Witchy Winter

by D. J. Butler

Etienne had brought his own men in only limited numbers. After all, they had the casino to operate and protect, for those who might choose to mourn the bishop’s passing by playing a hand of faro. And Etienne didn’t think he had enemies who would be so brazen as to strike at him here, in the crowd.

  Disgruntled members of the Synod? Unlikely.

  Chigozie? Impossible.

  The Chevalier of New Orleans. It had to be him. Maybe the chevalier anticipated Etienne’s arcane assassination attempt, or maybe he simply saw naked ambition in Etienne’s anointing as bishop and moved to cut off a threat.

  He dared not escape through the crypt—to do so with all these witnesses would give away the existence of that very useful passage.

  He turned to the Brides. First, he put the gede loa locket into a pocket in the shirt beneath his chasuble, feeling its tingle transfer from his palm to his side; his mother had arranged his maryaj-loa, as a mambo herself and as his mother, but that was no reason for her to see the Brides in action.

  Etienne’s mother had raised him with a sense of good manners.

  “Ezili Freda,” Etienne murmured, leaning to kiss a parishioner. She was a short woman, stocky and blonde, possibly a cheese-paring Republican or a German. He kissed her cheek and didn’t let her go, drawing her instead to his side.

  He felt her heat against him, and it was comforting.

  She smiled. “Pax vobiscum.”

  “Ezili Danto.” Etienne kissed another woman, dark-haired and well-dressed, perhaps an Italian or a Spaniard. Tears had burrowed long wet streaks in what had been elaborate make-up. He drew her to his other side, feeling the fire of her body, too.

  She smiled and clung to him. “Pax vobiscum.”

  “Bring them to me, my Brides,” Etienne whispered. “Bring them all to me.”

  A sound like a low moan rushed through the cathedral. Women who were already moving toward Etienne to give their new young bishop the kiss of peace moved faster. Women who had been grieving at the coffin, or whispering beneath the cathedral’s stone pillars to share their loss, turned and joined the throng.

  “Pax vobiscum, pax vobiscum.”

  Etienne felt the ecstatic charge of the Brides’ action shiver through his limbs. He would know none of these women carnally; he was married to the Brides, and they were the most jealous of women. But every woman in the cathedral, he knew, wanted him at that moment. If he did not prevent it, they would fall in love with him. Some would go away convinced they had become his lovers, and carry secret smiles in the corners of their mouths for weeks.

  They would all obey him, at least to a point.

  The women surged toward him.

  Etienne couldn’t control the Brides. They weren’t his to command, any more than his mother was. They were goddesses, and he was their exclusive husband. But as any husband could do, he was able to invite their presence. He was able to court them, flirt with them, tease them until they took him.

  Already trembling from the funeral liturgy, they took him now.

  Etienne sagged, quivering, into the arms of the two women holding him. Others joined them and he kissed every face he could see. Kisses on cheeks became kisses on lips, and Etienne had to wrap his chasuble tightly about him to keep it from hungry hands. The women surging around him from all sides pushed him to his feet again.

  The four approaching men half-drew scimitars and then resheathed them as a river of women flowed past them. The women jostled the mussulman fighters, knocking two of them down and earning a shouted curse.

  The women didn’t slow down.

  “Pax vobiscum! Pax vobiscum!”

  “I’m weak,” Etienne said, kissing a dark woman with long, curly hair. “Will you help me outside for a breath of fresh air?”

  They carried him. He was strong and young, having come up in Bishop de Bienville’s mob as a sticks and stones man—it had amused the pox-ridden old bishop that righteous Father Ukwu’s son wanted to learn the criminal trades. It might have amused him less to know that Etienne would win the fight to succeed him as criminal underlord of the Vieux Carré.

  It would have amused him much less to know that he would eventually also follow him as bishop, and would use that office to perform acts of Vodun magic. The bishop had been a cheerful sinner, but he’d been a cheerful Christian sinner.

  Weaker muscles and looser joints than Etienne’s might have been torn apart by the pack of women. Like a pride of lionesses with a wounded deer, they dragged him toward the side door of the cathedral, tossing men aside as they went.

