Witchy Winter

by D. J. Butler

  It was two weeks after his failed attempt on the Appalachee witch on the Serpent Mound, and after his attempt to press Imperial traders and militiamen to his master’s cause, that he realized his heart wasn’t beating.

  Holding one cold hand to his cold breast within his cloak, and pressing cold fingers of the other hand to his neck, he fought down a wave of panic. His heart did not beat, but he did not die.

  Experimentally, thinking of his rival and mentor Robert Hooke, he chose to stop breathing.

  He didn’t fall.

  This was a gift indeed!

  He ran, and found he didn’t have to stop. The snow slowed him, but his progress across the Ohio and then up into the Kentuck and Appalachee, and then down the other side onto the slopes above the Chesapeake, was lightning-quick because he took no more rest.

  Was this eternal life that Cromwell had given him? Was this what life with Lucy would be like after the great life-restoring and life-strengthening work of his master came to pass? Would he and Lucy cast aside their restraints and run free in the woods all year, like deer in God’s Eden in the careless days before Eve’s error?

  Descending toward Johnsland, he came upon the body of a young deer and it gave him pause.

  The creature was barely older than a fawn. It had been born late in the season, and caught away from its herd somehow, without the means or knowledge of its salvation, and it had starved or frozen to death. It lay stiff as wood where it had fallen, in a broad meadow bisected by an icy stream.

  The sight of the fawn’s frozen eye touched Ezekiel’s heart. He looked into the sightless orb, seeing an icy reflection of himself. Would the deer, too, share in Cromwell’s eternal life?

  No, he didn’t think so. Cromwell would slay the Firstborn to undo the Fall for the children of Eve. Deer were God’s creatures, but not his children, and Ezekiel and his fellow-rejoicers in the millennial future would still need something to eat.

  So the deer was dead.

  Ezekiel felt pity for the deer. He knelt beside it and whispered into its ear. Strange words, words Cromwell had taught him—he wasn’t sure quite when—words that felt unnatural on his tongue. Cutting his own tongue just at the tip, he kissed the beast, anointing it with his blood on its lips, on its brow, on its breast—

  the deer jerked at his touch.

  Ezekiel stood, tasting the tang of iron in his mouth. “Rise.”

  The animal obeyed with sudden, oversized movements, like a marionette in the hands of an untrained puppeteer. It jammed its forelegs downward and then pushed itself onto all fours.

  As it rose, the deer exposed portions its flesh that had been nibbled at by meat-eating creatures, and maggots.

  The deer lunged for Ezekiel and shoved its muzzle into his hand.

  The animal’s lips were cold, and it did not breathe.

  “Go!” Ezekiel flung his hands in a grand gesture of dismissal, urging the deer to take flight. It stared at him, and it seemed to Ezekiel that the reflection in the animal’s eye was gone. “Go!”

  The deer turned and moved away. It didn’t spring, or gambol, or stride; it lurched away, it staggered, it thrust itself one direction and then the other into the snow until it disappeared from Ezekiel’s sight.

  He imagined it meeting Lucy in a snow drift, and putting its muzzle in her sainted hand, and receiving stroking and petting in return. Lucy had inherited all her family’s gentleness, without their pulpit fire.

  But if he could raise the deer, why not Lucy?

  The thought sickened him the first time he had it.

  But not the second.

  And the third time it occurred to him, he lingered on the idea.

  In the high hills above Johnsland, he resolved upon another experiment.

  He’d come upon a town. It was little more than a crossroads, and he might have walked right through it without noticing it had the moon been dimmer or the sky overcast. But under a bright midnight moon, the hamlet’s buildings bulked as large sheets of silver and gray, casting black shadows at their feet.

  Near the crossroads itself, at the center of the little village, stood a church. It was wooden and rectangular, with a square tower culminating in a pointed roof. Surrounding it was a stone wall, low and crumbling, but two doors led through the wall—one into the church itself, and the second through a lych gate built of timber, and overgrown with climbing ivy frozen brown in the winter’s chill.

  Ezekiel stepped into the lych gate and felt resistance.

