The drum followed them longer than it should have.
Kofi stood at the stern with one hand on the rail and listened to it fade.
Pa Cudjoe’s slow heartbeat bounced off the tunnel walls, softer with every stroke, until he couldn’t tell whether he heard it or only remembered it.
Water dripped from the stone overhead and ticked on the deck.
The air smelled of wet rock and lamp oil.
Somewhere forward, the hull kissed the tunnel wall with a long, low groan, and Titus swore under his breath and shoved off with a pole.
“Easy,” Kofi called.
“She’s old enough without you denting her.”
“She’s the one hitting me.”
Theo stood at the bow with a hooded lantern, calling the turns.
His voice came back strange and doubled in the dark.
“Port. Port. Steady. Oh, I hate this. I hate this cave. Steady.”
“You said it moves,” Obi whispered.
“It does move. I’m very glad we’re leaving.”
Ahead, a grey smudge grew in the black.
It swelled into a ragged arch, and through it Kofi saw stars.
The Morning Star slid out of the cliffs into open water.
Cold night air hit his face, clean and salt-sharp after the close breath of the cave.
Waves slapped the hull.
The sails hung slack, waiting.
Then the water beside the ship rose.
It swelled in one smooth hump, black and glossy under the starlight, and broke.
A single tentacle lifted out of the sea, gray-green, pale suckers glistening, thick as the mainmast.
It rose until it hung level with the rail.
Nobody moved.
The tip drifted toward the stern.
Toward Kofi.
It stopped a hand’s width from his fingers on the rail.
He could smell it.
Cold, deep water.
Salt and something older.
Then it touched the rail.
Just once.
The way a man might touch a doorframe on his way out of a house.
It slid back under the sea without a ripple.
Kofi let out his breath.
His fingers were shaking on the wood.
“Was that goodbye?” Obi asked.
“Or a warning,” Theo muttered.
Clementine leaned on the mainmast with her arms folded.
“With that one,” she said, “I’d wager it’s both.”
A breeze found the sails.
They filled with a soft thump, and the Morning Star leaned south and east into the dark.
The children learned the ship in two days, which was two days faster than Theo had.
Obi took it on himself to teach them knots.
He was very serious about it and very bad at it.
“This one’s a bowline,” he announced, holding up a tangle of rope.
“It never slips.”
Cato tugged one end.
The whole thing fell apart in his hands.
Obi stared at it.
“That’s a different one. That’s a… slip-line.”
“There’s no such knot,” Toby called from the galley hatch, laughing.
“There is now.”
The twins, Mingo and Nell, wouldn’t sleep apart.
On the first night, Bess strung them two hammocks side by side.
In the morning she found both of them crammed into one, arms and legs tangled together, snoring.
On the second night she strung one wide hammock for both, cursing the whole time about wasted canvas.
She tucked a folded blanket under their heads when she thought nobody was looking.
Toby gave each of them a job.
“Every soul on a ship has a job. That’s the law.” He handed Cato a wooden bucket.
“You’re in charge of the hens. Feed them in the morning, collect the eggs, count them, and tell me the number.”
Cato looked at the bucket.
“What if there aren’t any eggs?”
“Then you tell me zero, and I’ll yell at the hens.”
Mingo got the goat.
Nell got the garden.
She knelt over the soil boxes every morning with a cup of fresh water, dribbling a few drops onto each pepper seedling, whispering to them.
When the first ginger shoot pushed up through the dirt, pale and curled like a fist, she screamed so loud Titus nearly fell off the rigging.
“It’s growing! It’s growing!”
The whole crew came to look at one tiny green shoot.
Pockets tried to eat it.
Nell smacked his nose.
The monkey sat back, stunned, then retreated to Cato’s shoulder and sulked there for an hour.
Clementine didn’t sleep much.
Every night, after the children dropped off, she went and sat beside them.
She’d kneel by Cato first, then by the twins’ hammock, lean close, and put her ear to their shoulders where the iron rings lay dark under the skin.
Kofi found her there on the third night.
“Anything?”
“Quiet.” She didn’t lift her head.
“Crying, but quiet. Like a child who cried itself tired.”
She reached into her apron and drew out a small cloth pouch.
She opened it and showed him.
Inside lay a pinch of dried, twisted leaves, dark and fragrant.
“Phibba pressed this into my hand on the beach. Said the smoke from these might hold the brands quiet if one wakes. Might.” She pulled the drawstring tight.
“There’s not much.”
“How much?”
“Five nights. Maybe six.”
“It’s four more days to Saint-Domingue.”
“Then we’d best not need all of it.”
On the fifth night, they needed it.
Nell woke screaming.
