Barbara Hambly - Dead water

“Goddam snaggiest stretch of the river, bar the reach below Vicksburg,” panted the old pilot Lundy, whom January found at the bottom of the stern-promenade stairway, clinging to the bannister in exhaustion. “It's like they got a patent snag-makin' factory up at the top of the Red River, and they just dump 'em in and let 'em float down. Never seen the like.”

January watched a second night, to try to slip into the hold, but Thucydides seemed always to be walking around the decks with a lantern. In the end, in exhaustion, he bade Rose good-night and returned to Hannibal's stateroom to sleep on the floor. Since discovering the poison and the juju-bag in the hold, he had felt uneasy anywhere on the lower deck at night.

He dreamed of poverty, of sharing a single room with Rose in the house of some aging former plaçée, and teaching piano lessons in the parlor to pay the rent. In his dream it was night, and Rose sat in silence by the window, a book open on her lap and her long brown hair lying in soft curls down her back, but no lamp beside her. January kept asking her in his dream, over and over, What is it? What's wrong?

And she would neither look at him nor reply.

Then he dreamed that the Silver Moon was sinking, that the juju-bag hidden deep in the hold was burning a hole in the bottom of the boat, was calling out into the darkness of the waters. And from the darkness of the waters great twisted hands reached up, snagging at the paddles, tearing at the fragile boards. He and Rose were in the dark of the hold as the planks began to break apart, she much farther in than he, and running away from him, running into that dark nightmare corridor. Running in the wrong direction, away from the safety of the door. He shouted her name, tried frantically to catch up with her, to pull her back to safety, but her hand slipped out of his, and the water took her. He groped for her in the darkness, holding his breath, fighting the dark water that closed over his head, while huge floating trunks and boxes slid and nudged at him in the blackness, and he heard Queen Régine laughing.

Your woman will be torn from your arms . . . .

He woke panting, drenched in sweat, to find Hannibal kneeling beside him on the straw matting, his long hair hanging down around his face by the light of the single candle.

“Are you all right?” asked the fiddler softly.

Night was black outside the windows. The Silver Moon could have been steaming through the depths of interstellar space for all that could be seen.

January sank back down on his rolled-up coat that he was using for a pillow; he was shaking.

“Or I suppose I should ask, is Rose all right?” Hannibal settled with his back against the bunk and his skinny knees drawn up under his immense white linen nightshirt. “You were calling her name.”

January shook his head. “It's the same dream,” he said wearily, and ran his hand over his face. “Always the same dream, since before we were married. I want to save her, and I can't. Sometimes it's from one thing, sometimes another—once I dreamed she was being carried off by a Roman legion, God knows where I got that idea from. . . .”

“Was she grading Latin papers that week?”

And January laughed. The iron reality of the fear retreated a little. But it watched him like a rat from the shadows.

“I suppose I should be grateful it's Rose I'm trying to save,” he said. “I can wake up, and there she is, sleeping beside me and dreaming about planting sweet-peas. Sometimes I used to dream about running through the streets of Paris, knowing Ayasha was dying of the cholera, back in our rooms. . . .” He flinched at the memory of those dreams. Of the way the streets of the river-side district lengthened and tangled into bizarre labyrinths, turned back on themselves, while he could hear his first wife's desperate breathing, her sobs as she lay on the bed. Could hear her calling his name.

“And I'd wake up,” he said softly, “and know that she actually did die.” He didn't add that sometimes it was Rose dying while he ran through the streets of Paris in that sweltering cholera summer, trying to find the way to her. To save her.

So that he would not have to face the rest of his life alone.

“I suppose that is what it is,” said Hannibal, “to be a knight-errant at heart. God knows what Sir Galahad dreamed about. It couldn't have been terribly interesting, fighting to rescue a cup. And an empty cup, at that. I think the worst part of trying to give up opium was the dreams—although mind you, I wasn't terribly keen on the throwing-up part either.”

Or the ghastly blackness of depression that had followed hard upon the physical symptoms, January reflected, considering his friend's gaunt face in the tiny seed of orange light. That Hannibal had, with an improvement in his health last winter, actually attempted to break his opium habit had astonished January; that he had ultimately been unable to do so surprised him not at all. To the girls among whom Hannibal lived, in the attics and back-sheds of the whorehouses and saloons of the Swamp, his resolve to give up laudanum and liquor had appeared merely quixotic in the face of the devastating symptoms of withdrawal: “Just have a bit until you're feeling better” had quickly collapsed the whole effort, leaving him, January thought, more fragile than before.

“Does Rose want to be rescued?” asked Hannibal now. “In your dreams, I mean?”

“I don't know,” said January. “God knows I've never had any luck with rescuing her in real life. And it may not be Rose I'm seeking to rescue at all, or not Rose only, but my sisters, my mother . . . my father. . . .”

When he slept again he dreamed of the slaves chained along the promenade, sleeping in their chains, while Rose lay curled on her blanket with her head on her satchel, beside Julia, as the huge paddle thrashed and glittered in the darkness. And in his dream he saw the faces of the men and women in the coffle, and knew them: his sister Olympe and her husband, Paul, his sister Dominique with her tiny daughter Charmian in her arms. For some reason his mother wasn't there—probably because she would never permit herself to be perceived as a slave, even in her son's dreams. But his father was, the father he had not seen since he was eight, since his mother was sold to a white man and went to New Orleans to live as his free mistress with her children.

And his father's face was his own.

All in chains. All being taken to someplace they did not know, to be separated forever. All trapped on the wet planks of the steamboat, churning up-river through the night.

Then he woke with the pale light trickling through the shut curtains of the stateroom, to the sounds of horns blowing, of cannon firing in the distance. And coming out on deck minutes later, he saw the town of Natchez-On-The-Hill lying before them in the hot light of morning.

SEVEN

Natchez-On-The-Hill was a handsome town of some four thousand souls, its tree-bordered square looking down on the river from the top of a high bluff and its shady streets lined with the Spanish galleries and graceful brick English houses of its original builders. It was the center of the richest cotton land in the South: even in the hush of summer, the landing at the bottom of the bluff was busy with keelboats, flatboats, and the small stern-wheelers that were the only steamboats that could navigate the low river. Merchants and planters bustled about the levee, seeing to the receipt of goods ordered from Paris and New York; draymen shouted at the deck-hands who loaded up their wagons, river-traders dickered for bargains with one eye open for pickpockets and thieves.