The Black God's Drums

by P. Djèlí Clark

  I go back over the sister’s words. The Jeannots took an oath: to take back the city or destroy it. Oya’s vision replays before my eyes: a giant skeleton’s grinning skull, rising to put out the lights of New Orleans. The pieces rattling around in my head suddenly fit together, and their meaning hits me all at once. “They want Shango’s Thunder!” I exclaim in alarm, jolting up straight in my chair. “They’re going to use it on the city!”

  Sister Agnès nods gravely, confirming my fears. “So we believe. And yes Ann-Marie, Jacqueline told us about the weapon.” I glance over to find the captain glowering at me and I shrug again. What’d she expect? You had to give information to get any from these two. “Fortunately for us,” the sister goes on, “we have the both of you.”

  That catches our attention, and we whip our heads about as one to look at the nun.

  She dips her head to me. “Touched by Our Lady Oya.” Her head swivels to the captain. “Blessed by Our Lady Oshun. Think it’s just by chance that you are both caught up in all this?”

  At the stove Sister Eunice cackles. “Non! Non! Not just chance! Not just chance at all!”

  The captain looks between the two women, her eyes narrowing. “Allyuh sure allyuh is nuns and not obeah women?” she asks.

  Sister Agnès only smiles: a plump knowing angel. I say nothing. Like I said before about these sisters: they’re odd.

  “Gumbo ready!” Sister Eunice declares. “Lucky for you, Jacqueline and Ann-Marie, I always start a small pot early—before making the other sisters’ midi meals. Just have to cut it five ways today.” She spoons steaming gumbo into several small bowls and walks over to set them in front of us. My mouth waters at the smell.

  “Mèsi! Mèsi!” Sister Agnès claps, receiving her bowl. “Now, Ann-Marie, let’s discuss how you are going to retrieve this scientist and spirit him back home.”

  That takes me by surprise. “Shouldn’t we warn the constables?” I ask. I don’t hold much affection for lawmen, but this seems something they should handle.

  Sister Agnès shakes her head. “Non. We can’t have the authorities involved. Should the constables take up this matter, the City Council will have to oversee it. And the Council is filled with too many ambitious men. Some of them might take it into their fool heads to keep this scientist and his weapon. Oh, they’ll say it’s for the good of the city, mo sèrtin. But doing so will make New Orleans a threat to the Confederacy, to the Union, even perhaps Haiti and the Free Isles.”

  “Not to mention the other powers who might rethink the treaty that protects us,” Sister Eunice puts in.

  Sister Agnès shakes her head a second time. “We don’t need any of that trouble here. The less who know of this weapon the better.” She turns her head sharply. “Don’t you agree, Ann-Marie?”

  The captain returns a deep considering nod. I think Sister Agnès has finally impressed her. “The Free Isles and Haiti prefer this remain an internal matter,” she affirms. “Besides, we not trying to have no big big fight. A small posse better for this. I can take some of me crew. Enough of we to handle these Jeannots.”

  “Tre byen!” Sister Agnès proclaims. “And Jacqueline will accompany you.”

  That’s the second thing that takes me by surprise. The captain turns wary eyes my way. “I don’t need the girl,” she says. For once I don’t argue. My part in our bargain is done. And I could do without a trip to the Dead City or getting caught up with Jeannots.

  “Oh, you do,” Sister Eunice disagrees, sitting down with her bowl. She jabs a silver spoon in our direction. “You both need each other. You just don’t know it yet. Heh!”

  I frown at her meaning, and want to protest. But in my head, I can hear Oya sliding her machetes one against the other. The sound of metal scraping on metal, slow but eager—readying for battle. I release a long inner sigh. Oya didn’t send her visions lightly. Whatever that grinning skull moon meant, it involves these Jeannots. Should have seen that earlier. But I was too caught up in my own affairs to take notice of how it was all connected. That means the sisters are right. I need to be there, like it or not.

  “Not to worry,” Sister Agnès says, cutting off the captain’s ready objections. “We’ll be sending you with some help. Sister Eunice? Do you have the items we managed to secure?”

