A Calculus of Angels (22 page)

“Wait,” he said. “Wait, please, come back.”

He looked up to find her watching him expectantly.

“Let me show you something else. If luck is with us, and the air is clear, we might see the rings of Saturn.”

“I’ll not waste more of your time,” she said. “I’ve seen what I came to see. I’ll meet you in the morning, at ten, when I know Sir Isaac will be away with the emperor.”

“No, but you haven’t seen enough,” he insisted. “The rings are not to be missed.”

She gazed at him like some strange night bird, a pale inhabitant of the moon A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

herself, and he thought she would refuse and knew that would sadden him.

But, at last, a minute smile crooked on her face. “Very well,” she agreed.

An hour later, as the sky began to cloud too much to see anything, they started back down the stairs. “Thank you,” Ben said to her.

Five steps passed, and then she answered, “You are welcome.” As if she knew what she had given back to him.

“There was more, wasn’t there?” he asked. “What attaches you so to the moon?

Why, of all the sights in heaven, did you care first and foremost to see—”

“Hush,” she interrupted. “We approach the guard.”

And when they reached the courtyard, she slipped off like a wraith, leaving him more confused than ever.

6.

Deep

Red Shoes wondered at the dark spangles of the ocean surface, trying to peer deeper, to see what might be below that translucent curtain. Once, he knew, the whole world had been endless deeps, before Hashtali, whose eye is the sun, covered the dark waters with a roof of earth. On land, that lower world was accessible only through narrow doorways— deep pools, caves, the densest forests. Only the bravest, most powerful
isht ahollo
dared such places, for the creatures of that lightless deep hated the upstarts of the land, nurtured poisonous revenge in their hearts. Anyone might encounter this poison—in the bite of a cottonmouth, in the fever from the swamps. But to go beneath was to A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

enter the heart of chaos.

Out here, the deep was unbuffered by land, the ship a dark cave of many chambers. The sailors reacted to this by stupefying themselves with rum, gambling constantly, picking senseless fights, planning what they would do at landfall. Red Shoes drank some of the rum—his hands hurt constantly, and besides, there was plenty of rum and very little fresh water-but neither that nor any other diversion could dull his unease. The best that he could do was stay where he could see the sky, deny the darkness all about him, and dream of his home. He was in a place where no Choctaw—even an
isht ahollo
like himself—ought to be.

Something white moved beneath the waves, and he leaned forward to the rail for a closer look. As his hands touched the wood, he realized his mistake—too late. Pain lashed up his arms, turned him into jelly, and the rail seemed to dissolve as he tumbled through the thick air.

The underworld swallowed him gleefully. He tried to strike back toward the surface, but he had never learned to swim; and besides, strong arms grabbed him, pulled him downward. He held his breath as long as he could, fighting, but he lost, and water filled his lungs.

It wasn’t so bad, the water in his lungs, once he realized he wasn’t dying. As the sea grew darker, he caught glimpses of the creatures who had captured him. Pale men, whiter than any European; mouths gaping gar’s teeth; wide, round eyes glowing with malice. He knew them from childhood tales. The
oka
nahollo,
the pale people of the water, who stole children to eat—or to transform into one of their own. As it was pointless fighting them, he relaxed, let them take him where they were going.

It was a town of mud, stone, and rotted wood; and it smelled like sea, garbage, putrefying meat. They took him into a moldering house, where a single
oka
nahollo
sat upon a dais before a black, heatless flame. He wore a diadem of eels

—as a Choctaw chief might wear swan’s feathers—and fixed Red Shoes with a round stare and shark’s grin.

“
Chim achukma? ”
he croaked, in a watery sort of voice.

“
Okpulo,” Red
Shoes responded. “
A chishno? ”

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“Well enough,” the chief continued in Choctaw, “considering that you people walk above my head and cast down your shit upon me, bury your dead so that they putrefy and sink into my domain.”

“This is not my doing,” Red Shoes said reasonably. “It was made thus by Hashtali long ago. Why have you abducted me on account of your grudge against him?”