  The two scarf-wrapped warriors stood in the door, others having moved aside or been moved. Armand lay on the stone floor behind them, clutching his side to stanch a strong flow of blood and glowering furiously. Etienne had insisted that his men not wear pistols to the cathedral for this service, and Armand had paid the price. Both warriors had drawn scimitars.

  They had bested Armand, unarmed as he was.

  Against the women, they never stood a chance.

  Accelerating and howling, the women struck the two swordsmen like a storm. Several took wounds, but then the scimitars were in the hands of the women, and the warriors lay on the floor, taking kick after kick to the face and stomach.

  “Pax vobiscum! Pax vobiscum!”

  The whirlwind of loa-maddened femininity swept Armand into its protective embrace, and then Etienne and his bodyguard were outside, standing on the cobbles in front of the Polites’ palace. Running toward them from the dueling ground came a dozen of Etienne’s men in white shirts and black waistcoats, holding knives and pistols.

  In the doorway, the two battered mussulman fighters dragged themselves to their feet and stared. Four others joined them from behind. Two made as if to charge, but the tallest restrained them, a hand on the shoulder of each.

  “Thank you, my daughters,” Etienne said. He kissed each woman again, retreating into the arms of his men with the wounded Armand, and waving farewell to his stunned attackers.

  “Pax vobiscum.”

  “I’m just a man who has seen his manidoo.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  In the darkness, Ma’iingan lost the healer.

  He had followed the four young men easily at first; they were on horseback, after all, and had been drinking. The combination of horse and ordinary night noises with the dulling of their senses would have let twenty Anishinaabe walk behind them on the trail in single file.

  One reasonably skilled hunter had it easy.

  Ma’iingan carried his loaded German gun ready, just in case, but the four Zhaaganaashii never saw him.

  He wasn’t worried only about the Zhaaganaashii; there were also the Irish. The Irish were a new people to Ma’iingan. Most of them spoke English, but they had another tongue, an older language of their own, so they were a different people. They seemed to have come in under the feet of the Zhaaganaashii, but had never advanced far inland. Here, in what Ma’iingan had learned was called Johnsland, after an old Zhaaganaashii king in their original homeland named John Churchill, the Irish planted and harvested on land owned by the great Zhaaganaashii lords. Apparently, there were also Irish in the big cities of the Turtle Kingdom, such as New Orleans and New Amsterdam.

  A Cherokee teamster had confided to Ma’iingan over a cup of coffee that in the cities the Irish had mostly become Anama’e, like the French, the Dutch, and most of the Zhaaganaashii. Here, many of them were something else, something the muleskinner called druid. Ma’iingan had never heard of druid before, but he was far from home and learning many new things. But since druid apparently sacrificed people to their manidoo, Ma’iingan slept by his loaded gun.

  When the young chief George had sent the healer Nathaniel and Landon, the unruly warrior who teased Nathaniel too much, toward the pig sty to sleep with a druid moon woman, though, Ma’iingan had immediately recognized a prank. A good teller of jokes could spot the jokes of others.

  Even when those others’ jokes were cruel and petty.

  When George had fired his
guns into the air, summoning the Irish farmers from their hut, Ma’iingan had crept deeper into the forest to hide. When he’d emerged, Nathaniel and Landon had disappeared.

  “Wiinuk,” Ma’iingan cursed.

  He skirted the confusion of the two Irish farmers squabbling as they reloaded their gun and the two Zhaaganaashii, still on horseback and now arguing. Charles was angry, but he was holding back his rage because George was his chief.

  “He’ll make his way back to his sty,” George said.

  “He’s just a boy,” Charles said. “They’re both just boys, George.”

  Abruptly, a naked man loomed up in the darkness. With no moon, for a moment he looked enormous, pale and covered in raw earth, and Ma’iingan almost took him for a manidoo of some sort, and raised his rifle—

  but then smelled the sour reek of animal droppings.

  The naked man was Landon, and he screamed.

  “Stop, please.” Ma’iingan lowered his rifle and spoke in his clearest Zhaaganaashii. “You surprised me, I am not at war with you. You see, na?” He held his arms wide to show peaceful intentions. “My name is Ma’iingan, and I’m a friend.”

  Landon screamed again and charged.

