Twenty blacks were brought from below to dance them a bit to music from Tommy’s flute and let them breathe. They climbed topside and stood crushed together, blinded by the sun, for that morning the weather was fair, yet hushed. Meadows and Ngonyama searched the fusty spaces between decks for Africans unable to come up on their own. There were always a few of these since Ebenezer Falcon rearranged their position after the storm. He was, as they say, a “tight-packer,” having learned ten years ago from a one-handed French slaver named Captain Ledoux that if you arranged the Africans in two parallel rows, their backs against the lining of the ship’s belly, this left a free space at their rusty feet, and that, given the flexibility of bone and skin, could be squeezed with even more slaves if you made them squat at ninety-degree angles to one another. Flesh could conform to anything. So when they came half-dead from the depths, these eyeless contortionists emerging from a shadowy Platonic cave, they were stiff and sore and stank of their own vomit and feces. Right then I decided our captain was more than just evil. He was the Devil. Who else could twist the body so terribly? Who else could enslave gods and men alike? All, like livestock, bore the initials of the Republic’s financiers burned into their right buttock by a twisted wire—ZS, PZ, EG, a cabal of Louisiana speculators whose names I would learn soon enough.
Meadows snapped his head away, his nose wrinkled, and he splashed buckets of salt water on them, then told Tommy to play. The cabin boy, taking his place on the capstan head, had not stopped smiling since seeing the Allmuseri god. Snapping together his three-piece flute and touching it to lips shaped in that strangely mad, distant smile unreadable as a mask, he let his chest fall, forcing wind into wood that transformed his exhalations into a rill of sound-colors all on board found chilling — less music, if you ask me, than the boy’s air alchemized into emotion, or the song of hundred-year-old trees from which the narrow flute was torn.
One side of Falcon’s face tightened. “Methinks that’s too damned melancholy. Even niggers can’t dance to that. A lighter tune, if you will, Tommy.” The cabin boy obeyed, striking up a tune of lighter tempo. Falcon, pleased, tapped his foot, stopping only to stare as Ngonyama and Meadows carried an African’s corpse from below. As with previous cases like these, Falcon ordered his ears sliced off and preserved below in oil to prove to the ship’s investors that he had in fact purchased in Bangalang as many slaves as promised. This amputation proved tough going for Meadows, for the last stages of rigor mortis froze the body hunched forward in a grotesque hunker, like Lot’s wife. Hence, after shearing off his ears, they toted him to the rail as you might a chair or the ship’s figurehead, then found him too heavy to heave over.
“Lend us a hand here, Mr. Calhoun.” Meadows wiped sweat off his upper lip.
I stayed where I was. Beside me, a moan burst from a carpenter standing too close to the slaves. They danced in place like men in a work-gang, but one had slipped when the ship rolled, falling on his back and accidentally, it seemed, kicking the sailor in his stomach. And a good kick it was, knocking the wind out of him. The mate looked puzzled; he ran two fingers over his forehead.
“You should earn your keep, my boy.” Falcon nudged me toward them, then brought a handkerchief to his brow. “One hundred bars overboard. Gawd, I hate waste.”
Ngonyama was holding the boy — for so he proved to be when I stepped closer — under his arms. Meadows had him by legs cooled to the lower temperatures of the hold. Though he was semistiff, blood giving way to the pull of gravity, motionless in his veins, was settling into his lower limbs, purplish in color as he entered the first stages of stench and putrefaction. The young rot quickest, you know. The underside of his body had the squishy, fluid-squirting feel of soft, overripe fruit. If you squeezed his calves, a cheeselike crasis oozed through the cracks and cuts made in his legs by the chains. It was this side of him Meadows wanted me to grab, providing him and Ngonyama the leverage they needed to swing him past the rail. I cannot say how sickened I felt. The sight and smell of him was a wild thing turned loose in my mind. Never in my life had I handled the dead. It did not matter that I knew nothing of this boy. Except for Ngonyama, the males had generally been kept below, but I’d seen him among the others when Falcon made the Africans dance. Judging by what little was left of his face, hard as wood on one side and melting into worm-eaten pulp on the other as rigor mortis began to reverse, he was close to my own age, perhaps had been torn from a lass as lovely as, lately, I now saw Isadora to be, and from a brother as troublesome as my own. His open eyes were unalive, mere kernels of muscle, though I still found myself poised vertiginously on their edge, falling through these dead holes deeper into the empty hulk he had become, as if his spirit had flown and mine was being sucked there in its place.
