The Shadows of God - J. Gregory Keyes [121]
“Indeed.”
“But look at them,” Philippe whispered. “walk among the ranks. They have come so far, achieved so much, only to see—this. What speech could we give them, what anthem could we sing that could make this last charge seem anything but suicide?”
For answer, Charles gave a harsh chuckle and stood, brushing his knees.
“Tsar Peter, the time has come for me to request my satisfaction.”
“Your Majesties—” Philippe began, but this time something in Charles’ countenance stopped him.
“I am at your service, sir,” the tsar replied.
“These are the terms I propose. We both mount, armed as we please, but with no armor. We ride straight for those guns. Whichever of us survives is the winner.”
Peter's face twitched fiercely, and then he bellowed a savage laugh that rang over their little army, out to the mass of enemies awaiting them. “And should we both live?” he said.
“Why, we shall settle our score another day.”
“And if we both die?”
“Then whoever falls last is the victor.”
“Very well, Your Majesty. I agree to your terms.”
A murmur went amongst the troops as the two removed their breastplates and stripped until they were bare chested. Charles mounted, fiddled with his weapons and saddle, then trotted in front of his Swedes and Janissaries.
“I have said I will never flinch in the pursuit of a just war. There are those among you old enough to know the truth of that, to have ridden from Sweden with me more than thirty years ago. You, my friends, were always my kingdom. I love you all, more than life itself. My younger companions, I love you no less. Not one among you has not shown his heart is strong. I now go to settle my oldest score. What God wills will be. Farewell.”
The tsar had no people to address. He came alongside Charles, a carbine in one hand.
And they rode. The horses were tired, but somehow they seemed to sense that this was the last time they would stretch their blooded legs on the grass of Earth, and they made the best of it, sending clots of dirt sailing out behind them.
Everything was still for a moment, save for those eight hooves, pounding, a tiny and beautiful thunder.
And then one of the Swedes, as if just understanding what was happening, screamed, “Iron Head!” And then everyone of them living—and by the sound of them, perhaps some dead—took it up, shouting to worry heaven, and dashed after their king.
It shocked through Oglethorpe like a dam bursting. He echoed the shout and set his horse in motion; and behind him his men—almost all now on foot—roared like ocean waves crashing on rocks.
Thus began the last charge.
Adrienne lay in a palace built of numbers, of geometries possible and absurd, of theorems solved and yet to be solved and unsolvable; and for the first time in more years than she could remember, she felt joy, the sheer joy she had known as a girl, at night in her room, calculating the motions of the Moon. She traced answers with atoms, or the bundles of affinities named atoms. The Indian posed questions— clever ones she would never have thought of—and she answered by solving them, imprinting the solutions on a parchment of space and time. Around her, the castle continued to take shape, extending upward and downward.
Below, she found endless lines of nonsense, and set about correcting them, conforming them to the grand equation, formed so long ago in her mind, seasoned and re-formed by her students, now finally attaining perfection and realization. It was, at last, the formula she had glimpsed all those years ago in France, when the world went wrong.
Almost. Something was still missing, something important.
“What are you doing?”
She found a child of some two years regarding her. Her child, her Nico, as she had last seen him in the flesh.
“Solving a problem,” she said simply.
“What is that,” he asked, “on your hand?”
“A pen,” she said, wriggling the fingers of her manus oculatus. “Something like a pen. I write with it.”
“You write as I do.” He cocked his head. “Are you really my mother?”
“Yes.”
“Where have you been?”
“I told you the truth