The River of Kings: A Novel

by Taylor Brown

  Laudonnière stands before the broken men. His collar seems stiffer today, whiter, his chest more fully swelled. His face is grim, as if displeased with the return of his prodigals. As if it pains him to speak their fate.

  “God,” he says. He pauses at the word. “I ask you men: Who but God has elected our king, by whose pleasure we embarked upon this journey? It is His Majesty in whom the power of God resides, and we are bound by oath to spare not our lives in service to him, and to obey whomever he appoints to command in his name.” He pauses again, hands clasped behind his back, chin high. He is nodding faintly, as if in agreement with some dictum whispered in his ear. “By such contract you have fed upon the king’s bread and drunk his wine, you have been given safe passage across the oceans and through the storms. And yet you abandon your integrity the moment it suits you, choosing to pursue earthly gains in lieu of the duties to which you are sworn. In doing so you have disobeyed not only man but God. For just as our king has been elected to reign over us, so have I been elected to rule in his name, to carry the writ of his power in my hand. You have thought, perhaps, that in this new land you might escape the justice of man, for your king is far, your sins hidden from his sight. Perhaps you could. But no man might escape the justice of God. Whose winds but his have brought you back here, to receive the fate you have earned?”

  Le Moyne, watching, can feel the swell of the men, the wet mouths and heavy breaths, like a pack of dogs. The want of bread has been forgotten, for this moment, in thirst for blood. Laudonnière looks from face to face of the returned, as if deciding each of their fates individually. He decrees that the four leaders of the sedition are to be hanged, naming them each, the nobleman Fourneaux first among them. The others will be repatriated.

  Grumbles and murmurs from the crowd. Unrest. Some of the men go to speak with him. Laudonnière cocks his head, allowing their petitions. He nods and nods, as if considering mercies. A generous ruler.

  Yes, he decides. Yes. They may put the condemned to the firing squad instead of the noose. Yes, they may hang their bodies high along the river’s banks, a feast for the vultures and crows.

  38

  Altamaha River, Day 3

  Hunter feels the tug of the umbilical as they swim. Lawton’s long black fins cycle beneath the surface, pulling him along. He knows a flashlight would illuminate a galaxy of white-fired eyes along the banks, like monsters in the dark of a closet or under the bed. Tethered to Lawton he feels safer. Anyone would. A vessel towed in the wake of a destroyer, with no bearing of its own. No control. Without thinking, he pulls his dive-knife and cuts the line.

  Lawton rolls over in the water.

  “The line break?”

  “Must have.”

  On the bank Lawton looks at the length of parachute cord, the white yarn-guts spilling out at the cut. He looks at Hunter.

  “You cut it.”

  It’s almost a question.

  “I didn’t like being roped in like that.”

  “It was for your safety.”

  “I don’t need to be put on a leash.”

  “It was just a buddy-line, Hunter.”

  “Then why do you give a shit?”

  Lawton looks down at the cord, frayed in his hand. He shakes his head, unable to understand, and Hunter feels a pang of regret for cutting it. He starts to reach out, to touch his brother’s shoulder, but Lawton has already turned into the bush, disappearing into the shadow of the bridge.

  They hike through the swampland dark. The concrete supports loom like monoliths, ruins of a disappeared civilization, each clasped in a dark harness of vines and roots. Moonlight falls broken through the canopy of cypress and tupelo, lying before them like shattered glass. Hunter keeps expecting it to crunch under his feet. They find an old maintenance ladder and climb back up to the long road of leaves.

  Hunter’s knee hardly hurts now. Sometimes the pain will rise and rise, peaking like a mountain inside him, like cold screaming stone, and then he will be outside of it, numbed, his knee pulsing like a tiny beacon at the bottom of a sea thick and dark as vein blood. In the hospital, the heavy opiates streaming through the IVs felt almost familiar, a dark tide that floated him over the pain. Sometimes, swinging the ax at practice, his shoulders will be balled with acid, his forearms corded with burning fuse, and then he will be out of himself, gone, and the block of pine will fall white-hearted at his feet like a surprise.

