Purchase these things in New York – good boots, a pistol for your protection (Purdey is the most reliable maker) – then a steamer to New Orleans. January wondered how, upon reaching New York originally, the younger man had traced his sister’s fleeing murderer. And he must have been young, January thought, if poor Katerina had just borne their second child when her husband had deserted her in pursuit of vengeance. Steamboat to Independence – lay in a good stock of liquor, fish hooks, trade-vermillion, mirrors. Join with one of the traders bound for Santa Fe – Merriwether has a reputation for honesty, as does Babbit, Becknell, McCoy . . .
I will be in the vicinity of Fort Laramie, watching for you. Hepplewhite and his men will meet us there . . .
‘Could Hepplewhite be an Indian?’
Hannibal looked up from the letter. ‘I can’t imagine where such an Indian would have been born, if the first thing his parents saw to name him after was a chair.’
January laughed. ‘A mission Indian,’ he said. ‘Who took a white man’s name, like Moccasin Woman – whom nobody ever calls Mrs Bryan . . .’
Hannibal was still considering this when Morning Star appeared from the moonless dark, still shrugging herself back into her deerskin dress. ‘Will you stay in the camp?’ She looked downslope, gauging the river and the wind. ‘It will come close to you. Whether or no, my husband, you and these ladies had best be crossing back soon. Can you hear the anger of the river?’
‘Can we stay in your lodge?’ January glanced across the fire at Frye, who was recounting with extravagant gesture and wild exaggeration a ‘sea battle’ between himself and two other canoe-gliding trappers against a war party of Arapaho on the Bighorn. ‘We’ll slip out by morning. Morales has offered us tent space, but until I see some kind of proof that he isn’t actually Franz Bodenschatz, I’d rather sleep near someone I know. Did you find the horses?’
‘I did,’ said Morning Star grimly. ‘They’re in Iron Heart’s camp.’
‘The Omahas?’ Hannibal’s brows shot up. ‘Of course, Iron Heart is a mission Indian, by the sound of his English, but they’re the last people I’d have thought would be helping a white man. He hates all white men alike—’
‘Because his people died of smallpox,’ said January softly, ‘down on the Platte . . .’
There was silence, broken only by the pounding of the river, the growl of the thunder in the north.
‘One of the lodges in Iron Heart’s camp isn’t being used as a dwelling, either,’ continued Morning Star after a time. ‘I lay in the grass and watched the camp until it grew too dark to see. No one went into it or came out—’
‘What is it that Bodenschatz tells his father to bring from Munich?’ asked January, and Hannibal turned over the thin yellowish sheets of the notepaper.
‘A warm coat, two kegs of decent brandy (Hennessy or Rémy Martin), tea and coffee—’
‘Exact words.’
‘The green China tea,’ read Hannibal, ‘and the African coffee.’
‘Who is he selling the shop to?’ Above them, the cottonwoods bent with the sudden onslaught of wind; Frye got to his feet and walked a little ways toward the end of the island, listening too.
‘We better be thinkin’ about movin’ if we’re gonna. That river’s comin’ up fast.’
‘Kleinsmark Apothekergeselleschaft . . .’
‘Kleinsmark Apothecary Company,’ translated January. ‘And Klaus Bodenschatz needs to close up greenhouses and lab oratories . . . Remember how his hands were stained? He was a chemist.’
Hannibal’s eyes widened as he understood. ‘Oh, Christ.’
‘African coffee isn’t coffee. Any more than Indian tobacco is really tobacco, or fool’s parsley is really parsley. It’s Ricinus communis – castor-oil bean – and poisonous as the gates of Hell.’
‘You mean those folks didn’t die of sickness?’ Frye came back to the fire, silhouetted gold against the rushing dark, the wind whipping now at his long hair. ‘I told you they mighta been poisoned. How’d this Boden fella manage to—’
He gasped suddenly, his eyes flaring wide, and even as January started to his feet, Morning Star shouted ‘Run!’
Frye pitched forward on to the fire, an arrow in his back.
