Nobody's Slave (31 page)

‘They meant to lock it up, but they forgotten to turn the key,’ said Madu softly in his ear as he pushed it open.

Outside, the bright dawn light stabbed into Tom’s eyes like daggers. As he hung there, one arm around Madu's neck, the other across his own eyes, he heard shouting and shots down by the harbour. A group of Spanish soldiers hurried past. shoving them back into the doorway.

‘It really was Francis, wasn't it? I saw him. We've got to get there!’

With Madu steering him, they stumbled down the narrow side-street into the square, where men were rushing hither and thither, some towards the fight, some away. One bell was still ringing - a single, steady toll. There were several broken or abandoned swords, pikes and muskets, and a string of slow-match on the ground, smouldering in a dozen places where it had been set alight and tied across a street to look like a line of soldiers in the dark. Perhaps there had been fewer raiders than he had thought. An Indian woman, unconcerned, was setting out her store of fruits for sale in baskets in the square as she always did, and a pony stood saddled ready for an early morning ride, outside a house. Its ears flattened and it tugged nervously at its bridle as a group of pistols went off loudly down by the harbour.

By the time they reached the far side of the square Tom could almost walk by himself. He forced his wooden, unresponsive legs on as fast they would go, his body loose and clumsy like a jointed doll. Madu stayed beside him, keeping a firm grip on his arm.

As they reached the end of the quay, they saw three small boats rowing furiously for the harbour mouth. A few pistol shots were fired after them, but most of the men on the shore seemed content to shout. On the deck of one of the boats stood Francis Drake, white-faced and with a bloody bandage round one leg. Tom stared like someone who sees his soul being stolen away. A hoarse croak came from his throat.

‘Ahoy! Francis!
Franciiis, ahoy
! Wait for ...’

‘What now? Don't jump!’ Madu seized the English boy’s arms to stop him leaping into the water. It was easy to hold him; Tom was still weak and groggy from the blows to the head. Too weak to swim after the boats, surely. They were hurrying away, eight oars to a side.

‘Is too late, Tom.’

‘It
was
Francis! I saw him plain, in the last pinnace! They came back, like they promised! And I missed them!’

But Madu's mind was working, quietly, resolutely amid the chaos. Now was the time, if ever there was one. No-one would know what had happened for hours.

‘Listen, Tom!’ Madu gripped Tom’s shoulder, speaking low and urgently into his ear. ‘I'm going to leave now, to find those Cimarrons. Maybe we find your English too, but if not, at least we free. You come, or stay, as you want.’

‘But ...’ Tom waved an arm hopelessly out to sea. ‘They're heading north, anyway - there! He's hoisted sail. We must follow the coast to the north.’

‘No! First we must get clear of the town, away from roads and soldiers. Then we go north, perhaps.’ Even as they spoke, time was passing. A group of Spanish sailors was rowing out to one of the ships in the harbor; Spanish soldiers were coming into the square to clear up the mess of the raid. Bodies of the dead and wounded lay everywhere. A dog whose leg had been hurt howled pitifully.

‘If we go, first we must hide – really hide - so no-one can find us,’ Madu insisted. ‘Then we search for friends.’

Still Tom hesitated; Madu wondered if the knock on the head had hurt him worse than he had thought so that he would be a liability. ‘We must go now, this minute. It never be so easy again.'

Slowly the pupils of Tom's eyes, which had been narrowed to slits like a cat's, widened to become more human. He shook his head like a dog coming out of water, and gripped Madu's shoulder in return.

‘All right. Let's go.’

Francis Drake's raid had failed, but the boys did not know that. He had crossed the ocean to attack Nombre de Dios and steal the Spanish treasure before it was loaded into the galleons, and he had almost succeeded. But when Drake was wounded, shot in the leg, the courage of his sailors had failed, and they had pulled him away, back to the ships and sea.

As the churchbells stopped ringing and the Spanish governor stared in thankful disbelief at the untouched stocks of silver in his storerooms, two boys moved unnoticed through the startled crowds of the outraged town. They picked their way past the carts of farmers bringing in food for the market, and slipped quietly off the road into the forest a mile inland.