Her brother sat up beside her in the hammock, clutching at her, as she thrashed.
The ring on her shoulder glowed a dull, sore red through the skin.
Clementine was there before Kofi reached the ladder.
She pinched a few leaves from the pouch, crushed them in her palm, and set them smoldering in a clay dish with a coal from the galley.
Thick grey smoke curled up.
She waved it over Nell’s shoulder with her hand.
Then she began to murmur.
Phibba’s words, soft and careful, as if she was afraid of getting one wrong.
“Sae-mora kel ashi. Sae-mora kel ashi. Dun veyo, dun veyo…”
The glow faded.
Nell went limp and sobbed into her brother’s neck.
Mingo held on to her and stared at Clementine over her shoulder with wide, wet eyes.
Clementine sat back on her heels.
She looked down into the pouch.
“Three,” she said quietly.
“Maybe four.”
The ship appeared on the sixth morning.
Obi saw her first from the crow’s nest.
A smudge of sail on the eastern horizon, heading the same way they were.
By noon she was close enough to see her hull.
She was big.
Twice the Morning Star’s length.
She sat low and heavy in the water, and she was riding slow, too slow for a ship that size with that much sail.
Theo went up the ratlines with the spyglass.
He was up there a long time.
When he came down, his face had gone the color of ash.
“Theo?”
He didn’t answer.
He handed Kofi the glass and walked to the rail and gripped it with both hands.
Kofi raised the glass.
He saw the hull.
Dark wood, well-kept.
Twelve gunports on the side facing him.
And along her waterline, just above the waves, a row of small square grilles.
Barred.
He knew those grilles.
He’d built grilles like them.
Enough air to keep cargo alive for the crossing.
The wind shifted.
It came to them across the water from the big ship.
The smell hit the deck like a fist.
Rot.
Sweat.
Filth.
Sickness.
A smell so thick it had weight.
Toby dropped a pot.
Bess put her hand over her mouth.
On the deck, Cato made a small sound and grabbed Obi’s arm.
Titus came down off the rigging in one leap and landed hard.
“That’s a slaver.”
“Yes.”
“Bound for Saint-Domingue. Full.” Titus was breathing fast.
“We can hear them, Kofi. Listen. We can hear them.”
Kofi listened.
Faint, under the wind, under the hiss of the sea, came a sound.
Low.
Many voices.
Not singing.
Not words.
Just the sound people make when there’s nothing left to say.
“We take her.” Titus’s hands had curled into fists.
“Now. We have guns. We have a ship. We come alongside at night and—”
“She has twelve guns on one side, Titus. We have four swivels and a handful of pistols.”
“We have surprise.”
“And she has a crew of fifty. We have eleven, and three of them are children.” Kofi lowered the glass.
His voice came out rough.
“We’d put a shot through our own hull and send every soul on both ships to the bottom.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I’ve built ships like her.” His throat tightened.
“I know exactly what one broadside from her would do to us.”
Titus stared at him.
His jaw worked.
“What are we for?” His voice cracked.
“If not this. Tell me. What are we for, Kofi, if we sail right past that?”
The deck went silent.
The crew watched them.
Kofi looked at the slaver.
At the barred grilles above the waves.
At the children on his own deck, Cato and Mingo and Nell, the rings dark on their shoulders.
“We’re for the day we can take a ship like that and win.” He made himself meet Titus’s eyes.
“That’s not today. If we die trying, then nobody on that ship gets saved. Not today, not ever.”
“You sound like every man who ever told us to wait.”
That landed.
Kofi felt it land.
Titus turned and walked away.
He went below without another word.
The slaver drew slowly ahead of them, riding low, until her sails were a smudge again on the horizon.
It took all afternoon.
Nobody spoke much.
The smell stayed on the deck long after she’d gone.
Titus didn’t speak to Kofi for two days.
He did his work.
He hauled lines and scrubbed decks and stood his watches.
But when Kofi came near, he turned his back.
At meals he ate at the far end of the deck with his bowl on his knees.
On the second night, Kofi couldn’t sleep again.
He walked forward and found Theo already at the bow.
The navigator sat with his back against the stem post and his knees pulled up, staring out at the dark.
His lantern sat unlit beside him.
His charts lay rolled up, untouched.
Kofi sat down beside him.
For a long time neither of them said anything.
“No jokes tonight?” Kofi finally asked.
“I’m out.” Theo’s voice was flat.
“It happens. Rarely. Don’t tell anyone, it’ll ruin my reputation.”
Kofi waited.
“When I saw her through the glass,” Theo said slowly, “I knew her. Not her, exactly. Her kind. The run of her hull. The grilles. The way she sat in the water.” He swallowed.
