Irregular Verbs

by Irregular Verbs

  Nivôse was nearly over, now, but the days were still short; for fear of snags and sunken logs Daniel ordered the anchor dropped while there was still light. He worried about giving the crew so much free time, but as yet there was simply too little to do to keep everyone occupied—on a steamship there was no need to braid rope or mend sails. In another season the whole river would be alive, singing with the voices of frogs and the calls of the herons and egrets, but now it was asleep. Even the alligators had grown torpid with the cold, and the men were denied the sport of luring them with chunks of meat and then bashing their skulls with axes.

  Three days from port the land began to dry out, the cypresses giving way to thick stands of pine. From here the forest spread out, uncharted and untouched, for countless kilometres; the river’s twists and turns meant that there was no horizon visible, nothing but trees in all directions. All was silent, save the low chug of the engine, until the boat was launched and one of the crewmen stepped onto shore: then a great hum arose, as though a thousand violins had had their bass strings plucked all at once, and a grey cloud of mosquitoes filled the air. The man turned and ran, splashing madly into the water, and was covered in welts by the time he made it back to the boat. There was much laughter among the crew over his frenzied retreat, but beneath it was a grim thought: they were trapped on the ship together, unable even to go ashore.

  The ship crept its way through the silent forest four more days until the river straightened out and the trees began to give way to a more open plain: at last there was a horizon again, les montagnes aux Arcs visible in the far distance.

  Now their initial supplies were running short. As soon as they were out of the forest Daniel had ordered Latour to watch for any Indian camps they might trade with, but so far he had seen nothing. Daniel was not sure what to make of that; he knew this country was well-populated, but also that the Indians were not generally seen unless they wished to be. The crew began to complain, quietly at first and then more openly, about the short rations. Left unspoken were their deeper fears: each bank was lined with high grass that ran as far as the hills, tall enough to conceal attackers. There was mostly peace between the Indians and Onontio—this was the name by which they knew the Republic, which they in their simplicity thought of as a single man, a great chief—but there were always the young men, eager to win a prize or a reputation.

  The tension broke on the eighth day. Daniel was in his cabin, trying to identify on his charts the tributary rivers they had passed the day before, when he heard a cry from the deck. At first he ignored it—a captain couldn’t be seen to run at the beck and call of his crew—but as the shouts escalated he lay the map down on his desk, rose and stepped out of his cabin, climbed up onto the deck.

  Two crew members were facing one another, standing in the open area at the stern, before the anchor windlass; a red handkerchief ran between them, wrapped around each of their left wrists, while each held a knife in his free hand. Thus bound together they circled each other, unable to retreat past the kerchief’s limit, and watched for an opening; as Daniel ascended to the pilothouse above he saw one of the men step in towards the other and slash at his face. This brought a reply from his target, and when they broke and separated as far as the handkerchief would allow each one was bleeding, one from the head and the other from the chest. A crowd had gathered, ringing them on three sides.

  “Tell them to stop,” Daniel said to Latour, who was leaning over the wheel and watching the fight.

  Latour shook his head. “They won’t,” he said. “The kerchief means it’s a duel of honour. Neither can let go without yielding.”

  Daniel took a deep breath, spoke in as loud a voice as he could manage. “You there, break it up,” he said. One of the two men fighting glanced in his direction; the other took advantage of his distraction to advance and attack.

  “I said stop!” Daniel shouted as the two grappled, their knives cutting at each other’s arms.

  “Might as well let them finish,” Latour said.

  “This is absurd.” Daniel reached for his pistol, realized he had forgotten it in his cabin; he lifted his key ring from his belt instead and went to the wheelhouse lockbox, opened it and drew out the pistol within. He went back to the railing, held out his gun and said, “I order you both to stop.” Both men paused, the handkerchief slackening a little, and Daniel took a breath. “Good. Now, let go of that kerchief and explain to me what is going on here.”

