When a second great splash and heave rocked the Maria Gômes, its master ordered muskets and cutlasses passed from the armory. Sailors sent a lime buoy over the side. The fizzling green glow from this floating lamp illuminated only a small radius. It was better than scanning blind. But soon the weed-choked sea quieted once more, save for the thumping of beating hearts on deck.
Several dark fathoms under the keel, a creature’s skin tasted the filth leaching from the foundering ship’s bilge. This sip was confirmation that there was soft, wriggling food inside that hard wooden shell. And so two eyes, each as wide across as a man’s arm, peered upward. A huge, muscular siphon sucked in a hundred gallons of seawater and then expelled it in a jet propelling three tons of horror to the surface.
Muskets had no time to lock, fire. Shouts on deck turned to screams, and then the screams ceased. Masts snapped like twigs, and the hull cracked amidships before sinking toward a rasping maw. And finally, the muffled wails from the cargo hold could be heard in the open air. A few voices sang a prayer. Ay-Koja, Witch of the Western Sea. Deliver your stolen children from oblivion, quickly and painlessly.
Yes, death would come swiftly. But it would be painful. Ay-Koja fed well. Exceedingly well.
Kiriqui Sifua Kiriqui, only nine years old and thus four seasons shy of circumcision, beamed his eye-toothless smile at his father. What an accomplishment for such a little fellow with lanky arms and legs and a protruding belly—presenting his journal as if a true man of science! He had recorded observations over the past two moons: Monkeys on the north bank of the Goma River learned to shake heavy bushia fruit from the high branches and eat it on the ground once the pods landed and split open. On the south shore, the monkeys ate the bushia blossoms rather than the pods, hence they remained arboreal and almost never set foot below.
“And these monkeys are of the same species of crested macaques?” Owuda Sifua Owuda quizzed his son, who nodded intently in reply. “Yet the south monkeys are indolent and stupid, mindful only of the eagles. But what of the north monkeys?”
“Their legs are stout like a man’s,” the boy chirped. “And they pop up on them to see if there’s trouble coming, like a boar or a farm dog, even a leopard. They look smarter, Father, and their tails do not seem to be as big now.”
“Uh-huh. Because they are adapting?”
Kiriqui nodded again. “Becoming something better!” Then he smiled once more. “And, Father, the bushia trees on the north shore have a better way of spreading their seeds in the monkey poop. It’s not good when the south monkeys eat the blossoms. Now the north trees cannot live without the monkeys. But the south’s wish them ill.”
Owuda handed his son a piece of sugar cake as a reward. The cake was still warm, having been baked that morning in Mother Barinda Sifua’s clay oven. Barinda, who was Kiriqui’s grandmother, lived on a houseboat like Owuda’s, but closer to the harbor town of Goma-ifo. She’d delivered some fat sea bass as well as cake. Barinda was the brashest, most foul-mouthed fishwife in Goma-ifo and had been admonished by the Fulani imams and the town’s constables for her lack of deference to men and married women. The Fulani Muslims were probably more offended by her lack of cover for her head and ample hanging bosom than by her bawdy hawking. But how was she to get noticed in the market’s crowd, sell her fish? Timidity meant no profit, and she needed all the money she could garner in order to help her son pay down his debts, with a little left over to fund his research. Owuda couldn’t buy food and raise a son alone on the meager wages the Fulani chieftains paid him as physician and surgeon.
Kiriqui wolfed down a bite of cake, then spoke with his mouth full of another. “Father, may I show my notes to the imam at my school? I’ve written them in Fulani, too, so he can read it. I practice Fulani just like it’s written in their Holy Quran.”
Owuda sighed heavily, shook his head. Kiriqui’s excitement deflated like a lamb’s bladder bag. In his zeal and pride, he’d asked an importune question. Owuda was now staring emptily at a bleached porpoise skull hanging from a post. “I’m sorry,” Kiriqui whispered as he battled back tears. Owuda didn’t answer him, and the child shrank onto his little straw cot, clutching a piece of cake.
