by D. J. Butler
The mounds, maybe.
But the wall was a work of magic, no doubt.
Cahokia’s magicians could be underground, hidden away in some palatine network. Or perhaps they simply had no society, no tradition, and no way to pass on magical lore to other Cahokians. Perhaps every Cahokian magician was like Luman Walters, an arcane parasite swimming through the long intestine of the world, stealing nourishment when and where it could.
He didn’t think so, though.
The open veil and the naked Serpent Throne unsettled him. Shouldn’t the veil be shut, especially in the presence of an outsider, such as himself, such as Notwithstanding Schmidt and the Imperial Ohio Company’s agents? Was it open because something had been lost, something that would let it shut? Was it open because the Cahokian regent Maltres Korinn simply knew no better—not being party to esoteric knowledge himself, he didn’t know what to protect from the public view? Was the veil open as a symbol of non-resistance to Imperial occupation—was that why he and Schmidt had been invited into the Temple to see? Had the Emperor demanded that the veil remain open?
Was the veil open as an invitation?
The idea felt impious to Luman. He was accustomed to stealing secret knowledge, but such lore’s value lay in the very fact that it was secret. Secret knowledge, sacred spaces offered to the whole world felt…wrong.
Was the open veil an invitation to him, to Luman Walters?
The director was conferring with the Imperial toll collectors and local agents, examining their accounts as she had examined the accounts of trading posts all along the Ohio River on their journey here. Left to his own devices, Luman toiled through the snow up another mound, one of the tallest, to look at what surely must be a Christian church.
The city’s famous basilica, he thought, the chapel of her kings, as he stood outside and appraised it. Here, too, were two stone columns and an entwined vine; the front of the church matched the front of the Temple of the Sun, at least in its largest details. What syncretistic semi-pagan nonsense this was, to nail together the incenses and hidden idols of the ancient Mediterranean and the austere heaven-reaching Christianity of the Old World behind a single façade? What ambition! What effrontery!
Luman laughed out loud.
The basilica was carpeted with birds just as the temple was, but these were whitish-gray creatures, a different breed. Fascinating.
A woman in the gray robe of a Cetean monk stood in the doorway of the church. “You’re with the Imperial Ohio Company.” She folded her hands placidly in front of her.
“And your accent sounds closer to Youngstown than to Memphis,” Luman shot back. “You’re not from here.”
“My order is a traveling one. You must be a traveler, too, if you can hear the difference between eastern Ohio and western in so few words.”
“I’m a wanderer.” Luman squinted past her into the dim interior of the church. He heard the murmur of many voices inside. “In many ways, Mother.”
“I’m Mother Hylia. May I show you around the building?”
“I’d rather look around on my own.” Luman shot her his most disarming smile, touched his coat to feel the reassuring crinkle of his freshly written himmelsbrief, and stepped inside.
He put on his glasses and looked.
The sheer astrality of the place struck him instantly. Twelve recessed niches about the outer wall of the nave were each dedicated to a saint, mostly Ohioan saints Luman knew only vaguely. And each was also clearly marked with a pattern of stars identifying it with one of the twelve signs of the zodiac, as well as, carved discreetly into corners, the customary glyphs of the signs: the stylized ram’s head for Aries, and so forth. Behind the altar rose a Cahokian Yggdrasil, climbing toward a depiction of the circumpolar sky. The transept on the right—which actually pointed north, but which, if aligned with the stars in the apse, would be the eastern transept—was carved with small disclike renditions of half a sun peeping above a flat plain; the corresponding image in the southern/western transept was half a sun peeping above wiggling lines, apparently representing water.
Cahokia lay on the eastern shore of the Mississippi River—the glyphs showed the sun rising in the east over the Cahokian Bottom, and setting in the west over the Mississippi.
The saints up the right side of the nave were women, and the constellations Virgo, nearest the altar, through Aries, nearest the front door. From the door to the altar up the left side of the nave ran a succession of six male saints bearing the signs from Pisces through Libra.
