The Mermaid's Child (23 page)

The smell was extraordinary: cooking spices, dung, sweat, and the pungent stink of frankincense. And above that, and closer, the odour of perfume on unwashed armpits, of hair oil made rancid by the heat, of melting cosmetics. Because beside me, on the dais, was the slave trader. He had painted his eyelids with blue, lined them with kohl, and smeared his skin with greasepaint. His nails were polished. He wore a loose robe in purple and white, billowing over flaccid muscles and softened belly. He had tucked a flashy dagger into his belt.
But no amount of ornament or drapery or paint or perfume could cover what he was: rotten at the core.

In his left hand he held the end of the rope that bound my wrists. In his right he held a switch of lithe young wood. He was speaking. And as he spun the words out of himself, threw them in loops across the crowd, I caught a word here or there, a phrase: “chance,” he said, and “teeth,” and “finest of this,” but I couldn't keep my concentration on what he was saying, couldn't snap the words off in the right places from the flow of sound. The words themselves no longer seemed to matter overmuch, but the patterns, the cadences and rhythms of his speech were so familiar. I was reminded of cool grey skies, market towns, close smoky rooms and the clink of coin in my palm. The difference was, back then Joe had been selling his phials of blue pills. This man was selling me.

The trader gave a tug at the rope, thwacked me across the backside with his cane, and I stumbled forward a step. I was aware, without looking, of a haze of upturned faces, a blur of oval shapes in tan and cream and black. The trader was now addressing his audience individually, trying to get the bidding started: “madam” I caught, and then something like “domestic, farm labour,” and then, I think, “forty, forty five?”

Among the crowd, a few heads were bent to exchange a word; there was a mutter here and there. My tongue still played silently behind my teeth, gathering sticky, foul moisture. There were no bids.

Then the trader put a hand under my chin, lifted it, turned my face towards him. A thread of spit joined his upper and lower lip, fattening and thinning as his mouth worked, as he lobbed words over his shoulder to the crowd, pinning me down with a clatter of quick-fire adjectives that I couldn't understand. He would glance towards his audience, gathering
up their interest, before looking back at me again to enumerate my virtues as a slave, tilting my head to consider it from a different angle.

For the first time that day, I lifted my gaze. I met his eye. I shifted the moisture to the back of my throat, and I spat.

The gob landed on his cheek, flicked into his eye, dribbled down towards his chin. It was unusually foul; viscous, yellowish and streaky. My own nose wrinkled at the sight of it. He staggered back a step, reached up a sleeve to wipe at his face. There was a ripple of laughter from the crowd. He wiped away a streak of greasepaint with the spit, smudged his kohl down his cheek. Beneath the cosmetic smear his face was red and glistening. He must have seen, in the instant that he met my gaze, the flames flicker in my eyes, because I saw a sudden shift, a slackness, a momentary fear in his. I smiled at him, and his face tightened again, the skin twitching under his left eye. He raised his stick and swung it at me, a stinging line down my right flank. It hurt, but I didn't let my smile waver. Instead, I shook my head. I put the strange words together, gathering phrases that I'd heard on board the pirates' ship, words the drovers had hissed at us on the long march here. Statements that came punctuated by a whip's flick, by a cuff at an ear or the back of a head. I wasn't entirely confident of the sounds, of the nuances of pronunciation: I was new to this tangled, spidery tongue. But I gave it all the energy and emphasis I could.

“Cunt,” I think I said to him. “Son of a hot bitch. Whore of shit.”

Something certainly got through: I could see that much. Either that or he was excessively startled to find that I could speak. His eyes tightened and he raised the switch again, higher this time, drawing it back as far as he could reach. He
swung it forward. It whistled through the air and landed on my upper arm. The fabric was old and soft; the blow cut right through the shirt sleeve and into my flesh.

I'd already made myself virtually unsellable. Now, if I could just provoke him sufficiently—if I could just make him draw that dagger from his belt. I glanced down at the weal on my arm. It was deep, red, and welling with blood. I raised an eyebrow, looked back at him.

