I felt my breath stop somewhere in my chest when they dragged Lara outside.
She wore only half a slip of a dress, shorter than what she wore in the daytime and nearly see-through where it fell down to the tops of her muscular thighs, even with only torchlight to illuminate her. Despite the fear that rose immediately to my throat, choking off my air, a blush started somewhere in my neck and ears as I realized I could see most of her outlined body in those flames.
“Lara,” I whispered.
I couldn’t get the word to come out any louder. Even so, hands touched me and grasped me from either side, warning me to be still.
They brought Chaote out, seconds later.
I saw a conference under way among the white men standing there. One had blood on his face, which caused me to look back at Lara, trying to reassure myself that her own blood wasn’t the source. Then the white man touched the cut there and cursed, muttering about ‘the little demon who bit him.’
One of the other whites smiled at his words, leering at Lara in her short shift.
The other men had eyes only for Choate.
I saw Master D’Alendria hanging back, somewhat apart from those who held the two slaves. His wig stood strangely on his head, looking as incongruous on him as it always did, compared to others of his kind. He wore a plain-spun top, undyed even to make it more white, and black pants shoved into work boots coated in island mud and plant matter.
His expression lacked the triumph and excitement I could see in the faces of the other white townsfolk and plantation men.
If anything, what I saw there resembled something closer to pity, as if, in looking at Choate, he knew he hadn’t been the one to defile his wife all those months ago, but felt helpless to stop the cascading events.
Master D’Alendria’s sympathy for Chaote took me aback, although I couldn’t say how it hit at my own heart precisely.
I saw the magic man then, standing close to our master, who still witnessed this judging with more than a little pallor.
“Is it him, magic man?” Master D’Alendria demanded, his voice deep, but still holding that darker thread of grief. “Do your bones tell you the truth of this thing, so we can be shut of it, once and for all?”
Somehow, it occurred to me only then that our master had lost a wife in all of this. A wife that—rumor had it, and one verified by my own observations prior to the nightmare of the past weeks—our master had loved dearly, and perhaps held in a higher regard than he did his own person.
Giselle D’Alendria was dead to him now, forever gone from his bed and his home.
The magic man frowned at our master’s words.
I saw his eyes look at Chaote, then past him, until he seemed to be looking at the very wall where I crouched, at me and my own eyes, where they peered through the cracks in the quarter’s walls.
I held my breath until those light-brown eyes shifted away. The magic man answered Master D’Alendria somberly, once more regarding Chaote, who stood, bare-chested, his eyes on his wife alone, in the center of the clearing.
“There is a danger in either path,” the magic man said only.
Master D’Alendria gave him an angry look.
“Do not plague me with your riddles!” he snapped. “Answer me with a single word, did he do this thing, or not?”
“You know the truth of his involvement in this matter already, sir,” the magic man said. “You need no chicken bones to answer that riddle. Yet fate has its own ideas as to what will finally occur in our lives...”
I saw our master’s lip curl in fury at the magic man’s words, even as he seemed to restrain himself from shouting at the old man again. Nodding instead, Master D’Alendria folded his muscular arms—the master himself couldn’t have been more than thirty-five, and wasn’t immune to the charms of physical exertion, unlike some of his countrymen—and stared back at where Chaote continued to look at Lara, his dark eyes holding an overt fear.
“Let the girl go,” Master D’Alendria said, his voice brooking no argument. “Even animals have loyalty to their mates. I will not have her killed for such a thing, not when there’s a good forty years of labor left on her. Tie her to her bed, if you must, but leave her here...I shan’t lose two slaves on this night.”
The look of relief that came to Chaote’s eyes was so palpable that I felt my throat close...although if it was in anger or surprise, I could not have with certainty said. I felt a twinge of something, a grief greater for him than I would have thought possible in the months since he’d been named Lara’s mate.
In that same instant, Lara herself burst out with another scream.
“NO!” She threw herself against the white men holding her, who regarded her with their own varying levels of disappointment, even as they stared at Lara’s body through the thin shift. “NO! NO...PLEASE! DO NOT HURT HIM!”
The larger and more muscular of the white men, most of them overseers and other tradesmen rather than plantation owners or their sons, gripped Chaote and began to walk him into the darkness beyond the clearing.
I could only watch, lost again in meaning and silence, as they dragged Lara writhing and screaming back towards the slave’s quarters. The white men handed her off to the older slave women and their husbands when they finally reached the darkened door. Lara continued to fight the slaves, too, but too many hands held her now and would not let go, and eventually I saw her collapse in a kind of despair into the nearest of the old women’s arms.
Lara’s sobs continued on into the night, long after the last of the torches went with Chaote and the white men into the jungle towards the ocean.
Lara’s sobs did not cease even when the sun came up over the mountains on the eastern edge of the island.
