The girls shifted, murmuring among themselves. Pulling herself up on to the rail, Elisabeth leaned out, stretching her neck into the wind. Beyond the prow the sea spilled over the lip of the horizon, tipping them towards their future. Elisabeth wrapped her arms around the rail, tasting salt and the nostrum sting of tar, and thought of St Augustine, who believed that the earth was as flat as a stove lid and that it floated on water like a slice of orange. Astronomers had proved one thousand times over that the world was a globe, but still she found herself thinking of the place where the oceans ceased, the sigh of the ship as it was borne over the fall into the abyss.
Slowly, in a shuffling line, as though shackled together, the girls trailed back towards their quarters. Elisabeth did not follow them. In the distance a dark smear above the indigo line of the sea looked like land. She knew it was not land. Ahead of them stretched the Atlantic sea, one thousand inscrutable leagues of water and wind and English warships. Beyond that, if they should survive it, lay the islands of the New World.
Elisabeth stared out to sea for a long time. In Rochefort the towns-folk had called Louisiana ‘the drowned lands’. They muttered of a barren swamp inhabited only by boy soldiers and wild Canadian hunters, a pestilent wilderness stalked by wild animals and wilder men. Above her, on the orlop deck, animals rattled and stamped in their cramped pens. The hold was too crowded to accommodate them, packed tight with muskets and gunpowder, barrels of flour and wine and bacon, bolts of cloth and miles of rope and twenty-three trunks crammed to bursting with the newly acquired necessities of a stranger’s bride. When at last she turned away, squeezing her eyes shut, the brightness of the sun repeated itself on her darkness in patterns of red.
Behind the narrow ladder that led to the foredeck, she drew the book from her pocket. The wood smelled of salt and warm varnish. Elisabeth drew her knees up to her chest, making a kind of lectern of them, and fingered the fraying ribbon that marked her place. Homer’s
Odyssey
, translated into French. A cheap cloth-bound copy, printed on cheap paper.
‘An epic journey,’ the bookseller had said when she paid for it.
‘Except that Odysseus comes home,’ she had replied, and she had hurried out of the shop before he could answer.
I
t was near the end of September and still the heat was insufferable. They lay beneath a palmetto shade, but even out of the direct strike of the sun the air was viscous, too thick to breathe. The boy squirmed on the pile of reeds that served as a bench and scratched fiercely at the insect bites on his chest. His eyes ached in the bleached-white afternoon. The screech and hum of the dark forest pressed itself into the cracks between the beating of gourds and shrieking of flutes and the caterwauling that passed for singing. There was not the slightest stirring of a breeze. Inside his too-tight boots, his feet were swollen and raw with heat and blisters. He had grown a full inch in the months since leaving La Rochelle and the sleeves of his shirt barely covered his wrists. The Louisiana sun had burned the backs of his hands red.
In his home town of La Rochelle, down by the wharves where the curses of the sailors spiralled in the sea-salty breezes like stalks of straw, they had called the savages
peaux rouges
, redskins. Kicking at coils of rope as he loitered, the boy had imagined a race of scarlet men, bright and smooth as cherries. But in this, as in so many other things, he had been disappointed. The savages were not red. They were brown. Some had a coppery hue, but most were just brown. Their skin was drawn all over with tattoos, as though they attached their limbs to their bodies with yards of black twine. Even their faces bore patterns, some so frantic that it was difficult to distinguish the ordinary features of eyes and mouth. Their hair fell in heavy braided tails down their backs, adorned with bouquets of feathers. They made no attempt to cover themselves. Their nakedness did not shame them. When they danced and stamped and sang, disporting themselves with their gourds and their drums, their cocks slapped the scrawl of their thighs and the chords in their necks strained against the webbing of their inked skin.
Their women were barely more modest. They covered themselves only with a strap upon which was placed a one-foot-wide sash of fur or bristles, painted red, yellow and white. Their breasts swung and shifted as they walked, the older women’s slack and empty, the nipples large as a palm, the younger ones round and high, bouncing a little so that it seemed to the boy that they winked at him. He stared at them, ashamed and angry at the agitation they aroused in him.
