Sacred Hunger (27 page)

“The boatmen seem a different people from the captives,” he said.

Barber had lit a pipe in the interval of waiting. “Aye,” he said, “they are Kru people, they belong to the coast; no one else can get these skiffs through the surf. The slaves are from inside the country.”

“And are they never made captive themselves?”’

“The Kru?”’ Barber grinned round the stem of his pipe. It was clear he found this question funny. “Who would do the paddlin”?”’ he said. ‘not those other beggars—they prob’ly never seen the sea before.”

“Never seen the sea?”’ Paris peered down over the side again. “But in that case -“

The man standing in the canoe was still grasping the narrow accommodation ladder. He looked to Paris now as if he might have mixed blood. He made a kind of military salute with his free hand and turned a beaming face upwards. “Welcome Libberpool!” he called. “Cap’n Thursoo! Haloo! You ‘member me? You ‘member King Henry Cook?”’

“It is that fat scoundrel Yellow Henry,”

Thurso said to Barton. “One of those women has got fallen breasts, I can see it from here. I ‘member you fine,” he called down. “Come up, and welcome aboard.”

Yellow Henry was beaming still but he made no immediate move to accept the invitation. “Ten prime slave,” he shouted. On the words, the drummer struck his drum a number of times and the bugler tilted up his instrument and elicited a short series of ear-splitting notes. Yellow Henry smiled through this, holding his hat. Still he made no move to mount the ladder.

Thurso nodded his head as if in appreciation of the music.

“Bring up you slaves for look-see,” he said. “You know me, you know Thurso, no panyar with Thurso.”

“What is panyar?”’ Paris said quietly to Barber.

“That is kidnappin”, stealin’ people for slaves.”

‘But that is what we are doing, isn’t it?”’

“No,” Barber said. “What we are doin” is buyin’ slaves. There is some skippers go in and take their own slaves, without benefit of dealers.

They even takes the dealers for slaves sometimes.

That’s why these fellers are grinnin’ so much. They are afraid of being took themselves.”

Paris watched the slaves unbound and the halters taken off them, watched them forced up the ladder one by one, Yellow Henry’s attendants, all steadily beaming, prodding them on with their cutlasses.

The girl was very young, he saw now, hardly out of puberty, with high, small breasts and a thin down of pubic hair. He saw that there were tears on her face, though she made no sound. The faces of the others were fixed and expressionless—from exhaustion, it seemed to Paris. But their eyes showed too much white as they came on to the deck. Some final, useless reluctance made him move away from the opening where the ladder was let down.

Last on board was the king himself, his arrival signalled by a fanfare more prolonged than any yet. He shook hands with Thurso, smiling still, breathing heavily from the climb. His attendants formed up on either side of him, clutching their muskets loosely. They were a motley band. All wore cartridge belts across their bodies. One or two sported cocked hats, though not so magnificent as their chiefs. One wore a dishevelled grey wig, another a lace shawl. All cast uneasy glances round them.

‘Ah, Bartoon,” the king said. “You keepee strong?”’

“Can’t complain.” Barton raised his narrow face and grinned. “You have got a memory for names, ain’t you? This here is Mr Paris, our doctor.”

“Ah, Paree! Dat a good hat.”

Yellow Henry smelled strongly of rum but he did not seem unsteady. There was spray on his gold-laced hat and on his sparse grey chest hairs and grossly swollen belly. The slaves, whom he affected now to ignore, were huddled behind him against the rail, guarded by members of the crew armed with whips. His own people stood in a semicircle around him. “You Libberpool?”’ he enquired of Paris.

“Norfolk.”

“No fuck. Haw-haw.” Yellow Henry glanced at his followers. “You no fuck now, we got biznez.” There was a general guffaw at this, in which some members of the crew took part. “Fuck later,” Yellow Henry said, encouraged.

“Bristool trash place,” he added after a moment. “Bristool shippis no give dash.”

He took a pace and spat with delicate contempt over the side. “You got dashee for Kru mans?”’ he said.

“I am goin’ ter bust that one,” Paris heard someone say behind him. Turning, he saw Tapley and McGann standing together. He did not know which had spoken—he thought Tapley. Both wore a similarly gloating expression. They were looking at the girl slave, who had not changed position since being thrust on to the deck. Her head was lowered and sun glinted on the tight springs of her hair. She stood in a position of frozen modesty, shoulders hunched forward and wrists crossed over her genitals. It came to Paris, with a certain surprise, that she, and all these people probably, the men too, were accustomed to being clothed below the waist.

