She Walks in Shadows(26)

Workings have a price, you see, and the single best currency for such transactions is blood, always — my blood, the De Russys’ blood, and poor Frank’s added in on top as mere afterthought. All of our blood together and a hundred years’ more besides, let from ten thousand poor negres’ veins one at a time by whip or knife, closed fist or open-handed blow, crying out forever from this slavery-tainted ground.

After Denis’s grandfather bred my mother’s mother ‘til she died — before his eyes fell on her in turn — Maman ran all the way from Riverside to New Orleans and further, as you’ve told Tully: crossed the ocean to France’s main port, then its capital, an uphill road traveled one set of sheets to the next, equal-paved with vaudeville stages, dance-floors, séance-rooms, and men’s beds. Which is why those were the trades she taught me, along with my other, deeper callings. Too white to be black, a lost half-girl, she birthed me into the demi-monde several shades lighter still, which allowed me to climb my way back out; perception has its uses, after all, especially to une sorciére. From earliest years, however, I knew that nothing I did was for myself — that the only reason I existed at all was to bring about her curse, and her mother’s, and her mother’s mother’s mother’s.

There’s a woman at Riverside, Marceline, ma mie, my mother told me before I left her that last time, stepping aboard the steam-ship bound for America. An old one, from Home — who can say how old? She knew my mother and hers; she’ll know you on sight, know your works, and help you in them. And so there was: Kaayakire, whom those fools who bought her named Sophonisba — Aunt Sophy — before setting her to live alone in her bone-yard shack, tending the linden path. It was she who taught me the next part of my duty, how to use my ancestors’ power to knit our dead fellow captives’ pain together like a braid, a long black snake of justice, fit to choke all De Russys to death at once. To stop this flow of evil blood at last, at its very source.

That I was part De Russy myself, of course, meant I could not be allowed to escape, either, in the end. Yet only blood pays for blood, so the bargain seemed well worth it, at the time.

But I have been down here so long, now — years and years, decades: almost fifty, by your reckoning, with the De Russy line proper long-extirpated, myself very much included. Which is more than long enough to begin to change my mind on that particular subject.



So, here you come at last, down the track where the road once wound at sunset, led by a man bearing just the barest taint of De Russy blood in his face, his skin, his veins: come down from some child sold away to cover its masters’ debts, perhaps, or traded between land-holders like a piece of livestock. One way or the other, it’s as easy for me to recognize in Tully Ferris by smell as it’d no doubt be by sight, were I not so long deep-buried and eyeless with mud stopping my mouth and gloving my hands, roots knot-coiled ‘round my ankles’ bones like chains. I’d know it at first breath, well as I would my own long-gone flesh’s reek, my own long-rotten tongue’s taste.

Just fate at work again, I suppose, slow as old growth — fate, the spider’s phantom skein, thrown out wide, then tightened. But the curse I laid remains almost as strong, shored up with Kaayakire’s help: Through its prism, I watch you approach, earth-toned and many-pointed, filtered through a hundred thousand leaves at once like the scales on some dragonfly’s eye. I send out my feelers, hear your shared tread echo through the ground below, rebounding off bones and bone-fragments, and an image blooms out of resonance that is brief yet crisp, made and remade with every fresh step: you and Tully stomping through the long grass and the clinging weeds, your rubber boots dirt-spattered, wet coats muddy at the hem and snagged all over with stickers.

Tully raises one arm, makes a sweep, as though inviting the house’s stove-in ruin to dance. “Riverside, ma’am — what’s left of it, anyhow. See what I meant?”

“Yes, I see. Oh, pute la merde!”

Tree-girt and decrepit, Riverside’s pile once boasted two stories, a great Ionic portico, the full length and breadth necessary for any plantation centerpiece; they ran upwards of two hundred slaves here before the War cut the De Russys’ strength in half. My husband’s father loved to hold forth on its architectural value to anyone who’d listen, along with most who didn’t. Little of the original is left upright now, however — a mere half-erased sketch of its former glory, all burnt and rotted and sagging amongst the scrub and cockle burrs. Like the deaths of its former occupants, its ruin is an achievement in which I take great pride.

“Said this portrait you come after was upstairs, right?” Tully rummages in his pack for a waterproof torch. “Well, you in luck, gal, sorta ... upstairs fell in last year, resettled the whole mess of it down into what used to be old Antoine’s ballroom. Can’t get at it from the front, ‘cause those steps is so mouldy they break if you look at ‘em the wrong way, but there’s a tear in the side take us right through. Hope you took my advice ‘bout that hard-hat, though.”

You nod, popping your own pack, and slip the article in question on: It even has a head-lamp, bright-white. “Voila.”

At this point, with a thunderclap, rain begins to fall like curtains, drenching you both — inconvenient, I’m sure, as you slip and slide ‘cross the muddy rubble. But I can take no credit for that, believe it or not; just nature taking its toll, moisture invading everything as slow-mounting damp or coming down in sheets, bursting its banks in cycles along with the tea-brown Mississippi itself.