Sacred Hunger

by Barry Unsworth

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you may tell Blair and Libby that they are lucky to get off so lightly. They can do their blood-letting on shore. If there is any more of it on board my ship I will take the skin off their backs.”

  “Aye-aye, sir.”

  “That little ‘un is a goer,” Barton remarked, as soon as the second mate had left. “He landed one or two good’uns on Libby.”

  “Why do you talk to me of that?”’ Thurso said, turning sharply upon him. “What is it to me? They will be here shortly. We have hit upon a good moment.

  There are no other ships anywhere in the offing or to seaward of us, which cannot long be the case. I believe they will have prime slaves in their pens there. We shall have to do what trade we can as speedily as may be. But hark you, Barton, I will not pay over the odds for them.”

  “No, Captain.”

  “I will not go a penny over the market.”

  Barton raised a thin and cautious face among the bales of brightly coloured fabrics and the shining rows of pans and kettles. The captain was becoming a talker these days. He glanced with accustomed stealthy dislike at Thurso’s impassive face and raw-looking blue eyes. Barton was sensitive to impressions and it seemed to him now that the captain was making assurances to somebody not in the room at all.

  ‘It would not do to pay over the odds, sir,” he said softly.

  “I am up to their tricks,” Thurso said.

  ‘There isn’t a man knows these waters better, nor the quality of the blacks here. They are rascals but I will be too much for them as I have always been before. They will find Saul Thurso always a jump ahead. I have never sold my owners short and I am not going to begin now, with the last one. He sends his nephew to spy on me, but I will do my best for him just the same. This is a hard trade and there are disappointments in it that could break a man’s spirit and blight his hopes who is weak enough to allow it.” He fell silent here, looking in dark abstraction at strings of glass beads hanging before him.

  “It has broke men’s hearts, Captain, to my sartin knowledge,” Barton said after a moment. “But we have a first-rate selection of goods here, upon my soul, there is what would please the most contrary and pernacious animal among ‘em. An” some of “em are pernacious difficult to please, as you an” I both know, Captain, havin’ been -“

  ‘What I know is not in your province,”

  Thurso said, rousing himself. “You keep to your place and I’ll keep to mine. I am just talking to you at present, Barton, that is all. We are in business together for the gold dust, as agreed. That is as far as things go between us.”

  “Yes, sir.” Seeing Thurso’s head lowered again in a return of that dark musing, Barton allowed his face to fall into an expression of faintly smiling indifference.

  So the two men stood for some time in silence in that festooned and cluttered emporium, surrounded by goods of extraordinary variety: hanging strings of yellow glass beads, copper bands threaded together, rolls of tobacco, cases of muskets, brass basins and copper pots, iron bars, linen handkerchiefs, pewter mugs, silk ramalls, bright red and deep blue bafts, chintzes, checked cottons, knives and cutlasses and gold-laced hats.

  Paris, approaching from the hatchway, glancing round the open door, saw them thus—standing silent in this cave of treasures, among coloured stuffs and shining surfaces—and he had an immediate feeling that these two also were on display, among the objects of commerce. This lasted only a moment. Then Thurso raised his head and saw him and said, “Well, it is our doctor,” with the usual intonation of sarcasm.

  But Paris could not return so soon to the tone of their everyday dealings. Whether he knew it or not, Thurso for the moment was transformed: bareheaded here, with his square-set figure and greyish poll, his attention momentarily disabled or distracted among sheen of cloth and gleam of metal, the reflecting surfaces of knife blades and mirrors and beads, it was possible to think of him as a stout and deferential ironmonger or draper comalm Paris expected to see an apron on him. Then he turned his head, the light fell on the square cage of his temples and jaws and the trapped and furious eyes within it, and the impression vanished.

  Paris began to speak, but he was interrupted by a sharp, wailing cry from above.

  “There they are,” Thurso said. “Mr Barton, I want the brandy we drew off hoisted below the quarterdeck awning. I want you to speak to Johnson and make sure he primes the swivel guns. The small arms will remain under lock and key, but you and Simmonds and Haines will carry pistols, if you please.”

