Nobody's Slave (27 page)

They were free, but wet and exhausted, without food or arms. They had no great plan, but to reach the sea. Tom remembered their last long, disastrous trek to Tampice, growing weaker and more defenceless by the day: a slow, steady decline to defeat that they must avoid this time. So they conferred together, their haggard, desperate eyes searching each other's faces for hope and good counsel; and as they did so, like a whisper of salvation, a sound came up to them from the road in the forest below - a murmur of Spanish voices, still half-asleep in the early dawn, the creak of bridles, the jingle of bells, and the pad of the feet of mules and horses.

‘A mule-train! Merchants, going to the city! They'll have food, horses, money - if we attack them we'll be saved!’

‘Aye, silver, too, maybe - we'll be rich!’

‘Don't worry about that. The only riches I want right now is a full belly and a warm coat ...’

‘And a horse to ride to the sea ...’

‘Aye, that too! But if we take 'em, lads, we must kill 'em all if we can. If there's none to run and tell the tale, we'll get clean away!’

‘Aye!’

Tom looked at the grim, determined faces around him, and felt his weary body surge with new hope. This was how they should have behaved before - this was how they would survive!

The mule-train was coming nearer. Quickly, they spread out among the mossy grey boulders and pine trees on either side of the track. They had agreed on a sign - a cry of ‘Jesus and St George!’ from Antony Goddard when they were to attack, or the hoot of an owl, thrice repeated, if for any reason it seemed unwise.

But it
must
succeed, Tom thought, as he crouched behind a fallen log, clutching the short, heavy branch he had found for a club. To fail is to be taken as a slave, and starve! They had the right to kill, to avoid that. He remembered his cousin Francis had said something like that long ago on board ship, when he had blamed the blacks for killing Simon. Now he himself was hunted for a slave, as the Africans had once been. Perhaps the Africans had a right to kill, after all, if it had felt like this for them. The thought of Francis reminded him of England, home, his mother spinning in the parlour - a home that he might see again, if only they could reach the sea!

He tried to breathe more easily, and slow the quick, intense beating of his heart. He could hear the creak of bridles and the murmur of Spanish voices as they approached. He licked his lips and tensed his knees to spring.

On his journeys with Don Carlo, Madu had often thought of escape. In the city he stood no chance, but in the vast, empty country, surely it should be easy enough? He could slip away by night, and live alone by hunting and stealth, as a man should. He had lived like that already, in the manhood training, at home. To do it here might prove him something of a man again.

So why had he not run? Perhaps because the opportunity had not arisen; there were always so many dogs and slaves around the big farms where they stayed in the country - perhaps it was that. But there had been other reasons. He could survive on his own at home, but much of the country here - the high, central plateau, the mountains, stony deserts, pine woods - was utterly different to Africa. And then, where would he go? He could not live alone forever, and he could not walk back across the sea. The only Africans he saw here were slaves, and few of them were Mani. The Indians he did not trust. So there was nowhere to run to, no one he could hope to join.

And if he were caught, his slavery would be much worse than it was now. He had seen enough farms and mines to know that - there were places where the entire workforce of hundreds of slaves was replaced over a period of five years, as the men died one by one at their work. His life now was a paradise compared to that.

They were climbing through a belt of pine trees, forty or fifty feet high. The road wound uphill ahead of them, twisting and turning to find the easiest route around the grey, mossy boulders. They were a strong troop - Don Carlo was transporting some valuable plate and cloth, and, knowing the danger of robbers, had a troop of twenty soldiers with him. He and the officers rode at the head of the column; behind them came a group of soldiers, sweating as they strode along in their heavy steel and leather coats, thick boots, and dull metal helmets. Then came Madu at the head of the mule-train, a dozen bony long-eared beasts led by Indians; and lastly the rest of the soldiers.

As they climbed, the tall whispering trees swayed overhead in the breeze. Beams of early morning sunlight filtered down through the shade to sparkle on the leaves of ferns and saplings. The woods were very cool and still, quite different from the rich vegetation and raucous birdsong in his own forest. Madu thought how easy it would be for a hunter to notice the least unusual sound here, and how hard it would be to hide. He felt safe from attack, and lonely, as he had never done in a forest at home. So he did not at first believe it, when he saw the head of a man.

