Crimson Angel

by Barbara Hambly

  By the last of the fading daylight, he searched the mile-long curve of the beach for any sign of Hannibal. Last night’s rain had destroyed whatever tracks there might have been, but he’d formed a good enough opinion of Lobo’s seamanship to trust the old man’s assertion that this was, in fact, the place he’d brought the fiddler ashore.

  At least he wasn’t murdered the minute he set foot on land.

  January himself had food for two days if he was stingy with it, a rifle, a pistol, several knives and five reales in his pocket. Hannibal, he guessed, had been set ashore with nothing. Before he reached the headland that ended the beach, night had fallen, so he made a bed for himself in the landward edge of the thickets of palmetto, far enough into the scrub to be free (he hoped) from sandflies. He ate his bread and cheese by moonlight, drank sparingly of his water bottle, and lay listening to the whisper of waves on the beach, the liquid calls of the birds as they settled themselves, each in its own territory.

  What country, friends, is this? Viola had asked, cast ashore at the beginning of Twelfth Night.

  The only one in the Western Hemisphere where I’m NOT in danger of being kidnapped by white men as a slave.

  And I’m still not safe.

  From westward along the beach – from the fishing hamlet in its cove? – came the throbbing of drums. Yet he found the sound comforting, knowing – as most whites did not – that it only meant that the villagers were dancing in the hot moonlit night. Happy – forty years later – to be free.

  With daybreak, he ate, sparingly, of his slender supplies and walked to the headland that bounded the beach to the east. He scrambled over the steep land, to another shallow curve of sand barely ten yards wide and still blue with the shadows of the mountains inland, and at the far end, where the mountains advanced to the water again, saw what he’d dreaded all along: a dark column of birds circling in the clear dawn light.

  He broke into a run.

  There’d been a camp there. Charred rocks and burned wood in a fire pit, makeshift shelters wrought of palmetto fans and banana leaves, the smell of a hastily-covered latrine pit. The body lay in the thickets of palmetto between the camp and the woods on the higher ground, three days dead by the smell of it, squirming with maggots.

  The buzzards grunted and hissed at him as he came close. They’d left little of the face – which was invisible, in any case, under its living, wriggling shroud – and what skin remained visible was dusky with the lividity of decay. But the boots weren’t Hannibal’s. Neither was the hair long like the fiddler’s, but straight and coarse. Indian hair.

  A Muskogee Creek, presumably, from Escambia County, Alabama.

  And by the behavior of the buzzards, the only corpse (or near-corpse) on the beach.

  The thought of searching the body, for either money, papers, or evidence of how the man had died, was literally nauseating. January backed away and returned to the abandoned campsite. The palm tree that had formed the corner of one of the shelters bore marks where a rope had fretted and scratched.

  They tied her here.

  Rage swamped him like a hurricane surge, momentarily blinding. Rage, terror, dread.

  Fresh bullet scars pocked the palm trunk, and another one nearby, but search as he might he found no blood in the sand near that tree. There was a great splash of it some ten feet away, and a trail that led into the fan-palm thickets behind the camp. It ended in the marks of scraping and dragging.

  The Leopard Society? Hannibal? One of Rose’s kidnappers – Maddox, Killwoman, Conyngham …?

  Have they somehow mislaid their own map to the treasure? Are they trying to double-cross Jericho? Get to the treasure – the secret – before him?

  Like a child’s wail, his prayer went up, Please, God, don’t let them have hurt her …

  Please, God, don’t let the world be as I know perfectly goddam well the world is.

  He tried to breathe, tried to steady his mind. This had all happened Saturday night, while he was pacing frantically back and forth in the bohio on Santiago Bay.

  There’s nothing I could have done. No way I could have saved her.

  He’d had whippings less terrible than the guilt and horror he felt. Than the fear that there was worse to come.

  They came ashore Saturday – because of the wind and rain? Did they anchor here the night, meaning to put out when the sea grew calm again and risk running around the Môle of St-Nicolas under the noses of Boyar’s troops and along the north coast to Le Cap?

