HF - 01 - Caribee (51 page)

But she had not died, and had instead been thrown into the bo
tt
om of a canoe. When? Yesterday? There it was. Yesterday morning, because in the interim there had been darkness, just as there had been unending motion, up and down and occasionally from side to side, and sheets of spray which had come flying over the bows of the canoe to sca
tt
er across the oarsmen and their captive, to drench her hair and back, and leave her gown stiff with salt.

She lay on her face, pillowed on her arms. Why her? Or had they taken other captives? The Caribs did not take captives, except . . . her stomach welled up into her throat. But she had already vomited all she could on the turbulent sea crossing. She could do no more than retch, as her brain seemed to coagulate with horror, and the fingers returned, to seize her arms and pull her to her knees.

The canoe was tilted on its side, and she was rolled out on to the sand. She lay on her back and gasped for air, and stared at the savage, grinning faces above and around her. A day and a night, and it was again dawn. They must have come a considerable distance. But without even ge
tt
ing up, she knew where she was, where she had to be. The colonists of Antigua lived on a single legend, the horror island of Dominica.

The man was back, the cacique. He was not tall, but his face seemed even harsher and grimmer than those of his companions, perhaps because there was more intelligence directing the bi
tt
er stare from the black eyes. He wore a necklace of human teeth, and his genitals were protected by a pouch secured round his waist. Apart from that he wore no clothes, and his only weapon was a spear. Now, without warning, he grinned at her and drove the spear downwards. She gasped, unable to move because of the terror which gripped her limbs. Her breath only slowly left her body as the sharpened wooden point bit into the sand next to her left shoulder.

'War-nah woman,' the cacique said. He withdrew the spear and brought it down again, slowly, reversing it as he did so, to direct the blunt bu
tt
into her belly. It rested on her naval. 'War-nah woman, shout.'

The bu
tt
pressed and she gasped again, and a
tt
empted to sit up, hands clasping the haft. But still it pressed, and she screamed as he wished, only a thin sound, but satisfactory. He grinned, and the paralysing pain was withdrawn. Aline rolled on her side, clutching her stomach, watched another canoe coming into the beach and more
Indian
s get out, saw Yarico being dragged towards her. Yarico? She wanted to shout
with
joy. Yarico. She was not alone.

The men holding Yarico gave her a push, and she landed on her hands and knees next to Aline. But she only glanced at the white girl, so apparently bemused was she to see the cacique. 'Wapisiane?' she whispered.

The
Indian
grinned again, and spoke in his own language. Yarico listened, all the character seeming to drain from her face as she stared at him. There would be no strength here, to be used as a prop, Aline realized, and realized too, in that moment, just how much she, and every one else in Antigua, had relied on Yarico's strength.

A third canoe had grounded, and from it was
taken a third captive, Hal Leam
ing, who had been left in command of the se
tt
lement while Edward was away. He was bruised and ba
tt
ered, and also plainly terrified, stumbling across the sand towards them, but Aline hardly saw him. Edward. Edward would have returned to English Harbour by now. He would have found the bodies of his children, sca
tt
ered on the beach, and with them the bodies of his colonists. Something he was used to. So, what would he do? Edwar
d Warner, the pragma
tist? He would turn to with patient resignation, and rebuild his colony. Only that way lay ultim
ate success. Would he spare a th
ought for his wife? A thought, certainly; she was sure of
that
. But nothing more. She was gone, and he must expect her to be dead, long before he could ever regain her, even if such a dream were remotely possible. But he had already spelled out his philosophy in that regard, on the beach when confronted with O'Reilly's Irishmen. She was but a single life, and must be set against the chance, no, the certainty, of losing many other lives. To chase behind her was not the act of a sensible man, of a colonial governor with responsibility for so many people, and above ah, that was not the act of a Warner.

Wapisiane had moved away, and the fingers were back, dragging her to h
er feet, beside Yarico and Leam
ing.

'Oh Christ,' Leam
ing mu
tt
ered. 'Oh, Christ. Why, mistress Yarico? Why us?"

'Bad,' Yarico agreed. 'For eat.'

'Oh, Christ,'
Leaming
said. 'Oh, Christ. I could not stand it. I could not. ...'

A push between the shoulder blades with the blunt end of a Spear sent him staggering forward. Yarico followed, and Aline came last. She raised her head and looked around her. Alone. She would die alone. There would be no companionship to be found from either
Leaming
or Yarico. They counted themselves already dead, and no doubt were wise to do so. But she ... to contemplate what might be happening to her within the hour would be to go mad. She must live for the moment, for every second a
s it passed. She must believe in
her own survival, up to the moment the knife sliced through her bu
tt
ock. For
that
was how it began. How often had they terrified themselves like silly children around
their
safe campfires with tales of Carib custom and cruelty.

She gazed at the mountains and the forest, in a profusion she would not have supposed possible. The sun was now starting to top the peaks
them
selves, and stream across the empty sea behind them. The mountains rose hi front of her mid on either side of her, for although they had left the beach only minutes ago
they
were already climbing. And th
ese peaks would clearly dwarf even Mount Misery. Yet they were green. And damp in a way St Ki
tt
s and Antigua had never been damp. There was water everywhere, gathering on leaf and rushing down in a series of rivulets towards the sea. Here was a unique land, In the context of these islands. A land where white men dared not come, where the
Indian
held sway.