The chief shuddered and turned a rather remarkable blue color before going on. “Because you are his creations,” he said.

“And you are not?”

“We own this world. No one made us.” The chief considered him a moment, and then leaned forward. “He
made you
from us. Did you know that? He stole you as children, dressed you in clay, taught you to hate us.”

“I fear you,” Red Shoes admitted, “but I don’t hate you.”

He cocked his head. “Is that why you steal our children? Revenge?”

“Yes. And because, being made of mud, you can do things we cannot—walk on the land as we cannot. You can help us, and you can be rewarded.”

“Ah. Rewarded with a place down here?”

“Bah. When we have again torn asunder the roof Hashtali has placed above us

—”

“That which imprisons you.”

The
oka nahollo
glared at him for a moment. “It hinders us, yes. But often we are content here—until you mud-spawn pollute the water we breathe. At those times, we act against the offenders.”

“Such as myself, I assume?”

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“Your soul came from us. Inside that mud shell, you have a powerful soul. At your birth, we offered you a useful place amongst us, and instead you chose to torture yourself, eat up your own shadow merely to annoy us. But there are far worse in the world than you: people who would destroy both your people and mine.”

“You mean the white people.”

“You call them
nahollos
, after us. Do you wonder why?”

“No. The first Choctaw who saw them thought of you, for they were pale as sea foam and came in floating houses. It was a natural mistake.”

“Was it?” The fishlike man grinned crookedly.

“Say what you have to say.”

The chief stopped smiling. “What I want to say is this, my cousin, my nephew.

When your kind emerged from the cave at Nanih Waiyah, when you dried and cracked out of your crawfish skins and became people made of mud—you did not lose your kinship with us. We are your elders, and you owe us respect and obedience. You were offered a chance to behave right once. Now I offer it again. If you refuse—” His eyes flashed black, then green, then pale as shell. “—refuse, and you are meat. Do you understand?”

Red Shoes met his gaze. “Eat me now, if you can.” He slapped his hands together, drew on his shadow, and split the sea chief’s skin. The dwarf, Kwanakasha, crawled from the slowly collapsing membrane, snarling before he, too, ruptured to reveal a black, winged thing with many eyes, an awful butterfly emerging from a fleshy chrysalis.

“You have been warned,” it said.

Red Shoes tore open the water and awoke in his own cramped quarters, to the rocking motion of the ship. His hands hurt terribly, and he realized that in his dream he must have been flexing them. For a moment he thought he would be ill, but he breathed the stale air deeply until the sea in his belly subsided. After a moment he went above to where the waters were at least below him and not A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

all around. Perhaps he would ask to sleep on the deck from now on, save when it rained.

In the welcome wind above, he contemplated his dream and what it might mean. It had been an attack. Knowing him weakened by his ordeal in England, Kwanakasha had made its move to free itself from him. But he suspected more than that. Kwanakasha had earlier spoken of the “great ones.” Red Shoes had a suspicion that he had just met one of them, through the mediation of his own little captive. If that were true, he was indeed in danger, for though legend spoke of such creatures, details on them were scanty, and the ways of defeating them—or even defending against them—were not known to him. He would have to be light on his feet, sharp of eye. He was hunted by a predator for which he had no name and knew no face.

A hoarse, spontaneous cheer went up from all eight ships when they sighted trees for the first time since leaving America. The Picard and Norman shores had looked much like England, bare of anything save grass. But when they reached what Bienville guessed was Brittany, they saw trees lying flat on the ground—as if blown over by an unbelievably high wind.

“I still would prefer that we had sent a party in toward Paris,” Bienville told the council over dinner that evening, “yet I understand your reluctance. But should we see an inhabited village, I must request that we go ashore.”

“And so we shall,” Blackbeard replied. “We’ve need of supplies, if nothing else.

But I’ll be damned if I send another of my men where I can’t see ‘im from behind a cannon.” He grinned ruefully. “They wouldn’t go, anyway.”

“Yes. But if we get news that Paris and Versailles still stand, you understand I will insist on going there.”

