Ganymede

Seven

The blower was a flat-bottom boat that sat high on top of the water, like a very small barge. Barely big enough to hold all three passengers without dipping below the rippling waterline, the craft shuddered until everyone sat very still. Behind them, a large diesel-powered fan loomed like a tombstone.

No one said anything until Josephine stated the obvious. “We’ll need something bigger to bring Deaderick out, won’t we?”

Ruthie shivered and drew her jacket closer around her shoulders, but said, “To be sure, but we can find something bigger on the island, non?”

“Sure,” Gifford agreed. “We’ll find something.”

“Something that still floats, or still flies,” Josephine muttered. “They can’t have grounded or sunk everything.”

“Yes, ma’am, I think you’re right,” he said. But something in his voice said he was afraid they were all wrong, and this wasn’t going to work at all. His small electric torch sputtered, and he turned it off, leaving them all in absolute darkness except for the moon overhead, halfway full and surrounded by a fogged-white halo.

Suddenly the crickets and frogs seemed very loud, and the buzzing drone of a million night bugs hummed against the background splashes of tiny wet things moving in and out of the water, up and down the currents, around the tree-tall blades of jutting grass.

“Does this thing have any lights of its own?” Josephine wanted to know.

Gifford Crooks leaned across her knees, saying, “Excuse me, ma’am — and yes, she does. Good ones, even.”

“Better than your flambeau?”

“Much better. This is a rum-runner, you know.” He lifted a panel and threw a small switch.

With the faint click and a fizz of electricity, a wash of low, gold light blossomed at the front of the boat.

At the fan’s base, a rip cord dangled from a flywheel. He gave it a yank and the engine sputtered; a second fierce tug and it grumbled to life. The fluttering gargle was terrifyingly loud, and the rushing suck of the blades made their hair billow backwards. Gifford Crooks adjusted the throttle, lowering the speed and dampening the drone until it was a low, throaty putter.

“Hang on, ladies. It’s going to get bumpy. And damp. Sorry.”

Slowly the boat turned as he drew on the steering lever, its caged fan churning the air and the water, too, so low in the marsh did the blower sit. The spray blew into the air, and a mist of swamp water and algae settled into their hair, onto their shoulders, and across their laps.

Little craft like the blowers were built to navigate the difficult terrain between land and water — the wet, deep places clogged with vegetation and animal life, thick with mud and unpredictable depths. They were made to skim the surface, to flatten the tall, palm-width grasses and slide across them, powered by the enormous fan — and aided by a pair of wheel spokes mounted on either side. The spokes were lifted up like a gate around the passengers, until and unless the boat became stuck. If the fan became tangled or the passage was too thick with grass or muck, the spokes could be dropped, and the band moving the blades could be rehung to move them instead. It was a jerky, difficult, last-ditch way to get the craft through the sopping middle-lands, but it almost always worked.

Never quietly. Never smoothly. Never without soaking the occupants.

They puttered through the marsh in silence, for speaking would’ve required louder voices and added more noise to the night than the diesel engine’s drone. Gifford Crooks navigated by some manner he didn’t feel compelled to share; he looked up at the sky from time to time, so Josephine assumed he went by the stars like the sailors, or perhaps his sense of dead reckoning was better than the average landlubber’s.

As the evening ticked by, the moon rolled higher.

And all the while, as Gifford manned the steering lever and peered intently at the flush of light before the craft, Josephine and Ruthie huddled close together, thanking their lucky stars that the night wasn’t any colder, and their destination wasn’t any farther. The whipping slaps of saw grass whispered awful things against the craft’s hull, and the loud sliding splashes off to either side warned of large animals with rows of sharp teeth and beady, slitted eyes.

Texian soldiers or Confederate spies were not the worst things in the marshes, a fact that the travelers knew, but tried to ignore.

And when the blower would muck across a particularly pungent patch of moldering black water that smelled like death, they all thought of alligators and how those terrible brutes preferred their meals drowned, sodden, and half rotted to pieces.

In time, the travel numbed them with its treachery. When every shadow could mean discovery and every splash might indicate the approach of a creature so big, it could tip the boat … even terror became mundane. As the hour came for the engine to be cut and the oars to be deployed along with the spokes, it was a relief for everyone on board.

This was different, at least. In a struggle against the algae-thick water by hand, and they had some agency over their own progress and survival.

