I looked west toward Our Lady of American Sorrows. The monastery was like a box of fireflies glowering with weapons. Rodger’s heart still beat, a soft green lost in its depths.
And where were the missiles? If I could see the things I knew, surely I could see them. I looked back toward the river, scanning from the monastery toward town. It took me a little while but I found them, four lances of fire pulsing in the heart of shantytown.
Those two false priests in their truck down at the river had been waiting for the men who slept out on the beach. The men whose dosses and fires Rodger and I had passed by when we’d gone to search for this very aeroplane.
Seeing the missiles had drawn my eye back to the aeroplane again. Right before me, blooming with a fiery glare of hate, was something I did not understand. There were six hard-edged glints that somehow also shared the soft glow of the living hearts around me. Even as I watched their glow seemed to pulse higher, as if responding to my view.
They were inside the aeroplane with me, in a forward hold. With a sudden certainty I knew these were what had brought the Mayan sorcerer down from his jungle kingdom. These were the rocks on which my great king—the Pope—would founder.
I realized that they could be only one thing. Without considering what I did, I moved toward them, passing through the wall of my cell as if it were a fog. I stood among six long cylinders of some finely polished metal, carefully racked in the Comète’s hold. There was a warning stenciled on the side of each.
Danger: matériaux nucléaire. Ne manipulez pas.
Though I had very little French, it was as if a voice spoke within my head. Danger. Nuclear material. Do not handle.
These were atom bombs.
Some things are too dangerous even to put in textbooks. So ours, which came from Londres or Boston or Nieu Amsterdam, always years out of date, merely talked about the Pope leading the free world to a victorious peace in the Second Great War. But the headmaster at the Latin School, Dr. Souza, thought some things were too dangerous not to be taught.
This was not old history. Though I barely remembered it, the teachers at the Latin School had lived through the war. We were taught in fourth form, not out of textbooks, but simply from their mouths and old books of clippings and letters, wire recordings off the radio.
The Second Great War had ended abruptly after the French Armée de l’Aire had struck Sevastapol and Beirut with atom bombs. The shocked Imperialists in St. Petersburg and Constantinople sued for peace. With the collapse of the European Front, their Brasilian and Japanese allies were quickly forced to follow. The newly-elected Pope Louis-Charles III had gone on wireless and sworn on the blood of Christ never to use the terrible weapons again so long as peace reigned.
As Mr. Fentress had said in fourth form civics, if you thought about the exact meaning of the Pope’s words, that pledge of peace was no pledge at all.
Now Father Kramer, surely acting on orders from the Pope, had brought those weapons to the Americas where they had never been before. Had brought them to New Albion, where they had never been wanted. Had brought his own stew of plots and counterplots to threaten us all.
No wonder the little man with the jade and feathers had come down from his jungle home. We were all lucky he had not arrived at the head of an army with demons on the wing. As a Catholic, I did not believe in demons. As an American, I believed in the natives and their powers.
“Sometimes only another stone is required,” he had said.
I walked to the skin of the Comète and stepped through. Rodger and I had failed on our own, and I had lost him to the false priests. Father Kramer had betrayed me to a cell. I had only one place left to go for help.
Papa.
Moving through the green-lit town among the glowing hearts and shimmering guns, I imagined that if the people around me saw me at all I was no more than a bird to them. Perhaps it had been the sorcerer himself who had reclaimed his feather at the aeroplane’s door last night. I found myself hoping he had watched over me since our meeting.
I flew along Water Avenue and lifted myself over the shantytown. The fiery lances of the missiles drew my eye again, scattered in four different places among the hovels of the poor. On foot, I was not sure I could find them again, unless some of the sorcerer’s power were still with me.
It was enough to know that they were there.
Up the hill, I saw that Mama was making her way through the streets toward St. Cipriano’s. She did not ordinarily go to Mass on Thursday morning, but with me missing and Papa working amid the crisis, she must have needed prayer. Or perhaps confession. If I’d still had hands in my bird form I would have crossed myself for her.
