by Alys Clare
‘We were afraid of the power,’ Simoun whispered. ‘All of us; we were overawed and horrified at what we’d unearthed in ourselves, and I reckon that Atashua and the other bokors regretted what they’d done, for none of them had understood how deep our anger ran.’ He drew a shaky breath. ‘When they did – when it was demonstrated one moonless night just what they’d brought about by stirring us up, and they saw the extent of the awful, horrible, wrong things we now could do, they knew they had to act. They were responsible for this wild new evil force, and because they were good people – they were, they were!’ he cried, although neither Jonathan nor I had suggested the contrary. ‘Because they knew they had to protect us from ourselves – us and others, oh, yes, even more vitally, protect others – they provided us with a counter force.’
I was lost. Bemused by this talk of an alien faith, of powers that everyone else in the room seemed to believe in while I felt like a lone voice of logic and reason, vainly crying It cannot be so! Such things are not possible!
But Jonathan wasn’t lost.
Even while I was struggling to understand – to begin to understand – he said calmly, ‘And so they provided you with Mama Tze Amba to be your guardian spirit.’
Simoun spun round to stare at him, so fast that I heard the joints in his neck crack. ‘You know this!’ he whispered, wonder in his voice. ‘You—’ But, overcome, he couldn’t go on.
‘You brought her with you on the most difficult journey imaginable; a journey when sense would dictate you travelled as light as you could,’ Jonathan said. ‘You pinned her to a rib in that terrible hold, controlling her awesome power as I imagine you have often been driven to control her when her fierce protection of you threatens to have the opposite effect?’
‘Yes, you are right,’ Simoun said, glancing across at the motionless white-clad figure. ‘She is terrible in her full power, Father. We suffered so badly on that ship, and when poor old Philpot went, she was like a great white flame, searing through the hold, about to blast out through the lower decks and upwards, and it wasn’t only discovery we feared but that she’d likely set the whole ship afire and we’d all perish.’ His face was alive with remembered horror. Henry reached out and briefly took his hand.
‘And that was when we had to fix her to the rib,’ Simoun concluded after a moment. ‘It was appalling, and we drew lots for who did it, and poor old Job Allcorn drew the short straw, and afterwards we wondered if—’
‘No, Father,’ Henry interrupted. He took Simoun’s hand again. ‘She’d have known why. She’d have understood. We told her, didn’t we? She always knows.’ He too turned to look at the tiny figure, giving it – her – a bow.
And then suddenly I remembered that Jonathan had spoken of two conflicting forces. It had been when we rode away from our visit to the Falco after he had carried out the purification ceremony, and he’d said that there were warring powers down in the hidden hold. I heard his words in my head. One was powerfully aggressive, evil, malign; it had its origins far away and a long time ago, for it carried the darkness and the cold damp of the deep earth. The other power seemed to be a protective spirit.
I turned to him now. ‘You knew,’ I whispered. ‘You picked it up, that day we went to the Falco together. You—’
‘I didn’t know, Gabriel,’ he whispered back, ‘any more than I know now, for these are deep matters of great antiquity and require a lifetime’s study.’ And briefly I saw a light in his strange green eyes; a hunger for knowledge, for knowing, a fierce desire to pore over abstruse writings and ancient texts, devouring them, taking them inside his own soul, using the sparkling intelligence and the keen insight that his Maker had bestowed upon him for their intended purpose. Yet here he was, vicar of a tiny parish in a far corner of England, dispatched here by those who well knew his worth and for this reason – because his qualities meant he maintained a dangerously open mind – had bound, controlled and exiled him.
I realized in that moment how very much I valued him.
‘I am very glad you are here,’ I said impulsively.
I doubt very much that he had any idea what prompted the remark, but he smiled anyway.
‘We have gone down on our knees in gratitude for Mama Tze Amba many a time, I can tell you,’ Simoun resumed, ‘and during the short time when she wasn’t with us, when we had to leave her behind and Puma here fetched her from that house, we—’
But Puma had made another of his strange noises. We all turned to look at him. Huddled in his shadowy corner, his blanket clutched to him and now held up over his face so only his eyes showed, he was all but invisible. His eyes shone briefly as he returned our anxious glances and he held up a hand, asking for silence.
