fringes of the Drowned Lands.”

  Alzbieta Torias and Uris the counselor both shot sharp looks at Sarah. “You know my people’s history,” the priestess said.

  “I know my people’s history,” Sarah said firmly. “Though not as much as I’d like.”

  Alzbieta inclined her head respectfully. “At my home in the city I have an archive of old writings you might wish to consult. You must read Priestly Ophidian as well as Common, I take it?”

  Sarah didn’t bat an eye. “I look forward to reading those writings.”

  “Well, I don’t know what the fringes of the Drowned Lands are,” Cal said. “I mean, iffen anybody thinks it’d be interestin’ to tell me about ’em, I’m listenin’.”

  “Thousands of years ago,” Uris said in a gravelly voice, “the Children of Wisdom in the Old World lived in seven kingdoms, four of which lay on a watered plain called Irra-Antum, entirely between what are now the island of Britain and Denmark.”

  Calvin shook his head. “Iffen I ain’t walked a land myself, I ain’t much for its geography.”

  “That’s a sea now,” Cathy Filmer said. “The North Sea, the English call it.”

  Uris nodded. “It was a mighty river valley then, a land of cultivated fields, low hills, and broad lakes as blue as the sky. And then one day the rivers flooded their banks, the seas leaped over their restraining dikes, and those four kingdoms were smashed. Some of the remnant fled to the surviving kingdoms—many to Bohemia, where they prospered a long time—but others came west. They came to the new world before the English, the Dutch, the Germans, the French, the Spanish, and all the other peoples of Europe. They treated with the ancestors of the Haudenosaunee and the Algonks, and here, with Lenni Lenape and other peoples, they again formed the seven kingdoms. But messengers never ceased to travel between the children of Wisdom in the Old World and their cousins in the New, and when the Serpentwars broke out, as Her Holiness indicates, the Oranbegans—who have provided many of our people’s explorers, traders, mapmakers, and wanderers—were tasked with keeping open the gate of the St. Lawrence. So it has been since.”

  “The Oranbegans must have received Wallenstein and his Germans, then, as well as the Bohemians fleeing the Old World,” Bill suggested.

  Uris nodded.

  Sarah shifted in her saddle as if she had an itch she couldn’t scratch. “I’ve never heard what caused the seas to rise.”

  Alzbieta looked at her coolly. “No? Perhaps the answer is in those scrolls.”

  Cathy Filmer shot Alzbieta an irritated look, but Sarah ignored it.

  “All the more reason to look forward to reading them,” she said.

  “Ahead lies Chester.” Yedera pointed.

  Cal was mounted and taller than the Podebradan and still had trouble making out the buildings she was pointing out. “That don’t sound like a Firstborn name to me.”

  “It’s English,” Uris said. “Though most of the residents are German-speakers, and call the town Lager.”

  “I’ve always been more of a whisky man, myself,” Bill murmured. “But a lager in a pinch.”

  “English?” Cal squinted past the line of Ophidian warriors marching ahead of them, making out the log stockade and the buildings inside, all perched atop a bluff. Below the town, to Calvin’s left, rolled the Mississippi River. It reminded him of Natchez. “It ain’t Hansa, is it?”

  “I believe Chester does abide by the Trading League Charter.” Uris smiled, leaning on his spear. “Why? Have you cheated a Hansard recently?”

  “I never cheated a body in my life,” Cal said. “I stole a cow or two, but only from folks as had too many to begin with. And I ain’t stupid enough to steal from the Hansa.”

  “The Hansa towns are the safest towns on the river,” Alzbieta said.

  “Iffen you’re Hansa,” Cal muttered.

  “We’ll be fine, Calvin,” Bill said. “Though I don’t believe we’ll find an inn to billet Her Majesty’s entire guard. Nor Her Holiness’s, I should think.”

  “No,” Uris agreed. “The warriors will all have to camp outside of town. The people of Chester won’t mind.”

  “And the Tawans?” Cal asked.

  “My men wear my colors,” Alzbieta said. “I hope yours aren’t taken for vagrants or wild animals.”

  “Or worse,” Uris added, “an incursion from the Great Green Wood. There are rumors from the Missouri, isolated tales that the feral beastkind are rampaging.”

  “Her Majesty has not yet proclaimed her livery.” Bill’s Cavalier drawl was unhurried, but to Calvin he sounded annoyed. “In the meantime, I suppose we shall have to rely on the natural ferocity and obvious martial prowess of her warriors to deter molestation.”

  “Quite.” Uris chuckled.

