Sacred Hunger

by Barry Unsworth

  The boy was stitched into his tough shroud and slung to a pole borne by Billy Blair and Shantee Danka. On the mound of the cemetery there was some sunlight still, broken by the long, straight shadows of the graveposts. Nadri was in the last of the sunlight as he stood beside the grave. As a man generally respected, he had been chosen to say a few words.

  “Nobody sabee where dis boy come from,” he said. “To Vai people he look like he come from Vai people, to Susu people he look like he Susu an” so it go like dat. Everybody say he look like dey own people. Dis boy got no tribe cut, he got no cockskin cut. Slavemark on him, look like done only two-three day, mebee dis boy nearly die already when dey put burnmark, mebbe not. Who put dis slavemark on him, Frenchman, Inglis-man, Danaman? Only ting we ken say buckra man slaver done it. If he got no mark tell us who he belong, we oblige say dis dead pikin belong nobody. But wait one minnit, what dat mean? My pinion dat mean he belong everybody. He belong all of us here.”

  Nadri’s voice had deepened on this and his listeners saw that he was moved. ‘Dis pikin belong everybody,” he repeated. “So we go bury dis one here, longside us people, an” we go put dat burnmark on him gravepost. Dat burnmark him name.”

  With that, the body was lowered into the grave. Iboti, who had helped to dig the grave, stayed behind to fill it in. He was too poor a man to work for nothing and had been promised a rabbit and a bag of chestnut meal—quite valuable this, as the nearest chestnut trees lay far to the north. This was a bad time for Iboti, perhaps the worst since the terrible days of his capture and enslavement. His woman did not want him and treated him with scorn. He was due to be charged with witchcraft next day and he was deeply frightened and unhappy at this. Also he was afraid of being caught here among the dead at nightfall. For this reason he worked rapidly, protesting his innocence and uttering propitiatory phrases in a continuous mutter as he worked. He was a fearful man and not blessed with great intelligence. Only fear of devils and hope in Tongman’s advocacy kept him from running off into the night.

  Sullivan adhered to his plan in every detail.

  He ate no supper. The tension of his feelings took away appetite. There was not much to eat in any case: he had neglected to provide for himself and he felt in no frame of mind for the communal supper at his woman’s hut, along with one and quite possibly both of her other men, Libby and Zobi, and her four children, the latest only a year old.

  He waited in his own hut until the cooking fires were low and the meal-time gossip over. The shouts of children continued afterwards but they too were hushed after a while. The moon was high when he emerged and a faint light from it lay across the compound. There was a chill in the air and a smell of wood smoke and mist. Sullivan shivered a little. He had taken pains with his appearance, tying back his long hair with a leather thong, trimming his beard, chewing mastic to clean his teeth and sweeten his breath.

  There were people still moving about here and there, but no one took much notice of Sullivan as he made his way to the corner of the compound where Dinka lived. No light showed from her hut, but he was not particularly surprised at this; people in the settlement generally slept early and rose with the sun. Dinka would be roused from her first sleep by his music and what better way for a woman to wake?

  He chose a place some yards from the entrance and seated himself on the ground. After waiting a while to steady his breathing he settled the fiddle to his shoulder and began to play the air of ‘Oh, Hear Me!” He had a husky tenor voice, not very strong, but pleasing—he had used it in dusty lanes and cobbled streets of the past, in another life, singing for coppers, dragging a leg for more pathetic effect. Now he put all the feeling he knew into it:

  Oh, hear me, my charmer!

  Wouldst kill me with scorn?

  See, the east lightens,

  Soon cometh the dawn.

  He was aware of movements, voices, people stirring in the huts around, but he kept his eyes on the entrance to Dinka’s. There had been no response from this quarter so far. He repeated the first two lines of the melody on his fiddle, drawing out the notes as tremulously as possible. Still no sign of anything.

  He began the second verse:

  Hear me, oh, hear me,

  Give ease to my pain…

  Abruptly he fell silent. A figure had at last appeared at the threshold, naked, but not the one hoped for and not the right sex even—a fact grossly apparent to the staring Sullivan considerably before he knew the face for Sefadu’s. The voice, when it came, was not unkind: “She no ken hear you now, fiddleman, she busy too much. Come back in de mornin”.”

  The strains of the fiddle had come to Kenka as he lay between waking and sleeping. He had heard fiddle-music before and knew that it must be Sullivan. At the same time, perhaps because he was not fully awake or because the music was distant and sad, it seemed like a voice of the night, not coming from any particular place or person. There was something magical about it and for this reason Kenka never asked any questions concerning the music, nor indeed mentioned it to anyone until many years later in a different place, when he was an old man and nearly blind.

  As he lay looking through the darkness he heard the silence left by the ceasing of the music fill again with small accustomed sounds, faint rustles in the thatch above him, the deep, regular breathing of his brother and sister lying nearby, the distant sibilance of the sea —not exactly a sound, this, but a very faint escape of silence.

  He began to think about the night-time deer-hunt which he had been promised—his first. It was due to take place very shortly now, before the full moon.

