The River of Kings: A Novel

by Taylor Brown

  Hunter runs his bow into the bank and steps out, the mud blurting under his feet. He can hear rustling in the hull of the cruiser, a hollow thump. Someone groans. Hunter jumps onto the bow, ax in hand, and makes ready to drop through the hatch, but Lawton’s head rears out of the darkness, looking up. His face is covered in blood, a river delta spread from a gash in his forehead. Streams zigzag around his nose and down his cheeks, running red into his beard. He’s grinning.

  “Jackpot,” he says.

  He holds up a cardboard flap, like the sign of a homeless man. In ballpoint pen, someone has drawn what looks like a seaborne dinosaur: fins like a sea turtle, four of them jutting oarlike from the pear-shaped body, and a long tail, an S-curved neck atop which sits a dragon’s head, long-snouted with big round eyes and a mouthful of daggered teeth.

  “Altie,” says Lawton. “I’d say we’re on the right track.”

  “What happened to your head?”

  Lawton’s eyes turn up, as if he can see the gash in his brow.

  “Oh. Bumped it.”

  Hunter looks past him, into the hold, just to be sure.

  47

  New France, June 1565

  Six leagues. The distance from the barques to the village of Utina, king in the west. A march that will take them six hours to complete. Before Le Moyne is a forest of arquebuses, iron barrels set in walnut and fruitwood. They sway over the shoulders of their bearers, pricking the sky. Despite the length of the march, each soldier has his taper already burning, ready to light the fuse of his matchlock. This visit is not to be a friendly one.

  Le Moyne had seen this coming, had known something wicked would follow in the wake of their commander’s failed foraging mission. Work on the Breton had all but halted, the men too weak. Desperate, Laudonnière appealed to his ally in the west, Utina. The chief could offer but scarce rations, he said. What corn he had he needed for seed. But send him a company of men to quell a disobedient vassal of his kingdom, and there would be plenty of corn and acorns to be seized.

  A week ago, Le Moyne watched the war party stumble nearly dead down the gangplank of their barque, returning from Utina’s western lands. They looked half-ghosted, skull-faced and hollow-eyed, paling already into the next world. Utina had used them to advance not upon a vassal of his kingdom but an enemy, one whose village offered nothing in the way of food for seizure.

  The men called for an audience with Laudonnière. They chose Lord d’Ottigni this time to speak for them.

  “Deceivers,” he told the assembled crowd. “Trompeurs. Serpents, like that of the Garden. They have made of us their handservants.”

  Oui.

  “The savage has betrayed us at every opportunity. Cheated us. Has even in his boldness murdered one of our countrymen.”

  Absolument.

  “They would let us to die in the land of their bounty, we who might offer them the word of salvation, the truth of Christ. We who have shed our blood and the blood of our foemen in their name.” He thumped his chest.

  Quels ingrats.

  “It is time, then, that we turn sword upon the serpent. That we force him to our will. I say that we seize the man himself. Utina. Mark me, friends: I will make him to share his bounty, or else his bowels will steam at my feet.”

  Men clapped and stomped the earth. They rattled their swords in their scabbards.

  Bravo! they said. Saisissez-le!

  Seize him.

  Le Moyne, watching from the crowd, looked to Laudonnière. He had been forgoing his collar of late because of the heat. His doublet was soiled, his neck a shrunken vine, a red warp of apple at the throat. He swallowed hard.

  “We have to consider the consequences of committing such an act.”

  Lord d’Ottigni spat, his face scar-white in the sun.

  “Aye,” he said. “And those of committing it not.”

  Again the cheers, the clang of steel and thump of flesh.

  Laudonnière’s eyes retreated into their hollows. He looked down at his boots, a scarecrow-man in overlarge rags. He said nothing.

  * * *

  They march straight to the great house of the king, seizing him without so much as a shot. Cries of alarm bound through the countryside—too late. Utina’s warriors are scattered, unprepared to retort with arrow or club.

  Le Moyne and his comrades are two days back at the boats, a company fifty-strong, waiting for the king’s ransom to be paid. On the first night, the women of the village appear on the river path, armed only with wails and moans. But their eyes, Le Moyne sees, jet here and there, recording the river landing, the heavy-timbered barques, the bristling of guns from the decks. They see their king chained to the mast.

