Empire of Unreason (33 page)

Priber looked to Voltaire. “We can be agreed in this?”

“In this as in nothing else,” Voltaire said impishly, doffing his hat
to the German.

“Well, then, I accept,” Priber replied. “I accept most
enthusiastically. You will not be disappointed, I think.”

Oddly, Franklin believed him. Voltaire needed some genuinely
idealistic impulse to temper his natural skepticism. He also needed
a broader viewpoint. Franklin had already arranged for the
Frenchman to meet with Nakaso and the Maroons, but he needed
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the Indian point of view. Priber, for all his faults, could probably
serve as translator for that.

“Now we need to get moving,” McPherson reminded them.

“Yes. Godspeed,” Voltaire said, waving his hat. “I hope it will not be
another twelve years before we meet again, Benjamin.”

“Me, too. Or even twelve months. Voltaire—” He paused, and the
philosopher gave him a questioning look. “Not to set a fox to watch
the henhouse, but—could you look after Lenka?”

“I would certainly be pleased to look
at
her, Benjamin— yes of
course, my friend. I shall guard her with my life.”

“Thank you.”

He turned then and, with Robert, followed McPherson and his men
into the trees.

9.

Mongols

“The easiest thing would be for us to just kill them,” Flint Shouting
muttered, gazing across the ridge at the line of horsemen. Red
Shoes counted twenty of them, but there could have been more.

“And what would you consider the
hardest
thing for us to do?”

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“Wait, like cowards, as they close the distance, as we have waited
for ten days. Wait for our horses to drop dead so they can catch us
on foot.”

“How long before we reach Wichita country?”

“Too long by a few days. We need fresh horses—even if we have to
steal some of those ugly little ponies.”

“Ugly, maybe, but they look sturdy. What’s your plan for getting
them?”

Flint Shouting looked at him as if he was crazy. “I just told you. Kill
all of them and take their horses.”

“The two of us?”

“Yes. Call lightning down from the sky, as you did a few days ago or
boil their blood—something like that. I’ll kill whatever your
medicine doesn’t.”

“Every time I send one of my shadowchildren to attack them, I lose
at least one. I’ve already spent my strongest and it’s left me… weak.”

More than weak, actually. The loss of a shadowchild was the loss of
a piece of his own shadow, the half of his soul from which he drew
his power. The resulting depression was terrible, had always been,
but this time was different. He was starting to feel… angry. Not
anger as he knew it, but anger like a wasp sting, like the hot
peppers white men sometimes ate. A kind of hatred. Not at
anything in particular, but at everything, each grain of dust.

Though he was also getting irritated with his companions, who
seemed to expect him to do everything for them, spend his soul to
save their lives.

So maybe this anger had nothing to do with the loss of his
shadowchildren. Anyway, it was better than the heart-wrenching
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grief he usually felt. Much better.

“You’re afraid the scalped man will catch you weak? Don’t worry. If
he returns, I will kill him for you.”

“Of course you will,” Red Shoes said, unable to keep sarcasm from
his voice.

“Are you calling me a liar?” Flint Shouting’s voice suddenly had an
unaccustomed edge.

“No. I’m saying you can’t beat the scalped man, any more than the
two of us can charge over that ridge and kill all of the Monkolas.

You aren’t a liar, you’re just stupid.”

Flint Shouting’s face worked through astonishment into fury. Red
Shoes felt his own blood rise. Who did Flint Shouting think he was?

It wasn’t as if they were kin. And the Wichita would never know
what had happened to him if he died here, days from their territory

—if they even cared, which they probably didn’t. He was, after all,
an adulterer, a thief, and a liar. No one would care if he…

No.

“I’m sorry,” Red Shoes managed. “I’m tired. I’m not angry at you,
Flint Shouting. I shouldn’t have called you stupid.”

The younger man’s lips stayed tight for a moment and then he
uttered a crippled little chuckle.

“You aren’t the first to say it, or the first to be right.” He broke the
gaze. The white people were the only people in the world who
considered it polite to stare into someone’s eyes when talking to
them. With most people, it was a challenge. They were no longer
challenging each other.

“So how do we get their horses?”

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“I have some ideas. We can—”

“Hsst! The leaf canoe!”

Red Shoes immediately intensified the obscurement that kept him
and Flint Shouting from the eyes of spirits. They were still visible to
eye and telescope, however, so they crouched lower, watching the
thing come.

“I thought you destroyed it, back when you called the lightning.”

“I did. This is another.”

“How many do they have?”

“They have a lot. Peter says he thinks the main body of airships will
arrive in the east when the army does. The ones accompanying the
army are just to supply food and carry the leaders.”

“And hunt us.”

“Yes. It’s how they find us, when we fool their trackers.” It was a
small ship, oddly shaped—very thin, seen from the edge, and
shaped like the leaf of the cassina plant—hence Flint Shouting’s
name for it. It flew more like a bird gliding than the big ships—it
had no red globes carrying it aloft. Its engine was a spirit, though,
of some sort. It could move fast, very fast—in fact, it seemed to
prefer to. But it could slow and hover as well.

“I’m glad they sent another one,” Red Shoes murmured. “It’s given
me an idea.”

They worked their way down the other side of the hills, switchback.

