The Shadows of God - J. Gregory Keyes [53]
“No doubt,” MacKay replied. “But he's not here.”
“Aye,” Oglethorpe replied, clapping him on the back. “We poor soldiers will have to make do. So let's set sail, or start swimming, or whatever term we should use for this unnatural business.”
“Aye, sir.”
And a few moments later, still gritting his teeth, Oglethorpe stood near the helm and watched the mud of the Altamaha flow by.
Red Shoes stood in the dark water, wondering. Had he come the wrong way? Was this a different entrance?
But no, this earth was freshly turned, and he could smell human hands on it.
They must have all agreed, he thought. But whose idea was it?
Bloody Child and Paint Red had influence, but not that much influence. Minko Chito would not have begun the idea.
It must have been the Onkala priests, the Bone Men. Only they might have seen what was in him and recognized the danger. Or perhaps the Bone Men had been seduced themselves by the minions of the Sun Boy. The Sun Boy attracted followers by sending dreams of glory and purification. Perhaps he had sent such visions to the keepers of the dead.
Well. But the Onkala priests did not know how powerful Red Shoes was. They did not know he could easily rip his way through this inconsequential barrier of earth. Eagerly, he gathered his strength. His rattles hissed in the darkness.
No. That was the snake, whispering in his ear. To the others, it would only prove he was the monster they thought he was.
And so he sat in the darkness for a time, and thought, and remembered something Mother Dead had told him. About the hole that led down to where she was.
He squeezed and ducked his way back down the tunnel, until he came again to the place where the roof went beneath. He took a few deep breaths, then dove, trying to ignore the hornets in his skull, the lizards on his arms, the scorpions between his toes, the voice that said to dig through the earth and kill, to make shadowchildren of blood and poison to burrow into frail human minds.
He swam down, feeling for different turns, earlier ways than the one he had taken down to the heart of the underworld. After a moment, he found one, one that led vaguely up.
As he swam, the tunnel straightened to a vertical, and his body became heavier, his arms lethargic. It was as if something had taken hold of his feet and was pulling him down. He kicked, but his feet were pinned together. He braced his arms on the walls to pull, but they would not, could not, and then he was sinking.
His legs knit together, and one of his arms was stuck to his side, then the other. And still something was dragging him down, naming him a name that was not his own but which was familiar.
Father, he thought, and his head was suddenly full of the wide reaches between stars, of the boundless nothing that was behind the place behind the world; and a terrible joy mingled with his terror.
Down. It was over. He had lost. Too long, in the underneath.
No. I am the water spider, sevenfold walker. I am the kingfisher, who dives beneath and always returns. I am the words beneath the black paint, the earth above the grave. I am Red Shoes, a house with many rooms but RED SHOES!
And he broke from the water into thick, hot, moist air, but air, and the light riddling through the tall cypress, in the headwaters of the river of the Choctaw, the River of Pearls. He stared up through the trees for a long while at the yellow eye of Hashtali winking through at him.
“Thank you, Hashtali,” he murmured. “Keep my spirit strong. Keep the Sacred Fire in me unpolluted, at least until I save your people.”
Nearby, someone chuckled. Red Shoes knew the voice, and whirled.
“Hello, chieftain of the snakes,” the scalped man said. He crouched on the rotting carcass of a cypress tree, his eyes gleaming. He was painted and tattooed like a warrior, but his head was a mass of puckered scars, all in a neat circle, where the skin of his head had been cut off.
“Not yet,” Red Shoes told him.
“But near, so near,” the scalped man rasped. “You will join us, soon.”
“I will not.”
“You prayed to Hashtali,