The New World (28 page)

I finished my star-gazing and turned back to my friends, expecting I would say something about the warmth of the night or the beauty of the river before we wandered back to our hotel. Expecting, too, that I would find everything as I had seen it a moment before, with Joshua gripping Anne Marie around the waist to prevent her from lurching into the water, and Natty staring into a stack of crates where another consignment of lobsters was stealthily signaling to her.

But nothing was the same.

Nothing.

Natty, Joshua and Anne Marie were all in a line with their backs to the river, bolt upright and apparently cold sober. Two other figures were guarding them, standing no more than five yards away and lit from behind by lamps in the tavern window.

I did not need to ask who they were. The Painted Man was crouched with a knife in one hand, his weight shifting from one foot to another and his decorations rippling across his shoulders—red and gold and ochre and white, as though he was winged with fire. Or winged with blood. Black Cloud was slowly shaking his head and stepping forward to show himself more clearly. His face was a skull carved from stone, the lips full and dry, his face yellowish and heavy-looking. He kept coming. Another step, then another, until he was only a yard away. Close as when his eyes had bulged at me from the boat following the
Angel
. Close as when he first strode into our prison and hauled me to and fro pounding his name into my head.

Black Cloud. Black Cloud. Black Cloud.

The silence between us was immense, and as the moon floated out from a cloud-bank I studied him inch by inch: the greasy black hair swept back from his forehead; the nose like a hawk's beak; the sunken cheeks; the sleek muscles swelling in the neck and shoulders; the thick body; the hands and feet too large, as though all his energy had flowed out from the center and congealed there, giving him an unearthly strength.

“Mister Jim.” It seemed the air itself had spoken, and all the floating pieces of my brain suddenly rushed together.

“You learned my name,” I heard myself say. The steadiness of our voices astonished me; we might have been friends meeting after a little separation. “And you speak my language.”

“It is not difficult,” he said. “English is arriving everywhere.”

“I suppose so,” I said, still hungry for every detail of him—the bristles prickling along his cheek and jawline, the flaking cracks in his lips, the bronze in his skin, the stubby eyelashes. This was my avenger. This was my death. And my privilege was to see him precisely. Yet it was also my privilege to know how wrong I had been. In all my dreams he had been exceptional, almost a god. Now I knew he was an ordinary man, his voice shrunk with thirst and his eyes bloodshot with the dust blown into them by the desert winds. It was not his strangeness that frightened me any more, but the opposite. He terrified me because he felt so familiar.

“Why did you take so long?” I was playing for time, but Black Cloud seemed content with this; he knew I could never escape him now.

“Two years is not long,” he said, with the trace of a smile in his voice. “No time is long to me. I looked for you, then I went back to my house. I left my house and I looked again. Then I went back to my house and looked a third time. I almost found you—but…” He raised his right hand to his left shoulder and pulled aside his tunic to show me a wrinkle in the skin, where it had healed over a wound.

“You see?” he said. “Your friend was clever and you escaped. But I knew where you would go.”

“Then why not come here first?” I asked. “You could have waited for us.”

“I could not wait,” he said. “You have what is mine.”

“Which is?” I said, but this was too much like foolishness and Black Cloud was suddenly impatient.

“You know the answer,” he snapped. “What is mine.” As he spat the last word, he stooped to press his forehead hard against my own and I felt his heat seeping through my skin as though his thoughts were burning into my brain.

“Mine,” he kept saying, his sour breath swarming over my face. “Mine, mine, mine.”

Then he straightened again, and as his heat diminished I put my hand to my chest. Black Cloud focused there for a second, but he still did not know the satchel was inside my shirt.

I gabbled at him some more to throw him off. “You have traveled a long way,” I said. Preposterous again, but for a moment good enough. He spun toward the mouth of the river, where the night-wind wandered about the islands of the estuary; he seemed to be listening for something he could not hear, looking for something he could not see; then he lost patience again and turned back.

