Omeros (9 page)

wondered if the farmer knew this with night closing

round his flambent Flemish nose. Admiral Rodney

had asked for the smartest midshipman possible,

who needed only one thing, a good memory,

so he was assigned to work his way to The Hague,

but in the roundabout way of all those people,

the higher the post the more their orders were vague.

He leant back in the coach, inspecting the twilight

ranked in darkening poplars, between which the farmer

glared at him. In a box on the roof, its ropes tight,

its brass clasp flashing, was his blue uniform; a

sword folded in it. He turned to the farmer’s face.

He had counted the clustered berries on the nose,

noted the eyebrows’ haystacks, the dull canal gaze

of his reflection, the forehead’s deep-ploughed furrows,

the bovine leisure with which he turned away eyes

stupefied by distances. Swaying on one knee,

an ochre jug gurgled. From this the farmer swallowed,

then heeled the cork shut with a ham-sized palm, only

to wriggle it again with one thumb to a loud

squeak that seemed to surprise him with every mile.

The stomach’s rippling orb enraged the squire,

who averted each offer with a hardening smile

at this bulk, obese and turgid as his Empire.

Were it not for the war he might have loved the place;

even with its ribbed windmills’ skeletal rattle,

for its orange-roofed farms hidden among poplars,

wheels with crystal weirs, its black-mapped, creamy cattle

grazing their long shadows. The fields were prosperous

and lied of peace. From them, horizontal fire

lit an enormous cloud, then its changing towers

were crossed by unlucky rooks, and a touched spire

withdrew from the field, as dusk pricked its first flowers.

Under a sucked-out sun, like a lemon lozenge

on a blue Delft plate, he counted the black crosses

of shipping, the steeples, and the immense

clouds over the port emptied as if by a plague.

The farmer grunted, not to him but to the chickens

between his huge boots, and boasted in Dutch: “The Hague.”

A spy sent through the Lowlands, he was to observe

from certain ports the tonnage, direction, and mass

of Dutch merchantmen; the arms they shipped in reserve

to American colonies through St. Eustatius,

an island bristling with contraband; then embark

to Plymouth to serve with Rodney. A florin moon

showed him the footman lowering his chest in the dark

of the wharves. He tipped his hat to the footman

and gave him a coin. He was a very thorough

and observant young officer with an honour-

able career ahead of him, but a bit raw.

His name was Plunkett, his vessel
The Marlborough.

II

Gunpowder and stores were shipped to St. Eustatius

from these innocent, moonlit harbours, in support

of French aid to the colonies; with slow paces,

the sea-chest hidden, he walked the edge of the port

as the moonlight amazed him, its milk-white brilliance

pouring from dark pewter clouds. It shone with such force

he could read his palm by it, and from this distance,

the curled brass names of the vessels under their prows.

He memorized them, closing his eyes, reprinted

their silhouettes like an etching. These merchantmen

sold guns not only to North American agents

but to British merchants selling their countrymen

to profitable conflict. The intelligence

would be used by the Admiral at home, to wreak

massive revenge not only on the Dutch islands

but on the French island bastion of Martinique,

with its sheltering harbour where the whole French fleet

could muster. For some reason, under the immense

clouds, he remembered the coop between the feet

of the farmer, with its uncomplaining chickens

waiting to be sacrificed, resigned to their fate.

His forked shadow aped him, scribbling its own report,

when a cry from the Night Watch froze it. They both hid

between huge kegs of gunpowder that lined the port,

while the startled moon, like a hunted hare, scurried

through the bare masts as leafless as its winter hills

to a snowcrest of powdery cloud. The hare stood

with its limp forepaws, ears pronged, its quivering nostrils

veering like a compass till it found the black wood

under whose rigging the Night Watch crunched like hunters

climbing with shouldered guns towards it. The hare’s face

of the frightened moon, as they searched with their lanterns

and ready muskets, made his pulse echo the pace

of the hare’s heart up those hills he had hunted once,

he muffled his heartbeat with one paw. A cloud capped

his own frightened face, and the moon’s. The hare crept down

into the cloud with its white tuft. The midshipman kept

low behind a wine-barrel, a huge demijohn,

and moved like the crippled hare back towards its den,

leaving drops on the snow, heart like a lantern

that the hunters might see, or wine-drops that redden

a snowy tablecloth, to where his sword was hidden.

His intelligence helped. After the Dutch defeat

on the islet facing Martinique, a great redoubt

was being prepared. Rodney was building a fort.

III

The slaves watched the Redcoats running between the trees,

dispersing like blossoms when the poinciana

rattles its hanging bandoliers in the breeze

as the thunderheads ignite with no cannoneer.

Battles were natural as storms; they needed no cause.

A common enemy bound captive to captor.

They clapped as the soldiers scrambled to the redoubts,

and their hot palms longed for lances in that rapture

of men before war, till a fusillade of shouts

burst from the apoplectic, sunburnt engineers.

