The Blackbirder

by James Nelson

  She looked at Plato. The black man gave a little nod of his head, gesturing upstream. And Saquam in turn cocked a single eyebrow. A hint of a smile played over his lips.

  And then Dunmore’s voice. ‘Come along, come along, damn it!’ Hats returned to heads, the tired men huffed along after Dunmore, who was following after Saquam.

  The Indian stood, and without a word headed off through the woods, upstream, leading the hunters away.

  It was half an hour at least after the sounds of the hunters faded that Plato finally spoke. ‘We best get out of here, we’ll catch our death.’ He stood, bending low under the overhanging branches, the water streaming from his shirt, and helped Elizabeth to her feet Her ankle was quite numb, and though there was a stab of pain when she put weight on it, it was not the overwhelming agony it had been. With Plato’s help she hobbled to the far side of the stream and sat down heavily on the warm pine needle bed of the forest floor.

  She sighed. ‘Plato, I am absolutely useless to you people,’ she said at last.

  ‘Oh, no, Mrs Marlowe, that ain’t—’

  ‘Stop it,’ she ordered, and Plato was silent. And then after a pause she said, ‘Do you think you could help me get back to Marlowe House?’

  ‘It would be hard. Hard on you, mostly, but yes, I could get you back.’

  ‘Good. Then once it is safe we shall go. I am no more than a burden here. Perhaps in my own element I can be of some real help.’

  CHAPTER 13

  Madshaka sat on the quarterdeck rail, all the way aft. The three big lanterns on the taffrail were lit, as they were every night, because the Africans were not entirely comfortable with the darkness and the ocean all around, but he was in the shadows just below them.

  He looked down the side of the ship, at the wake foaming white in the moonlight. He looked up at the sails, towering overhead, gray patches against the stars. Lovely, lovely, all of it.

  Gone was the stinking hold, the smell of close-packed people and lingering death that had permeated the blackbirder. Gone were their worries over food and water. The French merchantman was stocked full of food and water, as well as clothing wine, rum, and guns. Her hold was packed with silks and sundry other bolts of cloth, olives in barrels, hides, spices.

  She was six days out of Havana, bound for Le Havre, or so they had learned from the mate they had taken hostage. Within those wooden walls were luxuries such as many of the people had never known.

  It had been a nice day, a calm evening. They had stood on the deck for hours: James, Madshaka, and Cato, who had the watch, informal as it was. They said little. They did not have much to say to one another.

  There was tension to be sure. No way to avoid that. James was no fool, he could sense the subtle shifts in power, but as long as he, Madshaka, was careful there would never be anything substantial enough on which to hang an accusation.

  And even if James did suspect, who would he tell? Madshaka smiled at that thought. Cato? Good Boy?

  From forward drifted the soft singing of the women as they finished their day’s work. The people, the Africans, had no knowledge of ships, no prior framework into which they could fit such a thing as a sea voyage. For most of them their first view of the ocean had come when they were loaded aboard the blackbirder.

  So rather than adjust themselves to life at sea, they adjusted life at sea to what they understood: the family units, the tribes, the rhythms of life on land, sleeping and waking and eating.

  The women were up well before dawn, stoking the fires in the galley stove just as they might have in their own fire pits in their own villages. They cooked the strange food they had on hand, and fed their husbands and their children. In the late mornings they did their washing, singing their ancient songs while their children played around them, as their people had done for thousands of years in their native rivers.

  And the men, rather than hunting or tending cattle or clearing earth, stood their watches, trimmed the sails, laid aloft to fist canvas.

  In the evenings they would build a fire in the portable cookstove and sit around it and sing and joke and tell stories, each to their own tribe, each in their own tongue. It was a genuine community, or a clutch of communities, a replica of their former life in Africa, only set on the alien, floating, wooden ship in the middle of the vast sea.

