The River of Souls

When Quinn Tate closed the door and latched it, she went to the hearth and ladled out a bowlful of corn soup. To this she added a small corncake. Then she opened the door to the second room, where the bed was, entered it and sat down on the bed beside her man.

“Daniel?” she said quietly. “I’ve brought you some food.”

He didn’t stir. He’d been sleeping a lot. He was badly injured, of course. A bandage was wrapped around his head, his swollen face a dark blue mottled bruise, his black stubble growing into a beard. That was as it should be, for Daniel had always worn a beard.

“Can’t you eat anything?” she asked him.

He’d been awake a short time earlier, if only for a few minutes, but now it seemed he had slipped back again into the heavy depths. He was breathing all right, though. She had removed his sodden clothes before helping him into bed, and yesterday morning had cleaned the arrow wound on his shoulder with wellwater and applied a dressing made from crushed onions and ginger to draw out infection. She would be very attentive to that wound for the next few days, as some yellow pus had collected there.

As for the condition of his head and the regaining of his senses, she didn’t know. He had been mostly dazed and silent on their journey through the driving rain, and several times his legs had given way and they’d had to rest in the shelter of the trees.

But her Daniel was going to be all right, Quinn thought. Yes. He hadn’t come all this way to leave her again.

She set the bowl on a table beside the bed and stroked his unruly hair, which stuck up from the bandages like a black rooster’s tail. For awhile she sang a song to him in a quiet, clear voice, the verse being:

“

Black Is the Color of my True Love’s Hair,

His face so soft and wondrous fair

,

The purest eyes and the strongest hands

,

I love the ground on which he stands

.”

Daniel would soon be standing. Quinn was sure of it. He would be up and about and back to himself. It would take time, and healing, but he had returned to her from the gates of Heaven and she would guide him with a gentle hand back to her heart on Earth.

For the next few days she was patient. She went about her work of accepting clothes from her neighbors to darn and sew, for that was her way of bartering for food. No one need know about Daniel’s rebirth yet, she decided. No one had seen them return in the downpour of a dark night, and no one yet needed to know, for she feared someone might come and take him away from her again. She had feared so with the man named Magnus Muldoon. She had thought he sensed that Daniel was in the house, in that bed in the other room, and so she had decided to offer him entry and food thinking that if she did not do so, he might know for sure. But the man had politely declined and gone on his way, and that was the last she’d seen of him.

At night she lay close against her Daniel and listened to him breathing. Sometimes he awakened with a jolt and tried to sit up, but always he gasped with pain and put a hand to his bandaged head where the oar had struck, and then he slipped away once more. Quinn believed he was not ready yet to rejoin the world, but it would be soon. Until then, she changed his bandages, tended to him, drove the infection out of the arrow wound and sang to his sleeping form at night, by the light of a single white taper.

Then came the morning, four days after their return from the River of Souls, when she brought a cup of apple cider into the room and found her Daniel sitting up on the pillow with his eyes open. They were hazy and unfocused, his face still mottled with bruises and burdened with pain.

But he had spoken to her, in a raspy voice, and the words were: “Who are you?”

Quinn had thought this might be. That her Daniel, newly born in the body of another man, might not know her at first. It was like the fresh awakening of a new soul. And, after all, it was her task to guide him back to her heart.

“I am your wife, Quinn.” she told him. “And you are my husband, Daniel.”

“Daniel?” he asked. When he frowned, something hurt his head and he touched the place where the oar had struck. “Daniel who?”

“Tate.”

“Daniel Tate,” he repeated, and stared at her with his hazy gray eyes that held hints of twilight blue. He looked around the room as if searching for something familiar. “Why don’t I remember anything?” he asked.

She was ready for this question, and if it had to be a falsehood at first then so be it. “We were both harmed in an accident. On the river.” Not quite a falsehood, but not exactly the truth.

“What river? And what was the accident?”

“The River of Souls,” she said. “It runs not far from here. Your head’s been hurt. We were in a boat that turned over, and you struck your head on a rock. It’s goin’ to take you time to remember me. To remember us,” she corrected.

He lifted up his hands and examined them, like a child might. “I don’t work with my hands,” he said. “What do I do?”

“You teach the children readin’ and writin’. Oh, Daniel!” she said, and putting the cup of cider aside she got into bed with him and pressed herself close and felt both his heart beating and her own, and suddenly there were tears in her eyes. She wasn’t sure they were tears of joy or tears of sadness, because though Daniel had returned to her as he’d promised she had so much to tell him and teach him and make him understand, and was it wrong that the man named Matthew Corbett had had to die so that her Daniel might live again?

She must have sobbed, because he put an arm around her and held her tighter, and he said, “Don’t cry. Please. I want to remember, but…I can’t, just yet. Everything is dark. Will you help me?”

“Yes,” she answered. “Oh yes, I will.” And she kissed him on the cheek and then on the lips, and he returned her kiss but it was like the shadow of the kisses she had known from Daniel before, and she knew he was still far away and wandering on his journey from death back to life.

