The Playmaker (31 page)

“Sir,” she told him, “the savage is dying. I have it from Harry Dodd.”

Harry Dodd was a servant in H.E.'s house.

“Then you know him well?” Ralph could not prevent himself asking. “The savage?”

She had no trouble confessing it. In fact she did so at once. She had heard him crying at night. She had gone to the hut Bradbury shared with him and had tried to soothe the poor thing—he was tethered to the corner post inside by the chain attached to his wrist. At last Bradbury fell asleep on his mattress, and then so did the native. Her arms, it seemed, were around Arabanoo, and together they slept like two children in a fable.

“When I woke,” she told Ralph, “I discovered the native sitting up. He was there, cutting shallow little wounds in his chest with an oyster shell, and he told me by signs to be quiet. He sang one of those plainsongs he favours, but it kept Bradbury asleep.”

It was to this point a normal story which dealt with Dabby Bryant's usual ministrations. Now, though, it was to become fabulous, a matter of astounding magic which Dabby Bryant relayed in the same tone she used when arguing ordinary matters—such as whether or not she should be a player, whether or not Will Bryant should be boatmaster. Later Ralph would remember with surprise that he listened in the same manner, as if she were telling him about a fever or a recipe.

She said that while she watched the native she noticed he chewed on a tuber, the end of it sticking out of the corner of his mouth. She did not wake Bradbury—there was no doubt the native's song was deepening his curator's sleep. Arabanoo took the tuber from his mouth and forced it into hers. She chewed on it. “My head grew,” she told Ralph. “It hung over the place. But it was there too, small as a beetle, right by him. I saw him fold his big hand thinly on itself and slide the iron cuff off his wrist. Then he put down that bloody oyster shell and walked out of the hut.”

In the first of the light he led her past the fishing camp, where of course her husband, restored not only to the decent side of the stream but to the mastery of the fishing boat again, slept at their daughter's side.

This dream journey she recounted to Ralph seemed very geographic. She said the native had led her eastwards, over a hill covered in native cedars, to certain sharp rock ledges. And so to a crevice where lumps of quartz lay about. Smiling, he had picked up a triangle of quartz, and to her surprise—though not, it seemed, her alarm—cut into his abdomen with it.

This had been a serious opening of the body, unlike the decorative business he'd been engaged with when she first awoke. “He gouged away so hard that all in a hurry I could see his shining guts,” she told Ralph, and Ralph nodded, ordinarily astounded. “I'd go yelping at him, telling him not to do that. Yet I know it wasn't a grave wound for him, Lieutenant. For me or Will or Bradbury or any other Babylonian slave it could be a grave wound, and at another time of day or under a different sort of business, it might be a grave wound even for the Indian himself. But I knew that this cutting of his—it was no more to him than peeling off dead skin.”

Ralph felt a flush of concern that under certain influences his Dabby Bryant, his Rose, might believe it possible to inflict deep yet—to her confused mind—harmless wounds on her body.

“It was a poison he gave you,” Ralph explained, “and it made you see things.”

“I understand that, chuck,” she told him, piqued. “It was a dream, but—I tell you—a waking and walking one.”

So she had, in the manner of dreams, not felt too great an alarm when the savage uncoiled from his intestines a long rope of vine or gut. It ran forth slackly at first, but within a few moments was rising infinitely into the sky, toward the last of the stars. He took her by the waist, she said, and, climbing with her held by the ribs and dangling from him, drew her up that filament—that great green sinew—into a crowded wood. It was like the woods of her childhood, according to her description, the woods occupied outside Fowey by Gypsies and the families of failed mariners.

Yet this was—the way she relayed it—a redeemed forest and an Eden.

“Then we met the Mother and the Son,” said Dabby Bryant.

“The Mother and the Son?” Ralph asked her.

“The same ones,” she said. “The same ones you meet outside Fowey.”

Without being abashed at all, she was telling Ralph the gods of her childhood were Arabanoo's gods. Ralph felt an urge to ask, Who is the Son? Is it this Tawny Prince? But he did not ask it because Dabby Bryant went on about the encounter.

