Ames spoke to me slowly and clearly, as if I was a fool, first in Portuguese and then in English, which I found quite comfortable to my tongue by then. He was explaining the situation.
While his cargo of sugar was being unloaded, he must go into the town of Lisbon and meet diverse men for reasons of business. My work was to stand by him, do his bidding and if any attacked him, to do as I did in New Spain. I must be quiet as well because some of what he did must be secret.
Here I should tell you that in this land of the Kingly clerk Philip II of Spain and Portugal, the Suffering Jesus god is very strong and his priests are as powerful as princes. He has certain priests called the Inquisitors of the Holy Office who search out any that do not believe in and serve the Suffering Jesus. These are arrested, tortured, then burnt to death. Yes, this is true. It is not even for a burnt sacrifice, which would make some sense, for they do not believe that the Suffering Jesus eats the souls of the burned ones, or any souls at all. Never mind what other gods the victims may serve; all must serve the Suffering Jesus or die, even the Arabs or the English who serve Thundering Jehovah or those like Anriques and his wife who worship the secret-named god. To the Kingly clerk, there can be no one in all the land who worships any other god, or … These priests say the Suffering Jesus will be angry and disaster will befall all of them.
In their ignorance, these ghosts have made of their kindly god a most terrible monster.
‘Must I worship him?’ I asked Rebecca, when she explained all this to me while Anriques had gone on deck to shout at the dawdling men in their cranes and the hold-master. I wondered what the Queen Moon would make of that. No doubt she would find it funny. ‘What does this god like for his gifts? Are there songs I should learn?’
Rebecca coughed, shook her head. ‘I’m afraid you are not allowed simply to add him to all the other gods. You must give up your other gods and serve only him.’
‘But why? Surely my other gods will be angry?’
She shook her head again. ‘In fact, I don’t think it matters for you, Merula. You are black and they know blacks are heathens. So long as you are respectful, I think they will not care enough about you to worry about your soul. Many of them say you have no soul at all, being black.’
Well, how convenient. I grinned at her. ‘We say the same of you,’ I told her, but I am glad to say I spoke in my own tongue.
‘But what does the Suffering Jesus think of all this burning?’ I asked. ‘Does he approve what his priests do?’
‘It seems so,’ said Rebecca thinly.
‘But has anyone asked? Has anyone gone to the dreamtime to talk to him?’
Rebecca blinked at me. ‘What? Of course not. You can’t talk to the Almighty, not that way, and certainly not to a man who was no doubt a great Prophet but died fifteen hundred years ago.’
Ah. Again, how convenient. So it was I found the root of this constant tribal fighting between the savages of the north: none of them have rightly trained, upside-down people who can go spirit walking. They cannot send someone to visit the dreamtime and find out what their gods really want. We fight each other for sensible, civilised things like gold and land and captives and food and watercourses; they fight for these things but also for their gods, which become ever stronger and greedier as a result of all the blood poured out for them.
‘You have a different god from the Suffering Jesus,’ I told her.
‘No.’ She paused, thought and said, ‘Well, yes. But they do not understand it. Say nothing, don’t discuss anything to do with God while we are here.’
I bowed to her. Wearing men’s clothes was making me feel very much like a man, especially as I was so much taller than most of them. I thought of the warriors in their leopard skins who guarded my King and went out before him in war and it made me smile. Here was a way I could be.
When I joined Anriques on deck, he mentioned nothing of his problem with the gods, for he saw no reason to. Why should he explain things to me? I was his slave. All he did say, out of the side of his mouth, was that if ever he swore by the name of Jesus Christ, I must escape immediately, not even try to fight for him, but go back to the ship immediately and guard Rebecca.
Now this I found funny and I laughed. Anriques did not like it, he felt I was disrespectful to him. I could smell the fear on him.
So I went to one knee, touched his foot as a warrior would show respect. ‘If the priests are so dangerous, why not stay here on the ship, my lord?’