  Was the church enchanted? What kind of town ensorcelled its churchyard?

  Ezekiel looked about the village; all was dark.

  At the other end of town, a dog barked its obscure objection.

  Ezekiel pressed onward, and the resistance didn’t stop him. Like pushing his finger into cold porridge, he found he could will himself forward and through the gate.

  Curiously, the resistance struck him not so much as a physical impediment as it did a moral one. Standing in the lych gate, he felt disapproved of.

  Standing in the churchyard, he looked up at three stained-glass windows of simple, blocky work, depicting frontier saints: Robert Rogers, John Gutenberg, and one Ezekiel didn’t know, who leaned on a pitchfork and held the traces of a plow-pulling mule in his other hand.

  The saints sneered at him.

  He scowled back. “Yaas, show your disdain, but you gave what gifts you had to give and were only mortal in the end.”

  They said nothing, and Ezekiel found his way to the graves.

  There were a dozen markers, all simple wood crosses or planks, with names and dates burned into them and the occasional simple piece of praise or admonition: SHE WUZ A GOOD WOMYN stood between DRINK NOT and RISE EARLY SAYS HE WHO DIED YOUNG.

  Ezekiel knelt at the woman’s grave.

  Did he dare?

  Cromwell dared. Cromwell dared redeem all mankind from the cross of death, and he had imparted of his power to Ezekiel Angleton. Could Ezekiel not dare to redeem a single woman?

  And if this woman, then Lucy.

  He could discharge his errand in the Crown Lands and then be in the Covenant Tract inside a week. He knew where Lucy was buried, he had wept into the earth a hundred times at least.

  He stretched himself flat upon the earth of the woman’s grave. As the Tishbite and the widow’s son. He nicked the tip of his tongue and cast the knife into the snow beside him, pressing his face into the fluffy snow-blanket until he found thin grass and hard-packed earth beneath.

  He anointed the grave with his bloody kiss. Then, with a second thought, he smeared the anointing into a cross. An upside-down cross.

  Christ’s defeat, His lesser redemption, would be Cromwell’s victory.

  He saw a horn lying beside the wooden plank. He had seen such affectations before; a loved one would press the small end of the horn to the earth as if to the ear of a person hard of hearing, and speak into the large open end. This would guarantee that the dead heard the words of the living, and so in cemeteries from Atlanta to Boston grave-speaking horns could be found lying beside the graves of the popular dead, and where there were no such horns—even in towns burning bright with the New Light, or towns with great zeal for the Covenant—some cunning woman could be found who would provide one.

  Superstition. Silly nonsense to most, including, once, to Ezekiel.

  No longer.

  Ezekiel took the horn and pushed its small end through the snow to impale the earth beneath. He twisted the horn, drilling it in as deep as he could. He ran the bloodied tip of his tongue around the large opening, binding it with his essence and with Cromwell’s power.

  He pressed his mouth to the horn, feeling the blood make a seal with his face. The horn was cold, but no colder than Ezekiel himself.

  He was reminded, suddenly, of the double-bell-ended courting stick through which he and Lucy had whispered.

  He didn’t know the dead woman’s name, and he felt that was a weakness. “Daughter of Adam.” The voice coming from him rumbl
ed low in his belly, darker and more guttural than Ezekiel’s native high-pitched whine.

  Beneath him, he felt something stir.

  “You were a good woman,” he told her. “You are a good woman. You’re loved. Rise again, and feel the warm wind on your cheek and the sun on your brow.”

  Not in the dead of night and the dark of winter, of course. But if she rose to his call, one day she would feel those things again.

  The horn pressed to his face vibrated.

  Ezekiel pulled his mouth back, startled. The horn trembled again in his grip and he pressed his ear to it to listen.

  A voice rose from the earth through the horn. “I…am…guilty…” Its tones were basso profundo and it croaked like a bullfrog, but Ezekiel knew it was the voice of the dead woman beneath him.

  The corpse.

  The woman waiting to rise.

