Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [119]
These were like the tremors of fever. It seemed to Paris now that disease lay like a tangible presence there on the river, that they were proceeding through the very exhalations of plague. Fever shivered in the currents of the water, muttered among the mangrove flowers, rose and fell with the insects over the surface. His own sight seemed feverish and disordered to him, one moment listless, the next strangely intent.
He was relieved when a turn in the river brought them to a small landing stage, where the first canoe was tied up already and their escort stood waiting with Owen beside them, a thin figure in a straw hat and crumpled cotton suit, very white in the face, who began talking with a febrile eagerness to them almost before they had stepped out on to the planks.
‘I’m glad to see you,’ he said. ‘My people here brought me word you were on your way. Damned hot and sweltery weather, ain’t it? How is trade? What are you carrying? Usual stuff, is it?’
‘We’re a good ways from slaved yet,’ Simmonds said. ‘I don’t know if you remember me. Name of Jack Simmonds. I was on the crew of the Arabella four years ago; you had just settled in, sir. This is our doctor, Mr Matthew Paris.’
‘How de do?’ The factor’s hand was dry and hot. ‘Four years is a lifetime in this trade,’ he said in rapid and perfunctory tones. Paris met the gaze of soft, lustreless brown eyes, saw the white face move in what seemed an uncertain attempt at a smile. ‘I was set to make my fortune within three years or get out,’ Owen said, ‘and here I am still beside this stinking river.’
There was a reek of rum on his breath and his eyelids were reddish and inflamed – the more noticeably so for the pallor of his face. A refuse of palm fronds and coconut fibre littered the bank above the landing stage, with here and there the corpses of smallish, mud-coloured crabs emitting an odour of sadness and decay. The sky above had lost all colour now. For some moments the three men stood in an uncertain silence by the water, as if some other purpose had intervened, some purpose not their own, not yet fully apprehended.
‘Captain Thurso sends his compliments,’ Paris said at last. ‘He is not able to come in person, he is staying with Mr Tucker.’
At this, Owen appeared to recollect himself. ‘Tucker, there’s a man,’ he said. ‘You had better leave someone in charge of the canoes if there is anything worth stealing in them. These people are thieves, every man of them; they have no notion of private property, none at all, not an iota. They will not rob you to your face but they will pilfer you to kingdom-come.
‘Case in point,’ he continued with the same febrile eagerness as they climbed up from the mooring stage, ‘and it is why you find me a trifle in disarray at present. I have been surprised this very morning with finding the storehouse broke open and goods carried off to the value of fifty bars at least, that is near the value of a prime slave, in rum and tobacco and other goods, and small signs of discovering who are the thieves, except you bring in the Mandingo priest, which I have done, just to try it, not that a Christian can believe in their hocus-pocus tricks, but yet I have seen them perform strange things at different times while I have been a trader on the river here. On top of all that, just today my people have brought in three dead men from the bush. They are Bulum and one of them a chief of sorts – badly mutilated. He was a well-known character in these parts and so I am obliged to keep them here till they are fetched away by the Bulum priests. They are noisome already, but I can do no other, these people are particular when it comes to such matters.’
The house stood on the rise before them, a low rectangle, whitewashed mud brick on a framework of poles, with a sloping thatched roof. A wooden fence made a compound round it. Within this, in the shade of the fence, two men lay asleep, their spears beside them. A few thin hens scraped in the dust.