‘I must do my business.’
‘Send somebody. You are king of this ship, you could send your clerk. Or the priest.’
‘Nobody else can do what I must.’ Anriques straightened, pulled back his shoulders, put on a sword, then changed his mind and took it off again. He wrapped around a most marvellous dark green brocade gown, made of wormsilk that the Arabs love also and get from the east. He put on a velvet cap. Now Spain is not as hot as my own country, but still hot enough. He began to sweat immediately, stinking of fear, and I thought gloomily of washing his shirt.
We climbed down the ladder to the quay, and he set off, pale as milk, glistening with fright, firm of step. Behind him I walked, softly humming a song of warriors setting out to raid, in his honour.
* * *
All morning we walked in the bright sun from small white house to large white house. The buildings of the northern hairy ghosts are wonderful works, smooth stone raised up so high, looming out of the huts and pigpens and little courtyards with lemon trees and marble carved like lace.
Once we went into a temple where the idol of the Suffering Jesus hung at one end, bleeding silently into the pleasant cool. Anriques took his hat off as he went in, bobbed his knees to the altar where a lamp was burning. I copied him, hoping the god was in a good mood today. I pushed away my dreamsight as far as I could, lest he overwhelm me. Anriques sat on one of the side benches by the wall and waited. Another man came, in a black gown, trimming candles. Anriques followed him and I paced behind Anriques to a small inner room behind the altar, decked with many beautiful silver and gold cups and fine linen and priest-robes hanging, covered in the beautiful embroidery of the north, to show sacrifices and animals and magic signs. They have a wonderful craft to make pictures of things as if they truly were there, and not made of paint and shadow. Being simpler minded than real people, the hairy ghosts do not understand that you can show a thing by its meaning, they think in their ignorance that it must look like what it is.
I stood by the door of the room, while Anriques and the man in black spoke in a guttural language I had never heard before. Neither looked at me. Sniffing, I could smell incense, wine, a little oil. A strange temple, although so beautiful. There was no old blood. Certainly, blood was painted everywhere, as spattered as a battlefield, but there was no actual blood, neither human nor animal anywhere. Not even on the altar where the small golden cupboard stood with its light next to it.
To one side of the altar was one of their northern pictures, very fine, as if you were looking through a window, of the Queen Moon, shown in their primitive way, with ghost-skin: pale and young, she stood as she always does, on the full moon, her servant the serpent of wisdom wrapped about her feet, with stars in her hair and the crescent moon crowning her. A marvellous picture. Lady Leopard paced up and down in front of the picture, lashing her tail, agreeing it was good.
Out came Anriques, looking frustrated. He bobbed his knees and so did I, then he walked out of the temple and across the square paved space to sit under an awning at a wineshop, sipping wine. I stood by him, as the warriors of the King do, my arms gravely folded. In a little while, a man in red and yellow wool came past, and Anriques followed him to another wineshop.
I was unhappy. There was something I was not seeing and Lady Leopard was impatient with me for not noticing. She paced by my side, yawning sometimes, lashing her tail back and forth, patting her paw on flickers of light on the cobbles. I turned about, turned about, snuffed the air.
‘Sir,’ I said to
him as he sat drinking again and I stood by, ‘something is not right.’
‘What?’
I shook my head.
‘Don’t be afraid, Merula,’ he said patronisingly, ‘I have nearly finished my business. You will like the next meeting.’
On we went to a man’s house where his little girls played in a swing hanging on an ancient olive tree. They wore little gowns of rose silk and were in wonder over my skin, while Anriques talked with their father. I heard him asking about galleases. What had the man heard of these four, strange, new, hybrid galley-galleons being built for Admiral Santa Cruz in Naples? Surely there was something important about them, they must have some special purpose when the Invincible Armada sailed to take England? No, said the man, he only knew they were designed to carry heavy guns.
