The Praying Nun (Slave Shipwreck Saga Book 1)

by Michael Smorenburg

  I straighten from my work and ease the ache in my back.

  Just then, I hear the folks arriving up the stairs, the front gate clattering and our dogs giving a signature welcome-home bark.

  Oh, crap.

  If the old man comes in and finds the four perlie still lying in their raw and unprepared state in the sink, I’ll never hear the end of it.

  I strip off my mom’s wash-up gloves and nip back into the kitchen, load a bowl with the seafood, grab a breadboard, sharp knife and steak mallet, then head back outdoors to the shelf and basin where we prepare fish.

  It takes twenty minutes to clean, gut, slice and lightly beat the meat. It now lies quite supple, like white translucent cutlets of Kassler pork.

  I wash the area down and harass my mom into making a savoury rice dish as a base.

  The old man takes a look and grouses his obligatory protestations at having to eat “these bloody things”, and gets himself a whisky to fortify his mood.

  Having to eat these molluscs as a staple during his formative years, I do understand his hatred of them. If you don’t know how to prepare them, they’re as nasty as fillets of car tire.

  But I’ve learned a few tricks that he refuses to even consider. Very soon, the slimy white meat will be turned into the tastiest cuisine one can pluck from any ocean.

  Much as I’m dying to get back to my obsession with the tooth, I want to avoid the legitimate flak I’ll get if I don’t get the cooking over with.

  The old man has enormous respect for life and cannot abide waste. He has a credo: If you kill something, then you have an obligation to eat it. All of it.

  As a kid, I was guilty of bringing home fare from the ocean and then letting it hang about in my dive bag or the fridge until it had to be tossed. It was one of the only things that drove him to fury.

  What I need next is the intense heat that only LP gas provides, and an area where splatter doesn’t matter.

  I dig out our camping stove and set it up on a ledge next to the BBQ area outdoors. For good measure, I line the site with newspaper to pick up any splatter.

  A hot pan with a dollop of garlic butter and a flash fry is all it takes.

  Piece by piece, I very quickly convert the loaf-sized pile of slices from translucent white to a steaming bowl of golden slivers of shellfish that are a culinary delight.

  Into the darkening and gooey remainder of the cooking process that still swirls in the skillet, I pour a generous dollop of cream and a measure of cognac, then cut the heat and return the cooked meat to the sauce.

  Grudgingly, over dinner, the old man admits once again that the meal is delicious, served on mom’s rice.

  But this is no victory. He’ll quickly develop amnesia regarding this positive review of my harvesting and cooking prowess by the next time I repeat my performance, as I surely hope to soon.

  With night upon us and the dirtiest of the work completed, I bring my other harvest from the ocean indoors and set up my work area under the bright lights of the kitchen counter.

  As I worry and gently scrub at it, something familiar slowly starts to emerge from the grit: the torso of a woman carved into tooth or bone.

  There’s something in the shape that is hauntingly familiar. I know this shape so well, but I can’t seem to place it. I’ve seen the geometry of this pose before… somewhere.

  As I work, I try to remember where I’ve seen it.

  As she emerges from her long imprisonment in rock, I see that it was the curve in the middle of her spine that first caught my attention all those weeks ago at the bottom of the ocean.

  When I had first loosened and shifted the conglomerate underwater, I saw more of the bone protruding and realized that the tooth was large. Now I realize that I had been looking at a revealed portion of her bowed head.

  I haven’t yet revealed anything of her face, but I’ve discovered that she’s wearing a cape of some kind, a hood, perhaps a habit or cowl.

  Like a nun.

  “A nun…” I find myself musing, a frown creasing my forehead.

  I scrape and brush and scour for another hour and more, leaving the intricacies of her facial features alone for now.

  I work down her front and find she has hands held toward her face… perhaps holding a bible… perhaps in prayer.

  The old man comes through as he does every evening around this time in the winter to treat himself to cocoa.

  “You still at it?”

