The River of Kings: A Novel

by Taylor Brown

  “Some shooting,” he said. His voice was flat.

  “Korea,” said Hallam. “Slants.” He had another pull from the jug. “Mowed them down like yard grass.”

  “Is that what’s wrong with your face?”

  The man looked confused.

  “My face? Naw, that’s just my got-damn liver. It’s about give out on me.”

  “Oh,” said Uncle. He paused, his eyes gone far away. “I thought maybe it was all them yella men full up in your blood.”

  The jug stopped halfway to Hallam’s mouth. His lips hung open a moment, then slowly warped into that crooked grin. He lowered the jug and leaned toward them.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “Big ole riverboat like this, I expect me some entertainments. Y’all got some entertainments for me?”

  “Can’t say as we do,” said Hiram, shaking. “I expect we’re plumb out.”

  “Naw,” said the man, pushing his tongue through a missing tooth. “Don’t you go selling yourself short now.” He pointed the gun from one of them to the other. “I expect y’all got some natural entertainments I might could enjoy.”

  “Natural entertainments?”

  “How ’bout you two little queers kiss for me?”

  Hiram reared. “How ’bout you go fuck yourself—”

  The barrel exploded and Hiram felt the round snap past his ear.

  “I ain’t asking twice, cocksucker.”

  Hiram’s heart was thumping brutally, like a fist against his chest. Hiram looked at Uncle, then at the man, who cocked the hammer back. Uncle grabbed him by the back of the neck, two-handed, and planted a kiss on his lips.

  “Tongue!” roared the man. “I want to see some tongue!”

  They started to pull apart. Pow! Another shot. Two left.

  Uncle’s tongue speared its way into Hiram’s mouth. It wriggled in there like something on the end of a bait-hook. Hiram’s face was burning, scalded with shame. He opened an eye and saw the man had his fly open, his thing out. He was bent forward, coaxing and tugging it, that bubble of tongue poking through his missing tooth. His face even yellower now, the very color of sick.

  “You.” He pointed to Hiram. “Come over here.” He pointed the gun between his legs. “I got just the thing for that mouth.”

  Hiram looked around for help. Nothing, just fog in every direction. Nothing real but this. He was crying, he realized. The sobs racking him. He thought of diving for freedom but remembered Fight, his blood unraveling in the current.

  Pop!

  “Best get to it, boy, less it’s a bullet you want in that mouth.”

  Hiram started across the raft. The man’s organ ticked through his fly, a foul growth Hiram would have kicked and trampled coming across it in the woods. He knelt, slowly, and wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve. He bent toward it, and the man’s hand found his head, fisting his hair, twisting it into a knot. Down he went, the salty-sweet bulb sliding past his teeth, toward the back of his throat. He coughed, choking, and the thing came spit-strung from his mouth.

  “Let me do it,” said Uncle.

  Hiram turned and there was Uncle beside him, standing. Face quiet, chin set. Hiram hardly knew him, a boy seen from a distance.

  “You’ll get your turn,” said the man. “Don’t you worry ’bout that.”

  “I ain’t got a gag reflex,” said Uncle.

  “Bullshit.”

  He knelt and shouldered Hiram out of the way, and Hiram watched in horror as Uncle took the thing in his hand and slid his mouth right over it. His head sank, then rose, and the man let slip a groan, his eyes rolling back in his head. Hiram knotted up his shirt in his fists and bent double, trying not to wail against the backs of his teeth. When he opened his eyes he saw Uncle’s free hand coming out of his rubber boot, folding knife in tow, his head still bobbing. He opened the blade against his leg, so quiet, and Hiram, in abetment, did not scream as Uncle pulled the organ from his mouth and wrenched it sideways, cutting it free of the man in a long drive of blade that ended deep in the man’s inner thigh. Blood burst from the stump, spewing like a hose, and the man stood roaring from the ammo box, ramming the pistol in Uncle’s face. It clicked—a dud, the powder wet—and the man sank, clamping his hand over the leaks. Blood sprang between his fingers, spurting this way and that. When he looked up his face was white, unyellowed. He looked half a ghost.

  “Got into the artery,” said Uncle. “You ain’t got long. Repent for what you done.”

