Sacred Hunger (73 page)

Kenka did not return, but this caused no concern to either of them. The boy knew better than to go alone outside the compound after dark. It was a lesson drummed in from an early age: night was the time of the bear and the panther and the crocodile. He would be sleeping elsewhere, as he frequently did—perhaps at Tekka’s. The night was silent now except for the occasional cry of nightbirds. Paris rose to light another splinter of wood. Tabakali looked up at the movement and her long fingers rested among the seeds. “You worrit, an’t you?”’ she said. “Why you keep mum? What good dat serve?”’ She never missed any change in his demeanour, though it was sometimes long before she spoke of it. Lately she had seen some unhappiness drag at the lines of his mouth, though the expression was fleeting, soon lost in the patience and obstinacy that his face wore in repose. “Keep mum, end up poison belly,” she said.

“It’s nothing,” Paris said. “No wort” palaver.” He moved towards her and put out his hand to touch the warm soft skin at her nape. He had always loved the strong column of her neck, thick but shapely and unblemished. The musky scent of her body came to him and the sweet smell of the acorn oil she used on her hair.

‘We see if wort” palaver,” she said.

‘allyou tell me, den we see.” She smiled suddenly and he realized, without being able to share it, that her amusement came from something she saw as contradictory in what she was saying. “I wait dis palaver,” she said.

Paris hesitated still. Tabakali was a fighting woman, prompt to action or decision when confronted with the need; but he did not know how to discuss feelings of anxiety or foreboding with her as this involved some appeal to shared expectation and she lived far more closely from hour to hour and day to day than he did, making her—at least in his view of things—a natural victim of those who saw further. In this, as in a number of other ways, she had remained alien to him. He knew little of her past before enslavement, and she had no concept of his. And the lingua franca that had developed among them, derived from the trade pidgin of the Guinea Coast, though it had provided the only possibility of a common language, offered small register for feeling.

The tendencies that worried him most—the growth of trading partnerships and the increasing rivalry and secrecy of their operations—he could not find words for. He began to speak to her of something more tangible and immediate, the forthcoming Palaver at which Tongman was to defend Iboti against the charge of witchcraft brought jointly by his woman Arifa and Shantee Hambo, who was Arifa’s other man. A number of things about this case troubled him, not least among them the fact that Hambo was a fellow-tribesman of the powerful Kireku. Accusations of witchcraft were rare these days; most disputes concerned property or trade. Even in the early days there had been nothing like this. Some disputes concerning the evil eye there had been, born of jealousy and soon settled. Since then the nature of life in the settlement, the variety of language and race among the negroes, above all the violence done to traditional morality by the need to share women, had wrenched the people away from their accustomed styles of thinking, ideas of the supernatural had been driven below the surface.

There was, moreover, a disturbing aura of domestic intrigue about this case. Iboti was very slow in understanding and already one of the poorest people in the settlement, depending on Arifa for some of his necessities. If he lost the case Arifa would be entitled to deny him admittance to her hut and he would have to pay compensation to Hambo. If he won with Tongman’s help, he would avoid disgrace but he would have to pay Tongman’s fee. Either way he would be impoverished. This was not the first time that Tongman had spoken on someone else’s behalf at a Council…

‘Tongman big man for Palaver,” he said.

“He talk clever. Tongman is a good advocate.”

“Avokka, what dat?”’

“Avokka talk in de Palaver, talk any way, say any ting, dis way, dat way, never mind de trut.”

“Avokka,” she repeated. “Man talk clever pas” other man, dat his work. Docta sabee medsin pas’ other man, trappa make trap pas’ other man, dat dem work. Dat same-same ting everywhere.”

‘Docta an” trappa, dey don’ change you head,” Paris said with a smile. He was amused and strangely reassured by the invariably non-moralistic quality of her judgements. She admired all outstanding achievement of whatever kind.

‘Tongman no ken change you head cos you sabee he a talkin” man,” she said now, answering his smile with a triumphant one of her own. ‘allyou say hum-hum, dat jus” Tongman agin. When he don’ talk, dat danger time. Okpolu by de water, you no “fraid. Okpolu climb fence, den you watch out.”

