Father and son walked back together in the failing light. The lagoon water was steel-coloured, glimmering faintly, quite motionless. They kept well above it. In this deceptive light it was better not to go too near the water. Alligators sometimes entered the lagoons hunting for turtles. They could lie at the shadowed verges almost without breaking the surface. A moving adult was not likely to be attacked, but in the early years of the settlement a small son of Iboti had been seized and dragged under and no one had forgotten it.
High in the branches of a tree on the far side of the water a black snake-bird stretched its fantastic neck and uttered a single screaming cry. And as if this were a signal, while Paris and Kenka began the gradual ascent towards the first huts of the settlement, there began the evening clamour of the marsh birds rising to their roosting places, shrieking at the touch of the dark with a sound harsh and sorrowful like a fanfare of defeat. This lasted some minutes only, then the birds fell silent.
The compound was smoky with cooking fires and loud with the drum-beat sound of mortar and pestle. Tabakali’s hut was near the centre, facing the stockade gate but further back than most of the others, nearer to the dense foliage of the hummock that lay immediately below the pine ridge. The clashing rustle of palmetto fans was audible here in the slightest breeze and in the mornings the tallest of the palms cast thin shadows over the thatch.
The hut was the same as the others, built on a rectangle with more frontage than depth, with a palm-thatch roof sloping down on either side from a central ridge-pole. Woven mats hung from the split-log rafters to divide the space inside. In the hot season the huts were open-sided, but now in November mats had been hung all round to make an enclosure.
Tabakali was crouched at a low fire cooking silverfish on a cane grid. She smiled as they approached, but said nothing – she never spoke in greeting. Kenka, seeing that the food was not ready yet, disappeared round the back of the hut, where he found his sister playing knuckle-bones with some other children and joined in.
Paris stood for some minutes near the fire. The new moon was rising now, rimmed with the old one. The sky still held a lingering radiance, the few clouds very dark and soft-looking, as if charred. In the clearing of the compound there was light enough still, though figures at any distance were shadowy and indistinct in the smoky haze. Tabakali’s face was lit by the glow of the fire. She was unaware of him, lost in thoughts of her own. She was dressed in a piece of the new cotton, dark red in colour, that Nadri, her other man, had bought for her. Nadri, an ingenious maker of traps, had given three fox-skins for three yards of it, an exorbitant price but she had desired the material greatly. With a tenacity that had surprised Paris she had always contrived to dress here as she had done in Africa, with a length of dyed cotton flung over one shoulder, covering the breasts and gathered at the waist to make a short skirt. Earlier she had hoarded remnants of the trade cottons they had taken from the ship; but of late bolts of cloth, dyed in vivid colours, had began to appear among the people of the settlement, brought from an undisclosed source by the trade partnership of Cavana, Tongman and Tiamoko. Several of the women wore this new fabric now, in their different ways, though there was a tendency among the younger ones to imitate Tabakali and cover the breasts. She herself wore nothing beneath the garment and her narrow feet and long legs were bare.
He looked steadily at her, enjoying the licence of watching her when she was heedless. She had less now of the elegant sharpness of bone that had drawn him at first. In these years she had borne four children, one of whom had died. Her breasts were heavier and the years had put flesh on her shoulders and hips and softened the sheer planes of her face. Her mouth was set in a fuller pout, resembling now a dark pink, crumpled rose. But the long-browed, slanting look of the eyes was the same, somehow both insolent and docile, and her arms and legs were slender still; he could see the supple play of muscle in her thighs as she shifted on her heels. Suddenly he was swept by a longing for the refuge she could give him, a need for darkness and the simplicity of her embrace – need made fierce by the desire that waited upon it, loosening his loins with heat as he stood there in the smoky, echoing compound.
She glanced up at him now, with her habitual, rather startled-seeming abruptness of movement, as if to appeal for his support in some argument she was conducting within herself. But her expression changed at the sight of his face and she raised her head and straightened her shoulders. ‘You got big yai,’ she said. ‘Dat me or de fish you lookin’ at?’
‘Dat you.’
