by Jenny Barden
Leaping onto the ratlines, he climbed them fast, trusting to instinct as he scrambled above the mainsail to the top. From the platform he looked down, seeing a shifting view with a pendulum’s swing, while the mainmast yawed with the roll of the ship. He saw the decks diminished below bulging grey sails, the great swaying yards and the lines of rigging before countless stars. But while all else moved, the stars remained still.
He gripped the rope to the topmast, as fat as his fist, and thought of the days of labour ahead, and all the preparations that would need to be made before he could set sail on the high seas again, perhaps on the same ship, but on a voyage westward, going back. And he wanted to close the future up and seal it like a seam, hammer in oakum and cover it with tar. He wanted to plug all its gaps, and stopper them till he was spent, and not see it, as he did, like a void he could not shape.
Through a gap in the trees Kit noticed a patch of distant sea. He knew he was somewhere west of the Chagres, heading away from the coast and into the mountain wilds. He could make out the flecks of white sails, but he did not linger to try and study them. There would be no point. They would not be English. In the three years since he had lost his liberty to the Spaniards, even after his rescue by the cimarrones, he had learnt not to cling to false hopes. Let the sails fade into the ocean and not disturb his small contentment; merely the glimpse had induced a pang of loneliness.
He looked ahead to his friends climbing the jungle-clad slope, and his gaze returned to a young Negress. He could see her clearly from a bend in the trail. She had aroused his interest earlier, perhaps because her clothes were thin, clinging like new leaves to the buds of her breasts. Her dress was still wet from her capture by the river. She was pretty and smooth-skinned, with a figure of supple curves. Already he had smiled at the girl on the way back from the raid, and she had returned the same moist-eyed look of a trapped doe that had first aroused his sympathy. Kit believed he could understand her feelings. She would be bewildered, just as he had been after the cimarrones had found him. She would have no sense of liberation, only the fear of a worse slavery.
He watched her carrying a large gourd full of fish. The thing was difficult for her to manage as she scrambled up the track, but it showed that the girl had been claimed, Kit supposed. He would not interfere, though he wished that the girl could have been shown a bit more kindness. From his position near the end of the file, Kit saw her struggling, feet sliding in loose mud, while thorny creepers snagged at her torn and bedraggled clothes. The gourd belonged to Alaba, the man striding out in front of her, and Alaba was strong; he had no need of help with his carrying.
Kit looked aside.
A green lizard caught his eye, one with the miniature frame of a thin plated dragon. It remained perfectly motionless on a sun-dappled branch, but he would not shout that he had spotted fresh meat; he would leave the creature in peace. He breathed deeply, inhaling the pig-stink of tapir, while around him water drops shone like jewels on moss, and bright waxy flowers trailed their roots into the air. He thought of rest and food, together with the pleasure of drying his feet. A spot itched on his back that he suspected might harbour a grub, and he wondered idly who he might ask to dig it out.
His gaze returned to the girl. She had been stopped by a man called Sancho whose ears had been mutilated during his time as a captive. Sancho proceeded to tie a bundle of vine stems to her back; then he placed himself in front of her and continued walking. The girl was left to trudge behind with the gourd balanced on her head and the stems bouncing over her shoulder.
Everyone kept moving, until a howl of raw rage brought the line to a sudden halt. Kit saw the blur of a lunging man. Head down and roaring, Alaba pitched at Sancho and knocked him sprawling. Next, Alaba was on top, punching and kicking, butting Sancho in the face. The men wrestled savagely, rolling almost off the track before Sancho drew his knife and Alaba grabbed a stone. At that moment the nearest cimarrones pulled the fighters apart.
‘Ella es mío!’
‘No! Woman mine!’
Sancho and Alaba shouted at one another in the bastard speech that had become their common tongue – Spanish mixed with some of the English Kit had taught them, though there were other words Kit heard with the ring of African abuse. The knife was forced from Sancho’s grip as he was pinned back, snarling. Blood bubbled from his nose. Alaba spat and writhed. Three men held him with his arms in a lock.
‘Thief!’ Alaba yelled.
Kit marched towards the commotion. Men stood aside to let him pass. The girl pressed into the damp vegetation until she was half-covered by leaves despite the ants that crawled over her. She still had the gourd on her head and the bundle on her back. He smiled and signed for her to put them down. In obeying, she looked terrified.
One of Sancho’s torn ears was bleeding, and Kit wondered whether Alaba had used his teeth as much as his fists. Sancho’s long shins were clad in greaves and circled by shells below the knees. His bare chest was heaving. He panted, open mouthed.
‘Juzque,’ he gasped. ‘You judge.’
Kit raised his right hand and recognised the ripple of murmured approval as every man around him responded in kind. This had been the way since the day the cimarrones had split his chains. They had called him the bearer of Ifá: wisdom. They said he was marked by iron with the sign of mother Mawu. Before every raid they would touch the scar on his palm, his hand on their heads. If ever a decision had to be taken they would ask his advice, and each time they moved camp they would search for one he liked. Whenever a man was sick or troubled it was always the same – they would seek him out. Their faith in him was a mystery, though plainly it was linked with his horseshoe scar.