  The next day a mass of archers appears on the path.

  “Come,” they say. “Come. Our enemies from the foothills have burned our village in absence of our king. You must help us.”

  Laudonnière looks to Lord d’Ottigni, who sniffs.

  “Tell them there is no smoke,” he says. He juts his chin upstream. The forest there quivers, wind-moved or something else. “And tell them we see the clubmen hiding in the wood, en embuscade. Tell them they would be wise not to think us fools.”

  The natives look surprised at this. Quickly they bring forward a basket of fish and another of acorns, as if in penance. It is scarcely enough to feed the fifty men of the guard, let alone the rest of the fort. At the end of two days, they have failed to purchase the freedom of their king. Laudonnière is ill with frustration. D’Ottigni watches the woods over the barrel of his weapon, then looks back at the king chained to the mast.

  “They believe we will put him to death whether they pay the ransom or not,” he says. “That is their own custom, and they judge us by it.”

  Utina holds out his manacled hands, his palms paler than the rest of him, as if to offer apology.

  “We go,” says Laudonnière, motioning to the men. “He comes back with us to the fort. They will learn we mean to keep our word.”

  As the men make ready to sail, Le Moyne scans the forest a last time, knowing it full of watching eyes.

  What folly they must see.

  48

  Altamaha River, 1996

  Nearly midnight. Blue light splashes through the trees, silent, followed by red. It paints the walls of the park’s store and bathhouse, the fishing pier, the RVs parked like a herd in the trees. Hiram Loggins is breathing hard. In one hand he holds a pair of heavy pliers from the boat, a cutting blade set deep in the jaw. In his other hand a twelve-gauge flare gun, blaze orange. He is standing in the shadow thrown by the camp store, open late to feed and provision the searchers and grievers and police.

  His boat is tied up at an old dock floating downstream of the park. On the water he can hear the crash of hooks, the songs of mourners. They are singing of swinging low and flying away, of going over Jordan. Nothing has been found, no bodies. Just more of the wreckage that litters the river bottom, a whole broken city of objects cast off or sunk or simply lost. There are appliances murdered, microwaves and boomboxes bludgeoned or shot full of holes, and toys and tackle from every era, and deadheads of virgin pine whipsawed from the forest a century ago.

  Hiram peeks his head around the corner of the building. A patrol car sits in front of the store, lightbar cascading blue to red, blue to red. Soundless. A deputy leans against the driver’s door, arms crossed, watching the river. In the backseat, sitting upright behind the Plexiglas divider, a pale javelin of flesh. Uncle King. A man who saved Hiram once, more surely than any lost soul.

  Hiram is going to return the favor.

  He flattens himself to the wall of the store and his mind fumbles over shields and bucklers, feathers and wing-shadows of scripture. Anything that might help him now. Then he fills his lungs with air and steps from under the gutters and raises his flare gun to the moon. The round tears into the sky, sizzling upon its braided tail of smoke, and already he is disappearing behind the store. The flare casts its hellish light on the river, lighting
it like a sluice of molten ore. He knows the sight, so much like the muddy waters of the Cua Lon River, when he raked the jungle with tracer fire. Every face is turned up to look, open-mouthed with awe. The deputy comes round one side of the building, curious, as Hiram comes round the other, crouched low, heading for the cruiser.

  He pulls the handle and the door pops, opening, and then he is face-to-face with Uncle King. The man’s hair looks grayer than earlier today, almost white.

  “Give me your hands,” says Hiram. He has the pliers out.

  Uncle King doesn’t move. His eyes are wide, floating hazily in his skull.

  “Brother,” he says.

  “Gimme them hands,” says Hiram. He reaches behind the man and pulls his hands toward him, the metal bracelets gleaming red under the flare. He sets the chain in the cutting jaw of the pliers and squeezes both-handed, veins spilling out of his arms.

  Uncle King watches him.

  “Hell’s done took my children, brother.”

  Hiram looks up, squeezing with all his might. Wetness trembles in the man’s eyes.

