The River of Kings: A Novel

by Taylor Brown

  Lord d’Ottigni, leader of the detachment, yells from the boat.

  “Mother-cunt of Christ, Le Moyne! Move it!”

  Le Moyne pushes through the red sea of bodies, the flesh leaping back as if parted. Only their fingertips graze him, his cloak and gun. His body is angular now, sharp with hunger. The world has been growing quickly colder, browning and hardening under the paling sky. The woods are all but empty of game, the fish hidden in deeper holes. Even the alligators remain unfound. The mutineers took much of the remaining stores. The hard bread is nearly gone. Laudonnière assures them that reinforcements will arrive in April. Ships from France laden with provisions. They need only subsist until then.

  Then came Utina, king in the west. Give him twenty guns, he said, and he would open the road to the Apalatci. They had only to defeat his enemies at the foot of the mountains. In that high country would be every good thing. Gold, of course, and silver and copper, too. Surely a man could not be hungry who was possessed of such riches. The scouts dispatched to the west sent back hunks of rock that twinkled with precious metals, plates of gold and silver the tribes of the foothills wore as armor in battle. Les métaux précieux. Here was dream annealed, become reality, the golden west that would sanctify their journey, their blood and hardship. They need only side with this man Utina, the western king. The mortal enemy of Saturiwa, their once-ally.

  “Twenty guns,” said Laudonnière. “I will give him thirty.”

  A new barque was completed in eighteen days. The artificers kept shrinking, it seemed, even as the boats grew before them, as if the vessels were caulked with their marrow, hammered fast with their very mettle. La Caille had returned from his weeks in the forest. He seemed older to Le Moyne, darker, more sharply made. A necklace of boar tusks hung from his throat. Together they watched the ships being built.

  “Salvation is always upriver, eh, Le Moyne? A few leagues farther, just over the next horizon.”

  “Salvation is more than a full belly and purse of gold.”

  “Let us hope.”

  Le Moyne’s gun continues sailing through the crowd of natives, his armor clanking. On his opposite shoulder he carries his bedding and kit. He feels a weight lifted and turns to find a giant of a man taking the burden under his own arm, bowing in deference. The man’s body is devastating, slabbed and ribbed with power, though he wears the long hair and skirts of a woman. Le Moyne sees other such giants amid the crowd, she-men bearing the detachment’s provisions under their arms like a race of overlarge footmen.

  “Hermaphrodites,” says one soldier, his voice a hiss. “I heard they have no balls. What do you think, Le Moyne?”

  Le Moyne looks at the giant before him, sweet-faced and built like a mountain. He thinks of the paintings of angels hanging in the cathedrals of Europe, genderless beings whose long swords smite devils and serpents.

  “No balls?” he says. “I heard they have four.”

  “And two dicks,” says someone else. “So they can fuck you in the front and back, simultanément.”

  “How your mother likes it,” says another.

  That night they feast on corn and venison from Utina’s stores, a plenty they have not experienced for weeks.

  “If I am killed in battle tomorrow,” says one man, “at least it will be with a full stomach.” He laps the meat from a thighbone.

  Another belches. “Unless you shit yourself empty in the night.”

  “A glorious shit, mon ami. I will hug that squat-tree like my wife.”

  “As if your wife is so skinny.”

  “Aye, she has an ass the size of a house. That’s how I know I’m home.”

  “Laudonnière’s chambermaid is skinny as a sapling,” says another. “And flat as a plank. Would you not have her?”

  “Have her? I would split her like an iron wedge, and she would beg me do it again.”

  As they sit cross-legged before their food, the she-men keep emerging from the village storehouse with baskets of fruit and meat, carrying them into the darkness. They dwarf even the largest warriors. Yet there is a gentleness to them. A monklike calm. They seem always at some ritual, a step beyond the world. They are called “two-spirits” in the native tongue.

  Le Moyne’s countrymen watch them with hooded eyes.

  “Utina’s people do not seem so hungry,” says one, “hard as the season has been.”

  “Oui,” says another, chewing. “You would think them more generous with their new friends downriver. What say you, Le Moyne?”

