The Call of Zulina (14 page)

Something was terribly wrong.

Where am I?
Slowly, the question emerged from somewhere in Grace's muddled confusion.
What has happened to me?

With a great force of will, she opened her eyes.

Grace was half-lying, half-sitting in what looked to be a large, steamy dungeon. Oh, how her right hand hurt! With great pain, she turned her head to the side and squinted in an effort to see. Someone had twisted a blood-soaked rag around her hand, and her wrist was shackled to an iron bolt in the wall!

With every bit of strength she could muster, Grace gave a hard yank.

“Aaaahhh,” she screamed as searing pain ripped through her arm. The dungeon spun before her eyes and the room lit up like a bonfire roar. Grace fell back and collapsed into great, gasping sobs.

As the pain ebbed, an awful stench assaulted Grace. Fighting the nausea that arose in her, and taking care not to move her right arm, Grace cried out in English, “Help me!”

The strangled voice that came from her throat sounded strange and foreign in her ears. Not at all like any voice she had ever heard before.

“Mother!” Grace screamed in Lingongo's language.

No answer.

“Help me!” she called, this time in the tongue of Mama Muco's people. “Please, somebody help me!”

A rat scurried past her feet and stopped to sniff at the bloody rag twisted around her hand. With a terrified gasp, Grace tried to pull away, and then she dissolved into screams and sobs. It was all too awful! This had to be another horrible nightmare. It just had to be!

“Won’t do you no good to call out,” said a soft voice in Mama Muco's language. “No one will come to help you. We all called in every language we know, and no one ever comes to help.”

Grace froze. She wasn’t alone. She turned stiffly in the direction of the voice and squinted into the darkness. Yes, now she could make out something. There was a woman shackled next to her. Grace stared harder. A thick chain, connected to a ring embedded in the stone wall, was attached to a collar bolted around the woman's neck. Her legs … they, too, were chained to the floor. But unlike Grace, the woman's hands were free.

“We all hollered and screamed and cried and moaned, but we all still be here,” the woman said. “All except the one where you be now. Two nights ago he went to be with the ancestors. Guard carried him away to make room for you.”

“How did I get here?” Grace asked.

“Guard dragged you in,” the woman said. “We thought you would die. You left so much blood on the floor. What they do to you, girl?”

Grace didn’t answer. But it all began to come back to her
—
Cabeto and his words, and Tungo, and … and … oh! Tungo and the knife.

What would Admiral Joseph Winslow say when he was presented with the severed finger of his daughter who had dared defy him and against his orders had left the safety of his walled-in compound? And what of the proud and mighty Lingongo? Grace could still hear her mother's words:
“Why should you live like a princess when you bring absolutely nothing to my house? Even a princess must do her part.”

Cooing, moaning sobs broke through Grace's despondency. She leaned forward as far as the chains would allow and searched along the wall. Sure enough, another woman sat just beyond the one who had spoken to her. That woman's midnight-black face was decorated in an intricate pattern of tattoos that ran down both cheeks like finely woven reeds and across her forehead in perfectly matched rows. On her chin, the tattoos formed a pattern like arrow points. Never before had Grace seen such a face. It was at the same time beautiful and terrifying. The woman's hair, wild and unkempt, was a dull, muddy red color. She, too, was shackled by a metal collar and leg chains, but her legs were so thin, they looked as if she could pull them through the rusty manacles.

“How long have you been here?” Grace asked the tattooed woman.

The woman took no notice of Grace. She continued to stare straight ahead and wail.

“She be here forever,” said a man chained to the wall on Grace's left. He spoke in a rumbling dialect she recognized as the tongue of a few field hands who passed through her parents’ compound on occasion. She understood it only brokenly and could not speak it well. “She not talk much,” he continued.

Grace followed the voice until she spotted the speaker—a man, tall and bent, with hair heavily laced with gray. His face, like the woman's, was decorated with tiny tattoos.

“She name Udobi,” he said. “Me name Ikem. She be my woman and I be her man.”

In the dank dungeon, reeking with the stench of human misery and echoing with despair, Grace pulled herself as far upright as she could and strained to see around the entire room. At the top of the wall above her, three small openings let light in from the outside. Although it was extremely dim, she was able to make out still more people chained to the walls, to her right and to her left. Not to the wall across from her, however. She could just barely see, though, so she couldn’t be certain. Stone steps seemed to dominate that wall, and they led up to a platform or landing of some kind. She pressed forward and stared. Behind the landing was an opening covered by what might be an iron grate.

As Grace's eyes adjusted to the dim light, she peered more closely at the people chained to the walls. Seven, she counted. On her side were the two women to whom she had already spoken. Ikem was against the wall on her left, and beyond him were two young boys. The closer one, who looked to be very small, was attached only by a single chain at his neck. He lay on the floor crumpled into a ball, moaning softly. On the wall to her right, Grace could make out a young man in a ragged
dashiki
shirt, and beyond him, a woman she could barely see. Except for Udobi and Ikem, the people looked very much like those who lived in the villages around her family's compound.

Grace suddenly became uncomfortably aware that everyone was staring at her—everyone except the curled-up boy Embarrassed, she fixed her eyes on the floor.

