by D. J. Butler
“But know this. I will not be bound by rules that you agreed here in this council. You are people of wealth and office, but none of you is king. None of you is the goddess.” She turned to look at Alzbieta. “I’ll answer your riddle now.”
Alzbieta’s face was impassive. “What riddle is that?”
“Elhanan the son of Jaare-oregim slew the giant Goliath,” Sarah said. “But Samuel chose David to become king.”
“Yes?” Alzbieta smiled faintly.
“David means beloved. You are here as supplicants not asking the goddess to choose a ruler, but to choose a Beloved. A Beloved, a David, who may become your ruler. But you cannot command Her, and you do not bind me. I will follow the path my father has set for me, and I will do Her will.”
Alzbieta beamed.
“Her will,” the Regent-Minister of the Serpent Throne repeated, as if saying amen at the end of a prayer. He took up his staff with its iron horse’s head at the tip, and tapped the tip, also bound in iron, against the stone floor. “And the rules of my office.”
Sarah raised her own staff, carved at the tip into the shape of a horse’s head by her foster father, the Appalachee Elector Iron Andy Calhoun, and slammed its tip against the stone floor with a resounding thock!
“Signum quaeso!” she shouted.
She didn’t intend it as an act of gramarye, not exactly. She didn’t truly intend it at all, she merely acted, caught up in the enthusiasm of her new understanding. But as she shouted, she slipped her hand into her satchel and touched the Orb of Etyles with three fingers. Immediately, the green fire of the Mississippi River ley line rushed through the Orb, across her chest, and into the staff—
which sprouted.
One leaf popped out first low on the staff, and then a second opposite it and slightly higher. A third and a fourth broke from the pale wood halfway up its length, nearly parallel, and finally a fifth and a sixth.
And then the tip of the staff exploded into flower. A riot of buds burst from and around the horse’s head, adorning it and then concealing it, and at the same time a scent burst from the staff that Sarah seemed to vaguely remember.
Lemons, or oranges. But there were other notes mixed in, spices.
Where had she smelled it before?
Maltres Korinn bowed his head, but kept his grip on his staff.
“Theater.” General Sharelas snorted.
“Perhaps this one, too, has missed her calling in life.” Eërthes smiled coyly.
“My calling in life,” Sarah said grimly, eyes fixed on the Duke of Na’avu, “is yet before me.”
She didn’t yet have a plan for how to intrude upon the Presentation, but she still had time to come up with one.
* * *
Calvin climbed the mound alone.
He’d thought about inviting Cathy and Bill, Cathy because she was pleasant, and Bill because…well, because it felt awkward to invite Cathy without Bill…In the end, he’d left them at Alzbieta Torias’s family house in Cahokia, Cathy coolly watching the mound-top palace into which Sarah had disappeared, and Bill describing his plans for the next stage of drilling with his mixed force of Firstborn and beastkind.
It felt right to climb this mound alone.
He’d spotted it when standing beside Sarah on the Great Mound. This other mound, one of the city’s three largest, stood east of the Great Mound. And the building on its peak had to be a church.
It was cross-shaped, for one thing. The churches around Nashville, whether New Light or not, tended to be simple squares or rectangles, but older churches, and all the churches in some parts of the Empire, were cross-shaped buildings. Like the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, for instance. The building was cross-shaped, and on its east-facing spire it bore a plain, tall cross.
Also, it had stained-glass windows. Tall ones, like the windows of a church. And it was hard to tell for certain from the outside, but Cal thought the images he’d seen from the Great Mound were images of the seven days of creation: light on the first day, the firmament on the second, and so forth.
He stood now on the highest steps of the stairs that climbed the eastern slope of the mound and looked up. The building was made of stone and it was covered with statuary. There were monsters, including many prominent half-man, half-beast creatures, but there were also women and men. Like any saints’ representations, the statues were marked by icons, but Calvin didn’t know any of them.
Was that because he was New Light, and a little wary of saints and their followers generally?
Or were these Ophidian saints?
