Witchy Winter
Page 34
Ma’iingan leaped the fence to follow.
In front of the big house stood a pile of stones, each the size of a man’s head. The pile stank of blood and flesh, and the rocks were stained almost black. Ever so slightly, Charles turned his path and walked around the rough altar.
Charles led the horse right up the front steps of the big house and through double-wide doors into the interior. Ma’iingan followed, flashing a broad grin and empty hands at the homespun-clad people in the door who stared.
The interior was dark, and stank. Long leaves on the floor and the lingering odor of decades of asemaa couldn’t hide the fact that these people clearly urinated and defecated in the corners of their own home. Ma’iingan gagged.
“Landon Chapel!” Charles roared.
“Out back!” called one of the servants, and Charles pressed on, leading the horse straight out the back as he’d come in the front.
Nathaniel slapped at his ear and muttered.
Ma’iingan smiled and tried to look harmless.
On a broad stretch of green grass, a circle of boys yelled and waved their arms. In their center stood Landon, and he held a small bird in his mouth. The bird was alive, and Landon held its wing in his teeth. The bird—a sparrow—shrieked and scratched at its tormentor. Landon, meanwhile, tightly held a forearm-long rod behind his back with both hands, and slowly drew the bird into his mouth using his tongue and teeth. Blood ran down his chin.
Two men in black cloaks stood to one side, watching with arms folded over their chests. One of them wore a black patch over one eye. Old One Eye? It seemed likely. And he was a godi, a chief priest among Nathaniel’s people.
“Don’t let go of the stick!”
“How does it taste?”
“Bite harder, Landon!”
Old One Eye grunted in approval.
Ma’iingan stopped in his tracks. Savages.
Charles dropped the reins and exploded into the circle of young men. He pushed Landon; the younger boy immediately dropped the rod and the bird fell to the ground, squealing.
Nathaniel looked too distracted or in too much pain to hold the reins. Ma’iingan took them in hand to keep the horse from wandering, and made shushing noises to the animal. How were you supposed to calm a horse?
“You filthy liar!” Charles roared. “You murderer!”
“What are you talking about?” Landon held his hands up in front of his face defensively, and then he looked past Charles and saw Nathaniel. His face paled immediately. “Whatever Nathaniel said, he’s lying!”
“Charles, don’t,” Nathaniel murmured, but his voice didn’t carry over the sound of the yelling boys, who were all now egging on Charles and Landon.
Nathaniel slapped his ear again. He shifted back and forth in the saddle and frowned, furrowing his brows.
“You said he fell into the river!” Charles pushed Landon again. “You had us searching down to the Roanoake trying to find him, when you knew all along exactly where he was, because you left him to die!”
Landon denied nothing. “You can’t hurt me! My father’s the earl, and your father is a traitor and a murderer!”
Charles drew back his hand and slapped Landon across the face with his knuckles. The smaller boy almost fell over with the force of the blow. “For two things, you will answer me with your body, Landon Chapel. You’ve attempted to murder my friend Nathaniel, and you’ve insulted my father!”
The two-eyed godi started forward, but Old One Eye caught him and held him back.
“I’m unarmed!” Landon squealed.
Ma’iingan almost felt bad for the younger man. He couldn’t possibly survive a fight with this soldier, who was bigger and a better shot.
Then he reminded himself that Landon had been perfectly willing to do away with God-Has-Given by secret murder, and his feelings of compassion greatly diminished.
“Please don’t!” Nathaniel sounded as if he were having trouble breathing.
Ma’iingan touched the boy’s thigh to reassure him.
“Right here!” Charles shouted. Behind Ma’iingan, the house was slowly exploding into noise and motion. He jerked one of the two pistols from his belt and shoved it into Landon Chapel’s hands. “Right now! Ten paces, and if you want a second—”
Bang!
Charles sank to his knees in the gently falling snow. When he toppled over backward, Ma’iingan saw a small red hole punched neatly into his forehead.
