Fevre Dream by George R. R. Martin

  For more than an hour they moved down the river in silence, the only sound the slap of the oars against water and the song of an occasional bird. Toby Lanyard and Abner Marsh rowed, while Joshua and Valerie lay huddled together as if they were asleep, and Karl Framm sprawled beneath a blanket. The sun rose in the sky. It was a chill, windy day, but a bright one. Marsh was thankful for the planters and the great piles of smoking bagasse that lined the shores since the drifting gray pall from their fires gave the only shade there was for the night folks.

  Once Valerie cried out, as if in terrible pain. Joshua opened his eyes and bent over her, stroking her long black hair and whispering to her. Valerie whimpered. “I thought you were the one, Joshua,” she said. “The pale king. I thought you’d come to change it all, to take us back.” Her whole body trembled when she tried to talk. “The city, my father told me of the city. Is it there, Joshua? The dark city?”

  “Quiet,” said Joshua York. “Quiet. You weaken yourself.”

  “But is it there? I thought you would take us home, dear Joshua. I dreamt of it, I did. I was so tired of it all. I thought you had come to save us.

  “Quiet,” Joshua said. He was trying to be forceful, but his voice was sad and weary.

  “The pale king,” she whispered. “Come to save us. I thought you had come to save us.”

  Joshua York kissed her lightly on her swollen, blistered lips. “So did I,” he said bitterly. Then he pressed his fingers against her mouth to quiet her, and closed his eyes again.

  Abner Marsh rowed, while the river flowed around them and the sun beat down overhead and the wind swept smoke and ash across the water. A cinder got in his eye somehow, and Marsh cussed and rubbed at it until the eye was red and swollen and the tearing had stopped. By then his whole body was one huge ache.

  Two hours downstream Joshua began to talk, never opening his eyes, in a voice thick with pain. “He is mad, you know,” he said. “It is true. He took me, night after night. The pale king, yes, I thought that, thought I was . . . but Julian vanquished me, time after time, and I submitted. His eyes, Abner, you have seen his eyes. Darkness, such darkness. And old. I thought he was evil, and strong, and clever. But I learned it was not so. Julian is not . . . Abner, he is mad, truly. Once, he must have been all that I thought him, but now . . . it is as though he sleeps. At times, he wakes, briefly, and one senses what he must have been. You saw it, Abner, that night at supper, you saw Julian stirred, awakened. But most of the time. . . . Abner, he takes no interest in the boat, the river, the people and events around him. Sour Billy runs the Fevre Dream, devises the schemes that keep my people safe. Julian seldom gives orders, and when he does they are arbitrary, even stupid. He does not read, or talk, he does not play chess. He eats indifferently. I do not think he even tastes it. Since taking the Fevre Dream, Julian has descended into some dark dream. He spends most of his time in his cabin, in the darkness, alone. It was Billy who spied the steamer following us, not Julian.

  “I thought him evil at first, a dark king leading his people into ruin, but watching him . . . he is ruined already, hollow, empty. He feasts on the lives of your people because he has no life of his own, not even a name that is truly his. Once I wondered what he thought of, alone, all those days and nights in darkness. I know now that he does not think at all. Perhaps he dreams. If so, I think he dreams of death, of an ending. He dwells in that black empty cabin as if it were a tomb, stirring from it only at the scent of blood. And the things he does . . . it is more than rashness. He courts destruction, discovery. He must want an end, a rest, I believe. He is so old. How tired he must be.”

  “He offered me a deal,” Abner Marsh said. Without breaking his labored stroke, Marsh recounted his conversation with Damon Julian.

  “You had half the truth, Abner,” Julian said when he’d finished. “Yes, he would have liked to corrupt you, as a taunt to me. But that was not all. You might have agreed and never meant it. You might have lied to him, waited for a chance, and tried to kill him. I think Julian knew that. By bringing you aboard, he toyed with his own death.”

  Marsh snorted. “If he wants to die, he could cooperate more.”

  Joshua opened his eyes. They were small and faded. “When the danger is real and close to hand, it wakes him. The beast in him . . . the beast is old and mindless and weary, but when it wakes it struggles desperately to live . . . it is strong, Abner. And old.” Joshua laughed feebly, a bitter laugh without humor. “After that night . . . after it all went wrong . . . I asked myself, over and over, how it could have happened. Julian had drained a full glass of my . . . my potion . . . it should have been enough, it should have killed the red thirst, it should have . . . I did not understand . . . it had always worked before, always, but not with Julian, not . . . not with him. At first I thought it was his strength, the power of him, the evil. Then . . . then one night he saw the question in my eyes, and he laughed and told me. Abner, you remember . . . when I told you my story . . . when I was very young, the thirst did not touch me. Do you remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  Joshua nodded weakly. The skin was stretched tightly over his face, red and chafed-looking. “Julian is old, Abner, old. The thirst . . . he has not felt the thirst in years . . . hundreds, thousands of . . . years . . . that was why the drink . . . had no effect. I never knew, none of us did. You can outlive the thirst, and he . . . he did not thirst . . . but he fed, because he chose to, because of those things he said that night, you remember, strength and weakness, masters and slaves, all the things he said. Sometimes I think . . . the humanity of him is all hollow, a mask . . . he is only an old animal, so ancient it has lost even the taste for food, but it hunts on nonetheless, because that is all it remembers, that is all it is, the beast. The legends of your race, Abner, your vampire tales . . . the living dead, the undead, we bear those names in your stories. Julian . . . I think with Julian it is the truth. Even the thirst is gone. Undead. Cold and hollow and undead.”

  Abner Marsh was trying to frame a comment to the effect that he intended to erase the “un-” part from Joshua’s description of Damon Julian, when Valerie suddenly sat bolt upright in the yawl. Marsh flinched and froze in mid-stroke. Beneath the slouchy felt hat, Valerie’s skin was raw as an open wound, blistered and tight, with a color that had gone beyond red to the dark mottled purple of a bloody bruise. Her lips were cracked, and she drew them back in an insane giggle to reveal long white teeth. The whites of her eyes had swallowed up all the rest, so she looked blind and insane. “It hurts!” she screamed, lifting hands red as lobster claws above her head in an attempt to block out the sun. Then her eyes darted round the boat, and lighted on Karl Framm’s softly breathing form, and she scrambled toward him, her mouth open.

  “No!” Joshua York cried. He threw himself on top of her, and wrenched her aside before her teeth could close on Framm’s throat. Valerie struggled crazily, and screamed. Joshua held her immobile. Valerie’s teeth snapped together, again and again, until she had gnashed open her own lip. Her mouth dripped a froth of blood and spit. Struggle as she might, however, Joshua York was too much for her. Finally all the fight seemed to go out of her. She slumped back heavily, staring up at the sun out of blind white eyes.

  Joshua cradled her in his arms, despairing. “Abner,” he said, “the lead line. Under it. I hid it there last night, when they went out for you. Please, Abner.”

  Marsh stopped rowing and went to the lead line, the thirty-three-foot-long rope used for soundings, a pipe filled with lead at its end. Beneath its coils, Marsh found what Joshua wanted; an unlabeled wine bottle, more than three-quarters full. He passed it up to York, who pulled the cork and forced it to Valerie’s swollen, cracked lips. The liquor dribbled down her chin and most of it wound up soaking her shirt, but Joshua got a little into her mouth. It seemed to help. All of a sudden she began to suck at the bottle greedily, like a baby sucking on a teat. “Easy,” said Joshua York.

  Abner Marsh moved the lead line around and frowned.