Witchy Winter

by D. J. Butler

  Alzbieta nodded.

  Carved repeating knots decorated the outward-facing surface of the diagonal slabs, making them look vaguely Arab. Mashrabiya, wasn’t that what they called their wooden lattices? Only those were made to block the sun, not to hold writing.

  Besides, these knots looked too repetitive to be writing. Sarah ran her finger along one line of knots.

  There was, though, something familiar about them. Where had she seen them before? The knots were repeating circles of the same size, with a distinctive twist to the line running through them, first to one side and then to the other, the one side and then the other.

  “Well, cousin,” Sarah said. “Now I really want to see your city home.”

  Alzbieta bowed.

  “Why on earth would you call this a palace of life?” Sarah asked. “Doesn’t that sound like a more fitting name for, say, a Harvite convent? I don’t see sickbeds, there’s no food or water, in fact I don’t see even symbols of those things. I don’t see signs or writings of any kind, except what would have been on the scrolls. What does life have to do with it, or did our grandfathers just get tired of naming everything after wisdom?”

  Alzbieta laughed. “That is such an excellent question.”

  “And yet, your answer leaves so much to be desired.” Sarah snorted. “Ah, well. I tell you, though, it does my heart good to see a library, even if it’s an empty one. Maybe that’s why it’s a palace of life. It’s a metaphor for a great place to read.”

  Alzbieta only smiled.

  “Anyway, it’s as good a name as a ‘library.’”

  At that moment, Sarah heard gunshots.

  * * *

  Bill stood at the base of the mound, gazing up at the stones at the peak. A path of stone steps led up the front of the steep slope, zigging and zagging back and forth—Bill counted—to make seven angles.

  One for each kingdom.

  “I cannot conceive the engineering that would build such a thing,” he said to Cathy Filmer, at his elbow. “I believe if you piled an identical heap of dirt beside this one, the rain would instantly destroy it.”

  “Perhaps it was built one layer at a time, and once grass had grown up the mound to anchor it, each next layer was added,” Cathy suggested.

  “Or perhaps there is some structure inside.”

  “Do you mean stone?”

  “Perhaps. But a wood structure might do as well. As you say, once the grass had grown over it, the mound would retain its shape.”

  “Perhaps fills of different sorts?” Cathy ventured. “Different sorts of soil, or gravel, or layers of stone, to give the mound stability and allow water to drain. And consider that this is a mound of modest dimensions. But the Serpent Mound too, must be artificial, rising as it does from the plain. What massive amount of effort, what power and what resources, were employed to erect that mountain?”

  Bill looked at Cathy sharply. “I shall remember these remarks when Her Majesty is looking to appoint a chief of her engineering corps.”

  “I should recommend Mr. Hop for that. He seems to have an astonishing capacity to learn.”

  “That is quite a gift,” Bill agreed, “if not one, strictly speaking, acknowledged in the Gospel of Mark.”

  “Who knows in what strange gospel lie recorded the gifts that shall follow the disciples of Simon Sword?”

  Cathy smiled, and Bill chuckled, but his mirth was forced.

  “Mrs. Filmer—”

  “Bill, you call me that to hold me at arm’s length.”

  He hesitated. “Forgive me. Cathy.” He hooked his thumbs into his belt and stared at the mound-top temple again. “We have come to Sarah’s kingdom. We’ve found her allies, and even family.”

  “You are thinking she will soon send you to get her sibling where you concealed him.”

  “Her brother Nathaniel. It seems likely. And there will be…reckonings.”

  “Your wife may be alive.”

  “She would not be an old woman. And I believe we are still married.”

  “I know all this, Bill.” Cathy took his hand. “Tell me what you are really thinking about.”

  Bill sighed. “If I ride east, I fear it might be the end for you and me. If that happens, I hope you will understand that…without you, I could not have lived this long. Without you, I’d have died in a New Orleans ditch years ago. A man needs meaning, he needs something to live for. For a long time, what I had to live for was you.”

  “And your wife.” Cathy’s voice held a sorrow as sharp as a blade. “And Charles, your son.”

  “Say rather the memory of my wife and the hope of my son. But long separation had rendered those faint, and insufficiently vivid to keep me on my feet.”

