Empire of unreason age o.., p.13
Empire of Unreason (Age of Unreason), page 13
“Brilliant piece of work, Ben.”
“I'm just glad the stuff I had you pour in the river made the boats rise.”
“Not f 'r long. They're already sinking. Same stuff as went ony'raquapeds?”
“Something like that. I'll explain later. Now it's time to move.”
“I'd like to move with you, if you don't mind.”
Franklin turned to find Voltaire, grinning like a thief. He paused for a moment, trying to see through the man, wishing he had some invention that could reveal what lay in a heart.
But then, that's what his own heart was for, wasn't it?
“Voltaire, my friend,” he said, reaching out his hand, “welcome to the Junto.”
13.
Sun Boy
“Some kind o' Chinamen, I think,” Tug said, sotto voce, staring at the squat men moving around the tent huts. They looked different from the other plains people, with flatter faces and lighter skins. They wore baggy pants and shirts, and most wore some sort of splinted armor—strips of laquered wood sewn to leather harnesses.
“I don't know as I like this, strollin' amongst 'em as free as y' please,” Tug continued.
Red Shoes nodded understandingly. “But no one has challenged us,” he observed.
“There are people from ten tribes here, maybe more,” Flint Shouting told them. “And these fellows, who are of no tribe I know—and I've seen white people, too. Why should they challenge us? How could they tell we are invaders? We don't stand out any more than anyone else.”
“Still—” Tug seemed to be struggling with the idea. “These white men are Russians, by their uniforms—if they try an' talk to me, an' find I'm English…”
“You're just a trader, Tug, with us.” Red Shoes nodded around him at the vast encampment. “All these different people on the Red Road, the War Road,” he observed, “together. This is strange.”
They had crept past the sentries and into the camp before dawn—no mean feat, though Red Shoes had been able to ease their way with his arts. What they saw was incredible. The big camp was broken into half a hundred smaller ones: warriors from plains tribes and Europe—and, if Tug was right, China. They grow as they come, the woman had told them. Iron people.
They had iron and steel in plenty: muskets, breastplates, swords, and cannon. Red Shoes suspected that most of the latter—and probably supplies of food and water—were on the airships. That would explain why they stayed so tightly together, rather than spreading out, foraging. The smaller raids were probably more to spread terror than to obtain supplies.
“They must be aimin' to conquer the colonies,” Tug said.
That was evident, Red Shoes thought, but why? And who were “they”?
It had to be the Europeans, and he guessed the Russians. After all, the tsar had conquered all of the west in Europe. He had been frustrated at Venice and against the Turks. If he turned east—but the world was supposed to be a sphere, wasn't it? So east would meet west. Facing west, he faced Russia….
A dizzying thought. Dizzying, probably, even for the English and French colonists in America, who would expect any attack from Russia to come from the ocean they named Atlantic, not across the vastness of earth and water that lay in the other direction.
If that reasoning was right, his own people were in peril, for between this army and Charles Town were the Choctaw villages. Red Shoes suspected that the law of this army was join or die. It appeared that so far most had joined.
They spent the first part of the day wandering around the camp, but by midmorning, it was on the move. The three of them fell in with a band of Wazhazhe, whose language Flint Shouting spoke well and Red Shoes passably.
“Choctaw,” the lead warrior said. “Huh. You are far from home, farther even than us. Come here to fight them?”
“Yes,” Red Shoes lied.
“Us, too. We heard about the great iron people, the things they had. The Kapaha and Shawano keep us from French guns and trophies, and English ones, too. But guns, hatchets, and cloth started coming to us from the West, and soon enough stories about the iron people came with them. Thirty of us rode out in war party, thought we would ambush them. Of course, we didn't know then how many there were. Or about their wakanda and the sacred path it takes them on.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I was very young, I had a vision, but even the old men could never tell me what it meant. I saw pale men, pale like snow. They touched my people and made them into bone. They touched buffalo and made them bone, too.
“The old men told me that some had dreamed the same vision, long ago, and then a great sickness came, an unknown sickness, and killed many of our people. There were rumors, then, of pale men in the south, but we never saw one.”
“My folk did,” Flint Shouting said. “They were the Sapani. And sickness followed them, as you say.”
“I knew it was true when they told me. It felt right. And since that time, the sickness has come again and again, and many of our people have become bone. Since my grandfather's day, our folk have done nothing but dwindle.” He cast a glance at Tug, who, of course, was following none of this.
“Now we know the white people, of course. They bring useful things, pretty things, but we have to go far to get them, through hostile peoples jealous of the trade. Without guns we are easy targets for them, and our women and children for their slave raiders.”
“Where did these western white people come from? And what about these short people who are not white?”
“Both are from beyond Where-Water-Swallows-the-Sun. The brown ones are strange, but they know horses very well. They make a good drink from mare's milk. Some of the people who live on that sea have known them for ten years or so. They began coming, in their wakanda clouds, building towns and trading. Then, all of a sudden, they want to go to war. Everyone over there wanted to know why. Then the Sun Boy spoke to them.”
“Sun Boy?”
