A Falcon Flies (72 page)

‘I will go ashore immediately,' she said, and Mungo St John nodded.

‘I thought you would say that,' he said, ‘I will go with you.'

‘No.' Her tone brooked no argument. ‘You will aggravate that wound, and in your weakened condition you will be easy prey to this plague, whatever it is.' She glanced at Tippoo, and his face split laterally into that broad toadlike grin and he stepped up beside her.

‘By God, ma'am, I've had them all,' said Nathaniel, the little pockmarked bosun. ‘And none of them killed me yet.' And he stepped up to her other hand.

R
obyn sat in the stern while Tippoo and Nathaniel handled the oars, and as they pulled across the ebb towards the shore the bosun explained what they would find ashore.

‘Each of the traders has his own barracoon built and guarded by his own men,' he told Robyn. ‘He buys from the Portos as the blackbirds are brought in.'

As Robyn listened to Nathaniel, she realized the answers to questions that had worried her and Zouga. This was the reason why Pereira had tried so desperately to persuade them not to bring the expedition south of the Zambezi river, and why, when all else had failed, he had attacked it with his armed brigands and tried to destroy it. He had been protecting his brother's trade routes and selling area. It was not mere avarice and lust, but a logical attempt to preserve this lucrative enterprise from discovery.

She went on listening to Nathaniel.

‘Each trader fattens his wares ashore, like pigs for the market. That way they are stronger for the crossing, and he makes sure that they are healthy and not going to bring sickness aboard with them.

‘There are twenty-three barracoons here, some small ones with twenty blacks or so, belonging to the small traders, right on up to the big ones like
Huron
's, with a thousand and more prime blackbirds in the cage.

‘We have the slave-decks set up in
Huron
's hold, and we would have begun taking them aboard any day, but now—'

Nathaniel shrugged, and spat on the horny calloused palms of each hand in turn, and then plied himself to the oars once more.

‘Are you a Christian, Nathaniel?' Robyn asked softly.

‘That I am, ma'am,' he said proudly. ‘As good a Christian as ever sailed out of Martha's Vineyard.'

‘Do you think God approves of what you are doing here to these poor people?'

‘Hewers of wood, ma'am, and drawers of water, like the Bible says,' the weather-beaten sailor told her, so glibly that she knew that the reply had been put in his mouth, and she guessed by whom.

Once they were ashore, Tippoo led the small party with Robyn in the centre and Nathaniel carrying her chest in the rear.

Captain Mungo St John had chosen the best site available for his barracoon, on a rise of ground at a distance from the river. The sheds were well built, with floors of sawn timber raised above the mud and good roofs thatched with palmetto leaves.

Huron
's guards had not deserted, proof of the discipline which Mungo St John maintained and the slaves in the barracks had evidently been carefully chosen. They were all well set-up men and women, and the copper cookers were filled with boiling farina so that their bellies bulged and their skins were glossy.

At Robyn's direction they were lined up and she passed swiftly down the ranks. There were some mild ailments, which she singled out for later treatment, but she found none of the symptoms which she so dreaded.

‘There is no plague here,' she decided. ‘Not yet.'

‘Come!' said Tippoo.

He led her through the palm groves, and the next barracoon had been deserted by the traders who had built it and stocked it. Already the slaves were hungry and confused by their sudden liberation.

‘You are free to go,' Robyn told them. ‘Go back to your own land.'

She was not certain that they understood her. They squatted in the mud and stared at her blankly. It was as though they had lost all power of independent thought or action, and she knew that they would never be able to make their way back along the Hyena Road, even if they survived the coming epidemic.

With a flash of horror Robyn realized that without their slave-masters these poor creatures were doomed to a lingering death by starvation and disease. Their masters had cleared out the store rooms before they left, there was not a cupful of farina or corn meal left in any of the barracoons they visited that morning.

‘We will have to feed them,' Robyn said.

‘We have food for our own, that is all,' Tippoo told her impassively.