To rob me, I thought. But just as I expected to feel his hand thrusting inside my shirt, and the tug as he wrenched the satchel from its strap, a shudder ran through the muscles of his neck and along his arm into his fingers. I looked down and saw the quick shine of a knife. When the tip of the blade cut me I felt a hot dash of blood.

“Jim!” I heard Natty cry. She had seen this blood; it was darkening my shirt.

“It's only a scratch,” I told her, then wished I had not. Black Cloud would hurt me again now; he would cut me more deeply.

Instead, he rocked back on his heels and indolently lifted the knife away, throwing back his head and showing his large yellow teeth, smearing me with the fish-smell on his breath.

“A scratch,” he said lazily. “You are right. A scratch.” He did not care because he knew he could kill me whenever he wanted.

My wound started to sting me then and I hid my face. I wanted to clear my mind. To think. I should give him the necklace as Natty and I had so often said we must, then I should plead for our lives. But as I stayed hunched over, with my eyes shut and my blood booming in my ears, I still refused to do this.

“It's not yours any more. It's mine,” I whispered. “It's—”

Black Cloud would not let me finish. He bounded forward, seized me by the hair as he had done in our prison, and jerked me upright so fast I felt the skin tightening all over my face.

“That is a lie,” he snarled. “A lie, Mister Jim. You are no better than the rest, though you think you are. You are a liar.”

I could not reply. Where was Natty, I wondered in a kind of daze; she would know how to answer. When I glanced up I saw that she had stepped so close to the Painted Man his knife was hovering an inch from her throat. Her eyes glittered and the lamplight streamed over her green satin dress.

“Here!” she said to the Painted Man, seizing the moment by daring him to hurt her, nudging forward until the point of the knife actually touched her throat—which made Joshua reach out and grab her arm to hold her back. As he did this I remembered the gun in his belt, the silver shining pistol. Why not use it now? Why not shoot the Painted Man, then turn on Black Cloud and shoot him as well, and so finish everything?

Because he was cunning, that was the only explanation. He was planning to let Black Cloud murder me and Natty, then kill the murderers himself, so that he could collect the necklace and begin the life he wanted.

I lunged toward Natty to protect her but that was my mistake. As I stretched out my hand, the satchel slipped from beneath my shirt and Black Cloud saw it at once. “Is it here now?” he gasped. “Now?” He did not wait for my reply, only tucked his knife back into his belt and gripped my shoulder, holding me steady while he grabbed the satchel and ripped it away from me; as the strap broke it made a sharp little twang and burned the skin of my neck. Then he shoved me aside like rubbish; I no longer held any use for him.

“Ah!” He flipped open the mouth of the satchel and when he plunged his hand inside I heard the separate pieces of the necklace chiming together, slick and heavy and warm. His eyes widened as he felt the weight. He held it. He drew it out and hoisted it to eye level, grasping it by the knot which had once rested on the nape of my neck, and before that on his own, so all the pieces swung free and the whole design became clear. As they caught the light from the window behind him, and reflections from the river in front, the creatures carved along the individual pieces once more began to crawl and glide, sliding into and through one another, endlessly moving and always still.

I forced myself back to Natty again but she was safe suddenly; the Painted Man was no longer interested in her, any more than Black Cloud was interested in me. He wanted to stand as close as possible to Black Cloud, who was lifting the necklace even higher above his head now, letting the silver light splash down onto them both equally, glittering over their skin and dribbling into their eyes and noses and mouths.

This was our chance to escape! But it never occurred to me. In the clear light pouring over our enemies, all I could think about was how soon they would finish their gloating, and lead us away from the wharf and into the shadows where they would murder us. Where they would slice the scalps from our heads so our spirits would not rise again, and slash the tendons of our legs so we would never run through the world in our afterlives. Where they would fling us into the river and forget us,

“Jim!”

Natty was calling to me now but calmly, almost matter-of-fact.