“I’ve been aboard ships like that one, Kofi. I’ve stood on their quarterdecks and told their captains where to steer.”
Kofi didn’t move.
“My father taught me charts before he taught me to read. We traded between Saint-Domingue and Jamaica. Small work. Indigo. Cloth. Rum.” Theo picked at a splinter on the deck.
“He died when I was nineteen. I needed work. I was good. Everyone said I was the best young navigator in Port-de-Paix. So when a merchant captain offered me triple wages to chart him a fast route from the Guinea coast, I took it.”
“You didn’t know.”
“The first time, I didn’t know. I told myself I didn’t know.” He laughed without any humor.
“They never let the navigator below. You stay on deck. You watch the stars and the compass and the log line. You hear things at night, but a ship makes a lot of noises.”
He was quiet for a while.
“The second time, I knew. I knew before I signed.” His voice dropped.
“And I signed anyway, because the money was good, and I told myself if I didn’t do it, somebody worse would, and at least my routes were fast. Fewer days at sea. Fewer dead. I told myself I was being kind.”
The sea hissed along the hull.
Somewhere aft, Pockets chittered in his sleep.
“Tell me the rest,” Kofi said quietly.
Theo closed his eyes.
The Sainte-Hélène was eleven days out of the Bight of Benin when the fever came into the hold.
Theo was twenty.
He had a bunk in the navigator’s cubby under the quarterdeck, a good sextant his father had left him, and a copper cup he’d bought in Port-de-Paix because it was the first thing he’d ever owned that was only his.
The captain came up from below one morning, wiping his hands on a rag.
“We’ll lose a third of them if we don’t make landfall in eight days. Can you do it in eight?”
“Nine. Maybe.”
“Do it in eight.”
Theo did it in eight.
He cut a line through the southern islands that no chart showed, trusting his dead reckoning and his father’s old notes.
He barely slept.
He was proud of it.
On the seventh night he couldn’t sleep at all.
He went below.
Nobody stopped him.
The watch was drunk.
He climbed down the ladder with a lantern into the smell, and the smell was a wall, and then he was through it and into the hold.
The ceiling was so low he had to crouch.
The shelves ran from one side of the ship to the other, tier on tier, and people lay on them shoulder to shoulder, chained at the ankles.
There wasn’t room to sit up.
There wasn’t room to turn over.
The heat was like an oven.
The lantern light moved over faces, over hundreds of faces, and every one of them turned to look at him.
Near the ladder, on the lowest shelf, lay a girl.
She couldn’t have been older than twelve.
She was so thin he could see the bones of her face.
Her lips had cracked open.
Her eyes were glassy with fever.
When his lantern light hit her, she didn’t flinch.
She just looked at him.
She said something.
A word he didn’t know.
Then again, softer.
She was looking at the copper cup hanging from his belt.
He understood.
He unhooked the cup and went back up the ladder, and filled it from the water cask on deck, and came back down, and knelt on the wet planks, and held the cup to her mouth.
She drank.
Slowly.
Most of it ran down her chin.
When it was gone, she let out a long breath and looked up at him, and her cracked lips moved in what might have been a smile.
He stayed there until the lantern guttered out.
In the morning, the crew brought her up with the others who’d died in the night.
They made landfall in Saint-Domingue that afternoon.
Eight days.
The captain clapped Theo on the back and paid him a bonus for speed.
Theo walked off the ship in Cap-Français, and threw the bonus into the harbor, and never went aboard a ship like that again.
Theo opened his eyes.
They were wet.
“I don’t know her name,” he said.
“I never learned it. I cut a route through the islands so fast the captain paid me extra, and she died a day before landfall anyway, and I don’t even know what to call her in my head.”
Kofi said nothing.
There was nothing to say that would help.
“That’s why I joke.” Theo wiped his face with the back of his hand.
“If I stop joking, I start thinking about her. And if I start thinking about her, I don’t know how to stop.”
“And that’s why you came with us.”
“That’s why I came with you.” Theo let out a long, shaky breath.
“In Nassau, when I saw your crew row in, I thought, those people ran. They got out. Nobody drowned them. Nobody threw them over the side.” His voice cracked.
“I wanted to be near that. That’s all. Just to be near something that went right, for once.”
Kofi looked down at his own hands.
The scars from the lash.
The calluses from sixty-seven years of adzes and planes that nobody else could see.
“I built the ship we’re standing on,” he said quietly.
“Plank by plank. I knew what she was for.”
Theo turned and looked at him.
“I told myself I was only building a ship,” Kofi went on.
“That what happened after the keel touched water wasn’t my doing. I told myself that a long time.” He swallowed.
