Obama at the Gates of Detroit, Chapter 3

“Run!” someone shouted.

“They’re gaining!”

“Don’t look back,” Greenspan said. “Eyes forward. Watch your feet, lest you trip on a cobblestone.”

It was good advice. The embedded copper ingots made the footing treacherous, and errant green sparks singed the feet of the unwary.

I looked back.

Obama could no longer be seen beneath a writhing mass of silver clockwork and oaken claws. Only the occasional gout of emerald radiance testified to the battle that was taking place. The pile of Gardeners had become so thick, though, that many of the arriving automatons were ignoring it in favor of pursuing us.

The heart of Detroit is a mansion, built on and around and overtopped by the stump of the largest tree I had ever seen. Alive, the tree must have been as tall as any feat of human engineering: taller than the topless towers of Chitown. Even felled, the stump made a mighty tower, and Nader’s home had been fashioned to ring the base of it. I saw a spiral of stairs ringing the trunk, rising into the clouds. We reached the manse bare minutes ahead of our pursuit.

“Quick now, “Sharpton commanded. “Through the doors, while they’re still unguarded.” He grabbed one of the huge gate’s ring-bolts, inserted his stave like a lever, and heaved.

“They have guardians,” Greenspan said dryly. “Look again.”
White flakes fell around us, as if the blazing spring day had turned to winter. I looked up. The mansion was ringed by a massive portico, and the base and capital of every pillar was decorated with graceful, willowy limbed stone figures.

No, not stone. Wood. As I watched, a fine web of cracks appeared on the face of the nearest stature, a beautiful dryad with flowers in her cedar hair. A thin layer of plaster crumbled and sheeted off, revealing an angry scowl. A wooden bosom heaved, and wooden muscles flexed, and with a powerful wrench the statue pulled herself free from her mounting. More plaster fell away, and I saw that her eyes were chips of hateful malachite, and the grain of her skin pulsed with verdant energy.

She had friends. We were surrounded.

Brother Sharpton eyed them. He crossed his arms. “I don’t do walking statuary. Golems fall under wizard-work.” He pointed a hefty finger. “Magic ‘em, Alan.”

Grumbling, Greenspan turned away with a flourish of his raggedy green cloak. He grabbed the trundle containing Schwarzkopf – still slumbering peacefully – and kicked it. The bear-sark merely shifted his vast bulk, rolling over and using one of his matted, filthy furs for a pillow.

“Lazy schmuck,” Greenspan grunted. He tipped the wagon over, and Schwarzkopf rolled a good span before coming to rest at my feet in a snoring heap. Greenspan knelt next to him, and begged me to attend. He eyed me slyly. “Want to hear some magic words?” He put his lips to Schwarzkopf’s ear. “Desert,” he said. “Storm and shield.”

The bear-sark grunted: a deep, throaty rumble that made the ground shake. His hands made fists as, without apparent effort, he gouged ten deep furrows in the stone street.

“Instant thunder.”

Schwarzkopf lurched to his feet. Bleary eyes blinked and squinted in the brilliant sun. One hand went to his back and he straightened with a groan and a crack that was heard in Pennsylvania. He gnashed his teeth and scratched at a winter’s worth of mangy stubble. “Ruh?” He asked. “Mur?”

Greenspan pointed at the encroaching wooden men. “Republican Guard.”

“Yur?” Schwarzkopf glared, and I stumbled back. There was no sleep-blindness in his eyes now, only angry red corpuscles and a terrible, smoldering clarity. His hands dipped beneath his cloak of filthy hides and produced a pair of huge, crude axes with cleaver blades. They were ancient, and rusty, and pitted with old blood.

“Get them,” commanded Greenspan the Green, but it was scarcely necessary. Schwarzkopf tugged the upper cowl of his cloak – a huge, shaggy bear’s head – over his eyes and roared. He charged, and his axes carved a path through the ring of statues. They fell before him like cut timber.

“After him,” Brother Sharpton shouted. “Follow close behind!”

Wood chips flew on either side of us like the dusty wake of a prairie-ship. I saw a score of grasping hands hacked off at the wrist. When we reached the gates of Nader’s manse, the bear-sark parted the doors with a single kick.

“Nur?”

“Up!” Greenspan commanded.

We climbed.

And climbed.

The statue-folk tried to follow us, but with our whip-quick quarterstaves we tripped them up and hurled them off the stairs. I saw a dozen tumble and crack on the flagstones far below.

We climbed.

And climbed.

I saw Detroit spread beneath us, shining white and lurid green. My heart lurched. I saw the place where we had left Obama, and the smoking crater that testified to his strength, but, I could no longer see any sign of life. The whole city was as silent as a tomb.

We climbed.

And climbed.

And with the last of our strength, in the dying light of dusk, we heaved ourselves past the final stair. The top of the stump was a broad wooden plateau, a cable-length across. There was a gauzy awning in the very center, and a scattering of furniture, and a great, smoking forge. We approached carefully, for even from the edge of the plateau we could hear a strident voice speaking.

“Spoiler, am I? I’ll show them spoilers. I’ll show them a whole world of spoilers. Why, I have as much right as any Lord, don’t I? The office sits empty. The chair unfilled. Any man could take it, had he the will and the wit. My horse in that race was as good as the next. I am not an unreasonable man, am I?”

I glanced at Greenspan. He only shrugged. The strange voice continued to harangue the empty air.

“Fools! I WILL show them. They mock me, I know, but I’ll not stand it. I’ll not take the blame for Lord Gore’s exile. He brought it on himself. His weakness is at fault, not my strength. Yes. Weakness.” Here the voice changed, becoming low and thoughtful. “There is still a weakness in the vascular cambium, but I have nearly sorted it out. Yes, indeed. The root structure is strong, and the growth of meristematic tissue is quite pleasing. And what wonderful venation. Yes. Soon you will rise, my friend. Your time is almost at hand.”

And with that, the voice began an odd, lilting song, low and atonal, which tugged at my memories. It was the slithering sound of wind rustling an ocean of Kansan maize, the hissing of ten million new roots pushing aside the top soil, the quiet hum of sap flowing up the veins of a California redwood. The Greensong.

