Read Online Respectable Trade by Philippa Gregory - Free Book Online
Authors: Philippa Gregory
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They behaved as if they were a different species from Mehuru, from Siko, from the two hundred men they had on board. They prodded at them with sticks, whipped them with casual cruelty. They never looked in their faces, never met their eyes. There was something so cold and unnatural in their indifference that Mehuru felt his very soul wither and shrink from them. These could not be men. No man could treat another man with such chilling indifference.
The god Snake’s counsel was bleak on the voyage, and the farther he went from his home, the fainter and fainter grew the voice, until Mehuru had to face the dreadful prospect of losing his guide. He had no magic to bring him back—the gods go where they will—and Mehuru could make no offering. He had no pet snake to feed; he had no smoke to please the god or bones for it to play with. All he could do was dream that he was making pleasures for the god and give him the thoughts of his mind. So he lay in the pitching blackness with his back rubbed raw against the sweating planks of the hold, the filth of the bilges washing around him, and made in his mind a perfect flower, a flower from the hibiscus bush, bright scarlet, frilled as silk. Then he pictured a jeweled snake and brought the flower to the snake in a bowl of white clay studded with tiny blue stones.
The three images were almost too much for him: the brilliant snake, the perfect flower, and the white bowl with the blue pattern. In the sodden, sweaty torture of the black hold, with people dying around him, Mehuru shut his eyes and summoned three perfect forms: god in a flower, god in an animal, and god in a man, guiding his hands to work with clay and with little blue stones.
There was no way to measure time in the darkness. Mehuru woke sometimes and thought perhaps he had died and that the Yoruban belief that you stay near to the people you loved, watching over them, was all wrong. The afterlife was a perpetual rolling and pitching, heat and smell, and the horror of being pushed against sickly men, unable to help them, and no emotion but hatred for their rough bumping against you, and hunger for their share of food.
Sometimes the sailors opened the hatches and bawled down into the darkness for the captives to come out. The sunlight hurt their eyes, but they had to stand on deck, and one of the sailors would beat a drum while another cracked a whip. Mehuru looked at them in utter wonder. The sailors wanted them to dance. As obedient as idiot children, with the guns all around them and the whips cracking out the time, they shuffled and hopped while others were ordered to clean out the hold and throw the dead and dying over the side. Mehuru sank deep inside his mind while his body hopped and pranced.
If the dancing were to keep them healthy Mehuru could not think why they were fed so poorly. If their jailers wanted them fit, Mehuru could not think why they let so many sicken for lack of water in the unbearable heat of the hold. They lowered buckets filled with stale, warm water and bad yams that crawled with insects. Never enough water, never enough food. They had loaded about two hundred men, and elsewhere in the ship they were keeping women and little children, perhaps another hundred of them. On Mehuru’s shelf alone, five had already died. One had flung himself over the side, two had sickened, one had been whipped too hard and never came back to the hold, and the last one had sealed his lips from food and water and had watched the others eat every day while he starved himself to death. Mehuru’s imagination could not stretch to the scale of it. It never occurred to him that more than three hundred of them had been shipped but that only two hundred and forty or so were expected to survive. It was notnecessary that they should all survive. It was a process so large as to be industrial. Mehuru had no concept that his life could be written off as wastage.
He started to dread the arrival of the bucket of food, for only
The god Snake’s counsel was bleak on the voyage, and the farther he went from his home, the fainter and fainter grew the voice, until Mehuru had to face the dreadful prospect of losing his guide. He had no magic to bring him back—the gods go where they will—and Mehuru could make no offering. He had no pet snake to feed; he had no smoke to please the god or bones for it to play with. All he could do was dream that he was making pleasures for the god and give him the thoughts of his mind. So he lay in the pitching blackness with his back rubbed raw against the sweating planks of the hold, the filth of the bilges washing around him, and made in his mind a perfect flower, a flower from the hibiscus bush, bright scarlet, frilled as silk. Then he pictured a jeweled snake and brought the flower to the snake in a bowl of white clay studded with tiny blue stones.
The three images were almost too much for him: the brilliant snake, the perfect flower, and the white bowl with the blue pattern. In the sodden, sweaty torture of the black hold, with people dying around him, Mehuru shut his eyes and summoned three perfect forms: god in a flower, god in an animal, and god in a man, guiding his hands to work with clay and with little blue stones.
There was no way to measure time in the darkness. Mehuru woke sometimes and thought perhaps he had died and that the Yoruban belief that you stay near to the people you loved, watching over them, was all wrong. The afterlife was a perpetual rolling and pitching, heat and smell, and the horror of being pushed against sickly men, unable to help them, and no emotion but hatred for their rough bumping against you, and hunger for their share of food.
Sometimes the sailors opened the hatches and bawled down into the darkness for the captives to come out. The sunlight hurt their eyes, but they had to stand on deck, and one of the sailors would beat a drum while another cracked a whip. Mehuru looked at them in utter wonder. The sailors wanted them to dance. As obedient as idiot children, with the guns all around them and the whips cracking out the time, they shuffled and hopped while others were ordered to clean out the hold and throw the dead and dying over the side. Mehuru sank deep inside his mind while his body hopped and pranced.
If the dancing were to keep them healthy Mehuru could not think why they were fed so poorly. If their jailers wanted them fit, Mehuru could not think why they let so many sicken for lack of water in the unbearable heat of the hold. They lowered buckets filled with stale, warm water and bad yams that crawled with insects. Never enough water, never enough food. They had loaded about two hundred men, and elsewhere in the ship they were keeping women and little children, perhaps another hundred of them. On Mehuru’s shelf alone, five had already died. One had flung himself over the side, two had sickened, one had been whipped too hard and never came back to the hold, and the last one had sealed his lips from food and water and had watched the others eat every day while he starved himself to death. Mehuru’s imagination could not stretch to the scale of it. It never occurred to him that more than three hundred of them had been shipped but that only two hundred and forty or so were expected to survive. It was notnecessary that they should all survive. It was a process so large as to be industrial. Mehuru had no concept that his life could be written off as wastage.
He started to dread the arrival of the bucket of food, for only
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