TWENTY-ONE
January dove instead for the fire, dragging Frye out by the arm, and even as he did it he knew it would cost him his escape. At the same moment Hannibal snatched up one of the buffalo-hide apishamores, flung it over the man’s burning clothes, and January saw the young trapper’s eyes roll back and the blood stream out of his mouth. By that time Indians were coming out of the darkness on the west side of the island from the camp, as well as the side toward the mountains. January swatted the first one with the burning buffalo-hide. A rifle crashed – Veinte-y-Cinco? – and in the instant that the attackers hesitated, Hannibal flung another saddle blanket over the fire and, in the sudden darkness, grabbed January’s wrist, dragged him the length of the island and plunged into the river.
The skies let loose with rain.
Boaz Frye hadn’t been wrong. The river was coming up like Noah’s Flood. January fought to keep his head above water, felt the current grab him, snags of dead wood and broken trees ramming like live things stampeding. Hannibal’s hand was still on his wrist, and January reversed the grip, catching the fiddler’s thin arm and throwing his other arm over the first thing that felt like a substantial log that slammed into him in the dark.
And it was dark, pitch-black, even when his head broke the surface. Rain hammered his face, and he could see nothing of either mountains or sky. He could feel the log he’d caught hold of was good-sized, and he half-hauled himself clear of the water, pulling Hannibal up beside him. The log promptly turned turtle, ducking him under and smiting him on the head with a branch. January clung, scrambled, gasping; he felt Hannibal drag himself up on to the thrashing mass of wood and then, still holding tight to January’s arm, drop over the other side. January hauled himself up higher as something cracked at his legs underwater, grasping sinuously like sea serpents – tree branches? Then something that was definitely a rock gouged his calf.
He pressed his face to the wood, and tried not to feel the broken branch-stump that dug into his chest. There better not be any snakes in this log.
At least there aren’t gators in the river.
Rose, he thought. Rose, don’t worry. I’ll be home. He saw her – brief and complete, as if he stood next to her wicker chair on the gallery, with a lamp beside her and mosquito-veiling hanging off her wide-brimmed hat – and folded the memory, with its thought and peace, down into a tiny fragment, and concentrated everything he had into hanging on.
Cold hammering water, and blindness. Chill gnawed his flesh, spread toward the core of his bones – he’d been in the Mississippi, and even the inexorable strength of its currents hadn’t been like this awful cold. It’s July, how can it be this cold? He couldn’t breathe, wondered if Hannibal was dead, there on the end of the arm to which he clung, but there was nothing he could do about it one way or the other except hang on. A wall of water hit him over the head like falling bricks, throwing the whole log under – he clung desperately until another wave threw them up, choking, vomiting up half the river and still hanging on.
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, get me home safe.
Submerged snags tore his legs and feet, river-demon hands tried to drag him off. Two nearly succeeded, his own grip slithering and weak. The rain was like the sky mocking him. Another trough, tons of water pouring over his head like a building falling, no way to tell how long before they’d slam up again like a bucking horse into the air. The broken branch on the log itself seemed filled with a living malice, like the spirit of the tree trying to skewer him. Another current flung them sideways – blackness and water within blackness and water, and the only things real were the wet wood, the jabbing pain, the numb shock of the cold and the arm he held with so violent a desperation that he was surprised he didn’t break the fiddler’s bones.
He wasn’t even aware of it when the buffeting grew less. Just the gradual thought intruding: it’s not as bad as it was . . . His hands were nearly insensible in the cold, but rain no longer hammered his face. He tried to remember when the rain had stopped, and couldn’t, but at least he could breathe. Gleams of silver streaked the black water, though the river still carried them along like a runaway horse; the narrow moon broke the clouds. More snags tore his feet, sea serpents that rolled away when he kicked. Another kick struck gravel. January lowered his body as much as he dared, kicked again downward and felt his moccasin dig in sand, then cracked his knee on a rock. For a long time he struggled to push the log gradually in toward the eastern shore. The current thrust the log back into the main stream like a sullen stupid monster out to drown him.