The church was also covered with mourning doves. The gray and white birds were also called rain doves and turtle doves, though he was pretty sure it wasn’t the same species mentioned in the Bible. The birds crowded every horizontal space outside the building, cooing softly and staring at him with their little round eyes.
The church’s doors were recessed in a broad porch, and in front of the doors stood two stone columns. The pillars were carved, too, with climbing vines and leaves, and where the pillars reached the ceiling of the porch they branched out into boughs that seemed to hold up the front of the church. A carved vine hung across those boughs, connecting the two trees like the lintel above a door; even in the pale winter light, the vine glinted dully gold. He had only seen it from the foot of the slope, but Cal thought the building atop the Great Mound—the Temple of the Sun?—was fronted by a similar arrangement of two pillars and a vine.
One of the doors hung halfway open; Cal entered.
He stood a moment in the semi-darkness within, his eyes acclimating to the colored light through stained panes and his ears adjusting to the sounds bouncing off stone walls within, both muffled and amplified, when he heard a voice.
“What did you bring to trade?”
Cal turned and found a round-faced woman with short hair, dark brown with a hint of gray in it. She wore a gray robe with a crescent-moon shaped brooch pinned to her chest. “Ma’am, I ain’t learned, but I’ve read enough Bible to know Jesus don’t like you buyin’ and sellin’ things in a church.”
The woman laughed. “I mean, you’re a traveler, aren’t you? You’re Appalachee, and you look a little…road-worn. My guess is you’ve come here to trade. You might pick up beaver pelts from the Algonks or buffalo hides from the Sioux, or Cahokian crops. They call this the Cahokian Bottom, you know—it’s a flat plain created by the Mississippi, and its soil is rich from centuries of flooding, and abounds in crops. Although I doubt there’s surplus to sell, this year. What did you bring to trade? Not your neighbor’s cattle, I hope?” Her eyes twinkled.
“No, ma’am. Iffen I e’er sold my neighbor’s cow in the spring, it was because he sold mine in the fall.” Cal felt his face flushing. “But not this trip, anyhow. I come on this trip for…well, Jerusalem, I come for love, iffen I’m honest about it. I can tell you that, can’t I? You’re a priest, or priestess? Nun? St. Cetes, ain’t it?”
“We aren’t exactly in the confessional booth. I’m Mother Hylia.”
“Mother? Oh, as in Father Thalanes, Mother Hylia. I’m Calvin. Cal.”
Hylia frowned. “Father Thalanes? Did you know someone of that name?”
Cal nodded. “I started this journey with him, seems like ten years ago, though it weren’t but a few weeks.”
“Started? Did you part ways?”
“In a manner of speakin’.” To his surprise, tears sprang to Calvin’s eyes. “He…died.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I knew Thalanes. He taught me rhetoric and heuristics.”
“I have no idea what that means,” Cal admitted, “but he was a hell of a teacher, so I believe it.”
“I won’t tell anyone you’re in love,” Mother Hylia promised.
“Aw, she knows, anyway.” Cal scuffed the heel of his moccasin on the stone floor. “And I come for other reasons, too. I made a promise to my grandpa. And it’s the right thing to do.”
“I like to hear about people trying to do the right t
hing.”
Cal shrugged. “And I saw this and figured it for a church. Only I’m a mite surprised to see you here, because St. Cetes and all. I mean, ain’t you the ones as wander around and are all about freedom? I didn’t take you for the kind as would run a church.”
“We aren’t.” The nun bobbed her head. “This church…its proper title is basilica, by the way, meaning it’s a royal chapel, and this is the Basilica Mound we stand on…has secular priests. That is to say, priests who aren’t monks or nuns, and who perform services here. Some of them are away right now.”
“You jest visitin’, too?”
The nun shrugged. “Just visiting, and if someone needed any additional services, I’d help out the secular priests as I could. If a confession needed to be heard, for instance, or if there were call for an unscheduled Mass.”
“How about a tour of the church?” Cal asked. “Iffen you got the time. I ain’t e’er been in an Ophidian chapel, I reckon I might could use some explanation.”
Hylia smiled. “Every true journey needs a psychopomp.”