  “We’re all guilty, yaas,” Ezekiel agreed, pressing his face to the horn conduit again. “But you no more than any of us. There is a redemption and a rising.” Then he spoke Cromwell’s words again, words he didn’t know or understand, and this time in a variation that came naturally to him, as if he were speaking sentences rather than spouting gibberish.

  The woman’s answer bubbled and buzzed as if through water. Ezekiel squinted with the moonlight into the horn and saw that blood from his tongue had nearly filled it. He pressed his ear harder to the smooth dry shell and listened more closely.

  “I killed…my child,” the dead woman groaned.

  Ezekiel’s heart hurt.

  “Rise,” he told her. “Rise and make amends.”

  “I made amends,” she said slowly. “I drowned…myself.”

  Ezekiel shuddered. There was a tale here, and dark one. A suicide and a murderer, buried in hallowed ground? Her people must not know her crimes. Ezekiel could make this right. “Rise,” he said. “Tell your husband, confess. Make amends.”

  “No…husband. Neighbor’s…husband.”

  The compassion burning in his breast almost made Ezekiel feel warm. “Rise—”

  No!

  Ezekiel wasn’t certain he had heard an actual word with his physical ear, and the sound certainly hadn’t come from the horn. Still, the no had been shouted, and when he raised his eyes to look for the source, he was nearly blinded.

  Light from the fullish moon rattled against the white side of the church and filled Ezekiel Angleton’s eyes. In that light, one of the stained-glass images moved. It was the farmer-saint, the one Ezekiel didn’t know, and it advanced.

  Ezekiel blinked.

  The farmer leaped off the window and onto the whitewashed wooden wall.

  Ezekiel sprang back, rising onto his hands and knees. “By the Covenant!”

  The other two saints, Robert Rogers and John Gutenberg, both the saints of pioneers and frontiersmen, stepped down from their windows and stood before Ezekiel. They rose twenty feet tall above him in chunky blocks of colored light.

  The Lord Protector had spoken to Ezekiel once like this. Did he dare hope for another vision from his master?

  The plow-chasing saint moved off the end of the church’s wall and marched around the church’s yard following his stained-glass mule. The plow cut a furrow in the snow and earth that tracked the stone wall, seemed to cut directly into it without disturbing its architecture.

  “Leave her, foul thing!” Wobomagonda cried.

  Foul thing?

  The horn trembled, and Ezekiel heard a soft burbling within it, as the sound of a tiny brook.

  A force gripped Ezekiel and pushed him. He resisted with all his strength, but when he looked down he saw a bloody furrow in the snow, fifty feet long, and knew he had been pushed all the way back to the lych gate.

  “Leave!” St. John Gutenberg waved his book, the pane flashing in and out of Ezekiel’s view as it turned in the light.

  He heard a tinkling snort to his right and turned to see the mule coming toward him. He stepped, intending to step to the side—

  and the same force pushed again, hurling him back out through the lych gate. He fell back into the snow as the plow-chasing glass saint rushed past, splitting the gate entirely without ruining it.

  The saints loomed, if anything, taller.

  Ezekiel stepped back in the snow. Would all churches repel him now? Had he become unholy, like a vampire? Or was this church wrong, somehow, not the kind of church conducive to the Lord Protector’s work? This wasn’t the place, nor the time, to experiment further. He would find another burial, one not protected by such saints.

  He knew he could do it. He could speak with the dead, and he could raise them.

  He would be with Lucy again.

  Soon.

  And for the first time in many days, Ezekiel felt hunger.

  “Father, I do believe you are making even less sense than usual.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “You’re wrong.” The rumbling snarl of Kort’s ordinary speaking voice added an ominous note to everything he said. Chigozie flinched.

  “I am weak as any child of Adam,” he said. “I know I am wrong often. I pray God I am not wrong always, or in the most important things.”

  “The god in your belly.” Kort harrumphed, a phlegm-filled snort that launched plumes of steam. They huddled against the cold with the other beastkind of Kort’s pack in a thicket. Chigozie had stopped offering to make fires after several refusals, and instead wrapped himself in a combination of a wool blanket and a buffalo robe, both taken from a castle—really just a small stone tower in a clearing in the woods—the beastkind had destroyed and consumed.