  “Hmmm,” I grunt contemplatively, now ready to share what I’ve found with him. I wanted to have something more than a knob of bone sticking out of rock to show him, but this is beautiful and he’ll appreciate it.

  “Check this out, dad.” I hand it over.

  “The Praying Nun,” he says readily, recognizing it immediately and using the definite article ‘the’.

  “Yes!” This instantly jolts my memory of where I’ve seen it before. When I was a small boy, he took me down into the rocks to show it to me.

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “In the bay…,” I stammer, a little in disbelief. “On the wreck.”

  “Well now. You’ve got yourself a real mystery,” he understates what’s rushing through my head. He passes the rock back. “Who’s carved The Praying Nun and dropped it on your wreck? …and why?”

  The statue we’re both staring at in my hands is a picture-perfect copy of a granite outcrop at Maiden’s Cove.

  Maiden’s Cove lies just south of Clifton, beyond the Ridge where my father and I were born, and on the headland that divides Clifton from Camps Bay.

  It has a secluded rock-strewn beach and rock pools where I learned to dive and harvest the bounteous delicacies from the ocean.

  Even before I was old enough to dive, I used to go there with friends to a seep of fresh water that ran clear and produced a brook with soft, downy grasses where frog choruses called us to catch their tadpoles.

  The Praying Nun is there. As large as a house, she is a granite replica of this carving I hold in my hands. The granite model does not have a face, and neither does this replica.

  And it sets me to wondering, which is the replica and which is the original?

  _____

  Part 2

  Chapter 9

  Autumn, 1794

  Chikunda— “The Chatterbox” as his parents had aptly named him in their Swahili tongue—always had a plan.

  Without one, he would surely have been dead by now, many times over. He lived on his wits.

  His plan from the moment he was heaved aboard, manacled and trussed, was to identify the Induna—the headman—of this wooden vessel and become indispensable to him.

  It worked. Sort of.

  Antonio Perreira was the Captain of this ship. The São José de Afrika, she was called. A schooner with a broad-deck and a mainmast as thick as a man’s chest.

  Antonio the Captain had noticed Chikunda sitting bolt upright, head held high and chin thrusting forward with pride as the cutter rowed alongside with another load of human cargo.

  Chikunda—Christian, as he would soon be dubbed—was a man of rangy proportions. Stark naked, as were all the Negroes aboard, he stood tall and regal with a breadth and squareness to his shoulders that lent him the likeness of a polished teak door.

  He stood out from the other terrified wretches being whipped aboard and he held the Captain’s gaze with a rare and genteel confidence.

  Alas for Chikunda, his regal bearing had also caught the eye of Alfonso Oliveira.

  Alfonso was the boatswain—or ‘Bosun’—and the Bosun on this ship was charged with managing the cargo and keeping order aboard. He was an ugly man, built like a fortress with a bald head and a nose with a bulb at its end.

  In Chikunda, the Bosun instantly recognized an opportunity to earn his pay on the long voyage that lay ahead. He smiled pitilessly and directed a forbidding look of cruelty toward the man as he was led to the brand.

  The scourge, hanging limply in the Bosun’s hand, impulsively fluttered, mak
ing the rustling sound of a horse’s tail eager to lash flies into submission. Chikunda tried not to look, but the horror of it dragged his gaze down the twisted thongs of its length.

  A new scream went up at the entrance to the grate hatchway set into the ship’s deck as the fizz of the red brand struck its smoking mark onto the breast of the man ahead of Chikunda.

  The man was shoved whimpering down the three stairs and Chikunda was yanked by his manacles to the same spot.

  As the mate began to remove the brand from the glowing brazier of coals, the Bosun placed the lash across his chest, blocking him from the duty.

  “Stand aside,” he said.

  The tone of the man’s voice turned Chikunda’s bowels to liquid. The Bosun stepped forward and worked the bellows—two… three… four… vicious blasts—raising the coals from yellow to white.

