Sunday
America
59.
The Mother We Share
Jacob Lawrence’s The Visitors was back in the permanent collection in Dallas. Em and Rémy were forced to take an awkward route to reach it, fading from a painting at the National Gallery to one in Washington and from there to the Texas city. They clumsily dropped into the Lawrence painting, with Rémy landing on top of Em.
The people in the foreground leapt to their feet with a shriek, bringing the others from the kitchen into the main room. There was a pause as they stared at Rémy. Several pairs of eyes widened, and one or two members of the family bowed low. Their respect rolled across Rémy’s mind like an opening of a concerto in a dramatic wave of timpani and brass.
‘Please,’ he said, embarrassed. ‘I’m just a kid from Chicago.’
One of the men smiled. ‘You are from royal blood. Come. Ambuya has been waiting a long time to meet you.’
A child took Rémy’s hand and led him into the bedroom, where a minister sat at the side of the bed. The minister was faceless, dollops of white paint instead of any identifiable features. Em stood quietly at the bedroom door with the others, none of whom seemed able to take their eyes off Rémy.
The old woman in the bed pulled herself up against her plump pillows and patted her hair. Then she reached out her hand. Rémy took it. She pulled him closer, bringing him to sit on the edge of the bed next to her.
‘’Bout time you got here, my son,’ she said. ‘I knew your mom. My heart breaks for your loss.’ Remy nodded. Ambuya went on. ‘Lots of folks been talkin’ about what you’ve been doing, and how you’re gonna stop the devil once and for all.’
‘I’m trying, ma’am,’ said Rémy, the melody in his head a soft swish like a brush on drums. ‘But the plan has changed, and I need to understand a phrase. Musica vivificat mortuos: music brings life to the dead. Do you know it?’
Ambuya nodded. ‘It’s part of Nuru’s prophecy. Her story’s told still among our people in Africa. She was an African queen, enslaved in Ancient Rome. Indispensable to the first king of the city, Quirinus, she was a great healer, an alchemist, the first Conjuror, some said.’
Rémy rubbed his hands on his head, thinking, processing, trying to make the same leaps that his mother even in her madness must have made. All that research she had done in the Dupree Plantation archives.
‘There’s something hidden in that lost slave ship,’ he said at last. ‘Isn’t there?’
Ambuya gave a sorrowful smile. ‘Something powerful enough to stop the devil.’ She pulled herself up and reached for the mirror on her nightstand. ‘See for yourself.’
60.
Nuru’s Story
The green-framed mirror’s edges were bevelled and the glass was cloudy, but as soon as Rémy looked at its milky surface, his Conjuror’s mark shot a frizz of electricity across his scalp and a swirling darkness drew Rémy inside.
He smelled sweat and shit and sorrow. He struggled to move but couldn’t. Then his gut twisted. He was inside a gilded cage held aloft by a wooden pulley over a pool of water so blue it looked like glass. He thought he could see stars twinkling in its depths. His hands were shackled to the bars but his feet were hanging over the edge of the cage, almost touching the water. It was him, but not him.
The mirror’s darkness danced on the edge of his vision.
The pool itself was at the centre of an open-air structure, a primitive stadium that looked like a bowl dropped into the middle of a marshy field. A frenzied chorus of cheers erupted from a crowd waving palm fronds and laurel branches. Rémy felt a thrill of accomplishment. He’d travelled in time without Matt’s help after all. This was Ancient Rome.
The sun was high and the sky was clearer than he’d ever seen. No planes. No pollution. He blinked sweat from his eyes.
A legion of Roman soldiers was marching up over a hill and across the trampled field towards the stadium. Behind them stood the Roman Forum in its glory, a winding fortress wall enveloping the rolling vista that was the seven hills of Rome, the marble plinths and columns of temples and palaces on the Capitoline and Quirinal hills shining in the brilliant sunlight.
Two women in stolas, their skin shimmering like copper in the sun’s rays were flanking him, one holding a lyre… the lyre… and the other holding a set of ivory pipes in her long fingers. Three bronze cauldrons bubbling with silver liquid were balanced on the edge of the pool.
The frieze. Had to be.