  An hour before the sun set into the sea, the white mate came on deck, as he did every few hours, instruments in hand. He shuffled in his walk, head down, afraid to look at and possibly offend his captors. There were dark rings around his eyes, a few weeks’ growth of beard. He had not bathed or changed clothes since his capture, and when he was not performing those duties for which he was kept alive he remained huddled in his tiny cabin.

  As mad with terror as he appeared, he still went about his business confidently, as if having his familiar tools in hand allowed him to forget his nightmare circumstance. He laid his things gently on the deck, ran his eyes over the sails, glanced at the compass. He stepped to the weather rail and facing away from the setting sun manipulated his backstaff, measuring what, Madshaka had not a clue.

  The others, the people dragged from the forests by the slave traders, looked on what he did as magic, as some kind of supernatural conjuring, but Madshaka knew that it was not that.

  He watched the white man work his backstaff and heave the chip log over the taffrail and stick his little pins in the traverse board and stare at the stars with his nocturnal and he knew that they were just more of the white man’s tools, the kind of inventions that were letting white men run unimpeded all over Africa.

  Madshaka knew that the white man was directing their course to Africa, but he did not understand how. And though King James watched the man with a knowing eye, Madshaka suspected that he did not understand it either.

  That was good. It was important that he did not.

  At last the white man was done. He shuffled over to James, averting his eyes, as if James were some kind of real king, and muttered something that Madshaka could not hear. And then James turned to Cato and Quash and Good Boy and said something, and then finally said, ‘Madshaka, we gots to wear ship. Get the people to their ropes.’

  Madshaka nodded and trotted forward. This was the thing that made him uncomfortable. If the white man had said to him what he had said to James, would he have understood it? He could not ‘wear ship’ by himself. It was an unusual situation for him, to not be master of his environment. He needed James still, as much as he hated that notion.

  Twenty minutes later the ship was turned and the white man had disappeared below and the black sailors had returned to their families and their dinners. The last vestiges of light disappeared in the west and along the deck drifted the soft singing of the women, each tribe to its different songs in its own language.

  The embers burned low in the portable stove and the wind that blew along the deck and filled the canvas overhead was warm and steady and not a line needed tending. The clans sat together, the women wrapped in the bright-colored silks and dyed cottons they had found in the hold of their prize, the children wrapped in cloth or running around the deck naked or curling up with their mothers, their shattered worlds secure again.

  It was a comforting scene, a happy ship. When the sun went down and the manly shouting was done, then the women worked their influence on the people and it was peaceful again.

  Madshaka did not know how long he had been sitting there lost in his thoughts. Long enough for James to fall asleep, long enough for the few people on deck to forget his presence.

  At last a familiar form appeared on the quarterdeck, a man stepping aft.

  ‘Anaka,’ Madshaka called, softly. Anaka was the headman of the Kru. Madshaka’s people. His word was law with them.

  ‘Madshaka?’

  ‘It’s me. Come over here, Anaka, and talk with me.’ Madshaka spent so much time speaking in so many languages it was comforting to talk his native tongue. Language was the bond here, the basis of trust.

  ‘How ar
e you doing tonight, Anaka?’

  ‘I am well, Madshaka. Things are better now. The people are hopeful that we will see our homes again.’

  ‘Yes, we will. I can promise you that. And we will be wealthy men.’

  ‘How is that?’ Anaka asked.

  ‘This ship, all that is in it. She is full of cargo, you know, worth a great deal. We will sell the cargo and the ship too when we get to Africa, divide the money.’

  Anaka was silent for a moment, considering this. To the people on board, the ship meant food, water, a safe vessel, one that did not stink of death. The idea that it could mean wealth had not occurred to them.

  ‘How can we sell the ship?’ Anaka asked at length.

  Madshaka dismissed the question with a wave of his hand. ‘I have spent many years as a grumete, you know that. I have learned the ways of these white men. I know how such things are done. That is why I tell King James we must take the ship, when he does not want to.’ He paused for a moment and then said, ‘How many Kru are on the ship? Kru men?’

