Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [133]
The offer was signalled satisfactory by the men below, who were more interested – for the moment at least – in beads and brandy than in definitions. The goods were lowered down over the side, Calley was untied and hoisted on to the ladder to make his slow way upward with cramped arms. The dugout, cast free of the ship, made speed shoreward, the four men throwing themselves on the oars for dear life.
Calley was seized by Johnson and Haines before his feet had touched the deck. He made no resistance. Exhaustion, the sense of being a wrong-doer, the knowledge of punishment to come, combined to take the fight out of him. He was parched with thirst and bleeding from a host of scratches and cuts. He was given shirt and breeches from the ship’s store; then he was placed in leg irons and set on the forward part of the main deck under the eye of the first mate, whose watch it was.
The end of the afternoon watch, with most of the ship’s work done for the day and nearly everyone on deck, was the time favoured by Thurso for the carrying out of exemplary punishments. It was then that Wilson had been flogged and Thomas True and Evans; and it was then that the time came for Calley. He did not plead but he whimpered while he was being tied and began to cry out terribly with the first blows. When taken down he was conscious still and uttering sounds in his throat curiously as if trying to reassure himself. However, he was not able to get to his feet without help or stand unsupported. Paris, who had battled to establish his right to ministration in the earlier cases, felt he needed no further permission now. With Blair, distressed and blasphemous, to help him, he got Calley to the sick bay, got the heavy, helpless body facing down on the bunk and began to do what he could to clean the mess of blood from the back and staunch the lacerations.
Under the spread of water blood frilled like petals from the wounds the knots of the cat had made from nape to waist, and stirred the torn skin at the edges of the lashmarks. Calley, so abjectly clamorous throughout the public ordeal of his punishment, behaved with fortitude now, helped by a constitution of phenomenal recuperative power. He kept his face pressed into the blanket. After a while sounds came from him, faltering and half choked.
‘He’s tryin’ to say somethin,’ Blair said. The surgeon had asked him to remain and he stood there now with a basin for the blood-sodden swabs that Paris passed to him. ‘He better keep mum, hadn’t he?’ he said anxiously.
Paris glanced at him a moment. Blair’s face had paled, the freckles showed over the bridge of his nose and his eyes looked unnaturally prominent. He had looked thus at the branding of the first slaves, the surgeon recalled suddenly. Not a callous man at all, Blair, he thought. Bluster and bravado apart. Tender-hearted, even – whenever he couldn’t find a cause for rage to save him from it. ‘No reason why he shouldn’t talk, if he wants,’ he said mildly. ‘Can you make out what he is saying? The man is strong as an ox.’ Saying this he remembered the only other time Calley had spoken to him: ‘You gets a saddle to put on,’ and the look of shy mirth that had accompanied it. His friend and protector standing beside him.
‘What you sayin’, shipmate?’ Blair said, leaning down and talking loudly as if to a deaf man. ‘He an’t very bright,’ he said confidentially to Paris.
Calley kept his face pressed to the blanket. ‘Deakin gone,’ he mumbled, forming the sounds from the red