Lion's Blood

by Steven Barnes

  "Don't watch," his mother whispered, but Aidan could not, would not take his eyes away.

  Aidan needed to see it. See the bleeding hands as the lash ripped Kyle's fingers to the bone. See the upturned face as a lid was nearly torn away from its eye. See the nose as it broke, the shoulder as the skin peeled away. The body as it collapsed in total surrender.

  "Kyle!" Donough sobbed. "Kyle . . ."

  Aidan needed to burn this sight into his mind, into his heart. There would come a time, a way. He had to believe that. And if he could find that way, he might free his mother and sister. He would have to learn from the mistakes of others, even the poor sobbing wretch of a boy across the aisle even now pleading for mercy through a throat thickened by blood and tears.

  When his time came, he would not fumble, he would not be clumsy. He would be swift, and direct, and deadly.

  As his father would have been.

  All that day new captives were herded into the hold, until at last Aidan lost count of them and fell into a doze. When he awakened, the light streaming through the hatch doors had narrowed and faded. Darkness deeper than night reigned absolute. Already the air grew heavy and hot, almost like breathing mud. The narrow shelves were so tightly packed that he could feel the fearful, fevered respirations of Morgan above him. There was no room to sit up. There were probably a hundred eighty captives crushed into a space that would have been grueling for sixty.

  Their captors seemed to have less regard for them than Aidan had had for the village dog.

  "Who here calls O'Dere home?" croaked Riley. Donough Boru, Morgan, Brigit, and Aidan's own family were the only ones to answer.

  "Kyle?" Donough whispered anxiously. "Can you hear?"

  "I'm sick," Kyle croaked at last. Then he added: "But O'Dere is my home." He made a sound that might have been a sob. "I want to go home."

  "Who from Delbaeth?" a woman said quickly, and received five affirmatives.

  "And Buanann?" said a voice younger than Aidan. "Is there no one from Buanann? Am I the only one here?"

  There was no reply, and Aidan heard a soft wail.

  Then the Delbaeth woman spoke. "Don't cry, little one. What is your name?"

  "Cormac," the boy said. "Cormac of Buanann. Me ma and da are dead. All dead."

  "Hush," said the woman. "So long as there is a woman of Eire, you have a mother."

  "So long as there is a man," said a masculine voice across the aisle, "you have a father." A general murmur of agreement in the dark. "I am Niad of Cumhail, and I should be dead. I chose life over the company of my ancestors, and I must bear that burden. Coward I might be, but if you will have me, while we are together, call me father. And when we arrive in whatever hell waits for us, I will protect you as my son."

  "Well spoke," Aidan murmured.

  There was a pause, and then: "Niad?" said the boy.

  "Yes?"

  "Better a live dog than a dead lion."

  And incredibly, Niad managed a grim laugh, echoed and amplified by other voices. There were no lions in that hold. Only live dogs.

  But dogs, Aidan thought, could bite.

  And so the dark game progressed. Villages of Cormac, of Dagda, of Cridinbhel all had lost children in that hold, and in reaching out to one another they found themselves.

  For hours it seemed that there was no motion in the ship, and little sound except the distant, hollow sound of feet and muffled voices from above them and to the side. Then finally there was the gradual, soft swaying that told Aidan that they were under way, heading out to sea.

  The talking had died away, leaving only an occasional sob or a whispered word of comfort in the silence.

  "Aidan?" Nessa said quietly.

  "Nessa?" He twisted in his chains, eyes wide, struggling to see her.

  "If we die, I'm glad we're together," she said.

  "We will live," he said. "And if they separate us, I will find you, I swear it."

  "You swear?" Her words were soft, reedy, a child's voice, filled with a child's need to believe.

  "I swear."

  She sighed and rustled as he had heard a thousand times in the past. He knew that she was rolling onto her side, seeking the elusive comfort of sleep. Aidan hoped that her dreams would be sweeter than his. That is, if dreams were possible at all in such a dark and dreadful place.

  Chapter Six

  The seventh night out, Aidan awakened from a nightmare to find the hold lurching and rocking like a treetop in the wind. He snapped to the end of his chains, felt them pull at his flesh and then yank him back onto his pallet.

