I looked—then looked away, and this time the guards did not prevent me. On the contrary, they seemed very anxious for me to take in the whole extent of the property, including the shelter and halter-rail that stood off to the right; it was obviously a stable of some kind, although there were no horses.
They were even more enthusiastic when I glanced away to the left, where a large pile of wood had been collected together, the timbers peeling and sick-looking. A woodpile for fuel, I thought—but what of that? Then I looked again and noticed a door among the timbers. Not a woodpile then. A cabin of some kind.
A prison. Our prison. Where we would stay until the chieftain returned.
We shuffled forward, Natty breathing quick and shallow beside me. That was the only sound I heard during our final seconds of daylight, and when I looked down all that I saw was the powdery dirt curling over my toes and against my ankles. It was nothing more than dust, but felt very precious to me because it was my last sight of the world. When we swung along the front of the chieftain’s house, and one of our guards ran ahead to remove a wooden locking-pole from the prison door, it still danced in front of my eyes. And still danced when the door slammed shut behind us, and the log scraped back into place, and we were drowned in darkness.
CHAPTER 7
A Conversation in the Dark
I lost my balance, covering my face with my arms to shield myself. But there was nothing. Just pinprick lights and cobwebs tickling my skin—and stink. A warm, sweet, cloying stink of putrid flesh, and I did not like to think what else.
Then there was Natty, my fingers sliding through her hair and over her forehead and mouth, brushing her neck, the collar of her shirt, taking hold of her shoulders. I tugged her toward me and held her close; when I pressed my face against her cheek it was wet with tears.
“My love!” I whispered, and she leaned more heavily against me. Farther off in the world, in the world that did not belong to us any more, footsteps retreated and a dog whimpered.
“I told you,” Natty said at last. “They will hurt us—they will.”
I was too tired to encourage her any more; I merely straightened a little, then eased away from her.
“Where are you going?” she asked, in a flurry of panic.
“Nowhere,” I told her, and might have smiled. “I’m looking.” I let my hands fall from her shoulders because my instinct, like an animal in a cage, was to see how far I could move in any direction. I could not think properly until I knew how much space we had, or how little.
“How can you do that?” Natty asked, more composed now. “How can you look, when you can’t see?”
“Easy,” I said, as if I felt more confident myself, and raised my fingers to the ceiling, poking them into a mesh of cobwebs.
I estimated it was seven foot high, then I groped my way from one side of the hut to the other.
This time, ten foot.
Then I started from the door—the one door, built in the wall that faced the village—and set off toward the farthest end of the hut. My eyes were adjusting now and I could see that the darkness was not absolutely black as I had thought at first; the cracks in the walls meant it was shot through with little darts and slivers of sun, which filled the whole cabin with an airy sort of twilight. I stopped in a narrow beam that showed the floor covered in silvery dust, scooping up a handful and holding it close to my face. It was oyster shells, ground into powder.
I walked on, but even more cautiously than before, because the stench in this farther part was much worse. Fifteen paces. Twenty—then something brushed my bare ankle. Rags, I thought; something soft, anyway, ashily soft and then suddenly hard, with a burst of flies like fat in a pan.
“Ah!” I reeled away, my stomach heaving.
“Jim!” Natty called. “What is it, Jim? Are you all right?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, struggling to keep from choking. “There’s something here.”
“What sort of thing?”
“I don’t…” I staggered backward another few steps, expecting to end up beside Natty again, but she did not want this. She was suddenly back in command of herself, and as I retreated she pushed ahead, floating into the gloom with her white shirt glimmering like a moth.
Then her breathing faltered. “Come here,” she mumbled. “I’ve found someone.”
Immediately, I put my hand over my mouth and went forward to kneel beside her. Although the light here was very dim I could see she was stooped over a man, though more a corpse than a man: lank hair, gaunt face, markings on both cheeks. By peering more narrowly, I saw these markings were painted in straight lines, not circles like the warriors in the village. This told me he must be a stranger, probably an enemy captured in battle.
I blinked once or twice, clearing my eyes as much as possible, and a clay bowl swam into focus—resting on his stomach with his hands clamped around it. Apart from that tight grip, there was nothing lifelike about him. His eyes were closed and his chin had sunk onto his chest; a string of saliva gleamed in the corner of his mouth.
“Why is he kept like this?” I asked, which was a stupid question. What I meant was: why haven’t they killed him already?
Natty clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “You tell me,” she whispered. There was none of her mockery in this, just acceptance; we were both equally at a loss. “But we might say the same of ourselves, don’t you think? Why haven’t they killed us already? What are they keeping us for?”
Her voice was steady, as though her questions had nothing to do with anything that mattered, and when I did not answer—when I could not think how to answer—she merely prised the bowl away from our friend and passed it over to me. Then she smoothed the hair on his head as if to say she would soon return, and led us back to our place by the door.
Here she told me to put down the bowl and sit side by side with her; she was breathing more easily now, we both were.
“He’ll die soon,” she said, perfectly composed.
