The River of Kings: A Novel

by Taylor Brown

  “What a table it would make, no? Broad enough to feed l’entourage of our king.”

  “Aye,” said another. “But how would we sail home such a gift, it is so big?”

  Le Moyne looked at them.

  “You would cut down such a tree pour une table?”

  “Not just any table, man. Une Table Ronde, like that of Arthur or Charlemagne.”

  “If not a table, what then?” asked another. “Un dais, fit for King Charles’s throne?”

  Le Moyne rolled his eyes and skulked off into the woods.

  “What?” they cried.

  They continued upstream, and the trees soon pressed close, the ribbon of river kinking and whirling between narrowed banks, rounding bights and eddies that Le Moyne struggled to mark for later mapping. In his notes he wrote: Le Goulet.

  The Narrows.

  Upstream, they were received by one of Utina’s river chiefs. He fed them bread and fish, telling them of his enemies in the foothills to the west, men who adorned themselves in plates of gold and silver that scattered his people’s fish-tooth arrows like thrown pebbles. Captain Vasseur, leader of the excursion, thought the chief must be speaking of Spaniards, so armored. But no, the chief assured him, these were men who lived at the foot of the Apalatci, mountains rich with many bright metals, heated and hammered to fit a man’s body like a second skin.

  He said Saturiwa, king of the coast, merely collected what metals he could from the shipwrecks. His own people sifted the silt at the confluence of the streams that formed the river. But the Apalatci range, this was the true source of these wonderful and unusual things, these fine stones and metals the French desired. So plentiful were the mountains with riches, they could be dug free by hand and floated down the river by canoe or barque.

  Captain Vasseur, so inspired, assured the chief that the French of La Caroline would ally themselves with Utina, king in the west, helping him to achieve victory against his enemies at the foot of the mountains. Le Moyne said nothing. It was not his place to question diplomacy, the wisdom of pledging themselves to the great enemy of their ally, the coastal king. A man who brought them corn and thatched their roofs, whose warriors moved fleet-footed and silent through the woods, disguised in the hollowed-out hides of deer. Le Moyne was only to record what he saw, and so he did.

  He sketched the natives knee-deep in the current, sifting the silt for bright nuggets carried down from the mountains in the river’s flow. They urged him to come in, to try it himself. He removed his boots and stockings and rolled up his culottes. He was wading in the current among them, learning their movements, when he cut his foot on something buried in the riverbed. He bent, found the object, and washed away the mud, holding it to the light.

  His heart jumped.

  A stone the shape of a dart. A glossopetra. A tongue stone. The petrified tongue of a dragon or giant serpent. Royals carried them as amulets to protect against poison and plague, or wore them about their necks like charms. They were found high in the cliffs of Malta, where Saint Paul turned the vipers to stone, and in mountainsides storied for ancient dragons. He tucked it quickly into the pocket of his tunic, worried the natives might not wish it disturbed, and he was thinking all the while of the great serpent risen from the river on the day of their arrival. Here was further evidence, a treasure more prized to him than any golden nugget.

  They departed for home at daybreak, and the onset of night forced the expedition to stop upstream of the fort. Here they were welcomed by one of the coastal chiefs, eager to hear of the enemy blood they’d shed upriver. After all, he assumed this to be their excursion’s purpose. Le Moyne watched as some of the men leapt up to demonstrate how they’d struck down a pair of enemy warriors, a complete fabrication.

  Captain Vasseur took up the lie.

  “Had not the rest flown before our swords, surely our victory would have been great.”

  The chief was well pleased at this. He called for a feast in the Frenchmen’s honor, seating them in his hall above even his sons. Partway through the feast, jolly with food and triumph, the chief asked to see the captain’s sword. His face darkened as he held the blade to the firelight. It was stainless.

  Vasseur held out his hands.

  “It carried such enemy blood, I was forced to wash it clean in the river.”

  “Ah.” The chief smiled, pleased with this excuse, and handed back the sword.

  A little later he asked to see their scalps.

  Again, Vasseur held out his hands.

  “It is not the custom of my warriors to avail themselves of such trophies.”

