The Shadows of God (4 page)

“Will he remember you?”

“If he does, I’m not sure it would be with favor. I was exiled from France for writing a satire of the court at Versailles—which he seems to have satired here quite a bit better than I ever did.”

“Ah. Well, you should be able to help us with our manners, at the very least.”

“Always count on me for the very least.”

The gunboats drew up, and French marines in blue justaucorps called a challenge. They were armed with what looked like Fahrenheit guns.

Penigault spoke rapid-fire French, and tired as he was, Franklin had trouble following it.

He saw the result though. The marines snapped up their guns and fired.

THE SHADOWS OF GOD

2.

Faith

With a thought and a motion of her hand, Adrienne de Mornay de Montchevreuil warmed the water in the tub to almost boiling, then drew the screen that separated it from the rest of her cabin. She started working at the fastenings of her gown, absently gazing out the window. Her ship flew on, level with the clouds, and through one of those clouds, half obscured, she saw the
Dobrynya,
another vessel in her aerial flotilla. It looked like a large, flat-bottomed man-of-war, save that instead of mast and sails it was borne aloft by eight glowing red globes, prisons for the ifrit who pushed against the pull of gravity. She stopped at the fifth button and raised her right hand, the one given her by the angel Uriel. For an instant the ships and clouds vanished, replaced by lines of force and attraction, the aetheric patterns behind the mask of matter.

The ifrit were well, her people on the other ship safe. That was good.

She pressed her face against the glass, extending her sense farther into the aether.
Where are you, my son?

She felt him, like a slender strand unraveled from her dress, being pulled from far away. Wherever he was, he did not hear her now.

Someone scratched at her door.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me — Crecy.” Lome in.

Crecy was a tall, slim redhead. Her hair was drawn back into a long queue with a black ribbon, and she was outfitted in the blue-and-silver justaucorps, THE SHADOWS OF GOD

waistcoat, and breeches of Adrienne’s personal guard. She was, in fact, the captain of it.

“Have I come at a bad time?”

“I was going to take a bath,” Adrienne replied. She reached up and took the comb from her hair, so her black locks tumbled to her shoulders. “Is it important?”

Crecy shrugged. “I came only to wish you a happy birthday.”

Adrienne blinked in surprise, then smiled. “It is, isn’t it? I had forgotten. I’m—what? — I’m thirty-two today.”

“Not that you look a day of it.”

“How courteous of you. I feel it, though.”

“Youngster,” Crecy muttered. “Here. Do something with this.” She held out a small package.

“Crecy! What’s this nonsense?”

“Just take it, please, and no hysterical protestations.”

Adrienne took the small, linen-wrapped package and unwrapped it, then stared at the contents with a surprise that left her speechless. Her throat tightened.

“This—this is the first treatise I ever wrote, when I was eighteen.”

“Indeed, ”Monsieur La Monte.“ ”

“They would not publish it under a woman’s name,” Adrienne murmured.

“Where on earth did you find this?”

“In the library in Saint Petersburg, of course.”

THE SHADOWS OF GOD

“But why?”

Crecy stepped near and looked at her earnestly. “To remind you, Adrienne, of who you are.”

A shiver went through Adrienne, head to foot, and a tear threatened in the corner of her eye. “Veronique!” She sighed. “I needed that more than any present I could imagine. How do you always know?”

“I don’t. I wish I knew more often. I was lucky, this time.”

“Well, thank you.” She opened the book and thumbed through the pages, smiling at sentences she had forgotten even writing. “Thank you,” she repeated.

“It is nothing.”

“How is everything?” Adrienne asked, gently closing the volume.

“No mishaps, if that’s what you mean. Your students are eager to see you but understand the ordeal you are recovering from.”

“Hercule?”

“Hercule is as well as can be expected, considering he lost his mistress and his wife all in the same month. But he is still able, still capable. Still Hercule.”

“I should never have let our affair continue for so long,” Adrienne said softly.

“He should not have been the one to have to break it off.”

Crecy didn’t say anything. It was not a comfortable topic, the affair with Hercule.

“And Irena?” Adrienne went on. “How goes the search for her killer?”