“ ’Ere now,” said Meadows, “come about, Calhoun. I’m gettin’ tired of holdin’ him.” I gripped the boy from below, slipping my right hand behind his back, my other under his thigh, so cool and soft, like the purple casing of a plum, that my ragged, unmanicured nails punctured the meat with a hiss as if I’d freed a pocket of air. A handful of rotting leg dropped into my hand before I was able to push hard enough for the others to swing him, just before his limbs disconnected like a doll’s, to sharks circling the hull. That bloody piece of him I held, dark and porous, with the first layers of liquefying tissue peeling back to reveal an orange underlayer, fell from my fingers onto the deck: a clump from the butcher’s block, it seemed, and the ship’s dogs strained their collars trying to get it.
Ngonyama wrapped it in a scrap of canvas and pitched it as hard as he could into a wave. My stained hand still tingled. Of a sudden, it no longer felt like my own. Something in me said it would never be clean again, no matter how often I scrubbed it or with what stinging chemicals, and without thinking I found my left hand lifting the knife from my waist, then using its blade to scrape the boy’s moist, black flesh off my palm, and at last I swung it up to slice it across my wrist and toss that into the ocean too. “No.” Ngonyama placed his fingers on my forearm. He must have felt me wobble. His hands steadied and guided me to the rail, where I gasped for wind, wanting to retch but unable to. Saying nothing, he waited, and as always his expression was difficult to decipher. Weeks before I’d felt that no matter how I tried to see past his face to his feelings, the signs he threw off were so different at times from those I knew they could not be uncoded. It was said, for example, that the Allmuseri spat at the feet of visitors to their village and, as you might expect, this sometimes made travelers draw their swords in rage, though the Allmuseri meant only that the stranger’s feet must be hot and tired after so long a journey and might welcome a little water on his boots to cool them. Nay, you could assume nothing with them. But of one thing I was sure: There was a difference in them. They were leagues from home — indeed, without a home — and in Ngonyama’s eyes I saw a displacement, an emptiness like maybe all of his brethren as he once knew them were dead. To wit, I saw myself. A man remade by virtue of his contact with the crew. My reflection in his eyes, when I looked up, gave back my flat image as phantasmic, the flapping sails and sea behind me drained of their density like figures in a dream. Stupidly, I had seen their lives and culture as timeless product, as a finished thing, pure essence or Parmenidean meaning I envied and wanted to embrace, when the truth was that they were process and Heraclitean change, like any men, not fixed but evolving and as vulnerable to metamorphosis as the body of the boy we’d thrown overboard. Ngonyama and maybe all the Africans, I realized, were not wholly Allmuseri anymore. We had changed them. I suspected even he did not recognize the quiet revisions in his voice after he learned English as it was spoken by the crew, or how the vision hidden in their speech was deflecting or redirecting his own way of seeing. Just as Tommy’s exposure to Africa had altered him, the slaves’ life among the lowest strata of Yankee society — and the horrors they experienced — were subtly reshaping their souls as thoroughly as Falcon’s tight-packing had contorted their flesh during these past few weeks, but into what sort of men I could not imagine. No longer Africans, yet not Americans either. Then what? And of what were they now capable?
Ngonyama touched the pocket of his trousers, patting the key I’d given him. After that, he handed it back to me and turned down his thumb. As far as I could tell, the key was wrong for their leg-irons. Yet something in his look said keys and conventional means of escape did not matter anymore, that the mills of the gods were still grinding, killing and remaking us all, and nothing I or anyone else did might stop the terrible forces and transformations our voyage had set free.
He turned his back when Cringle, pretending to inspect a bracket on the topsail halyard, moved behind me. Along his neck I saw three bumps the size of berries. His voice, a hoarse whisper, said, “Go! We’ll give you twenty minutes before we take them back down. Be prompt now.” I proceeded on to Falcon’s door. There I took a moment to steady the twitchy fingers on my left hand by stretching them until each popped. In my waistband I carried a six-inch length of wire. This I wormed slowly into the lock face, letting it clear barriers I could see only in my mind until I felt it push against the pins of the bolt, thus releasing the bolt from the jamb. In less time than it takes to tell, I was inside.
