I shrugged, kilted my skirt, climbed the ladder. It was harder than I thought and I scraped my leg.
At the top was a wooden rail I must jump over and then a flat wooden floor like the roof of a temple, quite clean and decorated with rope. Jungle festoons of rope hung down or stretched like liana from the two great trees growing in the centre and far end of the floor. Here and there were large black calabashes, or iron pots, very long and narrow, which I did not then understand were the older brothers, the fathers and mothers of the guns that tempt our kings. The white wings of the ship were folded away upon the straight branches of their trees.
My dreamsight was dim but I could feel several gods over this strange sea creature.
One was the Suffering Jesus. Then there was his brother, a God of the Sea, Thundering Jehovah, worshipped by those mad, northerly hairy ghosts called the English. The great boat herself was a godling to some of her crew, of course. Below the gods, there was a battle. Souls that lived within the boat were battling a demon, an ugly flux demon that turns dung to water and flesh to fire until it withers and the soul departs. I could smell him clearly for the hairy ghosts are filthy, and like fools carry their dung in the belly of their boats. Smelled once, you shall always know him.
The old hairy ghost grabbed my hands and locked the iron bracelets on them again. They took me into a little wooden hut built under the floor of the boat. There was the man who thought himself my master, Mr Anriques, sitting by a cot, mopping the forehead of the one who lay in it. She was withered, her lips were drawn back from her teeth, her gums were black, she breathed hardly at all and her cream skin was dry.
He looked at me without hope when the old man pushed me down to the deck. I knelt. Why not? I am upside-down, it would have been more respectful to stand, but why should he know that?
Since then, I have found how very, very stupid are the hairy ghosts in the matter of demons. They know nothing. They do not know that flux demons and ague demons live in old water, they do not know that a flux demon must be fought with sweet water, they are like children in their ignorance.
From the way the scrawny ghost patted her head, I thought he might be her husband or her son – impossible to be sure since she was so withered.
Poor woman. Now the old ghost gave me a bucket with water in it and a cloth; the scrawny ghost gestured at his woman, said something. What did they want? Certainly she should drink – but was the water sweet? I tasted it with my finger. As I had heard of the sea, it was salty.
Not to drink then. To wash her? Ah, that was the answer. I took the cloth, squeezed it, made movements as if to wash the woman. Both of them nodded their heads.
I must tell them, though the poor woman would likely die. I looked on the little shelf by the cot. An empty cup. I took it, tipped it to her lips. Held it out. The old man brought a bottle, poured liquid. I smelled it – firewater. Poison to a woman so sick. So I poured it on the deck and the old man struck me.
So I put the bucket and the cup down and squatted. I am upside-down and I will be treated with respect. My face was a stone as the old man shouted and slapped at me, battered my back with his fists, and I waited for him to finish, staring at Mr Anriques.
Anriques approached. He took the cup, he dipped it in the bucket, held it, raised his brows. I turned my face, made a grimace at the salt. Now he shouted at the old man who marched away, muttering. We waited, Anriques and I, staring at each other. At last he came back, with sweet water in a leather jug and put it in the cup. I smelled it. Too sweet. I sprinkled a little salt water in it to clean it, then I gave it to the scrawny man and pointed at the woman’s lips, made a mime of drinking.
They are so slow, these ghosts. At last his face cleared. He spoke sharply to the old man, he sat beside his woman and he began giving her the water.
I could not give it to the woman to drink myself – if she died, they would say I poisoned her.
So I took the bucket and the cloth and pulled back the cover, gagging at the reek of the flux demon. They had put rags against her legs to soak up what came from her, but not enough. You should know, by the way, that hairy ghosts are filthy creatures who never bathe because their lands are so cold and their rivers are cold and dirty. Also, they are terrified of the white ugliness of their skins and hide themselves beneath their clothes. Their garments are beautiful but underneath is stench and corruption.
I cleaned the poor woman like a baby and I sang to her to keep her strength up, to tell her soul to fight. She wore a shirt, stiff with sweat and dirt but very fine with an edging delicately plaited of thread and it was soiled. I wished to take it from her, to have her naked so her skin could breathe, to clean her properly for there were sore places on her. Gently I lifted her to strip her and Mr Anriques turned away as I took the thing up and off her shoulders. She was a mother and had given suck, but where were her children? Then he was pushing another bundle of cloth at me, just as fine. At least it was a little cleaner. How could I tell him, she didn’t need it? But it would have made no difference for the hairy ghosts believe they must always be hidden lest their whiteness offend the Moon and each other.
I shrugged and put the new shirt on her and then when she groaned and jack-knifed with more flux, I lifted her and put her on the close-stool in the corner, held her as she groaned, wiped her again and put her back in bed. I signalled for Anriques to give her more water. He seemed surprised but he did it, while I chanted her a chant of strengthening and victory over the flux demon.
So we worked together in silence and song. Anriques was a puzzle to me. He wore a little cap on his head to hide his baldness and perhaps his hair the colour of the drought-grass of the plains. His many clothes were of that cloth-fur they call velvet, rich browns and black, edged with black and gold and underneath I could see peeking out his white shirt. His fingers were long and thin. I saw no hard places on them and wondered what he was: a king, perhaps? Certainly, in a way, he was king of the boat, for the hairy ghosts that worked upon it came to speak to him often and I heard him giving orders.