“I believe it was her secret lover, but I can find no evidence of who that was, none at all.” She paused. “Many still think I did it.”

THE SHADOWS OF GOD

“What nonsense.”

“Even Hercule thinks it,” Crecy said.

“Well, I do not. I never did,” Adrienne replied. “But it would be best if we could find the real killer, to set such talk to rest.”

“Of course.” Crecy looked down at her feet and cleared her throat. “Well. I shall leave you to your bath, Adrienne. And happy birthday.”

Adrienne caught her by the arm, leaned up, and planted a kiss on the redhead’s cheek. “Thank you, Veronique. It is no wonder I love you so.”

Crecy smiled and then reached to steady Adrienne as the ship tilted.

“We’re descending,” Adrienne said. “I wonder why.”

“I shall discover it,” Crecy promised.

“Wait,” Adrienne replied, fastening her buttons again. “I’ll go with you.”

Elizavet Tsarevna squealed in delight as the musket in her arms kicked and belched black smoke. She staggered, but she did not close her eyes at the flash of powder, and her aim was steady. She was Tsar Peter’s daughter, that much was clear. A piece of his fierce heart beat in her chest.

What effect her shot had was more difficult to tell. One of the great beasts fell, but a hundred other bullets whizzed into the mass of flesh and hair beneath them, and any one of them might have knocked it down.

Elizavet, however, was certain. “I killed it!” the dark-haired young beauty shouted jubilantly.

Adrienne congratulated the tsarevna absently, transfixed by the scene below.

The airships were cruising only a few tens of feet from the ground, and the massive humps of the
buffle
seemed almost within arm’s reach. Once beyond the western mountains, America was flat as a board, with no hills to run aground on or in which to hide enemy artillery, but still it seemed unsafe to be THE SHADOWS OF GOD

so close to such a herd.

Adrienne had seen a buffalo before, in Louis XIV’s menagerie, when she was his mistress. She had been impressed by the size and savagery of that first bison. But she could never have imagined so many thousands, never extrapolate the din of their hooves pounding the earth like an immense drum, the furious bellowing that turned birds in the sky. The crack of one rifle or a hundred meant little to such a living earthquake.

Elizavet, whooping, took a fresh musket from a servant and fired again.

“God makes strange, powerful things, doesn’t he?” said a man on her left, his own dark eyes also wondering at the spectacle. He nearly had to shout, even from a few feet away, to be heard.

“Good day, Father Castillion. Indeed he does,” Adrienne shouted back.

The Jesuit flashed a bright-toothed smile and shook a lock of his gray-streaked chestnut hair from his eyes. “Look at you!” he exclaimed. “You look just like that little girl in my mathematics tutorial, when I presented a new problem.

Never daunted or puzzled —just quietly excited.”

She couldn’t deny it, though his observation made her feel suddenly frivolous.

“Ah, I said something wrong. Look how your face transfigures. Surely you are allowed to enjoy yourself now and then.”

“I do not know that I am. I have little time for distraction.”

“Time enough, surely, to remind yourself of what you fight for? That the world is a beautiful place, worth saving?”

Surprised, she studied his lean face for signs of irony. “Are you serious?” she asked. “That does not sound like a Jesuit talking. Shouldn’t you be preparing me for God’s kingdom to come, rather than urging me to love this one?”

“This is God’s kingdom, or one of them. I cannot believe He made it beautiful merely to tempt us.”

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“Again, quite unjesuitical.”

He grinned wryly. “I’m fairly certain that if I were to return to Rome now—and open my mouth — I would be a Jesuit for no longer than the tick of a watch.”

“You’ve lost your faith?”

He scratched his chin thoughtfully. “When I was in Peking, my order was embroiled in a debate with the emperor. In fact, it wasn’t much of a debate—the Chinese emperor is absolute, and when he says his final word on something, it
is
final. My order, however, had difficulty accepting this, and so brought the matter up again and again. The argument had to do with conversions and pagan rituals. The emperor, you see, cared not in the least if we made Buddhists into Christians—but he insisted that the rituals of obeisance to the throne continue, even for Christians. He said they were secular, despite their clear religious content. He was inflexible, but we argued it with him every few years. I think the emperor saw more clearly than we, for, despite their pagan origins, the purpose of those rites
was
secular—to bind his subjects to him. We Jesuits could not admit it because that might be to allow that we Christians have the reverse problem: we pretend that secular ceremonies—the crowning of a king, for instance—spring from religion. It made me wonder: How much of religion arises from social necessity?