We approached carefully. In the gentle glow of a gas lamp, I saw my second Beltway Lord. Nader was a spare man, worn and wan, with caterpillar eyebrows and eyes that glowed with brilliant light: madness or intelligence, I could not say. He walked with a limp, and I saw that one entire leg was fashioned from solid bronze: despite this, it moved and flexed nearly as well as his flesh. He stamped about his little workshop, pausing only occasionally to water a cluster of vines or pour a crucible of molten silver into a clay mold. Everywhere I saw tendrils and vinestems crisscrossing the ground and wandering across the plateau into the encroaching darkness. For, as we grew closer, the last rays of the sun died.

And with them, so did Nader’s song. “I know you’re out there,” he said.

Greenspan and Sharpton shared an appalled glance.

“I’ve known since you crossed the threshold. You might as well come into the light, where I can see you.” When no one moved, he added, “Otherwise I’ll scour this stump clear of every scrap of animal life.”

Shamefaced, we shambled underneath the awning.

“Hmmm… You are not what I expected.” He had an apparatus on his forehead, an array of lenses and rotating arms: he stared at us through first one lens, then another. “Greenspan the Green. Hmph. I heard that you had been dismissed. A pity; you were ever a faithful servant. Friar Sharpton. Yes. Many times have we entered the lists together. And… Ah. General Bjornheônar Shwarzkopf. I see you have awoken… Interesting.” He dismissed the rest of us with a sneer. “To what do I owe this dubious pleasure?”

“We were sent by Obama. We bring an appeal for parley.”

“Parley…” Nader shook his head. “Obama came with you, I hazard? That was his presence I felt in the city? If so, your mission is in vain, for I can sense his presence no longer. My hybrids have seen to then. Nader’s Raiders, I call them. Well, then. I suppose he wished to propose an alliance. No. I’ll not be tricked into joining myself to one of the great parties again. And really there is no need. No need at all, anymore. No, not anymore. For you see –“ He cut himself off with a clap and a grin. “An inspiration occurs to me. Oh, what a capital idea! Yes. Yes! What a fortuitous confluence. A most notable convergence! You have arrived just in time to witness my triumph. Come,” he commanded, and I saw that he had the man Obama’s way of making a word that was not a sound, but a fact. “I will show you my progeny.”

He spoke as he walked. “I had intended to awaken it in a fortnight, on the night of the full moon. No ceremony, no guests. But now it occurs to me that it would be good to have witnesses to my triumph. Eventually everyone will see, of course, and those that ought to will cower before me, but it seems to me that there should be witnesses at the nativity. Someone ought to record it for posterity’s sake. You,” he pointed at me, “are a scribe. Do not bother to deny it: I see things very well. Very well indeed. Well attend, scribe. And behold!”

He wrenched the sheet off of a covered form. To this day I do not know precisely what I saw. Man-shaped, yes, but not a man, and half again as tall. It was covered in green vegetable growth, more like fur than hair. Not a wooden eidolon like the statues below, or even a hybrid like the ones that attacked us in the city, but perhaps in a similar vein. What stands out most in my memories are its eyes, which even dull and half-closed were glowing with a malevolent power I can’t begin to describe. Worse was its age. For it was old, old; it fairly radiated with a palpable sense of history.

“It is a primordial,” Greenspan murmured. “An Old One.”

“It’s a Derew,” Nader corrected irritably. “Nobilis Vir Arborus. One of the fabled – and, indeed, now almost totally extinct – male dryads. I have named him Fingal. And tonight, he will rise with the moon.”

Even as he said it, a wind sprang up in the north, and parted a veil of clouds. Only a sliver of moon showed on the horizon.

“If you will excuse me, I must move quickly.” Humming, Nader set to work with a small bronze scalpel, and a crystal decanter. I could not see what he did, but the tree-man shifted imperceptibly, and even in the near darkness I could see that his foliage was growing greener by the second. “I found him, you see. Deep beneath the bowels of Detroit. He was the Rust Barons’ great shame. They cut down the Great Tree, and used its wood for timbers as they sank mineshafts beneath its roots, and plundered the wealth of the world. But they could not kill the old tree completely – the roots always have a bit of life, if you know how to find it – and so they could not kill its dryad. It took every ounce of my power to revive him: he has slumbered for centuries. But tonight, he wakens… ah. There! Yes, that will do it. Step back, everyone.”

The moon shone upon us, unnaturally bright for its phase. Nader cast the decanter down at the derew’s feet; it shattered, and the smell of corn whiskey filled the air.

“Rise, Fingal. Fey moon above and circle below. Tide and fog, blood and fire. Rise!”

And it did. The tree-shape groaned, and came to its feet. I saw eyes like bare earthen pits take me in, eat me up, and pass me over. They were old, hateful eyes. Fingal rose.

The earth shuddered. Beneath us, in the city, I heard decrepit towers collapse into rubble. Trees shook and shivered as if whipped by a hurricane. I stumbled to my knees.

“Idiot!” Greenspan shouted. “Nader, you fucking moron, don’t you see what he’s doing?” The slim man pulled himself up from the ground. “He’s rousing the stump. The roots are shifting. You didn’t just awaken the dryad, you woke up his tree!”

“Yes,” Nader considered. “I suppose I did. Sympathetic forces and all that. Well, all the better; I had intended to pit Fingal against George’s forces, but with the power of one of the world-tree’s at my fingers… yes! How fortunate. Now, no one will be able to contest my claim to the Oval Throne.”

One of the soldiers had run to the edge of the stump and peered over. “It’s uprooting itself,” he screamed. “It’s tearing the city to pieces.”

Greenspan shouted. “You have to stop it! It’s a world tree; its roots grip the heart of the continent. If it keeps thrashing about like this, it’ll destroy the whole Midwest.”

“Yes, I suppose it will. Well. That was unforeseen,” Nader mused. “Stop it? No, I don’t suppose I will. No. Even if I could, I would not. It is my platform. I shall ride its planks all the way to the Potomac. And once there, its roots will batter down the Wall, and I shall finally gain entrance to the throne, as I was meant to.” His smile was terrible in its mildness. “The Green shall rule America.”

“No!”

We spun, and there he was: tall, fierce, awash in moonshadow, and beautiful. He sat astride an auto-phaeton, bareback, and its silver limbs pranced and reared, but he controlled it easily with a pat of his hand or a motion from his legs. The scales of his hauberk gleamed dully, each one inscribed with a word that, taken together, Declared Independence. Streaks of golden blood ran unchecked down his ebony face. Obama.