The head was that of a red-face, peering round the edge of a boulder; its eyes saw him as he saw it, and it ducked instantly out of sight. For a second he thought he had imagined it, but then there was another, with a body attached, creeping low and swiftly behind the bushes towards the first man. Madu realised what was happening. The column was approaching a narrow gully, where the rocks rose on either side to the height of the horses' heads, and came close enough for a man to jump down onto a rider passing through. Don Carlo and the other horsemen were nearly there, in the trap.

Yet for a long moment Madu did nothing. Slaves did not call out, or speak when they were not spoken to. Anyway it was not his quarrel. The horses plodded steadily forward, Don Carlo and the officers chatting idly together like men in a dream, oblivious to the sudden death ahead of them, that trembled and tensed to spring. But ...

‘Ohê! Ohê, Don Carlo! Para, para! Stop, stop!’

The mule snorted, then lumbered into a reluctant trot as Madu kicked his heels frantically into its sullen side, acutely conscious of the surprised frowning faces turning his way.

‘Ohê! Para, Para! There are robbers on the rocks! It is trap!’

Madu raised one hand to point, nearly falling from the mule as he did so. Don Carlo, his mouth already open to swear at his insolent slave, glanced ahead, just at the moment when a ragged, half-naked red-face rose from behind a tree. The man stood glaring at them for a moment, then hooted three times like an owl. Then he turned to run. A second later, the trees and rocks ahead were full of fleeing, half-naked figures.

‘So! To the hunt! Forward!’ Don Carlo's bright rapier flashed in his hand. He turned in his saddle to shout orders to the soldiers, and urged his horse off the road and in amongst the trees, crouching low under branches as he spurred forward to run the attackers down.

There were shouts and soldiers running all around. They raced into the trees, their half-pikes shortened and ready, their muskets reversed as clubs. Madu's mule, initially reluctant, was caught up in the excitement, and trotted determinedly off the road with the rest, with Madu clinging desperately to reins and mane as the bony spine lurched and jolted beneath him.

The robbers were surprisingly close ahead, their ragged cotton clothes and white skins showing up clearly in the green shade of the forest. Several had already turned and held out their empty hands in surrender. Only a few were armed. They seemed too weak to run; they were easy to catch. A group of five turned and stopped in front of Madu, desperate, wary, defiant.

‘By our Lady, here we go again! They'll hang us now!’

‘I said we should never attack 'em!’

‘It was that little black bastard, he gave the alarm! I'll get him, at least!’

If it had not been for the sickening jolting of the mule, Madu would have been sure it was a dream. The men did not speak Spanish, he was sure of that; and yet he understood them. And the boy who leapt forward at him, brandishing a great stick and yelling like a demon, was one he knew.

‘Tom!’

But the mule shied and veered suddenly to the right, so that Madu fell to the ground and the blow whistled over his head. His whole body was jarred by the crash; even as he struggled to get up he knew he would be too slow, would be hit. Then he was on his knees and there in front of him was Tom, pinioned by two Spanish soldiers, glaring about him with an enormous, impotent fury that focussed all its rage on the dazed, half-apologetic figure of Madu as he lurched clumsily to his feet in front of him.

‘A
ND IF I don't?’

‘Then I tell Antonio, and he whip you.’

Madu glared at the defiant, stocky figure who stood in the hall of Don Carlo's house, the pale blue eyes blazing at him from beneath the untidy mat of red-brown hair. His hands clenched with an involuntary urge to smack Tom's stupid, ungrateful head. He controlled himself with an effort, and tried again.

‘I do it before, many times. Now you new slave,
you
do it!’

‘No!’ Tom had seen the servants in his father's house empty the chamber-pots from the bedroom into the foul-smelling privies, and then once a week or so shovel the contents of the noisome privies themselves into the cesspits outside. He had never dreamed of doing such a task himself, and certainly not doing it for a Spaniard. ‘’Tis a filthy job! Fit for you perhaps, but not me!’

‘Then I tell Antonio. You want that?’ Madu forced himself to seem cool, despite the anger seething inside him. It was a skill he had learnt first on the manhood training, where it was considered childish to display unnecessary emotion; and as a slave such control had come to be second nature. But today it was very hard; he felt his hands shaking as he turned away, pretending indifferent scorn. He had gone three steps before Tom spoke.

‘No, Maddy - wait!’

Madu turned, still seeming casual, his dark eyebrows lifting a little in an unconscious imitation of an ironic look of Don Carlo’s. Tom's stubborn face looked confused as well as angry.

