Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [269]
He waited in his own hut until the cooking fires were low and the meal-time gossip over. The shouts of children continued afterwards but they too were hushed after a while. The moon was high when he emerged and a faint light from it lay across the compound. There was a chill in the air and a smell of wood smoke and mist. Sullivan shivered a little. He had taken pains with his appearance, tying back his long hair with a leather thong, trimming his beard, chewing mastic to clean his teeth and sweeten his breath.
There were people still moving about here and there, but no one took much notice of Sullivan as he made his way to the corner of the compound where Dinka lived. No light showed from her hut, but he was not particularly surprised at this; people in the settlement generally slept early and rose with the sun. Dinka would be roused from her first sleep by his music and what better way for a woman to wake?
He chose a place some yards from the entrance and seated himself on the ground. After waiting a while to steady his breathing he settled the fiddle to his shoulder and began to play the air of ‘Oh, Hear Me!’ He had a husky tenor voice, not very strong, but pleasing – he had used it in dusty lanes and cobbled streets of the past, in another life, singing for coppers, dragging a leg for more pathetic effect. Now he put all the feeling he knew into it:
Oh, hear me, my charmer!
Wouldst kill me with scorn?
See, the east lightens,
Soon cometh the dawn.
He was aware of movements, voices, people stirring in the huts around, but he kept his eyes on the entrance to Dinka’s. There had been no response from this quarter so far. He repeated the first two lines of the melody on his fiddle, drawing out the notes as tremulously as possible. Still no sign of anything. He began the second verse:
Hear me, oh, hear me,
Give ease to my pain …
Abruptly he fell silent. A figure had at last appeared at the threshold, naked, but not the one hoped for and not the right sex even – a fact grossly apparent to the staring Sullivan considerably before he knew the face for Sefadu’s. The voice, when it came, was not unkind: ‘She no ken hear you now, fiddleman, she busy too much. Come back in de mornin’.’
The strains of the fiddle had come to Kenka as he lay between waking and sleeping. He had heard fiddle-music before and knew that it must be Sullivan. At the same time, perhaps because he was not fully awake or because the music was distant and sad, it seemed like a voice of the night, not coming from any particular place or person. There was something magical about it and for this reason Kenka never asked any questions concerning the music, nor indeed mentioned it to anyone until many years later in a different place, when he was an old man and nearly blind.
As he lay looking through the darkness he heard the silence left by the ceasing of the music fill again with small accustomed sounds, faint rustles in the thatch above him, the deep, regular breathing of his brother and sister lying nearby, the distant sibilance of the sea – not exactly a sound, this, but a very faint escape of silence.
He began to think about the night-time deer-hunt which he had been promised – his first. It was due to take place very shortly now, before the full moon. Shantee Danka was back, after an absence of several days. He had returned for the Palaver. It was Danka who had seen the deer-tracks and the cropped shoots in a hummock no more than an hour away, beyond the freshwater lagoon. Danka would be leading them. He was a notable hunter and very strong – Kenka had once measured Danka’s bow against the thickness of his own wrist and found no difference. About him, as about almost all the older men of the settlement, there was a legendary glamour. Danka had been one of those who brought the ship