Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [265]
Here among the trees there was no sound. Sefadu stood at the edge of the pool, looking across to the sharp outcrop that thrust like wrinkled knuckles through the peat mould on the other side. These creases of rock were what had brought him. He had remembered the dark interior of this hummock, the cracked limestone and the complicated roots of the trees edging the pool. It was a perfect place for ground pearls, the most coveted of all ornaments among the women. He wanted to make a necklace for Dinka, so she would know his love.
He was three years younger than she, the youngest adult of the settlement, having been not yet ten years old when brought here – he had been a well-grown child and Thurso had thought him older. He was Temne-speaking like Tongman, but that was all they had in common, since Sefadu was not interested in dealing but in making things, and especially decorative things, though he made cutting tools and arrowheads also. He was tall and long-legged, rather narrow in build, with heavy-lidded eyes that gave his face a totally misleading expression of indolence.
The pause had been for something in the nature of a strong wish addressed to the spirit of his maternal grandmother, who had been a great gleaner and finder. Now he moved carefully round to the far side of the pool and began his search. After he had been there some time a brief but heavy shower descended. He stood patiently where he was, waiting to resume, watching the bark of the trees darken with wet. The rain stopped abruptly and he immediately began searching again, with the drenched leaves dripping down on him and the slow ack-ack of the grateful tree frogs resounding through the hummock.
It was an hour or so before he found the first pearls, caught among the exposed roots of a pond apple, four small opaque lumps, roseate and waxy, glistening softly among the dark root-hairs. There were two more in the soil below.
He put them in the skin bag he wore round his neck and searched on without pausing. He felt neither hunger nor fatigue. By mid-afternoon his bag contained thirty-eight pearls, all roughly the same size. Enough to make a necklace.
He set off back immediately, wanting to make the most of the light. Once again in the compound, he started work without pausing to eat or rest. His hut was also his workship and he had everything here that he needed: sailmaker’s needles, steel pins, chisels, all begged at various times from the people of the crew, some when he was still a child – he had always been clever at making things. Now he worked with application to pierce the pearls, the movements of his hands assured and delicate, his face set in a slight frown of concentration, joy and anxiety contending within him.
Somewhere not far away he could hear the voices of children. They were acting out the story of Wilson – he recognized the dialogue of the quarrel. Sefadu knew this story well; he had witnessed the execution of Wilson as a child and he had never forgotten it, the big man and his white, unbelieving face, the ragged volley of the muskets, fired by black men and white men together, all the men of the settlement. The voices of the unseen children carried to him, rapid, high-pitched, the actors scarcely distinguishable one from another, using words they knew by heart:
‘We here is two man one woman. You ken do matta mattick, yes or no? We got to share dis woman.’
‘I no share wit you, I wan’ fuck dis woman for wife.’
‘We go ask woman den. Woman, you take us share two husban’?’
‘Yes, sartin, I take you …’
No excuse had been found for Wilson’s crime. He had waited in hiding and stabbed a man to death, a negro, over a quarrel about sharing a woman.
Sefadu had not understood matters fully at the time. Those early days were clouded and confused with the terrors of