  Ma’iingan just dodged. He didn’t want to hurt the boy, and he also didn’t want to touch him, given his foul reek. Landon clawed at Ma’iingan’s face twice, and then tried to punch him, but finally gave up and ran away into the forest.

  Leaving Ma’iingan alone.

  He was a man whose family never went hungry for lack of game. On a night with no moon, though, he wasn’t going to be able to see any indications on the ground. He stood silent and listened awhile, considering.

  The sounds of the Zhaaganaashii exploded in yelling, and then faded away in three different directions. Landon: shamed and fleeing? George: returning to the big house in satisfied triumph? Charles: perhaps looking for Nathaniel?

  But Charles had quickly gone too far, unless Nathaniel was running away from the pigsty at a full sprint and in a straight line.

  Silence descended again. Had Nathaniel run so far away he couldn’t be heard? Was he dead? With a heavy heart, Ma’iingan picked a crooked pine between two chest-high spikes of rock. It was distinctive enough to be a landmark, and he kept his eye on it.

  Then he began slowly spiraling outward around it.

  In daylight, he’d have looked at the ground, seeking tracks. Instead, he looked for hiding places and peered into them: beneath fallen logs, behind boulders, up trees, within thickets. Nathaniel may have escaped by concealing himself, but Ma’iingan was a keen-eyed finder of hidden things.

  As it happened, he was so focused on peering into the shadows that he almost walked past Nathaniel.

  The boy’s incoherent moan gave away his location, at the base of a short, steep slope. When he heard the sound, Ma’iingan had to look twice to spot the boy, because he lay in the shadow of a thick pine tree. The starlight was enough to let Ma’iingan see his blood, oozing from multiple injuries.

  Ma’iingan shuddered. His manidoo had understated the case; the boy Nathaniel didn’t need to be raised from a sickbed, he needed his life saved.

  By feel as much as by sight, Ma’iingan examined the young man. There was a lot of blood, but it flowed from many small wounds, rather than from a severed artery. Nathaniel’s skull was intact, and although he had cuts on his chest and back, he wasn’t pierced through the body. He had a broken rib. His breathing wasn’t as regular as Ma’iingan would have liked.

  Mercifully, the boy was unconscious.

  Ma’iingan began by laying his wool blanket out beside Nathaniel, and then carefully dragging the boy onto it. The bleeding immediately got worse; he took the boy’s shirt off, tearing it into strips. He bound Nathaniel’s wounds with the cloth, slowing the bleeding and then watching in satisfaction as the worst of the wounds, in one of the boy’s arms, finally clotted.

  Ma’iingan started a fire.

  He kept it small, drilling flame with a firebow into a dried piece of wood, then feeding it chips and twigs until it could breathe on its own. Finally, he took his axe and collected large dead branches from the nearby pines, feeding the limbs one at a time into the fire.

  He found a stream nearby. With rolled strips of birch bark he fashioned a pot, filled it, and then boiled the water on his small fire. Deep in the night as dawn began to pale the sky in the east, he cleaned Nathaniel’s injuries with boiled water. That started the blood flowing again in some of the wounds, but this time the flow stanched easier. Ma’iingan bound the wounds again with new strips of cloth.

  As the sun rose, he helped Nathaniel into a sitting position for a few moments. The boy was only half-conscious, but he was lucid enough to sip at the edge of the birch-bark pot and drink the now-cooled water. Ma’iingan kept pouring water into his mouth until he turned his head away and coughed, and then he laid the boy down.

  Nathaniel’s forehead was hot, and he was beginning to sweat.

  “Gichi-Manidoo,” Ma’iingan muttered, dropping into an unintended prayer. “Help this boy. I need this boy to bring my son Giimoodaapi into the People. I need this boy to arise from his sickbed and become the great healer my manidoo promised me he would be, so that Giimoodaapi may eat and grow strong. Heal him, Gichi-Manidoo. Knit his flesh, restore his blood, revive his spirit. Give me the wisdom to help him heal himself.”

  If anything, Nathaniel’s fever burned hotter.

  Ma’iingan rose and began to search the hillside in the early morning light for anything he might make into a tea.

  * * *

  Nathaniel opened his eyes.

  Overhead, he saw the skeletal branches of a dead and barkless ash tree, and beyond it, pale sky.

