Nobody's Slave (26 page)

Don Carlo's wife and daughters were worse. Madu scowled as he caught sight of them now; Donna Anna, a tall, dark, aloof woman whose cheeks wobbled slightly as she spoke; and the two girls, Donna Isabella and Donna Lucia. Isabella was Madu’s age, Lucia a little younger. Both were very full of their own importance and clearly thought it the greatest novelty to have a black page-boy. They were forever pestering their father to let Madu run errands for them, instead of for him.

But for the moment, at least, their eyes were on the procession which half the town had come out to see. Already the noise had begun, and people were pressing forward. Madu struggled not to spill the chocolate, and to see what there was for himself.

As the procession came into the square there was an odd moment of silence. Then an old Indian woman pointed, and laughed; her laugh was taken up by a pair of young men, and then women and children, until gradually the whole square was shouting, jeering and laughing, to see what had become of the enemies of Spain.

The procession was headed by a young man on horseback, looking proud and nervous at once, flourishing his whip and snapping orders officiously over his shoulder. No-one paid any attention; the Indian guards behind gazed with alarm and interest at the crowd, occasionally menacing the prisoners with their bows or spears to prove their control; and the ragged prisoners in their midst trudged hopelessly ahead, too weak and exhausted to do anything other than follow the man in front, to whom each was tied by a halter round his neck. If these had been enemies of Spain, it was quite clear they were a danger no more.

T
OM WAS near the rear of the procession. He was tired, weak, and leg-weary, and looked about him with a mixture of dull awe and apprehension. He had not expected a city so magnificent as this - the buildings dwarfed his spirit. He tried to hold his head up proudly, despite the halter round his neck, and ignore the tumult of the crowd; but the sense of being a mere pygmy, an unwelcome ant in a temple of giants, oppressed him. With the other English sailors, he shambled dully, feebly to the centre of the square.

We deserve the laughter of the crowd, Tom thought. We should not have given up. We should have stayed in the forest, and died there. Better that than trust the Spanish. But in the forest they had been helpless. They were sailors; they only understood the sea. So this was the pathetic result of their failure to live on land - nearly a hundred English prisoners shuffling helplessly into the city square, guarded by a few Indians, an old man and a youth.

‘Chocolate, senor.’ Madu held out the tray before Don Carlo, bowing slightly as he had been taught. Don Carlo took his cup absently, then grabbed his sleeve by the arm as he turned to move away. Madu stiffened under the hard, thin, fingers; but his master's face was twisted into that thin-lipped painful leer which with him passed for a smile.

‘You see them, boy? You recognise these miserable wretches?’

Madu looked for the first time, carefully. Red-face prisoners in ragged, dirty clothes, many wounded, limping, hungry. He wondered what tribe they came from, to be treated so, bound with halters as the slaves had been on the ship. But should he know them?

The Indian guards ran up and down the line waving their spears officiously. The prisoners sat down clumsily, impeded by the halters which linked them to the men in front and behind. Madu saw a boy lift his bound wrists to push his untidy, red-brown hair out of his eyes. There was something familiar about it. Then, as the round weary face was raised, he saw the strange pale blue of the eyes and knew it was Tom.

‘Ha! Now he sees! Anna, Isabella - watch the young savage stiffen as he sees his enemies! Like a hound with deer, is it not?’

‘Hold him, Papa! He'll tear out their throats if you let him!’

Madu heard the amused babble of the Spanish family around his head, but did not know or care what they said. He was trembling, it was true - but with a mixture of emotions he could not fully understand. To see the red-face English brought to this humiliation made him glad - but it should have been done by the Mani people, not the Spanish. And Tom - did Tom deserve it as much as the rest?

Tom was looking around at the crowd with a kind of defiant despair in his face as though he expected the worst to happen; and as those pale blue eyes searched for his fate among the faces of the crowd, Madu knew they would see him.

He wanted to turn away, yet he could not move. Then he saw the leap of recognition on Tom's face, and was afraid because he thought everyone would think he was one of the English tribe too. Then he felt pity, and a mixture of pride and guilt because he had fine clothes and could look on to see what happened. What would the Spaniards do to these prisoners?

