The New World (23 page)

And our crew and fellow passengers? Did they hear this silence, or think what it might mean? Not at all. They had their own lives to lead, which I thought was shameful and at the same time perfectly understandable. And while Natty and I did not feel in the least bit inclined to join them, because we had so quickly and happily fallen into our old ways, it became more and more difficult for us to ignore them as the
Angel
continued her journey.

I should say they were a fair sample of every sort this new world had magnetized, or soaked up, or lured, or bought from the old one—beginning with the captain, who seemed to have been produced by a marriage of the moon and whiskey, which he consumed in large quantities with no visible effect. He kept himself apart in the little box of his wheelhouse, but sent the whip of his voice snaking back and forth all day over the heads of everyone on deck; commanding us to stand still, or to shift to the starboard or the port in order to influence the direction of the
Angel
; or to retie a pony that had broken from its rail; or on one occasion to admire two alligators which had caught and dragged into the water a deer they were determined to tear into a meal of two equal sizes; or to encourage the oarsmen; or to upbraid them for allowing us to run aground; or to congratulate them on levering us loose again; or to blame himself, or more often to praise himself, for his own work with the rudder which he continually heaved this way or that as the river demanded.

Compared to this fountain of energy and advice, the others on board seemed lesser mortals. Most of them were pioneers in their way, as I have already suggested—farmers and prospectors and men following a whim. Among them were also a few Indians, some wearing the costumes of their tribes, some squeezed into ordinary town clothes such as striped trousers and black hats, beneath which their hair protruded in braids or plaits or greasy hanks. In either case, they sat apart from other passengers, who declined to recognize them except to insist they move aside, or to spit in their direction. Occasionally this led to fights between parties who wanted to occupy the same spot; more often the Indians gave way at the first sign of difficulty, sloping toward some unpopular part of the boat; I saw the same quietness in the slaves who were traveling with their owners, or stood in a gang beside the ponies in the stern until they were needed.

Because Natty and I were still wearing our Indian clothes we were treated with the same indifference or scorn I have just described. Initially I found this very objectionable, and wanted to protest in a clear English voice that the manners of the wilderness were infinitely preferable to those in parts that called themselves civilized. Soon, however, I decided we should avoid every kind of confrontation, and move even closer to the stern of the boat, by the pony-stand and the slaves. I can hardly say it was peaceful there, since it brought us nearer still to our vociferous captain; but it was a neglected spot, and therefore suitable.

As we found our refuge in the stern of the
Angel
we looked around at those nearest to us in a friendly fashion, to show we were willing to be good neighbors, and introduced ourselves to a young man and woman not much older than ourselves. They seemed out of place in this part of the boat because they were pale-skinned and smartly dressed: the man in a suit of dark worsted; the woman in a plain woollen dress with a tartan shawl pulled over her head, but not to conceal the yellow ringlets that reached to her shoulders; both of them fresh-faced and eager-looking, or that was my first impression.

While we began to exchange pleasantries, such as how pretty the sun looked while it died across the water, or how noisy the trees along the bank had become now the birds were preparing to sleep—I decided their enthusiasm was in fact a form of anxiety. Their clothes were too small and pinched them around the waist and under the arms. Their smiles came and went too quickly. Their voices were very dry, which meant they swallowed at the ends of their sentences, with the young man often rubbing his long fingers across his forehead. Even when the darkness had settled around us more definitely, and the captain hung a lantern in his wheelhouse which caught all four of us in its net of light, I saw his hands trembling when he spoke.

I would have preferred not to mention any of this, but Natty showed a strange recklessness—propelled, I think, by the sadness she still felt at leaving the Rider. When we had exhausted our pleasantries, and were peering at the river swarming away into the gloom behind us, she told them our names and the outline of our story, then asked for theirs in return.

Joshua and Anne Marie, they told us; their home was hundreds of miles to the north, near where the
Angel
had begun her journey, in a settlement built at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri.

All this was mild enough, but then Natty became much bolder.

“Are you in danger?” she asked. “You seem troubled.” I am sure she tried to seem solicitous, since she felt she understood unhappiness very well in her present state of mind. But Joshua was not to know this. Before answering he took hold of Anne Marie's hand and squeezed it until his knuckles whitened.

“What's that to you?” he asked; his voice had the soft American drawl.

“We're travelers too,” Natty told him. “We have our own worries.” I thought for a moment she might be about to talk about the Rider but she drew back. “You can't help it,” she said. “Everyone who is far from home is in difficulties of some kind. It can't be avoided.”

Joshua leaned toward Natty, seeming glad of her inquiries. “Very well then, Miss Natty,” he said. “I suppose you could say troubled, yes.”