  “It ain’t either,” says Hiram. “We’ll find them.”

  “Same’s it took Old Hallam, the yellow-face, he that sleeps yet in the pit.”

  Hiram’s blood jumps at the name; the chain pops.

  “That son-bitch is doing more than sleep.” He points out into the dark. “Now run.”

  Uncle King doesn’t move.

  “What’s ate them, then, they ain’t come up?”

  Panic is rising in Hiram, his skin on fire. The deputy will be back any second.

  “Nothing’s damn ate them. Listen, man, you got to run.”

  When he doesn’t move, Hiram grabs him by the upper arm and pulls him from the car. They fall together in the dust. The flare is flickering now, dying out, the darkness swarming in like a flood.

  “Goddammit.”

  Hiram hooks Uncle King under the arms, struggling to his knees, heaving the man up.

  “We got to go,” he says. “Come on.”

  “They say it’s my fault, brother.”

  The flare goes out, the night suddenly darker, stunned blue and red. King puts his hand around Hiram, ready to be led, and just then Hiram hears the metallic click of a hammer being cocked. He turns, slowly, to see the deputy there behind him, a big nickel-plated revolver gripped in both hands. It isn’t a professional’s gun. It’s a fancy kind of pistol carried by someone who might like to use it. There is a lopsided grin on the man’s face.

  “You dumb sons of bitches,” he says.

  Hiram tenses, ready to spring, but King seizes his hand, right to right, like men shaking. Their scars touch.

  “Find them, brother.”

  49

  Altamaha River, Day 4

  They float down the big river. The sun has tipped westward, beginning its long roll from the sky, and a swallow-tailed kite wheels and dashes overhead, trailing her long fork of a tail, black as a serpent’s tongue.

  “What else you find back there?”

  Lawton scratches at the gash in his forehead, inspects his thumb for blood.

  “Nothing much. Few cans of beans stacked real neat. Roll of TP. Milk jug full of drinking water. Seems Uncle King has him a hideout in that old wreck.”

  “Maybe we should of stayed there to wait on him.”

  Lawton isn’t listening. He has the cardboard flap out, studying it over the paddle in his lap. One hand rises to tug on the end of his beard.

  “Looks like one of those what-you-call-’ems. Like a brontosaurus that swims.”

  “Plesiosaur?”

  “Yeah,” says Lawton. “One of them. Like the one in Loch Ness.”

  He cocks the paper one way, his head another, as if this will give him the angle he needs.

  Hunter rubs his nose. “You know when they first started digging up fossils, Darwin hadn’t come along yet. People didn’t know how the creatures fit with scripture, being pre-human and all. They figured them from a world before Adam, full of sea dragons and eternal night. Called them pre-Adamites.”

  “Huh.” Lawton is still intent on the sketch. “Thing is, I can’t see just one of a thing surviving. There’s got to be least two, male and female, and young’uns. They ain’t trees, living a thousand years. They got to breed. There’d have to be a pod of them. Nothing survives on its own.”

  “We even having this conversation, Lawton?”

  “The old man always thought there was something to it. The Altamaha-ha.”

  “That’s right. And this is the same man said G.I. Joes were dolls and dolls would make us queer. Said Hillary Clinton had a foot-long dick and wore a set of jelly-packed tits for show. Remember he’d be out on the water on the moonless nights, saying the pitch dark kept his senses sharp?”

  Lawton sets down the paper.

  “You just can’t believe in nothing he did, can you?”

  “It ain’t that.”

  “The fuck it isn’t.”

  “I can see his flaws.”

  “You see what you wanna see, Hunter. Always have.”

  “That’s rich coming from you.”

  “Always picking everything apart. It’s a pain in the ass is what it is.”

  “You’re a real dick sometimes, you know that?”

  “That don’t make me wrong.”

  Midafternoon they turn into Stud Horse Creek, a mile-long stretch that winds like a racetrack through the cypress. Hunter watches a swallow chase a fly across the creek, the insect darting erratically over the water, like an uncoiling string, until the swallow clips it from the air. They are nearing the delta, where the river will fork and fork again, fanning seaward through the marshes, and the ruins of rice plantations and shell-rung villages and perhaps even an ancient fort might be found.