Landon Chapel dropped the smoking pistol and ran.
Nathaniel shuddered uncontrollably. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell off the horse. Ma’iingan barely managed to catch him.
“I have filled the measure of my creation,
whether you show me mercy or not.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Why are there Imperial soldiers guarding the gates?” Sarah asked. “Or do Cahokia’s troops dress in blue? Everyone else seems to.”
For days, Sarah has been watching the sun rise and set farther and farther south, feeling the pressure of the approach of the solstice, and at the same time seeing each day grow darker than the day before. The darkness had reminded her of the Sorcerer Robert Hooke, who’d been swept away in a trap of Sarah’s devising, out of sight down the Mississippi, but never entirely out of mind. She ran her fingers through the short hair that had regrown to cover her scalp, giving her some scant protection against the cold.
It was a relief to have something else to think about.
The approach to Cahokia had been over flat land, dense with farms, creeks, and oxbow lakes and covered with forest. The Great Mound with its rectangular Temple of the Sun had appeared first in the distance—obviously a mound, and not a natural hill, because it was four-sided—as a knob over the treetops. Now it rose tall and angular, the largest of several mounds visible over Cahokia’s palisade wall, and thick with black birds; another bore what looked like a cathedral, and was covered with flocks of white birds. A third might be a palace.
The wall was imposing. Its logs were enormous, both long and thick, so the wall towered over every palisade Sarah had ever seen. The timbers retained many of their natural branches, which were laced together, giving the upper portion of the wall a basketlike appearance. Cannon mouths and muskets peeked over the woven top of the barrier.
The timbers were also covered with the double-sided cursive flow that Sarah had learned was the Ophidian script, and which she was beginning to be able to decipher. For every Adam-letter on top of the script—or rather, as she had come to learn in light of the fact that the oldest scrolls in Alzbieta’s collection were written in spirals, on the outside—there was a corresponding Eve-letter beneath, on the inside.
With her natural eye, Sarah wouldn’t have seen the letters, but she rode into her father’s kingdom with the patch off. She couldn’t impress these Cahokians with silks and gold, but she had her unearthly eye, and she made sure those she met knew it, staring them in the face as if assessing them. In the Second Sight of her witchy eye, Sarah saw curving letters running up the front of each log, and lacing them together; the letters glowed an Ophidian blue.
The wall was enchanted.
Sarah had her unearthly eye, and her unearthly troop. They marched neatly to Sir William’s command, cavalry skirmishers at the rear and pike- and musket-bearers in a compact mass in front, and they drew as many stares as Sarah herself did, riding beside the palanquin-borne priestess with her witchy eye naked to view.
But how far could she trust any of her warriors?
“The Treewall,” Uris said.
A wooden gatehouse squatted over the front gate; the Imperials had beaten her here. The soldiers on the gatehouse wore imperial blue, with steel breastplates and bonnets, and worked beneath an Imperial banner, blue and gold and bearing the ship, eagle, and horses of her mother’s family.
“This is the Pacification, Your Majesty,” Uris said. “No gate is to be shut that isn’t guarded by Thomas Penn’s soldiers. No court is to be convened that isn’t pre
sided over by his judges. And no market is to be opened that isn’t run by his traders and taxed by his revenue men.”
“Jerusalem,” Cal said.
“Yes,” Sarah said instantly. “This is my Jerusalem, and I will have it back.”
“Cahokia’s own soldiers wore gray,” Uris explained further, “when we had them. So do the city watch, who are called wardens.”
Sarah spurred her horse forward, her entourage promptly matching her pace.
The foremost of the Imperials was a paunchy man wearing a broad gray hat rather than a helmet. The snow, beginning to fall more heavily now, had formed a crust of white around the crown and brim, which dislodged tiny avalanches as he moved.
“Business in Cahokia?” His voice was not the monotone of a clerk about routine business, but the crisp burr of a man who cared what he was doing.