Or at least, the moment which the frieze depicted.
The woman with the pitch pipes reminded Rémy of Minerva, the goddess he had met when Luca had trapped him inside The Flaying of Marsyas in the Tomb of the Martyrs under the Tiber. He studied the woman with the lyre, her dark hair long, a spray of freckles across her sharp nose and high cheekbones. As the soldiers marched closer, Rémy recognized the uniform of the Camarilla, and their commander. Luca Ferrante, vast and muscular, led the column.
Then time skipped. The crowd’s cheers were deafening now, the drums in Rémy’s head crashing symbols.
An African woman, Nuru, walked in front of Luca beneath a canopy of laurel branches. Her head had been shaved, but she held it high. Behind Luca, an Emperor rode on a she-wolf as big as an elephant, his body gnarled with age, his skin yellow and paper thin.
‘Ecce unus est!’ The crowd chanted, and Rémy finally understood.
Behold the one!
But was it Nuru they were referring to?
Luca’s wings were folded against his centurion’s leather vest, the tip of his sword touching the curve of Nuru’s back, prodding her forward. Every hand in the first ring of seats was reaching out, desperate to touch Nuru as she glided past.
The great she-wolf lay down beside the pool, and one of the women helped the Emperor down beside the gilded cage. Rémy could smell the anticipation seeping through his skin.
Time skipped again. The she-wolf snarled. Nuru now held the lyre. She shook her head and Luca laughed. Rémy felt the air thin and saw Luca’s wings expand. He could feel the boy in the cage begin to suffocate.
‘Stop! Let him live,’ said Nuru, her eyes wide in anger. ‘I will conjure for you.’
‘Bring forth my kingdom and you both may live,’ said the old Emperor.
Nuru’s fingers picked an eerie discordant melody on the lyre. The notes came slowly at first, then faster, sending the sound out in golden ribbons that coiled above the pool. The pool bubbled into liquid gold as the music spread.
Time skipped. Rémy felt as if he had dropped a thousand feet on a carnival ride. Nuru’s bloody fingers were still plucking the lyre, but the sky was no longer clear blue. It was alive, crowded with flailing limbs and howling heads, misshapen bodies and contorted torsos. The stone seats of the stadium were packed with hundreds of souls in agony. Their screams, their torment, was sucking the life from him.
Then Rémy smelled oranges.
The mirror’s darkness began to creep inward, clouding the edges of the grotesque scene. Rémy fought the sensation. He had to stay. He had to see what happened.
Swarms of beetles surged from the pool, the water thick and viscous.
The mirror’s darkness edged closer.
Not yet!
Nuru’s playing reached a crescendo. The thick golden liquid was suddenly animated, transforming into a leafless barren tree. A beastly figure, part faun, part man, began to emerge from the centre of the tree’s pocked, splintered golden trunk.
Nuru nodded at the boy in the cage – at Rémy. A set of pipes had appeared in the boy’s hand. He put them to his lips, and a melody soared free above the field in a million silver daggers of light.
The cage sprang open. The boy leapt on to the altar stone as it cleaved in two, half of it crashing into the thick pool. The tormented souls reached for him, their arms grasping, grabbing. Nuru kept playing. The boy kept playing. The tree of life began to slow and stiffen, the beast freezing in place.
The mirror’s darkness was almost
upon him.
Time shifted.
61.
Annie’s Lament
Rémy had read the passage in his mother’s diary too many times not to know what was coming.
He was in a tight space, his breathing shallow and constricted as if someone was sitting on his chest. His hands were those of a child, thin wrists in iron manacles, feet unbound. The child was tucked into a narrow wooden space, she shoved a package wrapped in oilskin into a hollow then she peered between wooden slats damp with brine.
The air was stagnant, the reek of decaying flesh and rancid food clinging to the slats of wood. Buzzing flies carpeted the deck and swarmed over the limp sails, while rows of glistening black ravens sat like judges on the main masts.
Through the slats, Rémy saw the butchered body of a young man. Fat bluebottle flies covered his head and his mouth and what remained of his genitals. A bloody machete stood impaled in the splintered planks of the deck. Rémy’s gorge rose. Castration was a punishment for disobedience on a slave ship, a message meant to strip any vestige of pride or power that remained. Rémy wished the child would turn away, but she didn’t; wouldn’t.