  The men stood watching each other, the handkerchief still wrapped around their hands. “You there, Thibodeaux,” Daniel said to the man on the right, “I order you to release that handkerchief and drop your weapon.”

  Neither man moved; Daniel sighted his pistol carefully, aiming between them, and fired. Each man pulled away, drawing the kerchief taut, but neither one released it. The pistol was hot in Daniel’s hand. “Both of you, drop everything, now,” he said.

  “Captain . . .” Latour said from behind him.

  The kerchief had gone slack again, but neither man was willing to drop it or his knife. Daniel turned slightly to target Thibodeaux, aiming directly at his chest. “Be rational,” he said. “Is this business worth more than your life?”

  Daniel kept his pistol trained on Thibodeaux for a dozen heartbeats, wondering if he would be able to shoot a man who had done nothing more than defy him, before the man’s shoulders finally dropped. He tucked his knife into his belt and released the handkerchief, pointedly turning his back on his opponent. Howls of disappointment came up from the watching crowd.

  “That won’t be the end of it,” Latour said. “They’ll be at it again by nightfall.”

  “What is the matter with them?” Daniel asked, letting his pistol drop to his side. He kept his eye on the other man, made sure he put his knife away as well. “Did you ever see the meanest midshipman behave like that?”

  “They aren’t Navy,” Latour said, “and this isn’t the sea. Think: these are men that come from just a few kilometres upriver of the city, and you’re taking them further that way. What did you think it would do to them?”

  Daniel frowned, remembering the governor’s words. “This can’t be allowed,” he said. “I want them both whipped—do it at the windlass, where they fought. Where everyone will see it.”

  Latour stood silent for a moment; finally he nodded, and Daniel returned the pistol to the lockbox, went back to his cabin and shut the door.

  The river ran on before them for another day, gradually straightening out: now it might run a dozen kilometres or more before turning, and Daniel began to hope to see Sainte-Genevieve. The maps he had been given were nearly useless, simple drawings of a river whose contours changed with every season, cutting new channels when it flooded, and he had begun to wonder whether—as the crew whispered—the town had simply vanished. Daniel remembered the gigantic animals whose bones Jefferson had described, which the American had believed still lived in the interior. Here that notion was not difficult to believe, nor was it hard to imagine that they had slipped somehow back into history, to the days before rational men had first set foot on this continent.

  At last Daniel heard the whistle blow, three times for a port. When he went up to the pilothouse, though, he saw from the look on Latour’s face that something was wrong. He looked out onto the shore, and at first he could not see it: there was a town there, cottages in the Norman style but with walls and roofs of bark, mixed with the long lodges of the Indians and all surrounded by a wooden stockade.

  Then Latour handed him the spyglass and he understood: the city was empty. Corpses lay in the streets, swarmed with crows; poles erected at the doors of the Indian lodges stood topped with skulls.

  The crew was silent as the Eugénie steamed past the town, though they thronged the deck. Word got down to the boilers, and even the stokers and the engineer came above to see; at the sight of it, though, the engineer swore under his breath and hurried his gang back down below.
/>   “Sweet Reason,” Daniel said. “What happened here?”

  For a moment Latour was silent; finally he said “Do you want to—”

  “No, no,” Daniel said quickly. “Was this—is this Sainte-Genevieve?” As soon as he said it he knew the answer: there were no other French towns this far into the interior. “We should go upriver another day, see if any survivors went that way.”

  “Sir, are you sure—” Latour stopped. “The crew won’t like that. They’ll worry that . . .”

  “I know,” Daniel said, “but it’s just one day. After that we—” He stopped, picked up the speaking tube. “All stop,” he said.

  Latour frowned. “Sir?”

  “Look—here,” Daniel said, handing Latour the spyglass. “I think we have a survivor.”

  A black man stood on the shore; he wore a dark suit with a white collar, and he was waving a broad black hat in the air.

  “Send the boat,” Daniel said, then held up his hand. “I’ll take it. I want to know what happened here.”

