Down These Strange Streets

patois that Grey didn’t understand—but from the man’s attitude, his glance at Cresswell, and the murmur of agreement that greeted his remark, he had no trouble in deducing what had been said.

What is the word of an Englishman worth?

Grey gave Cresswell, groveling and sniveling at his feet, a look of profound disfavor. It would serve the man right if—then he caught the faint reek of corruption wafting from Rodrigo’s still form, and shuddered. No, nobody deserved that.

Putting aside the question of Cresswell’s fate for the moment, Grey turned to the question that had been in the forefront of his mind since he’d come in sight of that first curl of smoke.

“My men,” he said. “I want to see my men. Bring them out to me, please. At once.” He didn’t raise his voice, but he knew how to make a command sound like one.

Accompong tilted his head a little to one side, as though considering, but then waved a hand, casually. There was a stirring in the crowd, an expectation. A turning of heads, then bodies, and Grey looked toward the rocks where their focus lay. An explosion of shouts, catcalls, and laughter, and the two soldiers and Tom Byrd came out of the defile. They were roped together by the necks, their ankles hobbled and hands tied, and they shuffled awkwardly, bumping into one another, turning their heads to and fro like chickens, in a vain effort to avoid the spitting and the small clods of earth thrown at them.

Grey’s outrage at this treatment was overwhelmed by his relief at seeing Tom and his young soldiers, all plainly scared, but uninjured. He stepped forward at once, so they could see him, and his heart was wrung by the pathetic relief that lighted their faces.

“Now, then,” he said, smiling. “You didn’t think I would leave you, surely?”

“I didn’t, me lord,” Tom said stoutly, already yanking at the rope about his neck. “I told ’em you’d be right along, the minute you got your boots on!” He glared at the little boys, naked but for shirts, who were dancing round him and the soldiers, shouting, “Buckra! Buckra!” and making not-quitepretend jabs at the men’s genitals with sticks. “Can you make ’em leave off that filthy row, me lord? They been at it ever since we got here.”

Grey looked at Accompong and politely raised his brows. The headman barked a few words of something not quite Spanish, and the boys reluctantly fell back, though they continued to make faces and rude arm-pumping gestures.

Captain Accompong put out a hand to his lieutenant, who hauled the fat little headman to his feet. He dusted fastidiously at the skirts of his coat, then walked slowly around the little group of prisoners, stopping at Cresswell. He contemplated the man, who had now curled himself into a ball, then looked up at Grey.

“Do you know what a loa is, my Colonel?” he asked quietly.

“I do, yes,” Grey replied warily. “Why?”

“There is a spring, quite close. It comes from deep in the earth, where the loas live, and sometimes they will come forth and speak. If you will have back your men—I ask you to go there, and speak with whatever loa may find you. Thus we will have truth, and I can decide.”

Grey stood for a moment, looking back and forth among the fat old man; Cresswell, his back heaving with silent sobs; and the young girl Azeel, who had turned her head to hide the hot tears coursing down her cheeks. He didn’t look at Tom. There didn’t seem much choice.

“All right,” he said, turning back to Accompong. “Let me go now, then.”

Accompong shook his head.

“In the morning,” he said. “You do not want to go there at night.”

“Yes, I do,” Grey said. “Now.”

* * *

“QUITE CLOSE” WAS A RELATIVE TERM, APPARENTLY. GREY THOUGHT IT must be near midnight by the time they arrived at the spring—Grey, the houngan Ishmael, and four maroons bearing torches and armed with the long cane knives called machetes.

Accompong hadn’t told him it was a hot spring. There was a rocky overhang, and what looked like a cavern beneath it, from which steam drifted out like dragon’s breath. His attendants—or guards, as one chose to look at it—halted as one, a safe distance away. He glanced at them for instruction, but they were silent.

He’d been wondering what the houngan’s role in this peculiar undertaking was. The man was carrying a battered canteen; now he uncorked this and handed it to Grey. It smelled hot, though the tin of the heavy canteen was cool in his hands. Raw rum, he thought, from the sweetly searing smell of it—and doubtless a few other things.

. . . Herbs. Ground bones—bits o’ other things. But the main thing, the one thing ye must have, is the liver of a fugu fish . . . They don’t come back from it, ye ken. The poison damages their brains . . .

“Now we drink,” Ishmael said. “And we enter the cave.”

“Both of us?”

“Yes. I will summon the loa. I am a priest of Damballa.” The man spoke seriously, with none of the hostility or smirking he had displayed earlier. Grey noticed, though, that their escort kept a safe distance from the houngan, and a wary eye upon him.

“I see,” said Grey, though he didn’t. “This . . . Damballa. He—or she—?”

“Damballa is the great serpent,” Ishmael said, and smiled, teeth flashing briefly in the torchlight. “I am told that snakes speak to you.” He nodded at the canteen. “Drink.”

Repressing the urge to say “You first,” Grey raised the canteen to his lips and drank, slowly. It was very raw rum, with a strange taste, sweetly acrid, rather like the taste of fruit ripened to the edge of rot. He tried to keep any thought of Mrs. Abernathy’s casual description of afile powder out of mind—she hadn’t, after all, mentioned how the stuff might taste. And surely Ishmael wouldn’t simply poison him . . . ? He hoped not.

He sipped the liquid until a slight shift of the houngan’s posture told him it was enough, then handed the canteen to Ishmael, who drank from it without hesitation. He supposed he should find this comforting, but his head was beginning to swim in an unpleasant manner, his heartbeat throbbing audibly in his ears, and something odd was happening to his vision; it went intermittently dark, then returned with a brief flash of light, and when he looked at one of the torches, it had a halo of colored rings around it.

He barely heard the clunk of the canteen, dropped on the ground, and watched, blinking, as the houngan’s white-clad back wavered before him. A dark blur of face as Ishmael turned to him.

“Come.” The man disappeared into the veil of water.

“Right,” he muttered. “Well, then . . .” He removed his boots, unbuckled the knee bands of his breeches, and peeled off his stockings. Then he shucked his coat and stepped cautiously into the steaming water.

It was hot enough to make him gasp, but within a few moments he had got used to the temperature and made his way across a shallow, steaming pool toward the mouth of the cavern, shifting gravel hard under his bare feet. He heard whispering from his guards, but no one offered any alternate suggestions.

Water poured from the overhang, but not in the manner of a true waterfall; slender streams, like jagged teeth. The guards had pegged the torches into the ground at the edge of the spring; the flames danced like rainbows in the drizzle of the falling water as he passed beneath the overhang.

The hot, wet air pressed his lungs and made it hard to breathe. After a few moments, he couldn’t feel any difference between his skin and the moist air through which he walked; it was as though he had melted into the darkness of the cavern.

And it was dark. Completely. A faint glow came from behind him, but he could see nothing at all before him, and was obliged to feel his way, one hand on the rough rock wall. The sound of falling water grew fainter, replaced by the heavy thump of his own heartbeat, struggling against the pressure on his chest. Once he stopped and pressed his fingers against his eyelids, taking comfort in the colored patterns that appeared there; he wasn’t blind, then. When he opened his eyes again, though, the darkness was still complete.

He thought the walls were narrowing—he could touch them on both sides by stretching out his arms—and had a nightmare moment when he seemed to feel them drawing in upon him. He forced himself to breathe, a deep, explosive gasp, and forced the illusion back.