The New World (3 page)

The cliff path was hardly a path; it was shallow steps hacked into the rock, and so steep I soon dropped onto all fours, telling Natty she must do the same. Our climb was therefore very slow and painful, and also very frightening. Stones cut my hands, my fingers, my knees, my feet. Lunatic eyes glared at me. Bulbous lips puffed at me. Gusts of wind buffeted and blustered—the last gasps of the storm. Once I slithered so far into empty space, only a tuft of grass kept me alive. And all the while our guards never lost their footing, but skimmed over the ground as though their moccasins were skates.

I had no breath for talking and no inclination, except at halfway when I muttered “Nearly there” to encourage Natty. The guard in front of me immediately whisked round and slapped my face; the sting of his hand stayed on my skin like a burn-mark.

“Silence,” he shouted—not that word of course, but his own ferocious yap.

After that, it would be too much to say I was thinking. I was too tired to think and too nervous. But I was not completely blank. I told myself that if cruelty was so natural to these men, we would only survive by convincing them we were broken, so they would lose their concentration and let us escape. Escape to what I had no idea; I thought freedom itself would be enough.

When I reached the end of the path I therefore made a pretense, humbly dragging myself over the last few yards, gazing wretchedly at the wounds in my hands, then flinging myself down with no more breath in my body.

The ploy succeeded after a fashion. When Natty collapsed beside me and seemed to be just as spent, our guards smiled at one another like smug farmers whose cattle have been driven safely to market.

In fact I was very relieved to lie quiet for a while, with the tangled smells of the earth filling my head, and the muggy breeze tousling my hair. I even let myself drift toward sleep for a while, or at least toward somewhere far distant, where I was not in danger.

But I had curiosity too; I wanted to know where we were, and a minute later hoisted upright again. Our clifftop, which was an arc enclosing the whole bay, was the only high ground for miles in any direction. A hundred yards to my left, and the same to my right, and the same facing inland, it sloped down to a wilderness where the course of our hurricane showed like the track of a colossal carriage. And either side of this track, where the country was still unscathed: gray sand with silvery meres and gullies. And beyond these: red-brown earth, and steam blowing here and there as if the earth had been molten lava only a moment before, and we were the first inhabitants.

As for our clifftop, the centuries had worn it bare, so I thought it would look clean and simple in good weather. Now it was a bump of chaos, littered with leaves and seaweed. Why had God landed us
here
, I thought, when anywhere else the
Nightingale
would have crashed into soft sand, and her cargo might have been saved? There was no explanation. What had happened had happened by chance, unless it had all been arranged by devils in the rock beneath us. Unless they had summoned us and we had not been able to resist them.

I scrambled to my feet and pulled Natty upright beside me. Her face was streaked with mud, and gashed across the forehead where a stone had struck her.

“The end of the world,” she said, staring around and reeling a little in the breeze.

“Or the beginning,” I said, putting my arm around her waist to steady her.

“How do you mean?” she said.

I glanced at our guards to see if they minded us talking like this, but they were already bored with their power, and had moved away to admire the work of their friends on the beach below.

“Because we are here,” I said.

“And that's enough?”

“It's everything.”

“It's all we have, you mean.”

“It's all there is.”

Natty spoke cautiously, as though our talk was a game and she could not decide which play to make next. In the end she gave up and broke away from me; for a moment I thought her strength had gone and she wanted to lie down again. But she was quite deliberate. She tested her balance, then walked carefully toward the edge of the cliff. When there were only a few inches of land left, she looked round and gave me a cat's smile, as if she knew a secret but would not say what it was.

“Natty!” I shouted, my voice drowning those of the guards who barked at her, then crouched down astonished. “Get away from there! Come back!”

Her answer was to keep facing me and stretch out her arms sideways, so she hung crucified on the empty air, with the whole swerve of the bay widening behind her.

