I leaned closer to see what she had given us, but even this slight movement was too much for the child. She suddenly seized her mother by the hand and dragged her away from us over the threshold—at which our door banged shut, the locking-pole rasped into place, and the patter of their footsteps quickly faded. Although I was very hungry, and thirsty enough to have swallowed a whole barrel of water, I sat so still I might have been stunned; the turgid air of our prison swilled around us again, and the sour stink of our friend.
“They’ve gone,” I said after a little while, which was only to state the obvious.
“What is it?” Natty tipped onto her hands and knees and bent to sniff one of the bowls like a dog. “Water,” she said cautiously. “And this…” She dipped one of her fingers into the second bowl. “This is porridge.”
“Porridge?” I almost smiled again. “Surely you mean gruel?”
Natty sucked her finger-end. “Acorns. They think we’re pigs.” Then she sucked her fingers again. “No, corn. Corn. Here.”
She was pointing to the water-bowl, meaning I should drink from it first. “After you,” I told her, as if we were sitting at a table at home and minding our manners. As if, I thought in a flash, we were husband and wife.
Natty lifted the bowl to her lips and took two or three slow gulps, which made the saliva seep into my own mouth; then she passed it to me. The dusty liquid squeezed through my lips, over my parched tongue and sank heavily down my throat. I had never tasted anything so sweet; it almost knocked me unconscious.
“Jim,” I heard Natty say, which I thought meant she wanted more for herself. But when I gave her the bowl she climbed to her feet and disappeared toward our friend. I heard him swallow once, and felt the pang of not having helped a stranger myself; then she came back to my side and we shared the second bowl together.
She was right; it was corn, pulverized into a paste with some water added and foul-tasting as glue—but delicious all the same. When I had eaten a few mouthfuls, and Natty as well, I made amends for my neglect a moment before by taking the rest to our friend, and feeding him with my fingers; he was not able to swallow, and the mixture remained to harden on his lips.
I did not mention this when I came back to Natty, only placed the empty bowl beside its pair and sat down beside her again. Another idea had occurred to me, which made me think the child and her mother were not angels after all. They had given us food to keep us alive—but not out of kindness. They had fed us like pigs for slaughter, so they could kill us whenever they chose.
CHAPTER 9
Black Cloud
When exactly does day become night? On the marshes at home I used to watch sunlight dropping from yellow to gold, from gold to purple, from purple to charcoal, all the time thinking that darkness would come soon—then glanced around to find it had fallen already. I had missed the moment of change!
In our new world the differences were more clear-cut. One minute the sun glared on the horizon, and a second later it had vanished completely. The darkness that flooded our cabin then was so deep, we might have been locked inside a stone.
“Natty,” I whispered, but she was asleep so I went back to my watching.
Very soon another kind of light sprang up, a bonfire blazing in the pit in the meeting-ground fifty yards off, and streaking the faces of everyone clustered around: women and children in the background, men closer to the center.
Then a steady pulse began—tom-toms, played by a group of warriors sitting on the ground—and the remainder of the men began to dance. Not as we dance at home, in pairs or rows or columns, but rushing forward to make a ragged circle, jerking up their knees and pumping their arms like runners. As the smoke blew across them, making their bodies appear filmy and transparent, I thought they might have been lunatics in Bedlam, all screaming and yelping and lunging at one another with their spears.
Natty woke from her sleep at last, and so did our friend at the farther end of the prison; we heard him whimpering like a puppy as if he knew the meaning of everything we had heard outside, and how it would end.
And sure enough, when the drumbeats began pounding more fiercely than ever, two of the dancers lurched away from their circle and raced up the slope toward us. After they had unlocked and opened our door, which made me and Natty scramble away into a corner, they stared around for a moment as if they really believed our friend might have escaped, which was merely a piece of cruel theater, then plunged toward the end of the cabin and seized him and hauled him outside, pausing only to lock our door behind them.
As he sank down the slope away from us, I saw our friend forget his sickness and begin twisting between his guards like a wildcat—lurching and reeling, stumbling and rising, swaying forward and then heaving back. They dragged him straight to the meeting-ground and so to the fire, which had now sunk low in its pit and glimmered bright crimson, splashed with traces of pale ash.
All this happened so quickly I had no chance to feel any horror; I just stared in silence, even when the guards took our friend to the far end of the pit, where he faced the crowd and our prison on the slope above, then lashed his left arm to a stake driven into the ground beside the fire and swung on the rope to make it tight. Once this was done, they seized his right arm and tied it to a second stake planted nearby, which meant he was canted forward like a diver, teetering on tiptoes to escape the worst of the heat. But this was no help, because the guards simply heaped fresh brushwood into the pit and made the flames revive. Everyone watching enjoyed this; they clapped and moaned and sighed like the crowd at a circus.
Natty pushed away from her place beside me at our peephole. “Jim,” she said, in a shaking voice. “Don’t look any more!”
I could not answer and I could not move.
“Jim,” she said again, but muffled now, and glancing round I saw she had curled into a ball, closing her eyes and pressing her hands over her ears.