Now, as the growling mumble of the engine was choked off into quiet, they would move themselves the rest of the way. This small measure of control should not have satisfied any of them so much as it did, but Josephine gladly grabbed one paddle and Gifford Crooks took the other.

“Ruthie, you may have to crank the spokes if we get stuck. Can you do that?”

“Oui, madame, and if you are tired, you can trade places with me. Moi aussi, I can paddle.”

“I know you can, dear. And I might take you up on that, but not quite yet.”

So the churning gargle of the motor was replaced by the soft slip, strike, and dip of the long, flat paddles, moving in an arc on either side of the craft, drawing it farther and deeper south and west. Josephine didn’t realize at first that she was holding her breath between strokes, but when she did, she used those quiet seconds to listen for any signs of humanity.

Within an hour, she was rewarded by the murmur of big engines rumbling in the distance, and as they came closer still, the engine noise was augmented by chattering shouts projected by amplifying cones. And, with gut-churning intermittence, the background drone was punctuated by explosions — fireballs from hydrogen tanks meeting stray weapon fire, burnishing the horizon’s edge with bubbles of warm, yellow glow that flared, ballooned, and collapsed.

Josephine heard Texian accents, and the shifting gears of enormous ships, and the humming overhead purr of dirigibles. When she looked up, she could see them, mostly painted brown — some displaying the large lone star from the Republic’s flag. A few searchlights were poking down, their diffuse beams casting tubes of light that turned vague in the low-lying fog over the marsh grasses; but those lights were far away.

Gifford Crooks cut the forward lights and pulled his oar into his lap. Josephine did the same, and Ruthie tried not to fidget. She wrestled with her gloves regardless and finally asked in a tired, hoarse whisper, “What do we do now? Where do we go? How do we move past them?”

“We’ll have to take the long way around, and come at the big island from the west bank. It’s another mile of paddling, but it’s our only chance. Look at them up there — scanning the south and eastern shores, looking for folks who are running off, or trying to sneak out. They won’t be watching for folks coming in.”

“Why aren’t they watching the west banks?” Josephine asked.

A large spray of antiaircraft fire blew through the sky, its tracer bullets drawing a seared yellow line from the island to the clouds. The fire winged the edge of a dirigible, which made a halfhearted attempt to fire back before its thrusters flared and it scooted out of artillery range.

Gifford replied, “West side’s better fortified. That’s where the Spanish fort is. It’s mostly rubble, if you’re just looking at it during the daytime. But the bunkers are solid, and the pirates — or merchants, or whoever — use it for storage. There’s gunpowder and ammunition in the fort. It could fend off a siege for days.”

Josephine squinted at the dirigibles, and over at the small warships that had successfully squeezed past the bottleneck at Grande Terre and Grande Isle. None of them were the huge battleships that Texas often kept out in the Gulf proper. Only the lighter, faster models had made it without wrecking against the sea bottom or knocking into any of the scores of small islands and promontories that clogged the entirety of the bay.

She said, “They aren’t trying very hard.”

“What?” Gifford asked.

“They aren’t trying very hard — to take the west side, I mean. I guess they aren’t as dumb as they look. These little ships, they might be able to gang up and take the place, but it’d cost them more than it’d gain them. And the airships—” She gestured at the sky. “—if the bay boys have antiaircraft, those big hydrogen beasts are nothing but enormous targets. None of them look armored. But it’s hard to tell from here.”

“You’re right,” Gifford agreed thoughtfully. “They’re mostly transport ships. One or two armored carriers, but only the light variety. Maybe that’s all they had on hand.”

Ruthie asked, “What does that mean? I don’t understand.”

Josephine filled her in. “It means they’re surveillance ships, not warships. And there are a lot of them. Texas didn’t bring those ships to attack Barataria. They’re looking for something, not shooting at anything. They’re looking for Ganymede.”

“Ma’am, we don’t know that,” Gifford cautioned.

She turned around on her hard wood seat, and only then realized that half her behind had fallen asleep, and her ribs felt bruised from all the paddling in her unforgiving undergarments. “What else could they be looking for?”

“Pirates?” Ruthie offered.

“They already know the pirates are here — it’s the worst-kept secret in Louisiana. But Colonel Betters and Lieutenant Cardiff had the wrong idea. They thought we were smuggling the ship out in pieces, moving it down to the Gulf with pirate help.”