  The other nun’s eyes widen and she sets down her gumbo, jumping up and running over to an old cast-iron pot-bellied stove in the corner of the room. It’s all covered in rust, and don’t look like it’s used for cooking anymore. She stoops down to swing open its small iron door and reaches inside to pull out what looks like a baking pan covered in a bundle of black cloth. It takes two hands to lift it, and when she brings it back she puts it down gently on the table and takes off the covering.

  Underneath, there are four long dark cylinders fitted into a tanned leather case. They remind me of the tall tin cans the factories use to put jellies and fruit in. Next to the case is a big clear glass flask with a long neck corked by black rubber and a wide round bottom, like the ones I seen at the apothecary shops. It’s filled up less than halfway with some green liquid. Not just a regular green either, but a colour so bright it glows like a lamp. I’m not sure what I’m looking at exactly, and lean in to inspect it closer. The captain does the same—then suddenly rears back, coming to her feet and knocking over her chair in the process. She’s staring at the green in that flask like it’s a coiled-up swamp moccasin.

  “Drapeto gas!” she hisses between clenched teeth.

  I snap my neck back around to the glass flask in shock, and almost jump back myself—except I got a bowl of gumbo in my lap and don’t intend to spill that. Drapeto! The stuff they use in the Confederate States on the slaves. To keep them from running away or rising up. To make them not want to do anything but work and do as they told. That’s what’s sitting on this table now, just a short ways from me. It makes my stomach knot up. And in my head, I hear Oya letting out a long string of Afrikin curses.

  “Drapeto gas!” the captain exclaims again, like she’s trying to make sense of it. She cuts narrow eyes to the nuns. “Allyuh know how dangerous this is?”

  “Quite,” Sister Agnès responds mildly. “That’s why we keep it in a flask, Ann-Marie.”

  The captain shakes her head. “Haiti and the Free Isles trying for years now to get they hand on this. To get spies to smuggle it for we, so to study it. Maybe find a way to make it weak or deaden it. And the two of you have some keep up here in a kitchen in a convent?” Only thing that match the disbelief in her voice is the awe on her face.

  “We have our contacts in the slave states,” Sister Agnès replies, her voice even and calm as unbothered water. I bet she do, I think. Everyone knows the sisters help smuggle in runaways from the Confederacy. “Though, this came to us by surprise. Not gas, as you can well see, but a liquid distillation, which likely becomes the gas.” She stops, putting fingers to her temples. “But why am I talking? Sister Eunice can explain better than I. She has a head for this type of tinkering.”

  The other nun don’t need no further urging to jump in. “Likely drapeto is made as a liquid,” she says, pointing to the flask. “It’s fitted into the masks—probably in canisters by what we’ve seen from designs—and then, by means of an additive, slowly made into vapor and passed through filters built into the mask to be inhaled.”

  My body lets loose a shudder that I can’t help, my mind thinking again to the photographs I seen. Coloured men and women, even children, with those big black masks fitted on the bottom half of their face—with a long, rounded end that stick out in the front. All you can really see are their eyes. Eyes that look so blank and empty, like the real them is somewhere sunken deep inside, drowning in all that green gas. And they can’t get out.

  “I hear just the smallest bit of it take your mind away,” I recite, remembering what I’ve heard. “Make it so that you walking but dead inside.”

  “Oh, it’s not that potent,” Sister Eunice assures me. “At least not this batch we have
here. From the tests we’ve done—” She stops, reading the wide-eyed looks both me and the captain are giving, then shakes her head. “Non! Non! Sister Agnès and I only tested it on each other!” That don’t make our eyes go any smaller, but she continues. “From what we can tell, the liquid takes a good dose to have any real effect. And it leaves you in a matter of hours. But during that time, your mind is very susceptible to suggestions.”

  “It is an unpleasant sensation,” Sister Agnès adds with a grimace.

  “Wi,” Sister Eunice agrees, though she sounds more curious than appalled. “But we think if adequately delivered, it could be used to proper advantage. To, say, take away the will to fight from an enemy?” Her fingers tap one of the dark canisters in the leather case, and for the first time, I realize those things ain’t filled with jellies. They’re filled with drapeto! The captain frowns but takes a few steps forward and reaches out a hand to gingerly run across the canisters.

