I dropped onto my knees with my eyes closed, and when Natty touched my shoulder I trembled to feel its weight.
“Thank you,” she said.
But I could not look up yet. Fifty more bodies, was all I could think. Fifty more bodies, if all the ship’s company drift ashore.
Fifty bodies that will need fifty graves.
Fifty graves we must dig with our bare hands.
And no food to sustain us, and no shelter to cover us. And only rainwater to drink.
We would have managed somehow or other, I like to believe. In the event we never began.
CHAPTER 4
Savages
Up to this point I have been forced to collect my memories piecemeal; my sea-battering had scattered my wits. But I came to myself as we began our burial work. Salt and salt water drained out of me. Warm blood pumped into my toes and fingers. Exhaustion? Of course I was exhausted; we both were. But I could move, I could understand, I could speak—so I can tell my story more easily now, without always gasping for air.
After we had done our work with Rebecca, hiding her body beneath a mound of black stones, the next friend we hauled ashore was Mr. Creed, who had fought beside me on the sand of Captain Kidd’s Anchorage, beating away Smirke and his comrades. He was anonymous when I first caught hold of him, his face hidden by a rag of weed. As I pulled this aside and saw the pockmarks covering his cheeks and forehead, now all turned a peculiar clay color by the water, I remembered how much his disfigurements had embarrassed him in life. He often used to dab at them with his handkerchief, as though one day he might manage to blot them away entirely.
Then Natty called me, pointing to the cliffs again. High up where the zigzag path began she had noticed creatures scampering toward us. Dogs, I thought at first—a dozen or so. But they turned into people. People squeezing around the faces carved in the black rock; people slithering over the rolling eyes and long fangs; people skipping and scrambling and rushing the last few steps onto the beach and huddling to stare at us.
I jumped to Natty’s side and grabbed her by the hand. When I first saw Smirke and the rest on the Island I had felt terrified by their wildness. These men were not in the least bit wild; not savage at all in fact but very composed, standing stiff and straight with their weapons at their sides—bows, and axes, and arrows.
They were small, the tallest no more than five foot.
And young—twenty or so, the same age as ourselves.
With black hair combed away from their foreheads and slicked down with grease.
And clean-shaven faces decorated with swirls of green and red paint, which made their noses stand out like beaks.
With bare arms and legs but otherwise neat and tidy, wearing tunics of tanned animal hide, and moccasins.
And tucked into their belts, into every belt, a short knife with a bone handle.
“Who are they?” I was staring hard, as if this would keep them still or make them disappear.
“Red Indians,” Natty said, still perfectly calm.
I knew the words—I had heard them in Mr. Clarke’s schoolroom at Enfield—but Natty might as well have told me they had fallen from the sun.
“They must be Indians,” she said; she had made up her mind. “What else can they be? We’re in America.”
I stared at the ground thinking how the storm had blown us back past our Island and into the Bay of Mexico, how it had swept us north in the final part of its rampage, how this meant we must be—where in America, exactly? I remembered Mr. Clarke again. I saw the map he had shown us. I saw the Bay of Mexico like a gigantic mouth, and on the northern shore the long spit of Florida, Louisiana with its marvelous big river, the desert of Texas.
Then I looked up. “We are in Texas!” I said, like a conjuror producing a bird from his hat.
Was there ever a stranger geography lesson? We were guessing at territories, knowing we might be killed any minute.
“Which means…” I went on, “it will be easier for us to get home.”
“Why on earth?” Natty asked.
“Because the English are in America.”
“The English are everywhere,” Natty said, as if our countrymen made no difference to anything. But I did not want to hear this. I felt so encouraged to know where I stood on the earth, I turned back to the Indians and lit up a smile.
It was well meant but not well done; it made them decide they had waited and watched long enough, and now should begin strutting forward—which they did while bunching closer together, and bulging their eyes, and wrinkling their foreheads, and sticking out their tongues. I thought the cliff behind them had come to life and its demons had leaped down to hurt us.
Natty was more sensible. Letting go of my hand, she picked up two stones from the beach and weighed them to show she was wondering which might be the better to throw.
This at least made the men stop still and give up their eye-rolling and tongue-waggling. Instead they began a strange chant: a very ugly sound, like wild dogs yowling for food.
“Natty.” I put one hand on her arm. “We must show them we’re friends.”
“But how, Jim?” Her calmness had all disappeared and she sounded faint with fear.
“By doing nothing,” I said, but she never heard me because the chant had reached its climax, which was a loud explosion of yelps, with the Indians shaking their bows above their heads.
Natty threw down her own weapons at once—her poor stones—and when they saw this the Indians finished making their noise and looked at us carefully for the first time, as though they were only now noticing the different colors of our skin, and our ragged clothes, and our bare feet, and our bedraggled hair and our bruises.
I thought they had taken pity on us and began hobbling forward, but this only made them lose patience. A moment ago we had been fellow creatures sucked from the ocean by the storm; now we were intruders and they felt free to hate us.
Two of the men stayed as they were, gripping their spears straight up at their sides like guards, while the other ten hurtled toward us screaming at the tops of their voices; the insides of their mouths were stained black as ink.
