The Call of Zulina (29 page)

Although Tungo joined the others, his voice was neither pleasant nor cheerful. Grace looked at the laughing, cheering people, and wondered,
Am I the only one to hear the harsh, brittle edge to Tungo's voice? Can no one else detect the cutting bite of his comments?

It wasn’t only that Tungo seethed every time the others called Cabeto “chief.” The real problem was that he knew the same thing Grace knew—that the day to celebrate was not yet here. Danger had hit from one side—the smaller point on the folded cloth message from Mama Muco. But what about the longer point? What about the greater danger?

Oh, Mama, if only you could tell us more!

With all the dancing and singing, no one noticed Grace stand up and ease along the wall. No one saw her slip out through the broken dungeon door and into the rubble-strewn passageway. According to Oyo, who kept careful count, twenty-three of their number had perished. Hola was not among them.

Grace stumbled through the broken stones and entered the next cell. Blessedly, it was empty. The noise of the celebration made her head throb, and she longed to be alone for a while. She cleared a space for herself in a far corner, sat down, and leaned back against a sagging wooden crossbeam. The walls were blessedly cool, and when she rested with her head back and allowed her eyes to drift closed, she dreamed of mango groves … of a small black and brown gazelle with a white flick of a tail … of sweet potato fields seared black by a roaring fire … of a new silk taffeta dress stained with innocent blood.

“Sunba!”

Grace started at the sound of so urgent a whisper just outside the door.

“I come to make a deal with you.”

Shaking the dreams from her head, Grace looked around in confusion. Where exactly was she?

“It is you who are the strong one. We can all see that.”

Tungo! It was his voice she heard. She was certain of it.

“You are the wise one, Sunba. Why is it, then, that your brother takes the place that should rightfully belong to you?”

The deadly attack … the celebration … her throbbing head … her desperation to get away. Yes, it was all coming back. Grace could still hear the shouts and the songs—even the sound of the makeshift drums—as they drifted from the next cell. Perhaps it was time for her to go back and join the others.

“Do not accuse me of wanting to be chief,” Tungo was saying. “No, I want only what will set us free and what will keep us alive. But here is what I think, Sunba. The two of us together will be best for everyone. You are the strongest and the bravest man here. You proved that many times over. And I have the experience. Together you and me, Sunba—together we can defeat the white oppressors!”

Grace was already halfway to her feet, but at the sound of Tungo's urgent voice so close by, she thought better of it and sank back to the floor. What choice did she have? She pulled herself as far into the corner as possible and listened.

“Cabeto is my brother,” Sunba answered.

“We are all brothers,” Tungo responded. “Is that not true?”

“Cabeto is the son of my father,” Sunba persisted.

Evidently, Sunba walked away because Tungo called out, “We will talk again, Sunba!”

But he was met by silence.

Grace waited until she was certain Tungo had left and then returned to the dungeon. No one seemed to have missed her. Antonio, who was taking stock of their dwindling supplies, announced that the bean pot was already empty. Two men hefted it through the open door to the tunnel, and it clattered all the way down until it crashed into the wooden barrier at the bottom. The boiled meat was also gone.

There has been way too much celebratory eating!
Grace thought with rising frustration.

“Many vegetables … plenty of dried fish … some bread,” Antonio reported. “And that cheese the Dutchman brought.”

“Huh,” Safya scoffed. “Africans do not eat white man's cheese!”

Someone from the other side of the room shot back, “Depends on how hungry we get.”

Antonio said no more, but it wasn’t difficult to read the look on his face. With so many hungry people, the meager stores would not last long.

Questions whirled through Grace's head. There were so many things she wanted explained. But in the end, she asked only the one question that troubled her most: “Antonio, why was Lingongo waiting for the Dutchman at the end of the tunnel?”

Antonio laid down the muskets he was counting and looked up at her.
“Es una buena pregunta, señorita,”
Antonio said. “A very good question. I, too, have asked it—
muchas veces.”

Tungo and Sunba walked in just in time to hear Grace's question.

“The lioness is cunning,” Tungo said. “Surely she followed him and then lay in wait for his return.”

“Seems to me the Dutchman was cunning too,” Grace said. “Too cunning to fall into such a simple trap.”

“Sí,”
Antonio agreed. “And he was careful,
también.
I do not believe she could have followed him.”

“What then?” Cabeto asked.

“The lioness must have known the Dutchman would be there,” Antonio said solemnly. “If that is true, there is only one way she could have known—only from one of us.”

The room fell silent.

Grace's face burned hot as all eyes turned in her direction. How Grace wanted to stand up and scream out her innocence! She would pour out the sad tale of her poor Bondo, served up on a porcelain platter because Lingongo thought him useless and because it was to her parents’ advantage that she marry the snake Jasper Hathaway, even though it meant she would have to spend the rest of her life beating him off with a stick. How she longed to shout that Yao was wrong, that she was no longer a slave in the London house because she dared to climb over Joseph Winslow's stone wall, because she followed the narrow road away from the baobab tree up to Zulina. She wanted to scream out that she could be safely in the library of her parents’ house right now, surrounded by her books, instead of here in this dreary dungeon waiting to die. That she could have been an English lass and not an African slave. She wanted to scream that she had chosen to be one of them!