  “Would have to get up close to deliver it,” she murmurs. “Maybe with a long rifle or—”

  “Already solved,” Sister Eunice proclaims. She takes out a canister and taps at a little silver handle fitted on top. “You pull at this and throw. Then boof!” She stops to make a sweeping gesture with her arms that makes me and the captain both jump. “Drapeto gas everywhere! Just be sure to have a mask on. My own invention.”

  She says the last part with a smug smile and the captain takes to staring at the two sisters, that disbelieving look on her face again. “The two of you is nuns?”

  Sister Eunice lets out another cackle.

  “Nuns with a few useful resources at our disposal,” Sister Agnès puts in, a smirk tugging at the corner of her lips. “And we make good use of them as we can. We’ve also been supplied with a fairly good idea of where the Jeannots now reside. And we’ll be sending Féral along as your guide.” The captain and I share a glance. “Whatever faces the two of you are making, you can put an end to it,” the nun scolds. “You’ll have to travel La Ville Morte on foot I’m afraid. Your airship will just scare off the Jeannots and you won’t be able to see a thing through that swamp, besides. Féral knows the Dead City probably better than anyone in this room. So she’s going with you, and that’s that.”

  We all turn to the girl who’s sitting on the ground, slurping her gumbo messily and gnawing loud as ever on a crab leg.

  “Féral!” Sister Agnès chides her. “Bon manyè! You know we wait for grace!” The girl scowls, wiping gumbo juice off her chin and lowering her bowl—but not the crab leg.

  “What wrong with she?” the captain whispers. “She gone in the head or what?”

  Sister Agnès blinks. “Wrong? Why nothing. Féral’s just not very refined. She hadn’t lived among people when we found her—wandering the swamp, you see. The convent wanted to put her out, after several, ah, incidents, with the other girls. But Sister Eunice and I convinced them to let us care for her. The Sisters of the Sacred Family welcome all, no matter caste or colour, or, for that matter, tameness. Despite her rough ways, she’s a sweet child, in truth.” She pauses. “But be careful. She bites.”

  The captain grimaces. “So I does hear.”

  Féral looks up, baring her teeth in a sharp smile, the end of a crab leg jutting out between them.

  * * *

  It’s sundown by the time we start out into La Ville Morte, behind the big iron wall that borders Swamp Pontchartrain. The boatmen who bring us run contraband and runaway slaves on rafts and small canoes regular along the waterway. Mentioning the two nuns’ names is enough to gain passage for cheap. They don’t ask why we out here. Seem like they familiar enough doing work for the sisters. And probably figure the less they know the better.

  Our first glimpse of the Dead City is stone buildings and houses rising up from black water far as you can see, covered in cypress trees and swamp moss. All this was supposed to be a new set of quarters stretching as far as Lake Pontchartrain. That was, until the first tempête noire come. No one expected that lake to rise up like it did, washing away everything and everybody in front of it. When the wall was raised up, they left that drowned city behind, abandoned with its dead. The swamp moved in right after to swallow up the rest—like it was just waiting for the people to leave to take back what belonged to it.

  None of the boatmen are willing to go too far inside, not with night creeping up. Lots of folk see La Ville Morte as one big cemetery of the drowned—sacred ground with spirits who shouldn’t be disturbed. We get dropped off just a ways in and the boatmen turn back, leaving us with wishes of luck and God’s protection. We accept both and begin our walk through the Dead City.

  It’s me, the captain, the bearded Haitian, who I find out is named François, and the big Chinaman I now know is Mongolian, Nogai (cowboy hat and all), wading through what used to be the streets of La Ville Morte. Féral is our guide. She walks, sometimes even swims, through the swamp water, hardly making a sound or a splash. Every now and again she stops and gazes about, looking up at buildings of weather-stained stone with plants and whole trees growing out their open windows. She makes us stop too, with sharp grunts and hand gestures. That’s about the most talking she ever do. Could be she’s trying to find her way, or to keep us from the deep parts out here, where the ground drops away and we could well drown. We wait it out. Then, when she’s good and satisfied, she starts up again and waves us to follow.

