Barbara Hambly - 04 Sold Down the River

Ancilla screamed, the splinters driven by the ball piercing her leg like darts. "They fired Mon Triomphe..."

"Been there." Shaw had shoved one of his corpses into the doorway to prevent the men outside from simply slamming it and shooting the bolt, something that had been done on the other side of the room, though Quashie, grim-faced and filthy, remained there to guard against a sortie. "They's all all right. Ney! " he yelled. "Ney, God damn it! " and returned fire against two shots and a clicking fusillade of misfires, as if three-quarters of the rifles and pistols in possession of Ney's men had been bewitched. "Damn you, cut your engines! Draw your fires! Your pump's out!"

"Lying American whoreson!" And then, as an aside, "Son of a whore, what is with these rifles?"

"Your pump's out and your goddam engine's going to blow-"

Another shot; two men tried to rush the door, Shaw waiting until they were almost inside to return fire. Gosport, who'd managed to hack and saw all the way through the beam that held the chain, sprang forward, looping the chain around the neck of one attacker as the man's pistolinevitably-misfired, and the whole dozen or so men and women attached to that chain dragged the man down, ripping the weapons from his hands, his belt, his boots...

"Here's keys! " yelled Nathan in triumph. At the same time, January heard dim pounding on the engine room door, voices calling:

"Theo? Theo! Open up in there! Theo!"

One of the shots through the wall, thought January, feeling very calm about the whole business.

The man must have bolted himself in when the commotion started.

Nathan, hands trembling, was trying key after key in the manacle locks, while men threw open the opposite door again and Quashie fired with every piece he possessed-quite a number, now.

Harry, who'd been reloading for him, had tossed aside at least four pistols, and when Kadar grabbed for one said, "Won't work. Flint's busted."

"Get 'em out of here," said January quietly, rolling gratefully to his feet as Nathan found the key to his ankle chains and let him, finally, scramble right side up. "Just get 'em out, over the rail.

Risking a bullet's better than getting blown up."

"I suspect you're right, Maestro." Shaw fired again at another sortie. "River's rising and full of trash, floaters and logs and branches. Since we're bound upstream we're close to shore, too."

Outside men were shouting, arguing, and Jac Ney's voice rose above the rest: "I'll shoot the man who goes over-side!" There was a crashing, a thudding, from the door, and, January fancied, over the clank and lug and rattle of the engine another sound, the strangled desperate keening of steam escaping from too small a vent, trapped too long and too tightly...

"Now it may so be," Shaw added placidly, blasting away as the far door jerked open yet again,

"that I might get myself blowed up or knocked out or washed down the river a ways, and not be able to get all these folks back to the people that owns 'em. I'm leavin' that up to you, Maestro."

His gray eyes met January's, completely without expression. "If so be any survives."

"I doubt anyone will," said January, warning him.

Shaw nodded. "Well, we can only do our best. Was it Seneca that said Death is Freedom for a slave?" He pulled a packet of waxed silk from his shirt, and shoved it into the front of January'shis freedom papers, January guessed. "You watch out for that wheel, when you go over-side."

Shaw and January slammed the door open, firing in both directions, clearing a path. Return fire was sporadic-January could see only about a dozen men still on deck, Ney and his father among them. Dark heads bobbed already in the quicksilver current of the river, clutching at the snags and branches that the rise was bringing down. The boat itself was farther from the shore than January had reckoned, swinging with the current already but plowing hard. Even as the first of the newly freed men and women plunged from the hold, threw themselves across the narrow space of deck to the rail and over, he felt the boat lurch and hitch, felt the rhythm of the engine jar, jolting as the wheel picked up a snag. The huge tree-trunk caught, jamming the already overburdened machinery...

Men's voices yelling the dead engineer's name outside the locked engine room door.

Jacinthe Ney screaming at the Spanish mate as the man plunged over the rail, firing his pistol at his head and getting nothing but a broken spark from its damaged flint.

Hope flinging herself over the rail with her infant tied to her back with her shawl, Bumper and Nero following, holding hands tightly.

Jeanette and Quashie side by side, both firing rifles and pistols and everything else they could lay hands on to keep the white attackers at bay, Quashie like a filthy animal, bearded and bushy from five days' hiding, five days' watching. Five days, waiting his chance.

Disappearing Willie, amazingly, sat a dozen yards off in the pirogue that had brought Shaw and Quashie, already fishing children and the weak from the flood. His eyes met January's and he grinned, as if this were a game.

The Belle Dame lurched, swung with the current, even its own crew springing over-side like rats now, dark and sleek and wet in the water. Jac Ney fired at them, and hurled the useless pistols at their heads when they misfired, cursing like Satan in Hell.

January strode from the door of the empty cargo hold and swung up on the rail. He had a flashing glimpse of Ney's wild eyes, the dark muzzle of a pistol brought to bear, flame bursting and a ball skimming his shoulder like a hornet's hot kiss-And then the entire world went up in a bellowing roar of earsplitting fire. The concussion drove him down into the river's heart, drowning him, hammering his ears, the impact whirling him away. He felt the heat of it, struggled blindly upward, eternities without breath.

Sickened eons later, his head broke water. Burning hunks of wood, slobbering bubbles, floating shutters and benches and doors strewed the surface. He grabbed the door, for the current was strong, turned a little in the water and saw the hulk of the Belle Dame riding the stream like a floating bonfire. Heat pounded his face. Weak with shock and hunger and sheer fatigue, for a long time all he could do was cling to his isolate planet of flotsam, the sole life in a universe of wet gray.

In time the river sent him a plank, and he used this to paddle slowly to shore.

January fully expected that he'd have to haul himself out of the river, limp somehow to the nearest house, convince its inhabitants of his freedom and his bona fides, and make his way into Baton Rouge and hence back to New Orleans-staying one step ahead of Sheriff Duffy's posses all the while-entirely on his own. But as he paddled, trembling with exhaustion, in to shore, two figures waded out to meet him, Gosport and one of the second-gang women, Giselle. They dragged his makeshift raft in among the tangle of the flooded batture, and helped him up to the dry ground of the levee: "We must be ten, twelve miles down from where that boat blowed up," said Gosport. "We're clear round the other side of Duncan Point." On the other side of the levee, dark fields of cane disappeared into the fog. Somewhere voices sang: "Day zab, day zab, day koo-noo wi wi The darkening air stank of burned sugar.

Thank you, Mary, Mother of God. His fingers touched the rosary in his soaked pocket. Thank you God, for bringing me alive out of the fire and the flood.

He wondered if in fact Shaw had survived.

"You all right, Ben?" Giselle had her baby girl with her, tied to her back with a shawl when she'd gone into the river. The child blinked over her shoulder at January with huge liquid unsurprised brown eyes.