Kit looked up. The action gave him a chance to reflect, and it settled his mind to fix on something remote: a fragment of sky beyond a lofty tree. What did his friends expect? They would want him to order a combat to rules, watch over the fight and then proclaim the final victor. But both men were massive; he could not award the girl to either without wounding the other’s pride. He spread his hands and stared at his palms, calloused and stained, with the scar like a sickle island in the cracked dirt of a dry lake. What would Will do in his place? Will was always fair. Kit remembered how his brother would sort out the squabbles he had with his sisters.
‘We will hunt again tomorrow,’ he said. ‘We will find more women. Some may be prettier.’ He looked at Sancho and Alaba in turn. ‘You must each agree that if you win the girl, you will keep her.’
Several of the onlookers grinned. Sancho and Alaba looked less confident, but they raised their hands to receive the press of his palm.
‘You must accept my decision.’
They made plain that they would, muttering, ‘Be ni,’ and ‘Sí’.
Kit had not expected otherwise, though he often found their meekness puzzling. He was so much younger and slighter, and they could easily have killed him, but he had learnt to speak boldly, and they had never yet opposed him. He turned back to the girl, leading her forward to stand between them.
‘My decision is hers,’ he announced. ‘Let the girl choose.’
Alaba scowled while Sancho gaped. Kit could feel the astonishment of the rest gathered round. He took the girl’s chin and directed her head towards the men, first one, and then the other.
‘Choose,’ he said.
Her eyes rolled helplessly. Did she understand? He held her hand up for her to point. She must know, he thought, her arm wavered as if she was making up her mind. Both men eyed her darkly. Kit stood aside, but then she moved towards him, hand outstretched. She touched him firmly on the chest.
Kit recoiled. What did she mean? By knitting his brows, he tried to alert her, to show she must not touch him and had made a mistake. But she reached for him again, clasping the rags of his shirt, and Kit would have shrugged her off except that the men around him were pushing the girl closer, while Alaba and Sancho, no longer restrained, were roaring with laughter and pummelling his back.
*
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The island was a whole varied landscape compressed into the crescent shape of a fennel seed, with steep hills for mountains, small streams for rivers and a white beach for a bay that Ellyn had traversed from end to end in eighty-three steps. This was the place where she and her father had been left, set down from the Swan one night, before the ship sailed for England.
From the beach, looking over the sea, when the view was not obscured by spray or rain, the suggestion of a settlement could be seen in the distance: Nombre de Dios. The city was less than a league away; it appeared as a break in the line of lush mainland forest. She often saw ships, yet none came near. The island had small fertile fields, and a coral-stone shelter that she and her father soon made their home. But the domain was tended by people like ghosts.
On the sole occasion when Ellyn saw others on the island, they must have left by boat as she hurried to greet them, though she noticed no one actually go; she never caught them up. Yet the evidence of human activity was everywhere around: lines of drainage channels and pits in the soil left by the harvesting of roots, piles of weeds pulled from plots of strange plants – some like rushes with giant spikes ten times the size of ears of wheat. In nine days of exploring, her modest garnering had seemed like stealing, and she was further constrained for fear of being poisoned by the food. Whether to boil or soak, peel or deseed were all unanswered questions. As a consequence her diet was largely confined to old ship’s biscuit. She might have been more concerned about the effect of this on her father except that, since their arrival, he had eaten hardly anything. This was why she felt so frustrated as she crouched among the rocks at the end of the beach. She tugged at the net she had left in a coral pool, but it was snagged. The harder she pulled, the more it tore, while around her hands, taunting her in their abundance, twirled glittering shoals of bright little fish.
She should not have been vexed by her failure with the net, but the idea of catching some food had become a fixation. It was as though netting a fish would allay all her worries – cure her father’s disease and ensure their preservation. Yet she accepted this was nonsense, so why was she troubled? She squeezed her eyes shut, blinked and swallowed, trying to calm herself with reason, while knowing the answer full well: a netted fish would have been proof of her ability to manage.
Sitting back on her heels, she turned to the cliffs where parrots squabbled in the treetops over fruit too high to pick. And this was the nub of her quandary – she was hungry in a place of plenty, surrounded by dainties beyond her reach. With mounting exasperation she yanked harder at the net, only to pull it out at last, stinking, ripped and empty, except for pieces of broken coral and something that resembled a prickly chestnut. It was while she was deliberating on whether this catch might be edible that she became conscious of voices coming from somewhere out of sight.
Instantly she dropped the net and scrambled for the hut.
A musketeer was by a galley on the beach. Not far away, another half-armoured man was beating at the undergrowth around the coral-stone shelter. Ellyn dashed closer as fast as she could with her skirts held up and her feet sinking in the sand. Panic tightened her chest. She breathed in gasps, trying to run, thinking only of her father whom she had left alone. Shouts assailed her that she ignored.
‘No se mueva!’
‘Señorita!’
A man with a drawn sword strode rapidly across her path. But the plaintive sound of her father’s wailing impelled a surge of strength so desperate that the soldier trying to stop her only succeeded in tearing a sleeve. She bolted past him and through the door.