“Sucker of cocks,” I think I told him. “Son of a cunt. Go and fuck your mother.”

Someone, somewhere, laughed. And then he drew his dagger.

I could feel, as a prickle down my neck, the silent buzz, the thrill of fear from the other slaves. The trader grabbed me by the throat, pulled me round and back against him: the damp of his flesh pressed through my shirt; the taint of his breath was on my cheek. His hand was cupped around my chin, pulling my head back against his shoulder, exposing the length of my throat. He lifted the blade. I felt the cold line of metal pressed against my skin. I'd already made the choice, back on board the
Spendlove
, and chosen death over slavery. This would be the last time I would ever have to bear the unwanted closeness of someone else's body, the undesired touch of another's hands. No one would ever hurt me again.

I closed my eyes. I smiled. My father, the ferryman, would have said a word or two in my favour. He would make the crossing easy.

And I would have died, there and then, my throat cut on the dais of the market square in that dusty little town whose name I didn't know, on the trade route through an anonymous desert in a country I had never heard of; I would have sunk
down in a pool of my own blood, and I would have welcomed death, had not a voice called out above the noise of the crowd. And the words were, for that one instant, as clear as water, as transparent as if they had been spoken in my own native tongue. “Stop,” the voice said, and the slave trader stilled the dagger at my throat. My eyes flicked open.

“I'll give you three.”

For the first time, I looked directly at the crowd. The blade of the dagger was still pressed against my skin: peering down over it, it took me a moment to pick him out. A plump figure, hatted, coated, his face pink and wet in the heat, coming forward, moving through the crowd like a worm through wood. He stopped at my feet, looked up at the slave trader. He took his hat from off his head, wiped his forehead with the back of a hand. And when he spoke again, his speech had once more turned opalescent: I picked out a word here and there, watching his mouth as he formed the sounds.

“I like,” I heard, and “spirit.”

The trader slackened his grip and drew the knife across my throat, leaving behind a faint thread of pain, a trace of blood.

“Needful,” the strange man said, and then I heard him say a word that I'd heard maybe half a dozen times before, and never aloud or in daylight. A word that is whispered at night between slaves, when someone has been taken unexpectedly away, when a new captive is thrown into their cage. The man said it out loud in the marketplace, and I sensed the other slaves lift their heads, uneasy. I felt myself flush with something like shame. The word loses all its shadows in translation, but it means, roughly speaking, work so terrible and cruel that it kills you, but only after it has first destroyed your soul.

I looked up at the cold gleam of the stars, shivered. Aries low near the horizon, overhead, the dragon and Cepheus. What did that mean? I couldn't remember. Change? But then everything alive must change, if only by dying.

Just a need to find myself a pattern, to link myself to some external presence, to find meaning. Futile. I leaned my head back a little further. Where was the pole star? Was that Venus? Which way was north?

Nearby, tethered a little way from the lamplight's spill, the camels stood morosely, snuffling a little, shifting on their soft wide feet. Camels. The word stretched itself back across the years, snagged on the day the circus came. I'd never known what they were called until today, when I'd heard the men talking.

There had been three of us travelling together. In front of me, the man from the slavemarket was seated bolt upright, his jacket tight and creasing at the shoulders and armpits, his hat pulled down low. A younger man dressed in similar clothing was following behind. I hadn't had the chance to look at him properly. I was perched on the pack animal between them, surrounded by bundles and saddlebags, my hands tied in front of me to the animal's tack. As we swayed and pitched through the trackless desert, the sun pounding down on the crown of my head like a lump hammer, I listened to them talking, batting the occasional word back and forth between them, lobbing a phrase or two right over my head. Their voices were odd, heavily accented. Some of the vowel sounds were elongated and breathy, others were clipped away to almost nothing. But there was no mistaking it, their language of choice (their native tongue, I couldn't help but
suppose) was the same as mine. I recalled that moment of clarity in the market, and wondered if the older man had spoken briefly, unthinkingly, in our common tongue, then shifted to the local one to haggle.