  A single tear crawled down each of Cathy’s cheeks. “You are perilously close, Sir William, to telling me that your wife owes your survival to me.”

  That wasn’t what he’d intended, but Bill felt his foot far down his own throat, and was unsure how to extract it.

  The sound of a gunshot saved him.

  Bill spun to look westward, the direction from which the shot had come. His legs, still healing from his injuries of three days earlier, buckled under his weight and the pressure of the sudden move, but they held. The blue smoke lying over the gatehouse and the Firstborn warrior waving his arm suggested that the shot wasn’t from a hostile, but the eruption of more shooting from the gatehouse strongly indicated enemies’ presence.

  Then long-tunicked farmers and their children began to stream through the gate.

  “Please excuse me, Mrs.…Cathy.” Bill touched his battered hat and hobbled for the gate as fast as he could manage.

  He nearly collided with the counselor Uris, who emerged from the larger of the low mounds. Uris ran with an unsheathed long sword, demonstrating an ease that only came with long practice, and though the Firstborn must be older by a decade or more, his strides were longer and smoother than Bill’s.

  “Suh,” Bill said, “I believe there may be trouble. Would you mind—”

  “Dammit, man!” Uris snapped. “They’re not shooting at game. There must be unity of command, and you’re the queen’s choice. Don’t ask me if I’d mind, give me an order!”

  Bill nodded. He needed to propose to Sarah a formal chain of command and ranks that included all the Firstborn. And he needed to stop thinking of the Firstborn and the beastkind as warriors. Warriors were the fighters of a barbarian tribe, the Celts and the Saxons had warriors.

  Bill needed soldiers.

  “Saddle up the horses and prepare for a cavalry charge,” Bill said. “But arm them with their longbows in the meantime.”

  Uris nodded and began shouting orders in a language Bill recognized as Ophidian. The Firstborn soldiers within the palisade scrambled to prepare their horses.

  Bill staggered to the gatehouse, hearing a dull roar on the other side of the sharpened logs as he drew closer, the tumult punctuated by the staccato snap of gunfire. A final handful of Firstborn villagers skipped in through the gate and then it slammed shut. He dragged himself up the iron ladder to the gatehouse platform at a ragged sprint, drawing two pistols as he reached the top.

  His leg wounds stabbed him with pain.

  Four Firstborn warriors crouched leaning into the shelter of the log wall. Bill squatted beside them, lowering his head just in time to avoid being hit by a javelin that came over the wall and fell into the enclosure, sinking its sharpened tip six inches into the hard earth.

  Beastkind.

  Bill’s sense of how many beastfolk charged across the picked-over fields was uncertain, probably because some of what he saw looked like steeds charging and some looked like warriors, though more likely than not they were all beastmen. Dozens, certainly. A hundred?

  “Tell me your name,” he said to the Firstborn crouching nearest to him.

  The man had thin lips and eyebrows and a scar across his forehead, almost hidden by the visorless steel sallet protecting his skull. “Olanthes,” he said. “The m
en sometimes call me Ole.”

  “I’m not much of an expert in the longbow, Ole,” Bill said. “Am I right to think our archers within the palisade should be able to shoot a hundred yards usefully, arcing their shots so as not to hit you and me?”

  Ole nodded and pointed. “A hundred yards from our archers would put the arrows right about at that ditch.”

  The beastkind were crossing the ditch already.

  “Colonel Uris!” Bill shouted, inventing a rank on the spot. It was not well done, and he knew he’d have to revisit it later. “Prepare to fire three volleys! Aim for the large irrigation ditch parallel to the highway. On my command!”

  Uris had his thirty men lined up with bows ready, and saluted his agreement.

  Bill was in over his head. He would readily have admitted it, had his queen or his lady—as he knew Cathy truly to be—asked, but the truth was that the only other possible candidate for command in this battle was Uris, who had already deferred to Bill. But Bill was a dragoon and a pistoleer, a man who had led a single unit for a time, years earlier, and who had never had strategic responsibility for a field of action larger than a meadow, a mountain ridge, or a single wall.