T
OM WAS glad of the fire, although it was a risk. Every few moments some flying insect - a great moth or a beetle - flew out of the night straight into it, attracted by the flame in the darkness, and there was always the faint possibility that men might see it and be attracted too, although they had seen no sign of mankind all day. But he hated to see Madu damp the fire down, covering its burning heart with sods of grassy earth, to keep it smouldering till the morning. As the little flame disappeared, the immensity of the forest night pressed in on him, a rustling, living darkness in which he was blind. For a long time he lay awake, listening to the howls and hoots and menacing silences among the vast trees. His courage, like the fire, was a feeble flame that might at any minute gutter and go out.

Without Madu they would have had no fire at all. Tom had watched Madu make it, with scorn at first and then with admiration. Madu had used his pocket-knife to make a primitive bow from a sapling, with a twisted stem of liana for the string. He had looped the string around a sharp pointed twig, and moved the bow back and forth, drilling the twig into a groove in a dry log. He had drilled for over an hour until the groove became hot, and the dry leaves and moss beside it began to smoulder. He fed the fire with small twigs, and then larger ones, until he had a flame. Then he had prepared a fire-pot out of a gourd with holes in the side and the top, to carry the fire with them in the day as they travelled, feeding it with moss and leaves.

That had been on the second day, after they caught the snake. Tom would not have known how to do that either, but Madu pinned its head down with a forked stick and smashed its head with stones. The roast snake meat, after two days of sweat-soaked, leg-breaking travel, tasted like finest venison. On the first day they had had nothing but fruit, as they hurried to get as far from the town as possible; but since the snake they had eaten meat twice - a great bird like a turkey which they had stunned with a lucky throw of a stick, and a small wild pig which Madu had caught in a noose as it ran along a path.

Tom's scorn had long since changed to grateful admiration. Last time he had been in the forest, with the English sailors, he had been helpless and starving; this time, with Madu, he would survive.

‘Tomorrow we follow the stream,’ said Madu quietly, in the darkness beside him. ‘Men are sure to live by stream, and we can fish.’

Tom listened to the soft suck and gurgle of dark water fifty yards or so to his right, running steadily east, under the great trees, to the coast. But that, he knew, was not the direction Madu meant. He wanted to go upstream.

‘Maybe the English are moored at the river's mouth,’ Tom said, hopefully. But he knew what the answer would be.

‘Maybe. But I think is a Spanish town.’

Again the vast, whispering silence; broken by the distant, coughing roar of a jaguar. Madu knew what Tom was thinking.

‘You go downstream if you want, Tom. But you go alone, and that way you get caught. I never get caught again, not by English nor Spanish. You choose.’

So the next day, and the next, they struggled slowly upstream. At first the going was slow; great 200-foot trees towered above them, enormous ferns and fat-leaved bushes on the forest floor barred their way. A wonderland of huge flowers and insects surrounded them - great yellow and red butterflies with wings as big as crows’; centipedes a foot long; and millions of little biting things. Once they met an army of ants, millions of insects working together, devastating everything in their path. When they stepped in it the ants swarmed up their legs. The boys escaped by hopping into a stream, howling and laughing as they slapped and cursed at the insects crawling up and down each other's bodies.

The ground grew steeper and rockier, and the smooth stream began to chatter and tumble over little waterfalls that gradually grew higher and higher until at last, a week or more after their escape, they stood, thin and weary, their limbs cut and bitten, their clothes ragged and torn with travel, at the foot of a tall column of water that poured hundreds of feet down through the clear air from the top of a green crag to a pool where its spray burst into a shower of a million rainbows in the sunlight.

For a long time they stood and stared, lost in weariness and wonder, enjoying the refreshing drift of spray over their skins, their ears stunned by the thunder of falling water. There was a fruit tree near the fall; they picked some and ate it, lazing gratefully on the soft grass.

‘There must be a fine view of the ocean from up there,’ said Tom, shouting slightly because of the noise. ‘If there are any English ships, maybe we shall see 'em.’

‘But how you know they are English?’ asked Madu mockingly. Even at the foot of the waterfall they could catch a glimpse of the sea, but it was too far away for a ship to seem more than a scrap of tiny white sail, if that.

