Nobody's Slave (25 page)

‘Christiano?’

The sailor hesitated, then nodded. ‘Yes, we're Christians, God help us. Christians, yes, Spanish, no. And we're hungry! Food!’ He resumed his miming, but to no avail. One Indian waved to the forest, vaguely, as though food in plenty could be found there. Others, however, were more helpful.

‘Tampice. Tampice Christiano. Tampice.’ Several of the warriors pointed inland to the west, repeating ‘Tampice’ and holding three fingers up. The sailor turned to his friends in despair.

‘I think he means that there's a town called Tampice about three days' walk away. We'll find food there, and Christians.’

‘Christians, aye. We know what sort of Christians, too!’

But there was little help for it. When the Indians had left them, taking the clothes and knives, they buried their dead as best they could with their bare hands, and walked on.

Slowly, the days passed; plagued by mosquitoes, scratched by thorns, surviving only from water and the little fruit they could find that proved safe to eat, the band of naked, weary, half-starved men trudged on. Once or twice they saw deer, but were powerless to catch them; and once a sow and a litter of wild piglets erupted out of the undergrowth ahead of Tom and some others; but despite a wild, frantic chase, with parched, feeble croaks of excitement from the men and lusty squeals from the piglets, they were too weak to catch any of them; and when Tom at last collapsed helplessly on the ground, his limbs weak as jelly and his heart pounding in his feeble chest like a trip-hammer, he felt as though he would never get up again.

‘Here, lad, have a suck of this. Softly - don't waste it.’

He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned his head to see the weary, lined face of Antony Goddard bending over him, holding out half of one of the small, green fruits they had found yesterday.

Tom sucked gratefully, feeling the thin ooze of the liquid in his parched mouth, resisting the urge to devour the whole thing instantly. He handed it back with a weak smile.

‘Thanks. At home I used to chase piglets for fun. Any child could catch 'em.’

Goddard nodded. ‘But these are wild ones, lad, with more practice than those that wreck the market stalls. And we're weak.’

‘Aye.’ For a moment Tom was lost in the vision of the bustle of Totnes market that Goddard's words had conjured up: brightly coloured stalls, the crush of people, animals - and
food
! Food everywhere you turned to look! Why, you could live for a week on what fell off the stalls and carts by accident! He heard a piglet squeal, already a hundred yards off. It might as well have been a mile.

‘If only we could catch one, Master Godard. Perhaps we should go back to the sea, build a camp, try to fish.’

Goddard shook his head sadly. ‘’Tis no use, lad. Hawkins won't return for a year, if then, and we've none of us skill at hunting. He'd find a camp of skeletons. We've got to reach the Spaniards, ask their mercy.’

Tom did not want to agree, but he had to. They were becoming weaker day by day, and unable to find food. Several times they were ambushed by Indians, who shot arrows at them from behind bushes. Those who were wounded, or too weak to go on, had to be left behind.

But Tom was determined to survive. If reaching the Spanish town was the only way to do it, then that, however humiliating it might be, was what he would do. His legs got weary, so that sometimes they wandered sideways and would not obey him; his body was scratched and bitten until he was so covered in scars and lumps he looked half-human; and his dry tongue swelled until it seemed to fill his mouth and he was tempted to bite it and drink the blood. But he would not give up.

One night, as they lay shivering and exhausted under a clump of trees, watching the pitiless moon rise over the grasslands to the west, they heard a musket shot. Early the next morning they reached a wide, beautiful river - so wide and babbling and blue that Tom could not believe it was real until he was on his hands and knees in the pebbles at its edge, lapping water like a dog. Not for some time did any of them bother to look up, to see the horsemen who were watching them from the other bank.

Several sailors began waving, feebly, with joy. ‘Hey! Ahoy there! Hey! God be praised, lads - we're saved! They're Spaniards, Christians!’

Others, like Tom, were less glad. ‘Aye, Spanish Christians! Remember San Juan. Do you think we can take their horses?’

‘Maybe. There's only four of them. But what's it to fear? We came as friends - we're saved! Ahoy!’

‘Saved from the cookpot and thrown into the fire, more like.’

