George Martin - Fevre Dream

Sour Billy remembered it well. Julian had handled it real good. The younger sons had let down the old man; Jean-Pierre was a drunken lout, and Philip a weakling who wept like a woman at his brother’s funeral, but Damon Julian had been a tower of manly strength. They had buried Charles out back of the plantation, in the family cemetery. The ground being so damp in these parts, he’d been laid to rest in a big marble mausoleum with a winged victory on top of it. It stayed nice and cool in there, even in the heat of August. Sour Billy had gone into the tomb many a time in the years since, to drink and piss on Charles’s coffin. Once he’d dragged a nigger wench in there with him, slapped her around a little and had her three-four times, just so old Charles’s ghost could see the proper way to handle niggers.

Charles had only been the beginning, Sour Billy recalled. Six months later Jean-Pierre rode off to do some whoring and gambling in the city, and he never did ride back, and it wasn’t long after that when poor timid Philip got himself all ripped up by some kind of animal in the woods. Old Garoux was real sick at heart by then, but Damon Julian was by his side through all of it, helping. Finally Garoux adopted him, and wrote a new will leaving him just about everything.

There was a night not too long after that Sour Billy would never forget, when Damon Julian had demonstrated how thoroughly old Rene Garoux was in his power. It was up in the old man’s bedroom. Valerie was there, and Adrienne and Alain as well, they’d all been living in the big house, since any friend of Julian’s was welcome in the Garoux home. They watched with Sour Billy while Damon Julian stood at the side of the great canopied bed and pierced the old man through with his black eyes and his easy smile and told him the truth, all the truth about what had happened to Charles and Jean-Pierre and Philip. Julian was wearing Charles’s signet ring, and Valerie had its twin on a chain about her neck. Hers had once belonged to the missing Jean-Pierre. She had not wanted to wear it. The thirst was on her, but she wanted to finish old Garoux quickly, without talk. But Damon Julian stilled her protests with soft words and cold eyes, so she wore the ring and stood meekly and listened.

When Julian had finished his story, Garoux had been shaking, his rheumy eyes full of tears and pain and hate. And then, astoundingly, Damon Julian had told Sour Billy to hand the old man his knife. “He ain’t dead yet, Mister Julian,” Billy had protested. “He’ll cut your guts out.”

But Julian only glanced at him and smiled, so Sour Billy reached back and produced the knife and put it into Garoux’s wrinkled, liver-spotted grasp. The old man’s hands shook so bad that Billy had been afraid he was going to drop the damn thing, but somehow he hung on to it. Damon Julian sat on the edge of the bed. “Rene,” he said, “my friends are thirsty.” His voice was so quiet, so liquid.

That was all he had to say. Alain produced a glass, a fine crystal etched with the family crest, and old Rene Garoux carefully cut open the vein in his wrist and filled the glass with his own steaming red blood, crying and trembling all the while. Valerie and Alain and Adrienne passed the glass from hand to hand, but it was left to Damon Julian to finish it off, while Garoux bled to death in his bed.

“Garoux gave us some good years,” Kurt was saying. His words drew Sour Billy out of his memories. “Rich and safe, off by ourselves, the city here whenever we wanted it. Food and drink and niggers to wait on us, a fancy girl every month.”

“Yet it ended,” Julian said, a trifle wistfully. “All things must end, Kurt. Do you mourn it?”

“Things aren’t the same,” Kurt admitted. “Dust everywhere, the house rotting, rats. I’m not anxious to move again, Damon. Out in the world, we are never secure. After a hunt, there is always the fear, the hiding, the running. I do not want that again.”

Julian smiled sardonically. “Inconvenient, true, but not without spice. You are young, Kurt. Remember, however they may hound you, you are the master. You will see them dead, and their children, and their children’s children. The Garoux home falls into ruin. It is nothing. All these things the cattle make fall into ruin. I have seen Rome itself turn to dust. Only we go on.” He shrugged. “And we may yet find another like Rene Garoux.”

“So long as we are with you,” Cynthia said anxiously. She was a slight, pretty woman with brown eyes, and she had become Julian’s favorite since he had dismissed Valerie, but even Sour Billy could tell that she was insecure about her position. “It is worse when we are alone.”

“So you do not wish to leave me?” Damon Julian asked her, smiling.

“No,” she said. “Please.” Kurt and Armand were looking at him as well. Julian had begun sending away his companions a month ago, very suddenly. Valerie was exiled first, as she had begged, though he sent her upriver not with the troublesome Jean, but with dark handsome Raymond, who was cruel and strong and-some said-Julian’s own son. Raymond would be sure to keep her safe, Julian said mockingly as Valerie knelt before him that night. Jean was given his leave the next night, and went off alone, and Sour Billy thought that would be the end of it. He was wrong. Damon Julian had some new thought in his head, and so Jorge was sent away a week later, and then Cara and Vincent, and then the others, alone or in pairs. Now those who remained knew that none of them were safe.

“Ah,” Julian said to Cynthia, amused. “Well, there are only five of us now. If we are careful, and we make each fancy girl last for, oh, a month or two, sipping slowly as it were-why then, I believe we can last until winter. By then one of the others will have sent word, perhaps. We shall see. Until then, you may stay, darling. And Michelle as well, and you, Kurt.”

Armand looked stricken. “And me?” he blurted. “Damon, please.”

“Is it the thirst, Armand? Is that why you tremble? Control yourself. Will you rip and tear when we reach these friends of Billy’s? You know how I frown on that.” His eyes narrowed. “I am still thinking about you, Armand.”

Armand looked down at his empty cup.

“I’ll stay,” Sour Billy announced.

“Ah,” said Damon Julian. “Of course. Why, Billy, what would we do without you?” Sour Billy Tipton didn’t much like the smile Julian wore then, but there wasn’t nothing to be done about it.

A short time later, they set off to the place Billy had promised to show them. The house was outside the Vieux Carre, in the American section of New Orleans, but within walking distance. Damon Julian went in front, walking through the narrow gaslit streets arm in arm with Cynthia, wearing a private ghost of a smile as he regarded the iron balconies, the gates opening on courtyards with their flambeaux and their fountains, the gas lamps atop iron poles. Sour Billy directed them. Soon they were in a darker, rawer part of town, where the buildings were wood or crumbling tabby-brick, made of ground oyster shells and sand. Even the gas lines had not extended this far, though the city had had its gas works for more than twenty years. At the corners, oil lamps swung from heavy iron chains hung diagonally across the streets and supported by great hooks driven into the sides of buildings. They burned with a sensual smoky light. Julian and Cynthia passed from pools of light into shadow, back into light, then again into shadow. Sour Billy and the others followed.

A party of three men stepped out from an alley and crossed their path. Julian ignored them, but one of the men glimpsed Sour Billy as he passed beneath a light. “You!” he said.

Sour Billy turned his stare on them, saying nothing. They were young Creoles, half-drunk and therefore dangerous.