Council of Fire

by Eric Flint

  “Mademoiselle,” Edward answered. “Please don’t trouble yourself. I have been beside myself with worry. All of us have been.”

  “All . . . I beg your pardon, Monsieur. I do not know what I have done to cause such trouble.”

  “From what Doctor Messier tells me, it is what you have done that has saved us from the horrors the enemy had in store. You are a heroine, Mademoiselle. There is no doubt of it.”

  “I do not feel like a heroine. I feel—”

  Edward stood, holding his hat in his hands before him. He looked embarrassed, unsure of himself.

  “When I saw you at work, Mademoiselle, I . . . felt something. I cannot readily describe it. Protecting you was my duty, but being near you became the most important thing in the world to me. When you collapsed, I was heartsick. I have been waiting outside for word that you had come to yourself.”

  “Waiting outside—you mean, outside this tent?”

  Osha, now standing behind the prince, smiled and nodded.

  “I have been waiting since you were brought here.” He glanced over his shoulder at the tent-flap; it was obvious that it was late afternoon. “I would have waited all night.”

  “Surely Your Highness has many other more important things to do.”

  “Surely I did not. Even General Amherst did not seek to summon me from my post.”

  “I do not know how to respond to this. I am . . . do you; I mean to say, are you—are you courting me?”

  “I suppose I am, after a fashion.” His expression was startled, as if he had just come to a realization. “Yes . . . ” He smiled, then. “Yes. I think I can say that I am.”

  “This is not seemly, Highness. You are—and I am—”

  “Yes?”

  “You are a prince of the blood.”

  “Remarkably,” Edward said, “I seem to be the only prince of the blood. And there is no court protocol officer; there are no members of Parliament to give or withdraw their assent. There is no one to tell me to whom I may pay court. Well,” he added, smiling, “there is one person: you.”

  Catherine felt herself reddening and looked away. She did not answer.

  “I have offended you.”

  “No, not in the least,” she said, looking back at the prince. “I don’t know what to think. I want to tell you that your affection is misplaced . . . but your point is well taken. The world has changed and the rules, perhaps, have changed. But there is something else you must know.”

  “And what is that?”

  “It is not for all ears. Please approach.”

  “I do not wish to offend your modesty—”

  She beckoned to him. He came close, and at a gesture he bent close to her, and she whispered in his ear. As she spoke, his eyes grew wide.

  He stood up straight.

  “Truly?”

  “Upon my life, it is true.”

  “Who knows this?”

  “Monsieur Messier, myself—and now you. And I think it would be inappropriate for others to know at this time.”

  “I . . . agree. I shall hold it in strictest confidence.”

  Chapter 61

  New sensations

  The open space where the Stone Coats had been drowned was hard packed dirt now, with no sign of the monstrous creatures summoned by the native shaman. But Joseph, as he walked slowly across it, could see them, frozen, trapped many feet below the surface. They had not moved since the mud had engulfed them. The Stone Coats had not even been able to thrash about much—they appeared almost in formation, below the ground to the height of two men.

  Joseph was not sure which disturbed him more—that people were walking across the space where the Stone Coats had been, untroubled, or that he could see them and was.

  His fellow natives, especially the Mohawk warriors, kept their distance as he walked slowly around the area. His sight was well known, and he had earned their respect.

  The Jo-Ge-Oh, however, had a different notion of propriety. As he stood there in the evening shadows, a group of the Little People approached and stood before him.

  “We sit and speak the words for An-De-Le,” one of them said. “We want you to sit with us.”

  “I would not want to intrude.”

  “When he took his last breath, you were there. You should be there now, to aid his soul in rising to its celestial home.”

  “I worry that his soul is angry at me for letting him be slain.”

  “You said it yourself,” the Jo-Ge-Oh said. “He knew the risks and accepted them. He lived and died a warrior. You should be there,” he repeated.

  “I will come.”

  “I have already sent Major Rogers and a dozen of his best men to scout,” Amherst said.

  Montcalm attempted to keep his expression passive. Robert Rogers was a French bête noire, and Amherst likely knew it; there was no love lost between the ranger leader and the habitants. But Rogers was acting in their joint interest now, and there was no doubt of his skill.

  “As soon as possible, we should prepare our forces to move west. Controlling this battlefield means nothing.”

  “Where do you suggest we go?”

  “My first thought was Fort Johnson. But better, I think, we should go to the Council Fire.”

  “Why?”

  “We are allies now,” Montcalm said. “This battle has ended our war. We have a king in waiting, who has made us a promise: that he will receive his crown from the archbishop of Québec. If the service is performed at a place important to the natives we also call allies, then he binds all three peoples to him.”

  “Surely the Lord Almighty is everywhere.”

  “It is a matter of symbolism, Mon General, as I am sure you realize. We have only a short time to make this relationship fast.”