But when the Spaniards, reinforced by twenty more from the town, forded the river and came galloping towards them with drawn swords and lances lowered, it was too late to resist. They stood, for the most part naked, with their empty hands held out, and were rounded up, herded across the river, and shut, all together, in a little windowless prison hardly larger than a pig-sty.

Here, for the first time, Tom thought his courage might give out, as well as his body. For there was not enough air to breathe, nor room, so that when some men fainted, they could not fall down; and the cursing and panic were contagious. Yet they had bread and water, at least; and when the night came the air cooled down, so that it was possible to breathe more easily.

They took it in turns to sit, and found places where a draught came through a crack; and talked, to keep their spirits up. At least they were free of the Indians, one said; and there was food in the town, said another - he had seen oranges, lemons and grapes in plenty. But Tom thought, strangely, of his home in Devon - the orchards in the fields above the town where the apples would soon be ripe, and his father pressing cider in the vat. He wondered if Francis Drake and John Hawkins would get home, and if so what Francis would tell his parents, and Simon's. And he wondered if Hawkins would keep his promise to return, and how he himself could get back to the coast, to wait for him.

In the morning, the bolt was drawn on the door and the dazzling daylight flooded in. A rough hand dragged him out, and tied a halter round his neck.

T
HE CITY of Mexico lay like a lily in the middle of wide shallow lake, the soft pink stone of its buildings framed by the blue waters as the sky framed the white afternoon sun. It was built on an island, to which, across seven great causeways, the roads of the country came like the roots and stems of a plant, winding from every field and mine in the kingdom to bring to the city the tribute that gave it life.

Once, half a lifetime ago, that tribute had been blood. The city had been ruled by Montezuma, the Aztec Lord of the Sun. The god who controlled the Sun was Huitzilopochtli, whose unwashed priests with their matted hair and blood-clotted robes had convinced the people that the sun would only continue to rise if Huitzilopochtli were offered the still-beating hearts of men and women on his pyramids. So many thousands of people had been sacrificed at Montezuma's coronation that the pyramids had become a liquid mountain of blood. But it was prophesied that another god, Quetzalcoatl, would return across the eastern sea to end human sacrifice. And so when the Spanish adventurer, Cortes, had stepped out of his ship with fifty steel-clad horsemen and five hundred sweating foot soldiers, the Aztecs believed he was Quetzalcoatl himself; and Montezuma had been deposed.

The sun had continued to rise, but the city had been transformed. The pyramids had been torn down, and replaced by the buildings of Spain. A cathedral was built to the glory of a God that was not Quetzalcoatl at all. And palaces were built for merchants, who were concerned, not with blood, but the endless stream of silver that was dug from the ground by Indian and African slaves, and carried on the backs of mules to the city and thence to Spain. The lily still lived, a plant that sucked silver from the land as it had once sucked blood; and men still died in their thousands to serve it.

Each evening, the Spaniards would gather in the central squares of the city, to walk and talk, to see and to be seen. Today, when there was something special to see, there were even more people than ever. Most of the Spaniards were richly dressed, and had slaves to wait on them. Many of the slaves were black, including one who had once been the slave of John Hawkins, the English pirate.

‘A cup of chocolate then? Boy, fetch me two from the stall there. Quickly now!’

Don Carlo snapped his finger with that testy arrogance which was so much a part of him, and turned idly on his heel, strolling towards the fountain with the Spanish gentlemen he had just met.

Madu hurried across the square towards the chocolate stall. He could see a giggling flurry of ladies' maids heading that way too, and lengthened his stride to get there first. Madu had been in Don Carlo's service long enough now to know that he did not like to be kept waiting, for anything. Yet equally there was a risk in pushing too blatantly in front of anyone, especially Spanish maids like these.

The maids stopped to admire a puppy and Madu watched the black, motherly woman at the stall fill the cups with the powder of crushed cocoa beans, chili peppers, vanilla pods, aniseed, and maize flour, add the boiled water and sugar the Spaniards loved, and whisk it to froth with her swizzle stick. Her eyes met Madu's briefly, as he handed over the change; but there was no communication. She probably feared him for his fine clothes - hose, doublet, feathered cap - or perhaps she scorned them; either way, they divided him from her, as much as the halting Spanish she spoke. Even if she knew any African language, she would not have dared use it here, to him.