  Or did they plan to take the easier route along the southern coast of the peninsula to Gonaïves?

  In any case, the camp had been attacked, driving them back into their boat.

  Hannibal?

  The Egbo?

  Someone else?

  Wherever they sailed, Hannibal remained behind, afoot. Alone. Maybe wounded badly.

  In Gonaïves – maybe sooner – I can find or steal or beg a place on a boat down the coast to Port-au-Prince. That’s the way Hannibal will have gone, if he’s still alive.

  He turned his steps eastward along the beach, beside the innumerable laughter of the turquoise sea.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The coast stretched east in a succession of shallow crescent beaches, thin strips of sand below mountains cloaked in light woodlands of ceiba and palms. Many times he had to scramble over steep slopes rising straight from the sea. No streams trickled from the thin tree-cover above him, and though the sea winds mitigated the hammering heat, still the sun oppressed him like a physical weight.

  His only companions were his thoughts … and fear.

  Educated in New Orleans and Paris, heir to the wisdom of Socrates and Shakespeare, Harvey and Newton, January knew himself to be as much a stranger in this land as if he’d been set ashore in Africa.

  Here, deceased ancestors still took a lively interest in the doings of their descendants. Secret brotherhoods united men of families and tribes against outsiders. Old gods whispered to mambos and root doctors from out of bottles and gourds. Those whose hearts and minds sought dreams beyond eating, sleeping, farming and their families were obliged by ignorance to give them up.

  He was a stranger, protected by no clan and no tribe.

  Holy Mary, Mother of God, walk beside me …

  He came around a long shoulder of scrubland and found a potholed, uneven trace presumably used by the inhabitants of whatever lakou eked out a living here, by charcoal burning and fishing and maybe growing a little coffee. He was weary, and thirsty, though he’d gone fairly slowly, searching as he went for any sign that Hannibal had passed this way, and as he rounded that shoulder of cliff, he could see a village on the shore where a river came down from the jungled mountains inland.

  Baie-de-Henne, Lobo had called the place. A little harbor with fishing boats.

  He wondered if he could find someone there to sell him food and transport him across the gulf. Or would they simply whisper to the Egbo that there was a stranger – possibly a spy – afoot?

  The path widened, and by the animal droppings he found along it he guessed that there were lakou in the neighborhood, whose members led donkeys to the village to get supplies. Farmland spread along the river below the town, and January followed the edge of the woods inland, to remain unnoticed.

  He remembered the drumbeats of last night.

  At the woods’ edge, however, he met two men and a woman, leading a donkey laden with provisions from the direction of the village. They hailed him in cane-patch French similar to that he’d grown up with – ‘Mo kiri mo vini,’ his mother called it with scorn, as if she hadn’t worked like a devil to learn proper French when she’d been freed and had moved to town.

  Flight, he knew from childhood brushes with the pattyrollers, would call more attention to himself than foreign speech. So he called out, ‘Bonjou,’ half-expecting his mother to magically appear and slap him for it, and the woman lifted her hand to him with a friendly smile. When she spoke it was with French words strung together on an African we
ft, like beads.

  ‘You not from here, brother,’ she said, and January shook his head with a rueful expression.

  ‘I’m come from Cuba.’ And, thankful that he didn’t have to come up with a fabrication which could be checked, he went on, ‘Three men, indios, kidnap my wife in a sailing boat. I thought they were slave-traders, but the fisherman who saw it – who followed them, may God reward him a hundred thousand times! – says they brought her here, to Haiti. Is that Baie-de-Henne down there ahead?’ He pointed toward the village, and all three of the farmers nodded. ‘Have you heard anything of this? Of Indian men, with a mulatto woman among them?’

  He didn’t expect that they had – he’d scanned the wharf with Rose’s spyglass and had seen no sign of the black-hulled skiff that Lobo had described – but one of the men, with a nod at the gris-gris around January’s neck, said, ‘You go ask Papa Grillo in Red Beach. He got a humfo just past the town, and he know everything. He hear everything.’

