“Could it be some sort of demon?”
“No. Yes—I don’t know,” Ben said. “Nor at the moment do I much care.”
“Aye,” Robert grunted. “But there’s the stories about him ’n’ demons, you know.”
“Told by whom?”
“Servants. Them that cleans his laboratories. They whisper things about.”
“I’m sure a spark of electricity seems a demon to them.”
“ ’Tis more than that. What of the weird lights that accompanied that fellow Bracewell? The one as killed your brother and did his damnedest to kill you? I saw those, and you did, too. What would you call them?”
“An enigma, that’s what. A scientific man does not make hasty conclusions based in superstition.”
“Ah. Very well. But the emperor is no scientific man. What if these rumors of weird lights and strange sounds come back to him?”
“Pfuh. The emperor is like a child. Did I publish to him that rain was the splashing of angels in a heavenly tub, he would agree to it.”
They continued on for a moment, and then Robert chuckled. “For a colonial lad,” he said, “you have little enough awe of emperors.”
Ben shrugged. “Why should I? An accident of birth makes him no better than me. The age of monarchs is ending, my friend. Who are the great men of this day? Isaaac Newton, a yeoman’s son; Leibniz, the son of a professor; John Locke, an attorney’s boy.”
“Yes, and Jesus was the son of a carpenter, but a king still had him killed. You may not live in awe of them, but you best not turn your back, Ben, or give your tongue pr’miscus liberty.”
“Returned to that lesson, have we?” Ben said, but playfully. He didn’t mind Robert looking out for him, and the older man had saved his life more than once. Besides, he was certainly right. The court of the Holy Roman emperor was not the safest place in the world at the moment. With Vienna fallen, Hungary in revolt, Prague laid siege to twice in the last year, and a huge influx of refugees, the emperor and his ministers were often short-tempered. Still, if anyone at court had a secure position, it was Newton and thus himself. Without them, Prague would join Vienna beneath the red banner and white crescent of the Ottoman empire or fall prey to a Moscovado army. The Emperor Karl VI, if not a brilliant man, at least knew that. No, the Habsburgs needed their miracle workers.
At Robert’s suggestion, the two of them had taken a roundabout way back to the bridge, crossing the Old Town square again and wandering vaguely north. Their ultimate destination was the banks of the Moldau, which bent eastward around the city. There they could walk a circuit along the embankment back to the bridge. In the meantime, they were in no real hurry; almost two hours remained before Ben’s appointment with Newton, and unexpected sights hid around each corner of the great city, even in the meanest and most out-of-the-way street.
The unexpected this time was not some architectural gem or tucked-away shop, however.
“Someone follows us,” Robert hissed.
“You are certain?”
“Five men, all from the Vulture,” he said.
“What can they want, I wonder?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps it is an angry father and his friends.”
Ben strained his ears and heard what Robert heard: footsteps and voices muttering in a language unintelligible to him and yet familiar in cadence, in tone.…
“Russian,” Ben hissed. “They speak Russian.”
“Then probably not simple cutthroats.”
“Five, eh? Robert, let’s give ’em a surprise.”
“Ben, don’t place too much faith in your wild inventions. Five is still a lot of men. If they’ve guns—”
“I want to know what they’re after. We’ll just run around that corner and turn on our aegises, then clobber ’em.”
“Ben …”
“Come!” he shouted, and broke into a trot, glancing back as he did so. There they were, five men in nondescript clothing. One of them shouted, and they, too, began to run.
“Ah, shit!” Robert groaned.
And from the corner in front of them stepped a sixth man, pistol cocked and raised.
2.
Brigands
Outside, smoke clung to the earth like a bitter fog, mingling fumes of gunpowder, flaming thatch, and charred flesh.
“Yes, keep you quiet, little one,” Adrienne whispered, holding her son more tightly to her bosom.
“It is a strange child who does not cry at gunfire,” the man nearest her hissed. Le Loup was the only name she knew him by, a graying fellow with tangled hair, face as cratered as the moon by pockmarks.
