Empire of Unreason (17 page)

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.

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

“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 Vest 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 EMPIRE OF UNREASON

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.”

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

“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.

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

“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 meaning 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.

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

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 EMPIRE OF UNREASON

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 chittering. 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.

“Come with me!” Red Shoes said. In response, the man swung his chains viciously. Red Shoes ducked the attack.
“Viens avec moi, si vous voulez vivre!”

he tried again.

The man’s wild eyes cleared somewhat, and then he shook his head.
“Bien,”
he said.

Bullets rained from the ship. And they ran near, beneath the curve of the vessel, to make the shots more difficult.

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

Coming around the prow, they ran into the woman, with four warriors right behind her. She was just recognizing their presence as the first flash of powder in a striking pan lit them all.

Red Shoes acted without thinking. He boiled the blood of the men chasing her, and they all fell, screaming. The rifle roared, spitting flame at the heavens.

The woman blinked, as Red Shoes shoved his
kraftpistole
into her hand, and then nodded savagely.

Come
, he signed in the hand language.

They ran through the camp, men and demons waking all around them. And still coming, near now, the scalped man.

14.

Direction

Adrienne hammered on Crecy’s door near midnight.

“I’m not here!!” A voice shouted from within.

“Veronique, it is Adrienne. I’m coming in.” She pushed the door
open.

Crecy was sitting up in her bed, sheets pulled to her chin, her
covers mounded over a suspiciously large bulk.

“A moment, please?” The redhead glared.

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

“Oh—pardon. But it’s important, Veronique.”

“No doubt. If you could step out for a few moments—even around
the corner?”

Adrienne withdrew as requested, and a few moments later heard
steps retreating down the rear staircase. She reentered the room.

“I’m sorry about that.”

Crecy was shrugging into a dressing gown. It wasn’t buttoned, and
she made no move to fasten it, but instead poured a glass of wine
and flopped into an armchair, resting one slim, pale leg over the
arm. “Nothing I can’t have again, if I want it. What’s the matter?”

“What have our spies to say about our security?”

Crecy frowned slightly. “This could not wait an hour—or, more
appropriately, fifteen minutes?”

“Perhaps, perhaps not. It certainly could not wait until morning.”

“Our spies equivocate. I think some are no longer trustworthy. The
short of it is, I think the usurpers are securing their hold, and when
they are secure enough they will arrest you.”

“When will that be?”

“Weeks, I think. But in the meantime they nibble at you. Already
rumors are circulating that you are Menshikov’s lover, and that the
two of you conspired to kill the tsar.”