“And we—” I broke off as a large blue-fly droned toward us from the end of the cabin, circled heavily over our heads, then buzzed back toward the invalid and settled again.
“And we will die soon as well,” Natty went on. “That’s what you were going to say, isn’t it?”
I paused again; the question was too enormous. “It depends on their chieftain,” I said at last. “He’ll decide.”
Natty considered this. “And when will that be?” she wondered. “You saw his house—no one’s been there for weeks. We’ve no idea where he is. We don’t even know he exists.”
“Oh, I am sure he exists,” I said.
“Really,” she said, with a definite smile in her voice. “We might be at home discussing our neighbors in London!”
The word “London” sounded so strange in my ears that I could not help smiling myself. “What else can we do?” I said, with a shrug.
But Natty’s mood had changed again; now she was cold and matter-of-fact. “Nothing,” she said. “We can’t do anything. You said so at the cliff.”
“I meant we should get their trust,” I said. “I meant we should fool them and make them lazy, then try to escape.”
“Escape from here?” Her incredulity roused her a little. “How will we ever do that?”
I ignored her question. “I expect if we’re not killed we’ll be sold,” I said. I had not wanted to seem angry. I wanted to sound cold like her, because I thought it was a sort of control. Instead I frightened her, and as soon as my last word sank in, my word “sold,” she suddenly pitched forward onto all fours and began scurrying around the perimeter of the prison, making a detour to avoid our friend but otherwise feeling along the timbers with her fingers, thrusting them into cracks, testing the foundations to see if they were well set in the ground, and eventually circling back to the door, which she banged and pounded until it creaked on its hinges. Then she collapsed beside me again, breathing quickly.
“Well?” I asked, still stubborn.
> “Not possible,” she panted. “Like you said.”
“Not by disappearing through walls, no.”
“How then, Jim?” she said, her voice high and desperate. “How shall we ever escape? How?”
“Other ways,” I said, and when I heard how unhelpful this sounded, how mean-spirited, I knew I had hurt her. But in my unhappiness I did nothing. I hung my head and fell silent, listening to the life outside. I heard women summoning their children and arguing together, then men’s voices giving orders until everyone stopped talking for a moment. And in that pause: birdsong, very brash and unlike our English birds, and the howling conversation of wild dogs beyond the village. The longer I listened, the more heavily every sound pressed down on me; each call, each growl and bark, crashing onto me like a stone, driving me into the earth.
I gave up and let my thoughts sweep me away. For miles in every direction, perhaps for hundreds or even thousands of miles, no one spoke our language or knew our customs. There were people, certainly: our fellow prisoner and our jailers and maybe other tribes scattered here and there. But no one we could appeal to for understanding. No one we could trust. The whole world was a wilderness.
I would certainly have continued in this way, falling and never reaching the end of my fall, if Natty had not saved me.
All her coldness had gone now, and her fear; the crackle in her voice, which was her thirst again, made my heart melt. “There will be other ways,” she said—my own words repeated, but calmly and kindly. “We will find other ways to escape from here, and reach England again.”
The words came to me like a blessing and I seized them in pure gratitude, stretching out my hand and laying it against Natty’s cheek, curling my fingers into her hair and pulling her toward me. I kissed her, my mouth finding hers in the darkness and feeling her lips as dry as paper.
For a moment she yielded, relaxing a little, then turned away.
“Natty,” I said, my hand slipping down to my lap. “Please, Natty…”
“Jim,” was all she said. “We can’t, Jim.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, my head spinning.
“Surely you know?” she said.
She was trying to protect me but I needed her to explain. “What?” I asked her bluntly. “You must tell me, Natty.”
She lifted her chin as though preparing for a struggle. “Very well.” Her voice was a little louder now. “If that’s what you want. We are where we are—in prison. We have a dying man here. We are nearly dead ourselves. This is not—”
I interrupted her; I knew I would sound wheedling, but I could not stop myself. “So when, Natty?” I said. “When if not now?”
She hesitated, and even in the half-light I could see that her eyes were wet. “I can’t,” she said at length. “I can’t—that’s all. And besides, we must be safe.”
“What do you mean, safe?” Again, I spoke despite myself.
Natty tipped her head backward and bit her lip; she would not let herself weep. “I mean they mustn’t know anything about us,” she said. “These people. If they know how we feel, they will hurt us all the more.”
She reached out and took my hand. “Now, please,” she went on, more quietly still. “Understand.”
She let go of my hand and looked away from me, facing the door of our prison; her shoulders were slumped as though she had used up all her strength.
Again I could not help myself, and when I opened my mouth the words that escaped me were not the ones I had meant to use.
“I will die of this,” I told her.
Five short sounds, but I regretted them bitterly. I hung my head in the darkness and waited for her to rebuke me.
“No, Jim,” she said. “You won’t die of this, not of waiting.” Then to show there was nothing to add she stretched herself out on the floor, as naturally as if it were her soft and familiar bed at home, folded her hands across her chest and closed her eyes.