I still did not move. I had the idea that I must see the worst, so I would be able to meet my own death more bravely when the time came, and looked back to the fire-pit again. The two guards were now standing either side of our friend, but a little behind him to escape the heat. The larger one was holding a knife—I saw the blade gleam—and I thought he was about to kill him. But the knife made only a casual sort of strike, a lazy stab and twist that left him still alive. Yet the wound was wide enough. Wide enough, that is, for the other guard to push his hand inside our friend’s stomach, and ferret around, and catch hold of a piece of gut, and drag it out, and keep dragging it inch by inch like a fisherman pulling in a line, until it lay at our friend’s feet in a slimy coil.
Our friend made no sound in his agony, not a single cry, and I continued staring.
I watched the guards take hold of a pair of wooden clubs given to them by others in the crowd. Then I watched while they began walloping our friend’s legs and back. Then, when he could no longer cringe from the heat, I watched his body slump forward and the pool of his guts slide into the fire-pit and begin to roast.
Now at last I turned away and sank onto the ground. At the same time, I felt my mind expanding suddenly, traveling beyond the wilderness and the night-creatures around our prison until I came to the marshes near my home in the Hispaniola. I saw the moonlight there, quivering in creeks and gullies. I saw the flocks of white gulls sleeping on the mudbanks. I saw my father at home in his bedroom, with the Thames rippling beneath his window and the night-traffic of coal barges and other ships casting their shadows across the water. I did not spy into his face because I did not want to remember how unhappy I had made him. Neither did I want to catch myself in the room, because I knew it would remind me of how I had knelt beside the chest at the foot of his bed, and how I had betrayed him by stealing the map of the Island.
I wanted to be there, but invisible. I wanted to inhale the scent of the rush matting on the floor; to hear the lovely regular tick-tock of the clock, and the faint scratch of its minute hand passing round the dial; to remember the surpr
ising tidiness with which my father laid out his clothes for the morning, like a boy nervous for his school-day. To find everything I had known from my own childhood, and would find waiting for me when I returned.
When I returned. If I returned. The words trampled on each other, and I shook my head from side to side in the silvery floor-dust.
“Have they finished?” Natty whispered, lifting her hands away from her ears, opening her eyes again.
“Yes, they’ve finished,” I said, which was the second white lie I had told her. I could not hear our friend, but I thought the savages must still be at work on him, slicing off his scalp and other parts.
Natty did not speak after that and neither did I. Maybe I slept. Maybe I stared at the ceiling in silence. All I know is that time passed and we were still alive when the sun rose, and still able to feel grateful when our door creaked open again, and our guardian angels flew in from the sunlight and put more food and water before us.
When I thought of these two standing in the crowd I had seen a few hours before, I knew they must be devils as well as angels—which should have made the food revolting. But it did not. Although Natty and I both rolled away into the shadows as they gave us our meal, we scrambled forward soon enough when they left us, and the door shut behind them again.
In this way our routine was settled; one meal after sunrise each day, one around sunset, and both always the same water and corn-paste. In between: nothing—for ten days, twenty days, a month. Splinters of misty dawn, bursts of bright sun, smears of evening, streaks of moon. Mosquitoes attacking when they were hungry, otherwise jigging above our heads. Laughter, or cries, or shouts from the world beyond. Dog barks and turkey gobbles. Goats bleating. Long vigils at our peephole, where I learned the ways of the village so well I might almost have been a part of it—watching the men and women set off to the fields, and mill grain, and make oil, and sweep and cook and quarrel and reconcile.
It felt almost like sympathy, and came with a consequence I never imagined. For the better I knew our enemies the more remote I became from my only true friend. From Natty, I mean. Over the long days and the longer nights our conversation stumbled and stalled. Our minds shriveled. Even our small acts of kindness ended—holding hands while we fell asleep, lying in one another’s arms. Our old selves, our original selves, wandered off from one another. We were separate now, together but separate.
And what was I doing when this wandering ended at last? Not planning my escape any more; not poised for action. I was kneeling in a corner staring at a spider as he worked in a crack in our walls, thinking how clever his web-making was; how ingenious. A fly was caught there, drawn in no doubt by the smell of our waste, which was bad however carefully we buried it in a corner under the dust. After a minute of buzzing and struggling he lay still, and the spider prowled forward to engulf him.
When I returned from this, it was to hear that a palaver had broken out in the village: boys shouting, footsteps running, children crying for their mothers, and mothers calling for their children. I left my spider to enjoy his meal and pressed my face to my peephole, brushing the hair from my eyes—my hair which was now long and matted. The tepees were all deserted, and so was the track leading back toward the Black Bay, yet the earth itself had a look of expectancy, such as I have often noticed while walking along a lane in England before a traveler appears. The dust seemed to be shivering slightly, readying itself. I knew at once who must be about to arrive.
The chieftain. Our judge and jury. Black Cloud, to give him his proper name, which I was soon to learn.
