Sacred Hunger

by Barry Unsworth

  “Are you such a fool that you cannot see that it is the same thing?”’

  “The same thing? How the same thing?”’ He looked in astonishment at the captain’s face, saw the square jaws clench with a fury almost convulsive.

  It seemed that his question was by way of being the last straw for Thurso, who now leaned forward and spoke with an unconcealed violence of antipathy.

  “I see it now, you are one of those radical fellows they speak of, who will accept no authority.

  You will question everything, you will always think you know better.

  Hark to me now. The black will be tried with food again in the morning. If he refuses to eat, I will set Haines to flog him before them all until the skin hangs offhim, and I will continue so until he consents to eat or dies. That has been my practice before and it shall be the same now.” Pausing, he found the surgeon’s eyes on him, intent, without fear, hatefully perceptive. The other man’s presence was strong, oppressive to him, exerting some constraint that poisoned his fury with a sense of impotence, obliging him to explain, to seek to convert, to look for comprehension. He felt the blood beating heavily at his temples. ‘allyou preachy fool, you should have been a parson,” he said. “He cannot be allowed to die as he chooses. They must not believe they have the disposal of themselves. If you don’t understand that, you understand nothing. If he is going to die it must be at our hands and in pain, so that the others will not be corrupted.”

  Paris rose to his feet. He felt himself quivering internally with the offence of Thurso’s words and the reciprocal violence the other’s antagonism aroused in him. He thrust his hands behind his back. “I understand your words, sir,” he said huskily. ‘With your permission, I shall now -“

  At this moment, while the two were looking fixedly at each other, there came a cry from deck of a craft sighted. Thurso at once seized his hat and without a further word or glance stumped out of the cabin, the surgeon following. They stood on deck watching the approach of a narrow dugout with a framework amidships covered with palm thatch.

  “That is a river boat, Mr Barton,”

  Thurso said in his usual tones.

  “Aye, sir.”

  The captain raised his telescope. “They look like Susu people to me,” he said. “They have got someone there under the awning. It is a white man,” he added after some moments. It was not until the dugout was considerably nearer and riding broadside on to them that they were able to see that the man in the shadow of the thatch was Calley, wearing only a pair of filthy cotton drawers, with his arms bound behind him.

  “So,” Thurso said grimly, “one of our birds has come home to roost. These are up-country people. We shall need the linguister.”

  “Standing by, sir, Captain.”

  “What the devil is funny?”’

  “Nothing funny, Captain. Some these men mebbe speak Malinke.”

  “Tell them they are welcome aboard,”

  Thurso said. “Tell them they can come up.”

  Jimmy shouted down to the men in the boat below in a language of high, wavering pitch changes. He listened to the grave reply.

  “They say they not coming up, sir.”

  “Why in perdition not?”’

  “They say they don” like come up on the ship.

  They perlite people, don’t like to say it, my “pinion they scared of being panyared for slaves.”

  “They can trust me. I am known up and down this coast. I wouldn’t carry off free Africans.

  I give them dashee, one demi-john brandy.

  Tell them I am pleased they catch this runaway buckra man.” He looked balefully down at the unfortunate Calley, who sat in the shade of the palm thatch, head down, a picture of dejection.

  His upper arms were drawn together behind him with twisted raffia, so tightly that his neck tendons and the powerful muscles at his shoulders were tense with his efforts to withstand the traction.

  Jimmy translated, rubbing his chest in a circular fashion and half extending his right arm towards the boatman to indicate Thurso’s deep and abiding pleasure at the capture.

  “They say they trust you and they believe you.”

  “Good. They are sensible fellows.” Thurso looked down approvingly. “Why aren’t they moving?”’ he said impatiently after a moment.

  “They not coming up, sir. They say they believe you now but you may change mind while they on the way up and you cannot gantee that you will not change mind as nobody can gantee future thinking of his mind.”

  In relief at having got through to the end of this difficult sentence, Jimmy forgot himself again and smiled broadly. “So they not coming up,” he said.