Henry hurried to his side, speaking to him in a strange-sounding language. Puma answered, frowning as he tried to go on listening at the same time.
And presently I too heard what he had heard.
Footsteps, on the track outside.
And Puma quietly raised the blanket higher and somehow managed to extinguish the light in his eyes.
I lunged for my sword, lying just inside the door, and Simoun pushed that hidden object deeper beneath his pillows. I almost had my hand on my sword hilt when the door burst violently open, its leading edge catching me across the brow so that I was knocked aside and I saw flashing stars of bright light as pain seared through my head.
Two tall figures stood in the doorway. Swiftly they stepped inside and the second one closed the door. They were clad in black robes over which both wore heavy cloaks of good cloth coloured with costly dyes; one was deep blue, one dark brown. They had fashionable caps on their heads. To the casual glance they looked like prosperous merchants on a mission to seek out new trade. But I had a pretty good idea that in truth their nature was quite different.
The one in the brown cloak seemed to be in charge. Trying to focus, my vision still disturbed and my head throbbing with pain, I saw a man of perhaps sixty years, a little over average height, broad in the shoulders yet lean and sinewy. His face was heavily lined and his skin was sallow. It could have been that he had lived for years in the hot sun but I suspected he had been darkish from birth, for his white hair still had strands of black and his deep-set, small eyes and his eyebrows were dark as soot.
Even before he spoke, I had him down as a Spaniard.
His colleague, still leaning against the closed door, began to say something to him, but he silenced him with an abrupt movement of his left hand. His right hand, I now realized, held a narrow, wickedly-pointed sword and, as I studied the pair of them, the second man drew a long dagger from its sheath. He was watching us, cold contempt in his dark eyes. He was younger than the first man by perhaps twenty or thirty years and he too was dark, his hair black. His lips were full and sensuously curved. He had a familiar long, narrow object at his side. It was a musket.
The thought flashed into my throbbing head with the force of certainty: this was the weapon that had taken the life of Bartholomew Noble as he fled from Buckland Abbey.
I heard something that sounded like a vicious hiss coming from close at hand. I turned to see Simoun Wex, his eyes boring into the man in brown, and Simoun breathed, ‘God in heaven, I never thought to see you again, bastard priest.’
‘I have been following you close, Simoun Wex, for you left too clear a trail for men who are adept at hunting down runaway slaves,’ the man in brown answered, and his accent was indeed that of a Spaniard, for all that he spoke my language fluently. ‘You have in your possession something that does not belong to you, and I would like you to return it to me.’
‘It doesn’t belong to you either, priest,’ Simoun said. ‘You fucking Spaniards may believe you own the Caribbean, the lands surrounding it and everyone and everything in them, but I’m here to tell you that you don’t.’
The brown-clad man waved a dismissive hand. ‘You always did have it,’ he said in a cold voice, not even bothering to respond to Simoun’s passionate protest. ‘I suspected it,
and even when my most persuasive efforts still met with denial, I didn’t believe you.’
‘Yes you did, you smooth bastard,’ Simoun said. ‘I know you did because you let me go. Oh, it might have been in chains to the indigo plantation, but nevertheless, I went out from your control.’
For a mere second, the man in brown looked absolutely furious. Just as quickly he smoothed out his lean face once more. ‘You gave yourself away, in the end,’ he said. ‘You escaped, you ran, and your very flight was the confirmation I needed that you do indeed have what I always knew to be in your possession. It was not long before word reached me from those I had set to watch you. I knew for certain then. And here I am!’ He feigned surprise, as if amazed to find himself there in that grim little room.
Simoun Wex was nodding slowly. ‘Here you are,’ he agreed. ‘And what exactly do you propose to do?’
