Witchy Winter

by D. J. Butler

  “Pain.”

  “Why will they believe him?” Ma’iingan looked skeptical. “Does Landon possess some great reputation for truthfulness?”

  “He’s…more important than me.”

  The Indian stared.

  “He’s the earl’s son. A bastard, so he won’t ever be earl himself, but he’ll be set up with land someday, and when he’s old enough he’ll have a commission. Or he’ll get easy admission to the College of Godar in Raleigh, if he wants to and Old One Eye will have him. I’m nobody, I’m just an orphan.”

  Ma’iingan considered. “Well, my manidoo made no mention of Landon or Old One Eye or any of the others. And it said you were a great healer. So that makes you more important than Landon to me, and to my son.”

  “But the earl…” Nathaniel groped. “Charles. Even George and Landon, and Jenny Farewell, and the others. They’re my people.”

  “Ah.” The Ojibwe nodded. “You fear separation from your people.”

  “Yes,” Nathaniel said. “And from my world.”

  Ma’iingan knelt and began unwrapping the blanket. “You’ll find the world is much bigger than your people, Zhaaganaashii God-Has-Given. If the manidoo of a simple man from the headwaters of the Michi-Zibii can send to have you summoned to heal a child, then you have journeys long and strange ahead of you.”

  “But you’re unwrapping me.”

  “Henh. I would not have any person cut off from his people,” the Ojibwe said. “But we’ll travel slow, and you won’t leave my sight. You understand, na?”

  “I promise,” Nathaniel said.

  Ojibwe laughed. “Silly Zhaaganaashii.”

  “Why’s that? Why am I silly?” Nathaniel sat up carefully, feeling pain lance into his wounded limbs and especially his rib. “Can I have some water, please?”

  Ma’iingan threw the blanket back over his shoulders like a cape and fetched a birch-bark bowl full of cold water. Nathaniel sipped at it, feeling the shock as the chilled liquid soaked his tongue and the insides of his cheeks.

  “You know that if you say ‘I promise’ when you want me really to believe you, that tells me that when you don’t say ‘I promise,’ you don’t really mean it, na? If you speak the truth all the time and keep all your obligations, you never have to say you promise.”

  Nathaniel reached out an arm and Ma’iingan helped him climb to his feet. “Do you think that’s what I need, is to be taught a lesson in frank speaking?”

  “No, I’m just a fountain of wisdom. I can’t help it, I walk around with good advice and proverbs falling from my fingertips and getting tangled in my hair. Try not to trip on the good sense I accidentally fling into your path. That’s what my name, Ma’iingan, means. Fountain of wisdom.”

  “You said it meant wolf.”

  “Ah, caught in a lie, again.”

  * * *

  Ahmed Abd al-Wahid, prince-capitaine of the order of mamelukes of the Caliphate of Egypt and the West, tried not to breathe in the fumes.

  Even on his previous visit, he had found the smell of the chevalier’s Palais off-putting. Under the best of conditions, it smelled like the Christian and Jewish quarters of Paris; of sweat, of unfreshened breath, and of the occasional hint of full chamberpot, wafting in from a bedchamber on an inopportune breeze. That latrine stench of Christendom never went away, and no amount of Cologne water (which the wealthy of New Orleans applied in cloyingly large amounts) and tobacco smoke (with which the inhabitants of this continent seemed determined to fumigate their entire land) could completely hide it.

  All of Paris had once smelled thus, he knew. Abd al-Wahid was Egyptian, born a mameluke to a mameluke father and trained in Egypt’s madrassas in the classical arts of language, literature, swordplay, strategy, herbalism, medicine, and the Qur’an. After the westerner Napoleon had first ingratiated himself into the mameluke brotherhood, then been initiated and finally exalted to its head, Abd al-Wahid had been part of the mameluke vanguard to return with him to conquer Paris.

  The conquered parts had been scoured, irrigated, introduced to incense and spices. Those parts—the neighborhoods of Paris that were truly part of al-Islam, and not in name only—were now a garden of delights, the air breathable and the streets safe.

  In their ghettoes, Christians dickered over the price of grain and Jews made sour faces over the interest rates of payable instruments in fetid clouds of mankindity of which New Orleans was a pungent reminder.