“You and me, Theo. We’ve both got a hold full of faces we’ll never stop seeing.”
They sat side by side in the dark.
“Does it get lighter?” Theo asked.
“Carrying it?”
“No.” Kofi looked out at the black water.
“But you get stronger.”
Behind them, footsteps on the deck.
Heavy.
Slow.
Titus stood at the foot of the foremast.
Neither of them had heard him come up.
He’d heard.
His face said he’d heard every word.
He didn’t say anything for a long time.
Then he walked over and sat down on Theo’s other side, with his back against the rail.
“I’m still angry,” he said.
“I know,” Kofi answered.
“I’m going to be angry for a long time.”
“I know.”
Titus was quiet.
Then he reached over, without looking, and put one big, cane-scarred hand on the back of Theo’s neck, and left it there.
Theo’s shoulders shook.
He didn’t make a sound.
The three of them sat at the bow until the stars began to fade.
Saint-Domingue came up out of the sea on the ninth morning, and it didn’t look like any island Kofi had ever seen.
Mountains.
Green and blue and endless, layer behind layer, rising straight out of the water so high their tops were lost in cloud.
Jamaica’s hills would have looked like foothills against them.
Waterfalls threaded white down their faces.
Mist clung to the valleys.
Along the coast, smoke rose from a dozen places.
Thick, grey-brown columns.
Kofi knew that smoke.
Sugar works.
Boiling houses.
Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, up and down the shore.
“It’s so big,” Obi whispered.
“It’s so full,” Clementine said quietly.
She wasn’t looking at the mountains.
She had one hand pressed to her chest, over her heart.
Her eyes were closed.
Theo stood at the wheel with his chart.
“Léogâne’s that way. South and east, along the coast. We can’t go in there.”
“Why not?” Bess asked.
“Because this is a French colony, and we’re a ship full of Black sailors with no papers and no French captain.” Theo’s voice was quiet and flat.
“The harbor master sees us, and we don’t get to explain. They seize the ship and sell every one of you at auction by Sunday.”
Nobody spoke.
“Then where?” Kofi asked.
Everyone turned and looked at Clementine.
She stood very still at the bow.
Her hand was still pressed to her chest.
Then, slowly, as if something pulled her arm on a string, she raised it and pointed.
West of Léogâne.
Toward a stretch of coast where the mountains came right down to the water, green and wild, with no smoke rising at all.
“There.” Her voice shook.
“It’s strong now. It hurts.”
Theo sighed long and loud.
He turned the wheel.
“I want it noted in the ship’s log,” he announced, “that we are, once again, steering by Auntie’s ribcage.”
Clementine didn’t even open her eyes.
She reached behind her and smacked him on the arm.
The cove was small and hidden and green.
Mangroves crowded its edges, standing in the shallow water on their tangled roots.
A thin strip of dark sand ran along the back.
Behind it, the jungle climbed straight up the mountain, so thick it looked like a wall.
A stream ran out of the trees into the sea, clear and cold.
They dropped anchor at dusk.
As the chain rattled out, a sound came down from the mountains.
Drums.
Far away.
High up.
Not one drum but many, answering each other across the valleys, a rhythm that rolled from peak to peak like thunder that had learned to talk.
Everyone on deck stopped and listened.
“That’s not Pa Cudjoe,” Obi whispered.
“No,” Clementine breathed.
“That’s something much older.”
Kofi and Yaw rowed ashore with Clementine as the last light went red over the sea.
The boat grounded on the sand with a soft crunch.
Kofi stepped out, and the ground of Saint-Domingue was soft and warm under his feet.
Then he stopped.
Drawn in the wet sand at the edge of the water, just above the tide line, was a pattern.
It was big, bigger than a man lying down.
Lines and curves and small circles, crossing and joining in a shape that was almost a gate, almost a star, almost a tree.
Someone had drawn it with a stick, carefully, and not long ago.
The sea hadn’t touched it yet.
Clementine went very still.
“That’s a veve,” she whispered.
“A spirit’s mark.”
“For which spirit?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice shook.
“I don’t know this one.”
Yaw had his pistol half out.
He was staring past them, up the beach.
“Kofi.”
At the edge of the trees, where the dark sand met the green, stood a small figure.
A child, maybe, or a very small woman.
Wrapped in pale cloth.
Too far and too dark to see a face.
It raised one hand toward them.
Slowly.
Palm out.
Then it turned and slipped into the jungle and was gone, and there was nothing but the dark wall of trees and the drums rolling down from the mountains.
Yaw let out a breath.
“Somebody knew we were coming.”
Kofi looked down at the veve in the sand.
At the fresh stick marks.
At the careful, patient lines.
“Somebody’s been waiting,” he said.