‘He is right, ma'am,' Nathaniel confirmed. ‘We feed them, then we'll starve our own blackbirds – besides, most of them are poor goods, not worth the price of a cup of farina.'

In the second barracoon Robyn thought that she had at last discovered the first plague victims, for the low thatched sheds were crammed with rows of prostrate naked figures, and their low moaning and whimpering was a heart-breaking sound, while the smell of corruption was thick and oily on the palate.

It was Tippoo who corrected her. ‘China birds,' he grunted, and for a moment Robyn did not understand, and she stooped over the nearest body, then straightened immediately. Despite her training, cold blisters of sweat formed on her forehead.

By Imperial Decree from Peking, no black African slave could be landed on the shores of China unless he had been rendered incapable of reproducing his own kind. The Emperor was concerned that future generations would not be plagued by the growth of an alien population in their midst. The traders found it expedient to castrate their purchases in the barracoons, so that losses caused by the operation could be absorbed before the expense of the long voyage was incurred.

It was crudely done, a tourniquet applied to the root of the scrotum and then the entire scrotal sack removed at a single knife stroke and the wound cauterized immediately with a heated iron or a daub of hot pitch. About sixty per cent would survive the shock and subsequent mortification, but their price per capita was so enhanced that the trader could face forty per cent losses with equanimity.

There was nothing that Robyn could do for so many, she felt overwhelmed by the suffering and misery all around her, and she stumbled out on to the muddy pathway, blinded by her own tears. In the next barracoon, the one nearest to the central auction block, she found the first plague victims.

Once again the sheds had been deserted by the slave-masters, and the dimly lit thatched sheds were filled with naked figures, some squatting motionlessly, others lying on the damp earthen floor, knees drawn up, shaking with the cold of fever, and powerless to lift themselves out of their own bodily wastes. The sound of delirium and suffering was murmurous as of insects in an English orchard on a hot summer's day.

The first sufferer that Robyn touched was a young girl, just beyond puberty, and her skin was burning hot. She rolled her head from side to side, endlessly and senselessly, mouthing snatches of gibberish. Swiftly Robyn ran her fingertips down the girl's naked bulging stomach and immediately she felt the tiny lumps under the hot skin, like pellets of buckshot. There could be no doubt.

‘Smallpox,' she said simply, and Tippoo drew back fearfully.

‘Wait outside,' she told him, and he went swiftly and with obvious relief. She turned to Nathaniel. She had noticed the little pitted scars in his folded sun-toughened skin, and now there was no fear in his expression.

‘When?' she asked.

‘When I was a boy,' he said. ‘It killed my old ma and my brothers.'

‘We have work to do,' she told him.

In the gloomy stinking shed the dead were piled with the living, and on some of the wracked and furnace-heated black bodies the plague had already burst into full flower. They found it in all its stages. Papules beneath the skin had erupted into vesicles, bubbles of clear thin fluid that thickened into pustules, which in turn burst and released a custard-thick trickle of matter.

‘These will live,' Robyn told Nathaniel. ‘The plague is purging from their blood.' She found a man whose open pocks had already crusted over.

While Nathaniel held the man from moving, Robyn scraped away the crusty scabs with a spatula and gathered them in a wide-mouthed glass bottle that had once held quinine powder.

‘
T
his strain of the disease has been attenuated,' Robyn explained impatiently, and for the first time she saw fear in the flecked eyes of Mungo St John. ‘The Turks first used this method two hundred years ago.'

‘I would prefer to sail away from it,' Mungo St John said quietly, staring at the stoppered bottle which was half filled with damp yellow matter in which were small flecks of blood.

‘It would be no use. The infection is already aboard.' Robyn shook her head firmly. ‘In a week or less
Huron
would be turned into a stinking plague-ship filled with dying men.'

Mungo turned away from her and went to the ship's rail. He stood there with one hand clasped into a fist behind his back, the other still in its sling, staring at the shore where the thatched roofs of the barracoons just showed above the mangroves.

‘You cannot leave those poor wretches,' Robyn said. ‘They will starve. I alone could never find food to feed that multitude. You are responsible for them.'

