Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [134]
The two men listening had not understood everything of this because Calley’s face was muffled and the pain of the flogging choked the sounds in his throat. But after some moments they understood that the nature of the sounds had changed, they had become broken and gasping.
‘Dinna be snufflin’, lad,’ Blair said, and to him too there came a memory: waking in the darkness of the hulk to pain and the sound of rats and weeping … ‘No use snufflin’,’ he said.
Hearing something in the other’s voice, Paris glanced at him quickly and then away. Blair had tears in his eyes. The surgeon felt a sympathetic prickling behind his own.
Oblivious to the words and feelings of those above him and to the touch of water on his back, Calley wept into the blanket for the betrayal of his friend.
When Deakin became aware of the silence and turned and called Calley’s name and received no reply, he knew at once that the other was not far away, that he was crouching somewhere among the bushes, hiding. The world became very quiet to Deakin at this moment, so quiet that he thought he would be able to hear the pulse of Calley’s fear if he listened closely enough. But he did not want to find Calley now.
‘Go back, Dan’l,’ he called. ‘Make back to the river and follow downstream.’
The sound disturbed birds somewhere high above him; he heard the volley of their wings. No other answer came. He waited some while longer then went on. For a time he listened, but he knew that Calley would not come after him now. The silence persisted, enveloping him, absorbing the sounds of his passage.
He tried at first to keep north, following the course of the river; but the ground was swampy and treacherous and he stumbled among the intricate mangrove roots. He found himself longing for the open. All his passion for flight was in open country; he needed the complicity of the sky.
In the evening he turned westward, into more thinly wooded ground that rose slowly from the river, interspersed with belts of shrub. Here the going was easier and he made some miles before nightfall. He drank water from the tin container that, together with the pistol, he wore at his belt. It was more than half empty now. He ate some of the ship’s bread and salt pork he had kept wrapped all day inside his shirt. The bread was damp with his sweat.
Late in the afternoon of the following day he drank the last of his water. He was now in a country of broken woodland and spreads of tall, tussocky grass. The sky was open above him. Faint shadows of hawks moved over the ground. The silence intensified and within it Deakin spoke to himself, sometimes aloud. He would come to a village, people would come out from their houses. He would establish a trading post. Palm wine, lime juice, coconut milk. Don’t sleep, they will sell you. He could trade in gold dust, parrot’s feathers, teak …
He did not believe it. He could not imagine the shape of the houses in the village or the look of the people; and with this failure there came the knowledge that all his plans of trading had been only pretexts to find himself here, on the move, in this empty country.
Food he forgot in the growing torment of thirst. His own voice spoke no longer, but his father questioned him, cane in hand. Where are you making for? You know what will happen when you reach Jamaica, don’t you? What will they do to you when they get you on a navy ship again?
There was no way of answering so as to