He gave his woman water and gave her water and again and again, as I showed him. I lifted and cleaned and lifted and cleaned.
By morning the flux demon was weeping for mercy. I whistled to him, wishing for fire, wishing for my pipe that I had burnt, bidding him begone.
Sometimes the scrawny king, Mr Anriques spoke to me in many-coloured words. He used words that were rich crimson and indigo, he also used words that sounded pale blue and green, and I smiled and shook my head. He went out of the hut. It would be interesting to learn his languages. I hoped I would find someone to teach me.
There was a tramping and a moaning, many feet passing overhead, some of them singing their deathsongs. Even though I did not know their songs or their words, even though they were foreign prisoners taken in a war by a king I did not know, I crouched, shivering. My hair stood up and the world whirled about me and my dreamsight came crashing through the walls of my mind so all about me I saw the gods of the people, chattering, jostling, shapeshifting and fading.
The Queen Moon was a zebra beside me. Be not afraid, I shine in all the lands you will visit, she said.
Of course, I was still afraid, but her voice lifted me up and I stood. There was a croak beside me. The woman I had tended through the night had her eyes open: because the flux demon’s heat in her flesh gave her dreamsight as it often does, she saw the Queen Moon and her eyes widened.
‘Shhh,’ I said to her, and stroked the striped muzzle of my Lady beside me. She still shrank back in fear. So as to be less frightening, I squatted by her cot again, and I sang her a baby’s song, what I might sing to a girl-baby I had just helped from her mother’s cave. The woman calmed and watched my Queen as she clattered her shining invisible hooves across the boards, spun around, reared up like a nightmare, to entertain her and show off her beauty.
Great weariness comes upon me when the dreamsight has taken me and I did not want to listen to the feet slapping on the boards and
the clattering of the chains as the young men went down into the belly of the ship and were fastened there.
I rearranged the woman’s covers. She saw my iron jewellery and frowned and I patted her hand, not to be concerned as I was not. My Lady Zebra nudged me. So I took off my leopard skin and laid it over her bed, the most powerful protection she could have. Then I lay down beside her cot on the straw mat, cool and comfortable with my head on my arm, and was rocked and rocked by the arms of the sea holding the womb of my captivity. So I slept.
* * *
I woke surrounded by movement and the floor tilting first one way, then the other, and then again, another way. I started up in fright, crouched, fell. The light was different, the whole hut swayed like a tree. Now came Anriques and spoke sharply, pointing to his woman. Behind him came the old man with his bucket, tutting.
I gestured him in return to make her drink and then when I had done with tending the woman, I went to peer out of the little door in the side of the hut. The ship was opening her wings, her sailors scuttled like beetles up the cobwebs on either side of her trees, and the other sailors heaved and sang and heaved and sang while the Leopard Moon rode pale and sleepy on one side of the sky and the Lion Sun stretched and shook out his mane on the other.
Now the sea creature who had slept in the stone-shored lake rose up and fell down like a northern camel, standing and sitting and standing and sitting again. Boats full of men, shouting to give each other the rhythm, pulled the sharp end round on ropes so that she was heading into the great sea desert. And below, the foreign prisoners wailed and moaned and screamed.
I stood staring, with joy rising between my breasts, latching on like a child, to see her wings outspread, to feel her move, to know her for the creature of wind and water that she was, a godling in her own place. I sang and ululated of my joy. The sailors frowned and made signs against bad luck. One of them shouted in some language and the old man behind, struck me on the back.
Why should I take offence? I heard the fear in their voices. I squatted again, making myself small, which is the way to make friends with the hairy half-men in the forest. As far as I could, I made the movements of a prayer of thanks to the Queen Moon, asking for a safe journey. They forgot about me in their busyness. Softly, quietly, I crept out of the door.
The land was falling away, the wind flapped my leather skirt and pulled chicken bumps in my skin. The sailors were working with the huge triangle of cloth at the sharp end, folding it and folding it, tying it up, turning its long branch on end to tilt it the other way and then unfolding again as if they were a woman showing fair cloth at a market. The ship tilted over suddenly and I fell again.
A fancy came on me to see the last of my land. I thought, perhaps I will never again see the zebras and hear the lion cough in the night. All about me are hairy ghosts, except for the foreign prisoners in the hold, and I could not talk to them except in song. Sorrow walked up from my heart and clutched my throat. The rivers of my brain overflowed. I shall climb that tree and say goodbye, I thought.
So quietly, I kilted my skirt, went to the side of the ship while they were all watching something else, hopped up to the railing where the sailors’ feet had worn it smooth and began climbing the cobwebs made of rope that the sailors climbed. It was easier than a tree although the iron jewellery hampered me. Besides, Lady Leopard came and sat on my shoulder with her mischievous, whiskered face, lending me her grace and balance.