He did not answer her for a moment, then he turned back to study her curiously.

‘If
Huron
sailed, with her holds empty, would you stay here on this fever and smallpox-ridden coast to tend this multitude of doomed savages?' he asked.

‘Of course.' She was still impatient, and he inclined his head. His eyes no longer mocked, but were sober, perhaps even filled with respect.

‘If you will not stay for common humanity, then stay for self-interest.' She scorned him with her tone. ‘A million dollars' worth of human cattle, and I will save them for you.'

‘You would save them to be sold into captivity?' he insisted.

‘Even slavery is better than death,' she replied.

Again, he turned away from her, taking a slow turn of the quarterdeck, frowning thoughtfully, puffing on the long black cheroot so that wreathes of tobacco smoke drifted behind him, and Robyn and half
Huron
's crew watched him, some fearfully, others with resignation.

‘You say that you have yourself undergone this – this thing.' His eyes were drawn back, with loathing fascination, to the little bottle that stood in the centre of his chart table.

For answer Robyn lifted the sleeve of her shirt and showed him the distinctive deeply pocked scar on her forearm.

A minute longer he hesitated, and she went on persuasively, ‘I will give you a strain of the disease that is “passant” that has been weakened and attenuated by passage through another man's body, rather than the virulent form of the plague which you will breathe on the very air and which will kill most of you.'

‘There is no risk?'

She hesitated and then replied firmly, ‘There is always risk, but one hundred, nay a thousand times less risk, than if you take the disease from the air.'

With an abrupt gesture Mungo St John ripped open the sleeve on his left arm with his teeth and offered it to her.

‘Do it,' he said. ‘But in God's name do it quickly, before my courage fails.'

She drew the point of her scalpel across the smooth deeply tanned skin of his forearm and the tiny crimson droplets rose behind it. He did not flinch, but when she dipped the scalpel into the bottle and scraped up a speck of the noisome yellow stuff, he blanched and made as if to jerk his arm away, then with an obvious effort controlled himself. She smeared the pus over the tiny wound, and he stepped back and turned from her.

‘All of you.' His voice was rough with his horror and disgust. ‘Every last one of you,' he told the gaping terrified seamen.

W
ith Nathaniel, the bosun, there were three others who had survived the disease, and were speckled by the small dimpled scars which were its stigma.

Four men were not enough to help Robyn care for a thousand slaves, and her losses were much higher than she had expected. Perhaps this strain of the disease was more virulent, or perhaps the black men from the interior did not have the same resistance as the Europeans whose forbears had for generations been exposed to smallpox.

She introduced the crusted pus into the scratches on their limbs, working in the noon sunlight on into the gloom of dusk and then by the lantern's gleam, and they submitted with dumb resignation of the slave which she found pitiful and repugnant, but which none the less made her work much easier.

The reaction began within hours, the swelling and fever and the vomiting, and she went out into the other deserted barracoons to gather more of the loathsome pus from the bodies of those who had survived the smallpox and were now dying of starvation and neglect – resigning herself to the fact that she had only the strength and time to care for those in
Huron
's barracoons, resigning herself to the fact that there was farina to feed them only, and closing her mind to the cries and entreaty, to the silent dying stare from wizened faces that streamed pus from open pocks.

Even in her own barracoon the four of them working hour after hour, night and day, could give only perfunctory attention to each of the slaves, a handful of the cold pasty farina and a mugful of water once a day during the period of the most violent reaction to the inoculation. Those who survived this were left to care for themselves, to crawl to the water bucket when they could or to wolf a lump of farina from the spadeful that Nathaniel left on a wooden platter at intervals between the rows of supine figures.

Then when they were strong enough to stand they were put to work at piling the rotting bodies of their less fortunate peers upon a gun carriage and dragging them out of the barracoon. There was not the remotest chance of either burying or burning the bodies, and there were too many for the bloated vultures. They piled the corpses in heaps in the coconut grove, well downwind of the barracoon and went back for more.