Gypsy Blood (44 page)

“That’s the third time you’ve asked me.”

“Three times without an answer.”

“I can land…”

The oar twisted in his grip like an angry snake. It threw him to his knees on the wooden deck.

“Lucas!” Tamsen reached for him. The twist of their course sprawled her. She rolled towards the edge of the raft, catching hold of the safety lines Lucas laid about the craft’s perimeter.

While he was reaching for her the raft began to drift.

“Damn,” Lucas struggled to straighten their course. He fought the current for every inch, praying that the creaking oar wouldn’t snap.

Tamsen crawled towards him, wanting to help.

“Stay down,” Lucas warned.

She dragged herself forward but a rope had snagged about her ankle.

The raft yawed into a slow current-bound cartwheel.

“Lucas,” Tamsen called.

Lucas stared past her, towards the long thing that rose, Dagonesque, from the depths before them.

“Sea serpent!” Lucas shouted.

Tamsen looked back over her shoulder and screamed. Looming over her was the blunted tip of a mud-bound log, rising from its riverbed grave. Its slime slicked surface slid up and over the raft, looming higher as the current drove both raft and log hard together.

The raft tipped forward as the weight of the log began to tell. Lucas let go of the oar and grabbed Tamsen in a run for the side, hoping his momentum coupled with a well timed leap would carry them to safety.

“Jump,” he shouted.

At the brink of the leap the raft chose to yield to her assaulter. The sheer mass of the log bore down upon her deck. The raft tipped upwards and broke. The sudden upward lift catapulted both Lucas and Tamsen out over the river, airborne like a pair of winged angels.

In the height of his arc Lucas glanced at the shoreline.

A great black antlered deer calmly watched his approach.

And then he was under. The shock of total immersion slapped him into chilling reality. The river seemed deeper by fathoms than his last sounding had showed. He felt confused, not knowing top from bottom, looking for the light and hanging onto his breath and the small white hand of his wife.

She wasn’t swimming. Perhaps from the shock or perhaps she didn’t know how.

He felt her sink.

He held on to her. His breath beat upon the walls of his lungs, begging to be freed. He saw the glimmer of daylight through the water overhead, taunting him. The river seemed bottomless. He continued to sink, his attempts at swimming thwarted by his wife’s dead weight.

Was she breathing?

He couldn’t tell.

He spared a glance, catching sight of the rope trailing behind her.

Let her go
, an unseen voice whispered.

He wouldn’t listen. He kicked and struggled. The blood throbbed and beat in his temples, pounding him downward. His mind raved in panic. He heard singing – his father’s low dirge-like voice tolling “Washed in the Blood” as the old man held children beneath the sacred still waters of his pine barrel baptistery.

“
Let her go
,” the unseen voice whispered deeper.

The Lord is my shepherd
, Lucas wordlessly recited, counter-spelling the river’s deep terrified commandment.

Let her go
.

Lucas forced himself to relax. He tried to float. He felt no comforting upward pull. He remembered the summer his father threw him into the lake below their house.

“Sink or swim, Lucas, sink or swim,” the old man had gaily called.

“
Let her go
,” the voice shouted.

Lucas remembered his father’s final shame-filled walk into that same cold lake.

Father, forgive me
, Lucas told himself.

Tiny spots of light danced like frightened fish before his eyes.

He maketh me lie
, Lucas mentally chanted.

He reached out a hand towards the dark shapeless mass that hung close beside him.

Beside still waters
.

He felt what seemed to be the slimy surface of a tree, leading upwards. An underwater root? He caught hold of the root. He steadied himself for a moment. He swallowed water, gritting his teeth against the impulse to cough out. He kicked upwards and began to swim. His hands slid from the rotted surface.

Let go, let go, let go
.

In a moment of panic Lucas almost surrendered.

Tamsen nearly slipped away.

Lucas swam steadily, paddling with one hand while clinging to Tamsen’s still form with the other. When he weakened he reached for the root’s dead wooden meat. He drew vigor from somewhere within the wood’s murky heart, working his way upwards, humping along like some bizarre form of water bug.

He’d been holding his breath for a while.

How long?

Seconds? Minutes? Hours?

Days?

He watched the glimmering daylight filtered through God only knew how many fathoms, taunting and laughing at him, wishing him dead.

Yea though I walk through the valley
…

Goddamn, goddamn, God-be-damned I want to live!

At that last thought he emerged from the depths, laughing and gasping and choking, his left hand firmly entwined within a clot of rotted tree root.

“Praise God,” he croaked.

It was only then he remembered Tamsen, still hanging limply from his right hand. Her head bobbed serenely – face down in the dirty silent water.

Lucas released his grip on the root, turned to grab for her and slid inexorably backwards into the river’s eager grasp. He stretched his hand outwards and upwards.

“
I have you
,” a deep timbered voice said.

*2*

W
et dreams, dreams of drowning, dreams of death.

