Chapter 4: Numbers (5557)
Helen nodded at the Red Cross agent, a
tough looking man with an eye-patch. Either a soldier or a
swashbuckling pirate in a former life, she had no idea.
‘Thanks, Ned,’ she muttered as she
handed the phone back to him, hoped down out of his truck and
shuffled back to her dormitory, following a line of grey-clad women
who were coming back from their evening meal.
It would be an hour before lights out,
the women were expected to patch up their clothes in that time or
perform other mundane tasks. Some had jobs to do outside the dorm. It
was a wooden structure, a hot sweaty box that didn’t get much air.
It was cooler up here on the hillsides than down in the jungle, but
not by much.
Helen lay down on her bed, the lower
bunk of a crude wooden bunkbed and stared up at the half-rotten beams
and tatty mattress above. She was beyond self-pity now, two months in
the gulag had scorched away all her protective layers of bluster and
self-delusion.
More women filed in, mainly black
skinned, locals from the Delta. They sat together, fanning themselves
with bits of cardboard, talking and laughing, a sound like exotic
birds. The locals were the kindest of all the slaves, but Helen found
them difficult to talk to, her skin colour marked her out. To them
she was “one of dem left-over women”, a displaced person, not
worth getting to know as she’d soon be dead of a splinter virus,
worked to death or burnt. They were the originals, the first women on
the farm, from a congregation of Methodists that had been rounded up
by the Committee. Since then, others like Helen had arrived. There
were stories about a men’s camp not so far away, but only stories.
Her bunkmate, a large Delta woman with
her hair tied up in a plastic bag, ignoring Helen completely, heaved
herself up onto the top bunk, sending down a small shower of dust
that landed on Helen’s face. She took off her round glasses, and
after rubbing her eyes for a bit, cleaned the lenses on her sleeve.
A big black hand loomed down from the
top bunk, tough and gnarled like a bear paw. It waved for attention
then pointed at a folded magazine lying on top of a basket beside the
bed. Helen picked it up and passed it up to the hand.
“There you go Melissa,’ she
squeaked. There was a grunt from above.
Ten minutes before lights out a group
of women came in, recently fed and washed, workers from the backdam,
returned after a week of brashing and undergrowth clearance in the
Brown Ebony and Ironwood forests. A thin young woman, very dark
skinned and with a shaved head had been using one of the women’s
bunks. She was new and would not have known she had been sleeping in
another woman’s bed that last three nights. The backdam women were
the toughest of the slaves in the entire farm and despite the young
woman’s apologies they began to kick her about.
Helen sat up on her bunk and watched
on. She knew not to get involved but the young slave was so pathetic
in appearance, in a ragged and dirty smock, with not even a pair of
sandals for her feet.
The backdam slaves pushed and pulled
her around until the smock was ripped off her body entirely,
revealing her thin, breastless and naked body. The backdam women
laughed all the harder as she tried to cover herself again.
‘What you trying to hide there,
missy?’ they hollered. ‘You as flat as a saucer.’
Then they saw a witch’s mark on her
body, a pale mole on her left hip and the pushes and kicks became
more violent.
‘Obeah! You a witch!’ they
cried. ‘Church slave! Dey burn you witch!’
This was finally too much for Helen.
She was timid and half broken by her time in the camp, but before the
reditus, her and Gary had run a hostel in Australia for eight
years. She was used to bossing people around and settling disputes in
dormitories, and now all that muscle memory kicked in, catapulting
her across the room in the young girl’s defence even before she had
time to think of what exactly it what it was she was going to do when
she got there.
‘Hey!’ she yelled at them. ‘Leave
them alone you big bullies!’
There was sudden silence as they all
turned to look at her. She stooped to pick up the girl’s smock from
the floor and handed it to her.
‘Stay out of this, bule,’
said one of the backdam women, using the local racial slur for white
people.
‘It’s over,’ snapped back Helen.
‘If she’s a church slave then she belongs over there with the
rest of us.’