  Le Moyne sets a bone in the communal bowl.

  “I say friendship must be proven.”

  “Ah,” says the first man. He pats the gun barrel set across his lap. “And what better way than this?”

  Later they watch the two-spirits stuff a stag’s hide with the bounty of their stores, swelling the hollowed-out beast with new innards: a giant fruit-heart and lungs of eared corn, bones of cut cane and muscles of smoked meat. They work slowly, with great care, as if they mean to resurrect the beast by such bounty. Le Moyne sketches them by firelight. He is the last of his countrymen to bed down, his head nodding over the page. The two-spirits are still working when he falls asleep.

  Dawn finds the stag raised high above the plain, bounding as if into the rising sun. It is the greatest beast killed in the cold of the year, mounted upon a spear of the tallest pine, the tawny hide sewn up with the choicest fruits and nourishments of the land. Its neck is wreathed in leafy favors, its kingly antlers trailing garlands of plants and roots. The natives kneel naked at the foot of the stake, their arms thrown up to mimic the crown of antlers.

  Le Moyne and the others gather on a hill overlooking the scene, and Chief Utina walks among them, pointing and patting their backs, his body red-striped over the exotic signs that ink his skin. He is even more powerful in body than Saturiwa, king of the coast, as if men grow only larger to accommodate the western lands. He tells them his people are offering this mighty stag to the sun, their god, who might make his kingdom plentiful in the spring of the year. They wish to be strong and fierce and able, he says, to kill their enemies and feed their children.

  Le Moyne has produced his paper and stylus, and he crouches to one side, sketching the scene. The stag darkens, silhouetted against the rising sun. Soon the white orb of power perches boiling upon the spiked setting of antlers, fat as a jewel, and Le Moyne finds himself praying as he works, the words slashing quick as sketched lines through his mind.

  Please God let us scatter our enemies like sheep before the wolf and none of us fail his frères d’armes. Myself foremost Father God let me stand unquailed before my enemy’s arrows and clubs. Give me the courage to stand and fight. Let us find what we seek in the west to our king’s glory and yours. And let it sate us Father God that we may not starve for want of bread or blood. Let us water the earth with only a little of your creations’ blood and that we spill be but the blood of our enemies. Please God let us not starve. Fill the woods with game, our guns with powder. Make our hands steady and eyes keen, our aims true. Let us be the instruments of your will in this land, the sharp tip of your power. Let us not fail you nor ourselves nor our dark brethren here at the end of the earth. Grant us victory now and in the days to come.

  “Artist!”

  Le Moyne jumps, looking up. There stands Lord d’Ottigni, lieutenant-confidant of Laudonnière, who bears upon his neck and jawline the years-old scar of a misfire. The flashpan of an arquebus ignited in his face, the once-melted flesh hardening into a gleaming terrain of ridges and valleys and veins, like a miniature of the high country for which they are bound.

  “Artist, you have put a face on the sun.”

  Le Moyne, surprised, looks down at his sketch. There hangs a burning face in the upper corner of the scene, arched in power over the land, crowned in long arrows of light. He clears his throat.

  “So I have.”

  A wicked half-grin twists d’Ottigni’s face.

  “You are an idolater, no?”

  �
�I—I wish only for our king to know how these people imagine their deity.”

  D’Ottigni frowns, perhaps disappointed.

  “Tell me, artist. What of its countenance, this Soleil? Pleased or angry with the world it sees?”

  Le Moyne cocks his head, looking himself.

  “Truly I cannot yet tell. Perhaps we must wait for what the season will bring.”

  “Wait?” D’Ottigni smiles, his face twisted and bright. “A lot of confidence you have, artist, when you might not survive the morrow.”

  Le Moyne stiffens.

  “Not confidence,” he says. “La foi.”

  Faith.

  But Lord d’Ottigni does not hear him. He has turned his ruined face to the sun. His weapons, the sharp edges of his armor, gleam.

