Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [280]
Kireku appeared at the entrance, looked gravely at Paris for some moments without speaking, then motioned him to enter. He was naked to the waist and his chest and shoulders gleamed with the acorn oil which it seemed he had just been putting on himself. The palm matting on the side of the hut facing west had been raised and sunlight reached into the interior, where the corner poles cast long shadows. Paris found Barton inside, sitting on a mat in one corner with his back against a post. He lifted his narrow face and nodded as Paris entered, but said nothing.
Kireku gestured towards the mats on the floor, waited for Paris to sit, then sat himself. His long, narrow eyes were bright and fathomless in the sunlight and those parts of his body in the shade shone with blue-black glints at every smallest movement. ‘You welcome,’ he said. ‘You drink someting? You drink beer?’
‘Thank you.’
‘Barton, go git de beer.’
‘Aye-aye,’ Barton said, and Paris, as if in some uneasy dream where one struggles against recognition, heard in these syllables the same irony – too faint for insolence – the same servile alacrity as in the days when Barton had been mate on the slaveship. The response, too, was the same: Kireku directed a look of intimate disdain and irritation at his minister. ‘Look live, den,’ he said. ‘Stir you stumps.’
The beer was good – cool, unclouded and not too sour to the taste. They had to draw close to drink, following the sociable custom of the settlement, by which the beer, like the gruel sometimes made from the same grain, was taken with long-handled shell scoops from the same wooden bowl.
Paris smacked his lips politely at the excellence of the beer and commented on the beauty of the scoops – they had been made, he was told, by Sefadu. He answered Kireku’s queries as to his health and well-being and waited through the long, hospitable silences.
Whatever displeasure Kireku might have felt at the way the Palaver had gone, he showed nothing of it now. The face that regarded Paris was equable and handsome, with its broad nostrils and wide, full mouth. Thin diagonal scars of tribal incisions showed faintly on his cheeks. The marks of thought were on Kireku’s face, there were fine wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and slight vertical folds between the brows. But its general expression was confident and resolute. It was the face of a man in command of his passions and of the circumstances of his life. Now, either from indifference or contempt, he gave Paris the opening he needed. ‘Well, so it look like Iboti not de man,’ he said.
‘Not less he got wing,’ Paris said.
Kireku chuckled at this and tapped his temple with a long forefinger. ‘Iboti got brain of de bird, no got de wing,’ he said.
‘He not clever, dat is sartin,’ Paris agreed. ‘But dat not a reason make him Hambo porter.’
Grasping the opportunity thus afforded, he began to speak of his fears for the future of the settlement if it became accepted among them that a man’s weakness or stupidity or simply his poverty was reason enough for that man to be made the possession of another and forced to do that other’s bidding. Some men had short memories, but Kireku’s was longer and he would remember his own sufferings as a slave. If Kireku, as a leading member of the community, would speak to his fellow-tribesman Hambo and explain these things to him, it might be possible to stop this tendency now, before it took hold among them and became customary practice. Kireku was a man of sense and experience and he would know that once a thing became customary it soon came to be regarded as lawful and was then extremely difficult to root out …
Concerned above all to find words that would express his meaning clearly and show at the same time his confidence in Kireku as an ally, Paris had not