A Calculus of Angels by J. Gregory Keyes Read Free Book Online Page A

twisted around, the sword at her side leaping out like a silver eel. The horseman drew his own broadsword.
    He got a surprise. Crecy darted under his scything attack as if he were a child and then sprang up, her weapon a steel fan. Blood fountained from suddenly uncaptained shoulders.
    Then a second invisible fist struck Crecy and she pitched over and did not move.
    3.

    A CALCULUS OF ANGELS
    Winter Talk
    Red Shoes raised his face to the familiar, welcome scent of hickory smoke that the wind whipped by him as he and Bienville rode past the house at the edge of the woods, a lean, gray building, a wolf sort of building, ready to grow thin in the bleak winter but not destined to starve. Some Europeans, he had gathered, came from frozen countries, and they brought with them the art of living in ice. Gazing up at the slate sky, at the hills in their white coats of water-cut-to-pieces, he wondered if they had not somehow managed to bring their weather with them.
    “ I appreciate your company,” Bienville said in Mobilian, the trade language. It was like a child’s version of Choctaw with a funny accent and a few strange words. Red Shoes had never much cared for it.
    “It’s good to get out upon the land,” he replied in French. “It’s good to hunt again.”
    Bienville chuckled. “So you do speak French. Your English was so good, I began to wonder if you were really a Choctaw at all.”
    Now Red Shoes smiled. “I am Choctaw, Governor. We have met, in fact—or at least been in the same house before.”
    “We have? You’ve the advantage over me, young man.”
    “At the time, my uncle was the Tishu Minko, the speaker for the chief. You stayed one night in our chukka, in Chicasaway. It was only a few months after you took the heads of the Natchez chiefs. We thought much of you, then, for the Natchez had been trouble to us for many years.”
    “I remember that,” Bienville said. “I remember a boy, too, a boy with a strange look in his eye who never spoke.”
    “Me,” Red Shoes acknowledged.
    “You’ve learned to speak.”

    A CALCULUS OF ANGELS
    “So I have.”
    The trees were denser, but it was young growth, the churned ground between them bearing the frozen record of men, horses, swine, and cattle. How far would they have to go to find game? It didn’t really matter. He had spent a month in the town of Philadelphia, waiting for the ships to be provisioned and the winter to pass. He had busied himself studying maps, reading books, improving his English. But English towns were claustrophobic, and he still had months yet to spend there. Merely being outside was worth the bitter cold—and the simple fact was that Bienville had not asked him hunting for the purpose of hunting, either, but to talk.
    “And in many languages,” Bienville concluded.
    Red Shoes sighed. “Governor Bienville, you wish to ask me of my relations to the English.”
    “That is true,” Bienville answered. “You have exposed me. The Choctaw have been French allies for many years, now. And yet, always I have suspected that some lean toward their Chickasaw cousins and the English.”
    Red Shoes shrugged. “The old men tell me we turned to the French in the first place to get guns to protect ourselves from the Carolina slavers and their Chickasaw allies. The French have been our friends, and they still are.”
    “Then—”
    “But the French have also been the friends of the Natchez, and yet you yourself, Governor, have led troops against them.”
    “Choctaw troops in part, I seem to remember.”
    “Exactly, Governor Bienville. Do you think that we are like children, that we see only what you want? The French are our friends because it suits them to be, because it is to their advantage. The Choctaw, likewise, ally with the French because you help us against our enemies. That is honest. But when you set grass fires, you must watch for a shift in the wind.”

    A CALCULUS OF ANGELS
    “Then you cultivate no secret alliance with the