George Martin - Fevre Dream

“Damn him,” Marsh said. “I should have killed him, Joshua.”

“If you had, we would never had gotten away.”

Marsh frowned. “Hell. Maybe. Maybe it would have been worth it anyway.” He looked around the yawl. Toby was rowing, looking like he badly needed help. Marsh took another oar. Karl Framm was still unconscious. Marsh wondered how much blood Valerie had taken. Valerie herself didn’t look so good. Huddled up in Framm’s clothing, his hat pulled low over her face, she looked like she was shrivelling in the light. Her pale skin already looked vaguely pinkish, and those big violet eyes seemed small and dim and pained. He wondered if they’d got away after all, as he slipped the oar into the water and put his back into it. His arm hurt, his ear was bleeding, and the sun was bright and rising.

On the Mississippi River, October 1857

Abner Marsh hadn’t rowed a sounding yawl in more than twenty years. With only him and Toby pulling, it was damned hard work, even going with the current. His arms and back were complaining fiercely within the half-hour. Marsh grunted and kept on rowing. The Fevre Dream was out of sight now, vanished behind them. The sun was creeping up the sky, and the river had grown very wide. It looked to be almost a mile across.

“It hurts,” Valerie said.

Joshua York said, “Cover yourself.”

“I’m burning, ”she said. “I never thought it would be like this.” She looked up at the sun and shied away as if struck. Marsh was startled by the vivid redness of her face.

Joshua York started to move toward her, and stopped suddenly, looking unsteady. He put a hand up against his brow and took a slow deliberate breath. Then, carefully, he edged closer. “Sit in my shadow,” he said. “Pull down your hat.”

Valerie curled up in the bottom of the yawl, practically in Joshua’s lap. He reached down and straightened the collar of her jacket in an oddly tender manner, then rested his hand on the back of her head.

Down here, Marsh noted, the riverbanks were shorn of all timber but for an occasional row of ornamental saplings. Instead they saw carefully cultivated fields to either side, flat and endless, here and there interrupted by the splendor of a big Greek-Revival plantation house, its cupola overlooking the wide, tranquil river. Ahead on the western shore, a pile of smouldering bagasse, the refuse of sugarcane stalks, was sending up a column of acrid gray smoke. The pile was big as a house; the smoke spread in a shroud across the river. Marsh couldn’t see no flames. “Maybe we ought to put in,” he said to Joshua. “There’s plantations all around us.”

Joshua had closed his eyes. He opened them when Marsh spoke. “No,” he said. “We are too close. We must put more distance between us and them. Billy may be coming after us on foot along the shore, and when night falls…” He left the rest unsaid.

Abner Marsh grunted and rowed. Joshua closed his eyes again, and pulled his wide-brimmed white hat lower.

For more than an hour they moved down the river in silence, the only sound the slap of the oars against water and the song of an occasional bird. Toby Lanyard and Abner Marsh rowed, while Joshua and Valerie lay huddled together as if they were asleep, and Karl Framm sprawled beneath a blanket. The sun rose in the sky. It was a chill, windy day, but a bright one. Marsh was thankful for the planters and the great piles of smoking bagasse that lined the shores since the drifting gray pall from their fires gave the only shade there was for the night folks.

Once Valerie cried out, as if in terrible pain. Joshua opened his eyes and bent over her, stroking her long black hair and whispering to her. Valerie whimpered. “I thought you were the one, Joshua,” she said. “The pale king. I thought you’d come to change it all, to take us back.” Her whole body trembled when she tried to talk. “The city, my father told me of the city. Is it there, Joshua? The dark city?”

“Quiet,” said Joshua York. “Quiet. You weaken yourself.”

“But is it there? I thought you would take us home, dear Joshua. I dreamt of it, I did. I was so tired of it all. I thought you had come to save us.

“Quiet,” Joshua said. He was trying to be forceful, but his voice was sad and weary.

“The pale king,” she whispered. “Come to save us. I thought you had come to save us.”

Joshua York kissed her lightly on her swollen, blistered lips. “So did I,” he said bitterly. Then he pressed his fingers against her mouth to quiet her, and closed his eyes again.

Abner Marsh rowed, while the river flowed around them and the sun beat down overhead and the wind swept smoke and ash across the water. A cinder got in his eye somehow, and Marsh cussed and rubbed at it until the eye was red and swollen and the tearing had stopped. By then his whole body was one huge ache.

Two hours downstream Joshua began to talk, never opening his eyes, in a voice thick with pain. “He is mad, you know,” he said. “It is true. He took me, night after night. The pale king, yes, I thought that, thought I was… but Julian vanquished me, time after time, and I submitted. His eyes, Abner, you have seen his eyes. Darkness, such darkness. And old. I thought he was evil, and strong, and clever. But I learned it was not so. Julian is not… Abner, he is mad, truly. Once, he must have been all that I thought him, but now. .. it is as though he sleeps. At times, he wakes, briefly, and one senses what he must have been. You saw it, Abner, that night at supper, you saw Julian stirred, awakened. But most of the time… Abner, he takes no interest in the boat, the river, the people and events around him. Sour Billy runs the Fevre Dream, devises the schemes that keep my people safe. Julian seldom gives orders, and when he does they are arbitrary, even stupid. He does not read, or talk, he does not play chess. He eats indifferently. I do not think he even tastes it. Since taking the Fevre Dream, Julian has descended into some dark dream. He spends most of his time in his cabin, in the darkness, alone. It was Billy who spied the steamer following us, not Julian.

“I thought him evil at first, a dark king leading his people into ruin, but watching him… he is ruined already, hollow, empty. He feasts on the lives of your people because he has no life of his own, not even a name that is truly his. Once I wondered what he thought of, alone, all those days and nights in darkness. I know now that he does not think at all. Perhaps he dreams. If so, I think he dreams of death, of an ending. He dwells in that black empty cabin as if it were a tomb, stirring from it only at the scent of blood. And the things he does… it is more than rashness. He courts destruction, discovery. He must want an end, a rest, I believe. He is so old. How tired he must be.”

“He offered me a deal,” Abner Marsh said. Without breaking his labored stroke, Marsh recounted his conversation with Damon Julian.

“You had half the truth, Abner,” Julian said when he’d finished. “Yes, he would have liked to corrupt you, as a taunt to me. But that was not all. You might have agreed and never meant it. You might have lied to him, waited for a chance, and tried to kill him. I think Julian knew that. By bringing you aboard, he toyed with his own death.”

Marsh snorted. “If he wants to die, he could cooperate more.”

Joshua opened his eyes. They were small and faded. “When the danger is real and close to hand, it wakes him. The beast in him… the beast is old and mindless and weary, but when it wakes it struggles desperately to live… it is strong, Abner. And old.” Joshua laughed feebly, a bitter laugh without humor. “After that night

… after it all went wrong… I asked myself, over and over, how it could have happened. Julian had drained a full glass of my… my potion… it should have been enough, it should have killed the red thirst, it should have… I did not understand… it had always worked before, always, but not with Julian, not… not with him. At first I thought it was his strength, the power of him, the evil. Then… then one night he saw the question in my eyes, and he laughed and told me. Abner, you remember… when I told you my story… when I was very young, the thirst did not touch me. Do you remember?”