  “That the top and tail of it.”

  “By God,” Thurso said savagely. “That man shall suffer for this when I get my hands on him.

  If we had been homeward bound, with the slaves discharged, I would have let him rot ashore. Tell them the brandy will be lowered down to them. All they have to do is to loose his bonds in a way that will allow him to mount the accommodation ladder.”

  Jimmy spoke again and the man in the prow of the dugout replied in a long and statesmanlike speech marked by grave, emphatic gesture.

  “Beggin” your pardon, Captain,” Haines said, still seeking favour and reinstatement, ‘why don’t we shoot one of the beggars? That one gabblin” now.

  We could pick him off easy. That would bring “em round.” He paused a moment, clearly taken with the beautiful simplicity of his idea. “Why not shoot ‘em all?”’ he said.

  “You blockhead,” Thurso said, turning upon him sharply. “Risk rousing the coast against us? Who would come trading to the ship after that?”’

  “They not satisfy with the offerea’Jimmy announced.

  ‘Very well, I can give them tobacco if they prefer.”

  “No, sir, pardon me.” In pure nervousness now Jimmy smiled again. “They want brandy and tobacco,” he said. “That is dashee for catch him. They say they want also ten bar slave price.”

  “What?”’ Thurso’s brows drew together. For some moments it looked as if he might burst into some violent expression of rage. But then a different look came to his face, something resigned, humorous almost. He glanced aside and nodded to himself as if in recognition. “Aye,” he muttered, “but they are traders, these people. They sit there under our guns and hold us to ransom. They separate the merit of the capture from the man’s price and make us pay for both. Tell them I agree, but I won’t haggle over the bars. They can have ten head blue beads for him, take or leave it. And tell them he is not a slave but an English seaman.”

  The offer was signalled satisfactory by the men below, who were more interested—for the moment at least—in beads and brandy than in definitions. The goods were lowered down over the side, Calley was untied and hoisted on to the ladder to make his slow way upward with cramped arms. The dugout, cast free of the ship, made speed shoreward, the four men throwing themselves on the oars for dear life.

  Calley was seized by Johnson and Haines before his feet had touched the deck. He made no resistance. Exhaustion, the sense of being a wrong-doer, the knowledge of punishment to come, combined to take the fight out of him. He was parched with thirst and bleeding from a host of scratches and cuts. He was given shirt and breeches from the ship’s store; then he was placed in leg irons and set on the forward part of the main deck under the eye of the first mate, whose watch it was.

  The end of the afternoon watch, with most of the ship’s work done for the day and nearly everyone on deck, was the time favoured by Thurso for the carrying out of exemplary punishments. It was then that Wilson had been flogged and Thomas True and Evans; and it was then that the time came for Calley. He did not plead but he whimpered while he was being tied and began to cry out terribly with the first blows. When taken down he was conscious still and uttering sounds in his throat curiously as if trying to reassure himself. However, he was not able to get to his feet without help or stand unsupported. Paris, who ha
d battled to establish his right to ministration in the earlier cases, felt he needed no further permission now. With Blair, distressed and blasphemous, to help him, he got Calley to the sick bay, got the heavy, helpless body facing down on the bunk and began to do what he could to clean the mess of blood from the back and staunch the lacerations.

  Under the spread of water blood frilled like petals from the wounds the knots of the cat had made from nape to waist, and stirred the torn skin at the edges of the lashmarks. Calley, so abjectly clamorous throughout the public ordeal of his punishment, behaved with fortitude now, helped by a constitution of phenomenal recuperative power. He kept his face pressed into the blanket. After a while sounds came from him, faltering and half choked.

  “He’s tryin” to say somethin,” Blair said.

  The surgeon had asked him to remain and he stood there now with a basin for the blood-sodden swabs that Paris passed to him. ‘He better keep mum, hadn’t he?”’ he said anxiously.

  Paris glanced at him a moment. Blair’s face had paled, the freckles showed over the bridge of his nose and his eyes looked unnaturally prominent. He had looked thus at the branding of the first slaves, the surgeon recalled suddenly. Not a callous man at all, Blair, he thought.