  He hurt.

  ~The boy is not dead.~

  ~He is not dead yet.~

  “Not dead yet.”

  His mouth tasted tangy, acidic. Like pine needles, or a nettle soup, or maybe wild berries.

  He smelled fire. He smelled…the intimate smell of another person, as if he were wearing someone else’s clothes. Not a bad smell, just the smell of a stranger.

  Realizing he lay on his back, he tried to raise his head to look down at himself. A bolt of lightning split his skull and he collapsed backward again. His ears rang with high-pitched whining.

  “You must feel great pain,” a voice said. He didn’t know the accent, but the person’s speech was deliberate, slow. “The dogwood brought your fever down, but you’ve been seriously wounded.”

  ~Release me, O thou earth!~

  Nathaniel mouthed the words, but he was too weak to pronounce them.

  He turned his head slowly to one side to look. An Indian sat cross-legged a few feet away, looking closely at him. The man didn’t wear the trousers and coat of a Cherokee, or the colorful shirt of a Haudenosaunee. He was bare-chested, and wore leather leggings and moccasins, and he seemed to be unarmed. His broad face was handsome, with jet-black hair, strong jaw and cheekbones, a high forehead, and clear eyes. His mouth was set in a cryptic, expressionless line.

  No—there, a few feet away, a bow and a rifle and an axe all lay against a fallen log. The man wasn’t unarmed, but he was deliberately sitting away from his weapons.

  ~I itch, I burn!~

  Nathaniel tried to scratch his ear and found he couldn’t raise his arm. His head pounded.

  “Do I still have my arms and legs?” he asked.

  “Henh.” The Indian nodded. “I just wrapped you up tight. It was cold.”

  “Thank you,” Nathaniel said.

  “We’re pretty far out here in the forest, and I don’t know if you’re going to be walking anytime soon. We get hungry, we might have to eat one of your legs. Maybe I should just take it off now, hang it up and let it start drying, na?”

  The casual tone of the Indian’s voice and his completely straight face struck terror into Nathaniel’s soul.

  Then the man laughed, his face breaking into a crinkled grin. “I’m joking, Zhaaganaashii. Where’s
your sense of humor?”

  Nathaniel’s heart pounded. “Maybe it’s tied up. Like the rest of me.”

  “You’re not tied up, Zhaaganaashii. You’re wrapped up, like a dakobinaawaswaan. Like a baby, na? Wrapped in a cradleboard, so it can’t run away from its mother.”

  “You don’t want me to run away?”

  “Maybe I look like your mother, na?” The Indian laughed again. “No, I would be a very ugly mother and you’re much too good-looking. I don’t want you to hurt yourself. You knocked yourself pretty good falling down that hill, and you bled a lot. I wrapped you to help keep you from opening the wounds by moving too much.”

  “I didn’t knock myself. And I didn’t just fall down that hill.” The whining in his ears grew more shrill, making it hard for Nathaniel to even produce words.

  The Indian nodded. “No, it was your friend, Landon.”

  Nathaniel stared. “Who are you?”

  The Indian ground at the dirt with his moccasin heel. “I’m going to stop calling you Zhaaganaashii, because I know your name. Your name is Nathaniel.”

  “What is Zhaaga…anyway?”

  “It means English. English-speakers. Cavaliers and Yankees and Appalachee and Pennslanders, you’re all Zhaaganaashii.”

  “In Lenni Lenape?” It was a guess.

  “No, I’m not one of the grandfathers. I’m Ojibwe, or Anishinaabe. However you want to say it.”

  “One of the Algonk peoples? Like the Massachusett or the Natick?”

  “Henh.” The Indian laughed. “If I can lump all you Zhaaganaashii together, I guess you can lump together the Algonks.”

  Nathaniel felt the urge to sing. It was childish, but he was tied up like a baby, so he went ahead:

  Look east, look west, look here, look there

  Algonk Electors come from everywhere

  Outside the empire, they’re “wild” or “free”

  Those inside send Electors three:

  Wampanoag, Massachusett, Mi’kmaq, Sauk

  Nanticoke, Chickahominy, Shawnee, Fox

  Mohican, Chippewa

  Abenaki, Ottawa

  Look north, look south, look up, look down