When I pushed myself up I rose into a reeking mess of blood and fire; the marines on the quarter-deck above us had been cut up awfully and two of the guns on the starboard side were knocked over on their side, one with the wood of the carriage splintered away. Our number two gun was loose on the deck, bucking back and forth with every swell, running over and crushing the bodies that lay on the deck. As I stood it came at me, and I was dazed enough to be cool about the way I stepped aside, stooped down for a capstan which I jammed into the wheel, stopping the gun short in its wild career.
‘Good lad,’ said a blackened, grinning face to me as I stood, quite unable to know what to do next. I recognized the layer of the number one gun, which was now on its side and finished; he motioned at me and we worked like fiends to get the cannon back into harness. Now that I had someone showing me what to do I was myself again. I was always strong for my age, and between the two of us and another of his crew we had the gun ready when our sails took the wind and it came time to give reply. Even on that first day I had a feeling for the craft, and as the gun grew hot and leapt like a beast into the air when we fired, it took me not long to learn the rhythm of it, the quick scrape with the wet cloth inside, the cartridge, shot, running it up, the tap-tap as the layer took his sights and then waiting for the top of the wave, and then the roar. We were taken apart, though, that day, and we must have surrendered if a frigate hadn’t come up to scare off the Frenchman, and when it was over my part was noted and I was made a part of the number one crew, which suited me very fine.
After that I served on many ships, most of them men-of-war heavy with cannon and shot and low in the water; we sailed many waters, and as the years passed I visited many countries, many cities in Europe and Africa and then Asia; I fought men of all races and colours and learned how to use the instruments of war. Then an English ship I served on docked at the port of Goa, and that evening for the first time I walked on the soil of this country which we call India; we traded with the Portuguese and two weeks later sailed again. I sat on deck whenever I could and watched the coast of Malabar slip by, green and dark, with fishing boats slipping in and out among the beaches and the palms and the swamps; we passed by many ships, some Portuguese and some Arab and some belonging to the kingdoms on the coast. One afternoon, a week or two before we rounded Comorin, I saw a tiger lying on a beach, stretching and yawning in the sun, and we all rushed to the rail, shouting and gesturing, and I remember thinking, I must remember this; and as we watched he stood up and stared at us; even at that distance I could see the yellow glare of his eyes; then he grunted (I felt my heart squeeze) and moved off into the darkness under the trees.
We docked at Calcutta, and I wandered through the streets, the bazaars full of fruit, muslin, silk, fish. I saw people dressed in every imaginable colour, turbans round and triangular, jewellery on every limb; there were traders, soldiers, scholars, priests, labourers, servants; there were dozens of languages, accents sibilant and staccato, long hovering vowels and strong decisive consonants. We stayed for a month, and I spent every moment I could walking, alone.
Finally, loaded with spices and silk, we set off. I watched the white beaches recede into a distant stain on the horizon, with the sails cracking and the mast creaking above me, a heaviness in my heart. For two days we headed due south-west, and then were seized by a dead calm; we drifted. The sea was a flat grey; a school of dolphins surrounded us and splashed through patches of seaweed, walking through the water on their tails, grinning up at us; on the tenth day we saw land to starboard, and slowly drifted closer to it. I could see huge trees, gnarled and twisted, branches reaching down, roots rising out of water; the air was very still, the sun sent us scurrying for whatever shadow we could find, and the pale blue of the sky hurt the eyes; I sat under a boat, fanning myself with a little straw punkah I had bought in Calcutta, dreaming, thinking of the stories I had heard of the kingdoms of the plains and the Deccan, the nawabs of Avadh, the broken Moghuls, the Sikhs, the Marathas, the Rajputs, the sultans of the south. Late that night, a slight breeze sprang up, and our captain came running out of his cabin, shouting orders; ropes creaked and wood groaned, and we began to move, slowly, hesitantly, and then out of the trees, from the dark forest, I heard a coughing grunt; I stood bolt upright, and then a tiger’s roar boomed over the ship, a harsh fearful spitting sound, unbelievably loud; I felt warm liquid spill out of me and spread down my thighs, but even before the echoes had died away I was running towards the rail; I went over in a running dive and hit the water like a knife; racing towards the trees, I could hear shouts behind me, but I knew they couldn’t stop to put out a boat after me —the wind was up, and they couldn’t be bothered with one man; so I pulled myself through the darkness, weeping and laughing and talking to myself. Soon, I was able to pull myself up onto a thick root. The lights of the ship receded. I was alone, among the trees.