Tamsen’s dying mind was awash with the raucous laughter of the river gurgling within her ears. Whispering lurid suggestions as she floated and felt herself lifted upwards, heaven bound, a darkling vision of godhood hanging over her mouthing words she dared not hear.

Up, down, up, down.

Her head bobbed helplessly, choking and swallowing. The log reared over her like the great dripping member of some dark forgotten sea god. Poseidon, Neptune, Triton – names dredged from the pages of a childhood classical primer and other names she hadn’t read. Names she couldn’t speak. Names she dared not utter.

Jacob? Are you there Jacob?

The raft shattered like a broken vow beneath the log’s blind implacable thrust. She saw another river, another woman and another time. In the storybook of memory she felt the ropes, tough and twisted, cutting livid tattoos into her flesh. She felt her body bound to the unforgiving dunking stool. She felt herself moving within another woman, feet dancing in midair, old Delta.

Up, down, confess, confess.

A hand like chilled iron clenched around her wrist while the raft and her belongings and her life drifted past, moving down to something cold and hungry that waited far below.

She heard a voice, loud and distorted in the echo-echo of the water, (
Lucas, is that you?
), a woman’s voice, loud like thunder, shrieking
LET-HER-GO
.

Up, down.

She saw Lucas’s ship, the ship she had never seen and yet she knew it. She knew the creak and groan of each ice-locked member, threatening to give way. She knew there was death all about, pushing at each bulkhead, seeking some means of entry, of relief.

She knew that as dark as death outside of the ship was, darker still was the darkness of the belly, hidden deep below. She felt cold bitter hands and cold bitter flesh, cold upon each other, weeping cold bitter tears.

Up, down, up.

She felt herself being lifted and carried through the valley with his voice dark above her. His words dripped like sweet thick molasses, filling her up, drowning her and leaving her for dead by the warmth of a slow crackling fire that whispered ashy secrets and spoke of smoke and release.

*3*

T
hrough the drown of darkness Lucas remembered a conversation, long ago and a lifetime away.

“We must go,” he’d said to Tamsen.

“But why?” she’d asked.

“My father....”

“Your father is dead.”

“The townsfolk?”

“People will talk but their memories are short. Give them time. They’ll forget the shame that has passed.”

She sounded so confident.

So sure.

Had he ever listened?

“We carry the cross of shame,” he told her. “Some memories will never die.”

“Are you so certain?” she’d asked.

“We must go,” he’d replied. “There can be no alternative.”

And so they left.

*4*

“A
re you going to sleep forever?” a voice graveled close as death to Lucas’s ear.

Lucas raised himself up. He opened his eyes, attempting to clear his vision with several great sandy blinks. He shook his head and groaned aloud.

The other man kept talking, far too loudly. “Alive, by God, alive. I yanked two fish from Lady River’s arms today.”

Lucas remembered a strong hand grasping his. The hand of the Lord, he’d thought, raising him up onto Jordan’s rocky shore. Then a voice, strong and deep,
I have you
. From there he began a blissful descent into oblivion, blacking out while barely halfway on to the shore.

“Can you sit? Can you speak?” the voice again, loud but farther away as if the speaker had straightened up. “Holy Christ man, are you helpless?”

Lucas winced as much at the blasphemy as his discomfort. He felt cargo shifting within the hold of his skull. He touched his cheek, found a sticky wetness and reflexively touched his fingers to his lips. He tasted blood and spat it out as if it were a poison.

“Tastes good, don’t it? I had to drag you out and you cut your cheek upon the wood. You and that woman were too damned heavy to lift but there was no way in Hell I could make you let go of her hand.”

Lucas’s right hand squeezed reflexively upon thin air, cramping slightly with the effort. “Tamsen! Is she...?”

“The woman?
 
Sure, she is fine. She’s just taken on a little river water. I guess she swallowed when she should have spat. How the hell did that rope get around her anyway? She’s up with Jezebel now, in the cabin, drying off.”

Lucas’s eyes focused upon a large blackened pair of boots – the left solidly planted, the right cocked upon its heel. A large cross was carved into the boot’s wooden sole. Lucas coughed violently, both to clear his lungs and to conceal his shock. His efforts at diplomacy sadly failed.

“I am no godsman, if that’s what you think,” The strange man said. “I put the cross down there to walk upon, grinding it into the dirt wherever I go.”

Lucas raised his eyes. From his perspective the stranger seemed huge, a barrel of a man as tall as a tree, coarsely featured and roughly hewn. His heavy arms crossed about his trunk in a manner that spoke of a hunter’s patience. A scraggly beard played about his cheeks like a forgotten smile and a savage scar furrowed a path down and across his left cheek.

The stranger grinned fiercely, exposing a set of huge yellow teeth that contrasted sharply with his darkling features. He bore a strong hint of mulatto.
One of Cain’s own
, Lucas’s father would have said.

The stranger wouldn’t stop talking.

“A couple of sheep came ashore. One was dead. I saw a couple of crates as well. I’ll send the boy to look but the rest is gone for sure. Lady River don’t give back much, once she’s took.”