Ruthie asked, “Moving it through Barataria?”

“It’s a secluded spot with good docks, crawling with men who will do anything for a dollar — men who have been sneaking products in and out of the city for a hundred years. Goddamn,” she swore. “Clear out the viper’s nest with the government’s blessing, and scrounge up the Ganymede while you’re at it. Even if you fail at one, with money and planning, you’ve got a good chance of succeeding at the other.”

Crooks shook his head. “Are even the Texians that arrogant? To think they could uproot the bay in one strike?”

Josephine returned her gaze to the gliding lights of the searching ships in the water and in the sky, and fixed it there as she said. “They’ve done it, haven’t they? Temporarily, I’d wager. But they’ve beaten down the Lafittes in the short term, that’s for damn sure.”

“I wouldn’t write them off yet,” Gifford argued as another streak of antiaircraft fire broke the velvet blackness of the marshland midnight. “They were caught off guard, that’s all. Texas will get bored. They’ll eventually figure out Ganymede isn’t there and wander off — or the Lafittes will safely abandon the place and restore it later.”

Josephine said, “Probably. Pirates are lone wolves, as often as not. But if you call a number of lone wolves to your aid, you wind up with quite a pack.”

And then Gifford asked, “Do you think they’d come? For the Lafittes? For Barataria?”

“They’ll come from all over the world,” she said softly. “This bay is the closest thing they have to a homeland — it is their nation, in a way — and I do not think they will let the insult stand. Not for long. Give them time.”

“Deaderick doesn’t have time,” Ruthie reminded them.

“Then we won’t wait for them. No cavalry coming but us, isn’t that right, Mr. Crooks?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said without even the faintest note of enthusiasm.

“Then let’s get paddling, shall we?” Her next questions came close on one another’s heels, as if she might get answers she wouldn’t like if she quit asking them. “He’ll be fine there, won’t he? He was fine when you left, wasn’t he?”

She began to stroke with the oar, and Gifford followed her lead. He answered so far as he was able. “Yes, ma’am, he was hanging in there. I don’t think—” He grunted as his oar stuck, and he pulled it out again. “—I don’t think the shots he took were so bad.”

Ruthie sneered. “Two bullets, not so bad.”

“There’s different kinds of being shot. Rick took his lumps, and they missed his heart. Missed his lungs, as far as we could tell. His worst trouble will be festering, if the wounds take a fever. And there’s only so much we could do about that, under circumstances like these.”

“We’ll need a doctor. A nurse. Somebody.” Josephine paddled grimly.

“We will find one. We will find somebody.” Ruthie patted Josephine’s shoulder, then wrapped her arms around herself as if the night were cold.

For two hours more they paddled, coasted, and hid between the tall clusters of waving fronds and bubbling holes where alligators hid and small fish slept. Eventually they’d circled the largest island and sneaked around to the far side where the fort was hunkered low near the narrow coastline, such as it was.

Even from the blower, with its fan long silenced, the three occupants could see that the fort’s walls were worn down, their corners rubbed into softness by the years. It looked like nothing so much as an assortment of pale stone walls, and from so far away, those walls appeared so short, a woman could step across with a lifted skirt and a tippy toe. Their height was shortened from age, yes. They were dwarfed by the latticework of pipe docks and oversized ships drifting close, and drifting away again. But they were not as short as they seemed, and they were not so fragile that they hadn’t stood a hundred years already.

“Not much of a fort,” Ruthie complained, having never seen it from the inside. Her words were muttered as low as a bullfrog’s hum.

Josephine replied in kind, keeping everything muted, lest they be discovered. “There’s more to it than you’d think. Let’s go around to the fort’s southwest corner. There’s a canal going under the wall, but you can’t see it from here. For that matter, you can barely see it when you’re right on top of it.”

“Will there be a guard? A lookout?”

“I assume,” Josephine acknowledged. “But leave him to me.”

A Texian search ship eclipsed the moon, the clouds, and the faint sparkles of stars shining through them. It moved slowly, like an oversized balloon, or that was the impression it gave on the ground. Untrue, of course. The big thing’s graceful sway belied a terrible speed, and it swung a brilliant yellow searchlight. Josephine, Ruthie, and Gifford could hear it all the way from down in the marsh — the sizzling pop and fizz of the electric filaments simmering against the mirrors that reflected and focused them.