“What is a fancy white lady like you doing in a slavehold?” demanded the man in the
dashiki
shirt.

“I am not a white lady!” Grace snapped more defiantly than she had intended. “My father—” She caught herself and stopped short. Perhaps it would be best to keep quiet about her father. So far, her relationship to the admiral had only gotten her into trouble.

“No mind, child. We all lost people,” Ikem said in a mournful voice. “We not any of us know who we be anymore.”

The pain that scorched through Grace's hand was almost unbearable. In an effort to take the pressure off it, she pulled herself first to one side and then to the other. But no matter how she readjusted, more pain pounded through her. And the rough stones of the floor and wall dug into her back and legs. Her head throbbed, and the stifling dungeon swam before her eyes. Grace leaned back and allowed her eyes to drift closed.

“Who caught you, fancy lady?” pressed the ragged man. “Mandingos?”

Grace said nothing.

“Serawoollis?” Grace opened her eyes and stared at the floor.

“Who be fool enough to catch a white man's lady and beat her like you been beat?” he persisted.

“No one caught me,” Grace answered wearily. “I just … I mean …”

Grace faltered in midsentence. Nothing made sense to her. Why should it make any sense to these people?

“Leave the lady alone,” said Ikem. “She frightened and hurt. Give time to her.”

“She have time enough,” said the young woman next to Grace. “All she have be time and time and more time. Time until the white cannibals come for her and take her away.”

“Stop that talk!” Ikem ordered. “No one never seen white cannibals. That nothing but bad talk.”

“The stories say—” began the young woman.

“Stories all they be,” Ikem insisted. “We hear no more stories here. They only make fear and pain grow until we not be able to bear it.”

“If they don’t want to eat us, why they got us all trussed up?” asked the young boy who wasn’t crying.

“We slaves. That all we be,” said Ikem. “We do they work and they feed us. We take care of them and they take care of us. Same as slaves we have in our
stad—
our village. Nothing more.”

“No, not like that!”

This was a new voice, strong and commanding. It came from the far corner beside the stairs. Grace stretched and pulled herself further toward her painful right side and managed to make out a powerful-looking young man she had failed to notice before. Staring hard, she saw that he was shackled to the wall not only by his neck, but also by his wrists and legs. His face seemed to be battered, and his bare arms and shoulders were crisscrossed with stripes all too familiar to Grace. They could have been made only by a determined person experienced with a whip.

Although it meant tugging painfully at her injured hand, Grace strained against her bonds in order to get a better look at the man.

No, she had never seen him before. She was certain of that. And yet, there was something familiar about him. He reminded her of someone.

“In our villages, slaves are not chained to dungeon walls,” the new man said with deep but quiet bitterness. “In our villages, slaves are not beaten until they die. In our villages, slaves are human beings.”

The room fell silent. A smothering gloom crept into Grace and enveloped her soul.

“Mama Muco's God,” Grace whispered in English. “Can you hear me through these stone walls? Can you hear my voice over all the tears? Please, please, if you can hear me, reach down and help me!”

Iron scraped against iron. At the sound, an eager hum arose throughout the dungeon. Grace watched as two African men dressed in white man's clothes pushed the door open and forced their way through. They struggled down the steps, lugging an iron pot between them.

All the while, two other Africans remained on the landing to stand guard.

The two men on the floor carried the pot over to the first boy and unlocked his manacles. The shorter African ladled a scoop from the pot and slopped it onto the boy's outstretched hand. As the boy eagerly licked it up, they moved on to Ikem.

“Give the boy a chance,” Ikem said with a nod toward the curled-up boy.

The shorter African grunted.

“What is the matter with you?” the taller guard said to the shorter one. “The old man spoke. He is chained to the wall, but he is still a lord of the earth. Show him respect.”

The short African stepped back and gave the boy a sharp kick. “Food!” he barked.

The boy didn’t respond, and the two moved the pot on. Ikem held his peace.

As the guards unlocked Ikem's bonds and slopped food into his hand, the woman next to Grace began to weep. “Me!” she called out. “Me!”

The guards moved on to Udobi, then to the begging woman, then to Grace. As they approached her, Grace stared at the muskets the Africans carried. They were exactly like the ones her father had piled up in crates and stacked in the storeroom behind the London house. Following what the others had done, Grace held out her hand
—
the uninjured one. The metal spoon slopped out a scoop of pounded horse beans in slabber sauce. Grace glanced up at the African guard who served her—and she froze. It was Tungo! And the look he gave her boiled with murderous hatred.

What passed between the two did not go unnoticed.

“Who is the
señorita
?” one guard on the platform called down.

Tungo ignored him, but the other guard snickered. “Why do you ask, Antonio?” he called back up. “You want to buy her from the slave trader? You, with all your gold?”

“Not me!” Antonio answered. “She is
demasiado preciosa
.”

Even as the hungry captives continued to lick between their fingers and search the floor for one more drop of food, Tungo and his partner started around the room, jerking arms back into place and snapping on manacles. The guards gave each one an extra tug to make certain it was secure.

When Tungo came to Grace, he gave her right arm a wicked jerk. Grace screamed in pain.

“What do you want from me?” Grace demanded.

Without a word, Tungo turned and walked away.