‘We will talk about dashee when we have had a proper look at the goods,” Thurso said, in a tone almost jocular. “Have a seat here in the shade.

Will you take a dram while the slaves are being looked over?”’

“Brandy,” Yellow Henry conceded. He settled his bulk with dignity, at the same time darting looks to left and right of him. “Dese chiefs also like dram,” he said, indicating his escort.

“Mr Paris,” Thurso said, with a sort of ponderous and malignant courtesy, “go forward and take a look at what they have brought, if you please. You had better go with him,” he added to Barton.

“Aye-aye, sir.” Barton’s eyes had been on the barrel. With visible reluctance he stepped alongside Paris towards where the slaves were clustered. He had pistol in his belt and a broad-thonged whip of plaited leather in his hand.

“It is teeth and eyes you looks at first,” he said moodily. “These beggars is up to all manner of tricks.”

Paris thought he must mean the traders—the captives looked past all tricks save that of endurance. He had taken himself in hand: this was a medical examination he was about to conduct, not different in essence from others he had conducted. Nevertheless it was with a continuing sense of not being fully responsible, of acting under duress or in some sort of preordained ritual, that he now approached a tall negro on the outside of the group, took him by the wrist and sought to draw him forward a little. Why he began here he could not have said. The man had raised his eyes at their approach, unlike the others; and Paris had seen him hold back on the climb up the ship’s side —he had been struck several times with the flat of a cutlass. He hung back now; Paris had to use some force. Seeing it, Libby stepped forward with an oath and struck with his whip at the negro’s flank.

The man gasped and started at the blow and his head shook, but he uttered no other sound. Libby would have repeated the blow but Paris raised his left arm as a barrier.

The man came forward now without resistance. Across his chest and shoulders Paris saw the weals of some earlier beating, edged with blood. The arm he held was trembling through all its length with a continuous vibration, like a leaf in a faint current of air. Again, like a refuge, memory came to Paris: an exhausted swallow on the beach; he had warmed it between his hands, felt the pulse of fear pick up with the return of warmth, until its whole body was a single vibration of the terrified heart. But not terror only, he thought —there had been some indomitable hope of life in the bird…

With the same sense of compulsion, like that attending some quest or mission in a dream, he met the dark and somehow impersonal regard of the negro, the eyes at a level with his own, fathomless and shallow in the bony sockets. He faltered for a moment at the gaze of these eyes that did not see him, did not know what they were seeing—the man was stricken with the openness of the place, he was sightless at his own exposure.

Paris felt sweat gathering inside the band of his hat. The enveloping glare of the noon sky was all around them. With a slight grinding of the teeth, a simulation of savagery without which he could scarcely have proceeded, Paris seized the negro’s lower jaw and forced it open. There was no trace of saliva in the mouth, but tongue and gums were perfect, the teeth immaculate.

“Good mouth,” Barton said in his ear. “They chews on a piece o” bark.”

With Barton murmuring at his side like some confidential assistant, full of hints and instances, he peered at the negro’s eyeballs and into the pink whorls of his ears. He prodded his chest and listened to his heart and felt the glands of his throat. He examined the surface of the body for evidence of disease but found only the whip marks and extensive contusions in the upper arms caused by his bonds; he had been bound very tightly and for considerably longer than it had taken to ferry him from shore.

‘Don’t forget the cock, Mr Paris,”

Barton said. “Seat of pleasure. Lay hold his arms, Libby. They sometimes strikes out. Big ‘un, ain’t he?”’

The man was circumcised. Paris drew the loose skin back to look at the whole crown of the penis. He was aware again of that light, continuous trembling. He spread the man’s thighs to look for venereal lues in the region of the groin. There was nothing. Straightening up, he saw the fluttering of fear or shock at the base of the negro’s throat.

The man panted suddenly, a single deep gasp.

His eyes were unseeing. “He is in good condition,”

Paris said. He experienced a momentary giddiness.

I must have got up too suddenly, he thought. There was a sweetish, musky odour in his nostrils.

