A Calculus of Angels

by J. Gregory Keyes

  “Go to sleep,” Red Shoes commanded, and the eyes of the thing dimmed.

  His own lids flickered open long enough for him to see Nairne, awake, staring at him, to hear Tug’s loud snores before closing again, sealing him in sleep.

  He awoke to frantic whispering a few hours later, feeling no more rested and perhaps a bit feverish. His falcon was still dormant, traumatized by its birth, and might well be of no use until he was dead, depending entirely upon what the intentions of the wild men were and when they decided to do something about them.

  The whispering was from a shadowy form, kneeling above their prison. “I’m not sure, Reverend. How can I be sure?”

  “Search your heart, your faith, and you will know that God still lives,” Mather answered.

  “I once was a Puritan,” the shadow confided. “And yet I have been convinced—if there is indeed a God, how can he so treat the world?”

  “Son, the world is a place of sin. God hates our sin, but He allows it to us. He also allows us to escape it.”

  “I want to believe, Reverend. But after all I have seen and felt—and I have seen the old gods, Reverend.”

  “You have seen devils and specters,” Mather replied. “You have seen through the eyes of godlessness and fear.”

  “Fear? Reverend, I have seen more than fear. I have seen towns and forests wiped clean off the Earth from here to forty leagues. In all that distance, not one person lived. Were they all sinners? Could they have all been sinners? Beyond that, I have seen the dead heaped in the streets. I have seen the living, their skin blistered from them, eyes blasted, eardrums shattered. For the love of our Lord, Reverend, could they have all been sinners? I prefer that God be dead than to think him capable of such cruelty.”

  “What you prefer is of no matter,” Mather replied. “God is, God was, God will be. And, no, all of those dead were not damned, but neither are all those in a ship that sinks, a town drowned by hurricane. But there are those among the dead who are elect—who live on—and those who are not and do not. Son, you have been drawn into worship of the devil, because you have lost hope. But does the devil give you hope? Do these so-called ‘old gods’ give you hope?”

  The shadow was silent for a time. “No, sir. But we live better than some. And it makes the despair—” He paused, searching for words. “There’s different kinds of despair. There’s a kind that makes you mean, and it’s better, you see? Better than just watching your family die, better than thinking everything is done, that the Lord has come and gone and didn’t think you worthy.”

  “It isn’t all done, friend. You can still be worthy, still hope for the covenant of grace. When this life is over, hope you for nothing better?”

  “How can I hope?” The man was weeping. “Reverend, how can I hope?”

  “You can hope because God is real, and His love is real, and His justice is real. And thus if you stay in the ways of sin, depriving yourself of the covenant of grace, you may despair of the same things. Regain your faith!”

  The man above was openly sobbing now. “You have faith, though you will die tomorrow under torture?”

  “Torture?”

  “The old gods are said to like torture, to eat it.”

  “Very well, son. I will not like the torture, but I will not despair, no more than did Jesus on the cross.”

  “But didn’t he despair, Reverend?”

  “For an instant. Perhaps I will, too, for an instant. But let that instant stretch too long and it becomes eternity. And if you think your life is wretched now—”

  “It must be good,” the man wailed, “to die knowing you have God’s grace.”

  “None can know for certain that they are elect,” Mather replied quietly, “but that is the essence of faith.”

  The guard was silent, then, and though Mather tried to get his attention a few more times, he did not respond. Finally, the old man fell silent.

  “Torture,” Nairne replied quietly. “Are you brave enough for that, Red Shoes?”

  “We are brought up to torture, to expect it—but still I hoped to avoid it.”

  Nairne smiled. “I’ve lived with the Choctaw, you know, and the Chickasaw, and the Muskogee. I’ve seen how the children attack hornet’s nests so they can endure their stings, to learn stoic ways.”

  Red Shoes smiled at the memory of childhood. “Many are not so brave when the first hornet stings.”