“A boy, a white boy. But he is the son of the Sun. What he says comes true. He says the white people from the east—the English and French—will be our death, and when he says it, we are reminded of our visions. From every tribe, there is at least one who had my vision. The Sun Boy reminds us, and then we know what we have to do.”
“I imagine,” Red Shoes said dryly, “that you also collect many scalps along the way, of those who don't join you. And I suppose imagining what you will take from the white men in the east is an incentive.”
The Wazhazhe war chief grinned. “Yes, of course. But it is stronger than that. Go hear the Sun Boy speak, and you will know.”
“But he is a white man. Why trust him?”
“From the west, not the east. White because he is the son of the Sun.”
“West is the direction of death and failure.”
“Ah, but we are marching east, bringing death with us, leaving new life behind. The world has lost its harmony. We will cleanse it and make it whole again. The disease will go away.”
“And you will gain much loot.”
“Loot, yes, and honor. I will own more horses than my whole village has seen.” He shook his head. “You doubt me? Go see the Sun Boy.”
“What about your villages, shorn of warriors, helpless against those who do not join you?”
The Wazhazhe quirked his mouth. “Those who do not join us will perhaps raid villages in the ghost country. Not elsewhere, for just that reason.”
In the next two days, they passed several villages, but all had been abandoned. However, several bands of warriors also joined them.
“How do they know?” Red Shoes asked Slapped-in-the-Face.
“The scalped men tell them,” the Wazhazhe answered.
That was what Red Shoes had thought, but did not say so.
They camped that day well before evening, as a black monster of a storm scraped across the flat earth to the west. Red Shoes found Flint Shouting watching the distant lightning as if trying to read something in it. Red Shoes joined him. The Wichita had been uncharacteristically silent since they had joined the army.
“They might be right,” Flint Shouting said, after a time.
“Right?”
“About the white people. Maybe it is best if we drive them away.”
“Maybe, but the white people are behind this army, too. It is a trick, Flint Shouting.”
“You have been to their country. You know how they think. What do you say?”
Red Shoes laughed. It felt good, for he had not laughed in some time. “The nations of the white people are numerous. They do not all think the same, no more than the Wichita and Choctaw think the same.”
“But you and I think more alike than either of us do like the French. And perhaps these white people from the west are more like us, too.”
“Look around you,” Red Shoes said. “What do you see? Do you see people behaving in a way you understand? I don't. The Choctaw fight to protect themselves. They fight for glory, for trophies, for revenge, sometimes to help allies. The French, the English, the Spanish—they have been very good at getting us to fight their wars for them, have you noticed? The English Queen Anne waged war on the French and Spanish. But who died? Yamassee, Apalachee, Muskokee, Alabama, Choctaw. A few white men, a handful. A few of the black men they brought with them. Mostly, red men died, killing one another. Why do we do this? Because we think we will gain trade goods. Because they arm us against our enemies, enable us to fight for our own reasons, but better. Because some of our leaders see only the next raid, the next silver gorget to hang on their necks. And now, what do you see here? A handful of white men and thousands of Indians. This goes beyond that, though. How many brawls have you seen in the camp?”
“Two.”
“Yes, when the Crow man fought the Throat Slitter and again when the Black Shoe fought the Cheyenne. Hated enemies, people with blood debts going back to the ancient times, and now they all march together with white men as if they are brothers. It is unnatural, Throat Slitters and Crow walking together, and only two fights.”
“That might be a good thing.”
“It is a European thing, this idea of creating a mob of people—not kin, not even friends, for no purpose other than to fight. I saw it in their own country, and what it leaves behind is terrible. Not a few ghosts, not small blood debts, but such death and emptiness that no one even cares. What you see around you is not just a very large war party. It is an army, and that is something different. And when they fight, when they come against first the French and then the English—it will be just as I said: Indians fighting a war for white men. And who will they kill? The tribes in the south. My people—”
“And your enemies. Think if you joined your people with these, how your ancient foes, the Chikasha, would fare.”
Red Shoes sighed. “Yes, except that the Chikasha would probably join them, too, and then we must pretend to like them.”
“And if your enemies join, and the Choctaw do not—” Flint Shouting made a gesture as if slashing his belly.
“Yes,” Red Shoes said. “I must reach my people first, so they will have time to deliberate.”
“Why not send one of your dream spirits to tell them?”
“I can't do that from within their midst. It would be like dropping a cricket in a pond full of fish. I must be far from here before I try that.”
“We're leaving, then?”
“I want to see this Sun Boy, first.”
A few days later, Slapped-in-the-Face advised him to fast.
“It is best to prepare to see the Sun Boy,” he said, “as for any holy thing.”
They fasted and went without sleep for two days, and on the afternoon of the second day, they saw the Sun Boy.
A broad plaza was formed around the airship, and people gathered expectantly. Red Shoes felt the hush, the thinness of the universe. Fasting and denying sleep brought even the most ordinary man nearer to the world-beneath-the-world. As the substance of the body faded, the shadow gained power. For him, always nearer the otherworld than most people, the effect was magnified.