  "Christ, save us!" cried the woman below Aidan's feet.

  "Goddess!" moaned the woman from Delbaeth. "I beg you, don't let me drown. Please—" Her plea was truncated by another savage lurch. Water poured down through the hatch and sloshed through the sludge of vomit and body waste slicking the center aisle.

  Aidan was certain that the screwship would founder, bringing them a cleaner death than any other that might await. At least this way captives and captors would be delivered unto death together! And if there was a final Judgment, as Deirdre claimed, then they would see who was right, and who was damned.

  The ship tilted like a dolphin dancing on its tail. Again, water gushed into the hold. Distantly, he heard screaming from the top deck and found himself hoping that some of the black bastards might have been washed overboard. A fisherman knew the peril of water: that which fed and succored could swallow as well. A fisherman made peace with the rivers and the sea, and feared it not. He hoped that every one of their captors would find death in the deep. Some prisoners wailed that they were going to die, but Aidan bit his lip and refused to scream.

  Through most of their voyage, he had heard a deep thrumming in the ship's bowels, a pulse, almost as if the ship was a living thing, and sometimes he felt heat through the walls, heat that made the press of bodies even more agonizing.

  But there were other times when that pulse died, and he knew in his bones, from the generations of fisher folk that had birthed him, that these were times when the ship used the power of wind to move them.

  This strange ship, the flying boats, the towers that touched the clouds all these things were the work of men. Black men, yes, but they were human. He had to believe that, or he was lost.

  Drown us. Drown us all, now, and we die together. Not masters and slaves. Not eaters and eaten. But as folk who had wandered too far from land and paid the price fishermen have paid since God first blessed the land with life.

  But they did not die. The ship did not founder. In time the waves hushed. The ship's stomach-voiding side-to-side lurch diminished, slowed, died. Stinking water drained from the hold, washing away some of the corruption with it. As the acid of mortal terror leeched from his belly, Aidan fell into an exhausted sleep.

  Twice a day they were furnished with water, and once a day with food. The blacks seemed loath to venture into the dankness of the hold so great was the stench. On some days, the hold filled with tiny black flying things that swarmed over their wounds, crawled into mouth and eyes, and made sleep all but impossible. Aidan breathed the insects and the stink in and out for so long that they seemed a part of him, things he might never cleanse from nose and throat and lungs if he lived a thousand years,

  He was constantly ill. Sick of his own festering wounds, which the black men daubed with a stinging, tarry slop. Sick of the sound of his own mother vomiting up her food, of the constant crying and pitiful attempts to comfort. Sick of the swarming flies, the fleas that festered, and of the rats that grew bold enough to chew the edges of suppurating wounds when a captive grew too weak or despairing to fend them off.

  Sick of the dead.

  Daily, now, it seemed that one or two of the captives yielded up their lives, killed by despair and unending horror. The black men searched among them every morning, and hauled the corpses up onto deck, perhaps to eat, perhaps to throw to the sharks.

  It was not until they came for Kyle Boru, dragging his limp body
from its pallet, that Aidan stirred from a glassy lethargy into full horror.

  "No!" Donough screamed, the sound a raw-edged howl of despair. "He's not dead! He's moving! Stop!"

  And Aidan watched the form of his friend, the terrible limpness as Kyle's head thumped down onto the muck-smeared center aisle. The pale palms turned upward in the thin light. The unblinking eyes, half-lidded, staring at them all without the slightest accusation. Fear not, he seemed to whisper. Mourn not. I am safe, and away.

  He watched as Kyle was hauled out of the hold, trying to close his ears to the terrible, gut-wrenching howls of the surviving Boru boy. He clasped his hands over his ears, sealing them until all he could hear was his own frantic breaths echoing in his skull.

  Finally, a wobble-legged Aidan was taken up along with some of the others. He feared he might be devoured or murdered. When the sunlight struck his face the agony of sudden blindness forced Aidan to forget his fears. He threw his hands in front of his eyes and shrieked, and the others joined their voices in choral protest.