“I don’t know why I’d need a pump,” Cal said. “I mostly jest want to look at the pictures.”
“I’ll follow you,” Hylia said. “When you want something explained, tell me, and I’ll give it my best shot.”
Cal nodded and ambled up the left side of the nave. He’d gone about halfway, nodding at every statue but not asking Hylia for more information about any of them, when he stopped with a sudden realization.
“Men,” he said.
Hylia nodded.
“Every single one of these saints is a man. I don’t know half of ’em—I mean, there’s Elijah, and that’s Paul, right? And the feller lookin’ at his own skin on the door must be Cetes. But I don’t know the one holding the basket, or the feller with the snake wrapped around his middle, or the one drivin’ a mule, but they’s no women.”
“Arakles,” she said. “Ophiuches. St. Peter of the Plow. Would you like to hear their stories?”
Cal considered. “I reckon not. Not at the moment, anyhow. But…I can’t figure this. Where are the women?”
“Keep walking.” Hylia smiled.
In the stained-glass windows around the center of the church, Cal read, moving backward through time, the story of the expulsion from Eden, the Fall, and the Creation. They were mostly told in images he knew—and here he found the first image of a woman in Eve—though those representations had a Cahokian twist. Adam and Eve, holding hands, fled the Garden before a fiery, sword-wielding angel, who stood across a line of what Alzbieta Torias had called Adam-stones. And when they built their home outside the Garden, it was a stone house perched on a conical mound.
At the rear left side of the chapel in stained glass, the first day of creation flowing from his lips, was a bearded giant, crowned and enthroned. “It ain’t always you see God Hisself,” Cal said. “Usually you jest see Jesus. I mean, not to fool around with God and Jesus bein’ the same person, or the same substance but different persons, or howe’er it is you’d say it in betterick and holistics.”
Hylia smiled and pointed back the way they’d come, over the church doors. There, always on the male-dominated side—the south side of the building—was a stained-glass image of Christ after the passion, wounds in his hands but smiling.
“I see,” Cal said. “Well, mostly so far this is the same stuff I might could see in any chapel in Nashville or the Kentuck. Exceptin’ you got some odd saints, but so do the Yankees and the French.”
Hylia beckoned him to follow, and crossed through the center of the church. Looking to his left as he walked, Cal saw what must be the center of the stained-glass image dominating the apse: he recognized the circumpolar stars immediately, with Draco and the Bears. He cocked his head and thought; God the Father seemed to occupy the place of the enthroned King Cepheus, and he didn’t see Cassiopeia—but he spotted a robe-covered arm that must belong to her.
Then he crossed to the north side of the nave, and saw that the Cassiopeia figure was a woman, crowned and enthroned like Cepheus-God the Father. From her flowed the same stories of Creation, Fall, Expulsion, and so forth, but the stories were different. On day one, the Father spoke and light came from his mouth; on day one, the…Mother?…spoke and angels flew from her lips, holding squares, compasses, trowels, garden spades, and other tools.
The stories were too much for Cal to absorb all at once. He noticed that in the Garden, there was no serpent—instead, Eve seemed to holding the apple out to Adam, having a reasoned conversation, while their free hands touched, fingers interlaced together. Rather than mound-top homes, after the Expulsion, this Adam and Eve built mound-top observatories like the one Cal had seen at Irra-Zostim. And at the end of the sequence of stories—bringing up the train of a parade of female saints—over the door in stained glass was a woman holding a baby.
“Mary,” Cal said, relieved he finally recognized something.
“The Virgin,” Hylia said. Smiling the same damned smile.
“Only your builders might could a used more models. All your women look the same—Eve, Mary, Cassiopeia—”
“Cassiopeia?”
Cal pointed at the great creatrix in stained glass.
“The Virgin,” she said again.
“Right.” And then Cal realized he’d walked right past something without noticing it. He retraced his steps into the center of the nave, where he’d passed through, eyes fixed on the circumpolar stars. This time he looked down.
