Caribee

by Christopher Nicole

  'They tell me very little’

  "Yet their contempt for me must be evident. You'd do best to wait until our situation is resolved. I am no less confused than you. To claim you now, of your own free will, were to damn you forever to living at my side. And you may prefer to seek your comfort elsewhere, given time.'

  'Thus you say I made a grave mistake in deserting my father.'

  'Aye,' he said. ‘You did that, Aline. Now hurry back and tell them that the dogs have picked up our scent.'

  As they had been intended to do. The two mastiffs on the beach were casting into the trees, and baying their eagerness into the morning air. And the officer was giving orders to his men.

  Aline stood up. 'You are a savage, Monsieur Warner. I suppose I understood that from the moment of our first meeting, and yet I could not believe it of a white man with a background of gentility. My father was right. I apologize for forcing my company upon you, monsieur. Be sure that I shall not do so again.'

  She went through the trees, and he sighed. Christ, how complicated life had become. But if he were a savage, would he not merely have thrown her on her back, at this moment, and taken his pleasure from her, and then gone to battle without anxiety, in the sex-induced euphoria which would carry him successfully through whatever lay ahead?

  If he were, indeed, a savage. But now, at the least, he must fight like one. He was on his knees, watching the last of the Spaniards enter the forest below him. He turned, and made his way back through the forest to where he had left his people. He could have arrived only seconds after Aline, and found them staring at him. Whatever she had said, they would have no doubts as to what had happened in the woods. And, thinking in terms of savages and savagery, what had he here? He gazed at the sweating faces, the loose mouths, the tongues which came out and circled the thick lips, the sharp teeth beyond, the straggling beards, the tattered breeches which were all any of them wore, the naked Carib girls and the three white women, standing with Philip—Philip, so like Father, who still wore a shirt. They knew nothing of his plans, for he had told them nothing; not even Susan suspected what was in his mind. They knew only that in two days they had been unable to master the small, light Indian bows Yarico and her companions had made for them. For missile power he must rely on himself and the four Caribs. But the Irish were none the less fighting men, who would do what he commanded, a wolf pack who would follow him at least once. He wondered if Aline realized that as she stood beside them. But no doubt Aline, with that still undamaged self confidence of hers, supposed that in experiencing Edward Warner at his worst she had actually experienced mankind at his worst, and having survived, she had nothing more to fear.

  And then, had they not been savages, would success have been the least possible?

  'They are coming,' he said. 'Down there will lie our salvation.' He pointed, and heard Susan's breath as she caught it.

  'Down there?' O'Reilly peered at the crevasse. 'We'll be naught but bits of meat hung out for the dogs.'

  'You'll be surprised,' Edward said.

  'Bad place,' Yarico said. 'Spirits of dead down there.’

  ‘I've no doubt they will be,' Edward agreed. ‘In an hour or two. Down you go, Susan. You'll have to show these bold lads there's nothing to be afraid of. You too, Margaret, and take these children with you. Over the inner lip, Susan, and into the burning cave. You'll keep the children quiet, and no matter what happens, you'll not come out until all sounds of battle have ceased. You understand me?'

  She hesitated, and then nodded. 'And the Frenchie?'

  'Stays here,' Edward said. ‘I've a task for her.'

  Aline's hair flew as she turned her head, sharply.

  'All right,' Susan said.' 'Tis a fact I'll be small value in a set to. Come on, Meg. And ye lot. God speed, Edward. And to your boys, Paddy O'Reilly.'

  O'Reilly cocked his head. 'Them's the dogs.'

  'So we'd best hurry,' Edward said. 'You’ll take your lads down, Paddy. You'll find more space than you suppose, so you'll split up, ten to each side. It'll be dark as the pit, but after a few moments you'll get used to it, because of the light coming over the back.'

  'And what will ye be doing, Ted, lad?’