  Again the chief smiled, accepting the captain’s explanation.

  Le Moyne watched the chief’s sons, their torsos wide and slatted as carved sandstone. Their faces showed nothing, solemn as masks. Perhaps they believed the lies. Then came a gibbering through the hall, a thumping of the floor, and a holy man entered with a bowl held high and steaming above his head. It was the black drink, cassena, consumed at rituals. The chief and his sons and warriors each drank from the bowl. Soon their faces shone, their eyes round with new mania. White blisters of sweat quivered on their noses and chins. The priest dislodged a dagger embedded in the central beam of the hall and began dancing among them, skipping and stomping and chanting, the blade winking in the torchlight.

  Le Moyne and his companions cut eyes at one another, their hands creeping toward their swords. Meanwhile Vasseur, their leader, sat fixed in his seat of honor, a pained smile upon his face. The priest whirled around the table, striking strange heraldic attitudes, first rampant with arms outflung, now embowed like a leaping dolphin, toeing his way across the floor. He hovered behind each of the chief’s sons, chanting, his gaze locked even as his limbs hurled and spun, and none of the sons turned to look. He came to the last of them, the most boyish of the line, and the dagger fell in two quick whips of light—“hyou, hyou!”—plunged hilt-deep between the boy’s ribs.

  A stifled scream bloated the boy’s face, his neck webbed and veined. He stared only at the far wall, refusing to look upon the wounds in his side, twinned like the bite of a great fanged serpent. Soon he began shaking, seizing, and his eyes rolled white in his skull. He collapsed, his limbs splayed, his blood coiling in the dirt. Now the other sons rushed to kneel about him, groaning through their teeth, as if to voice his pain. The women were let into the hall, mothers and wives and daughters who prostrated themselves at his feet, keening, their eyes rounding balefully to the sky.

  The French sat immobile, wide-eyed, hands on the pommels of their swords. The natives would not speak now save for the names of their enemies, vicious utterances that crowded the hall. When the boy was taken away, Le Moyne went with the interpreter—a man called La Caille, from the previous expedition—to try and learn what had happened. They found the wounded son on a woven mat in a nearby hut. The air was ragged with smoke; a clutch of women knelt at his side. They were placing poultices of fire-warmed moss on his wounds, weeping as they did. He looked but a child now, his face ashen, a white paste gumming the corners of his mouth. His breath came fast and shallow, fugitive. Le Moyne and La Caille looked at one another.

  “Ask them why he was struck.”

  The women responded with open palms, their faces pleading.

  “No trophies,” translated La Caille. “No weapon-blood.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  The women slapped their sides where the boy had been struck.

  “The wounds,” said La Caille. “The wounds must be remembered.”

  “Whose wounds?”

  Back at the boats, the men pressed them for an explanation. Le Moyne looked from face to face, each awed and expectant.

  “If warriors return from battle with no evidence of shedding enemy blood, the chief must order his most-beloved son struck by the blade that killed his ancestors. The wounds of the dead are renewed, their deaths newly lamented.” Le Moyne held out his hands. “It is like a penance, I think.”

  The men looked
at one another, their eyes wide.

  “Des sauvages,” they whispered. “Des barbares.”

  Savages.

  Captain Vasseur decided it was not too dark to navigate the river after all. They cast quickly from shore. Le Moyne stood in the bow of the vessel, thumbing the tongue stone in his pocket. The moon trembled like a silver platter on the river, the same as it did on the quay-waters of Dieppe. He wondered at the blood ritual he had witnessed, at how strange and strangely familiar it seemed.

  But back at the fort, in the days that follow, the story of the chief’s son is soon forgotten. For it is not of bloodletting the men want told. It is of the Apalatci. The mountains.

  “Apalatci,” they whisper. “Apalatci.”

  Gold.

  10

  Altamaha River, 1975

  Hiram Loggins pushes upriver through the swirling dawn mist, his hand on the twist-grip throttle of an outboard motor. The two-cycle din sets river birds to flight, rails and storks and ibises trailing their long, stiltlike legs. He is wearing another man’s coveralls, fresh from the drawer with the fold-lines still in them, the name Barlow stitched on the patch over the heart. He is wearing another man’s boots as well, size twelves—a size too big—and he has the taste of another man’s woman in his mouth. A taste he can’t get out.

