The Shadows of God - J. Gregory Keyes [38]
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.”
“No doubt. But there is a problem. The other communiqué 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.”
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.”
“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.