  Smiling, he pulled the brand from the coals and brought it to Chikunda’s chest, carefully not making contact but allowing the searing heat to scorch for a moment across the small distance to the naked skin. Chikunda stood unflinching and the Bosun made a small grunt of disappointment before stabbing the glowing iron onto the man, aiming its centre at the darkened areola of his victim’s nipple.

  Chikunda winced from the assault, his knees buckled, and the Bosun smiled, pressing the brand to follow the man’s faint.

  “ENOUGH!” The Captain had been watching the exchange and struck the brand away from the slave’s chest with a club that all crew carried for defence.

  “You have sympathy for a kafir?” The Bosun squinted confrontationally, opting for the label Moslem slave traders used to identify ‘the unbelievers’.

  Chikunda’s legs gave way and he sank to the deck as if in prayer, the sweat-oiled muscles of his broad back palpitating and shuddering from the agony within.

  “You and I are kafirs as well,” the Captain reminded the Bosun, nonbelievers of Allah as they were. “Douse this man with seawater,” he instructed the mate who immediately turned and went quickly to the rail with a bucket and rope. “It is our job, Bosun, to deliver this cargo unmolested and in saleable condition. Until they are sold, they are the property of this ship and its owner, my brother. Am I clear?”

  “To quench your precious cargo’s discomfort more thoroughly,” the Bosun suggested with a smirk, “allow me to heave him overboard?”

  “If anyone is thrown overboard on this voyage…” The Captain left the threat unfinished and the Bosun looked to his shipmates, studying them carefully for an appetite for mutiny if it came to that.

  “We have more loads to cram in and these filthy kafirs are bunching at the companionway, pretending there’s no more space within. Get the hound.” The Bosun looked to the sailor he’d nominated as its handler.

  The man disappeared toward the stern where the animal cowered in its cage.

  Chikunda slowly raised his forehead off the deck and was kneeling now, his chest heaving and his eyelids fluttering with the effort of regaining a dignified pose. The mate appeared with a bucket slopping water and the Captain stood aside.

  “On my deck?” the Bosun challenged. “You would foul my deck for this… thing?”

  “May I go overboard…” Chikunda asked in perfect Portuguese and the Captain whirled with a start. The Bosun and crew appeared as if they had seen a ghost. “…to reduce any further distress, sir?”

  “Where did you learn to speak?”

  “At the Mission, sir.” Chikunda’s face was a mask of pain, his words slurred but his diction impeccable.

  “You are a Christian?” the Captain asked, dumbstruck.

  He nodded. “And my wife, sir.”

  “I’ll throw him over,” the Bosun offered, heading off the unfortunate trajectory this conversation was taking, knowing that these kafirs could not swim. Throwing the negro into the sea would bring this matter neatly to a close.

  “Please, sir.” Chikunda’s hand pressed into the flesh around the viciously wrinkling burn wound. It offered some relief and distraction to pinch near the cooked flesh.

  “You will drown,” the Captain declared.

  “I can swim, sir.”

  “Then you will swim away.”

  “And I’ll have the pleasure of blowing his head off,” the Bosun added hopefully.

  “My wife is already aboard. Faith… Faith is aboard, sir. I will not leave her.”

  “Your wife’s name is Faith? Why?”

  “She was orphaned, sir. Mkiwa, that is her Swahili name. It means ‘orphaned child’. But Faith is the name given to her at the Mission, sir.”

  “Then your name on this ship will be Christian. Let us see you swim, Christian,” the Captain challenged.

  At that moment, the sailor sent to fetch the dog led it by a chain onto the foredeck. It was a rabid and mange-ridden thing with its ribs showing. As Christian battled to his feet, the dog flew into a frenzy, rearing up at him.

  Terrified as he was, Christian knew that he must show no fear before these white men. He ignored the deranged beast and shuffled past it.

  All activity on the deck came to a standstill. A path cleared before the black man as he approached the gunwale, his gait stooped and slowed by the trauma, his hand clutching to his heart.

