The River of Kings: A Novel

by Taylor Brown

  “Go now, boy! Find your brother!”

  He dances to the side, fists up, his head bobbing and ducking like a snake from a basket. The boy rises smiling before him, blood in his teeth, the rifle stuck in the mud at his feet.

  “Go!” The old man’s eyes are wild. “The kingdom is upon us!”

  Hunter rises and runs hobbled and skipping for the shed, the trail zigzagging before him. He comes tearing through the burlap flap, heaving, and he is dizzied in the sudden dark, his vision flecked and starred. He sees only murky dark shapes, as in deep water.

  “Lawton?”

  A white palm swims out of the dark, silencing him. Dimly he sees the two men sitting along the wall, their hands zip-tied in their laps, and his brother leaning before them.

  “You telling me a single big female could be worth as much as a car?”

  “Da. Very nice car. BMW.”

  “Lawton,” says Hunter. “We have to go.”

  His brother, rising out of the dark, does not seem to hear him.

  “So my daddy stumbled onto your little racket up here? Threatened to out you and you killed him, that it?”

  The old soldier looks stunned.

  “Kill him? Mr. Loggins, I was his friend. I work here for him.”

  Lawton steps back as if punched.

  “Bullshit you did.”

  The man raises his hands and points to the four corners of the shed.

  “He build this house. Hiram’s house. We worked for him.”

  The big poacher looks at the two brothers, his beard long and jagged, his face pleading.

  “You look.” He nods toward the central framing post. “You look.”

  Even Hunter bends toward the post. There, carved in a nearly circular knot of wood, is a down-struck trident. Mark of the Delta Devils, terrors of the Mekong, kings of the brown water.

  “His sign,” says the man. “Hiram’s sign.”

  “No,” says Lawton.

  The big poacher holds his bound hands against his chest, as if praying.

  “You tell police, you burn his name.” He looks from one of them to the other, pleading. “You burn his dream.”

  Hunter watches his brother’s shoulders sag. The faith hissing from his chest, the ghost he kept so close to his heart. Hunter grabs his arm.

  “Lawton, we have to go. There’s a third one out there and he had a gun.”

  The big poacher blanches.

  “Yuri! He is back? You must go! He is psikh. Psycho. My brother’s son. Someone get hurt!”

  Lawton doesn’t seem to hear. He looks at Hunter, wide-eyed.

  “Caviar,” he says.

  * * *

  When they step again into the light, the storm is close. Big clouds the color of bruise hang just over the trees, like an invasion, and the world has taken on a certain violet clarity, as if charged. The first streaks of rain slant down through the sky, striking the roof of the shed with hollow claps. They start down the path to the river.

  “I checked the refrigerators after you left. They got it packed in tins like shoe polish. Caviar, man. Fucking sturgeon roe. They catch them with trammel nets, tow them up the canal to process.”

  Hunter puts a hand at the small of his brother’s back to speed him up. They left the two men bound against the wall, but they aren’t the ones he’s worried about.

  “Him,” says Lawton. “Him of all men.”

  He shakes his head, cursing their old man under his breath. Raging. And Hunter knows why. Their father was a hard man, yes. Even cruel. But he was a man of the river, they thought. A keeper of it. Hunter, pushing his brother along, can feel the power quaking beneath his hand, and he knows Lawton can’t hardly stand it. He is not made for this. His world is too sharp-cut and sure, its shape honed and set. And for a moment Hunter wishes he were that way, too. That hard and unbending, like something made with a knife. But he isn’t, and he is afraid what his brother might do.

  They reach the river and slide down the embankment to their boats. Lawton stands over Hunter’s kayak in the spitting rain, looking down at the bag of ashes, addressing it.

  “Guess you got what was coming.” His leg whips back. “You dead son of bitch!”

  His foot wheels and snaps, kicking the bag free of its rigging. It flies across the beach, lands in a dark dent of sand at water’s edge. Hunter limps across and picks it up. He turns and holds it out to his brother.

