A Respectable Trade. Philippa Gregory

said piously. ‘And we are all of us in the merciful hands of God.’

      They did not know themselves to be in the merciful hands of God. They seemed very far from any god. They lay very close together, stacked side by side like logs in a woodpile. When the ship rolled they rolled hard one way, bumping and bruising, and then when it pitched back, they rolled again. When the ship reared up over a massive wave and crashed down it was as if they had been packed on their naked backs in a rough wooden case and dropped, over and over again. Within a day they were bruised from the planking, within a week the skin was rubbed away. When the sea was heavy the water poured in through the gratings on the deck into the hold where they lay, and the slop buckets overturned and sewage washed around them. They were not fed during bad weather and those that were not vomiting from seasickness or already dying from typhus went hungry. When the sea was calm they were ordered up on deck, staggering under the bright uncaring sky, and made to wash and dry themselves, sharing a soiled piece of cloth. A man watched them rinse out their mouths with vinegar and water and spit through the netting into the huge waves which rolled unstoppably towards the little ship, coming from the far horizon, as high as hills. It was a nightmare, a long unbelievable nightmare, which got worse and worse every day.

      At first Mehuru had thought that the crew were ghosts, that he had died at sight of the ship and that this was some long punitive afterlife. The crew’s skin was so pallid and their eyes were empty of colour or warmth. He could not at first accept their dreadful ugliness. They did not look like men and they did not act like men. They behaved as if they were a different species from Mehuru, from Siko, from the two hundred men they had on board. They prodded at them with sticks, they whipped them with casual cruelty. They never looked in their faces, they never met their eyes. There was something so cold and unnatural in their indifference that Mehuru felt his very soul wither and shrink from them. These could not be men. No man could treat another man with such chilling indifference.

      The Snake god’s counsel was bleak on the voyage and the farther he went from his home, the fainter and fainter grew the voice until Mehuru had to face the dreadful prospect of losing his guide. He had no magic to bring him back, the gods go where they will, and Mehuru could make no offering. He had no pet snake to feed, he had no smoke to please the god, or bones for it to play with. All he could do was dream that he was making pleasures for the god and give him the thoughts of his mind. So he lay in the pitching blackness with his back rubbed raw against the sweating planks of the hold, the filth of the bilges washing around him, and made in his mind a perfect flower, a flower from the hibiscus bush, bright scarlet, frilled as silk. Then he pictured a jewelled snake and brought the flower to the snake in a bowl of white clay studded with tiny blue stones.

      The three images were almost too much for him: the brilliant snake, the perfect flower, and the white bowl with the blue pattern. In the sodden sweaty torture of the black hold with people dying around him, Mehuru shut his eyes and summoned three perfect forms: god in a flower, god in an animal, and god in a man, guiding his hands to work with clay and with little blue stones.

      There was no way to measure time in the darkness. Mehuru woke sometimes and thought perhaps he had died and that the Yoruban belief that you stay near to the people you loved, watching over them, was all wrong. The afterlife was a perpetual rolling and pitching, heat and smell, and the horror of being pushed against sickly men, unable to help them, and no emotion but hatred for their rough bumping against you, and hunger for their share of food.

      Sometimes the sailors opened the hatches and bawled down into the darkness for the captives to come out. The sunlight hurt their eyes but they had to stand on deck and one of the sailors would beat a drum while another cracked a whip. Mehuru looked at them in utter wonder. The sailors wanted them to dance. As obedient as idiot children, with the guns all around them and the whips cracking out the time, they shuffled and hopped while others were ordered to clean out the hold and throw the dead and dying over the side. Mehuru sank deep inside his mind while his body hopped and pranced.

      If the dancing were to keep them healthy Mehuru could not think why they were fed so poorly. If their jailers wanted them fit, Mehuru could not think why they let so many sicken for lack of water in the unbearable heat of the hold. They lowered buckets filled with stale warm water and bad yams which crawled with insects. Never enough water, never enough food. They had loaded about two hundred men and elsewhere in the ship they were keeping women and little children, perhaps another hundred of them. On Mehuru’s shelf alone, five had already died. One had flung himself over the side, two had sickened, one had been whipped too hard and never came back to the hold and the last one had sealed his lips from food and water and had watched the others eat every day while he starved himself to death. Mehuru’s imagination could not stretch to the scale of it. It never occurred to him that more than three hundred of them had been shipped but that only two hundred and forty or so were expected to survive. It was not necessary that they should all survive. It was a process so large as to be industrial. Mehuru had no concept that his life could be written off as wastage.

      He started to dread the arrival of the bucket of food for only then, when they were ordered to gather around and share ten to a bucket, eating with their dirty hands, could he see how many of them were sickening to death. They were the ones who did not struggle and claw at each other to get to the food. Mehuru set himself the task of fighting for his share and then giving half of it to the neighbour on his right. He did it as an exercise, a discipline, not an act of love. He thought he would never love anyone, ever again.

      When he had eaten, and the slowly dying man beside him had mumbled on his slabber porridge, Mehuru would shut his eyes and try to build a picture of a perfect tiny snake as an offering for the god.

      He knew that his mind was going when the snake became very bright and easy to find. The snake became more important than the ship, more vivid than the clammy touch of the dying man beside him. The snake opened his mouth and sang to him as Mehuru felt his skin grow wet with sweat and his mind shift and slide away from the darkness. He knew he should stay in his waking mind and guard Siko; but he had not seen Siko, except for a glimpse on deck, since they had set sail. He knew he had failed in his duty to him. He knew he was guilty of a mortal sin in taking the boy into danger. But he could not keep himself alert, he could not stay on guard. As they went farther and farther west Mehuru sank into a deep deathly indifference.

      He could not tell how long they had been sailing, but when they came on deck to dance there were more limp bodies thrown overboard, and there were fewer who could dance each time. Mehuru looked around idly for the children, the little ones who had been loaded on the ship as round as berries and as dark and shiny as the sacred wood of the iroko tree. They were thinner and many of them were sick, but worst of all was the way the bright life was draining from them. They no longer cried like desperate fledglings for their mothers, they were lost children. Whether they lived or died there would be a gap in their spirits which nothing would ever replace. How would they respect their fathers, and how love children of their own, if their most powerful memory was being abandoned to despair?

      He thought that about forty had died, and two crewmen as well, when the sound of the ship changed one night. Then came urgent noises of running on the deck overhead, and abrupt commands and anxious shouts and then the great rolling yaw of the ship ceased, ceased at last, and he heard the roar as the anchor chain sped out through the housing and the ship thrust a claw into the ocean bed and dragged herself to a standstill. They were brought up on deck as if to be ready for dancing, but then they were manacled, arms to legs, and chained from one neck to another. The captain, even whiter than before and thinner from the voyage, looked at each shivering black man or woman or little child before he waved them into the line and had them locked on to the chain. A few, a very few, he waved to one side under guard of a sailor who held a musket easily at their heads. Mehuru thought of the unreliability of the muskets on sale in Africa and thought it might be worth taking the chance and rushing the man. But when he looked around to see where he might run he felt sicker than he had felt in the whole long voyage. For they were not off the coast of Africa any more. Wherever they had come to, it was a land he had never seen before.

      The last of his courage went out of him then and when the captain waved him to the little group he went as weakly as the children who were already chosen. The last time he saw Siko was when the boy hobbled obediently to the long