Helen made to leave but one of the
larger women grabbed her by the arm. She towered over Helen who was
barely five feet tall. As the women pulled her arm to hit Helen, a
shadow passed across them. They both turned to see Melissa looming at
Helen’s side. Melissa, with her forehead as flat and as broad as an
anvil, well over six foot tall, wearing a ragged t-shirt and a pair
of men’s jeans, she was a walking wall of intimidation. The backdam
woman released her grip on Helen who then took the opportunity to
yank the girl away.
‘Come on over here with us,’ said
Helen, soothing the sobbing girl. ‘Me and Melissa and a few of the
others are all from the church. You can bunk with us.’
Melissa silently turned and when to her
bunk, where she once more climbed up into the creaking upper berth.
Helen ushered the girl into the lower bed, saying, ‘look, you can
share my bed tonight and we’ll get you sorted out tomorrow,’ as
she again picked up the dropped magazine and handed it up to
Mellissa.
Both Helen and the girl were small, so
they fit on the long bunk together easily. By the time they were
settled the custodian had been around to blow out all the lamps and
as Melissa caused the whole bed frame creak and groan above them as
she tried to find a comfortable position to sleep in, they had a
whispered conversation.
‘Thank you miss,’ whispers the
girl, her head beside Helen’s on the narrow pillow.
‘How old are you?’ asked Helen.
‘Sixteen miss,’ answered the girl.
‘My name is Tina, miss.’
‘Do they have you detailed yet?’
‘Dey got me working in de kitchen,
miss.’
‘Oh, that’s ok then,’ said Helen,
trying to sound comforting. ‘You should be fine there.’
Helen herself had started in the coffee
plantations but was too small and weak to be much use, so they had
moved her to the orange orchard where she worked with one other woman
watering and weeding around the Parson Brown orange trees.
‘Better sleep now anyway, Tina,’
whispered Helen. ‘They don’t like it if we talk too much after
lights out.’
The next morning Helen had come back to
the farm to fetch a ladder for the orange grove. As she exited the
barn, she had gone to get it from she was confronted by two of the
backdam women from the night before. They blocked the doorways with
their bodies, menacing silhouettes again the bright sunlight outside.
‘Hey, where you going, scunt?’ one
of the snapped.
Helen stopped in her tracks and dropped
the ladder. ‘What do you want?’
‘What you tink?’ the smirked. ‘We
guna box you up prappa!’
The woman who had just spoken lunged
and caught Helen on the nose, a blow that caused blood to flow, but
it was the only hand they were ever going to lay on her, because the
smaller women dummied to the right then fled to her left, up a pile
of hay bales and hurled herself bodily out of the window at their
summit.
She landed in the dirt and was on her
feet and running as the two larger turned and chased after her. She
sniffed and spat out blood as she ran, heading for the main gate
where there were two guards who might rescue her, or maybe they would
watch and laugh and she was beaten. If she could get to the grove her
boss would protect her at least.
As she reached the gates, a big black
church SUV rolled into courtyard and stopped right in front of her.
She tripped over her own feet and fell to her knees. Glancing over
her shoulder she could see the other women had stop too, they looked
as confused as she was. Church cars were rarely good news. The
passenger door of the sinister vehicle opened. Helen awaited her
fate.
***
Father Nimite had decided to make the
best of the journey as he could. He was not a smart man, he told
himself, but if he trusted in God, how could he go wrong? He didn’t
really know what to expect to find in Goldengreens. Something pretty
awful, if half the stories were true.
He sat in the back of the church SUV
with a large bag of cassava pone and sugar cake that he shared with
the driver. He was regretting sitting in the back of the car. He had
planned on having a nap, but the road was too uneven for sleeping and
now every time he wanted to talk to the driver or offer a sweet, he
had to lean forward.
The next time they stopped he’d move
through to the front he decided, but for now he leaned his arms on
the seat rests, watching the roadside shops roll by and making
conversation. The driver he knew from before, a tall and raw-boned
fellow by the name of Samuel Benjamin, who was currently keeping his
eyes on the road, watching for potholes and fallen branches.