Falcon’s cabin was as I remembered it from my previous visits. Perhaps a little messier. Closing his door I bent down on all fours and began feeling with the tip of my knife for the hair-thin wires closest to the entrance. And then suddenly I could not breathe. I felt caged. Wrong if I did as the first mate asked. Wrong if I sided with Falcon. I began hiccuping uncontrollably (my body’s typical response to dilemmas that had no solution), a worse fit of this than when Isadora and Papa tried to blackmail me into marriage: a palpable feeling of dread I cannot describe unless you have been, say, in the hayloft of an old Illinois barn during an earthquake and feel the rafters tremble, and wonder how near it is to crushing in and the loft collapsing and beams raining down upon your head. That is how I felt. With so many men at odds, each willing something so different from the others, like the factions at war during the French Revolution (my own velleities included), and some not even fully aware of their will, the result could only be something unforeseen that no one willed or wanted. A change not in the roles on ship but a revolution in its very premises. On my knees, I did nothing, though it felt as if the room, and ship even, fell away. Some part of me was a fatherless child again. Alone in an alien world. Wanting to belong somewhere and to someone. Five minutes passed. Maybe fifteen before I could move. Then, involuntarily, my hands clamped together in a bedside, precynical posture I’d not taken since boyhood, one of surrender and bone-felt frailty in the face of troubles so many-sided my mind trembled to think of them. “God,” I asked, “is this some kind of test?” My worldly wits were gone, and I knew, there on my aching knees, the personal devastation that was my brother’s daily bread: burning for things to work out well, knowing the lives of his loved ones depended on this, but having no power or techniques or strategies left except this plea for mercy flung from an inner wasteland into the larger emptiness, the vast silences, the voiceless shadows out there. But no answers came. Only an inexplicable calm, as if I were the sea now, and the dam of my tears — the poisons built up since I left southern Illinois — burst, and I cried for all the sewage I carried in my spirit, my failures and crimes, foolish hopes and vanities, the very faults and structural flaws in the blueprint of my brain (as Falcon put it) in a cleansing nigh as good as prayer itself, for it washed away not only my hurt after hurling the dead boy overboard but yes, the hunger for mercy as well. My hands were moist from this hoarse weeping. My face was swollen and, searching myself, I discovered I no longer cared if I lived or died. The passion for life in me, that flame, was dead. Such was my position, and the windless state of my soul, when the Old Man’s door flew open, flooding light into the darkened room, and I looked up, and through stinging eyes saw:
The mate named Fletcher. One side of his head was battered in. The bone of his nose was broken. Nailing me with his gaze and noticing only that I was a Negro, he raised his fist and started to swing.
“Fletcher, it’s me, Calhoun!”
He stayed his arm in mid-swing. “The cook’s helper?”
“The same.”
He drew a great breath and, snorting, sent columns of blood cascading down the front of his blouse. I could see he was about to keel over and steadied him. “You’re too soon,” I said. “Cringle set the takeover for tonight, didn’t he?”
He shook his head, then tried to swallow. “Me’n Daniels was in the storerooms, just went down for one bloody minute, when eight of ’em come pourin’ in the slop chest like roaches when you open a wall—”
“Falcon’s men?”
“Daniels was skivered from navel to nose quick as a butcherin’, but I run up here and—” He gagged. His eyes flew wide to take in the semidark room. “Are the guns in that cabinet?”
