The River of Kings: A Novel

by Taylor Brown

  They paddle harder, deeper into the canal. Their mouths are open, their shoulders burning. Digging, digging. Trying to outrun what’s coming.

  Too late.

  The wail peaks, and they can only turn to watch it come, watch the steel bow burst into the canal, fill it completely, a bullet in the throat of a gun. No way out.

  It doesn’t. The skiff flashes past the mouth of the canal, never slowing, the men aboard staring straight ahead. Hunter looks at his brother, his mouth open.

  “They didn’t see us.”

  Thunder cracks overhead and Lawton straightens, looking up, like someone has called his name. When he looks down again, his eyes are the wildest blue.

  “Blast caps. I saw blast caps in the shed.”

  “What?”

  Lawton is already wheeling his boat in the canal. His face a grimace, little time to explain.

  “It ain’t us they’re after. The thunder, it’s cover.”

  He digs his paddle deep into the current, nearly vertical, his back spreading like a shield. The blade flashes this side, that side, his boat making a zigged white wake, accelerating.

  “Goddamn them,” says Lawton. “God damn them.”

  Hunter scrambles to turn his boat around, to keep up.

  “Lawton!” he cries. “Lawton!”

  * * *

  Hunter can’t catch him. His arms and shoulders are screaming, his lungs searing. His heart hammering. One mile, two. The pain howling through him, saying, I am here I am here I am here, and Hunter going outside of himself, his mind fixed only on his brother. And still he cannot catch him. Lawton is slamming his paddle into the waves, ripping speed from the water, his boat slithering with power. Not leading them now, no. Fleeing. Outrunning the little brother who would only slow him, who would try and stop him.

  Hunter is ten yards behind when they shoot into the broad bend of river, where it carves hard against a wedge of high ground, and the poachers’ skiff chugs midstream in the current, high over the ninety-foot sturgeon hole said to lie like a mineshaft in the riverbed, the great fishes stacked like cordwood in the darkness.

  The white-bearded boy is standing in the bow of the boat, the carbine strapped over his shoulder, one eye purpled in bruise. He is holding a stick of something. He brings a thin flame to it, and it begins sparkling in his hand. A fuse. He smiles, sharp tongues of light licking his face. The sky flares, the trees along the bank whitening like a wall, a ghost fortress rearing pale and huge from the earth, and Hunter knows this is the place where hundreds died.

  Where hundreds will.

  Lawton unzips his vest, drawing the pistol as if from his breast. He cups it close with both hands, like a dark little bird, then pushes it straight toward his target. Hunter thinks of the ravaged fish in the pit, soon to burn, and an old man perhaps among them, his mouth gaped to the sky. He thinks of saying nothing.

  “No!” he cries.

  The boy looks up, startled, and sees the gun.

  The sky crashes in thunder and light, and it sounds like a shot.

  The boy drops the dynamite.

  It bounces on the gunwale, and Hunter sees what will happen before it does: the stick tumbling over the side, the waterproof fuse hissing into the depths. The muffled thunder of the blast, the white geyser of spray. The corpses drifting to the surface, slowly, like so many souls. The river blistered with their white bellies, dozens of them, giants black-mouthed and round-eyed. Awestruck. A kingdom raptured, risen in night. The great myth of the river rising among them, a dark monster coiled and kinked like a diseased organ. Inanimate now. A creature made hoax, composed solely of retreads and twine. Returned only to this.

  Hunter sees it all happen.

  But it doesn’t.

  The dynamite twirls in the air, sparkling.

  It bounces back into the boat.

  The boy lurches after it; so do the others. They struggle and scream on their hands and knees, clawing and kicking, fighting like dogs in a pit.

  Too late.

  The hull channels the blast. It blows straight up, a bulb of white light that lifts them ragged over the water, jointless and piecemeal, like broken dolls. The wreckage floats down, gently almost, and the bodies crash.

  * * *

  Quiet, all sound stolen from the air. The hull smolders, a blackened shell canted strangely on the water, surrounded by debris of every kind. Metal and netting and meat. A slick of oil has caught fire. It burns low on the water, a twist of smoke. Hunter looks at Lawton. He is still holding the gun. Staring at the wreckage. His eyes wide now, and soft.