Despite the volumes of books and scrolls on anatomy, physiology, pharmacology archived by the Fulani, and the natural science tomes brought by caravan from the Arab lands, imams decreed that all living things were as Allah made them on the day the Earth began. Just three moons prior, Owuda sold a paper to Jojof scholars in Benin, explaining how the porpoises of the Goma estuary once walked the shores as otters long ago and evolved to fishlike form after eons of adaptation. Their nostrils moved to the tops of their heads and became blowholes. Their paws turned to fins. But the imams ordered the honorarium disgorged. The money was escheated to the Fulani viceroy, of course.
Owuda had dedicated that paper to Efia, his wife and Kiriqui’s mother. She’d died of tumors in the womb close to five seasons ago. Owuda had gone into debt procuring medicine for her. As succor for his despair and failure, Owuda indulged in beer, lettuce milk opium and dice. The vices sucked him deeper into poverty. His creditors were all vassals of the viceroy, and by law the viceroy could call due Owuda’s debt at any time, for any reason. Barinda knew this well, and she labored to help her son regain his dignity and livelihood. And Owuda vowed to train his son, despite mandatory schooling of all Goma children by Muslim clergy, and then move the family to Benin, where men of science were respected, not hounded as heretics. Maybe the tuabo—whose asses the viceroy kissed in return for rum, muskets and musical clocks—would allow the family passage to one of their universities far to the north in the cold and snow? With their tall ships, brass instruments, great looms and foundries, these white men surely appreciated science, even if they did dress in smocks that reeked of sweat and their tobacco, and their pantaloons were stained with dried piss. He spoke a little tuabo: Portuguese and even some English, learned from a bearded shaman in dirty homespun robes who came to Goma-ifo to spread the word of the prophet Christ to the fishermen and boat builders. The Fulani, who rode horses and camels and cared nothing for things nautical, heard only the word of the Quran’s prophet and messenger of Allah, named Mohammed.
Now, Kiriqui resolved not to act like a baby for making his father sad. He blotted his eyes dry enough to see that Owuda was no longer in a fugue. Rather, Owuda was on his knees, eye-level with his worktable and staring at his specimen jars of live, soft and shelled creatures from the deep sea and tidal mangroves. The boy joined his father on the plank floor. There was a puddle of water down there, and the table itself was wet. Kiriqui finally noticed why. The two largest glass jars had been uncorked. Kiriqui had sworn both containers were sealed tight when he awoke that morning; the roiling mass of arms in the bigger jar made his neck tingle. It was an octopus. But what scared the child the most was how this little beast’s mottled skin seemed to spike or flatten and tint pink to brown, as if that was how the animal showed joy or hate or hunger or fear. In the open jar adjacent to the octopus’s container was a slurry of tissue, shell fragments and severed claws that was once a reef crab.
Kiriqui sputtered, “I-I didn’t touch them, Father. I swear . . .”
Owuda tapped the octopus’s jar. “I know, son. This is . . . extraordinary . . .”
Then the child spoke the unthinkable, and his words made him quake. “Father, he opened his own jar . . . and the crab’s? He ate it and went home?”
“She, not he,” Owuda whispered as he studied his specimen. The creature’s eye widened, then narrowed, as if confessing to this stealthy escape and murder.
“She could have come out and got on my face . . . wh-while I was asleep?”
“No, of course not.” Owuda then motioned for Kiriqui to fetch a skewer from the hanging iron stewpan. Owuda opened another jar containing live prawns and speared one with the skewer. He brought it to the top of the octopus’s jar, holding the morsel just above the rim. Two thin tentacles, brown and wrinkled like wet paper, unc
oiled and tasted the air. Once they felt the wriggling shrimp, the skin suddenly fired bright orange, like a mango’s flesh. Kiriqui gaped when he heard the tiny round suckers adhere, and gasped when his father’s wrist bent from the octopus’s tug as the doomed prawn disappeared from the skewer. Owuda related how the octopus is an ambush killer, stalking unsuspecting prey, while its cousin the squid chases down fast swimmers like fish. Both had beaks like a parrot’s made out of the same material as a man’s fingernails. Both had spiny, rasping tongues for scraping meat.
Meal consumed, the octopus resumed its serene pose and pallor. But its flesh blazed again when Owuda shot to his feet. Barinda was shrieking from the riverbank.