‘You been down this way recently,
Samuel?’ he asked.
‘Not since de reditus,
Father,’ replied the driver.
‘How long we got to go do you think?’
asked Nimite.
Samuel shrugged. It was anyone’s
guess. This road along the coast was in a sad state of repair and the
road through the jungle was expected to be a whole lot worse. Beyond
the thin line of civilisation, the jungle loomed, a sweltering mass
of untamed vegetation. Somewhere in there was Goldengreens, and
beyond that Zion, then Paradise, names from the before times that
seemed quaint now, then – eventually – the mountains, and beyond
that no one from Evermarch or the Delta had so far dared to go.
Before the reditus it had been the Amazon basin, but now? God
only knew.
The car ground its way along the
brick-topped road all the way to Adelphi, where they would have their
last look at the sea before plunging into the hot green gloom of the
forest. Nimite was dreading it, so he signalled Samuel to stop, and
they got out and stretched their legs. They walked down to the wild
wide beach, for lack of anywhere better to go.
‘This is it, Father,’ said Samuel
as they came to a halt. ‘You naw see the sea again until we get
back.’
Nimite breathed in the cool sea breeze
as if he was drinking it. He looked out across the water, the gentle
sound of the waves rolling in soothing his nerves. Well, at least the
blood tide had gone now, swirled away to where he did not know, but
it had coloured the coastline red for a whole year right at the start
of everything. It had killed a lot of the sea life too, and the stink
had been so bad that people in the Delta had moved inland to be away
from it. Evermarch had managed a little better due to the lower
temperature, and when the rivers had clogged up with dead fish,
dolphins, whales, seals and everything else, the city had at least
been organised enough to have the manpower to deal with it. Not so
the Delta, where whale corpses still lay rotting up and down the
coast. Not only that, but wrecked ships. Nimite could see three big
ones from where he was standing, dark shadows in the sea haze. People
lived in some of the wrecks, he had been told.
‘All as foretold in Revelations,’
he remarked to Samuel, sweeping his right arm across the view of the
coastline. ‘Although the same verse foretells a great mountain
burning with fire cast into the sea, but I don’t know where
that went.’
‘We are probably better off not
knowing,’ said Samuel.
Nimite turned and headed back to the
car.
‘You still got that cat?’ he asked
conversationally as he got in the passenger seat.
‘Enid?’ replied Samuel. ‘Yes
Father. She managed to survive everything.’
Samuel started the engine and pulled
the car out onto the main road. There had been a little traffic
coming to Adelphi, but the road they were now taking was deserted and
overgrown.
‘Here we go,’ he murmured as he
turned on the headlights.
‘I remember dat cat,’ went on
Nimite with a melodious laugh. ‘And that woman. You here from that
woman you used to… What were she name now…’
‘Desdemona?’
‘Oh!’ laughed Nimite. ‘Desdemona,
that right! Now there was a woman. She used to shack up with that
fella O’Henry. You remember? She lash him up with a cutlass then
ran away to de refuge on St George Street. What a fine figure she
had. You know what happen to her?’
Samuel shrugged again. ‘Me naw no.’
‘I remember it so well, Samuel’,
Nimite ever tugging on the driver’s shoulder. ‘One of the last
days. Days before de change you know. And O’Henry comin to look
for her… Oh I remember, I hear it from de nuns at the refuge, he
and his men were there, comin to taker her out and do God only knew.
And then? I don’t know what happened after that, because then the
refuge was gone and all de nuns in it and we had the clansmen
instead. Do you know what happened to her, Samuel?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ replied Samuel,
although he knew very well. Desdemona was in his own flat, lying on
his sofa watching TV and eating metemgee bought from a street
vendor.
Nimite patted his driver on the knee
and leaned back in his seat. ‘Well. I hope she ok, but you naw, she
was a wild one. I hope she’s ok.’