I sat down in the dust between the two little girls and they asked their hundreds of questions. They had seen Africans before in the market – was it true we came from the place where lions lived? Yes, I said, I myself have sung the lion-friend song to stop them from hunting me on the plains. Did our mothers dip us in paint when we were born? No, I said, this is how we grow. Did the colour come off? No, I said, holding up my arm, see – rub it or wash it, there it stays. ‘What happened to your skin?’ I asked the little girl, laughing. ‘Poor child, why are you so pale and pink?’
‘How did it happen that we are so different?’ asked the littler one.
‘Perhaps God made all people like me at first,’ I said to her, ‘but when your tribe went into the far northern lands, the cold froze your skins to ice.’
The older girl shook her head bossily. She told a fine god-tale of the first people, whom the hairy ghosts call Adam and Eve, and how they had two sons first, and one called Cain, killed the other called Abel. And God banished Cain and marked him and all his children for the crime with a black skin.
I laughed to hear it. Only hairy ghosts could believe such foolishness: are they not the only ones who look as they do? Well, then. Who has been marked?
Anriques left that place looking worried. We went to the shops in the richest marketplace, full of people talking and laughing and swatting away the beggars. He bought a book in one place and left it in another.
At last he relaxed. As he sat at yet another wineshop, he bought me a lemon sherbert when he had one himself, as I was thirsty by then. It was full of bright sourness of lemons and sugar and water, very delicious.
‘Nearly finished, Merula,’ he said. ‘All I must do now is visit the harbour master to complete the sailing paperwork and then we can weigh anchor and go with the next tide.’
His face was still tense, the moisture beading his forehead, but he seemed less afraid. Still frustrated, he had not found what he came for, but he could see the path back. I thought he was wrong and my feet stamped themselves up and down in a small war dance, Lady Leopard flowing round me, her whiskers twitching with excitement. I looked at the marketplace, at the beggars and knew what I had not liked.
‘Sir,’ I said to him, ‘look at them. What are they?’
He followed where I pointed and frowned, told me the name.
‘Why have no beggars begged from us?’ I asked. ‘They have left us alone as if we had a plague. Look!’
He shrugged, unwilling to be frightened again. ‘Didn’t like the looks of you, perhaps, Merula.’
‘No, no,’ I said impatiently, ‘they know we are dangerous to approach.’ I glared around, trying to see who was following us, but there were so many people, all so brightly dressed and talking, and hairy ghosts all look alike anyway.
‘It doesn’t matter, we’ll soon be gone,’ he said, obstinately blind and I spat with impatience.
‘Sir,’ I hissed at him fiercely, ‘go back to the ship and sail away.’
He only shook his head. ‘I must visit the harbour master for my papers, and one more meeting. Come on.’
So we walked, untroubled by any beggars or street-hawkers at all, to another place by the water, made in white stone. The harbour master in his office smelled of fear and he looked at me sideways.
‘What is that?’ he demanded of Anriques.
‘My slave,’ said Anriques. ‘She is my attendant.’
‘Leave it outside.’
I made a two-fisted bow to him, as a warrior might to his enemy, and stepped outside. As I did, just in the tail of my eye, I saw the last of a file of men, shining with their curving peaked helmets and smooth metal breastplates, carrying the long axe-spears of the north, as they went quietly down an alleyway at the side of the big white harbour master’s building to a sidedoor.
Lady Leopard looked at me, swished her tail, climbed quite catlike on my shoulder. She weighed nothing.
I followed the way the file of men had gone, to see the door shutting behind the last of them. I saw a window, open but covered by a carved and beautiful grill made of metal peacocks to keep out the sun, and I climbed up some baskets to the window ledge and looked through it.
And there was Anriques facing the harbour master. Behind Anriques in the corner stood a clerk behind a high desk, impassively dipping his pen, a white gull’s feather in his back velvet cap. Something about the clerk’s face was familiar.