The chaos inside confused her senses. Shadows coalesced around the hunched shape of a man pulling linen from a chest, while light streamed through dust picking up glints from points and links. She glimpsed the shimmer of steel and the pale pages of a book amongst up-ended articles and things jumbled in the dirt. Amidst all this, the taint of her father’s sickness and the earthy smell of the shelter were somehow mixed with the odour of oil, suggesting a lamp spilt, or weapons greased; she did not know. The only clear perception she had was of her father’s strident moans, though all she could see of him was the mound of his legs. The man’s wide shoulders obscured the rest. Then, as the man turned, she was startled by the sight of something white over his mouth, and this was all the more striking because his hair was black and so were his clothes, but he did not speak. She heard her father calling out.
‘Put that back! The walls will fall down! Desist, sirrah, and do as you are bid. Pull off my boots!’
The sight of her father’s locket in the man’s grasp finally triggered the release of her rage. To witness her father scorned in his incapacity, and their belongings treated with such disrespect, was an affront and violation that was too much to bear.
‘Stop that at once!’ she shouted as she rushed closer, glowering down at the man’s masked face. He had a handkerchief held under his nose. His hooded eyes widened slightly as his arched brows rose – brows that were so thick there was no true gap between them. But he kept the cloth in place and straightened smoothly to stand before her. The man was short, though the cut of his doublet gave his stature some distinction. When he threw back his head she glimpsed the frill of a ruff above a high, tight collar, and all this coupled with the rings on his fingers, and the elegance of the rapier at his hip, was enough to convince Ellyn that the man most probably had some rank. And then, too late, she feared for what he might do. With the handkerchief still pressed to his mouth, the man raised his free hand and snapped his fingers.
‘Váyase, señorita.’
The precise meaning of what he said was lost to Ellyn, but his gestures were clear. She watched him wave at her dismissively, and then nod to a soldier who moved menacingly towards her. She ignored him and flung herself down at her father’s side, pulling a sheet over his bare feet, wondering why it was that he had complained about boots, though nothing he said any longer surprised her. With her arms wrapped around him, she tried to soothe as he whined.
‘This tavern is a stink-hole! The lackeys here are imbeciles. Come here, man, and ease my feet. Fetch me my pumps.’
‘Father, hush, for pity.’
She stroked his wisps of hair and looked down on his half-closed eyes. In the dim light his skin appeared yellow. Strong hands pulled her away, but she did not struggle, she knew resistance would be futile, and a commotion around her father would only distress him more. So she turned in the hope that the man behind her, too fastidious to breathe the same air that she did, would have some compassion if she beseeched him with a look. But his response was a scowl, and to address her in words, which to her amazement she could understand, albeit that they were ponderous with a thick Castilian accent.
‘Come outside, señorita.’
Orders were snapped that left her released. The man who could speak English barked more commands behind her. He sent soldiers scurrying who had assembled near the shelter, and others from the beach then followed them into the trees. She was left in no doubt that they were searching for anyone in hiding. They advanced up the slopes, hacking and slashing, probing as far as the heights above the cliffs and the rocks below them. They would find nothing, of course, except perhaps a torn and useless net. But while the man turned aside, having taken the silk away from his mouth, she was surprised to see him shut his eyes. He breathed deeply, lips trembling, before again covering his nose and inhaling with a shudder. She was left staring at his hand with its jewel-encrusted rings, and the black hair that grew on the backs of his fingers, until he settled enough to put the handkerchief away.
He had an animal look that repelled her, animal because he was so hairy, but he was also quite handsome in a haughty way. His features, in profile, were like a heavily buttressed wall. He had a hooked nose, and a jutting chin that was further emphasised by a neatly clipped beard. The effect was of an expression that was fixed in disdain, something she noticed most when eventually he faced her. She felt belittled by his regard, though he bowed to her qu
ite courteously.
‘Capitán Gonzalo Callejón de Bastidas. I serve His Majesty at Nombre de Dios. It is a pleasure to find an English lady here.’
Ellyn curtsied and clasped her hands to hold them still.
‘My name is Ellyn Cooksley, daughter of Nicholas Cooksley, master merchant of Plymouth. It is an unexpected pleasure to meet a Spaniard who speaks English.’
‘I was taught by slavers—’ Bastidas gave a scornful smile ‘—but my English is poor. I have little use to speak it. We do not trade with foreigners. You understand? They cause trouble.’ He extended his arm towards the sea, encompassing the spread of the whole horizon in the way he swept his hand. ‘This coast belongs to Spain. It is Spanish since my grandfather, Rodrigo de Bastidas, came here to discover and conquer for Aragon and Castile. The whole sea of the Caribs and the land, everything – these islands and bays – all belong to Spain. The Empire supplies what we need.’ He turned and fixed his black eyes upon her. ‘So why are you here?’
‘My father is sick,’ she said as steadily as she could, ‘and I am caring for him.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where are your friends?’
‘On their way back to England.’
He gave a hollow laugh.
‘You expect me to believe your countrymen have abandoned you?’