“Hurry,” Josephine gasped, leaning harder against her oar. She was exhausted. They were all exhausted. But the big white beam was sauntering nearer, sweeping and scanning, and they were pinned on most sides by the oversized grass.

Ruthie struggled for optimism. “We’re almost there!” she whispered fiercely, spying the curved archway like a mouse hole in the fort’s southwest wall.

“They’re going to see us,” Gifford fretted. His eyes stayed on the sky, on the too-big ship hovering just out of shooting range, combing the edges around the fort. “We can’t dodge the light. We can’t outrun it!”

“Maybe we don’t have to.”

“Ma’am?” Gifford asked, lifting his eyebrows at Josephine.

“It’s not far. Another what — fifty yards? Start the engine.”

“Ma’am!” Ruthie gasped.

“You heard me. Start the engines. This blower can outmaneuver that dirigible any day of the week. We’ll make a dash for it, cross our fingers, and slide right under the wall before anyone up there has any idea what to make of it.”

“But, ma’am—,” Gifford began.

Firmly, she cut him off. “Every single moment you delay costs us time. The ship will swing around momentarily, and the light will come with it. The longer it takes them to see us, the less time they have to shoot us.”

Ruthie looked faint, but Josephine clasped a hand down on her knee. “Buck up, darling. They aren’t likely to hit us.”

“How can you be so sure, eh?”

“Because if we’re within striking range, so are they. Pull the cord, Mr. Crooks! Pull it now, or I’ll do it myself.”

He reached for the cord and gave it a yank. The engine sputtered, but did not catch. He pulled again. This time it burbled to life in a cough that rose to a roar. He threw the boat into gear as the two women simultaneously lifted the spokes up out of the water and drew their oars into their laps.

Lacking the forward momentum of a craft in motion, the little blower struggled against the saw grass, forcing past it only with difficulty at first. But as the motor drove and the diesel chugged, it pushed onward, stronger, faster, so that the grass slapped up against the sides. The women ducked down and Gifford Crooks leaned forward, one hand gripping the steering lever and the other manning the gears. He dropped them lower when the turf choked their progress, and urged them higher when the way was clearer.

The dirigible above swooned and spun, and its light swung around to hunt them. It found them within moments, but it had a hard time keeping them.

The blower dashed through the black-water muck, skimming the top and leaving a terrific trail of fetid spray and shredded leaves, grass, and cattails behind it. Every few moments, the light would catch up to them, hold them, and slip away again. They were moving too swiftly, in too stark a zigzag pattern, for any lamp above to track them for long.

Overhead, the sound of artillery came in a smattering line of pops, but if anything landed close to the blower, there was too much noise and motion for Josephine, Ruthie, or Gifford to hear it. If bullets landed, they were fired from so far away that they merely dropped into the water, and any larger shells that were incoming, only stabbed at their wake.

Josephine wished to God she’d thought to bring a flag, not that it would’ve mattered, necessarily. She had to trust that whoever was watching from the fort was aware that this small blower speeding toward the canal was not the transport of any Texians or other officials. She had to believe that the men on guard would assume they were in search of shelter, or to provide reinforcements or information, or for some mission other than sabotage.

It was either assume this or turn back. If she was right, they’d be allowed under the wall. If she wasn’t, they’d be blown out of the water before they reached it.

At night, with or without the light that beamed down from above like the angry glare of an archangel, no one would recognize her on the tiny boat. No one would know her, or hear her name even if she had time to shout it.

Soaked to the bone, she and Ruthie grasped the handholds, and each other, and kept their heads low, as if they could duck out from underneath the penetrating gaze of the light. Faster and faster their destination approached. They neared it at a breakneck speed, dodging left to right and back again, zipping around unnavigable clumps and clusters of foliage, tree stumps, and fallen masonry boulders from the old walls.

Their mouse hole destination wall grew bigger on the immediate horizon, illuminated by the swishing glances of lights from the air, and by the sometimes-flashes of tracer bullets flicking from ground to sky, sky to ground. Gifford Crooks aimed for the portal and squinted against the spray of swamp water misting into his eyes, flying off the grasses. He set his course, gunned the engine to the outside limit of what it could sustain, and gave it all the fuel the thing could manage.

Surging with a bounding leap, the blower nearly leaped off the surface of the clotted water, then slapped back against it and moaned, the swamp hissing against its undercarriage.