  Looted was the word Chigozie would have used for the depredations of mankind, but the beastkind didn’t loot. They left behind banknotes, gold, firearms, tools, and many other things of value to the children of Adam. They ate and burned, like a plague of locusts.

  They also raped. Since Chigozie’s intervention, they didn’t rape women, a fact for which Chigozie thanked God every time the marauders entered a goat pen or a cattle paddock and the startled and pained cries of livestock began to rise to the wounded sky. The beastkind didn’t rape women, or men, or children, but they slaked their lust on any beasts that fell into their path, usually just before eating the same hapless creatures. Chigozie couldn’t watch, and he couldn’t stop them, so he cringed in the woods praying as the pack assaulted one farm after another.

  The beastkind also didn’t take prisoners. That meant that each farmhouse or Missouri stockade-enclosed town was left behind strewn with bodies, but it also meant that some of the Missourians escaped, fleeing into the woods past Chigozie, more likely than not headed toward their deaths from exposure.

  Others fought, and Chigozie saw the bloody evidence of the battles in the snow. Again, he saw dead men wearing the curious wooden breastplates, and the red banner of the crowned bird.

  Chigozie didn’t flee. Was this not his lot, assigned him by God and the Synod? He knelt in the snow and begged for forgiveness and direction instead.

  “What am I wrong about?” he asked Kort.

  The bison-headed beastman raised his muzzle and gazed at the overcast sky of early evening. “We aren’t giants.”

  “No?”

  “We may be the children of your Cain. But the giants are another people.”

  Chigozie had been leaning back against a knotted tree trunk; now he sat up. “Do you mean the sloths? The giant cattle I have seen in the woods, the dire wolves? The strange and enormous beasts of the Missouri?”

  Kort shook his head. “Before the Silver-Weak came, and long before the Germans, there were giants in this land.”

  Chigozie imagined men hundreds of feet tall, striding over the forest. He’d never heard of such a thing. “Where did they go?”

  “Those who survived the judgment of Simon Sword?” Kort shrugged. “Some live in towns on the rivers in the far north and call themselves Talligewi. Others on the great inland seas, north and also east. Some survive among the Pueblo, where they are called Si-Te-Cah
and are treated as kings and demi-gods. Their descendants among the Plains Horsemen are smaller now, but still have the red hair. Some live in the kingdom of stone pyramids, below the junction of the rivers.”

  “What did Simon Sword judge them of?” Chigozie asked. “What was their crime?”

  “Everyone has committed some wrong.” Kort shrugged. “Simon Sword judges everyone. It’s his nature.”

  “These giants, then. The Si-Te-Cah. They must not have been mountain-sized, if they left descendants among the Free Horse People.”

  “The ones I have seen? Half again your height. I have heard of some who are twice the height of a man, but not more than that. Such a man as might give pause to other men, but no, not mountains.”

  “You have seen the giants.”

  Kort nodded. “In the north. The Talligewi. Their houses are on stilts standing above the water of lakes and marshes. Famous tellers of riddles.”

  “Red-haired?”

  “Or fair, like the Germans. They’re also great workers of copper. They herded us with spears of copper once, and our teeth were blunted against their copper breastplates. They drove all the snakes southward from their lands. But then Simon Sword judged them.”

  “Before the Firstborn?” The Moundbuilder kingdoms were thousands of years old, Chigozie had always heard.

  Kort nodded. “But there were giants. You’re right in this. There are giants, and they were here at the first, as my people were. The children of Cain. Tell me more about this Cain.”

  Chigozie hesitated.

  “You fear I won’t like what you say.” Kort exhaled through his nostrils, a beastlike gesture. “But you should also fear to disobey me.”

  “I do fear you,” Chigozie admitted. “But I fear God more.”

  “I’ve stood at the windows of your temples to watch your mysteries.” The beastman snorted. “Your god is bread. Your god fills the belly, and nothing more.”

  “Cain was a son of Adam and Eve,” Chigozie said.

  “I know Adam and Eve.”