Barbara Hambly - Dead water

The end portion of the promenade was otherwise deserted, for the piles of cordwood separating the servants from the chained slaves were nearly gone. The whole line of Gleet's coffie, and Cain's, were visible now, wolfing down their beans and rice from gourd bowls or passing tin cups of water along the line. Stepping back into the passway, January glanced through the engine-room door. As he'd suspected, the hands were bringing in the smaller quantities of wood from the bow.

Supper over, Eli's voice could be heard through the passway from the women's side of the boat, chatting with his old mother and with a young woman of Cain's coffle as he played with her child.

The narrow door that led down to the hold, thick with shadow, seemed to beckon like Aladdin's Cave.

“You got your pick-locks?”

Hannibal produced them without a word.

The profound stillness within the bowels of the ship seemed to breathe, a velvet-black abyss beyond the feeble rectangle of torchlight falling down the ladder from the passway. For fear of drawing attention, January carried no light—the most he'd have been able to provide was the candle-end he habitually carried in one pocket—and beyond the first few jumbled outlines of trunks and crates, stacked any-old-how where the deck-hands had left them, it was as if the universe itself fell away to nothing. Overhead, men's footfalls creaked in the engine-room, masking whatever tiny noises another human's presence might have produced, but January smelled the very faint whisper of habitation, of a latrine-bucket hidden somewhere in the darkness.

She was there, all right. Or someone was.

He drew a deep breath, then said, “It's me. I know you're there. Please, speak with me.”

Silence. He remembered the wrinkled, furious face in the torchlight of Congo Square, the rotting rooster-head Rose had brought to him, still covered with specks of down from the pillow it had been sewn up in. The rasping whisper in the darkness of the cemetery: I curse you to the ruin of all you touch, and the destruction of all you hope . . . .

He had never in his life expected the extent of jeopardy that he now stood in, with the money vanished, and the near-certainty of arrest and detention—and possible hanging—facing him when the boat reached Mayersville.

“Régine,” he said, his voice carrying softly in the darkness, “I beg your pardon. I lost my temper, and spoke to you as I shouldn't have. I was only trying to help a young girl under my protection. I was afraid, and angry. I need to speak to you. I need your help. Please speak to me and I swear my oath I'll tell no one you are here.”

Go ahead and tell the world I'm here, piano-player, if you think it'll do you any good. No one will find me.

Thu had to know she was here by this time, even if he had not on that first day when he'd called out, Who's there? January could swear—almost—that Thu had been near the hatch above when he had glimpsed the movement of skirts in the shadow. The steward had always impressed January as a sharply intelligent young man, but intelligence didn't mean a man wouldn't be cowed by a voodoo.

January's own luck since Queen Régine had spit in his face had certainly not been anything to boast about.

And there were other ways of buying Thucydides's assistance than superstitious awe. Voodooiennes were artists in secrets and information, buying, selling, trading knowledge and the power that knowledge gave. The presence of Thu's brother in chains on the vessel qualified as a lever whichever way you looked at it.

And, voodooiennes were never above paying top price for what they needed, whether that was protection, information, or hands to do work in places where they themselves could not go.

Good God, he wondered suddenly, did Queen Régine invest her money in the Bank of Louisiana as well? Did she get on the boat, not in pursuit of me, but in pursuit of Weems?

She'd been in a position to see everything that went on, over the past week. Could Thucydides be working for her, or at least supplying her with information . . . ?

In which case he, January, wasn't safe anywhere on the boat.

“Your Majesty,” he whispered desperately, “please . . .”

But watching silence was his only reply. A moment later Hannibal's musical whistle sounded in the passway above: Oh hide me in the rock, O Lord, O Lord . . . .

Since there was no way of knowing whether the approaching company was black or white, someone who could be talked around or someone potentially genuinely dangerous, January backed hastily out the door and closed it behind him, and crouched, waiting, in the dark of the narrow stairwell. “My dear Gleet,” said Hannibal's voice from the passway, with just enough trace of drunken slur to it to convince January that his friend was as sober as a judge—or as sober as Hannibal ever got. “Just the man I've been looking for.”

“Damn shame,” groused Gleet heavily. “Damn shame, to hang a well-set-up boy like yours. Complete waste . . .”

“Particularly,” said Hannibal, “since Ben actually was asleep in my stateroom the whole time and never laid a finger on Weems.”

“Oh, of course, of course!” Gleet hastened to agree. “But a white man, you know . . . I'm afraid once the sheriff gets hold of it, there'll be no way around hanging him. Do you really work for the Bank of Louisiana?”

“In a manner of speaking,” said Hannibal. January snapped the padlock shut, and stole up the steps like a shadow just as Hannibal maneuvered Gleet out of the passway and onto the promenade beyond. “But in nothing like the capacity our friend Mr. Molloy seems to quite sincerely believe. You and Cain were out that night, two or three times—you heard nothing? Saw nothing?”

As January looked around the corner, Gleet shook his head, and spat a long stream of tobacco juice onto the deck, so close that it fouled Cissy's skirt. If looks could maim, there would have been blood on the deck as well as tobacco juice, but the nursemaid said nothing, and Gleet either didn't see her glare or didn't care.

“Like I told the Colonel, it was quiet as tombs. Even the niggers were quiet—seems like the fog hushed 'em down. Lookin' for ghostses an' ha'nts,' I expect.” Gleet laughed with jovial contempt at anyone who would believe in a spirit world. “I looked over the wenches first, then the bucks, and Cain walked along with me, civil for once—touchy bastard.” He laughed again, an obnoxious haw-haw. “Maybe he thinks there's ghostses an' ha'nts in the dark, too.”

From behind the corner January watched the burly slave-dealer put a brotherly arm around Hannibal's shoulders. “What'd he offer for your boy?”

Hannibal shook his head sadly. “Not a thing—not a red cent.”

January expelled his indrawn breath and whispered a prayer of thanks that Hannibal had decided on the truth rather than a fabrication, which, though it might open new avenues for information, might also be checked.

“Cheap bastard,” Hannibal added as if the thought had just occurred to him. “Stuck-up, too.”

Gleet nodded, and spat again. Cissy and Rose moved the boxes on which they sat back away from the smudge-pot, into the soft, gnat-filled gloom closer to the silent paddle.

“Gets his niggers to mind him, though,” Gleet told Hannibal. “They's so scared of him, if he told the lot of 'em to turn somersaults on the deck, they'd do it. Look at him like whip dogs, even that stuck-up boy 'Rodus—who I told him'll make him trouble, just see if I'm not right. And it is a stupid name, like I said. People don't want to buy a boy named Herodotus. Give 'em a boy name of Jim or Joe or Pete. . . . That boy Pete I got, you know what his name originally was?”