The Call of Zulina (19 page)

“iOjalá! iQué lástima!”
Antonio exclaimed. “The door to the tunnel … it has been bolted from the outside! We are locked in. All of us!”

Udobi, still hysterical, was now at the foot of the stairs. Kwate jumped forward and grabbed her arm, but she wrested herself from his grasp. He grabbed again at her withered, fleshless body, and then he picked her up in his arms.

Just at that moment the door flew open. A deafening explosion shook the dungeon and filled it with blinding smoke.

Then silence. Terrible silence.

On the wooden landing by the open door, Lingongo stood with a smoking musket clutched in her hands. At the bottom of the stairs, crumpled together on the floor, lay Kwate and Udobi. A bright red pool oozed from under them and slowly spread out across the rough stones.

A universal gasp enveloped the dungeon. Everyone stood still and gaped, too horrified to move. Everyone except Tungo. He sprang to his feet, musket in hand, and returned the gunfire. Although his musket ball missed Lingongo completely, it knocked a large chunk out of the stone wall next to her head, which was far too close for her comfort.

“Lock them in!” Lingongo bellowed in fury as she ducked out through the open door.

The door banged shut behind her, and the iron bolt clanged into place.

A shocked silence fell over the dungeon.

But Lingongo was not through yet.

“Grace!” she called from the other side of the grate. “We saw you in there. We saw that you were walking free.”

The room swam in front of Grace's eyes, and she reached out to steady herself on the slippery stones of the wall.

“Do you hear me?” Lingongo demanded. “You are not bound and you are not chained. You could get out of there if you wanted to. So I ask you, Grace, which side are you on?”

Grace stepped away from the wall and forced her feet to move forward, one step after the other, until she stood directly under the wooden doorway landing. Her heart pounded so fast and so hard, she had to gasp for breath. Her hand throbbed with more pain than she had suffered since that first horrible day.

“Ye ain’t one o’ ’em, Grace.”

It was Joseph's voice now.

“Ye's a lady, ye is. Them's nothin’ but worthless savages in there. Jist slaves. We's goin’ to kill the lot o’ ’em, jist as they deserves. String ’em up by they necks, we will. So ye come on out o’ there right now, girl! Ye ’ear me, Grace?”

Grace would not look at the others. She didn’t dare meet anyone else's eyes. Not just then.

“Your time has come to an end!” Lingongo called. “What will it be—them or us? Slaves who kidnapped you, or your mother and father?”

Grace was well acquainted with the sound of rage in her mother's voice, but for the first time in her life, it failed to strike a panicked frenzy in her heart. Every part of Grace's existence had already been devoured by fear. Fear lurked in the carved mahogany furniture and the brocade settees of the London house. It hid behind the baobab tree where the chiefs are buried and the road divides and goes in two directions. It masqueraded as a smile on Jasper Hathaway's jowly face just as terrifyingly as it prowled the shadows and dungeons of Zulina. Yes, Grace was well acquainted with fear. So she took a deep breath and let her mother rage and threaten. For once in her life, Grace—and not her fears—would do the deciding.

“Speak!” Lingongo demanded. “I will wait no longer!”

Grace looked around her—at Oyo, her beautiful face streaked with tears. At Safya, who still clutched the terrified boy forced into this horrible place, nameless and unwanted. And at the men, clustered together as one, their eyes fixed on her, waiting for her answer. Then she looked down at Udobi and Kwate at her feet, the withered old woman almost hidden in the embrace of the powerful young man. She looked up at Ikem who stood over the two of them, paralyzed in grief, his feet soaked in their blood.

Grace lifted her face, and her eyes flashed defiantly. “I am not a proper English lady, Father! And I am not an African princess, Mother!” she said. Then in a voice clear and strong, a voice that did not belie the tears in her eyes, she proclaimed, “But neither am I a slave!”

“Do not waste any more of my time with your idle prattle!” Lingongo commanded. “Make your choice! Will you come home and face your punishment, or will you stay here with these worthless slaves?”

“I will stay!” Grace answered. “And I, too, will be free!”

Lingongo's rage roiled within her. “You will not be free!” she exploded. “I will crush you under my foot like a troublesome insect. You will hang by your neck from the gates of Zulina. And when you do, there will not be one person, African or white, who will mourn you!”

Outside the door, Joseph, his face deathly pale, whispered to no one in particular, “I brung me daughter up to be a fine English lady, I did! I brung ’er up to marry me a gentl’man o’ class.”

Through clenched teeth, Lingongo hissed, “That daughter of yours, Admiral Joseph Winslow, with her haughty ways and fancy clothes, is no fine lady. And she certainly is no African princess. I will whip the faded flesh from her scrawny back. Then I will heat your branding iron to white hot. Since Grace has chosen to be a slave, a slave is how she will die.”

T
he dungeon reeked of gunpowder and of death. Grace had grown accustomed to the foul stink of human misery, but this new stench was far worse. It was the smell of finality—the smell of hopelessness.

Grace slumped back against the wall and slowly sank to the floor. The finely woven silvery filigreed ferns that had made her blue day dress a matter of such pride to Joseph Winslow snagged and ripped as the silver threads scraped against the rough stones, but Grace could have cared less. She hated this dress. She hated every piece of fancy European clothes she had ever worn. Not only were they tight and uncomfortable, but it humiliated her to wear them. No wonder people stared at her with such contempt! No wonder they assumed she was just another one of their detested oppressors!