  28

  Darien, Georgia, 1993

  They’re calling it the Storm of the Century, a cyclone that comes sidewinding out of the Gulf in mid-March, a wheel of destruction the size of a continent. The squall line strikes the Big Bend of Florida. The storm-surge blasts across oceanfront streets, ripping palm trees from the ground and sending boats into dining rooms and shopping mall parking lots. The winds gust to one hundred miles per hour, unleashing a brood of tornadoes that turns the sky a sickly green. Debris crazes the air, roofs whirl like giant distraught birds through the sky. The spiky pines of the coast rip open the storm’s belly like claws. Snow begins to fall on Florida, six inches on the Panhandle, and the storm wheels northward across Georgia, whiting the land, felling trees and killing power.

  “Goddamn end of days,” says Hiram, squinting through the windshield wipers.

  He’s at the wheel of his wife’s Chrysler Town & Country, a station wagon with long slats of faux wood trim down the sides. They are plowing up the old coastal highway, the car rocking and shivering in the wind, lurching murderously toward the trees at every gust. The world is sideways, the big roadside oaks and pines heaving like an angry green sea. Clumps of moss tumble across the road like doomed opossums or raccoons—maybe some of them are. The tires of the Chrysler thump again and again over nameless wreckage the pavement feeds them, and Hiram keeps the accelerator down, his jaw slightly open, his breath coming through his teeth.

  In the rearview mirror he can see his two slavering boys beating each other silly, each wearing a pair of overlarge white gloves. He looks at his wife riding shotgun.

  “Those goddamn Mickey Mitts. One of them’s gonna knock the other’s tooth out before we even hit the county line. Twenty bucks for the damn things, another two hundred for the dentist.” He shakes his head. “Shitfire.”

  “Hiram!”

  He swerves around a fallen branch.

  “I seen it.”

  They’ve been down in Orlando, the boys’ once-in-a-lifetime trip to Disney World. For years, Jo-Beth has been after him to take them. He argued that everything was too overpriced down there.

  “A kingdom of Yankees that don’t know no better than to pay twenty dollars for a picture of their kid with some kiddie-diddler in a mouse suit full of trapped farts and lunchmeat-breath.”

  “It ain’t that bad.”

  “Ain’t bad? The got-damn place eats up money like a big hole in the ground. In Florida of all places, the drooping dick of America.”

  Jo-Beth is hard, though, always was. She has a square jaw like a man and big viselike hands, her hair shot through with iron. If Annabelle is the red dream of power and speed, of a world singing him yes—yes and yes and yes—Jo-Beth is his old battleship-gray truck churning through mired roads, never taking no for an answer. Her siege of the Magic Kingdom was deliberate, medieval. Mickey magnets on the refrigerator and Epcot brochures on the kitchen table. Disney movie nights and whispers before bed. It was a place every boy ought to experience, she said.

  “Shit. I never did.”

  “And look how you turned out.”

  Finally he caved, throwing down his ballcap and stomping it flat.

  “All right, goddammit.”

  They left Orlando a day early to race the storm home. The radio man says roofs are collapsing all across the state of Georgia, homes and factories not built for the burden of snow, and airports are closed up and down the Eastern Seaboard. There are whiteouts in the mountains north of Atlanta. The National Guard is deploying in 6x6 trucks along the roads, aiding motorists trapped in their cars. A freighter has gone down in the Gulf and countless other vessels are missing at sea. There have been over thirty deaths reported in Florida already, another ten in Georgia so far. It’s seven below freezing in Savannah; people are huddled in blankets in the powerless dark. Farther north, the snow is falling at three inches an hour, building record drifts. The weather people are calling it “thundersnow.”

  Hiram maneuvers around more limbs fallen across the road, grinding his teeth. Orange Asplundh chipper trucks have come out too early, parked lopsided on the shoulder. Ponchoed men cling to the machines in the screaming wind and rain and snow, trying not to be blown into the churning throats of their hoppers. Road signs shudder and twist; in front of a badly shingled house, a Silverado sits crushed under a fallen oak, the window glass blown out in icy blue pebbles. They pass the entrance to the old rice plantation, Hofwyl, which gives tours to schoolkids now, and the county line isn’t but a mile ahead. The road turns a long bend and the trees open up, a paved causeway over the wide brown marsh flats of the Altamaha River Delta.