  “She know where she going?” the captain asks, striding beside me through water that comes up to her hips. The Haitian and Mongolian follow behind, carrying long rifles and big bundled sacks strapped to their backs.

  “Nobody knows the swamp or La Ville Morte better than the Hideaways,” I point out, pushing through water that reaches to my middle. Thankfully the sisters were able to get me and Féral some sturdy boots to step through all this muck. Some good britches too, and dark blue jackets they say was for Union drummer boys back during the war. They fit a bit tight but still nice, and make it so I don’t catch too bad of a chill. Kept my cap though. Don’t go nowhere without that. Night’s coming on quick now and it’s getting so I can’t barely make out much. But the swamp girl finds her way easy, taking us around moldering buildings and under whole trees that’s slipped off their roots and lying longwise.

  “Hideaways?” the captain asks.

  “The white folk who ran off into the swamp,” I explain. “People say when the uprising started against the Confederates, back during the war, all the big whites sent their families into La Ville Morte to hide with the house slaves. Only, those slaves run off to join the uprising and left them out here alone. Some of them white folk get so scared, they wandered deeper in and get lost—claim they heard rumors coloured people was killing all the whites or making slaves of them. They stayed and had children out here. And those children had children. Grow up wild as the swamp.” I tilt my chin to indicate Féral. “Every now and again, some of them wander out.”

  The captain eyes me funny at hearing the tale. I just shrug. “Least, that’s what people say—believe it or no.”

  She turns back to eye our guide, suspicion creeping over her face. “So is a granddaughter of a plantation owner leading we? Her mother was probably some mistress in a big house with a hundred slaves. Allyuh does trust she?”

  Imagining the swamp girl dressed up all fancy like some plantation belle I seen in pictures almost makes me laugh. “Féral don’t know nothing about any of that,” I assure her. “She not no plantation mistress. She just Féral, is all.”

  The captain seems to accept that, though she glances every now and then at the small girl as if expecting her to vanish and leave us lost. Most times, though, she’s got her eyes on the waters or turning her head real quick like she hear something. She seem bothered and uneasy. At least more than usual. The swamp will spook you like that, if you let it.

  We make our way around what used to be a church. All that’s left are walls, with clumps of hanging moss and vines growing through them like long twisting worms. You
can see where some swamp birds made nests in its windows, and they look down at us like we trespassing on their home. There’s a stretch of quiet, and I listen as the swamp that covers La Ville Morte comes to life with calls and croaks and chirping. Remind me of New Orleans in a way. After a bit, the captain talks again, though her voice is real low now.

  “How long Oya been . . . with you?” she asks.

  The question catches me by surprise. Didn’t think she wanted to walk down this road again. But I answer. “Long as I know myself. Ma maman said Oya’s strong in her people’s blood. The womenfolk, anyway.” I pause before venturing my own question. “How long Oshun been with you?”

  The captain takes a while, then says: “My grandmother see she in me since I was small. We house was near a river.” She stops again. “Sometimes, I could hear those waters singing to me sweet, sweet. They call my name. Like they know me.”

  In my head Oya whispers words that I repeat: “Oshun is at home in the rivers.”

  The captain makes a face like that’s not what she wants to hear. “My grandmother say Oshun can show me secrets in those waters, learn me how to heal and make people love and laugh.” She snorts. “But that not what I want to do with my life. I make up my mind that no goddess ruling me. When I big enough I run from that river, away from that sweet song.”

  I look down at the waters of the swamp. These waters come from Lake Pontchartrain—Oshun’s domain. “You hear that song right now?” I ask. There’s more silence. Then . . .

  “Yes,” the captain admits, voice down to a whisper now. “All around me. Calling.”

  So that explain why the woman is so damned fidgety. Whenever there’s a storm or high winds, Oya is at her strongest. I can hear her blaring in my head and all around me. In these waters, Oshun must be like that for the captain. Fighting it has to be like trying to push back a flood. In my head, Oya laughs. You can run from those old Afrikin goddesses. But they find you when they ready.