The mob was divided. As was usual in Don Carlo's family, the conflict was reflected by his daughters. While Isabella joined enthusiastically in the cries of ‘Lutherans! Enemies of God! English dogs!’ Lucia had begun to murmur sympathetically: ‘Do they not look ill, Mama? See how thin that one is - and the dreadful sores on his leg! I'm sure they have not eaten for a week - could I not send for something from the kitchen?’

Her sister rounded on her fiercely, scorn blazing from the dark eyes in a face that would have been beautiful had it not been scarred by the smallpox she had had two years ago.

‘But they are English devils, pirates, enemies of God! You saw them burn our ships, Lucia, when we arrived - how can you be so feeble as to pity them now?’

Lucia was round, chubby, and stubborn. She had been lashed by her sister's tongue too many thousands of times to notice it more than she noticed the wind.

‘But they are hungry and sick - see, Mama, they are no danger now. Surely it would be holy charity to show them a little kindness, now they are beaten. Please, Mama - Papa?’

In the end she won her way, to her sister's fury, as she often did; and Madu found himself sent to fetch a basket of cheese, fruit and bread from the kitchen. When he returned, he found he had not been the only one sent on such an errand. Remembering how he himself had once scrabbled for a bowl of maize porridge in the filth of the
Jesus'
hold, he tossed the food down to the captives as carelessly as he dared.

But they were too hungry to notice. He held out some bread to Tom, who bit off great, greedy chunks without speaking. Madu was about to move on when a pair of clumsy, bound hands reached out for his leg to stop him, and he found himself looking down into the pale, desperate eyes.

‘What ...’ Tom had to swallow the last of the dry bread before he could speak. ‘What will they do to us?’

Madu was afraid that the Spaniards would see he spoke English. He looked round warily before he answered. Yet Tom deserved a little more than the rest, from him.

‘I not know,’ he said truthfully. ‘Make you slave, maybe.’

‘Maybe kill us,’ Tom said urgently. ‘What happened to those on the ships - the other sailors, the Master, the hostages?’

Madu thought to himself how typical the question was in saying nothing of the fifty slaves; and Tom took his ironic smile to be one of sardonic revenge.

‘Master and gentlemen prisoner. Sailors they kill. Slaves they take for their own.’

‘So now you’re a slave to a poxy Spaniard instead of John Hawkins!’ Tom snapped back bitterly, irritated by the faint, condescending smile he thought he saw on Madu's face. ‘I suppose you're glad!’

The smile faded, but there came no answer. But the eyes in Madu’s impassive dark face widened for a moment, and the nostrils flared, so that Tom remembered their fight on the
Jesus.
Then a soft, fussing girl called to Madu imperiously in Spanish. He took a slow breath, bowed his head, and turned away.

All the rest of the day Madu wondered what he could have said. The prisoners were taken away to a hospital in a monastery; and as he served at the table that evening, Madu listened to the discussion about their fate.

‘The Viceroy will hang them all, if he has his way,’ said Don Carlo, dabbing carefully at his lips with a napkin as Madu cleared away his silver plate. ‘He says they are all pirates guilty of an assault on a Spanish Imperial port, and should pay the penalty!’

‘And so they should!’ agreed Isabella vehemently, her beautiful pock-marked face looking oddly, disturbing childish in the candlelight. ‘Don't you remember the way the guns sank our ship, papa - the way their cannon ruined our beautiful cabin, our linen? Did I bring my dresses all the way from Spain to have them ruined by a pack of godless Lutherans?’

They were hardly
all
ruined, Madu thought to himself, or she would not be able to change two or three times each day. But there were many extravagances like that in this house.

Don Carlo sighed.  ‘No, my dear, of course not. But on the other hand ...’

He was interrupted, as so often, by his wife. To men, on his official business, he could seem cold, aloof, dignified, with a hint of cruelty even; but in his own house it was the women who ruled.

‘On the other hand, our Viceroy had made them a promise, which he did not keep,’ said his wife, frowning at Isabella. ‘And though you say they are Lutherans they still worship Christ, I believe, in their way. Is it not a more Christian act to give them to the care of our holy monks, who can heal their bodies and show them the error of their ways? I, for one, shall see they are sent food.’