‘You - you really did this?’

‘Many times. What Antonio say, I do it. But today, he say
you
do it. So I tell you.’

Tom hesitated, and some of the light seemed to fade from his eyes as their difference in status sank in. But the anger of the burly steward Antonio was not to be trifled with; he knew what Madu said about whipping was true. He took a deep, bitter breath.

‘All right, then.’

‘Good. I show you the shovel.’

It was a small victory, but a vital one for Madu, and he knew he would have to win it many times again. But at least he had some slight claim to Tom's gratitude now, as well as his scorn. Three days ago, when the Viceroy had decreed that anyone who wished could take the recaptured English sailors into their houses as unpaid servants - slaves, in fact, if not in name - it had been Madu who had helped Don Carlo choose Tom, by saying, when asked, that he was reliable, a hard worker. Neither of these things had been especially true, but Madu felt he owed Tom something, for having unwittingly caused his recapture; and he knew Don Carlo was not a naturally cruel master, as others might have been. Tom owed him something for that, Madu thought; and now that Tom was actually in Don Carlo's household with him, he saw that it was vital to make him realise that things were not the same between them as they had been on the
Jesus
. Here Tom was even less important than he was himself.

But Tom did not seem to accept this.

‘You're not my master,’ he hissed angrily at Madu later that night, as Madu showed him where to sleep and told him what he would have to do the next day.

‘You not mine, either,’ answered Madu coolly. ‘I just tell you Antonio orders. We both slaves now.’

‘I'm nobody's slave! I'm a free Englishman tricked into captivity by these treacherous Spaniards! If it hadn't been for you I'd be free yet, waiting for John Hawkins by the sea!’

‘
If…
’ If they'd managed to walk that far, Madu had been going to say; but there was a bigger ‘if’ than that. ‘If not for you and John Hawkins,
I'd
be free, now, too.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Tom brushed his straggly hair out of his eyes, irritably. ‘That's different, Maddy, that's trade. And anyway ...’

‘Trade!'
Madu's shout of indignation echoed in the little sleeping cell. ‘Oh, I see. When I am slave is trade, but when you are slave is talk of English freedom and Spanish tricks! This what you say?’

‘But - we caught you in war, Madu! That's fair enough ...’

‘Spanish caught you in war too. Is the same. And was not fair enough.’

‘The Spanish are not at war with us. We never attacked them.’

‘The English not at war with us. We never attacked them!’

‘But ...’

No answer immediately came to Tom's lips. Tired, irritable, angry, he stared at the earnest black face glaring into his own, and then shook his head to try and clear it of confusion.

‘But Maddy, I treated you fair, on the ship, didn't I? You can't have forgotten that?’

‘
I
treat
you
fair now, here, in Don Carlo's house. You listen, do like I say, and we can be friends, help each other. But you a slave now, same like me. You must do what you told.’

‘I am
not
a slave.’

‘You are.’

The two pairs of eyes, one alight with that cold, unearthly blue, the other with the deep, steady brown of the earth itself, glared at each other, refusing to agree.Yet later, as each boy lay on his hard wooden bed, both Tom and Madu were troubled by what the other had said, and the words of their quarrel echoed in their dreams like the whispers of ghosts.

‘We both slaves now.’

Tom dreamt that he was running endlessly along forest paths. The forests changed abruptly from tropical jungle to pinewoods, and back again, and sometimes there were marshes of long grass which lashed his face, and empty beaches whose sands sucked at his feet, so that he could never run fast enough. All around him were the drums, beating, mocking, telling each other where he was, while the black warriors followed at a steady tireless lope that was always halving the distance between them. Then out of the woods came painted Indians and Spaniards, who speared the bodies of his companions until only he was left. And always the black men came closer, their white teeth gleaming in their faces as they laughed, and Madu's voice whispered in his ear: ‘You slave now. We sell you to Spanish. Is trade, you see. Only trade.’ But when he turned his head to look at the figure who was running so effortlessly beside him, it was not Madu at all, or rather, only the body was Madu’s - the head was that of Simon, his long fair hair floating lazily over his eyes as it had always done, his thin sensitive face white as a ghost’s. And the man behind him, dressed in the clothes of John Hawkins, was Madu, selling a train of haltered, naked English slaves to Don Carlo.