  Hunter swallows, licks his lips.

  “You didn’t—you didn’t shoot, did you?”

  Lawton blinks, as if coming awake. He leans over the water and spits. A thick little island of white. He looks up again, and the softness is gone from his eyes. They are hard, hard as Hunter has ever seen them.

  “Blast-fishing accident,” he says. “Happens all the time.”

  63

  New France, September 1565

  Three of them, he sees, reeling like a single drunk beast through the woods. Survivors. They crash through brambles and thickets, nearly naked, their bodies torn ragged and bloody by the forest’s jags. He steps out of the bush where he has been hiding, waiting to see if they are Spanish or French.

  “Le Moyne!”

  It is a man called La Crete, of Rouen, and a Belgian Le Moyne doesn’t know. Staggering between the two of them, her arms hooked in theirs, is Laudonnière’s chambermaid, so long rumored to be overzealous in service of her master. She wears a red wound on her breast, the mark of a Spanish sword, but her eyes are fierce, undefeated. Le Moyne feels a sting for having thought ill of her in the past.

  They all of them embrace, brother creatures in an alien world. Le Moyne, so cold and alone, feels his heart flare like a blown ember in his chest.

  “Where are you headed?”

  “The seashore.”

  “Come,” he says. “I know a path.”

  They are perhaps a mile farther along when they come across Laudonnière himself, their old commander, dressed yet in his ragged red doublet. He is tending to a man with a sword-gash in his neck. They say they escaped through a breach in the wall when the Spaniards entangled themselves in the ropes of the courtyard tent, bringing it down upon themselves like a great bedsheet, their pikes piercing the fabric like mad little quills. Laudonnière is knotting a stocking about the wounded man’s neck. Le Moyne squats down beside him.

  “Can you walk?” he asks.

  “Oui. Toute la journée.” All day.

  Le Moyne smiles and claps the man on the shoulder.

  “Good,” he says. “You will have to.”

  They are fifteen by the time they reach the marshlands, picking up other survivors along the way. The sky is low, dark-bellied, spitting rain. The golden plain of reeds spreads before them like a meadow.

  “It doesn’t look so bad,” says Laudonnière.

  Le Moyne reaches out, letting the first line of swordlike reeds tickle his palm.

  “How it looks is not the problem, I’m afraid.”

  They are all night slogging through the wetlands, the tide running up to their navels, their wounds stinging from the salt. The edges of the grasses burn against their skin, and they leave a trampled corridor of bent and bloodied reeds in their wake. Surely, thinks Le Moyne, unknowing men would think it the work of some crazed creature of the forest, gut-shot, dragging itself to the sea to die.

  He is colder and hungrier with every step, his feet numb, so sogged he fears them inseparable now from the cured skin of his boots. In the night his thoughts turn again and again to thin-limbed Grandchemin, hacked to pieces for the amusement of those upon the wall. A gentle man, with no drop of meanness in his marrow. And again and again Le Moyne envisions his monster rising vengeful from the darkness, curling high over the fort, its tail cracking like the whip of God. He envisions it smiting the Spanish barbarians for their sins, lashing them from the wall
s, red-flooding the river for leagues. The animals stricken before they can take root in the land.

  But this is fantasy, he knows. Such violence will be the task of men.

  Dawn breaks a steely gray before them, dark silhouettes floundering against the impending light. They stumble upon another group of survivors, a flock of them squatting wrecked and motley in the reeds. Roars go up on both sides. They embrace, their bodies quivering with cold and joy. An hour later they find a small island in the marsh, no more than a grove of pines, and two of their band shimmy up into the trees. They begin to shout and swing their arms from the upper reaches, their cheeks flushed with color as they descend.

  “There is a ship!”

  “It is anchored at the river’s mouth!”

  They cross two wide creeks that day, using long poles to which they cling two or three a side, thrashing to keep their heads above water. Miraculously, no one is lost. They are another long night in the half-drowned reeds, the rain beating down on their heads, and when the wind cuts hard across the shelterless plain they hook themselves arm in arm so as not to be driven down into the muck. Their tattered vestments snap in the gusts, blown sideways, and Le Moyne holds the maidservant by her wrists, looking away as she squats to relieve herself in the wind-bent reeds.

