Sacred Hunger

by Barry Unsworth

  “Not Jimmy climb de tree. Mebbe Oose no tell ‘bout black bear an” fraid him arse.”

  Paris thought about this for some moments. The turtle had stopped swimming and lay some dozen yards out, with the blunt nob of its head and the glistening curve of its shell just above the surface. ‘Dis what I tink,” he said at last. “Nobody sabee de whole story. Mebbe Oose forgit, mebbe change some ting. Oose got arse same like you, me, Tekka, he want save him arse same like everybody. An” you sabee why dat, don’ you?”’

  The pure pleasure of knowing the answer had spread over Kenka’s face. ‘Man lose him arse no ken climb tree, no ken do anyting.”

  “Dat right. You member dat, Kenka. Now I go tell you different story ‘bout tree. You see where we standin” now, we standin’ side of tree big too much grow close tagedder we call jungle ammack. You sabee dat name?”’

  The boy nodded.

  ‘Dey got big big tree grow in dere, in de heart of it. Man look up, no see de top.

  Animal in dere, deer an” leppid an’ rabbit. You ever walk all de way roun’ dis ammack? You big boy now, we do it one day baimbai. Take axe an’ knife, ask you mamma make nyam for us eat on de way.

  Grass land grow all roun’, all covered water in de rainy time. Dis ammack an island in de grass.”

  ‘What mean aylan?”’

  “Same like land in de sea. You sabee?

  Grass land like de sea. So de question is, how dis aylan come here dis place? One time all same same grass. Mebbe dis place jus” little bit high. Mebbe dis much.” He made a gap of some inches between finger and thumb. ‘High nuff catch seed come on de wind.”

  “Come from where?”’ Kenka was absorbed. The area of his face seemed to have contracted and his eyes opened wide and startled-looking as though the next thing coming might be too much for him.

  “Come over de sea from de aylan in de sea where de big tree grow. Mebbe seed resin tree or palm. Mebbe seed mastick tree I use for make medsin, you sabee? Mebbe so small seed no ken see. Den build up slow too much, root keep ground tagedder, water stick on leaf, den anadder seed catch. So it go on mebbe two-three hunnerd year.” But he saw this meant little to the boy. “Long time ago, before I born,” he said.

  “Now we got dis big ammack, tree start fightin”. You come dis way I show you someting.”

  The turtle, which had been watching them all this time, nosedived as they began to walk along the bank.

  Shoals of tiny black fish darted here and there in the warm shallow water at the edges. A butterfly with zebra stripes of cream and black wavered past them. Paris led the boy some way in among the trees. In the gloom here, bordering black water, amidst a tangle of palmetto and the strange, leaning, festooned trees of the swamp, he found a strangler fig enfolding an oak in its murderous embrace, its network of creepers embedded in the trunk of its dying host.

  ‘See dis tree?”’ he said. “Dis killer tree. Dis tree find anadder tree den grappul him, climb all over de trunk till fust tree life choke out.”

  Kenka did not know this word and Paris placed hands round his own neck in illustration. He tried to explain the operation of this strange, deadly plant, which had seeded in some crevice on the oak and from these tiny beginnings and over many years had clambered relentlessly up to the light, murdering its host by infinitesimal degrees on the way. It had tentacles as thick as a man’s body now; one of them had leapt a dozen feet and put a smooth loop round the branch of a nearby mangrove.

  “In de finish, kill dat too,” Paris said. He was aware that this had become a different story from the one he had set out to tell. Some darkness from himself had intruded. He felt suddenly guilty, as if he had committed some sin of the spirit, perhaps irreparable, seeing the boy’s rapt face in this dimness among the trees. “I want tell you,” he said. “You listen good and member it. Dis a tree, we talkin”

  “bout, not a man. Man ken climb an” live in de sunshine tagedder.”

  This had come perhaps too belatedly. Kenka’s face had a considering look but his mind had taken a different turn. ‘One tree chok anadder,” he said. “Den anadder chok dat one. In de finish all dem fall down.” He made a sharp gesture with one thin arm. “We come back grass agin, no aylan.”

  “What den?”’ Paris asked, amused and somehow touched at this rigorous conclusion.

