Guns and Guano

by Andrew Knighton

CHAPTER 5: SCARS

  It wasn’t just a roar. It was the ancestor of all roars, hurtling out of the primal past, clawing ragged across the mind. Deep inside Dirk’s unconscious a small, frightened fragment of his animal ancestry trembled and cowered away from the noise.

  The bear charged towards the back of the party in heavy bounds, dirt flying as its paws tore the ground. Mouth gaping wide, blood drooling from its jaws, it leapt at Hasegawa Minoru.

  Minoru ducked and twisted, rolling out of the saddle. One hand shot up, brushing against the bear as it hurtled over him. Minoru’s horse, momentarily frozen in panic, now bolted into the trees. The oriental, one hand grabbing at a stirrup, was dragged away through the leaf-mould, his wife galloping after him.

  The rest of the horses whinnied and scattered, fleeing the stinking mass of fur and muscles that had appeared in their midst. Most of their riders went with them, hanging on for dear life.

  The gun tumbled from Dirk’s hand as he fought to keep his steed under control, while Timothy, already on the floor, fumbled for his experimental rifle.

  The only ones who had control of their horses were Isabelle and Braithwaite.

  Isabelle still held a rifle, and she fired it straight into the body of the onrushing bear. But the bullets didn’t even slow the beast. As her horse reared up in panic the bear swung a massive paw, gutting the steed. Dropping the rifle, Isabelle leaped for an overhanging branch and scrambled into the safety of the treetops.

  The sight of its stablemate being eviscerated was too much for Braithwaite’s horse. Even as the Yorkshireman brought his gun around, the animal whinnied in terror and galloped off into the trees, taking him cursing and swearing with it.

  Cullen had been flung from the saddle. He lay groaning at the base of a tree, blood seeping from a gash in his forehead. His eyes flickered on the edge of consciousness. The bear prowled towards him, eyes glittering, breathing the salt smell of the injured man. Its breath came in rasping growls.

  Dirk leapt to the ground, reaching for his boot-knife even as he landed. The bear ignored him as he stalked towards it, accompanied by the “chuggachuggachugga” of Blaze-Simms furiously pumping a lever on his gun.

  Bekoe-Kumi appeared in the space between Cullen and the bear, machete in her hand. She swung the blade around, batting the bear’s claw aside but failing to draw blood. The bear roared and swung at her with both arms. She ducked one but the other caught her shoulder. With a dreadful crunch she was thrown to the floor, her arm twisted unnaturally beneath her.

  The bear sniffed the air and turned back towards the bleeding Cullen, eyes gleaming with the madness of fixation. It paused for a moment over the injured governor, watching as he turned his head with broken, twitching movements. It snorted and raised a paw, sunlight glinting off claws as it prepared to strike.

  Dirk leapt.

  Fur filled his senses as he landed on the bear’s back - the smell of it, the sight of it, the coarse strands of it between his fingers. He grabbed with one hand and pulled hard. Bellowing, the beast swung its head back, even as his knife hit its shoulder. He plunged the blade through layers of tough, writhing muscle, the edge scraping against bone. The bear howled as he pulled the blade free and drove it in again - once, twice, three times, blood flying in long red spatters.

  Twisting its head around, the bear snapped at Dirk with jaws like a steel trap. Rattlesnake fast, he jerked his arm back to avoid having it ripped off and the knife, slippery with blood, slid from his grasp. The beast reared up on its hind legs, almost throwing him. In desperation he swung one arm around its neck, and then the other, gripping his own wrists and tugging hard against its throat. The creature wheezed and staggered back, one fore-leg hanging blood-soaked and useless, the other trying to swat the giant fly clinging to its back.

  Triumph rose up within Dirk. But it was knocked from him, and his breath with it, as he was slammed against the trunk of a tree. The bear leaned back, crushing him between its weight and the towering palm. Squeezing as hard as he could at the beast’s neck, he tried to strangle it before it could suffocate him. Man and bear grunted in unison as they threw the last of their strength into the fight. But try as he might, Dirk couldn’t breathe. Black spots danced across his vision. His ears filled with a roaring that wasn’t all bear. Head spinning, he felt his grip loosening, his muscles falling limp as his eyelids drooped and he sank back into...