  ‘Would any in the town sell me food?’ He gestured to his own nearly-empty gunnysack – macoutes, they were called here. ‘Or any you know of, be willing to take me down to Gonaïves, or Port-au-Prince?’

  ‘The fishermen there are all out.’ The younger man nodded toward the jewel-blue waters of the gulf. ‘They’re not in till evening.’ He was skinny, with the thinness they all shared, the thinness of malnutrition and overwork.

  ‘And maybe better you not stay in the town that long,’ added the woman, glancing at him with worried eyes. ‘There’s men in town that watch for strangers, that work for the bokors. A stranger that no one will miss—’ She shook her head. Though her clothing was hand-woven, faded and shabby, still she wore a tignon bright and brave and fashioned of at least half a dozen kerchiefs, like the market women in New Orleans. The style of wrapping he dimly recognized as that signaling a married woman, but only the older market women these days kept closely to the old system of using a tignon to denote status. Except for the voodoos, women in New Orleans pretty much tied their headwraps as they pleased, the fancier the better.

  He thanked them and went on, giving the village wide berth. It was in his mind that he might also ask at the church for some help on his journey, but he’d heard no sound of bells. Priests, he recalled, had fled with the other whites, or been killed, and the church in Haiti had broken from the church in Rome. Once past the village, he turned his spyglass back upon it and saw that the steeple of the little church there was in ruins.

  There was a road, however, past the town – unpaved, and gashed with evidence of the summer’s torrential rains – and this made the going easier. Towards noon January retreated to the shelter of the woods, ate the remainder of his food and drank as little of the water as he could stand. He’d come, he guessed, about a dozen miles from where Lobo had left him on the beach; when he lay down in a palmetto thicket to sleep, he took a certain amount of care to pick a place where he wouldn’t be easily seen.

  He slept and dreamed of the corpse on the beach.

  A mile or so from Red Beach, with the evening beginning to come on, a man came down from the woods above the road and hailed him in a friendly fashion: was he a stranger here? Where was he bound?

  ‘I’m Tullio, I got a little farm up in the hills …’

  He spoke French, not the local language, and his hands weren’t a farmer’s hands. His clothes, though old, were of store-bought cloth, not homespun. When Tullio offered to buy him a p’tit-goave at a tavern he knew in the village (‘My cousin’s husband owns the place, best rum in the north-west …’) January excused himself.

  ‘My cousin, he said he’d meet me on the road past town.’

  ‘Where’s your cousin coming from? There’s nothing past town, brother, not for twenty miles. It’s not safe, walking when darkness falls.’ Tullio shaded his eyes and looked suggestively westward, where the sun was sliding towards the sea beyond the tips of Hispaniola’s two long peninsulas. ‘Much better you spend the night in town. My sister, she can put you up.’

  January couldn’t shake the man off until they’d passed the village – which was so small that it barely boasted a wharf – and he turned up the twisty little path which led, according to the farmers that afternoon, up the wooded shoulder of the hills to the humfo – the sacred compound – of Papa Grillo.

  Tullio put a hand on January’s arm, brow drawn with concern. ‘You want to watch out for old Grillo,’ he warned, dropping his voice almost to a whisper. ‘He works with both hands, you know? Poisons people and then sells them cures. Puts the cross on people and then they got to pay him to take it off. He’s a bokor – a werewolf as well, some say. Men who go through his gate sometimes don’t come out again.’

  Not much to January’s surprise, the first thing Papa Grillo told him – when one of the women pounding grain in the yard of the modest compound sent a child to fetch the white-bearded and thoroughly ugly hougan from the largest of the several houses – was that Tullio was the one who worked for the bokor, Efik, further up the valley. It was Efik who poisoned strangers, and then revived them as zombi and sold them to the mulatto planters on the south coast.

  ‘The smuggler boats, they come in and put out from Red Beach,’ grumbled the old man as he seated himself on one of the benches in the peristyle, the thatch-roofed marquee in the middle of the compound where the dances were held to honor the loa. ‘The President, he don’t care how les grands along the south coast get their workers. Mulattos.’ He spit. ‘Christophe should have killed them, along with the whites.’