  'My job is to get the Dons into the cave. As many of them as possible. But you'll not move, Paddy, and not one of your people will move, until Philip here gives the signal. The Dons are as superstitious as anyone. They'll be worrying about the dark and the glow from the inner cave, long enough. When the signal is given, you'll fall on them. But you'll mind out for mademoiselle here. She's going to be more use than any one of us, and you remember that. But there's another thing. This is just the first shot in our war. There mustn't be any survivors.'

  Now, where had he heard someone say that before?

  The baying of the dogs was close. Paddy O'Reilly looked at Brian Connor. 'Ah, well,' he said. ' Tis certain we'll the more quickly if we stay up here, Brian boy.' He sat down and disappeared. The rest of his companions followed.

  'Now, Philip,' Edward said. 'You'll take command. When you hear my call, you'll give the word down there. Arrange your men along the outer walls, and tell them not even to breathe, until they get the signal. And be sure that Susan and Margaret Plummer and the children stay in the inner cavern.'

  'Man, 'tis sure a wondrous place.' O'Reilly's voice ghosted up to them.

  'But what is that light, to be sure?' Connor's voice shook.

  'A natural phenomenon,' Edward reassured him. 'Now be quiet.' He held Aline's arm. 'Would you assist us, mademoiselle?'

  'But of course. It is all of our lives, is it not?' She freed her arm.

  Then listen well. I wish you to remain here, to allow the Spaniards to catch a sight of you. They will certainly like what they see. Then you must run away from them, and jump clown into the crevasse. Once in there you must run through the cave and join Susan and Meg.'

  'And the Spaniards?"

  'Most of them will wish to follow you inside, or my estimate of human nature is sadly at fault. You'll understand there is a risk here. Should you slip, or fall... .'

  She tossed her head. ‘I am not so easily overcome, monsieur, when I am prepared. You took me by surprise.'

  'Aye. Well, it is less the men that worry me than the dogs. Now prepare yourself.'

  He showed Yarico and the other three Carib girls that he wanted them to climb the trees close to the entrance, with their bows and a supply of arrows. 'And you'll shoot straight, Yarico,' he said.

  'Yarico always shoot straight,' she remarked.

  ‘I've no doubt about that. Who do the Caribs pray to, just before battle?'

  She pointed to the sky. 'The Caribs pray to Sun, Edward. Sun is cacique of all things, unless sleeping.'

  'Well, he's wide awake now. Ask him to keep an eye on things, will you?"

  He climbed the tree he had selected for his own, carrying one of the heavy muskets and all the powder and ball; he was himself not sufficiently accurate with a bow. It was nearly noon, and the heat came boiling down through the dun tree curtain. And now he could hear the dogs quite loudly, and even the cries of the men; they could tell their animals were onto a human scent. He flicked sweat from his forehead, dried his hands again, and watched Aline. She knelt by the crevasse, as he had instructed her, apparently busying herself with gathering some bark. But she too was listening; he could see the colour in her cheeks, and he could watch the rise and fall of her breasts. She was a young woman of rare courage. And rare beauty. And even rarer spirit; it was possible to suppose, watching her expression, that she was enjoying herself.

  A dog yelped, close at hand, and Aline stood up. There was a shout in Spanish, followed by a chorus of excitement. Aline glanced through the trees, and then ran for the cleft, sitting down and sliding out of sight.

  Through the bushes came the dogs, held on leashes by two of the soldiers. The rest followed in a close group, discipline forgotten as they hurried for the picture and the promise which had been presented to them. But discip
line, as Edward had hoped, was slender at this moment in any event. The crimson jackets were made darker by sweat; more than one morion had been removed and was carried under the arm, leaving the man at once vulnerable to a blow on the head and incapable of quickly drawing his sword.

  The dogs came up to the crevasse, and shied away from the utter darkness within. The men gathered in a cluster before the aperture. But now the dogs were casting on either side of the entrance, beginning to show an interest in the trees, clearly scenting the Carib girls and perhaps Edward. Once again he flicked sweat from his forehead, and levelled his already primed weapon.