  “Aye-aye, sir.” Barton was already out of the room and making for the hatchway.

  “As for you, sir,” Thurso said, “I shall want you up on deck with me. You had better wear your hat. Hats always impress these people. A naked-headed man is not rated so high with them.”

  He had himself donned a cocked hat. Under its shadow his eyes seemed to have retreated further.

  Something like a smile touched the corners of his mouth.

  ‘allyou may find yourself with something to do at last, Mr Paris,” he said.

  Paris went back to his cabin to fetch his hat.

  He had only the low-crowned black one which he had worn on his visit to the Kemps and which had, unknown to him, aroused such antipathy in his cousin Erasmus. He put it on, for lack of anything more imposing, and ascended hastily to the deck.

  Here for the moment there seemed only what there had been before, the hot sun, the welcome breath of the northern trade wind, the distant thunder of the surf.

  The tapping of Wilson’s mallet continued to be heard, there was a smell of hot pitch and black fumes of it were hanging everywhere. Standing on the afterdeck some yards from Thurso, he heard the boatswain order McGann to take the cauldron off but leave the brazier in place and keep it fed.

  Looking towards the shore, he saw at first nothing different. There were the changing depths of the water, marked by shifts to paler colours; the plunge and seethe of the waves as they broke on the shore and the distant iridescence of the spray, which was flung high —higher than the level of the deck, as high as the ship’s cross-trees, it seemed. Beyond this was the veiled forest.

  Straining his eyes through the dazzle of the surf, he saw at last the dark shape of the canoe, rising up to the line of sight like a piece of sediment in a shaken bottle. It rode a crest for appreciable moments on a course slightly athwart the ship. He heard or seemed to hear the blare of some instrument like a trumpet and a rapid pattering of drums. Then the canoe had plunged into a trough among the waves and vanished from view as completely as if it had never been, as if the sight of it had been mere illusion, product of strained eyes, trick of light.

  It was in this dream-like interlude that Paris knew suddenly why this coast had seemed in a way familiar amidst all its disturbing strangeness, why he had felt at first sight of it something tug at his memory. Those parallels of colour and light had reminded him of his boyhood in Norfolk, fishing from a rowboat, looking shoreward when the tide was on the ebb, the pale striations of the shallows, the constant fret of surf and strips of half-dried sand beyond, pale gold, with stretches of gleaming wet between, layer on layer, always merging and always distinct. Like the plumage of a bird, he thought, like wing feathers…

  He felt homesick, desperate for a refuge.

  In these few moments, with the canoe still lost to sight, an urgent desire for escape came upon him—not only, he realized, from the thraldom of the present and the ordeal he sensed coming. The scenes he had remembered belonged to his youth, to the days of his courtship; he had come with Ruth to those beaches in the early days of his marriage. It was what had happened to Ruth that he wanted to flee from, his part in it, the desolation of his life. These seemed connected, in a way he could not properly understand, with what he now stood waiting for. Somewhere within him words of a prayer formed, drop by drop, as if by some process of distillation independent of his will: Take this from me, let nothing more be required of me, let me go back to the time
before such things were done, such things were possible… But he knew there was no such time.

  The canoe rose to sight again, nearer now and more distinct, broadside to the ship, and Paris saw that it was indented or fretted with heads. He had time to notice, before the craft bobbed down again, the processional, frieze-like effect of this, enhanced by what seemed some shared and ceremonial burden. At the prow a man was sitting upright, wearing a high-crowned hat. One of that frieze of heads raised a tubular object as though to drink. The bugle blast came again over the water.

  They watched as the long canoe was steered through the zone of the surf with amazing dexterity. In the calmer water her progress was swifter and more direct.

  Soon she was lying alongside.

  The hatted figure at the prow had got to his feet, holding to the ship’s accommodation ladder for balance. He was a tall, obese man, the colour of dry clay. In addition to his gold-laced tricorn hat he wore a pair of linen drawers, a cutlass and a necklace of feathers. He was flanked by several men armed with muskets. One of these had also a drum between his knees and another a small bugle round his neck. All of them, chief and escort, were smiling broadly.