Two men flanked her, gripping her thick arms. They were the viceroy’s Goma constables. A third man showed Fulani cheek and chin scars, though he wore tuabo pantaloons and buckled shoes. He leveled a musket as he stepped to the houseboat’s mooring. “Physician Owuda Sifua Owuda!” the man shouted. “You and your whelp are hereby commanded to appear before the court of the viceroy, Djenu the Magnificent. Put on your sandals and come with us! No questions!”
Though the armed man made no attempt to muscle his way onto the boat, Owuda nodded and slipped on his sandals. He’d seen the fear in his son’s and mother’s eyes.
“Bring your medicine bag and instruments!” snapped this musketeer. Owuda complied again, slinging his kits. He ushered little Kiriqui off the boat onto the shore.
“Now release my mother,” Owuda calmly asked the musketeer after swallowing a throat full of terror. “You made your point.”
The musketeer grunted, and then motioned with his head. The Goma men let Barinda go, and immediately she rushed to Owuda. The musketeer shoved his weapon in her path, but she crushed it to her breasts and enveloped her son and grandson as completely and tightly as the sinewy tentacles of that octopus.
“Djenu is a pig-fuck who would sell his own mother to the tuabo for snuff,” she hissed in Owuda’s ear. Kiriqui clung fretfully to her mighty thigh.
Owuda kissed his mother’s wet cheek. Pulling away, he forced a reassuring smile that hardly reassured little Kiriqui. He peeled the boy off Barinda’s leg. Owuda’s complicity likely saved a beating from the knotted cato-nine tails hanging from the constables’ belts.
With the sun starting its slow dip to the sea, Owuda and Kiriqui clambered into a dugout for the trip into Goma-ifo and Djenu’s villa. Weeping, Barinda waved at Kiriqui, even though Owuda kept the boy’s eyes facing front. Many river folk had gone to Djenu’s villa, never to return. Many hundreds of river folk. Thus a curse passed Barinda’s lips. Ay-Koja, Witch of the Western Sea. Destroy all who thieve my blood toward the setting sun.
The Fulani were a big, slender people seemingly ill-suited for the small ponies on which they swept from the dry plains of Mali. Djenu stood shoulders above most Goma, Ashanti and Uwethi folk, and his scarlet turban made him look even taller. He always looked as if he was posing for a tuabo artist—hands on his hips, head cocked. As Owuda entered the hall of teak and mahogany inlaid with mosaic tile, he saw two tuabo seated at the viceroy’s table and a Fulani maid filling the men’s cups with pungent spiced beer. The men kept their swords in their scabbards and pistols shoved in their bandoliers. No one was allowed arms or blades within twenty paces of the viceroy. No one but the tuabo apparently. Owuda bowed to the man called the Magnificent and made sure Kiriqui did also; Kiriqui whispered he had to pee.
To Owuda’s surprise, it was a tuabo with long, stringy black hair who spoke first, and it was in agitated Portuguese. The viceroy just nodded, shrugged uncomfortably. Owuda wished he could smirk. The tuabo called himself Captain Anselmo Gonçalves, and then he finally allowed the Magnificent One a chance to posture.
“Physician,” Djenu bellowed, “you must know why I’ve summoned you.”
Owuda acknowledged that he had debts, but inquired nonetheless if Djenu or his courtiers were ill. Perhaps a boil had to be lanced, penile chancres treated with tincture? Djenu didn’t take the facetious bait. Rather, he called to his guards, who disappeared and then returned with a litter bearing a tuabo swaddled in bandages brown with dried blood. The man’s chest still moved, and that was the only indication he was alive. The two other tuabos winced. Owuda watched with a doctor’s eye, though Kiriqui cowered behind his father. He took some peeks nevertheless.
The viceroy couldn’t mask his own queasiness as the guards gingerly removed the bandages to reveal huge red, circular wounds that oozed pus. The poor devil’s left leg was severed, and the stump still bore a tourniquet.
Duty to healing rather than to Fulani overlords pulled Owuda to the man’s side. “I could apply a poultice,” he thought aloud, “and feed him arrowroot fungus for the infection.” Owuda looked up. “But, how long has he been this way?”
Captain Gonçalves answered in fractured Goma that his crew fished the man from the weed sea one moon ago. Three weeks. The amputation was butchery; the tuabo, for all their wondrous machines and mastery of land and water, were barbarians when it came to caring for their own.
