Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [256]
Paris stood for some minutes near the fire. The new moon was rising now, rimmed with the old one. The sky still held a lingering radiance, the few clouds very dark and soft-looking, as if charred. In the clearing of the compound there was light enough still, though figures at any distance were shadowy and indistinct in the smoky haze. Tabakali’s face was lit by the glow of the fire. She was unaware of him, lost in thoughts of her own. She was dressed in a piece of the new cotton, dark red in colour, that Nadri, her other man, had bought for her. Nadri, an ingenious maker of traps, had given three fox-skins for three yards of it, an exorbitant price but she had desired the material greatly. With a tenacity that had surprised Paris she had always contrived to dress here as she had done in Africa, with a length of dyed cotton flung over one shoulder, covering the breasts and gathered at the waist to make a short skirt. Earlier she had hoarded remnants of the trade cottons they had taken from the ship; but of late bolts of cloth, dyed in vivid colours, had began to appear among the people of the settlement, brought from an undisclosed source by the trade partnership of Cavana, Tongman and Tiamoko. Several of the women wore this new fabric now, in their different ways, though there was a tendency among the younger ones to imitate Tabakali and cover the breasts. She herself wore nothing beneath the garment and her narrow feet and long legs were bare.
He looked steadily at her, enjoying the licence of watching her when she was heedless. She had less now of the elegant sharpness of bone that had drawn him at first. In these years she had borne four children, one of whom had died. Her breasts were heavier and the years had put flesh on her shoulders and hips and softened the sheer planes of her face. Her mouth was set in a fuller pout, resembling now a dark pink, crumpled rose. But the long-browed, slanting look of the eyes was the same, somehow both insolent and docile, and her arms and legs were slender still; he could see the supple play of muscle in her thighs as she shifted on her heels. Suddenly he was swept by a longing for the refuge she could give him, a need for darkness and the simplicity of her embrace – need made fierce by the desire that waited upon it, loosening his loins with heat as he stood there in the smoky, echoing compound.
She glanced up at him now, with her habitual, rather startled-seeming abruptness of movement, as if to appeal for his support in some argument she was conducting within herself. But her expression changed at the sight of his face and she raised her head and straightened her shoulders. ‘You got big yai,’ she said. ‘Dat me or de fish you lookin’ at?’
‘Dat you.’
‘Good, I happy for dat too much, never mind den, we forgit ’bout fish, buzzad bird ken have dem.’
‘No, no,’ Paris said, smiling. He knew that it amused her to catch him in contradiction of any kind. ‘You plenty sabee man keep more dan one ting inside him head same-same time.’
She rose in one lithe movement and turned towards him. ‘Keep ting in your head same-same time, head go sick,’ she said in the tone of finality she used when it was a question of Paris’s well-being – an area in which she felt sole and undisputed authority. ‘You docta, you no sabee dat? Better one ting one time. Fish ready now.’
The fish had been brought that afternoon by Blair in thanks for the curing of Sallian’s latest-born – whom Paris had delivered three months before – of a colic. This had not been a difficult matter; the baby’s cramps had been alarming in their violence but had been eased within a short time by a mild infusion of wild mint and quassia root. But Sallian’s gratitude was as large as everything else about her and she had dispatched Billy with the silverfish.
They ate in a circle at the fireside, sitting on rush mats that Tabakali had made with a skill learned in childhood and stained blue with the leaves of a dye plant that grew wild further north in