Fevre Dream Page 0,80

Orleans, August 1857

IN the heavy silence that followed Joshua's story, Abner Marsh could hear his own steady breathing and the thump of his heart laboring in his chest. Joshua had been talking for hours, it seemed, but in the black stillness of the cabin there was no way to be sure. Outside it might be getting light. Toby would be cooking breakfast, the cabin passengers would be taking their morning strolls along the promenade on the boiler deck, the levee would be bustling with activity. But inside Joshua York's cabin, night went on and on, forever.

The words of that damned poem came hack to him, and Abner Marsh heard himself say, "Morn came and went-and came, and brought no day."

"Darkness," said Joshua, softly.

"And you've lived in it your whole damn life," Marsh said. "No morning, not ever. God, Joshua, how d'you stand it?"

York made no reply.

"It ain't sensible," Marsh said. "It's the goddamndest story I ever sat still for. But damned if I don't believe you."

"I'd hoped you would," said York. "And now, Abner?"

That was the hard part, Abner Marsh thought. "I don't know," he said honestly. "All them people you say you killed, and still I kind of feel sorry for you. Don't know if I ought to. Maybe I ought to try to kill you, maybe that's the only damn Christian thing to do. Maybe I ought to try to help you." He snorted, annoyed at the dilemma. "I guess what I ought to do is hear you out a little more, and wait before I make up my mind, Cause you left somethin' out, Joshua. That you did."

"Yes?" York prompted.

"New Madrid," said Abner Marsh firmly.

"The blood on my hands," Joshua said. "What can I tell you, Abner? I took a life in New Madrid. But it was not as you might suspect."

"Tell me how it was, then. Go on."

"Simon told me many things of the history of our people; our secrets, our customs, our ways. One thing he said I found greatly disturbing, Abner. This world that your people have built is a daylight world, not easy for us to live in. Sometimes, to make it easier, one of us will turn to one of you. We can use the power that dwells within our eyes and our voice. We can use our strength, our vitality, the promise of life unending. We can use the very legends your people have erected around us, for our own purposes. With lies and fear and promises, we can fashion for ourselves a human thrall. Such a creature can be very useful. He can protect us by day, go where we cannot go, move among men without suspicion.

"In New Madrid there had been a killing. At the very woodyard where we stopped. From what I read in the newspapers, I had great hopes of finding one of my own race. Instead I found-call him what you will. A slave, a pet, an associate. A thrall. He was an old, old man. A mulatto, bald and wrinkled and hideous, with a milk-glass eye and a face terribly scarred by some ancient fire. He was not pleasing to look at, and inside-inside he was foul. Corrupt. When I came upon him, he leapt up, brandishing an axe. And then he looked at my eyes. He recognized me, Abner. He knew what I was at once. And he fell to his knees, crying and blubbering, worshipping me, groveling as a dog to a man, begging me to fulfill the promise. 'The promise,' he kept saying, 'the promise, the promise.'

"Finally I bid him stop, and he did. At once. Cringing away in fear. He had been taught to heed a bloodmaster's words, you see. I asked him to tell me the story of his life, hoping he might lead me to my own people.

"His story was grim as my own. He was born a free man of color in a place called the Swamp, which I gather is a notorious district of New Orleans. He lived as a pimp, a curpurse, finally a cutthroat, preying on the flatboatmen who came down to the city. He'd killed two men before he was ten. Later he served under Vincent Gambi, the bloodiest of the pirates of Barataria. He was overseer to the slaves Gambi stole from Spanish slavers and resold in New Orleans. He was a voodoo man as well. And he had served us.

"He told me of his bloodmaster, the man who took him in thrall,