‘Good, I happy for dat too much, never mind den, we forgit ’bout fish, buzzad bird ken have dem.’
‘No, no,’ Paris said, smiling. He knew that it amused her to catch him in contradiction of any kind. ‘You plenty sabee man keep more dan one ting inside him head same-same time.’
She rose in one lithe movement and turned towards him. ‘Keep ting in your head same-same time, head go sick,’ she said in the tone of finality she used when it was a question of Paris’s well-being – an area in which she felt sole and undisputed authority. ‘You docta, you no sabee dat? Better one ting one time. Fish ready now.’
The fish had been brought that afternoon by Blair in thanks for the curing of Sallian’s latest-born – whom Paris had delivered three months before – of a colic. This had not been a difficult matter; the baby’s cramps had been alarming in their violence but had been eased within a short time by a mild infusion of wild mint and quassia root. But Sallian’s gratitude was as large as everything else about her and she had dispatched Billy with the silverfish.
They ate in a circle at the fireside, sitting on rush mats that Tabakali had made with a skill learned in childhood and stained blue with the leaves of a dye plant that grew wild further north in abandoned plantations; Kireku and the Shantee brought it down sometimes, together with the small, bitter oranges that grew there.
With the fish they had swamp cabbage, eaten raw, and koonti cakes – excellent these last, as Paris several times exclaimed. The koonti plant, knowledge of which they owed to the Indians, grew plentifully in the shore hummocks and in the pine ridges above them, and it was the exclusive concern of the women to gather the roots and make the flour. But Tabakali’s koonti cakes had a particular excellence known to everyone in the settlement, rivalled only by those of Sallian, and this despite the fact that Tabakali came from a nomadic people who did not cultivate the ground and so – unlike almost all the other women – she had no experience of similar root crops like cassava. But she was meticulous almost to a fault and addressed herself thoroughly to everything from gathering and cooking to cleaning her teeth and oiling her body. She had developed her own methods of pulping the roots and washing the starch free, fermenting the sediment not just once or twice but four times, so that the flour was purer and her cakes lighter in texture, pale yellow in colour instead of the usual orange. With wild honey, when this could be found, there were few things in Paris’s experience more delicious.
After supper the younger children were put to bed and Kenka went off to see his friend Tekka – his friend for the moment, at least: these two were of an age and by turns friends and enemies. Just now they were united in a common excitement as they were both to be allowed to accompany Paris and Nadri and Shantee Danka on a hunt for deer due to take place before the moon reached the full.
Inside the hut they lit a thin, foot-long pine quill resting longways in an upright stand fashioned by Barber from a cask-hoop. The resinous wood gave off little smoke and the light from it was reddish, slightly wavering.
Tabakali sat near the light on a low trestle. She was sifting through some wild cane seeds she had gathered to make porridge, taking them handful by handful from a skin bag on to a board across her knees. Paris sat with his back against a corner post, saying little, enjoying the peace that came to him always within this warmly lit enclave at nightfall, compounded of the silence, the gentle light, the deft movements of the woman. No call would be made on him here; Tabakali rarely enjoined any task on him or Nadri when they came to her. She had a strong sense of territory, and that included the division of labour; Nadri’s work was trapping, at which he was a notable success, applying skills learned from his father in childhood, snaring quail in the wide grasslands; Paris’s work was his sickroom and his garden.
Kenka did not return, but this caused no concern to either of them. The boy knew better than to go alone outside the compound after dark. It was a lesson drummed in from an early age: night was the time of the bear and the panther and the crocodile. He would be sleeping elsewhere, as he frequently did – perhaps at Tekka’s. The night was silent now except for the occasional cry of nightbirds. Paris rose to light another splinter of wood. Tabakali looked up at the movement and her long fingers rested among the seeds. ‘You worrit, an’t you?’ she said. ‘Why you keep mum? What good dat serve?’ She never missed any change in his demeanour, though it was sometimes long before she spoke of it. Lately she had seen some unhappiness drag at the lines of his mouth, though the expression was fleeting, soon lost in the patience and obstinacy that his face wore in repose. ‘Keep mum, end up poison belly,’ she said.
