Nobody's Slave (6 page)

For a moment everyone - the boys, the warriors on the walls, the women behind them, the people in the town, everyone - stood still, stunned by the sudden silence. Then the shouting began.

‘Yaaaah! Devils! Hyena-filth! Spawn of the black spirit! Yaaah! Sumba-devils, come and die!’

Madu found himself shouting with the rest - anything, nonsense, it did not matter - and all along the wall people were yelling and waving spears and bows as they did in the festival of the rains, to ward off the black spider-spirit, whose children crept into women's huts at night to steal babies to feed their monstrous mother. Somehow the Sumba seemed like that; an evil that the drums had left in the air above them, and must be driven away before it descended to infect them all. And for Madu it was worse, for he knew, however he tried to forget it, that through his mother Ezinma the blood of the Sumba ran in his veins, too.

After a while the shouting stopped. Madu and Temba stayed for a while on the wall, staring across the river to the gloom of the trees beyond, to see if they could see any movement - any glint of spear or shield or line of black figures forming ready to cross - but there was nothing; only the sinister snap and swirl as what had seemed to be a log changed to a crocodile and dived beneath the surface with a struggling bird.

Then, quite suddenly, the sun set, and the sky above them was brilliant with stars. Nwoye hurried purposefully along the wall to where they stood.

‘You must go down from the wall now, boys. It is no place for you in the night.’

‘But ... Nwoye, do you think they will attack?’ Temba asked.

‘They will attack sometime, certainly. And when they do, this will be no place for you.’

‘No, Nwoye.’ Madu hobbled clumsily down the steps after Temba.

‘I will ask Mganza to see your foot again, Madu. This is no time to be slow.’

‘Yes, Nwoye.’ Madu hobbled miserably to his mother's hut, more than ever conscious of how useless and unnecessary he was. Why did Nwoye have to send him away, now? Surely he should learn about war, now that he was training for manhood?

In the hut his elder stepbrother Ikezue sat, eating his evening meal. He looked up as Madu hobbled in.

‘So. The wounded warrior returns,’ he grunted. ‘Have you killed them all?’

Madu scowled. ‘No more than you. It's not my fault I'm hurt.’

‘No, I know. Just a tree that kicked you.’ Then Ikezue saw the misery on his step-brother's face, and relented. ‘I'm sorry, that wasn't fair. I heard father say you bore no blame for the matter of the leopard. Come, sit here. It must be hard to walk all day with a foot like that.’

Madu sat down, grudgingly, in the place Ikezue made by moving his shield. His mother, Ezinma, gave him some food, and he ate silently for a while, ignoring the press of people in the crowded hut.

‘Did you see anything, across the river?’ asked Ikezue. ‘I saw you watching, after the drums.’

‘No,’ said Madu. Then, eager to talk despite himself: ‘Do you think they will attack tonight?’

Ikezue frowned seriously, flattered to be asked his opinion. ‘It's possible. If they do, it will be later. Just before dawn.’

‘Why then?’

Ikezue shrugged. ‘It's the best time to attack. Haven't you learnt that yet in warrior training? Just before dawn, the enemy are half-asleep and think they've got through the night safely. And then, if your attack succeeds, you've got the daylight to finish them off.’

‘Oh.’ Madu thought for a minute, impressed. ‘But if we know that, surely we should be ready for them then.’

‘We will be. At least, I shall. I'm on duty then. Anyway they'll never get over these walls - haven't you seen them?’

Madu nodded. The walls seemed impassable to him. But the drumming of the Sumba had sounded like the end of the world.

‘Ikezue,’ he said, hesitantly.

‘Yes?’

‘What did the Sumba do to those villages they attacked? I didn't understand everything the drums said, last night.’

His stepbrother frowned again, this time bitterly. ‘Most people they killed. The men, the children, the old folk. Some of the women they took for themselves - the young ones, those they think pretty.’

As Nwoye took my mother, Madu thought. But he said nothing.

‘Some men, some women, they sell to the red-face.’

‘The red-face? What do the red-face want with them?’

‘Eat them. Red-face live on men. That's why their faces are red, with the blood.’

