Valentine's Rising by E.E. Knight Read Free Book Online Page A

out of the reach of the Kurians. Instead there was little but strings of empty homesteads in the hollows, fields and gardens already run to weed and scrub.
    He looked down and discovered that he had finished his spear point. It was conical, and rough as a Neolithic arrowhead. They had no pointed steel caps for a tip of the kind Ahn-Kha had made on Haiti. Getting it through a Reaper’s robes would be difficult.
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    The Jamaicans were singing in the other room. One of them had found a white plastic bucket of the sort Valentine was intimately familiar with from his days gathering fruit in the Labor Regiment, and employed it as an instrument with the aid of wooden-spoon drumsticks. With the backbeat established, the rest of the voices formed, seemingly without effort on their part, a four-part harmony. The rest, military, civilian and Grog, sat around listening to the calypso carols.
    Narcisse, in the kitchen with Valentine, scooped some rice pudding onto his plate. She used a high kitchen stool and a chair to substitute for legs, moving form one perch to the other as she cooked.
    â€œI used to have one of these with a turning seat in Boul’s kitchen. Got to get me another someday. You’ll like this, child. Just rice, sugar and raisins,” she explained, when he raised an eyebrow and sniffed at it. “Okay, a touch of rum, too. It’s Christmas.”
    â€œRum?”
    â€œI liberated the prisoners held in the officers’ liquor cabinet back in town.”
    â€œYou’re a sly one. How did you make it inside that rigged-up jail? More magic?”
    Narcisse spooned some more pudding into his cup. “Sissy’s old, but she still has her game. Good thing I kept some coffee in my bag; those men back there didn’t know a coffee bean from their earlobe. I ground it and brewed it, and before I knew it they had me in their kitchen. Just in case you didn’t come back, I had them thinking that the Jamaicans were special farmers who knew how to grow coffee and cocoa and poppies for opiates. Was hoping to save their lives. Those soldiers believed me. Ignorance isn’t strength.”
    â€œYou know your George Orwell,” Valentine said.
    She shrugged. “Never met him. It was one of Boul’s sayings.” Boul was the man she cooked for before Valentine had brought her out of Haiti.
    â€œBoul struck me as more the Machiavelli type.”
    â€œDaveed, you’re troubled. You worried about the baby?”
    Valentine was dumfounded. The letter Mali had left him with, with orders not to read it until he reached the Ozarks, had never left the pouch around his chest, where it rested among his precious seeds.
    â€œDid Mali tell you?”
    â€œOh no, Daveed. I smell the child in her when we left Jamaica. She young and strong, Daveed; your girl’ll be fine.”
    â€œIt’s a girl?” Valentine was ready to believe that someone who could smell a pregnancy could also determine the sex of an embryo.
    â€œDaveed, you got to quit being a prisoner of the past. Forget about the future, too. Come back to the here and now; we need you.”
    Valentine glanced into the other room. Maybe it was the soft Caribbean tone of her voice, a bit like Father Max’s. It reminded him he needed to confess. He lowered his voice. “Narcisse, there are people dying because I let them down. You know how that feels?”
    Narcisse put down her spoon and joined Valentine at the table. Someone had spent some time varnishing the oak until the grain stood clear and dark—the Free Territory had been filled with craftsmen. The pattern reminded him of grinning demon faces.
    â€œI’ve never been a soldier, child. Spent a lot of time runnin’ from them, but never been one. The men, wherever they’re from, even those ape-men . . . they believe in this fight too. They’re not as different from you as you think. They don’t follow you blind, they follow you because