None of us in the quarters closed our eyes that night.
In all of that time, that sickness in my belly did not dissipate either.
It remained there, unsated, even after I knew that Chaote had finally drawn his last breath.
***
The death of Chaote did not satisfy the whites.
Chaote’s body hung naked from an old magnolia tree that stood not far from the ocean, on a small, grass-covered hill that gave a view of both the cane crops and the distant blue of the clear sea. It stood as probably the largest of the magnolias on the master’s land, and I could not help thinking it was a good place for Chaote, as he had stared out so often upon a similar view in his rare moments of leisure, even after Lara had been given to him as a wife.
The whites did not take the body down.
Instead, they let it rot there, perhaps as a message to us (one, it must be said, we did not need), or perhaps as a message to the other white women in town, most of whom did not need that lesson, either.
In any case, they let Chaote’s muscular body rot without interference, which it did quickly and efficiently, as all things do in the wet air of the islands. The magic man conducted rituals over it, but only in the dead of night, and only after all of the white people had left.
Even so, the white people heard of this, and the whispers began anew.
All of those townsfolk present had heard the magic man’s unwillingness to name Chaote in the late hours of that night. More than I had wondered whether guilt had driven the magic man to hesitate to accuse the young slave, especially with the man’s wife crying uncontrollably by his side—a wife that the magic man himself had given to Chaote.
Rumors that the magic man allied with the Maroons in the hills arose from that same collection of whispering tongues. It began to be said, by whites and blacks alike, that the magic man used his magic to break down the mind of our young master, and deprive him of his fair young mistress. Some thought the magic man had seen a weakness in Master D’Alendria, in the wife he so adored, and sought to create a fear in him of his own slaves. They said that the magic man had given the master’s wife a mystical birth, one that produced a devil meant to undermine the very foundations of the plantation’s home.
On other islands, ma
gic had been used against the whites in such a way.
These stories were well known not only to the whites, but to us, too, and fortified by the sale of blacks between the various plantations among the islands.
Our magic man had always been seen as above reproach in such things by Master D’Alendria, who consulted him whenever such doubts arose as to the character of others of his household. Now those whispers took on an ugly, frightened cast, a wondering as to whether the magic man had hidden his true disposition from the whites all this time.
Further, our master grieved her, I knew.
He grieved his young wife, Giselle, just as Lara grieved Chaote.
I shut my mind to both things, for to dwell on either would only take me to dangerous places in my own mind. Grief is not an emotion I enjoy, whether it is mine or another’s.
Still, Lara’s continued pain stung, perhaps more than it should have done, given that Chaote was, after all, her husband.
Given that the magic man was seen as unusually gifted—not only in spells and medicines, but with his own brand of uncanny cleverness—that seed, once it found its way to fertile ground, dug only deeper into those dark soils, taking root and worming further into the minds of every white in the township, until many were quite overcome with fear of him.
I do not know when or how they finally reached Master D’Alendria’s ears, these whispers and suppositions and rumors of black magic and mystically-created demon babies and other Maroon-like ill-doing, but it was not long before an alternate theory of how Mistress D’Alendria had been impregnated had reached the insides of the planter’s mansion.
It explained everything, really...all of the things that had been left partly unsatisfied by Chaote’s gruesome death. It must have explained those things to Master D’Alendria, too, and in a way marginally more agreeable than the thought of his young wife’s betrayal.
I stood inside, with my African father, who stooped low now from age as he cleaned pots with metal tools in the imported, porcelain sink. I snuck in to help him more often these days, but I knew I couldn’t save him from being found out for his increasing weaknesses much longer. My father had simply gotten too old to perform his tasks at the level of competence needed for an educated man like Master D’Alendria, even without a wife present.
I still felt some measure of debt towards the slave father who had taken me in, along with his wife, for the affection they had shown me. Therefore, I did what I could to prolong that time, in the hopes that my father might be a few years older before they declared him entirely useless. For this reason, I happened to be indoors when the master burst into the kitchen that late morning.
Master D’Alendria’s blue eyes looked wild that day, holding a crazed, far-seeing light that I flinched from, in spite of myself.
My African father might have done the same, but for the fact that his own eyesight had withered a lot over the years. He also had an increasingly pronounced tendency to wander off in his own mind into pleasanter recollections than whatever it was with which his hands might be occupied.
Therefore, only I stared at our master as he stood where he rarely had cause to stand, in front of the large stone fireplace in which most of his meals had been cooked these past seven years.
“Do you need something, sir?” I ventured after a pause, when he hadn’t moved for a few long seconds, nor his expression changed.
Master D’Alendria stared at me, as if noticing me for the first time.
“You are assistant to that magic man, are you not?” he said.
The words sounded like an accusation.
“Indeed I am, master, sir. I was chosen for this role...” I trailed a bit, at the end, feeling like I should apologize for that fact somehow.