Natty and I raised our fists—ready for them, but in truth very pathetic. No matter, though; instead of knocking us down the men tore straight past; to my amazement they did not even glance at us; we might not have existed.
Were they like cats, deciding to murder us slowly? That was my thought, but when I turned to look—when I cringed and looked, I should say—I saw the men were still sprinting toward the sea, still ignoring us, and only pausing when they reached the water’s edge. Here they made a huddle again, chattering urgently before breaking apart and scampering along the shoreline, one of them stopping every few yards until they stood at regular intervals around the whole crescent of the bay.
Was it the wreck they wanted to loot, was that all? And if so, were we free to leave? I glanced back at the two men left to guard us, but they were scowling and gripping their spears more tightly than ever. Daring us to run, I thought, so they could skewer us, then hack us to pieces.
The idea was so frightening we stayed perfectly still.
A minute passed and none of us moved, or took our eyes from each other.
Another minute.
Then suddenly our guards began strolling toward us, swinging their arms with insolent slowness, stopping only when their faces were inches from our own. I smelled fish on their breath and winced away, but they would not allow this and one of them seized my chin; he made me face him again and began fiddling inside my shirt, along the waistband of my breeches, pinching me and prodding me. The other guard did the same with Natty, and giggled as he touched her.
“Jim…?” Natty’s voice was trembling. “What shall we do?” Both guards had finished their inspection and now they were leering at her, wiping their hands across their mouths.
“Nothing,” I said, still as steady as possible.
“Nothing again?”
“There’s nothing we c
an do.”
“What do you mean? We have to do something!” Natty spun round to face toward the waves and I followed, thinking our guards would haul us back. In fact they seemed pleased, because now we had to watch the rest of their troop, the savages along the shoreline who while our backs were turned had all stripped naked and begun scouring the water, launching themselves forward whenever a body appeared. They did this very nimbly, gleaming through the waves with their warpaint fading along their arms and shoulders, seizing a prize, then wrenching it up the beach as though it weighed nothing at all.
The first two or three of our friends they landed in this way, including Mr. Creed, were poor creatures who never owned anything valuable in their lives, not even a bracelet or an earring; their bodies were tossed aside as worthless. But when one of the men found the remains of Bo’sun Kirkby, who wore a gold band that remembered the wife waiting for him in London, he pulled the knife from his belt and sliced off the finger as if he was cutting a rose from a rose-bush.
As easily as that; the butcher had no human feelings at all. He slipped the ring onto the middle finger of his own left hand, then without pausing he lunged forward again to jerk the bo’sun’s head from the stones and flourish his knife. Once he had addressed himself to his task in this way, with relish, he sliced around the crown of the bo’sun’s head to strip the bald white skin from the scalp, pursing his lips to show it was a delicate job and required him to concentrate. Then he hoisted his trophy into the air; then he tucked it into his belt alongside his knife; then he turned back to the waves, looking for his next victim.
“No!” Natty whispered. “What’s happening, Jim?”
She meant me to comfort her but I was dumbstruck. I thought I had seen our own death. I thought it must come soon.
“Should we tell them about the silver?” Natty was desperate now, but still thinking more clearly than me.
“Why would we do that?” I spoke in a kind of trance.
“Jim. Listen to me.”
“I am listening.” I might not have been; I was looking toward the cliffs, but when I saw the stone creatures writhing inside their rock-prison I swung away again, scanning the gulls as they flocked above our wreck, or the sails of the Nightingale blooming underwater like colossal flower-heads, or the day’s first weak sun-shafts lancing down through the waves toward our silver on the seabed, or anything except our guards.
Then they were stampeding forward again, spinning us apart and separating us. We staggered on the stones, we floundered, and a moment later we all stood in line: one guard, me, Natty, the other guard.
“Speak to him,” Natty said, meaning our leader who had turned to confront me; her voice was imploring. “Be simple, Jim. Be kind as you are.”
I felt touched by this, and another time would have said so. Now I only cleared my throat, and said what had always been in my mind, speaking slowly and clearly.
“We come as friends.”
There was no reaction, no light in the hard brown eyes.
“We are your friends,” I said again, louder this time but still meaningless.
Meaningless and apparently outrageous, because my guard began chewing like a rabbit, pursed his lips, hollowed his cheeks, then cracked open his mouth and spat out a jet of disgusting black liquid. Some landed warm on my face, the rest on the tatters of my shirt so I felt it through the cotton.
Tobacco juice. I stood my ground, wiping the foul stuff away, although it clung to my fingers even when I smeared them on my shirt, my breeches, the stones at my feet. But this was outrageous too. So outrageous the guard spat a second time and then began to harangue me, spattering me with his saliva.
I withstood this tirade as well, but my heart froze inside me. I thought: when this is done he will murder me, because I have offended him so much.
But when his fury burned out he did not even reach for his knife. Instead, with a flash of his yellow teeth, which I suppose might have been a smile, he led us to the foot of the cliff, where he ordered us to wait for a moment.
