Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [284]
He took the track that led in the direction of the lagoon. On reaching the edge of the pine ridge he glanced back. From where he was standing most of the settlement was invisible, cut off from sight by the trees. He could see the pale gleam of sunshine on the thatched roofs of the nearer huts. The stockade gates were open. Just beyond them, on the level ground before the first of the trees, children were playing together.
They were full in the sunlight. He could see the rapid play of their shadows as they moved. No voices came to him at first and he could not determine the nature of the game. There was a line of small children, somehow linked together, perhaps tied. Two larger boys, armed with sticks, appeared to be guarding them. A group of older children stood in a cluster some yards off. Kenka was among these: there was a quality of eagerness in his son’s slight figure recognizable to Paris even at this distance. A moment later he picked out the form of Tekka, tallest of the group. There was one standing slightly apart – it was the mulatto boy, Fonga, whom he knew well, having treated him regularly for an inveterate condition of congested sinuses. Fonga was a delicate, rather gangling boy, a year younger than Kenka, not well coordinated in his movements, something of a butt for the others. One of the guards, Paris now realized, was not a boy at all, though as tall as most of the boys there – it looked like Lamina, whose life he had saved when she was a baby.
As he stood there the wish rose in him to know the nature of the game they were playing. It came as a reprieve from his unhappiness; and then there was something potently suggestive in the way they had grouped themselves, something of ceremony or accustomed ritual about it, in this last, lingering sunlight of the day.
He saw Fonga point at the line of small children. The guards raised their sticks and made whipping motions at the captives. It was a game of slavery … Then Kenka stepped forward, a lonely figure between the group he had left and the linked line of slaves. Paris saw the raised hand, the uplifted face. The echo of the shout came to him – it was the first sound he was conscious of hearing. He understood now what the game was and he was swept by the poignancy of his son’s loneliness there, immobile, his arm stiffly raised, between opposed factions. Paris knew that the loneliness was his too and had never changed, the same now as at the moment of his intervention on the deck of the slave-ship.
It was Fonga who played Thurso and this too was only to be expected, he thought. Power had its ironies of reversal; the weaker had been coerced or cajoled into performing the detested role of the strong. Entirely appropriate too that it should be Kenka, with his eagerness to shine and to excel, who had secured the empty role of glory, over in seconds, leaving him with nothing more to do.
With close attention he watched the game to its conclusion, saw Thurso draw his pistol, saw Cavana make the gesture of throwing the heavy spike which had destroyed the captain’s right eye and sent him staggering back against the bulkhead. Then came the wild shot that brought down Tapley with a shattered leg – performed now with much impressive writhing by a boy he did not recognize. Tapley’s wound had turned gangrenous and he had died five days later. Tekka the cynic it was who struck the decisive blow. As Rimmer, he stepped forward while the cursing Thurso fumbled to reload, and stabbed the captain to the heart.
A great advantage of the stage that actions of irrevocable violence could be endlessly repeated, modified, Paris thought, as he resumed his way. Some profounder sense of the difference lay in his mind, though he could not immediately express it to himself. The sunlit