  Anaka thought for a moment. ‘Twenty. About twenty.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ Madshaka said, but he did not continue.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘There is much more money to be made before we reach home, Anaka. Many ships on the ocean, and we have the warriors aboard that we could take them, take all of the valuable cargoes. Just think, after all the suffering we have been through at the hands of the white men, we could return rich, by taking back from them what they have stolen from us. It is a nice thought.’

  A nice thought indeed, and in the dim light Madshaka could see that Anaka was thinking about it. ‘Has King James said anything about this?’ the Kru headman asked.

  Madshaka nodded. ‘We have talked of it. He is starting to think like me, that it is a good idea to enrich ourselves before we return. He knows a great deal about the ways of the pirates.’

  ‘But he does not order it.’

  ‘King James is a fair man. He does not want to impose his will alone. He and I have discussed this at length.’ Madshaka had to force himself not to smile. Lord, this was so easy! The ship was his to control, standing as he did between King James and the others, the only one who knew what both were saying, the sole conduit for communication.

  Anaka was quiet for a long time as he thought about that. Madshaka knew from experience that the thought of easy wealth was hard for any man to resist.

  At last he said, ‘What should we do?’

  Madshaka smiled. ‘We are pirates now, you know? We vote on what we should do. We see a ship, we vote on whether or not we attack. King James will not order it, he wants to be fair, but he thinks like I do that we should enrich ourselves.

  ‘Twenty Kru men, that is a lot, if they all vote the same. And you have influence over the other tribes as well.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Will you talk to them? You speak other tongues, I know. Tell the others we can make the white men pay for what they have done to us. We can be free again, and we can be rich as well.’

  ‘Yes, Madshaka, I will,’ Anaka said, and there was determination in his voice. Anaka was now filled with thoughts of wealth. Anaka would talk to the others.

  The headman hurried off and Madshaka remained on deck for a few minutes more, looking around, trying to see if there was anyone looking his way. The after end of the ship was lost in the darkness. No one around but the helmsman, and he was looking the other way.

  He chuckled softly to himself. That had gone very well. These others might not think of wealth, but he himself was no stranger to the notion.

  He was an ambitious man, had once already worked himself into a position of real power and wealth before his ostensible partners had hit him on the head and sold him to the blackbirder. But he had not forgotten them. Their turn would come.

  But first, pirating. By pure chance he found himself aboard a fast ship with a gullible crew of strong young men he could use as warriors. It was not an opportunity to be wasted.

  When he was at last certain that no one knew or cared what he was about, he stepped forward and down the aftermost scuttle.

  He was prowling now, hunting. He was aware of the power in his arms, his legs, the silence of his step, the strength that was there to be summoned instantly. He had seen lions before and they were the same, soft-footed, powerful. Nothing ostentatious, they did not need to be. When you were truly powerful you did not need to show it.

  Down the after scuttle and down again to the lower deck, moving aft, crouched under the low beams, awkward for a man so tall, but still his motion was fluid. He was invisible in the dull light of the lower deck, his dark skin lost in the shadow. He did not expect to find anyone down there. The people stayed on deck as much as they could. They had had enough of ships’ holds.

  Aft, past the stacks of cargo, to the tiny cabins that lined either side of the stern section, one deck below where King James slept. It was all blackness there, save for the one feeble light that lit the white mate’s cabin from within.

  Madshaka stopped a few feet from the cabin door and listened. He could hear the man, breathing, making tiny movements. He could smell his unwashed body, the sharp smell of sweat, not sweat from exertion but sweat from fear. He wondered how long a man could live with that terror before his mind snapped. Perhaps he would find out.

  He took a step forward, grabbed the latch on the cabin door and swung it open, slowly, slowly, letting the hinges give their menacing creak. Inside the mate lay on his berth, pushing himself back, back against the bulkhead, away from whatever new horror was coming to him, his bloodshot eyes wide.