  Hiram stomps the brakes with both feet.

  There is no marsh. The delta is completely flooded over, the road skimming the very surface of a giant inland sea roiling and capping like a world aboil. Hiram’s heart pummels his breastbone. Here is the sea risen up against him—the outgoing tide beaten inshore by cyclonic winds, the river crashing against it, the land overrun in high water. In places, dark rivers cross the road, who knows how deep, and the floodwaters swell and break against the shoulders of the causeway, spitting foam. The backseat is quiet, no more slapping of mitts to flesh. The punches no longer fly. The boys have smashed their faces against the cloudy windows, their mouths O-shaped with awe.

  “We ought to wait it out,” says Jo-Beth. “Turn around and get a hotel room.”

  Hiram can feel the signs on his skin tingling, making themselves known. The swallows pinned fluttering to his shoulders, tugging at his spirit, the North Star pointing him on. There’s something he needs to see.

  “Fuck it,” he says, “y’all wanted rides.”

  He pegs the accelerator to the floor. The tires skitter for traction, the rain slurring across the windshield, the little engine racketing under the hood.

  29

  Altamaha River, Day 3

  Hunter looks up, watching his brother’s feet on the rungs of the ladder. The rest of him disappears into the treed-over gloom of the old railroad bridge. It’s dusk and tiny shapes flit in the lights of the park across the river, fliers drawn into the electric suns. The shrieks of children float over the water, and the heavy hawing of whiskey-throated men. Hunter looks down at the boats, hidden in a thicket along the bank, and then back at his brother, a cloud of shadow above him. He sighs and grips the steel rungs of the maintenance ladder, hauling himself off the ground.

  Earlier that afternoon, they rounded a long bend, the sun high above them like a frying egg, and there it was: the old abandoned swing bridge at Altamaha Park. Big iron trestles stretched from the far bank, skeletal trapezoids bloodied with rust, and part of the bridge—a swing span—was turned parallel to the river’s flow, allowing the passage of boats too tall to slip beneath the fixed trussworks. Thousands of freight cars once thundered across the river here, along with the Silver Meteor and Orange Blossom Special, the great passenger trains of the Seaboard lines. But this section of rail had been abandoned for nearly as long as they could remember, the trains diverted to newer tracks, the work of changing ownerships and accidents that occurred along such elevated stretches of line.

  The park itself sat on the bank. There were two boat ramps, a man-made beach,
a netted-off swimming area with Styrofoam floats to mark its limits. There were cabins for rent and campsites for RVs and tents, a kids’ playground complete with slides and monkey bars, a lighted fishing pier and floating dock. A jumble of old river-houses lined the banks just downstream, each perched on thin, weak-seeming stilts. The floathouses here were all gone, hauled away or cut up by axes and chainsaws when the state ruled against them two decades ago.

  They dragged their boats up the little beach, watched intently by two leathery women in beach chairs who twittered and giggled. They had crinkly cigarette faces and loud fingernails and koozied beers, their fleshy amplitudes hardly contained by stringy bikini ties. Their children splashed in the muddy water. Hunter watched one of the women dig her painted toes into the sand, staring right at him.

  Lawton caught him looking.

  “You don’t want none of that. Rode hard and put up wet, them two.”

  Hunter felt his face burn.

  “I wasn’t looking like that.”

  Lawton looked at him: Sure you wasn’t.

  They tied off their boats and headed for the camp store set some ways back from the river itself. The door jingled as Hunter walked in, the cold blast of machine-air shocking him after two days without air-conditioning. He bought two hot dogs in yellow buns from the glassed rotisserie, each cradled in a paper tray of curlicue fries, and a bloodred can of Coke from the chipped ice of a display bucket. Lawton met him at a picnic table outside with a triple stack of hamburger patties set in a tray of near-colorless lettuce and tomato. A few purple onion circles were glopped in mayonnaise.

  “The hell is that, Lawton?”

  “Salad.”

  “That is the sorriest salad I have ever seen.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  Hunter bit into his hot dog, backing this with a handful of fries. “You worried you’re getting fat or something?”