The Penalty

by Mal Peet

  The pai had given me a carrying fire. His teachings. That is why I did not go ghost. That is why I went through death and came out the other side.

  One morning I was woken up not by the cold or by the poke of Billywells’s foot but by a great clamour of shouting. The white men were very excited. Some danced on the floor of the ship with their arms around each other. Some made a criss-cross sign on the front of their bodies.

  At first I thought it was just another shadow of rain cloud on the edge of the sea. Then I saw that it did not drift and change. It was land. This land.

  There was wind and little sweeps of rain on our backs, and the bellies of the sails were full. By the middle of the day I could see hills and trees. That night, the ship rested for the first time. There was land ahead and to the side of it, and when the moon rose I saw a pale line where the water ended. That night too, Billywells brought a barrel to the middle of the ship and pierced it, and it leaked drink into the white men’s cups. I hid in the cooking shack when they got fierce and noisy, but Billywells came to me and poured some of the drink into my mouth. It was wet fire, and I thought he was killing me because he had no more use for me. I fought and spat but some of it burned down into me and my stomach rose up against my ribs. This made Billywells happy, and he rubbed my head and went away shouting.

  We did not land in that place. The ship sailed close to the shore for two more days. I could smell the trees. And we came at last to a world of stone. A long rampart of stone and wood rose out of the water, almost as high as the walls of the ship. From the top of this rampart a great space stretched away, and the ground was also stone. This space was full of people and all sorts of loud work, and I did not know whether it was a joy or a terror to see that most of the people were black like us, although they wore clothes like the white men. Things I did not know the names of were heaped all around, and there were strange four-legged animals wearing baskets on the sides of their bodies. Also houses of stone. One of them was very big, bigger than any house I had ever seen, with a great gate in it like an open mouth. Then came a grey cliff that reached up to the sky. And I saw that there was a crooked road climbing the cliff, and people and the basket animals were going up and down it in lines like leaf ants in the forest.

  When our men and women were brought out of the belly of the ship, some of them moaned in fear when they saw where they were. But many were too weak even to cry out, and some had the big-eye sickness and could see nothing. Many had legs that would not unfold and they had to be carried from the ship on hammocks hung between two poles. Black people did the carrying, and some of us tried to speak with them, but they would not answer. Some of them were weeping. I still had strength because I had not been chained and because of the extra food that Billywells had given me. So I was made to carry a man in my arms down onto the hot stone earth. He was taller than me and bigger, but he was like bent sticks with a head. He weighed almost nothing, but I staggered and almost dropped him. My legs had forgotten how to walk on level ground.

  We were taken into the mouth of the big house. Other people were in there already, among the shadows, and when they saw us they sang and mourned.

  We were there for many days. We slept on dry grass and we had coverings at night. White men came and looked closely at us and gave us bitter medicines. Also food, not only the filthy porridge but strange fruits and bird meat and a kind of bread. Most of us lived. We learned to walk again, growing stronger.

  And when we were strong enough to bear it, the white men burned a mark on the front of our shoulders with a red-hot iron.

  THE DAY CAME when we were taken up the crooked road that climbed the cliff. We were all joined together by a chain and this made the walking difficult. Stones bit our feet. On one side of the road there was only airy nothingness and a great fall which filled me with a kind of drifting sickness when I looked at it. We climbed so high that we were level with the great black birds that sailed across the face of the rock, turning their grey heads to look at us.

  When we reached the top of the cliff many of us cried out in fear and wonder. Because we found ourselves in a great city of stone houses that filled our sight, and they were magical colours, and some had towers that were taller than the masts of the death ship. And what marvelled me was that light burned from many of the windows, so bright that I could not look. I thought these houses must have their own suns prisoned inside them. This was the first time I saw glass, a thing I came to love. Sheets of nothing that you can touch, and see through without being seen. Like the thin invisible wall you step through if you die.

  And the towering city of coloured stone was full of people. Black people like us, and white people. It took some time for me to understand that the white people who had no legs, who floated in great robes, were women, because the robes covered their breasts. As we climbed the last steps, the sky filled with the sound of bells and many people came towards us, calling out in their languages and pointing. They surrounded us like a cloud of bright-coloured flies when we were led along the hot stone road between the houses. We were almost naked. We had been given small aprons of cloth which hardly covered our sexual parts, and the women stared at us, hiding the lower parts of their faces behind little screens like painted palm leaves. And I saw that there were black women who did the same, and who wore long robes like the whites, and my mind struggled to understand this.

  In a great sloping space between the houses we were chained to a wall by our necks and hands and feet. There was a roof of dry grass above our heads, shading us from the sun who was in a cruel mood. We were all croaking our thirst, and after some time we were given water. Things were done to us. Many people came to touch us, our arms, our legs, our sexual parts. A man pushed my head back and forced my mouth open and looked into it. When he had gone, the bitter taste of his fingers lasted a long time.

