George Martin - Fevre Dream

“Somewhere. Anywhere.”

“Do you still hope to find your dark city in a cave?” Julian said mockingly. “Your faith is touching, child. Have you mistaken poor weak Jean for your pale king?”

“No,” said Valerie. “No. We only want a rest. Please, Damon. If we all stay, they will find us out, hunt us, kill us. Let us go away.”

“You are so beautiful, Valerie. So exquisite.”

“Please,” she said, trembling. “Away. A rest.”

“Poor small Valerie,” Julian said. “There is no rest. Wherever you go, your thirst will travel with you. No, you shall stay.”

“Please,” she repeated, numbly. “My bloodmaster.”

Damon Julian’s dark eyes narrowed just slightly, and the smile faded. “If you are that eager to be away, perhaps I should give you what you ask for.”

Both Valerie and Jean looked at him hopefully.

“Perhaps I should send you away,” Julian mused. “Both of you. But not together, no. You are so beautiful, Valerie. You deserve better than Jean. What do you think, Billy?”

Sour Billy smirked. “Send them all away, Mister Julian. You don’t need them none. You got me. Send them off, and they’ll see how much they like it.”

“Interesting,” said Damon Julian. “I will think on it. Now leave me, all of you. Billy, go sell the horses. See Neville about the land.”

“No dinner?” Sour Billy asked with relief.

“No,” said Julian.

Sour Billy was the last to reach the door. Behind him, Julian snuffed the light, and darkness filled the room. But Sour Billy hesitated at the threshold, and turned back again.

“Mister Julian,” he said, “your promise-it’s been years now. When?”

“When I do not need you, Billy. You are my eyes by day. You do the things I cannot. How could I spare you now? But have no fear. It will not be long. And time will seem as nothing to you when you join us. Years and days are alike to one who has the life eternal.” The promise filled Sour Billy with reassurance. He left to do Julian’s bidding.

That night he dreamt. In his dreams he was as dark and graceful as Julian himself, elegant and predatory. It was always night in his dreams, and he roamed the streets of New Orleans beneath a full, pale moon. They watched him pass from their windows and their little iron-lace balconies, and he could feel their eyes upon him, the men full of fear, the women drawn to his dark power. Through the dark he stalked them, gliding soundlessly over the brick sidewalks, hearing their frantic footsteps and their panting. Beneath the swaying fire of a hanging oil lamp, he caught a fine young dandy and tore his throat out, laughing. A sultry Creole beauty watched him from afar, and he came after her, hunting her down alleys and courtyards as she ran before him. Finally, in a court lit by a wrought-iron flambeau, she turned to face him. She looked a bit like Valerie. Her eyes were violet and full of fire. He came to her and pushed her back and took her. Creole blood was as hot and rich as Creole food. The night was his, and all the nights forever, and the red thirst was on him.

When he woke from the dream, he was hot and fevered, and his sheets were wet.

St. Louis, July 1857

The Fevre Dream lay up in St. Louis for twelve days.

It was a busy time for the entire crew, but for Joshua York and his strange companions. Abner Marsh was up and about early every morning, and on the streets by ten, making calls on shippers and hotel proprietors, talking up his boat and trying to scare up business. He had a mess of handbills printed for Fevre River Packets-now that he had more than one packet again-and hired some boys to paste them up all over the city. Drinking and eating in all the best places, Marsh told and retold the story of how the Fevre Dream took the Southerner, to make sure the word got around. He even took out advertisements in three of the local papers.

The lightning pilots that Abner Marsh had hired for the lower river came aboard as soon as the Fevre Dream put in to St. Louis, and drew their wages for the time they’d idled away waiting. Pilots didn’t come cheap, especially pilots like these two, but Marsh didn’t begrudge the money too much, since he wanted the best for his steamer. Once paid, the new men resumed their idling; pilots drew full wages all the time, but didn’t do a lick of work until the steamer was in the river. Anything besides piloting was beneath their dignity.

The two pilots Marsh had found had their own individual styles of idling, though. Dan Albright, prim and taciturn and fashionable, strolled aboard the day the Fevre Dream put in, surveyed the boat, the engines, and the pilot house, nodded with satisfaction, and immediately took up residence in his cabin. He spent his days reading in the steamer’s well-stocked library, and played a few games of chess with Jonathon Jeffers in the main saloon, although Jeffers invariably beat him. Karl Framm, on the other hand, could usually be found in the billiard halls along the riverfront, grinning crookedly beneath his wide-brimmed felt hat and bragging about how him and his new boat were going to run everyone else off the river. Framm had a heller’s reputation. He liked to joke about how he kept one wife in St. Louis, one in New Orleans, and a third in Natchez-under-the-hill.

Abner Marsh didn’t have the time to worry over much about what his pilots were doing; he was too busy with this task or that one. Nor did he see much of Joshua York and his friends, although he understood that York frequently went on long nightly walks into the city, often with Simon, the silent one. Simon was also learning how to mix drinks, since Joshua had told Marsh he had a mind to use him as night bartender on the run down to New Orleans.

Marsh did frequently see his partner over supper, which Joshua York was in the habit of taking in the main cabin with the other officers, before he retired to his own cabin or the library to read newspapers, packets of which were delivered to him every day, fresh off incoming steamers. Once York announced that he was going in to the city to see a group of players perform. He invited Abner Marsh and the other officers to accompany him, but Marsh was having none of it, so York wound up going with Jonathon Jeffers. “Poems and plays,” Marsh muttered to Hairy Mike Dunne as they sauntered off, “it makes you wonder what this damn river is comin’ to.” Afterward, Jeffers began to teach York to play chess.

“He has quite a mind, Abner,” Jeffers told Marsh a few days later, on the morning of their eighth day in St. Louis.

“Who?”

“Why, Joshua of course. I taught him the moves two days ago. Last night I found him in the saloon playing over the score of one of Morphy’s games, from one of those New York newspapers he takes. A strange man. How much do you know about him?”

Marsh frowned. He didn’t want his people getting too curious about Joshua York; that was part of the bargain. “Joshua don’t like to talk much about himself. I don’t ask him. A man’s past is none of my business, I figure. You ought to take the same attitude, Mister Jeffers. In fact, see that you do.”

The clerk arched his thin, dark eyebrows. “If you say so, Cap’n,” he replied. But there was a cool smile on his face that Abner Marsh found disquieting.

Jeffers was not the only one to ask questions. Hairy Mike came to Marsh, too, and said that the roustabouts and stokers were spreading some funny talk about York and his four guests, and did Marsh want him to do anything about it?

“What kind of talk?”

Hairy Mike shrugged eloquently. “Bout him only comin’ out at night. Bout those queer friends o’ his, too. You know Tom, who stokes the middle larboard? He been tellin’ this story-says that night we left Louisville, well, you ’member how thick the skeeters were, well, Tom says he saw that old Simon down on the main deck, jest kind o’ looking around, and a skeeter landed on his hand, and he went and swatted it with his other hand. Squashed it. But you know how full up skeeters git sometimes, so when you squash ’em they jest bust with the blood. Tom says that happen’d with the skeeter on the back of Simon’s hand, so it smeared up all bloody when he got it. Only then, Tom tells it, that Simon jest kind of stared at his hand for the longest while, then lifted it up, and damned if he didn’t lick it clean.”