This Son, she said, had drenched the earth with the blood from his tooth, from which everything came, harbour and sea, mullet and oysters, cray and whiting. The clever ropes inside Arabanoo's belly connected him to this wonderful Son.

So Bryant understood—as she told it—that the savage was not a prisoner. “He was able to get out when he chose.”

But that Mother, she said, wasn't kind to Arabanoo. She warned him he'd been too easily charmed by H.E. Arabanoo's wife had arranged for him to be cursed because he had looked into the eyes of a pink-faced spirit. “Yet there was a clever man who could take the curse off the savage. She said the man's name was Ca-bahn.”

Hearing the wizard's name, and never having heard it before, Ralph had no doubt he would hear it again. Why, he could not say. It was a reason of the gut. He was connected to that name by a green sinew of thought.

Bryant recounted then how, by means she seemed to take as given, she and Arabanoo had returned from the sky to earth, to the hut and to sleeping Bradbury; and that, folding his hand like a flower once more, the Indian had enslaved himself inside the iron wristlet, while she had gone back to the fishing camp.

“How cruel it now is,” said Dabby Bryant, the tears beginning easily again. “the poor black man will perish of smallpox and think it is a curse.”

Ralph sat her down, soothed her, and pleaded to the player in her. The player, he hoped, would win over the generous witch. And indeed, perhaps because she knew there was no recourse she could take to help the savage further, she did revive at last. He could see in her face a desire to take on the shrewish country cunning of Rose again. It was as if she had passed on the burden of the savage to Ralph.

Composing herself, nodding—without much belief—at his promises to do what could be done with the Indian, she agreed to go up to the clearing for Act 5. He watched her finish the crossing and stride up to the place where the other players were gathering. He felt a rush of fraternal love for her. She had given him secrets, he was sure, that she could never pass on to Will Bryant.

Ralph found H.E. sitting at his writing table in the parlour of Government House, at the foot of the only stairwell in all this vast space. This was the stairwell which had so teased the mind of Arabanoo and at the head of which he now lay in fevered stupor, his coma on this side of town running parallel to that of Harry Brewer over on the west side.

By the parlour window sat Davy Collins. He nodded Ralph to a seat by the writing table. Ralph saw that H.E. wore a heavy coat and a fire had been set and was burning. H.E. looked starved. He stuck scrupulously to the rations, with the exception that he had a convict gamekeeper named McIntyre. It was probably a lifetime of griping naval food that had left him pale, and not only lean but crooked. It was known he had suffered extreme privations and dangerous business among the
degradados
, the convicts of Portugal, when as a young man he offered himself to serve with the Portuguese navy along the coast of Brazil. H.E. had confessed to spending time in a Portuguese penal city, Colonia do Sacramento, on the River Plate. There, H.E. had said during the first King's birthday dinner nearly a year past, the Portuguese had placed their convicts beyond the Tordesillas line, drawn by the Pope to divide Portuguese influence in Brazil from Spanish influence along the Plate, the Uruguay, and the Paraguay.

To test that line the Portuguese had founded Colonia do Sacramento far forward of the border, their own convict city. Yet it was not uniquely penal, H.E. had said, not all of it devoted to felonry; some of the land had been taken up by Portuguese orchardists, some by veterans of the Portuguese army. There was a time when Spanish ships in the Plate and Spanish artillery in the hills all about had this city of Colonia blockaded, and at that stage H.E. had been commander of the only Portuguese warship in the place. The township survived on illegal trading with Spanish farmers, a few fish, and dogs—wild and domestic.

Significantly, when H.E. had spoken of Colonia do Sacramento, the unhappy city, it was not in connection with hard rations and poor food. It was more as a reflection on the ironies of that ancient line of Tordesillas the Pope had drawn out around the earth, from the Amazon to the Moluccas, to separate the claims of the Spanish from those of the Portuguese. The British, out of respect not for the Pope but for their ancient ally Portugal, had drawn the line further out into space still, almost
ad infinitum
. H.E. had remarked at the table on the monarch's birthday a year before that his Letters Patent gave him power over all the country between this convict city to the east and the meridian of 135 degrees to the west, so that the line would not be violated even here, so far out in the earth's undesired spaces.