  Whump!

  Something spattered across his face, strangely comforting in its soft warmth. The pressure on his body lessened and then disappeared entirely as the bear slumped to the ground, and Dirk with it.

  A glorious rush of air flooded his lungs. Though his head still ached, the black spots had vanished, and the roaring with them. Staggering to his feet, he looked down in bewilderment at the headless bear.

  “Did you see!” Blaze-Simms appeared at his shoulder, a grin splitting his face. Green smoke drifted from the barrel of his rifle. “And look there!”

  The tree against which Dirk had been pressed now featured a hole half an inch across, smoothly bored all the way through to the far side. It was spattered with brain.

  Dirk ran a finger down his face. It came away unpleasantly sticky.

  “You shot right by my head.” He didn’t like feeling angry. The loss of self-control could lead to bad places. But right now, the feeling was hard to resist.

  “That’s right!” Blaze-Simms waved his gun. “Splendidly accurate, isn’t it?”

  “You shot right by my head.” Dirk fought to keep his voice calm. “Not knowing how accurate your gun would be. Or how destructive. Or a hell of a lot else about how it would work.”

  “And it worked out splendidly.” A little of Blaze-Simms’s good cheer seemed to seep away. “I say, is something the matter?”

  “You could have blown my head off, you goddamn lunatic!” Dirk bellowed. He took a deep, panting breath. That hadn’t been the right thing to do, but he felt a lot better.

  “I’m so sorry.” Blaze-Simms looked crestfallen. “I didn’t think…”

  “I know, Tim.” Calmer now, and feeling a little guilty for the upset he’d caused, Dirk patted his friend on the shoulder. “You never do. But it worked out in the end.”

  “It did rather, didn’t it?” Blaze-Simms’s brow furrowed. “I really am sorry, old chap. Are you frightfully peeved?”

  “I’ll get over it.” Dirk shook his head. It was hard to stay mad at someone like Timothy Blaze-Simms. There was too much of the charming, innocent child about the guy - not an ounce of ill intention, and every desire to do better, however hard he sometimes failed. “This critter seem odd to you?” He prodded at the bear with his riding boot.

  Timothy scratched his head in thought, all signs of distress gone as curiosity took over. “It’s a bear on a tropical island. That’s odd. And it is unusually large, even for a bear...”

  Dirk pointed at the spot where his knife had gone in. Exposed muscles still twitched and writhed, severed ends lashing out of the wound like blood-engorged worms. As one, both men knelt and touched the bear’s back.

  “Damn thing’s squirming like a sack full of snakes.” Dirk raised an eyebrow. “What do you reckon is causing that?”

  Blaze-Simms shrugged. “A number of conjectures spring to mind, but I think dissection is the way to...”

  Cullen groaned as Bekoe-Kumi tried to lift him with her good arm. Timothy continued talking, caught up in his thoughts about the bear. Not for the first time, Dirk decided to just leave him to it.

  At Dirk’s approach Bekoe-Kumi reluctantly stepped aside, letting him pick up the injured governor.

  “C’mon.” Dirk easily lifted Cullen, cradling him like a baby. “Lets go get some help. The scientist and the grizzly are gonna be a while.”

  As he spoke, Isabelle landed gracefully on the ground beside him and picked up her rifle.

  “Would you like some company?” She tucked back a loose strand of hair and checked the chamber of the gun. This was a side of her Dirk ha
dn’t seen before, and made him smile despite his injuries.

  “You up to protecting him if anything else comes around?” He nodded toward Blaze-Simms.

  “I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman.” Isabelle took an ammunition belt from the saddle of her dead horse and wrapped it around her waste. “But I have twenty-five rounds and a good eye for details. We will be fine.”

  The hunting party had scattered and the horses with them. Dirk couldn’t blame the beasts, or even their riders. That bear would have given a rhinoceros a heart attack, there was no good reason for innocent animals or their soft living owners to stick around and get themselves mauled. But that created a problem for those left behind. Miles from the mansion, without help or horses, and with a man badly in need of medical care, they were reduced to marching through the jungle, heading as quickly as they could toward the nearest settlement. Fortunately for Dirk, Bekoe-Kumi knew the island, and she knew the quickest route to help. Unfortunately, that meant an hour of dense undergrowth, boiling heat and swarming mosquitoes.

