The New World (4 page)

Even when this track ended we still walked easily enough, passing through stagnant marshes, then reaching sand-dunes covered in sea-lavender, where flocks of finches and sparrows sprang up like chaff, then fell down like grain.

Our guards paid no attention to any of these things, which they doubtless saw every day and thought quite ordinary; to my eyes they seemed almost miraculous, and for the first time since our capture I felt my spirits rally.

“They won't hurt us,” I told Natty, suddenly filling with hope.

There was a pause while she swallowed. “You're a fool, Jim Hawkins,” she said at last, her voice cracking. “If you believe that you're a complete fool.”

Natty's reply hurt my pride but I knew it was fair.

I had deceived myself; I had let the earth deceive me.

For the next part of our journey, although the walking remained easy, and the wreckage of the storm fell behind us, and the clouds began to break up, and the deep blue sky reappeared, and clammy heat turned into dry heat, and our clothes dried out and became more comfortable, I would not be so foolish. I would accept things as they were. I would admit to strangeness and danger. And thirst. And hunger. I would see we had no authority over our own lives; no influence over where we went, or when, or how.

This was the lowest I had fallen since our wreck, because for the first time I accepted how much we had lost. “Father,” I whispered to myself at one point, meaning not the Almighty but my own flesh and blood. “Forgive me.” I had allowed myself to think of him once or twice since reaching dry land, but never before had I wanted his company so much.

At the same time there was Natty, and I knew we must cheat our fate together or not at all.

“Why is there no one here?” I said, just to make conversation. Our guards did not mind, but continued marching at the same steady pace, their moccasins pattering on the dry earth.

“Why should there be?” Although Natty remained out of sight behind me, it was clear she was not in the least interested. She touched me on the shoulder and pointed ahead, where our track now cut into different country again, sprinkled with small oaks and walnuts.

“You see?” she sighed. “There's nothing here—just trees and grass. Nothing.”

I nattered on regardless. “Where are their houses?” I asked. “Where do they live?”

Natty sighed. “Why are you thinking about houses, Jim? This is the wilderness. We're not in London now. We're not in England.”

“Very well,” I said; I knew I was making a fool of myself. “Not houses, then. Whatever they make instead. Tents. Or whatever they find. Caves.”

There was no answer, just scuffling footsteps and another weary sigh.

“All right,” I continued, more wildly than ever. “Not caves, then—I don't know, Natty. People must live somewhere, that's all I'm saying. There must
be
people here and they must live somewhere. People are everywhere.”

This provoked her so much she tried to laugh, a dry croak that made the guard ahead of me spin round and put a finger to his lips.

For once I was glad to obey him and fall silent; I had done my best and it had come to nothing. I had failed. For the next two or three miles I therefore kept my mouth shut and my eyes blank. I refused even to take an interest in my guard, let alone the seed heads that popped in the grasses as the heat of the day increased, or anything else in the country on either side.

In this vacancy I soon slipped back to childhood again and my father, who now appeared in a thousand scenes of kindness: showing me his winding tracks through the marshes near our home in the Hispaniola, asking me to help serve his customers in the taproom there, bringing me food when I was unwell, pointing out the boats and shipping that worked on the river, teaching me their names.

At another time these memories would have been delightful; now the weight of them made my chin drop onto my chest as if I had no more will to live. I felt the earth opening before me, and saw the darkness boiling at the center; I decided I did not care any more if I toppled in.

What saved me was very surprising. We came to a hill-crest, a sluggish wave that rippled through the whole landscape, and when I looked ahead I found the earth suddenly opening into a valley. But not a valley like any we had seen before. This was very neatly shaped, and the central ground had been cleared to make fields, where rows of corn were growing between brushwood fences.

Our guards were certainly pleased to see it, and made us pause while they pointed out features they thought were especially admirable: the oaks that grew at regular intervals along the middle of the valley; the piles of stones that had been removed from the fields and rolled into heaps; and the smooth path (whitened by feet meandering to and fro) that led from where we stood and ended in a village.

A village. Not a collection of houses arranged as a street, such as we know in England, but twenty-five or thirty triangular tents—tepees, I soon learned to call them—which sprouted wherever their occupants had chosen to build them. Some looked like unlit bonfires made of sticks and logs; some had a framework of long poles covered with different kinds of skin; and some were shabby, with rubbish heaped around their entrances.

