“Of course,” Serenummo adds, a nervous smile on his lips, “no one would ever actually do business with them — I mean sell them a slave. That would be too cruel,” he whispers, glancing sideways at Ned, “too cruel. A fate worse than death.”
At that moment a sudden sharp clamor swoops at them out of the utter desolation of the night. It is immediately succeeded by a bitter curse, a burst of grumbling and tooth gnashing, the rattle of asses’ hoofs. “Damn me if I didn’t bust me fookin’ leg just now. Goddamnit. Curse that son of a bitch Park and the cunt of a whore that give him suck.”
Smirke’s voice.
Serenummo rises quickly, pats Ned’s arm and slips off toward his master’s tent as the commotion draws nearer. A moment later Smirke staggers into the puddle of firelight, four hollow-cheeked stragglers beside him, their eyes narrowed with fever and fright. The flanks of their asses are stippled with blood, the muzzles white with foam. “Christ,” one of the men barks as he flings himself down beside the fire, “we was nearly eat alive back there!” Ned recognizes the man as Frair, a sack of bones and tired complaints, a real blue-ribbon whiner.
“Couldn’t go on no more,” adds another, weaving on his feet. “So we laid up by this big black tree and soon as the sun goes down these slinkin’ wolves come up — Jee-sus — sniffin’ at me feet they was.”
Smirke sits heavily beside Frair, glowering at Ned as if he were personally responsible for all their troubles, while the others — as drawn and dazed as survivors of a shipwreck — lurch off toward the tent, asses in tow. Without a word, Smirke leans forward and digs into the pot of rice and onions the explorer has put aside for latecomers. He eats with his hands, chewing noisily, grunting and belching, sucking the mucilaginous gop from his fingers like a big henna lion lapping at its paws. Frair ducks in behind him, a thin-faced little jackal snapping up the scraps.
Smirke has grown thinner over the past months, his bulk reduced by disease and exhaustion. Most of his twisted coppery hair has fallen out, and his skin, where it isn’t burned, is the color of tallow. He is still big, brawny and stupid — and hence dangerous — but he hasn’t given Ned much trouble in recent days. Ned, favored by Park with a lighter load, is generally near the front of the coffle, while Smirke, saddled with an extra ass and two thirds of the carpentry equipment, invariably brings up the rear. After a ten-hour march in the rain, Smirke just doesn’t seem to have the energy to settle his accounts.
Which is as it should be — because the time has come for Ned to settle his own. Forget that Smirke had beaten him lustily, stolen his hard-earned cash and ruined his chance with Fanny. Forget that he’d perjured himself to see Ned sent to the gallows those long years ago. It’s of no consequence.
What matters is that the madman is here, waiting his chance: it’s kill or be killed. Just three weeks back, as they were saddling their asses on a grim sodden morning, Smirke had come for him without provocation. It seemed the canvas girth had snapped in his hand as he attempted to tighten it, and his temper snapped along with it. Hulking and enraged, he kicked the ass, flung down the useless strap and threw himself on Ned. The attack was brutal, calculated to stun and kill. He hit Ned in the lower spine without warning, drove him forward into a shallow pool reeking of urine and forced his face down. If Park and Martyn hadn’t been on them in an instant, Ned would have drowned. As it was he got a lungful of fluid and a deep bone bruise that kept him stooped over for days. Smirke, raving and gibbering, had to be bound up like a bale of hay and slung across an ass’s back. “I’ll kill you for this, Rise!” he bellowed, again and again, till someone put a sock in his mouth.
Looking at him now, hunched over his meal like a slobbering beast, the close-set pig’s eyes gone dead with fatigue and malarial asthenia, Ned has an inspiration. He holds his breath till Smirke and Frair are snoring in unison, the two of them splayed out before the fire like hounds after a hunt, and then leans over Jemmie Bird to check for signs of consciousness. Bird is dead to the world. Heart slipping, throat dry, Ned checks the priming pan of his musket and slips Jemmie’s pistol into his belt. Then tiptoes away from the campfire, gradually melding with the shadows back of the tents. “Hsssst,” he calls. No response. He tries again. Still nothing. And then, thin as a bristle, the call comes back.
The Maniana are there, fragments of the darkness. He can smell them — sweat and grease and the musk of some wild animal — a smell that startles him with its pungency and pervasiveness, a smell that dredges up ancient racial memories, at once atavistic and sematic. Then he sees them, grinning, their teeth hanging in the emptiness as if independent of jaws and faces. As they draw closer he backs toward the circle of firelight, the musket leveled at the nearest set of sharp gleaming teeth.
They emerge from the shadows as if from a pool, the dark sucking back at them. There are five of them, young and lean and wild-eyed. The smell grabs at his stomach. He motions them forward, and the nearest savage, the one with the cobra-head necklace, edges closer. Ned points down at the sleeping Smirke. “Trade?” he says in Mandingo. The cannibal looks down appraisingly at the big sunburned man, and then glances up at Ned. His teeth seem to champ and he snatches at his shoulders to suppress a tremor of anticipation. Suddenly his face becomes a question, a prayer, and he holds up three fingers.
Ned is puzzled at first. . and then it hits him. He’s asking if all three are for sale — Bird and Frair as well as Smirke. One of the others has come forward now, lean and hungry-looking, peering down at the sleeping men like a housewife at the poulterer’s. No, Ned motions emphatically, and holds up a single finger before pointing again to Smirke. The first man looks a bit disappointed, the wolfish grin flickering momentarily, but then the second says something, sharp and flat, and both nod their heads quickly, like carrion birds dipping into a carcass: it’s a deal.
Ned watches from the shadows as the five silently bind the slumbering Smirke with hemp cords, wrapping him like a mummy. When they’ve got him secure, the man in the cobra-head necklace slaps the big whiskered face awake, simultaneously plugging the pink bud of the blooming mouth with a wedge of cotton and beeswax. Smirke struggles against the cords as they haul him off, trussed like a pig, a string of mad protestations and cries for help mired deep in his throat. “Mmmmmmmm,” he grunts, “mmmmmmmmm,” as if he were sitting down to a candlelit supper.
Electrified, Ned has drifted closer, fatally drawn like moth to taper, until he catches himself with a jolt — if he doesn’t watch it he’ll wind up in the pot alongside Smirke. Suddenly Cobra-head whirls round, one eye twitching, lips pulled back in a lewd unholy grin, the grin of one conspirator to another. Ned flinches as the savage holds out his hand. The smell of him, this close, is unbearable: Ned wants to tear his clothes off, run whooping through the trees, drink blood. There is something in the Maniana’s hand, a black leather purse, small and smooth as a pear. Take it, he gestures, dipping his head and extending his arm. Ned reaches out for the soft black bag, wondering, and then realizes with a rush of giddy joy that this is his payment — Judas Iscariot — and he laughs deep in his head as he slips the bag into his pocket. He feels evil, powerful, exhilarated. A partner to demons and devils and things of the night.
He steps forward and looks Smirke square in the eye. The big man lies there like a whiskered baby, his mouth squawling against the gag, neck craning, arms drawn tight to the body as if swaddled in linen. Tendons ripple in his jaw, his throat swells with wasted breath. And the eyes: beating wildly from face to face, stark and terrorized, until they settle on Ned with a look of wrath and hatred and utter hopelessness. Ned responds with a wink, snapping a hand to the side of his head and waving a pair of fingers like an old maid seeing a crony off at the docks. And then, slow as the sun rising over the hills, the corners of his mouth begin to lift, in a smirk.