“What is okpolu?”’

“Okpolu is frog.”

Paris nodded gravely. “Okpolu,” he said, as if in serious intention to remember it, and this made her laugh and look down and raise a hand to her mouth in the strange gesture, half modest, half superstitious, with which she always covered her laughter.

He laughed a little in response, moved by tenderness and renewed desire at this familiar and strangely helpless movement of hers. She sat carelessly, exposing her inner thighs below the short skirt—modesty and indifference were blended in her in a way he had never understood. With the sensitivity that she showed in all physical matters, a swiftness far surpassing his, she kept her eyes down for some moments. When she looked at him it was with a certain quality of steadiness that he also recognized, proud, calm, quite unselfconscious.

He heard a movement and a brief muttering from one of the sleeping children on the other side of the partition. Then silence again. “You finish dat now,” he said, pointing towards the cane seed beside her on the trestle. At once she began to sweep the grain into a clay bowl, tilting the board and using the edge of her hand. Paris watched, remembering the first time he had come to her, the desolation of his desire, standing outside in the dark, a cool wind from the sea, his feet kicking in the debris of fallen palmetto leaves, the loneliness of need possessing him and Ruth’s image lost among the rustling fronds at his feet. The same soft light, the same sense of warmth and safety.

.. He had shared her with several men since those days but nothing had changed the feeling she gave him of having reached a safe haven. Just so had she looked at him then, as he stood dumb before her, with the same steadiness, without subterfuge and yet with a pride and decorum that had survived all the brutalities of the slaveship.

“Make dead de fire,” she said softly.

She slept naked but for reasons that seemed cogent to her she would not undress before him nor ever make love except in the dark.

They lay together on the bed of rush matting and deerskins. Faint light came through where the woven mats joined the eaves. He could make out the line of her cheek, and her eyes in their shadowed hollows.

Her smell came to him and he nuzzled his face against her neck and kissed the pulse in her throat and then the full mouth, which softened to his kisses; having early discovered his eccentric taste for kissing on the mouth she had practised the way of it that pleased him most. She pressed against him, but softly; her first movements of love were always gentle and slow. She moved her hands over his chest and abdomen and traced the bones of the pelvis. Preliminaries between them never lasted long. For him her touch and nearness in the dark were enough and when he turned to her he found her always ready.

Tonight as he rode to his peace he muttered that he loved her, loved her, but the only reply that came was in the quickened breath of her excitement.

Afterwards she was asleep almost at once, almost before his weight was off her. Sleep, however, did not come to Paris despite the torpor of his body—indeed his mind seemed the clearer for this. He lay awake for a long time, his thoughts moving outward in concentric ripples from the solitary phenomenon of himself to the human creatures sleeping around him, then to the spaces of the night that wrapped them all.

Once again the wonder of their existence on this remote strand came to him. In terms of odds defeated and probabilities defied it verged on the miraculous. Even the first condition of survival, the unity preserved among them after Thurso’s death, in the aftermath of the mutiny, when staying made them all accomplices in murder, even this had been due to accidental factors, the presence of the gold dust on board, the extraordinary fervour of Delblanc.

No one had known of the gold dust at that time but Barton and Haines and Haines only because Barton needed his help. The knowledge had been enough to make these two throw their weight behind the mutiny. Fear too, of course—both men were hated; but had they not planned to return to the ship they might have opposed the idea of grounding her. Once she was grounded there had been no turning back.