“Aye, but—”
Before I could finish, Fletcher shoved me aside, behind the door, which saved me when he lurched toward the cabinet, caught his foot on a wire no more than an inch from the floor, and set off two explosions fainter than the pop of firecrackers. Still, I was splattered with bits of his scalp and a thousand needles of splintered glass from the cabin windows. He gave a cry I heard from a great distance, as if I’d gone deaf. Nay, I was deaf after the explosions. And blinded by the smoke, the smell of black powder flung like soot onto the broken furniture and Fletcher himself. Heavy as he was for me, and unable as I was to hear, I dragged him toward the door, and bumped into someone in the entrance. Turning, I looked straight ahead and saw no one. Then down, and there was Captain Falcon, cursing silently (since I was deaf), holding a saber in his right hand and, in his left, a bloody scalp of hair. Like Fletcher, he shoved past, dodging round his own traps, and it was then, as I stood trying to read his lips whilst he shouted, that the Republic must have run onto half-hidden rocks, or struck an isle, or the father of all waves fell upon us, for the walls buckled from a tremendous, rolling crash and rumbling that smashed the beams of the ceiling and threw us to the floor. The impact laid back strips of skin on my arms. Outside: the confused noise of men on deck. Then gunshots. Heavy feet thundered forward, some aft, and now and again something fell to the deck. I called to the skipper, “Have we run aground? What was that?”
Faintly, as if from far away, he said, “There’s something ’cross my legs!” For the first time since I’d known him, the captain’s voice sounded frightened. “They lit a cannon, Calhoun. Fired right into us. Kin you hear me? Give me your hand!”
From where I lay, he was impossible to reach. I knew only that I must find Baleka and Squibb. Two pistol reports, like the work of a whip, rang out—crack! crack! — and my stomach froze solid. There was heavy thumping on deck. A creaking of the blocks. Tacks and guys, sheet and braces rang loud against the wind. I pulled myself free of debris in the cabin and collapsed on a deck boot-deep in blood. As my sight sharpened, I saw through the curtains of smoke a squat, broad-shouldered slave named Nacta, who sprang toward me, cleaving the air with a marlinespike. A foot from my head he checked his swing. His chest was heaving. He kicked me aside, then disappeared into the skipper’s quarters. Backing away, I sensed then that not Falcon’s loyalists but the Africans had overcome Fletcher and Daniels, though how in God’s name I could not guess. I skidded over shattered barrels, the carcasses of dogs ripped open like charnel-house swine, and cedarwood blocks floating in deckwash. There was damage to the lower rigging and jigger staysail, which hung in rags from the mizzen lower mast. In disfiguring smoke that stung my eyes, someone from the world below, the hell of the hold, hunched over a sailor, who lay on his side like a body washed onto the shore, beating him about the head with a deckscraper, and when this blotched and spectral figure saw me, he faded back into the smoke. The ship swung, pitching me forward. I fell, flopped around, and rolled. Righted myself. Briefly, in the corner of my eye, I caught movement by the lifeboats, what seemed in those fibrous seconds to be two men — one black, one the barber-surgeon — working quietly, single-mindedly at the uphill chore of killing each other. The African, still in chains, was stone still, holding at waist level a rusty saw. As Meadows moved, bringing his sword down in an overhead strike, the other brought his saw straight up, his fingers steadying the handle, guiding the teeth straight into the barber-surgeon’s belly in a clean, swift, diagonal stroke that left Meadows frozen in mid-swing before his bowels spilled at his feet. I swung my head away. When I looked back they were gone, or had turned into two barrels. Impossible!
I rubbed my eyes and waded forward cautiously toward the cookroom. The helm was unattended. The wooden steering wheel, with its spokes that favored a Hindu mandala, revolved slowly in winds that spun the crippled ship in a circle, without direction. Without destination. We were dead in the water. Adrift. A creaking hulk of coppice oak tossing about on a sea the color of slate. Finally, I heard motion. Even fainter still, a madhouse cackle that seemed to come from the crow’s-nest. Then more shapes, like figures in a shadowgraph, appeared gathered by the foremast. Many of the sailors were face down and knocked for seven bells. Some had surrendered after a one-sided battle that appeared to be over-weighted, strange as this sounds, toward the Allmuseri who used the slippery deck to their advantage. They had been in chains before, I remembered. Taken in raids by other tribes. Consequently, capoeira, or their close-quarter version of it, was based on doing battle after they were bound: knee-shattering kicks thrown after they’d fallen. Ankle-breaking footsweeps. Chokes designed to use their chains until one of them found the key to their shackles, and those freed swung the ship’s cannon back toward her bridge. Engaged as they were in disarming the remaining sailors, none had seen my approach. I eased backward, and felt fingers dig painfully into my arm.