Sarah hoped she wouldn’t have to kill him, but she was conscious of a thousand eyes on her; her soldiers, the Imperials on the walls, Cahokians within the palisade and coming up behind her on the road.
This was her entrance into her kingdom, and it mattered.
She stared into the soldier’s face until he flinched. “The Kingdom of Cahokia was old when William Penn laid the foundations of the Slate Roof House. By what authority does a servant of Thomas Penn ask any question of a subject of the Serpent Throne?”
“The Serpent Throne is empty,” the soldier said.
“The Serpent Throne is never empty, whether you see its occupant or not.” Sarah sharpened her voice. She was telling Ophidian theological ideas as fact, and they were moreover theological ideas on which she herself had at best a tenuous grip. “And you do not answer the question.”
“By the authority of the Philadelphia Compact that makes Thomas Penn Emperor.”
“Has the Electoral Assembly stripped Cahokia of its status as a voting power? Have the Electors authorized this outrage?”
The soldier hesitated. “I’m acting under orders from the Emperor. I’ve seen his signature myself, and I need to know your business.”
“Apparently my business is teaching you a little lesson in civics.”
Sarah rode through the gate, and the soldiers didn’t try to stop her.
“Iffen I’s a carpenter,” Cal muttered as he emerged from the gatehouse at Sarah’s shoulder, “that mound right there’d make me hang my head in pure shame.”
By carpenter he was referring to the false name he and Sarah had given when they’d been in New Orleans a few weeks earlier, pretending they’d been married. Poor Calvin. Telling others he was Sarah’s husband might be as close as he ever got, she didn’t dare tell him otherwise and he knew it.
Though he’d be a good husband to someone, someday.
“Who you think you’re kiddin’, Cal?” she shot back, under her breath so the crowd that grew along both sides of the avenue wouldn’t hear her. “You ain’t a carpenter, you didn’t build the thing, and it still bothers you.”
The mound he was talking about was low and rectangular, and angled maybe thirty degrees off true. It lay just inside the gate in a square of tall grass, at the edges of which stood stone and wooden buildings, thatched Cahokian-style. Seven knobby boulders like rotten teeth, like shorter, more worn cousins of the standing stones atop Irra-Zostim, lay strewn in a loose oval about the old mound.
The other mounds, or at least all the tall ones Sarah could see, were built on a single, consistent angle. The thatch-roofed buildings among the tall mounds, as well as some of the semi-interred dwellings that were also called mounds, though they were really in a different category from the earthwork pyramids, stood on roughly the same orientation, though with some slouching by a few degrees one way or the other.
“Oriented north-south?” Sarah asked Alzbieta, and knowing the answer she pressed on immediately. “To the pole star, or to the lodestone?”
“To neither, actually.” Alzbieta nodded to the gathering crowds to both sides of her palanquin, so Sarah took to doing the same, deliberately making her nods just a little smaller than the priestess’s. “The pole star changes over time.”
“Now I know you’re shittin’ me,” Cal said. “That’s the one star as don’t move.”
“As observed during your lifetime, Calvin, you’re correct.” Alzbieta looked skyward, as if imagining the motions she was describing. “But over thousands of years, you’re wrong. The tree of life points approximately at Polaris now, but it has pointed at different stars in the past and it will point at still different stars in the future.”
“The tree of life?” Cathy asked.
Alzbieta said nothing.
“Then how are the mounds oriented?” Sarah asked. “If they’re truly thousands of years old, they must be fixed on a north-south line determined by some former pole.”
“I saw a new heaven and a new earth,” Alzbieta said. “For the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.”
“There you go again,” Cal muttered. “Soundin’ half-Christian and half-crazy.”
Alzbieta laughed out loud. “The mounds of Cahokia are oriented to the true celestial pole, the dark space in the night sky around which the transitional poles swing. That is the true eternity, the true fixed nail of heaven.”
“Lord hates a showoff,” Cal said.
