The King`s Commission

the unknown. Once we've been shoved into motion, it usually goes much better.'

'That's been my experience.' Alan nodded. 'What about Cowell and McGilliveray?'

'Cowell sahib is still scribbling away at his objections, but the Turtle- rajah came round at the last, long as the goods get up-river. He suggested the sloop would do better to handle the transfer of goods from Shrike, instead of having your ship come inshore with her. Wants you to pass the word to your captain to load her up and stand ready to meet us once we get the gora logs convinced to set out the red war pole.'

'Could you possibly speak the King's English, Kit?'

'Ah, sorry, not possible, you see. Been too long away from it. I can pidgin with any Samboe you want from the Hooghly Bar to the Coromandel coast. I can even get along in Creole with the slaveys up in the Blue Mountains. Who knows, by the time we're done, I'll master Creek, too?'

'Well, we can open another bottle,' Alan sighed, tossing the empty onto the coverlet of the hanging cot. 'Or we could get started while it's still dark and quiet.'

'Best go, then. Or we'll never.' Cashman tried to smile.

'Aye. Goddamnit.'

'Amen, parson Lewrie.'

Chapter 4

Florida pretty much ain't worth a tuppeny shit, Alan thought moodily as they lay up ashore just a few miles short of the headwaters of the Ochlockonee. The past night and day had been miserable. The air was still, and foetid with the smells of marsh and mud, the swamps aswarm with mosquitoes and biting flies, biting gnats. Alligators and poisonous snakes were two-a-penny on the banks, in the water, laying out for a bask on the tree limbs that overhung the banks when they were forced close ashore by a bend in the channel, or snuffling about under the banks in their nests and roaring at them when disturbed.

They had made very good time, though, catching a favorable slant of wind on the first night when the river was wide enough for short-tacking inland. So far they were a day ahead of schedule.

It was only after the sun had come up that they had been forced to row as the banks closed in and rose higher in thickly treed hammocks that blocked the breeze from the sea, and the familiar tang of salt air was left behind like a lover's perfume. The heat wasn't bad, though the air was stiflingly wet enough and humid enough to wring perspiration from them by the bucket, and it was a blessing that the leafy green waters could be drunk safely, or dipped up and sluiced over tired bodies.

Bald cypress, scrub pine, and yellow-green stagnant ponds spread out on either hand under the canopy of the marshes, punctuated by water reeds, sharp-edged grasses, or jagged stumps of prodigious size. Bright birds the like of which the hands had never seen cried and stalked or fluttered below the canopy. Frogs the size of rabbits croaked at them from their resting places. Water bugs skittered on the deceptively calm water as it slid like treacle through the marshes. Now and then a hammock of higher sandy ground loomed up around a bend in the channel, covered with pines thick as the hair on a cat's back, open to the bright sky as the result of a lightning fire, or burn.

Otter, deer, a host of wildlife, lurked along the banks. Alan saw raccoons for the first time, and opposums hanging by their naked tails like obscene caricatures of rats. He had been almost nauseated by McGilliveray's granted comment that opposums were very good to eat, though he was never one to refuse a bread-room fed 'miller' in his midshipman days-at least the ship's rats were decent-sized!

McGilliveray had gone totally native by then, stripping off his shirt to bare more pagan tattooing, wrapping a length of cloth about his head like a Hindi's turban as Cashman styled it, naked under breech-clout, and the leggings only covering his thighs, held up by thongs from the single strap that held the breech-clout in place. Most of the sailors had tied their kerchiefs about their heads like small four-cornered mob- caps. The soldiers sported rough imitations of turbans, and had taken off their shirts as well, though their skins gleamed almost frog-belly pale in the fierce light, and several were already regretting the exposure, and patting their burns with water. At least in that regard Alan's sailors were more fortunate, since they had had months and years of continual tanning by the sun, so they appeared at first glance as ruddy as any savage.

'Apalachee scout over there,' McGilliveray whispered, coming to Lewrie's side. 'I shall go speak to him.'

'Is that wise?' Cowell asked, almost prostrate with exhaustion, though he had not done a lick of work since plunking his posterior on a thwart the night before. Alan thought it comical to see how McGilliveray had tricked Cowell out in breech-clout, leggings, moccasins and calico checkered shirt, with a turban of his own, like a maggot done up as a man. He could not have fooled a European at a hundred yards, and any Indian running across him would have asked him how fast the pitch was at the new Lord's cricket grounds.

'We have to let them know who we are eventually, sir,' McGilliveray said. 'They saw us land, tracked us up- river. I had hoped we would make contact with them last night. It's only polite, seeing as how we've crossed most of their territory already.'

'If this is the best real-estate they have, they're welcome to every bloody stick of it,' Alan griped.

McGilliveray stood up and waved an arm, calling out in his odd language, and from where Alan thought only a mosquito could live, up popped a full half-dozen savages, dressed in breech-clouts and tattoos only, bearing long cane bows and arrows. McGilliveray took off his moccasins and waded across a shallow slough of weeds and reeds to converse with them.

'They don't look like Rousseau's noble savages, do they, Mister Cowell?' Cashman asked, coming to join them as they stood idly by watching the parley.

'Look how lithe and tall they are, how nobly they bear themselves, sir,' Cowell disagreed softly. 'One does not need much clothing in such climes. Mankind, reduced to Eden, without a houseful of possessions and gew-gaws, with no prating philosophies to occasion rancor, shorn of metaphysics, of confusing science. They are a handsome folk, you'll not be able to deny. All pretensions of society cast aside, and relying on Nature and our Creator and their native wit for sustenance. You may speak of barbarity, of quick anger and bloody-handed murther, but has Mankind, in all our wisdom, gone far beyond those passions for all our supposed improvements, Captain Cashman?'

'We don't kill quite so openly and easily, sir,' Cashman replied.

'Life, in all its facets, is closer and more personal with them, sir. They are not like us, but we were once much like them, and still are, in many ways yet. The brave man slays with a sword, the coward with an invitation to tea, if I may paraphrase the quotation, ha ha.'

'I've never been scalped at a cat-lapping,' Alan quipped. 'Fucked with, God yes, and damned proud of it, mind.'

'We are in luck, Mister Cowell,' McGilliveray told them when he returned. 'There are Seminolee a few miles ahead of us, in a spring camp to fish. Lots of horses.'

'Any Spanish?' Cashman pressed.

'None seen this far inland in weeks. Some parties passed north of the swamps and crossed the rivers heading west a few days ago,' McGilliveray/White Turtle grunted, having seemingly given up the act of smiling for the duration. 'A company of horse, and one of foot, with baggage train. But they were busy driving stolen cattle they took from British colonists far off to the east.'

'According to this map, there is a small stream that leads to the Apalachicola River,' Alan pointed out, folding out their large chart. 'How deep is it? This one that leads west and nor'west.'

'Very shallow. Dugout canoes have trouble there,' their guide said, after peering at the map, and at Lewrie. 'Another change, Mister Lewrie?'

'We've made good time by water so far, why change bets now?' Alan replied, mopping his face with a kerchief. 'If it goes our way.'

'Best we continue on north.' White Turtle scowled, pointing in that direction with a chin jutted over his shoulder. 'This river bends easterly to the lake. Where the lake begins we find horses. Leave the boats, and a guard