Read Online The Shadows of God by J. Gregory Keyes - Free Book Online

he saw her with eyes of Red Shoes, who loved her.
    “You are with me,” he said. “You are part of me. As long as you want a place by my side, it is yours.”
    She touched his face in turn. “You used to frighten me,” she said. “I can see the spirit you swallowed. It is still there, a poison in you. But I do not fear it any longer.”
    “You should. I do. But I will not let it harm you, Grief.”
    “I know. You may destroy the world — ”
    “Only to rebuild it as it should be. And I have not decided to do that.”
    “Yes. I was saying you may destroy the world, but I truly believe I am safe with you. A strange thing.”
    “Everything is strange. And I — ”
    An arrow thunked into Red Shoes’ back. He heard the nearby twang of the bow, this hiss of the shaft on a corn leaf, and was already dodging. Not quickly enough. He didn’t feel any pain, just impact, but that was the way it was with THE SHADOWS OF GOD
    arrows. A dull shock, like someone thumping you. He yanked his ax from his belt as he whirled, gathering his shadowchildren around him. He shouldn’t have relaxed, not even here, not with the Sun Boy and his scalped men searching for him.
    “I got him!” someone whooped, and a chorus of shrieks went up in the corn.
    Grief had drawn her kraftpistole —though it was empty of charges.
    Someone in the corn started singing the war song. Red Shoes looked down.
    The arrow was a blunt piece of cane, lying harmless on the black earth.
    A boy leapt out onto the path, his face smeared with red and black clay. He held a toy war club carved from a branch.
    “Got you, Uncle!” the boy shouted. “Now your scalp is mine! My name shall be He-Killed-a-Wizard!”
    “Chula?”
    “Welcome home, Uncle.”
    Red Shoes sighed and placed his ax back in his belt. “That was foolish, Chula. I might have killed you.”
    “You never even heard me!”
    “That’s true. That—” He broke off, remembering himself as a boy. He smiled.
    “That was good, actually. I always said you would be a great warrior. Now I see some proof of it.”
    “They said you were coming!” Chula said. “The old men foretold it. They said you were coming to lead us to war! Is it true?”
    Red Shoes looked at the boy. No boy, really, but a lithe young man of fifteen, eager for war. But for the Choctaw, war usually meant a raid, two or three deaths, a scalp for a trophy and then months of bragging.
    It did not mean facing an army as large as a plague of locusts, an army with THE SHADOWS OF GOD
    artillery and airships, whose numbers were so great that the whole Choctaw nation could disappear into them like of drop of water into a sea.
    And so it was with some pain he saw the joy on Chula’s face when he said,
    “Yes, that is so.”
    The boy whooped and shook his toy war club, and out in the corn, his friends answered.
    “Are you coming to Mother’s house?” Chula asked, when he had started the war song again, forgotten the last part, and broken it off.
    “If I’m welcome there.”
    “Mother said you were.”
    “Then come along,” he said, mussing his nephew’s hair.
    “Who is she?” Chula asked, gesturing at Grief.
    “My wife,” Red Shoes replied.
    “Your wife,” his sister said, voice flat. “You never took a Choctaw woman, and yet now you bring this—what is she?”
    “Awahi, a tribe far out on the high plains.”
    His sister scowled, ruining what was usually a pretty face. “And where will you live? In her house on the plains? Has she any property? Do you expect to move in with me, or take a Choctaw wife, one with a house?”
    Red Shoes smiled. “It’s good to see you, Speckled Corn, little sister.”
    She hesitated. She had probably sworn not to forgive him this time, for leaving for so long. She had done it before, in front of witnesses.
    As before, she broke it. She threw herself into his arms, weeping. “Where have you been? Why do you do this? My boys need their uncle. Since our brother THE SHADOWS OF GOD
    died, and