  When Aidan finally adapted to the light, he recoiled in horror: in every direction, as far as he could see, there was nothing but water. Endless rolling waves, no sight of land, nothing but sea in all directions. He was stunned out of his pain, transfixed by the sight. Who would have thought there was so much water in all the world? To hear tales of something called an "ocean" was one thing. To be adrift in such an impossibly liquid world was something else altogether.

  "Where is the land?" murmured Niad of Cumhail, close behind him.

  "Don't know," said a man in front. His wild pale beard was matted with black and yellow specks. "Water has swallowed the world."

  The air was so still that the smoke from the ship's chimney rose almost straight up. From where he stood Aidan could not see the screw turning at the back of the ship, but felt the vibration beneath his feet.

  He heard a splash to his left, and turned in time to see a woman's body rolled over the side into the ocean. Had one of her hands struggled, feebly, to cling to the rail? No, he couldn't believe that, couldn't allow that image to remain in his mind.

  The black sailors bent down and hefted up a smaller, male form. Aidan watched, numb, as it cleft the water.

  Even when the whips cracked and their captors forced their unsteady legs to walk around the deck, Aidan could but stare out over the rail. Water, only water. An endless blue hell, restless and avid.

  Every few days a clutch of the captives were brought up on the deck, lashed until they shambled about the boat, told to hanjala-t! Dance! as whips fell about their shoulders. They lurched and ran and hopped as the blacks threw buckets of brine on them, noses wrapped in wet rags to ward off the stench.

  But their sores, from shackles and fleas and rats and near starvation, never healed. The brine could not rinse away the blood and pus, and the fish slop ran in the mouth and out between the legs without pausing to offer nourishment.

  The black men examined their miserable cargo, and seemed to feel that too many of them were sick, too many dying. As a result, the quality of food increased, they received more time out of the hold and on the deck, and the abysmal depths of the ship were sluiced out daily with brine mixed with some kind of sour-smelling potion.

  Sometimes Aidan was allowed to lie on the deck for an hour at a time. He gazed up at the sails, or the smoking chimney, or watched the eternally rotating screw as it chewed its way through the water. Half sick and half asleep, half alive and half dead, he wondered at such times if there had ever been an existence before this one.

  Then Nessa might find his hand with hers, and he would see in her haggard face the shadow of her old smile, and he knew that there had been a past for them. And if a past, then perhaps too a future.

  He had life. And therefore, hope. Given that much, he would create the rest.

  When the sea water slopped down into the hold, Aidan prayed for death. At other times, he prayed for life to a God who had apparently forgotten he was ever born, or worse: was angry with him. Nessa seemed to collapse into herself, lost the ability to speak although their mother sang to them in a weak voice, seeking to comfort with song what her arms could no longer reach or hold.

  What strength she offered was given at great price to her own mind and body. She could barely move, herself. When the hatch lifted he could see her, just across the aisle, lying on her side, chained to the wall, coated in her own filth. Deirdre was mortified by her sickness and helplessness, and one night, thrashing and screaming at phantoms, she awakened with a wail of despair.

  "Ma," Aidan whispered. "What's wrong?"

  For a time she didn't answer, and at first he thought that perhaps she wouldn't. "I've lost my baby." Her voice was bereft of hope. "I've lost Mahon's child."

  He was dumbstruck, amazed that he had forgotten that she carried his father's seed. And realized that she hadn't mentioned it, had carried that burden on her shoulders, alone, hoping against hope that the rigors of the voyage would not tear his unborn brother or sister from her womb.

  "Forgive me, Mahon," she sobbed. "Forgive me . . ."

  And there was nothing that Aidan could think to say in comfort.

  She had muttered "Forgive me . . ." for seemingly endless hours when the hatch opened and the food bucket was lowered once again. Three of the black men, cloths tied across their faces, followed it and were moving along offering ladles of slop to the captives.

  He could see his mother’s face, now all hollow eyes and slack mouth.

  "I'm not eating today," she said.

  "Ma," Nessa whispered. Aidan prayed that she might say more, but his sister fell silent.