Nimite turned to the left and watched
the jungle slowly go by for a few minutes. He was not a subtle man,
but his vocation had made him sensitive to people’s feelings and he
could see that Samuel was getting a little defensive about his line
of questioning, so he dropped it.
Nimite slept through much of the rest
of the journey. It was early in the morning, still dark, but getting
lighter when Samuel woke him.
‘We are here, Father.’
‘Oh,’ groaned Nimite as he came to
his senses. ‘No trouble?’
‘No trouble, Father,’ replied
Samuel. ‘We went through a couple of unmanned checkpoints coming
up.’
Nimite sat up and stretched, then
opened the car door and slowly worked his way out of the seat.
The hot humid night air was a striking
contrast after the cool air conditioning of the car. He had not been
to Goldengreens since before the reditus, but he still
recognised it. Samuel had driven them into the carpark by the church.
Looking left and right he could see the main street of the town, dark
and silent, not even a streetlamp to light their way, only the light
of the moon showing the outline of the roofs against the sky.
The door of the church opened and an
old man in shorts peered out at them, silhouetted by the light
inside.
‘Father Nimite?’ gasped the old
man. ‘Is that you?’
‘It is, its!’ beamed Nimite. ‘We
tried to call, Father Dekulos, but could not get through. So, I have
been sent!’
‘Well come in then, come in,’
muttered the elderly priest, chewing on his cheek.
While Samuel was sent through to the
kitchen to rouse the maid and get some breakfast, the two priests
went through the Dekulos’s office where he found and threw on a
T-shirt, covering up his skinny ribs and wiry white chest hair. The
office was dark, lit from moonlight only, until Dekulos located and
lit an oil lamp. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw a wide
desk with empty bookcases behind it. Stacks of newspapers lay about
on the floor and were piled up against two over-stuffed filing
cabinets. Father Dekulos did not keep a tidy home.
‘I’m glad you are here,’ muttered
the older priest as he moved a cat off his office chair and sat down
to needlessly arrange some papers. ‘We’ve been cut off for such a
long time. Just a few hours of electricity each day. It was ok, we
was doing ok, but…’
Nimite waited, but the old priest had
evidently finished. To Nimite, the old man looked lonely and
exhausted. A shadow of the man he had known only a few years ago when
they had both lived and preached in Georgetown.
‘Well,’ the younger man began with
a cough. ‘Perhaps you can guess why I’m here. The bishop sent me
down to find out what’s happenin wit deez farms you got here.’
Dekulos looked forlorn, huddled on his
chair with a knee up to his chin. ‘It’s the Committee. They are a
law unto themselves. They take over the farms and make many camps in
de jungle around here.’
‘Where are the papers? The need
permission from the diocese for such things.’
Dekulos made a token movement towards
some of the papers on his desk.
‘What even are they producing?
‘Sugar cane, coffee, fruit, they got
pigs I think.’
‘Where does it go?’ asked Nimite
with a yawn. ‘It doesn’t come up to Evermarch.’
‘I think it goes south.’
‘South?’ asked the younger priest
sitting forward, suddenly more alert. ‘There is nothing to the
south!’
‘This is what I hear, but they keep
the gates shut, no one is allowed in. The trucks leave, but to where
I don’t know.’ The kitchen maid came in with a tray of tea.
‘What about the slaves dey got
there?’ ask Nimite as he accepted a cup with a nod of thanks.
‘A big parcel of Leopard Street
Methodists, that’s what they say,’ replied Dekulos. ‘They all
up in de backdam. The women’s camp at Develde Farm is the closest,
that’s where the gossip comes from. They have other camps further
back, or so they say.’
‘Maybe we go there then,’ said
Nimite as he drank his hot cane-sugar sweetened tea.
For a moment Dekulos looked alarmed.
‘Better not, Father Nimite. They will not let you in. I tell you
what, there is a logging camp, now that I remember, that is just as
close. I can take you up there.’
They talked a short while longer, then
Nimite was shown to his room. He made sure to say good night to
Samuel.