Like their menfolk, the female savages were snarled with tattoos. Many had stripes of black the full length of their noses and down their chins, dividing their faces in two like trees marked for felling. Their scribbled-on skin was greased with bear oil, their black hair too. When one of them bent before him to offer him a slab of the rough yellow cake that passed among their kind for bread, the sharp musky reek of her caused him to flush and he was stricken by the sudden and powerful urge to strike her, the blood itching in his clenched fists. It was well known that the savages were as carelessly carnal as animals.
He sank his hands into a platter of pumpkin as she stood and moved noiselessly away. Her bare toes were ringed with circles of dark dots. He thought of the time in La Rochelle when he and his cousin Jean had hidden behind his uncle’s house and watched as his uncle raised his new aunt’s skirts and pressed her against the wall, his stubby fingers scooping her breasts from her stays. Jean had nudged him so hard then that he had fallen noisily against the wall and his uncle had heard them and come after them with a rod. He could not remember the beating but he remembered his aunt’s blue-white breasts and her thick white thighs, the skin puckering as she tightened them around his uncle’s waist.
Heaping food onto his plate, the boy ate swiftly, urgently, in the savage manner, without a spoon. The juice from the pumpkin was sweet and thick as syrup. He lifted his plate and drank it, then wiped up the last sticky smears with a wad of cornbread. Only when the meal was over and the savage women were gathering up the empty baskets and clay dishes did he raise his eyes and stare again at the sway of their breasts, the hitch of their polished buttocks as they walked. The carpenter, watching him, whistled and several of the men laughed. The boy shrugged and his neck reddened as he spat his contempt into a curved palm.
Later, when the fire of the sun had burned itself out and night drifted against the split-log palisades that encircled the settlement, the savages danced again. They made a ring of twenty or thirty and, to the sound of a whistle and a drum made from an earthen pot and a strip of deerskin, they danced into a line and then back into a ring. The boy thought of the sailors in La Rochelle, the vigorous jigs scraped out on the fiddle, the gold in their ears and in their teeth. The night was illuminated by torches of bound cane twice the height of the tallest man and as wide around. The savages’ faces shone in the orange glow. Shadows jumped against the palisades and the dark mound of the temple where they kept the bones of their ancestors all piled up like an unlit fire. The drums beat louder, rattling like sticks between the boy’s ribs. In the huts of the warriors hung the shrivelled scalps of their enemies. The skin was yellow, the hair as brittle as dried seaweed.
When finally the dance was finished, the men were taken to their sleeping quarters, an upended beaker of dried mud with a roof of palmetto leaves. At the entrance to the cabin a young savage woman waited, her hands clasped together. She wore a mantle loosely around her shoulders and, beneath its hem, a small child clung to her leg, its cheek against her thigh. Speaking a few words in her own tongue, she gestured at the group of men, asking them with her hands if they had all that they required. The ferret-faced carpenter from Nantes made a show of shaking his head vigorously, thrusting the finger of one hand through the circle made by his forefinger and thumb on the other. The men laughed and groaned, slapping him on the shoulder as they pushed him ahead of them into the cabin. Inside bearskins had been laid by way of cots upon the packed earth floor.
At the threshold, drawn by some impulse he could not explain, the boy turned towards the savage girl, one hand fluttering out from his side. The girl hesitated, her eyes dark and shuttered, and the shells in her ears gleamed. The boy parted his lips as though to speak but he said nothing. He let his gaze drop. Slowly the girl bent down and lifted the child onto her hip, her heavy black plait falling over one shoulder. The infant twined its arms around her neck, its legs around her waist, pressing its face against her cheek. The girl raised her head once more towards the boy, like a deer scenting the air. Then, drawing the child closer, she walked away into the darkness.
The men were restive that night. It was widely known that the chief of the savages had offered to the commandant as many women as there were men in the party and that the commandant had refused him, setting his pale arm against the chief’s dark one and gesturing with his hands to indicate that the flesh of one should not touch the other. From the pallet next to his, the carpenter leaned over and jabbed the boy in the ribs. His finger was sharp as an awl.
