Meadows had raised the sail and lay comfortably stretched by the tiller. He had rolled his sleeves down to protect hisarms from the sun and replaced the stocking cap with a dark, broad-brimmed hat that moths had long ago gotten the best of.
Moist waves of moving heat danced on the slow water around them, the swiftly evaporating slough of the mid-world sea. To the north was a high atoll of barren rock with calling seabirds landing on ridges above the tearing surf. TheBlack Jokewas nowhere in sight. And that should have made her very happy.
Mechanically she lifted her hands and began to feed her fallen curls back into hot brass hairpins that were lodged, burning, against her scalp. To Meadows she said, “Thank you for covering me. It was kind of you.”
“Who’s kind?” Meadows said. “Not me. I just happen to know that you’ll be needing your pretty looks where we’re going. You ain’t got nothing else to be bargaining with. Mind, there’s some that likes the feel of a woman’s skin fevered from the sunburn, but your head was alayin’ sideways, and there ain’t no one cares to see a face half red and half white like a harlequin.”
The import of his words sank in slowly. “Are we not going to land on the American coast?”
“Silly wench,” he said indulgently, readjusting his hat a step backward on his sweat-smeared brow. “Too far away for that. We’ll land us on an island and find a better transport to the mainland.”
It sounded like an unpleasant middle step. “Who lives on these islands?”
“Here? Slaves escaped from their lawful masters mostly, and renegade white cutthroats. Witch doctors. Lunatics what’s run off from insane asylums. The scum of the earth, and worse.”
Merry dropped her forehead into her open palm.
Pleased with his effect, Meadows said, “Where we’re off to, see, is called the Devil’s Kettle. Smugglers come ’n’ go from it, and I’m going to bribe me a passage to New Orleans. What you’re going to do is yer business and not mine.”
Merry said tightly, “I shall go to the—the authorities.”
Meadows gave a crack of laughter. “There ain’t no authorities in a hundred miles of here.”
“There must be someone. Missionaries—or—or priests.”
“Missionaries! That’s a good one. Kind of missionaries we got around here, why, they’ll be ready to teach you all kinds of things you can do on your knees, missy, but you can bet one of ’em won’t be prayin’. Heh, heh. Maybe you’ll run away into a swamp and get eaten by an old granddaddy alligator.” He made a chomping motion with his jaw. “Gulp!” Meadows chuckled at her expression. “And they got big old snakes longer than a mizzenmast that’ll drop down on you from the trees and squeeze you till you can’t breathe no more and then swallow you whole. And you make a lump in their middle that don’t go away for six months.”
All in all, Merry had had better afternoons. There was worse to come. From time to time Meadows took a yellowed sheet of paper from his breast pocket. He shook it open, studied it, shrugged, folded it up, and put it back in his pocket.
“What is that?” Merry asked, after the fourth such occurrence.
“This here’s a map drawn by the hand of Mr. Benjamin Treadwell himself. Yep. You’ve heard of Benjamin Treadwell.”
“No.”
“Sure you have,” he insisted.
“No, I haven’t. Is he a cartographer?”
“Course not. Ain’t no kind of an ographer. Never met an ographer in my life. Ben Treadwell’s a gentleman and a smuggler, and used to sail with Jean Laffite. And you know where Ben is now? Struck out on his own and made it to the top of the smuggling racket. Why, in New Orleans he’s got him a house that any man of business would be proud to own, with fancy lady friends, and the gov’nor howdy-dos Ben on the street. A friend of mine, is Ben Treadwell. Good friend.Old Ben, he used to work these islands. Knew this area like the hairs on his own belly.”
Merry craned her neck a bit to glimpse the map as he shaded it with his hand to fend off the harsh, bleaching sun. After she had looked it over, she said, “You’ve got the map upside down.”
“Eh? No, I don’t.”
“You do. Look at the compass that’s drawn on the bottom of the page. TheN—meaning north—is pointing downward.”
Meadows squinted fiercely at theN. “That ain’t noN. That’s aW. Look at it. One line down, one line up, one down, one up.W.”
“It’s not,” Merry said. “That first line down is a wrinkle.”
“Wrinkle?Ain’t no wrinkle. I know a wrinkle when I sees a wrinkle, and that ain’t no wrinkle.”
“Now, look,” Merry said, borrowing her manner from Cat. “That is anN. Smooth it out on your knee so that you can see it correctly.” With bad grace he did as she asked, and she tapped the controversial letter with the barrel of her pistol. “See?” Firmly, “AnN. And directly across the compass from theNis an… anE. Wait a minute! This compass has north opposing east and south opposing west! Oh, this is a fine map indeed.”
“Itisa fine map! The compass that’s drawn on a map don’t mean nothing anyway; it’s the outline of the land mass that counts. What’s a female know about maps? Nothin’. Let me tell you something, missy. I was reading maps before you was born. And watch that pistol! I’ve no fancy to be shot in my manhood. This map is one hundred percent reliable. I trust it like I would the milk from my mammy’s paps.”
Merry was not about to be dragged into a debate. “Oh, well,” she said warily, “I hope you’re right. I can’t tell one of these islands from another.”
