by Wilbur Smith
The Maharajah Sadiq Khan Jahan had not paid him to carry this Englishman who claimed to be Courtney, the famed ‘Tazar’, to Quelimane. He had simply sent an official along with the soldiers who escorted the Englishman to the docks who said to Barros in Arabic, ‘His Highness has been informed that you have a shipment bound for Quelimane.’
‘That is correct,’ Barros replied, in the same tongue as he rubbed the vivid pink scar line that ran from the corner of his mouth up into his hairline. It was a nervous habit he could not break himself of.
‘They have been bought by Senhor Lobo, to work in his mines.’
‘Again, correct.’
‘Very well, please add this one to the shipment,’ the official said as Hal was pushed forward to stand next to him, opposite Barros. ‘He is an Englishman. If he survives the journey, His Highness wishes him to be presented as a gift to Senhor Lobo.’
‘A fine gift,’ Barros remarked. ‘Not only is he a white man but he looks strong and healthy. Good teeth. Senhor Lobo will breed from him, I dare say.’
‘Very possibly,’ the official agreed and then went on, ‘His Highness recognizes, however, that voyages at sea are fraught with danger and will not hold it against you if this journey should prove fatal to this individual.’
‘You are saying that I am free to do with him as I will?’
‘Exactly so. His Highness has decreed that the fate of this man shall be in the hands of Allah, the all-knowing and merciful.’
‘What an interesting decree,’ Barros said. ‘I will be sure to consider it at all times.’
And so, for the second time in his short life, Hal Courtney found himself in the heat, the confinement, the darkness and the overpowering stench of a slave deck, shackled to a ringbolt and soaked in other men’s liquid excrement.
Hal estimated that they were six days out of Zanzibar when one of Barros’s crew – a man who’d swiftly made himself known to the terrified, half-starved, seasick and dying slaves by the eagerness with which he laid into them with the cat o’ nine tails that never seemed to leave his right hand – came down to the hold with two other sailors and, by the light of a horn lantern, poked and prodded the slaves with his whip’s knot-end.
‘What is that bastard looking for now?’ Hal asked himself, squinting against the sudden, uncomfortable brightness from the ship’s lantern.
The Portuguese sailors had buried their noses in the crooks of their elbows and one was cursing the stench. The man with the cat thrust it between the shoulder blades of an emaciated African who sat slumped over so that his forehead was almost touching the slime-smeared boards. When the slave did not respond, the man bent and hauled his head back at which the African groaned and opened his eyes. The slaver let go, mumbled a curse and moved on.
‘That one looks strong,’ one of the whip man’s companions said in Portuguese, pointing his cutlass at another African.
‘And I have one here,’ the other sailor said, ‘a proud young cock too by the looks of him,’ and Hal knew enough Portuguese to wish he had not sat so straight-backed nor glared at the slavers with such defiance. The man looked at him more closely and added, ‘Wait! I think he is white.’
‘All the better. Bring them up,’ the whip man said.
Hal and the African followed the Portuguese sailors up the ladder that had been widened to allow pairs of slaves to go up and down it without their ankle chains having to be removed.
‘Ah, the Englishman,’ Captain Barros said, then turned to the taller, more muscular of the other two slaves. ‘And this other one also looks strong. Good. An excellent choice. Black against white. There is a certain … art to it.’
Barros stood with his officers and his cabin boy by the mainmast, all of them, even the boy, wearing broad hats to keep the sun off. The boy looked so like Barros, even down to the arrogant tilt of his head, that Hal was certain he was the captain’s son.
‘Get a move on, Fernandes, you timber-toed old goat!’ Barros yelled at a grey-haired crump-back who was clumping across the deck on a peg leg. ‘I swear you would be no slower if we took off the other leg too.’
‘I will tell the surgeon to bring his saw,’ a long-faced officer put in, ‘and we can place wagers on that also while we’re about it.’ This raised a laugh from the others, especially the boy.