In the aftermath of Lingongo's murderous attack, the dungeon echoed in a cacophony of despair. The boy Hola's howls could not be quieted despite Safya's attempts to cajole him and soothe his fears. Ikem's wails and chants rose and fell as he rocked his dead wife in his arms. Beneath those howls and wails hummed Oyo's soft sobs
—
the beautiful one, whose soul was broken in two.

And without letup, from the men's corner, increasingly bitter arguments jarred through the cries of sadness and loss.

“We need time to gather our people!” Cabeto insisted. “Then we will break through the tunnel and swim to shore. Make a way where there is no path, then go on to our homes in the village to gather strength and numbers. White men cannot follow us if we leave here on the blackest night with no moon to give light to them.”

“No!” Tungo argued. “We do not have time to wait! I say we use the guns we have—kill them all before they kill us! First the lioness and then the white trader. Then all the other white men we can find—kill them one by one—and then the
slattees
who do their bidding as dogs serve their masters. Their bodies will warn other white men who think they can make us their slaves!”

“You speak, but you do not think,” Cabeto argued. “Few cannot stand against many. Before we could kill them, we would all be dead.”

“Then we will die heroes!” Tungo shot back.

Other voices rushed in … angry voices. Argue, argue, and argue some more, until Grace could stand it no longer.

Grace stifled her desire to scream. She cradled her aching head between her good hand and her throbbing, injured hand, and clamped her mouth tight. Oh, how tired she was of all the arguments! What good did it accomplish, anyway? Not one single bit! They were all still locked in the dungeon. Only there were fewer of them now because two were dead.

Why did it have to be Kwate? Of all the men in the dungeon, he was the kindest, the most gentle. He spoke with a voice of reason the way Cabeto did. If Kwate had not been killed, he and Cabeto could have stood together against Tungo.

And why Udobi? All she wanted was peace—even if it meant a lifetime as a slave. Right now she should be sitting in front of her mud hut, stirring a pot of millet porridge as she watched her grandchildren at play. It made no sense! But then, nothing made sense anymore.

Grace wondered whether the harmattan winds had stopped blowing yet. She couldn’t tell through the stone walls, of course. But maybe when the winds finally stilled, maybe when the sand settled and no longer darkened the sun, maybe then her world would regain its reason. Maybe, if any reason continued to exist.

The huddled men were too busy trying to outyell each other, to see who could shake his fist highest and hardest, to notice when Ikem stopped his chant and gently laid his woman on the floor. But Grace noticed.

Slowly, deliberately, Ikem pulled himself up to his full height. Then he turned to the huddled men and spoke in his rumble of a voice.

“No more!” Ikem ordered with such authority that everyone immediately fell silent. “Look what your guns do to my woman! The white man and the lioness now see what strength we have. Now they know for certain what we can do. Everything, they already know it all. They be no surprise arrows left in our quivers.”

Ikem strode over to Antonio. “You, please,” he implored. “You say to the white man no more have to die. Say we be good slaves to them. Then they be good masters to us. You say that to them. Make them understand.”

With an outburst of fury, angry voices broke out again. But this time they were aimed at Ikem.

“Sit down, Old Grandfather!” Gamka ordered with a sneer. “Stay with your grief, but do not give us advice. Your words are foolishness!”

Cabeto turned on Gamka and demanded, “What is happening to us? Are we becoming like them? We have among us a lord of the earth, an old man. And you will show him respect!” Yet when he spoke to Ikem, Cabeto's voice remained respectfully firm. “Good or bad, we will not be slaves, my father. Good or bad, we will allow no one to be master over us!”

“Five men alone, they cannot fight the
—
” Ikem began.

“Five
warriors
!” Gamka bellowed as he lunged forward.

Tungo, right beside him, exclaimed, “Five
angry
warriors who refuse to live as slaves!”

Antonio joined in, and Sunba, and Cabeto, too, until Ikem's single voice was drowned out by a whole new torrent of angry words. In the midst of the wave of passion, Grace stood up. At first she swayed unsteadily, but she planted her feet and willed herself to stand firm. “You do not have just five men,” she announced.

The arguments faded as all eyes turned to Grace.

“You have five men and
one woman
.”

Fading sunlight fell through the grate and cast a slanted beam down the wall, directly across Grace's face. She stood proud with her head held high and looked for all the world like a royal princess of a noble people. The sun lit up the natural golden fire sprinkled through her hair. Surely her grandfather, king of the most powerful nation on the African coast, would have been proud.

“Five men and
two
women!” said another voice, this time from behind Grace. It was Safya. She, too, rose to her feet and held herself tall and proud and confident.

“Three women.” Oyo turned her tear-stained face to Grace. Had the room not fallen so silent, her soft voice might never have been heard. But in the hush of amazement, it rang sweet and clear.

Next to Safya, the boy slowly rose to his feet. In a voice still a bit shaky, he said, “And me, the one you call Hola—
the boy who can save.
You have me too.”

“Nine of us! One for each gun, and one more to hand around the gunpowder!” Tungo roared as he leaped jubilantly into the air. “Now we
will
fight! And we will keep up the fight until every last bit of our gunpowder is gone!”

“Even then we will not stop!” exclaimed Gamka. “Not as long as one of us still has breath!”

Ikem's shoulders sagged as though a heavy sack had been thrown onto his aged back, and he stumbled back to where Udobi lay. “I not mourn for my woman only,” he said with a sigh. “My chants be for us all. For now we be all dead.” Once again he sank to his knees at his wife's side. Once again he raised his head. A long, mournful cry poured forth from deep within him. Then his cry formed into words, and the words became chants that he repeated again and again and again. No one raised a voice of protest, and no one moved away.