They didn't say much, and the sound didn't travel well; it was soaked up quickly by the thirsty desert air. But I gathered that they were not relishing their journey, and that in particular they loathed travelling by camel.

As the dunes' shadows had deepened, lengthened, and the sky's blue began to darken, there were a number of speculative exchanges as to the best time to pitch camp. The place was irrelevant, as every dune was much the same as every other, but if it was left much later they would be pitching tents in the dark. This decided, the older man called a halt, and shouted and kicked at his camel until he'd bullied her into kneeling. She hissed and folded up on herself like a card table. He dismounted and dragged at the other animals' bridles until they too crumpled down onto the sand. He untied my hands, directed me with a pistol to unload the bundles from the pack animal, then to begin the assembly of the tents. From time to time he'd shout a word or two in the local tongue, “quick quick,” or “stupid,” directing me in much the same way as he had the beasts. I remained as wordless as the camels, tried to keep my face as expressionless as theirs.

Once the work was done, my hands were tied again, and my feet were hobbled; I could stand, and walk a little, but not with any ease or comfort. I was parched, chafed, saddlesore and weary, my head throbbing from the day's long sun. I was given a cup of water, a piece of bread, and a scratchy blanket to keep out the desert cold, so that I could sleep. I could not sleep.

They were sitting on little folding stools. Jackets off,
shirtsleeves rolled. Each had a pistol strapped into a holster beneath his left arm. A lamp glowed at their feet. Beside it stood a basket with its lid off, and every so often one of them would reach down, select something from inside, and bring it to his mouth. I couldn't see what it was they were eating, but imagined, enviously, dried fruits and meats and cheeses.

The younger one was wiping his fingers on a handkerchief.

“I don't mean to be awkward, sir,” he said, “but I'm very uneasy about this.”

I looked more closely. The yellow lamplight picked out the lines of concern on his face.

There was a chink here. I might be able to worm myself into it, might slip right through.

“Don't talk nonsense,” the older man was saying. “You'd've done exactly the same if you'd been there. It's just good business. Bargain like that? Cheaper than indentured labour, even. And, when you think about it, the advantage of”—he hesitated a moment—“this kind of worker—is that there's no call for compensation or any kind of fuss, should the inevitable happen. No widows or orphans, no grieving parents, none of that palaver. If only we'd thought of it before, we could have saved ourselves a fortune.”

The younger one nodded, just a slight dip of the head. He was reaching down for something more to eat. The older man brushed his hand aside, picked up the basket and slapped the lid into place, securing it with a peg.

“We can't be too picky now, can we, Cunningham?” he added. “The way things are going, we can't afford to pass up on a fit young thing, bargain price. Anyway, if we hadn't bought it, he'd've killed it there and then. Cut its throat in the market. We did it a favour, if you think about it. We saved its life.”

Then Cunningham glanced my way. I dipped my eyes back down towards the sand. He lowered his voice.

“I wish you wouldn't say ‘it,' ” he said. And I thought, there it is. The chink.

“Eh?”

“I mean, sir, after all, she is a girl.”

This was something of a surprise, but I kept my face poker-straight, as if everything was sailing straight over my head. Even in the half-light, even without looking directly, I registered the flick of the younger one's eyes over towards me again. What was it that McMichaels had said?
It's amazing what a little discomfort does to a person's appearance
. I'd had more than a little discomfort in my time. My time had worn me like a pair of weekday shoes.

I hadn't been a girl in ages. But if Cunningham liked girls, I could be a girl.

“D'you think so?” The older man paused a moment. “D'you know, it didn't even cross my mind.”

He straightened up, hands on his thighs. He picked up the lamp.

“Well,” he said. “There's only one way to be sure.”

The younger man stood up beside him.

“Really, sir—”

“Come on.”

They came across towards me. The older man hunkered down, set the lamp on the sand and ground its base in to keep it upright.

“Sir—it doesn't really matter, does it.” The younger man was standing a little further back.

“You just hold its hands,” he said, “and I'll undo these buttons.”