Despite appearances, their mounted pursuers were still hours
behind them; they would have to find the same ford in the river
that Red Shoes and his companions had, and it would likely take
them some time to pick up the trail on the other side. They were
back in the country of low trees—few were more man twice as tan
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as Red Shoes. It made him feel like a giant trying to hide in a
landscape he dwarfed, especially with the leaf canoe searching for
them. It was better—many times better—than the grass, but he
would not feel comfortable again until he was home in an honest
wood, where the sky was pushed up where it belonged.

The others awaited them in a clump of scrubby oak. The woman—

who called herself simply Grief—tracked them in at arrowpoint.

They had exhausted their powder on a group of Snakes who
managed to catch up with them. The Snakes had used all their
powder in the battle, too, but they had been armed with bows.

Tug looked as if he was asleep. Tsar Peter was scraping awkwardly
at his own face with a knife. There was a fair amount of blood; he
had knicked himself more than once. Red Shoes wondered if it was
some sort of ritual of kingship, this cutting of the beard. He plucked
his own fine hairs out by the root. “Well?” the tsar asked.

“Some twenty of them, pretty near. I think they have a Kansa
guiding them. The rest look like those people you called Monkolas.”

“Mongols. Were there any Russian uniforms amongst them?”

“Two, I think. Also, they’ve sent a new airship. This one looks
different, and it’s faster.”

“Shaped like this, and flat?” The tsar traced an oval in the dirt.

“Yes.”

“A Swedenborg.”

Red Shoes shrugged to indicate that meant nothing to him. The tsar
did not elaborate.

“The horses’re near dead, han’t they?” Tug sat up, rubbing his eyes.

“Yes.”

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Peter directed his finger at Flint Shouting. “I thought you said we
could reach your people before they caught up with us.”

“I was wrong,” Flint Shouting said simply. Red Shoes knew the
Wichita didn’t like the tsar very much. He thought he talked too
much and smelled bad.

“No fresh horses, no powder, no shot—and no allies. That’s the
situation?”

“Yes.”

“We can get
all
those things,” Flint Shouting said. “If we are brave
and strong and swift, we can get them.”

“He means to fight for them?” Peter asked.

Red Shoes nodded. “And he’s right. That’s exactly what we’ll have to
do. And we’ll do it tonight. For the moment, though, we need to
make a little more distance south.”

They rode, and the big sky dimmed and darkened.

Tsar Peter came alongside him. He was a large man, the tsar, and
he looked uncomfortable on the pony that sagged beneath him.

“Our chances are bad, aren’t they?”

“They could be better.”

“May I ask you a question?”

Red Shoes wondered why white men said such things. Why did one
need permission to ask a question? One either knew whether
asking a question was appropriate or not. Asking permission to ask
it would not make it any more or less so.

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But he had spent a lot of time with the white people. “Of course,” he
said.

“Why are you helping me?”

That surprised Red Shoes, but it shouldn’t have. He thought for a
moment, to formulate his answer. There was another thing about
white people—they didn’t like pauses in conversation. They didn’t
want you to have time to mull something over. If you didn’t answer
right away, they imagined that they had somehow not framed the
question clearly.

So the tsar started again. “You say you fought against me once.

There are many men who can make that claim. Few would be
disposed to aid me against my enemies. Nor am I foolish enough to
think that the prerogatives of royalty mean anything to a savage.

Oh, I’m sure you’re loyal enough to your own king—”

“We don’t really have a king, as such.”

“No ruler?”

“We have a
minko,
but his power is mostly the power to explain to
the people why they ought to do what they already
want
to do.” He
suddenly felt the anger again, stirring in his belly like a bad meal.

“You ask why I help you. I don’t know the answer to that. You are
an important man, part of huge movements in the world. At this
moment I cannot say whether it would be better—for my people,
myself, the world at large—to kill you or save you.”

“But you chose to save me.”

Red Shoes smiled. “I can always kill you later. I cannot raise you
from the dead.”

The tsar smiled somewhat wolfishly. “Considering the things I’ve
seen you do, I wonder about that. But I think I understand you
now. Good. And I think… I think you will find my goals to your
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liking.”

“What are your goals?”

“To frustrate these creatures who style themselves angels, to take
my empire back from their puppets, to repair my people and keep
them from war, on this or any other continent.” He paused, ducked
a low branch. “All I have ever wanted was what was best for Russia.

To make it equal to the nations of the West. I strove at that for
years. Then, one day, we were
more
than equal—not because
Russia had become such a fine place, but because the world had
gone mad and the great nations of the West had fallen. I once
admired those countries—I saw so much good in them, so much
that my own people needed. It was intolerable that it should all slip
away just as it was in my grasp. And the world, being mad, began to
make my nation colder. So, my mission changed. I extended my
empire, that I might preserve what I could of Holland, France,
England—and so that I could have the fertile fields of Poland,
Bohemia, and Hungary to feed my people with.”

“And, as I understand it, you attained most of those things years
ago.”

“Yes. And then I was determined to turn my eye inward. And yet
always I was drawn into another war, and another. I see now that I
was manipulated by my evil councilors, that I fought battles that
there was never any need for. When I discovered some of my
generals plotting to invade this continent—the English, French, and
Spanish colonies, that is—I put an end to it. I had one of them
beheaded. I thought the matter settled.

“But, as we see, it is not. They
do
invade, and Russia cannot bear it.”