Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel (7 page)

Inside the fort stood a blue-and-green cart with a red canvas
cover, its wheel spokes and tongue picked out in canary yellow, in the middle of an otherwise empty parade ground. On the side of the cart's high canvas cover, in faded black letters, were the words "Sabbati Zebi. Seer and Prophet. Fortunes Told 5C/. Prognostications 10C/. Prophecies 25C/." Below that was the rune
and the word
Raido
.

From the wagon came a groan. "Who is it, Caliph?" a voice said. "Who comes? Cossacks to finish me off, no doubt."

"It's Morgan Kinneson of Kingdom Mountain, Vermont," Morgan called out. "The elephant brought me."

The voice inside the cart did not reply. Morgan lifted the back flap and peered inside. An elderly gypsy man lay on a pile of straw, holding his stomach and rocking. He had long gray hair and a silver hoop in one ear. Over his legs and stomach was drawn a ragged quilt. Beside him sat an old trunk with a faded painting on the lid of a genie rising out of a bottle.

"I die now in a minute," the gypsy said to Morgan. "Because of your cursed war and all it unleashes."

Morgan looked at Sabbati Zebi. "It isn't my war," he said.

"Look," Sabbati said. "I am traveling the countryside north of here with the Caliph and minding my own business when suddenly I am overtaken by a clubfoot driving a fine sleigh and dressed all in black, with a sable hat. He sees the sign on my cart,
raido
, and asks what it means, and I make up some gypsy foolishness. He watches me with his snaky black eyes, and I know he does not believe the tale. Then he asks if I have seen a tall boy with fringe jacket and long, light hair."

A chill ran up Morgan's back. "Was this man armed?"

The gypsy shrugged. "Not knowing. Perhaps. His eyes are dead eyes, and I am afraid. So I tell him I am ill and must get to a doctor.
That I have a bad tumor inside my stomach, is killing me. And he says is my lucky day, he is doctor. He gets from the carriage a carpetbag. He says he has the right medicine, will cure Sabbati. He presses my stomach and I pretend to shriek in pain. Then he asks me again. Have I seen a boy from Vermont with a musket and another gun around his neck. Or a long-legged black wench. I shake my head and groan as if in pain, and the clubfoot says he will examine my stomach, and out of the bag he whips his doctor's cutting knife and does this to me."

The gypsy pulled back the quilt. With his other hand he was cradling his own intestines, spilling out of a long rent in his stomach. "Look," he cried. "The so-called doctor sliced me open and pulled out my guts and trod on them with his great black iron shoe."

Morgan started and drew back, but the gypsy reached out and seized his hand. "The Caliph is bring me here. To the fort I also call
raido
. Is wounded?"

Morgan realized that Sabbati was referring to the elephant. "I didn't see that he was. But he's crying."

"Is cry for me, his brother. Elephants have souls, too, like gypsies. They cry tears. They smile with their eyes. They are beloved friends. And like a gypsy, mark me well, they are dreaded enemies who never forget a wrong. Thirty years the Caliph of Baghdad and I are together, peddling our wares and transporting our dark friends. Now this. Killed by a clubfoot who pulls out my guts and stomps them into the ground with a boot like a blacksmith's anvil. He will kill you too if he finds you."

"Not if I find him first, he won't. I'm going to fetch you a doctor."

"No doctor," Sabbati Zebi screeched. "Is doctor who turns me inside out. With his fine sleigh and well-fed horses."

"These horses," Morgan said. "What kind of horses?"

"Horses with four feet and a mane. What other kind is there? Bay-colored."

"Good Jehovah!" Morgan cried out. He was horrified to realize that he had not only led the second gunman from the frozen slang to Sabbati Zebi, but the clubfooted creature with the Yellow Boy had no doubt murdered the kindly priest who'd picked him up as well.

"Bring me a little water," the gypsy said. "A terrible thing it is to die thirsty."

The dying man nodded at a wooden bucket hanging from the tail of the cart. Morgan grabbed the bucket, sprinted to the lake, returned with the water. With his cedar drinking cup he scooped out water for the gypsy, who gulped it down.

Sabbati gave him a cunning look. Then he demanded more water but this time he could not swallow it. The crafty expression never left his face as he said, "How is it, Sabbati, you may say to me, that if you can prophesy future events, you couldn't predict being attacked by the crazy clubfoot?"

No such question had occurred to Morgan, who was certain that no one could predict the future. To Morgan fortunetelling was almost as great a fraud as Sunday school.

The gypsy shook his head. "Predict the future I don't. Only reveal character. Yours I find lacking."

Despite everything--the dying gypsy, the crying elephant, Jesse's death, his seemingly hopeless mission, and with the second killer and perhaps others as well closing in on him--Morgan smiled. "You're right," he said. "Now I'm going for the doctor."

"No. Only watch with me. When I pass, take what you want from the trunk, then set fire to my cart with me inside. Now swear
that you will do this and that you will give Caliph to the best-hearted person you know. Swear."

"I'll see that your beast is well cared for," Morgan said. "In the meantime, what do you know about this?"

He got out Jesse's stone and handed it to the gypsy. Sabbati's black eyes snapped. "Where?" he said. "Where do you find this?"

"A black man named Jesse Moses gave it to me."

"Listen. You must throw this stone as far out into the lake as you can throw it. Is dangerous. Now watch with me a little. You owe it to me because I do not reveal your whereabouts to the clubfoot. Yes, I see you coming three days ago. I predict the present as well as the past. Don't fall asleep. I travel soon. Then you and the Caliph must leave here before the crazy returns with his long doctor's knife. And throw the stone in the lake. Do you promise?"

