Chapter 13 - Star Fall
May, 1768 - New Orleans, New France
In your anger, sin not.
As Elisa dressed for dinner, she glowed with thoughts of her beloved. She was meeting Chase and Henri, the Nightwalker, for an early dinner. She couldn’t wait to tell them that her beloved, according to Paul’s calculations, should be returning within the next few days. Through Elisa’s field work with the Circle Knights she’d been able to reconnect with her beloved on many occasions but, since he’d been on assignments for over a decade, none of her friends had ever met him.
So much had transpired during those years. Her gifts had developed just as Chase suggested they might and well beyond. Her primary gifts were telepathy and telekinesis. Her secondary gift was the ability to turn any reflective surface into a portal across time and space. It was Elisa’s ability to read minds that allowed her to reach into the minds of others to create the portals to places she’d never even seen. An assortment of other gifts had been bestowed upon her as well. Elisa looked into the free standing, full-length mirror in front of her. She stretched out here hand and thought of Paris and there before her the mirror turned into a window of a busy Paris street. All she had to do was to step into it to be there.
Elisa didn’t really have an idea of where she and her beloved would go once he returned and they got their child back from her mother. They would also have to make decisions about whether or not they could both continue to serve as Circle Knights once they were able to live as a family. They’d individually taken vows to serve but, certainly Paul and the Circle Knight Elders would understand that a family should be together. Once she became an Elder, she was sure to get her way.
Elisa also wondered how her beloved might adjust to this world he left so long ago. They were married as children. Now, he was a man. Master had emancipated her upon his death, but he continued under the legal status of slave.
Paul was the designated Circle Knight Elder in charge of counter-intelligence. He had taken her beloved with him into The Pit on a secret mission. The Pit was a place of horrors, but the creatures there feared Paul and obeyed his every command. Still, Paul needed her beloved to watch his back. Fourteen years and many adventures had passed for her. For her beloved, fewer than three years had passed by. Time does not flow in The Pit as it does in this realm. Her beloved would be eighteen years old and, worse still, his mind would be that of an eighteen year old. Their brief rendezvous in the Pit, facilitated by Paul, in no way reflected the realities of married life.
She was blessed to still be quite youthful in appearance as her body filled out into womanhood. More importantly, she had matured in other ways. And though he survived the Pit, had his time there warped him in some unrecoverable way? The evils of that realm were soul changing to witness. And what of his return? Could an eighteen year old handle a family and someone like her who was now a grown woman? Henri tried to assure her that this would not be an issue for her beloved. “Trust me, it won’t be a problem”, a smiling Henri had said, inferring that any eighteen year old man would love to have a woman like her, and would do anything to keep her.
But, all of those questions could wait. Tonight was a night to enjoy the warm summer breeze and the conversation of good friends. Elisa arrived at the restaurant to find Chase sitting at an outside table. He rose to pull out a chair.
“Merci,” Elisa said with a smile as she removed the red sash hanging across her shoulder and hung it on the back of the chair.
Chase then spoke to Elisa in English which they often did to avoid prying ears, “So, did you tell Henri that your husband is due in port soon? You know that Henri is totally in love with you, right?”
Elisa smiled again. Before she could answer, a calm and cool Henri came around the corner laughing.
“Oh course, she knows I love her, but I am an honorable man, most days, and as such, I’m willing to wait my turn. It wouldn’t be the first time,” Henri said this with a wink.
Chase poked Henri with his cane which hid a slender sword, “So, how are you so sure that he won’t be like Elisa and never age a day past twenty-five?”
Henri acknowledged, “That may well be. But, gifted as he is, most of these Circle Knights are still bound by their three score and ten as are most mortals.”
Elisa giggled a bit not quite believing what she was hearing, “Surely you jest, Henri?”
“Oh, no my lady and I will tell your beloved so when I meet him. But, I will also tell him that I will honor the sanctity of your marriage as I would expect another to honor mine were I married. Make no mistake. Thirty years or so from now I plan to take his place. No offense to him, but we’re a special breed we three. To each of us time is a friend, not an enemy.” Henri stated affirmatively.