It was as they had been told. He was a white boy of perhaps thirteen, slim as a willow. To Red Shoes' ghost eyes, he flared like a brand, like lightning given form. And crouched all around him, in the air above him like a cloud, Accursed Beings swarmed. Nishkin Achafa, with their single eyes of flame, beasts that were panther, bird, snake, and fish all at once. Writhing about the boy like smoke were the forms of two Long Black Beings.
In the nadir of his soul, Red Shoes felt a sudden sympathy, a kinship, something whetted keen like a knife edge. And fear—he felt that, too. Once he had battled a single Long Black Being, and come very near his doom. Here were two. What if they should catch the odor of their brother, whom Red Shoes had swallowed and made a part of himself ?
He tried to make himself quiet to the spirit world, to mask his scent. He felt beads of sweat forming on his forehead.
“God Almighty,” he heard Tug whisper, and Flint Shouting grunted something similar.
“What do you see, Tug?” Red Shoes managed to whisper.
“Angels,” the big man said, “glorious bright.”
“Stars,” Flint Shouting added. “The Dreams-That-Are-Above walk about him, as they did when the world was young.”
As the Sun Boy began to speak, the spirits came among the crowd. The boy spoke a language that Red Shoes had never heard, but the meamng was clear enough in his head, not in words but in the language of dream. He remembered nightmares, and worse than nightmares. He saw the death of his people, smallpox and famine. He saw the white people revealed for what they were, creatures from the muddy waters below the earth, pale, half-formed things with mouths filled with garfish teeth, hungry, always hungry. He saw victory for himself and for his people.
It was not coming from him. It was not him thinking those things, as the boy sang of redemption, of the conquest of death, of a polluted world made clean again.
He had to concentrate, for the spirits were all around him now; and if they scented him, if they knew him, he was doomed.
Trembling, he closed his eyes, but found the disturbing forms there more distracting than vision, and so opened them again.
He saw the scalped man, pacing through the crowd. It was as if no one but Red Shoes noticed him. He walked slowly, examining faces, nodding, grim. He had not seen Red Shoes yet, but he was working his way nearer every moment.
Then the crowd was screaming war whoops, firing muskets, clapping weapons with open palms, and it was over. The spirits sighed away, and Red Shoes slipped out from the crowd and didn't stop walking until he could feel the presence of the scalped man no more.
Later that night, his strength returned, he cloaked himself in hoshonti, the cloud, and went to the great airship. No one— not human or spirit—noticed him climb over the rail or pad across the wooden deck. He moved along, hunting, a panther, an owl.
He could feel the Sun Boy, feel him as he might a raw wound on his own flesh.
He found him on the deck, beneath the night sky. He was seated on a wooden dais, and ten men sat around him. All were speaking together in a language he did not know. The spirits were no longer translating. He crept closer.
Hiding in the shadow of the forecastle, he saw that they were not all men. One was a lovely pale woman with slightly slanting eyes. One of the men wore iron chains. He had a mustache and the beginnings of a beard and wore the green uniform of the dead Russians. When Red Shoes saw him, his dream from the Natchez country came back unaccountably— of a spirit shrieking, of a shadow dying. The vision leaked from the man like smoke through a thatched roof.
This man was from that dream. This man had come from the crashed airship.
Red Shoes listened to the strange speech. It was not French or English or Italian—he did not know Russian.
But near the Sun Boy, crouched in a sense at his feet, was one of the Long Black Beings. If he could touch its mind, it might translate, as it had when the boy spoke earlier. But the risk—if he were found out…
It would be very difficult, perhaps the most difficult thing he had ever done, to touch so lightly.
He had decided to try anyway when the Long Black Being suddenly stirred awake, and all the one-eyes suddenly gathered about the Sun Boy like flies around rotting fruit—or like bees, protecting a queen. Red Shoes bit his teeth together, ready to fight, but then he realized that it was not him they had noticed. He was still invisible to them.
Their attention was on a woman, who suddenly stood across the deck from him and fired a musket at the Sun Boy. The sound of the gun roared out into the quiet night, and then all was suddenly motion, as if ants had been kicked from an anthill.
Five pistols barked back at the woman, as she calmly raised a second musket and fired again. One of the strange, squat men fell screaming. The others drew blades and charged after her, and in that instant Red Shoes recognized her as the young woman from the Awahi village. For a powerful instant, he wanted to help her, for no other reason than that she was young and fearless and beautiful. But then he noticed something in the confusion that no one else seemed to. The white man in chains, the one in the Russian uniform—had lurched to the side of the boat and was throwing himself over.
Red Shoes made his decision in an instant. His shadow-children hurled themselves toward the man, wrapped a shroud of wind about him. At the same time, Red Shoes ran as fast as he could, leapt up to the rail and out into space.
He hit the earth about the same moment that the Russian did. Only the intervention of his magic saved the stranger from a broken neck.
Now the spirits were turning their eyes toward him, and the aether filled with keening and animal cluttering. They knew him for what he was, knew he was a worse enemy than the crazy woman.
And he suddenly felt the scalped man, too, out in the darkness, a bullet arriving.
He reached the Russian man in a few strides. He was struggling to his feet, chains held in front of him. Red Shoes hadn't realized how tall he was.