"I'll wait with you," Morgan said, then instantly wished he hadn't. How at this rate would he ever find Pilgrim? But having failed to keep his word to deliver Jesse Moses safely to the railway station, he was determined to watch with the gypsy.

"If he comes for you--I mean the doctor," Sabbati said, "go to Big Eva. She will protect you, at the sign of
Laguz
, on Henry Hudson's River, in the Mountains of the Bark Eaters. See? Here on the stone, not far south of my sign,
Raido."

"What does it mean?
Raido?"

"Sojourner. As all gypsies are. I am now about to make yet another journey, one we each make only once. Tell the Caliph farewell from Sabbati Zebi."

"Sabbati," Morgan said, tracing his rune,
, on the back of the dying man's hand with his finger. "What is this called?"

"Nauthiz,"
the gypsy said.

"What does it mean?"

"Ask Big Eva in the Mountains of the Bark Eaters," the gypsy told him, and then he closed his eyes and did not speak again.

A
LL NIGHT Morgan waited with Sabbati Zebi until, toward dawn, he fell asleep. When he woke, the hand he held was cold. The sky was growing lighter. Soon day would arrive and with it, perhaps, the deranged doctor. He must leave the fort as soon as possible.

Morgan began to sort through the gypsy's belongings. A coal-oil lamp half full of oil, which he lighted. Some pots and pans and a brazier. Some glass jewelry. A bag of counterfeit brass coins. A few colored hair ribbons and combs. The trunk inscribed with the genie contained a small framed picture of Jesus delivering his sermon on the mountain, another of Moses gazing on the Promised Land, yet another of Jacob wrestling with his angel. Several miniature bottles containing a yellowish liquid labeled Sea of Galilee Water. A packet of St. Peter's writing styluses, a fragment of St. Paul's singed robe, and a splinter from the cross of the thief crucified beside Christ. Finally, a box of blue-tipped sulfur matches and a wicked-looking foot-and-a-half-long dagger with a round cork handle, a silver band around the top. The dagger was all Morgan wanted.

He looked out at the elephant, who was weeping again. "I know," he said, placing his hand on the rough, dusty folds of the animal's leg. "I know, Mr. Caliph."

Morgan sprinkled the oil from the coal lamp over the gypsy and the contents of the cart. He struck one of the sulfur matches on the barrel of Hunter and tossed the flaming match inside the cart,
which ignited in a heartbreaking whoosh. Then, with the Caliph walking beside him, he headed south from Fort Blunder on the pike along the lake.

The sun rose behind the mountains across the water. Ahead a gigantic glittering bird, as huge as Sinbad's roc, was perched in the lower limbs of a lakeside willow tree budded out red for the spring. The fiery rays of the rising sun sparkled off the bird's multicolored feathers so that it hurt Morgan's eyes to look at it. The elephant let out a trumpeting bellow and began to shy away from the mythical bird in the willow tree, which was no bird at all but the Admiral of the North, his hundreds of bright buttons shining in the crimson sunrise, pinned to the willow by the throat with his own trident. His unmoored wooden boat drifted on the lake nearby. The Chesapeake Bay punt gun with which the Admiral had taken Fort Sumter afresh each day was gone.

S
INCE LEAVING FORT BLUNDER THREE days ago Morgan had eaten nothing but a porcupine he'd clubbed in the road and a red squirrel clipping end twigs off a maple tree to suck on the rising sap. He'd killed the squirrel with Ludi's scattershot, but there hadn't been enough meat to get onto the tine of a fork. Twice he'd fed the elephant, once at a rundown farm where a man sold him a hundredweight of damp, smutty hay and again at a lumber camp, where the hay turned out to be mostly straw with all the nutritional value of sawdust. In the mountain hamlets he passed through, consisting mainly of a sawmill, a dozen or so battened dwellings, and maybe a log schoolhouse, he asked directions to the
headwaters of Henry Hudson's River. People would point vaguely toward a jumble of snowy peaks off to the south. No one seemed to have heard of Big Eva or to have glimpsed any sign of the horrible box-footed creature in black, but Morgan could not shake the sense that he was not far away, perhaps toying with him, cat-and-mousing him for some fell purpose of his own. Surely, back at the fort, it would have been as simple for the vivisectionist to kill him as to kill the Admiral.

In one wretched assortment of hovels, children and loafers had pelted him and the Caliph with mud and snow, pinecones, stinking potatoes, frozen horse and ox dung. The grieving elephant walked on with its head down, oblivious to these missiles. The steep mountainsides were covered with felled trunks of hemlock trees, stripped of their bark and strewn about all higgledy-piggledy like the colossal white bones of some extinct race of giants annihilated in long-ago warfare amongst themselves. Yet these Adirondacks, or Mountains of the Bark Eaters as the gypsy had called them, were the mountains of Morgan's great hero John Brown, who from this fastness had helped many an Underground passenger move on to Canada and safety. Thinking of Brown gave the boy courage as he moved deeper into the forbidding peaks, hoping to elude the killer who had eviscerated the gypsy and, Morgan had no doubt, impaled the poor Admiral of the North with his own trident. Morgan's father had told him that by taking the law into his own hands in Kansas, removing fathers and husbands from their homes and hacking them to pieces, Brown had violated the most sacred commandment of the God he claimed to serve. Morgan could scarcely disagree. Yet he thought that later, at Harpers Ferry, Brown's error had been in his strategy, not in his principles. Tarnished though he was, John Brown was still the public figure
Morgan most admired. Given a chance, he'd have gone to Harpers Ferry with him. For a certainty Brown would have known how to deal with the clubfooted demon who was pursuing him and the Caliph.