Blackbeard nodded. “Aye. No need to ‘labor the point.”

The next day they did see a village, or what was left of one— more cause for jubilation.

“So it’s not th‘ whole world ’uz dead. Not th‘ whole world!” Tug said.

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“What did happen, I wonder?” Nairne said, watching the ruined village go by.

“It’s as if the breath of God blew across here, hard enough to flood harbors even in America.”

“My people tell a story about wind,” Red Shoes said. “They say that he is much like a man, and lives in a house, here, in the east, in the sky. He had many children and he sent them abroad to bring him news, but none ever returned.

Finally he went looking for them. He looked a long time, and at last discovered that a man made of iron had captured them all and drowned them in a river.

Wind killed the Iron Man with a puff of tobacco smoke.”

“Strong tobacco. Did he find his children?”

“The Iron Man had a wife. Wind tortured her until she told where they were.

When she told him, he threw her in a fire. Each time she crawled out, he kicked her back in.”

“Nice fellow, Wind.”

Red Shoes smiled. “When he got his children out of the water, they blamed him for their fate, but did not thank him for their rescue.”

“Did he burn them, too?”

“No, he let them go, made them the winds we know today. Then he went to sleep in the water. He said the next time he woke up, he was going to blow away everything in the world.”

“Ah. And you wonder if Wind woke up here?”

“No,” Red Shoes said, shaking his head. “I don’t think this was Wind at all. But maybe if we find a village with someone alive in it, we can ask.”

They saw people the next day, but by the time the first of the longboats put ashore, the village was deserted. Cooking pots, left to ruin over flame, were proof of the haste with which the evacuation had taken place. Forays into the surrounding countryside turned up no one.

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Discouraged, the flotilla spent two days off the coast, watching. Though they occasionally caught a glimpse of someone stealing in or out of the village, they were never able to make any contact.

“This bodes ill,” Blackbeard said, when the council met again. “These people have been taught to fear ships.”

“Pirates might teach such fear,” Mather suggested.

“They might,” Blackbeard said, grinning, “though I doubt it. What is a pirate without ports? Without tavern keepers and wenches and fresh food? Usually the coast towns like pirates well enough, for it’s on the seas we do our work and in the towns we spend our money.”

“If not pirates, what then?”

Blackbeard shrugged. “Maybe a new sort of pirate. Maybe pirates more akin to those madmen we ran across in England. Reavers, sailing up the coast like Vikings.”

“That
is
bad. What if we should meet these reavers?”

Blackbeard grinned more broadly. “Then we will teach them the difference between a village full of fisherfolk and a well-armed flotilla.”

“I think,” Cotton Mather said, “that it is time to think about the second part of our commission.”

Bienville frowned. “We have not yet finished the first charge of it.”

“In part we have. We know that, for all practical purposes, and for whatever reason, there is no such place as England anymore.”

Bienville nodded. “Yes, but France—”

“To all accounts, France is at the very least in grave disarray. All the channel ports, great and small, are gone. If there is a Versailles, it is cut off from the sea. The fear along this coast shows that the people here enjoy scant protection A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

from the king—if there is still a king. Most of us agree that an overland expedition, with no better intelligence than we have, is out of the question.”

“Not out of the question, sir—” Bienville began, but Blackbeard cut him off.

“Out of the question.”

“May I continue?” Mather asked politely.

“As you wish.”

“The farther south we sail, the more agreeable things become. When last we heard, Monsieur Bienville, Spain was under Bourbon rule. We are now in the Bay of Biscay. It is my sense that we should not tarry here but sail on to Spain.

Intelligence of what has become of the mother nations was an important part of our charge, but let us be frank. It is more important to both our colonies that we discover trading partners, whether they be French, Spanish, or Portuguese. These ships we have here are more than half the present sailing strength of North America. If we lose these ships in risky endeavors, we harm our peoples—for all we know, the only remaining fragments of England or France. Sir, if we find a busy port, a vital port, we shall learn what we wish to know. If we do not, all our efforts are in vain.”