“Jim,” she repeated. “Look!” For a moment I thought I had jumped from one dream to another. Black Cloud and the Painted Man were still as I had seen them a moment before, with their backs turned to the wall of the inn, but they were no longer admiring the necklace. They had let it go. They had dropped it onto the wharf beside my satchel. And all their quickness had drained out of them—all of it, just in a few seconds.

I had been wrong again about Joshua. He had never wanted to harm us; he had only been waiting for his moment. While Black Cloud and the Painted Man were gazing at their treasure, and while I was lost in thoughts of my own murder, he had decided it was time to undo the buttons of his topcoat and pull the silver pistol from his belt. Now he was pointing it toward our enemies.

My ears were already tingling with the explosion I thought must follow; as their bodies collapsed onto the wharf the tremor passed through the timbers and upward into my feet, flooding through my body until it had filled me and set me free.

Natty snapped me awake.

“Joshua!” She was standing side on, silhouetted against the tavern window and holding out her right hand. She was asking for his gun; she wanted it herself.

I glanced at Black Cloud and the Painted Man, expecting to see them coiling all their strength together, convinced in their rage that nothing could harm them. But they were stock-still. Aghast that all their miles in the wilderness, all their scouring and listening and watching, had been made worthless by something so paltry. By the little silver mouth of a pistol.

Except I was wrong. They were not stunned or anything like it. They knew their knives and the strength of their own bodies were nothing compared to a gun, but they were still entirely themselves. When I looked at Black Cloud again, thinking I might hold his gaze and show him that I was his equal, he slowly shook his head. I was worthless to him. I was dust blowing in the wind.

Joshua and Natty did not see this; they were arguing. “I can't give it to you,” he was telling her, still pointing the gun at Black Cloud. But as I began listening to them again I did not believe him; there was too much confusion in his voice.

“You can,” Natty told him. “You'll give it to me right now.” It was the same note I had heard in our first conversation together, when she called me onto the towpath outside the Hispaniola and said I must come with her to meet her father. She would not be denied; Joshua would not be able to withstand her.

And sure enough, when she leaned across to pry the gun from between his fingers, Joshua surrendered it without a struggle, almost as if he was glad to see her take it. Then she gripped the gun with both hands, aiming at Black Cloud's heart, and nodded toward me without taking her eyes from his face. Like Joshua I did what she wanted—but in my case because I understood, and I loved her. I stepped forward and picked up the necklace where it lay on the wharf, and I heard Black Cloud groan. A soft roar, as if all the breath was leaving his body at once. The Painted Man covered his eyes with his hands.

“It is mine now,” I said, and slipped the cord over my head so the silver pieces spread out across my chest again. Their light flickered into my eyes and half-blinded me, but I saw Black Cloud's face clearly enough. His eyes were absolutely black and expressionless; he would not give me even the smallest part of himself.

“Change places,” Natty ordered, tossing her head to show our prisoners they must stand on the edge of the wharf with their backs to the river, while Joshua and Anne Marie withdrew into the shadows of the inn.

I understood again, and this time I knew I must not obey her. But I was too weak, and Black Cloud and the Painted Man were indifferent to her now. They shuffled over the wharf, and when they came close to Natty she plucked the knives from their belts and threw them casually into the darkness behind her; one fell on a soft bale of cotton and made no sound, the other clattered on the bare decking.

Only then did I try and reason with her. “You mustn't do this, Natty,” I told her. “They're men, the same as us.”

“They're not the same,” she replied. “They would have killed us before, and this is what they deserve.”

“No, Natty,” I said. “We must give them to the law.”

Natty raised her eyebrows. “The law? Why ever should we give them to the law? The law will decide we're thieves, Jim—that's what the law will do. It will decide we're guilty and put us in jail, not them.”

“But we have what we want!” I said. “They can't hurt us any more.”

How much of this Black Cloud understood I cannot say; in the corner of my eye I saw his mouth twisting into a sneer.

“We'll tie them up, then,” I said, floundering now and with no other arguments left. “We'll leave them here, or take them farther off. And we'll still be gone in a day—we'll still be safe.”