Owuda examined the circular wounds. The skin was abraded from extreme suction. Owuda suddenly pushed back from the litter to chase an insane thought from his brain. Captain Gonçalves must have read Owuda’s face, and he spoke in Portuguese this time, slowly so Owuda could understand.
“You—witch doctor. Your head man, Djenu, says you know sea beasts, too?”
“I am not a witch doctor. Please, keep this man drinking plenty of clean water or tea, and diluted fruit juices . . .”
“We give him rum, nigger.” This white man drew closer, and his breath stank of gum rot. “Listen. This is Rodriego. No others survived the sinking. Not crew or”—his head dipped slightly—“cargo. Our patrons want the losses to stop, and they will, by God—even if it means listening to what you lot have to say.”
The other tuabo, visibly shaken by his cohort’s suffering, pleaded with the captain to allow the man his death rites from a Christian shaman. The captain growled back no, then pressed Owuda further. “The marks on him. Tell me, nigger—what does this?”
Owuda shook his head. “I know only what can be empirically tested . . .”
“Huh?” the Captain intoned. “You’re a cheeky one, eh? Don’t test me.”
Djenu the Magnificent barked to his guards, who were happy to return to their trained vocation as thugs. One yanked little Kiriqui away from his father. The other brute drew his scimitar and brandished it at Owuda. Djenu said, “This boy is too young for circumcision, thus he remains your property . . .”
“Lordship,” Owuda answered, “I have given you loyal and expert service, and I must protest your—”
“And since you belong to me, then this boy is my property, too!”
“Belong . . . what? I am a physician and surgeon of Goma, and I—”
“You are a dog who owes sums now declared due, with interest! Can you pay them? Ah, I think not. Like the other dogs who cannot pay rent or taxes to me, you’re no more than a thief. A criminal . . .”
It felt like the guard’s sword had already cleaved Owuda’s skull or ripped into his viscera. Mind howling, Owuda wanted to tear this Fulani garbage to pieces. But they had his son. His precious little man of science. His living fragment of Efia. And so Owuda closed his eyes, absorbed a vision of his mother, Barinda, and his own father, long dead, then muttered, “What is your pleasure . . . Lordship?”
Djenu pronounced that Owuda Sifua Owuda and his son were now his chattel, but he hereby deeded them to the Royal Lisbõa Sugar Company. The guard released Kiriqui, who hadn’t a clue what the viceroy meant. He ran to his father, kissed him and said, “So now we go home to Gran-ma?”
Owuda hugged him so tightly. He thought of a lie, but Anselmo Gonçalves beat him with words in pidgin Goma.
“No, boy, you go with your father on a boat. You go find what hurt our boats. Then you go to Brail or Virginia—and work.”
Before Owuda and Kiriqui could weep together,
the tuabo in the litter loosed his own cry. “Olho gigante,” he wheezed in Portuguese. Big eye. “Muite olho.” Many eyes? “Serpente . . .”
Sunrise brought this man’s death. Sunrise brought father and son to a raft paddled slowly to a huge tuabo ship anchored off Goma-ifo.
This was the fodder for cane and tobacco, gold mines and brick pits: including Owuda, twenty-two men, ten women—one pregnant and one older than Barinda. Two young girls who belonged with the old woman, and a little boy around Kiriqui’s age who seemingly belonged to no one. This child was the only soul not sobbing or spitting at the tuabo sailors, and he called to Kiriqui to ask sweetly and blithely why Owuda wasn’t yoked with iron or bound with hemp rope like the other adults. Kiriqui was too sick with fear to answer, but Owuda took the child to his side. The sailors didn’t rebuke him for this instant adoption. Thus two boys and a grown man would occupy a cubby under the quarterdeck four feet wide, five feet long, two feet deep. Nevertheless, uncaulked seams around a small hatch offered a bit of airflow. Sailors stuffed everyone else in the hold, stacked like fish on a drying rack, with one glass-enclosed tallow candle for light. Shrieks and moans very quickly replaced the echo of rat squeaks down there; the odor of vomit displaced that of must and seawater.
Voices From The Other Side Page 19