  Shantee Danka was back, after an absence of several days. He had returned for the Palaver. It was Danka who had seen the deer-tracks and the cropped shoots in a hummock no more than an hour away, beyond the freshwater lagoon. Danka would be leading them. He was a notable hunter and very strong— Kenka had once measured Danka’s bow against the thickness of his own wrist and found no difference. About him, as about almost all the older men of the settlement, there was a legendary glamour. Danka had been one of those who brought the ship up from the sea…

  Kenka had never been to the hummock where the tracks had been found, but he felt he knew it because he had questioned both Paris and Nadri at different times and both had described it to him in detail, just as they had described the method of the hunt. There was a bayhead over a narrow stream. The stream flowed out of a tunnel of moonvines and there were small red fish in it and it opened into a pool that was completely roofed over by the branches of trees like a room with a floor of water.

  He began to rehearse the hunt in his mind, as he had done often before. Every phase of it had taken on the colour of ritual, and everything had to be done in a precise, unvarying order. They would leave while it was still light. He would see the silver stream flowing out of the vines and the red fish flashing in the clear water.

  He would wade upstream with the others, through the low opening in the tangle. They would wait at the edge of the clearing, making sure they were on the right side of the wind so that their scent would not be carried to the thickets where the deer came. The deer liked dark and secret places, Kenka knew, they were timid and swift to take alarm. But in spite of this, they always wanted to know the meaning of things and it was this that was their undoing. Dat de ting capsai dem, Nadri had said. Same-same ting every time.

  When it was growing dark he and Tekka would be allowed to light the fires of splinterwood in the shallow pans that the men carried on their backs in a rope harness. These made a light just strong enough— too much light would frighten the deer away. Deer don” stan’ for blazelight… Kenka lay completely still, on his back, his hands held down by his sides. The dark shapes of the deer would approach silently through the trees, drawn by the light. They would be dazzled but still they would come nearer, not seeing the forms of the hunters or the tightened bows with the heavy arrows. The light of the fire would shine in their eyes—their eyes would be wide open and blind. Perhaps at the last moment som
e fear would turn them away, but then it would be too late. There would come the twang and swish and the deer would fall and kick for a little while and then be still.

  With the death of the deer the night would be empty…Kenka was obscurely troubled as he lay there. The deer was killed because it wanted to know the meaning of everything and he understood this because he was the same himself. He had heard his father say it to Tabakali. Dis Kenka cur’us boy, alius want de answer, what dis mean, what dat mean…His father had seemed pleased… The glowing, sightless eyes of the deer faded in the darkness among the trees and Kenka drifted towards sleep.

  50.

  Palavers were held at irregular intervals, whenever disputes occurred which could not be settled privately. They took place in the compound, in the open space between the stockade and the first huts. Though serious enough to the disputants, they were regarded as a form of entertainment by those not involved and were always well attended. In the hot season evening was the preferred time but now, in the cooler weather, mid-morning was judged suitable, particularly as that evening would be taken up with the naming of Neema’s latest child, under the joint fathership of Cavana and Tiamoko—friends and partners, these two, sharing wife and trade interests.

  Neema had decided to have the naming on the same day as the Palaver so as to ensure a good attendance— desirable alike for prestige and the volume of gifts and good wishes.

  It was early still, not long after sunrise, and Paris was in his sickroom administering an infusion of quassia and dried orange peels to Libby, who had a jaundiced look to his solitary eye this morning and had come with complaints of a night disturbed by vomiting. This morbid condition, accompanied in the first hours by a low fever, was one that Libby had suffered from at intervals for a good number of years now.

  He was not alone in this. Others of the crew people, though none of the Africans, were troubled by a recurrent fever, mystifying in its cause to Paris, as there seemed to be no evidence of reinfection. In some cases it took the form of a single mild bout lasting a day or two, in others there was a more dangerous period of closely spaced peaks. Libby’s fever was accompanied by an evident obstruction of the bile, but this was not so with any of the others. It was difficult to see a pattern anywhere. However, the men seemed well enough between times and there had been no deaths from fever since Rimmer’s, five summers ago. Paris himself had experienced no recurrence of the illness that had stricken him aboard ship, except for a tendency to ache and shiver when he caught the mildest chill.

  He had long since exhausted his store of cinchona; now, to allay the fever and clear the blood, he relied on the powdered bark of the bitter ash, of which he had discovered isolated specimens growing on the shorewards side of some jungle hummocks, or on a concoction of sassafras.

  Libby was grateful enough, in his surly way, and Paris took the opportunity to ask his opinion of the charge against Iboti, due to be heard later that morning. As he had expected from a hanger-on of Kireku—and it was really the purpose of his question —it was the Shantee view that he got.

  “It is clear as daylight,” Libby said.

  “Iboti is guilty. He tried to kill Hambo just as much as if he had stuck a knife into him. He was seen gatherin” dust from Hambo’s footprint to make the fetish. Why should Hambo’s woman say she seen him if she never did?”’

  ‘She is Iboti’s woman too. Why she says this or that is what we hope to find out at the Palaver.”

  Libby made a gesture of contempt.

  “Palaver’s a shaggin” waste o’ time,” he said. ‘The death fetish was found on Hambo’s roof.”