  “What about . . . the young woman? Do you want to wait for her to recover as well, or shall we restrict this to a strictly military operation?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I want to be skeptical. But after what we saw . . . ”

  “The Indian spirits? More evidence that the world has changed. That young woman helped defeat the monsters. We need her—she should be ready to move as well.”

  “You know,” Amherst said, “that Prince Edward has taken a great interest in her welfare.”

  “I’m not surprised. His last duty on the battlefield was defending her and her machine. Like all of us, he saw the native spirits appear and do—what they did—and he carried her off the field. But we shall see if he conducts himself as a prince, or just as a young man.”

  “I would not blame him in either case.”

  They attended to their dead. The British regulars organized details to search the battlefield to find bodies and bring them back to a central location away from where the fighting had taken place. They made no distinction between British soldiers, Colonials, French or natives; Father Jean-Félix Récher was waiting there to help organize and arrange the fallen. The work was done in relative silence. The British soldiers made no comments about Catholic priests, and Récher was carefully courteous to the Mohawk, Onondaga and Oneida shamans who took charge of the natives.

  Putting an army in motion, especially one with many disparate pieces, is no easy task. It is not so much the ability of troops to form up and march; that was perhaps the most trivial part, as soldiers, even militiamen, were accustomed to doing that. It came down to the support systems: how the troops were fed and sheltered, the organization of the supply train, the support and noncombat personnel, the shovels and tent poles and bandages, the bandoliers and anvils and cobblers’ tools that went with every army. Picking it all up and moving it, even if there was no opposition, was a significant task.

  But the need was great. What remained of the enemy force was somewhere to the west. It might be ready to make a stand, and the men who had just fought it, and its unimaginable monsters, were not interested in giving it any time to regroup. Eighteen hours after the native spirits brought the battle to an end, the army was read
y to move.

  Johnson Hall

  She felt it, of course. But Fourth Sparrow had already come up to the house, as if she had felt it even before it had happened. The little one was early; there might have been another moon, and that might have been better given the uncertainty about Guyasuta and Sganyodaiyo and all they had brought—but the Great Spirit had settled matters and the child was coming.

  Molly had never given birth, but at Canajoharie she had helped many times and knew what to expect. Even the pain—it was the spirit of the new child descending into her womb, waking from its comfortable sleep, waiting to emerge into this changed world.

  As the contractions began to come, she began to sense her consciousness stretching out to the boundaries of the Hall, to the low stone wall that defended the many people who had found refuge there. What would happen when the birth began? Would she lose her hold on that protection? There was no way to know.

  “Concentrate on the child, Degonwadonti, sweet Konwatsi’-

  tsiaienni,” Fourth Sparrow said, as she strained and sweated.

  “People are in danger . . . ”

  “Let others worry about that, little sister.”

  “But the boundary—”

  “Others,” the old woman interrupted. “Others will worry. You are giving life.”

  She closed her eyes—

  And suddenly, as if she had been thrust from her body, she felt herself hovering in the air, high enough that she could see all the lands around her. From her ethereal body outward she could see a circle of light that bathed the main house, the hill on which it stood, and the circular wall of stone that surrounded it down below. Campfires and tents were scattered around, and within were small glowing patches that she recognized as the many brothers and sisters who had come to Johnson Hall for protection against the darkness that she could sense beyond the edge of the light she projected.

  But the darkness had retreated. What had seemed oppressive and frightening—what had terrified her for months, at least since William had ridden away into that darkness and disappeared from her sight—seemed to have suffered a setback, a reduction. Could some great shaman have stopped their advance?

  She looked down at her body on the bed. It lay quiet and still, seemingly at peace.

  But she could feel the child within her—a son: she was sure of it—a baby boy. Her ethereal form was transparent, and the child was looking up to her, affectionate and anticipating the beginning of his life. Yet this glorious vision, this bodiless existence, was without pain and without constraint. This wonder was something she did not want to let go.

  Fourth Sparrow was running her hands over Molly’s unmoving physical body below. The delicate cord that connected it to her transparent, hovering form seemed to be fraying. She wanted to remain here forever, all-seeing and painless—

  No.

  It was a world of pain, a place of normal and mundane sensations . . . but it was life, with all its boundaries and limitations, the existence that the Great Spirit had given to every man and woman. This new world was the same as the old, but there were new sensations and visions.

  If this other place, this other existence, was reachable, it could be reached again. With enormous regret, she allowed herself to descend back into her physical body—and with one final push—

  Moments passed.

  Moments passed, and with a surge of pain, she felt her son emerge from her body and be taken up by Fourth Sparrow and two other women who had come to join her. She looked up through her own eyes and saw the fear in the old woman’s eyes retreat. She could hear the first cries from her son, and then her consciousness drifted away.

  She woke up to the smells and sounds of an evening meal being prepared outside. She felt as if every muscle in her body had been strained, but now was relaxed; yet she felt more at peace than she had been for months. As soon as she was awake, she saw Fourth Sparrow—who might well have been there for the entire time. The old wise woman picked up her son from his cradle and handed him to her. She reached for him and placed him so he could feed, but before the infant settled to the task he looked directly at Molly and held her gaze for several seconds. It was a disturbingly knowing gaze for a baby only a few hours old, something she would remember for many years to come.