  Hunter hears a motor through the trees, closing fast, and he watches a wood stork unfold its great black-edged wings, fleeing in slow motion across the creek. The steel hull of a skiff flashes from the bend in front of them, cutting high and hard, skidding across the water. A boy stands shirtless at the helm, white and lean with a white-blond scraggle of beard. A rifle is strapped across his back. A small doe lies in the stern of the boat, curled in blood, a red hole in her side. The skiff roars past them, never slowing, and Hunter sees a wicked gleam in the boy’s eyes, like the slashed blade of a knife. Then he is gone, around the next bend, and Hunter is left thinking of the boy Andino mentioned, the one who slung live cats over powerlines.

  “Motherfucker!” Lawton holds his paddle level as his kayak hops up and down on the chop. “I was swimming this river when that little son of a bitch was still sucking titty-milk.”

  Hunter watches the heavy wake of the boat thump the creek bank.

  “I don’t think it’s deer season.”

  “If it was asshole season, I’d be tying that little motherfucker on the hood of my truck.”

  Stud Horse Creek dead-ends into a smaller creek, like a T-junction in the swamp, and they paddle to the right. The sun is still white in the west, half-fallen from its noon zenith. This new creek kinks and curls even more sharply than the first, reversing whole directions, sawing itself ever deeper into the swamp. A flight of cormorants skims low over the water, feathers a glossy black, like birds risen from an oil slick. Around the next bend a group of roseate spoonbills sits in the branches of a big cypress, white-necked with pink wings. They are friendly birds, and sort of sad, too, with their goofy bills. They look like wooden spoons, the kind used to slurp spaghetti sauce and spank the bare asses of unruly boys.

  “It’s the crawdads they eat,” says Hunter. “Makes their wings turn pink.”

  Lawton spits. “That’s funny. I don’t remember giving a fuck.”

  * * *

  They nearly miss the canal. The mouth is crisscrossed with leafy overgrowth, concealed like a secret door in the wild. The canals were dug by logging crews in the sixties, the dredge burden used to build roads that bore men and equipment over the soupy earth, reachin
g the virgin cypress at the island’s heart. They pass one canal and paddle into the second, pushing their way through clutches of vines and branches, the shielding fronds of palmettos. The canal is narrow, perhaps ten feet wide, a sword of water piercing the undergrowth, with the old causeway running along its shoulder. They paddle until the snags and deadfalls grow too thick, then shore their boats, tying them to a water tupelo grown straight up in the middle of the road.

  The sun itself is hidden by the trees. Light slants in through the branches and leaves, crudely jeweling the ground. Lawton looks at his wristwatch.

  “Best get to it. I don’t want to sleep out here.”

  Hunter looks around. The old road is hardly worthy of the name, a feeble causeway among the explosive green on every side. He gets his hand-ax from the boat, Lawton his machete. They take a drawstring nylon bag with water bottles, matches, waterproof jackets stuffed in sacks. A couple of energy bars and emergency blankets folded the size of card decks. They start to walk. The palmettos push in on every side, spiky and green, woody vines snarled about them like ship’s rigging. A surge of tide has come and gone, the muddy ground covered in shallow pools, tea-dark, which linger at the feet of endless cypress and tupelo gum. The great trunks are everywhere, stone-gray and tusk-scarred, their branches bearded with moss. Every direction the same, a swampy maze.

  Hunter’s feet make prints in the earth, and he knows they should be wearing boots for the snakes. It is a hike of some half mile to the island’s interior, and soon his knee has begun its throb. Around him the world is turning cooler, darker. Older. He hears snaps in the brush, the crackle of leaves, beasts rifling through the maze. Birds screech from treetops. The cicadas roar as one, in siren or song. A big vein stands out on one of Lawton’s calves, zigging like a river on a map. He slashes and chops at the vines and brush that bar their path, the machete secured to his wrist with a loop. Hunter’s hand-ax has a leather thong at the end of the handle. He’s secured this to a carabiner on his vest. The tool bobs along at his side, its edge muzzled in leather.