Chase smirked and called out for the barkeep to send out their favorite wine, bread and cheese before leaning into Henri to comment in English, “Obviously, you began drinking before you came here to meet us.”
Henri poured the last of the wine into everyone’s glass and then offered a toast to Elisa, “To Elisa and new opportunities.”
Clinking glasses and nodding, they drank to the fact that Elisa was all but certain to be designated as an Elder-in-waiting and would take the next available seat. That could be in months or in hundreds of years. But seldom was someone designated unless one of the current Elders was ill or had grown weary of the position.
Elisa reached over, touched Chase’s hand, and whispered, “And, once I come into my own, I will handle that matter with your beloved. It is a condition of my accepting their offer. So, do not worry.”
Chase smiled.
The three friends joked and kidded one another until their order arrived. They talked about the people they knew and told embellished stories about each of them including Elisa’s young protégé, Zi. The breeze and the mood were light and the wine flowed freely. In those moments, Elisa could almost forget her racial identity and those she left behind, but reminders were all around her, some more telling than others. The servant woman who carried their drinks stopped about six feet from their table as a mild sense of recognition swept over her face. Then, she remembered her place as a runaway slave and bowed her head as she placed the wine bottle on the table.
Elisa reached out her hand and placed it softly on the woman’s hand and tried to comfort her, saying in French, “ll est correct. Comment se fait-tout le monde?”
The woman didn’t answer Elisa’s query about life on the plantation. What she saw in the woman’s thoughts made her blood run cold. Elisa sprang to her feet knocking the bottle of wine to the ground.
She took the woman by both arms and screamed first in French, “Quand est-ce arrive?” and then, “When did this happen to you? ”
The frightened young woman said nothing, but in her mind revealed all that Elisa needed to know.
Elisa looked back at Chase and Henri communicating telepathically to them that they needed to leave the table immediately before turning to the glass window lining the store front of the restaurant. That was the only notice that she could offer them before she revealed herself. She walked towards the glass stretching out her hand before her. She walked into and through the window. The other customers sitting outside could not believe what they saw. Each swore it must have been a trick of the evening light or something in their drinks. None of them knew that Elisa had planted these possibilities in each of their minds.
Elisa stepped out on the other side into the dining room of master’s house and levitated gently down to the grand dining table. The dinner table was surrounded by her father’s family. With a single thought, she made each of them forget what they’d just witnessed as she lowered herself to the floor, exited the home, and entered the cookhouse. Elisa walked through the kitchen, not stopping to speak to her mother’s girlfriend from the field who was cooking in her stead.
Instead, Elisa called out, “Mama,” as she pushed opened the door to the small room she had shared
with her mother all those years.
She saw Ola with Elisa’s her fourteen year old daughter curled up in her arms. Elisa took a breath before sitting on the edge of the bed to reach out to her daughter, who had been raised with no idea that Elisa was her real mother. In fact, since she’d left the plantation, no one mentioned Elisa’s relationship to anyone there. It was as if she had never existed, or as if everyone there was enchanted in this one regard. Elisa pulled Lola up into her arms and then turned her around as she pulled down the top of her dress to reveal her back. Her heart sank as she saw the fresh wounds over older ones from the overseer’s whip. The marks formed a tree of agony on Lola’s back.
Without taking her eyes off her child, Elisa asked her mother, “Where is he?”
By “he” she meant the new overseer who was brought on after master died. Master’s eldest son now ran the plantation. He knew that Lola was his niece in blood, thus he allowed her to work in the big house. The overseer was not to touch Lola without his explicit consent. The overseer had gone too far and the new master demanded that the overseer leave their farm by sunset.
The overseer’s name was Hugo and all the slaves knew that he wasn’t right from the day he arrived. The field hands, like the servant girl working in New Orleans, knew that he was hell on earth. Ola tried her best to keep him away from the child, but she’d failed. Elisa pulled the answer to her inquiry from Ola without her saying a word.