‘It’s nothing,’ Paris said. ‘No wort’ palaver.’ He moved towards her and put out his hand to touch the warm soft skin at her nape. He had always loved the strong column of her neck, thick but shapely and unblemished. The musky scent of her body came to him and the sweet smell of the acorn oil she used on her hair.
‘We see if wort’ palaver,’ she said. ‘You tell me, den we see.’ She smiled suddenly and he realized, without being able to share it, that her amusement came from something she saw as contradictory in what she was saying. ‘I wait dis palaver,’ she said.
Paris hesitated still. Tabakali was a fighting woman, prompt to action or decision when confronted with the need; but he did not know how to discuss feelings of anxiety or foreboding with her as this involved some appeal to shared expectation and she lived far more closely from hour to hour and day to day than he did, making her – at least in his view of things – a natural victim of those who saw further. In this, as in a number of other ways, she had remained alien to him. He knew little of her past before enslavement, and she had no concept of his. And the lingua franca that had developed among them, derived from the trade pidgin of the Guinea Coast, though it had provided the only possibility of a common language, offered small register for feeling.
The tendencies that worried him most – the growth of trading partnerships and the increasing rivalry and secrecy of their operations – he could not find words for. He began to speak to her of something more tangible and immediate, the forthcoming Palaver at which Tongman was to defend Iboti against the charge of witchcraft brought jointly by his woman Arifa and Shantee Hambo, who was Arifa’s other man. A number of things about this case troubled him, not least among them the fact that Hambo was a fellow-tribesman of the powerful Kireku. Accusations of witchcraft were rare these days; most disputes concerned property or trade. Even in the early days there had been nothing like this. Some disputes concerning the evil eye there had been, born of jealousy and soon settled. Since then the nature of life in the settlement, the variety of language and race among the negroes, above all the violence done to traditional morality by the need to share women, had wrenched the people away from their accustomed styles of thinking, ideas of the supernatural had been driven below the surface.
There was, moreover, a disturbing aura of domestic intrigue about this case. Iboti was very slow in understanding and already one of the poorest people in the settlement, depending on Arifa for some of his necessities. If he lost the case Arifa would be entitled to deny him admittance to her hut and he would have to pay compensation to Hambo. If he won with Tongman’s help, he would avoid disgrace but he would have to pay Tongman’s fee. Either way he would be impoverished. This was not the first time that Tongman had spoken on someone else’s behalf at a Council …
‘Tongman big man for Palaver,’ he said. ‘He talk clever. Tongman is a good advocate.’
‘Avokka, what dat?’
‘Avokka talk in de Palaver, talk any way, say any ting, dis way, dat way, never mind de trut.’
‘Avokka,’ she repeated. ‘Man talk clever pas’ other man, dat his work. Docta sabee medsin pas’ other man, trappa make trap pas’ other man, dat dem work. Dat same-same ting everywhere.’
‘Docta an’ trappa, dey don’ change you head,’ Paris said with a smile. He was amused and strangely reassured by the invariably non-moralistic quality of her judgements. She admired all outstanding achievement of whatever kind.
‘Tongman no ken change you head cos you sabee he a talkin’ man,’ she said now, answering his smile with a triumphant one of her own. ‘You say hum-hum, dat jus’ Tongman agin. When he don’ talk, dat danger time. Okpolu by de water, you no ’fraid. Okpolu climb fence, den you watch out.’
‘What is okpolu?’
‘Okpolu is frog.’
Paris nodded gravely. ‘Okpolu,’ he said, as if in serious intention to remember it, and this made her laugh and look down and raise a hand to her mouth in the strange gesture, half modest, half superstitious, with which she always covered her laughter.
He laughed a little in response, moved by tenderness and renewed desire at this familiar and strangely helpless movement of hers. She sat carelessly, exposing her inner thighs below the short skirt – modesty and indifference were blended in her in a way he had never understood. With the sensitivity that she showed in all physical matters, a swiftness far surpassing his, she kept her eyes down for some moments. When she looked at him it was with a certain quality of steadiness that he also recognized, proud, calm, quite unselfconscious.