  Paris looked curiously at the other man’s face, which was pallid and swollen with the bad night he had passed. Libby borrowed opinions from those he served. Why not beliefs too? “I did not know you set so much store by fetishes, Libby,” he said.

  “Me? A few sticks an” feathers an’ a bit o’ spit?”’ As he got up to go Libby uttered a short laugh, not altogether convincing. ‘When I am sick,” he said, “don’t I come for medicine? I don’t go to Amansa, beggin” for a charm.”

  After he had gone, Paris stood quietly, without moving. There was an ugliness of spirit about Libby, which showed even when he was trying to be amiable—perhaps more then. A period of silence seemed necessary before the place could be healed of his visit. Paris knew this was a superstitious feeling, but superstition of one sort or another, like nostalgia, moved among them all; and this sickroom, though open to everyone, was a very private place for him, it was where he came to commune with himself andwiththe past.

  Everything he possessed was here. His mahogany medicine chest stood on trestles of split palm log, with his small set of instruments, cleaned and polished, laid out in their slots of frayed plush and his glass-stopped bottles set in a row. Barber had made him a cabinet out of mangrove wood and he kept his collection of roots and oils and dried leaves on the shelves and his few books in the drawer.

  In a certain way the past was gathered here, as it was in the cemetery. Paris had kept the splints he had used to set a broken leg, the charred cane with which he had vainly tried to cauterize a snake-bite and save a life. In a jar on the shelf of his cabinet he kept the eel-skin—carefully cured —from which in desperate haste he had fashioned a catheter to pass down the throat and into the stomach of a baby of six months that had swallowed some flakings of koonti root—poisonous before pulping and draining. The child had been at the point of death, pulse and respiration had almost ceased. The improvised tube had enabled Paris to use his syringe to inject an emetic—it was a common pewter syringe, still there among his instruments. The effect had been miraculous: within minutes the pulse had become perceptible again at the wrist, the convulsed action of the mouth had ceased and the child had taken a quivering breath. Verging on the miraculous too that fortunate chance of the fresh eels caught from the creek and the tiny quantity of ipecacuanha still remaining at that time among his medicines. The little girl was six years old now…

  Memories are grafted together in ways beyond our choosing. He could not think of the child saved without some memory of his lost Ruth, though his thoughts of her in these days most often went back before the time of their misfortunes to the early days of courtship and marriage. Now there came to his mind a day in spring when they had walked together along the shore near her parents” home, in Norfolk. They had walked a long way, hand in hand, far beyond the harbour, to a deserted stretch of shore. The tide was out, he remembered. Levels of rippled sand, the pale blue of the tide-pools and the real sea beyond, darker, uniform to the horizon. Sunlight: the shingle was bright along the beach and the bunches of wet kelp were gleaming.

  Terns were screaming overhead—he had brought his telescope to watch them plunging for fish. Ruth had felt cold in the ruffling breeze from the sea and he had used his tinder-box to make a fire of driftwood up among the dunes. Bright flame against the pale dune grass. They held out their hands to the flame and laughed at nothing but the joy of being there together. Her pale hands reddened by the chill and then the fire. She had gone a little way alone to gather the blue flowers that grew there, that kept their colour when dried—he could not remember the name. He had followed with his eyes the slight, lonely figure against the sweep of the dunes. On an impulse he had taken up the telescope and trained it on her.

  She was brought suddenly close before him and he was amazed and deeply moved to see the cherishing and tentative way she put out her hand to the flowers.

  All the gentleness of her nature was in it. He had realized then that this was the way she touched everything, and he had been swept by such love for her that his sight for the moment seemed darkened and her figure lost…

  He was still standing in the same place half an hour later when Nadri approached, carrying a fish trap he had made, which he was intending to leave here while he attended the Palaver. In fact he could have left it anywhere with perfect security. Theft was rare in the settlement, the nature of life was too public. But
in any case no one would have dreamed of carrying off his trap because it was instantly recognizable for Nadri’s: no one else made traps the equal of his, either for cunning or beauty. This one, which he set down at a corner of the sickroom, was quite large, a yard or so in diameter, cylindrical in shape, with one end open and a funnel-shaped passageway leading to the interior. Warp splints made of willow sticks curved inward, admitting entry of the fish into the maze-like filling of the trap, and the closed end had a wicker lid. “That’s a fish-trap?”’ Paris said. “I don’t believe it.” Nadri smiled.

  His perfectionism in the matter of traps was a longstanding joke between them. ‘Why, what you think it is?”’

  Sharing the same woman had thrown them together and over the years Nadri had picked up a good deal of English from Paris, helped in this by a good ear and a quick intelligence and also, Paris had learned, by a grasp of language derived from his education—he was a Moslem and had been taught as a child to read and write and figure in Arabic. Other things too Paris had learned by degrees. Nadri came from a region of high grasslands and wooded valleys behind the Ivory Coast and had been clerk to a merchant, subsequently marrying his employer’s daughter. It was while journeying on business for his father-in-law that he had been taken by a slaving party. He had a daughter who would be fourteen now if she was still alive.