But there was time. There would be much time for the burning of white tapers in the night, and much time for two souls to cleave together once more.

Daniel Tate awakened in a cold sweat from the occasional nightmare. In them, a masked figure wearing a white suit with gold trim and a white tricorn also trimmed with gold reached out for him with a hand concealed in a flesh-colored fabric glove. In his nightmare Daniel shrank away but his movement was slowed as if mired in mud, and the masked figure of a man turned into an octopus whose tentacles also reached for him in horrific but determined slow-motion.

Quinn listened to these nightmares, but could never help him understand why he was having them. She just held him close and whispered “I love you, Daniel,” into his ear until he fell again to sleep.

Came the day he stood up from the bed and walked shakily across the room. Came the day he dressed in clothes he did not remember ever wearing, the clean white shirt just a little too big for him, and came the day Quinn opened the front door and he stepped out onto the porch and drew in the faintly-decomposed scent of Rotbottom. By this time he knew all about the alligators and that he was in the Carolina colony, that he was a teacher and would get back to teaching when he had fully recovered. His appetite had returned, the bandages were removed from his head and the bruises were nearly gone yet he felt deeply bruised within his brain, and things were floating in there like thorns that caught and snagged and left the brief quick flash of images he could not decipher.

It occurred to him one afternoon that he faced problems he could not solve. This greatly disturbed him but he took the cup of tea that his wife offered and thought how lucky and blessed he was to have such a woman loving him and to love, and he thought no more of such disturbing things.

At length he was able to walk around the town, with Quinn always at his side. The citizens of Rotbottom knew that people came and went, there were always empty cabins that individuals and whole families moved into and out of, and everyone generally minded their own business. Thus it was noted that Quinn Tate was living with a new young man, and after one neighboring woman asked Quinn his name and was told it was “Daniel, my husband,” people gave her a wide berth. They also looked at Daniel strangely, but since this whole world seemed strange to him he dismissed their interest.

One afternoon nearing two weeks since Daniel had sat up in Quinn’s bed, they were walking back from the wharf with a bucket of freshly-caught catfish when Daniel noted a cabin far down in the hollow, about forty yards beyond their own. It was untended, covered with vines and nearly obscured by the wilderness. The front porch sagged, the roof appeared near collapse, and the whole place had an air of supreme neglect. But obviously someone did occupy the place, because there were two horses in a corral and a wagon nearby.

“Quinn,” said Daniel, “who lives there?”

Her face tightened. “We don’t want to bother him. He’s a very mean man…like that Royce was.” She had spoken without thinking, and immediately wished she could take the name back.

“Royce? Who is that?”

“A man we knew, a time ago. But the man who lives down there,” she said quickly, changing the subject, “is to be left alone. Been here…oh…maybe six months. Heard he comes out after dark to go fishin’. He took up with the widow Annabelle Simms, and it was frightful how he beat her when he got drunk. After he broke her nose and her arm, she came to her senses and left.”

“Hm,” said Daniel, pausing to stare down at the unkempt hovel. “He sounds dangerous. What’s his name?”

“Annabelle said he used to be royalty, from some other country. Could hardly speak English, she had to teach him. Called himself Count…” Quinn hesitated, trying to come up with the name. “Dagen. Somethin’ like that. He’s got a crooked left wrist, looks like a break that didn’t set right.”

Daniel nodded, but said nothing.

“I say he’s to be left alone,” Quinn continued, “’cause a month or so past I saw him down in the woods swingin’ a sword around. Looks like he knows how to use one…so he’s not somebody I care to invite to supper.” She gave her man a smile and a playful nudge in the ribs. “Just enough catfish for us, anyway.”

Daniel agreed, and he carried the bucket of fish on into their home.

What night was it that he had the dream? Maybe not the same night he’d heard about the widow-beating count, but one soon after. The name Dagen kept bothering him. Something about it…it wasn’t right. In his dream he had been seated at a banquet table, with all manner of food on silver platters spread before him, and scrawled on the wall was the shadow of a swordsman at work, carving the air into tatters with a vicious and well-trained arm, and the air of danger had swirled thick and treacherous through the room.

Dagen.

Count Dagen.

He used to be royalty, from some other country.

In the middle of the night Daniel had sat up, not so quickly as to disturb his wife, and listened to a dog barking in the distance. Otherwise the world was silent, but questions pressed upon Daniel’s mind.

What was a count from some other country doing in Rotbottom? A swordsman? A man with a crooked left wrist? And the name—Dagen—wasn’t right. No…that wasn’t the man’s name. Close, but…no.

“Go to sleep,” said Quinn, reaching up to rub his bare shoulder. “Darlin’…go back to sleep.”

He tried, but he could not. He lay there for a long time, beside his sleeping wife, thinking that there was a problem he desperately needed to solve but not quite sure what it was.