‘Everything ok, Father?’ asked his
driver.
‘Father Dekulos is a good man,’
whispered Nimite. ‘Or he used to be. There is the devil’s work
here.’
Samuel’s eyebrows raised, but Father
Nimite said nothing more, turned and went to his room.
The next morning Father Nimite talked
to Samuel alone after breakfast. ‘Father Dekulos will guide us to
the woman’s camp after Sext prayers. I’ll call for you after
lunch, keep your eyes and ears open Samuel.’
***
There was an air of menace as they
drove through the town in the afternoon. To Father Nimite’s eyes
the people looked haunted. They had been cut off for a year after the
reditus, an event that had been confusing and chaotic enough
on the Delta was even worse out here. Right at the start several
hundred clansmen had been dumped in the area, but they had all been
picked up now and resettled in the Delta projects. What was left now
was a portion of the original people of Goldengreens, dressed in
colourful patched up clothes that seemed out of place on the gaunt
shuffling frames of those that wore them.
It was three miles to the farm, and
they rode there in silence. There were armed men dressed in black at
the gate, but when they saw the church plates on the car, they waved
it through.
Samuel rolled the car into the main
compound then followed a lane round to where several other vehicles
were parked. The two priests stepped out just as a woman was being
chased across the farmyard by several others. The pursuers’ shouts
stopped abruptly when they saw the expensive church SUV and the
priests. Their quarry tumbled to the ground, a small white woman with
blood in her mouth.
‘What is the meaning of this?’
asked Nimite, pulling himself up to his full height. With his
sunglasses on his round acne-scarred face he was an intimidating
sight and towered over the slave woman who had just fallen at his
feet.
He leant down and she scrambled back,
but he was only reaching for the spectacles that had fallen off her
face when she had tripped. Nimite blew the dust off them and handed
them back to her.
Just as he was about to say something,
a Committee woman, dressed all in black, came rushing up to them and
called over two guards to take the slaves away.
‘Father Dekulos?’ she wheezed
through dark fat lips. ‘What is this?’
‘Do not worry, Anjulie. We are just
visiting. This is Father Nimite from the Evermarch Temple.’
Anjulie took them to a shaded area
where tables and chairs were laid out for the Committee members.
She arranged her long black skirts
around her legs, revealing gout-ridden toes in loose dusty sandals.
She fanned herself with a piece of carboard torn from an orange box
as they spoke.
After some small talk Nimite asked,
‘can I see where the slaves are kept?’ and rather reluctantly the
Committee woman toured them around some of the barns where the women
lived and slept. As they went between the buildings, he noticed
something.
‘And what is that?’ he asked,
pointing to an area of ground that was scorched black and littered
with burnt wood.
‘That’s where we burn the witches,
Father.’
He went over and kicked up some of the
ash.
‘And how may have you burned here?’
‘I’d have to check the records
Father, but at least thirty.’
Nimite looked up again and let his eyes
rest on the horizon for a moment, a distant tree line of brown and
green, sweltering under the rich blue sky. He could tell he was
making Anjulie and Dekulos nervous, and he was leaning into his stern
demeanour to make sure they stayed that way. Underneath he was
overcome with emotion, and fearful of what they might do if they
stopped fearing him. All this sort of thing was supposed to be done
with. After the madness of the first year, there were laws in place
to stop this sort of thing. Laws that were enforced by the church.
After a long silence he cleared his
throat and said, ‘show me your records, Miss Anjulie. Specifically
for the acquirement of slaves.’
***
Samuel had found his way to a shady
spot by the main gate that overlooked some of the coffee fields,
where he now sat, watching the workers come and go. He was a city boy
and the farm looked almost idyllic to his untutored eyes. The women
tended and harvested to some schedule that was utterly mysterious to
him, but it seemed like good honest work, out in the fresh air. It
was a shame that slavery had to come into it. While the clergy dealt
with the muta woman, he drank a cup of iced sugarcane juice
one of the kitchen women had bought him. He was tall and well dressed
in his driver’s suit and he could see that he was drawing their
eyes.