A moment later I did the same, and the warmth of her body enveloped me as surely as if I held her in my arms. For a long time afterward my voice continued buzzing in my head, repeating the same words over and over. How would I not die of waiting? How would I not die of waiting?
CHAPTER 8
Angels of Mercy
My dreams were all of shipwrecks. Bleached faces and mutilated bodies; wide-open eyes with crabs scrambling across them; bruised lips and bloated fingers; hair dandled like weed in a current. And Natty on the seabed beside me, weightless and silent.
None of them could scare me awake—and, when they ended at last, and I drifted back toward the surface…
A song.
A song that was beautiful at first and very faint, part of a different dream. Without waking Natty I crawled across the dust and pressed my face to a crack in the timbers by our door. No good. Not wide enough to see anything. Except there was a piece jutting out from the timbers, a loose strip of bark I could tear off and so make a peephole—an eye on the world that measured an inch wide and a foot long.
Our lookout place.
I blinked as the breeze streamed into my eyes and found a miracle waiting—sunset gilding the horizon, with russet mist drifting across the tepees in the village, and the cornfields glowing beyond. A young man was there, balanced on one of the little heaps of stone: the light made his body shine like gold; in the foreground a woman was grinding corn in a bowl.
They were watching too, but not watching the sunset. And when I squinted sideways I could see why. A party of men was winding through the fields, following the same path that we had taken earlier in the day, and all singing in unison. I knew them at once; one of their leaders was wearing Mr. Stevenson’s blue coat, still back to front with the tails flipping over his knees and the high collar covering his jaw.
The savages had finished their day’s work and now they were swaggering home for food and congratulation, telling the village what they had found and showing them too: pewter cups from the captain’s cabin; pans from the galley; a carved gilt picture-frame with no picture inside it.
Only the four men heading the party, including the one dressed in Mr. Stevenson’s coat, were carrying these bits and pieces. The eight who followed behind them had a much more significant task, and I thought would have swaggered much more boldly if they had not been so weighed down. If they had not been carrying two stretchers they had made out of sticks and rushes, and if these stretchers had not been stacked with our silver. Two large and heavy loads, glittering like an enormous catch of herring.
On the Island I had often troubled myself about the silver, thinking we should not call it ours. Yet when I saw it lugged along by these savages, and the smiles splitting their faces, and the other brutes rushing out from their tepees to gloat over it, I thought I had lost something I deserved to call my own. They might as well have broken into my father’s house and robbed him while he slept. And robbed Mr. Silver too, who in that moment I remembered as a reformed character, launching the Nightingale on her adventure simply to right a wrong and finish a story.
When they reached the chieftain’s house opposite our prison they halted with a triumphant shout, and applause from the people now crowding around them. This noise finally woke Natty, who scuffled to my side. But we did not speak. We were too full of dread—and, if I am honest, of curiosity as well. The simplest actions seemed remarkable: the villagers returning to their tents and beginning to prepare for a feast—lighting fires, scouring pots, pouring oil, dropping in pieces of fish and meat and vegetable; the scavengers carrying the silver into their chieftain’s house. Yet as each man disappeared with his load, or stepped back into the twilight empty-handed, smoothing his hair and straightening his tunic, he kept his eyes on the ground and never once looked in our direction. Even when the work was finished they still ignored us, leaving two of their tallest fellows as guards (who immediately lay down on the veranda of the house and fell asleep), while the rest carried away the stretchers they had made, and joined their families in the village.
As they withdrew, a woman and child broke from the shadows around the tepees. At first I thought they merely wanted to see the silver again, or to wake the guards who were meant to be protecting it. But when they reached the veranda they turned in our direction, drifting over the ground as if their feet hovered above the earth and did not actually touch it.
I signaled to Natty that we should shift away from our peephole, so they would not discover it and close it up again. This meant that when the door opened—after a little scuffle with the locking-pole—we saw two silhouettes against the darkening sky, and could not read their expressions.
I wanted to say a friendly word and show we meant no harm, but as I was about to speak Natty put her hand on my shoulder. Our visitors kept silent as well, the child (a girl, no more than six or seven years old) staring and hunching a little, the mother more nearly upright and square-shouldered. So far as I could see, both wore the same sort of dress, made of hide and decorated with small stones. The mother’s hair was pulled back from her face into a single long rope; the child’s was worked into two smaller plaits that slid over her shoulders and swayed in the half-light.
Then the child stepped forward into the deeper darkness of the prison and toward our friend. I lost sight of her as she did this, but knew she had found him when I heard a grunt of pain—because she had kicked him or punched him. The mother chuckled, and when her daughter returned she nodded her head as a sign of approval.
I thought it would be our turn for some kind of insult next, but after piping a question to her mother, the child took from her two small bowls I had not previously noticed, and walked toward us very carefully, stopping a yard away; then she put them down on the ground without spilling a drop, before scuttling back to the doorway again and picking up the empty bowl we had left there.
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