Ruthie prayed in French. Josephine held her breath.

And just before the craft slipped beneath the arch, Gifford cut the engine and let the blower glide forward — holding its course but slowing to jerk them all in their seats. Josephine toppled to the floor and took Ruthie with her. Gifford threw himself down on top of them, sheltering them with his own body.

The blower drifted from violent night to sudden midnight, emerging on the other side of the mouse hole into a ground-floor warren that was more mud than water. It heaved and skidded sideways up onto the closest bank, lodging itself in the mud and settling with a wet sucking sound.

The engine died.

The sudden silence left Josephine shaky; she lifted her head and pulled Ruthie close, just in time to hear the clicks of guns being made ready, and pointed in their direction. Gifford looked up, held out his hands, and said, “Fellas, kindly ignore the uniform. I’m with the bayou boys, and they’ll vouch for me. This here is—,” he started to say, gesturing at Josephine.

“Miss Early!” the nearest man gasped, and he lowered his gun. He was not a tall man, nor a particularly fearsome one in appearance, but the others deferred to him all the same, and all the guns present were soon pointing at the ground.

Though he was balding on top, around the sides and back, he had enough hair for a ponytail tied with a bit of leather. His clothes were smeared with gunpowder and soot, which had clearly become the operating uniform for everyone inside the fort. At a glance, they might have all been the same race, or the same army. The same group of burrowing resistance fighters, determined to dig in and raise hell.

“Mr. Boggs,” she replied.

He extended a hand to help her out of the blower, and she took it. “Here about your brother, I assume?” Every word was pronounced with the oddly emphasized vowels of the Cajuns. His eyes protruded slightly and his stocky frame was approaching fat, but was comfortingly sturdy as he pulled Josephine onto the firmer surface of packed earth at the mud’s edge, then drew Ruthie up as well.

“Deaderick, yes. He’s here in the fort, isn’t he?”

“Where else would we take him? He’s here, and he’s all right for now.”

“Have you any doctors?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No doctors, no lawyers, no teachers, no judges — or anything else too civilized, I’m afraid. They’ve got us in a pickle, pinned down. But it could be worse.” Mr. Boggs extended a hand to Gifford, too, and soon all three of the small blower’s passengers were standing on something closer to terra firma than they’d known since leaving the riverbanks.

“How’s that?” Gifford asked.

“We have fresh water, some food — and ready fishing, right outside the wall — and all the gunpowder and ammunition we can carry.” He returned his attention to Josephine and cocked a head at the other men who’d joined him as part of the welcoming committee. “Listen, ma’am, we didn’t mean to alarm you. We had to check out the newcomers, you know how it goes.”

“You’d be madmen if you didn’t. You know me — and this is my girl Ruthie Doniker, and our escort, Gifford Crooks.”

“I seen you before,” said one of Boggs’s men to Gifford.

“I was here before, out on the island — not in the fort. I fight with the bayou lads, been sent down from Saint Louis. And I got no complaint with Barataria, let me make that real clear up front.”

“Don’t worry about it, son,” said Mr. Boggs. “You’re with Miss Early, and that means you’re all right. I’m Planter Boggs,” he introduced himself, and then his men. “This is Arthur Tate, Mike Hardis, Frank Jones, and Tam Everly. They’re all that’s left from the crew of an airship called the Coyote Black, which is no longer with us.”

The man introduced as Frank Jones was very thin, with ginger-colored hair and a pointed beard. He said, “It was one of the first to go, over there.” He waved a hand to indicate something outside the fort.

And Mike Hardis added, “It went up like a Chinese New Year, though. Took half the dock out. Can’t say she didn’t leave us with a bang.”

“Still, it’s a shame,” said Tam Everly. “I figured I’d run her ’til it was time to retire. Then pass her off to one of my nephews. Won’t be happening now.” Arthur Tate patted him on the shoulder.

“I’m sorry to hear about your ship,” Josephine told the lot of them. “But can one of you, or all of you, I don’t care — can someone take me to my brother? I’m so tired, I can hardly hold my head up. But I won’t settle down for the night until I’ve set eyes on him.”

“Right this way, Miss Early.” Planter Boggs led the way. “And you there,” he said to Gifford. “Get out of those browns before you get yourself shot. You know what the Good Book says about avoiding the appearance of evil, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir, but the evil was a good disguise to get me in and out of town.” He stripped off the jacket and tossed it into the empty blower, but despaired at the vest and pants.