‘’Course, it’s worst for you, ain’t it?’ he jeered. ‘For a man of your appetites and experience, the lack of it must be torture!’
The men laughed as the boy cursed and hunched himself into a ball.
‘I think the infant is crying,’ one of the others taunted.
‘Fetch a woman to suckle him,’ said another.
‘Fetch one for each of us!’ protested a third.
Amid the laughter the blacksmith they called Le Grand noisily passed wind. The men laughed harder. The one with the scar beneath his eye, whose work the boy did not know, slid a flask of
eau-de-vie
from his pocket and passed it around. When it reached the boy, he snatched it up and drank with a practised toss of his wrist, steadying himself against the burn in his breastbone. The carpenter began a lurid tale of a pair of doeskin breeches and two red-haired seamstresses from the Vendée. As the flask emptied, the men’s tales grew wilder, the coarse words thickening the darkness like flour. From his place at the centre of the circle, the boy listened and his scalp prickled with scorn and longing.
Later, as the men mumbled and snored and a mosquito sang its high-pitched whine like a secret in his ear, the boy lay awake, his hands still and his throat dry, waiting for the headache that threatened at the base of his skull. He was accustomed to sleeplessness. In La Rochelle, in the screened-off bedchamber the boy had shared with his five brothers and sisters, he had leaned out of the narrow window when the others were asleep and watched the shift and jostle of the masts in the harbour as they scraped the star-barnacled sky.
Now he lay upon his back, staring up into the night, and the tears seeped from him like sweat. On the ship there had been other boys like him, four of them in all. Together they had learned how to mend rope and wash decks, to scale the rigging in all conditions, to read a compass and to endure without a sound the regular beatings of the boatswain. At night they had boasted in whispers about the adventures they meant to have in the New World. They worked to gain their passage, nothing more. Not one of them meant to stay a sailor.
The first to fail had been the band’s self-appointed leader, a gap-toothed whelp with a pirate’s swagger and hair the colour of apricot preserves, who had reminded Auguste powerfully of his cousin Jean. The boy had grown feverish shortly after the ship had set sail from Havana, where she had stopped to take on supplies; even as he succumbed to delirium, the other two had begun to complain of chills and pains in the back and joints.
By the time the passengers disembarked at Massacre Island, all three of the other boys, and several of the ship’s crew, were dead.
They stayed in the village for three days, during which the savages sang and danced three times a day. Though the afternoons brought violent thunderstorms, the heat did not break. But the commandant showed no sign of haste. He was a slight man with a fair complexion, almost undersized, but though he was hardly twenty years of age there was an authority to him that was not easily disregarded.
While it was his older brother and founder of the colony who was acknowledged as the finer soldier, it was widely agreed that in matters of politics and diplomacy it was the commandant who held the advantage. The heat and caprice of the wild lands did not diminish him, nor did the strange ways of the savages discompose him. His father had departed Dieppe for New France as a young man, and all twelve of his sons had been familiar from birth with the singular language of the Huron savages who were the Canadian settlers’ closest allies. The southern tongues were not like Huron, but the commandant’s mouth had adjusted itself quickly to their strange shapes. Whether dealing with man or savage he bore himself always with a quiet assurance, as though nothing could occur that he had not already anticipated.
He made no objection to the savages’ rituals. On his chest he bore a tattoo in their fashion, a twisted mass of vipers with forked tongues, inked by a Pascagoula during preparations for war. Though he hated tobacco, he always smoked the pipe of peace they called
calumet
, drawing several long puffs in the manner of the chief. It was an outlandish-looking thing, the
calumet
, a hollow length of cane decorated all over with feathers so that it resembled several fancy ladies’ fans tied together.
When the commandant permitted the savages to smear white dirt in circles upon his face, the boy was ready to snigger, had his hand cupped in readiness, but, when he sought about him for an accomplice, the men’s faces were blank. Le Grand was the only one to catch his eye, his face creased with a warning frown. Awkwardly the boy looked away, his cupped hand thrust stiffly into the sheath of his armpit.