“Squibb!” shouted Cringle. “If you do that again, you pig, I’ll make you sleep below, or on the other side of the ship!”
“Pardon me, sir, but that’s Nature, yuh know. A man shouldn’t keep it inside, and that. ’Tain’t healthy, me wife Maud used to say. It’s bad for the heart, she says. Why, when we first got married Maud usta say—”
“I don’t care what she said! I’m not your bloody wife, man!”
“Aye”—he winked my way—“thank God fer that.”
Quietly, under his breath, Cringle repeated one of his Scriptural passages, then rolled over and slept, as did Squibb, flat on his back with his parrot on his belly, like a sea gull atop a whale in a tropical current.
Next day I joined them in the landing party that went ashore. The Republic lay at anchor a distance of ten cables from the fort, with McIntosh at the helm, and slip ropes on her cables, the ship ready to spread canvas and sail if for some reason Bogha betrayed us. By the time the last Allmuseri caravan arrived it was full dark. A balmy night. Squibb and I bloated ourselves on beer in the town square, tossed coins to beggars crippled at birth by their parents to make them better panhandlers, and watched one turbaned harem girl whose figure and veiled face filled me with such longing that I felt as if my life’s blood splashed to the ground each time she sashayed by, so fascinating was this girl, and so long had I felt coltish and unwillingly celibate at sea. I knew my hungry gaze must have burned her, for her brown fingers, long and thin with bones frail as a bird’s, gently brushed my hand the fourth and fifth times she refilled my mug. By that time my heart was bouncing off my ribs, and I barely saw two African boys sprint past us, announcing the approach of a caravan from the interior. I stood, felt unsteady, then sat again, hearing gunshots from afar. Behind us the fort’s many guns replied, so thunderously the air shook. Abruptly, all was confusion. Cries went out from every merchant. From every bazaar the coffle’s arrival was cheered. I looked around for the lass, but she was gone. I stood to see better. Squibb yanked me back to my seat.
“Better yuh keep your noodle down, Illinois.” He was instantly sober, his grip on me tight as a winch. “Or yuh’ll be sold too. Stolen right off ship, I’m sayin’, and pressed into a gang. It’s happened before.” He tugged a little at my sleeve. “These blokes don’t know you’re a sailor. And they don’t care.”
He needn’t have told me twice. I squeezed back a little into the shadows, watching Bogha’s servants light palm-oil lamps atop the fort’s walls. Cautiously I eased back into the crowd to see better, sweat streaming inside my blouse, puddling at the back of my spine above my belt. I sighted Cringle off to one side and, sidling up behind him, caught him talking to himself, tapping his chin with his pipestem and appraising the Allmuseri tribesmen shackled in twos at their ankles. As I’d heard, they were a remarkably old people. About them was the smell of old temples. Cities lost when Europe was embryonic. Looking at them, at their dark skin soft as black leather against knee-length gowns similar to Greek chitons, you felt they had run the full gamut of civilized choices, or played through every political and social possibility and now had nowhere to go. A tall people, larger even than Watusi; their palms were blank, bearing no lines. No fingerprints. But all Allmuseri, I had been told, had a second brain, a small one at the base of their spines. A people so incapable of abstraction no two instances of “hot” or “cold” were the same for them, this hot porridge today being so specific, unique, and bound to the present that it had only a nominal resemblance to the hot porridge of yesterday. Physically, they seemed a synthesis of several tribes, as if longevity in this land had made them a biological repository of Egyptian and sub-Saharan eccentricities or — in the Hegelian equation — a clan distilled from the essence of everything that came earlier. Put another way, they might have been the Ur-tribe of humanity itself. I’d never seen anyone like them. Or felt such antiquity in the presence of others; a clan of Sphaeriker. Indeed, what I felt was the presence of countless others in them, a crowd spun from everything this vast continent had created.
Past the barbican to the broad piazza of the receiving house, Ahman-de-Bellah, a froglike, vast-bearded Arab who was notorious for drawing out the brains of his enemies with an iron hook, herded the Allmuseri to stand before Bogha and Captain Falcon, who met Bellah with the cracking-fingers greeting of the coast. There, off to one side of the trees, his people put up their tents, then forced the Allmuseri toward the warehouses.
“Poor bastards,” said Cringle, seeing me squeezing my fists and unable to swallow. “Their villages were destroyed by famine.” He banged his large calabash pipe on the Bible he carried, bound in pressed pigskin, to shake loose the dottle. “Ahman-de-Bellah took them without a fight. Their rivers dried up. The drought’s lasted a decade, I believe, which means they’ll never survive the voyage back, if that’s what you’re wondering. The skipper won’t find three in ten healthy enough to spend two months in the hold. Better,” said he, “to be dead in a ditch than in their shoes.”
“Peter, what’s happening on ship?”
“How do you mean?”
“The captain, he gave me a talk I cannot untangle. He asks me to help him—”
The mate shook his head two, three times. “Stay away from him, Rutherford. He’s mad”—Cringle touched two fingers to his left temple—“and if you hope to see New Orleans again, the best thing is to separate yourself from Falcon now.” The muscles around his eyes knotted. “He will sink this ship and take us with him. He doesn’t want to return. Did you know that? That’s why he goes to sea. Haven’t you noticed how nothing is ever right for him? How even when he jokes, it is a jeering kind of humor? No one knows this, but he’s been married thirty years and he still plays with himself. His wife, Molly, a beldam if ever there was one, makes him wash his hands and dingus before they fornicate. She picks her nose when they make love, she’s that bored. Little wonder he doesn’t want to return to her. When she is angry, I hear, she sews all his clothing together. In their wedding portrait, which I have seen, she is thin enough to be a model for El Greco. Now she’s dumpled enough to pose for Peter Paul Rubens. And that’s the least of his complaints about life. He is vain. And therefore self-pitying. And vicious, lad. He keeps a list of personal affronts, insults and abuses he’s received, or believes he’s received, and dates them — he reviews them when he’s drunk, keeps them alive, and always watches for a man’s weaknesses once he’s signed on. He knows mine is Tommy, that I cannot stand his treatment of the boy.” Cringle stood pitched forward as if in a stiff wind, a habit he’d formed at sea. “Out there, on the ocean, in Africa, or during some ’adventure,’ he hopes something will do for him what he cannot do himself.”
“Then you’re saying we won’t get home?”
“Not with what he’s bringing aboard.”
“The Allmuseri?”
“No,” said Cringle, “the other thing. .”
“What?”
“I don’t know what it is! It has no name. All I know is that it belongs to the Allmuseri and has no business in our world.” He looked away, out toward the distant ships whose dactyloid masts favored a dark stretch of winter trees on the water, then away again. Ever since we’d come ashore he had been twitchy as a squirrel. So tense any clock he came close to ran, by my reckoning, forty seconds faster. “Are you with me and the few of our chaps who stand against him?”