Up and up I went, up the middle tree, the one with square wings. The ship made the tree move up and down and sideways, but it seemed easy enough compared with some of the trees I had climbed to get at the frogs that hide high in their branches or for the mosses and lichens that grow on the bark. The ropes narrowed underneath a platform where you can stand to look out. I had watched to see how they did this thing: I climbed up and back on the ropes that led to its edge, hanging by my hands and feet like a monkey, then scrambled over the edge and past the great ropes and blocks for the next part, and stood on the platform. Some of the sailors turned to me, mouths open, eyes wide to see such a thing. Shouts came from below, but they were busy. They must move the sails to catch the wind, they would catch me later.
Another set of rope webladders stretching up, and up I went. So far to see, such a wide world. No other trees, only the pleated taffeta of the blue sea, a fringe of green where the faraway land met the sand.
I came to the second and highest branching where there was a place to sit of a barrel, nailed in place, and I stood on it, holding the topmost branch that had a pennant for its glory, which flapped against me in the wind. I held tight with my toes. The Queen Moon tutted at me lazily from her sleeping couch of clouds. I gave praise to her properly where no one could strike me. Perhaps I was loud. Below, I saw the ants running here and there, afraid.
Would I fall? Perhaps. But it was very fine to feel the dipping and swaying of the great tree in the wind and I laughed as the barrel flung me up and down and from side to side, like a wild zebra objecting to being ridden. No worse than that, and this tree would not bite.
Behind lay the green of my own land. When I die, my soul shall fly there, an arrow from the Moon’s bow, away from the cold lands of the hairy ghosts where they bring themselves to bloody battle and their gods go out before them. They say they only worship one god, but they lie.
Below me I could see the faces, some red, some white, some brown, as the crew stared at me. They were little mushrooms eaten neatly by caterpillars, each white fungus eaten with three round holes. They looked so funny, I laughed. The Anriques ghost cupped his hands and shouted a few words I could not hear.
I had finished my praise. I climbed down into the barrel to look from and waved, then climbed carefully the rest of the way. As I jumped to the deck, the crew had a net ready and caught me up in it, as if I were a wild beast, and I laughed and laughed to smell their fear of me. A great argument began over me, but I was tired as I always am from a god-riding, and so I fell asleep.
Later I heard they had been within an inch of throwing me overboard for being mad and insane and unaccountable, fearful as they were of a sickness in my head. But the Queen Moon protected me, for Anriques needed a woman to tend his wife and had found only girls half-mad with raping in his hold. Now he had left our land and could buy no more.
They loaded me with iron tribute to slow me and keep me from climbing, and they tethered me to a ring on the wall of the woman’s little hut. They knew I was a demon because of the blackness of my skin and the woolliness of my hair. That I was a woman only mattered because they were so distracted by my breasts. They were forbidden to take the foreign women out of the hold to use them and afraid to venture down where one of the young men might willingly give his life for the chance to crack a ghost’s head open. But there I was, safely hobbled, they thought, fetching food and water in the service of the sick ghost woman. She had made me put on one of their shirts for modesty when she grew well enough to see me clear. I found it very strangling. My breasts languished for the touch of the air and it made no difference to the sailors who stared as greedily at me as before.
At last two of them plotted together and bribed their fellows for a clear bit of time at the beakhead when I was emptying buckets. They planned to catch me and hold me and make the man-woman dance with me, whether I would or not.
It was a sad and strange thing: I tried to warn them of Lady Leopard coming when they cornered me, but they did not understand me. Even when I tried the few words of English that the woman who believed herself my mistress had taught me, they still did not believe me. They thought they knew what I was.
Well, there was one man that had his jaw broken in so many places he never spoke clearly again. And the other was pitched into the sea screaming, leaving his manpiece behind.
These are the ways of the gods, they do not usually know mercy. I would have been kinder to the men, since they did not yet know me.
Anriques came to me where I lay bruised by the wooden wall in h
is wife’s cabin, and asked me what had happened and I told him as best I could that I was not there at the time and they must have fallen.
Anriques spoke quietly to the fellows of the man who died and also to the man who lay wasting for lack of food below decks, because his jaw was jelly. The sailors muttered at me, watching me sidelong, and making gestures against the evil eye.
* * *
The sailors themselves had time to plot evil because we were becalmed in the heat of mid-ocean, where there is no land for miles and miles and all the windgods of all the nations play and dance together unceasingly. Except in the centre of their dance is a blank space where no one dances and seaweed floats past, and there we sat for day after day while our sweet water grew less and less, and more and more green.
A couple of days later, I knew that the men were planning something for they had been gathering in small knots and talking and then moving apart as if they were busy whenever one of the ship-chiefs came near. Some of them were proper men from the coast and they knew what sort of person I am, and told the others. The poor foreigners in the hold wailed and cried. Their water was down to half a pint per day. Even the hairy ghosts were only drinking a pint each. Corpses splashed into the sea every morning and some popped up from their ballasting and followed behind us, stinking.
‘Is it true you are a witch?’ said one sailor to me when I squatted washing shirts in salt water in a bucket. He was the ugly, barrel-chested man with a long pigtail dipped in tar, his face nearly burned human by the Lion Sun, the old man who served Anriques.
Gloriana's Torch Page 4