Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [252]
Gratitude, however, there had been, or acknowledgement at least. Two days later, a party of twenty men, their bodies shining with oil, their hair dressed with ornaments of shell and bone, came in deputation under the leadership of one with a headband of feathers and heavy earrings of shell-lining. They sat for an hour in complete silence and left gifts of shell ornament and carved arrowheads, sour oranges brought from abandoned Spanish settlements further north, above all cakes made from koonti flour: it was to these Indians that the people of the settlement owed the knowledge of the koonti plant that had given them their staple food. From the Indians too, in the course of time, they had obtained the foundations of their husbandry, pumpkin seeds, tubers of sweet potato. They had made gifts in their turn, in the early days, using goods brought off the ship, clasp-knives and kettles which it had been Thurso’s intention to sell off in Jamaica. Some, like Cavana and Tongman and the Shantee people, had joined by degrees in the trade in skins with the settlements on the banks of the St John River to the north.
These neighbouring Indians, whose faces were tattooed in a pattern of concentric circles coloured red and blue, though hunting and fishing over the same grounds and though skirmishing incessantly with tribes to the west of them, offered the settlement no further hostility. For them too the past merged easily into legend. The story of this rescue was repeated among them, the alliance became a kind of custom and went unquestioned.
There could be no doubt of it – Delblanc had been right: in saving the three Indians they had preserved themselves and made possible the survival of their colony. Not long afterwards the execution of Wilson had brought acceptance of the need for the men to share the women, a problem on which they had nearly foundered, though it had been a matter of simple arithmetic from the start with only fourteen females surviving.
Twelve years, Paris thought. Twelve floodings of the saw-grass plain, with the great freshwater sea slowly flowing southwards, following the gradual tilt of the land. Twelve dry seasons with the mud cracking and the eroded shapes of the rock exposed, and the alligator, which Paris had long ago observed to be the true benefactor of these marshes, burrowing in the mud and maintaining small colonies of life in the water-holes thus made. One of the most ancient of beasts, an aboriginal reptile. He had watched them whenever he could, marvelling at the perfect adaptation to the circumstances of their lives. In this case, for reasons obscure to him, there seemed to have been no diversifying of the species. The alligator had neither died nor changed. The churchmen who had pilloried and imprisoned him and given him before ever he stepped on to the deck of a slaveship the horror of degradation that had led him by devious courses to this place, they might have pointed to the alligator as a proof of original creation, one of those who had voyaged with Noah. Climates might have cooled and warmed again, mountains risen, continents formed, but in the watery recesses of the world this same beast lived on. And it was because he was perfect …
On such a scale of time the twelve years of the colony was too short for detection, let alone measurement, it was less than a breath. Yet it was a whole life to him in the beating of his heart. He had been happier than he could have believed possible in this forgotten corner. But increasingly nowadays it seemed to him that this short history was assuming, had assumed, a definite shape, determined by the violence of its beginnings. A shape implies an end … With a sudden deep uneasiness he thought again now of Kireku and of those who moved in his orbit, Barton, Libby, men by nature subservient, quick to see