Nobody's Slave (32 page)

Madu began to explain again, but Tom interrupted him. He was tired of being spoken about as though he were a thing, an encumbrance; and his Spanish was good enough at least for this.

‘No! Me not Spanish am! Is English! Will fighting all Spaniards like have you!’

The Cimarron leader laughed, showing rows of gleaming white teeth. ‘So. It is very clear you are not Spanish, senor. A certain small difference in the accent, I think. If you wish to fight the Spanish you are welcome here. But tell us first how you come to be a slave.’

Tom did not fully understand what he said, and so, luckily for him, it fell to Madu to explain; and for Tom's sake Madu said as little as possible of the purpose of Tom's original voyage. But the name of John Hawkins came up, and several men frowned grimly. A prolonged discussion began, of which the boys understood nothing. At last the man with the scar, who seemed to be a leader, addressed them again in Spanish.

‘Some of us have heard of this Hawkins, who has a name as foul as any Spaniard. But it is a belief with us that a man should not be condemned for his past, if he is prepared to fight for freedom now. If we did not respect this belief we should not survive long, for there are many amongst us of different tribes who have been enemies in the past. So you may tell your friend he is welcome here, if he will learn to hunt and farm and fight and accept our ways, as you must do also. But should either of you betray us to the Spaniards, you will find we too can be cruel, as well as kind. Now come - I will find you a place to build a hut.’

S
O BEGAN a new life. A dozen young men helped them build a hut. They showed Tom how to weave the branches together, and daub the walls with mud. They were given weapons, short bows with light arrows for hunting birds and small game, and heavier ones with iron tips for deer and jaguar. They hunted often, and worked too in the common fields, though the Cimarrons were no great farmers. Fruit and game from the forests provided most their needs, and what they took from the Spanish the rest.

As days lengthened into weeks, and weeks into the first month, the demands of this hard, practical life took most of their thoughts and energy. Tom struggled to learn the mixture of Spanish and African words that was the common language of the village. He learnt how to use his bow and hunt, and began to feel a pride that he, too, could cope with this strange, proliferating jungle, knowing and using it like a friend, as the sailors did the sea. But he felt Madu drifting away from him, becoming absorbed into the life of the village in a way that he knew would never happen to him. And the tension that had always been between them began to smoulder and flare again.

‘Are you not glad we came inland?’ Madu asked one afternoon, as they rested with their backs to a rock, shaded by a tree at the top of the waterfall they had seen on their first day. Their kill, a deer, lay on the ground in front of them, its feet tied round the spear they were using to carry it home. Beyond the deer, the view fell away sheer over the crag onto a falling carpet of mighty treetops, themselves hundreds of feet above the shady forest floor; and beyond the trees was the sparkling blue of the sea.

‘Is your country good like this?’

‘My country?’ The words brought a vision to Tom of the harvest time at home in Devon. In his mind’s eye he saw a patchwork of fields all yellow and green and red, and himself laughing with the other boys as they rode the great haywains home in the evenings, the shire horses snorting their way down the dusty lanes to the barns, where the first swallows were beginning to gather in lines on the rooftops. Then he opened his eyes and saw a fat six-inch centipede hunching its way up a tree beside him. He wondered if he would ever see a real English harvest again.

‘My country is not like this,’ he said mildly.

‘Then I am not surprised you red-face must travel. For me this is a perfect country, even better than my own. Isn’t it like that garden Lucia tell me of in your religious book?’

‘The garden of Eden?’ Tom gaped in astonishment, and then burst out laughing.  What would old Josiah Thuxton, the vicar at home in Totnes, say to the idea that Adam and Eve lived like a pack of savages in a tropical jungle?

‘Why you laugh?’ Madu was annoyed, hurt that his attempt to understand the red-face mind should seem so absurd.

‘Laugh? Well, the garden of Eden was supposed to be ... well, perfect, like ...
holy,
you know, like heaven
.
’Tis hardly that here, now, is it?’ Tom slapped at a beetle that had landed on his arm, still chuckling at the thought of the reverend Thaxton sweating up the jungle path in cope and chasuble.

‘So? That what I meant. What is not perfect here?’ Madu frowned at him, genuinely perplexed. ‘We live like free men, not slaves. We live safe, in a village away from the Spanish. We have forest, to give us food easy from hunting. Why is it not perfect?’