When he first strode round the curve of the path and everyone in the village surged forward to greet him, stretching out their hands to touch, screeching and hollering, I had only a general sort of impression. He was broad-shouldered, muscular, thickly covered in decorations, wearing moccasins and a tunic that reached to his knees. More strangely, I thought he seemed to shine; to glow with a faint and silvery light. Beside him was a smaller man, more compact, also wearing a tunic and moccasins, but with his face and arms and legs all streaked with red and yellow paint. And padding behind them, two savages I recognized from the Black Bay; they were leading almost identical brown ponies, which were smeared with sweat because they had been ridden hard.
Natty crept up beside me. We were both wide awake now and had to see everything; our lives would depend on it.
When Black Cloud reached the veranda opposite our prison, which meant he and the painted man were only some ten yards away from us, he turned toward the crowd and raised his arms; there was a gasp and then silence, broken by a dog yelping as it was driven away with a stone.
Now I saw why Black Cloud seemed to shine; why a luminous power seemed to hover around him. He was wearing a necklace that dazzled whether the sun struck it directly or not, and kept a pulse of light alive in his whole body. A necklace made of ten or twelve slim oblong silver pieces that were strung on a thin leather band. These pieces were longest at the center, three or four inches, then gradually smaller as they spread outward across his chest in a fan shape. When he lifted a hand to adjust them, a moan ran through the crowd and they knelt down and pressed their foreheads to the earth.
Black Cloud took his time, letting his gaze wander here and there as though he was counting everyone in the village, absorbing news of their existence since he had seen them last, allowing his power to flow out and weigh them down and return to him again.
Only when he felt sure of their devotion did he speak—a strangled roar consisting entirely of z’s and x’s, which I suppose meant something like “dismiss,” for the whole village then rose as one body, and meekly turned and went back to their tepees, many of them shaking their heads at the wonder they had seen.
The last men to disappear were the two in charge of the ponies; they now led them to the further side of the main house, tethered them to the halter-rail, fed and watered them, and rubbed them down with handfuls of dried grass before bowing to Black Cloud and slipping away to the village to join the others.
Black Cloud remained on his veranda, sometimes casting a glance in their direction to make sure everything was done as he wanted, mostly staring at the village and breathing deeply. He seemed absolutely content, absolutely fixed and solid. His companion beside him—whom I shall call the Painted Man, having never heard his name—was less…not less impressive, but less comprehensible. The decorations covering his body were not all one shade of red, as I had first thought, but many different colors, with dabs of yellow ochre and white and even pale green. In a different place he would have looked garish. Here he was sinister and important.
Black Cloud himself I could only see in profile, standing with his legs slightly apart like a massive statue and his thick arms hanging loose at his sides. His hair was pulled back from his forehead but worn much longer than his warriors’, and criss-crossed into a single plait that reached to his waist; there were feathers worked into it, mostly white, but also bright green and blue, which must have come from some species of parrot. His costume was decorated with fragments of shell similar to those used by the women to prettify their dresses.
And the dazzle, the shimmer lifting off him? That was mainly due to the necklace as I have said, but also to the oil he had rubbed over his body. He had varnished himself like a painting, so the markings that covered his arms and face all came alive when he moved and showed the energy fizzing inside him.
When I had finished my inspection my heart was beating as quickly as if I had been running.
“Do you…” I began saying to Natty, but she would not look in my direction, and only put her finger to her lips; her hand was shaking.
I turned back to Black Cloud meaning to admire his necklace again—and I was immediately distracted, this time by the belt tied around his waist. It was plain enough, made of leather strips and fastened with a wooden pin, but there were trophies strung from it. Wood, I thought at first, then looked again. Not wood. Fingers and ears, in fact, and other scraps of flesh, some
still caked with dark red blood. By the time I flinched away, I thought nothing would be impossible to Black Cloud. He would wreck and possess everything he wanted.
Then Black Cloud and the Painted Man began speaking about us. We knew this, because by pointing toward the horizon, then behind them into their house, they showed they knew about the silver, and if they knew about the silver, they knew about their prisoners. To judge by the way Black Cloud sneered at our cabin, while the Painted Man threw back his head and rolled his eyes, I thought they must already have settled how they would deal with us—but not yet. At their leisure. After glaring toward us once more, and scowling and stamping his foot, Black Cloud swung away and disappeared into his house, with the Painted Man following.
Natty and I let a few minutes pass, thinking they might make a quick recce of the treasure and then return to us. But when the silence settled more deeply, and a flock of sparrows landed on the veranda of the house and began picking about in the dust, and the shadows lengthened, we left our peephole and settled down by the wall again.
I felt so sure we had only a few more hours to live, perhaps until the evening, when we would be barbecued in the same way as our friend, that I found it astonishing my curiosity about the world should survive. Yet while we awaited our final judgment it was always the most ordinary things that caught our keenest interest. The heat and the mosquitoes. The faint squeak of the oyster-dust shifting beneath our weight. The spider, back at his butchery. Does every condemned man feel the same in the hours before his execution? I expect so, but to anyone who has not suffered in this way, the idea will seem very peculiar.
And this is how Black Cloud and the Painted Man found us, when they decided to give us their attention again. Not cowering in fright in the farthest corner of our prison, or kneeling as we made peace with our Maker, but lolling side by side as we had done every previous day, watching the sun-patterns in the cracks of our walls.
The New World Page 5