Barbara Hambly - Dead water

And when January shook his head, the man only sighed, as if at a child who'd set out to run away from home with no more than a biscuit in his pocket. He wore, January saw, pinned to his belt-loop the tin badge of a slave who was rented out—who would come home every evening to his master and hand over his wages, the way January's mother wanted her son to do. Leading January to the pile of cordwood that sheltered the lunches of the dock-workers, he handed him a stoppered gourd and a bandanna bundle that smelled of cheese and fresh-baked bread.

“You watch out,” said the stevedore. “They's slave-stealers in them swamps. Don't you go speak to no white man, and you look twice at the colored ones.”

“I know that much,” January said. “Thank you.” And he gave him fifty cents he couldn't well afford, knowing the man would now have to find a lunch of his own.

“Mind how you go now. And give your pretty lady a kiss from me.”

“I'll do that.” And any number of candles to the Virgin Mary, added January silently, if I catch up with that boat . . . .

A mounted deputy stopped him just beyond the last few shacks up-river of the town, but seemed satisfied when January showed him the pass Hannibal had written. After that January quickened his steps along the river road. In New Orleans—and in cities on the borderline of slave states and free—there were organized rings of slave-stealers who'd keep their captives half-stupefied with opium until they were deep in the South, too far to strike out easily for their homes.

It was one thing to say Follow the river north . It was another to think of how many miles there were to cover between some plantation deep in Louisiana or Alabama, and the Ohio River that divided Kentucky from states where white men didn't ride nightly patrols. He remembered, too, the six-foot post in the jail-yard at Natchez, and the crack of the deputy's whip.

In New Orleans, January felt more or less safe, at least in the old French Town. But even that area of safety was steadily shrinking. He didn't go above Canal Street into the American suburbs if he could help it. Even in the French Town, he was careful to dress well and speak well, the marks of a man of wealth and position. The marks of a man who had family, people who would miss him and call in the law if he should disappear.

As he walked along the river road in the blazing Mississippi sun, he felt anger rise again in him, anger and fear. Fear that he had to push aside, daily, if he was to function at all. Anger that could scorch and wither his soul out of all possibility of love and joy, if for one instant he let it get the upper hand.

But how, he sometimes wondered, could a sane man not be angry?

How could a sane man not be afraid?

The anger and fear were a pain in him, like the pain in Hannibal's joints and lungs, a pain that never eased. He understood how men with that constant grinding ache of soul would seek out opium or alcohol, not for pleasure, but simply for relief from the knowledge that there was nothing that he could do.

A lizard eyed him from a gray deadfall tree a little ways down the slope of the batture, fixing him with a sharp black gaze before it flicked away like an eyeblink. In the brush beneath the willows of the bank something moved, a rabbit or a fox, but January's breath jerked hard in his lungs for a moment.

Somewhere behind him, and probably not very far away, the Reverend Levi Christmas would be trailing the Silver Moon .

Unless of course he simply got on her at Vicksburg this morning, all decked out in his black coat and pastoral collar.

That will be all I need.

But at least if that were the case it would mean that Christmas wasn't somewhere behind him, waiting to kidnap him and sell him to some cotton planter in Texas.

The mouth of Chickasaw Bayou lay three miles up-river of Vicksburg, part of the murky bottomlands that lay between the meandering Mississippi and the bluffs along the Yazoo. The air was thick with gnats there, the sunlight greenish through the motionless leaves of cypress and willow. Turtles basked on dessicated logs that rose through the glassy brown surface of the water, arranged, as usual, largest to smallest, with an occasional tiny turtle perched on its larger cousin's back.

January cut a sapling with his pen-knife—the only knife a slave might carry—and prodded the long weeds and honeysuckle that overgrew the faint trace of cow-path, twice startling sinewy rustlings in the undergrowth that spoke of copperheads or water-moccasins lying just out of sight. Once he saw an alligator in the bayou, masquerading as a floating log. Its gold eyes reminded him of Jubal Cain's, glittering just above the line of the silent water.

He was far from New Orleans, and far from the Silver Moon, but Queen Régine's curse seemed to be working just fine.

He moved as quietly as he could, stopping repeatedly to listen. The woods were so still that the drumming of the cicadas seemed to roar in the trees, and the squeaky mew of a catbird cut the stillness like a violin note. He wasn't sure what made him first realize he was being pursued.

It wasn't a sound—he didn't hear the strike of hooves until afterwards, nor the rustle of a man flanking the road through the underbrush. Whatever it was that lifted the hair on his nape, January didn't hesitate. He waded silently into the bayou ( Virgin Mary, please don't let there be gators ) and made for the nearest half-sunk tree, sliding almost completely under the water on its far side and keeping the slime-draped trunk between his head and the waterside path.

Still silence. Did I really just hop in the bathtub with every gator and cottonmouth in Warren County out of sheer bad nerves?

He stayed where he was.

And stayed.

“Where the fuck'd he go?”

Shit, was the ground dry or muddy on the edge where I went in? He couldn't recall.

Hooves, and the faint jangle of a bit-chain. The creak of saddle-leather.

“Got to gone in the woods.”

“The fuck he did, Reverend, I was comin' round through the woods. He can't have gone up a tree.”

The Reverend Christmas laughed, a hoarse braying. “I'd like to see a nigger that big hangin' in a tree like an old coon. We'll get him, Turk. If he's headin' for the river, we'll catch him.”

“What if he ain't?”

“Where else he gonna go? They all head for the river when they run. I hear there's a regular leg of the Underground Railway runnin' up the river these days. That's where he's headed, sure.”

“You think he got that boy Bobby with him?”

“I didn't see him. He coulda been waitin' for him outside town. One way or the other, if that big bastard is indeed our loyal friend, I got a score to settle with him on that boy Bobby's account. . . .”

The voices faded, swallowed up in the soughing of the trees.

So Bobby decided to run after all. Christmas and his bravos had probably counted on the Silver Moon laying by for a few more hours, and had been caught on the hop by her sudden departure. They had almost certainly seen him on the waterfront. At least the Reverend wasn't on board with Rose.

“. . . figure we can catch 'em at Horsehead Bar.”

January had just begun to reach down for footing on the murky bottom, when other voices sounded on the path. He ducked down again, praying the movement hadn't caught anyone's attention.

“That's twenty miles!”

“You ever know a boat to get off Horsehead Bar in less'n two days at low water?”

Something brushed January's leg underwater, and he fought not to flinch. By force of will he remained where he was for another ten minutes, listening. When the frogs began to croak again, eerie in the stillness, he cautiously raised his head. The path and the woods were empty. Trembling, he waded, not back to the path, but across the rest of the bayou, and plunged into the tangled undergrowth of the woods.