Toby fed them before anyone asked a single question.
He set five bowls on the deck at dawn.
Rice cooked soft in coconut water, a little salt fish, a slice of plantain fried in the pan.
Sukey looked at the bowl a long time before she picked it up.
Hetty ate with both hands.
The twins shared one spoon and fought over it without a word.
Cato didn’t eat.
He sat beside his mother’s body under a sheet of sailcloth near the mainmast.
He’d sat there all night.
His hand rested on the cloth where her shoulder was.
Obi carried a bowl over and set it down beside him.
He didn’t say anything.
He sat down on the other side, close enough that their shoulders touched, and stayed.
After a while Pockets crept down from the rigging and curled up in Cato’s lap.
Cato’s hand moved off the sheet and onto the monkey’s back.
Kofi watched from the helm and let out a breath he’d held since the dock.
Phibba’s fog carried them north for two days.
It never lifted.
They ate in it, slept in it, steered in it.
Phibba’s little gray boat slid ahead of their bow, trailing smoke from her pipe like a lantern on a string.
Kofi followed the smoke and nothing else.
“This is a crime against navigation,” Theo said on the second morning.
He had his charts spread across a barrel and was glaring at them.
“I have no stars. I have no sun. I have no coastline. I am following an old woman’s tobacco.”
“It’s working,” Kofi said.
“That’s what bothers me.”
Near dusk, the fog thinned.
A long dark shape rose out of the sea ahead.
Cliffs, gray and pocked, with scrub clinging to the top and waves breaking white at their feet.
“Cat Island,” Phibba called back.
Her voice carried strangely over the water.
“Mind the rocks. Follow mi close.”
She led them along the foot of the cliffs until the rock bent inward.
At the waterline, black and low, a cave mouth opened in the stone.
The sea sucked in and out of it with a deep, hollow sound, like something breathing.
“The tide’s dropping,” Theo said.
“In an hour you won’t get a rowboat through there.”
“In an hour, you’ll get the whole ship through there.” Phibba puffed.
“Hold here. Wait for the water to go down. And whatever unu see, don’t shoot it.”
“Why would we shoot—”
The water beside the cave mouth began to boil.
It started as bubbles.
Then the sea heaved.
A wide ring of foam spread across the surface, churning, spinning.
The ship lurched as the current grabbed her hull.
Something rose out of the middle of the ring.
A tentacle came first.
Gray-green, thicker than the mainmast, studded with pale suckers as wide as dinner plates.
It slid up the side of the cliff and gripped the rock.
A second tentacle broke the water on the other side of the ship.
Then a third.
Then the head.
It was a shark’s head.
Blunt-snouted, huge, as long as the Morning Star’s longboat.
Its skin was pale and scarred.
Its eyes were black and flat and each one was the size of a cook pot.
Water poured off its jaw in sheets.
Nobody screamed.
Nobody could.
Theo made a small sound like a stepped-on cat.
“Don’t,” Kofi whispered.
“Nobody move.”
Phibba stood up in her boat.
She knocked her pipe against the gunwale and blew a long stream of smoke across the water toward the thing.
Then she reached into a basket at her feet, pulled out a whole snapper, and tossed it into the churn.
She uncorked a small bottle and poured a thread of rum after it.
“Evening, old man.” Her voice was soft.
Easy.
“Mi bring company. Them good people. Mi vouch for them.”
The shark head turned toward her.
The black eyes stayed on her a long time.
Then it turned toward the ship.
A tentacle lifted out of the water and hung above the deck, dripping.
The tip drifted toward Toby.
Stopped.
Moved to Bess.
Stopped.
To Titus, who stood with his fists clenched and his jaw locked.
To Ezinne.
To Clementine, who met its gaze without blinking and murmured something under her breath.
To Yaw.
To Obi, who grabbed Cato’s hand.
To Theo, who closed his eyes.
To Kofi.
The tentacle stopped.
It hung there.
A foot from his chest.
The suckers flexed and unflexed.
Kofi could smell it: salt and cold and deep water, the smell of the sea the night he drowned.
The shark’s eyes fixed on him.
They didn’t move.
The whole ship held its breath.
A long time passed.
Longer than with anyone else.
Long enough that Kofi felt something under his shirt grow warm against his chest.
Then the tentacle drew back.
The head sank.
The foam closed over it.
Phibba stared at Kofi from her boat.
The pipe hung forgotten in her fingers.
“Him never do that before,” she said quietly.
“Do what?”
“Stop so long. Not for me. Not for nobody.” She squinted at him.
Then she shook her head and stuck the pipe back in her teeth.
“Tide’s down. Come.”
Theo opened his eyes.
“Is it gone?”
“It’s gone.”
“Good. I’m never going near water again.”
