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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 Etie
"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 Ha
Still, it was less crowded than the jail cell, quieter and far cleaner. By the last threads of blue moonlight he could see the man nearest him, and beyond him the little bundle of clothing, tin cup and plate, and the tin identification medal that showed him to be a slave working rather than a runaway when he walked about the streets.
He was sleeping under a roof he'd chosen for himself.
January closed his eyes.
His hand slid into his pocket, fingering the battered rosary as he told off prayers of thanks.
The illusion of freedom was tiny, he thought- maybe as tiny as his own illusion of justice-but they made do with it. It was better, to them, than the marginally more comfortable accommodations under a master's roof. Better than leaving everything he owned, everything he had worked for, everything he had left in the world, for the convenience of whoever had put that scarf around Angelique Crozat's ivory silk throat.
Save for a few hours snatched along the way, he had been without sleep for two nights and most of a third. Sleeping, he dreamed of the soft wailing voices of the workers in the fields, under the glassy weight of the new sun.
"They say go north, find us new kin, They say go north, find us new kin,
We try save our folks, We never come back again."
But the dream's light changed, from the early spring sun, harsh on the cane fields, to moonlight heavy as quicksilver, a black ocean strewn with phosphor galaxies, the black shape of a ship riding silent in the dark.
Dark blots on the ivory silk beach, like messy scabs; a tangle of walls and pens, shacks and fences; charred flesh and the smell of human waste and branding fires; the muted whisper of weeping. The glint of eyes that showed twelve young men, watching from the clotted shadows of the mangrove swamp.
"Without my folks, is no land home, He say without my folks, no land be home,
I'll die on that beach, Before I live my life alone."
"I walk on needles, I walk on pins," sang a voice back, whirling through dark and time like the smell of a burning house. "I know well the Grand Zombi..."
The throb of drums swept aside the beat of the surf on the shore. Voices cried, "Calinda! Dance the calinda! Badoum, badoum!"
Rain smell, and the throbbing in his hand as if it had been pounded with a hammer. It was only marginally more painful than the rest of his body: legs, arms, back. Downstairs, two people argued in gombo French over the price of a half-pound of sugar.
Leaky gray light showed him the slant of the roof, the bundles of blankets, tin cups, spare shirts that were shoved into corners and around the walls. When he sat up mice went scurrying, but the roaches were less concerned. Possibly, thought January wryly, because some of them were almost as big.
No one was in sight. The dancing in Congo Square generally didn't start until well after noon. The door onto the stairway stood open, the noise coming through it clearly. He limped over, stooping under the rafters and stepping through, stood on the little porch just outside, looking across the muddy yards, the wet, dark slate tiling of slanted roofs, and the cypress and palmetto that marked an area only recently and incompletely claimed from woods and swamps.
A rabble of plane trees and the white spire of the Church of St. Antoine showed him where the square lay. He was, he guessed, within a mile of his mother's house.
And that was exactly where the police would look for him, if they were looking.
Bouki the hyena, he's out riding the tracks, whispered a rusty voice in his mind. When you break cover, you watch your back.
Painfully-feet aching, legs aching-he descended the wooden stairs to the yard.
"It's two bits to sleep the night." A man came out of the store that occupied half the downstairs of the building. His face was the color of well-worn saddle leather, and about as expressive. He stood with folded arms in the muddy way that led back from the yard to the street.
The voice wasn't the same as the one Lacrime had spoken to last night. At a guess, the owner of the store collected money from the men who slept in his attic, but asked no questions about who came and went. The man with the cigar had been one of the other slaves.
"I have no money," said January. "I can get some. I'll bring it, later in the day."
"You'll bring it and six white horses too, huh?"
"I'll bring it." January's head ached, though not nearly as bad as his body or his hand. Fatigue and hunger made him feel scraped-out, as if the marrow had been sold out of his bones. He felt he should argue with this man, or produce some telling reason why he should be trusted, but he couldn't think of any at the moment. He'd have to pay Desdunes for his horse, too.
Even anger had gone to ash. He could have struck him, he supposed-from a great distance-but that would mean someone would call the police.
"I hold on to your boots," said the storekeeper. "When you come back with my two bits, you get your boots back."
So it was that January was barefoot, ragged, his hand wrapped in dirty bandages, and his whole body sweating like a nervous horse with fear that someone would stop him, ask his business, or worse yet recognize him, when he slipped down the narrow walkway and into his sister Dominique's yard. Becky, standing under the kitchen gallery ironing the intricate cut-lace puffs of a dress sleeve, looked up and called, "What is it? What do you want?" in a hard, cross voice, then looked again and set the iron down quickly.