  Now the Palais was full of smoke. Not the delightful citrus smell of frankincense burning, or the anointing fragrance of myrrh and cloves together in virgin olive oil, but thick, nose-shattering smoke made by burning a weed Abd al-Wahid did not recognize, green and fresh from the earth.

  Clay pots stood at the corners of each room and at intervals in the halls. If he stooped, he knew he could get his head beneath the thick clouds and see more clearly, but Abd al-Wahid stayed erect.

  A mameluke didn’t stoop, except to pray.

  And he liked that the thick, aromatic smoke tended to hide from his view the many idolatrous paintings with which the chevalier decorated his palace. Abd al-Wahid knew they were saints from the style of the paintings, with strange little icons—fish and books and weapons—attached to each figure, but he couldn’t have identified any of them.

  They were all idols to him.

  The other five mamelukes in his party followed him: Ravi the Jew, who was an alchemist and astrologer; Zayyid al-Syri, who knew poisons and the care of beasts; Nabil al-Muhasib, who had memorized maps of this New World Empire and was the only member of the party other than Abd al-Wahid to speak its languages well; Tariq al-Farangi, who had been born Gerard, to Christian parents, and who was master of the intricacies of both ship and wagon; and Omar al-Talib, who claimed he had read every book in the al-Qayrawan mosque, but was such a liar that no one believed him. Still, Omar was a subtle torturer and a competent physician.

  Abd al-Wahid had expected that he might be in this New World a long time, hunting the renegade Talleyrand across the filthy, freezing continent, and he had chosen his men carefully. They weren’t loyal to him—al-Farangi and al-Muhasib had been known to Abd al-Wahid only by reputation before he’d selected them—but they were loyal to the order, to the Caliph, and to the prophet.

  Peace be upon him.

  They had come to the New World in eight, but two of those eight had returned to Paris with Talleyrand’s head.

  They climbed a staircase behind one of the chevalier’s servants.

  “The smoke,” Abd al-Wahid asked, looking at Ravi and Omar each in turn. “What do you make of it?”

  “I wish they were burning their furniture. This building has so many cabinets and bookcases!” Tariq laughed harshly. “A true man needs no furnishing but a mat.”

  “For prayer?” Al-Farangi asked. “Or for entertaining a woman?”

  “By God,” Tariq said, “I can’t always tell the difference!”

  Abd al-Wahid permitted himself a hidden smile.

  “The smoke is against illness,” Ravi said.

  “Couldn’t they spoil the air in the room only where the sick person lies, O stargazing son of Isaac?” Zayyid al-Syri coughed.

  Tariq laughed again. “But it’s the chevalier who is ill, and so his servants must suffer as well. It’s the way of all great men.”

  Omar shook his head. “No, they fear contagion.”

  “What is it they burn?” al-Wahid asked.

  “I know not, prince-capitaine,” Omar said. “I know only that it stinks.”

  “Barbarians!” Ravi spat into the soil of a potted lemon tree.

  “Christians!” Al-Farangi joined him in spitting.

  “I believe I know the scent,” al-Syri offered.

  “A poison?” For a moment, Abd al-Wahid feared he had been lured into a trap to be murdered.

  “Peppered camel’s dung,” al-Syri said. “Wet. Heavy on the pepper. With dried orange rind added for nuance.”

  “You have smelled such a com
pound before?” Abd al-Wahid asked.

  “In Jerusalem,” al-Syri said. “It was sold as a food.”

  “Only to children of Ishmael,” Ravi fired back. “They’re accustomed to eating camel’s dung without any spices at all, and so regard the addition of the orange rind and the pepper as a great sophistication.”

  Abd al-Wahid laughed drily, and then the servant ushered them into a room.

  This was the audience chamber where the chevalier had seen them before. The desk was gone, replaced with a bed such as the French kings before the Caliph had used to receive morning visitors. Bloated and pale, they had lain in their nightclothes in bed to demonstrate their power to force the nobility of their land to approach them in a ridiculous circumstance.

  Now they all lay in muddy unmarked graves, downriver from Paris along the Seine.

  But the chevalier lay in bed not to demonstrate his power, but as a sign of his illness. In the corners of this room stood not one smoking pot, but four, one per corner. A young girl sat on a stool to the chevalier’s side, dabbing at his face with a damp cloth.

