The River of Kings: A Novel

by Taylor Brown

“Spaniards,” says one. “God help us all.”

  The French ships cut their anchors and flee. Well into the night, fire pops and cracks along the horizon, a storm rolling low against the sea.

  * * *

  Noon of the following day the French ships heave into view, their masts stabbing the sky, their hulls topping the horizon like a wave. The wind is ripping, the water capping at the river’s mouth. The small fleet crashes up and down just off the coast, toyed by the heavy surf. A messenger posted down on the seashore comes running into the encampment, breathless with news. Le Moyne and others climb down from the walls to hear.

  “The wind keeps them offshore,” says the messenger. “They signal us to come to them.”

  Laudonnière, deposed, has taken to bed. A fever, some say, spurred by his fall from grace. The men look to Ribault. The great sea captain runs his fingers through his red beard. He shakes his head.

  “No. The Spanish may have captured the vessels in the night. It could be a trap.” He looks from man to man. “We wait.”

  Later that day, a tiny shape appears inshore of the ships, thrashing through the breakers. A swimmer. He is brought into the fort on the back of a mule, swaddled still dripping in a large blanket, almost dead from the feat, like the long-runner of Marathon. He brings a message from the captain of le Trinité, lead ship of Ribault’s fleet. The Spanish force is under the command of Pedro Menéndez de Aviles, who says he is under order of his king to hang and behead all Lutherans in this land and upon its seas. He pursued the French ships long into the night, his guns never silencing, but the French were able to outpace his fleet. At daybreak, the Spaniards anchored far down the coast, putting ashore a large company of negroes armed with spades and mattocks.

  At this news, Ribault shows his teeth, unsmiling.

  The next day a party of friendly natives arrives from the south, bearing further news of the place. They say the Spanish are entrenching themselves, working their slaves day and night. Ramparts are being erected, trenches dug. Earthworks raised from the ground. They say the Spanish are calling the place San Agustín.

  * * *

  Ribault calls a council of war, to which Le Moyne finds himself invited. In the room stand the chief military officers of the fort—more than thirty of them—and civilians of certain status. Ribault sits at one end of the long table, Laudonnière the other, a phalanx of captains between them. Laudonnière stands first to speak. He has dressed to receive them, his red doublet now ragged and overlarge, creases of pain writ in his face. His hand trembles slightly on the back of his chair.

  “I—like the rest of you—would like nothing more than to strike the Spanish at first opportunity. But I must counsel prudence. Such a course should not be taken rashly. Seigneur Ribault, I propose that you and your men remain here to fortify our defenses against a seaborne attack. My men and I, who know the country well, will travel overland to settle this matter with the Spanish.”

  The first settlers—Le Moyne included—murmur their assent.

  Agreed.

  Our commander has spoken well.

  We should hold the ground we stand.

  Yea, protect the walls we have built.

  Ribault leans back in his chair, his great hands laced across his chest. When they finish, his chair rocks back to earth. He rises, enormous, setting his fists upon the table. His eyes blaze.

  “Before sailing from France, I received word from the Admiralty that this Spaniard Menéndez meant to attack us, and I was told we were to yield nothing to the man. We are to drive him from this land or else bury him in it. If we march overland against the Spanish—to this San Agustín—we may very well lose the opportunity of destroying his force. They could simply retreat to their ships. The better plan, I believe, is that we sail against them, now, with every available man and ship, and seize their vessels at anchor. They will have no refuge save the works their slaves are building. They will be trapped.”

  He looks from one face to another, eyes yet blazing, as if he could sway each man with a look. Le Moyne watches the officers shift beneath his gaze, scratching their chins or rubbing their hands, and he realizes that the man is truly possessed of such power. Laudonnière, alone, stands against him. He is trembling visibly now, but his spine and jaw are set.

  “Seigneur Ribault, we must remember it is la saison de l’ouragan. A whirlwind could land upon us at any time. To sail now, we endanger our entire fleet upon a single venture, while imperiling those who remain.”