  “Many find the same when the hot iron touches them the first time,” Nairne muttered. “They find that it is to a hornet’s sting as a hornet’s sting is to nothing at all.”

  “I have heard this said as well. Have you ever known the iron, Thomas Nairne?”

  He nodded. “Yes. And I have known the pitch pine.”

  Red Shoes stared at him. “And you yet live?”

  Nairne chuckled mirthlessly. “They pushed splinters of lighter knot everywhere in my body, so that I was more porcupine than man, but they never lit them. The next day they let me go. I still don’t know why.”

  “That’s the way war is.”

  Nairne shook his head. “With your people. For you, war is a way to glory, sometimes a matter of survival. Torture is to punish the enemy, but also gives him a chance to die well. Whatever it is to these men, it isn’t that.”

  “How can you know?”

  “These people are not like you. Some call your people savage, and perhaps in some ways you are. But you have laws, love, marriage, children, games to go along with war.”

  “And these do not?”

  Nairne shook his head. “Whatever these people pretend they are—Picts or Druids or God knows what—they are not that. Two years ago they were yeoman, tradesmen—their leader has the accent of gentility, and I’ll wager him noble born, no matter how he disguises it. No, these are men who have nothing at all. They’ve thrown all away and only pretend to have something to replace it with. They are, in short, merely mad, not savage. To be savage is to have redeeming qualities.”

  “I take that as a compliment,” Red Shoes told him. “But that makes our lot all the worse, doesn’t it?”

  As if to comment on their whispered conversation, the shadow leaned close to the grate again.

  “Reverend?” The voice sounded calmer somehow.

  “Yes?”

  “Reverend, I accept what you say. You must be right. God must still live. Thank you, Reverend, for you have made me a Puritan again.”

  “It brings me joy to hear you say that, son,” Mather replied. “You will not regret. When we walk together in the golden city, all this will seem a distant dream.”

  “I long for that day, Reverend. My decision is made.”

  “That mean yer goin’ t’ help us out o’ here?” Tug hissed, hopefully.

  The shadow paused for a moment. “I can’t,” he said at last. “Evil as they are, I can’t go against them. But I will preach to them, you can be sure, and I will martyr myself. I will ask to die with you!”

  “Son, have you thought that perhaps God still has work for you to do? For us to do?” Mather asked, voice a little strained.

  “It can’t be,” the shadow whispered. “He can’t. I don’t have the strength, Reverend. The one thing I can still do is die a Christian. Didn’t you say that He would forgive me? Didn’t you say that He would allow me into the kingdom of heaven if I let Him back into my heart?”

  “Son, that is only the first step, not the last. Sometimes dying is not the bravest nor the truest thing.”

  “Aye, come along, feller.” Tug grunted. “I’ve had me a talk with God, and He has plenty and more plans f’r me.”

  The young man was weeping again. “No,” he said. “I’ve made up my mind. It’s all I have the strength for.”

  He fell silent again, and after a moment, Nairne nudged Red Shoes. “See?” he whispered. “All any of them want is a way to die. They’ve just gotten it twisted up.”

  “Let us hope,” Red Shoes replied, “that we can untwist it.”

  At the first gray
of morning, the grate was lifted, some twenty of the wild Englishmen crowded around it. Red Shoes’ heart fell. His shadow-child was not yet strong enough to free them, and even if it could, it hardly mattered at the moment, with so many armed men to prevent their escape.

  The man in the white mask stood above. “Who will be the first to honor the old gods?” he asked.

  No one in the pit spoke up.

  “Very well,” the man said after a moment, “if none of you understand the honor you are being given, I will let the old gods choose.”

  “No!” Mather exclaimed. “No, let it be me.”

  “Ah! The reverend! Then you understand now.”

  “I understand that you can sacrifice me to the devil, but he will not have my soul. In sacrificing my flesh, you sacrifice your own eternity and assure mine.”

  The masked man shrugged and signed to his men, who made to reach down for Mather.

  “No!” someone shouted from above. “No! Let me be the first!”