Then I was at Papa’s office close to the Civil Palace. The Ministry of Commercial Affairs was one of the tallest buildings in town, four stories with cornices and limestone gargoyles over the high, narrow windows. Circling around it, I could see the hearts and weapons within. I saw that there were cellars, which I had never known, and more hearts beat deep beneath the ground. These were darkened or inflamed, hearts in pain, surrounded by more weapons.
Many more weapons.
Papa worked atop a prison.
I wondered at this. New Albion had one small jail, in the Civil Palace proper, where miscreants or drunks were kept. Serious criminals—murderers, rapists, incorrigible thieves—were sent to Teixeira to stand before the Archbishop’s court. So we’d been told in Latin School.
But people disappeared sometimes. I knew this. Rodger’s cousin’s father had vanished while out hunting. Everyone said a jaguar had gotten him, but no body had been found. A man who lived further down Rondo Street had never come home from his job at the Coffee Exchange one day the summer I was fourteen. They said he’d been mugged and thrown in the river.
Oh, Papa. You lecture me on freedom, but you work atop a secret prison.
Still, who else did I have?
Even if he had turned into another man with a gun. I had come to fear what guns did to the men who held them just as much as I feared what they did to the men they were pointed at. There was no gun bigger than the atom bombs the Pope had sent to New Albion.
That thought decided me.
I circled the building twice more before I dove for Papa’s window. The glass rippled against me as I passed through it, then I was in his office. He glanced up from his desk, looked at me without seeing me, rubbed his eyes and went back to studying some papers spread before him.
I found a perch on the back of a chair by the window. How would I speak to him? Would he believe it was me? I wasn’t sure I was ready to give up the spirit road yet, even if I knew how. I did not think I could ever find my way back to this place, and I intended to go for Rodger once I had set Papa on the problem of the atom bombs.
The door opened and another man walked in. I recognized him as someone I’d seen in the halls here, but we’d never been introduced.
“Fizeram-no,” said the newcomer. He was speaking Portuguese! The language of our Brasilian oppressors in the Second Great War. “Os papéis em Teixeira e em Nouveau Orleans estão carregando a história, que significa que Londres e Avignon sabem tudo sobre ela.”
Even stranger, I understood him, though I had no Portuguese. They have done it, he had said. Everyone knew, even in Londres and Avignon.
Done what?
“Tolos,” said Papa. Fools.
I had no idea my father spoke Portuguese. That chilled my heart.
“Idiots,” he went on. “Poderiam ter mantido esse segredo por anos. Uma explosão no Matto Grosso nunca observado. Mas preferem cantar como galos de um alto do celeiro.”
No one would have noticed an explosion in the Matto Grosso for years, if they hadn’t crowed about it like roosters in the barn
. Papa and the other had to be speaking of a Brasilian atom bomb. So the Pope hadn’t been the first to bring those weapons to the Americas. No wonder the Mayan had come to New Albion. He needed to stop their spread.
“Now the bombs are here,”
I said aloud.
“Now the bombs are here,” Papa said, echoing my words without seeming to hear me.
“What?” asked the other man.
Papa stared at him. “I didn’t speak.”
“You said something about bombs here.”
“Atom bombs in New Albion,” I said.
“Atom bombs in New Albion,” Papa said. He clapped his hands over his mouth for a moment.
The other man frowned. “Are you well, Hubert?”
“I…I…” Papa never stammered, but he did so now. “I may have taken ill.” He wiped his brow with a kerchief. “The pressure of the past few days.”
“Tenha um cuidado. Estes não são dias seguros.” Have a care. These are dangerous days. He walked out, leaving Papa to stare at the wall.
I watched, wondering. Papa had never spoken Portuguese to me. He must have known something of the language, his mother was Brasilian, but Papa was born and raised here in New Albion. I never knew my grandmother. She’d died during the war.