  Since the fight Daniel had been in the habit of wearing his pistol at all times, and now he made sure it was at his side before he boarded the boat. He chose two men as rowers, Chiasson and Lamoureux, and they launched the boat and headed for shore. The man spotted them and began waving more frantically, running towards the sandy spot where they were going to make landing. The boat slid onto the bank a metre or so from shore, and Daniel held a hand up to the man, warning him to keep his distance.

  The man dropped to his knees at the river’s edge. “Praise to the Lord,” he said in English. “Praise Jesus.”

  Daniel looked from one of his men to the other, feeling an absurd urge to cover their ears as he would a child’s. He climbed out of the boat and approached the man carefully, his right hand hovering near his pistol. “You are an American?” he asked, speaking the same language.

  Standing, the man nodded. “Frederick Bailey,” he said, extending a hand. His clothes, though cut in imitation of finery, were coarse, and his face was well-scarred with pocks. “I do speak some French, though, sir, if you prefer it.”

  “That’s all right,” Daniel said, glancing back at his men. “My name is Daniel Chalkwater, captain of the Eugénie.”

  “You’re an American, too?” he asked.

  “Only by birth,” Daniel said. The man had reason to be nervous: a white American in this territory was most likely to be a slave hunter. Daniel looked from left to right, taking in the abandoned town. “Have you been here long? Did you see what happened?”

  Frederick’s eyes widened briefly. “Oh. Oh, yes. A terrible plague.”

  “A plague?” Daniel asked, his heart tightening. “Where are the bodies, then? And how did the skulls get on top of the posts?”

  “Ah! That was—that was Coeur-Lion,” Frederick said. “He knows the French hygiene—moved all the bodies out of the town—”

  “You know him? Coeur-Lion?”

  “Know him? Why, he—he saved me. More than that, he saved my soul.”

  Daniel nodded, searching the man’s face for signs of madness. “Your soul,” he said.

  “Oh, I know you French don’t believe in such things—not most of you—but Coeur-Lion, he’s a wiser man. He knows there are powers that guide our paths.” Frederick glanced back over his shoulder, at the ruined town, then turned back to Daniel and held his broad hat over his chest. “I am, as you can see, a preacher—my master found I had a quick mind, a good memory, so he taught me to recite the Gospel. A parlour trick, you see, but he soon found he could hire me out to the other masters to preach to their slaves—to show God wanted them to be good slaves, you see. I did such a fine job of that my master took me on tour, brought me to the mines in the mountains to preach to those slaves—they have a terrible time keeping them, you see, because it’s so near the border. Thought I might convince ’em not to try to escape.”

  “But you escaped instead,” Daniel said.

  “My body did, sir, but not my soul. That was still captive till I came here, you see, and Coeur-Lion freed it—showed me there was more to my faith than the master’s shackles. Oh, I was torn up, sir, before I met him—pulled this way and that by my faith and my freedom.”

  “I hadn’t been told Coeur-Lion had much knowledge of religion,” Daniel said. “I can’t see where he’d have learned it.”

  “He’s a wise man, sir, a very wise man. He understands, in a way that is beyond your reason—married your French logic to faith, you see, made all his peoples live together in peace. He’s the greatest man your race has produced, sir.”

  Daniel nodded slowly. “Where is he now, then?”

  “Oh—well—he tried to control the plague in the town, as I told you, sir, but in the end it was no use. He moved on up the river to get away from it, with what people were left.”

  “And you?” Daniel asked. “Why are you still here?”

  A pained look crossed Frederick’s face. “He thought I was sick,” he said. “Anyone in whom the plague hadn’t already come and gone had to stay behind, you see, but I had it as a child—” his fingers went to the scars on his cheek “—so it never came.”

  “And everyone else, he just left them here to die?”

  “It’s the hygiene, sir, the French hygiene. He taught me. Limit the spread, control the disease. You must know that.”

