Barbara Hambly - Dead water
Christmas pulled a knife from his belt with his free hand, and January had to twist aside to keep from being eviscerated. His grip on the Reverend's throat broke, and as the outlaw brought up his pistol, January kicked him backwards, down onto the men on the stair.
“Don't let them go!” he yelled, and plunged down after them, crowding them to keep them from shooting. But this time no one followed. Jim and the others were already falling back to the perceived safety of the pilot-house, not understanding how fatal it was to give ground, and January felt a knife rip into the muscles of his back. Then he was falling backwards, down off the stair, clutching and grabbing and then hitting the back of the deck hard.
A fury of shouting and pounding came dimly to him from below as he lay on the boards of the deck, stunned and trying to breathe. Every whisper of air brought stabbing pain in his side—a rib broken, he thought, the pain wasn't where he'd been stabbed and though he felt weak and lightheaded, it was the long burning pain of a slash. Opening his eyes, he saw the last of Christmas's men piling up the stair onto the hurricane deck, surrounding the pilot-house.
Head swimming, January rolled over, tried to get up. Two of the last men up the stairs halted, turned back, and climbed down to him. They had pistols, but spent smoke poured from the barrels—January let himself fall back onto the boards of the deck, and both men stuck their knives into their belts.
“Big bastard,” said one of them, bending to grab January's wrists. The other took his ankles to drag him to the rail, so the kick January delivered to his groin was unexpected, perfectly positioned, and murderous. The man at his wrists dropped them and fumbled for his knife—Mr. Ankles being doubled up on the deck screaming—and January didn't even bother going for a weapon, just pistoned his feet down to the deck and drove his elbow up under Mr. Wrists' chin with a force that smacked him hard against the arcade support.
January heaved first the one, then the other overboard, and was scrambling up the stair to the hurricane deck before either of them hit the water.
From above him he heard Levi Christmas yell. “You might as well give up in there, old man, 'fore we shoot the pilot-house to pieces!”
There were a dozen outlaws, ranged in a circle around the flimsy board structure. From inside, January could hear Theodora Skippen screaming, “Levi, no! Levi, it's me, Dora . . . !”
Oh, that will certainly get him to throw down his guns. . . .
January yelled, “Christmas, the money isn't on the boat!” and all the outlaws turned.
There was momentary stillness. Levi Christmas brought up his pistol to bear on January; then, when January remained unmoving, the Reverend walked toward him on the blood-splattered decking. When he got within two yards of January, he said in a calm voice, “We been followin' this boat since Natchez, and we had a look at every trunk that's been took off it. We ain't seen no gold yet.”
“That gold never left New Orleans,” January told him. “If you've been watching this boat, you'll have seen that every trunk and box in the hold was searched the day before yesterday, and all we found was a lot of underwear and shoes.”
“All that means is that Irish bastard hid it,” replied Christmas evenly. “Wasn't that why he tried to shoot your master? You and that master of yours wouldn't still be on board if the money wasn't here. It's a good try,” he added with a broken-toothed grin. “But that money's here, and I'm gonna find it, if I gotta heat up some irons and toast the titties of every woman on board to get somebody to break loose with a little—”
The whole deck lurched underfoot as the Silver Moon staggered like a drunkard on a spree. January covered the six feet between himself and Christmas with a single leap and wrenched the pistol from the Reverend's hand—when Christmas grabbed for another of the several around his neck, January brought the pistol-butt against his verminous temple with crushing force. A chorus of screams rose from the pilot-house and above them rode Jim's shout,
“We hit a snag! We goin' down!”
The boat was already beginning to list.
January was nearly trampled by Christmas's men as they pelted for the stairway down to the lower decks. Not one of them so much as paused to scoop their stunned and unconscious boss from the deck. Even as January reached the door of the pilot-house it flew open and the women streamed out, Mrs. Tredgold screaming at her husband, “This is all your fault!” and Melissa Tredgold simply screaming.
January tossed his pistol to Rose and dragged Hannibal onto his shoulder like a sack of flour; Rose put her shoulder under Mr. Lundy's to help him along, last of them all, down the steps to the deck. “What happened?” panted January. “Did you hit it deliberately?”
“Hell, no,” buzzed the pilot. “With all the windows but the visor-board shut, I couldn't see, and the river's stiff with towheads . . . it had to happen. You think I was gonna wreck the boat this far from the free states, with all those folks still on board?”
“So you were part of it?”
“'Course I was part of it!” snorted Lundy. He clutched at Rose's shoulder and the stair-rail as they carefully negotiated the steps first down to the boiler-deck, then to the main deck below. “Why the hell else would a spavined old wreck like me be still rasslin' around this river, if it wasn't to help get a flock of runaways north to Canada?”