And one last star-sign: on the left, above the transept marked with the setting sun, descended the one asymmetrical feature Luman could see of the entire building’s ornamentation, and here again the blasphemous will to miscegenate Biblical story, star-lore, and sheer pagan nonsense, struck Luman as cheerfully and gruesomely attractive. A woman and man descended, apparently from the circumpolar north, their arms wrapped about each other. They were naked, except that they wore a snake wrapped about their loins, a snake that managed to be at the same time modest and lascivious. And the right front foot of the woman just dipped into the ecliptic plane of zodiacal imagery tying together the long chamber’s dozen saints.
Adam and Eve, fleeing the garden. Wearing the snake, their tempter, as clothing. Ophiuchus, invading the zodiac and breaking its eternal perfection into the audacious prime number of thirteen.
Luman envied the vision of the architect and the artists who had put this together.
Only after he’d taken all this in did Luman Walters notice the people.
There were masses of huddled Children of Adam in both transepts, and along both sides of the nave. They lay on furs and blankets, they slept piled in corners, they shared out loaves of oat bread and dried river-fish.
“You look with an experienced eye.” Mother Hylia stood at Luman’s shoulder, uninvited.
“The people,” Luman said. “Who are they?”
“Refugees. The basilica takes them in.”
“Under the regent’s direction? Korinn?”
“He invited the priests to do so, but they had already begun, of their own initiative.”
“Ohioan?” Luman hadn’t realized the Pacification had grown this heavy. “But they don’t look Eldritch…forgive me, Firstborn to me.”
“They’re mostly children of Eve,” Mother Hylia said. “From the Missouri.”
“Is the Missouri under the Pacification?” he asked.
“The beastkind rage,” Mother Hylia said. “The Missouri burns, and the Mississippi has become dangerous.”
Luman nodded, took a deep breath. Cahokia was besieged from east and west both. “My eyes have been opened,” he said, pointed up at the astrological images in response to the Cetean’s earlier remark. “More than once.”
“But not here, I think.”
Luman considered. “Not here. And I think you won’t open them for me today.”
“It isn’t my role,” she agreed. “Mine is a wandering order. We administer to the spiritually poor where we find them.”
“In the church? What do you call this church, anyway?”
“It’s the Basilica of St. Eve and St. Adam. Sometimes called Eve and Adam’s.”
“And it’s…Christian?”
Hylia said nothing.
“And what’s the difference between this church and the temple?” Luman asked. “The temple where the throne is, I mean. The Temple of the Sun.”
“That’s the very difference.” Hylia spoke slowly. “The temple houses the Serpent Throne.”
The Firstborn cleric didn’t seem inclined to be forthcoming, but Luman wasn’t discouraged. This was the way of the initiated everywhere, and in all traditions. Initiation required persistence. The door only opened to one who asked and knocked.
A man in a match coat and slouch hat approached slowly. He held dirty hands cupped before him, and two children drifted in his wake.
Luman obliged by handing over several coins. Would the Imperial money do them any good here
? With Director Schmidt cracking down, surely there would be less and less to buy every day.
“You found me in this church,” he said, resuming the conversation with the priestess. “You could minister here to me. Open my eyes.”
“I’m a guest here, too, and I must take care not to overstep my invitation.”
“Where’s the homeowner, then?” Luman felt that somehow, he was asking this wandering priestess the same question he had been asking himself about the Serpent Throne earlier that day. “With whom can I speak? Whose favor must I beg, in order to know more?”
“Cahokia is today a land with no king.” Hylia might not be Cahokian herself, but her voice filled with barely restrained tears as she discussed the kingdom’s state. “It’s a land whose queen doesn’t today walk among her people.”
“You’re making a distinction I do not understand.”
Hylia ignored his remark. “Even some of the city’s priests are away. We who are here care for the city and the land until the queen comes.”
“Not the king?” Luman pressed.