“The thought festered in me until it produced a more terrifying one. I wondered how much religious ritual arises not from faith but to disguise the
lack
of faith? Like a child repeating, ”It
is
true, it is true“ to convince himself.”

“An uncomfortable thought.”

He nodded. “And they aren’t new thoughts, of course —indeed, in theology they are sophomoric. And yet the sophomoric is often true, yes? To me, the things I saw and heard in China proved to me that I had never had faith but only a
desire
for it and a fear of being without it. The very strange thing—another of those powerful and strange things, you see —is that I did not lose my faith — I
achieved
it. Abandoning my pose of knowing God, I came to truly know Him. So I believe, anyway.”

“Then perhaps you can tell me where He is in all of this?” Adrienne asked. “His THE SHADOWS OF GOD

angels are loose in the world without any governor, and it is impossible to distinguish between those angels fallen and those still in grace — if there ever was a distinction. Monstrous things tear at His creation, destroy His beauty, and war is everywhere. I cannot see God. Where is He?”

For an angry instant she thought Castillion’s answering gaze contained pity, and so she nearly told him to go to hell, if he still believed in it. But then she realized that his eyes reflected something more complex, with no hint of condescension in them. He tapped his chest and then, carefully, hers. “He is there,” he said. “You cannot see Him —that would defeat His purposes, I think.

Spectacles make Him no more visible than the naked eye, nor telescopes nor microscopes nor that fabulous hand of yours. It is the mistake that Newton and other philosophers in his vein made—to think that in dissecting the universe they would at last find God. God is not to be seen; He is to be felt.”

She drew back from him a step, staring at him with new suspicion. Not long ago, in a dream, she had heard nearly those same words, spoken by a creature who claimed to be Sophia, the mother of angels. Was this really the priest who had taught her so many years ago? Or was he more than he seemed?

And so she raised her right hand and
looked,
peeling away the gauze of matter that covered Father Castillion, dissecting him in just the way he had just been complaining about, revealing the ghostly etching of the vortices and secret knots that bind the world. She saw nothing unusual there, no hidden ifrit or angel.

But she no longer had faith in her power. What she saw with her hand came from Uriel, an angel she did not trust—who might not even be alive, for she had not heard from him since the battle of New Moscow.

Castillion hadn’t noticed her reaction or her deep glance. He was still preaching, looking not at her but at the distant skyline. “Some things we see may reveal God, however, by opening our hearts. You feel nothing when you see that?” He gestured at the vast herd. “No joy, terror, awe, worship? I do, and I think you do, too. I said you looked like a little girl just now. Is it not said that only coming as a little child shall we find the Lord? That is what I mean.

Mademoiselle, when I lived as a Jesuit, I never once felt like a child.”

Something in that lodged in her throat and pressed behind her eyes. With that THE SHADOWS OF GOD

foolish suddenness she had avoided for many, many years, her eyes filled with tears. She looked away, to hide it from him, but he would not be fooled. He took one of her hands and squeezed it. His hand was warm and rough, and it felt good. She felt foul for having doubted his humanity.

“Do you still hear confession?” she murmured.

“I do not,” he replied, “though I am willing to talk of anything you wish. Your confessions do not need me for God to hear them and forgive.”

“It is not forgiveness I need. It is advice.”

“I offer whatever I have, but I will not pretend to perfect wisdom.”

“You know by now we are searching for the tsar.”

“I know you follow the prophet and his army,” Castillion said cautiously. “I know you think the tsar may be a prisoner.” His brow wrinkled. “But there is more to it. You want to talk about the boy, the prophet.”

She nodded. “When I met you, you said you believed that this ”prophet‘ was the Antichrist, come to destroy the world. All of that is written in the Bible, yes? If we are to believe the Bible, this time was bound to come —God ordained that it should. And yet just now you exhort me to save God’s beautiful world. But if God Himself desires that it be destroyed, what point in striving against Him?“