The Shadows of God (12 page)

If I suspect you are hiding a single thing from me, I will have you publicly stripped and searched. Do you understand me?”

Mar hesitated another second, then pulled two final letters from his pocket, weeping.

“There’s nothing you can do anyway,” he murmured.

Oglethorpe read one while Nairne read the other, then they switched, neither uttering a sound. Then the two leaders looked at each other for a long moment.

“MacKay, find the officers. We need to parley, now, this moment.”

Captain Parmenter had come in during the commotion, and he now cleared his throat. “What is it, sir? Another attack?”

“Hmm? Yes, General Henderson is at Fort Moore, and he has sent six hundred troops to reinforce Mar. They will be here in a week’s time.”

“Six hundred? You can whip ”em, sir.“

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“No doubt. But there is a problem. The other communique is from Charles XII, the Swedish king exiled in Venice. He sailed more than a month ago from Venice with four men-of-war and four thousand men.

“Jesus, sir. I mean, pardon me, sir, but four thousand men would be better than gold to us right now.”

“That is true. But Charles doesn’t know his message was intercepted by the Pretender. In fact, he doesn’t know a thing about what’s going on here, because he’s been sent a pack of lies that he thinks comes from Mr. Nairne. In eight days time, he will rendezvous with what he thinks are our forces in the Altamaha Sound, and there he and all his men will be cut to pieces. The Russians, you see, have a deep hatred of Charles, and they have been trying to end his life since seventeen hundred. Unless we take a hand, they will have their way.”

“And we lose four thousand allies before they can be of any use to us,” Nairne added.

“What’s it mean, sir?”

Oglethorpe scowled, then rubbed his forehead wearily. “With our new amphibian boat, we might have a slim chance of reaching the sound and breaking the teeth of this trap, or at least warning Charles and his flotilla. But it will mean abandoning Montgomery to the redcoats. We can’t do both.”

“Abandon Azilia, sir? Again?”

“That’s the choice, Captain. That’s the choice.”

8.

THE SHADOWS OF GOD

In the Navel of the World

There were two Nanih Waiyahs. One, the smaller, was a modest mound of earth, flat on top. Once, the Choctaw had a fire temple on Nanih Waiyah there, but the fire had gone out, and no one could build it again. The building had long rotted away, but the hill still stood, abandoned save when the chiefs met to discuss matters of law or other great affairs. Red Shoes hoped they would stop there, at the lesser mound.

They didn’t. They continued past it, across a damp bottom that eventually became a marsh, and finally
lunsa,
the darkening, the swamp at the navel of the world.

And from
lunsa
rose Nanih Waiyah the greater, a much larger, round hill. The smaller mound had been built by human hands, carrying basketloads of dirt.

The greater Nanih Waiyah had been built by no human hand.

“Hashtali, whose eye is the Sun,” one of the Bone Men intoned. “When the world was all quagmire, when all of the world was the water of the darkening, Hashtali reached down, and with his hand he pulled up the mud and spread it out. He spread it over the realm of the snakes, and the White People of the Water, over the fish and worms. He pulled it up here, and Nanih Waiyah is the mark of his hand. It was open like a crawfish hole; and, like crawfish, he found creatures of mud inside. Some saw the light and climbed up, curious to see it.

Some of those could not bear it and went back down, but some continued up, and their skins dried and split, and they crawled out into the sun as human beings.

“More came, and more, and with them, hidden among them, the evil ones, the accursed. So Hashtali put down his hand again and pressed the earth shut, here, at Nanih Waiyah. That is all I have to say.”

And he fell silent, without finishing the story. The silence stretched until Red Shoes guessed it was expected for him to say something.

“They are our ancestors, down there, those things that are not men. They are our cousins and our aunts.”

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“And at times,” the Bone Man said, “one must be chosen to consult with them.

Are you that one, Red Shoes?”

“You say that you are,” Bloody Child mocked. “If you are, you can go in and return. The guardians of this place will not harm you. But if you lie — ”

“You know nothing of the mysteries,” the Onkala priest snapped suddenly, cutting Bloody Child off. “Only
we
know what will happen if Red Shoes fails.”