The crump-back was carrying the six-stringed instrument the Portuguese and the Spanish called a viola da mano, meaning ‘violin of the hand’ for it was played with the fingers rather than a bow. Now he thrust it in the air angrily. ‘I am coming as fast as I can, Barros, you mean bastard!’ he growled, arriving at the mainmast with a muttered tirade of foul curses.
Captain Barros gave Hal a tired look and, apparently ignoring the fact that he was talking to a man who looked like an unshaven, unkempt beggar and was stained with his own and other men’s excrement, said, ‘I only allow him to speak like that to me because he was a friend of my father, and because he is a halfway decent musician.’ Barros nodded at the instrument in the old man’s grasp with its long, ornately carved neck and its strings in six paired courses. ‘He might as well be married to that viola da mano of his. It belonged to his grandfather, I believe.’
‘Great-grandfather, though it was already old then,’ Fernandes corrected.
The captain wafted that away. ‘The point is that I doubt our young Englishman has ever seen such an instrument, have you?’
‘Only in paintings,’ Hal said, caught up in the pretence that they were gentlemen conversing in an elegant salon, rather than a captain and a captive on a slaver’s deck.
Barros nodded. ‘Yes it is a shame that the viola da mano has long since fallen out of fashion. And yet we still enjoy it now and then, eh, gentlemen?’ The five officers nodded and grinned. ‘Now then, you English are a civilized race. The mark of any civilization is its love of music, don’t you think?’ He turned to the man with the cat o’ nine tails and gestured at Hal’s ankle irons. The man took a key from his belt and bent to undo the fetters.
‘And will you look at this one’s eyes?’ Barros said, turning to the muscular, black slave. ‘See the way it looks at me. It would like to tear my head from my shoulders.’
‘This will be a close contest,’ another officer said, frowning as he examined the slaves in front of him.
In Hal’s experience most slaves maintained a docility, did their best to look unthreatening in order to simply survive. They kept their eyes downcast and their thoughts to themselves. But this one eyeballed the captain, his well-muscled body naked but for a loincloth, tensed as though ready to fight for his life. Could Hal win such a fight against such a proud, fierce adversary? It appeared that he was about to find out.
And yet fighting was not what Captain João Barros had in mind.
The men nearby were ushered away so that Hal and the muscular slave were left standing in an open patch of deck, a few paces wide and equally deep. Both of them were breathing heavily, not from exertion or fear but simply because they were sucking in the fresh sea air like starving men after all their days below deck.
‘You will dance for us,’ Barros told them. ‘You will dance to Fernandes’s music and you will not stop dancing until the old man stops playing. Well, you may stop if you grow weary, but it is only fair to warn you that he who stops first will suffer the consequences.’
The man beside Hal showed no sign of understanding a word, until Barros sent for one of his black sailors who hurried down from the foremast shrouds and translated the captain’s speech into a language the slave seemed to comprehend.
‘What consequences?’ Hal asked.
Barros nodded in the direction of an officer who stood resting one bare foot upon a great coil of rope. ‘The first one to stop appreciating Fernandes’s playing will be dropped over the side on the end of that rope,’ he said. Then he turned to his men: ‘Those of you who lose money on the outcome of the dance may win it back again on the outcome of the fishing.’ He grinned as he turned back to Hal and spread his
arms. ‘Am I not a fair man?’ he asked. ‘That is why my crew loves me.’
Behind him the others were already making their wagers, babbling at the ship’s quartermaster who was struggling to keep his book up to date.
Hal looked up at the Madre de Deus’s mainsail. Captain Barros did the same.
‘Ah,’ Barros said. ‘You are hoping we can keep up this speed. Eight knots, wouldn’t you say?’
Hal was thinking of the shoals of tiger sharks that would be following the ship, scavenging on the offal and latrine waste that was flung overboard.
‘We have calculated that the sharks swim at an average speed of two knots,’ Captain Barros said, ‘but they can swim much, much faster in short bursts.’ He turned to his officers. ‘What do you say?’
‘We’ve recorded them going above eight knots, Captain, but they don’t keep it up for long,’ the quartermaster said.