‘As soon as you have given me what I have come for, I shall probably kill you,’ the brown-cloaked man said. ‘Yes, as you are no doubt about to point out, you are four and we but two, but we are well armed and you are not. Besides which you and your son are enfeebled from long hardship and near starvation, one of your companions is a man of God’ – he shot a scathing glance at Jonathan – ‘and the other is reeling from his recent blow to the head. Hmm?’
You are four.
For a moment I couldn’t work out what was wrong with that statement; my head was giving me a great deal of pain and I was feeling faint. I was on the point of speaking but Jonathan drove a sharp elbow into my ribs.
Then, of course, I realized.
My three companions were far ahead of me. Henry was slumped down against the wall as if he was as enfeebled as the priest had just said he was, Simoun was lying quite still, holding the man with his eyes, Jonathan was watchful and I held my head and groaned in pain.
The two strangers’ eyes were fixed on us, the man in brown not moving his gaze from Simoun, the other one flicking his glance between the four of us. Everything about him spoke of barely-contained fury, and I had the sense that he would have elbowed his companion out of the way and taken charge himself were it not for rigidly-enforced obedience.
Unnoticed by either of them, Puma crept slowly along the side wall of the desolate little room, edged his way around the angle where it joined the front wall and then seemed to slither along it – there was no better word to describe his fluid, soundless, boneless motion – until he was on the far side of the doorway and just behind the man in the deep blue cloak.
He struck like a snake too, with deadly rapidity and totally without mercy. As he struck, it seemed to my bemused, bewitched eyes that he was a snake: long, narrow, glistening like shining black silk, with a thin, darting forked tongue that shot out of the flattened head and dived straight into the side of the throat of his prey.
The man fell as if pole-axed. He made no sound; raised not a finger to defend himself. For a few moments he twitched, there on the dirty floor at his companion’s feet, then he lay still. The brown-clad priest gave a cry and bent down over him. Puma melted away.
The priest shot up and fixed Simoun with a furious stare. There was no fear in those small black eyes: not yet.
‘What have you done to him?’ he screamed. ‘What devilish weapon has been used against him?’
Simoun feigned wide-eyed innocence. ‘Weapon, priest? As you just said, we are not armed.’ He opened his arms, spreading his hands.
‘But—’ The priest looked wildly around the room. ‘Where is it?’ he screamed, fury making him hurl out the words in a shower of spittle.
As he looked once more around the four walls, his eyes fell upon the tiny, white-clad figure that stood in the shadows against the wall.
And I watched as mad fury gave way to abject, shaking terror.
The priest gave a whimper, dropping his sword with a clang and then using his right hand to cross himself, over and over again, the pale fingers making ceaseless figures of eight movements. I heard him muttering prayers in his own tongue, beseeching the Lord for help. Slowly he dropped to his knees, and now he clasped his hands before his face.
He did not seem able to tear his eyes away from Mama Tze Amba.
‘I believe you recognize her, bastard priest?’ Simoun said in a very cold voice. ‘You tried to stamp out her cult, didn’t you? You tortured, maimed and murdered her priests, priestess and adherents, and you probably thought you’d won.’ He paused, then said very softly, ‘But you didn’t.’
The priest was babbling now, and I smelt urine as his bladder failed him.
‘Mama Tze Amba knows what you did, priest,’ Simoun went on. ‘We told her every last detail of how you killed my companions from the Minion.’ He drew a deep breath and shouted, ‘How you stuck stakes in the ground, surrounded them with dry wood, tied my beloved friends to them and burned them alive!’
‘No, no, mercy, mercy!’ the priest was screeching. ‘Not I, it was not I!’
‘A liar too now,’ Simoun observed. ‘Oh, dear, dear, and you about to meet your God, priest. Is lying really wise?’ He pretended to think about the matter. Then, relentless eyes back on the priest’s, he said, ‘It was you, and Mama Tze Amba knows it. She will extract her price, bastard priest, and you will receive what you meted out.’
‘Noooooo!’ The priest’s protest rose to a deafening scream and he writhed as he knelt there, his body twisting this way and that.