  Bill gave the order for the beastkind to make camp. This was repeated through Chikaak to the rest in a series of barks and yowls, to which Jake listened intently, his head cocked to one side. At one point in the process, he thumbed through a deck of Tarocks as he listened, occasionally staring at one of the cards.

  Then Jake dismounted, handing his reins to Cal, and walked with the beastfolk warriors into the nearby trees. He emerged a few minutes later, just as the Cahokian warriors had found a site for their camp a quarter mile away.

  “Look,” Cal said to the Dutchman as he handed back the little man’s reins, pointing at the two campsites. “Look at the difference.”

  Like any ordinary military unit, the Cahokians had located their camp around a central clearing, where some of them now began to build a fire and erect tents. The beastkind, on the other hand, had chosen a grove, and now they singly burrowed beneath bushes, lay between close-growing trees, hid within snarled brambles, and otherwise bedded down for the night like animals.

  Bill, overhearing, snorted. “We have much work to do yet to shape them, Sergeant Hop.”

  Jake smiled at the mention of the rank. “Less than you think, Captain Lee.”

  Then he leaned in to say something discreet to Sarah, which Calvin didn’t hear.

  Chikaak followed them into Chester, where he drew curious looks, but no more than Alzbieta in her palanquin. When Sarah had chosen an inn—the Wallenstein, the biggest, sturdiest, oldest inn in the small Hansa community, and located very near to the stockade wall opposite the river—Chikaak loped back to join the beastfolk.

  Cal tried not to look like he was staring, but he kept an eye on Alzbieta as they approached the front door of the Wallenstein. Would the sedan chair go inside?

  But at the door, one of her slaves—who must have been designated in advance, because Calvin saw no communication pass among any of the Eldritch at the time—stood at the palanquin’s curtain and took Alzbieta in his arms when she climbed out. He held her like a child before him, marching across the common room of the Wallenstein, up the back stairs to the landing, and then through the door into Alzbieta’s room.

  “You hopin’ to catch a glimpse of Her Holiness hoppin’ into bed?” Sarah needled Cal.

  Cal chuckled. “Didn’t mean to stare, I’s jest…Jerusalem, it’s odd, that’s all.”

  They stood isolated from their companions for a moment. Uris had announced he would seek a physician for Sherem, who continued to wander from his path from time to time, and stepped out.

  Sarah turned so no one else could see her face, and suddenly she looked very tired, and even scared. “It is odd, Calvin. It’s odd and backward and very old, and I don’t understand it. And no, I don’t read any kind of Ophidian, so what in tarnation am I going to do about that? And…and worse.” She leaned heavily on her horse-headed ashwood walking stick, then reached up with her free hand to touch Calvin’s cheek. “I’m sad Thalanes isn’t here. So I’m glad you are.”

  “You want me to carry you, jest say so. Might have to be pig-
a-back, though—I ain’t got that feller’s arms.”

  After Calvin had finished negotiating and paying for rooms (one for Sarah and Cathy, with two beds, and two spots beside the common room hearth that he figured he, Bill, and Jake would share), Sarah and Cathy went upstairs, and Cal found himself standing at the bar in the inn’s common room, waiting with Jacob Hop for a small beer.

  Jake turned away from the bar to look at the common room while they waited. He smiled, and then he spoke to Cal sideways, out of the corner of his mouth, and almost entirely without moving his lips. “Two things are very important tonight, hey?”

  “Sure,” Cal said. “Let’s talk about tonight. Shall I git Bill down here?”

  “He is already standing outside the women’s door,” Jake said. “Dat is a good thing, let’s leave him there. First, do not get drunk.”

  “I ain’t the most blazin’ New Lighter you’ll e’er meet,” Cal protested. “I ain’t a Kissin’ Campbell, nor a Swoonin’ Stone, but I got the New Light, after my own fashion. You don’t have to worry.”

  The Dutchman blinked at him. “Sober, begrip you me? I mean, you understand?”

  “Yeah,” Cal said. “Jest this small beer and that’s all. I don’t quite trust these Cahokians, despite ’em bein’ Sarah’s people and all.” Or maybe, partly, because they were Sarah’s people, in a way Calvin wasn’t, and couldn’t quite understand.

  “Ja, don’t trust them. And here’s the second thing, it’s a distress signal.”

  Cal sighed. “I thought you weren’t a Freemason.”

  “I am not.” Jake frowned. “Can you whistle?”

  “Of course I can whistle. How else you supposed to signal your cousin you’re in position and ready to make off with all them Donelsen cattle?” Cal grinned.

  “Hey?” Jake grinned back. “This is the signal if you see anything…dangerous. A threat.” He whistled three tones, high, low, and medium.

  Cal whistled it back. “That it?”