“Come to the fo’c’s’le,” said Ngonyama. He was wearing Captain Falcon’s cap. “If you wish to plead for the lives of any of these men, that time is now.”
“You plan to kill them?”
“That decision isn’t mine, Rutherford.”
“This morning you said you’d set them free!”
He thought for a moment, his left hand bandaged, I saw then, a bloody mess where the dogs had torn away three of his fingers. “As I said, the decision isn’t mine.”
I followed him to the forecastle. Then I heard first the low voices of men whispering, then loud ones in disagreement, and soon two lanterns blinked as someone moved across the room. Ngonyama stepped to one side, bidding me enter first. Stepping inside, placing my hand over one eyeball — as children do — I peered past the door rail to see what was inside, and when I saw what was inside I moaned. Everything was in ruin. Sea chests had been smashed open. Cabinets overturned. Inside, Cringle was seated amidst this debris on a straight-backed chair close to the east wall, with hieroglyphs of lamplight dancing on his scarred forehead. He bled from a gash that trenched open skin by his nose then deepened and disappeared into his hairline. His head drooped. His hands, I noticed, were bound with luff rope, his ankles with shreds from his waistcoat. His bare chest was crosshatched with scars. And, no. He was not alone. I saw three Allmuseri sitting on the benches; I recognized two more named Babo and Francesco passing a bottle of the skipper’s best bellywash, and still another called Atufal, a big man who had an iron collar around his neck and stood behind the mate arguing — if my hasty translation could be trusted — for them to toss him over the side.
My entrance stopped all conversation. I stepped forward and came as close as I durst from the doorway.
“All the way in—njoo hapa.” Ngonyama smiled two rows of black-veined teeth. “No one will hurt you here, Rutherford. These men are your brothers.” How I wished I could believe him! Cringle tried to speak, but the one called Atufal seized his hair, yanking back his head. The strands stood out like stalks. His throat was bared. Against this white stalk the little black named Babo placed an English handsaw. Atufal said again that the mate should be killed. Ngonyama listened. He began to pace, and prime a horse pistol. The others tossed Cringle’s life back and forth among them, some grumbling aye—yebo in Allmuseri — to his execution, then making a clean slate of the crew; some like Ngonyama saying la, or nay. Contrary to what I’d expected, they were in no mood to celebrate their victory. They were too tired and frightened for that, as well they should be. This battered rag-wagon was home until they found land. And what then? A firing squad, most likely. Whether they put to in Bangalang, or Louisiana, or any New World port, they would be cut down like wheat. No Yankee court would free them. They were still chattel, according to white men’s law. Ngonyama, who was nobody’s fool, knew this to be fact. He wanted the killing to end. They were not free men yet, he told the others, only free of the stinking hold. Gently he pulled me toward a chair. “You must help us,” he began. “There is so much to unravel. .”
My fingertips on the seat, I sat lightly, tipped forward and ready to spring, for still I did not trust him. Yes, I was black, as they were, but they had a common bond I could but marvel at. The little black Babo, who had always seemed so servile before, sat sharpening a hatchet with cloth and stone, a strip of some sailor’s coat bandaging half his head so that only one eye was uncovered. The other, Atufal, whom Falcon often shackled to the ringbolts on deck, had gone kill-crazy during the mutiny, shooting and stabbing our sailors and his own tribesmen as well, striking down in his fear anything that moved toward him. He’d taken a musket ball in his left shank, which was mangled, white bone visible through the black flesh of his thigh, but still he seemed more pleased than pained. All of them were injured and exhausted, but transfigured by their victory. Was it my victory as well? Or was Ngonyama only saving my life for some scheme? “Start with Falcon,” I said. “What have you done with the skipper?”
Ngonyama bit down his lip and walked to a window, righting overturned chairs as he went. He kept his back to me. “Nacta is guarding him in his cabin. Don’t plead for him, Rutherford.” His shoulders drew in. “It would be a sin to let him live. He is responsible for every death on board.”