He heard a movement and a brief muttering from one of the sleeping children on the other side of the partition. Then silence again. ‘You finish dat now,’ he said, pointing towards the cane seed beside her on the trestle. At once she began to sweep the grain into a clay bowl, tilting the board and using the edge of her hand. Paris watched, remembering the first time he had come to her, the desolation of his desire, standing outside in the dark, a cool wind from the sea, his feet kicking in the debris of fallen palmetto leaves, the loneliness of need possessing him and Ruth’s image lost among the rustling fronds at his feet. The same soft light, the same sense of warmth and safety … He had shared her with several men since those days but nothing had changed the feeling she gave him of having reached a safe haven. Just so had she looked at him then, as he stood dumb before her, with the same steadiness, without subterfuge and yet with a pride and decorum that had survived all the brutalities of the slaveship.
‘Make dead de fire,’ she said softly. She slept naked but for reasons that seemed cogent to her she would not undress before him nor ever make love except in the dark.
They lay together on the bed of rush matting and deerskins. Faint light came through where the woven mats joined the eaves. He could make out the line of her cheek, and her eyes in their shadowed hollows. Her smell came to him and he nuzzled his face against her neck and kissed the pulse in her throat and then the full mouth, which softened to his kisses; having early discovered his eccentric taste for kissing on the mouth she had practised the way of it that pleased him most. She pressed against him, but softly; her first movements of love were always gentle and slow. She moved her hands over his chest and abdomen and traced the bones of the pelvis. Preliminaries between them never lasted long. For him her touch and nearness in the dark were enough and when he turned to her he found her always ready. Tonight as he rode to his peace he muttered that he loved her, loved her, but the only reply that came was in the quickened breath of her excitement.
Afterwards she was asleep almost at once, almost before his weight was off her. Sleep, however, did not come to Paris despite the torpor of his body – indeed his mind seemed the clearer for this. He lay awake for a long time, his thoughts moving outward in concentric ripples from the solitary phenomenon of himself to the human creatures sleeping around him, then to the spaces of the night that wrapped them all.
Once again the wonder of their existence on this remote strand came to him. In terms of odds defeated and probabilities defied it verged on the miraculous. Even the first condition of survival, the unity preserved among them after Thurso’s death, in the aftermath of the mutiny, when staying made them all accomplices in murder, even this had been due to accidental factors, the presence of the gold dust on board, the extraordinary fervour of Delblanc.
No one had known of the gold dust at that time but Barton and Haines – and Haines only because Barton needed his help. The knowledge had been enough to make these two throw their weight behind the mutiny. Fear too, of course – both men were hated; but had they not planned to return to the ship they might have opposed the idea of grounding her. Once she was grounded there had been no turning back.
The presence of the gold, then, had been an accidental blessing. But the man who had done most to keep them together had not been a member of the crew at all. He saw Delblanc’s face before him now, with the starkness on it of a truth belatedly, overwhelmingly, perceived. Delblanc had seen more clearly than anyone that only concerted action could save them, not only from surrounding dangers but from one another. Perhaps there was already present to his mind the marvellous opportunity the mutiny presented to test his theories, vindicate man’s natural goodness in this dream of a community living without constraint of government or corruption of money. A ship blown off course, a scuffle of sick and desperate men, the blood of a madman clumsily and almost casually spilt, he had seen in these a truth of politics, a revolution, the founding of a new order. But it was I, after all, who began it, Paris thought, I who stepped forward under that witnessing sky. For the sake of others or myself? The old question, as far as ever from being answered. Was it to halt a crime or merely to straighten my back at last, face at last those who had set me in the pillory, made a hobbling beast of me? Impossible, now and for ever, to be sure …
In the landfall itself, where others saw merely a refuge, Delblanc must have seen also a violent birth. Paris thought of that dawn, the unreal calm after the long bufferings of the wind, the listing ship with her decks washed clean by the night’s rain, the sight of the long, sickle-shaped sand bar fretted with waves, and the curving sweep of the inlet. It was afternoon before they could bring the ship into the channel, but the sun was high enough still to cast a band of light across its mouth, making it seem like a glorious threshold.