  One good thing about the journey was that it let him walk off the last of his anger at Blaze-Simms. Leaving the Englishman behind left him free to mutter darkly about lunatic inventors, venting his frustration as he stamped through the undergrowth. The strange looks Bekoe-Kumi shot his way didn’t bother him, and she assured him that any threats would have been scared off by the bear’s roaring, leaving Blaze-Simms safe to play with the corpse. The thought of Isabelle and her gun was added reassurance.

  At last they emerged from the jungle on a valley side, looking down across fields of vegetables to the small port below. A couple of locals, bare to the waist and sweating in the midday sun, were busy planting yams in soil grey with guano. Seeing Dirk’s burden, one of them ran ahead while the other led them down the track into town.

  Freeport was a colonial settlement in the traditional style, not planned and built by design but laid down over years like silt in a river. A seafront hotel sat amid a thick crust of warehouses. Behind them a drift of makeshift workshops and shanty cottages became increasingly ramshackle and dispersed as they receded into fields and jungle. The settlement didn’t so much end as fade out, becoming one with the undergrowth somewhere up the valley side.

  Cullen was a dead weight in Dirk’s arms. The governor’s breath was irregular, broken by coughing spasms. His eyes had rolled back in his head, white orbs showing beneath flickering eyelids. Arms and legs hung limp and useless as a new-born baby. His pants were damp as a baby’s too, but at least they didn’t smell so bad.

  Dirk hated that the most. The moment when the scent of blood was overwhelmed by the stench of loosened bowels, and you tried not to show the guy you knew he was dying. He’d been through it on a cold night on the plains, while the footfalls of braves whispered out of the darkness, and three times in one day on that shot-blasted hillside north of Washington.

  Shifting Cullen in his arms, he tried to keep this sack of fragile humanity from slipping through his grasp. Normally he’d have had no problem, but normally he hadn’t been wrestling a bear. His arms ached and his bruised chest sang with pain where the governor pressed against it.

  They’d reached enough houses to be called a street when folks came rushing out to meet them. Four men in patched trousers, their flesh worn but their stance proud, slid Cullen onto a stretcher, stained canvas sinking beneath his weight, and left him to their shoulders. Relieved of his burden but still concerned for his unconscious host, Dirk followed them.

  Now that he was in among the buildings, they reminded Dirk of towns on the western frontier, places with names like Hanging Rock, Deadwood and Tombstone. The closer they got to the heart of the place, to the space where outsiders might go, the grander the fronts of the buildings became, while what lay behind remained as cheap and shabby as ever. But the air stayed clear, even for a coastal town, without the sewage smell of civilisation. The care these folks took over their town seemed at odds with the cheap, rickety state of the buildings. Dirk figured care could only do so much.

  The marketplace was bright with yellow ears of corn and the red-green skin of mangoes. Dirk stared at the crops, huge and healthy at the wrong time of year. No-one else seemed amazed at the sight, so he set the observation aside and moved on.

  Around the edges of the market, old women sat on worn carpets selling battered tools, driftwood furniture and threadbare sheets, detritus lost or abandoned by passing ships, neighbouring islands and Hakon’s white inhabitants. Too old to work the fields, they sifted through what others threw away, mended it and bartered it for enough food to see them through their final years.

  Many of the market stalls were sheltered by awnings rigged out of sheets and canes. The stretcher bearers stopped in front of the sturdiest shelter, walled on three sides with thick blue wool that blocked out the sunlight, creating a pool of darkness amid the market’s bright bustle. They lowered Cullen to the ground and stood back.

  A hand reached out of the darkness, brown skin spotted white and purple with chemical stains. Bleached finger tips brushed Cullen’s face and he murmured, turning unconsciously to the hand for comfort.

  “Omalara told him be careful in the jungle, but he don’t listen.”

  A face emerged, disembodied against the darkness, round features topped with a yellow headscarf. A face Dirk had seen once before, conspiring with Cullen in the back passages of the governor’s mansion. Eyes of sparkling darkness passed over Bekoe-Kumi and locked onto Dirk. He felt a chill. Whatever was happening here, he was suddenly one step closer to the heart of it.

