Speaks the Nightbird

'You up prowlin', boy?' Shawcombe's eyes were deep sunken and the skin of his face was daubed dirty yellow in the candlelight. A curl of smoke oozed from his mouth.

'I . . . have to go out,' Matthew replied, still unnerved.

Shawcombe drew slowly on his pipe. 'Well,' he said, 'mind your legs, then. Awful sloppy out there.'

Matthew nodded. He started to turn toward the door, but Shawcombe spoke up again: 'Your master wouldn't want to part with that fine waistc't, would he?'

'No, he wouldn't.' Though he knew Shawcombe was baiting him, he couldn't let it go past. 'Mr. Woodward is not my master.'

'He ain't, huh? Well then, how come he tells you what you can do and what you cain't? Seems to me he's the master and you're the slave.'

'Mr. Woodward looks out for my interest.'

'Uh huh.' Shawcombe tilted his head back and fired a dart of smoke at the ceiling. 'Makes you cart the baggage, then he won't even let you dip your wick? All that shit about wolves and how you ought to be guarded. And you a twenty-year-old man! I'll bet he makes you scrape the mud off his boots, don't he?'

'I'm his clerk,' Matthew said pointedly. 'Not his valet.'

'Does he clean his own boots, or do you?'

Matthew paused. The truth was that he did clean the magistrate's boots, but it was a task he did without complaint. Some things over the years—such as organizing the judicial paperwork, keeping their living quarters in order, darning the clothes, packing the trunks, and arranging sundry other small affairs—had fallen to Matthew simply because he was much more efficient at taking care of details.

'I knew you did it,' Shawcombe went on. 'Man like that's got blue blood in his veins. He don't want to get them hands too dirty, does he? Yeah, like I said, he's the master and you're the slave.'

'You can believe what you like.'

'I believe what I see,' Shawcombe said. 'Come over here, lemme show you somethin'. You bein' a slave and all, you might well want to have a look.' Before Matthew could decline and go on his way, Shawcombe lifted his right fist and opened it. 'Here's somethin' you ain't never seen before and ain't like to see again.'

The lantern's light sparked off the surface of a gold coin. 'Here!' Shawcombe offered it to Matthew. 'I'll even let you hold it.'

Against his better judgment—and the urge to pee pressing on his bladder—Matthew approached the man and took the coin from him. He held it close to the lantern and inspected the engraving. It was a well-worn piece, much of the lettering rubbed off, but at its center was a cross that separated the figures of two lions and two castles. Matthew could make out the faint letters Charles II and Dei Grat around the coin's rim.

'Know what that is?' Shawcombe prodded.

'Charles the Second is the King of Spain,' Matthew said. 'So this must be Spanish.'

'That's right. Spanish. You know what that means, don't you?'

'It means a Spaniard was recently here?'

'Close. I got this from a dead redskin's pouch. Now what's a redskin doin' with a Spanish gold piece?' He didn't wait for Matthew to venture a guess. 'Means there's a damn Spanish spy 'round here somewhere. Stirrin' up some trouble with the Indians, most like. You know them Spaniards are sittin' down there in the Florida country, not seventy leagues from here. They got spies all in the colonies, spreadin' the word that any black crow who flies from his master and gets to the Florida country can be a free man. You ever heard such a thing? Them Spaniards are promisin' the same thing to criminals, murderers, every like of John Bad-seed.'

He swiped the coin from Matthew's hand. 'If you was to run to Florida and your master was to want you back, them Spaniards would jus' laugh at him. Same's true of somebody done a stealin' or a murder: get to Florida, them Spaniards would protect him. I tell you, once them blackamoors start runnin' to Florida by the scores and gettin' turned into free men, this world's gonna roast in Hell's fires.' Shawcombe dropped the coin into the tankard, which still had liquid in it, judging from the sound of the wet plop, then sat smoking his pipe with his arms crossed over his chest. 'Yeah,' he said with a knowing nod, 'a Spanish spy's out there, payin' the redskins to get up to some mischief. Hell, he might even be livin' in Fount Royal, an Englishman turned black- coat!'

