by Wilbur Smith
Huron’s seamen, all of them armed, formed a guard about them, and Tippoo led them holding aloft a bull’s-eye lantern which he shone into the shadows as they hurried down the path.
Mungo St John was on his feet, but supported by Nathaniel, his bosun, and Robyn had bound up the wound roughly with a strip of linen torn from a seaman’s shirt and had used the rest of the shirt to make a sling for Mungo’s right arm.
Through a grove of mangroves they reached the bank of the creek on which the barracoons had been built and in the centre of the stream, her bare masts and yards silhouetted against the starry sky, lay the lovely clipper.
She had lanterns in her rigging and an alert anchor watch, for at Tippoo’s first hail the whaler swung away from her side and was rowed swiftly to the bank where they stood.
Mungo climbed the ship’s side unaided, but sank down with a grateful sigh on to his bunk in the stern cabin, the bunk that Robyn remembered so vividly.
She tried to force the memory from her mind, and keep her manner brisk and businesslike.
‘They have taken my medical chest,’ she said as she rinsed her hands in the porcelain basin at the head of the bunk.
‘Tippoo.’ Mungo looked up at his mate, and the bald, scarred head bobbed once and then Tippoo ducked out of the cabin. Mungo and Robyn were alone, and she tried to remain remote and professional as she made her first examination of the wound in good lantern light.
It was narrow, but very deep. She did not like the angle of the thrust, just below the collar bone but angled in towards the point of the shoulders.
‘Can you move your fingers?’ she asked. He lifted his hand towards her face and touched her cheek lightly.
‘Yes,’ he said, as he stroked her. ‘Very easily.’
‘Don’t,’ she said weakly.
‘You are sick,’ he said. ‘So thin and pale.’
‘It is nothing – lower your arm, please.’
She was terribly conscious of her matted hair and filthy mud-stained clothing, of the yellow tinges of fever on her skin and the dark smudges of fatigue and terror under her eyes.
‘Fever?’ he asked quietly, and she nodded as she went on working on the wound.
‘Strange,’ he murmured. ‘It makes you seem so young, so fragile,’ he paused, ‘so lovely.’
‘I forbid you to talk like that.’ She felt flustered, uncertain of herself.
‘I said I would not forget you,’ he ignored the instruction, ‘and I did not.’
‘If you don’t stop, I will leave immediately.’
‘When I saw your face tonight in the light of the fires, I could not believe it was you, and at the same time it was as though all our lives we had a rendezvous to keep here tonight. As though it had been destined from the moment of our births.’
‘Please,’ she whispered, ‘please stop.’
‘That’s better – please is better. Now I will stop.’
But he watched her face attentively as she worked. In the ship’s medical chest which he kept in the locker below his bunk Robyn found most of what she needed.
He neither flinched nor grimaced as she laid the stitches in the wound, but went on watching her.
‘You must rest now,’ she said as she finished, and he lay back on the bunk. At last he looked tired and drained, and she felt a rush of gratitude, of pity, and of that other emotion which she had believed that she had long ago subdued.
‘You saved me.’ She dropped her eyes, no longer able to look at him and busied herself with repacking the ship’s chest. ‘I will always be grateful for that, just as I will always hate you for what you are doing here.’
‘What am I doing here?’ he challenged her lightly.
‘Buying slaves,’ she accused. ‘Buying human lives, just as you bought me on the slaving block.’
‘But for a much lower price,’ he agreed as he closed his eyes. ‘At twenty dollars gold a head there is not much profit in it, I assure you.’
She awoke in the small cabin, the same cabin in which she had sailed the length of the Atlantic Ocean and in the same narrow uncomfortable bunk.
It was like homecoming, and the first thing she saw after her eyes had adjusted to the harsh beam of sunlight through the skylight were the chests of her medical instruments, her remaining medicines and her few personal possessions.
She remembered the unspoken command that Mungo had given to the mate the previous evening. Tippoo must have gone back ashore during the night, and she wondered what price he had paid or what threat he had made to get them back for her.
