Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [253]
Made restless by these thoughts, Paris got up, crossed the corner of the compound and passed through the gate in the stockade. He walked some way through the forested ground that lay on the seaward side of the settlement until he found the little rocky eminence among the tall slash-pines where he often sat in early evening, his favourite time here as it had been at home in England. Trailings of cloud had formed earlier but these cleared as he sat there and the sky took on a look of readiness for the dark, that depthless clarity which is no colour and the womb of all colours.
He was looking eastward to where the sea lay, invisible but always present, revealed by something wild in the quality of the light above it. They had built their huts out of sight of the sea on the slightly higher ground between the barrier hummocks near the shore and the lagoons and grasslands behind, a site affording some defence against marauders and some protection from the storms that swept the coast in late summer, while still open to the prevailing sea breezes that combed through the pineland ridges and freshened the exhalations of the swamps.
It seemed to Paris as he sat there that he had somehow earned the right not merely to live in this place but to love it – a stronger claim of possession, one enforced by the things of deepest familiarity that surrounded him, the invisible sea that cast its light, the dark snake-birds already flying up to roost in the high branches, the breeze moving in the palmettos, stirring the leaves against the palm trunks with a sound like the faint clashing of cymbals, the slender blades of the leaves themselves, curving in perfect gradation like the first whorl of a green shell. Fear of loss gave a sharper intensity to his perception. This was the place that suffering and crime had made their own, where he had been able to save some lives and ease some pain, where he had found a refuge and a physical passion undreamt of in the arms of a woman still in most ways a stranger to him.
A vagrant beam of sunlight fell across the clearing and lay briefly on the papery bark of a gum-resin tree, lighting the peeling strips to a red glow, as if the tree were burning. The upper branches were hung with drapes of green moss, dark in the centre, fluffed with sunlight at the edges. Paris looked up beyond this, to where branch and foliage and festooning moss melted and fused into a single veil-like substance. Slowly his anxieties receded.
As he began to return he was met by a voice calling for him through the trees and knew it by something sorrowing in the tone for that of Kenka, who was Tabakali’s son and – though this had never been declared between him and the boy – his too.
‘Here,’ he called and after a moment saw the boy come out into the small clearing and approach silently. Kenka followed him sometimes for no seeming reason but to be in his company and this gave great pleasure to Paris, who had from Kenka’s earliest infancy watched him and sometimes stalked him as it were about the place, to find occasion to speak to him. Children lived with their mothers and they had all the men for their fathers, such at least was the general principle. But it happened sometimes that men took a particular interest in those they knew for their own. Paris had seen his own lineaments in the child’s face, in the shape of his eyes and the set of his mouth; and he had known that this was his and Tabakali’s child and the child that Ruth had not lived to give him.
‘How you sabee I here dis place?’ Paris said.
‘I see you talk Oose, see you go,’ the boy said. He had eyes that seemed to look inward until startled by speech, and in this he was like his mother. Tabakali’s too the straight shoulders, the sturdy column