  “Fuck you,” said the man. He tried to raise the pistol, but it weighed too much.

  “Repent,” said Uncle. “Save yourself from hell.”

  The man’s eyes were closing, his head lolling like a fading drunk’s.

  “I been.” He panted. “I been there already.”

  Uncle opened his hand. The severed organ lay there, and the man dropped the pistol and took it. He held it down to himself, like he might reattach it, and soon he slumped forward, head between his knees, as if to examine the work more closely. The wounds kept pumping, covering his face, a planet aswim in blood.

  When it was done, Uncle stabbed him several times on either side of the backbone, gill-like wounds to free the air from his lungs. They rolled him over and sat the heavy anchor on his chest and lashed him to the iron weight, coiling the rope under his arms again and again, using their hardest knots. They were just rounding the bend upstream of the bridge, the trestles shadowlike in the fog, when they rolled him over the side. He floated there a minute, facedown, and then he began to sink.

  * * *

  Hiram feels his hook reach bottom. He begins dragging the prongs along the riverbed, inch by inch. The evening sun has been swallowed in the trees, the sky blistered red. He feels a slight pressure on the hook and yanks, setting the flukes in another lawn chair or milk crate or busted television set. To his surprise, the line jerks in his hands, nearly ripping him from the boat. He crashes to his knees, rope burning through his scarred palm. He envisions a monster on the end of the line, yellow-faced and bloated, a man grown gills and fins and sharp yellow teeth.

  “Hallam, is that you?”

  Hiram Loggins sets his white rubber boots against the inner curve of the hull and rises, his whole body going taut. He begins to fight.

  53

  Fort Caroline, July 1565

  Le Moyne, abed a bloody pallet, roars against the pine branch set between his teeth. The arrow shaft stands throbbing from the flesh of his thigh, the skin puckered and stormy at the root. Above him the surgeon, bone-saw in hand. Le Moyne roars again, trying to rise, but men kneel on his every limb, holding him in place.

  Someone touches his forehead. He hears the voice of La Caille.

  “He’s only going to cut off the fletching, my friend. That we might remove the shaft.”

  Le Moyne rolls his head and sees, across the room, a pot of oil bubbling on the fire. They have cut away his breeches. His body is a waste, his legs the girth and pallor of bleached bone. They quiver beyond his control. His friend places both hands around the arrow’s shaft, steadying it, the boar-tusk necklace rattling at his throat. The surgeon begins to saw.

  Le Moyne’s screams throttle the bit, the pinewood singing between his teeth. He can feel every evil bite of the saw, the arrowhead rocking in the meat of him like an anchor, a stony root. They might be cutting through his very bone. The fletching comes free and they roll him onto his side without saying why. When they hammer the arrow through the back of his leg, freeing the dart, his bowels break loose. A foul stench blooms in the room.

  “Je suis désolé,” he croaks. “Je suis désolé.”

  La Caille places a hand on his sweat-blistered forehead.

  “No, my friend. I am the one who’s sorry.”

  They pour the oil boiling into the wound. The pain screams through him, bright as the sun, loud as God. He did not know he could hurt so bad. He lifts from the floor, peeling from his own flesh, as if his spirit will out. Then darkness.

  * * *

&nbs
p; They should have known. The signs were everywhere. Three days ago, they marched into the western lands, the kingdom of Utina, to collect the ransom they were owed. All along the way, arrows were staked in the ground, scalps dangling from their nocks. Ominous banners planted all through the land, haunting their every step. The men cast sidelong glances at one another.

  “What can it mean?”

  “Perhaps they wish to honor us.”

  “For what? Seizing their king and demanding ransom?”

  “More than a few of these trophies were won by our own guns.”

  “And what a lot of good that has done us.”

  They were three days in the village, waiting while the ransom was assembled at their feet. Sacks of corn and grain, one for every man, that would be clumsy to carry. Utina, their once-hostage, was nowhere to be found. Finally they discovered him hiding in a den on the outskirts of the village, and he told them the meaning of the staked arrows: war.

  The chief held up his hands. He could do nothing, he said. His people would not listen. It was Lord d’Ottigni they hated, he of the ruined face. They had pledged to bald the white-faces, every one, and lift their fragmented bodies high against the sun.