  The officer in command of the search party came to a decision, and signalled half his men. The girl had gone into the cave, and he was not going to let her escape. The officer sat down and slid into the darkness; he had not even bothered to draw his sword. His men followed, one by one, a dozen of them, leaving eight standing around the entrance. The odds were not as good as Edward had hoped, but they obviously were the best he was going to get. He threw back his head and shouted, 'Now.'

  Pandemonium broke loose. From inside the cavern there came shouts and howls, as the Irishmen, their eyes by now accustomed to the gloom, laid about them on the temporarily blinded Spaniards. The men at the lip insensibly gathered closer together. They could hardly be missed, although as they all wore cuirasses it was still necessary to be accurate. Edward fired. His ball caught one of the men in the thigh, and he gave a scream and fell to his knees. Yarico and her companions were far more deadly; one of the Dons took a barb through the neck, and hit the ground with scarce a sound. Two others were wounded about the face, and the remainder gazed in horror at the forest as four more arrows struck home. There was one survivor, and he dived for the entrance to the cave, again as Edward had hoped. Three of his comrades were dead, and the other four lay on the ground, vainly tugging at the barbs lodged in their flesh.

  'The dogs,' Edward yelled, for the mastiffs were at the foot of the trees. A moment later they were stretched on the earth, and Yarico came sliding down with the utter ease common to the Indians' prehensile fingers and toes. Edward followed more slowly, then ran to the entrance of the cave. The wounded Spaniards stared at him with wide eyes, and one said something, clearly a plea for mercy. But he had no means of coping with prisoners of war, even had he been able to forget the people on Nevis. 'You'll see to these men,' he told Yarico, and slid into the entrance.

  The battle in the darkness was also over. Now the Irishmen moved around their victims, completing their dreadful work where it was necessary, loosing morion and breastplate, sword belt and pistol holster.

  'Mon Dieu,' Aline said from the inner lip. 'But I was afraid, Edward, I confess it now.'

  'And they're dead.' Susan sat beside her. 'Every last one of them? Ye have a way with ye after all, Edward. I never doubted that'

  'By God,' O'Reilly shouted. 'He's the kind of general we've needed. With this armour, and these weapons, why, we'll show them Dons a thing or two. Aye, Ted, lad? Nay, I'll not call ye that again, I swear it. General Warner. Aye, General Warner, ye'll tell us this is but the beginning.'

  Edward gazed up through the aperture at the forest outside, and the brown stained grass, where Yarico and her girls were stripping one of the living Spaniards to slice the raw flesh from his buttocks.

  'Aye, Paddy,' he said. 'This is but the beginning.'

  10

  The Crisis

  Edward knelt on the sand, to draw with the end of the stick he held in his hands. ‘We can start to take the offensive, now,' he said. ‘I'd judge they're more scared of us than we of them.'

  He gazed at the men standing around him. They wore armour, cuirasses and morions, over crimson Spanish doublets and new Spanish breeches; they carried pistols and arquebuses, and every man wore a sword. Yet they were the same Irish devils who had once mocked him. Lacking two of their numbers, alas. But Yeats and his friend had died well, fighting a rearguard action on the day they had been caught too far from the cave.

  And the women. Susan, who seemed to grow larger every day; she still wore no more than her shift, which drew tight against her belly. Aline and Meg had actually found themselves breeches to fit their thighs and shirts to cover their breasts and shoulders; if the result was the display of more white leg than any man present had ever seen before at one time, they were actually far more decently clad than when reduced to their tattered undergarments. Yet they had not really changed, either. Meg Plummer still fought like an avenging angel, and Aline . . . Aline played her part as required, but she had withdrawn her mind. The brutality, the bestiality, the utter absence of civilization with which she was surrounded, had at last proved too much for her. She spent much of her time with the children, talking to them and entertaining them. But this was to the good, because the children were always a problem. Little Tom more than most, as his mother reached back into the savage recesses of her mind for survival. But Little Tom was Aline's favourite. He was a Warner.