Although Natty was standing behind me now I heard her distinctly. “Good-bye,” she said, as a drizzle of pebbles blew down from the carvings above, and under my breath I finished what she had begun. Good-bye to the Nightingale; good-bye to our friends; good-bye to our fathers; good-bye to England; good-bye to the lives we had known as children; good-bye to each other.
Then the guards growled again and I set my foot on the path. We began to climb.
CHAPTER 5
On the Clifftop
The cliff path was hardly a path; it was shallow steps hacked into the rock, and so steep I soon dropped onto all fours, telling Natty she must do the same. Our climb was therefore very slow and painful, and also very frightening. Stones cut my hands, my fingers, my knees, my feet. Lunatic eyes glared at me. Bulbous lips puffed at me. Gusts of wind buffeted and blustered—the last gasps of the storm. Once I slithered so far into empty space, only a tuft of grass kept me alive. And all the while our guards never lost their footing, but skimmed over the ground as though their moccasins were skates.
I had no breath for talking and no inclination, except at halfway when I muttered “Nearly there” to encourage Natty. The guard in front of me immediately whisked round and slapped my face; the sting of his hand stayed on my skin like a burn-mark.
“Silence,” he shouted—not that word of course, but his own ferocious yap.
After that, it would be too much to say I was thinking. I was too tired to think and too nervous. But I was not completely blank. I told myself that if cruelty was so natural to these men, we would only survive by convincing them we were broken, so they would lose their concentration and let us escape. Escape to what I had no idea; I thought freedom itself would be enough.
When I reached the end of the path I therefore made a pretense, humbly dragging myself over the last few yards, gazing wretchedly at the wounds in my hands, then flinging myself down with no more breath in my body.
The ploy succeeded after a fashion. When Natty collapsed beside me and seemed to be just as spent, our guards smiled at one another like smug farmers whose cattle have been driven safely to market.
In fact I was very relieved to lie quiet for a while, with the tangled smells of the earth filling my head, and the muggy breeze tousling my hair. I even let myself drift toward sleep for a while, or at least toward somewhere far distant, where I was not in danger.
But I had curiosity too; I wanted to know where we were, and a minute later hoisted upright again. Our clifftop, which was an arc enclosing the whole bay, was the only high ground for miles in any direction. A hundred yards to my left, and the same to my right, and the same facing inland, it sloped down to a wilderness where the course of our hurricane showed like the track of a colossal carriage. And either side of this track, where the country was still unscathed: gray sand with silvery meres and gullies. And beyond these: red-brown earth, and steam blowing here and there as if the earth had been molten lava only a moment before, and we were the first inhabitants.
As for our clifftop, the centuries had worn it bare, so I thought it would look clean and simple in good weather. Now it was a bump of chaos, littered with leaves and seaweed. Why had God landed us here, I thought, when anywhere else the Nightingale would have crashed into soft sand, and her cargo might have been saved? There was no explanation. What had happened had happened by chance, unless it had all been arranged by devils in the rock beneath us. Unless they had summoned us and we had not been able to resist them.
I scrambled to my feet and pulled Natty upright beside me. Her face was streaked with mud, and gashed across the forehead where a stone had struck her.
“The end of the world,” she said, staring around and reeling a little in the breeze.
“Or the beginning,” I said, putting my arm around her waist to steady her.
“How do you mean?” she said.
I glanced at our guards to see if they minded us talking like this, but they were already bored with
their power, and had moved away to admire the work of their friends on the beach below.
“Because we are here,” I said.
“And that’s enough?”
“It’s everything.”
“It’s all we have, you mean.”
“It’s all there is.”
Natty spoke cautiously, as though our talk was a game and she could not decide which play to make next. In the end she gave up and broke away from me; for a moment I thought her strength had gone and she wanted to lie down again. But she was quite deliberate. She tested her balance, then walked carefully toward the edge of the cliff. When there were only a few inches of land left, she looked round and gave me a cat’s smile, as if she knew a secret but would not say what it was.
“Natty!” I shouted, my voice drowning those of the guards who barked at her, then crouched down astonished. “Get away from there! Come back!”
Her answer was to keep facing me and stretch out her arms sideways, so she hung crucified on the empty air, with the whole swerve of the bay widening behind her.
I found myself gazing at her calmly despite the danger. Why this should have been I cannot say—some part of my brain demanded it, as though I had grown so used to her company in the last weeks and months, I needed to remind myself what she looked like. She was beautiful with her slenderness, and her short black hair in its coils, and her liquid eyes, and her brown skin like river-water. But it was not her beauty that held me. It was her wildness. Her quickness that made her seem like a bird who had learned the ways of mankind, but might renounce them again at any moment.
I am not sure how long I rambled like this in my mind; for a second that passed as slowly as an hour. And when I came back to myself, I found that I was imploring our guards to help me rescue Natty and pull her away from the cliff-edge and save her.
All to no avail, because now their surprise had worn off and they no longer cared what happened. She was not so precious as she had seemed at first, not enough for them to risk their own lives, at any rate. When one of them knocked the other on his arm and grinned, I thought he was saying if she jumped she jumped: that was fate as well.
The New World Page 2