  Kenka answered his father’s smile with the look of serious pleasure he always had when he knew the answer. “Anadder seed come on de wind,” he said.

  48.

  Father and son walked back together in the failing light. The lagoon water was steel-coloured, glimmering faintly, quite motionless. They kept well above it. In this deceptive light it was better not to go too near the water. Alligators sometimes entered the lagoons hunting for turtles. They could lie at the shadowed verges almost without breaking the surface. A moving adult was not likely to be attacked, but in the early years of the settlement a small son of Iboti had been seized and dragged under and no one had forgotten it.

  High in the branches of a tree on the far side of the water a black snake-bird stretched its fantastic neck and uttered a single screaming cry.

  And as if this were a signal, while Paris and Kenka began the gradual ascent towards the first huts of the settlement, there began the evening clamour of the marsh birds rising to their roosting places, shrieking at the touch of the dark with a sound harsh and sorrowful like a fanfare of defeat. This lasted some minutes only, then the birds fell silent.

  The compound was smoky with cooking fires and loud with the drum-beat sound of mortar and pestle.

  Tabakali’s hut was near the centre, facing the stockade gate but further back than most of the others, nearer to the dense foliage of the hummock that lay immediately below the pine ridge. The clashing rustle of palmetto fans was audible here in the slightest breeze and in the mornings the tallest of the palms cast thin shadows over the thatch.

  The hut was the same as the others, built on a rectangle with more frontage than depth, with a palm-thatch roof sloping down on either side from a central ridge-pole. Woven mats hung from the split-log rafters to divide the space inside. In the hot season the huts were open-sided, but now in November mats had been hung all round to make an enclosure.

  Tabakali was crouched at a low fire cooking silverfish on a cane grid. She smiled as they approached, but said nothing comshe never spoke in greeting. Kenka, seeing that the food was not ready yet, disappeared round the back of the hut, where he found his sister playing knuckle-bones with some other children and joined in.

  Paris stood for some minutes near the fire. The new moon was rising now, rimmed with the old one. The sky still held a lingering radiance, the few clouds very dark and soft-looking, as if charred. In the clearing of the compound there was light enough still, though figures at any distance were shadowy and indistinct in the smoky haze. Tabakali’s face was lit by the glow of the fire. She was unaware of him, lost in thoughts of her own. She was dressed in a piece of the new cotton, dark red in colour, that Nadri, her other man, had bought for her. Nadri, an ingenious maker of traps, had given three fox-skins for three yards of it, an exorbitant price but she had desired the material greatly. With a tenacity that had surprised Paris she had always contrived to dress here as she had done in Africa, with a length of dyed cotton flung over one shoulder, covering the breasts and gathered at the waist to make a short skirt.

  Earlier she had hoarded remnants of the trade cottons they had taken from the ship; but of late bolts of cloth, dyed in vivid colours, had began to appear among the people of the settlement, brought from an undisclosed source by the trade partnership of Cavana, Tongman and Tiamoko. Several of the women wore this new fabric now, in their different ways, though there was a tendency among the younger ones to imitate Tabakali and cover the breasts. She herself wore nothing beneath the garment and her narrow feet and long legs were bare.

  He looked steadily at her, enjoying the licence of watching her when she was heedless. She had less now of the elegant sharp
ness of bone that had drawn him at first. In these years she had borne four children, one of whom had died. Her breasts were heavier and the years had put flesh on her shoulders and hips and softened the sheer planes of her face.

  Her mouth was set in a fuller pout, resembling now a dark pink, crumpled rose. But the long-browed, slanting look of the eyes was the same, somehow both insolent and docile, and her arms and legs were slender still; he could see the supple play of muscle in her thighs as she shifted on her heels. Suddenly he was swept by a longing for the refuge she could give him, a need for darkness and the simplicity of her embrace —need made fierce by the desire that waited upon it, loosening his loins with heat as he stood there in the smoky, echoing compound.

  She glanced up at him now, with her habitual, rather startled-seeming abruptness of movement, as if to appeal for his support in some argument she was conducting within herself. But her expression changed at the sight of his face and she raised her head and straightened her shoulders. “You got big yai,” she said. “Dat me or de fish you lookin” at?”’