Bloody Child bowed his head and fell silent, but his face remained unrepentant.

“Must I do this?” Red Shoes asked. “War is coming. You cannot avoid it, whatever happens to me.”

“But we must decide what to do,” Minko Chito said. “I must know whether to join the Sun Boy or fight him. I must counsel my people one way or the other.

You claim to be our war prophet, our seer. You claim to speak the truth. Go into Nanih Waiyah. Return. We will know what to do, or so the Bone Men tell me.”

Don’t do this,
Red Shoes wanted to say, remembering again the burning village of the Wichita, the people the angry power in him had caused him to slay.
I am
a snake trying to remember he is a man,
he wanted to tell them. J
am an
accursed being trying to do good before his soul unravels and has no choice.

This will hasten my end, if not end me. And then there will be no war, for
what I will become will devour you and scorch your nation from the Earth.

But he could not speak. They might try to kill him on the spot if they knew what he was thinking, what he could do. Instead, he faced the great mound, bounded on the right by the still water of the Darkening, by cypress that made a cave of the sky; on the left by the shadowed forest. And there, at the point where the mound met the earth, waited a small, dark opening, just large enough for a single man.

He squared his shoulders and stooped into it.

It went down, a tunnel cut not through stone but through a hard, slippery clay.

THE SHADOWS OF GOD

It descended into water—first to his ankles but quickly to his waist, his shoulders; and then only his head was out. The gray light behind him faded, and then the roof of the cave came down into the water.

He held his breath and ducked under. After an armsbreadth, the roof went up again, and he had air once more.

But no light, no light at all.

Should he make a shadowchild for light? No. He must not attract attention here. He must not. He must keep his shadowchildren close, and quiet.

The tunnel continued, narrower and narrower. Though the roof in this section seemed very high, now Red Shoes had to turn sideways to squeeze forward.

He stopped to catch his breath, and above in the darkness he heard something the like the legs of a very large spider brushing.

And music. The soft, distant
pung pung pung
of a water drum. The faint chanting of voices.

Inside him, the coiled snake stretched, and Red Shoes felt his bones, rods of lightning ready to burn out of his skin. He trembled there for a long moment in the dark, trying to remember who he was.

I
am Red Shoes. Choctaw
. I
am not accursed. I am not the feathered snake
.

He remembered his friend Tug, the sailor who had saved his life in Venice, who had become his companion these last ten years. Tug, his friend.

Tug,
who ran from me. Who still runs from me
.

But Tug had reason.

He remembered Grief, her quiet anguish, her fierce lovemaking.

He remembered the old man he had known as a child, who had battled the spirits and lost. His eyes as vacant as pumpkin seeds, his drooling mouth, not THE SHADOWS OF GOD

even able to feed himself.

I am Red Shoes. Not accursed. Not yet.

The trembling stopped, and he went on.

The roof drooped again, and once more he had to hold his breath and swim in the dark. But this time the tunnel slope did not rise again. It continued, until his lungs ached, and he suddenly realized he was swimming down, toward the bottom of the Earth, to the place where his people had come from. To where some still lived.

But then he found the skin of the water and cut through it, and was born again into darkness.

Or near darkness. But there was singing, and a small glimmering light, and a vast cave that could never fit into the hill of Nanih Waiyah. Song echoed about him, and the tapping of the water drum was like thunder.

From the darkness walked a woman. She appeared neither young nor old, though her hair had streaks of silver. She looked Choctaw, but her skin was pale, as if she had been in this place for a very long time. Her face was tattooed in the old fashion, around the mouth and her arms were strung with the twisting forms of serpents, and water panthers, eels, and garfish. She wore a breechcloth and a white feather mantle upon her shoulders. She stopped singing and regarded him.

“You swam very deep,” she said.

“I swam until I found air,” Red Shoes replied.

“Most never find it. Others find it quickly, far short of this place. Only a few can come this far.”