  The cutter, having been rowed back out again and brim full of black bodies, was halfway from the waves to the ship.

  Christian reached up and gripped one of the stays of rigging that soared up to the top of the main mast, put his bare foot on the gunwale and lithely pulled himself up to stand on it, swaying. He dived and went under with barely a splash.

  The water reduced the pain instantly, providing fleeting relief and washed away the tattered and roasted flesh.

  Gasps and whoops of amazement came from the crew, some crossed themselves, disbelieving that they were witnessing a black man resurface and tread water.

  “Throw him a line,” the mate ordered a sailor.

  The Bosun had snatched a blunderbuss from the guard who manned the slave hold’s hatchway. He had the yawning muzzle of the weapon trained on Christian, itching to blow the man’s skull open if he took one stroke away from the ship.

  “Let him have his leave.” The Captain countermanded the mate’s order. “Bosun, put that thing aside! You will identify Faith. When this man has satisfied himself, bring him aboard and deliver both of them to me… dressed. Now make room for this shipment.”

  The cutter came nudging up to the ship’s side and the slave cargo was swiftly hauled over the rail and clubbed into a queue, ready for the brand.

  The dog was sent into the hold to clear space for the new arrivals. Restrained by its leash, the handler played it like an angler would a fish, allowing the dog to surge but not allowing it to savage and damage the cargo.

  This was an unorthodox but highly effective method that the Bosun had devised for closing any gaps between slaves below.

  With the space between the deck levels no more than the height of a man’s knee, all it took to seal the slaves within their prison was to chain the final few down to the decking at the mouth of the hatch’s threshold.

  These were the dangerous moments, when the slaves were still at full strength. That was something that the Bosun would remedy within a week of sailing.

  He’d semi-starve the prisoners of food and drink. The weakest would die off, but since they would not make it to the market anyway, it was no real loss.

  His aim was to weaken and demoralize the stronger among them, breaking their spirit, making them malleable and grateful when the putrid water and rotten gruel was eventually doled out in miserly portions.

  “To my quarters,” the Captain spoke, privately, to the Bosun as he passed. “Now.”

  Presently, the Bosun ducked through the low doorway into the Captain’s private quarters, the Captain standing at his chart table.

  “You risk rebellion at this critical moment of loading? They can still smell Africa and think they have a chance at it,” the Bosun argued.

  “You take too much
pleasure in your task. It sickens me,” responded the Captain.

  “The Book of Exodus is clear: ‘And if a Master smite his servant or maid with a rod, and the slave does die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. But if that slave continues a day or two, the Master shall not be punished’. No slave in my care has put me in peril of my maker.”

  There was a prolonged silence and then he continued.

  “I endured a slave rebellion,” the Bosun reminded the Captain, who he despised greatly for his soft character and insipid faith, “…when you were still a pirate.”

  “A privateer,” the Captain corrected him. “We carried Letters of Marque.”

  Letters of Marque were licenses issued by a King or Queen to attack and capture enemy merchant shipping vessels. Without the monarch’s seal of approval, the act of robbery and plundering on the high sea would otherwise be considered common piracy, carrying the penalty of death.

  It was said that the Bosun had personally put the noose around the necks of the ringleaders when the slave rebellion aboard a previous ship he’d sailed on was quashed.

  It was said that he had made the victims stand with bare feet on a hastily constructed frame through which cutlasses were slotted so that their sharpened edges were the slaves’ platform.

  The condemned hanged themselves when they could take the lacerations to their soles no longer.

  “Your experience with a rebellion does not give you license to do more than your duty.” The Captain was tiring of Alfonso’s constant challenges. “The matter at hand is clear. This man claims to be a Christian. I take him at his word, I will hear him out and act accordingly. You will obey my order and the law on this matter. Is that clear?”

  “What law?”

  “Enough insolence!”

  Captain Antonio Perreira slammed his fist onto the chart table and stood to his full height, his head now touching the low ceiling, looming over the shorter block of inhumanity serving as his enforcer.