He caught a glimpse of a tall graceful man wearing a ruffled shirt, an embroidered tunic, blue pantaloons and silver buckled shoes, wiping blood from his hands with his handkerchief. The ship’s captain hung from the main mast overhead, his face engorged, his body swaying with the ship’s steady rocking. The child – Rémy – dropped her eyes to a young woman squatting on the deck over her newborn infant. The woman’s thin body was covered in a caul of sweat.
Don Grigori, the monster who’d murdered his mom, leisurely tugged the machete free, leaned over and sliced through the newborn’s umbilical cord. The woman pulled her infant protectively against her bloody tunic as Don Grigori leaned over and spoke to her in a high-pitched voice.
‘Musica vivicat mortuos…’
Cradling her infant in her arms, the young mother glanced towards the child’s hiding space. The mother was the double of Rémy’s mom.
The anguish of the moment crushed Rémy. He understood now that his mother’s journal entries were more than just clues to him about his future. They were a testament to their past, her book of lamentations. This was his family, slaughtered and grieving, frightened and alone. He had read his mother’s words so many times but they had been just that. Words. He’d never felt this level of rage or such an epiphany before.
A thunderous crack tore through the trees and a figure dropped on to the upper deck, swords drawn, a yellow turban tied around his head, two straps crossing on his chest holding his daggers.
Rémy wanted to cheer.
‘You’re too late, Moor,’ said Don Grigori warily. ‘I will take this infant when I have finished with the mother, and you will not stop me. My master has need of him.’
The ship rocked violently in the water, angry waves crashing onto the deck as Alessandro lunged. With the full force of his momentum, he stabbed his dagger into a large packing crate that stood on the deck, aiming for the Inquisitor’s portrait that Rémy knew must be packed inside, allowing the Inquisitor and Don Grigori to escape Europe.
Don Grigori dropped the machete and howled like a banshee. His skin lit up in a flash of white light, then dulled to a powdery translucence. A grey, amorphous creature surrounded by swarms of flies was sucked away, through the broken planks of the crate. Into the damaged painting, Rémy guessed, to recover as best he could.
Crouching at the mutilated torso of the man on the deck, Alessandro said a quiet prayer as he lifted a familiar golden talisman from around the dead man’s neck and draped it carefully around the young mother’s throat.
‘I am forever at your service,’ Rémy heard him say.
Rémy’s hand instinctively went to his own neck, to feel the same talisman hanging where it always did. But he only felt the child’s bare trembling skin. The talisman was not his, yet.
Alessandro glanced through the slats at Rémy. ‘Come, child,’ he said simply as he prepared to destroy what was left of the crate. ‘You’re safe now.’
Suddenly a riot of voices and whistles could be heard from the shoreline. Musket fire popped, and a hail of musket balls ripped into the deck. Cursing, Alessandro leapt to the railing and dived head first into the Mississippi. The crate remained where it was.
And that’s when the child began to sing. Silver ribbons of music flirted with the breeze, dancing over the dark green water, dipping and swirling above Rémy’s head, snaking through the trees towards the plantation house beyond the sugar cane fields.
Rémy felt himself detach from the child’s body. In the distance, he could make out the pillars of the wrap-around porch and the palm-frond blades of the fans spinning silently in the warm night breeze. Men and women were drinking on the wide veranda. All around him, the bayou was thick with lush green foliage, glossy plants with white flowers shaped like trumpets and live oaks knee deep in the bayou, their branches adorned with kudzu. Willow branches skirted the surface of the water like the hem of a ball gown. A great blue heron lifted off and swept over the bayou. Eucalyptus, honeysuckle, jasmine and the sharp metallic stench of blood hung in the air.
The music stopped.
Louisiana
62.
Wade in the Water
Rémy sat on the bow of a ramshackle barge, a square wooden wheelhouse and cabin in the centre of its deck, the pea-soup water of the Mississippi lapping against its hollow hull. His bare feet were dangling over the edge, his toes flicking its buggy surface. Behind him Em was in a black neoprene dive suit, the pale skin on her neck covered in a thin sheen of sweat and a thick layer of mosquitoes.