“He came into the world to the sound of muskets,” Adrienne told him. “He cries when he does not hear them.” She peered wearily out the narrow door of the cottage, caught a flash of cobalt through the haze, as if a bluebird were winging through the bleak morning. From quite near, a gun roared.
“It is good,” Le Loup said. “I have been known to smother children when they raised the alarm for my enemies.”
Adrienne met his gaze. She needed no words to make Le Loup uncomfortably return his attention outside.
Adrienne kissed her toddler on the forehead, wondering what thing it was in a child that could demand life of its mother. As a girl, she had not much considered motherhood, and it had never pleased her to be around children of less than seven or so years of age, and not often then. Her own son was really no different from any she had met save that he belonged to her. He was greedy: He gnawed at her breast, even when she had no milk to give, when her own ribs were visible through her starving flesh. He was stupid: stupider than any cow, goat, or dog, which by the age of one and a half would be capable of foraging for its own food and have the sense to remove itself from its own excrement. Not so her darling child. It seemed impossible that he might one day read, speak in sentences, dress himself.
And yet this creature, this child, was the only reason she still lived. It was as if everything in her that yet wanted to survive had congealed itself into him so that she could see it, be reminded by it, demand that she continue the motions of life, though her soul felt dead.
She kissed her son again. “Sleep, Nico,” she said, and lay the fatigued child on a bit of straw.
Almost as tenderly, she lifted up the carbine next to her and primed the pan. Stretching out on the stinking dirt floor of the cabin, she propped the short weapon on a hearthstone, sighted the door, and waited. Outside, the nameless little village continued to smolder.
“Hsst! Awake!” Crecy’s voice came in her ear. Adrienne blinked and realized that she had nodded off—for one moment or many she did not know, since the scene outside had scarcely changed. Adrienne glanced up at Crecy. The redhead’s chiseled features were lovely in the faint light, but there was no other outward sign that Crecy was female. Her rangy frame and narrow chest were easily disguised by her stained waistcoat and heavy gray justaucorps. Perhaps Le Loup and his bandits suspected her true sex, but if they did, they assented to the fiction, for they had all had ample demonstration of her speed, strength, and skill.
“They’ve passed. We must go before they return.”
“They left no sentries?”
“Tonio has already disposed of him.”
Adrienne eased up, searching for her things. She looped the dirty sling that Nicolas rode in about her shoulder and lifted him into it. He was awake, watching her with gray eyes clear of human thought—and yet communicating something, a hint of some weird secret, an enigma only mute pupae such as he were privy to. Something like a feather stirred in her chest, quite near where she had once kept her love for another Nicolas. It was a place she could prod as one might prod a sore, but it was no longer painful; what she felt there was only a cold cavity. The gangrene that nearly destroyed her was gone, but the scar of it still clung.
Le Loup was already outside, encircled by some ten or so of his band. Adrienne and Crecy emerged from the house, and, with as little sound as possible, they all began to move off.
&
nbsp; Half an hour later, the village was a plume of smoke in the sky, then a memory. Le Loup and his brigands had hoped to raid it, but it had already been abandoned by all save corpses when they arrived. While they were searching the ruins for food, clothing, and other valuables, the bluecoats had come, more than they could ever hope to deal with, and so they had hidden and waited. Bandits did that often, as Adrienne had discovered in the past several months.
Now they wound through muddy, overgrown pasture, weeds and thistles waving higher than their waists. The sky was an iron skin upon the heavens, as it had been since the comet had come at a madman’s call and ruined the world. But at least the rains had slackened.
“We cannot stay with these men much longer,” Crecy confided, as the line stretched out and they were able to achieve relative privacy near the middle of the column.
“We need them, I think,” Adrienne said.
“Oh, indeed, but they will soon decide that they do not need us. Or me, at any rate.”
“Le Loup is jealous,” Adrienne admitted. “He knows you are the better leader, and his men know it, too. But that can be managed.”