Then two steps in succession; then three. The bed of the river shallowed underfoot, the log – branches or roots further back, for in the darkness January could see only a long unwieldy bulk behind him – snagged on the bottom. He called over the log, ‘Can you make it to shore?’ but was a little surprised to hear a reply.
‘The wills above be done! – but I’d fain die a dry death.’
Only Hannibal would recall enough of The Tempest to quote it after being dragged through watery hell.
‘Hold on. I’ll come around for you.’ January released his hold on the log, dragged himself around the front end on legs that shook so violently he feared he’d fall and be swept away. He’d meant to go back to help Hannibal ashore if he needed it, but found the fiddler had worked his way along to the front of the log as well, breast deep in the surging water. January had to drag him to shore by the back of his coat.
Then they just lay on the bank among rocks and gravel, the river streaming over their feet, cold to the marrow and more exhausted than January could remember ever being in his life.
‘I was distinctly led to believe,’ complained Hannibal in a faint voice at last, ‘we’d be carried across the Styx in a boat.’
‘Charon’s had to cut back on expenses because of the bank crash.’
Hannibal started to make some answer, then just lay on the bank and laughed ’til he cried.
‘Come on,’ said January after a time. ‘Let’s make a fire before we freeze to death.’
Another break in the cloud showed him the hills looming above them – God knew where they were – and the cottonwoods of the bottomlands rising straight up out of the floodwater like a pitch-dark wall. January pulled Hannibal upright and limped through the belt of trees, the water retreating down his shins until the ground was solid underfoot.
‘Was Frye dead?’
January nodded.
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure.’ Would I have stayed by him if he’d been still alive, unable to flee, unable to fight? With the Indians coming out of the darkness—? January hoped he would have had the courage to do so, but didn’t know. ‘Did the ladies get away?’
‘I don’t know. I saw Pia run for the water . . . Was that the Omahas?’
‘Has to have been. Which means,’ January added, ‘I’m guessing that Frank Boden alias Franz Bodenschatz is Charro Morales. He asked Frye about Irish Mary – he has to have known we wanted that hat. Then suddenly he’s asking us to put up with him in his tent? What they don’t know won’t hurt them? After he was the one who demanded a quarantine? My guess is he was going to tell the camp a touching story about us being swept away when the river rose.’
Hannibal swore, thoughtfully, in classical Greek for a time, and collapsed on to a flat rock. ‘So what do we do?’ In the moonlight January could see he was shivering in his soaked clothing.
‘Build a fire.’
‘Shall you recite the magic spells to do that, or shall I?’
‘You recite the magic spells to chase the bears away,’ said January. ‘I’ll scrape bark.’ He held out his hand, knowing they’d have better luck finding dry wood on higher ground. It was clear, even in the faint moonlight, that the flood had extended all throughout the bottomlands, leaving torn-up branches everywhere and everything soaked. He hauled Hannibal to his feet again.
‘How far did we come down, do you think?’
‘I’d say we were in the water for close to an hour.’ January flexed his hands, felt his way from tree to tree toward the glimmers of light on the higher ground beyond. ‘The moon was just past zenith when the clouds covered it over, and I don’t think it was much more than an hour after that, that we were hit. Feel the grass,’ he added as they came clear of the trees. ‘It didn’t rain down this far.’
‘Thank God for small favors.’ For a time there was silence as the two men collected the driest branches they could find, carried them to the edge of the trees. There was a clump of sagebrush large enough to make a sort of windbreak, and behind it, January scratched the wet layer of bark from a piece of dead wood with his knife and scraped a powder of the drier under-bark on to a split bough. Though he could barely walk, Hannibal brought handfuls of dry grass, his breath rasping like a rusty saw. Fingers made clumsy by cold, January struck the fire flint from his belt pouch with the steel. It took him seven or eight tries – laboriously re-scraping bark from time to time – while the night grew colder, but he told himself that if Jim Bridger could make a fire under these conditions, he, Benjamin January, certainly could . . .
‘There,’ he said at last as the whisper of smoke curled up. ‘I owe God my first-born son.’ Even as he made the jest he felt a strange shiver: Rose will be close to her time, when I come home.