  Ribault sits back. His blue eyes flood the room with contempt. Coldly they rove the first settlers, seeing their sunken cheeks and blistered skin, their humbled hearts. His gaze falls upon Le Moyne. Le Moyne sees the cold sea in those eyes, the unbanished pride. He knows what the man will say even before he does, dismissing the old commander’s concerns with a wave of his hand.

  “The Spanish sail in this season, do they not?”

  Laudonnière remains standing. His eyes are pleading now, almost wet. They crawl from face to face, but the officers look at the table, the sergeants their boots. He looks to Ribault.

  “Please, sir, I beg you to hear my advice.”

  “I have heard it, sir. And I have made my decision. We sail at once.”

  * * *

  Le Moyne stands straight-backed on the main deck of the warship. His arms at his sides, his chest pushed out, his leg yet lame. He can feel his blood beating against the welted flesh, the pain tolling through him like a bell. Ribault has commandeered Laudonnière’s men as well as his own, and every soldier well enough to stand has made ready to sail. For three days the wind has blown against them, keeping them at anchor among the islands of the river’s mouth. It blew hard out of the south, the very direction of this Saint Augustine. Finally the conditions have righted, and Ribault has ordered a final inspection of the men before pulling anchor.

  Lord d’Ottigni paces slowly down the line, his eye appraising each man through the frozen half-mask of his face. He carries his sword in hand, sheathed, using the blunt point of the scabbard to prod and inspect his soldiers. He pokes them here or there, as if testing their joints or muscles. He lifts loose garments to see what disease or contraband they might be hiding. He dresses them down for ill-sharpened blades, unclean barrels. For smelling like goats or pigs or the cunts of whores.

  “These Spaniards fashion themselves conquerors—conquistadors—and like all Catholics, they have a great thirst for blood. We will give them plenty this day. We will make them to lap like dogs in the pools they shed.”

  The men stamp their feet, thundering the deck.

  Yea! Hurrah! Slaughter them whole!

  Lord d’Ottigni stands before Le Moyne.

  “L’artiste,” he says. “I am glad you have come.” There is no mocking in his voice, not since the battle in the west, when Le Moyne stood to fight despite his wound. “How fares the leg? It has healed so quickly?”

  “Oui, seigneur.”

  “You are sure?”

  “Oui.”

  D’Ottigni nods, then jabs the metal tip of the scabbard into Le Moyne’s thigh at the very spot of the wound. Le Moyne gasps as if skewered, the leg buckling beneath him.

  D’Ottigni turns to his sergeant.

  “This man is unfit for service. Have him remanded to the shore boat.”

  “Seigneur, s’il vous plaît! I can fight!”

  D’Ottigni turns and clasps his shoulder. “I know you can fight.” Now he leans close, the dead ridges of his face scraping across Le Moyne’s cheek. His voice is a whisper: “But someone must live to tell the world of our great glory in this land, yes?”

  Le Moyne opens his mouth to protest, but d’Ottigni is already gone. The sergeant points Le Moyne down the line, one hand palming the pommel of his sword.

  On the shore boat, Le Moyne finds himself next to his neighbor, the tailor Grandchemin. The man is sulking, hands clapped on either side of his head.

  “What have they sent you back for?” asks Le Moyne.

  The
man shakes his head.

  “I am to repair some garments for Lord d’Ottigni, for his return to France. He says he does not wish his family to know how poorly he has been living here.” The man shrugs. “He says it is work he wishes completed at once.”

  Le Moyne feels a tightness in his throat. He can see it clearly: the lone trunk delivered home from a foreign shore, the garments clutched to a grieving woman’s chest. She holds a shirt to her nose, trying to remember his scent.

  D’Ottigni does not believe he will live.

  Le Moyne calls to the men aboard the ship. He asks them to send for his friend La Caille. But it is too late. The anchors are already being pulled from the water, the sails swelling with power. The great wall of the ship moves away from their boat, a moat of sea dividing them. La Caille appears finally at the rail, waving with both hands, but their cries to each other are lost, scattered by the wind. Le Moyne sends his love across the water, thumping his chest, and he thinks he sees La Caille, tiny now, do the same. His heart feels huge, balled like a giant’s fist, and he wants only to open it, to reach his friend.