Barros nodded and turned back to Hal. ‘Of course none of this need concern you; just so long as you keep dancing.’ With that he spun on his heel and swept an arm towards the old crump-back, inviting him to begin. ‘“Jamaica” if you please, Fernandes. But keep it sprightly. The English do so love a jolly jig.’
Fernandes began to pluck the cat-gut strings with his long yellowed fingernails.
The African looked at Hal and Hal looked at the African.
‘Well? Get on with it!’ Captain Barros said and the man with the cat lashed it across each of them as an incentive.
And so Hal danced.
‘I take it that you ken we cannae dock in Quelimane, or any of the ports along the coast.’ Benbury looked at the Buzzard, as they both leaned against the Pelican’s quarterdeck rail, and he watched the beak rise and fall as he nodded. ‘The damned Portuguese control the lot o’ them and they’ll no’ let anyone trade except themselves and the Arabs. Putting a slave ashore counts as trade.’
‘Putting a stolen slave ashore counts as a capital offence,’ the Buzzard’s rasping voice interjected. ‘What did you have in mind?’
‘Well, my second mate, Pereira, knows where the mines are and swears blind he can find them if he has a sextant tae reckon the way. Once you get there, he can translate for you too, for I gather this Lobo laddie has no other tongues but Portuguese and some language the local savages babble. I’ll be putting you ashore by a river delta I know where there’s no white men tae be found. Mind, the going’s a wee bit swampy thereabouts, but you can take a boat in a good fair way, I’d imagine. And you’ll be closer tae the mines than if I took you tae Quelimane.’
‘I’m going on this journey am I?’
‘One of us has to do so,’ Benbury pointed out. ‘And I’m the one sailing the ship.’
‘It will not improve Judith Nazet’s maidenly beauty, marching halfway across Africa,’ the Buzzard objected.
‘Och, dinnae fash yersel’ … She’s no some delicate white lassie. She’s a blackie, same as the rest o’ them. She’ll feel perfectly at home.’
al started slow, as did Fernandes, despite his captain’s orders to keep the tune spirited. The old grey-beard’s fingers caressed the strings of his instrument, knuckles and sinews warming to their task, reminding themselves of the joy of coaxing music from that smooth-curved figure-eight–shaped body of cypress and cedar. He eased into the tune in his own time, like a lady lowering herself into a hot bath, plucking the strings so that they sang their sweet, soft song.
Hal also let himself merge with the melody, his muscles gathering their strength, his mind striving to forget the humiliation of what he was being forced to do. The only thing that mattered was Judith. All he had to do was survive.
Heel and toe, heel and toe, his hands clasped behind his back as his feet marked out the steps, laying claim to that small piece of the Madre de Deus’s deck. Again and again his bare soles landed softly on the planks, beginning to pick up speed as Fernandes let the music gather itself, like a captain hoisting his sails to the wind.
Hal supposed he had the advantage of at least being familiar with the tune, whereas he doubted the African had ever laid eyes on any instrument resembling the viola da mano. And yet it soon became clear that music was in the other man’s very blood for he moved with a poise and grace which Hal could only marvel at, as the first droplets of moisture rolled down his temples, his bones creaking in their joints after days of captivity.
‘Jamaica’ had flowed into a tune Hal did not recognize but he was dancing a jig now, pure and simple. The kind of dance sailors could do after a hard day’s toil, in their sleep, or even on the end of a hempen rope. Hal held his torso rigid, one hand on his hip, the other arm hoisted behind him almost like a fencer’s. His feet were lively and brisk, tapping out their beat in triple rhythm, the muscles of his legs bunching like corded rope so that Hal knew that for all his dishevelment his audience must be impressed to see such a broad-shouldered, well-built man as he dancing with such lightness of foot. And yet he still felt clumsy when he looked across at the African, who seemed to have picked up the steps as naturally as a bird taking to the wing. Moreover, the black man was not even sweating, whereas Hal’s eyes were stinging with it, the liquid running in rivulets down his back, each drop tapping out its own beat on the deck.