  He watches Lawton marching down the long tunnel of trees, where railcars once screamed. His brother has made a career of pain. The men he ranks among, they are the elite, the tip of the spear. They can run and swim and climb for hours, tireless as machines, and shoot with lethal precision when they stop. They can jump from aircraft at the edge of space, the earth curved beneath them, and land in fields one-tenth the size of a city block. They can navigate underwater at night. But most of all they are the great pain-takers, their kind culled in the wake of cold and privation, endless miles of ocean swims and beach runs, scalded lungs and torn feet, vomit, bullhorns spraying abuse. Miseries of every kind, which words cannot wrangle. Pain that goes on for weeks, months, until the few who remain are scooped up like hard little stones on the Pacific beach.

  Hunter thinks of asking Lawton how he copes, if it’s the same for him. But you rarely talk about that kind of pain, he knows. It isn’t as therapeutic as it is for other trauma. The power is in the silence, he thinks. The brotherhood of endurance.

  He doesn’t open his mouth.

  * * *

  They make camp at the end of the trestle, elevated high over the river. Across the water, the lights of Altamaha Park burn in the night, a city in miniature. Shadows move in tents and trailer windows, romances played out by lantern or flashlight. Stifled giggles, animal grunts. Now and again a broken bottle, an empty can crushed underfoot.

  They have brought up their sleeping bags from the boats. They lie head to head along the old rail-bed, staring up. Lawton tugs on his beard.

  “It could be they’re cooking meth downriver. Back on one of them backwater sloughs.”

  Hunter breathes in, exhales through his teeth.

  “You mean these Russians?”

  “Slavs,” says Lawton. “We don’t know they’re Russian. Slavic accent, they could be Poles, Serbs, Czechs.” He is counting them off on his hand. “Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Slovaks. Bosniaks.”

  Hunter rolls over.

  “Who gives a shit what they are? There’s people whose job it is to worry about it, and we aren’t them.”

  Lawton shakes his head.

  “This river ain’t the same as it was, brother. I don’t like it.”

  “Because there’s Slavs on it?”

  “That ain’t what I mean and you damn well know it.”

  “Things change, Lawton. Hell, we learned in biology your skin replaces itself every twenty-seven days. You ain’t even laying in the same hide you were a month ago.”

  Lawton touches his forearm, his thumb finding the frog.

  “Something ain’t right, brother. I know it.”

  “Ain’t right about what?”

  Lawton’s thumb covers the tattoo, pressing it like a button.

  “About Daddy’s death.”

  Hunter glances down his body, the black bag of ashes sitting at his feet like a bag lunch.

  “He’s ash now, Lawton. You got to let it go. Let him go. That’s what we came here to do.”

  He looks back at his brother, the top of his head as he lies in his mummy bag. He’s getting a bald spot, Hunter sees. A white dime amid the stew of red. Lawton’s head rotates slightly and he spits—thwop—a thick gobbet that arcs through the steel trusses, glistening, tail skittering like something that could grow legs and croak.

  “Letting go,” he says. “Never been too good at that.”

  * * *

  Hunter wakes in the night. The rails are thundering beneath him, the bridge groaning in pain. He looks frantically for the midnight engine, the white ball of power come boring
out of the darkness. Nothing. Not yet. He looks for Lawton. He is lying athwart the tracks, asleep. Hunter shakes him, pinches him. Slaps his face. His brother is dark-browed, too stubborn to wake. His body is snared in vines, Hunter sees, roots the size of man-arms or snakes. He is tied to the tracks like a damsel, a witch at the stake.

  “Lawton. Lawton!”

  Hunter tears at the roots; his fingers bleed. It is like great muscles clutch his brother, thousand-year arms skinned with bark. Hunter looks for his ax. There it is, leaning against the trussworks, the handle bone-colored in the darkness. He takes it up. The world flares white, and he can feel a heat rising against his back. A star, iron-tailed, is screaming down the tracks, an event that can’t be stopped. An extinction. He straddles his brother and raises the ax, tears streaking his face. He is looking for the place to strike. The vines are like an armor, a history that binds him, and Hunter wonders if they will bleed. Lawton’s eyes are open now, his beard a ring of fire around his face. He is grinning, his eyes full of light, as he looks at the risen ax.