Lord Nader made a motion – a command, I think – but before the words left his lips Obama’s arms blurred and he loosed a cobblestone from either hand. They landed at our feet with a blinding flash. When I could see again, I was on my back. We all were. Above us and between us Obama charged, and the sound he made as he crashed into Fingal, the sheer bloody force of impact, nearly deafened me. With a wave of his hand Fingal tore the mount out from underneath Obama, and the silver Gardener burst into metal shards, but it was too late: Obama had wrapped his arms around the derew.

How long they wrestled I cannot say. It was an even contest. They were the same height, both far larger than a normal man, though the derew’s bulk – wood so old and gnarled and dense that it was practically coal – was far greater than Obama’s spare frame. Fingal rent at Obama, tearing at his flesh with oaken claws and crushing him with bone-shattering force. For his part, Obama bore it patiently and silently. His grip was gentle, even loving. He clasped Fingal to his chest like a prodigal son. Fingal beat at him. Fingal charged first one way, then another, all across the wooden plateau. Fingal stamped and gnashed mossy teeth and clawed the air, but he could not break Obama’s hold. The derew’s efforts were echoed below, as the stumps great roots lashed the streets of Detroit and destroyed its beautiful order. I began to think I was back aboard the heaving deck of a land-ship as the tree’s gyrations pitched us about. I saw that Greenspan and Sharpton had taken the initiative to bind and gag as dazed Lord Nader.

And then I saw Fingal, in desperation, fling himself off the edge of the tree. Soon after, the earth ceased to shake and the tree grew still.

It was noon the next morning before we found them: the stairway had collapsed, and the climb was arduous. There fall had carried them nearly to the shores of the Eerie Sea. Obama knelt in a furrowed crater, above the broken, twisted form of Fingal. The giant’s eyes were closed, and it breathed in laborious gasps.

“He will recover, in time. His kind are nearly immortal.” Obama turned to Nader. “Though I would appreciate it if you let him slumber. His time is not yet nigh. The earth is unready.”

“You invade my city, break all my plans, and have the temerity to lecture me?” Nader spat.

“We approached under terms of parley, and were set upon. We only defended ourselves.”

“Then parley, and be gone. It will take me years to undo the damage you have caused.” Nader sneered. “I assume you have demands? You didn’t come here to ask to learn the Greensong, so I suppose you must want me to build something. Weapons? Bombs?”

“Ships. The Ronpaul assails my people from on high. The Texas Empire’s scytheplanes play havoc across the prairielands. The Other Beltway Lords send bounty hunters against me. I need ships to defend my people.”

“Oh, indeed. Land-ships, I presume?” Nader snorted. “I could build you ships. Such wondrous ships as you have never seen. Hmmph. I expect that this is the part of the conversation where you threaten my life if I don’t?”

“We are under a flag of parley. It is treason and goddamning to take a life under parley’s flag. Nay, I did not come to demand, but to ask—“

“The answer is no.”

--and to trade,” Obama finished smoothly. “I have something you desire very much. A schemata.”

Nader was suddenly interested. “What kind of schemata?”

Greenspan produced a roll of parchment, made of paper so soft and supple that it was like cloth.

Obama said, “In the War of Brothers, Lincoln Silvertongue commissioned a great warship to protect against the depredations of Jefferson Landharrow and his thirteen bastard generals. She was carved from a single piece of ferric meteorite, powered by the unstoppable Indifference Engine, and her guns were quenched in the tea-soaked waters of Boston harbor, and enchanted to give no wound that was not mortal. Though she finally foundered at sea, the mighty Monitor could not be defeated while she ploughed the lands between the Missisissipi and the Atlantic. She was a one of a kind ship, and her blue prints are your, if you can give me a dozen from her mold.”

Nader snatched the scroll. “Let me see that! Yes. Astounding. Look at the keel to beam ratio! That bluff bow…” He studied it. “Yes. It may be possible. May be. Of course, the secret of its engine has been lost, but I have my own theories there. I have tendered drawings of a Green engine; after all, cannot the same force that thrusts a tendril of root through five feet of solid limestone be used to drive a flywheel? Force is force, after all.” Nader mused on this point, lost in thought, idly flipping the lenses on his viewing apparatus.

“So you will do it?”

“What? Oh. Perhaps…” Lord Nader considered. “A dozen? I could make you a dozen such ships, if I had the materials. Yes. And, of course, we have access to finer metals than they did in Lincoln’s day. Indeed. Yes.” Nader eyed Obama shrewdly, clutching the roll of parchment to his breast. “You will give me the schemata, and the materials necessary to build thirteen such ships. I will keep one for myself. Yes, that would be fine.”

Obama looked grave. “And will you support my claim to the Oval Throne?”

Nader waved it away. Yes, yes. I know when I am beaten. I’ll not press my own claim. Unless you die, of course. Or are defeated. Or someone else claims the throne.”

“Then we are agreed.” Obama spat on his palm and held it out. Nader clasped it, and I felt the earth shiver. Trees rustled throughout the city. Insects ceased their droning. Birdsong fell silent. As far away as Sacramento and Tallahassee, the other Beltway Lords paused in their warring, and checked their lunars and consulted their oracles and tasted the subtle lines of force that flowed through the earth. They all agreed: the balance had shifted.

The first pebble had fallen. In time, the avalanche might engulf them all.

Obama at the Gates of Detroit, Chapter 2

And thus we came to the gates of Detroit. Five hundred feet tall they were, and wrapped in banded iron, but we passed them easily, for they stood ajar. Beyond them lay the great and ancient city of Detroit, arrayed before us on its seven hills. It lay across the land like an emerald web, with broken fingers of steel and stone thrusting up from between the mighty bows of cedars and conifers, and shining silver avenues of light dividing the forests into regimented sections. Everywhere I looked I saw gaping, eyeless towers, and in the entire city I am certain that not a single pane of glass remained unbroken. Even the buildings that remained intact were clothed in vines and creepers, as if the fauna were attempting to swallow the city whole.

“Once the power of Iron ruled this domain,” Obama said quietly. “From the holy city of Duluth, along the shores of the Gitche Gumee, even unto fabled Toledo, did Iron hold sway. But Detroit was always the heart of it. Here the Rust Barons dwelt, in their forbidding cast-iron fortresses, and they handed down their pronouncements to the people on lacquered black scrolls housed in solid gold wire-baskets every solstice-night. They commissioned great works, to proclaim to the world the glory of Iron: the Topless Tower of Chitown, the great locomotives that devoured the leagues beneath their wheels, and the Colossus of Eerie. In the Great War they fashioned terrifying engines of destruction that strode the world and crushed the enemies of the Constitution at the behest of the Roosevelt the Second. They build the first land-ship, the first air-ship, and the first auto-phaeton. Truly, their power was unmatched within our borders.”