“Everly, Tate. One of you fellows — can you get him something less … troubling?”

So Gifford Crooks took his leave, and Josephine and Ruthie followed Planter Boggs back into the depths of the old Spanish fort. “He’ll catch up to us later,” Boggs promised. “Come on now, and watch your step. It’s none too bright back here. We’re doing things the old-fashioned way, without any of those electric torches. Trying to conserve our power, you know how it goes.”

He reached for a torch of the ancient variety, a wooden club with fuel-wrapped rags knotted around its head and set aflame. The stink of burning petroleum wafted along, carried and deposited in thick black smoke that stained the walls and the low stone ceiling.

Ruthie stuck close to Josephine, holding her mistress’s elbow as if she was steadying her, and not just looking for an excuse to keep the comforting contact. She asked, “Are we underneath the fort? I do not understand. We went under the wall, but…”

Mike Hardis, a terribly young man with a potato-shaped body but sharp, smart eyes, answered her. “The canal used to be deeper. The Spaniards moved supplies in and out of the fort on flats, all the way from the center inside … out to the bay, and then to the Gulf. But the years have filled it in, as you saw. And now the basement chamber — which is only halfway underground,” he noted as they began to climb a short flight of stairs, “is filled with a century’s worth of tidal mud and backwash. Even so, I can’t say it doesn’t make for a convenient back door. How’d you know to come looking for it?”

Planter Boggs looked pointedly at Josephine. She answered for herself. “In my younger days, I spent a good deal of time at Barataria, and sometimes in the fort.”

“I imagine you still have a number of friends here,” Mr. Boggs said as he led the way up the narrow stairwell, torchlight bouncing off the walls around the rounded corners, up ahead of him.

“Friends and paying customers, if I cared to have them. Most of the men I knew back then are older now, and either wiser or dead. I hope you’ll pardon me saying so, gentlemen.”

On that somber note, they hiked up into a large common room that was so sealed up, it felt to Josephine as if they were still underground, or mostly so. More firelight burned from every corner, some of it chimneyed away by ventilation shafts and columns of brick — but some of it accumulated within the long, flat room with the ceiling so low that the tallest men were compelled to hunch. Some forty or fifty men eyed the newcomers warily, then opportunistically, upon seeing that two were women. And then a name was breathed, somewhere in a back corner.

“Miss Early.”

The whisper carried back and forth throughout the closed, dark nightmare of that cramped and awful place, until the men who stood in their path parted and let them pass.

In French, Ruthie said into Josephine’s ear, “You’re a bit of a legend to them. I had no idea.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“And still they know of you? You must have been remarkable.”

“Still am.”

Cramped and crowded, the room’s walls felt uncomfortably close and the air was stale with smoke, sweat, and the worry of men who knew exactly how much death could be dealt from above and outside. Somewhere off to the west the rat-a-tat-tat of antiaircraft fire shook the fort and was answered by the nearest armored dirigible. Tiny explosions smacked overhead, drilling into the roof and digging into the fortifications. Something heavier landed, and the roof shook. The ceiling quaked and rained mortar dust down on the already silent, already anxious collection of souls below.

“This way,” Planter Boggs pushed. “Never mind the return fire. They haven’t breached us yet, and we’re holding the worst of it at bay from the corners, and what’s left of the other canals.”

“And from the walls themselves,” Mike Hardis added.

Ruthie’s eyes widened. “There are men outside still?”

“Only the crazy ones,” said Frank Jones. “But they’re launching hand-bombs and taking potshots at the boats that slink up close. Somebody has to do it.”

Josephine didn’t want to think about it. “Just get us to my brother. Please. Hurry,” she begged.

“Come through here. It’s this way.”

Another short set of stairs, half a flight down and then up again, and the small band arrived in what had once been a galley — if the leftover counters, racks for pans, and drawers for cutlery were any measure. It’d been converted to a makeshift clinic of sorts. No doctors, no lawyers, no teachers, no judges. No one in charge, but that was always the way of pirates, and no emergency could change it.