  Now his field of battle was the Kingdom of Cahokia, and House Elytharias was at stake.

  The beastkind were nearly to the wall. Bill looked down along the palisade and saw roughly twenty men. They crouched behind the wooden wall to shield themselves from hurled spears and rocks, but they were armed with long spears and swords, and they wore helmets and mail.

  It was medieval.

  “Sergeant Olanthes,” Bill commanded. “Prepare to repel the beastkind.”

  Olanthes shouted in Ophidian.

  “Fire when ready!” Bill called to Uris.

  The first volley of arrows launched overhead, striking in the middle of the beastkind horde. Bill took the Heron King’s horn in his hand and blew. Double-time advance. It was not a perfect summons, but it was clear.

  From the woods to the east of the palisade, he heard the same short melody repeated in a coyote’s howl.

  A second volley of arrows went overhead, falling into the back half of the bestial mob.

  “Closer!” Bill roared. He could barely hear himself over the thunder of hoofs on the growling of beasts, but Uris nodded as if he’d understood, and shouted to his men.

  The third volley fell at sixty yards, again in the middle of the pack.

  Beastmen at the rear howled in pain and puzzlement. A few of them tore at each other. The late afternoon autumn sun was weak and behind his attackers, but nevertheless Bill thought he saw foaming muzzles.

  The beastkind assault was not organized, it was madness.

  Bill’s beastkind marched from their forest camp. Pikemen led out, long spears borrowed from Alzbieta Torias’s Firstborn warriors pointed forward and ready. Behind them came musketeers, including Jacob Hop and the coyote-headed Chikaak, marching on foot to one side of the column and holding carbines.

  Not Bill’s beastfolk. Sarah’s.

  The assault struck the wall with such force that the timbers shook. A sound that combined barking, snarling, baying, and guttural shouts washed over Bill. Ole and the other Firstborn stood and jammed down into the attackers with their long spears, drawing angry cries of rage in return.

  “Mount up!” Bill waved to Uris. “Prepare to charge!”

  Uris waved back.

  Bill rose up to discharge one pistol and then the other into the attackers. He struck a crocodile with a man’s head between the eyes, and put a bullet into the chest of a cobra-headed man who was at least eight feet tall.

  Suddenly, Cathy was beside him, holding a pair of pistols. She fired her guns as well into the oncoming mass.

  Sarah’s beastfolk regiment was getting closer.

  Bill crouched again to switch pistols, almost falling. Cathy caught him, and he gripped her fiercely. Lightning bolts of pain shot through both legs.

  Uris’s men were mounted, and had long swords drawn and raised. Good—a cavalryman who impaled a foe had to drop his lance, but a mounted swordsman could chop a target in half, propelled forward by all the muscle of his mount, and keep going.

  The wall shook as another wave of the beastmen slammed into it. To his left, two Firstborn men screamed as they were dragged off the wall.

  The palisade shook a third time, and it felt as if the center of the shockwave was directly beneath Bill’s legs. He rose with two loaded guns, lurched forward—

  a man with a rhinoceros head, who was very nearly the size of a rhinoceros himself, pawed the earth with bare feet and charged the wall again, slamming into the logs and shaking them—

  Bill fired. Bang! Bang!

  One shot struck the rhino-man between the shoulders. The other hit him in the top of his head. He backed away two steps and threw himself at the wall again.

  A hurled stone the size of Bill’s head struck him below the waist. The rock came at him from an oblique angle, and it managed to strike both his thighs. Bill screamed and collapsed to the wooden walkway, bouncing and nearly falling off, but for Cathy’s tight grip on the front of his coat.

  “Bill!” she gasped.

  He nodded to indicate that he was fine, which was a lie; he could feel that both his legs were broken. Putting the Heron King’s horn to his lips, he blew firing position. That would have his front row of soldiers arraying themselves into a defensive wall, bayonets forward. The wall shuddered. Then Bill blew again.

  Fire.

  BANG!

  To Bill’s immediate satisfaction, the carbines fired together, at the signal. Together, they sounded much louder than they did singly. The shuddering of the palisade wall suddenly stopped.