  The masked man and others turned at the shout.

  “You are one of us,” the man said.

  “No! No, I am a Puritan. I have fallen from grace, but God has shown me the way back.”

  “Your dead god has only shown you doom,” Qwenus said. “But very well. Let us see how well your god keeps you.”

  Red Shoes had never seen the young man’s face, but shortly he heard his screams.

  Unlike his companions, whose faces reflected a dwindling of hope, Red Shoes began to feel a glimmer of possibility, for as the torture began, his shadowchild came awake. Torpid, weak, but awake.

  He set it to working on the wire. If the young man took long enough to die, they would at least have a chance.

  The young man did not last very long, however. He did not die repentant, as he wished, but instead died begging for his life, swearing his allegiance to the old gods. After a brief pause, in which the wild men chanted some sort of song in a language Red Shoes did not understand, the grate lifted again.

  “Now,” the masked man said. “Reverend?”

  Nairne stood straight up in the pit. “Cowards,” he shouted. “Cowards! Give me a sword, and I’ll show you and your ‘old gods’ what fear is. I’ll show you slaughter!”

  “Aye!” Tug yelled. “Cowards every one of you. Not a one—not the whole damn lot o’ yer—could stand against old Tug.”

  General pandemonium broke out then, as the anger and fear in the pit spoke. Meanwhile, Red Shoes’ spirit gnawed at the wire bonds of the grate. But when it came apart, this was not what they needed. All eyes had to be focused away from them, and soon, or his whole effort would be useless.

  Which meant that someone had to be tortured.

  And so Red Shoes gave a war cry.

  The war cry was something that Choctaw children spent considerable time learning. A man’s war cry said everything about him that was important; whether he was brave, determined, reckless—or weak, frightened, unsure.

  Today Red Shoes was sure and reckless, because otherwise he would not live. The cry cut through the surrounding tumult. Following his shout, there was silence, and he screamed again, glaring defiantly up at the leader, pointing at him.

  “What have we here?” Qwenus asked.

  “You have a man who doesn’t fear you. You have a man who laughs at you. You have a man who will piss on your corpse before the day is out! You have a man who sees you trying to play that you are Indians and would show you how absurd your playacting is!”

  Nairne gripped his arm. “Do you have any idea what you are doing?” he hissed.

  “A red Indian?” the masked man said. “We have a red Indian among us?”

  “Your one-eyes didn’t tell you that, woman?” Red Shoes shouted. “Did they tell you how I will treat your mother when I’ve done with you?”

  The man laughed, but Red Shoes smiled savagely, for he heard the anger in the laugh. He had won the right to be tortured.

  The sane part of him did not think this a good thing. But he could not let the sane part of him have any say now. To live, he had to let the Hacho out, the madman, the shedding snake.

  He continued shouting at them as they hauled him out of the pit. He spat on the man in the mask, and the anger felt better and better.

  When he saw how the young man had died—tied to a frame and burned in the genitals and face by a hot gun barrel—he laughed again.

  “You have a mighty high capacity for amusement,” Qwenus observed.

  “I’m just laughing at your stupidity. You think to torture me in that way? You think I fear that?”

  “I think you do,” the masked man replied, a hint of uncertainty in his voice. Most of the other wild men were staring at Red Shoes as if he were some kind of strange, rabid animal.

  “My people have been torturing since the beginning of time,” Red Shoes went on. “There has never been a white man who did not beg for his life in the first seconds of torture, calling for his mother—and that with our little children doing the deed. Do you know how many white men I have watched shit themselves before the brand even touched them?”

  “We will see how brave you are,” the man assured him.

  “I will show you how brave I am.” Red Shoes spat. “I will show you how to torture a man! Unless you fear me, a helpless captive surrounded by armed men, you geldings!”

  It didn’t work. The masked man nodded for him to be tied spread-eagle to the frame. While they did so, Red Shoes continued his tirade, escalated it when the cherry-red gun barrel approached him, held in a large pair of tongs. Behind him, he was dimly aware that his shadowchild had nearly finished its work.