I found myself gazing at her calmly despite the danger. Why this should have been I cannot say—some part of my brain demanded it, as though I had grown so used to her company in the last weeks and months, I needed to remind myself what she looked like. She was beautiful with her slenderness, and her short black hair in its coils, and her liquid eyes, and her brown skin like river-water. But it was not her beauty that held me. It was her wildness. Her quickness that made her seem like a bird who had learned the ways of mankind, but might renounce them again at any moment.

I am not sure how long I rambled like this in my mind; for a second that passed as slowly as an hour. And when I came back to myself, I found that I was imploring our guards to help me rescue Natty and pull her away from the cliff-edge and save her.

All to no avail, because now their surprise had worn off and they no longer cared what happened. She was not so precious as she had seemed at first, not enough for them to risk their own lives, at any rate. When one of them knocked the other on his arm and grinned, I thought he was saying if she jumped she jumped: that was fate as well.

I took a deep breath and stepped toward her myself, with the shoreline opening giddily below me, and the
Nightingale
like a toy, and the waves scratching around her, and the scavengers scurrying over the stones.

“Why, Natty?” I said as gently as possible, looking away from the fall and into her face. “What are you doing?”

She blinked at me. “Surely you know the answer to that, Jim?” she said.

She was right; I understood perfectly well. She had put her life in the balance to keep herself safe. It was a way of saying “I choose; I am still myself.”

“Very well,” I answered, still softly. “But Natty, be careful.”

“Oh, Jim,” she said, with a curious drifting note in her voice, as if she was falling asleep. “How I count on you—I do! You are always here to rescue me. You are always…”

Her voice trailed off, then wandered back again.

“Do you love me, Jim?” she said. She had never asked before, not straight out like this.

“I do love you, Natty,” I told her. “You know that. I've loved you from the beginning.”

She gave a long sigh and the wind blustering up the cliff tore it away from her like smoke. “From the beginning,” she repeated. “The beginning's a long time ago now, isn't it.”

I thought she was trying to bewitch me and make me tumble alongside her down through the buffeting air. But I would not be tempted. “Come away now, Natty,” I said, “this is enough—” and reached out a hand.

Her expression changed at once, her dreaminess vanishing completely. “Jim!” she hissed, turning away from me and pointing down to the beach. “Look!”

I took a quarter-step forward, thinking a demon had broken into her mind and made her begin to imagine things—until I peered beyond, over the edge of the cliff, and saw what she meant. She had noticed another body on the black stones below. A lifeless body. And then, as the wave that brought it ashore drained away over the pebbles again, not lifeless. I saw a leg straighten and thrash in the undertow. I saw the body convulse and roll onto hands and knees. I saw it shake like a dog and stand.

It was Mr. Stevenson, our watchman from the
Nightingale
. I had last seen him hours before with an ingot of the silver clutched to his chest, plunging toward the seabed as our ship foundered; now he was breathing again, and gasping, and wiping the hair from his eyes.

Our guards saw as well and they crept up beside us, nervous at first then suddenly careless, jumping about and chopping the air with their spears. What did they mean? To catch him, of course. To tell the scavengers to catch him.

“Mr. Stevenson!” I shouted, but he could not have heard; the wind had risen again and the distance was too great.

Natty said nothing but seized my hand and gripped it tight. She wanted me to see that while the currents had stripped shoes and clothes from most of the bodies already washed ashore, Mr. Stevenson was still wearing his blue sailor's jacket.

The mob swarmed toward him, all naked as the day they were born, and Mr. Stevenson began to run, tugging at the pocket of his jacket with both hands. A pocket I now saw was bulging with something hidden.

A weight.

He tugged it clear and threw it behind him.

A bar of silver.

It thumped on the stones gleaming bright as a fish and the mob surged forward. “
Ooooh! Ooooh! Ooooh!
” they cried, their voices soaring across the cliff-face, then they rushed together and seized it and passed it from hand to hand in quick flashes and glimpses. Only when they had petted it like this for a while, crooning and ogling, did they remember to look up.