Tom felt a touch of that sinking feeling which he had had with Simon sometimes, in argument. But the idea still seemed to him too absurd to consider seriously.

‘Well, for a start, you need a girl, don't 'ee? You got the snakes all right, but if you’m Adam, you got to have some maid for Eve!’

A warning flicker passed across Madu's eyes, and Tom shivered suddenly as he saw there was an answer to that, too.

‘Or have you got one, already?’

They both knew who he meant. The black girl, Nwayieke, who had met them that first morning, and stumbled out her few halting half-remembered words of Mani. Her mother, it turned out, had been a Mani slave, sold here by the Portuguese before she was born. From her mother Nwayieke had heard the tales of her tribe, told to her in the old language that few other slaves could speak. Her mother was dead now, flogged to death by a Spaniard for stealing, and Nwayieke had been captured in a Cimarron raid. She was admired by several young Cimarron warriors, and one Uzo, especially; but it was a rule of the Council that no girl could marry before she was sixteen, which Nwayieke claimed she was not, and recently Madu had been earning more than a few scowling looks from Uzo for the time he was spending with her. But it was an irresistible joy to him to be able to speak his own language again, and to such beautiful ears. The very thought that she might come to belong to someone else, or that even Tom might mock her, was not at all a joke but a real, aching pain to him.

‘If I have, what is it to you?’

Tom did not answer, and the silence hung between them like a sword. He knew quite clearly why this affection of Madu's hurt him, though he hated to admit it. When he and Madu were together, or with the other young men, his white skin and weak command of the language did not matter too much, but when Madu was with Nwayeike Tom felt utterly outside, alone.

But
without
Madu he had no place here. He was tolerated by the Cimarrons, not liked. In the past he had by turns hated, scorned and then resented Madu; now he needed him, badly, for a friend. Nwayieke was drawing that friend away from him to herself, and into that black society of which Tom could never be a part.

So he said nothing, and the silence lasted. It might have lasted for hours, for it was a matter too important for either to give way; but they were suddenly aware of a flutter of birds and a silence among the trees to their right. Both had the hunter's sense that they were no longer alone, even before they heard the brief murmur of voices.

The glare of sulky anger between them faded to caution. There was no time to hide the deer; silently taking up their bows and spears they crept in amongst the trees and rocks. They found a place where they could see but not be seen. They waited, with arrows fitted to their bowstrings; ready to spring an ambush if they chose, or melt away into the gloom if that seemed safer.

Three black men came into view. Tall, strong with faded white shirts and trousers, and stout leather boots on their feet. Two carried bows, longer than Tom and Madu’s, and quivers of arrows over their shoulders; the third had a curved sword and a brace of pistols pushed into his belt. Their teeth were filed sharp, like Sumba warriors; and one had swirling tattoos on his cheeks. They looked wary but confident; as though they had been this way before.

Even as they stood on the edge of the crag, and saw the view and the abandoned deer, the red-face appeared behind them. Even Tom understood why they were called red-face: their faded shirts were soaked with perspiration, their sweaty bearded faces glowed like the wet flesh of pomegranates.

One, a stocky, resolute young man with dark curly hair and a short beard, caught a glimpse of the view and laughed, flinging out a triumphant arm as he turned to the others; and Tom thought: this is a dream.

‘There you are, my lads! Spread your wings and ’tis but a straight flight down to the sea!’

A grumbly, exhausted voice from behind answered him, unimpressed.

‘Then suppose you build us wings, Francis Drake, to get us down there smartish. ’Tidn't as though us weighs much, now, after being ate up by all these bugs.’

But the Africans were pointing to the deer. Even as Tom and Madu stared, stunned into immobility by the shock of who the men were, the three Sumba had fitted arrows to their bows, and were scattering warily amongst the trees.

‘Quick! We must go!’ Madu whispered, his words scarcely audible. He moved back, into the trees. But Tom tugged his arm.

‘No, Maddy, wait!’ he hissed. ‘’Tis all right, they're friends, English! That's Francis there! My cousin!’

Madu's eyes rolled wide and white as he glared back, snatching his arm away. ‘English is red-face!’ he said, a little louder in his anger. ‘And these men Sumba! Nobody catch me!’