The galley was a room full of motion, and the only electric lights she’d seen so far blazed with comparative brilliance above old food-preparation tables, which were now occupied by moaning, groaning injured men. Half a dozen dead bodies were piled in a corner, a fact that was only feebly hid by the application of a filthy tablecloth as a shroud. Limp hands and feet jutted out from the pile, and warm, sticky bloodstains showed up where the wounds were not yet finished leaking. Ruthie put her hand over her mouth and tried not to gag. Josephine would’ve done the same — the smell of urine and burned flesh and gunpowder and blood was almost more than she could stand — but she’d spotted Fletcher Josty in the room’s middle, beside a decrepit pump-water sink that, against all odds, was still working.

The bayou guerrilla yanked and shoved on the handle and water did veritably appear, though it wasn’t as clean as one might hope. Many hands held out bowls, cups, and dirty rags, hoping to collect some of the liquid for refreshment or cleansing.

Josty pumped furiously, trying to force the men to take turns. “One at a time, you bastards! There’s water to go around, but you have to wait your turn! I can’t make it come out any quicker,” he grumbled.

“Fletcher!” Josephine cried.

The room stopped for an instant, as even the eyes of the wounded turned at the sound of a woman’s voice. But another jagged cry rang out and the chorus of aching voices rose behind it, and the sad scene carried on as before, except that Fletcher quit pumping. He grabbed the nearest able-bodied soul and shoved him at the pump, ordering, “Keep that arm moving. Keep that water flowing.”

Then, as he abandoned that wretched post, he danced between the tables and the sprawled arms and legs. “Miss Early,” he said, looking like he would’ve tipped his hat if he’d had one on. This free man of color was as filthy and smeared with soot as everyone Josephine had seen so far, but she was overjoyed by the sight of him, and it was all she could do to keep from hugging him.

Instead she grasped him by the shoulders and asked, “Deaderick?”

“In the cellar, ma’am.”

“Oh … oh, God…”

“No, no. He’s still alive, it’s just cooler down there, that’s all, so that’s where I’ve stuck ’im. Some of the men who are stable, and needing to rest … it’s all we could do to make them comfortable. It’s more sheltered, too, I think. If Texas brings in anything bigger, or shoots anything worse, we might be digging for cover.”

“Then to the cellar. Now.”

Planter Boggs gave Josephine and Ruthie a little bow and said, “Ladies, if you’ll excuse me.”

“Of course,” the madam said without looking. She was already trailing behind Josty, and Ruthie behind her.

And down into the cellar they followed — back to the level where the canals came and went. A large round of artillery connected with a thick mortar wall somewhere to the east. Josephine thrust out an arm to brace herself. The whole world shook, and it seemed like even an old fort built by Spaniards to survive the Second Coming couldn’t stand beneath the onslaught.

But stand it did.

And in the cellar, on the old concrete docks that were barely raised above the mud, Deaderick Early lay between two other men in similar states of injury and consciousness.

She ran to his side, trying to keep from disturbing the others. Without stepping on them or kicking them, she knelt beside her brother and took one of his hands in hers — clasping it to her breast and examining the damage with as much cool reserve as she could muster. She tried to keep the panic out of her eyes when Deaderick opened his own.

“I knew it,” he said unhappily.

“You knew what?” she asked. It was a relief to hear him talk, even to hear him complain. But the bubbling red across his chest was not a relief, and his face was blanched and pale beneath the burnish of his complexion. Every muscle from his forehead to his chin was stretched tight with pain.

“I knew you’d come. Whether or not anyone told you not to. That’s why I told them not to tell you. Josty did it, didn’t he? Damn fool.”

Ruthie seized Deaderick’s other hand and held it up to her cheek. “Bien sûr she came, you ridiculous oaf!”

“Christ Almighty, not you, too.”

“Oui, moi aussi. Now, hush and let us take care of you.”

“I don’t need you to take care of me.”

Josephine released his hand so she could explore the injuries with her fingers. Gently, thoroughly, and trembling, she unpicked his buttons and revealed the sad, masculine attempts at bandaging. An ash-colored rag that might once have dried dishes was balled up and compressed against the largest of two holes, or so she learned upon lifting it. It stuck, blood drying to chest hair, and Deaderick grimaced.

“Woman, let it alone! If you leave it be, it’ll stop bleeding.”

Fletcher Josty hovered into the scene and contradicted him. “It hasn’t stopped yet, not for good. Not like the other one. Rick, I’m starting to worry.”

“Save your worry for yourself, because when I’m up again, I’m going to tan your hide for getting Josie involved.”