  The barrel touched him on the left nipple. In his maddened state he did not register pain, but rather a dull shock that ran up to his scalp. He laughed again, laughed harder at the expressions on the faces around him.

  “You see?” he shrieked. “You see? Let me up from here, and I will show you how to torture.”

  The man with the barrel paused, uncertain. He looked to the leader. The rest of the men watched him uneasily.

  “Very well,” the masked man said finally. “Let us see what he has to show us. Let him amuse the old gods.”

  They cut him loose, and he tried not to look at the ugly pucker where the iron had touched him. He whooped some more and began a song, his head light and tingling. The man with the hot iron still stood there, unsure what to do.

  “Well? Show us, Indian.”

  That was when Red Shoes took the rifle barrel in his bare hands. He spun and swung it at Qwenus, imagining that his hands had simply become wood, that the smell was meat burning on a distant fire. He struck the “god” at the juncture of shoulder and neck. The barrel resisted coming away, fused as it was to the man’s flesh, but he managed it and swung again, catching another of the blind men who stood in ranks behind their leader. He swung it three more times before his body realized what he had done to it and brought down the night.

  He awoke to pain, and a gentle up-and-down motion.

  “What?” he muttered. He was cradled in someone’s arms.

  “Aye! He wakes!” called the person carrying him. Through blurred vision, he made out Tug’s face.

  Other faces crowded around him. He recognized Fernando and du Rue, closest.

  “I’ve never seen nothin’ like that,” Tug whispered, “what you did.”

  “How are you?” Nairne asked.

  “Not well,” Red Shoes replied.

  “The wire on our cage just fell away,” Tug continued, enthusiastically. “Then we showed ’em. I boosted Fernando out, an’ he threw down the rope. None of ’em even noticed, they ’uz too busy watchin’ you. Hell, most of ’em didn’t even stay for the fight.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Be still,” Nairne said. “And the rest of you leave him alone, you hear? He needs rest.” He turned back to Red Shoes. “We’re almost to the ships. Will you live?”

  Red Shoes nodded. It was difficult to move. Now that the madness
was gone, he couldn’t imagine how he had picked up a hot gun barrel.

  He had no intention of looking at his hands. He knew that given time he could heal them, though he guessed it would be months before he could grasp anything with real strength. But at least he was alive.

  “Did anyone die?” he asked Fernando, after Nairne and the others fell away a bit.

  “Aye. Some seven or eight English.”

  “Any of them ours?”

  “No. Saint-Pierre was shot, but only through the shoulder. He should live.”

  “Good. Do we have any rum left?”

  “No. The crazy Englishmen drank it all.”

  “I hope Blackbeard gives me some, then. I shall need it very soon.”

  “If he refuses,” Fernando promised, “I will strangle him.”

  Part Two

  SECRET KNOTS

  The World is bound by Secret Knots

  —Athanasius Kircher,

  The Magnetic Kingdom of Nature

  A Devil is a Spiritual and Rational Substance …

  —Cotton Mather,

  Wonders of the Invisible World, 1693

  1.

  Comet

  His skin was a coat of ice, thickening toward his bones. The night was cathedral windows stained only with the pale hues of the moon, mosaics of umbra and uncertain light filtering through the bare branches of the trees. Curiously, those branches knit together tightly enough that he could not make out the actual source of the wan illumination. Ben did not know where he was or how he had gotten there.

  Wandering aimlessly at first, now he began to make out vague geometrical shadows amongst the twisted tree trunks. Buildings, he realized with a start, or the remains of them.

  He approached the yawning portal of one of the structures, its lintel framed in dead briars, the flagstones crumbling, barely evident beneath his feet. Inside, it was lighter, the luminescence of alchemical lanthorns coppering the walls. It was like discovering some lost Babylon—one of those cities in the desert that travelers to Arabic lands reported, visible one day, lost again the next, buried here not by sand but by root and branch.