This unimaginable western meridian of 135, Ralph knew, lay sixteen hundred unvisited miles to the west of where he now sat, looking at the pallid governor and at H.E.'s frequent visitor Davy Collins. The spaces over which His Majesty had empowered H.E. had in any case little meaning when set against the reaches of criminality which still had to be traversed in the souls of the lags. H.E., though by temperament an explorer, a namer, a taker of longitudes and latitudes, here again, as in Colonia do Sacramento, lacked supplies. The fact seemed legible in his skinny frame. The fuel necessary for an inquiry into the millions of square miles which lay untagged in all directions was lacking. The Blue Mountains, forty miles away, beyond which the more ignorant lags believed China lay, were therefore as absolute an end of things as the edge of a flat earth would be. H.E. asked Ralph to sit down now, and Davy Collins asked after the play, and how Nancy Turner the Perjurer was performing? The old woman who worked for H.E. appeared briefly to ask Ralph if he wanted port, which he said he did not. When she left, H.E. began to speak.

“It seems the native is dying,” he told Ralph. “But it is very strange, very strange.”

“John White says it is smallpox,” said Davy. “But the native has no visible pox on the body. There is simply a terrible fever and a sort of poisoning within.”

H.E. took up the story again. “In his periods of lucidity he is much distressed, Ralph. It is appropriate—though there are many closed-minded people who might think otherwise—that in his distress he should have the comfort of physicians of his own race. Indeed he cries out for such comfort.”

“He calls out,” said Davy Collins, “for a
car-rah-dy
—that is what they call their priests. The name of the
car-rah-dy
is Ca-bahn. This Ca-bahn of course lives on the north side of the harbour, in the country from which we took Arabanoo.”

H.E. began to cough, took out a handkerchief, and continued his instructions murmuring into it. “I have asked Captain Collins, as a man who understands the importance of our connection to the Indians, to lead a small party to find Ca-bahn, both as a mercy to poor Arabanoo but also because that is perhaps where we should begin in any case to make alliances with the Indians. I mean, so to speak, with … something like a prelate or pontiff of the natives. I thought of yourself, Ralph, as an adjutant to Captain Collins in this excursion, since you had never shown yourself infected with that rancorous spirit which we find among many of the officers here.”

Davy said, “We will take two sections of men from your company, Ralph, and a small party of convict oarsmen and porters. We will camp tonight on the beach on the north side, and tomorrow go in search of Ca-bahn. It should not be too difficult a matter, and by now the outbreak of smallpox among them should have largely abated.” Davy Collins smiled. “You should be back with your playmaking the morning after next. I take it one of your convict players can oversee
The Recruiting Officer
until then.”

Both H.E. and the Judge Advocate smiled at him now. He looked away. He heard his own voice emerge thinly in the room. “I must make provision for one of the players, the convict Mary Brenham, who was beaten three nights past by Black Caesar and who has just left the hospital. Though she has been offered to stay in the fishing camp with the Bryants, I do not know if that is a proper locality for her and her son.”

He was ashamed of this maligning of Dabby, yet it was preferable to the shame of mentioning Wisehammer as a rival. Ralph was concerned as well by H.E.'s strange opinion of the Jews. If he confessed there was now a chance of Mary Brenham, one of the better she-lags, moving in for protection with Wisehammer, again one of the better lags, H.E. might well approve and tell him there was no need to make further arrangements for the girl. For as Dick Johnson would have complained, H.E. approved of the spirituality of Jews and natives, though not of that of Moravian Methodists.

It occurred to Ralph that Dick Johnson was exactly the man who should be used in this extremity. “I've asked the Reverend Johnson,” he lied, “to take her into his household and under his protection. For the present time.” For God's sake, not forever, he hoped. “I must now conclude these arrangements.”

Davy, who himself had a weakness for a convict girl, looked at him a little ironically but would not humiliate a friend before a viceroy. “We will not be pushing off till three o'clock, Ralph. Is that sufficient time?”

“Yes,” confessed Ralph.

“You will of course bring Private Ellis, who will carry your supplies for two days as well as his own.”