  “We’ve got to move. You’re taking this on your boat.”

  Lawton looks away.

  “I don’t want to.”

  Hunter steps forward and rams the ashes into his brother’s chest.

  “I ain’t asking.”

  Lawton cradles the bag against his breast.

  “Those French you were talking about. What happened to them?”

  “What do you think?”

  61

  Fort Caroline, September 1565

  Le Moyne looks out upon the great bend of river where his monster might live, the belly of water rain-cratered and capping in the wind, and he prays and prays for his brothers at sea. The great cypress trees along the banks are swirling and crashing against one another, like an ocean themselves, and a dark line of siege towers threatens the coast, storm clouds dropping wet panes of glass that shimmer and crack with jags of light. Le Moyne prays to God and to the river itself. He prays to the beasts that swim in the slumberous peace of the depths, hardly cognizant of the soundings and wreckage of the upper world. He prays for salvation.

  Laudonnière was right: un ouragan is upon them.

  A hurricane.

  A week ago, in the wake of the fleet’s departure, the sky darkened, like night come early, and the rain began to fall. It has not let up. Day and night it lashes them, slung sideways by torrents of wind. Huts blow down. Thatch roofs tumble away in the gale. The fort turns to slop, knee-deep, and men huddle shivering in their blankets. They totter about like lepers, back-bent with faces cloaked. A horse slips and breaks a leg, drowning in the muck. They eat it. Rain gushes down even the chimneys, snuffing any effort at warmth. The river rises maddened before them, foaming between its banks, and the sun remains unseen. Le Moyne must wonder if a second flood is upon them, if they have triggered the wrath of God in this new land. Or perhaps it is the sun-god against them, turning his white eye blind to their peril, letting the violence of the earth run unchecked.

  There are no more than 150 people left at the fort. They are the sick and wounded, the servants and couriers, the men who cannot even load an arquebus, and they are the women and children, too. Ribault has left behind but twenty good men who can fight. Le Moyne is on the wall day and night. There are hardly enough men to rotate the watch.

  Dawn of the eleventh day, and no one has been seen in the lands about the fort. The word comes down the line: the officer of the guard has taken pity. They are to retire to their quarters for three hours’ rest. Le Moyne comes down from where he was praying on the wall. He staggers gratefully to his hut, setting his arquebus against the inside of the door, rolling himself clothed and booted into his hammock. He closes his eyes, listening to the rain drum on the thatches.

  * * *

  In his dream they break like a river from the trees, iron-scaled, their breastplates clattering over their hearts, their crested helmets cutting the air like so many fins. Their faces are long and dark, daggered by black spade beards, their eyes white and round with hate. They carry swords and spades and poleaxes, the edges honed bright, and they spread as they come, overrunning the meager defenses on the fort’s landward side, scattering the white flesh of its inhabitants like game. The people scream as they are cut down, churned under the armored flood.

  Le Moyne’s eyes snap open, awake, and then he is out of his hammock, shooting between two conquistadors who stand very real at the threshold of his hut. He passes between them untouched, as if he were for a moment but the dream of himself, and it’s like they never see him. Like a spirit passing. All around him now is the wreckage of bodies,
bright-slaughtered against the black earth, and the mother-wails of the stricken, the undead, and he knows this is no dream. Limbs lie strewn in the mud, fingers and toes yet twitching, and severed heads stare open-mouthed in lasting wonder. There the headless torso of a child, chest-down, like a broken doll in the muck.

  He runs stiff-legged for the nearest embrasure, where he must scramble over the broken bodies of men who rushed to the wall, a mound of them oozed and tangled beneath his boots. He steps on their faces, their necks and backs, climbing through the notch and leaping into the moat on the other side. Then he is out of it, black-slopped, scurrying across the open ground and into the woods.

  * * *

  “Let us wait until morning,” says one of the men. “Surely the fury of the Spanish will abate. Then we will surrender ourselves to their mercy.”

  “Mercy?” says one of the others. “Do they know the word? We would be better off fleeing into the wilds, taking up with the savages until God shows us some path.”