  “What happened?” she asked, and as an afterthought, “Sir?”

  Omalara’s hands danced over Cullen’s body as she listened to Dirk calmly describing the bear attack. He’d given dozens of reports on acts of violence in the past, whether on the battlefield or while investigating a crime. It wasn’t hard to stay matter-of-fact.

  She asked questions about the way Cullen fell, the angle he’d lain at, how long since the attack. Hands like leather raised a damp cloth to the governor’s brow, mopping away sweat and blood with maternal tenderness. She pulled back a flickering eyelid to peer at the pupil beneath, prodded swiftly and expertly at his wounds, turned the angle of his shoulders so that he settled back and the rasping of his breath eased. Then she disappeared again into the darkness, emerging with pestle and mortar and a palm-frond basket of dried herbs.

  “Omalara’ll tend to Mister Governor’s wounds,” she said, dropping leaves and seeds into the bowel. A fresh, sweet scent rose as she pounded them. “Ubu Peter, he show you the town while you wait, sir. Make sure you not missing your tourist time.”

  One of the stretcher bearers stepped forward and nodded to Dirk. He was younger than the others, shaved bald on top, with a body like a Greek statue. Dirk could see there was nothing he could do for Cullen that the old woman couldn’t do a hundred times better, so he let himself be led away between the market stalls.

  They walked towards the docks, a small cloud of children flurrying like dust in their wake, pointing in open curiosity at the large, blood-stained white man.

  “Stop your rudeness.” Ubu Peter frowned at the children. “That any way to treat the governor’s guest?”

  They backed away but continued to giggle and stare from outside the range of Ubu Peter’s attention.

  “I’m sorry for their rudeness,” he said to Dirk. “Not many white men come to our market, or to town on foot.”

  “Don’t worry.” Dirk was struck by Ubu Peter’s educated way of talking, the clear tone of his voice. Ashamed as he was to make assumptions because a black man talked well, it seemed out of place here, all the more so compared with Omalara. Curiosity came to the fore once more - it was time to dig a little. “I ain’t gonna get offended at a bunch of kids starin’ at the stranger. It ain’t like there’s a whole lot else going on around here, right?”

  Ubu Peter’s eyes narrowed in a moment of suspicion, giving Dirk all the confirmation he neede
d. If this guy knew that his question was loaded then the island’s secret went beyond the governor and the old lady.

  “I grew up in a place like this.” Dirk touched his injured shoulder. It hurt like hell, but the secrets around Omalara had put him off asking for her help. So he kept on walking, talking so as to stop himself gritting his teeth. “It’s the sort of place folks in the States call a one horse town. ’Cept around here it’s more of a one town island. Not much excitement for a youngster.”

  Ubu Peter’s expression softened and he smiled in a way that, in any other context, Dirk would have taken as patronising. “We keep them busy. Hakon has its own excitements.”

  He pointed towards the near end of the docks, where a weathered heap of skulls stood - an aging, bleached pile like a morbid pyramid. As they came close, Dirk saw that they were all human, a hundred mementoes of the long dead, some fractured or pierced, those at the bottom of the heap spattered with lichen.

  “That is how things used to be.” Ubu Peter looked solemn. “The strong crushed the weak, the powerful the powerless. Traders at the top, beating the slaves, keeping them in place. Then the strong slaves below them, keeping the weak in line for their masters and themselves. On down through layers of pain, to the children snatched from the African coast and dragged through here for sale. At every level, ‘examples’ were made. Some were more guilty than others, but in a time like that, when all you have for power is fists and anger and sharp words, no-one stays innocent for long.”

  “And now?”

  “What do you think, Mr Dynamo?”

  Dirk hadn’t given his name since he came to town. No matter what novelty he had for the children, Ubu Peter had known he was coming.

  They strolled along the docks, his guide pointing out what passed for the sights of Freeport, mostly the warehouses and ships of guano companies. As they were walking, a barge drifted into the bay and bumped up against one of the ships, a cloud of grey dust rising from both. Men scrambled over the smaller vessel, cloths over their mouths, skin mottled white by their cargo. They filled buckets with guano, white men on the deck above hauling the precious waste into their hold for its journey to Europe.

