George Martin - Fevre Dream

Joshua ducked under a thick gray drape of Spanish moss that hung from a low, twisted limb, and Marsh did likewise one step behind him, and there she was.

Abner Marsh gripped the shotgun very tightly. “Hell,” was all he said.

The water had returned to the old back channel, and it stood all about the Fevre Dream, but it was not deep enough, and the steamer was not afloat. She rested on a shoal of mud and sand, her head thrust up into the air, listing about ten degrees to larboard, her paddles high and mostly dry. Once she had been white and blue and silver. Now she was mostly gray, the gray of old rotting wood that has seen too much sun and too much dampness and not enough paint. It looked as if Julian and his goddamned vampires had sucked all the life out of it. On her wheelhouse, Marsh could see traces of the whore’s scarlet that Sour Billy had slapped upon her, and the letters OZ real faint, like old memories. But the rest was gone, and the old true name could be seen again, where the newer paint had crumbled and peeled. The whitewash on her railings and colonnades had fared the worst, and that was where she was grayest, and here and there Marsh saw patches of green clinging to her wood, and spreading. He began to tremble as he looked at her. The damp and the heat and the rot, he thought, and there was something in his eye. He rubbed at it angrily. Her chimneys looked crooked because of the way she was listing. Spanish moss festooned one side of her pilot house, and drooped off her verge flagpole. The ropes that held up her larboard stage had snapped long ago, and the stage had come crashing to the forecastle. Her grand staircase, that great curving expanse of polished wood, was slimy with fungus. Here and there Marsh could see wildflowers that had taken root in cracks between the deck boards. “Goddamnit,” he said. “ Goddamnit, Joshua, how the hell could you let her get like this? How the hell could you. ..” But then his voice cracked and betrayed him, and Abner Marsh found he had no words.

Joshua York put a gentle hand on his shoulder and said, “I’m sorry, Abner. I did try.”

“Oh, I know,” Marsh swore. “It was him that did it to her, that turned her rotten like everything else he touches. Oh, I know who it was, I sure as hell know that. What I don’t know is why the hell you lied to me, Mister York. All that business about the Natchez and the Robert E. Lee. Hell. She ain’t goin’ to outrun nobody, she ain’t never goin’ to move again.” His face was beet red, he knew, and his voice was starting to get loud. “Goddamnit it all to hell, she’s just goin’ to sit and rot, goddamnit it, and you knew it!” He stopped suddenly, before he started to shout and woke up all the damned vampires.

“I knew it,” Joshua York admitted, with sorrow in his eyes. The morning sun shone behind him, and made him look pale and weak. “But I needed you, Abner. It was not all lie. Julian did put forth the plan I told you, but Billy told him what bad shape the Fevre Dream was in, and he gave it up at once. The rest was all true.”

“How the hell can I believe you?” Marsh said flatly. “After all we been through, you lied to me. Goddamn you to hell, Joshua York, you’re my own goddamned partner, and you lied to me!”

“Abner, listen to me. Please. Let me explain.” He put a hand up against his brow, and blinked.

“Go on,” said Marsh. “Go on and tell me. I’m listening, damn you.”

“I needed you. I knew there was no way I could conquer Julian alone. The others… even those who are with me, they cannot stand before him, before those eyes… he can make them do anything. You were my only hope, Abner. You and the men I thought you would bring with you. It has a painful irony. We of the night have preyed upon the people of the day for uncounted thousands of years, and now I must turn to you to save our race. Julian will destroy us. Abner, your dream may have rotted through, but mine can still live! I helped you once. You could not have built her without me. Help me now.”

“You should have just asked me,” Marsh said. “You could have told me the goddamned truth.”

“I did not know if you would come to save my people. I knew you would come for her.”

“I would have come for you, damn it. We’re partners, ain’t we? Well, ain’t we?”

Joshua York regarded him with quiet gravity. “Yes,” he said.

Marsh glared up at the gray rotten ruin that had been his proud lady, and saw that a goddamned bird had built a nest in one of her stacks. Other birds were stirring and fluttering from tree to tree, making little birdy sounds that vexed Abner Marsh no end. The morning sunlight fell upon the steamer in bright yellow shafts, slanting through the trees and swimming with dust motes. The last shadows were stealing away from the dawn, into the underbrush. “Why the hell now?” Marsh asked, frowning at York again. “If it wasn’t the Natchez and the Robert E. Lee, what was it? What makes today different from the last thirteen years, that all of a sudden you’re runnin’ off and writing me letters?”

“Cynthia is with child,” said Joshua. “My child.”

Abner Marsh remembered the things York had told him so long ago. “You killed somebody together?”

“No. For the first time in our history, conception was free of the taint of the red thirst. Cynthia has been using my drink for years. She became… sexually receptive… even without the blood, the fever. I responded. It was powerful, Abner. As strong as the thirst, but different, cleaner. A thirst for life instead of death. She will die when her time comes, unless your people can help. Julian would never permit that. And there is the child to think of. I do not want it corrupted, enslaved by Damon Julian. I want this birth to be a new beginning for my race. I had to take action.”

A goddamned vampire baby, Abner Marsh thought. He was going to go in and face Damon Julian for a child that might grow up to be just like Julian was. But maybe not. Maybe it’d grow into Joshua instead. “If you want to do somethin’,” Marsh said, “then why the hell ain’t we in there, instead of yapping out here?” He jerked his shotgun in the direction of the huge ruined steamer.

Joshua York smiled. “I am sorry for the lie,” he said. “Abner, there is no one like you. You have my thanks.”

“Never mind about that now,” Marsh said gruffly, embarrassed by Joshua’s gratitude. He walked out from under the shadows of the trees, toward the Fevre Dream and the rotted, purple-stained indigo tanks that loomed behind her. When he got down near the water, the mud grabbed at his boots and made obscene sucking sounds as he pulled them free. Marsh checked again to make sure the gun was loaded. Then he found an old weathered plank lying in the shallow, still water, leaned it up against the side of her hull, and hefted himself up onto the main deck of the steamboat. Joshua York, moving quickly and silently, came behind him.

The grand staircase confronted them, leading up to the darkness of the boiler deck, to the curtained staterooms where their enemies slept, to the long echoing dimness of the saloon. Marsh did not move immediately. “I want to see my steamer,” he said at last, and he walked around the stair into the engine room.

Seams had burst on a couple of the boilers. Rust had eaten through the steam pipes. The great engines were brown and flaking in spots. Marsh had to step warily to make sure his foot didn’t crash through a rotten floorboard. He went to a furnace. Inside was old cold ash, and something else, something brown and yellow and blackened here and there. He reached in, and came out with a bone. “Bones in her furnace,” he said. “Her deck rotted through. Goddamned slave manacles still on the floor. Rust. Hell. Hell. ”He turned. “I seen enough.”