They got back to their job of hauling the cannon

that hung halfway up the cliff over the white noise

of the sea-lace. It was bound like a cadaver

lowered at a sea-burial, with this difference—

that the roped body was rising from the water

in iron resurrection, inch by squeaking inch

from the rusty hawser, dangerously swaying,

while two slaves locked and kept the wheel-handle of the winch

from whirring backwards and others watched the fraying

ropes that smoked from the strain. If a single knot frayed,

the cannon would hit the cliff and its weight unravel

the balance and the strain on their shoulders too great

as the weight increased and the cannon would travel

straight down to the sea, carrying slaves and soldiers

with it. There was fear and pride in their work now

and Achille’s ancestor cursed his pain-locked shoulders,

tilting his body for purchase, locking his jaw

like the winch of the wheel until his temples hurt,

but he passed on the engineer’s orders: “More! More!”

and felt the little avalanches of loose dirt

under his soles. The cries of black warrior ants

passed in a chain as they lifted the iron log

towards the crest of the trees, so he changed their response

to a work-song they knew, hauling a long pirogue

up from their river, and between beats his commands

varying softly, then the groans between the counting,

and, higher than pain, they let the ropes saw their hands

till they bled on the hemp, and the cannon mounting,

mounting, until its mouth touched the very first branch,

like an iguana climbing, entering the trees.

And their hands sprung up like branches: slaves, engineers,

they embraced one another separately, in tears.

They leapt in the air, they drummed with their blurring heels,

they loosened and flipped the ropes, and the hawser’s tails

wriggled up the precipice. In its iron wheels

the iron lizard sat fixed towards the French sails.

That was their victory. Some paused to watch the foam

chaining the black rocks below them, and thought of home.

It was then that the small admiral with a cloud

on his head renamed Afolabe “Achilles,”

which, to keep things simple, he let himself be called.

Chapter XV

I

In the channel with three islets christened “Les Saintes,”

in a mild sunrise the ninth ship of the French line

flashed fire at
The Marlborough,
but swift pennants

from Rodney’s flagship resignalled his set design

to break from the classic pattern.
The Marlborough

declined engagement and veered from the cannonade;

reading the pennants, she crossed the enemy’s trough,

her sister frigates joining the furrow she made.

You have seen pelicans veer over pink water

of an April bay. So, stem-to-stern, Rodney’s force

in a bracing gust followed
The Marlborough;
but, since

the wind grew too light, both fleets were tacking off-course

and closing in at three or four knots from the wind’s

changing sides; so close that all their cannoneers could

read the other’s arc of ignition, hear the shout

before the recoil, and see the splintering wood,

then close-fire muskets, like cicadas in drought,

or stones that crack from a fisherman’s beach-fire.

The midshipman felt the hull coming hard about;

the Admiral had wanted some hands below, before

the close fighting. His order had to be obeyed.

II

A malevolent flower of smoke continued past dawn

on the brightening horizon. He heard the deep roar

of the boatswain, the gunner’s “Aye!” From her squadron

a French frigate coming close had been hit. She bore

down on
The Marlborough,
the young midshipman peered

at her smoke-shawled beauty, and thought there was no war

as courtly as a sea-battle; her white sails steered

towards him, her embrochures spitting fire

while black veils of fury billowed from her beaked head;

for this he had watched the gulls from his ploughed shire,

the canvas on one shoulder, and the deadly ride

through marsh lowlands. Observation is character,

so he watched her wallowing in her wounded pride

with her loosened stores, he heard feet pounding the board

of the upper-deck, and slid, as his vessel tried

to avoid ramming. He held on, reached for his sword,

when
The Marlborough
shuddered to the dying groan

of the cracking mainmast, a gommier, a split elm,

its leaves like collapsing canvas, covering the ground.

He grabbed air as the helmsman wheeled hard at the helm,

then the sky showed through a hole. Then it vomited

a wave through the wooden maw, spewing its debris

of splinters and—God knows why—bottles; as she passed

he read her ornate italics:
Ville de Paris.

III

He was making for the ladder that led them up

to the deck, sword drawn in one hand. With the other

he was hoisting himself on the rail when the ship

foundered again and another huge wave poured through

the hole, and this time its wash rapidly mounted

in the cabin, spinning him from the ladder against

the wall opposite, and as hard as he tried

to wade in its whirlpool of debris, the next wave sent

him against his own sword. It was a fatal wound

but he pulled out the sword. Then the wash thudded him

on the roof of the cabin, the surge spun him round

as he swallowed water with no floor under him.

Once the breach was drained and the direction altered

and the shorn mast stripped, the pouring breach was secured.

They found him face downwards, still holding to the sword.

From the hull of the
Ville de Paris,
wine-bottles

bobbed in the wake, crimson blood streamed from the wood

as they drifted in the mild current from the battle’s

muffled distance. The casks and demijohns’ blood

stained the foam faintly, and now one of them settles

on the sea-floor, its pyrite crusted and oblate

with the sea-blown, distended glass. Huge tentacles

rolled it as a cat boxes its prey. Then it was left—

a chalice hoisted by a diver’s rubber claws.

Chapter XVI

I

Plunkett’s ances-tree (his pun) fountained in blossoms

and pods from a genealogical willow

above his blotter’s green field. One pod was the Somme’s.

It burst with his father’s lungs. Then a pale yellow

asterisk for a great-uncle marked Bloemfontein.

At the War Office he’d paid some waxworks fellow

to draw flowers for battles, buds for a campaign.

The cold-handed bugger’d done it for a fortune.

Undertaker’s collar, bald as a snooker-ball,

as hunched as a raven, he plucked titles in turn

from their cliffs of gilt ledgers, picking with his bill

from Agincourt to Zouave, returning to where

he found blue blood in the Plunketts. The Major

voiced no objection. But why Scots? Why a claymore

with a draped tartan? And, when the willow faded

into a dubious cloud, he smiled. To pay more,

naturally, and he did. A carved, scrolled shield waited

at the willow’s base, his name and hyphen

for a closing date, then a space for son and heir.

“No heir,” he told the mummy from Madame Tussaud,