“You live on a ship, Theo.”
“I’ll figure something out.”
The cave swallowed the Morning Star whole.
The tunnel was barely wider than her beam.
Kofi steered by the sound of the hull brushing rock on each side.
Lanterns showed wet black walls streaked with white salt and green weed.
The air grew cool.
Water dripped.
Somewhere far ahead, a steady low rumble echoed through the stone.
Then the tunnel opened, and the world changed.
Kofi forgot to breathe.
They’d come out into a cavern so vast he couldn’t see the far wall.
The rock rose up and up into shadow.
High overhead, a jagged hole opened in the roof, and through it poured a column of golden evening light, and with it a fine, glittering mist that hung in the air and caught the light in a thousand small rainbows.
Below the light lay a lagoon.
The water glowed.
Not reflecting the light, but glowing from underneath, a clear pale turquoise so bright Kofi could see fish turning thirty feet down, see white sand on the bottom, see the shadows of rocks and weed.
And in the middle of the lagoon sat an island.
White sand beach.
Coconut palms leaning out over the water.
Fruit trees heavy with mangoes and guavas.
Green terraces cut into the slope, planted in neat rows of yams and peppers and beans.
Goats grazing.
Chickens scratching.
And houses, dozens of them, built of driftwood and coral stone, with thatched roofs and cook fires sending thin smoke up toward the light.
People stood on the beach.
Men and women and children.
They were watching the ship come in.
Some of them waved.
“That’s not possible,” Titus whispered.
“Trees don’t grow in a cave. There’s no sun.”
“There is sun.” Clementine was staring up at the light.
“It just comes down a different way.”
“That’s the Boiling Hole,” Phibba said.
Her boat bumped against the Morning Star’s side.
“Up top, it’s a lake that churns and spits. People say a monster lives in it.” She grinned with three teeth.
“People right.”
“Did you build this?” Kofi asked.
“Mi?” She laughed.
“Mi found it. Thirty years back, running from dogs with a baby on mi hip. The Grey Sperrid bring mi here. The old man below let mi pass.” She looked out at the island.
“Old place. Older than me. Older than the English. Older than anybody.”
“How many live here?”
“Forty-one. Forty-two, now, if unu keep that girl Sukey. She say she tired of running.”
Kofi looked at the island.
The farms.
The houses.
The children running down to the waterline to see the strange ship.
He had lived ninety years and never once seen a place where people like him owned the ground under their feet.
They buried Juba the next morning.
Phibba chose the spot herself, on a high terrace under a mango tree where the light fell longest.
“She walk on salt long enough,” she said.
“Let her rest in dirt.”
Titus dug the grave.
He wouldn’t let anyone help.
When it was done, he climbed out with his hands raw and stood at its head, his jaw clenched so tight that Kofi could see the muscle jump.
Cato stood at the foot, holding Obi’s hand on one side and Sukey’s on the other.
The people of the Hollow came.
All forty-one of them.
They didn’t know Juba.
They came anyway.
An old man with a drum sat down at the edge of the terrace and began to beat a slow rhythm with his palm.
Ezinne stepped forward with her fiddle.
“I’ve been trying to finish this for two days,” she said.
Her voice shook.
“I think I have it now.”
She played the tune once through.
Then she sang.
Salt-pan mother, branded twice, paid the Company’s iron price.
Told her boy with her last breath, no more iron, not in life nor death.
Then the chorus.
Soft.
The people of the Hollow didn’t know the words.
Halfway through, they started singing anyway, picking up the last line from the Morning Star’s crew.
Kofi Brook don’t die.
Kofi stood at the back and didn’t sing.
He couldn’t.
Cato knelt and pressed his hand flat into the loose dirt over his mother.
“No more iron,” he whispered.
That evening Kofi found Phibba sitting on a ledge above the lagoon, feet dangling, pipe glowing.
“Sit,” she said without turning.
He sat.
Below them, the lagoon glowed in the dark like a lamp.
Cook fires dotted the island.
Children’s voices carried across the water.
Somewhere Theo was complaining loudly about something, and somewhere Bess was telling him to shut up.
“Unu want to know how mi do it,” Phibba said.
“Yes.” This chapter was copied from novelping.com without permission.
“Mi carry people two places. Florida first.” She jabbed her pipe north and west.
“The Spanish at St. Augustine. Since before you were born, the Spanish king said any runaway from an English colony who reached him is free. Him don’t do it out of kindness. Him do it to spite the English. But free is free.”
“And the second?”
“Jamaica.” Her voice softened.
“The Maroons. Up in the mountains where the English can’t follow. Them been free since before the English come. Them take in people who make it that far.”
“How many boats do you have?”
“Four. Quashie runs the best one.” She nodded toward a thin man mending a net by the water.