Ola pleaded with her daughter, “Elisa, what are you going to do? Master found out what he’s been doing to the children and told him to leave the county tonight. We all agreed that it would be best for our baby if we just made him leave and never spoke of this thing again.”
Elisa shook her head and looked up at her mother, “What, more lies? Exactly, how have all of these lies protected us?”
Elisa stood from the bed and softly brushed the young girl’s hair with her hand, “Don’t worry. That bad man will never hurt you again, little Lola.”
Elisa strode out the back of the cookhouse and through the courtyard past the stable. Some of the older field hands in the stable did a double take as she passed their way, but each wondered if the evening light was playing tricks with their eyes. The women whispered rumors of her being some sort of enchantress. Those who were mothers had no doubt where she was headed. Hugo, the overseer, lived alone in an old cabin between the slave quarters and the bridge leaving the property, the same bridge underneath which Elisa had been married to her beloved.
Outside his cabin, Elisa saw Hugo’s tattered wagon tied to his equally tattered horse. Elisa could hear Hugo moving about and she could smell the alcohol before ever stepping foot into his cabin. Next to the wagon were several items that Hugo had not loaded yet including a very shiny piece of metal that must have doubled as a mirror and a table top. Elisa pushed it to the ground before walking up to the door. Hugo stopped what he was doing and looked up in a panic. He thought it was the plantation master coming to make sure that he was indeed gone by sundown. The frightened little man stuck his head through the doorway to look around. When he saw the beautiful Elisa, he grinned.
Elisa’s eyes narrowed before she said a single word, “Hugo.”
“Oui, Madame?” Hugo replied.
Then, suddenly, he was head over heels suspended in the air. Elisa used her telekinesis to hold him aloft by his ankles.
Hugo cried out, “Vous etes l’enchanteresse!”
“Oui, Hugo,” Elisa replied.
Hugo had heard some of the slaves whisper about an enchantress, but he always laughed at their fears. Elisa stretched out her hand towards the shining metal oval now lying on the ground and it began to glow in shifting red hues. She moved Hugo right above the newly formed portal.
As lowered him into the portal, she called out to him, “Profitez de votre temps en enfer.”
Thus, she lowered him into The Pit.
When he was gone, Elisa closed the portal and wearily, with tears streaming down her face, turned back to the road to the Damascus plantation. It was dark now and so quiet that she could hear the hoofs of horses approaching from nearly a mile away. There were two horses and two riders. It was Chase and Henri who had used the portal in her apartment which led to one hidden in the woods on the other side of the river. They’d taken a couple of horses there and were now riding hard towards her.
As Elisa looked back across the river, she noticed pillars of light of various colors forming all around her. Each pillar condensed into a being. The Elders of the Circle Knights had been summoned from all over. Paul was among the twelve. The chairwoman of the group, who was ethereal in her appearance, spoke for them all, “Elisa, you know, full well that we do not throw mortals into The Pit without written approval, especially not for the sake of vengeance. Even if you were a Gatekeeper, this would not have gone unnoticed.”
Elisa could only read a few of the minds around her, but she knew that each of them was an alpha level Knight such as herself and all of them had far more experience than her. She would be no match for all of them should she decide to fight. She knew from the moment she left her mother’s room that it would come to this, although she hadn’t expected it this soon. Elisa said nothing.
The chairwoman spoke again, “As you know, in our order, we cannot have a Knight, much less an alpha level Knight, breeching one of our core principles as you have done. We are here to protect mortals, not to judge them. If we allow this, our whole purpose is challenged. Thus, we have voted, eleven to one, that you be condemned to The Pit for an indefinite period of time.”
Elisa looked towards Paul, realizing that he was the lone vote in her favor. She could hear Chase and Henri riding across the bridge
They yelled, “Attendez!” over and over.
As a bright blue light began to glow around her, Elisa smiled and lifted a hand towards her friends before the chairwoman made her final pronouncement, “May God have mercy on your soul.”
With that, Elisa was cast into The Pit. Chase and Henri rode up to the circle just as the Elders, including Paul, disappeared into the night. Both men screamed into the nothingness that remained.