“The mounds are thousands of years old,” Sarah said. That must mean that Ophidian star lore, their knowledge of the movements of the heavens, was rooted thousands of years even earlier in ancient history.
“Yes,” Alzbieta agreed. “Your ancestors and mine had been watching the northern sky revolve for millennia before ever they came here.”
“From the sunken lands beneath the North Sea,” Sarah said. “Another first earth that has passed away.”
“Only in that case,” Uris said, “there was more sea than ever before.”
“And that mound?” Sarah nodded with her head at the low, weed-choked hill they were now leaving behind as they passed up Cahokia’s main avenue. “Did someone else build it, then? Or does all Cahokia point at the true empty eternity of space, except for one itty bitty part, that points at the latrine instead?”
“The mound is sacred,” Yedera said. “It’s the grave of an early queen. She was known as the Sunrise Queen for the glory of her reign, though we’ve forgotten her proper name. That’s the Sunrise Mound.”
“Those are Eve-stones,” Alzbieta said softly. Sarah caught the words and remembered that Alzbieta had once seemed offended at the mere question whether there were such a thing as Eve-stones, but the conversation had already moved on, and her chance to ask for more information had passed.
“Would Your Majesty like to meet the Regent-Minister?” Uris asked. “That low building in the west is his office.”
“The regent can seek me out,” Sarah said. “I come as supplicant to no man.”
“The Great Mound,” Alzbieta Torias said. “The Temple of the Sun.”
The Great Mound. Sarah nodded.
The avenue was built of the smooth, round paving stones Sarah had seen elsewhere, including on the Serpent Mound. Snow lay piled high to each side of the avenue, and a dirty trench had been worn by feet and hooves down the center. As Sarah rode due north—toward the invisible dark hole in the sky above Cahokia—a buzz of voices ran ahead of her. She heard the questioning tones, and saw looks of doubt, fear, and surprise on the pale faces and clear eyes looking up at her.
She turned her head from side to side, nodding as she met the gaze of her people. They nodded back, and waved. The buzz faded to a deep hush.
Among the crowds, she saw from time to time pairs of Firstborn men in short gray capes, armed with clubs. The city’s wardens, most likely. Jammed into every irregular corner were tents and lean-tos, and from them children of Adam in filthy wool blankets and furs stared at Sarah. They weren’t slaves, and they were ragged and starving. Some were Firstborn, and some weren’t.
Refugees from the Missouri and from the Pacification.
She saw slave collars too, in shocking numbers. Most of them were worn by children of Eve.
But not all.
Almost everyone in the plaza was on foot. Sarah halted in the center of the plaza and turned her horse in a slow circle, gazing on each face in turn and nodding from time to time. She made a point of making eye contact with the slaves in exactly the same fashion as she did with those who were free. She made eye contact with refugees, too—in some sense, they were her father’s people.
Uris rode forward several steps and brought his horse to a snorting halt, apart from the rest of Sarah’s entourage. “People of Cahokia!” he called. “Before you rides Sarah Elytharias, daughter of Kyres! Cry welcome to the daughter of the Lion of Missouri!”
For a moment, the hush deepened.
Then a deep-throated yell shot up from the crowd, echoed off the snow-laded clouds, and nearly left Sarah deaf.
Sarah’s heart pounded. Blinking away tears—why should she weep?—she rode north again.
Cahokia’s Great Mound was covered with moss, lichen, and grass. As she arrived at its foot, Sarah saw a staircase running up the front of the mound to its peak. “You may step on the mound,” she said to Alzbieta. She did not intend it as a question.
The priestess nodded.
Sarah dismounted. “Please keep the horses, Cal,” she said.
He looked disappointed, but he took her animal’s reins and said nothing.
“Sir William, I doubt we’re in any danger. If I’m mistaken, I’ll require you to hold the base of the mound against any attack.”
“Your Majesty.” Bill doffed his hat and bowed.
“I’ll stay with Sir William,” Yedera said.