Crecy was silent for a score or so steps. “He hasn’t touched you, has he?”
“Touched me, yes. More, no. But I fear—”
“Fear nothing. I will kill him, if it comes to that.”
Adrienne shook her head. “We need him.”
“Not that badly.”
Adrienne frowned. “You still treat me as if I am some delicate flower. You would do it, if it meant the survival of your son, your friend.”
“And you still treat me as if you think me a whore,” Crecy shot back, “and a stupid one. If you lie with Le Loup, he will have made his conquest. He will then pass you along to his men. Do you want that? Is that a sacrifice worthy of you?”
“If it keeps us alive.”
“Listen to yourself. Listen. Is this how you were brought up by the sisters at Saint Cyr?”
Adrienne snorted. “They brought me up for nothing, nothing at all. What use have they made me to the world or myself? The only thing they prepared me for was to take vows, and if I had done that I would be raped or dead or both now, for the convents are the first place men like Le Loup go; and in these days all men are like him. Yes, all that I learned in Saint Cyr, my skill in mathematics and science, literature, the ways of grace—all useless. What has my fortune always turned upon? In Paris, at Versailles, now? The organ between my thighs. That is the way it is. How dare you confront me so, Crecy? You have always known this about the world, and I do not mean by that that you are a whore. Only that you were never a fool.”
“I never thought you a fool,” Crecy softly replied.
Adrienne did not meet Crecy’s gaze. She had come to understand when the other woman was exercising her caustic sarcasm and when she was sincere by the set of her strange, pale eyes. Just now, Adrienne did not want to risk seeing sincerity there.
“Listen,” Crecy said, still softly. “Do not lie with him. It will gain us nothing and lose us much. Le Loup thinks you are my woman. He will not take you by force.”
“No, but he may kill you in your sleep. What then?”
Crecy shrugged. “It is simple. I shall not sleep.”
“Crecy, I—”
She broke off because one of the bandits ahead—a thick, stupid Picard named Roland—folded to the ground. She blinked once before she heard the faint report.
“Flame!” someone shouted. The tall grass hissed as if full of snakes, followed by more distant gunfire, like hands clapping. Adrienne turned and saw a neat row of little blue clouds in the field behind them.
Two more bandits fell and another ran screaming, gripping an arm that flopped like the broken neck of a chicken.
Crecy’s musket was already up, and now it spat fire. She knelt as the smoke enveloped them, reloading with enviably smooth motions.
“Crawl that way thirty feet and then run,” the redhead hissed.
“Not without you.”
“I’m coming. One more shot.” She grinned nastily. “I think our decision is made, by the way. Monsieur Le Loup has grown a third eye.”
“You saw?”
“I put it there.”
“God will damn you, Crecy—”
“Run. For Nicolas.”
For a heart-stopping instant, Crecy thought her friend meant the other Nicolas, the man she had loved, who now rotted somewhere near Versailles. But of course she meant the child.
And so she ran, the tough shafts of the weeds tearing and scratching at what little was left of her dress. As she ran, finally, little Nico began to wail.
Behind her, Crecy shouted orders. The remaining bandits had clumped behind her and were retreating with a certain amount of order; half kneeling to fire while the others ran and reloaded, and then reversing places. Most were old soldiers, and so had the training in their bones, but Crecy could reach into that marrow in a way that Le Loup never could.
She realized that she was glad Crecy had shot the foul little man. To hell with him.
Adrienne topped the rise of a hill, and her heart sank. Three men on horses—wearing the familiar blue coats—were fast flanking them from that direction. She shouted toward Crecy, to warn her. Whether from the gunfire or her own barking voice, the other woman did not appear to hear but continued retreating toward the riders. In a moment, she and the bandits would crest the hill and be visible.
Adrienne sank down. As the retreat continued, it began to lose its illusion of order. She had not counted survivors before, but they were fewer. Cursing, Adrienne unslung the carbine from her back and reprimed the pan, noticing as she did so how precious little powder remained.