  After a moment Daniel nodded. “Tell me, then,” he asked, “this God of yours, this Jesus—did Coeur-Lion explain to you why he brings plagues like this? Why he lets them kill men and women, young and old?”

  Frederick frowned. “Well, sir,” he said, “I suppose it’s that we’re all slaves to God, you know—and it’s a master’s duty to whip his slaves now and again, remind them who’s in charge.”

  In the end Daniel decided to take the man onboard—he said he had been to Coeur-Lion’s new camp, and could act as a guide—and the ship began to move slowly upriver once more. He was thankful Frederick’s French was limited; the crew members’ power of reason was limited enough without exposure to religion, superstition and whatever else might be in the man’s head. Already he was disturbed by what Frederick had said about Coeur-Lion: again he was reminded of the governor’s words, and of the second sealed envelope in his desk. What was it about this territory, this river, that so changed people? If it were changing him, would he even notice?

  The river began to bend over the next hours, turning from northwest to nearly straight north. Daniel remained in the wheelhouse with Latour the whole time, spyglass at the ready, and he had reluctantly allowed Frederick in as well—better, he thought, to keep him away from the crew. The man began to get excited as they rounded the bend, and after a few moments Daniel saw what he was gesturing at: on the western bank, a few kilometres away, stood a vast artificial hill, stepped like the Mexican pyramids. Its scale was hard to gauge at this distance but it had to be at least two hundred metres long on each side, thirty high. Smaller pyramids, perhaps thirty or forty of them, were scattered around it, half-buried and with their edges weathered smooth, and small square buildings with domed roofs nestled in their shadows.

  “That’s it,” Frederick said.

  As they crept towards the landing the pilot’s course, intentionally or not, veered nearer to the western shore; near enough that when the arrows began to fly, a few of them reached the ship.

  “Hard to starboard!” Daniel called. “Get us to the middle of the channel!”

  Swearing under his breath Latour threw himself at the wheel, fighting to shift the ship’s course. Daniel unholstered his pistol and ran out onto the deck, looked around: the arrows, still flying, were falling into the water now, but one had lodged deep in Thibodeaux’s leg. The man was lying on his back on the deck, his face pale, his breath coming in shudders.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Frederick said from behind him.

  Daniel kneeled down next to Thibodeaux, took the man’s knife from h
is belt and cut ribbons off his shirt. He tried to tie a tourniquet but the blood still flowed from the wound, sluggish and dark.

  “Let me,” Frederick said, elbowing Daniel aside. He took one of the ribbons cut from the man’s shirt and dipped it in the blood; then he held the stained cloth between his hands and prayed, saying, “Blood, I judge you in the name of the Father. I judge you in the faith of Jesus. I judge you in the name of the Holy Spirit.” Then he turned to one of the other men on the deck, said in broken French “Take this and hide it. Somewhere safe, and never let him see it.”

  To Daniel’s surprise, the bleeding had slowed; though Thibodeaux was still deathly pale his breath was coming in more even gasps as well. “Is that the French hygiene Coeur-Lion taught you?”

  Frederick shook his head. “No, sir. Just faith in Jesus.” He held out his hand, opened it to show the blood on his palm.

  “And I suppose Jesus will keep this man from getting sepsis in his wound?” Daniel shook his head, called one of the crew over. “Alcohol, the white bottle,” he said.

  The rain of arrows had stopped now, and once the wound had been sterilized and Thibodeaux taken to the Captain’s cabin Daniel returned to the wheelhouse. “Ready the boat,” he said.

  “Should I blow for a port?” Latour asked.

  Daniel shook his head. “I think they know we’re here.”

  The Eugénie moved upriver at a crawl, the pyramid rising up as they neared it. Daniel had never seen the pyramids of Egypt or Mexico, only read descriptions of them, but he doubted if they could be any more magnificent than this: it was by far the tallest thing on the plain, looking as tall as the far hills. “Who could have built these?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Frederick said.