  Then a white man and a black man stood in front of us. The black man beat a blood-red drum and the white man held a long black stick in the air. His face was covered in sweat so that it looked like a mask of polished wood with black eyeholes. The crowd became silent. He spoke to them in a great voice, then came close to us. He laid his stick on the shoulder of the first man chained to the wall, and when he did so many of the white people in the crowd called out and lifted their arms. There was much shouting and sometimes laughter like barking. Then there was a quietness, the black man struck his drum, and the white man made marks on a paper.

  I was the fourth in the line, and when the stick touched me all the eyes of all the people also touched me. It was the first time in my life so many people had looked at me, and the power of their looking made me tremble so much I thought my legs would fail and I would fall and choke on the iron collar that clutched my throat. Then it was over and the white man made his marks on the paper and moved his stick to the man chained next to me.

  When we had all been touched and shouted at, the white man went among the crowd, leaving the man with the drum close to us. He looked at me and spoke quietly in a language I did not understand.

  Then he looked more closely at me and used a different language, wonderfully my own. “Loma person? From the great river?”

  I nodded, feeling my heart grow big as prayer. I saw now that behind the drum and beneath the white man clothes there was a boy not much older than myself.

  He said, “You belong now to Colonel d’Oliviera. It could be worse.”

  I was silenced because I understood his words but not his meaning.

  “His place is two days’ boat from here.”

  Still I could find nothing to say. He looked to see where the white man with the stick was, then turned his face back to me. “Who is your ancestor?”

  I answered, “Achache.”

  “The Dancer,” he said.

  “And the Magician.”

  He looked at the ground between us then lifted his face. “It would be best if you forgot him. Worship is useless here. We are beyond reach. Not even great Maco knows where we are. I have seen
things which teach me this. Soon you will see them too.”

  I licked my lips. I could not tell him about the pai and the burden of his knowledge that I carried.

  He said, “The white shits call this place El Mundo Nuevo, the New World. And they are right. There is nothing old and good here. Listen to me: be who they say you are and try not to die. That is all you can do.”

  “What is your name?” I asked him.

  But before he could answer, the white man with the stick came towards us calling, “Jaquito! Jaquito!”

  The boy bared his teeth at me, a smile that was not a smile.

  “That is what they call me,” he said, and turned away and played a summons on his drum.

  And then we stood in our chains and watched the whippings. We mourned and groaned because we had never seen such a thing done to men. Each one was tied to a rack like the ones we dried our nets on, back in the real life. Each one screamed and prayed when the first lashes struck him and then fell silent because – I thought – he had died. Blood ran down to the ground, and the skin on each back peeled away like the bark of the coloba tree.

  I WAS ONE of six men bought by Colonel d’Oliviera that day. One of the others was called Abela and he was also from the great river, although not from my village. We were taken to a yard with iron bars over the windows, where we slept. The next morning a white man came. His hair was greased tight to his skull and tied at the back with a cord made of skin. His nose was long and red and hooked, like a fish hawk’s beak. His eyes worried me. They looked like he had been weeping tears of blood. And I had seen him before. The day before. He had stood at the front of the crowd when we were sold.

  The black man who had watched over us in the night jumped up when he saw the white man and stood straight as a spear, so I thought that this was the colonel who owned me. It was not. It was Captain Morro. The overseer. A word I did not know then, but one I grew to know very well, and hate. He came close and looked at us. He had a smell that was sweet but also rotten. I knew this smell from the death ship. Rum.

  Ah, the pleasure I had, killing him. The richness of the smell in the forest, after the rains. The birds celebrating the new weather. How the life came out of him in thick slow bubbles as I kneeled on his shoulders to drown him in the brown water. And then I poured the rum on him and put the bottle in his hand.

  This was years later. But for me time is folded, like cloth.

  We were given clothes. Breeches and a shirt. It was stiff, the shirt, and harsh on my body until my sweat softened it. Then we walked in chains through the baking crowded streets of stone back to the edge of the cliff. Climbing down was worse than the climbing up had been. Abela went first. I tried to look only at his back because I was afraid the fainting sickness would take me. But halfway down I saw that at the foot of the cliff there was a great quarrel of the black birds. They fought and lifted and fell again, too many to count. And when at last we got to the bottom of the road I saw the reason for their business. A body, one of ours, lay burst in a gully and they were tearing at it. The eyes had gone and the face was a red mash. I felt a coldness in my blood, which frightened me. Later this coldness would be my power, but I did not know it then.

  Again we were put on a boat. It was difficult, because they would not release us from the chains and we had to climb down an iron ladder with our faces to the wall. The boat was not much longer than a war canoe, but wider. It had a small sail, bundled on the mast like the white funeral clothes on a thin old woman. Four black men, two on each side, holding oars. At the front a white man with black fur on his face sat watching us, a gun across his folded legs and another one beside him. With his arms he told us to sit.

  We waited a long time while things we did not understand happened. Then Morro climbed down the iron ladder, shouting up at people who stood above us. Sacks and bundles were handed down with a great amount of fuss and argument. The boat rocked and banged against the wall. Morro at last sat himself in a shelter made of cloth at the back of the boat. He had a glass bottle in his hand, half full of golden liquid.