  Paris looked down at the bound figures in the waist of the long canoe. That frieze of heads had been theirs. There were ten of them, five men, two boys, two women, and a girl, all completely naked. They sat in silence, their arms bound behind them and their heads forced upright by means of a common yoke: it was the projections of this that had looked so strangely ceremonial at a distance. They were lighter in colour than the boatmen, who were coal black and heavy-browed, and had a muscular development of chest and arms such as Paris had never seen before. He could see the deep rise and fall of their breathing as they rested on the long paddles. He saw that Barber, the carpenter, was standing near and remembered he was an old hand on slaveships.

  “The boatmen seem a different people from the captives,” he said.

  Barber had lit a pipe in the interval of waiting. “Aye,” he said, “they are Kru people, they belong to the coast; no one else can get these skiffs through the surf. The slaves are from inside the country.”

  “And are they never made captive themselves?”’

  “The Kru?”’ Barber grinned round the stem of his pipe. It was clear he found this question funny. “Who would do the paddlin”?”’ he said. ‘not those other beggars—they prob’ly never seen the sea before.”

  “Never seen the sea?”’ Paris peered down over the side again. “But in that case -“

  The man standing in the canoe was still grasping the narrow accommodation ladder. He looked to Paris now as if he might have mixed blood. He made a kind of military salute with his free hand and turned a beaming face upwards. “Welcome Libberpool!” he called. “Cap’n Thursoo! Haloo! You ‘member me? You ‘member King Henry Cook?”’

  “It is that fat scoundrel Yellow Henry,”

  Thurso said to Barton. “One of those women has got fallen breasts, I can see it from here. I ‘member you fine,” he called down. “Come up, and welcome aboard.”

  Yellow Henry was beaming still but he made no immediate move to accept the invitation. “Ten prime slave,” he shouted. On the words, the drummer struck his drum a number of times and the bugler tilted up his instrument and elicited a short series of ear-splitting notes. Yellow Henry smiled through this, holding his hat. Still he made no move to mount the ladder.

  Thurso nodded his head as if in appreciation of the music.

  “Bring up you slaves for look-see,” he said. “You know me, you know Thurso, no panyar with Thurso.”

  “What is panyar?”’ Paris said quietly to Barber.

  “That is kidnappin”, stealin’ people for slaves.”

  ‘But that is what we are doing, isn’t it?”’

  “No,” Barber said. “What we are doin” is buyin’ slaves. There is some skippers go in and take their own slaves, without benefit of dealers.

  They even takes the dealers for slaves sometimes.

  That’s why these fellers are grinnin’ so much. They are afraid of being took themselves.”

  Paris watched the slaves unbound and the halters taken off them, watched them forced up the ladder one by one, Yellow Henry’s attendants, all steadily beaming, prodding them on with their cutlasses.

  The girl was very young, he saw now, hardly out of puberty, with high, small breasts and a thin down of pubic hair. He saw that there were tears on her face, though she made no sound. The faces of the others were fixed and expressionless—from exhaustion, it seemed to Paris. But their eyes showed too much white as they came on to the deck. Some final, useless reluctance made him move away from the opening where the ladder was let down.

  Last on board was the king himself, his arrival signalled by a fanfare more prolonged than any yet. He shook hands with Thurso, smiling still, breathing heavily from the climb. His attendants formed up on either side of him, clutching their muskets loosely. They were a motley band. All wore cartridge belts across their bodies. One or two sported cocked hats, though not so magnificent as their chiefs. One wore a dishevelled grey wig, another a lace shawl. All cast uneasy glances round them.

  ‘Ah, Bartoon,” the king said. “You keepee strong?”’

  “Can’t complain.” Barton raised his narrow face and grinned. “You have got a memory for names, ain’t you? This here is Mr Paris, our doctor.”

  “Ah, Paree! Dat a good hat.”