“What happened?”

Instead of answering, Obama bent down and dug up a handful of dust. The fine silt drained through his fingers and scattered on the wind.

“Things change,” Brother Sharpton translated. “Things always change.”

The man Obama mused on his dusty palm. “There were still people dwelling here when Lord Nader arrived. I know not what fate befell them, but they are gone now. Only the Green lives now, and the Green abides alone.”

He clapped his hands together and stood, striding forcefully down the cobblestone street. Each paving stone was inset with a single copper ingot, and occasionally they would vent a fat green spark that crisped the air and made our hair stand up. “Attend to me,” Obama called, “and I will sing to you of Nader the Lame.” We followed him cautiously, choosing our steps so as not to tread on the conducting stones.

“It began with an accident, on the fields of Jahro, during the Great War. It is not known what marvel of the Rust Barons cost Lord Nader his leg – certainly one of their mighty war titans, which were fielded on all sides – but his fury over that loss is graven in every stone of this city. He set himself against the Rust Barons, and even before he had fashioned a new limb for himself he sang vendetta before nine High Justices; he promised to end the reign of Iron forever.”

“And so he did.”

“How?” I asked. “How could one man kill an element?”

“It helps if the man in question is a Beltway Lord,” Greenspan said dryly.

Obama shook his head. “Any person can shake the foundations of the world, if they have the strength of spirit. And Nader’s spirit is strong. As strong as anyone’s. I only wish he had heeded wiser council, in those days when he was willing to heed any council at all. Again and again he sets himself against the mighty, and some enemies do not fall as easily as the Rust Barons did. Lord Nader has made many new enemies, and seen few victories, since last we spoke.”

There followed a pause, a temporary lull, in Obama’s speech, a habit we had grown accustomed too. He was a man of great words and gravid silences. As we waited for him to begin again, our feet carried us along one of the seven main arteries of Detroit, a shining and inexorable path to the huge castle that capped the central hill. The streets were lined haphazardly with huge trees, their boughs neatly trimmed to prevent them from overshading the road, and so the burnished cobblestones gleamed beneath us even as the woods on either side were cloaked in darkest shadow. The air was still and heavy and I heard no animals – not even the shrill call of birds or the buzzing of insects – and the ten warriors and myself soon grew extremely nervous in the foreboding quiet.

I say we heard no animals, and it was true, but nevertheless we felt a presence grow near. Sometimes I would sense movement between the trees, and know that there were dark eyes lodged in fearful visages, all intent upon our band, though I could not explain why I was so certain.

“Lord Nader made all this,” the man Obama finally said. “He sang to the heart of Iron and turned it green. He was always possessed by a love of the earth, and all its generative forces. He sang the Green as well as any many alive; perhaps he was even as good a greensinger as Boone or Roosevelt Lionheart. He—“

His words were cut off as a whirlwind of motion burst out of the forest ahead of us. A silver form alighted upon the cobblestones, poised and erect: later I was put in mind of the way plains caribou, upon being startled out of the high grass, will freeze in place as the sniff the air for hunters, all coiled muscle and power barely held in check. It was as strange a thing I have ever seen: in figure it resembled a centaur, except with silver-rimmed wheels instead of legs and a body made of copper wire and steel bones and whirring clockwork. Clear peridot eyes regarded us stoically for a moment, and then dismissed us. One of its arms snaked out and plucked a bent branch from a tree’s limbs, and only then did I notice that its hands ended in wicked pruning shears. It stowed the branch within some unseen compartment and then, its task complete, it folded in on itself, like a flower opening in reverse, and it was suddenly transformed into a simple auto-phaeton, the likes of which can be seen ferrying men of wealth and substance up and down the streets of New York or Philadelphia or even St. Louis. Soundlessly it departed and sped along the path on gleaming wheels. As it passed over them, each of the cobblestones happily discharged its load of verdant lightning into the wheel rims.

“Gentlemen,” Greenspan said wryly. “I think we’ve just seen the Gardeners of Detroit.”

Obama studied the receding shape critically. “Yes, it must be so. It resembles some of his earlier designs. I had not imagined that he had come so far, I so short a time.”

“How?” someone sputtered. It might have been me.

“Lord Nader studied under many masters, in his youth,” Obama explained. “He mastered the arts of iron-working, as well as greensinging, and was equally adept at both, as well as alchemy, astronomy, statistics and fatebinding, and the studies cryptozoological. Even before his vendetta he earned the enmity of the Rust Barons by forging intricate, if impractical, improvements on their existing designs. The Nader-smith never settled for anything short of perfection; he decried the works of other inventors as crude and unsafe and unsound. He seeks a precision of form that cannot be found in animal, vegetable, or mineral.”

Sharpton grunted. “And I don’t think he likes unannounced guests very much either. Look over there.”

Shapes were speeding towards us along the shining path, from the direction we had come. As I watched, the walls disgorged more speeding figures to fall, their wheels already spinning, onto the road in a clatter of sparks. They soon closed the distance: auto-phaetons were faster than any flesh and bone horse.

“Run!” Obama commanded, and we fled.

As we approached the nearest intersection, two huge shapes stepped out from beneath the trees. They were crude and haphazard, vaguely man-shaped piles of wood and steel. Flecked gray bark and fetid lichen peeked out from beneath pitted iron plating. Steel beams and bones and springs were lashed together with ropy clingers and vine tendrils. Gnarled limbs ended in glittering razor claws. Amber eyes glowed as if backlit by furnace fires.

“Hybrids!” Obama ducked beneath the sweep of one paring-bladed hand. “I never imagined that he would develop Hybrids!” He clapped me on the back and hurled me out of the path of another wooden monster’s attack.

One of the warriors, a skinny kid named Spider, tried to attack the hybrid sentinels with his quarterstave, and was split nearly in two by a grotesque backhanded blow. Another man, Edison Mathers, unloaded the contents of his pepperbox revolver into the eyes of the thing attempting to rip his leg from its socket, with no appreciable result. Obama leaned down with his long arms and sturdy hands and plucked one of the metal ingots from a paving stone and hurled it at that second sentinel. It struck the tree-thing in the face and exploded in emerald light. The monster dropped poor Edison to the ground.
Obama drew up another paving stone, and another, and another. They crackled in his fingers and wrought actinic fire as they struck Nader’s hybrids. “Flee, if you would save your lives. Your weapons are of no use here.”

