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. ”