But he had spoken too loud, already. One of the Africans turned, saw them, and raised his bow to shoot.

Tom leapt out from behind the bush, waving his arms high, and shouted. ‘No! 'Tis all right! I'm English! English! Don't shoot!’

The man hesitated, lowering his bow and looking round for his friends. Then Tom heard a rustle in the bushes to his right. The man heard it too, turned, raising his bow, loosed. Tom saw the arrow, long after, in his dreams, flashing through branches and leaves to strike, quivering, in a tree a foot behind the fleeing Madu's head.

‘No! Don't shoot! I'm English! English! Friends!’ He made so much noise and fuss, running towards the man with his empty hands held wide and smiling, leaping about like an idiot, that the man was confused and Madu was long gone before the other men came up. Their leader, his cousin Francis, stared at him in open, laughing astonishment.

‘Well, by God's holy fish!
Tom!
Be you a ghost, boy, or what?’

If it was joy Tom felt, it was somehow, strangely painful. He laughed, but tears blurred his eyes.

‘No ghost, cousin Francis. Just a sailor, waiting for a ship to go home.’

‘A
ND SO you ran from them?’ Nwayieke's laughter gurgled mockingly in Madu's ears, as they sat together in the shadows outside his hut, a little removed from the loud feasting that was taking place in the square in honour of the red-face.

‘Yes. I came to warn the village.’ Madu felt his face burning with embarrassment in the darkness; yet it had seemed so right at the time, even though Tom had run towards them.

‘You don't understand, Nwayieke, do you? These are the men who took me as a slave - some of these very men sitting there now with the elders.’ Madu glared in furious misery at the short, determined figure of Francis Drake, who sat laughing heartily as the Sumba leader, Pedro, flexed the tattooed snake on his arms.

‘The first time I saw English red-face, they set fire to our town, Conga, and burst through the gates with Sumba - black men with filed teeth and tattoos just like these. They killed my stepfather, and Temba, my friend. My mother and sisters are lost. I am a slave because of them ...’

‘I know, Madu, you told me.’ Nwayieke was no longer laughing; the cool touch of her fingers on his wrist stopped him. ‘But we have all been slaves here, even these Sumba, this Pedro. It is not special. And didn't you say that your mother was of the Sumba tribe, a slave to the Mani just as my mother was to the Spanish?’

‘Yes.’

Nwayieke's face was lit by a burning torch a few yards away. It sent ripples of orange and yellow flickering over her smooth black skin. He thought he had never seen anything so beautiful as those soft cheeks, that thin, straight neck, the delicate half-hidden ear. And the voice, so light, so earnest as she spoke the half-forgotten Mani words.

‘So you see life ... life is not so simple, Maduka. In Africa Mani and Sumba made slaves of each other, but here … we have Sumba in this village too.’

‘I know.’ Here, those Sumba who knew he was Mani treated him with a stiff, careful politeness, as he treated them.

‘Here we are all Cimarrons together. It is the Spanish who are our enemy. We were all slaves to them - even your red-face friend Tom. So we must ally with the other red-face tribes - the English and the French - to fight the Spanish. Just as we have allied with the Sumba.’

Her fingers, which had been on his wrist, intertwined with his; the whole of his arm was trembling with the touch. He watched her eyes, dark and serious in the firelight; he could not bear to lose her. She is beautiful, but what she says is wrong, he thought. His fingers tightened unconsciously, so that she gave a little gasp of pain.

‘Nwayieke, the Spanish are not so cruel as these! You haven't been in a slave ship, you don't know! When I was a Spanish slave, I was never treated so badly, so foully as by these English ...’

‘Then you were lucky!’ She snapped the words so sharply that a group of boys near the fire looked round. Nwayieke glared at them, her proud chin held high, and they turned away with a shrug and a knowing laugh. She spoke again in a lower voice.

‘You were lucky, Madu, you should know that. Not one slave in a hundred is as lucky as you, to be brought into the Spaniard's house and treated as you were.’

‘I know,’ said Madu, embarrassed. ‘I have seen ...’

‘You have
not
seen – not enough. And you have not felt! Feel now!’ She took his hand in the darkness and to his utter, trembling amazement, slipped it under her light cotton blouse and behind her back, so that his hand rested on the skin at the back of her waist. Her face was over his shoulder; her words came softly in his ear.