“That’s a lie!” flashed Cringle. “ ’Twas he set them free during the fight. I saw him! We were exhausted, some of us sick, and that one”—he flicked his head at Babo—“killed Daniels, who had keys to their leg-irons, and let the others loose. They clubbed us with the wood we gave them for pillows and tossed the dead like Tommy into the sea. And he—”
Atufal’s hand stifled the rest. Babo placed his hatchet down on the mate’s neck. He slanted his eyes toward Ngonyama, seeking the sign for them to kill him. Ngonyama shook his head. No. But he was alone in his decision. Three of them I recognized as warriors named Ghofan, Diamelo, and Akim urged Babo to open the mate’s throat. And they had reason, good reason, for seeing the last of the Republic’s officers dead. Akim, a wide, dark-fired man who was short but had the strength of three, squatted on his hams; he made them relive his sister’s death five days after we set sail. Ghofan, a black who had been gelded, and then suffered the torture of the brand, pulled his shirt down to show them how Falcon had burned in the initials ZS not once but three times until the impression was as clear as stigmata, or the markings on cattle. Each man had his atrocity to tell. If not brutality to them then a beadroll of humiliations the midshipmen had inflicted upon the women, two of whom had been raped, or on their children, and to this list Diamelo added the small but nonetheless violent assaults on their spirit — parading them naked for bathing before their own children, forcing them to eat by ramming fingers down their throats, answering their wild clawing from the hold with gales of laughter. On and on the charges came, and with each accusation a finger was stabbed toward the mate. Mercifully, he understood none of what they said. He was quietly whispering to himself the Lord’s Prayer. Against this evidence of American crimes perpetrated on the Allmuseri, Ngonyama was helpless. His plea for sparing Cringle’s life was shouted down. I felt my face kindling. My stomach made a turn. Glaring at Babo, Akim slashed the air with his hand. Therewith, Babo’s fingers tightened the blade on Cringle’s neck. The mate closed his eyes.
“Wait.” I was on my feet. “Listen to me. . please!”
Irritably, Babo hung fire.
“You need him,” I said, gathering my wits, sailing close to the wind. “Kill Falcon if you want, but if you kill his helmsman, you’ll never reach land. Never! None of you can read English maps. Nor keep this ship full and by once she’s fixed, provided she can be fixed, and only Peter can help you do that. He’s the only officer left.”
Cringle spat blood and broken teeth onto the floor. “They’ll see hell quicker’n they’ll see help from me.”
“Will you please”—I ground my teeth—“shut up!”
“No, you shall hear this! As God is my judge, I’ll see every murderer here brought before a firing squad. Turn your back a second on me,” he said to Ngonyama, “and you shall have a foot of steel in it.”
Ngonyama frowned. “He should not have said that.”
“He will help you,” I said. “If he doesn’t, I’ll drag him to the rail myself.”
Diamelo took a step toward me. He rubbed his finger, very dark, along my face, which was a shade or two lighter than his own. “Do it now.” His voice had a clean monotone like metal. “Prove what you say.” Then to Ngonyama: “On whose side is he? I wouldn’t trust this one.” He took the hatchet from Babo and forced it into my hand. “Not until he has broken away from them.”
Four others agreed, chiming in that I was a crewman like the rest, an American, a risk unless I joined them by spilling blood, as criminals like Papa Zeringue demand a crime before you enjoy their protection. After this stiff exchange, the Allmuseri were eager now for me to execute Cringle. They waited, their eyes following me minutely as I gripped the hatchet, which felt heavier in my fist than a handspike. Now I had endangered my own neck. Why in heaven’s name had I not kept my mouth shut, or choked my luff, as sailors say. If I refused, both Cringle and I would be pitched overboard. A long moment passed. I felt my head going tighter. I drew a deep breath, stepping toward Cringle, the hatchet lifted over my head. How long their silence lasted is impossible to say; I heard only the rasping of wheel ropes. Waters lapping. A ruffling of sails and the stormlike sound of wind. The kerosene lamp burned low in its bracket. Cringle sat motionless, waiting to hear his own head hit the floor. My fingers opened. The hatchet fell.
Diamelo ordered me to pick it up.
“Nay,” said I. “You can kill him, and me too. But without his help, and mine, you’ll wander the mid-Atlantic until the ocean swallows you, or some man-of-war heaves to and puts you in irons again.”