  Yarico. She stood immediately behind him, her shadow falling across the plan he would draw. Her three compatriots were beside her. They had lived long enough amongst the white men to know that they no longer belonged there. White men did not live as they did because they had fine clothes and big houses and huge ships and noisy guns. They apparently believed that it was best to five as they did. But survival depended upon these four women, in more ways than one, and they had utterly reverted to their native state, wearing no more than the aprons of their childhood, carrying their bows at all times, and waiting eagerly for the next occasion to pounce upon an unwary Spaniard.

  That first day, that first victory, Paddy O'Reilly had vomited, and Aline had all but fainted. And Edward had found the officer's pistol and shot the Spaniard through the head before he could suffer further. And only then stopped to think. What a terrible word for the commander of a desperate band of human beings fighting for their lives. Thought implied so many things, involved so many aspects of the business of living he had always rejected as utterly horrible. Thought composed the entire reason for the hatred between his father and himself. Thought had convinced him that the Spaniards must also be convinced that there were many, many people, savages no less than white men, lurking in the forests of St Kitts. This was the name the Irish had given to the island, and it was far more fitting than the papist St Christopher or the pompous Merwar's Hope.

  So, of them all, only he had truly changed. He was shocked every time he saw himself reflected in a pool of water. But this was a pleasant shock. His size, for he dominated them all alike by his height and his breadth; his full fair beard which fitted naturally into his uncut hair; the firmness of his mouth—here was a far cry from the vacillating creature of only a few months before. But here, too, was a man who understood only death and destruction, survival by whatever means came to hand, however horrible.

  Thus he had taken his decision. The dead had been neither buried nor burned. They were stripped of their clothing, mutilated and carved, and heaped on the beach by Hilton's house. There the ghastly, stinking remains had been discovered by the next patrol. Then the forest had come alive. But he had taken his people back into the recesses of Susan's cave, and there they had remained in utter security, to venture forth again and annihilate another patrol, two days later. And give one of the living captives to the women, so that nothing could be left as doubt in the Dons' minds.

  This second catastrophe had stung Don Francisco de Toledo into action. The Spaniards had moved forward as an army, so quickly and in such numbers that the guerrillas had been taken by surprise. Hence the loss of Yeats and his friend. But thanks to that sacrifice they had got back to the cavern, and while over a thousand Spanish soldiers and sailors had tramped the beaches and the forest trails, they had remained in safety hidden away beneath the earth. Yet the character of the cave had certainly changed. It had changed that first day, when a dozen men had died inside its eerie half light. And it had continued to change ever since, as more than twenty
people had used it as a home. Its beauty had dissolved in oaths and blasphemy, in crude jokes and cruder songs; its air had become filled with the stench of human sweat and human excreta; and its dark corners had been filled with eyes watching and wanting. Theirs was a sexless society, because Edward Warner so ordained it, and because they knew that they lived by virtue of his leadership and his determination, and his ability. By his talents and his courage he had gained an ascendency over these people in a way his father had never done. This was a remarkable thought, but it was none the less true.

  And yet he never doubted by how slender a margin his superiority ranked. His biggest headache lay in the fact that the women were as eager as the men. Not Susan, perhaps. But then, Susan merely hated the destruction of this private world in which she had spent so many hours. The Caribs, certainly. Aline, at least as regards himself. Even Meg Plummer, perhaps. They were young, strong women, living close to death and in circumstances of utter intimacy with a score of young, strong men, whom they daily watched lolling and hunting in their defence. Only by working them all to the point of utter exhaustion could he keep them from each other's crotches, and, by an almost inevitable sequence of emotions, from each others' throats. Certainly there was work enough to be done. The fish had to be caught and gutted in the black hours before dawn, when the Spaniards did not venture over to Windward. And they could not live on fish alone. They suffered from a food shortage as it was, even if Yarico and her girls managed to keep them supplied with fresh fruit. But yet the spur was action against the Dons, for which they relied upon Edward's imagination and leadership. And for two days now no Spaniards had appeared on Windward. Thus it was necessary to take the fight to them; last night four of the Irishmen and two of the Carib girls had been late returning to the cave, and no one doubted the cause of their delay. Tonight it would be an increasing problem.