She rose swiftly from her bunk, ashamed of her sloth; whoever had left the chests, had also filled the enamel jug with fresh water. With relief she washed away the mud and filth and combed the tangles of her hair before finding worn but clean clothing in her chest. Then she hurried from her cabin down to the master’s quarters. If Tippoo had been able to find her chests, then he might be able to find and free her people, the Hottentots and porters who had gone upon the auction block in the firelight.
Mungo’s bunk was empty, the vest and bloodstained shirt bundled and thrown into a corner of the cabin, and the bedclothes in disarray. She turned swiftly for the deck, and as she came out into the sunlight she saw that it would be only a temporary respite from the monsoon, for already the thunderclouds were boiling up over the horizon.
She looked about her quickly. Huron lay in the centre of a broad estuary, with mangroves on each bank, and the bar and the open sea were not in sight, though the tide was ebbing, rustling down the ship’s hull and leaving the mud flats half exposed.
There were other vessels in the roadstead, mostly big dhow-rigged buggaloos typical of the Arab coastal traders, but there was another fully rigged ship at anchor half a mile further downstream, flying the flag of Brazil at her peak. Even as Robyn paused to watch her, there came the clank of her capstan, and men ran up the ratlines and spread out along her yards. She was getting under way. Then Robyn realized that there was unusual activity all about her. Small boats were plying from the shore to the anchored dhows, and even on Huron’s deck there was a huddle of men on the quarterdeck.
Robyn turned towards them, and realized that the tallest of them was Mungo St John. His arm was in a sling and he looked drawn and pale, but his expression was forbidding, the dark curved brows drawn together in a frown, and the mouth a thin cruel line as he listened attentively to one of his seamen. So absorbed was he that he did not notice Robyn until she was only a few paces away. Then he swung towards her, and all the questions and demands stayed behind her lips for his voice was harsh.
‘Your coming was an act of God, Doctor Ballantyne,’ he said.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘There is a plague in the barracoons,’ he said. ‘Most of the other buyers are cutting their losses, and leaving.’ He glanced downstream to where the Brazilian schooner had set reefed main and jib and was running down towards the bar and the open sea, and there was activity aboard most of the other vessels.
‘But I have over a thousand prime blacks afattening ashore – and I’ll be damned if I’ll run now. At least, not until I know what it is.’
Robyn stared at him. Her mind was a whirl of doubts and fears. ‘Plague’ was a layman’s word, it covered everything from the Black Death to syphilis, the grand pox, as it was called.
‘I will go ashore immediately,’ she said, and Mungo St John nodded.
‘I thought you would say that,’ he said, ‘I will go with you.’
‘No.’ Her tone brooked no argument. ‘You will aggravate that wound, and in your weakened condition you will be easy prey to this plague, whatever it is.’ She glanced at Tippoo, and his face split laterally into that broad toadlike grin and he stepped up beside her.
‘By God, ma’am, I’ve had them all,’ said Nathaniel, the little pockmarked bosun. ‘And none of them killed me yet.’ And he stepped up to her other hand.
Robyn sat in the stern while Tippoo and Nathaniel handled the oars, and as they
pulled across the ebb towards the shore the bosun explained what they would find ashore.
‘Each of the traders has his own barracoon built and guarded by his own men,’ he told Robyn. ‘He buys from the Portos as the blackbirds are brought in.’
As Robyn listened to Nathaniel, she realized the answers to questions that had worried her and Zouga. This was the reason why Pereira had tried so desperately to persuade them not to bring the expedition south of the Zambezi river, and why, when all else had failed, he had attacked it with his armed brigands and tried to destroy it. He had been protecting his brother’s trade routes and selling area. It was not mere avarice and lust, but a logical attempt to preserve this lucrative enterprise from discovery.
She went on listening to Nathaniel.
‘Each trader fattens his wares ashore, like pigs for the market. That way they are stronger for the crossing, and he makes sure that they are healthy and not going to bring sickness aboard with them.