Madu shuddered. He had heard of the red-face before, amongst the boys of his own age, but had never been quite sure whether it was true, or just a tale someone had heard, from a traveller playing a joke. But now he was hearing it again, from Ikezue, who was a man and had done his warrior training. And whatever his other faults, Ikezue could not tell a lie as a joke. He was not that sort; his face would not stay still.

‘They are scavengers; they live off flesh like hyena. The Sumba do it too sometimes, but the red-face are worse. They buy men and women, and keep them in their great canoes to eat. That's how they travel so far on the sea - they take their food with them.’

Ikezue described how he had met a man who had once seen a band of red-face, with a group of prisoners they had bought or captured. Their faces were really red, or sometimes yellow, like rotten fruit. Hair grew round their mouths because of the human meat they ate. And they covered their bodies with thick, colourful clothes to hide the shame of their flesh.

Madu put his bowl down, feeling slightly sick. ‘And the Sumba sell men to these red-face?’

‘That's what the drums said. Only a few though.’

‘I'd rather be killed.’

‘So would I.’ Ikezue grinned, his white teeth flashing in the darkness. ‘But there's no need to talk of that now. It's we who are going to kill the Sumba, not they us.’

‘Good. I wish I was a warrior too. And my foot was better.’

‘Don't worry. Your time will come. And if you can't do any better, at least you can keep them out of this hut. You're the eldest man in it, now.’ Ikezue picked up his shield and spear and went quietly out into the darkness.

For a long time after that Madu sat thinking, trying to ignore the movements of the women and younger children in the hut around him, and concentrate on the small sounds of the night outside. From where he sat he could see, through the door, the dark figure of his uncle M'boko standing silently on the rampart, or walking slowly up and down to ease his legs. His uncle seemed quite calm, unworried. Madu wondered if the Sumba would really attack at dawn. He hoped they would attack, and be beaten - then there would be great celebrations of victory, surely, and perhaps even the Festival of New Warriors would take place here, in Conga, and he would be accepted as a man before the two Kings, instead of just the village elders. He grinned to himself, flushed with the glory of the thought. That would be something to remember, and tell his children about, one day.

But it would only happen when the Sumba were beaten. If he wanted to see that, he must be awake before dawn. He lay back quietly on his bed of grass, and closed his eyes to sleep.

S
IMON LAUGHED. ‘On days like this, I feel there could be nothing finer than the sea.’ He leant back luxuriously, tossing his long fair hair out of his eyes.

‘There is nothing finer,’ Tom agreed stoutly. He rested his chin on one of the lower footropes of the shrouds, and gazed ecstatically out to sea. They were suspended outside the hull of the great ship, sitting in the forechains, the narrow wooden platform outside the hull, to which the foremast shrouds were attached. The planks of the hull, still hot from the tropical noonday sun, rose and fell gently behind them. Their bare feet dangled idly above the sea, cooled by the afternoon breeze which was blowing them in towards the distant smudge of the African shore. All around them, the sea sparkled with its brilliant blues and emerald greens, and to windward, standing in beside them with all sail set, were the other ships of the fleet - the
Minion
, the
Angel
, the
Swallow
, the
Judith
, the
William and John
- their forepeaks, under the proud plumage of sail, rising and dipping gracefully over the gentle waves like the beaks of great painted swans.

‘What do you think it's like, there?’ asked Simon, glancing ahead to where the green of the shore had almost, but not quite, begun to resolve itself into individual bays and hills.

‘What? Ashore?’ Tom mused over the question for a moment, watching a seaman in the maintop of the
Minion
shade his eyes as he gazed ahead. He remembered eagerly the tales they had been told. ‘Well, you've heard. Great forests full of steam and swamps and strange fruits, and fierce ravening monsters - elephants with teeth as long as a man, and men black as coals, like them down in the hold, only with gold rings round their necks, if we’re lucky. 'Twill be all that, no doubt.’

‘I don't believe the rings of gold,’ said Simon doubtfully. ‘Where would they get gold, when they have no clothes to their bodies, hardly?’

‘’Tis the lords among 'em have the gold. And clothes too - smart cotton shirts and trousers, and great robes of leopardskin, too, Master Barrett says. He's seen 'em. These are only poor fellows we took off the Portuguese. They had nothing - but their smell!’

‘That was because the Portuguese never washed 'em, or let 'em go to the heads. John Sanders had to sluice 'em down with a bucket when they came aboard.’