  O Lord protect my brother aboard that great lumbering ship and return him safely to my arms. Bless my countrymen every one Father God that their swords and spades and shot may find Spanish hearts—every last one of them, if that is what it takes.

  The fleet has hardly crossed the horizon when thunder cracks overhead, so loud men cower and duck, and Le Moyne falls to his knees, clutching the tongue stone to his breast.

  58

  Altamaha River, Day 5

  The river is black beneath them, the sky pale. The wind cold, born in mountains far out of sight. Hunter looks over the side of his boat, his reflection gliding alongside him. It wavers and shudders, shadow-dark, like some spirit in the water. He looks away. On the right bank lies Cambers Island, the site of a rice plantation in antebellum times. The field hands fled the place after the Civil War, when the overseer proved ignorant of their freedom. The place is nothing but trees now, scarce hint of those who lived there before. Hunter stares on into the maze of trunks and vines, into the shadowy vents, unsure what he expects to see. Ghosts, perhaps.

  From the air, or satellite, other signs can be seen. The geometric grid of dikes and canals cut into the swampy earth, still visible, like signs for the gods. The rice fields were flooded and drained by a system of locks, the slaves toiling daylong in the ankle-deep muck. A third of them died in the first year of work. But here, from this level, nothing but trees and marsh and swamp.

  Hunter looks ahead. Lawton sits very erect in his boat, his paddle wheeling side to side, steady as a clock. They will be down into the lower delta soon, the river branching, birthing the fan of child rivers that reach wildly for the sea. The cypress and tupelo will grow sparser, leaner, giving way to the brown expanses of salt marsh that border the coast. At last the line of sea islands will rise against the ocean, an armada humpbacked and green, their seaward edges paled with fine quartz sands. There is Wolf Island, a refuge for migratory birds since the 1930s, and Sapelo Island, where the Gullah people live, descendants of fugitive slaves who still speak their creole tongue. Below that is Saint Simons Island, a moss-haunted realm of golf courses and beach resorts, and all of the lesser-known islands between, rumored stomping grounds of pirates and Confederates. And so many people believe the state is landlocked. In the men’s room of a bar in Darien, a sticker has been pasted on the mirror: GEORGIA HAS A COAST?

  They are close now. Perhaps five miles to the interstate bridge, another ten to the ocean. They will cast their father’s ashes into the black waters of the marshes, where the river flows both ways, in and out.

  They have been under way less than an hour when Lawton pulls his phone from the pocket of his vest, squints at the screen, then tucks it away. He looks over his shoulder.

  “I got to take a leak.”

  “You serious?”

  Lawton is of that special breed who refuses to stop on a road trip for anything as insignificant as a piss. Same as their father. On road trips the old man made them piss in mason jars he brought for the purpose, and this with contempt.

  “Serious,” says Lawton. “Must be getting old or something. All these muscles shrinking more than my dick.” He jabs his thumb ahead. “This bend ought to do me.”

  They shore their boats at a small bluff of orange silt, concave beneath a green lip of turf, and Lawton starts up the bank. Hunter follows him, realizing he, too, could use a pit stop. Maybe it was something in the powdered drink mix—

  He stops cold, a thrill risen in his gut. At the crest of the bluff, where a line of water oaks stands at attention, there is a break in the understory. A path, too high to be seen from the water. A secret door. He thinks of how Uncle King knows every inch of the river, its secrets and ghosts. The locations of sea monsters, shipwrecks, perhaps even an old French fort.

  “That’s what he told you, isn’t it—”

  Lawton wheels and glares at him, one finger to his lips: silence. Then he turns and starts down the path, moving in a half-crouch. Slowly, slowly. Stepping here and there to avoid sticks and leaves, his bare feet soundless on the trampled turf. Deft for so big a man. Practiced. Hunter follows, a little behind, careful of his own feet, the sound they make. The wind rises, swirling through the trees, leaves humming on every side. They are fifty yards down the path when they cross a small creek and find an alligator gar lying across the trail, gutted. It is four feet long, a torpedo of a fish with hard, enameled scales and outsized teeth. A living fossil, dead. A warning. A black vent has been sliced in the yellow belly, the innards scooped out and left to rot in a ropy pile. Maggots glisten in the cavity. Flies abound, ticking like tiny robots across the exposed viscera. It smells like it looks.