  ‘Dat you.”

  “Good, I happy for dat too much, never mind den, we forgit ‘bout fish, buzzad bird ken have dem.”

  “No, no,” Paris said, smiling. He knew that it amused her to catch him in contradiction of any kind. “You plenty sabee man keep more dan one ting inside him head same-same time.”

  She rose in one lithe movement and turned towards him. “Keep ting in your head same-same time, head go sick,” she said in the tone of finality she used when it was a question of Paris’s well-being—an area in which she felt sole and undisputed authority. “You docta, you no sabee dat?

  Better one ting one time. Fish ready now.”

  The fish had been brought that afternoon by Blair in thanks for the curing of Sallian’s latest-born— whom Paris had delivered three months before—of a colic. This had not been a difficult matter; the baby’s cramps had been alarming in their violence but had been eased within a short time by a mild infusion of wild mint and quassia root. But Sallian’s gratitude was as large as everything else about her and she had dispatched Billy with the silverfish.

  They ate in a circle at the fireside, sitting on rush mats that Tabakali had made with a skill learned in childhood and stained blue with the leaves of a dye plant that grew wild further north in abandoned plantations; Kireku and the Shantee brought it down sometimes, together with the small, bitter oranges that grew there.

  With the fish they had swamp cabbage, eaten raw, and koonti cakes—excellent these last, as Paris several times exclaimed. The koonti plant, knowledge of which they owed to the Indians, grew plentifully in the shore hummocks and in the pine ridges above them, and it was the exclusive concern of the women to gather the roots and make the flour. But Tabakali’s koonti cakes had a particular excellence known to everyone in the settlement, rivalled only by those of Sallian, and this despite the fact that Tabakali came from a nomadic people who did not cultivate the ground and so—unlike almost all the other women—she had no experience of similar root crops like cassava. But she was meticulous almost to a fault and addressed herself thoroughly to everything from gathering and cooking to cleaning her teeth and oiling her body. She had developed her own methods of pulping the roots and washing the starch free, fermenting the sediment not just once or twice but four times, so that the flour was purer and her cakes lighter in texture, pale yellow in colour instead of the usual orange. With wild honey, when this could be found, there were few things in Paris’s experience more delicious.

  After supper the younger children were put to bed and Kenka went off to see his friend Tekka—his friend for the moment, at least: these two were of an age and by turns friends and enemies. Just now they were united in a common excitement as they were both to be allowed to accompany Paris and Nadri and Shantee Danka on a hunt for deer due to take place before the moon reached the full.

  Inside the hut they lit a thin, foot-long pine quill resting longways in an upright stand fashioned by Barber from a cask-hoop. The resinous wood gave off little smoke and the light from it was reddish, slightly wavering.

  Tabakali sat near the light on a low trestle. She was sifting through some wild cane seeds she had gathered to make porridge, taking them handful by handful from a skin bag on to a board across her knees. Paris sat with his back against a corner post, saying little, enjoying the peace that came to him always within this warmly lit enclave at nightfall, compounded of the silence, the gentle light, the deft movements of the woman. No call would be made on him here; Tabakali rarely enjoined any task on him or Nadri when they came to her. She had a strong sense of territory, and that included the division of labour; Nadri’s work was trapping, at which he was a notable success, applying skills learned from his father in childhood, snaring quail in the wide grasslands; Paris’s work was his sickroom and his garden.

  Kenka did not return, but this caused no concern to either of them. The boy knew better than to go alone outside the compound after dark. It was a lesson drummed in from an early age: night was the time of the bear and the panther and the crocodile. He would be sleeping elsewhere, as he frequently did—perhaps at Tekka’s. The night was silent now except for the occasional cry of nightbirds. Paris rose to light another splinter of wood. Tabakali looked up at the movement and her long fingers rested among the seeds. “You worrit, an’t you?”’ she said. “Why you keep mum? What good dat serve?”’ She never missed any change in his demeanour, though it was sometimes long before she spoke of it. Lately she had seen some unhappiness drag at the lines of his mouth, though the expression was fleeting, soon lost in the patience and obstinacy that his face wore in repose. “Keep mum, end up poison belly,” she said.