  Bluster and bravado apart. Tender-hearted, even —whenever he couldn’t find a cause for rage to save him from it. “No reason why he shouldn’t talk, if he wants,” he said mildly. “Can you make out what he is saying? The man is strong as an ox.” Saying this he remembered the only other time Calley had spoken to him: “You gets a saddle to put on,” and the look of shy mirth that had accompanied it. His friend and protector standing beside him.

  “What you sayin”, shipmate?”’ Blair said, leaning down and talking loudly as if to a deaf man.

  ‘He an’t very bright,” he said confidentially to Paris.

  Calley kept his face pressed to the blanket.

  “Deakin gone,” he mumbled, forming the sounds from the red mist his consciousness was reduced to. “I didn’ go wiv “im.” All the events of these last days, already scrambled hopelessly in his mind, turned on this central desolation. Blundering lost through the endless savannah, panicking at silence, tormented by thirst, struck and baited by the tribesmen when they had finally succeeded in subduing him—vengeance this, for the several that had been hurt in the process; none of it was more than a nightmare embroidery surrounding his desertion of Deakin. The words continued to issue from him. “I come back. There was noises… I was scared.

  Deakin gone by hisself now. He shouted for Dan’l. Shouted for me…”

  The two men listening had not understood everything of this because Calley’s face was muffled and the pain of the flogging choked the sounds in his throat. But after some moments they understood that the nature of the sounds had changed, they had become broken and gasping.

  ‘Dinna be snufflin”, lad,” Blair said, and to him too there came a memory: waking in the darkness of the hulk to pain and the sound of rats and weeping…

  ‘no use snufflin”,” he said.

  Hearing something in the other’s voice, Paris glanced at him quickly and then away. Blair had tears in his eyes. The surgeon felt a sympathetic prickling behind his own.

  Oblivious to the words and feelings of those above him and to the touch of water on his back, Calley wept into the blanket for the betrayal of his friend.

  When Deakin became aware of the silence and turned and called Calley’s name and received no reply, he knew at once that the other was not far away, that he was crouching somewhere among the bushes, hiding. The world became very quiet to Deakin at this moment, so quiet that he thought he would be able to hear the pulse of Calley’s fear if he listened closely enough.

  But he did not want to find Calley now.

  ‘Go back, Dan’l,” he called. “Make back to the river and follow downstream.”

  The sound disturbed birds somewhere high above him; he heard the volley of their wings. No other answer came. He waited some while longer then went on.

  For a time he listened, but he knew that Calley would not come after him now. The silence persisted, enveloping him, absorbing the sounds of his passage.

  He tried at first to keep north, following the course of the river; but the ground was swampy and treacherous and he stumbled among the intricate mangrove roots. He found himself longing for the open.

  All his passion for flight was in open country; he needed the complicity of the sky.

  In the evening he turned westward, into more thinly wooded ground that rose slowly from the river, interspersed with belts of shrub. Here the going was easier and he made some miles before nightfall. He drank water from the tin container that, together with the pistol, he wore at his belt. It was more than half empty now. He ate some of the ship’s bread and salt pork he had kept wrapped all day inside his shirt.

  The bread was damp with his sweat.

  Late in the afternoon of the following day he drank the last of his water. He was now in a country of broken woodland and spreads of tall, tussocky grass.

  The sky was open above him. Faint shadows of hawks moved over the ground. The silence intensified and within it Deakin spoke to himself, sometimes aloud. He would come to a village, people would come out from their houses. He would establish a trading post. Palm wine, lime juice, coconut milk. Don’t sleep, they will sell you. He could trade in gold dust, parrot’s feathers, teak…

  He did not believe it. He could not imagine the shape of the houses in the village or the look of the people; and with this failure there came the knowledge that all his plans of trading had been only pretexts to find himself here, on the move, in this empty country.

  Food he forgot in the growing torment of thirst.

