A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [110]
He came through trees and found himself facing water he’d never seen before, jewel green with duckweed and scaled over with the expanding rings of water drops in the rain. Cypress like old gray gods in rags crowded along its edge, pale against the bright green of the pines behind them. In the water itself their knobby knees rose up like wading children sent ahead to scout the shallows. A turtle blinked at him from a log.
Thank God the alligators are still sleeping this time of year, he thought, turning back on his own tracks, casting around for the blaze he’d left—he thought he’d left—hereabouts. The water in front of him might be the bayou along which Ti Margaux had his broken-down house, or might be a tributary of it, or might lead somewhere else altogether. The rain came harder, rustling in the leaves of the live oaks, the needles of the pines. By the water the air was cool, but in the trees again, even the rain didn’t seem to affect the damp heat, only keep him from hearing the sounds of pursuit. He stumbled in a tangle of wild azalea, and very suddenly, found himself face-to-face with a young black man in the coarse trousers of a field hand, a club in his hand.
“Here he is!” shouted the man. “Here he—”
January covered the distance between them in two long strides, wrested the club from the hunter—who was too surprised at being attacked, instead of fled, to use it—and cracked him a hard blow across the side of the head. The young man went sprawling, stunned, and January sprinted in the direction he thought he’d been going immediately before the encounter. The rain pelted harder around him, blurring the green-on-green-on-green of water and vegetation into a confusing monochrome.
He turned toward the thicker growth along the water, but voices were calling out from the high ground, so he knew he couldn’t go to earth. Instead he veered for the high ground himself, where the water ash and cypress and palmetto gave place to loblolly pine that killed most undergrowth with its needles. His long legs pumped, his body settling into its stride. He was tall, but he hadn’t run in years, and his boots were heavy on his feet. Too many years, he thought, as his breath burned suddenly in his lungs. Those boys back there would be young, and fit.
He skidded, wove, plunged back toward the water again. Something gray caught his eye, and he saw that it was the old house of the deceased Ti Margaux, impossibly on the other side of the water. He had no idea how he’d gotten himself turned around, but the place was unmistakable. For a moment he considered lying low and letting them run past, but they’d see the house as well, know he’d head there. The snakes would be sleeping in winter, like the gators—Please God, let the snakes be still sleeping! Then he pulled off his coat and plunged into the bayou.
It wasn’t wide—twelve or fifteen feet—nor particularly deep. He only had to strike out and swim for a stroke or two, holding the coat and his papers aloft, then his boots were slushing thickly in unspeakable mud and a tangle of alligator weed that dragged at him like steel nets. Underwater leaves slit at his thighs and sides as he dragged himself ashore, stumbled up the slope, dragged open the door of the old barn and caught up the bridle, remembering to work evenly and without haste as he coaxed the bit into the horse’s mouth, buckled chin strap and band. He flung himself, dripping, onto the horse’s back without benefit of saddle and kicked the animal forward out the barn door at a gallop.
Outside there was only a tangle of cypress and red oak, buckler fern and butterweed and creeper slowing the horse’s stride. January ducked, keeping his head down under the low-hanging branches, wet moss trailing over his back as he tried to find the narrow trace that had led him here.
Then men were on him, springing out of the jungles of verdure, black, half-naked, armed with clubs and yelling with