Excerpt from "Our Lady of American Sorrows"
I sat with my friend Rodger--two months older and taller than me, but otherwise close as any twin brother--on the flat stone roof of my family's house, second from the end of the row on the steepest block of Rondo Street. We were both sixteen, and this was our last summer of freedom before our final year at Latin School, before we had to work for our livings. The day was so hot it felt as if the sun itself reached down to press on my head.
We shared our perch with a handful of iguanas and a pair of dusty-winged crows. We could see half the town, from the landing field along the river to east, back to the Civil Palace downtown. A series of open-topped trucks belched black smoke as they strained up the cobbles of Charles Avenue, coming from Ostia, New Albion's little port at the river's mouth. Four in three hours!
Each was filled with straight-backed men in black cassocks, their dog collars visible like white slashes against their throats even from our distance. They all were heading for the monastery west of town--Our Lady of American Sorrows, a great fortress of a holy house inhabited only by solemn Cistercians.
Until now. I sincerely doubted these were more Cistercian brothers come to call. "Four trucks," I said. "Perhaps a dozen priests in each."
Rodger snickered. "Are there enough souls in danger here in New Albion to need fifty new priests?"
"No one needs fifty new priests," I said darkly.
Papa was a theist, which was legal in New Albion, sort of. Even though Mama had raised me well I found his skepticism daring. Last Sunday at Mass at St. Cipriano's, Father Lavigne told us that Pope Louis-Charles III had sworn a renewed mission in the Americas when he had elevated the Archbishop of Teixeira. But fifty priests? If the Holy Office were coming to test the faith of our parishes, Papa would be in trouble.
I tried to imagine another reason for the priests to be here, hoping to conjure some little word-magic to offset my newfound fear. "Perhaps they are headed for the interior, to the native countries."
Rodger's snort was answer enough for that. "Just you watch," he said. "Something big is brewing."
No more trucks appeared, and the next aeroplane wasn't due until Friday, so after a while we got our fly rods and crickets to go fishing for bats off the seaside cliffs at sundown. The catch was always difficult, but they crisped so well on the fire, and tasted delicious with sea salt, lime and ground peppers.
* * * *
New Albion sprawls across dusty hills that are almost never hidden from the sun. Despite what they say about us in Avignon and Londres, it does rain here, at least at certain hours of the day during certain times of the year. Our little country is known mostly for our heat and our cloudless summers, and beaches which stretch at the feet of pale cliffs two hours' walk to the east.
We were also known, I suppose, for our coffee. That plant grows in abundance, both wild and cultivated, in the high hills far to the west of town, where there is shade and rain drifts down from the distant mountains. Somehow God arranged it so we had neither ocean nor coffee ourselves here in New Albion proper, but were rather simply caught in the middle ground between the salt spray and the morning's benediction.
Papa had been working on a new kind of coffee mill ever since I could remember. He had a job as well, at the Ministry of Commercial Affairs in a high-windowed office down by the sluggish river that he sometimes took me to see. He sat under an old wicker-bladed fan that squealed in a slow tempo, stamping seals on forms after holding them in files for long periods of time. Since his mother was Brasilian, it was good that Papa had a civil service job--anyone with Brasilian connections had been under suspicion since the Second Great War.
Another reason to fear the new priests.
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Includes the Hugo Award finalist Novelette "Into the Gardens of Sweet Night". From Americas you almost recognize to Americas that never could have been, these four extraordinary tales will transport you into a landscape of true American strangeness. Jay Lake's America is the kind of place from which you may never want to return.