Ngonyama considered this. Diamelo did not buy it. There was an eye battle between them for a moment, and the boy won, quietly pleased, I think, that I’d given him a way to end the slaying. “You speak well, Rutherford.” His face sharpened: lean and pointed like a cat’s. “I’ve no doubt you were a good confidence man in New Orleans.”
I had to sit again and squeeze the seat of my chair to hide the shaking of my hands. Ngonyama spoke to his former yokefellows in a voice too fast for me to follow. Reluctantly, they saw the wisdom in releasing Cringle. Still, I was not done. I made bold to say, “Spare the captain until you sight land.”
Ngonyama made a 180-degree turn. “No!”
“He can’t escape, you know that! Use him to take us to safety. After that, do with him as you will.”
“You ask us to let him live?”
“Nay,” says I. “I ask you to make him your slave.”
That thought stopped Diamelo. I could tell the taste of it intrigued him. “All right, then. As you say, he will serve us, and then we can slay him.” Begrudgingly, Babo followed Diamelo’s order to untie Cringle. His other bravos the boy sent outside to see to the wounds of their women and children, and to prepare a sacrifice to ensure their safe passage. In spite of himself, Cringle said, “They’d better steady the booms and yards by guys and braces, and lash everything well down.”
Ngonyama said, “Thank you.”
Then he took me to one side and told me to bring up any mates who had fled to the storeroom, his face older-looking now, grave, his shoulders giving way to gravity or the crunch of some secret grief he could not share. “Rutherford”—his brow tightened—“I have done as you advised. But, as you see, Diamelo is very strong with the others. You know, in our village I was a poor man, like you, but his father was well-to-do. Diamelo is used to getting his way. I worry less about your captain now than how Diamelo can sway my people.”
Once outside, as we made our way down the ladder to the storeroom, the mate, who was above me, looked down and sneered, “Savages! And silver-tongued ones at that! Was it you who taught him English? You made a mistake there, Calhoun. He’ll have you servin’ his dinner, and wipin’ his arse next, that one, if you listen to him.”
“Maybe. . but suppose he meant what he said.”
Cringle kicked at me in rage. “Will you wake up, boy! Can you take his side after what they did? They were about to kill you too, Rutherford, or are you so wet you’ve forgotten that?”
“I’m not on anybody’s side! I’m just trying to keep us alive! I don’t know who’s right or wrong on this ship anymore, and I don’t much care! All I want is to go home!”
“Well”—he backed off a bit—“I’m not snapping at you. I owe you my life. I doubt if anyone would thank you for saving me, certainly not my family, seeing how I’ve failed them, but I’m grateful none of my sides were knocked off tonight, and I’ll do whatever you say, God help me.” He clapped me on the back. “That much I owe you.”
The Allmuseri prepared their ceremony to sanctify the ship, to make it a kind of church, and enlist their gods as guides in our seafaring. Cringle and I canvassed the ship’s storerooms and underbasements, looking for survivors, and to no avail until we descended into a tiny shotlocker full of saltpeter barrels in the lowest cell of the prow. I heard moaning — it was distinctly moaning — from the tiny cubicle, and called Cringle, who squeezed inside with an old Swedish poop lantern, then crawled back out, his free hand leading two figures I had given up as food for the sharks: Baleka, Squibb. Immediately, the girl squeezed me around my waist, both her hands bunching my shirt in the back.
“You’re all right, Josiah?”
“Passable, Mr. Cringle. We come down heah soon as the fracas broke out.” He folded his arms across his chest. “The others, I was wonderin’. . Are they. .”
“Dead? All but four of us. The Negroes have the ship now. It’s their move. The only protection we have from them, I’m sorry to say, is Calhoun.”
I mustered a smile. “Y’all better be nice to me.”
The mate frowned, clambering back up the ladder. We sent Baleka up next, followed by Squibb, but I tarried below for a time, feeling a wave of dizziness wash over me, and I noticed spots on my forearm, which I dismissed. Once the wooziness passed, I pulled my sleeve down to my wrist and wearily climbed back into open air.