By the time they reached the main deck, Christmas's men had already taken both the Silver Moon's skiff and their own and cast off. At the bow the decks were almost awash—Thu and Davis were coolly directing the deck-hands in the ripping-out of doors and bull-rails to provide spars to swim to shore. Water slopped over into the hatchway as they pulled the cover clear for a raft, and January froze.
He said, “Shit.”
“What?” Rose tucked the pistol into her waistband, was preparing to ease Hannibal onto a hatch-cover to paddle to shore.
“Get him ashore,” said January. “I'll be back.”
And he sprang down the ladder-like stair to the door of the hold.
It was still padlocked, but since there was no longer need for secrecy of any kind, January knocked it in with two kicks. Away from the wan light of the hatch the hold was pitch black, waist-deep in water at the bow end already, bobbing with crates and boxes floating about in the darkness like ambulatory islands. More crates were slithering down as the deck slowly tilted. Rats clung to them, climbed on January's back and arms—he thrashed them off and they went scrabbling for the steps.
“Régine!” he bellowed into the darkness. “Régine, here! This way!”
A woman's voice called back out of the abyss, frantic with terror. “Here! Oh, God, I'm caught! Help me!”
January plunged in the direction of the stern. Water heaved and sloshed around his hips, then his thighs, but he could hear it rushing behind him where the tear in the hull was. Ahead of him in the blackness the woman's voice sobbed, “Here, I'm here, oh God please don't leave me . . . !”
The boat lurched as the weight of water in the head dragged it farther down. The deck-boards slithered under January's feet, and something big and square-edged slipped down and struck his shoulder a glancing blow in the darkness, the sudden jab of his broken rib and the wound on his back bringing on a wave of nauseated faintness.
“I'm caught, oh God, somethin' fell on me, I can't move it, I can't push it. . . .”
The shadows showed him nothing, only outlined the edges of the shifting crates. Darkness suffocating, like a wet nightmare of slanting deck-boards and huge things like pyramid-blocks slithering and bumping as they slid, further adding to the weight at the boat's nose. “I'm here,” he called out, “I'll get you. . . .”
Her voice had been quite close to him. Hands groped for his.
Big hands, not Queen Régine's tiny, childlike fists.
He didn't ask, only felt along the folds of a dress, found where crates and trunks had fallen on her with the boat's first reeling lurch. “Hold still.” He dug in his pocket for matches. In the sudden flare of yellow light he saw, not the bitter little voodooienne he'd expected to find, but the slave-girl Julie. “Hold these. You know how to light a match? Scratch it in the paper, like this. . . . Is there someone else down here? Another woman?”
“No.” Her eyes were huge in the tiny flare of light, following his movements as he hauled and threw the trunks from the top of the pile that pinned her legs. The pain of his rib went through his vitals like a sword. “Thu said I could stay here,” Julie gabbled as if the words themselves fought back panic. “I was gonna swim for the shore when we caught on the bar, but 'Rodus stopped me, came up, and caught my hand. He wasn't chained—you know Thu's part of the Underground Railway? Him and 'Rodus? They're brothers—'Rodus had a key to the chains—they was takin' folks north, disguised as a slave-gang. He said Thu had blankets hid down here, and food, in case somethin' went wrong an' somebody had to hide out. They had poisons here, too—I know they's poisons, 'cause my granny knows about them things . . . oh, God . . .” she gasped as the boat lurched again and water slopped up around January's ankles. “Oh, God, we're gonna drown. . . .”
Moving the crate on top of the trunk that actually pinned her legs was like trying to move a house. January grunted, feeling his muscles crack and strain, panic icy in his heart. “'Rodus brought you down here?”
“No, we had to wait for Thu. And 'Rodus told me, Be quiet or we're all of us dead, and pushed me far back in the gang when Thu came down. Thu had Mr. Weems with him, tellin' him how he'd found somethin' strange hid in the hold. I didn't see much—it was plenty dark—but 'Rodus had a stick of firewood in his hand, big around as your arm. I don't think Mr. Weems ever saw what hit him. Oh!”
The matches had burned down to her fingers; she fumbled with the scratch-paper, and with a hiss everything fell into the water as the boat lurched again. January pulled the last trunk out of the way and felt for Julie's hands in the darkness, wondering in despair how they were ever going to find the open door. The deck was at an angle of over forty-five degrees underfoot and there was a constant slipping and scraping in the darkness as trunks slithered down.