“Not yet the king. The queen first, and it’s past time for her to come.” The priestess looked up the left side of the nave; she was seeing some sign or meaning there that escaped Luman.
Luman frowned. “Because of us? Because of the Pacification of the Ohio?”
Mother Hylia sighed. “The emperor is the least of the goddess’s foes.”
He had to try one last time. “I have money.”
She looked at him with a cold eye. “Simon Magus had money. Still, Peter would give him nothing.”
“You mistake me, Mother.” She didn’t mistake him, of course, but he had to try. “I would make a contribution. I would put some of the emperor’s money into the coffers of the goddess. To pay for this church, and for the temple. I would make a sacrifice at Her altar. Wouldn’t that incline Her servants to share with me Her…wisdom?”
Hylia shook her head slowly. “Get thee behind me.”
And Luman Walters felt abruptly very, very small. He was indeed a parasite, in the intestine of God Himself. He stole magic, he murdered God’s tiniest creatures to cast mere magical spells, he was complicit in extortion, and in starving an entire people.
What purity did it give him, if he simply refrained from pork and from liquor?
Nodding silently to the Cetean, and again to the refugees, he let himself out.
* * *
Nathaniel opened his eyes to dim orange light, flickering against the deep green crosshatch of closely needled pine boughs. A thick cloud of tobacco smoke enveloped him; somehow it managed to smell thick and close and at the same time sweet. Spiritual. Heavenly.
The voices were still there.
And yet everything had changed.
He now heard what the voices were, he could hear what they looked like, in life or in the world of stars and spirits.
Nathaniel heard the voice of the tobacco, the asemaa plant sacred to his Ojibwe friend. ~Taste the wisdom of my leaf, ride my smoke to all the heavens, O healer!~
He heard the slow, creaking murmur of the wood of which the barn was built, slowly drying out over decades. ~Root and twig, bark and leaf, I miss the water that once coursed within me.~
He heard the spirits of birds, tucked away in their nests. He heard the spirit of a field mouse, thrilling with victory at having scavenged two nuts from beneath the drying barn floor. He heard the dead spirits of four slain horses, whose neighing was a rhythmic drumbeat always in his ears.
He held a drum. A physical, tangible, real-world drum, clenched to his chest and strapped over his shoulder. He’d never seen it before in his life.
Nathaniel slowly rolled himself into a sitting position. Then he laughed out loud.
His wounds were gone.
He pressed the spots where his flesh had been cut, and found them suddenly whole. His broken rib was healed. He pressed his scalp, from which had flowed so much blood, and found it knitted clean.
Above all the other spirits, above his own laughter, above the equine thrum of his horse-drum, he heard a high-pitched, shivering chord. It reminded him of the glass harp he’d heard once, on a rare trip to Richmond, when a musician had wet her fingers and then touched the rims of variously filled glass tubes to produce notes.
Only the sound he heard now was bigger. Much bigger.
As if a glass harp the size of the world were being played constantly, and most people had no idea.
The perpetual whine he had heard the first fifteen years of his life was gone.
No, not gone. The whine had resolved itself into this musical chord, as if something had been distorting the sound all his life, and now that impediment was gone and Nathaniel could now hear the music that had surrounded him all the time.
He picked up his tricorn hat and put it on, one corner pointing forward. It felt wrong, to his surprise. As if it no longer fit his head. His drum neighed in protest. Experimentally, he rotated the hat, pulling it down toward his ears to try to find a good fit, and discovered that it fit quite well with two corners pointing out parallel to his shoulders and a third pointing behind his head.
In other words, backward. The hat he’d worn for years now fit him…but only backward.
The drum whickered in contentment.
He picked up his coat and shrugged into it. Despite the tobacco smoke and the closeness of the air, the barn two steps away from the fire and the tiny sweat lodge was chilly. The coat felt entirely wrong, hanging on his shoulders. He shifted, but it didn’t become more comfortable. He pulled the coat down and tried to button it.