They climbed, up and then down. The water did li
tt
le to alleviate the heat, and they steamed; perspiration gathered on
their
foreheads and trickled out from their hair, rolled down
their
legs to meet the water which had already accumulated on their calves and ankles. Her gown and her pe
tt
icoat—she thanked God she wore only a single undergarment, like most of the colonists' women—had become a soaked mass, clinging to her flesh. But she could also thank God for the hardening process she had undergone in the forest of St Ki
tt
s during the Spanish campaign, for here was a country of a hardness and unevenness she had never experienced. There seemed no end. Whenever they topped a rise there was another peak rising in front of them, and between it and them there was always a deep, stony valley into which they must descend, slipping and sliding, urged onwards by their cat-footed captors.

Until, without warning, after they had walked perhaps five miles, their breaths were swept away in an appalling stench which rose from out of the earth before them. They were descending from another hilltop, crawling over fallen tree trunks and pushing damp branches and leaves from their faces, but now they checked, to look down at the valley beneath them, where the trees and
the bushes ended to leave noth
ing but a wide, long swathe of bare rock and stunted scrub, punctuated by steaming pools of water and even a rushing stream, also sending vapour into the air, while on the far side of the valley a much greater mass of steam could be seen exploding into the morning.

'By Christ,'
Leaming
mu
tt
ered, his terror momentarily forgo
tt
en.
' 'Tis sulphur. We are on the li
p of a volcano.'

'Valley of dead,' Yarico said.

A spear bu
tt
thudded between Aline's shoulder blades and she stumbled forward. They descended the hillside and into the desolated valley, marching between the streams, careful to avoid the boiling water. The heat was intense, unlike anything she had ever experienced before, and she could almost feel her flesh beginning to blister, while breathing was ever more difficult. But the valley was, after all, no more
than
a half a mile long, and soon
enough they emerged into the th
ick forest on the far side, and within minutes after this, reached the clearing of the Carib village.

And here, whatever terrors, whatever discomforts, they might have experienced earlier, were very rapidly forgo
tt
en in the horror of their present. The tribe had anticipated their coming, and now surged around them with shouts and peals of wild laughter, tearing at their clothes, prodding and pinching at their bodies, stroking their faces and pulling their hair. A woman brought a gourd of water, and Aline reached for it with relief, but this was not the Carib way. Her arms and shoulders were seized and she was forced to her knees, while her hair was pulled to drag her head backwards, and the water was emptied on to her face, to the accompaniment of more peals of wild laughter. It clogged her eyes and nostrils, and only a li
tt
le got down her parched throat. She shook her head to clear her breathing, and gazed at Hal
Leaming
, Stripped naked, and secured to a stake not fifty feet from where she knelt, the rope pressed round his wrists and neck as she had so often heard described, his body held upright, his feet free and able to move, and
they
did as he twisted to and fro, and she watched his mouth opening and closing, but it was impossible to hear what he was saying because of the din around her. She closed her eyes, and kept them closed, and heard a scream and then
another
, and forced her lids ever tighter together, and
breath
ed, and gasped, and was then jerked to her feet again by hands on her shoulders,
with
such force
that
her eyes flopped open.

But
Leaming
was dead, his body a ta
tt
ered skeleton, coming closer as she was thrust forward. Oh, God, she thought. But it can only have lasted a fe
w seconds. Less than that. Oh, G
od, she thought, give me courage, for those few seconds. I do not wish to scream and beg. Oh, God.

There was another stake, set only a few feet from the first, and to this she was marched. Her arms we
re held wide while her cloth
es were torn from her body, cut free with sharp knives wherever knot or pad would have restricted the tugging fingers. But to be thus humiliated and manhandled seemed irrelevant at this moment. She was aware of some relief at losing the sweat-sodden garments, and even a momentary feeling of coolness before the heat of the
sun mid the naked bodies pressin
g close had her panting again.
Then her arms were dragged beh
ind her back and secured, and her shoulders touched the stake. Another cor
d was being passed round her throat, an
d dragged tighter
than
she had expected, so that she had to stand on tiptoe to prevent herself being strangled. And now, without warning, there was a puff of breeze, which blew her hair in a cloud across her face, and left it there for a few precious seconds, shu
tt
ing out all the horror around her, before dying to allow the strands to drift back onto her shoulders.

Now, if ever, was the time to close her eyes. But now she could not. She gazed at the men surrounding her, shouting and screaming, waving knives and shells, and gourds, to catch her blood. They surged right up to her, pulled the hair on her head and the hair on her body, squeezed her belly and her breasts; she tensed her muscles against the coming cut which would be the signal for her destruction, and stared at them with as much resolution as she could manage, and discovered that she was still alive. Yet still they danced around her, driving thought from her br
ain with their maddening cacaph
ony. And still the terrifying cadaver that had been Hal
Leaming
hung to the stake only a few feet away. Were they trying to make her scream, as they had made him scream? Were
they
, after all, only children?

Edward had told her, often enough, about the Caribs. 'They are not cannibals,' he had said, 'for the love of human flesh. It is almost a religious act, with them. They eat the flesh of a conquered enemy to obtain his strength, his speed, his brain, perhaps. For instance, you will never hear of a woman being eaten. Why should
they
, when
they
would expect to obtain
nothing
of value from her?"