  In the morning they can see a ship mast in the distance, a dark cruciform planted at the river’s mouth, and by noon they can see the ship itself rocking on the inshore swells. They cross another wide river, again using poles cut by a carpenter of their company, and on the far bank they stagger on through the reeds, veering drunkenly, their legs buckling now and again so that men fall to kneeling as if so inspired. Le Moyne finds himself at the head of this procession, pushed on by those behind. They are like a current at his back. He cannot collapse, he knows, or they would follow him down. They are of a will now, their bodies wrecked and failing, a single long train of flesh delivering itself to the sea.

  Sometime later he trips, lurching forward through the reeds, and splashes headfirst into a wide arm of water. He thrashes in the darkness, upturned, trying to right himself, until strong hands hook him beneath the arms. He is lifted choking from the water and hauled over the side of an open boat, landed like something caught on a line. Men pound his back, slapping the water from his lungs. He blinks the salt from his eyes, staring up in wonder.

  “Christ,” he says softly.

  The sailors above him smile.

  “Pas encore,” they say.

  Not yet.

  * * *

  They sit huddled on the main deck of the Levrier, the ship they saw anchored at the river’s mouth. They are cloaked in the crew’s own shirts, passing a flagon of brandy from one to another. Small boats are still coming in, picking up other survivors from the marshes. The sky is beginning to darken, the world deepening from gray to blue. Le Moyne has a sip of the brandy, letting it burn down his throat, then hands it along. He stands and walks to the rear of the ship, stepping up onto the quarterdeck at the stern. He looks west, inland. There in the distance he can see the dark hulk of the fort, set amid the wilds like a giant foundered ark. In two days they will sail for France. He, Jacques Le Moyne de Morgue, has come across oceans and through storms and famine and war. A flower painter. He has come to record the savage beasts that reside at the reaches of the earth, those perhaps of long teeth and armored scales, and found numbered among them the gods and kings of men. He looks a last time upon the ridged flesh of the water, waiting for something newly awful to rise from its belly. He sees nothing save the river itself, and his own reflection fluttering upon it.

  A ghost.

  He opens his hand. In it sits the tongue stone. It seems dulled from the wear of his pocket, the rub of his thumb. The edges slightly rounded, like a heart hewn from rock. He hurls it far across the water, watching it plop back into the river. Perhaps the tide will drive it upstream, home. For another hand or foot to find.

  He leaves the rail, stepping down again onto the main deck, into the company of men.

  64

  Altamaha River, Day 5

  The interstate bridge rises in the distance, a lithic gray hulk presiding over the swamp. It wheels with jeweled lights, red and yellow and white. The drivers pass high over the land, dazed by the hum of their machines, the sanctums of metal and glass that protect them from the wastes of swamp, the nameless creeks and rivers and shoals. The history they will never know.

  Hunter looks back a last time. The fire has burned itself out, and the skiff sits awkwardly on the water, tiny now, haloed in wreckage. Someone will find it, eventually, and the sheriffs will be called out. They will fish in the bodies, the limbs and boots tangled in the reeds, and they will tow away the foundering skiff. It will be filed an accident. They will never know of the kayaks that passed the tragedy—their hulls leave no tracks. The mouths that could speak will not. It will be years before anyone finds the shed, if they ever do. The hogs will discover it first, rooting through the packaged food, shitting plastic wrappers through the woods. Creeper vines will climb the walls, and the weather-treated boards will warp, the tar paper curling with age. Birds will brain themselves against the window glass. Floods will come and go, the walls tattooed with waterlines. Perhaps one will sweep the place away.

  Hunter, if he is lucky, will grow old and gray, a stone tooth hanging from his neck, grasped in some golden instant by the tiny hand of a babe. The trees will keep watch along the bluff, tall and stoic as a wall. The sturgeon will hover fat as cannon in the river dark. Gentle as sheep.

  Safe.

  The river turns. The bridge rises slowly against the sky, like a gateway of some kind, and soon they are sliding beneath its shadow, listening to the rhythmic pounding of traffic on the joints. Hunter swallows.