From the way Anriques stood, I knew he was afraid, and what he was afraid of was another man who sat at the table, his back to my window, wearing a black suit of clothes, very fine silk brocade, but black, black, black, dull as squid ink, with a great strange white wheel about his neck made of linen and a black hat on his head. Anriques bowed to him and as he straightened, he caught sight of me, my shape against the sunlight through the metal peacock I was clinging to.
Nothing in his face changed, but he spoke up loudly. ‘I swear by the Lord Jesus Christ that I am only a merchant, dealing in sugar,’ he said very clearly and slowly. ‘Your informer is lying, Christ have mercy on him, no doubt so you at the Holy Office will let him die, Señor Inquisitor Pasquale.’
The man in black was elegant, with a pale, slender, gentle face. He looked sadly at Anriques. ‘No, Mr Anriques, I think not. I think you were here to meet a traitor named Francis Ames and receive vital intelligence about His Majesty’s Armada.’
Anriques stood still. The world hung. How interesting, I thought. Now he was like a warrior when he had not been one in the alley-ambush in New Spain on the other side of the sea. Now he was poised and calm. Yes, his face was concerned, afraid, as it should be, of course. But his body, calm.
‘Who is this Francis Ames who speaks ill of me?’ he asked.
The harbour master’s clerk was watching intently, his pen poised to record.
‘Your friend,’ said the Inquisitor. ‘He said so when we arrested him. You bought him with stolen English gold.’
The clerk smiled briefly, bent to write again. Mr Anriques/Ames too relaxed a little. The soldiers I had seen filed in from the anteroom where they had been waiting.
‘Please make no fuss, Mr Anriques,’ said the Inquisitor. ‘We prefer to do these things quietly.’
‘By the Lord Jesus Christ, sir, I am innocent.’
I climbed higher, stepped from one grill to the next, peeked around the corner. Then men at arms surrounded Anriques’ slight body, and marched him off, with Señor Pasquale in the lead. I looked back at the clerk, still writing away, staring fixedly at the page. He felt my stare, glanced at me – then he looked down again.
Anriques had sworn by the Suffering Jesus who was not his god, therefore what he said was a lie and he was giving me the signal to go back to the ship. And I felt sure that there was more to the harbour master’s clerk than met the eye.
I leaped down from the window ledge, and looked about me at all the crowded hurrying people. Would the harbour master tell the men-at-arms that Mr Anriques had had an attendant? Would he think of it? Would he assume I had simply made my escape?
Ha! He might. I bent down, picked up a broken basket full of bones, and put it on my head, then I walked out into the square. What shall I do, Queen Moon? I aske
d. Shall I go now to the ship?
Oh yes, first the ship, came the soft tickling voice of Lady Leopard at my ear, there is a thing you must do there.
So I sang her songs as I carried my basket of scraps and when I came to the ship, tied tight to the quayside, I scattered the scraps out across the stones and the seagulls swooped down, quarrelling to pick them up. The men with ropes to the yards were swaying up the last great bags of sugar loaves and swinging them out onto the quay. Every bag of sugar was one slave’s life – cutting the cane in the hot sun, boiling and straining it – and in my dreamsight, blood dripped. But I had no time for dreamsight.
I walked over the gangplank onto the ship, saw Michael high on the yards, and went straight to where Rebecca waited in the cabin, staring at papers. When she saw me alone she gulped like a frog.
‘Where is he?’
Not to frighten her, said Lady Leopard. Be gentle but quick.
I had wanted to sing my mistress a woman-warrior’s song, but this was not customary to her people and the strange music might confuse her. So I went to one knee at her feet, where her soft crimson gown flowed onto the wood like blood, like blood.
‘My mistress,’ I whispered, although being upside-down, now I was the one in command as her world tipped itself up around her, ‘come with me now, take gold and a cloak and come.’
On the harbour side I heard the squawking and alarm calls as something frightened off the seagulls eating the scraps. I went to the bed, took my leopard skin and scooped the jewels from her casket into it, making it like a bag. There was the sound of marching feet, the sound of shouting.
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