‘There are twenty-three barracoons here, some small ones with twenty blacks or so, belonging to the small traders, right on up to the big ones like Huron’s, with a thousand and more prime blackbirds in the cage.
‘We have the slave-decks set up in Huron’s hold, and we would have begun taking them aboard any day, but now—’
Nathaniel shrugged, and spat on the horny calloused palms of each hand in turn, and then plied himself to the oars once more.
‘Are you a Christian, Nathaniel?’ Robyn asked softly.
‘That I am, ma’am,’ he said proudly. ‘As good a Christian as ever sailed out of Martha’s Vineyard.’
‘Do you think God approves of what you are doing here to these poor people?’
‘Hewers of wood, ma’am, and drawers of water, like the Bible says,’ the weather-beaten sailor told her, so glibly that she knew that the reply had been put in his mouth, and she guessed by whom.
Once they were ashore, Tippoo led the small party with Robyn in the centre and Nathaniel carrying her chest in the rear.
Captain Mungo St John had chosen the best site available for his barracoon, on a rise of ground at a distance from the river. The sheds were well built, with floors of sawn timber raised above the mud and good roofs thatched with palmetto leaves.
Huron’s guards had not deserted, proof of the discipline which Mungo St John maintained and the slaves in the barracks had evidently been carefully chosen. They were all well set-up men and women, and the copper cookers were filled with boiling farina so that their bellies bulged and their skins were glossy.
At Robyn’s direction they were lined up and she passed swiftly down the ranks. There were some mild ailments, which she singled out for later treatment, but she found none of the symptoms which she so dreaded.
‘There is no plague here,’ she decided. ‘Not yet.’
‘Come!’ said Tippoo.
He led her through the palm groves, and the next barracoon had been deserted by the traders who had built it and stocked it. Already the slaves were hungry and confused by their sudden liberation.
‘You are free to go,’ Robyn told them. ‘Go back to your own land.’
She was not certain that they understood her. They squatted in the mud and stared at her blankly. It was as though they had lost all power of independent thought or action, and she knew that they would never be able to make their way back along the Hyena Road, even if they survived the coming epidemic.
With a flash of horror Robyn realized that without their slave-masters these poor creatures were doomed to a lingering death by starvation and disease. Their masters had cleared out the store rooms before they left, there was not a cupful of farina or corn meal left in any of the barracoons they visited that morning.
‘We will have to feed them,’ Robyn said.
‘We have food for our own, that is all,’ Tippoo told her impassively.
‘He is right, ma’am,’ Nathaniel confirmed. ‘We feed them, then we’ll starve our own blackbirds – besides, most of them are poor goods, not worth the price of a cup of farina.’
In the second barracoon Robyn thought that she had at last discovered the first plague victims, for the low thatched sheds were crammed with rows of prostrate naked figures, and their low moaning and whimpering was a heart-breaking sound, while the smell of corruption was thick and oily on the palate.
It was Tippoo who corrected her. ‘China birds,’ he grunted, and for a moment Robyn did not understand, and she stooped over the nearest body, then straightened immediately. Despite her training, cold blisters of sweat formed on her forehead.
By Imperial Decree from Peking, no black African slave could be landed on the shores of China unless he had been rendered incapable of reproducing his own kind. The Emperor was concerned that future generations would not be plagued by the growth of an alien population in their midst. The traders found it expedient to castrate their purchases in the barracoons, so that losses caused by the operation could be absorbed before the expense of the long voyage was incurred.
It was crudely done, a tourniquet applied to the root of the scrotum and then the entire scrotal sack removed at a single knife stroke and the wound cauterized immediately with a heated iron or a daub of hot pitch. About sixty per cent would survive the shock and subsequent mortification, but their price per capita was so enhanced that the trader could face forty per cent losses with equanimity.
There was nothing that Robyn could do for so many, she felt overwhelmed by the suffering and misery all around her, and she stumbled out on to the muddy pathway, blinded by her own tears. In the next barracoon, the one nearest to the central auction block, she found the first plague victims.