“Oh, shut your mouth. You’ve met your sister, haven’t you? Like we could keep her away.”

Just then, someone shouted from the far end of the cellarlike nook. “All right, you goddamn pirates have gotten your way. I’m here, and you won’t do any better — not for trying. Who needs attention?”

“Are you a doctor?” Josephine asked like lightning.

“Used to be. I’m starting down here and working my way up like the free men of the air have demanded. So tell me,” said the man. “who’s in the most danger? Has no one sorted them out, grouped them by seriousness of condition?”

Fletcher rolled his eyes and said, “This ain’t no hospital, mister. It’s been all we could do to get ’em out from underfoot!”

Josephine stood and shoved Fletcher Josty aside. “Never mind him. Get yourself over here, Doctor, if that’s what you are. My brother has two bullets in him, and he needs your assistance now.”

“Only two? He’s one of the better cases.”

“I’ll pay you. Whatever you think you’re worth. I … I own a boarding house, in the Quarter. Get over here and fix my brother, and I’ll see to it that you have a week you’ll never forget, do you understand me?”

“No, but I’m open to the explaining,” he said, coming toward her. He was an older man and, by the look of him, a lifelong alcoholic. The skin across his nose was the color of blisters and streaked with broken blood vessels; his eyes were likewise shot through with red, and his face hung off his skull with a droop like a hound dog’s.

“Get over here, then. Fix this man.”

“No,” croaked Deaderick. “There’s worse up there, men who need the attention more.”

“Shut up, if your woman’s willing to pay. I was dragged out of bed for this, and I’ll help who I like — and who I’m paid to patch. I said I’d start in the cellar and work my way up, and you’re as likely a patient as the next man, aren’t you?”

“What kind of doctor are you?” Josephine thought to ask, feeling suddenly uncertain about this.

“A genius or a quack. Either way, I’m Leonidas Polk, and I’ll patch this fellow up if I can, but you need to get out of my way. Good Lord, they’ve just been letting you bleed?”

Deaderick replied, “No. But the one bullet hole, it don’t want to plug up right.”

“You can stitch it, can’t you?” Ruthie asked, still squeezing Deaderick’s left hand as if she could lend him some of her own life force.

“Stitching won’t do any good on something like this,” he said, whipping out a pince-nez and examining the bloodiest spot on Deaderick’s chest, where the blood had sensed an opening and was beginning to flush afresh. “Do you have any other conditions? You’re not a dust sniffer or an absinthe drinker, are you?”

“No…”

“Is the bullet still inside?” he asked.

“No, I don’t think,” the patient replied. “Straight through, both shots. If the blood would stop coming, I think I’d be all right. I could stand up and see myself out,” he swore, though no one believed him.

Ruthie kissed his hand and said, “Stop it, you silly man. You’ll lie there and get better. The doctor will fix everything, won’t he?”

“Son of a bitch, ma’am. Don’t tell him that,” Dr. Polk swore.

“But you’ll do what you can,” Josephine told him more than asked him.

“I’m going to need some gunpowder and a match.”

Deaderick swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing in a nervous slide. “I was afraid of that.”

“Afraid of what?” his sister demanded. “Afraid of what?”

Dr. Polk asked, “How long has it been since you were shot?” He looked again at the wound. “Five hours? Ten?”

“Thereabouts.”

“We’ve got to cauterize it. I’d break it to you more gentle, but there isn’t time. Ma’am, get me some gunpowder and a match.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s best that you don’t.”

Josephine hauled herself to her feet, confused and even dumbfounded by how difficult it was. She staggered toward the stairs that led to the galley, and within a few minutes she’d talked herself into a dead man’s powder pouch and a box of matches. Horrible though it was, she had a feeling she knew where this was heading … and she couldn’t stand it. But this was a doctor — maybe a quack, maybe a drunk, but the only one present, roused, bribed, and impatient — so she’d do as he asked, because heaven help her, she didn’t know how else to proceed.

Dr. Polk reached for the gunpowder. “Ladies, avert your eyes. For that matter, you might want to do the same,” he told Deaderick. Then he spilled a tiny trail around the wound and on it — a black sprinkle of glittering stuff, barely a dusting. “I mean it,” he reiterated. “Look away. All of you.”

He struck the match.

Deaderick screamed.

And Ruthie passed out cold.