Thomas was quiet, then, for a moment, and looked dreamily into the dark.
‘Why?’ he went on. ‘One might ask, why? Listen…
As I stumbled and swam through the swamp, thirsty, starving, I asked myself again and again; but the roots of things are hidden, shrouded. The black trees towered above me, and I sprang from branch to branch, my skin covered with sores and bites and cuts. I lost my shoes in the bubbling ooze that rose and fell each day with the tide; I grew faint and lost all sense of direction, and often I collapsed, my limbs jerking and flopping about, dreaming, seeing impossible creatures rise out of the green water: chimeras, gryphons, phoenixes. Why? I asked, and all I can say even now is that for some the unfamiliar holds the promise of love, of perfection.
One morning, I lay on my back on a small island, a patch of brown soil in the middle of rushing water. With watery eyes I watched the sun climb through the leaves, and then I felt a hot rush of breath on my feet, a miasma that climbed up my thighs and over my chest, a rich rotting-meat smell that filled my nostrils. I looked up into golden eyes, calm eyes, eyes vacant in a natural ferocity quite without malice. I felt whiskers brush softly across my cheek, and then there was the sharp pain of a bite in my left shoulder, just below the neck; he picked me up and carried me easily through water and over trees and dry ground. The blood slipped out of me and over his jaws, dripping into the thick green scum; the sun followed us, moving over the patchwork canopy above; the light danced in my eyes and I knew I was going to die. Just before the last fragment of my awareness dropped away, I lost all control and smelt, in the mist that hung above the water, the odour of my own refuse.
I opened my eyes and there was a man standing above me, his bare brown legs straddling my body; he was shouting at the tiger, waving a spear. The tiger was crouched, its belly flat on the grass, its tail flicking to and fro; it snarled, jaws thrust forward, teeth stained pink from my shoulder. The man’s voice dropped into a tone almost conversational —he spoke to the animal in a language full of grunts and clicks; the tiger seemed to listen, and then the man screamed, raising his hands high above his head. The tiger backed away, easing out of its crouch, and then turned and disappeared into the trees.
My saviour bent down and smiled, speaking to me in that gentle clicking language. He was an old man with a tiny wizened face painted in red and green and crowned with coloured feathers; around his neck and in his ears he wore jewellery made of bone and chiselled pieces of coloured stone; he wore animal skins, and carried a spear and a bow. All this I saw as he bent over me and brushed the salt-encrusted, matted hair away from my face. He clapped a palm on his dark, muscular chest.
‘Guha,’ he said, ‘Guha.’
I tried to speak, but could produce only a thin scratching sound. Guha wiped the blood and mud away from my shoulder and picked me up effortlessly, draping my limp body over a shoulder. My head swayed with each stride, and my cheek slid back and forth across smooth brown skin; soon, the regular rhythm of our motion and the sound of the swamp, that twittering, grunting, humming, booming song, answered each other in a hypnotic antiphon that compell
ed a descent into the region of dreams and memory: already, the places and faces of my past had taken on that soft glow that hides, forever, the grotesqueries and sufferings of childhood and the desolate loneliness of first youth.
When I woke up Guha was rubbing my limbs with a wet tuft of soft grass, wiping away the caked dirt and sweat; later, he cradled my head in his lap and squeezed the juice of fruit into my mouth; and always, he spoke to me, chuckling and clucking softly, rolling his eyes, gesturing. Often, he left me in the little clearing where he made his camp and loped off beneath the heavy branches. He would return, hours later, bloody carcasses hanging from the belt at his waist. When I could walk, I hunted with him; I would crouch behind him; we stalked, and in the swamp where I had seen nothing, felt only hunger, I saw an abundance, life burgeoning, swimming, crawling, giving birth, clawing, biting, all the wonder and the filth. I killed, and each time Guha knelt over the still-warm body, murmuring under his breath, touching the bloody flesh with his long, thin fingers.