‘Anyway, not all the English are Lutherans,’ said Lucia. ‘I have heard …’

But Madu had to go to the kitchen, and never found out what she had heard. The matter of the red-face religion, anyway, was a puzzle too complex for him. Often they spoke, like Donna Anna just now, of their God as a god of mercy and kindness; yet the fact that both red-face tribes seemed to worship this same mild, merciful God in different ways seemed to be one of the chief causes of their hatred of one another - as though each suspected the other of stealing him. Recently the girls had begun to amuse themselves by trying to instruct him in their religion, and showing him how to pray. Outwardly he obeyed, but it meant nothing to him. From what he had seen, their God was not at all concerned with Africans, so Madu saw no reason to be concerned with him.

But then, who was? As he lay in his tiny cell behind the kitchen late that night, and his unsleeping eyes watched the moonlight creep interminably across the bare white-washed walls, he felt terribly alone. Here, in Don Carlo's house, he lived with no hope, no deceit - an empty shell of a person who did what he was told dutifully, without question, without feeling. It was a way to survive; it was not a way to live. To live was to be a
man
, not an item of property; and the only person who thought of him as human now was Tom. At least Tom had cared enough to save his life, to be angry with him about what he thought, or who he served. But Tom thought he was happy to be a slave!

It was unfair - he wished he could have explained to Tom, said something to show how he felt. But no-one knew how he felt, or cared. Madu lay alone on the wooden bed in his empty cell, pounding his clenched fist softly on the wall, and he felt his chest grow hot and heavy until it was hard to breathe, and he choked; and then, for the first time for many empty weeks, he wept.

T
OM HATED the wool. Every morning the Spaniards brought it in, great rough greasy bales of it, for the English and Indians to card. All the long sultry day they worked, sweating and sullen on their benches, dragging the lumps and tangles out and packing the smooth, carded wool into sacks and bales for the Spaniards to take out. They were not fed until all the bales were done. For every bowl of thin, spicy, soup he ate, Tom thought he must have carded a dozen sheep.

The carders themselves were flat, wooden tools with a handle and a row of sharp nails, which could be used as weapons. There were thirty English sailors and Indians imprisoned in the long, stinking, stone-built shed, and fights broke out once or twice a day. Men would crowd around to shout encouragement as the fighters, usually an Englishman and an Indian, punched and kicked and grappled with each other, trying to use the carder to leave a deep line of parallel scars across the other's face before the horse-whips of the Spanish overseers drove them apart. So far the whips had always succeeded; but tonight the fight was to be different.

It was not before time, Tom thought. When they first arrived in Mexico city, they had been sent to a monastery, but that had not lasted long. Since they had been moved here to the wool-carding sheds they had grown thinner every day from lack of food. If they did not escape soon, he would be too weak to do it. Already his ribs showed clear through his skin, and many were in worse case than him - skin tight on their skulls, their arms little but bone. But they could do nothing to make the Spaniards bring more food - it was a case of starve to death, or try to escape.

The fight this time was between two Englishmen. It began suddenly, as planned, while the Spaniards were collecting the last of the carded wool for the day. The two men grappled each other, cursing and yelling ferocious oaths, and in a moment they were surrounded by a crowd of cheering onlookers, Tom amongst them. Somehow, several benches and a table were overturned, crashing into the Indians to create further chaos. In a few moments the low, gloomy room was in pandemonium, a milling mass of shouting, roaring men. The guards strode in amongst them with their long whips as usual, lashing about them indiscriminately.

But there were only three guards, and when the first vicious blow of a spiked wool-carder caught one on the back of the head, he spun round in panic, to see a dozen more raised like claws to drag him down. The guards died quickly, their necks broken, their corpses torn by long lines of parallel scars; in a few moments more their keys, swords, whips and knives were taken and the sailors were outside. The Indians, stunned, followed too, then melted swiftly into the night.

It was a stormy night, with rain falling in sheets, and no sight of a star. Even if there had been stars, it would not have helped them greatly, for few had more than the basic sailor's skill of finding north, and none knew the lie of the land. The sea was to the east - that was all they knew, and east could not be found. But they ran and trudged determinedly through the night, always seeking higher, wilder ground, until the dripping dawn saw them in the hills only a few miles from Mexico City itself.