#3 - Page 158 (1/2)

Ishmael snorted briefly, but complied, pausing only to refresh himself from the tray of food Fergus had brought. Fergus himself lounged against the door, watching the prisoner through half-lidded eyes.

“They be twelve boys talkin’ strange, like you.”

Jamie’s eyebrows shot up, and he exchanged a glance of astonishment with me. Twelve?

“Like me?” He said. “White boys, English? Or Scots, d’ye mean?”

Ishmael shook his head in incomprehension; “Scot” was not in his vocabulary.

“Talkin’ like dogs fightin’,” he explained. “Grrrr! Wuff!” He growled, shaking his head in ill.u.s.tration like a dog worrying a rat, and I saw Fergus’s shoulders shake in suppressed hilarity.

“Scots for sure,” I said, trying not to laugh. Jamie shot me a brief dirty look, then returned his attention to Ishmael.

“Verra well, then,” he said, exaggerating his natural soft burr. “Twelve Scottish lads. What did they look like?”

Ishmael squinted dubiously, chewing a piece of mango from the tray. He wiped the juice from the corner of his mouth and shook his head.

“I only see them once, mon. Tell you all I see, though.” He closed his eyes and frowned, the vertical lines on his forehead drawing close together.

“Four boys be yellow-haired, six brown, two with black hair. Two shorter than me, one maybe the size that griffone there”—he nodded toward Fergus, who stiffened in outrage at the insult—“one big, not so big as you…”

“Aye, and how will they have been dressed?” Slowly, carefully, Jamie drew him through the descriptions, asking for details, demanding comparisons—how tall? how fat? what color eyes?—carefully concealing the direction of his interest as he drew the man further into conversation.

My head had stopped spinning, but the fatigue was still there, weighting my senses. I let my eyes close, obscurely soothed by the deep, murmuring voices. Jamie did sound rather like a big, fierce dog, I thought, with his soft growling burr and the abrupt, clipped sound of his consonants.

“Wuff,” I murmured under my breath, and my belly muscles quivered slightly under my folded hands.

Ishmael’s voice was just as deep, but smooth and low, rich as hot chocolate made with cream. I began to drift, lulled by the sound of it.

He sounded like Joe Abernathy, I thought drowsily, dictating an autopsy report—unvarnished and unappetizing physical details, related in a voice like a deep golden lullaby.

I could see Joe’s hands in memory, dark on the pale skin of an accident victim, moving swiftly as he made his verbal notes to the tape recorder.

“Deceased is a tall man, approximately six feet in height, and slender in build.…”

A tall man, slender.

“—that one, he bein’ tall, bein’ thin…”

I came awake suddenly, heart pounding, hearing the echo of Joe’s voice coming from the table a few feet away.

“No!” I said, quite suddenly, and all three men stopped and looked at me in surprise. I pushed back the weight of my damp hair and waved weakly at them.

“Don’t mind me; I was dreaming, I think.”

They returned to their conversation, and I lay still, eyes half-closed, but no longer sleepy.

There was no physical resemblance. Joe was stocky and bearlike; this Ishmael slender and lean, though the swell of muscle over the curve of his shoulder suggested considerable strength.

Joe’s face was broad and amiable; this man’s narrow and wary-eyed, with a high forehead that made his tribal scars the more striking. Joe’s skin was the color of fresh coffee, Ishmael’s the deep red-black of a burning ember, which Stern had told me was characteristic of slaves from the Guinea coast—not so highly prized as the blue-black Senegalese, but more valuable than the yellow-brown Yaga and Congolese.

But if I closed my eyes entirely, I could hear Joe’s voice speaking, even allowing for the faint Caribbean lilt of slave-English. I cracked my eyelids and looked carefully, searching for any signs of resemblance. There were none, but I did see what I had seen before, and not noticed, among the other scars and marks on the man’s battered torso. What I had thought merely a sc.r.a.pe was in fact a deep abrasion that overlay a wide, flat scar, cut in the form of a rough square just below the point of the shoulder. The mark was raw and pink, newly healed. I should have seen it at once, if not for the darkness of the orlop, and the sc.r.a.pe that obscured it.

I lay quite still, trying to remember. “No slave name,” Joe had said derisively, referring to his son’s self-christening. Clearly, Ishmael had cut away an owner’s brand, to prevent identification, should he be recaptured. But whose? And surely the name Ishmael was no more than coincidence.

Maybe not so farfetched a one, though; “Ishmael” almost certainly wasn’t the man’s real name. “They be callin’ me Ishmael,” he had said. That, too, was a slave name, given him by one owner or another. And if young Lenny had been climbing his family tree, as it seemed, what more likely than that he should have chosen one of his ancestors’ given names in symbol? If. But if he was…

I lay looking up at the claustrophobic ceiling of the berth, suppositions spinning through my head. Whether this man had any link with Joe or not, the possibility had reminded me of something.

Jamie was catechizing the man about the personnel and structure of the Bruja—for so the s.h.i.+p that had attacked us had been—but I was paying no attention. I sat up, cautiously, so as not to make the dizziness worse, and signaled to Fergus.

“I need air,” I said. “Help me up on deck, will you?” Jamie glanced at me with a hint of worry, but I smiled rea.s.suringly at him, and took Fergus’s arm.