“But—“

“Go!” he commanded; less an order given than a natural law. “I will guard your backs. Make to the heart of the city, if you can. I will join you,” and, under his breath where no one but I could here, he added, “…if I am able.”

We fled.

Obama at the Gates of Detroit, Chapter 1

Plame abandoned us on the edge of the Asphalt Sea, forty miles south of Detroit. Even the spirits of the air cannot intrude on the dominion of a beltway lord, and Lord Nader casts his wards wide. I recall little of my journey through the corridors of magic, except that it was cold, and windy, and full of the chattering gossip of the unburied dead.

The Asphalt Sea balked us for a time, as it balked all who would encroach upon the domain of Nader the Lame. The vast, featureless plain of bubbling bitumen smoked in the noonday sun, and stretched as far as the eye could see. Beyond it, Detroit – a gaudy emerald in a silver setting – beckoned us onward.

“We travel by night,” the man Obama ordered. “Anyone caught by sunlight on that ebon expanse will be roasted alive. Naught but bone and ash will remain.”

“It will take more than a night to cross that sea,” I observed. “What will we do when the sun rises and we are only halfway across?”

“I have prepared for that eventuality,” Greenspan said, but would reveal no more.

I’ll not recount that night’s difficult journey, nor how the heat came up through our boots til the soles of my feet smoked, nor how my skin crisped even in the night air. Obama lead us single file across the Asphalt Sea, dragging behind us a sleeping Schwarzkopf in a trundle made from two children’s wagons. When the sun threatened to broach the horizon, Obama called a halt, and the Bear-sark was rolled off his cart to reveal a roll of canvas the size of a stout man. Greenspan unfurled it into a magnificent silk pavilion, made from cloth that shone like silver. When I marveled at its construction, Greenspan explained that it was enchanted with the ancient runes of Goretex. We spread it upon the ground and slept in comfort all that day.

The second night’s journey was marred by only one unusual occurrence, around the fourth bell, as a shrieking whine split the desolate silence of that black plain. A heart’s beat after the cry, a pair of broad black shapes that filled the sky for an instant, and then we were bathed in the winds of their passage. Schwarzkopf snorted, and rolled over in his sleep.

“Birds?” someone asked fearfully. “Wyrm-shrikes? Thunderbirds, perhaps? I’ve heard that Colorado Rocs can grow that big.”

“Nay, tis the Texas Air National Guard,” Obama answered. He halted, and stared into the distance, watching their flight: he had the best eyesight of any of us, for, as all well know, he spent his childhood in the wafting kite-city of Moloka’i where he was an apprenticed leper-seer, and spent many a night in vigilance against incursions by the rotting ones. Deep consternation creased his brow, and even a touch of reproach. It is the closest I ever saw him come to anger. “King George sends them to make war on the north.”

“Against Canada?” I blurted. “That’s crazy.”

“They don’t call him the Mad King for nothing,” Brother Sharpton cackled.

The man Obama sighed. “King George has declared Canada to be an abomination, and bids his scythe-planes to harry it away from our border. The land, you ken, not the people. Every month a flight of planes takes wing from Fort Worth and makes the trek across the whole country until they reach the border. Many fall along the way, to the RonPaul's guns or the thunderbird's talons, or simple storms. When they arrive, the few survivor's dive at the ground and carve furrows in the tundra with their wing mounted blades until they exhaust their fuel.”

“And then?”

“Then they crash, and die,” Obama said with disdain. “Until the next month, and a team of brave young fools arrives to try and flagellate the earth itself. And so it will continue, until the world ends, or the northern half of the continent surrenders and sinks beneath the waves. It is a senseless thing, like so much that happens in these last days.”

“What do the people of the north think of this?”

“The Canadians are not like us,” Obama said shortly, and would speak no further on the matter.

That morning we reached the foothills of Detroit, and heaved a sigh of relief as we rested our toes in good loam and soft grass, instead of tar and rock. The bulk of Detroit stretched above us, a towering pyramid of stone, capped in dense foliage. We circled the mount until Obama showed us the single cobblestone road that spirals upwards into the city. “Step not from this path,” he warned, “neither to the left nor the right, for if you do you will be set upon by the guardians.” But of these he would reveal nothing.

We made one circuit of the road that day, and found ourselves staring down upon the place where we had first set foot on the path, over a cliff one hundred paces tall. This is the manner of the road into Detroit’s dark heart: it winds ever upward. We made camp upon the path, not daring to leave it, though fruit trees and sumptuous berry bushes sat invitingly only a few steps away. Eventually the man Obama became restless and foraged ahead while we slept. Soon we were awoken by his joyous laughter. We rushed up the road to find him staring at a copse of trees, within an arm’s span of the path.
“Potomac Cherry Trees,” he cried. “I had not thought to see their like again, after the Sundering. I had thought them all ensconced behind the source wall. Truly this is a blessing to our cause.” He plucked a berry from the tree and held it out to me. “Taste it.”

I did. “Sour,” I opined, and then my eyes widened, and I bent nearly double in shock.

“It takes people that way, sometimes,” Brother Sharpton said. “They are God’s own fruit, but they do contain too much for one man.”

“Once they were a gift, from the Emperor of the East to the Emperor of the West,” Greenspan explained. “Before the sundering, that was. Before even my time. Fruit of the Samurai, they were called. One single cherry is enough to sustain a grown man for a full day, both food and drink. Two cherries grant him the strength of seven men, though at the end of that day he will collapse and sleep for a week. Three cherries is instantly is fatal.”

“There is more to it than that,” Obama said mischievously, and he stroked the supple bark of the tree with his hand. Soon he began to sing in a high, sonorous chant. It contained something of the songs of the prairie larks, and something of Leonard Cohen. After a time, a miraculous thing happened; where he passed his hands over the wood, it changed shape. Soon, without using a blade, he had a branch of the tree shorn of leaves and smoothed into a simple staff, colored the crimson hue of the tree’s heartwood. “Potomac Cherrywood makes the finest weapons known to man or elf. A simple quarterstaff fashioned from it is stronger than steel, and light and supple as thought.”

He made twelve more, one for each of our number except himself, and Schwarzkopf. Obama never wielded a weapon in anger in the entire time that I knew him. “We are well armed now, I judge. As well as we aver shall be. Come, friends. We must make haste to the top of the city, for there we will find Nader, and take our counsel.”