Crouching in the brush, she took aim at the nearest rider. Her weapon was shorter than a normal musket, designed for firing from horseback, and it was thus less accurate. The mounted man had a pistol, however, which was less dependable still—unless it happened to be some sort of scientific weapon, in which case she was doomed. She let him come closer, not certain whether he had yet seen her, determined to use any advantage she had. The other two horsemen still rode at right angles to her, completing their flanking motion.
Something familiar about the man’s uniform nagged at her. It was blue—most of the robber gangs had formed from army regiments, so that held no surprise for her—but the facing was silver, like that of a Hundred Swiss, the old personal guard of the king of France. Nicolas had been a Hundred Swiss.
She let him come closer, closer. Still he hadn’t seen her, or had lost her if he had.
And then Nico screamed, a long wail that only the deaf or the dead could not hear. As the horseman located them, she fired. The recoil rocked her back, and as she recovered she saw her foe still sat his horse, his pistol leveled. It spat flame, but not at her—over her—a wild shot.
Or so she thought. The horse pivoted broadside, rearing, and the man fired a second pistol, also over her head; and this time Adrienne turned to follow the deadly ball.
Crecy had just come over the hill, but even as Adrienne watched, crimson erupted from the center of her waistcoat and she twisted around, the sword at her side leaping out like a silver eel. The horseman drew his own broadsword.
He got a surprise. Crecy darted under his scything attack as if he were a child and then sprang up, her weapon a steel fan. Blood fountained from suddenly uncaptained shoulders.
Then a second invisible fist struck Crecy and she pitched over and did not move.
3.
Winter Talk
Red Shoes raised his face to the familiar, welcome scent of hickory smoke that the wind whipped by him as he and Bienville rode past the house at the edge of the woods, a lean, gray building, a wolf sort of building, ready to grow thin in the bleak winter but not destined to starve. Some Europeans, he had gathered, came from frozen countries, and they brought with them the art of living in ice. Gazing up at the slate sky, at the hills in their white coats of water-cut-to-pieces, he wondered if they h
ad not somehow managed to bring their weather with them.
“I appreciate your company,” Bienville said in Mobilian, the trade language. It was like a child’s version of Choctaw with a funny accent and a few strange words. Red Shoes had never much cared for it.
“It’s good to get out upon the land,” he replied in French. “It’s good to hunt again.”
Bienville chuckled. “So you do speak French. Your English was so good, I began to wonder if you were really a Choctaw at all.”
Now Red Shoes smiled. “I am Choctaw, Governor. We have met, in fact—or at least been in the same house before.”
“We have? You’ve the advantage over me, young man.”
“At the time, my uncle was the Tishu Minko, the speaker for the chief. You stayed one night in our chukka, in Chicasaway. It was only a few months after you took the heads of the Natchez chiefs. We thought much of you, then, for the Natchez had been trouble to us for many years.”
“I remember that,” Bienville said. “I remember a boy, too, a boy with a strange look in his eye who never spoke.”
“Me,” Red Shoes acknowledged.
“You’ve learned to speak.”
“So I have.”
The trees were denser, but it was young growth, the churned ground between them bearing the frozen record of men, horses, swine, and cattle. How far would they have to go to find game? It didn’t really matter. He had spent a month in the town of Philadelphia, waiting for the ships to be provisioned and the winter to pass. He had busied himself studying maps, reading books, improving his English. But English towns were claustrophobic, and he still had months yet to spend there. Merely being outside was worth the bitter cold—and the simple fact was that Bienville had not asked him hunting for the purpose of hunting, either, but to talk.
“And in many languages,” Bienville concluded.
Red Shoes sighed. “Governor Bienville, you wish to ask me of my relations to the English.”
“That is true,” Bienville answered. “You have exposed me. The Choctaw have been French allies for many years, now. And yet, always I have suspected that some lean toward their Chickasaw cousins and the English.”
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