The Portuguese officers were enjoying themselves. Some of them were laughing and clapping along with the music or slapping their thighs to the off-beat. Others were pointing at Hal or the African, explaining why their man was going to win and why their friend’s wager was as good as lost. Captain Barros had a shark’s grin on his face and other sailors had gathered at the rails to watch, no doubt putting up their own stakes on the outcome.
Hal was lost to the music now, entranced by the rhythm of his feet on the deck. That rhythm was still gathering pace, too, as old Fernandes belied his years, his fingers doing their own dance up and down the instrument’s neck.
‘The Negro is lithe as a cobra,’ one of the officers called in Portuguese.
‘Perhaps he is dancing for his gods,’ another said. ‘He is calling up a storm to gather him up and take him back to his nine wives.’
‘Nine wives? Christ, I’d rather jump overboard than have eight more like my one,’ the quartermaster said.
The sun had risen high above the African mainland now. It blazed across the ocean off the Madre de Deus’s starboard, its ferocious heat like that from a furnace across the deck. Hal’s breathing was ragged. His legs were growing heavy and he was gasping for water, like a caught fish gasping for air. The newly scrubbed deck around his feet was dark with his sweat and he did not dare look up at the African for fear of seeing the man still looking strong and resilient, for that might break his own will to keep going. Yet he could still hear the African’s feet thumping on the deck, heavier now at least, thank God, and he could see the blur of the man in his peripheral vision.
And so he danced on.
Then, despite the pain that radiated from all the little bones in his feet, up through his big leg bones and the powerful muscles of his thighs, to his hips and into his neck so that his head felt like a great lead weight, he pitied the African. Because Hal was dancing for the woman who owned his soul and for the child who had yet to take its first salt-tanged breath. A life at sea had forged Hal’s body into a hard, unyielding tool. Every muscle and tendon was honed to excel at any physical task.
Even so, that tool was dulling now. He was dancing at half speed, unable to keep pace or maintain any sort of rhythm that bore a relationship to the sound coming from the viola da mano. His body was faltering. Above him he could hear gulls laughing at him and he grimaced through the pain. What must he look like? he wondered, through the haze of pain and thirst. Like an old man staggering across the scorching hot Saharan sand, he thought. And yet even with his body beginning to fail him, Hal knew that his heart would never fail. His jig might be nothing more than a grotesque parody of itself, but only death itself could stop his feet clumping on that deck.
It was a wonder that old Fernandes was still goi
ng, for he must have been exhausted too, but that was none of Hal’s concern. His arms hung uselessly by his sides and he could barely lift his chin from his chest.
‘Keep going, you dogs!’ someone growled, and the cat’s nine tails lashed the African’s back and shoulders and Hal tasted the man’s blood on his lips.
‘Looks like the sharks will be getting some dark meat for their dinner,’ one of the officers said.
‘It ain’t over yet,’ another man interjected. ‘Your Englishman is not looking so bloody lively.’
The spectators were calling and shouting but Hal was too tired to make out most of what they said. His long lank hair hung dripping in front of his face. He was barely aware of anything, even what his own legs were doing and whether or not they were still moving. He heard the whip crack again and thought it might have scoured his own flesh this time. Then he stumbled and fell to one knee and his mind screamed in defiance, demanding that he get up. So he did, but as he rose he glanced to his left and saw that the African was down on all fours, his head sagging and his belly sucking in and out as he heaved for breath.
Hal heard a cheer and realized it was for him. He straightened his spine and lifted his head. He put his right hand on his hip and hoisted his left arm until the hand was above his head.
Heel and toe. Step right, step left, step right, hop right. When he rose off the weight-bearing leg to change stance, the other leg almost buckled when his foot landed, yet somehow he was dancing again.
‘That’ll do me!’ the quartermaster called, to a chorus of cheers and curses.
‘Yes, that is quite enough. You have won, Englishman.’ Captain Barros swept his hat off his head and held it high to signal the end of the contest. ‘Your countrymen would be proud.’