  They are huddled in a small clearing in the woods, Le Moyne and four others who have escaped the fort. They are quivering from cold and fear, clutching themselves.

  “There is another way,” says Le Moyne. “We make for the coast and find one of the small ships used to offload the provisions from France.”

  The men shake their heads.

  “It is too far, Le Moyne.”

  “I know these paths. I can guide us.”

  “Suppose we cannot find one of the boats?”

  Le Moyne looks from one of them to the next.

  “We must have faith.”

  Again they shake their heads.

  “Go chase your boats, Le Moyne. I would rather try my luck with the savages.”

  The rest of them nod in agreement.

  They each clasp arms with Le Moyne, bidding him farewell, and then they are gone. Le Moyne stands a long minute beneath the dripping woods, alone, and then he turns for the sea.

  * * *

  “Le Moyne, up here!”

  It is Grandchemin, the tailor, wedged in the crook of a tree, wearing only his nightshirt. He glances at the woods about him, then slides down the trunk, his toes probing the ground.

  “Have you seen any others?”

  Le Moyne nods.

  “Four. An hour ago.”

  “Where are they now?”

  Le Moyne shakes his head.

  “They decided to try their luck with the savages.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m trying for the coast. I could not convince them to come.”

  Grandchemin looks this way, that way, as if a Spaniard might leap from a bush, poleax in hand. His Adam’s apple quivers in his throat.

  “By God, you’ve convinced me.”

  They are all day on trails known only by the deer and the Indians and Le Moyne in his afternoon walks with sketchbook and arquebus. Faint corridors through the forest, deserted now, as if some plague has emptied the land. The trees crash overhead, their branches tangling. The earth sucks at their feet. They cross risen creeks that tumble and swirl through the sodden earth, smashing against their thighs. The rain spats their faces and eyes, and they trudge with their hands held before them, trying not to trip on cypress roots thrust like spikes from the ground. The leaves seem only to taunt them, so bright and slick, like little shields bouncing in the rain.

  They come finally to the land’s edge. The expanse of salt marsh lies before them, brown-gold under an iron sky. The day is darkening, the sun descending unseen. Night is moving in from the sea, shooting dark rifts between the clouds. They are miles yet from the green humps of the seaward islands where the boats might be at anchor.

  Grandchemin holds his elbows in his hands, as if to sheathe their bony points. He looks back at the woods out of which they came.

  “What now?”

  In answer, Le Moyne steps down into the marsh, his boots swallowed up to the knee. They fight on through the falling dark, thrashing through the chin-high reeds, jerking their feet in and out of the muck. Again and again they fall, leaving their blood in the grass, and they have not even considered the tide. It rises belly-deep in the night, and cold, and they have no rest. They can but kneel in the flooded plain of grasses, the tide lapping at their throats and chins, the rain beating down on their heads. Two strange polyps on the water, ghost-white, calling out to their god. Dawn breaks colorless over the land, and they see no boats.

  “Le Moyne, I cannot go on.”

  Grandchemin is standing knee-deep in the water now. His nightshirt clings to him like a second skin, the hair-patches at his chest and nethers darkly evident through the soiled cloth. His face is nicked red, bleeding. His Adam’s apple like something gone rotten on the vine.

  “You can, Grandchemin, and you will.”

  “Let us go back and surrender. We are men of value, Le Moyne. We have skills. Surely they will take us in.”

  “They will kill us, man, like all the others.”

  Grandchemin looks down at himself.

  “Would it not be a better death than this?”

  * * *

  They squat in a thicket, watching the fort. Spanish sentinels are visible on the walls, their polished helmets ridged like the skulls of brutes. Now and again cries of laughter lift from the place. They sound black-throated to Le Moyne. Wicked.

  “I pray you, man, do not go. God will open some path for us yet.”

  Grandchemin shakes his head, his eyes fixed upon the fort.

  “I have made my decision. If I am treated kindly, you may follow.”

