Dead water - Barbara Hambly [60]
A lizard eyed him from a gray deadfall tree a little ways down the slope of the batture, fixing him with a sharp black gaze before it flicked away like an eyeblink. In the brush beneath the willows of the bank something moved, a rabbit or a fox, but January's breath jerked hard in his lungs for a moment.
Somewhere behind him, and probably not very far away, the Reverend Levi Christmas would be trailing the Silver Moon.
Unless of course he simply got on her at Vicksburg this morning, all decked out in his black coat and pastoral collar.
That will be all I need.
But at least if that were the case it would mean that Christmas wasn't somewhere behind him, waiting to kidnap him and sell him to some cotton planter in Texas.
The mouth of Chickasaw Bayou lay three miles up-river of Vicksburg, part of the murky bottomlands that lay between the meandering Mississippi and the bluffs along the Yazoo. The air was thick with gnats there, the sunlight greenish through the motionless leaves of cypress and willow. Turtles basked on dessicated logs that rose through the glassy brown surface of the water, arranged, as usual, largest to smallest, with an occasional tiny turtle perched on its larger cousin's back.
January cut a sapling with his pen-knife—the only knife a slave might carry—and prodded the long weeds and honeysuckle that overgrew the faint trace of cow-path, twice startling sinewy rustlings in the undergrowth that spoke of copperheads or water-moccasins lying just out of sight. Once he saw an alligator in the bayou, masquerading as a floating log. Its gold eyes reminded him of Jubal Cain's, glittering just above the line of the silent water.
He was far from New Orleans, and far from the Silver Moon, but Queen Régine's curse seemed to be working just fine.
He moved as quietly as he could, stopping repeatedly to listen. The woods were so still that the drumming of the cicadas seemed to roar in the trees, and the squeaky mew of a catbird cut the stillness like a violin note. He wasn't sure what made him first realize he was being pursued.
It wasn't a sound—he didn't hear the strike of hooves until afterwards, nor the rustle of a man flanking the road through the underbrush. Whatever it was that lifted the hair on his nape, January didn't hesitate. He waded silently into the bayou (Virgin Mary, please don't let there be gators) and made for the nearest half-sunk tree, sliding almost completely under the water on its far side and keeping the slime-draped trunk between his head and the waterside path.
Still silence. Did I really just hop in the bathtub with every gator and cottonmouth in Warren County out of sheer bad nerves?
He stayed where he was.
And stayed.
“Where the fuck'd he go?”
Shit, was the ground dry or muddy on the edge where I went in? He couldn't recall.
Hooves, and the faint jangle of a bit-chain. The creak of saddle-leather.
“Got to gone in the woods.”
“The fuck he did, Reverend, I was comin' round through the woods. He can't have gone up a tree.”
The Reverend Christmas laughed, a hoarse braying. “I'd like to see a nigger that big hangin' in a tree like an old coon. We'll get him, Turk. If he's headin' for the river, we'll catch him.”
“What if he ain't?”
“Where else he gonna go? They all head for the river when they run. I hear there's a regular leg of the Underground Railway runnin' up the river these days. That's where he's headed, sure.”
“You think he got that boy Bobby with him?”
“I didn't see him. He coulda been waitin' for him outside town. One way or the other, if that big bastard is indeed our loyal friend, I got a score to settle with him on that boy Bobby's account. . . .”
The voices faded, swallowed up in the soughing of the trees.
So Bobby decided to run after all. Christmas and his bravos