Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [65]
She hauled him to the beach and dropped him hacking and wheezing on the sand.
And she left him spitting up salt water, ready to begin his life to come. He certainly never saw her again. Though he felt a certain power, which had come from her. He felt as though he had survived a great test, and that he could do anything, anything! And suffer no harm. Poor thread of a human being, nearly lifeless detritus of an argument between two gods, he believed that if he had not saved himself then he at least had the powers of nature on his side, and that they had saved him—how close to the truth this was, and how utterly distant and far—to do great things on earth.
Chapter Twenty-six
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The Pest House
The ship had stopped moving!
Even before she opened her eyes she could smell, beyond the stench of feces, urine, blood, vomit, the perfume in the air, the flowers. She was sure she was dead.
“Home!” she called out, “we are home!”
“Home!” the word passed among them.
Others began to weep, some shaking those who had not yet awakened, only to discover that they would never awake, not in this world.
They had returned home! The home shores, the home beaches, the forests of home! This hope became only the first cruelties of their disembarkation in the New World.
Sailors descended the ship’s stairs, using whip-handles to goad the people onto the deck. Yes, warm breezes carried the scent of flowers and land lay no more than a body’s length away. Land—but not homeland. The sky above seemed a different shade of blue. Not home, not home! Women bleated like sacrificial lambs while men muttered to other men. The sound grew louder, like the rumbling of running animals on a plain. Sailors, and rough men who boarded from the shore, rushed among them, waving stanchions and threatening to beat them down. Slowly the muttering subsided as the news dawned on them that they were further from home than ever before.
Lyaa could hardly stand as she moved along with the herd of people to descend the gangplank. Seeing someone crumple and fall into the water, she held tightly to the rope railing, assembling with the others on the wooden pier. Flowers—and in the distance trees she had not seen before, with broad leaves, flowering. She breathed deeply, desperate to rid her nostrils of the awful stench of the ship. The sun came up behind her. Her legs trembled so they could scarcely hold her. How many days and nights? How many storms? How many bodies?
Shouts! Thunder of voices!
Pale-skinned men roughly dressed now herded them into a fenced-in place near the water and others came carrying buckets and doused them with cold water, again and again. A white-haired pale-skin wearing a mask over his eyes walked among them, daubing at his nose with a cloth. Now and then he pointed to a person, sometimes a man, but mostly women, and others came to lead them from the compound.
Lyaa enjoyed the dousing, and hoped for more. To rid herself of the stink of their long voyage was the only thing that she truly wished for, at least for the moment. And food! Yes, yes! When more pale-skins carried in barrels of soup and baskets piled with bread she elbowed her way past the frailer captives to lower herself to her knees and feast on the thin mixture.
Some people pulled themselves away from the barrels and collapsed onto the pier. Others ate, and then vomited, and ate again. And vomited. She herself ate until her belly ached, and then she paused for a breath or two, and ate again. More pale-skins pushed their way into the crowded pen, shouting in that language Lyaa could not understand.
What did it matter to her? At any moment she could shake loose these leg-manacles and fly out of the compound, soaring high above whatever land this new place happened to be. Nothing else mattered to her. Her freedom lay just outside the reach of her hand, just beyond the