A large clansmen came across the yard
and sat on the log beside him, then offered him a cigarette which
Samuel declined. The tanned and muscular man wore a patch over his
right eye.
‘You the Red Cross man?’ asked
Samuel.
‘Aye,’ nodded the man, breathing
smoke out of his nose.
The man introduced himself as Edward
McQuade and went on to tell Samuel something of the farm. ‘Aye, my
beat is this place, the men’s camp further in and two more farms on
the other side of the river. This place is the worst, so I stay here
most of the time. It would be a decent profitable farm if it wasn’t
for that fucking Anjulie. She roasts about a woman a month at the
moment.’
‘Can’t you do anything?’
‘Not much,’ admitted Ned with a
shrug. ‘Last week I could at least make sure they got phone calls,
but my troposcatter back to Evermarch is down, so I’m pretty
redundant. I can mostly stop the burnings if I’m here, but my boss
gets mad at me if I don’t visit the other camps.’
‘Troposcatter, what’s that?’
asked Samuel.
Ned nodded over to what looked like an
army truck with a satellite dish on it.
‘Don’t let that dish fool you. It’s
not satellites, it bounces microwaves on the troposphere layer of the
atmosphere. Got a range of five hundred kilometres, but is doing
bugger all at the moment. The fucking receiver must be down again.’
Samuel, intrigued, got up and walked
towards the truck. An hour later this was where Father Nimite found
him, sat in the back of the MAN truck as McQuade talked him through
the intricacies of microwave communication.
‘Samuel!’ Father Nimite called up
to him. ‘Are you in there?’
‘Yes, Father,’ replied Samuel as he
hopped down from the back.
‘It’s worse than we could have
though Samuel,’ said Nimite wiping sweat off his face with a
handkerchief. ‘They have no law here. No church. The Committee are
slaughtering dem up here. In this camp and de other places.’
Samuel nodded. He had been hearing all
about it from the McQuade.
‘No phones here, so you’ll need to
go back by yourself,’ went on Nimite.
‘What about you Father?’
‘I’m going to stay here and see
what I can do,’ said Nimite. ‘Some of these women. Dey belong to
the church. I see the paperwork. Get them out of here and give them a
good wash and a feed. How dey end up here God only knows, but they
are church property.’
Samuel seemed about to say something,
but then appeared to think better of it. He looked over Nimite’s
shoulder, scanning for Father Dekulos.
‘What is it, Sam?’
‘Well,’ hedged Samuel, trusting
Nimite but knowing that telling on a priest had to be done carefully.
He drew Nimite away from the vehicle and in a low voice said, ‘the
Red Cross man, he be tellin me. Father Dekulos has been selling the
church slaves to the farm. He allowed to do that?’
‘No,’ sighed Nimite. The priest
then kissed his teeth. ‘If Father Dekulos has sold them to the
Committee, then he would have needed to get a writ from a bishop. And
where he get that out here?’
Nimite thought for a moment. Samuel
looked up at the sky.
‘We take them anyway,’ he said.
‘Likely Dekulos sold them illegally. He never tink we come down
this way again, I’m sure. You take them Sam, then we see what
happens. I’ll write you a letter to take back to Bishop Thorman.’
‘What you think the bishop do?’
asked Samuel.
‘I don’t know,’ admitted the
priest. ‘Shut it all down I hope.’
***
Three hours later, as the sun was
beginning to head towards the horizon and Wormwood was rising in the
south, Samuel set off with four women in his SUV. They all smelled of
the fields, sweat and sunburnt skin. There was a clanswoman in the
back along with a skinny backdam girl and a monstrously large woman
that had to hunch over even to sit down on the back seat.
In the passenger seat was a middle-aged
heretic woman in a tattered floral dress who prattled on about her
missing husband until Samuel had to tell her to shut up.
