Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [100]
Yellow Henry sighed and rolled his eyes disdainfully. He barely deigned to follow the direction of Thurso’s pointed finger. He was not a proficient reader in any case. ‘Las’ time all same-same,’ he said. ‘Brumgem trash place, muskit no good.’ His face fell suddenly into an expression of angry truculence. ‘We buy Dutchee muskit,’ he said.
‘Dutch muskets?’ Thurso was clearly scandalized at this. ‘English workmanship is the best in the world,’ he said. Despite his attempt at equanimity some rage had crept into his face and voice at the insult.
Yellow Henry appeared to meditate for some moments, stretching his mouth and distending his nostrils in an expression half savage, half humorous. His face glistened. Some quality of stillness had invested the men flanking him. ‘Brumgem muskit take off man fingah,’ he said at last. Apparently deciding to make a joke of it, he pouted and puffed explosively into the air, blinking rapidly and raising a hand to follow the track of his breath. ‘G’bye fingah,’ he said. There was laughter at this among his men. He turned his heavy shoulders to look round at them. ‘Show dem Brumgem muskit,’ he said.
Two of the men, smiling radiantly, raised their right hands. Each had a forefinger missing and one had lost also the first joint of his thumb. At the sight there was a whooping clamour of merriment from the king’s retainers.
Yellow Henry himself was overcome by laughter. When he looked up there were thick tears in his eyes. ‘Why you laughin’?’ he said. ‘Why you make big yai? Dey lucky, still got hans.’
Paris looked from the grinning faces to the mutilated hands. It seemed suddenly swelteringly hot, as if the clouds had hushed the wind. A sensation of nausea came to him, like the onset of some long-suspected disease. Taking advantage of the general release of tension in the wake of Yellow Henry’s joke, he passed down on to the main deck, where the slaves already branded and shackled were grouped together, and thence to his cabin.
Once there, he bathed face and neck and hands in the water it was Charlie’s duty to fetch for him each day. He tried not to smell it, as it had become malodorous with this long time in the butts; but it was blessedly cool. The nausea receded. In an attempt to reach some degree of the detachment he felt was needed now to save him, he had his usual recourse to Harvey, turning quickly through the pages until his eye was arrested at the celebrated argument from quantity, the first of its kind in the history of physiology: ‘The heart in one half hour makes above a thousand pulses; indeed, in certain men and at certain times, two, three or four thousand. Now if the drams be multiplied, it will be seen that in one half hour there is a greater quantity of blood, passed through the heart into the arteries, than can be found in the whole body …’
But for once Harvey failed to provide solace. It was too closely argued, too logical, it resembled too much what was happening on deck at that moment: Thurso and Yellow Henry were using the argument from quantity too, and every whit as rigorously. Perhaps he needed some more personal and passionate statement. He opened his volume of Pope and began to read at random:
As Man, perhaps, the moment of his breath,
Receives the lurking principle of death;
The young disease, that must subdue at length,
Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength:
So, cast and mingled with his very frame
The Mind’s disease, its ruling Passion came …
This was beautiful, but too measured for him in his present disturbed state, too neat in its elegant contrivance of the rhymes and precise balancing of analogies. He abandoned it in favour of Astley’s collection of travellers’ accounts of Africa:
They have continual warre against Dragons, which desire their blood, because it is very cold: and therefore the Dragon, lying awaite as the Elephant passeth by, windeth his taile (being of exceeding length) about the hinderlegs of the Elephant, and so staying him, thrusteth his head into his