There was an altar, such as he’d seen in the St. Louis Cathedral, and in other churches. But behind the altar, pointing up toward the stained-glass north (actually on the west side of the building), was a large golden candlestick. Its arms were irregular in size and height, giving it the appearance of a seven-branched tree, or an irregular ladder, climbing from the altar at the center of the church up into the center of the sky.
Was it in fact the trunk of a seven-armed tree, covered with gold?
Cal stared, feeling rooted into place.
He barely heard the hushed whisper of feet on stone approaching, but he felt the tug at his elbow and found Mother Hylia standing only inches from his shoulder, disconcertingly close, as Thalanes had liked to stand.
“I can’t figure out,” Cal said slowly, staring at the stars in the central window, “whether these pictures—and you, and Sarah, and all…this—are extremely familiar, or extremely foreign. Pretty sure it’s one of the two.”
“Do you feel like a man twenty years married, who looks on his wife one night and realizes he doesn’t know her at all?”
“Jerusalem, I…mebbe. It’s like they’s a side to all these stories I ne’er knew, the right side, so to speak, or the left, dependin’ on where you stand.”
“Or the inside,” Mother Hylia said.
“The inside. Jerusalem.” Cal shook his head. “I don’t understand this and I ain’t about to understand it. I’s New Light when I come through the doors and I reckon I’m New Light still, and that’ll jest have to do for plain old Calvin Calhoun.”
“The gods look on the heart, Calvin,” Mother Hylia.
“Gods. Jerusalem.” Cal thought of Simon Sword, the iridescent bird-headed giant king of the Mississippi, proposing marriage to Sarah. He rubbed his eyes, trying to wipe away the memory.
“Of course, gods. ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…male and female created he them.’ Gods and goddesses.”
“Jest tell me one thing.”
“If I can.”
“St. Peter of the Plow…that ain’t some Firstborn way of talkin’ about Simon Sword, is it? About Peter Plowshare?”
Mother Hylia laughed. “Of course not. But they sound similar, don’t they? But then, the Vodun loa Papa Legba and St. Peter of the Rock both have a key, but they’re very different beings. No, St. Peter of the Plow was a farmer who for his righteousness was given a plow by God.”
Calvin’s head hurt. “A magic plow?”
“A holy plow.
And every furrow cut by that plow sprouted fruitful, with grain and squash and beans. And the farmer’s neighbors urged him to become rich, but instead he gave all the food away to the poor, until there were no poor. Then the neighbors urged Peter to make himself rich, but still he refused. Instead, he gave the food to his immediate neighbors, and then all the people in the county, until the county was fabulously wealthy, famous for the abundance of its food.”
“I’d be happy to own such a plow myself.” Calvin tried not to think of the golden plow, the Heronplow, that Sarah now carried in the bottom of her shoulder bag.
“Still the plowed furrows grew food, and Peter traded the food for donkeys, and bundled the excess food on the donkeys and sent it over the mountains to people who were hungry there. And then he bought ships, and filled them with corn and squash and beans and sent them overseas to the poor around the world.”
“Lord hates a man as lacks ambition.”
“Finally, one night an angel appeared to Peter, and said ‘Peter, God wishes you to be rich. Why won’t you do as God commands?’ And Peter trembled there beside his bed on his knees, and said ‘God forgive me, but money is not the riches that I want.’ The angel again: ‘What riches do you wish, then? Ask, and Heaven itself cannot refuse.’”
“You mean will not,” Cal said.
“Shh. ‘Heaven itself cannot refuse.’ And Peter, in the goodness of his heart, said, ‘What I wish indeed is Heaven. I wish to live in Heaven, and my only regret is that I cannot live in Heaven and also do the works on earth God wishes me to do.’ At his last word, the plow sprang from its place on the mantel and rushed outside on its own. With no hand guiding it and no beast pulling, that plow bit into the earth and carved a square all around Peter’s house. From the moment it finished its work, the interior of the square it had marked became Heaven on earth. Angels descended to minister to Peter, and though he left his home to plow and reap, and to feed to the poor until the end of his days, every night he lay awake all night seeing visions of Heaven all around him, eating honeycomb and drinking wine with the angels, and then rising refreshed, though sleepless, every dawn.”