  His own voice spoke no longer, but his father questioned him, cane in hand. Where are you making for? You know what will happen when you reach Jamaica, don’t you?

  What will they do to you when they get you on a navy ship again?

  There was no way of answering so as to avoid error.

  No possible answer could avert his father’s rage.

  Whatever he said, he would be beaten and locked up in the dark shed. Thurso gets the bounty, he said, trying to evade punishment by answering a different question altogether. Thurso gets five guineas for me. But this was wrong, his father’s face grew dark and swollen. It filled the sky and burst and Deakin drank what rain he could catch in his mouth and his cupped hands.

  That was on the fourth day of his freedom. After the rain the long, tawny grasses were swept by whispers, the sun came out again and the ground steamed.

  His pace was slow now and he staggered a little, but he was cooled by the rain and his mind was clear. He had no sense of a destination. It came to him that he had never had one. All his destinations had been only breaking loose… But that was not it either. Patiently, like a celibate remembering some cherished episode of love, he began to assemble the details of that first escape, the feel of the metal bar in the dark, the fear and exultation of the splintering wood. No tropical light had ever been so blinding as that of the dim dawn he had stepped into then, no sky at sea so vast as that one. That light, that enlargement, had been destination enough. He had never found it again, he had run ever since between narrowing walls, under lowering skies.

  He slept in his damp clothes and woke feverish. At first light he was on the move again, but his progress now was very slow. He was beginning to lose his sense of the rhythm of his walking, stepping too short, not raising his feet enough, so that he frequently stumbled and sometimes fell. With each fall the recovery took longer.

  Soon after sunrise, crossing a wide savannah, with the grass-heads glinting reddish and the low, broad-leaved trees beaded with fire, Deakin saw figures moving like dark flames to encircle him. One pointed or gestured, with a strange, repeated jabbing motion, and the sun ran in glitters on something.

  They were round him in a circle. That is how you capture a man or a beast, Deakin knew one that you thi
nk might be dangerous. To be enclosed on all sides is the end of a runner. Frighten them off. Again the gleam of the raised spears caught his eyes. They would want his pistol and his water bottle and his leather belt. They would want to tie him… His sight was confused. He fumbled the pistol out of his belt and fired at a flash of sunlight. The sound was shattering. It was inconceivable that any sound could ever follow it and for Deakin none did. He saw another flash, different, speedy, but he heard nothing. The spear struck him below the breastbone and pierced him almost through. He fell to his knees and rested there a moment, holding the shaft like something precious, and the destination of light briefly flooded his eyes from a sky that blazed and closed.

  29.

  No one on board ever knew what had become of Deakin. He joined the company of those who have no official death. For the Admiralty he remained a deserter in perpetuity. On Thurso’s crew-list he was entered as “Run”, and this was all his epitaph. Paris, writing in his journal at intervals that grew longer, gave him space only for good wishes. By this time, for the surgeon, Deakin’s disappearance had been overshadowed by a death that was official.

  Jack Simmonds, our second mate, is no longer with us. He departed this life yesterday. I had noticed on our return from Tucker’s that he bore every appearance of fever. The day following he was sent out again and on return of the yawl was unable to get aboard without assistance and complained much of headache and a weakness in his limbs. That evening, the fever mounting, I had him conveyed to the sickroom and attempted to allay the heat by bathing of his limbs and administering an infusion of powdered cinchona bark, of which I came provided with a good stock; but the fever grew worse in the night—I have seldom seen such violent throes; they came close to paroxysm.

  Early next morning he began to exude small quantities of blood from his nose and gums and the corners of his eyes; I detected marks of blood also on his forehead and in his armpits. Within two hours of this discharge, the heat subsided abruptly, a clammy moisture succeeded and the poor fellow’s face took on the look of death. He asked me to make sure that his wife received the wages due to him and I promised to do so. I had not known he was married. At three in the afternoon he began to vomit quantities of blood darkened with bile and shortly after choked and so died, I standing by quite powerless to save him or even much alleviate his sufferings. His body was committed to the sea the same euening, with Thurso reading the service.