  Lord d’Ottigni, in command, growled.

  “Your sun will see his children rot.”

  He ordered each man to take up his sack of grain. They must move quickly now, before the savages could act. Le Moyne was chosen as part of the vanguard, eight men strong, to move ahead of the formation. Before them lay the wide path out of the village, drowned in shadow, set like a canyon through walls of towering pines. The company moved out, the grain heavy on their backs, their bodies stilted beneath the weight. A company of men starving, staggering into a trap sure to come.

  Six leagues, Le Moyne thought. More than half a day’s hard march, and an attack could come at any step. Death was everywhere, it seemed. In his stomach, the hollow place that could swallow him up. In the woods, the spears and arrows sharpened for blood. In the river itself, swimming with teeth, with drowning currents and hidden shoals. In France, it never seemed so hard simply to survive. There was disease, war, the threat of Catholic swords. But it was not a constant siege, as here. Here the land was unbroken. In this country so green and rich, thousands would die, he realized. They would die in the pines and on the rivers, in the mountains his countrymen never reached but someday would. They would die by cold and hunger, by arrow and club and claw. By their own ropes and daggers and guns, their own hands and visions and dreams. This land was savage at its heart, an ocean of wildest green that would wreck whole nations of men, the virgin roots catching their blood.

  The first scream was almost a relief. The man ahead of Le Moyne crumpled, grasping a shaft newly sprouted from his belly. Now more arrows, like sudden weather, whistling as they passed. Le Moyne dropped his sack and crouched behind its bulk. An arrow struck it, a puff of chaff, and he raised his weapon, firing into the throng of archers streaming from the woods. A man fell, squirting and flapping on the ground, and Le Moyne began to reload. His comrades were firing at will, an angry sea of powder smoke tumbling and churning over the road. Natives jerked and twisted, their naked bodies cracked open in pink bursts of spray.

  Arrows mobbed the sky, quick as hornets, and he heard the wet crack of them striking bone, the concomitant screams. When the main column caught the vanguard, a second legion of archers attacked from the rear. Men yelped, back-shot, as missiles crisscrossed the air, leaping from the smoke.

  Hours, it went. The Indians would not approach too closely the mouths of the guns. Le Moyne knew they feared French steel, the blades that hacked so cleanly through clubs and limbs. Instead, groups of archers would scamper forward, shrieking, and loose their arrows in unison, a swarm of them rattling against the sky, and then dart back into the woods. The ground bristled with arrows, shafts canted like strange crops of weeds. The men themselves looked little different, their flesh sprouted with quills. Still they fought. The Indians began rushing in, in groups of twos and threes, grasping their loose arrows from the ground.

  D’Ottigni stood in the middle of the road, arrows singing past him.

  “Les flèches!” he yelled. “Cassez-les en deux!”

  Le Moyne grabbed the arrow nearest him and broke it in two, as instructed. Others were doing the same, snapping them over their knees or stomping them into the ground. Nearby, a small grove of arrows stood random-struck, knee tall. Le Moyne kicked and trampled them, the shafts snapping like bird bones beneath his feet. When he looked up a lone arrow was bearing down, meant just for him. It buried itself in his thigh, and he fell seated on the ground, staring wide-eyed at the wound. A man stepped alongside him, firing on the archer as he fled. The warrior fell, wounded in his lower spine. The bottom half of him lay still, the top half of him struggling to drag his dead legs across the ground.

  Le Moyne felt the shooter’s shadow cross him. He looked up: Lord d’Ottigni. Le Moyne had never seen him use a gun.

  “Levez-vous, Le Moyne! Battez-vous!”

  Le Moyne nodded. He got up to fight.

  It was dark when they reached the river. Nearly half of them pierced, bleeding, staggering up the gangplanks into the barques. Le Moyne had been dragged on a hastily assembled travois, same as the others who couldn’t walk. The moon throbbed over him, watching him gasp and cringe as the sled hit bump after bump. The Indians had begun melting away once their arrows were spent, but a few fought on, loosing single arrows out of the dark. In the wake of the march lay the sacks of grain, discarded, bleeding their ransom in the road.