  It’s that red hair, maybe, that sets him on fire, those blues eyes that might cool him. He’d had her there on the porch, on the rail, with her husband snoring just inside the house.

  “Dead to the world,” she said. “Take a load of buckshot to wake him up.”

  Then a second time, in the hull of this very boat, Barlow’s, too, as he slipped it into the creek. He’d never been with a woman like that, that moved like she did, that forced him so deep, looking like he was killing her with every thrust. And still she wanted more, her white legs climbing him yet higher, her heels digging into his kidneys, her toes kinked. She was well made beyond anything he’d seen, like another species almost, so wet-hot he thought his thing might come out pinked.

  After the second time, he stood in the boat, his new coveralls on but unzipped, and watched her step back into her panties on the creek bank. The ink under his skin was still burning, as if danger were yet near, in the trees or wiregrass or water.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “I got a floathouse. Upriver. Just you and me.”

  She tried not to laugh.

  “You were good, I’ll give you that. But you want to take me out of here, it won’t be to no shantyboat.”

  He could take a punch, always could. In the chin or ribs or tight-made belly. A skill learned early on the river. It didn’t matter if you bled or fell, as long as you didn’t cry. He set his jaw, stubborn and underbit, and ripped the starter cord on the outboard, waking the thing in a blue puff of oil smoke. He pointed the bow upriver, into the dark kinks he sought when the straighter world went crooked.

  Now he can feel the dawning sun on his back, clearing the trees, and he twists the throttle to the stop. He is racing daylight. They are both headed upstream, the sun burning off the white river of mist that conceals him. No witnesses but the tree birds and alligators, the wild hogs rooting in the bushes along the shore. Even to them he might seem the ghost of something skating upriver, a shadow in the mist.

  The Amelia-Jo is gone, he knows—seized by the DEA, surely, laced now with official tape and writs—and he doesn’t know how many of his men got away. He heard splashes in the night, other men jumping ship, but he didn’t see any of his crew as he made his escape. Sheriff Poppell turned on them, acting as if he and his deputies were out to bust the shipment, not protect it. Hiram, floating on the far side of the boat, one hand on the hull, heard the drawl come sliding from the lawman’s mouth.

  “Thank God y’all shown up. We could use the reinforcements intercepting these here grouper-catchers. Didn’t see you was DEA in all this dark.”

  Hiram reported the boat stolen early this morning, calling from a payphone at one of the dark little marinas on his way up the river. The DEA will know it was him, but they will have a tough time proving it. Still, he figures it will be a long time before he sees his boat again, if he ever does. Evidence, they’ll say, part of an ongoing investigation. Apologies, they’ll say, somebody dropped a wrench on the gauges or ripped open the upholstery looking for contraband. Somebody cut a hole in the hold, looking for secret compartments, or broke off the rudder putting it in storage.

  This is the sixty-foot trawler it took him ten years to save for, finding a bank to finance the part he couldn’t. In the span of a night he’s traded it for a ten-foot johnboat, trading also the arms of a good home-woman for the legs of another man’s wife. All this, and little to look forward to now but the decks of other men’s boats.

  He spits and wipes his mouth with the back of his arm.

  He motors upstream of the floathouses that jumble the riverbanks, entering the Narrows, finding the bend where a line of willows grows along the bank. Rag Point. He runs the bow into the reeds and steps onto shore. He has his jeans from earlier with him, a crusty ball wadded under his arm. He snaps them flat, disbursing flakes of dried mud in every direction, then ties them around the trunk of a willow that stands along the shore, knotting them leg to leg. An offering. A few of the other trees bear rags or torn shirttails like rotten neckties, old talismans long forgotten, the faith in such powers mostly lost. Done, he curls his boat in the river and heads for the creek of his birth, passing the city of shantyboats watching dim-windowed from the river’s banks.