  Cut-paper banners hung from the rafters overhead, bright against the shadows of the thatch. The central post – the avenue of the gods, before which Grillo sat on his bench – was painted red with black stripes, the table of stones built up around it scrubbed spotless. ‘President wants the súceries back, so he can get taxes from them. Free men, free women, they had enough of that kind of work in slavery times, they won’t do it. They just want to work their farms and raise their children. This Boyar say – this mulatto who call himself President – they’re strangers who got no business here anyway, why should he care?’

  He shrugged and offered January a gourd of ginger water. Just behind the peristyle stood a small house, and through its door January could see the shadowy altars of the various families of gods, Guédé and Rada and Petwo, gay with cut paper, beaded bottles, little dishes of candy and tobacco and cups of rum.

  ‘Since I’m a stranger here myself,’ said January, shaking his head in thanks, ‘and there’s two others who’ll die if I disappear, I’m going to say no. But thank you.’ He’d set down his rifle against the bench where he sat, but it was in easy reach of his hand.

  The hougan tilted his wall eye at him, then saluted him with the gourd.

  ‘I heard of those men,’ he said, when January had told him what he sought. ‘The indios that bring that mulatto woman ashore. There was shooting. One of the indios was killed and a blan’ shot, who got away into the trees bleeding—’

  ‘A white man?’ Shit. His heart turned cold at the recollection of the marks where the injured man had been dragged away.

  A stranger … who got no business here …

  ‘Indios shove the woman into their boat, climb in and row out a little. They set their sails when the tide turns and go east. The fishers say they seen them go by, in the dawn Sunday. They be going to Gonaïves, I bet.’

  They’d go straight across the gulf if Port-au-Prince was their goal. Heading definitely for Le Cap … ‘You didn’t hear what became of the blan’?’

  Grillo shrugged again, but his good eye rested probingly on January’s face. ‘The boys that seen all this, they were too scared to look for the blan’ in the night. When the men from the village go back in the morning, that blan’, he gone. I heard nothing of Tullio having him – they say he was bad hurt – but Tullio’s not the only one.’

  DAMN it. Horror filled him, and the knowledge that unless he reached L’Ange Rouge ahead of the Creeks and found what they were
looking for before they did, they would have no further reason to keep Rose alive. But, against that, the memory of Hannibal stepping jauntily off the Black Goose on to the wharf at Grand Isle.

  He didn’t have to come with us. Rose and I had to come to Cuba for our lives, but he came only for friendship.

  Only because I asked him to.

  Hannibal had said to him once, I’ve never been anything but a waste of air and boot-leather.

  But not leave him like this. To have his brain killed by whatever drug the bokors used, and his body – with who knew what dazed shred of consciousness still aware – turned over into slavery …

  It wasn’t my doing that Rose is here. But it IS mine that he came.

  And yet it was impossible – impossible – to abandon Rose …

  ‘You want me to throw the shells for you?’ the old man asked gently.

  ‘The man is my friend.’ January heard the desperation in his own voice.

  Heard, too, what Père Eugenius back in New Orleans would have said: This is your punishment for having that pagan priest back in Cuba throw them for you the first time.

  And, like his choice between Hannibal and Rose, he had no answer for that.

  The old man’s shell tray reminded January of Olympe’s: wooden, and very old, carved with the Twin Brother Gods, whose arms circled the perimeter of the board. Papa Grillo shut his eyes and rocked back and forth as he tapped the edge of the tray with the wand, recited the prayers to Papa Legba, then started in on all the legends connected with the shells in a high, rambling voice. Some were the same that Lazaro Ximo had recited, in the dark bohio in the walled slave village on Hispaniola Plantation. Others January half-recognized from when Olympe would do what she called a ‘full tale’, though generally she just threw the beans on the board. Papa Grillo sprinkled dust on the board and went on endlessly, rocking and reciting while the evening darkened around them and the women called their children to supper. Outside the compound, birds were crying their territories in the trees.