  Yellow Henry smelled strongly of rum but he did not seem unsteady. There was spray on his gold-laced hat and on his sparse grey chest hairs and grossly swollen belly. The slaves, whom he affected now to ignore, were huddled behind him against the rail, guarded by members of the crew armed with whips. His own people stood in a semicircle around him. “You Libberpool?”’ he enquired of Paris.

  “Norfolk.”

  “No fuck. Haw-haw.” Yellow Henry glanced at his followers. “You no fuck now, we got biznez.” There was a general guffaw at this, in which some members of the crew took part. “Fuck later,” Yellow Henry said, encouraged.

  “Bristool trash place,” he added after a moment. “Bristool shippis no give dash.”

  He took a pace and spat with delicate contempt over the side. “You got dashee for Kru mans?”’ he said.

  “I am goin’ ter bust that one,” Paris heard someone say behind him. Turning, he saw Tapley and McGann standing together. He did not know which had spoken—he thought Tapley. Both wore a similarly gloating expression. They were looking at the girl slave, who had not changed position since being thrust on to the deck. Her head was lowered and sun glinted on the tight springs of her hair. She stood in a position of frozen modesty, shoulders hunched forward and wrists crossed over her genitals. It came to Paris, with a certain surprise, that she, and all these people probably, the men too, were accustomed to being clothed below the waist.

  ‘We will talk about dashee when we have had a proper look at the goods,” Thurso said, in a tone almost jocular. “Have a seat here in the shade.

  Will you take a dram while the slaves are being looked over?”’

  “Brandy,” Yellow Henry conceded. He settled his bulk with dignity, at the same time darting looks to left and right of him. “Dese chiefs also like dram,” he said, indicating his escort.

  “Mr Paris,” Thurso said, with a sort of ponderous and malignant courtesy, “go forward and take a look at what they have brought, if you please. You had better go with him,” he added to Barton.

  “Aye-aye, sir.” Barton’s eyes had been on the barrel. With visible reluctance he stepped alongside Paris towards where the slaves were clustered. He had pistol in his belt and a broad-thonged whip of plaited leather in his hand.

  “It is teeth and eyes you looks at first,” he said moodily. “These beggars is up to all manner of tricks.”

  Paris thought he must mean the traders—the captives looked past all tricks save that of endurance. He had taken himself in hand: this was a medical examination he was about to c
onduct, not different in essence from others he had conducted. Nevertheless it was with a continuing sense of not being fully responsible, of acting under duress or in some sort of preordained ritual, that he now approached a tall negro on the outside of the group, took him by the wrist and sought to draw him forward a little. Why he began here he could not have said. The man had raised his eyes at their approach, unlike the others; and Paris had seen him hold back on the climb up the ship’s side —he had been struck several times with the flat of a cutlass. He hung back now; Paris had to use some force. Seeing it, Libby stepped forward with an oath and struck with his whip at the negro’s flank.

  The man gasped and started at the blow and his head shook, but he uttered no other sound. Libby would have repeated the blow but Paris raised his left arm as a barrier.

  The man came forward now without resistance. Across his chest and shoulders Paris saw the weals of some earlier beating, edged with blood. The arm he held was trembling through all its length with a continuous vibration, like a leaf in a faint current of air. Again, like a refuge, memory came to Paris: an exhausted swallow on the beach; he had warmed it between his hands, felt the pulse of fear pick up with the return of warmth, until its whole body was a single vibration of the terrified heart. But not terror only, he thought —there had been some indomitable hope of life in the bird…

  With the same sense of compulsion, like that attending some quest or mission in a dream, he met the dark and somehow impersonal regard of the negro, the eyes at a level with his own, fathomless and shallow in the bony sockets. He faltered for a moment at the gaze of these eyes that did not see him, did not know what they were seeing—the man was stricken with the openness of the place, he was sightless at his own exposure.

  Paris felt sweat gathering inside the band of his hat. The enveloping glare of the noon sky was all around them. With a slight grinding of the teeth, a simulation of savagery without which he could scarcely have proceeded, Paris seized the negro’s lower jaw and forced it open. There was no trace of saliva in the mouth, but tongue and gums were perfect, the teeth immaculate.