  “How are things for the black man in America?” Ubu Peter watched his countrymen shovel the same shit that smeared their skin.

  “They ain’t in chains any more.” Dirk had played his own small part in that, but he wasn’t sure he felt pride in it. The business had been so bloody, the price so high, that however righteous the result he could only feel regret.

  “They are free, like us?” Ubu Peter asked.

  “Damn straight they are.” Something about the tone of the question put Dirk on edge, as if a doctor were prodding at a painful wound. “Plenty of good men died making sure it happened.”

  “So now, for you, slavery is fixed?”

  “Unless I got two more scars and five less buddies for nothing, hell yes it’s fixed.”

  Ubu Peter had that look on his face again, the soft, secret smile that unsettled and infuriated Dirk, making him want to shake the man and find out what the hell he was missing. But this was his host in a foreign town, not some stranger in a bar, so he kept his cool and kept walking, trying to fathom it in his mind. Something about the island, its people, its history, maybe something about Dirk himself, it amused Ubu Peter. Did he think this place was somehow superior? Because Dirk didn’t see much to be superior about. Maybe it was the sort of twisted superiority he’d seen in some Confederate officers at the end of the war, the inner victory of knowing you were right even when the world had gone so very wrong.

  With slavery at the front of his mind, he looked again around the bay. With something to connect it together, a lever to shift his perceptions, he saw details he hadn’t before. Rusted remnants of chains embedded in the hotel walls. The ghosts of signs showing through faded whitewash, advertising the strength and health of their wares.

  “This place was pretty big in the trade, huh?” he said.

  “It was a no-place.” There was an eloquence beneath Ubu Peter’s accent, and a deep sense of sorrow. “Not truly Africa, nor England, nor the promised hell of the Americas. A place where slavers and merchants could do business without needing to dirty their feet on a foreign land.”

  The ships, like the buildings, told part of the story. Dirk had seen their like off the coast of Florida and Louisiana, old hulks whose creaking timbers once carried poor wretches through a forced Atlantic crossing. And with that realisation he saw the port through Ubu Peter’s eyes, still full of oppressed blacks, their fates tied to the tools of the slave trade, and to the white men who dictated to them from the faded grandeur of the hotel. Dirk’s America might have moved on, but this place was still living its history.

  “Didn’t a slave ship sink somewhere round here?” He lit a cigarillo, offered another to his guide.

  “No, thank you.” Ubu Peter waved away the cigarillo, pointed past the southern headland. “Round the coast there are two tall rocks standing out of the sea. The captain was young, the pilot foolish. They tried to sail between them, showing off their skill. But there are other rocks too, hidden below the water.”

  “Any survivors?”

  “The crew.” There was bitterness in the words.

  Their route was taking them away from the docks now, back towards the market. Every person they passed Dirk pictured in chains, trapped in a hold fast filling with water as their captors left them to die. The thought made him shudder, but at least now he knew where he needed to go.

  “You know if anyone’s ever been out to the wreck?” he asked.

  “No!” Ubu Peter looked shocked. “It is a bad place, haunted by the spirits of the ones who died. Those waters are death.”

  Dirk wanted to challenge his guide’s mystification of a simple wreck. Important as it was to respect his host, he didn’t hold with talk of spirits or of God. The beatings he’d taken when he questioned religion as a kid had made him determined to leave it behind. He embraced the rational potential of the modern age, and hated to hear smart folks slip into irrational habits. But before he could assemble the argument in his head they reached Omalara’s tent and the rising sound of Cullen’s voice.

  “...was meant to be in a cage for experiments, not roaming the jungle.”

  “You asked for hunt, we gave you hunt.”

  “With the greatest of respect, I wanted a couple of colourful... Oh, Dynamo, you’re back!”

  Stooping to peer inside, Dirk nodded to Cullen and the two women tending on him - loyal Bekoe-Kumi, looking at the patient in concern, and elderly Omalara, whose voice he’d just heard. He wished he’d had the chance to hear more of their conversation, hinting as it did at yet more secrets behind the events of the hunt. If he hadn’t been with Ubu Peter he might have stayed out of sight and listened, but there was no point skulking when you’d already been spotted.