  “It’s nothing,” Paris said. “No wort” palaver.” He moved towards her and put out his hand to touch the warm soft skin at her nape. He had always loved the strong column of her neck, thick but shapely and unblemished. The musky scent of her body came to him and the sweet smell of the acorn oil she used on her hair.

  ‘We see if wort” palaver,” she said.

  ‘allyou tell me, den we see.” She smiled suddenly and he realized, without being able to share it, that her amusement came from something she saw as contradictory in what she was saying. “I wait dis palaver,” she said.

  Paris hesitated still. Tabakali was a fighting woman, prompt to action or decision when confronted with the need; but he did not know how to discuss feelings of anxiety or foreboding with her as this involved some appeal to shared expectation and she lived far more closely from hour to hour and day to day than he did, making her—at least in his view of things—a natural victim of those who saw further. In this, as in a number of other ways, she had remained alien to him. He knew little of her past before enslavement, and she had no concept of his. And the lingua franca that had developed among them, derived from the trade pidgin of the Guinea Coast, though it had provided the only possibility of a common language, offered small register for feeling.

  The tendencies that worried him most—the growth of trading partnerships and the increasing rivalry and secrecy of their operations—he could not find words for. He began to speak to her of something more tangible and immediate, the forthcoming Palaver at which Tongman was to defend Iboti against the charge of witchcraft brought jointly by his woman Arifa and Shantee Hambo, who was Arifa’s other man. A number of things about this case troubled him, not least among them the fact that Hambo was a fellow-tribesman of the powerful Kireku. Accusations of witchcraft were rare these days; most disputes concerned property or trade. Even in the early days there had been nothing like this. Some disputes concerning the evil eye there had been, born of jealousy and soon settled. Since then the nature of life in the settlement, the variety of language and race among the negroes, above all the violence done to traditional morality by the need to share women, had wrenched the people away from their accustomed styles of thinking, ideas of the supernatural had been driven below the surface.

  The
re was, moreover, a disturbing aura of domestic intrigue about this case. Iboti was very slow in understanding and already one of the poorest people in the settlement, depending on Arifa for some of his necessities. If he lost the case Arifa would be entitled to deny him admittance to her hut and he would have to pay compensation to Hambo. If he won with Tongman’s help, he would avoid disgrace but he would have to pay Tongman’s fee. Either way he would be impoverished. This was not the first time that Tongman had spoken on someone else’s behalf at a Council…

  ‘Tongman big man for Palaver,” he said.

  “He talk clever. Tongman is a good advocate.”

  “Avokka, what dat?”’

  “Avokka talk in de Palaver, talk any way, say any ting, dis way, dat way, never mind de trut.”

  “Avokka,” she repeated. “Man talk clever pas” other man, dat his work. Docta sabee medsin pas’ other man, trappa make trap pas’ other man, dat dem work. Dat same-same ting everywhere.”

  ‘Docta an” trappa, dey don’ change you head,” Paris said with a smile. He was amused and strangely reassured by the invariably non-moralistic quality of her judgements. She admired all outstanding achievement of whatever kind.

  ‘Tongman no ken change you head cos you sabee he a talkin” man,” she said now, answering his smile with a triumphant one of her own. ‘allyou say hum-hum, dat jus” Tongman agin. When he don’ talk, dat danger time. Okpolu by de water, you no “fraid. Okpolu climb fence, den you watch out.”

  “What is okpolu?”’

  “Okpolu is frog.”

  Paris nodded gravely. “Okpolu,” he said, as if in serious intention to remember it, and this made her laugh and look down and raise a hand to her mouth in the strange gesture, half modest, half superstitious, with which she always covered her laughter.

  He laughed a little in response, moved by tenderness and renewed desire at this familiar and strangely helpless movement of hers. She sat carelessly, exposing her inner thighs below the short skirt—modesty and indifference were blended in her in a way he had never understood. With the sensitivity that she showed in all physical matters, a swiftness far surpassing his, she kept her eyes down for some moments. When she looked at him it was with a certain quality of steadiness that he also recognized, proud, calm, quite unselfconscious.