When he said the word “troubled” Anne Marie also repeated it like an echo, and as if this suddenly gave him permission to speak his mind, Joshua then lost all his reserve. Looking from me to Natty and then back again, with his eyes glittering, he said, “We have run away from home. Our parents—our fathers, at any rate—do not approve of our friendship. But we have turned our backs on them. We are making a new home in New Orleans.”

“In New Orleans,” said the echo, also leaning forward until her pretty face was flushed with lamplight. I saw now she must be a little younger than Natty, and much paler in her complexion. I felt touched by her innocence, and tempted to add that we had also been driven into the world by our fathers, but Natty was ready with her next question.

“How long have you been traveling?” she asked.

“I reckon we've lost count,” said Joshua, and gave a little chuckle, as if he could not believe the size of the country he lived in. “Maybe a month. Maybe six weeks. Strange way to start a life.”

“Strange how?” asked Natty.

“Floating along,” Joshua said. “Just floating along.”

“I can think of worse,” said Natty. “We're bound for New Orleans ourselves.”

“How's that?”

“Well—” Natty began, but the captain interrupted her, shouting even more violently than usual, and suddenly pointing behind us over the wake of our boat.

Most of the other passengers paid no attention but continued their conversations in little groups and knots, or their sleep on the hard boards, or their meditations where they lounged against the bales of skins and other commodities. I found myself thinking how serene they all looked, how peaceful. And if not peaceful: how helpless. How like a ship of fools.

Perhaps this occurred to me because I already knew what the captain had seen—although when I turned to look where he was still pointing into the darkness behind us, I could make out very little. Beyond the fringe of our lights, a million mosquitoes bounced in the air like grains of sand in the mouth of a spring.

But there was a sound in the air, faint yet persistent. A bell, ringing continuously, then a murmur of voices muffled by the last bend of the river, then shouting.

It was another boat. Were the crew in difficulties and needing help? If so, why did it feel as though they were hunting us down? Were they pirates?

Our captain thought they must be, to judge by the way he now began roaring at his oarsmen to work faster. “Go to it, you idlers,” he shouted. “Go to it! You have the fallen angels coming up behind you, and if you want your wages go to it!”

But I knew better than him. I knew it was not pirates, or not the kind he imagined.

I touched Natty on the shoulder, meaning she must stay sitting with our friends and not show herself, then worked my way farther aft through the few other passengers collected there, and the groups of slaves, and then the line of ponies, until I reached the tail end of the boat where I had a clear view of the river. The mud smell rose in my face, warm and close.

But this was not the reason I held my breath.

I held my breath to listen.

There! The shouting came again, blowing toward me like smoke so I could not hold it. Then again, and this time with a sprinkle of lights showing through the trees that marked the last river-bend. Now I heard it properly, and snatched it.

The words were my name. My name and Natty's name.

Black Cloud. He must have learned what to call us from people along the way. He must have returned to Achilles and hailed a second boat to follow our own. Had Achilles not said they came suddenly in groups, then not at all?

And where was Achilles now?

I did not like to imagine him, or the dead creatures staring down with their blind eyes, and the mirror-light swaying across the silent walls of his cabin. I could only think about Black Cloud finding a lighter boat than our own. A boat closing very quickly, which would soon be alongside us.

The captain still did not know this; he still thought it was pirates. The other passengers did not know it either, because they could not hear our names in the voices echoing across the water. But they knew there was danger all right, great danger—and were now suddenly milling around the deck, with the women mopping their faces and exclaiming, and the men promising to stand firm, and showing the weapons strapped to their belts, and boasting how they would use them if necessary.

Natty left our friends and came to stand beside me. I felt the warmth of her shoulder soaking into my own, just as I had felt it years before on the
Nightingale
, as we cut toward the Island and saw the fires burning in the darkness.

“It's him, isn't it?” she said.

“It is.” I reached for the satchel around my neck and felt the weight inside it and heard the pieces of silver sliding softly together.

“What shall we do?”

“At the moment? Nothing. There's nothing we can do.”

They were the same words I had spoken in the Black Bay, gazing at the waves as they pounded the
Nightingale
and slithered across her stripped and tilted deck; the same that I had said again in our prison in Black Cloud's village.

Natty remembered. “Nothing again?” she said.

I looked behind me toward Joshua and Anne Marie, who were embracing one another, and at the other passengers still churning beyond them; they looked like figures in purgatory, waiting for judgment.

“We will fight him,” I said, which was all I could think of. “We have what he wants but he mustn't take it. I won't give it to him.”

It was ludicrous—the sort of thing a child might say—and anyway Natty did not hear me. She was fixed entirely on the scene behind us: the boat closer still, the bow-wave creaming the mud-colored water, and the torchlight dripping off the arms and shoulders of the oarsmen, fizzing into fragments where it struck the ripples in the current.