  “Don’t,” he says.

  39

  Fort Caroline, April 1565

  The day has come. The food is gone, the storehouse empty. Le Moyne stands on his bluff over the river, pen idle. He is watching the carrion birds coil black-winged over the executed mutineers, their ruined bodies hung from a crude scaffolding erected on the riverbank. Despite himself, Le Moyne envies those birds. At least they have something to eat.

  He drops his head and starts down the slope, joining the others as they work along the river. They are tearing palmetto plants from the earth, their hands red-torn from the barbed stalks. The ground lies cratered in their wake. The roots are something, anything, to boil and eat. A soldier with a pitted face, shirtless, is preaching the evils of Utina as he works. Utina the great deceiver, who has led them only upon paths of folly in the west. Utina, who has made of them his handmaidens, aiming their guns upon his own ambitions. Utina, who has brought them, finally, to this ignominious end.

  “The savage cannot be trusted.” The man tears a root from the ground. “They are an impish breed, in want of souls.”

  The others nod, grunting in agreement. Le Moyne says nothing, focusing on the work.

  “They are godless,” says the man. “No higher than beasts.”

  Yes, say the men. Verily. In truth.

  “Liars and connivers,” says the man. He casts a glance at Le Moyne, still silent. “They have hearts as black as this earth.” He raises a clump in hand. “What say you, man?”

  Le Moyne grips the barbed shaft of the plant before him, gritting his teeth.

  “I have seen their hearts,” he says. “And they are red.”

  “You have missed my point, sir.”

  Le Moyne yanks on his plant, the roots popping from their foundations.

  “Perhaps.”

  They pick berries, tiny and dark, that upset the bowels of many. They hunt what game they have not already killed or driven from the lands about the fort. In the fields they dig for the roots of the sorrel plant. Men gather fishbones from the refuse piles and grind them into meal. Others, the entrepreneurial of the garrison, have hoarded a small store of acorns, which they grind into meal and sell at twenty sous a plate.

  The second week of the famine, Le Moyne accompanies a hunting party three leagues upstream, seeking the muddy lagoon where a legion of lagartos congregate in the morning hours. They are arrayed like stone-carved basilisks, absorbing the heat. Lord d’Ottigni leads them down the gangplank, his wrecked face gleaming in the sun. They go barefoot, armed only with pikes and sharpened staves—their guns cannot penetrate the armored hides. They stomp ankle-deep through the mud, emboldened by hunger. The monsters come awake before them, as from dreamless stone, turning their yellow jaws toward the bare ankles of the men, the white calves. Their heavy bellies rattle with threat. Le Moyne can feel the mud quivering between his toes.

  They surround a huge lizard that curls itself against them, hissing at the ring of whittled points. They are trying to mimic the native hunters, who ram pine spears into the mouths of the beasts, turning the crushing force of the jaws to their advantage. The long rows of teeth lodge in the soft wood, sealing shut the mouth, whereupon the savages overturn the beast and attack the soft belly with spears and arrows and clubs.

  They move closer, closer, their weapons trembling. Le Moyne can almost taste the tender white meat of the tail, like a treasure beneath the green mountain of hide. The man beside him inches nearer, his mouth open, his tongue out. Their eyes are fixed only on the head, the eighty-some teeth snaggled like crude daggers, when the tail comes wheeling around, a giant’s club that strikes with a sickening crack. The man beside Le Moyne falls screaming to the ground, his knee buckled inward.

  “Attaquez-les!” cries d’Ottigni, and they rush the beast, jabbing their weapons into the armored hide. The tail reverses direction, snapping and throwing spears like so much kindling, and men fall screaming, clutching their hands and wrists. Several of the spears strike home, but now they are turned upon their masters, jutting from the monster’s hide like spines or quills. Le Moyne leaps away as the haft of his own pike, wrenched free of his hands, flashes past his jaw. Men are scrambling in the muck, the beast whirling and roaring before them. Lord d’Ottigni, sneering, draws his sword with a sounding ring.