Barack Obama and the Thunder Zeppelin

The sequel to Barack Obama and the Pirates of Wichita, this one is even more poorly edited and spellchecked. Again, these vignettes are meant purely as parody, and not even the good kind of parody. We're talking MAD magazine levels of political discourse here, people.

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Five days the Ronpaul’s zeppelin assailed Obama’s camp, and on the sixth day its guns fell silent.

The first day we stood in his momentous shadow, he let fear be his weapon. We jabbered and quivered as the sun was eclipsed, and many wanted to flee, until the man Obama ordered fires be lit and food prepared and walked among with bowl in hand, offering fellowship. After that we were bolstered, and stood proud.

The second day the Ronpaul loosed his lightning cannons, and arcs of blue fire fell from the sky. This also Obama had foreseen, and the lightning was sheathed harmlessly in tall steel needles ringing the camp, and the bolts passed into the earth along copper wires, and for the first time in months we had power for our electric lamps. And we danced in the light of incandescent tubes, and were again made fearless.

The third day’s dawn saw a rain of black thread, as a thousand Sturmfrunten rappelled down from the zeppelin’s flanks. Dozens fell to our lead balls and arrows as they dropped, but then they were upon us, and we commenced to melee. Obama’s men – and women, for I have never seen so many ladies don mail and take up spear as in Obama’s camp – were armed with little more than meat cleavers, bone-hewn bows, and antique rifles, but each one of us was worth ten stout soldiers when Obama’s voice was in our ears. The Sturmfrunten came with pistol and saber and teeth and worse, and fought like demons. For that day, and the next, and the next, they pushed us back. We fought them at the gates, until the gates fell, and we fell back to the towers. We fought them in the towers until the towers were breached, and the last defenders leapt from the battlements on ziplines, and lit the fuses on our sapping charges, and collapsed the towers rather than let them be seized. We fell back to the tunnels, dragging our wounded, many of whom were delirious and mad: for the Sturmfrunten all took a slow poison before battle, which stripped them of both the capacity to feel pain and eventually their lives, and caused wounds made by their teeth and nails to fester and rot. Many of those so stricken began to rant endlessly about

We fell back to the tunnels, and there we held the line. A thousand of the Ronpaul’s men entered those tunnels every day, and less than half that crawled out as the sun set. We built a new hell for them, underneath the prairie soil. By the fifth day they were mining through piles of their own dead just to reach us. On the sixth day, they did not come.

We emerged from our tunnels to see the zeppelin retreating, and the ground littered with corpses. Less than two hundred of us remained. We stood, blinking, in the light of a sun we had not seen for two days, and wondered aloud why they had given up.

“Because the Ronpaul is a slave to laissez-faire capitalism!” A strident voice shouted, “who would not recognize fiscal responsibility if it bit him in the ass.”
“Praise God!” A second voice agreed.

I turned to see two men riding a weary mule, and dragging a sledge full of furs behind them. One was short, and wizened, and wrapped a tattered green cloak around his thin shoulders. The other was rotund and proud and wore the frock of a traveling street preacher. I was shocked to realize that I recognized them, for they had been described to me once: Brother Sharpton, and Greenspan the Green.

Greenspan kvetched. “Damned fool and his damn-fool blimp. He could have been great, I tell you. He could have been the one to break the Source Wall and seize the Ordained Office. But he’d rather putter around in a giant phallic symbol. Christ! I taught him everything he knows about free market principles and fiat money-minting; I guess I should have taught him everything I know, instead.”

“Amen,” Sharpton added.

“You know why he’s leaving now? I’ll tell you why he’s leaving now: he went over budget. How stupid is that? He could crush you! He has ten times as many jackbooted thugs in reserve as he’s thrown at you so far, but he won’t use them, because he hasn’t allotted for them in his Annual Warmongering Budget. He had the victory in his grasp, and he fumbled it. That’s what comes of being beholden to fidgety stockholders. Moron.”

“Then we have gained a reprieve, though it be temporary.” Obama laid a hand on my shoulder as he unfolded his giant frame from the tunnel’s cramped confines. “For he will not return until he has chaired an emergency stockholder meeting, and amended accounts repayable, and drank from the crystal source of the mighty Mississippi, which will throw him into a great delirium for a fortnight. When he awakens he will need time to divine which visions were oracular, and which were pharmacopoeic, and an additional week until he ceases to speak in tongues.”

Greenspan nodded. “He won’t be back this fiscal year.”

“Then you are indeed the harbinger of hope, mighty wizard.” And Obama bowed to him then, something I had never seen him do for any man. “I welcome the three of you to my camp, and regret that I have little hospitality to offer.”

And I realized that there was a third man; one that I had previously mistaken for a pile of sodden furs. He was huge, and round, and sleeping soundly beneath a cloak made from the pelt of a huge bear, and wore a helm that was a grizzly’s head, and drooled.

Brother Sharpton caught my eye. “He’s fiercer than he looks, lad. That’s Schwarzkopf the Bear-sark. He might be hibernatin’ now, but he fights like the devil himself when roused.”

Greenspan cleared his throat. “We have come…” He hesitated, and pulled an abacus from his cloak, and clicked stones from row to row. The calculations did strange things to my eyes, for some stones seemed to pass through one another, and others appeared, or disappeared. Greenspan stopped, satisfied. “Yes. That will do. As I said, we have –“

“This ain’t easy for us, Obama,” Sharpton interrupted. “We’ve worked for Beltway Lords before, and been ill-treated and ill-used. Our advice has fallen on deaf ears and dull minds. We’ve gone unheeded and unwanted, and in the end, we’ve always been discarded.”

“The last time was for Georgie II, until he came too much under the influence of the Roving Man’s words and the insidious singing of Cheney’s clockwork arachni-tons,” Greenspan complained. “I was the last of his advisors to be cast aside. Now nothing is heard in the Lone Star Chamber except lies and more lies and mad laughter.”

“So we decided we'd ride this donkey as far as it would take us,” Sharpton said. “And it brought us here.”

Obama took them aside then, and they shared the counsels of the Beltway Lords, which are difficult for mortal men to comprehend. They spoke through the night, while the rest of us went belowground and sank into grateful slumber. The next day Obama called ten of his stoutest warriors, as well as myself, into the tunnels, and conducted us to dank stone chamber I had never seen before, and sealed the door behind us. Greenspan, Sharpton, and Schwarzkopf were there as well. Schwarzkopf was snoring gently on his feet.