The warmth that went through him had little to do with the new-flickering blaze.
I will have a first-born son. Or a beautiful daughter . . .
‘Well,’ remarked Hannibal a bit later, ‘I understand now why the ancients worshipped fire.’
Longer silence. They arranged damp wood to dry, dragged the larger boughs to extend the crude shelter. The fire was small – a squaw fire, they’d call it in the camp. January gave thought to who might see it.
‘There must have been a bottle of poisoned liquor in old Bodenschatz’s coat pocket,’ said Hannibal, when he’d warmed up a little. ‘They’d all have drunk it – the Dutchman, Fingers Woman, the engagés. I expect Clarke found it among the bodies . . . I can see him toasting their departing souls with the last gulp left. It’s what I’d have done. If Frye thought it was the cholera,’ he added quietly, ‘castor bean – African coffee – must be bad, mustn’t it?’
‘It’s bad,’ January answered. ‘It looks a great deal like cholera. Poison wouldn’t bring on a fever, but if there were irritation or burning, that would account for their wanting water. You’ve heard how hard the smallpox struck the Indian villages south of the Platte,’ he added. ‘And, of course, when we were in Mexico City a few years ago, they all said – the Indios – that it wasn’t so much the Spanish that destroyed the old kings and the old gods, as the smallpox. That there were not even enough of the living left to bury the dead . . .’
‘Et nous, les os, devenons cendre et pouldre . . . And Bodenschatz would need Indian allies, if he was planning on tracking a man through these mountains.’ In the flickering orange light, his thin fingers seemed nearly translucent. ‘Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses . . . If you wrong us, shall we not revenge? D’you think they’ll be coming after us?’
‘They have to be.’ January huddled close to the flames, wishing he dared strip off his clothing to let it dry, for the clammy fabric chilled his flesh worse than the cold air would have. ‘Right now, all anyone knows in the camp is what Veinte-y-Cinco and Pia have to tell: that we were set on by Indians. But if we come back – if even a whisper goes around the camp that Morales is Boden, and is in league with the Omahas to poison the camp . . .’
Hannibal sighed. ‘I was afraid you were going to say that.’
Considering that not only the Omahas would be hunting them, but also that there were
Blackfeet somewhere on the east side of the river, January half expected that he would be unable to sleep for as much as a minute between caution and cold. He was dead wrong about that and through the rest of the night, turn and turn about with Hannibal, had to fight not to drop off on guard duty, digging the sharpened end of a stick into the heel of his hand or the calf of his leg to remain awake. Even the gnawing hunger that swept him wasn’t sufficient to keep him alert. Morning found him cramped, aching and weak from weariness. Even during the season of sugar harvest, old Michie Simon had fed his cane hands to keep them prime for work. He would have sold Hannibal to the Arabs for a bowl of rice and beans and thrown in Morning Star for lagniappe.
‘Shall we cross the river?’ asked the fiddler, when the first stains of dawn whitened the freezing air. By the roar of the current on the rocks it hadn’t gone down much. ‘What are you doing?’ Hannibal protested a moment later as January scattered the fire, used the remainder of the dampish wood as a makeshift shovel to bury the coals.
‘Trying to avoid sending up a smoke signal,’ January returned – regretfully, since his clothes were still damp and the morning chill cut like a razor. ‘It’s light enough to see one now.’
Hannibal made a face and coughed. His body was racked with shivers, and he looked like a dying man. ‘I suppose the next thing you’re going to tell me is that you forgot to put a haunch of buffalo in your pocket before we fled.’
‘Sorry.’
They made their way through the trees to the river, but as January had suspected, it had risen higher in the night.
‘We were in that?’ Hannibal stared, aghast, at the churning brown torrent, the white teeth of foam and the leaping snags of uprooted trees.
‘He’ll be hangéd yet; Though every drop of water swear against it.’ January considered the flood, then the foothills behind them. ‘It may be for the best,’ he added. ‘If the Omaha do come after us, they’ll look along the river. There’s less cover on that side. From here, we’re not far from the foothills, where we can stay in the timber. All we need to do is follow the river north—’
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