Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [94]
‘Norfolk.’
‘No fuck. Haw-haw.’ Yellow Henry glanced at his followers. ‘You no fuck now, we got biznez.’ There was a general guffaw at this, in which some members of the crew took part. ‘Fuck later,’ Yellow Henry said, encouraged. ‘Bristool trash place,’ he added after a moment. ‘Bristool shippis no give dash.’ He took a pace and spat with delicate contempt over the side. ‘You got dashee for Kru mans?’ he said.
‘I am goin’ ter bust that one,’ Paris heard someone say behind him. Turning, he saw Tapley and McGann standing together. He did not know which had spoken – he thought Tapley. Both wore a similarly gloating expression. They were looking at the girl slave, who had not changed position since being thrust on to the deck. Her head was lowered and sun glinted on the tight springs of her hair. She stood in a position of frozen modesty, shoulders hunched forward and wrists crossed over her genitals. It came to Paris, with a certain surprise, that she, and all these people probably, the men too, were accustomed to being clothed below the waist.
‘We will talk about dashee when we have had a proper look at the goods,’ Thurso said, in a tone almost jocular. ‘Have a seat here in the shade. Will you take a dram while the slaves are being looked over?’
‘Brandy,’ Yellow Henry conceded. He settled his bulk with dignity, at the same time darting looks to left and right of him. ‘Dese chiefs also like dram,’ he said, indicating his escort.
‘Mr Paris,’ Thurso said, with a sort of ponderous and malignant courtesy, ‘go forward and take a look at what they have brought, if you please. You had better go with him,’ he added to Barton.
‘Aye-aye, sir.’ Barton’s eyes had been on the barrel. With visible reluctance he stepped alongside Paris towards where the slaves were clustered. He had pistol in his belt and a broad-thonged whip of plaited leather in his hand. ‘It is teeth and eyes you looks at first,’ he said moodily. ‘These beggars is up to all manner of tricks.’
Paris thought he must mean the traders – the captives looked past all tricks save that of endurance. He had taken himself in hand: this was a medical examination he was about to conduct, not different in essence from others he had conducted. Nevertheless it was with a continuing sense of not being fully responsible, of acting under duress or in some sort of preordained ritual, that he now approached a tall negro on the outside of the group, took him by the wrist and sought to draw him forward a little. Why he began here he could not have said. The man had raised his eyes at their approach, unlike the others; and Paris had seen him hold back on the climb up the ship’s side – he had been struck several times with the flat of a cutlass. He hung back now; Paris had to use some force. Seeing it, Libby stepped forward with an oath and struck with his whip at the negro’s flank. The man gasped and started at the blow and his head shook, but he uttered no other sound. Libby would have repeated the blow but Paris raised his left arm as a barrier.
The man came forward now without resistance. Across his chest and shoulders Paris saw the weals of some earlier beating, edged with blood. The arm he held was trembling through all its length with a continuous vibration, like a leaf in a faint current of air. Again, like a refuge, memory came to Paris: an exhausted swallow on the beach; he had warmed it between his hands, felt the pulse of fear pick up with the return of warmth, until its whole body was a single vibration of the terrified heart. But not terror only, he thought – there had been some indomitable hope of life in the bird …
With the same sense of compulsion, like that attending some quest or mission in a dream, he met the dark and somehow impersonal regard of the negro, the eyes at a level with his own, fathomless and shallow in the bony sockets. He faltered for a moment at the gaze of these eyes that did not see him, did not know what they were seeing – the man was stricken with the openness of the place, he was sightless at