The Spanish maids had less respect. As he was picking up the little wooden tray with the two cups on it, he froze as the lobe of his ear was twisted between finger and thumb. He turned his head, perforce, and found himself staring into the scornful, mocking eyes of one of the ladies' maids.

‘Ha! A chocolate boy! So sweet of him to buy them for us, wasn't it, Rosalinda?’

A peal of merry giggles answered this, and he felt his hands, holding the tray, being steered carefully away from the stall. The hand holding his ear twisted his head round further.

‘Over there, boy, see? The Senora in the litter with the green curtains. And be careful not to spill them. She has had four boys whipped for less!’

‘Not this one,’ said another voice, as a soft hand stroked his cheek. ‘I think she would prefer to lick this one. The skin is as smooth as chocolate itself!’

Madu tried to jerk his head away, carefully, hampered by the tray in his hands. ‘But ladies, my master ...’

‘Will have to sell you too, if her ladyship wishes. She has a great appetite for pretty black boys. As I do!’

‘But my master will be angry!’ The tug on his ear pulled him a further few stumbling paces away from the stall.

‘And who is your master to be angry with the Donna Maria Catherina Lucian Alquina de la Soto, eh? He had better fall on his knee and ask her apology!’

‘Such lovely legs he has too! But surely they can move more quickly?’ Madu felt a palm stroking the back of his thigh, amid more giggles and laughter.

‘My master is Don Carlo Antonio Manis Guzman da Sotomayor da Silva, Lieutenant General of Supplies and Secretary to the Viceroy!’ Madu had not learnt a lot of Spanish, but that phrase he knew; and it worked.

The fingers let go of his ear. He stood up straight, still holding the tray, and looked around at four blushing, rather chastened young women.

‘Oh.’

‘Well, we did not know.’

‘Then if you really will not give us the chocolate ...’

Madu walked away, feeling his own face hot and embarrassed at the amused stares of the crowd around them. He heard a suppressed giggle, and a loud sigh from behind him.

‘Such lovely skin, too. Donna Maria will be so disappointed.’

The great square was crowded, and he could not immediately see Don Carlo. But he thought he would be by the fountain. Usually the society of the town would meet in the park, the Alameda, at this time, where the shadows of the trees provided cool shade in the late afternoon, but today there was the procession, so they were gathered in the Plaza del Marquese. Nearly everyone in Mexico City was there, riding or strolling up and down - anyone who was anyone, that is. And together with them were their slaves and servants, like Madu and the maids, and a great fringe of stall-keepers and hucksters and gamblers ready to provide entertainment.

Madu moved carefully round the edge of a cockfight, catching a glimpse between eager backs of a blur of bright feathers in the dust. Then he stood respectfully aside as a young gallant, one hand on his long, jewelled rapier, the other describing elegant circles in the air, passed by reciting some nonsense to his belle, who gazed at him rapturously while her chaperone, a short, frowning, middle-aged female dwarf, stumped along behind.

Madu had been Don Carlo's personal slave for little over a month, yet already he was used to it. In a way, apart from the strain of the new language, it was little different from serving John Hawkins, except for the enormous opulence of the house, with its stone pillars, colonnades, and staircases. Like the town itself, it was so much vaster than anything Madu had ever imagined, just as the people were so much richer. But he had to make the best of it. His life was no more his own than before.

It had begun when the Spaniards had swarmed aboard the
Jesus,
sweating and triumphant with their gleaming swords and armour, to find it defended by a crew of half-naked, filthy Africans, and a black page-boy in fine, though blood-stained, European clothes. They had beat down the resistance, cruelly, and then laughed, pointing at Madu in surprise; clearly he was different. And so when the other Africans had been sold in the market at Vera Cruz as common slaves for the mines or plantations, Madu had been taken as a prize by the leader of the attacking force, Don Carlo.

Since then Madu had realised, more than ever before, that he was a thing, like a dwarf or a monkey; a decoration, a pretty curiosity, to follow his master around and be used and shown off at times. He had richer clothes now even than Hawkins had given him - many suits of them - his job was only to wear them, to run errands, and to display the young, handsome black body that the maids had liked. He heard them, behind him, cooing over a dog; for them, he thought, he and the dog were much the same.