In the event, however, more suffering had lain beyond. Those early days had been the worst. Weakened by hunger and privation, huddled together on the rim of the limestone pineland, they had lived as they could on beach plum and palm berries and a species of blackberry growing along the shore. These fruits, insufficient as they were, had probably prevented deaths among the crew, several of whom were suffering from scurvy; but more negroes died in those first days and some ran off and were not seen again.
More would have run and almost certainly died, if the fate of Haines had not come as a fearful warning. He and Barton had disappeared on the first night, Barton to return two days later, half raving, bearing still the ripped jute sack that had held the gold dust, as if this evidence of his loss could somehow, as well as proving his words, exonerate him, plead in his favour. The story he came back with, garbled afterwards in pidgin and a variety of African languages, had lived in the minds of them all.
The two had returned to the ship with what speed they could. In spite of their enfeebled state they had brought the sacks off her. Their first plan, of making off in the longboat, was frustrated because she was fouled and they were too weak to free her, and too much in haste – they were possessed by fear of being surprised at their work. Ever the actor, even in his state of shock, Barton had sought to convey this fearful haste to his listeners. He wanted them to understand, to see that his conduct had been rational, laudable even. ‘We had to get clear of the vessel,’ he said again and again, rapidly and tonelessly. ‘You can see that, shipmates.’ And then, with his inveterate fondness for the polysyllabic flourish, ‘It was iniquitous dark, lads, we didn’t dare to show no light …’
Paris found himself smiling involuntarily as he lay there. Barton’s impudence surpassed everything. The thin face bloodless with exhaustion, staring with a fear still not overcome, the ripped sack – his gauge of truth – still in his hand. And the incorrigible flourish of the phrase.
They had blundered with the sacks for some distance and settled down to wait for daylight. This, when it came, brought further problems. Their idea was now to bury the gold, but the ground was too marshy. They had stumbled through thickets of mangrove and swamp willow, carrying the sacks, looking for a place. Eventually they had come to the edge of a shore hummock, where a stream ran like a tunnel into thick vegetation. Here, above the stream, there was a deep mould of leaf and soil. But now a difficulty arose, strangely unforeseen in the midst of all their labours: they could not agree on a hiding place because neither man could trust the other not to return to it alone and take all the gold for himself.
Strange and absurd situation, Paris thought, lying wide-eyed in the darkness, the two exhausted men quarrelling there by the stream as the sun climbed above them, coming to blows at one point, if Barton was to be believed, over two sacks of dust. ‘It came to me that Haines was not a man to be trusted,’ Barton said, glancing at the faces round him, restored to the community of honest men.
The solution they had hit upon was for each man to bury his sack in a place of his own choosing. And it was then, in the interval between reaching this decision and summoning the energy to carry it out, that an amazing stroke of good fortune occurred to save Barton’s life. ‘Luckiest shit I ever had in my life, lads,’ he said, looking haggardly from face to face, inviting them to share his luck, repeating the fact in that rapid, toneless voice of his nightmare: ‘Luckiest shit of my whole life …’ Luckyshit Barton, Blair had begun to call him after that, and so he was known to everyone now, even the toddlers who did not yet know why.
The diet of beach plums and palm berries had left Barton with violent diarrhoea and he had felt the gripes of it just at that moment. Leaving Haines there by the streamside, he had removed himself into a thicket of bushes. He had taken his musket with him, but he had left the gold with Haines. Because of this he had not gone too far away; and he had chosen a place from which any movement Haines made along the stream would be visible to him.
As he crouched there in the first easement of his pangs, he had heard a slight sound. He had looked up and seen with heart-stopping shock a party of naked savages, fearsomely tattooed in whorls of red and white on their faces and chests, come drifting down through the trees, moving with a lightness that seemed to have no need of stealth. They had not seen him, but it was immediately clear to him that they had seen Haines.