* * *
By the time the sun moved to the south and the days grew short, my clothes had disintegrated into fragments, and I dressed like Guha, even wearing feathers and stones. I learned some of his language, the words for leaves, insects, fruits and animals, for fear and danger, and we spoke to each other in fits and starts. Sometimes, in camp, at the end of the day, he would sing, raising his eyes towards the red glow between the trees; I understood some words, grasped some small fragments of what he offered to the sky, but even if I had understood nothing there would have been no mistaking the wonder in his voice, the awe and the good humour. In return, I sang him songs I remembered from my childhood. One night, under a full moon, I sang a ballad, an old clan favourite about knocking the English about in a battle long ago, and as I paused between verses Guha piped up in his quavery voice and let loose with a few lines of one of his little ditties, and soon we were swinging back and forth merrily, sending the birds whirling above the tree-tops in confusion; he bent over and thumped my knee, nodding his head, and then we both collapsed in laughter, roaring, infinitely pleased by our madness; our camp-fire crackled on, and perhaps even the watching moon smiled a little at our antics, because good friendship is hard to find, and life is long.
The next morning Guha walked around the camp picking up things, suddenly filled with purpose; he motioned to me to collect my meagre belongings. I followed him out of the clearing; that day we walked in a straight line, due west, with Guha slipping soundlessly through the bushes; at sunset we paused for a few minutes to eat, and then went on. Where are we going? I tried to ask, where? but he pressed on, silent.
That night we left the entangled trees and still water behind and moved across a rolling plain; walking across a raised dike, I saw the light from a distant lamp blinking in the dark, and realized we were in a place of cultivation, of irrigation and harvests. For a moment, I felt fear, and wished we were back in the damp recesses of the swamp, but I had crossed oceans to escape the strangling constrictions of home, to find a shining fiction called Adventure, so once again I licked my lips, grasped my weapons firmly, and we went on, never slowing or pausing. For twenty-four nights we journeyed, hiding during the days in groves of trees or fields dense with sugar-cane; several times people passed within a few feet of us, and sometimes packs of village dogs loped by, sniffing and restless, but Guha’s skill was ancient and boundless. At the end of this time we reached a region where the ground rose up in wooded ridges, and as the sun rose on the twenty-fourth day we left the fields behind and climbed into the shade of the jungle.
Now we seemed to wander aimlessly, meandering in great arcs among the trees and the brush. Guha grew dreamy, reaching out with searching hands to touch leaves and bark. By a stream, at a place where the ground was dark and loamy, he turned back to me and pressed on my shoulders, making me sink to the ground. He arranged my limbs so that I sat cross-legged, pushed at my back until my spine was straight. With his spear, he etched a circle in the ground around me. Then he cupped my face in his palms and leaned closer until I could see the flecks of yellow in his eyes, and with the tenderness that one sees in a mother’s face as she wipes her baby’s bottom, with that awkward craning of the neck, with that defenceless love, he whispered slowly, so that I could understand: ‘In the circle, stay, here it is.’
’What?’ I said, but he stepped back and reached down to the muddy circumference that bound me in, his fingers bending and snapping out, and just when it seemed that he was about to touch the soil, a sheet of white flame rose up from the circle, smokeless and clean. I cringed in terror, then stood up and screamed, begging Guha to stop it, to let me out, but he smiled, shouldering his spear, and then the flames rose up and hid him, hid everything, until I could see only a round section of sky above me, and even that was soon wiped clean by the hot orb of the sun. I sank to my haunches, sobbing. For a while, I prayed to God, to the saviour of my childhood that I had forgotten in my travels, and his blessed mother, I begged to be delivered from this place of evil and witchcraft; I mumbled apologies for associating with the undelivered who had sold their souls to Satan; I asked for divine retribution to be visited upon the mage Guha, who had trapped me, no doubt to use my soul in some filthy ritual, in some bargain with unclean demons. I knelt, my face pushed into the mud, hands clasped, confessing every transgression, every sin, every craving that had ever sprung from my sweating, excreting, mucus-ridden flesh, every burst of anger, every last iota of greed, every afternoon lost in sloth, every evening given to the disgusting business of mastication, salivation, and digestion; I confessed everything, the sins multiplying, breeding on each other in a bloody, monotonous manner, like some species of low animal: murder, lechery, buggery, covetousness; I wept until my body hurt with each wrenching sob, and then I fell into an exhausted doze.