‘Maybe if they attack the others?’suggested Tom, but it was a foolish, forlorn hope, no more.

‘Forget about the ships,’ said Madu irritated. ‘We're here now.’ He stood up, turned to face the waterfall ...

And saw the girls.

There were five of them, standing quite still by a rock at the foot of the waterfall, staring at Madu and Tom. They were all black, tall and young with long loose skirts and blouses like some of the female slaves in the Spanish towns; yet these had a fierce look of pride about them that no slave ever had.
This is our place
, the look said -
who are you?

After a long, steady stare during which Tom got slowly to his feet, the girls came forward across the grass, cautious, but unafraid. Two of them had bags of clothes slung from their shoulders; and the others had set down baskets by the rock.

‘We are friends,’ said Madu slowly, in the Mani language. ‘We have come to find the country of the Cimarrons.’

The girls spoke to each other in a language he did not understand. Then one, a tall girl with a narrow fine face and hair carefully plaited in little squares all over her head, stepped forward.

‘You are a slave boy, is it?’ she said awkwardly in Mani, searching for the words as though she had forgotten them. ‘But who be this Spanish one?’

‘He is not of the Spanish tribe. He is red-face of the English tribe, and was a slave also. He has escaped with me.’

More quick, puzzled, talk, during which Tom asked anxiously what they had said. But Madu ignored him.

‘There are no red-face in the land of the Cimarron. But it may be the English tribe are different. Will you come to the village?’

‘Yes. It is why we have come.’ Madu smiled; in part with pure relief that he had found the people he sought and that they seemed, at first sight, friendly; but also because of a sudden, inexplicable liking for this girl who spoke for them. He had seen girls - black girls of his own age - among the Spaniards, but like him they had been slaves, whose lives were not their own. The free, challenging look in this girl's eye reminded him of the jokes about girls he had shared with Temba; and reflected his own freedom to himself. Yet perhaps his feelings were a little too obvious, for the girl frowned at him and turned away, to lead the way to the village.

It was surprisingly near; less than a mile along a gentle, winding track through the trees. As he saw it, Madu felt a sudden, enormous sense of homesickness and loss, such as he had not known before, in all the tumult of his travels. For it was his own village, as similar as anything could be. Perhaps a little bigger, the ditch outside the thorn fence a little deeper, the arrangements of huts in streets a little more regular, like a Spanish town. But there was the Council Tree in the central square, with what looked like the Boys' House near it; the thatched huts with the colourful sleeping mats hanging outside, and the clusters of chicken and children and small dogs scurrying around the feet of women who sat spinning or weaving baskets quietly in the sun.

As the girls led them to the square, they were surrounded by young men with sharp spears and bows, who muttered and frowned ominously as they stared at Tom. But no-one touched them. In the shade of the Council Tree a group of older men were sitting, quietly talking, or mending bows and spears. They wore clothes that had clearly come from the Spaniards; but more loosely, in a way more adapted to the needs of life in the forest; and there was nothing Spanish about the fierce, black faces that watched them impassively as the girl explained where she had found them.

One, a tall, strong man with a wide, flat nose, a puckered scar on his cheek, and deep, hypnotic brown eyes, asked Madu a question in a language he did not understand. The sleeves of his yellow silk shirt were cut short, and Tom noticed the muscles ripple as he moved his arms.

The man repeated his question, this time in Spanish. ‘How did you know to find us here?’

‘We did not know,’ answered Madu steadily, aware that many eyes were searching for the slightest sign of a lie. ‘We knew only, that free men lived in the hills, so we followed the river to find them.’

‘Were you followed?’

‘No.’ Madu smiled as he remembered the long, arduous journey, in which he had rediscovered the skills of his manhood training. ‘We did not come the way the red-face would choose to follow.’

Several men laughed at this, and Madu felt a subtle, heady difference between them and the elders of his own tribe; a certain easy freedom, a lack of the restraints of tradition - or was it just that he had grown, and they saw him as a man like themselves, rather than a boy?

‘Yet one red-face came with you. Is he not Spanish?’