Dead water - Barbara Hambly [61]
“. . . figure we can catch 'em at Horsehead Bar.”
January had just begun to reach down for footing on the murky bottom, when other voices sounded on the path. He ducked down again, praying the movement hadn't caught anyone's attention.
“That's twenty miles!”
“You ever know a boat to get off Horsehead Bar in less'n two days at low water?”
Something brushed January's leg underwater, and he fought not to flinch. By force of will he remained where he was for another ten minutes, listening. When the frogs began to croak again, eerie in the stillness, he cautiously raised his head. The path and the woods were empty. Trembling, he waded, not back to the path, but across the rest of the bayou, and plunged into the tangled undergrowth of the woods.
His benefactor at the landing had instructed him to follow Chickasaw Bayou but hadn't mentioned what other bayous might intersect it in the marshy lands within the big river's loop. Trying to keep the bayou on his left, January encountered a wider body of water. . . . Another bayou? The Yazoo River? It seemed to have a current, but bayous frequently did. In the leafy summer woods it was difficult to determine the direction of the sun, which stood nearly straight overhead now. The windless air was suffocating. January crossed the river—or bayou—and followed it to his left, but it bent back on itself, and rapidly dried to a shallow pan of reeds and dead trees fringed with ants' nests the size of flour-sacks.
When he turned back to seek the original bayou, he found himself amid trees that looked totally unfamiliar, cypress and bright-green thickets of harshly-whispering palmetto, the ground a jungle of elephant-ear underfoot. He pushed through this until, ahead of him, he smelled the whiff of smoke, the ashy pungence of a fire newly damped. He stood to listen but heard nothing. No voices, no curses, no friendly bicker of men breaking camp.
Silently, January moved back into the palmetto thickets . . .
. . . and heard a rustling away to his right.
He moved away from it as silently as he could, but something—the birds too silent, perhaps? The cicadas hushed?—turned him back farther into the woods, and after a few moments he heard the unmistakable crack of a trodden stick to his left. Among the palmettos he was at least sheltered from sight, and he moved from clump to clump, listening to the rustle of the men hunting him. And they were hunting him, two of them at least, working through the thickets on either side. Somewhere close by he heard a dog bark, and made for the sound, his steps quickening as the slashing rustle neared.
They had to have heard him, he knew, and broke into a jog, then a run. The thresh of his legs through the tangles of honeysuckle and elephant-ear drowned all sound of pursuit, but he didn't dare look back. Only strode, struggled, ran upslope, then down to a marshy little trickle of puddles that might have once been a bayou. Someone behind him yelled, “You, boy, stop!” as he broke cover at the bottom, but he plunged into the woods on the far side and cut toward his right as soon as he thought he was out of sight. The heat dazed him, beat on him, suffocated him; he smelled smoke again and heard a cock crow, and the next minute he saw open sky through the trees ahead.
A small field lay before him, corn thick and nearly head-high under a sun like molten brass. January vaulted the split-rail fence and threw himself into the green shelter of the rows, ducking low and keeping still, like a rabbit, like Compair Lapin when Bouki the Hyena prowled around. The dust-smell filled his nose. Closer the dog barked again. A cornsnake blinked at him from the dappled shade, then slid away in a little whisper of red and gold.
Through the rustling of the long, leathery leaves he thought he heard voices at the edge of the field.
Let him walk through