“These three,” Obama said, “have agreed to become my generals in the upcoming war. The mighty wizard Greenspan will manage the northern campaign, proud Schwarzkopf the east, and faithful Brother Sharpton the south. As to the west….” Obama looked to the ceiling: his eyes, as I have learned, can pierce mere stone as if it were glass. “The western campaign manager still needs to be found. As well, we have a desperate need for allies, if we are to survive the Ronpaul’s next attack. For he will come again, and again, and again, until you are ground to dust and I lie dissected on a table.”


“So we must undertake a quest. We may not return, I warn you. Any man who finds himself unwilling must speak up now, for after this, there is no going back.” No one objected. It was unthinkable that they would. “Very well. Greenspan?”

The wizard stepped forward, consulted his abacus, and coughed in embarrassment. “Anyone could do this, really. It isn’t even magic. Not proper magic. Hmph. ‘PLAME! Zephyr of the east wind! By thy true name I invoke and bind thee: answer, or be torn asunder.’”

There was a shriek, and a wailing sob, and we were buffeted on all sides by blasts of air. The man Obama stretched an arm out and grasped the air, and the winds coiled and shrank until he held a whirlwind in his hand. A whirlwind with a woman’s voice. “Release me! I will not be chained again!”

Greenspan laughed nastily. “A sylph that values her freedom should be more circumspect with her true name, because there’s no telling who it will end up with, down the line.”

“I know,” she sobbed. “But the wild Rover had such a twinkle in his eye, and played the flute so bittersweet. How was I to know?”

“I will not bind you, though it lies within my power.” Obama’s grip eased. “Instead, I will ask for your help.”

“Help?” Plame screeched. “What Lord would ask for what he could so easily take?”

“Me,” Obama said simply. “I offer you, instead, a bargain. Transport my people and I along the path of the winds, in secrecy, and I will give to you what you most desire: a new name.”

“It can’t be done,” she said.

Brother Sharpton grinned and produced a huge leather tome, bound in the pale, veinous skin of some unknown animal. “It can. This here is the Book of Dead Names. Slave names. Traitor’s names. Names of children never born. Names of fatherless sons and daughters. For everyone whose name was ever lost, or misplaced, or stolen: it ended up in here. And we can let you choose one.”

Plame sighed. “Very well. For that price, I will show you the secret paths. Name your destination, and I will conduct you there, if it is within my power. For as you well know, some places are warded against entry from even creatures of deep magic.”

Obama unclasped his hand, and the whirlwind expanded until it was a gentle breeze rustling our cloaks. “Detroit,” he commanded. “The Hanging Gardens.”

“I would speak with Nader the Lame.”

Barack Obama vs. the Pirates of Wichita

Inspired by the musical works of Stan Rogers, and intended purely as parody, I present: Obama vs. the Pirates of Wichita.

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I need you to understand: we didn’t take the Ronpaul’s marque out of greed, or because we loved his cause. I have met the Ronpaul’s people, but I can’t fathom the mind of a man who would believe in such a rabid font of craziness. No, we took his gold out of necessity. The Abigail Adams is a whaler, and land-whales have been few and runty these last three years, and their oil is thin and impotent.

We voted on it, according to ancient telluritime law. We cast our lots in front of the woodstove: red stick for aye, black stick for nay. Captain Fogarty took the five lots accorded to him by tradition and broke them over his knee, and cast the splinters into the fire. “I’ll do it, damn you, because I don’t see a better way, but I’ll be goddamned if I have to like it.”

None of us liked it, much. Even old Tom Finch, the Abigail’s gunner, didn’t like it, and he had proposed it. Old Tom had grown up down south, in the Texas Empire, and though he didn’t like to speak of it much, we all guessed that he had been a soldier for Mad King George. I could see why he might like to keep it quiet: the terrible scytheplanes of the Texas Air National Guard were the source of half my childhood nightmares. Regardless, Finch claimed that he could fix the Abigail’s guns to shoot something a lot more dangerous than harpoons.

We followed the Ronpaul’s trail for fifteen days, from Joplin to Springfield to Peoria, until we were down to our last drum of corn-whisky, and Abigail’s turbines were smoking hot. We passed the days with tales of the Beltway Lords, and their incessant warring. Barrister was our navigator, and kept the ship’s logs, and he knew every Fed-yarn there ever was. He sang of Lord Gore: how he gained the power to speak the language of beasts by killing the god of werewolves, and how he called the last seven living griffins to him, and harnessed them to a chariot, and flew to the moon. I have been assured that he lives their still, in a city of silver and marble, and that all that dwell there are immortal, but cursed never to know laughter or joy, and there is no music allowed but Air Supply. He sang of Romney Three-faced, the Great Salt Pope, who wields the spiked and golden miter of Moroni and has twelve thousand brides, all fashioned, through surgery and sorcery, to look like Jessica Alba. He sang of fey Kucinich, who loved the queen of Faerie so much that he ceded her the great redwoods of California in which to make her court, and went to dwell there with her, and put up a girdle around the forest so that no man who enters can ever leave. He sang of Dame Hillary, and how she summoned up Old Man Coyote, and tricked him into wearing a manacle on his paw, and refused to release him until he taught her the secret of Skinchanging. The trickster-god denied her until she killed all his seven and seventy mistresses, and cut off his tail, and starved him for forty seven years.

“Is that true?” I asked.

“True enough,” Barrister said. “I was there when she laid siege to New York. The White Queen took the form of an ice wyvern, and tore down the walls of every one of Giuliani’s fortresses. The Thane-Mac-Ferr retreated ten times, and she pursued, until she finally broke her fangs against the great steel doors of Madison Square, the final fortress, and went away with her tail between her legs. And that’s why Iron Giuliani is still Gotham’s king.”

We spotted the Ronpaul’s zeppelin near Skokie, where he was conducting his terrible market. For the Ronpaul may travel unimpeded through every duchy and fiefdom, and buys and sells all manner of goods, and always trades fairly. But everywhere he goes, he is hated, for he will only accept payment in gold or firstborn daughters. We passed into the shadow if his air-ship, and marveled at the snub-nosed tips of his powerful lightning cannons.

The Ronpaul sent a representative to meet us, one of his black-clad Sturmfrunten. Fogarty examined the gilt-edged letter of marque in great detail, while the rest of us stared greedily: even the Sturmfrunten’s coat buttons were made of solid gold. The Ronpaul was in possession of the second largest gold reserves in the world, following only upon the heels of the Elder-Wyrm Thompson, who lay sleeping, his scaled bulk curled around the shattered halls of Fort Knox. He rolled over in his sleep from time to time and shouted angrily for bourbon and chewing tobacco.