Thus things stood on the Republic for the rest of the day. Come nightfall, the fifteen Allmuseri who had survived the ship’s takeover gathered on the starboard side. Their women had fashioned loose, baggy gowns for themselves from old sail. Although they had given better than they got in the fight, many of the men were injured. Six were carried to the ceremony, another five hobbled on crutches cut from top-mast timber. Baleka pulled the skipper’s goat to a hastily built altar inside a red circle they had splashed by the foremast. The sky was full of sea gulls, the sea calm now, shimmering as brightly as a mirror the way it reflected the moon. Cold, light breezes fluttered in the lower sails, so light you needed to wet your finger to feel them. Rags of gray vapor played round the topmost spars. Sitting on a crate beside Squibb and me, the mate shivered and pulled his peacoat close around him. He was jumpy from lack of sleep, his face ashen. “Mark my words, all of you. We’re going to need that animal in a few days.” Out of tobacco now, he sucked his pipe, which made a gurgling sound from spittle backed into the steam. “The storerooms are flooded. There’s nothing left to eat”. He grinned sourly, then coughed. “Unless we’re ready to start eating each other.”
Squibb stiffened. “Sir?”
“There’ll be none of that,” says I. “Only Falcon speaks of eating flesh, and he’s under lock and key in his own cabin.”
Squibb’s belly rumbled. He looked down the deck to where Nacta stood with a rifle outside the skipper’s door. “Who’s gonna be captain, then?”
“Cringle, I guess. He’s next in line. And one of their people to watch him.”
The mate looked straight at me.
“Would to mercy I do get my hands on the helm,” said he, rocking his head, “then I plan to steer us to America, so help me. We could steer the ship toward Africa during the day, as the blacks want, then toward the States at night when they’re sleeping.” Again, he sucked his long pipe. “We’ll be docking on Long Island before the Negroes know what hit them.”
“Can we do that?” asked Squibb.
I left a silence.
“What if we don’t find land?”
Again, I could vouchsafe no reply.
“Mr. Calhoun. .”
“Rest easy, Josiah. Whatever we do, the Allmuseri have the next move.”
Which was now, I saw, to complete their peculiar cleansing ritual. From what I could understand, the blacks were not simply offering the skipper’s goat to their god; they were begging him to wash the blood of the Republic’s crew off their hands. Perhaps even more important to them than freedom was the fact that no leaf fell, no word was uttered or deed executed that did not echo eternally throughout the universe. Seeds, they were, that would flower into other deeds — good and evil — in no time at all. For a people with their values, murder violated (even mutilated) the murderer so badly that it might well take them a billion billion rebirths to again climb the chain and achieve human form. Ngonyama wondered, I could see, if it had all been worth it, this costly victory in exchange for their souls, for that indeed was what was at stake. Ironically, it seemed that Falcon had broken them after all; by their very triumph he had defeated them. From the perspective of the Allmuseri the captain had made Ngonyama and his tribesmen as bloodthirsty as himself, thereby placing upon these people a shackle, a breach of virtue, far tighter than any chain of common steel. The problem was how to win without defeating the other person. And they had failed. Such things mattered to Ngonyama. Whether he liked it or not, he had fallen; he was now part of the world of multiplicity, of me versus thee.
And so they placed their foreheads on deck in shame and supplication, praying that the killing would not be carved forever into their nature, and that some act other than the traditional payment for murder — their own deaths in exchange — might be accepted to balance out their world again; that the Republic would be a ferryboat to carry them across the Flood to their ancestral home. When they were done and Ngonyama walked quietly to where we sat, his voice splintered as he spoke, his eyes hardly focusing on me at all.
“We are finished, Ndugu, my brother.” He wiped his forehead with his fingers. “All is in order and ready for the return. We should start at once. My people have decided to sail for Senegambia. You must convince your captain to plot a new course for us.”
Cringle sneered, “Good luck.”
“If he does not,” said Ngonyama, “I can guarantee that all of you will die.”
This was no idle threat. Therefore, twenty paces found me at the skipper’s door. Nacta would not step aside, his wide-legged stance a challenge of sorts as he jiggled in his left hand the ring Falcon wore to unlock his firearms. Down the deck Ngonyama ordered him to step aside. As Nacta moved away, I entered, limping a little on my left side, for the last interview anyone on this earth would have with Ebenezer Falcon.