  At first the men rowed the boat. Then we passed a tongue of land and the wind and the waves grew. Sprays of water like thin rain landed on our skins, and the boat shuddered. I saw that Abela was afraid. The four men took their oars from the water and laid them down, then two of them untied the cords around the sail and it opened with a sound like thunder-crack, but softer. The boat swung and tipped. Abela hung his head between his knees and groaned. Morro shouted orders and pulled at a beam of wood fixed to the back of the boat. The sail filled with wind, and it was as if a great hand lifted us and we flew over the water. Morro drank from his bottle and then, amazing me, he began to sing.

  Our flight across the sea slowed. The sail rippled and banged. Morro called out, and the oarsmen pulled on ropes. The sail swung and filled its belly again. The boat leaned. The waves now came from behind us, and broke into small pieces and ran away. I began to see sticks and leaves and sometimes big fruits drift past us, and then thickening streams of different-coloured water. When I saw forest on both sides of the boat, I understood. We were on a river. A wide, slow, green river.

  My thoughts struggled in my head like a hooked fish. I wanted to believe I was coming home. Perhaps I had been in dream time, taken on a vision journey so I could receive the teachings of the dying pai. And now I was waking, returning to share the warning stories of what I had seen. Or perhaps the white men’s ship had sailed all the way round the bowl of the world, back to the beginning, and just beyond the next bend I would see my people waiting to greet me, glad that I had passed my manhood ordeal.

  The sail finally slumped and died. The men lashed it into bundles again and bent to their oars. I looked at Abela and saw that he too was full of wonder, and that home thoughts had tricked him, also. Because tears lay in the hollows below his eyes. How cruel hope is, and what a sly hunter!

  IN THE AFTERNOON of the second day the river changed its mood. I had slept through most of the morning so that the ache of remembering would not go on. I saw that although we seemed to be still in the same place, the water had coils in it and a rougher skin. The sky was grey like light shining on a knife. I smelled rain coming. Ahead of us, small islands covered in low bushes divided the river. I remember thinking it would be a good place to fish. Now the men broke their rhythm to let the river carry the boat closer to the trees. Then they would dig deep into the water, their muscles hard beneath their skins, and we would swing out again. They had good skill. But Morro had been rum-drunk the night before, and sat slumped with his arm on the steering beam, looking as if he had eaten bitter fruit.

  We were close to a low island made of sand and small stones when the rain came down on us. It was good steep rain, and I lifted my face to let it run into my mouth. Then something punched the bottom of the boat. The men lifted their oars and called out. Everything tipped. I thought of the terrifying Big Mouth that walked underwater in Loma’s river, and fear rose in my throat.

  But it was not that. We had wandered from the deep water, and the belly of the boat had run onto the soft floor of the river. It was Morro’s fault, and he tried to hide his shame inside anger. With shouts and kicks he drove us to one side of the boat while the oarsmen used their oars like poles on the other side. It seemed to work. The stern came free and drifted out, but then it was seized by the current. In a heartbeat, the boat swung round, its nose still stuck in the mud. Morro roared and fell upon the steering beam, but it was too late, and the oarsmen who now rushed to our side were blocked by our bodies and all was a confusion of arms and legs and chains. Now we were pointing back the way we had come, and in the grip of the river. Then another great blow to the belly of the boat and it stopped again. The gun man stumbled and would have fallen on top of us if he had not wrapped one arm around the mast. I looked down into the water and saw swirls of mud and dark tangles of underwater grass. The only sounds were the hiss and prickle of the rain falling onto the river.

  Morro stood
up. Water dripped from his chin and beak. He kicked the boat and said the same word many times. Mierda, mierda, mierda. The same word he used for us. Shit.

  Morro looked down at us with his bloodstained eyes. He spoke, but not to us, because the gun man replied. We knew Morro did not like the answer because he roared the same words again. The gun man lifted his shoulders, then opened a box and took out a hammer and a thick iron pin. He gave them to Morro who stooped and seized Abela’s arm. He laid it on the edge of the boat, then used the hammer and the pin to drive the bolt free of the iron bracelet on Abela’s wrist. The chain fell away. Abela was now divided from the rest of us. Strangely, I felt a kind of sadness. Then Morro took my arm and used the hammer and pin to free me from the next man. Abela and I looked up at Morro trying to understand his shouts and signs. We could not. The rain was thick now and cloaked his words and everything around us. It seemed that he wanted us to stand, so we stood. He showed his teeth and pushed us and we fell backwards into the water. It smacked us with a soft warm hand, like a mother.

  The boat was heavy, not like my people’s boats. Abela and I heaved at it with our hands and shoulders while Morro cursed down on us. The water was up to our armpits and the mud ran away beneath our feet. The oarsmen pushed against the river bed and signalled strength and courage, but we could not understand their words, and sometimes when we moved to a new position we sank deep and could find nothing to stand on. I worried because I knew the full strength of the river was waiting to carry the boat away like a leaf.

  It happened suddenly. The bow swung out. I looked up and saw the gun man’s face pass above me, his mouth a red hole in its fur. Then there was nothing but water beneath me and the great weight of the boat sliding onto me, forcing me under. I sucked in a breath, saw Abela vanish, then I was in almost-darkness.