“He a salter.”
“A salter? Like salt plague?” I reeled backward. His dead flat eyes skimmed over me, looking not at me but at what lay beneath my skin: my hot, pumping, salt-laden blood. “Are you saying he’s riddled with the salt plague? The salt plague which makes your mind and body rot? The salt plague for which there is no cure?”
“Owo,” she said, which meant yes in one of the Mande languages.
The urge to retch rose so strongly I ran to the shade where vegetation probed the sterile sands. On hands and knees among the stiff-leafed plants I vomited up bile. My arm throbbed as if hot needles had been jabbed into my flesh and were engaged in a frantic dance aided by a swarm of impatient wasps. His flat, mindless gaze, as dull as an imbecile’s and less cunning. His lurching gait. The salt plague ate your body and your brain. There was no cure, no palliative, no hope, only a slow deterioration into living death.
The thud of footsteps made a counter-rhythm to the fear and pain drumming in my head. Maybe I was going to die, but I wasn’t dead yet. I shoved myself up. Figures swam into my vision.
“Salve. Salve, Perdita.”
Greetings, lost woman. The formal Latin soothed my ears.
A person moved toward me with palms outstretched in the sign of peace. “By Jupiter Magnus! It is Catherine Bell Barahal. How in the unholy hells you got here I cannot imagine.”
I brandished my cane. I wasn’t going to get bitten again. “Don’t come closer. I’ll kill you.”
“Catherine Bell Barahal. Look at me. We’ve met before.”
Five people stood in a cunning circle around me, so I couldn’t bolt. Behind, still on the beach with the sun’s glare washing their skin to the color of rotting corpses, the young woman was tugging on the thing that had bit me, trying to drag it away as it strained toward me. Three men and two women faced me. Four of the strangers were foreign. They had thick straight black hair very like my own and they looked a little like Rory but a lot more like someone else entirely: broad across the cheeks with high, flat foreheads and deep-set brown eyes, fit and healthy. In fact, they looked like people, nothing like the lurching man-thing that had bitten me. At least the monster in the water had been terrible in its perfectly awful beauty. Wouldn’t it have been better if it had killed me and I’d bled my life away in the water?
Blessed Tanit! I was going to die in the most horrible way imaginable.
My knees gave way. First I was standing and then I was on the ground.
One of the men crouched beside me, out of range of my cane.
“Catherine,” he said in a quiet voice. “I’m not a salter. Hold out your arm.”
His calm tone convinced me to hold out my arm. A woman upended a vessel. Salt water poured over the wound. I must have yelped, but all I could hear was the pain.
“You’re faint. Drink this.”
I was dead anyway so if he meant to poison me it would be preferable to die quickly instead of slowly. He handed me a hollowed-out gourd and unsealed its cork. I lifted its rim to my mouth. A sweet liquor with the kick of strong alcohol coursed down my throat. I began to chug it, until one of the women spoke curtly, and the speaker took hold of my undamaged wrist and stayed me.
“Wait. Let it settle. Then you can have more.”
Its searing after-bite blasted along my throat. Finally he came into focus. He had hair the reddish-gold color commonly seen in western Celtic tribes who had not mixed with Roman legionnaires and the Mande refugees from the empire of Mali.
“You were with Camjiata,” I whispered. “In the law offices.”
“That’s right. I’m James Drake. You do remember me?”
The liquid churned in my belly. I broke into a sweat. “Was that man a salter who bit me?”
“Stay calm.” He spoke to the others. By their voices, it seemed they were haggling.
“My mind must be rotting already,” I cried. “I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”
They came to a grudging consensus. The others moved off, taking the creature and the young woman with them. For some reason, the creature did not attack them.
“That’s because we’re speaking Taino,” he said, turning back to me. “It’s the common language in these parts. Drink up. It’s the local drink. It’s called rum.”
I drained the vessel. The liquor cleansed my mouth; it numbed and dazzled, spiking straight to my head. “Will rum cure me?”
“No. Rum can’t cure the salt plague. The seawater has flooded his saliva away. But I want to wash the bite again. You have to come with me. Please put the sword back in your belt. No need to wave it around.”