Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [251]
‘Dey ’fraid snake.’
‘Dey ’fraid leppid.’
The children always took part eagerly at this stage, sharing these fears in large measure. ‘Dey ’fraid black bear,’ Tekka said.
‘You right, boy. You great man for black bear, an’t you? Dem slave-taker ’fraid dey own shadder. Why dat? Dat ’cause dey bad wickit man, dey sabee take sell slave bad ting too much, dey feel bad inside demself. But us people go after dem no ’fraid. Why dat?’
‘Dey more of us.’
‘No, Sammy, dat not de answer. Us not ’fraid ’cause us in de right. When you in de right, you heart strong, you no ’fraid nottin’. So dey camp on de bank, make fire, set one man watch. Den dey go sleep. Indian still tied tagedder. Now dese slave-taker bad man too much but us people no go for kill dem, very bad kill anadder man, we all man got to live tagedder in dis world, but dis time got to kill for free dem slave …’
Sitting outside the small hut adjoining his sickroom that he used when not with Tabakali, Paris thought about those distant killings again now. He could never see Hughes without some memory of them. There were men and women like this in the settlement, so charged with a particular event that they carried an evocative aura about them.
It had been about this time when they set off in pursuit, evening, the sky draining slowly to an opalescent, milky blue. With the approach of darkness they heard the cry of frogs, some solitary voices at first, then the great glimmering expanse of flooded saw-grass had resounded with them, a loud, unbroken, pulsing chorus, strangely like sustained lamentation to Paris’s ears.
The men they were following had bivouacked on a sandbank among sea-grape trees and palmetto, as high as they could get above the water. They had lit a fire and one had settled to watch, a white man, musket across his knees. The Indians they had roped to a tree. Paris remembered the firelight on the pale trunks of the sea-grape trees, and the shadows of their long, deformed-looking branches.
That ceaseless litany of the frogs had concealed all sound of their approach. The Shantee, Kireku, had gone first, tall and lithe and soft-footed, with a visible appetite for murder. Or is it only now, Paris wondered, in the distrust and division of these later times, that I attribute this to him?
Kireku had slashed the guard’s throat from behind before he could stir or utter a cry. But the man had choked and bubbled in his death and one of the others had started up, seen the moving forms and shouted once before Barber reached him, chopped at him with the short axe he had brought among his carpenter’s tools from the ship, pursued him still chopping as he tried to crawl away. The others were roused now. All Paris could remember, after this bloodied, crawling form in the firelight, was a confused and violent struggle in which Zobi had been struck down by the stock of a musket and he himself had shot with his pistol the man wielding the musket, a powerful negro, shot him through the body, seen him blunder away through the trees and followed, not knowing how badly hurt he might be, and found him coughing out his life in the dimness beyond the light of the fire. Expiring in blood, the negro had begged to be spared. Paris remembered the eyes fixed on him, the soft mumble of the voice. And he remembered the hush that had fallen all around himself and this dying stranger. He had not been able to understand it at first, then he realized that his shot had silenced the frogs.
On this blood and that of Wilson, whose death was still to come, their small republic had been founded. This was the Battle of Red Creek, as Jimmy told the children – he knew the importance of names. The colour came from the red stain in the water made by the fallen mangrove leaves.
The Indians they had taken back with them, still bound. By yet another stratagem deriving from the inspired Delblanc they had only been released later, ceremonially, before the whole people. They were copper-coloured, slender but robust, small-boned, with long straight black hair and depthless, glittering eyes. They