  "You've got to eat, Ma," Aidan said. "If you don't eat, you'll die."

  She gazed at him. "We're already dead," she whispered. "I remember stories about hell, and a river the dead cross to reach it. This is that river, Aidan. My people were wrong. There is no Christ. There is no heaven. There's only hell." She began to weep.

  "Ma," he whispered as the bucket grew closer. "If you don't eat, they'll just pour it down your throat. Please. For Nessa."

  Deirdre stared at him, and he saw the tip of her tongue extend to wet her cracked and bleeding lips. Then she nodded, just a tiny one, and when the bucket came to her, she ate.

  At night, often one of the black men descended into the hold, carrying a lantern. He would study them, and select one of the women, and unlock her chain, forcing her to climb the ladder to the deck. They protested and sometimes struggled, but ultimately always went. When the woman returned Aidan noted she had been washed clean, but walked as though she had waded through a river of filth, and sobbed until dawn brought restless sleep.

  Once one of the women was simply too sick and weak to move, even when struck. The black man called up to the deck, and two of his companions came down. The sight of the new men seemed to galvanize her. She struggled to rise, but her weakness was not feigned, and she collapsed back onto her pallet. They unlocked her and hauled her away.

  "Why?" she begged. "I'm sick. I'm sick. Please don't—"

  Only minutes later, Aidan and his family were brought up onto the deck, blinking and struggling to shade their eyes against the light. Each step felt as if his legs had turned into dead eels.

  Nessa, still almost completely silent, was actually a bit stronger than his mother now, perhaps physically stronger than Aidan. Their tattered, stinking clothing flapped in the breeze

  Then he saw the sick woman. She was broad-hipped and bony, pocked with wet-lipped sores, her hair a deeper red than Deirdre's. He didn't know her, but thought that perhaps she was one of the three women from Cumhail, east and upriver of O'Dere. A burly black man struck off her chains. Two others hauled her to her feet, and to the edge of the ship. Then they simply threw her overboard.

  The woman who had been chained next to her howled "Goddess! Why do you forsake us! Let us die, let me die–" Despite her travails, she had fewer sores than most of the others, and her flesh seemed more firm. The black men
poked at her, lifting her tattered dress, squeezing her leg and thigh as she shrieked. Her cries seemed only to excite them, and laughing, they unlocked her chain. She scraped at the deck, pulling at the muck with her fingernails as the men grabbed her legs and dragged her away. Her prayers became unintelligible howls as they shoved her behind one of the smokestacks.

  Her howls grew ever more anguished, then, as Aidan listened, assumed a deeper, more wrenching quality.

  Deirdre pulled her children close. Together, they shivered in the ocean spray. Her cries became prayers again, mixed with deep male laughter. After a few minutes the prayers became numb, brute sounds, and even those sounds, in time, surrendered to the eternal, merciless roar of the waves.

  Chapter Seven

  29 Safar 1280 A.H.

  (A.D. August 14, 1863)

  Aidan dreamed of swimming in clear, cold water, surrounded by salmon and trout, ever flashing just beyond his reach. He was wrenched from that dream by a sudden, violent sound and a flood of light, and emerged along a tunnel of pain and fear back into the world of captivity.

  The ship lay at rest, and the upper hatch had opened. Through it, a stream of dust-speckled light assaulted their eyes. The black men swarmed down into the hold, unlocked the chains from the restraining hooks, and herded all the captives up onto the top deck.

  Aidan clung to Deirdre, all of his pretense to manhood vanished. Oddly, his fear and weakness seemed to give her strength. She lurched upright, eyes ringed darkly, cheeks gaunt, but standing straight. Her body radiated heat, as if the fever within her were banked, but might never be extinguished.

  Finally, Nessa found her voice. "Ma," she asked. "What now?"

  "We don't know," Deirdre said. "We'll find out soon. God won't ask more from us than we can give." Aidan was both shocked and humbled. How could she, again and again, put faith in her Christ? Even in such a state, his mother had infinitely more strength than Aidan had ever imagined. He tried to believe. Needed desperately to believe.