  “That one in the bow,” he says. “With the rifle. I think he might of got Uncle King back at the camp.”

  Lawton’s shoulders rise, fall.

  “I thought the old man might show.”

  “He saved me,” says Hunter. “Twice.”

  Lawton nods. There is a heaviness emanating from him. A coldness, as from stone.

  “Probably he saved us both.”

  Hunter feels the urge to reach out, to touch his brother on the shoulder or arm. To bring warmth back into him. Blood. He clears his throat.

  “They got what was coming,” he says. “Them in the boat.”

  Lawton is silent a long time.

  “Sure they did.”

  Miles on they pass beneath the old coastal highway, silent at this hour, and a marina swings into view, lit like a floating city. A motley flotilla of cabin cruisers and pontoon boats, fishing skiffs, speedboats raked low on the water. A line of identical twenty-eight-foot offshore boats, battleship-gray with badges emblazoned on the hulls. The restaurant at Mudcat Charlie’s presides over the docks, a haven of college football and horse racing and everything fried. The rain has quit, the sky still bruised and quaking. The sun is nearly down. The restaurant windows burn gold over the boats. People laugh silently behind the glass, sipping sweet tea with crumbled ice.

  Hunter thinks of his father speeding along this water in the last light of day, his chest bare, his chin high. A man certain of his dominion. Then a sturgeon lifts like a god from the river, armored and sun-blazed, and Hunter wonders if anger clutches the old man’s heart in that final instant, a bloody fist shattered at last against the world. Or does he stare slack-jawed at the creature instead, this ancient fish that stands with the cypress and the serpent and the river of old, and is his heart full of wonder?

  Hunter closes his eyes, opens them.

  The marina slides past. They paddle on through a small cut, following the river until it widens, opening its mouth toward the sea. Lawton removes the dry bag from his boat’s rigging and sets it on the deck in front of him. He opens the top and looks at Hunter, who nods. Lawton pours the contents over the side, their once-father dusting the current like a fall of dirty snow. Hunter watches the ashes darken on top, then c
loud palely beneath the surface, curling seaward like spirit or smoke. The same path the sturgeon will take in the fall of the year, an unseen fleet of them lumbering blindly, together, into the ocean’s deep. They will return in the spring, like they always do. They know. Just as Hunter does, seeing the pale mask of his brother’s face, set now like a shield of bone. He knows he will never be back.

  They turn their boats homeward, parallel, brothers against the falling dark.

  Epilogue

  The old man stands tall upon his boat in the failing light, the barb of his harpoon catching the last of the sun. The wound in his side blazes like a cardinal. Below him the river moves, alive, a great form sliding below the surface, ridged like the river itself. The creature he has hunted so long, passing like the shadow of God beneath his feet. He will make it to bleed. He raises his weapon yet higher, poised in power over the water, and he does not hurtle it into the river’s heart. He sits, slowly, and lays the weapon across his lap. He closes his eyes, listening to the flood of the river against its banks, waiting for the world that comes.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The events at Fort Caroline—the first European fort in what would become the United States—are touched by mystery, gleaned as they are from the written narratives of those here involved, the facts of which are perplexing, even contradictory. The exact location remains unknown. For years, it was thought to have been on the banks of the St. Johns River in Florida. Now many scholars believe the fort was located on the Altamaha. Though I have endeavored to stay true to historical record when possible, I have taken much license, making the historical figures and settings my own. I would be remiss not to mention some of the contemporary sources and modern scholars who have aided me in this process: Jacques Le Moyne de Morgue, Narrative of Le Moyne (J. R. Osgood and Co., 1875); René Laudonnière, Three Voyages (The University of Alabama Press, 2001); Charles E. Bennett, Laudonnière & Fort Caroline: History and Documents (The University of Alabama Press, 2001); Miles Harvey, Painter in a Savage Land: The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America (Random House, 2001). This last book I highly recommend for readers who would like to learn more about the French experience at Fort Caroline. I am greatly indebted to Scott Juall, Ph.D., who has worked extensively on the French voyages here described, and who allowed me to lean on his expertise in this area, as well as the language of the period.