'Possibly.' Matthew's need for relief was now undeniable. 'Excuse me, I have to go.'

'Go on, then. Like I say, watch where you step.' Shawcombe let Matthew get to the door and then said, 'Hey, clerk! You sure he wouldn't part with that waistc't?'

'Absolutely sure.'

Shawcombe grunted, his head wreathed with blue pipe smoke. 'I didn't think so,' he said in a quiet voice.

Matthew unlatched the door and went out. The storm had quietened somewhat, the rain falling now as misty drizzle. In the sky, though, distant lightning flashed through the clouds. The mud clasped hold of Matthew's shoes. A half-dozen steps through the mire, Matthew had to lift up his nightshirt and urinate where he stood. Decorum, however, dictated that he relieve his bowels in the woods behind the barn, for there were no leaves or pine needles nearby with which to clean himself. When he finished, he followed the lantern's glow past the barn, his shoes sinking up to the ankles in a veritable swamp. Once beyond the forest's edge, he gathered a handful of wet leaves and then crouched down to attend to his business. The lightning danced overhead, he was soaked, muddy, and miserable, and all in all it was a nasty moment. Such things, however, could not be rushed no matter how fervently one tried.

After what seemed an eternity, during which Matthew cursed Shawcombe and swore again to pack a chamberpot on their next journey, the deed was completed and the wet leaves put to use.

He straightened up and held the lantern out to find his path back to the so-called tavern. Once more the waterlogged ground opened and closed around his shoes, his knee joints fairly popping as he worked his legs loose from the quagmire. He intended to check on the horses before he returned to the so-called bed, where he could look forward to the magistrate's snoring, the rustling of rats, and rainwater dripping on his— He fell.

It was so fast he hardly knew what was happening. His initial thought was that the earth had sucked his legs out from under him. His second thought, which he barely had an eye-blink of time to act upon, was to keep the lantern from being extinguished. So even as he fell on his belly and the mud and water splashed around him and over the magistrate's fearnaught coat, he was able to lift his arm up and protect the light. He spat mud out of his mouth, his face aflame with anger, and said, 'Damn it to Hell!' Then he tried to sit up, mud all over his face, his sight most blinded. He found this task harder than it should have been. His legs, he realized, had been seized by the earth. The very ground had collapsed under his shoes, and now his feet were entangled in something that felt like a bramble bush down in the swampy muck. Careful of the lantern, he wrenched his right foot loose but whatever held his left foot would not yield. Lightning flared again and the rain started falling harder. He was able to get his right leg under him, and then he braced himself as best he could and jerked his left leg up and out of the morass.

There was a brittle cracking sound. His leg was free.

But as he shone the lantern down upon his leg, Matthew realized he'd stepped into something that had come out of the earth still embracing his ankle.

At first he didn't know what it was. His foot had gone right through what looked like a mud-dripping cage of some kind. He could see the splintered edges, one of which had scraped a bleeding gouge in his leg.

The rain was slowly washing mud off the object. As he stared at it, another flash of lightning helped aid his recognition of what held him, and his heart felt gripped by a freezing hand.

Matthew's anatomy studies did not have to be recollected to tell him that he'd stepped into and through a human-sized rib cage. A section of spinal cord was still attached, and on it clung bits of grayish-brown material that could only be decayed flesh.

He let out a mangled cry and began frantically kicking at the thing with his other shoe. The bones cracked, broke, and fell away, and when the last of the rib cage and vertebrae had been kicked loose Matthew crawled away from it as fast as the mud would allow. Then he sat up amid leaves and pine needles and pressed his back against a tree trunk, the breath rasping in his lungs and his eyes wide and shocked.

He thought, numbly, how distraught the magistrate was going to be over the fearnaught coat. Such coats were not easy to come by. It was ruined, no doubt. A rib cage. Human-sized. Ruined