The presence of the gold, then, had been an accidental blessing. But the man who had done most to keep them together had not been a member of the crew at all. He saw Delblanc’s face before him now, with the starkness on it of a truth belatedly, overwhelmingly, perceived. Delblanc had seen more clearly than anyone that only concerted action could save them, not only from surrounding dangers but from one another. Perhaps there was already present to his mind the marvellous opportunity the mutiny presented to test his theories, vindicate man’s natural goodness in this dream of a community living without constraint of government or corruption of money. A ship blown off course, a scuffle of sick and desperate men, the blood of a madman clumsily and almost casually spilt, he had seen in these a truth of politics, a revolution, the founding of a new order. But it was I, after all, who began it, Paris thought, I who stepped forward under that witnessing sky. For the sake of others or myself? The old question, as far as ever from being answered. Was it to halt a crime or merely to straighten my back at last, face at last those who had set me in the pillory, made a hobbling beast of me? Impossible, now and for ever, to be sure …

In the landfall itself, where others saw merely a refuge, Delblanc must have seen also a violent birth. Paris thought of that dawn, the unreal calm after the long bufferings of the wind, the listing ship with her decks washed clean by the night’s rain, the sight of the long, sickle-shaped sand bar fretted with waves, and the curving sweep of the inlet. It was afternoon before they could bring the ship into the channel, but the sun was high enough still to cast a band of light across its mouth, making it seem like a glorious threshold.

In the event, however, more suffering had lain beyond.

Those early days had been the worst. Weakened by hunger and privation, huddled together on the rim of the limestone pineland, they had lived as they could on beach plum and palm berries and a species of blackberry growing along the shore. These fruits, insufficient as they were, had probably prevented deaths among the crew, several of whom were suffering from scurvy; but more negroes died in those first days and some ran off and were not seen again.

More would have run and almost certainly died, if the fate of Haines had not come as a fearful warning.

He and Barton had disappeared on the first night, Barton to return two days later, half raving, bearing still the ripped jute sack that had held the gold dust, as if this evidence of his loss could somehow, as well as proving his words, exonerate him, plead in his favour. The story he came back with, garbled afterwards in pidgin and a variety of African languages, had lived in the minds of them all.

The two had returned to the ship with what speed they could. In spite of their enfeebled state they had brought the sacks off her. Their first plan, of making off in the longboat, was frustrated because she was fouled and they were too weak to free her, and too much in haste— they were possessed by fear of being surprised at their work. Ever the actor, even in his state of shock, Barton had sought to convey this fearful haste to his listeners. He wanted them to understand, to see that his conduct had been rational, laudable even. “We had to get clear of the vessel,” he said again and again, rapidly and tonelessly. “You can see that, shipmates.” And then, with his inveterate fondness for the polysyllabic flourish, “It was iniquitous dark, lads, we didn’t dare to show no light..

.”

Paris found himself smiling involuntarily as he lay there. Barton’s impudence surpassed everything.

The thin face bloodless with exhaustion, staring with a fear still not overcome, the ripped sack—his gauge of truth—still in his hand. And the incorrigible flourish of the phrase.

They had blundered with the sacks for some distance and settled down to wait for daylight. This, when it came, brought further problems. Their idea was now to bury the gold, but the ground was too marshy. They had stumbled through thickets of mangrove and swamp willow, carrying the sacks, looking for a place.

Eventually they had come to the edge of a shore hummock, where a stream ran like a tunnel into thick vegetation. Here, above the stream, there was a deep mould of leaf and soil. But now a difficulty arose, strangely unforeseen in the midst of all their labours: they could not agree on a hiding place because neither man could trust the other not to return to it alone and take all the gold for himself.

Strange and absurd situation, Paris thought, lying wide-eyed in the darkness, the two exhausted men quarrelling there by the stream as the sun climbed above them, coming to blows at one point, if Barton was to be believed, over two sacks of dust. “It came to me that Haines was not a man to be trusted,”

Barton said, glancing at the faces round him, restored to the community of honest men.

The solution they had hit upon was for each man to bury his sack in a place of his own choosing. And it was then, in the interval between reaching this decision and summoning the energy to carry it out, that an amazing stroke of good fortune occurred to save Barton’s life. “Luckiest shit I ever had in my life, lads,” he said, looking haggardly from face to face, inviting them to share his luck, repeating the fact in that rapid, toneless voice of his nightmare: “Luckiest shit of my whole life…”

Luckyshit Barton, Blair had begun to call him after that, and so he was known to everyone now, even the toddlers who did not yet know why.