  Cathy peered over the wall, and Bill dragged her back down. “I’d rather lose both my legs than your head, my lady.”

  She smiled at him through tears.

  Reload, Bill blew again, and then he let the horn drop to his side and reloaded himself. He was much faster at this than any of his soldiers, so he reloaded two pistols and then dragged himself, wincing from the pain, to the edge of the palisade to look.

  He got there in time to see the last of his carabineers snap his swivel ramrod back into place. That was a gratifying sight, but much better was the sight of what was happening in front of the shooters.

  The pikemen were holding the line.

  Their fellow beastkind threw themselves with ferocity and shocking courage into the spears, but though Sarah’s beastfolk fighters snarled and roared in response, they held their pikes in disciplined fashion, creating a bristling wall of steel that kept the other, more feral, beastkind back.

  The troop’s right flank was protected by the palisade wall. One or two of the rampagers tried to creep around the left flank, but there Chikaak or Jake, each carrying a carbine and several pistols, shot them as they came.

  “Ready!” Bill waved to Uris.

  Uris waved back.

  “Open the gate!” Bill shouted to Sergeant Olanthes. The gate began to swing.

  Fire, Bill blew.

  BANG!

  Bill with his two loaded pistols shot the rhinoceros-headed beastman, who was looking with entirely too much enthusiasm at the opening gate. Wild beastkind dropped in the carbine volley.

  “Charge!” Bill waved to Uris.

  Charge! he blew.

  Sarah’s beastkind surged forward with a roar. The pikemen spread apart as they raced forward, creating a wider broom of mayhem with which to sweep the enemy. The musketeers raced in between them, with jaws wide or weapons swinging.

  The few wild beastkind who turned to look at the palisade gate, or worse, tried to enter, were run down. Uris’s men were enthusiastic and disciplined, and if they weren’t great horsemen, they were good enough to remember that the lethal things were the weight and velocity of the horse, together with the blades of their long swords. They churned the beastmen underhoof and mowed them down like scythes cutting down dry hay.

  The sound of death shrieks
and squeals of pain behind them made some of the beastkind charging Sarah’s warriors hesitate, and a few even turned around. Their uncertainty and division were their doom—Chikaak and his fellows tore them to pieces.

  Numerically, the beastkind attackers still outnumbered the palisade’s defenders. But they had been surprised and hurt, and they had lost their momentum. They fled now like leaderless men.

  Or like wounded animals, not cornered and with no cubs to defend.

  With more disciplined cavalry, he’d have wanted to pursue. With more archers, he could have launched a few more volleys into the retreating, shuddering mass of semi-bestial flesh. As it was, the Ophidians with him on the wall fired a few desultory shots at their retreating attackers. Jake, from where he stood on the ground, did the same, and then the beastkind horde was gone.

  Bill slid down the ladder to the ground, bearing his weight entirely on his arms. Cathy followed, anxiety in her face. Reaching the earth, Bill collapsed before Chikaak and Jake, just as Sarah and Alzbieta Torias reached them.

  “Sir William,” Sarah said, “you’re injured.”

  He nodded his acknowledgement. “Jake, Chikaak,” he grunted up at his sergeants, “organize patrols. We need advance warning of any attempt to return, and especially of any indication that we are to be placed under siege.”

  “We won’t be besieged,” the priestess said. “That isn’t a beastkind art. This wasn’t an organized attack or part of any plan.”

  “No?” Bill asked. “What was it, then, Your Holiness?”

  “It was madness,” the priestess said.

  Sarah shook her head as if the answer were obvious. “This is the reign of Simon Sword. And this is only the beginning.”

  For the first time, Bill found he disliked Chikaak’s lolling tongue and ever-present grin.

  “Beelzebub’s bedpan,” he managed to gasp, and then he lost consciousness.

  “Brother Onas, do you hear me?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Kinta Jane rode a mule.

  She’d worked for it—improbably, not as a prostitute, but as a seamstress, in the Ohio German hamlet whose name she never learned, where the Stolze Marie had come to dock, the morning after paying a negotiated bribe to the Imperial Ohio Company revenue enforcers somewhat lower than the thirty percent stated tariff, but high enough to send the Company men away in song.