“You understand thisss?” the Ronpaul-man hissed through teeth filed to points. “We extend to you protection and supplies, and in return you bring us the head of the man Obama. When the outlaw is dead, each man who survives will be rewarded with their weight in gold.”

“I understand,” Fogarty growled.

The Sturmfrunten’s eye-lenses clicked and whirred in the silence. They say the Ronpaul can see everything his agents see. “Good. This one will accompany you, to ensure that you complete your task.” Fogarty grumbled, but could not object beneath the zeppelin’s foul shadow.

We sailed west, towards Topeka. We were confident, in the beginning: the Abigail was a stout ship, trim and true, and we were doughty men, we whalers of the Flyover Country. We daily braved terrors the civilized world could not dream of: the predations of the wretched carnivorous quick-buffalo herds, the choking sargassum maize, and the constant threat of earthswimming praire sharks. A skilled whaling-ship captain can bring fame and fortune and fat barrels of whale oil to his crew. Poor captains face mutiny and marooning and the dreadful “prairie mercy”: a stiff shot of Napolean brandy and a pistol with only one shot.

For ninety one days we scoured the prairie harbors, and always we were informed that we had just missed him, that the man Obama had departed only yesterday, with a destination that no one could ever recall. It was clear that the outlaw prince had the sympathy of these common people, and we would find no succor here. We grew discouraged, and considered pitching the Sturmfrunten overboard and making for St. Louis, and points east. Then, on the ninety sixth day, as we put out of Wichita, we spotted the dust plume of a fat hover-ship.

It would be another two days until Obama’s ship as in sight. The Audacity of Hope was gravid and low and loose in stays, but she still gave us a merry chase. For a day and a night we pursued him, choking and half-blinded by the dust of his passage. At length, we stood two cables away. The Sturmfrunten – we never did learn his name, if such creatures have them - crouched on the foredeck and spat obscenities as we readied our cracked four pounders. Our guns made an awful din as we pulled aslant of the Audacity. For a moment there, I really thought we would win.

There was a tremendous explosion. The Abigail Adams shook and pitched on her side. With one fat ball the bandits had stolen the fight, and crushed our rigging and spread Captain Fogarty across the deck like a skillet of hash.

I was the second in command. I started to give the order to retreat, and heard two sharp reports. The Sturmfrunten had drawn a pepperbox revolver, and had killed old Tom Finch and taken the wheel from him. “No cutting and running! We take the man Obama, or we die trying.”

You can’t argue with bullets. We limped after Obama, smoking and quaking. The Audacity easily outpaced us, until the Sturmfrunten dropped the lever that poured pure corn-ethanol into the Abigail’s fuel hopper.

“She’ll blow, if we don’t slow down,” I murmured, and got a wad of spittle for a reply.

The Audacity turned, and opened her gun ports. One volley did us in, cracking her air skirt and making shrapnel of her aft turbine and sending her sinking, deflated, to the ground. After that, there was nothing to do but sit and glumly watch the prairie sharks gather.

A cry went up. The Audacity had pulled astern of us, and dropped anchor, and pinned us with her swivel guns. I heard a snap of cording, and a thump, and then the man Obama stood on our deck, still gripping the rope he had swung over on.

We stared. Perhaps it was the fact that he was nine feet tall; perhaps it was his eyes, which were as gentle and compassionate and fierce as a mother bear’s; perhaps it was his armor, each chain link of which had been forged from the smoking remains of the Liberty Bell. Not even the Ronpaul’s man thought to raise a hand against him.

“Bravely fought!” he cried. “Who is your captain?”

We pointed mutely at the corpse and, I swear, I saw a single tear trickle down his face. He wiped it away and I gasped, for I suddenly understood why the Ronpaul wanted him dead; his hand came away gilded with dust, for Obama cries tears of molten gold.

“Bravely fought indeed,” he whispered, and walked among us. The entire time I have been with him, I never saw Obama give a single thought to his own safety. “I am the Prince of Outlaws, and, I am sorry to say, that puts this ship under Bandit Law. Your fuel I will take, for you no longer have need of it, and any loose valuables, but your lives are your own. You may accompany me if you wish, for my band of merry thieves is small as yet, and I always have need of brave women and men. If not, I will leave you alone; we will lend you use of our radio or flares, to signal for help, or we can dispense prairie mercy to those who prefer it.”

We mulled it over: the only ones likely to rescue us this far out were traveling Romnists, and they would only save stranded sailors if they agreed to become one of the Pope’s salt wives. The Sturmfrunten shrieked and quivered and thrust his face up towards Obama. “I would rather die than betray the Ronpaul!”

Obama laid one shovel-sized palm upon the quaking creature’s forehead and, with infinite compassion on his face, brought his fingers together. “Civic responsibility begins with personal responsibility,” he explained, with brains still dripping from his clenched fist.

After that, the vote was unanimous. Obama embraced each man, and called him brother. He shook each of our hands, staring us firmly in the eye, and in this way divined the fiber of our character, and our futures, and our true names, by which we could be bound or commanded. These last two he kept to himself.

The crew of the Audacity of Hope welcomed us with open arms. Time passed. I adjusted easily to my new duties, as did all of us. It was simple, easy work; and while I was said to see the end of the Abigail Adams, I was not unhappy in my new position as command third. The man Obama spoke seldom, which was just as well, for even the simplest utterance from his mouth would cause some among the crew to break into grateful tears. He spent his days alone, in his cabin or standing at the bow and watching the horizon.

On the fifteenth day since our battle the man Obama took me to the side, and pointed at a distant light in the eastern sky. “We have been spotted by my lookouts. They light a beacon to call us home.” The next day we could see the source of the light; a pillar of fire twenty feet high, gripped in an enormous green hand, twice the height of a man.

Barrister gasped, “That... That’s the—“

“The Lady,” Obama agreed. “What little of her we could salvage.”

He turned to us, as we passed beneath the shadows of the two gateposts of Obama’s camp, between the huge green arm and the crowned head, and opened his arms. “Welcome, friends, old and new, to the camp of the Outlaw Prince. Welcome to the last free city in America. Welcome to the last bastion of democracy. Welcome home.”

There was a sign nailed over the gate. I read the word awkwardly, unsure of its meaning.

“Iowa,” I whispered.

It sounded like hope.