“
Plata
,” they sang out. “
Plata. Plata. Plata
.”

Whatever this meant I thought it would please the guards, but not in the slightest. They jabbed their spears toward Mr. Stevenson on the beach below, hacking at the air.

I shall describe what followed very quickly, because I hate to remember it. After choosing one man to stay and protect the treasure (which he did by placing it reverently on the black stones, then standing directly above), the rest of the pack began sprinting along the shore, where Mr. Stevenson was still struggling to escape. At this time I suppose he was a hundred yards away from them, limping and hopping with his blue coat flapping around his legs, and no idea where he might go, only that he must be as far away as possible. This made me think he was very brave when he turned to confront his enemies. When he heard them panting close behind him and dropped onto his knees to face them.

Mr. Stevenson. I saw him then as I had seen him first on the
Nightingale
at her quay in Wapping, climbing into his crow's-nest to take a view toward the river Thames. For the next many days after that, in the rain as we blew along the south coast of England toward Start Point, then as we crossed the flowing green hills of the Atlantic and reached the calmer and warmer pastures of the Caribbean, I had heard him calling down to me—about the weather to come, about the weather we had avoided, about the chance of this landmark or that being our target. In particular, I could not forget the soft Scottish accent that colored his verdict “All's well, all's clear” as we came into the safety of our cove on the Island.

This good man had been the voice of our adventure as well as its eyes. Now the savages had bunched around him and set their bows and fired their arrows into him, all the while howling and yelping as if it was themselves they hurt. Mr. Stevenson never made a sound, not even when most of these arrows pierced him in the chest and stomach, and a few punctured his hands, and more injured his face and head.

A single shaft, if it had been well aimed, would have been enough to dispatch him. This assault made him into a kind of hedgehog, which the savages then turned into a man again by all stepping forward to pluck out their arrows and wipe them on their bare skin and return them to their quivers. Once this was done they turned round and tramped along the beach to rejoin the guard they had left standing over the silver.

As I watched them go I realized I was still holding Natty by the hand, holding her so hard I thought I must be hurting her—and I loosened my grip. But I did not let her go. I was thinking one of the savages might suddenly remember some unfinished business, and return to Mr. Stevenson to desecrate his poor body in the same way we had seen the bo'sun desecrated. In the event, after more rejoicing around the silver, only one brute went back to him—slapping his head like a forgetful schoolboy, then manhandling Mr. Stevenson to remove his blue coat. When he had done this, and held it up to the sky, and seen it was spoiled with arrow-holes and blood, he put it on back to front.

Our guards watched this like the audience at a play, nodding approvingly from time to time and grunting, but otherwise in silence. Only when it was finished and the scavengers were all together again, fawning and gloating over their treasure, did they resume their shouting. Calling down orders to search the carcass of the
Nightingale
very thoroughly now, to see if it contained more of the same kind.

At last I let Natty go and heard myself breathing again, turning toward her to hold her in my arms. But now our guards had finished their entertainment they were impatient again, dancing along the cliff-edge without so much as another glance at the beach, and poking with their spears until we were back in single file. A few moments later we had marched off the high ground, and come to the edge of the plain that would take us to the interior of the country.

As we heard the air quieten around us, and felt its dampness and warmth, I gathered my wits enough to feel thankful the smooth ground made for easy walking in bare feet; it meant I was able to keep my head high and look about me, no matter what barbarous scenes continued to run in my head. Mr. Stevenson on his knees. Mr. Stevenson toppling forward onto his ruined face.

For the first two or three miles we tramped west along a narrow strip of sand that twisted between the coast and a shallow lake. The effect was very desolate, as the wind drooped around us in sickly swoops and plunges, and plucked at the debris our hurricane had left in its wake: boughs torn off trees and blown here from miles away; stinking clumps of seaweed buzzing with flies; mysterious root-clumps bleached as white as bone; and sometimes bones themselves—of birds, mainly, but also some larger skeletons of creatures that might once have been dogs or wild cats.