  54

  Altamaha River, Day 5

  Hunter hears a faint scraping and opens one eye. On the low edge of the platform a robin perches, watching the dark world before dawn. It has gray wings, its chest a ball of fiery orange, like some herald of the coming sun. It hasn’t yet sung. Hunter closes his eyes, remembering the boyhood story of how the robin got its breast. A father and his son, in the cruel wilds for the night, took turns to keep a fire going on frozen ground. The boy was tired, his eyelids heavy. His father was already asleep. In the shadows beyond the fire, a wolf in wait. A tiny robin, gray as the wood, swooped down to fan the flames with his wings, keeping the fire alive through the night, so long his breast burned red.

  Hunter opens his eyes again. The robin is watching him. A single eye, black and tiny as a bead. Hunter waits for the bird to sing its morning song—cheerily, cheer-up—but no. Its wings flicker and it drops over the edge of the platform, gone.

  Hunter looks around. Lawton is curled on his side beneath a blanket, his head pillowed on a straightened arm. His hand is slightly open, like he just dropped something. Uncle King is gone. His pallet is neatly rolled, his cans and jugs arranged in soldierly rows. Hunter closes his eyes, trying to remember last night. He was so tired once they reached the top. The hike, the fight, the boar, the climb—he could let all of it go at last. Exhaustion hit him like a drug, an opiate in the blood, and the heavy blanket felt so soft on the planked floor of the platform, high over the concerns of the world. The night a starry dome, so dark and cool. His body seemed almost to melt. He could remember dozing in and out, catching only scraps of conversation. Lawton and the old man talked long into the night, it seemed. The two of them shadowy in his mind, voices alone, melding with his dreams.

  “If it really exists, how come you’re wanting to kill it? Hell, if the thing’s time has come, so be it. You’re the one was saying man’s had long enough to prove himself. I ain’t disagreeing. I seen a lot of this world from forty thousand feet up, and we look like some kind of disease on the land, black-topping forests and blasting mountaintops, draining marshes and building our houses and condos on top. On the ground it’s worse. I seen women with their noses cut off, their ears. I seen little boys castrated for talking to us. I seen a woman once, she was hung by her hands, her skin cut under the armpits and peeled down to her waist. Drugged so she’d come awake hanging there bared to the meat, folds of outturned skin han
ging down like flower petals. The red tulip. It’s a thing. It’s named. I put a round of five-five-six in the brain of the man that done it, and at the time I wanted to do the same to his whole fucking family. His mother, his dog.

  “What I’m saying is there isn’t much to recommend us as a species. Not many of us, at least. Me included. But my daddy believed in that creature down there, and he wouldn’t of wanted it dead. Just the opposite. He’d of wanted to know that big-toothed son of a bitch was still down there, a thing man hadn’t yet killed. A great fucking spite.”

  Hunter, hearing this, felt a part of himself swell toward his brother. He wanted to reach out, to touch him on the arm. To let him know. But his limbs were too heavy, weighted by sleep. They would not move. He could feel himself falling deeper, as if into a welcoming cave. He wanted to bring Lawton and the old man with him, into this good place, but they would not be moved.

  * * *

  “Get up and piss, boy. The world’s on fire.”

  Hunter blinks open his eyes. A big toe is prodding his shoulder. Lawton’s.

  “College making you a damn layabout or what?”

  Hunter sits up and rubs the sleep from his eyes. The sun is breaking ground, a red bubble flushing the sky.

  Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.

  “Fuck you, I was up half an hour ago. You were so conked out there wasn’t nothing to do but go back to sleep. I don’t know how you can do what you do for a living and sleep like that.”

  Lawton grimaces.

  “Yeah, the boys might of put a bullhorn in my ear once or twice.”

  “I hope you pissed yourself.”

  Lawton tugs on his beard.

  “No comment.”

  Hunter crawls to the edge of the platform. Mist rises from a vent in the trees, the river sliding unseen beneath them. A flight of white ibises skims in chevron over the cypress, glazed red. Hunter does not see his robin. A bright stream zags across his vision, falling against the trees. It’s Lawton, hands on his hips, shins against the railing, pissing. Hunter thinks of those boys on the bridge, that first day, watching their spit sail south. He stands next to his brother and wrangles his thing from his shorts, flying a bright banner over the trees. He squints at the dawn.