  11

  Altamaha River, Day 1

  The sun burns low behind them, a fiery peach that casts their shadows long, a pair of black lances on the river. They pass the entry to Steamboat Slough, the site of an old freight landing, and soon Double Yellow Bluff rises before them, shouldered high from the water like a yellow clay beach. It’s empty but for a single alligator, four feet long.

  Hunter scratches his nose.

  “Spring break, and no girls in string bikinis to welcome us.”

  “You come to the wrong beach for that,” says Lawton. He squints at the alligator. “Though you got one there might indulge. Love that little pecker of yours clean off.”

  “Know what I heard, Lawton?”

  “No.”

  “Too much muscle, it’s bad for your dick. Not enough blood to go around. You might ought to keep that in mind.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “How come you think Arnold quit bodybuilding? Dick like a rubber band.” Hunter droops his index finger, frowning.

  Lawton sniffs. “It was his heart made him stop.”

  “Well, what else would he say? Conan the Barbarian can’t have a limp dick.”

  Lawton growls.

  “Where’d all the college kids go for spring break? Panama City, some bullshit?”

  “Lot of them. Few down to Mexico.”

  “You wanted to go?”

  “I don’t have the money for that. Not much my scene, anyway.”

  “That’s because you’re smart.” Lawton places his paddle across his lap and reaches into his vest for his can of dip. “Bunch of horny, spoiled-ass college kids drinking neon shit and humping in the street. It’s a damn disgrace is what it is. No wonder there’s countries want to blow us off the map.” He tucks a wad of tobacco under his lip, screws closed the lid, and looks at Hunter. “Still, though, you got to put your dick in more than a tube sock sometime.”

  Hunter feels his face redden.

  “Big talk from you. For all you know I’m knee-deep in it, beating ladies off with a stick.”

  Lawton lifts his sunglasses and looks him up, down, his blue eyes big as little oceans.

  “Nope. You ain’t been getting any.”

  “Least I don’t have to be fed saltpeter to keep me from soiling the sheets.”

  Lawton grins. “If that’s what they’re doing, brother, it ain’t working. I been on ships it’s a factory of fist-pisto
ns under the hatches. You’d think they were hand-powered.”

  They paddle on past the beach, and Hunter is thinking of the girls at school. They’re so golden, their calves and shoulders and necks; their teeth and toes gleam. They aren’t the same species as him, seems like. They can’t be. Their language isn’t even the same.

  He fingers the shark’s tooth at his neck.

  “Seriously, though. When you guys are deployed, living in a hooch or out in the field or whatever, how is it you deal with, you know…”

  “The threat of vasocongestion?”

  “Vaso-what?”

  “Blue balls, brother. Serious business there. We handle it the same as everybody else, just takes more creativity. You ain’t really jacked off till you done it kneeling in a hole you dug, hunched in full kit, trying to see a six-month-old copy of Maxim with your night-vision goggles.”

  “Damn.”

  Before long they’re in sight of Rag Point, where the low-hanging willows along the bank once fluttered with hundreds of makeshift pennants, torn shirttails and sleeves and bandannas. Their father said it was a sacrifice to the river. A man who failed to “treat” the point could expect a world of hurt to come down on him before he saw the mills of Darien, if he ever did.

  Lawton noses his boat into the bank and jumps out. He hitches his bowline to a snag and turns around, fists jammed on his hips.

  “You coming?”

  Hunter is still maneuvering toward shore.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  Lawton already has his dive-knife out, luminous in the purpling light. He’s cutting the tail from his shirt.

  Hunter shores his boat and steps past him.

  “I got to piss.”

  He walks into the trees. It’s dark under the drooping willows, a world dappled gunmetal and gray. There are no rags he can see. He wonders how many old shirttails are buried in the ground beneath his feet, their magic dwindling as they rot away. He picks a bush and unzips his shorts and looses himself, a yellow-bright beam. He’s thinking he needs to hydrate when he feels his shirt yanked taut, slashed, and he whirls to find Lawton standing behind him, grinning, holding a strip of his shirttail like a cut-out tongue. In his other fist, the knife gleams.