  “He will see far, Degonwadonti,” Fourth Sparrow said. “And he will be a great chief.”

  “He will have his chance,” Molly said, and guided her son to her breast.

  Colony of New York

  He would not tell them that he understood their fear, or that he felt fear himself. But nothing he could say or do would prevent them from leaving. They had been on the warpaths since spring; they had followed him and believed in him—and in Sganyodaiyo and his power over the spirits. Something had interfered with his last and greatest summoning, one that had scared Guyasuta himself—the Gâ-oh, the spirits of the four winds. It wasn’t clear what he had been trying to do—the spirits of the winds were fickle and unpredictable.

  The cost of that last summoning—the loss of the remaining Dry-Hands and ten hands of warriors, now summoned to the spirit lands by Ciinkwia—was the deciding factor. Whatever loyalty they felt for the cause had melted away.

  As for Sganyodaiyo—he was gone, not in his tent, not among the warriors that remained. He might have left on his own, except that the mare he had ridden remained in the camp. If Sganyodaiyo had gone, he had gone on foot.

  Guyasuta did not know what to feel and did not know what might await him back in Logstown. For a spring and summer, he had made the whites feel real fear, and had commanded the loyalty of many warriors who felt the same anger and resentment.

  Uncertainty and insecurity were not sensations he enjoyed. But he told himself, this was simply a setback—a pause before the next steps in a campaign to remove the whites from the lands of the Great Spirit. It would come to pass: not this season, but another.

  Chapter 62

  We must learn to live together

  Colony of New York

  It had been nearly twenty years since Henri-Marie Dubreil de Pontbriand, Archbishop of Québec, had come to the New World aboard Rubis. It was a trip he would rather forget. Tossed on the waves of the Atlantic, he had been sick most of the way and praying to the Lord Almighty for his life to be spared in nearly every waking hour. When the ship finally reached calm waters in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, he had held a thanksgiving Mass that had been more heartfelt and more moving than any mass he had performed in Paris, or Saint-Malo, or anywhere else. His arrival in his own see could not have been less auspicious.

  But that had been two decades and two wars ago. He flattered himself to think that the land, and the Church, had prospered in that time. There had not been much progress in bringing the light of the True Faith to the Anglais, but he believed that there would be plenty of time for that.

  The last few months had been trying. Récher had told him of what he had seen upriver, and there were other tidings—troubling ones—from all over. And now, it seemed, they were on their own. No word from the king, or from the Holy Father. He didn’t know what that could mean. The sacred Word had not changed, the message of the Gospel had not changed, but the rest of the world seemingly had.

  As if he had needed any confirmation of the nature of the terra incognita the world had become, a courier had come to Québec bearing a letter written on fine parchment, with a wax seal embedded with a royal signet.

  By the royal command of Prince Edward Augustus, it read, your presence is requested for the consecration and confirmation of His Royal Highness as King of North America.

  There had been another letter from the Marquis de Montcalm explaining that as the senior clergyman on the continent, the archbishop would be called upon to place a crown on the head of an Englishman—and in return the French, at least the habitants of New France, would acknowledge him as king. There were no other kings available; the world had been sundered, and there were people and forces that wanted to destroy Christian civilization
on the continent.

  What was more—if there needed to be any more!—this coronation would take place at the center of the native confederation—the Onondaga place they called the Council Fire. In this way, French and English and even some of the natives, would be bound together in a new confederation. Royal dignity would be reposed in the body of a young English prince of the blood. And Montcalm’s letter, as polite and deferential as it had been, made it clear that this was not a request—it was a settled arrangement, in which Pontbriand would be expected to play his part.

  With all the dignity and ceremony he could muster, Pontbriand directed his vicar-general, Jean-Olivier de Briand, to prepare his household for a trip into the heart of darkness; native land surrounded by English land. He could have demanded that all parties come to him—but it was clearly not part of the arrangement.

  It took a full week for the archbishop’s entourage to travel the distance from Québec to Onondaga. Pontbriand thought it might take longer but the paths through the forest seemed unusually clear for his mounted party, as if some effort had been made to move debris out of the way. They were straighter and more direct than he had expected them to be. Even the weather seemed to be cooperating.

  A few days from Québec an honor guard met up with the episcopal party, led by the young officer, Olivier D’Egremont. They were attired in their best uniforms, and though Pontbriand had felt himself adequately escorted, he was relieved when the officer and his six guards joined the southward-moving party.

  D’Egremont dismounted and kissed the archbishop’s ring, then returned to his horse. Pontbriand gestured for the young man to ride alongside him.

  “Tell me, my son. Have you met the prince?”

  “Oh, yes, Your Grace. He is . . . an impressive man.”