A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [123]
“Were you?” asked January. They stood knee-deep in water, skimmed over in an emerald velvet whisper of duckweed, the woods around them gray-silent, hung with silver moss, dark leaves, and stillness. More rain had fallen earlier and the world smelled of it, and of woodsmoke from some distant squatter’s shack. Maybe bandits, and maybe others like Lacrîme.
“Ah.” The old man spat and turned to lead him once again along the silent traces in the woods. “They took our village, filthy Dahomies. We twelve, we young men, came back from hunting to find it all gone. Big stuff, the stuff of great tales. We followed them through the jungle, along the rivers, through the heat and the black night. And they left what traces they could, our parents, our sisters, our little brothers, and the girls we were courting. It would have been a great tale if we’d taken them back. A great song, sung all down the years.”
He shook his head, with a wry mouth that such innocence could have been. “Maybe we sang a verse or two of it to each other, just to try it out, to hear how it would be.
“But there was no tale. Not even with my own village was I put in a ship, but with a bunch of people—Hausa from up by the great lake, Fulbe and Ibos—whose language I didn’t even know. Young men are stupid.”
He glanced back over his shoulder at January, laboring behind him.
“Nobody will give you justice, p’tit, no matter how much truth you shove down their throats. I’d been better to go north with my friends and look for another tribe of the Ewe, who at least knew the names of my gods.”
“Did you ever find them again?” asked January. “Your own people, your family—those who spoke your tongue, who knew the names of your gods?”
The Ewe shook his head. “Never.”
January followed in silence, as twilight settled deep over the green-gray land, then night.
They traveled on through night, sleeping only little. The food was gone and the rum January had been putting on his hand to keep infection at bay. He checked the wound whenever they stopped, which wasn’t often, until daylight failed; the mess of the raw flesh was ugly, but looked clean, as far as he could tell, and he felt no fever. He was weary, however, weary beyond anything he’d ever known, even working in the fields—even the weariness after fighting, hiding in trees and blasting away with a rifle at the advancing red-coated troops with the expectation of losing his own life any minute, hadn’t been like this. He guessed this was one effect of the wound, but the knowledge didn’t help him much. He wanted only to sleep.
“Not safe to sleep, Compair Rabbit,” the old man said, shaking January out of his doze where they’d stopped to rest by the foot of a tree. “Bouki the hyena, he’s out riding the tracks. Used to be there was farms in the boscage, villages like in Africa. We’d live like we did, and they couldn’t find us. When they came, we’d just melt away in the woods. Now Bouki and his hyenas, they ride the trails, hire Americans from up the river. Compair Rabbit better not sleep now when Bouki’s out hunting.”
They found a pirogue on the tangled banks of the long bayou that stretched from the lake in toward the town and hugged the bottomless shadows of its banks where the moonlight didn’t touch. In time they followed in the waters of the canal toward the grubby scatter of wooden cottages, mud and stucco houses that made up the Faubourg Tremé, the newer French suburb. Though it was long after curfew, Orion and his hunting dogs sinking west toward their home beyond the trackless deserts of Mexico, January was conscious of lamps burning, ochre slits behind louvered shutters, threads of amber outlining shut doors. All around him, as Lucius Lacrîme drew the small boat close to a floating wooden stage and led the way up and into