The six Africans Tom was talking about had been taken from a small Portuguese caravel which they had surprised, and which had now joined the fleet, under the temporary command of Francis Drake. They had been the first Africans Tom had ever seen. They had been brought onto the Jesus, naked, chained to each other, and covered in their own filth. Tom laughed at the memory. The terrified Africans had shivered and howled, rolling their eyes and jabbering anxiously to each other, while John Sanders the bosun had thrown buckets of water over them, and swabbed them clean with a long brush. Then they had been taken below, chained in the small space forward where the pigs and goats had once been.

Simon was silent for a moment, thoughtful. A group of flying fish burst out of the water below them, planing away on their brilliant coloured wings from their pursuers below the surface.

‘I should hate to be chained in the hold like a pig,’ he said. ‘The rats would crawl all over you in the night.’

‘Why, so should I, or anyone. Specially in this heat.’ Tom shuddered at the thought. Earlier in the voyage, he and Simon, like many of the other boys and seamen, had slept in the hold for warmth, but as they had sailed further south the damp, airless, stuffy heat below had driven them up to the deck, where they slept each night now, rocked gently by the swell as they gazed up at the unbelievable myriads of tropical stars.

And so the hold had been left to the animals, most of which had now been eaten; and these six Africans, the first of many they hoped to capture and sell as slaves. True, Tom thought, he would not like to lie there, chained in the stuffy darkness, unable to see outside or even stand up without bending; but then he was not a slave, nor likely to be. He scanned the sea for more flying fish, squinting his eyes against the dazzling sparkle of reflected sunlight.

‘You don't want to worry about they Africans, Si. They're not like us. They're savages - they don't feel like we do. Black ivory, that's all.’

Black Ivory
was a phrase the bosun had used the other night, to describe the African slaves. It was the best cargo a sailor could get, he’d said: not only was it cheaper to buy, and easier to find than white ivory - elephants’ teeth – but you didn't have to carry it onto the ship; it brought itself, on its own two legs! A very marvel of the age!

Tom and most of the others on the gundeck had roared with hearty laughter, thinking how the black men’s skin did indeed shine like polished ebony when it was wet; but Simon had not seemed to see the joke, even then. It was another of the difficult things about Simon, Tom thought. Not only was he frail, unsuited to life at sea; he also thought differently from other people. Tom glanced at his young cousin now, puzzled and a little wary. There was an irritating, stubborn frown on Simon’s face which often preceded an argument.

‘You may say they don't feel like us, Tom, but they looked afraid to me, when they were sent below.’

‘Oh yes, of course.’ Tom laughed, watching as a group of gulls swooped, squabbling, on a bucketful of refuse thrown overboard by the cook. ‘They were afraid - like horses, when they don't understand. They’ll calm down soon enough.’

‘Maybe.’ Simon glanced towards the shore, which was growing steadily larger and larger, so that they could almost see the individual trees and bays. ‘I wonder, though. What can it be like, to live there? To be born in a land as hot as this, with elephants and other monsters all around you. What could it be like to be in their heads, look out through their eyes?’

Tom frowned, a little alarmed by the thought, which had not occurred to him before. ‘Why, 'tis ... like nothing, I suppose. Like ... like to being an animal.’ His face cleared, as the explanation came into his mind. ‘Aye, that's it. Do you remember when Master Barrett said, that hunting Africans was the finest sport, better than hunting deer or wolf by far? That’s how ‘tis, see. They’re animals, really. Not proper men. Not Christians like us.’

‘Perhaps they’re not Christians, because they've never heard of Christ,’ Simon said.

‘Oh, aye, probably.’ Tom laughed again: the idea of Simon as a preacher was not such a bad one. ‘You go tell 'em about him, then, Si. Take your Bible ashore and read to 'em.’ 

To his surprise, Simon considered the idea seriously. He flicked his hair out of his eyes, suddenly quite eager and passionate.

‘Perhaps I should, Tom. Don't you see, that's what we ought to be doing to these poor devils, not hunting and enslaving them. If they don't know of Christ, we should tell 'em - how can they learn, else? But instead, what do we do? Chain 'em in the hold like animals, and sell 'em across the sea to Spaniards - Papists, Tom, worshippers of Antichrist! We damn 'em worse than ever!’