After another twenty minutes of
silence, the clanswoman leaned forward and spoke to him. ‘Tina
needs to pee.’
‘She just have to hold it in,’ said
Samuel without turning. ‘I’m not stopping until Goldengreens is
far behind.’
‘This is a nice car,’ replied the
clanswoman, apparently not scared of him at all. ‘Won’t you get
into trouble if she pees in it?’
Samuel was about to tell her to shut up
as well, but then he saw up ahead that one of the check points they
had gone through in the dark on the way down was now manned. Four
armed men, dressed in black, were waving at him to stop. Samuel hit
the central locking button and opened the driver side window
half-way.
As they slowed down, he told the women,
‘don’t speak and don’t get out of the car.’
The evident leader of the men leaned
down to the window, his broad face dripping with sweat. He was very
dark skinned with crooked yellow teeth. ‘Who are deez woman?’ he
asked.
‘Slaves,’ replied Samuel. ‘Dey is
church slaves. I’m on church business. This be a church car.’
The armed man stepped back then went
round to the rear of the car to look at the license plate. When he
returned he said, ‘show me your pay-pas.’
Besides his Evermarch ID, Samuel only
had the letter from Father Nimite for the bishop and he had a feeling
it would be fairly anti-Committee so showing it would do more harm
than good.
‘I do not have any papers for you,’
he said eventually. ‘Just a letter for the bishop, but it is…’
Just then, the woman in the passenger
seat started talking. ‘Brother!’ she cried, addressing the
Committee soldier. ‘Brother! You must help me! I have been sold and
gone from here to there and gone to everywhere! I am a God-fearing
woman! My husband has been taken by bandits in the hills.’
Another of the guards taped on the
window with the barrel of his gun, and she opened the door.
‘What is your story, Sista?’ asked
the younger, taller Committee soldier. He was holding an AK-47 in
both hands and stepped back as she got out of the car.
‘I do not want to go to Evermarch,
Brother!’ she sobbed. ‘I need to go back to find my husband.’
‘Come with us, Sista,’ said the
young soldier, motioning to the guard hut with his gun. ‘We can
help you.’
The woman in the patterned dress took a
few steps, but then turned back to the car, suddenly in doubt.
‘Heh,’ said the large-faced guard.
‘Heh, driver. We take all these women, eh? Maybe dey are all
looking for dey husbands?’
Samuel looked over his shoulder. The
two other guards were at the rear doors trying to get in. The three
women in the back cowered, sheltering behind the big woman. He looked
to his left again and saw the woman in the patterned dress being
dragged off. When his eyes caught hers, she screamed, a feral cry of
terror. Samuel put his foot down heavily on the accelerator and the
wheels spun kicking up stones into the faces of the guards at the
back. As the car sped off, the women in the back screamed, but no
shots were fired.
As they disappeared into the jungle,
the clanswoman said, ‘you can’t leave her there! You can’t just
leave her! What do you think they are they going to do to her?’
Samuel had a fair idea what was going
to happen to her but said nothing.
‘Do you hear me?’ she said, louder
this time as she all but clambered into the front.
Samuel pushed her back. ‘What could I
do woman?’ he demanded, almost yelling. ‘What could I do? In
another second you would all be in the same pot, and I would be
dead.’
The big woman silently pulled the
clanswoman back.
‘I told you not to talk! I told you
not to get out!’ continued Samuel, on the edge of hysteria.
‘Nothing like this ever happen to me. The muta in Evermarch,
dey respect the church. Those were bandits, dey bad men. We respected
in Evermarch…’
Samuel went on talking, but eventually
he ran out of breath. After a few more minutes he had recomposed
himself enough to ask, ‘did you know her?’
‘No,’ admitted the clanswoman. ‘We
did not know her.’
Samuel glanced back at the small bule
woman but said nothing. After another minute or so, she tapped him on
the shoulder.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘Sorry driver,’ she replied
quietly. ‘Tina peed herself.’
Silently he reached into the glove
compartment and passed back a box of tissues.