  Ubu Peter watched him with a piercing gaze, while Dirk tried to act like he’d heard nothing of the argument.

  “I hear I have you to thank for my still being alive.” Cullen shifted himself up on his elbows, against the protests of Omalara and Bekoe-Kumi. His shirt had been cut away, his head and chest swathed in bandages and sharp smelling poultices.

  “Tim did his share too.” Dirk tried not to think about how close that bit could have come to killing him.

  “And where is Sir Timothy now?” Cullen’s ingratiating smile gave way to a wince.

  “Probably back at your mansion, playin’ with the kill.” Dirk could picture staff rushing from the grand house, intent on helping the injured from the hunting party, only to find Blaze-Simms digging around in a heap of guts. He hoped they’d have the sense to drag both the Englishman and the bear home. “We should head back too, let them know you’re OK.”

  Cullen paused long enough for Omalara to give an almost imperceptible nod.

  “You’re right,” he said. “After all, it’s nearly time for tea.”

  The mirror above Dirk’s dresse
r had an ornate frame of gilt fruit and leaves. Like other decorations in the upper part of the house it looked like the handywork of someone who knew Europe second-hand through the extravagant trappings of her empires, and who was trying to imitate that culture without seeing what lay behind it. The leaves were a strange mix of oak and jungle fronds, the clustered fruits mangoes and blackberries. In its mismatched flora, it achieved an exoticism and travelled diversity that at once exceeded and undermined the world-spanning grandeur of its glittering antecedents.

  In the centre of this magnificence Dirk saw himself, dirty and battered. He fumbled with worn fingers at the buttons of his stained shirt, revealing a chest so bruised it was more blue than pink, crushed the colour of ripe berries by the bear.

  Wincing at every movement, he hung his shirt over the back of a chair next to his holstered Gravemaker. Tomorrow it was coming with him. It didn’t matter if they were shopping for coconuts, he wasn’t going anywhere without the pistol. Whatever crazy critter the island flung at him next, there’d be no messing around with knives and strangulation and Timothy’s new-fangled gun. The damned thing was getting a dose of honest to goodness lead.

  Not that his plans for tomorrow involved much time on the island. He’d talked with Blaze-Simms and Mrs McNair since getting back to the house, and they’d settled on a plan. Timothy had been excited about the bear, its body distorted by some compound that stimulated constant muscle growth. He’d wanted to go hunting again, see if he could find more critters like it. But he was easily excited, and when Dirk shared what he’d learned about the wreck Blaze-Simms’s excitement turned that way instead. The inventor wanted to try out some new diving kit he’d made, and if that brought his attention back to what they’d come here for then Dirk was happy to help out.

  Tomorrow was a day for treasure hunting.

  Night drifted in through an open window, a medley of cricket song and bat cries. The warm scents of the day had faded from the air as jungle flowers closed up against the darkness, leaving the freshness of leaves and lawn and an inescapable acrid hint of ageing bird shit.

  Dirk settled on the edge of the bed, carefully stitching up a tear in his shirt. He’d had a hell of a time getting needle and thread. The servants had fallen over themselves to fix the shirt for him, and he’d had to shout to get what he wanted. He’d been patching his same three shirts for years, he didn’t need someone else doing it now.

  The shouting had thrown him. Hearing his voice echoing back across the kitchen, like some lazy aristocrat screaming the servants into line. It was no way to treat anyone, never mind real workers. But he’d felt so frustrated. The feeling had been building for a while, at least since the bear. He’d just been so damned stupid, letting it trap him against the tree, grating him on the bark like a giant pink fruit. He should have jumped clear and grabbed a weapon, or scrambled up and gone for the eyes. Instead, Blaze-Simms had had to rescue him from his own screw-up. Next time, he’d know better. Next time he’d...

  A scream pierced the stillness of night. Not pausing to think, Dirk rushed onto the landing, listening as another shriek tore the air. It was coming from Isabelle’s room. He grabbed the handle but it was locked.

  “Mrs McNair?” He hammered at the door. “Mrs McNair? You need help?”

  The only answer was another drawn-out scream.