Empire of Unreason (16 page)

all eyes turned to Franklin, whose turn it was. He stood, clasped his hands behind his back, and flashed the whole company a little smile.

“Mr. Smith has just made a very pretty speech about liberty,” he said, “and the king has given it his second. I applaud it, I do indeed. But I do not think we can speak of liberty without speaking also of duty, for one does not exist without the other, though some seem to think it. It is said that liberty thrives best in the woods, and those of you here who live on the land and in the woods know that to be true. How often have I heard you say that you are beholden to no one? Have you said it? Or you? Your smugness in your liberty, I say, comes from your lack of duty. What duty is there in the woods? Only to yourself, and there is the problem. That is why some of you do not want to see a king, for you will have duty to him. That is why some of you, in your arrogance, came to these shores—to have liberty and escape duty.

“And you argue you have duty to yourselves, some of you. A man told me yesterday that his duty is only to keep his land, to make a living, to turn a profit if he can, to feed his children and his wife. This is not duty, my friends, but self-interest and not deserving of good remark. You mistake liberty for simple wildness, as the good Sir Chapton has just explained to us. You mistake the savagery of the Indian for liberty.

“I can hear some of you now, already arguing with me. You say you hold a duty to your neighbor, to protect him as he protects you, and that you have done so these past twejve years, and even before that. You prattle that it is your duty to protect the rights of your fellow men, so that they will protect yours. You argue that when the Spanish and Apalachee tried to take the homesteads in the South, the call of duty brought men from every colony to defend that land, and that this duty needed no king to demand or enforce it.

“You are all deceived, and I am—I admit it—angry to see you have deceived yourselves. You should plainly see that duty to yourself, your family, your neighbors, and your countrymen is only the shadow of duty. Real duty—true duty—comes only from servitude to a single man, to a king. Real liberty, true freedom, comes only in being told what to do. So I say, welcome the king!

Embrace our long-lost father so that we might become children again. Look at him and look to the harbor, for there your liberty lies!”

He thrust his finger toward the water, and the stunned silence that had settled EMPIRE OF UNREASON

during his speech continued for a few heartbeats, as people struggled to understand what they saw.

Like a pod of whales coming to surface, long black forms were bobbing up from the deeps.

“There is a tyrant’s liberty!” Franklin shouted. “Moscovado warships should you not be blockheads enough to put the yoke on yourselves!”

“They are not Moscovado!” James shouted, leaping to his feet. “Those are my own ships! English ships!”

“Then why hide them, Your Majesty?” Franklin returned over the rising hubbub of the crowd.

“Hush, Benjamin Franklin,” Sir Chapton shouted. “Your disloyalty to the Crown is well known. You have no wish but to make America your own dominion, all of us servants to your scientific demons.”

“You all know me!” Franklin returned. “You know I am loyal to my country. It is this king and these Tories who are disloyal—to everything we’ve worked for.

Would you be the vassals of the Russian tsar? That is what this man offers you.

Ask him to open up those ships. Ask him to have—”

“Benjamin Franklin,” roared Chapton, “by order of this legislative body, which you have much abused, I order you to cease this treachery.” As he said this, red-coated soldiers suddenly seemed to be everywhere, muskets leveled, not just at Ben but at the crowd and any member of the legislature who had shouted in support of Ben.

“Well, now we see,” Franklin said, “as do the other colonies.”

“Jesus!” Sterne shouted. He lifted a
kraftpistole
and fired a shot through the opticon. Robert hurled himself aside barely in time. The crowd surged, not so much forward as in all directions as the crackle of the discharge faded.

“I declare martial law,” Chapton shouted. “Until we have sorted it out, until we have discovered what sorcerous trick Mr. Franklin has played upon us. I—”

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“Enough of this!” James bellowed, drawing his sword and walking out between them. “Enough. I am your king, by God! By divine right I am your king, and you will treat me as such!”

Now there were a few jeers, but as the soldiers packed tighter around them, these subsided.

Panting, James paced and then thrust his blade into the ground. “No more of these parliamentary games. The gall, the absolute gall.” He whipped on his master of arms. “Arrest Mr. Franklin. Arrest any known to side with him.

Now.”

Franklin grinned. “That was not your wisest command, Your Majesty.”

“How is it that you think to instruct me?” James asked.

“It’s just I count you outnumbered by two to one,” Franklin said, pushing his thumbs into his coat pockets.

James looked around, as did the crowd. Encircling the pavilion were upward of a hundred and fifty men; farmers, traders, Indians, militia, Italians, freedmen—all armed to the teeth.

“Now,” Franklin said jovially, “I believe my friends and I will walk out of here.”

“I have twenty times this number of men,” James said. “I have more powerful weapons than you can imagine. Already your forts and munitions are occupied by loyalists.”

“Sir, I don’t intend to fight you here and now, not unless you force it. But if my friends see those ships unloading, or more troops approaching, they’ll open up. We may lose, but I’ll die secure knowing you won’t sit on any throne save in hell. So let’s all take a deep breath and calm ourselves down. I’ve said what I came here to say, and now it pleases me to leave.”

The tension stretched, and for a moment Franklin knew it all rested on James, a man he did not know. Was he more proud than sane? It would determine whether many lived or died.

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“Go,” James snapped at last. “But go from this city, or I will have you hanged.”

He raised his voice. “To all the rest of you—lay down your arms now, and I’ll offer you not only amnesty but a place in my army. Stay with this man, and you are damned to die, I promise you.”

Not a man wavered. Franklin felt a lump of pride rise in his throat. The Junto had done a better job with the militia than ever he imagined they could. Still smiling, he stepped off his bench and strode from the pavilion into the mass of men, who cheered him as he came. Robert stepped out to meet him.

“Is it all ready?” Franklin asked.

“The women and wagons are already on their way,” he said.

“Let’s go then, as soon as we’re off the parade ground. If we haven’t cleared the redoubts in half an hour, they’ll start cutting us to pieces.”

“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 on y’r aquapeds?”

“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.”

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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 lacquered 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 understanding . “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.

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

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, EMPIRE OF UNREASON

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.”

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“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.”