He shook his head, with a wry mouth that such innocence could have been. "Maybe we sang a verse or two of it to each other, just to try it out, to hear how it would be.
"But there was no tale. Not even with my own village was I put in a ship, but with a bunch of people- Hausa from up by the great lake, Fulbe and Ibos-whose language I didn't even know. Young men are stupid."
He glanced back over his shoulder at January, laboring behind him.
"Nobody will give you justice, p'tit, no matter how much truth you shove down their throats. I'd been better to go north with my friends and look for another tribe of the Ewe, who at least knew the names of my gods."
"Did you ever find them again?" asked January. "Your own people, your family-those who spoke your tongue, who knew the names of your gods?"
The Ewe shook his head. "Never."
January followed in silence, as twilight settled deep over the green-gray land, then night.
They traveled on through night, sleeping only little. The food was gone and the rum January had been putting on his hand to keep infection at bay. He checked the wound whenever they stopped, which wasn't often, until daylight failed; the mess of the raw flesh was ugly, but looked clean, as far as he could tell, and he felt no fever. He was weary, however, weary beyond anything he'd ever known, even working in the fields-even the weariness after fighting, hiding in trees and blasting away with a rifle at the advancing red-coated troops with the expectation of losing his own life any minute, hadn't been like this. He guessed this was one effect of the wound, but the knowledge didn't help him much. He wanted only to sleep.
"Not safe to sleep, Compair Rabbit," the old man said, shaking January out of his doze where they'd stopped to rest by the foot of a tree. "Bouki the hyena, he's out riding the tracks. Used to be there was farms in the boscage, villages like in Africa. We'd live like we did, and they couldn't find us. When they came, we'd just melt away in the woods. Now Bouki and his hyenas, they ride the trails, hire Americans from up the river. Compair Rabbit better not sleep now when Bouki's out hunting."
They found a pirogue on the tangled banks of the long bayou that stretched from the lake in toward the town and hugged the bottomless shadows of its banks where the moonlight didn't touch. In time they followed in the waters of the canal toward the grubby scatter of wooden cottages, mud and stucco houses that made up the Faubourg Treme, the newer French suburb. Though it was long after curfew, Orion and his hunting dogs sinking west toward their home beyond the trackless deserts of Mexico, January was conscious of lamps burning, ochre slits behind louvered shutters, threads of amber outlining shut doors. All around him, as Lucius Lacrime drew the small boat close to a floating wooden stage and led the way up and into the rough gaggle of unpaved and unguttered streets that smelled of outhouses, January sensed a kind of movement in the dark, a certain life flitting in the dense black of the alleyways. Once he heard, dim as a drift of smoke, a woman singing something that had naught to do with Mozart or Rossini, with polkas or ballads or the loves and griefs of whites.
Lacrfme led him around the back of a whitewashed cottage whose stucco was chipped and falling and
badly in need of repair. Tobacco smoke rode over the stink of the privies in the dark of the yard. There was a gleam of gold, like Polyphemus's brooding eye, halfway up the outside stair to the attic.
"Hey, Compair Jon," breathed Lacrfme-though January had no idea how he could have seen or recognized anyone in the density of the shadows.
"Hey, Compair Lacrime," replied a soft voice from above. The smell of smoke increased as the man took his cigar from his mouth and blew a cloud.
"There room up there for my friend to sleep?"
"Being he got no objection to featherbeds and lullabies, and beautiful girls bringing him cocoa in bed when he wakes."
"You got any objection to that, Compair Rabbit?"
January looked up at the glowing coal. "You just tell them girls that cocoa better not have skin on it, and make sure those lullabies are by Schubert and not Rossini -leastwise not anything Rossini's written lately."
He heard the soft snort of laughter. "Mozart right by you?"
He made a deprecating gesture, like a housekeeper haggling in the market. "If that's all you got, I guess I'll put up with it." He felt he could have been happy on bare boards, which he suspected would be the case, just so long as he could lie down and sleep.
"They'll be looking for you in town, you know," said Lucius Lacrime's soft, scratchy voice at his elbow.
He'd told the old man a little of what had happened in Chien Mort - that he was a free man who'd lost the proofs of his freedom, and what had passed between him and Galen Peralta. "Even those that don't know what went on know runaways mostly head for town nowadays."
"People know me here," said January.
"And people know old man Peralta. And if you mink you got a chance against him in court of law, you're a fool."
January knew he was right. The diought of going into a courtroom, of trying to persuade a jury that he was innocent on his cloudy assertions that a white woman was involved in some kind of scandal - a jury of white men, possibly Americans - frightened him badly, worse than he had been afraid chained to the pillar in the sugar house. It was like holding a line in combat: stand and fire, knowing that if you ran you were a dead man, but facing some other man's loaded gun.
If he didn't run now, he thought, he might not be able to later.
But the line hadn't broken, he thought. They'd kept firing, and the British had eventually fallen back.
That the Americans hadn't even thanked him for his trouble was beside the point.
"I have to stay," he said. He didn't know what else he could say, besides that.
In the darkness it was impossible to see, but there was a rusde of fabric, a glint of eyes, as the old man shook his head. "That's how I ended up taking a ride in a great big ship, p'tit," said Lucius Lacrime sadly and clapped him softly on the back. "And nobody'll sing that song about your courage."
The thought of starting again elsewhere, of giving up what little he had left without a fight, dragged at him, like the time as a child he'd caught a fishhook in his flesh. The thought of letting Peralta, Tremouille, and Etienne Crozat win. He was at Chalmette again, loading his musket and watching red blurs take shape in the rank brume of powder smoke and fog.
"I still have to stay."
"You lay still, then, until you know what the hyenas are doing, Compair Rabbit. And when you break cover, you watch your back."
January didn't hear him go.
TWENTY
The attic over the store was one of those places Abishag Shaw had been told to shut down, a sleeping place for slaves who preferred to rent their own bodies from their owners for cash money, and find their own food and housing and employment, rather than exist in the enclosed compounds behind the white folks' houses. In a room twenty feet by thirty-blocked off by a wood-and-plaster wall from the attic storeroom of the shop below- ten men slept, as January had guessed, on the bare floor, rolled in blankets with their heads on their spare jackets or shirts. The place stank of unwashed clothes, unbathed flesh, of mice and roaches and of the smoke leaking through the brick of the two chimneys that rose up along the dividing wall. January had to feel his way gingerly down the center of the room so as not to trip over anyone, as he sought the place he'd seen in the little dim moonlight let in when he'd opened the door.
There was a dormer on the other side of the slanted roof-which, like Hannibal's attic in the Swamp, rose to a point a foot and a half short of his own height-and after a few minutes his eyes adjusted to the still denser dark, so that he could guess at the shapes that lay all around him, breathing deeply, heavily, in the vermin-infested dark.