Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [125]
Owen seemed about to reply, but then his expression changed suddenly. ‘Here she is,’ he said. ‘She has come at last with our supper. You have taken your time, haven’t you?’
The woman had entered silently. Her moving form in the lamplight sent shadows flexing about the room. She set down the dishes on the table, straightened herself and stood still for some moments, though without looking directly at Owen.
‘Do you think I don’t know where you have been?’ Owen said. ‘She pretends not to understand anything,’ he added to Paris. ‘Me go call Mandingo priest-man,’ he said loudly. ‘He catchee thief. Tomorrow – do you hear that?’
The woman glanced indifferently at him then turned and walked slowly out of the room.
‘She has been plotting with her relatives,’ Owen said. ‘But I have given her something to think about now. Serve yourself, sir. Let us not stand on ceremony.’
Paris took boiled fowl and rice and a sauce of palm oil and chopped peppers. Small black flies had entered the room; he felt the occasional sting through his shirt. Glancing up, he found Owen’s eyes on him in a wide, unsteady stare.
‘The Mandingos have a fashion of finding things out,’ the factor said. ‘I did not believe it when I came here at first, but I have seen things with my own eyes … They follow the law of Mahomit according to the Alchorn, as they learn it from the Moors of Barbary and elsewhere, and so fetches it down here by these wandering pilgrims. You may say it is not reasonable for a Christian man to believe they are able to perform anything above the common run. But I have seen them with nothing but a few feathers and a handful of sand find out the secrets of futurity and things that people have spoke of to no one. It is my belief they have the power of some evil spirit or familiar sent to them by the great enemy, to draw these ignorant Bulums to himself.’
The rum he had drunk, the wavering light, his host’s oddly disconnected speech, had combined to confuse Paris. It seemed to him for a moment that the factor was referring to some powerful and malignant slave trader further in the interior. ‘Who is that?’ he said. ‘Further upriver, is he?’
‘I am talking about Satan.’ Owen looked gloomily before him. His mood was turning morose. He had eaten very little and now thrust his plate aside and reached again for the bottle. ‘It is by Satan’s help these ignorant wretches are so deceived,’ he said.
‘The Bulum compose the local population, don’t they? Is the woman … your housekeeper, is she a Bulum?’
‘No, she belongs to the Kru people.’
‘They are darker, aren’t they? Yellow Henry and his band are Bulum, I suppose. Well, he is a mulatto of course, but –’
‘You were acquainted with Henry Cook then?’
‘It was he who came with our first slaves.’
‘He’ll never come with another.’ Owen clapped white, slender hands at a fly, looking afterwards with a sort of hallucinated intensity for traces on his palms.
‘Why? What do you mean?’
But the factor had reverted to his former gloomy staring and made no reply. He remained silent for some considerable time with his head sunk on his chest. Paris was beginning to think he had gone to sleep when he spoke again, in the blurred and dogged fashion of a man contending with his own obscured senses to reach to the heart of truth. ‘No,’ he said, ‘for all religion these Bulums have only the Porra Man.’
‘Who is he?’
‘There is a secret mystery that these people have kept for many ages, or for all we know since their first foundation. It goes by the name of Porra or Porra Men. These men are marked in their infancy by the priests with three or four rows of small dents upon