Once again the sheds had been deserted by the slave-masters, and the dimly lit thatched sheds were filled with naked figures, some squatting motionlessly, others lying on the damp earthen floor, knees drawn up, shaking with the cold of fever, and powerless to lift themselves out of their own bodily wastes. The sound of delirium and suffering was murmurous as of insects in an English orchard on a hot summer’s day.
The first sufferer that Robyn touched was a young girl, just beyond puberty, and her skin was burning hot. She rolled her head from side to side, endlessly and senselessly, mouthing snatches of gibberish. Swiftly Robyn ran her fingertips down the girl’s naked bulging stomach and immediately she felt the tiny lumps under the hot skin, like pellets of buckshot. There could be no doubt.
‘Smallpox,’ she said simply, and Tippoo drew back fearfully.
‘Wait outside,’ she told him, and he went swiftly and with obvious relief. She turned to Nathaniel. She had noticed the little pitted scars in his folded sun-toughened skin, and now there was no fear in his expression.
‘When?’ she asked.
‘When I was a boy,’ he said. ‘It killed my old ma and my brothers.’
‘We have work to do,’ she told him.
In the gloomy stinking shed the dead were piled with the living, and on some of the wracked and furnace-heated black bodies the plague had already burst into full flower. They found it in all its stages. Papules beneath the skin had erupted into vesicles, bubbles of clear thin fluid that thickened into pustules, which in turn burst and released a custard-thick trickle of matter.
‘These will live,’ Robyn told Nathaniel. ‘The plague is purging from their blood.’ She found a man whose open pocks had already crusted over.
While Nathaniel held the man from moving, Robyn scraped away the crusty scabs with a spatula and gathered them in a wide-mouthed glass bottle that had once held quinine powder.
‘This strain of the disease has been attenuated,’ Robyn explained impatiently, and for the first time she saw fear in the flecked eyes of Mungo St John. ‘The Turks first used this method two hundred years ago.’
‘I would prefer to sail away from it,’ Mungo St John said quietly, staring at the stoppered bottle which was half filled with damp yellow matter in which were small flecks of blood.
‘It would be no use. The infection is alr
eady aboard.’ Robyn shook her head firmly. ‘In a week or less Huron would be turned into a stinking plague-ship filled with dying men.’
Mungo turned away from her and went to the ship’s rail. He stood there with one hand clasped into a fist behind his back, the other still in its sling, staring at the shore where the thatched roofs of the barracoons just showed above the mangroves.
‘You cannot leave those poor wretches,’ Robyn said. ‘They will starve. I alone could never find food to feed that multitude. You are responsible for them.’
He did not answer her for a moment, then he turned back to study her curiously.
‘If Huron sailed, with her holds empty, would you stay here on this fever and smallpox-ridden coast to tend this multitude of doomed savages?’ he asked.
‘Of course.’ She was still impatient, and he inclined his head. His eyes no longer mocked, but were sober, perhaps even filled with respect.
‘If you will not stay for common humanity, then stay for self-interest.’ She scorned him with her tone. ‘A million dollars’ worth of human cattle, and I will save them for you.’
‘You would save them to be sold into captivity?’ he insisted.
‘Even slavery is better than death,’ she replied.
Again, he turned away from her, taking a slow turn of the quarterdeck, frowning thoughtfully, puffing on the long black cheroot so that wreathes of tobacco smoke drifted behind him, and Robyn and half Huron’s crew watched him, some fearfully, others with resignation.
‘You say that you have yourself undergone this – this thing.’ His eyes were drawn back, with loathing fascination, to the little bottle that stood in the centre of his chart table.
For answer Robyn lifted the sleeve of her shirt and showed him the distinctive deeply pocked scar on her forearm.
A minute longer he hesitated, and she went on persuasively, ‘I will give you a strain of the disease that is “passant” that has been weakened and attenuated by passage through another man’s body, rather than the virulent form of the plague which you will breathe on the very air and which will kill most of you.’