“Two of them leak. One of them been sinking slow for five years.”
“Show me.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“I’m a shipwright,” Kofi said.
“I built ships my whole life. I can build you false hulls. Hidden holds. Compartments the Navy could search for a week and never find.” He stopped.
His throat went tight.
“I built one ship to carry people into chains. Let me build some to carry them out.”
Phibba looked at him a long time.
“And after?”
“After what?”
“After unu fix mi four little boats.” She puffed smoke.
“Mi see your face when unu look at this place. Unu not thinking about four boats.”
Kofi looked down at the island.
At the houses and the farms and the people who owned them.
“There are other places like this,” he said slowly.
“Aren’t there? Other coves. Other people hiding. Other old women with boats.”
“Some.”
“Then what if they weren’t alone? What if every one of them knew where the others were? What if a family running from Trelawny could go from one to the next, cove to cove, boat to boat, all the way to Florida, and never once see a Navy sail?”
Phibba said nothing.
“And what if one of those places was strong enough that the Navy didn’t dare come in?” Kofi’s voice dropped.
“Strong enough to protect the others. Strong enough that people could stop running. Build houses. Farm. Live.”
“Unu talking about a country, Kofi Brook.”
“Maybe I am.”
She laughed.
It was a dry, rusty sound.
But when it stopped, her eyes had gone wet.
“Mi old,” she said.
“Mi hands shake. One day mi won’t come back from a run, and this place will need somebody who can hold it.” She tapped her pipe against the rock.
“Mi not saying it’s you. Mi saying mi watching.”
Clementine found them there an hour later.
She sat down heavily on Kofi’s other side.
Her hands were shaking.
“The brands,” she said.
“I’ve looked at all five of them now. Phibba’s smoke quieted them. But they’re still crying. The spirits inside. Chained in, all of them.” She pressed her palms against her knees.
“It’s like hearing a child locked in a box.”
“Can you free them?”
“I don’t know how. I don’t know if anybody here knows how.”
Phibba shook her head.
“Mi smoke dull a brand. Mi can’t break one.” She was quiet a moment.
“The old ones in Saint-Domingue, maybe. The houngans in the hills. The lwa there are older and stronger than anything in these little islands. If anybody knows how to set a chained spirit loose, it’s them.”
“Saint-Domingue,” Kofi said.
“Saint-Domingue,” Clementine echoed.
She looked down at her own hands.
There was dirt under her nails.
She hadn’t been gardening.
“I keep dreaming about roots,” she said, very quietly.
“Mangrove roots. Reaching down into dark water. Every night since Nassau. And I wake up with dirt on my hands.”
Phibba turned and looked at her for a long time.
“Something calling you, auntie,” she said.
“Better listen before it stops.”
Salt Pan was a ruin.
Bell walked across the pans with his hands clasped behind his back.
The salt house was a heap of broken slate and split timber.
The iron stakes still stood in their ring.
The pens lay empty.
The rakers had been locked in their huts since the day of the escape, and they watched him through the gaps in the walls with dull, sun-blind eyes.
Josias Tucker sat on a crate in the shade with his leg splinted and bound, sweating and gray.
“They took six,” he said.
“Six of the Company’s people. The Company will have my holdings for it.”
“I don’t care about your holdings.” Bell stopped in front of him.
“Tell me about the brand.”
Tucker hesitated.
Then he reached into his coat and pulled out a ring.
It was cold iron, heavy and plain, big enough to fit over a man’s fist.
A thin black thread hung from it.
Tucker held it up by the thread, and the ring turned slowly in the air.
Then it stopped.
It hung at an angle, as though something far away was pulling on it.
North.
“Every salt master carries one,” Tucker said.
“It pulls toward the brands. Toward the Company’s people. The closer they are, the harder it pulls.” He licked his lips.
“It’s weak now. Barely a thread. Somebody smoked them. But it hasn’t gone. A brand that deep never goes.”
Bell held out his hand.
Tucker put the ring in it.
Bell let it hang from the thread.
He watched it turn and settle.
North.
Faint, but steady.
Cross stood beside him and stared at it with naked hunger.
“Captain. That’s better than blood.”
“Blood can be cut,” Bell said.
“Iron remembers.”
He closed his hand around the ring.
Behind him, Sterling Brook limped across the salt, sweat soaking his collar.
“Well? Do we sail?”
“No, my lord.” Bell turned and looked north across the flat, white, blinding pans.
“We don’t chase him anymore. He knows how to run. We’ve proven that three times over.” He tucked the ring into his coat, over his heart.
“Now we let him settle. We let him build. We let him think he’s found somewhere safe.”
“And then?”
Bell almost smiled.
“And then we take everything he’s built, all at once.”