  Lawton lowers himself to one knee and cocks his head, examining the work. Hunter starts to say something, but Lawton’s blue eyes cut toward him, killing the words in his chest. Now Lawton rises, and on they move. The path winds deeper into the woods, zagging around deadfalls of old timber, crossing shallow streams where Lawton kneels for prints. Hunter is breathing hard now, like he would after a standing block chop. He looks down and finds the hand-ax at his side. He doesn’t even remember taking it from the boat.

  Another hundred yards on and both of them stop.

  Before them two saplings stand arched over the road, their upper reaches lashed to form a makeshift arbor. The skulls of small animals and fish dangle from the branches on lengths of fishing line, a crop of cruel ornaments trembling in the breeze. Their hollow sockets sway this way, that way, guarding the path before them. Hunter reaches up to touch one—a raccoon’s skull, maybe, or a large gray squirrel’s—then doesn’t. When he looks down again, Lawton has a gun.

  * * *

  “You fucking liar.”

  It isn’t a fort. It is a tar-paper shack, built narrow and long like a shotgun house, dirt floored with papered windows. A lank square of burlap covers the front door. Hunter’s voice is low, edged between them like a knife.

  “What did that old man tell you last night?”

  Lawton glances at him, then reverts his eyes to the shed. His brow is dark. The pistol is small, chunky and modern and black. Another thing kept hiding in that vest.

  “He said it was a place we ought to see.”

  “What kind of a place?”

  “A place that holds answers.”

  “To what, exactly?”

  Lawton watches the place, cataloging corners and exits, fields of fire.

  “That wasn’t exactly clear.”

  “Here I was thinking he told you the location of the old French fort, and you were holding out to surprise me.”

  “It’s probably nothing. A hunting camp. Maybe those poachers…”

  “You’re just a goddamn broken record, huh?”

  Lawton turns, eyes blazing.

  “There’s something evil on this river, Hunter, whether you want to believe it or not. Maybe it had to do with Daddy’s death, maybe
not. But he ain’t the first turned up dead or not at all, and the Sheriff’s been doing shit-all. Somebody’s got to get to the bottom of it. I didn’t come halfway around the world just to sprinkle them ashes like a bunch of pixie dust. I’ll know the reason why.”

  Before Hunter can reply, Lawton jams his phone in his hands.

  “Shit goes south, you hit number one on speed-dial and run your ass for the boats.”

  “What’s on speed-dial, a goddamn drone strike?”

  “Friends. There’s people know I’m here.” He edges back the slide, the brass glint of a shell in the chamber. “Sit tight, I’m just gonna clear the place.”

  “Not by yourself you’re not.”

  “Oh yes I am. This is my decision. I’m not putting you at risk.”

  “It doesn’t work like that, Lawton. You doing this touches us both.”

  Lawton puts a hand on his shoulder.

  “You’re a good brother, Hunter. And I’m proud of you. I have zero doubt you could of made a frogman.” His big hand squeezes. “But I’m the one trained for this. You follow me, I will beat the ever-loving shit out of you.”

  Hunter grabs for his vest too late. Lawton is already breaking across the clearing, crouched low, making for the corner of the shed. He pauses there, setting his shoulders behind the weapon, and starts across the front of the building. His upper body is locked in firing position, his feet moving trimly below his fixed hips. “God damn you.” Hunter breaks from the bushes, scampering toward the shed. Lawton has stacked himself against the doorframe, his pistol angled low, his chest moving up and down. Hunter comes up behind him, his heart whirling like a siren, and starts to grab for his brother’s shoulder.

  “Lawton—”

  It’s like touching a trigger. Lawton’s body explodes. In a single motion he whips wide the burlap flap and sweeps into the darkness.

  “On the ground! Everybody on the ground!”

  There is commotion, the crash of a table or chair.

  “Hands! I wanna see your hands!”

  Hunter ducks through the flap.