The Quirinus had sunk somewhere in this delta. It was after midnight, yet the temperature was still in the thirties and the humidity was like a wet sponge on his skin. Every few seconds he heard Em slap a mosquito. Strangely, they were not biting Rémy. It was as if he had a protective shield over his body. He watched them swarming above his skin, then buzzing away.
‘I can’t believe you don’t have one frickin’ bite,’ Em grumbled, pulling the zipper up under her chin and waving at a cloud of insects in the air above her head. She finished checking their diving equipment while Rémy checked the journal for further details.
‘Quirinus was the first king of Rome,’ Rémy offered after a moment. ‘His body was taken by the First Watcher. I saw it all in the mirror.’
‘I thought the first king was Romulus?’
‘Same man. Quirinus was a Sabine warrior, believed to be the deified Romulus.’
Rémy dropped his mom’s journal into a diver’s bag, sealing it before he stuck it inside a pocket on his wetsuit.
‘Why has no one salvaged this ship before?’ Em wanted to know.
‘No one knows it’s here,’ said Rémy, zipping up his dive suit. ‘And the devil probably guards it.’
‘That’s not funny.’ Em dragged over Rémy’s gear and checked his air flow and numbers. ‘Remind me again why I’m doing all these checks alone?’
‘Because you’re the more experienced diver.’
Rémy used his binoculars and zoomed in on the pitched roof of the Dupree Plantation house visible above the tree-line. Seeing nothing else of note, he was about to drop the binoculars into the front pocket of his backpack when a flash of light on the horizon caught his eyes.
‘Did you see that?’
Em looked up from testing her breathing tube and glanced in the direction of open water. Heat lightning strafed across the sky for a second, creating a pillow of blue and pink between the sea and the sky. ‘What, that?’
‘No.’ He put the binoculars to his eyes again, slowly scanning the horizon. One or two shrimpers bobbed across his line of sight off to the west, but nothing else.
‘Quit worrying,’ Em advised. ‘We’re on our own.’
She spat into her mouthpiece and rubbed her spit into the tube with her fingers before fitting her mask. She gave Rémy a thumbs-up and a smile.
/> Rémy forced a smile in return.
63.
Sorrow Songs
Moonlight drizzled through the cypress and willows crouching on the bank. Pines and live oaks rustled in the light breeze that brought no relief from the heat, even though the sun had set hours ago. The twisted grey branches of dogwood trees looked like arms delving into the stagnant pools of the delta.
In her animated wetsuit, Em climbed off the deck and slid into the murky shallows.
‘How deep do you think we’ll need to go?’ she asked, bobbing in the water.
‘We have fifty metres of rope, but I don’t think we’ll need more than fifteen,’ said Rémy. ‘Twenty at the most. This bayou isn’t as deep as some of the others in this region.’
He lifted the heavy rusted iron anchor and dropped it over the side of the barge, waiting until he felt the tightening tug on the guide rope. Then he wrapped and knotted the rope on an iron link on the side of the barge. He adjusted his mask and tapped his gauge, slowly sliding into the water next to Em.
The radio clicked in his ear, her voice clear. ‘You good?’
‘Fine,’ said Rémy, watching Em’s glimmering silhouette dive down in front of him.
‘It’s scary dark down here.’
Rémy was still treading water at the surface. He ducked down. ‘We could be right above Atlantis and not know it.’
Using the anchor line as her guide, Em pointed the beam of her torch in front of her. Rémy stayed as close to her feet as he could. Her body glowed like Nemo in the murky water.
When they reached the anchor, Em scanned the area, the torch illuminating only a few metres in front of them.
‘I can’t see anything that looks like a wreck,’ said Em in Rémy’s earpiece. ‘Maybe we got the coordinates wrong.’
‘No,’ said Rémy firmly. ‘This is the place.’
He scanned his torch in the other direction. Thoughtfully, he picked up the anchor and dropped it again, sending a cloud of sediment, eels, and water snakes swirling around them.
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