Then, my horrified eyes quite incapable of looking away, I understood what was happening. Beside me I heard Jonathan begin to pray, and vaguely I recognized the words of the prayer for those facing an agonizing death who had but moments left.
I could not believe what I was seeing.
It could not be real.
But it was.
Either by some power emanating from the tiny white-clad corpse, or perhaps from the superstitious priest’s belief in this power, he thought he was being burned alive.
His screams were terrible. He had grasped the gold cross he had concealed beneath his black robe and now he clutched it in both hands, his knuckles white, his eyes rolling back in his head, his mouth still moving as he went on repeating his soundless prayers.
And, just for an instant, I smelt smoke and the stench of burning flesh.
I risked a look at Mama Tze Amba.
Her eyes gleamed with a light like a white-hot flame.
I think I cried out, then I fell over sideways, Jonathan caught me and I felt myself slump against the floor. Then the world turned black.
I don’t think I can have been insensate for long.
I opened my eyes to find that I was lying on the bed recently occupied by Simoun Wex, a pillow beneath my head and a blanket up to my shoulders. I was shivering.
I sat up.
The priest was dead.
He lay on his back, one hand still clutching his cross, and his eyes were stark with terror. His mouth was so widely open that he had dislocated his jaw, which was what told me for certain that he was dead, for had any life remained within him he’d have been screaming in agony. He had fallen over his dead companion’s outstretched legs. Simoun crouched before the two of them, Henry beside him, and Puma stood beside the little white-robed corpse, muttering as if he was talking to her.
He probably was.
Jonathan knelt beside the Wex father and son, and he was praying. They, I observed, were praying with him.
I bowed my head and waited until he had finished.
‘You really feel all right?’ Jonathan asked me anxiously.
It was some time later; his prayers had been extensive, but then we had all just witnessed something extraordinary and very frightening, and I think we all welcomed the sense of God’s presence and support.
‘Yes, Jonathan,’ I said with a hint of impatience, struggling to evade his grip and stand up, for I was desperate to examine the man in the dark blue cloak and see how Puma had killed him. If Puma had killed him, and it hadn’t really been the work of a huge black snake that had someh
ow manifested itself in the depths of rural Devon …
Now Simoun, Henry, Jonathan and I stood together beside the dead Spaniards. For some time we were silent: shock can have that effect.
Presently Henry said tentatively, ‘Did she – did Mama Tze Amba really do it? Burn him, I mean, and yet us not see it?’
‘I smelt smoke,’ I said quietly. And something far worse, I could have added.
‘I too,’ Jonathan said, and Simoun Wex muttered agreement.
‘But—’ Henry began.
‘I think,’ Jonathan said after a very long pause, ‘that it was the priest’s own faith that made him believe he was burning. All of us could see that he wasn’t, couldn’t we?’
But none of us replied. Like me, the others didn’t seem too sure.
‘He was a man of strong, perhaps fanatical, faith,’ Jonathan went on. ‘His religion made him do terrible things to his fellow men; his God was a ferocious deity for whom no action was too barbarous or vicious. That is not my God,’ he said, his voice dropping until it was almost inaudible.
‘So – so you’re saying that he believed she had the power to make him burn and so he thought it was really happening?’ Henry said, his disbelief ringing out.
And with a soft smile, Jonathan said, ‘How else do you explain it?’
Jonathan made me sit down on the end of the bed while he gave me food and drink. Simoun was lying behind me, still pale with shock but with a smile of quiet satisfaction hovering around his mouth. Henry was crouched beside Puma, back in the corner that he had made his private domain, speaking quietly to him in that alien tongue.
I chewed my way through the bread and cheese and took a small draught of beer from the cup Jonathan held so insistently to my lips. Then I stood up – my head swam, but I ignored it – and announced to the room in general, ‘I have to fetch Theophilus Davey.’
Jonathan made no protest; he knew as well as I did that I had no choice.
Simoun looked up at me steadily.
‘And what do you intend to tell him?’
I met his eyes. ‘That you, your son and your companion have made your way home to England—’
