Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [264]
He looked up gleefully from this sport to see a fretting and worrying of waves round a dark shape at the water-line some distance ahead of him. He thought at first it might be a section of the trimmed hardwood timber sometimes washed up from cargo ships; but it was too short for that and too light – the water was lifting and moving it this way and that. Then he saw that it was the body of a negro, not fully grown. The sex he could not determine yet. As he drew nearer the movements of the body seemed like a sort of languid play. He saw now that it was a boy. Calley stopped and stood looking. It came to his mind that the sea was bringing this body to life. Calley knew there were spirits, he saw and heard them everywhere about him, they informed his dreams. In a shaft of awe below any power of words it seemed to him that this negro boy would presently crawl up out of the sea. Then he saw the staring eyes and the slight, helpless gestures of the hands and he knew the boy was dead.
He went forward and drew the body out of the water and laid it higher up on the beach. The boy was perhaps ten or eleven years old and his body was whole – he had escaped sharks in the deep water and crabs in the shallows and the vultures that would have found him soon. He was emaciated; his cage of ribs was clearly visible beneath the skin, the collarbone like a halter on him. There was a brandmark on his chest, on the right side, above the nipple. The scar was red, still new.
Calley fell now into a painful state of anxiety and indecision. He stood looking from the dead boy to the empty shore and sea and sky. He was absolutely alone with the responsibility of this discovery, nothing to guide or help him. He could leave the body where it was and walk on as if nothing had happened. He would never speak about it, no one would know. Would Deakin have done that? Deakin would not just walk away from the dead child. Deakin would take the body and show people …
He stopped and picked up the boy in his arms. The body was ice-cold and Calley shivered slightly at the contact of this cold flesh against his own. He hoisted the slight form across his shoulders and resumed his way. Soon he became accustomed to his burden. He walked on steadily, his mind vacant, aware only of the washing sound of the waves, the growing warmth of the sun.
Also abroad early was a young man called Sefadu, whom love had made restless. He had risen with the first light and paddled for two hours through the channels on the edge of the flooded saw-grass plain towards the dark line of a jungle island on the horizon. The water levels had begun to sink but he often hunted here for duck and quail and he knew the floodlands well. He had been born in the Bolilands of Sierra Leone, a region not much different, flooded in the rainy season and dry in winter. In the narrow, flat-bottomed canoe, which he had hollowed out himself from a single trunk, he could pass at a level of a few inches.
The tall grass grew close and the minute teeth on the blades cut his arms and shoulders sometimes. But his purpose was fixed and the fire in his mind steady, so that he hardly noticed these wounds, or the indignant herons and spoonbill birds that flapped up with heavy wingbeats at his approach.
He tied up the canoe at the edge of the hummock among pads of water-shield plants still cupping their catch of dew, and stepped into the green twilight of the trees. He had been here before and knew there was a wide sink-hole on this side, not far into the trees, a deep hollow in the rockbed which was the hummock’s foundation. Thrusting