Grace's mouth was open to say all this. But as she looked around her, from one person to another, all her fair-minded arguments died within her. Who was she to lecture these people—these men and women and little ones who had been ripped away from their burning villages, who had been forced to watch in helpless horror as their families were torn away from them and killed or shipped to faraway countries? These people who had been shackled and bound in chains, and whose backs bore the scars of her own parents’ cruel whips? What did Grace possibly have to say to these people about suffering?

So she closed her mouth and kept her peace. “One of us is the betrayer,” Tungo stated. “I will make it my job to find out which one. And when I do—”

Tungo unsheathed his knife and flashed it in the waning beam of sunlight. Then with one vicious movement, he plunged it deep into the corner wooden beam.

“E
venin', Mr. Hathaway,” Tom Pitts said. “You kin go on down t' the house. Jist follow the cobblestone path.”

“I know the way!” Hathaway snapped.

Tom Pitts and Henry Taylor stood guard at the front gate in the wall around the Winslow compound. Each man held a musket, loaded, tamped, and ready to shoot. And just for good measure, each man also had a razor-sharp knife tucked into a sheath at his waist. Tom and Henry knew exactly who was to be allowed inside, and they knew what they were to do if anyone else tried to get past them.

When Jasper Hathaway arrived at the house, Muco opened the front door, admitted him, and then showed him to the library, which was set up to accommodate twenty-two men. Never before had so many people been inside the London house at one time.

“’Ere now, Jasper, set yersef down,” Joseph said with exaggerated hospitality. The wound Lingongo's whip had slashed across his face was red and swollen and still looked quite nasty. When he tried to smile, his eye watered and his lip drooped.

Most of the chairs were already occupied by grim-faced white men who grumbled impatiently to each other. All except for Benjamin Stevens, who sat stiffly in a seat in back, as far away from the others as he possibly could.

“Let's get this meeting started!” boomed a man with a shaved head and a bushy mustache. Turning to Joseph, he accused, “We shouldn’t even be here, Winslow. This ain’t our fight.”

“Oh, but ’tis, Nate,” Joseph argued. “Them ’eathens is always tryin’ to take over wot by rights is ours. If’n they gits by wi’ it ’ere, then the slaves at yer place’ll git wind of it and next thing ye knows, they’ll be fightin’ ye too.”

“He's right,” Benjamin Stevens agreed with a sigh. “Like it or not, the trouble has already been stirred up, and tomorrow it could be us.”

“I already lost two good men in your battle,” Nate said. “What more do you want from me?”

What Joseph wanted was encouragement … and men he could depend on to stand up and fight alongside him no matter what … and money (preferably gold) to finance the battle … and respect. Respect most of all. It was indescribably painful for him to stand by and watch as slaves grabbed away so much of his property. But what he absolutely could not abide was all the talk he overheard about his personal failures and his weaknesses and a whole array of other purported inadequacies. He would do anything to get this mess behind him—absolutely anything. Which was why he had told—no,
ordered
—Lingongo to stay away from this assemblage. It was his meeting, he said. He had called the men together to get their help. Starting today, he, Joseph Winslow—Admiral Joseph Winslow—would be the one in control of Zulina.

“Such a trouncing at the hands of slaves is
un insulto
to every one of us and also to God on high!” Capitán Carrillo pronounced.

Joseph opened his mouth to answer, but Jasper Hathaway stood up and demanded his attention.

“Where is Grace, Joseph?” he insisted. “You promised me I would have her hand in marriage, yet when I last saw her, she was walking the streets by herself! Now I ask you,
where … is … your … daughter
?”

“This ain’t ’bout Grace!” Joseph snapped testily. “’Tis ’bout us. Is we to keep control o’ our rightful pro’pity, or ain’t we?” He had tried to keep Grace's presence at Zulina a secret from his future son-in-law.

“Grace is as good as my rightful property, Winslow! If she is a captive up in that fortress, as some say she is—” Hathaway began.

He didn’t get the chance to drive his point home, however, because at that moment the library door flew open and Lingongo swept in. She strode straight to a dais, which was fortuitously positioned directly in the path of rainbow hues cast across the room by the library's diamond-cut window panes. Regally and with measured purpose, Lingongo mounted the dais and stood, haughty and disdainful, before the gaping men. She had wrapped herself in a
kente
robe of gold, woven through with a pattern of black and red and green. But her stunning clothing did not cause the men's mouths to drop in unison.

No, it was the astounding collection of heavy, gorgeously tooled solid gold jewelry that transformed Lingongo into such a dazzling sight. Thick chains festooned with enormous solid gold pendants hung from her neck. Heavy bracelets decorated both arms, and rings glinted on her fingers and toes. On Lingongo's head rested a golden crown with row after row of birds and animals and flowers, all tooled in gold by the most expert African craftsmen. Even Lingongo's beautiful chocolate face was flecked with fine gold dust.

A unified gasp arose in the room. Jasper Hathaway plopped back down into his chair, his mouth frozen in an open position. As for Joseph Winslow, he reeled backward and fell directly onto Capitán Carrillo's lap, although the Spaniard was so transfixed he hardly seemed to notice.

It was some moments before Joseph was able to regain either his footing or his voice. But he finally managed to croak out a strangled, “Lingongo, I tol’ ye to stay away t’day. I tol’ ye—”

Lingongo turned on him. “No, I told
you
!” she said. “I told you I would not be humiliated without demanding vengeance! I told you I would not compromise with ruffians and thieves and
slaves
! I told you I was born a princess and no one could take my royalty away from me!”