  Madshaka smiled, a broad smile, a look that he knew was terrifying under those circumstances. Reached to the small of his back and drew out his dirk. He let the light play off the long, thin blade, held it casually at his side as he stepped into the small space.

  The white man shook his head in mute protest. Madshaka raised the knife, held the needle point under the man’s chin.

  ‘You don’t want to die, do you, pilot?’ Madshaka asked, softly, and the man shook his head again.

  ‘I didn’t think so.’ He held the knife there for a moment more, letting the man consider the situation, then he withdrew the blade and sat back on his heels.

  ‘Where you taking us, pilot?’

  The man thought about it, as if the question were a trick. ‘Kala—’ he croaked, coughed, cleared his throat. ‘Niger River Delta, Kalabari, like you say.’ His English was heavily accented with French, but good.

  Madshaka nodded his head, as if considering this information. ‘If I tell you to take us to Whydah instead, can you do that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And can you do it in a way King James don’t know?’

  The Frenchman looked confused, considered the question, then said, ‘Yes … I don’t think King James know the navigation. I don’t think he know what I do.’

  Madshaka nodded again. ‘You take us to Whydah, then. You take good care with your tools, we have perfect … how you say?’

  ‘Landfall?’

  The smile spread across Madshaka’s face again. ‘Right. Landfall. You understand me, pilot. And you don’t tell James, you don’t tell anyone.’ He raised the knife up. ‘If anyone find out, I kill you, and I take a long time to do it. You believe me?’

  The white man nodded, his eyes on the gleaming dirk.

  ‘Good,’ said Madshaka.

  To Whydah then, and business to which he must attend. And when James found out who was really in command, it would be too late, too late by far for him.

  CHAPTER 14

  The night was black and still at that hour, somewhere around four o’clock in the morning, and it seemed as if there were no people left in Williamsburg, as if they had deserted the town, left it to the nocturnal creatures. It was the strangest sort of sensation, a floating, disconnected existence, something that Elizabeth was having difficulty adjusting to.

  She slowed her horse to a wa
lk when they reached Boundary Street at the western end of town and then stopped a block from the hulking shape of the Wren Building, that great brick edifice like an English country manor house. She listened, cocking her head this way and that, trying to discern any sound that was not crickets or frogs or any of the benign noise of the Virginia summer night.

  There was nothing that she could hear, as if her horse were a raft on which she sat and drifted on a warm black sea.

  Was it really necessary that she sneak into town this way? She had no idea. She had no notion of what was acting in the capital, what was being said about her, what accusations were being tossed about. She knew only that Dunmore had been able to run unchecked, and neither she nor Marlowe had been there to counter anything that the man had said, and so it had probably gone hard for them.

  It was possible that the law did not want her for anything, that there were no charges leveled against her, but she thought it unlikely enough that she did not care to be conspicuous. She had slipped out the back door of Marlowe House, kept to the shadows, moving, stopping, listening. She had no reason to think that the house was being watched, nothing beyond a visceral uneasiness, but such premonitions had served her well in the past and she took note of them now.

  After a long moment of hearing nothing, Elizabeth climbed down from the horse, easing down on her still-sore ankle, and led the animal across the grass, far from the road, to the young trees that dotted the lawn in front of the Wren Building. The college had graduated its first class just two years before, and the trees had been planted just a year or so before that, so they were none too big, just big enough for Elizabeth to secure to them the reins of her docile horse.

  She patted the animal’s neck, then stepped back to the edge of the street and listened again, but again there was no sound. The two pistols she carried on loops inside her riding cape thumped silently against her hips as she walked; the dark hood masked her yellow hair.

  She crossed Boundary Street at the head of Duke of Gloucester and hobbled east, keeping to the north side of that wide avenue. There was no moon, just a great dome of stars and the hazy Milky Way, and so every corner of the street was as dark as every other. Still, she kept close to the buildings, close to the trunks of the trees, where movement would be less likely to be noticed, sailing along like a dark spirit.