  The Chevalier of New Orleans was skeletal. The flesh on his face, and his neck and hands, and around his collarbone where it was visible, had all sunk and turned gray. Here and there the ashen skin was marked with lesions, bleeding and oozing dark yellow liquid, leaving the chevalier’s nightshirt a mottled orange and brown. The chevalier’s beard had grown in along his jaw, thin and patchy. The orbs of his eyes were dark yellow and his teeth looked unnaturally long—his gums were receding.

  “Va-t’en.” His voice was sepulchral. The girl set down her rag and duly left.

  Abd al-Wahid spoke to his fellows in Arabic. “When I am ill, it is God who heals me.”

  “Perhaps,” al-Syri said drily, “the chevalier doesn’t know the Qur’an as well as you do.”

  The chevalier exhaled, his breath rattling like the gasps of a dying man in his chest. He continued in French. “What experience do you have with curses?”

  It was an unexpected question. “There is the evil eye,” Abd al-Wahid said. “One does not compliment a mother too enthusiastically on the beauty of her child, for fear it may attract the envy of the djinn.”

  The chevalier waved his hand impatiently. “I mean real curses.”

  “By a magician?”

  “Worse. A holy man.”

  Ahmed Abd al-Wahid considered. “Then you fear that it’s God Himself who has cursed you, by the instrument of this holy man.”

  “Priest. Yes. He laid it upon me while living, and then the curse struck me the day the holy man was laid in his grave.”

  Abd al-Wahid consulted with Ravi. Everyone knew that for exorcism, you asked a Jew.

  “Tell him, if God wanted the chevalier dead, the chevalier would be dead,” Ravi said. “This isn’t the work of God, it’s the work of a sorcerer. Or perhaps his humors are out of balance.”

  Abd al-Wahid passed on the message.

  “Perhaps. The pain struck me first when I removed…certain defensive talismans. And when I tried to replace them, the talismans themselves burned.” The chevalier ruminated. “The priest’s son. The man you are to kill. He has a reputation for being a Vodun sorcerer.”

  The mameluke had little sense of what this word Vodun meant. “He’s also a priest, like his father. And he is loved, if I’m to judge by the crowd that filled the cathedral.”

  “Ask him,” Ravi said, “is the fumigation a magical defense against the curse?”

  Abd al-Wahid turned to the chevalier. “Is the reason you’re burning this camel’s dung to protect you against the curse?”

  The chevalier laughed, just a bit at first, and then enough that he vomited, leaning over to spit a yellow string of bile to the floor. “It’s not camel’s dung,” he said. “I think. And yes.”

  Abd al-Wahid translated.

  “Good.” Ravi bobbed his head enthusiastically. “His defense is working, but it’s not enough. So tell him, get his own sorcerer. Not to defend, you understand, but to go on the attack. Like a boxer, the chevalier must punch back until his enemy is compelled to pull away.”

  Abd al-Wahid translated. The chevalier’s eyebrows rose slightly. “And you? What will you do?”

  Abd al-Wahid sighed. “This man is difficult. He has many bodyguards, and for much of his day he’s surrounded by them. The time when he’s most exposed is when he’s preaching in the cathedral.”

  “You attacked him there before.”

  “Yes.”

  “And failed.”

  “He’s protected by some…power of fascination. He has djinn with him, or houris, and they are mighty to attract and command women.”

  The chevalier coughed. “If I have a choice, I’d rather he not be killed during an actual service. That would be two bishops in a row, and it might be too much for even the most jaded residents of New Orleans.”

  Abd al-Wahid bowed slightly, hand on his heart. “We’ll find the right moment. Fear not, Chevalier; it is only a matter of time.”

  * * *

  “Josep!” Montse called.

  The man who poked his head up over the rail of La Verge Caníbal wasn’t Josep, but Miquel. Miquel was Josep’s younger cousin, too young to have seen war but old enough to have slipped through more blockades than he could remember.

  Miquel waved. “Montserrat!”

  Montse waved back and waited. She stood on a rocky arm of land that crawled out past jungle and bayou to create a small bay, unseen from any highway and out of the way of the sea-lanes. Two fires burned low beside her, two to make a coherent signal because a single fire might be laid by a casual traveler or a fisherman. La Verge Caníbal had sailed in in response to the fires and now dropped anchor.