The buttons wouldn’t stay closed. The drum objected with a discordant thump.
Nathaniel sighed, but then laughed.
Shrugging out of his coat, he pulled the sleeves through and turned the entire thing inside out. Then he put it on again.
It fit perfectly.
The drum rumbled its contentment.
The great invisible glass harp of the universe swelled its song to a sweet climactic chord of approval and then dropped again to a background whisper.
“Nathaniel,” he heard.
It was no spirit, because when the spirits spoke to him now, he knew more. This was the sound of man, a man whose voice was muffled.
In the dim light, it took him a moment to find George Randolph Isham, strapped with leather belts to the central column of the barn.
Ma’iingan? And Landon?
Nowhere to be seen.
Nathaniel took the penknife from his coat pocket—
and found that mere contact with it hurt him. He didn’t cut himself, he successfully grabbed the penknife by its handle, and still he felt it wound him deeply. He heard spirits of pain shrieking tiny objections from all along the blade, and his drum boomed out its support for their wrath.
He tossed the knife aside.
“I’m sorry,” he said to George. “I can’t use that. Not anymore.”
“Why not?” George’s voice was muffled slightly because he was tied so tightly to the column.
“I don’t really know.” Nathaniel set about untying the earl’s son. The knots were tight and expert, but Nathaniel’s fingers were strong and he was determined. With a couple of minutes’ work, he had freed George.
George immediately flung his arms back, sucking in a deep breath and twisting his own neck around as if to relieve a cramp. The neck made a loud crack! and then George began to cough. He held on to the column because his ankles were still tied.
“Are you well?” Nathaniel asked.
George caught his breath and stared. “Am I well? Am I well? What about you, Chapel? What happened to you? Are you…are you mad?”
Though George trembled with energy, Nathaniel remained calm.
“There is madness in Johnsland,” he said. “It may be because of me, at least in part. But it isn’t in me. I know that now.”
George raised an eyebrow. “I saw you climbing this pole, and then you fell. You were unconscious, and I would hav
e sworn…it looked as if a bear was crouched over you. You talked a lot, but it made no sense. Were you dreaming?”
Nathaniel shook his head. “No dream.”
George’s laugh was bitter. “A vision, then.”
“The Nathaniel Chapel you knew is dead. He was torn to pieces far from here. I’m a new person.”
“You’re a new person who doesn’t know quite how to dress.” George’s smile was gentle, an expression Nathaniel wasn’t used to seeing on the other young man’s face.
Nathaniel chuckled. “Hasn’t that always been true?”
“I owe you an apology,” George said.
Nathaniel smiled. “I think Landon needs to hear it more.”
George nodded. “I shall protect you,” he said. “But my father may want you hanged.”
Nathaniel stood still a moment, contemplating the young man who would one day be Earl. “No, I don’t think so. I think in fact I might be the one who can heal him.”
George’s smile dropped into a flat, lipless line. “That’s a cruel joke, Nathaniel Chapel.”
“Look at me,” Nathaniel said. “I was wounded, here, here, here, here…and here.” He pointed out the spots he’d been cut and battered, and ended with the top of his head. “And now? Do I bleed? Is my bone crushed?”
George bit his lip.
“I’m not certain I can heal your father,” Nathaniel said. “But I think perhaps I can. And I’ll certainly try.”
He knelt and untied his ankles. George stood silent while Nathaniel worked, and when Nathaniel had finished and rose to his feet again, they met each other’s gaze.
Nathaniel smiled.
George’s brow furrowed. “You aren’t the Nathaniel I have known all his life.”
“I’m a new man,” Nathaniel said. “With iron bones and a stone from the vault of heaven in my ear. I’ve died and been remade. I ride the horses of song through all the worlds, and if I can heal your father, I will.”
George shook his head slowly. “I can’t tell whether you’re mad or not.”
The small rear door of the barn opened and Ma’iingan came in, propping up Landon under one shoulder.