She stepped closer, and he felt the snake in him again —a sudden anger, a flare of vicious hatred that was in no way human.

“Ah, I see,” she said. “You have the scent of one of my children about you. I did THE SHADOWS OF GOD

not know mortals could do that. Be careful with him; he sleeps in you, but is not dead.”

“Your children? Who are you?”

“Give me a name. I am a mother to many things. I bear them in darkness.

Some even say I bore you, you human beings, down here in my dark womb. I think perhaps I did, before Hashtali took you from us, dressed you in that clay.

Mother Dead. That is what I have been called.”

“You summoned me here.”

“Perhaps I did. I felt you coming, and was curious. These are strange times, even for me, who has been here for so long I no longer remember what is real and what isn’t.”

“What are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I have kept company with many shamans from other tribes. I have spoken with the philosophers of Europe. All of us, when we come here, to this place behind the world, we see something different. We see what our eyes are accustomed to seeing.”

“Yes. Your eyes are clay, and can see only clay, or the image of clay. But there is the spark in you that is more, that came from us, else you could never come here at all. What am I? What I said: a mother. Not a thing made of flesh and blood —no more than my son, whom you swallowed, was a snake. We are the eldest, those Hashtali sent into the world to create it. And once here, we took it from him. He made you to get it back. That is why we really fear you, you know

—my brother, my children and nieces and grandnieces—he clothed you in clay to take you from us, to let you work where we could not, after he turned the world inside out and made us ghosts.”

“Must we fight, then, as I fought your son?” ,

“No. Let Hashtali have the world back. I wish to be free of it. I wish—there is a THE SHADOWS OF GOD

human word,
redemption.
That is what I wish. But what you must understand, Red Shoes, is that I am nearly alone in that. My brother is my enemy, and all of his children. And most of my own have turned against me as well. Things go badly for me.”

“The Sun Boy?”

“Yes. He is the key, though even I cannot say exactly how. He is doom or salvation.”

“But is he my enemy? And are you my friend?”

She shrugged. “I cannot answer that. I want the Choctaw to live and multiply. I want to preserve humanity in all its varied forms?”

“How can that be done?”

“The sky must be broken and mended. The world must be turned upside down again.”

“But that is what the Sun Boy wants. It is what your son, the Antler Snake inside me, wishes.”

“Yes. And no. I do not know the final answer, Red Shoes, only the vague shape of hope. You creatures of clay are the ones made to find it.”

“I will find it then. But you—are you in danger, Mother Dead?”

“I am hidden where they cannot find me. I wait. Only you and one other have found me, and both of you are mortal. Given time, my enemies will find my spoor, follow my trail, and then I will die. I stay quiet here, waiting, hoping, watching. Giving what help I can. Some of my children are still loyal, but they fall even as we speak. They plunge from the heavens like burning stars, and I can only weep.”

She turned her back on him. “Go. Leave no trail.”

“Can you tell me nothing more?”

THE SHADOWS OF GOD

“Only that I will be there if I can, when the time comes. That is all. Now go.”

Red Shoes reluctantly returned to the water; the trip back seemed longer.

When finally he reemerged in the dark tunnel, he was bone weary, shivering, as weak as if he had just run for seven days and nights.

Painfully, he went forward to where the others were waiting. The passage narrowed, as before, then dipped underwater again.

When he emerged, there was no light, and there ought to be. The entrance should be only a short distance away.

Perhaps night had fallen while he spoke with Mother Dead.

But then his groping hands encountered fresh dirt and clay, and he understood the truth. While he had been beneath, his companions had been busy. They had entombed him in the mound.

9.

Old Acquaintance

“Have the years struck you dumb, Benjamin?” Vasilisa asked, a laugh somehow threaded through the sentence.

She was more beautiful than he remembered. There was silver in her otherwise onyx hair—a streak of it, pulled fetchingly down one side of a face which did not otherwise seem to have aged. It still looked like polished ivory, her eyes gently slanting jewels, her nose small and upturned, like that of a girl THE SHADOWS OF GOD

in the earliest year of womanhood.