  She was a beautiful sloop, large enough to pose a threat to most commercial vehicles, but small enough to hide even on this busy coast, and with a sufficiently shallow draft that she could sail up the Mississippi at least as far as Shreveport. Her name was painted proudly on her prow, as if she were an Imperial cruiser—though a patch of black-painted sailcloth could be dropped over the name at a moment’s notice to conceal it—and her Catalan crew now hastily threw two men overboard in a small boat to come retrieve their captain.

  Josep was one of them. Once her would-be lover, his success was making him portly, but he was a deadly gunner with small arms as well as with cannons, and knew every spar and plank of La Verge Caníbal as if the ship, and not its mistress, was the woman he had wooed for years.

  Josep sat in front. Miquel sat behind and plied the oars.

  Montse had released the chevalier’s horse to freedom miles away and walked here. Her route had taken her past alligator-infested creeks and muddy trickles squirming with venomous snakes.

  Josep sprang to the earth and tweaked both mustachios before opening his arms. “Montse, meu amor!” he exclaimed.

  “Josep, you fat bastard, you’ve been eating sugar candy nonstop since I left.”

  Josep nodded vigorously. “And washing it down with rum. How else shall I console myself for the absence of the light of my life?”

  “If I die, you can have the ship,” Montse said. “That’s all I have for you, and you know it.”

  “You will no doubt live longer than I, Capità, and deprive me of my inheritance.”

  “That’s certainly my plan.”

  They embraced briefly.

  Miquel stepped into the shallow water and steadied the boat with his hands.

  “The ship, I have taken good care of her in your absence, Capità,” Josep said.

  “You may as well tell me you have breathed in the time since I left, Josep. Of course you’ve taken excellent care of her.” Montse stepped into the boat and sat down.

  “In anxious anticipation that you would return to our ménage a trois.” Josep leaped into the boat. Despite his bulk, he landed with perfect poise and the boat barely noticed his arrival.

  “Why do you soil your manly Catalan lips with French words, Josep? They aren�
�t worthy of your blood.”

  “In your absence, what else shall I soil them with? What but your skin would be worthy?”

  “Never mind. If it keeps your sugar-stained lips away from me, speak all the French you like.”

  Josep and Miquel both hesitated, looking at the jungle at the end of the spur of earth.

  “And Margarida?” Josep asked.

  “Margarida has been taken,” she said.

  “Was she captured by the customs men?” Miquel’s voice was proud. “The girl is old enough to spend a little time with the gendarmes, until we find the man to bribe.”

  “The girl isn’t one of us,” Montse said slowly.

  “Why do you talk nonsense?” Josep cut her off sharply. “Of course she is one of us. La Verge Caníbal won’t abandon any of her crew.”

  “Yes,” Montse agreed. “La Verge Caníbal will abandon no one. But the girl has another heritage, and now I must tell it to you, if I’m to ask you to risk your lives.”

  “Well.” Josep raised both his eyebrows several times in quick succession. “You could offer me other compensations besides knowledge.”

  “You’ll die lonely waiting for me, Josep,” she said.

  “I’ll die,” he agreed. “But I’m not lonely.”

  “What’s her heritage, then?” Miquel asked.

  Montse stared at the jungle, and beyond it, the Pontchartrain and New Orleans. “She’s the daughter of Hannah Penn, the greatest beauty ever to walk the woods and fields of Pennsland, and the King of Cahokia. She’s a true princess born, and the Chevalier of New Orleans wishes to hold her hostage.”

  Miquel whistled low.

  “I don’t think so,” Josep said immediately, a gleam in his eyes.

  “No?”

  “No. I think my friend Margarida is a Catalan to her bones, and the Chevalier of New Orleans is about to learn that no es fote mai amb els catalans.”

  * * *

  The members of the City Council looked astonished.

  There was the Dutch furniture merchant, Van Dijk, in a fine black frock coat and white cravat despite the hour; the weave of his waistcoat matched a popular style of upholstery he sold to the grandees of the city, a style called Champlain, for the great family of Acadia. Van Dijk was tall, thin, and beardless; white-haired, bespectacled, and baffled.