Dead water - Barbara Hambly [38]
January nodded, and rubbed his eyes, gritty with the exhaustion of having stayed up most of the night watching for another chance to break into the hold. But either because of yesterday's incident, or because Thucydides had discovered the evidence of Queen Régine's presence on the boat, both the bow and the stern doors down into the hold were not only double-locked but, January suspected, unobtrusively watched as well.
Through the day the steamboat pecked and slogged and struggled its way upstream, sometimes seeming to become mired in sunken forests of flotsam and snags. They bulled their way over bars below Dead Man's Bend and Esperance Point, and for a time hung up on a bar below Palmetto Point so badly that it looked as if every male on the boat would be required to help “spar” over—literally lever the boat by means of mast-like poles chained to the capstans on the bow, like a wingless locust shoving itself along the ground. When they entered the horrendous mat of snags and driftwood around the mouth of the Red River, in the final slanting light of the hot evening, it seemed to January that they would be trapped there forever.
“Goddam snaggiest stretch of the river, bar the reach below Vicksburg,” panted the old pilot Lundy, whom January found at the bottom of the stern-promenade stairway, clinging to the bannister in exhaustion. “It's like they got a patent snag-makin' factory up at the top of the Red River, and they just dump 'em in and let 'em float down. Never seen the like.”
January watched a second night, to try to slip into the hold, but Thucydides seemed always to be walking around the decks with a lantern. In the end, in exhaustion, he bade Rose good-night and returned to Hannibal's stateroom to sleep on the floor. Since discovering the poison and the juju-bag in the hold, he had felt uneasy anywhere on the lower deck at night.
He dreamed of poverty, of sharing a single room with Rose in the house of some aging former plaçée, and teaching piano lessons in the parlor to pay the rent. In his dream it was night, and Rose sat in silence by the window, a book open on her lap and her long brown hair lying in soft curls down her back, but no lamp beside her. January kept asking her in his dream, over and over, What is it? What's wrong?
And she would neither look at him nor reply.
Then he dreamed that the Silver Moon was sinking, that the juju-bag hidden deep in the hold was burning a hole in the bottom of the boat, was calling out into the darkness of the waters. And from the darkness of the waters great twisted hands reached up, snagging at the paddles, tearing at the fragile boards. He and Rose were in the dark of the hold as the planks began to break apart, she much farther in than he, and running away from him, running into that dark nightmare corridor. Running in the wrong direction, away from the safety of the door. He shouted her name, tried frantically to catch up with her, to pull her back to safety, but her hand slipped out of his, and the water took her. He groped for her in the darkness, holding his breath, fighting the dark water that closed over his head, while huge floating trunks and boxes slid and nudged at him in the blackness, and he heard Queen Régine laughing.
Your woman will be torn from your arms. . . .
He woke panting, drenched in sweat, to find Hannibal kneeling beside him on the straw matting, his long hair hanging down around his face by the light of the single candle.
“Are you all right?” asked the fiddler softly.
Night was black outside the windows. The Silver Moon could have been steaming through the depths of interstellar space for all that could be seen.
January sank back down on his rolled-up coat that he was using for a pillow; he was shaking.
“Or I suppose I should ask, is Rose all right?” Hannibal settled with his back against the bunk and his skinny knees drawn up under his immense white linen nightshirt. “You were calling her name.”
January shook his head. “It's the same dream,