  “We will go together.”

  “No, man. This is my path to walk. I will not have your fate tied to my own.” He turns to Le Moyne. “Farewell, my friend.”

  They embrace.

  “Je vous recommande à Dieu,” says Le Moyne. I commend you to God.

  The old seamster begins threading his way out of the woods, and Le Moyne creeps up to his bluff overlooking the fort, where he used to sketch and paint. Grandchemin emerges from the trees, hook-nosed and bony as a crane, hobbling in his once-white nightclothes across the open ground. The men upon the wall spot him, calling to others below. The gates open and out steps a party of three armored men, their bodies clanging as they stride to receive him, their palms set casually on the pommels of their swords. Heads appear all along the wall behind them, watching.

  Grandchemin falls upon his knees as they near, his arms flung wide, the oversized nightshirt hanging upon his thin-whittled frame like the sail of a ravaged ship. The sleeves catch the wind, fluttering, and his long button-sewing fingers are spread wide, as if he would embrace these men who now encircle him.

  “Merci,” he beseeches.

  A metallic flash, quick as thought, and his right arm lies severed on the earth, writhing like a giant worm. He screams, the stump spurting red into the grayed-over world, and a second sword flashes, taking his remaining arm. He falls upon the ground, his armless trunk flopping in a ragged aura of blood, and the men along the walls roar with pleasure. The third soldier sweeps his sword and takes the man’s head. They bend and quarter him, then raise the bloody fragments of his body upon the tips of their steel.

  All along the wall, cheers and applause.

  62

  Altamaha River, Day 5

  Thunder cracks like a shot, like the sky has broken, and the rain comes hissing down in angry streaks. They are pulling into the current, the river quickened with storm, and Hunter is leading them now. Something is driving him, like fear but stronger, surer, spreading through his whole body. It is something he knows. That they need to distance themselves. That they are in danger. That Lawton is.

  He doesn’t have Lawton’s strength, his muscle, but he is light and fast in a boat. His keel cuts cleanly through the roughened current, and he pushes hard, setting pace. He looks back at Lawton, and his brother is digging, his shoulders balled beneath his shirt, his beard dark and pointed beneath his chin. A flash of lightning, the dimmed world made white, and
Hunter thinks he sees tears streaking his brother’s face. Maybe the rain.

  His shoulders are burning, his lungs, his breath coming ragged through an open jaw. His heart booms inside him like an alarm. He uses the paddle like he would an ax, driving the blade flat and deep with every stroke, his cadence machinelike. Relentless. This engine that runs on pain. He knows he has to stay ahead of Lawton. He has to lead them now. Somehow he knows. His brother will follow if led.

  They are less than a mile downriver when he first hears the engine, the high wail of an unmuffled outboard. It is coming from upriver, the way they’ve come. He looks back. Nothing, not yet. It’s still in the creeks that feed the river. He looks around. The banks are dense, overgrown, guarded by half-submerged trees rocking in the current. He knows they are a good five miles from the nearest marina, and the town of Darien is nearly as far. Unless—

  He looks back at Lawton.

  “Rifle Cut.”

  A shortcut, a narrow canal straight-cut by slaves in the 1820s for boats bringing timber, tobacco, turpentine, into the Darien docks. Overgrown now—only paddlers negotiate it.

  Lawton shakes his head.

  “We still have to scatter his ashes.”

  “We’re taking the cut,” says Hunter.

  The storm worsens, the river crumpling in dark swales and whitened caps. The world gone twilight, strange and dim, then exploding in absolute nakedness, too bright to see. The wail of the outboard flutters in and out of their hearing, closer and farther as it negotiates the serpentine kinks of the creeks. But getting ever louder. Gaining.

  They enter the cut. A strange thing, this man-made geometry in a world of spiraling creeks and black mud, where wildness rules. A brutal thing. Black men sunk to the knees, the waist, hacking away with sharp implements. A world cut straight, at the behest of distant masters.

  They can hear the wail of the boat rising behind them, nearing.