They had passed quite close, it seemed – within thirty yards. He had his musket there beside him. Haines would have heard him if he had called, would have had at least some warning, some chance to defend himself. What sort of hope or calculation had passed through Barton’s mind in those moments could only be conjectured. It was possible of course that he was simply petrified with fear. In any case, he had done nothing. ‘There was no use,’ he said. ‘They was too many. I couldn’t be sure a shot would drive them off and I wouldn’t have had no chance for a second.’ In the fever of his veracity he did not attempt to cover his cowardice. His chief thought, he told them, in the babbling of his honesty, was that the Indians might smell his shit and find him. He had tried to cover it, when they had passed below him, with the edge of his shoe.
But before many seconds the smell of butchery had been in their nostrils. Barton had not seen, from his crouched position there, what was done to Haines. He had heard a sound of surprise, like a cough or a loud grunt, then a wailing cry. Some other broken sounds there had been, more like effort than pain, but these had been made indistinct by some chattering syllables of the Indians and then by their laughter, rather high-pitched.
He had remained there, not daring to move, crouched over his own excrement, tormented by flies. He did not see or hear the Indians again and supposed they had taken a path below the stream. Long after silence had settled he waited still. When he went finally, moving his cramped limbs with utmost caution, he had found Haines lying there and the sacks ripped and empty. Haines had been scalped. He lay on his back across the slight track above the stream, presenting to the trees and to the sky beyond them a face unrecognizable, obscured by blood from crown to chin.
‘He was always proud of his hair, Haines was,’ Barton said. It was the boatswain’s only epitaph.
There was not much more to the story. The horror showed in the mate’s eyes, and everyone understood it. The quiet, sunlit path, the glint of flies about the terrible red face of the corpse. He had crawled some way, it seemed – the Indians had left him alive. ‘Mebbe that was what they was laughin’ at,’ Barton said. ‘I heard the varmints laughin’.’
He had begun to make his way back, halting at nightfall and shivering through till first light – he had not dared to make a fire. Next day he had gone on, staggering with exhaustion, involved in endless detours among the mangroves. He had been at the limits of his strength when he had found them again; but he was still clinging to the vital evidence of the ripped and gutted sack.
‘Look what they done, shipmates,’ he said, holding it out in witness to an insane universe. ‘Them iggerant beggars … They cut the sacks open an’ shook the gold out, down into the creek.’ On the point of collapse, Barton looked round with a drained, exhausted triumph at this ultimate proof of human folly. ‘How can you unnerstand people like that?’ he demanded.
Sullivan was the only one to find anything to say to this, Paris remembered, with a feeling of amused affection. Sullivan always liked to have an answer to everything. He had fastened on the tottering Barton the fleeting speculation of his gaze. ‘Clear as daylight to a thinkin’ man,’ he said. ‘They was hopin’ to find somethin’ valuable, and they got disappointed like, when they didn’t.’
It was an old story now, but not forgotten. Haines’s face of blood was part of the collective memory of the settlement, though only Barton had seen it. The body was never recovered. The rains came and the grasslands were flooded. By the time the people were able to venture so far there was no trace. But the place where he met his end was called Goldwater by Jimmy in his classroom stories and it became as legendary in its way as Oose Tree or Red Creek, enshrined like them in the imagination of the children. It was said that at certain times, when the water ran clear in the stream bed, glints of gold were still to be seen there.
It had been Luckyshit Barton’s last attempt at private enterprise. He was Kireku’s lackey now and generally despised, a man without friends and without a regular woman. To Haines something was held to be owing, simply for the manner of his death, and this was also true of Wilson. It was strange that these two, bad men both and sworn enemies, should have been the martyrs and founding fathers of the community.
Delblanc had known how to use these deaths, as he had known how to use everything. Not least of the mysteries that touched Paris’s mind as he finally drifted towards sleep was how his dead friend, an itinerant portrait painter of good birth and easy manners, had been able to forge men of such metal into instruments of a higher purpose. But of course it was not a higher purpose at all, he thought, despite the rhetoric of the time. It was our purpose, Delblanc’s and mine; his based on doctrines of liberty, mine on some inveterate hope. Men living free and equal in a state of nature … What gave us the confidence to suppose that a state of nature could only mean what it meant to us, a notion of Eden, a nostalgia of educated, privileged men?