During the Brasilian occupation, I realized, though Papa never spoke of it. What had happened to her?
Perhaps Papa was a spy.
Why would he be discussing explosions, in Portuguese, here and now? Because if he discussed them in English, too many people who might overhear would understand.
Neither Papa nor the other man had been surprised when Papa had repeated what I’d said about atom bombs. Surprised that he’d said it, yes. But not surprised at what he’d said.
Papa was a spy. Or a traitor. I glowered at him. The pistol had changed my father into someone I did not want to know. He had betrayed me as thoroughly as Father Kramer. My own father.
No one was what I thought them to be.
“Peter?” Papa whispered after a few minutes.
Without answering, I left the office. There was nothing I could do here. The world would have to save itself from an atom war, and my father with it. Rodger needed my help before the power of the spirit road left me.
My personal sacbe took me high into the sky and west, toward Our Lady of American Sorrows.
Approaching from the spirit road, the monastery continued to resemble a box of fireflies. I could see the lines of the buildings of the courtyard sketched against the outer walls. The beams of the structures were limned bright in my vision. Rodger was in a monk’s cell in one of the towers. There was no one close to him, though the base of the tower was guarded. Trucks in the courtyard held more fire-lance missiles along with other weapons that glowed. Grenadoes, perhaps, or mines.
I did not want to know.
Instead I flew into the tower that held Rodger until I found myself outside his cell. I landed in the hall.
He lay on a cot, half sleeping. His heart flickered as if he were weakened or dying. There were no bars between us, just a wooden door someone had bolted from the outside. I had to go to him. I reached for the bolt to draw back, and in that single material act found myself off of the spirit road.
I was inside Our Lady of American Sorrows in the flesh.
For a moment I was angry at myself for letting the spell loose. How had that happened?
Because I was thinking of myself as being in the building, not on the spirit road, when I had reached for the bolt. It made me want to swear, that I had so easily given up the power lent to me by the Mayan.
Then I was amazed that I was there at all. This was a miracle of both God and sorcery, that I could come here to help Rodger in his extreme need.
And finally I was glad not to still be confined inside Father Kramer’s Comète.
Enough. I was here with all my clothes and wits alike. I checked my pockets. The jade pipe was gone, as were the cigarettes, which of course I had not been holding when I’d smoked the pipe. I still had the matchbook with the green rooster on the cover.
I tugged open the bolt and stepped in to see Rodger.
He was pale, hot and sweaty. Both of his eyes were blackened. His cheek had been split, by a beating I supposed, and badly taped back together.
No wonder he was unguarded. Rodger would no more walk out of here on his own than he would fly without an aeroplane.
That was my department, apparently.
“Rodger,” I whispered. “It’s me. Peter.”
“Ah…” he said. “I never…” He shuddered.
I felt cold, too, a freezing tang of fear like a dagger in my chest. I’d never seen a dead man before we’d found the priest in the river yesterday, and I’d certainly never watched someone die. But Rodger looked close. Too close.
“Don’t worry. I’ll get you to the Misericorde St. Cosmas in town. They’ll fix you right up.”
“Peter.” Rodger’s voice was a strained whisper. “The Pope, Louis-Charles…he’s…”
“I know,” I said, thinking of the atom bombs back at the landing field.
“They will kill him, I think.” Rodger gasped. “So many questions.”
Kill who? The Pope? Father Kramer? “Why the missiles,” I wondered aloud.
“Cover their tracks.” Rodger’s breath heaved as his chest shuddered.
“Enough,” I said. “Ups-a-boy.” I gathered him up off the cot, his arm across my shoulder. Rodger couldn’t quite stand, and his right foot seemed to be broken, but he held his weight on the left.
This was my fault. Everything that had happened to Rodger. I should have followed him into Our Lady of American Sorrows the night before. I shouldn’t have left him here alone.
As we stepped out of his cell, I shot the bolt again. We shuffled to the stairs, he and I, and started down them. There was no one on the landing. When we made the next level down, the door at the base banged loudly and voices speaking French floated up the stairs.