The door at the stern end, thought January. It opened inward, padlocked on the outside—was there enough purchase to kick it open, with the deck tilted, always supposing he could find it in total darkness . . . ?
Light. A rectangle of daylight, above and behind as the stern door opened, and Rose's voice, “Ben! Ben, are you there?”
“Here!” He grabbed Julie's arm, half dragged the limping girl up the slippery slant of boards. Rose, Thu, and 'Rodus reached down, clinging to the slant of the steps; dragged Julie up, then January, as the Silver Moon's boards groaned and snapped with the weight of water in her head. January blinked in the daylight, half-blinded, seeing the water all around the vessel full of spars and planks, doors and shutters, each bit of wood bearing a paddling figure, heading toward the shore. Some, he saw, had already reached safety, and were wading out into the water to haul others in.
“Hannibal . . . ?”
“Is safe, Davis and Jim took him over.” Rose removed her spectacles and tucked them into her skirt pocket. “When the vessel started going down, I realized you couldn't get out of the hold the way you'd gone in. . . .”
The two Fulani brothers had rounded up several doors on the stern promenade. The Silver Moon lurched over sideways, dripping paddle still turning wildly in the air—“Better get out of here before the weight brings her over,” warned Thu as he helped Julie down onto a door, then dropped into the water to seize the end of the door and kick toward the shore. 'Rodus took a plank—January and Rose, another door, with January holding and kicking in the same fashion, and feeling like his cracked rib was going to work its way out of his body at every kick. Tomorrow, he knew, he'd pay for the surge of desperate energy that kept him going now.
Thucydides, he noticed, was letting the current carry him farther down, toward a point of land separated from the others, where Julie could get ashore without being noticed. Mindful of the number of outlaws still roving around the woods, January followed.
Water splashed in his mouth and his eyes, and under the surface nameless things—branches, rotting trees, what felt like tangles of submerged rope—tore and grabbed at his ankles. Even in low water the tug of the current was like a giant's hand. Rose pulled her skirts and petticoat up around her waist and slipped the lower part of her body into the water, kicking, too.
They were both breathless and numb when the door finally grated on sand.
Then all they could do was lie on the muddy bank among the dead trees and mats of leaves, feet in the water, gasping for breath and staring up at the cloud-puffed blue of the sky. It wasn't even noon.
That morning before dawn, Hannibal had been rowed over to the bank to shoot and be shot at by Kevin Molloy, now sunk, with Oliver Weems, and Levi Christmas, in the wood and iron coffin of the Silver Moon.
The duel seemed weeks ago. January tried to calculate when he'd last slept and realized it had been on the floor of Hannibal's stateroom the night before last, the night that Weems had been murdered by the conductors of the Underground Railway because he'd tried to blackmail the wrong man.
“I suppose all the sheriff of Issaquena County is going to have to do is bring a posse out here on the first moonlit night,” mused Rose, rolling painfully over. She'd lost her tignon in the river, and her long brown hair hung down soaked over her shoulders like seaweed. She fished her spectacles from her skirt pocket, put them on again, and looked back at the river, where smoke still poured from the tall stacks of the Silver Moon, still visible above the surface of the water. Mr. Souter would have to warn other pilots of it as they came bowling down the river to Brock's Wood-Yard.
She went on. “He'll be able to round up most of Christmas's men when they go diving to try to find the gold in the wreck. . . . Did you mean it when you said the gold wasn't even on the boat?”
“I think so.” January heaved himself shakily to his feet and took Rose's hand, led her up the muddy bank. All around them rats were scrambling up out of the water, shaking their brown coats and trotting purposefully off into the woods. They probably have relatives in the neighborhood.
Forty or fifty yards upstream, he could see the door Thu and Julie had used for a life-preserver, lying near a tangle of beached snags. Movement caught his eye and he saw 'Rodus limping down the bank, then turning aside into the tangle.
Hand in hand with Rose, January made for the place, walking slowly and stumbling every now and then into potholes in the bank.
“Molloy stole something from Weems's stateroom,” he told her. “Something that could be easily pocketed, and could be taken all at once, not like six hundred pounds of gold or even a couple of valises of securities and Bank of Pennsylvania notes. Something that was hidden with the same copy of the Liberator that mentioned Judas Bredon's speeches and involvement with, not only Abolitionism, but with the Underground Railway. It was something that Weems thought he could retrieve easily, too—hence his searching the staterooms of everyone on board whom he thought might have had reason to steal it. It would have been easy enough for Thucydides to tell him that some member of the slave-gang had seen Molloy hide something somewhere, to get him to go down to the promenade deck at midnight.”