But Master D’Alendria only nodded, his blue eyes no longer seeming to see me.
He stared into the low fire in the stone grate instead, once more lost in that faraway place, his countenance as hard as the water-washed river stones that made up the chimney’s blackened face. I noticed again, that, without his wig, as our master was now, his arms browned by sun and the darker skin above the open shirt visible at his collar, he appeared much more of a real man to me than he ever did when he dressed for the other whites in town, with the powder and the buckled boots and whatever else.
Just when I’d thought he had dismissed me entirely, those blue eyes once more found mine.
“Is he a good man?” my master asked, blunt. “This magician of yours. Is he closer to God or the Devil, in your view?”
I could only gape at him, and at the strangeness of the question.
To ask a slave about God, to raise the question of the relative character of one dark-skinned man to another, as though I were a real human being, took me so far aback that I found I could not answer him.
As if realizing the import of his own words in those few seconds of pause as I stared, Master D’Alendria waved them away, making them invisible.
“Never mind,” he said coldly. “I cannot risk it, in any case.”
I could not think of a word to say to that, either.
I only watched as our master turned on his booted heel, leaving the smoke-filled kitchen and myself and my father to our suds-filled bins, where my father still hummed happily away, scrubbing food from the previous night’s meal from the iron, oblivious that anything at all had passed.
***
They killed the magic man two days later.
Unlike with Chaote, I did not witness his being taken.
The whites, perhaps fearing that we would protest given his status among our people, found a time to take the magic man when none of his congregation would be the wiser. We merely went to the religious meeting that day, in the clearing where we had always been allowed to pray by Master D’Alendria. That clearing, as usual, was sheltered from the sun by canvas sheets and lit with candles set on stones, but the magic man did not arrive.
His body was never found.
By now, Chaote’s had fallen to the dirt at the base of the tree, bones picked clean by animals and birds, and scarcely wearing what remained of the rope that finally killed him.
I found myself the unfortunate leader of the next religious service.
The congregation was quiet on that day. Perhaps more of them had seen this coming than I had realized. I certainly could not quite get over my shock at how quickly and seamlessly things had unfolded before my eyes.
I now stood as the magic man for our people, the new Ndi-obeah of Christo de Mar. They would look to me now, with my lesser knowledge of plants and bones, to tell them how best to keep their children alive, to keep their wives from dying of sepsis, to birth their babies and read the moon and the stars to tell then what would come. They would ask me to say the prayers for the dead, to pray to the storm gods to spare them, to tell them who to marry and who to punish.
The realization pained me, frightened me and filled me with wonder, all in roughly equal proportions.
They did not know it, for I did not look it, but I turned thirty-eight on that day.
I made it through the ceremony with raised arms and chanting lips, moving in a near-trance that did not connect anything I said with the thoughts that sifted through the darker corners of my mind. I reached the end of the service and not a one of them said a word, or looked anything but grim as their understanding grew that yet another of our ranks had been taken to satisfy the anger and fear of the whites. Not a one of us really believed the magic man had done this thing, least of all me, but no one asked us, apart from Master D’Alendria that morning in the kitchen.
At the end of the service, everyone filed silently out of the clearing, leaving me alone in that oval of packed earth, surrounded by candles...
...but not alone.
Before I could make a move from my place by the stone altar we had constructed all those years ago, when Master D’Alendria first bought land here and began to people it with those of us with dark skin, a voice made me turn, the only one that could still do so
, no matter how softly it whispered.
“I know, Ruli,” she told me.
I turned, staring at her.
Her brown eyes were cold, darker than I’d ever seen them. Her hands clenched at her narrow hips in fists.
For the first time, Lara did not hide in any way that she was like me.
I stared at her, feeling the heat rise in my chest as the sight between us sparkled, filling the air with wisps of flame that none of the whites or blacks would have seen, had they been there with us.
The magic man might have seen it, but he was gone now.
“I know what you did,” Lara said. “To Chaote. To me. I know, Ruli.”
“He lay with her—” I began.
“You made him do it!” she snarled, her lit eyes boring into me, showing her true race with a force that sucked my breath. “You pushed him, Ruli! He wasn’t like us...but he loved me. He loved me, Ruli! I will kill you for this, if it is the last thing I do!”
Before I could think of a single word of protest or denial, Lara turned on her bare heel, stalking out of the tent in her plain cotton dress, those wisps of light and electricity still flowing angrily around her head and lithe body, even as it dimmed from the eyes that now shone with a dark-black shimmer like volcanic rock.
I did not bother to defend myself.
There would have been no point.
I had known the risk, but I did it anyway.
Even now, I cannot bring myself to feel even a small shred of remorse.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. Under that name, she publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov’s Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award.
Fiction River: Fantasy Adrift Page 21