When I awoke the flames were gone, leaving only a glowing, deep red circle that moved and trembled, like the molten lava I had heard described by a traveller on one of my ships, long ago; the ground on which I crouched was covered with congealed yellow masses of vomit. I reached out towards the red border, feeling no heat, but the closer I came to it, the more I felt a dread that rose from the region of my belly; I cannot explain this now, cannot make you understand, I think —I could no more have touched that circumference than I could have caressed a blade fresh from an armourer’s smithy, hissing and spitting; I certainly could not bring myself to step over Guha’s magic line, out of my airy prison, so I stayed.
In the dim light of dawn, I watched a deer emerge apprehensively from the trees and tiptoe to the water. Feeling the pangs of hunger, I looked around my little patch of ground, finding only a few blades of grass; I plucked a green sliver and put it between my lips, and instantly a great rush of saliva filled my mouth, but even before I had finished chewing I felt satiated. Over the next few days I discovered that I seemed to somehow absorb nourishment from the air and the sunlight, from the fragrance that drifted up from the flowers that grew among the rocks on the banks of the stream; so I survived, watching the animals and the birds, who circled me warily at first but soon accepted me as one of the inhabitants of that world, as a spectator as silent and as unthreatening as the rocks or the trees. None of the predators attempted to enter the circle, so after a while I grew to trust the efficacy of Guha’s magic, and watched the graceful lope of the leopard by day and the heavier, confident tread of the tiger by night.
I grew light-headed as the days passed; the dew lay thick on the leaves at dawn, and the white clouds moved imperceptibly against the sky; sometimes I slept and dreamt, and when I opened my eyes the dreams seemed to continue. Mist, the world is mist, terrible and lovely, and sometimes even as I dreamt I knew I sat still within the circle, my body growing translucent like imperfect glass, so that I could see the blades of grass through my fingers, and now the sun pierced my heart and my shadow grew faint and indistinct; finally, I could stay upright no longer; I curled up on my side, my knees drawn up to the chest.
; When they found me they could see the earth through my thighs and my arms; for a while, they told me later, they watched me, believing that I was a piece of someone’s dream, or a ghost grown weak from grief. Guha’s red circle was gone, leaving only a faint dark stain; after a while I began thrashing about, and they saw how I scraped in the mud until I found a tiny sliver of green that had barely thrust itself into the air and raised it, trembling, to my lips; they knew then I was a human being. They picked me up, exclaiming how easily my body rose from the ground, and carried me to their village where an ojha shook dried leaves over me and an old woman fed some glutinous grey stuff into my mouth, her fingers rough and hard against my lips.
They called themselves the Vehi, and told me, later, that once a piece of the sun had fallen, circling end over end; an eagle, imagining it to be some kind of small hummingbird, had stood on one wing-tip and arced down to snap it up, and had fallen immediately groundward, rendered insensible by the heat within its gullet. As time passed the eagle’s feathers and claws and beak had fallen to the ground one by one, until all that was left was a soft-skinned animal reshaped by the luminosity within, and this was the first human, the remote ancestor of the Vehi. I lived with them for many months, recovering from my ordeal, learning their language; I threw away my remaining ornaments, and learnt to dress like them, wearing about my loins a single piece of cloth, obtained in trade from the plains. At first I spent my time wandering among the trees, watching the women gather fruit and roots, but when I had regained my strength I went hunting with them, tracking animal and fowl of every description. Sometimes I told them of home, and of the other great cities I had seen, and they tapped their cheeks in wonder, but it all seemed distant to me now, colourless, flat, and I wondered how I could have lived like that; once I would have called these people savages, and even unsaved, but now I knew that but for them I would have vanished into the mud of the forest, become a dream or a ghost, because I understood now that this is what the forest can do. So I stayed with them and learnt their stories.
Red Earth and Pouring Rain Page 10