  “Slut-mother of Christ!”

  He leaps between the wooden spines with surprising alacrity, straddling the beast between his knees, as if he would ride its spine, and drives his sword two-handed through the base of its skull. The lizard, skewered to the earth, shivers and quakes, dying, and the men stand stunned, as if witnessing the awful work of some demon or god. The lieutenant’s face is red-halved, disgusted, as he rises from the animal’s back, eyeing the men.

  “Espèce de couilles molles.”

  You of soft balls.

  They cannot lift the carcass, so they rope the neck and drag it open-jawed and web-footed to the boat, cutting a bloody wake through the muck. They sail home to butcher the kill, the injured men sprawled on the deck, groaning their agonies to the sun.

  * * *

  Still they continue to waste, wrecked by their own bones, their skin stretched ever tighter over the joints and spurs of their underpinnings. Their faces are sunken like the revenants of old tales, sallow and cave-eyed. Their jaws hang unhinged; they mouth-breathe at even the lightest work. The Indians, seeing them, will not approach the fort. They can see the desperation in the Frenchmen’s eyes, Le Moyne knows. The savage hunger. Already there have been perverse acts, natives killed, food stolen from their huts. Soldiers roving the country in starving bands, daggers winking, tapers hissing in the night.

  The sun grows hotter, the world blooms green. Tools lie idle, earthworks crumble. Gaps open in the palisade. Of the Apalatci mountains there is nothing now. No one speaks the name, like that of a traitor they wish to expunge from memory, history. A collective shame best forgotten. May comes and the crops have not yet ripened in the fields. There is no corn nor beans nor acorns in the villages. The Indians sell them fish from their cypress dugouts, making the white men wade out to them, far out of sight of the fort. Their prices are extravagant. Soldiers sneak downstream to meet them, returning without boots or hats, knives or shirts. They trade their armor and swords, their trinkets from home. Le Moyne sees a man return almost naked, a single large fish clutched like a silver-skinned babe in his arms.

  Still he sings his Psalms in the afternoons. His voice is shaky and weak; his own ribs seize him like talons. The words seem empty to him, said so often they are devoid of meaning. They have become but patterned mouth-sounds, no more comprehensible than the savage incantations of the jarua. He kneels upon the riverbank, watches the current slipping through his fingers. Only one line runs again and again through his mind, rote as a beggar’s.

  Give us this day our daily bread.

  Give us this day our daily bread.

  Give us this day our daily bre
ad.

  In the mornings he fights the temptation to climb one of the trees, to perch like some pale and wingless bird among the others, hoping dawn will reveal the fleet of ships that will save them. He is hollowed out, a vacancy full only of want. The art has fled from his hands, his heart. Meal and roots he cups to his mouth, handfuls of river. He looks at his reflection in the water. A creature unrecognizable almost, wavering like a spirit. Is this the monster he sought? The wonder at the end of the earth?

  A night in May, a month after the food runs out. Le Moyne is drawn to a crowd along the northern wall, a half-circle of men huddled in all positions. Standing, squatting, sunk down on all fours in the dirt. All of them watching. It is a gray-haired bitch brought over on one of the ships, whelping, her great body quivering as the pups come curling from her womb in their glistening cauls, furred already with their eyes mashed closed. A man with pointed mustaches presides, his beard grown scraggly down his neck. He is taking trades. Bronze and knives, tiny sacks of meal. Bundled sheaves of sorrel root, dirt still clung in the hairs. Men jab their hands toward him, showing what they have. Voices wrestle for attention. When a deal is struck, his assistant hands the whelp still dripping to the buyer, and the buyer scurries into the darkness, hunched over his prize, tearing open the caul like a gift.

  That night Le Moyne lies on his bed, staring up at the thatch of palms.

  “I saw a man selling a litter of puppies tonight.”

  La Caille places his hands behind his head.

  “Pour manger?”

  “Oui.” Le Moyne breathes in. “I did not know whether to cut the man down, or check my own purse for fifty sous.”

  “You would not have done such a thing, Le Moyne. I know you.”

  “No, my friend. But I fear the day I will.”

  40