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By Root 1379 0

the voyage and the hardships they had suffered on first landing. As a child, aboard the slaveship, he had seen death come in fearsome ways; he had heard people shrieking around him in the stinking darkness and he had joined in, screaming, not knowing whether it was fear of death or desire for release. But this public death that Wilson had suffered was not like any other he had seen. The white man had been brought out and tied up and slaughtered like an animal. He had not struggled, he had not believed it, he had walked among the people as if in a dream. Wilson had been killed by everybody. It was this that made his death special, the children had been told. It was justice, it was all the people showing how much they hated this crime. Killing was justice when everybody joined in.

At ten, Sefadu had not been able to understand this because his idea of justice was more personal. It puzzled him still, twelve years later. Killing Wilson had been good for the settlement, it had shown the black people that their lives were valuable to the white people, but he could not see how that could be called justice. Delblanc, dead now himself, had been the great talker for Wilson’s death, just as he was talking for it again now, in piping tones, outside the hut:

‘Turn you arse about, I talkin’ to you. What you name?’

‘My name Wilsoon.’

‘Wilsoon, you kill one man. How ken people live tagedder if dey do dat? How ken dey learn share woman if dey do dat? The worl’ fall in pieces if dey do dat. So now we all go kill you, Wilsoon …’

They had tied Wilson to a tree and discharged their muskets at close range into his body. Sefadu remembered how at that sudden explosion of sound great flocks of birds had risen from the marshes. For some moments their wings had filled the sky. Wilson had hung in his ropes all that day and the next for everyone to see …

Sefadu paused to blow dust from the mouth of the tiny hole he was making. The little pile of pearls on his low bench was diminishing slowly. He sat cross-legged on the floor to work, in the light of the entrance. The image of Dinka came into his mind as he had seen her last, the shapely arms, the proud carriage of the head, the long, narrow eyes both languorous and mocking. On her lower lip, close to the join, there was a tender flush of blood, dark pink, as if at some previous time this lip had been turned a little more inward, into the protective softness of the mouth …

Sullivan too was busy that afternoon. He was replacing a broken string in his fiddle. He would win Dinka by the power of music, and he desired the instrument of persuasion to be in best possible condition. Sullivan’s life from earliest childhood had been too hard for him to maintain much consistency of principle or opinion – that is for more sheltered folk – but he had retained a belief in music as an aid to love.

He had been alerted to the need for swift action by his talk with Billy and Inchebe and his realization that both of them had a fancy for Dinka, in spite of being settled men with a good wife. He was by no means convinced that his praise for Sallian had done much to make them see the error of their ways. Indeed, he was rather afraid that his words had misfired and roused their suspicions, Inchebe’s particularly. Inchebe was a subtle and a guileful fellow; there was a good deal to fear from this quarter, Sullivan felt.

Fortune had favoured him in the shape of a fresh-killed deer brought in by Hughes the day before. He had selected a length of gut from the carcass and had squeezed and nipped the blood and excrement out of it with utmost care, pulling it repeatedly between finger and thumb until it was as clean and sweet as he could make it. All night it had been soaking in a strong lye of wood ash. Now he had begun to peel away the softened film of skin lining the outside, a task requiring patience and devotion and lightness of touch, all of which qualities Sullivan brought to it and desired also to bring to Dinka. Meanwhile, as he worked his hopes rose, he whistled between his teeth a tune of his boyhood, ‘Katy Brannigan