Only a hundred yards behind us now. A trim little boat. A dainty boat. Half the size of the
Angel
, with a compact cabin at the center and just two passengers on deck. Two passengers standing between the oarsmen, and sheltered by a pale awning.

Eighty yards.

Seventy.

“Mister Jim!” The voice was hard as a hammer-blow and perfectly expressionless. “Miss Natty!”

That was all. The same sounds pounding the air over and over.

“Mister Jim! Miss Natty!”

Now the captain heard them too. “What are they saying?” he shouted, thrusting his shining head and shoulders through the window of his wheelhouse. “Who's put us in trouble?”

I kept my eyes on the devils behind us and kept quiet.

“People have put us in trouble,” repeated the captain. “Jim and Matty.”

“Natty,” said Natty, which I thought was a confession, but she quickly muddled this by adding, “We heard him say ‘Natty.' ”

The captain blew out his cheeks and made a loud puffing sound. “Natty, then. You wouldn't have seen them, I suppose?”

“No,” I said, without even turning to face him, because I knew he would see straight through me. “How could we know them? We've only just come aboard.”

I gave a little laugh, but the captain was not so easily fooled. “You wouldn't
be
them, I suppose?” he persevered. “You two?”

“No,” I told him again, and did him the courtesy of half-turning, laughing more loudly. In the corner of my eye I saw Joshua and Anne Marie, who remembered our names; they had stiffened into waxworks.

“Probably it's a trick,” I told him. “To make us slow down so they can jump aboard and rob us.”

The captain considered this for a moment, glaring down at me, then away.

“Maybe a trick, maybe,” he muttered under his breath, but I ignored him. The boat was fifty yards off now, and the deck-lights dappled more brightly over the oarsmen at the prow—six tall Negroes on either side, stripped to the waist and plunging so hard into their work the spray leaped toward them in melting claws and teeth. Between them, two other men stood in loose tunics and leggings. One was massive and four-square, his big hands cupped to his mouth to make a trumpet for his voice; the other was much smaller and slighter, his face bare to the breeze and his fire-paint glimmering.

Forty yards.

Thirty.

Twenty-five.

I was spellbound. Transfixed by the drumbeat of the voices. By the waves sloshing against the prow. By the jinking lights. By the men themselves. By Black Cloud and the Painted Man—the two of them stretching forward together, suspended over the prow of their boat as if they were flying, with the swirls and spirals of their decorations swarming across their faces, and their eyes bulging, and their teeth bare, and their skin shining, and their hair glossy as polished metal.

Ten yards.

There was no wound on Black Cloud, nothing to show the Rider's arrow had ever hurt him. There were only his hands dripping with river spray, and his stony eyes, and our names no longer our names but groans and gasps, and his fingers like talons, and the satchel almost within his reach—almost, almost.

Five yards.

Four.

Three.

He had paralyzed me. I had no choice, no will of my own. I hung there like a bird skewered on a thorn.

The captain's shouts were whispers.

The other passengers did not exist.

And I knew how it ended. I saw our two boats splintering together. I heard the soft bang of Black Cloud pouncing onto the deck beside me. I felt the weight of the necklace lifting from me, and my whole body lightening and floating and fading as if my heart had been torn out of my chest.

Except my heart was not torn out.

My heart was still thundering.

And I was still here, living and breathing.

With the satchel still safe around my neck.

With the captain's moon-face still looming through the window of his cabin, still bellowing at his oarsmen.

With the oarsmen now shouting back: the
Angel
must fly! Fly to the left! Now! Now! To miss the sandbank ahead!

And she did fly—with the captain hauling on the polished old beam of the rudder so it almost struck the following boat on the nose and knocked Black Cloud from his perch. With a shudder that ran through the whole length of our hull. With a screech, and a squeal, and a big splash over the port rails.

I lost my balance and grasped at Natty. It broke the spell. It freed us. I crouched down and braced for the catastrophe.

But nothing happened.

There was only the river sweeping us forward, the thick brown water churning and purling and twisting and gurgling, while I looked off the stern of the
Angel
and saw the pale bulge of the sandbank looming in the current behind us like a whale, an albino whale, then sliding exactly beneath the prow of our enemy, and rising up, and bringing his boat to a dead halt, and holding it fast with a scraping wrench of timbers and pitch. And still holding it fast.

In a second we were out of reach.

In two seconds safe.

In five or six vanishing round the next bend of the river.

But I saw everything I wanted to see—and did not want to see. I saw Black Cloud snarling. I saw his eyes swelling like a gargoyle. I saw his talons tearing the air. I saw the Painted Man collapsing onto his knees, raging, cursing. I saw their lamps dwindle. And at the same time I heard the river still splattering against their hull, and their timbers keening, and our captain roaring, and our fellow passengers cheering, because there was nothing behind us now except darkness and silence.