“…trois bataillons des parachutistes dans Teixeira,” someone said. I could almost understand that.
They clattered up the stairs, a deeper voice complaining, “Brésiliens damnés par Dieu. Teixeira est une ville ouverte. Aucunes forces là, par traité!“
The first voice laughed. “Aucuns militaires dans New Albion par traité, l’un ou l’autre.”
The rest of them laughed at that too, five or six voices at least. They couldn’t be more than a flight below us. I shoved at the nearest door, which popped open to the walkway atop the monastery wall. Rodger groaned as I dragged him out then pushed the door shut. We leaned against the wall, trying not to be seen from the courtyard below.
A few seconds later the squad inside the tower must have reached Rodger’s cell. I heard someone bellow incoherent rage, then, “Jésus Le Christ! Cette ville est-elle pleine des garçons d’oiseau? Ils toute la mouche foutue partie!“
Some fragment of the Mayan’s spirit road stayed with me, because I could swear I understood that. Bird boys, he called us.
Boys. Not boy. Which meant Father Kramer had told them of my escape. Of course, he’d had the false priests aboard the Comète this morning.
I smiled at Rodger. “We’re going to fly out of here.” I had no idea what to do next.
“Don’t let them kill the Pope,” he muttered, and sagged into my shoulder.
Craning my neck to look down into the courtyard, I saw two more of the Bedford trucks, loaded with weapons crates. A few real Cistercians scurried about down there, while a number of the false priests worked on weapons or exercised in a circle.
Though taking a truck would have been nice there was no way to get to it without being seen by the eyes of dozens.
I heard more shouting from inside the tower, then the door slammed open in front of me. Two of the Frenchmen raced out, rifles ready, right past Rodger and me. They looked over the wall at the river, then down at the courtyard.
We were trapped. Horrified, I prayed for some shred of the invisibility I had enjoyed the night before.
The two in front of us turned to face the courtyard, shouting, “Avez-vous vu ce garçon? Le petit bâtard glissé librement!“
A man cleaning a rifle pointed right at Rodger and me. He began to
grin.
The two false priests turned. We weren’t four meters apart. The one who had been shouting turned red, opening his mouth for some new round of insults even as the other raised his machine pistol at us.
We had seconds to live. Still holding Rodger’s shoulder, I swept us both over the edge of the wall and into the air, forty meters or more above the river. I prayed for deep water and good lungful of air.
The last thing I heard was the surprised laughter of the Frenchmen.
When I’d flown out from town along the spirit road, that mystical sacbe the sorcerer’s pipe had opened for me, I had been like a hawk or even an angel. I had soared above the earth with no care for the consequences of gravity.
It must have gone to my head, because for one tiny moment as we jumped, I somehow expected to soar again. Instead, Rodger and I tumbled out away from the wall and the cliff below, falling over the river as the dead priest must have a day or two before us.
We couldn’t have been falling for more than a few seconds but I could have written books during my time up there in the air. There was a peaceful aspect to that moment of inevitability. Rodger and I were free of false priests and atomic bombs and my traitorous Papa, flying like birds. There were no more choices. We were committed, fleeing for our lives from bullets and bad intentions alike.
I had a brief hope that Rodger might have been free from pain too as he floated like a doll, loose in the air, when the flat hand of the river slapped us both into a deep, cold darkness.
My ears rang as hard as they ever had when I fell off a bicycle. All the air left my lungs in a rush. Even as my mouth opened to gasp, I stopped myself. I was deep down in the pool at the river’s bend below Bullback Hill, the water almost black except for the pale curtains of bubbles. I wanted to swim, to find the surface, knowing I had seconds to live.
But where to go?
Even underwater I could hear. There were dull thuds, small sounds like raindrops in mud. More bubbles flashed around me, darting in lines.
Bullets. From above.
At least I’d found up. Which way was downstream?