“Let’s have a look at his arse,” Barton said. “Get him down on his knees. Get his head down, Deakin, will you? And you, Calley—press him by the nape. You fool, what are you doing? I want his head touchin” the deck an’ his tail in the air. That’s right. You have got to be up to their tricks, Mr Paris. I have known these rogues of dealers to plug up slaves’ arses with corks to keep in the bloody flux long enough to sell “em.

You wouldn’t credit what they will stoop to.”

“I think I would,” Paris said. The examination seemed to have passed out of his hands. He looked away from the bowed form of the black man, still as stone on the deck, to the sea, the distant wildness of the surf, the wall of forest beyond. They had come from somewhere behind there, perhaps from far inland. They were forest people. It came to Paris, like so much these days, as a shaft, a missile that found him, which he would have avoided if he had been able—broken sunshine, river banks, clearings of villages, always cover somewhere near, always enclosure. And now this terrible openness of sea and sky…

‘We have got to make him caper,” Barton said, cheerfully. He was his usual loquacious self now, having apparently recovered from his disappointment over the rum. “Make sure he has full possession of his limbs,” he said. “Step back, Mr Paris, out of the line of the whips. Let us see the brute jump a bit. They are idle devils. Here, you beggar, like this.” He jumped up and down and kicked out sideways. “Like that, you sabee? Quashee do same-same ting me. Jump, damn you. Here, Cavana, wake him up with your whip, will you?”’

The negro panted when he felt the lash, and seconds later cried out on a high-pitched note that sounded more of despair than pain.

“He is givin” us a song when we wants a dance,” Libby said with a grin, turning his good eye round on his henchman Tapley.

‘That’s it, oopla!” Barton clapped his hands.

The negro had begun a shuffling motion, kicking out his feet and flapping his arms. Paris, again with a sense of being impaled on his own perceptions, saw that thick tears had gathered in the man’s eyes.

“We have one to start with, Captain,” Barton said, going up to Thurso where he sat under the awning with the king. “Prime male, ‘bout thirty years old, no pox, no flux, clean as a whistle.”

“We’ll start with him then,” Thurso said.

“Tell Mr Paris not to waste his time on the older woman, she’s got fallen breasts, I won’t buy her. You sabee Thurso,” he said to Yellow Henry. “We do trade mebbe five-six time.

What for you bring me woman dugs down her belly?

You sabee damn well I ain’t go buy dat one.”

Yellow Henry’s smile disappeared and his face settled for some moments into lines of sullen savagery. “She one fine-fine slave,” he said. “Worth fifty bar. She cotched together with de girl. Turns out she dat girl’s mudder.”

“What is that to me?”’ Thurso said. “She is not worth transporting. You can’t get any sort of price for a drop-breast woman. No, she goes back to shore. I’ll keep the girl, if she is sound.”

“She sweet-sweet.” Yellow Henry belched and began to smile again. “One more drams,” he said, holding out his glass. “She sweet cunny, dat one. Look how she holding it. She not bambot ooman—nobody bin inside. Keep her han” over it like a bird fly out.” He rolled his bloodshot eyes roguishly. ‘Bird go fly in,” he said.

The king’s bugler laughed loudly at this witticism and half raised his bugle as if to deliver a blast, then appeared to think better of it. “Whoosh!” he laughed. “Bird fly in.”

Thurso had not smiled at the sally. “We go below now, look-see goods,” he said. “We got plenty fine-fine thing. Yes, you can take some men with you but they’ll have to wait at the door, there’s no room inside. You had better come down with us,” he said to Simmonds. “Barton stays up here with the doctor. Haines, stand by the brandy.”

They were below a considerable time, during which Paris, with his mentor always at his side, proceeded with the examination of the slaves. The last of the five men had a hard crust on the pinnae of the ears, a concretion oddly similar to the deposit Paris had known to form on the surface of the joints in cases of gout. There was also a tumour-like swelling in the groin which had broken at the surface to excrete a gum-like substance. “Do you see that, Barton?”’ he said.

“See how hard it is along the edges—it has made a kind of rim round the ulcer.” In the interest of this, he forgot for a moment where he was, what he was doing. “The wound is like a crater,” he said. “I have read of this somewhere.” He began a careful palpation of the arms and legs, the short and thickset negro submitting with a sort of exhausted docility. Close to the surface, quite distinct to the touch, he found a number of small, tumour-like swellings. Beneath the dark skin he could discern a reddish colouring around them.