Background on Torquemada’s people was scant except for the four high-level assistants who had guarded him before he became a vampire. I did discover that two of the original four had entered the States before Jane Yellowrock became queen, searching for the Tarot and for Soul. The two were here when vampires got back their souls. Here, alone, without Torquemada, their maker, who would have given the vampires stability they otherwise lacked.
One was Inigo.
At some point in the last week or so, the vampires had discovered the devil dogs and begun to hurt them. Kill them. I needed to visit the church grounds again. I had questions to ask about the genetic lines of the people buried in church history: plant-people and devil dogs. I stood and walked to the window. The weather was horrible, but the drive to the church was easier than the drive up the hill to Soulwood.
Prepared to be shot down, I took the long hallway to the office where LaFleur and FireWind worked on computers and chatted on the phone.
* * *
Occam had driven us to the Nicholson home and was sitting on the small front stoop with my father and my older brothers, watching the children play in the snow. Even the church called off school when there was enough snow to play in. At this elevation and on this side of the hills, it was just cold enough to not have melted at all, the temps at just under freezing, and there were various snow forts, snowmen, and snowball fights taking place across the church grounds to keep the most active Nicholsons occupied.
The younger children who didn’t want to play in the cold were upstairs with the older girls, doing schoolwork and chores, the door to the stairs firmly shut.
The mamas, Mawmaw Maude, and I were alone in the big kitchen, me standing on the table as they took measurementsand pinned bridal gown fabric. It was not the way I had planned this interview to go. They were sipping tea and coffee as was their own particular taste, mugs nearby as they worked. They were worried. My call to them had made certain they would be. But they worked well when worried, pins in their mouths, scissors and tape measures on the table.
“Was the church always polygamous?” I asked.
The four women looked at each other, communicating the way only women who had raised a passel of children together could. Mama Grace shrugged and stabbed a pin into a fold of silky fabric. My mama nodded, but she looked down too, her face set in uncertain lines as she draped a longer piece that would become the removable train.
Mawmaw said, “If she was in the church, she would know by now. If she left the church after she knew, she would have taken that knowledge with her.”
They were talking about me, around me, in front of me, while sticking pins into me.
“This is church business,” Mama Carmel said, her tone stern. “But I agree.” She looked up at me and said, “Church business, not police business. You understand?”
“I understand,” I said. Didn’t mean I’d keep it secret.
“The answer to your question is,” Mama Carmel said, “we always was polygamous. We’ns used to have written records back to some place near what coulda been the Mediterranean, back in Babylon times, but places changed names time and time again. Lotsa unknowns in there, we know. The records was copied over and over for a couple hundred years, but no one could read ’em, lines pointing here and there and no way to understand. The recordkeepers figgered they was fulla mistakes after the umpteenth copy, just tracing pointy lines that meant nothing like words. So at some point, they jist wrote down what they knew from the oral tradition.
“But you’un need to know that everything back before the 1300s is jist chatter. It mighta been made up. It mighta been created outta whole cloth to give import where there was none, and we’uns have come to that understanding with acceptance.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I understand.”
“Starts out, we wasn’t even Christians or a church. We was a tribe a heathens.” Mama Carmel settled into a storytellingmode, her voice soft, with a telltale rhythm that suggested she had told it before. “Some a our men were particularly good warriors. After a war when only a handful survived, and they beat back the enemy to the last man, they brought back women prisoners, and men prisoners who couldn’t procreate, under the care of a man who they called a chief eunuch. They brought home gold and slaves and concubines who looked different from our people, them new folk bein’ pale a face with light eyes. The few remaining fighting men took in their own tribal women who had lost husbands, making them wives, and new concubines from the prisoners.”
“Forced,” I said.
“Is there any other way?” Mama asked.
I scowled at my mug on the table at my feet and wished for a sip of tea.
“There was no other way, not back then,” Mama said sternly, “and we’uns don’t blame the women, not then and not now. We’uns know that it wasn’t any better within the church, not until recently, but the church is changing. Me being appointed a women’s elder is changing a lotta things. Now you’un be quiet and listen to Mama Carmel. This is important.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, forcing my face into neutral and my hands to my sides as the mamas stuck pins perilously close to my flesh.
“They integrated households,” Mama Carmel continued, “with a hierarchy of wives who wielded control over the concubines. But them concubines was smart and had skills the wives didn’t. They taught the wives how to improve their farming and the chief eunuch taught the tribespeople how to write that pointy language. But they was different in other ways too, though the warriors and the tribe we come from didn’t know it. Bringing the captured people in, that was what made us what we are today.
“From the chief eunuch, they also learned how to castrate their weak human offspring, so they could control breeding, the way we do sheep and goats and cattle. And some a them concubines had more than jist a gift for farming. They made things grow. They were bred and their daughters became wives. And sometimes even first wives, over the first tribal women, a’cause their offspring was different.
“The original tribal women bred warriors, and the concubines bred farming women. Two lines of people, distinct, and yet merged.”
Mama Grace took over. “They stayed put for a few decades and taught the arts of war to the strong sons and castrated the weaker sons, making the less vicious men into farmers, tradespeople, artists. And they inbred too much. Two, three generations later, a new war started and the fighters signed on with the side they thought had the best chance of winning, and became a mercenary army. On the battlefield, they became terrifying fighters.” Mama Grace’s voice dropped low, as if to share a secret. “Stories called them the Dogs of War. Said that in fighting, they changed shape and became ravening beasts.”
All the mamas were looking down, not one meeting my eyes.
The door opened, letting in a blast of cold. Sam stood framed in the doorway, lean and lanky. “Okay to come in? It’s getting colder.”
“No,” Mawmaw said, her voice low and hard enough to turn him to stone. “You tell Micaiah this is the women’s story. Y’all go to the church or to your house.”