Beyond these tents, at the head of the valley, stood the greatest surprise of all: a large low house built of stones taken from the fields, with a shaded veranda in front and outbuildings to left and right. I knew at once it must be the home of their chieftain. Now, I thought, with my heart pounding; now he will appear to us and we will hear our sentence.

But nothing happened. Our guards continued their chattering; cloud-shadows swilled over the fields and darkened their yellow to gold; Natty touched my shoulder again, to show she understood what I was thinking, then her hand fell away. And that was all. The house was deserted. There was no smoke rising from the chimney, and no movement in the windows.

Was the chieftain dead or was he hunting perhaps, or fighting? I had no way of knowing, and therefore no reason to feel we were any safer than before. Yet at the same time I told myself we would not be killed at once, because the chieftain was not here to give the order.

The idea was soon knocked aside—by Natty, first, suddenly gesturing in front of us at a group of women working in the fields, then by the women themselves, who set up a great hollering when they saw us, and so brought everyone else in the village streaming out from their tents and up the slope toward us.

Very soon about sixty people had collected, all pointing and murmuring. Women with babies strapped to their backs in flimsy knapsacks. Children. Leathery old grandfathers and grandmothers. And all very inquisitive—darting forward, then back again, pointing and staring. And very suspicious as well. When one group of young boys ran up carrying bows and arrows which they fired into the ground at our feet, the rest of the crowd applauded them, because they could not decide whether we were humans or monsters.

Our guards did not like the idea that we might be hurt in this way and hurried us forward, but this only made the crowd surge around us more wildly than ever. The little children were the least afraid, often laughing at us behind their hands. The women were as scornful as the young men though more decorous, being dressed in animal hides that were stuck over with pieces of shell. I noticed that some of them had trophies dangling from their belts—hair, and wrinkled pieces of skin. And all of them, regardless of age and sex, had decorations painted on their arms and hands and faces—rusty reds and greens, the same as our guards.

The crush was so great we soon came to a standstill, whereupon a young child stepped forward, a boy of seven or eight; he approached very boldly, stretching out his hand with the fist clenched—and then, just when I thought he might be about to punch me, he pinched me, a sting like a mosquito, before breaking into a grin and stooping above the mark he had made, to see the whiteness in my skin before he scampered off again.

It was nothing in itself, a game, but I could not help feeling a little spurt of elation. I thought if the children of the village could make us likeable, our strangeness would be forgiven by the others and we might soon become friends. For this reason I then began to encourage them as much as possible, smiling and laughing when three or four others approached me, daring one another to pinch not just my hands and legs, but my nose, my face, and anywhere else they could reach.

Our guards soon tired of this and shouted at us to move again, which made the children scatter as quickly as they had appeared. It was a disappointment, I admit, and I felt it sharply—as though I had been banished from the company of friends—but I kept my chin up as we made our way forward, catching an eye here and there to prove I was made of the same flesh and blood, and showing as much curiosity as possible about their clothes and their tents and the whole arrangement of their village—until suddenly I found myself looking at things I wished I had never seen. Human heads, severed and sewn into a kind of necklace, that hung around the entrance to one of the largest tepees; and farther off, a large circular area with a pit dug in the center. The mouth of this hole was filthy with the wreckage of bonfires, and close by, collapsed between two stakes, lay a naked body, the skin so blistered it hardly resembled a body at all.

Our guards laughed aloud when they saw me noticing this, prodding me with their spears and seeming to congratulate one another. Only when we reached the chieftain's house did they become more somber again, showing us we must stop here a moment, and admire the magnificent thing before us.

To tell the truth, the house was a very ramshackle affair when seen close up, with draughty holes in the roof and gaps between the stones of the walls. Yet it was also very mysterious and threatening. The shadows sprawling across the veranda looked heavy as marble, and the windows were empty squares of darkness. A curtain draped over the entrance dragged its hem in the dust as the breeze blew; it was dyed the color of blood.

I looked—then looked away, and this time the guards did not prevent me. On the contrary, they seemed very anxious for me to take in the whole extent of the property, including the shelter and halter-rail that stood off to the right; it was obviously a stable of some kind, although there were no horses.

They were even more enthusiastic when I glanced away to the left, where a large pile of wood had been collected together, the timbers peeling and sick-looking. A woodpile for fuel, I thought—but what of that? Then I looked again and noticed a door among the timbers. Not a woodpile then. A cabin of some kind.

A prison. Our prison. Where we would stay until the chieftain returned.

We shuffled forward, Natty breathing quick and shallow beside me. That was the only sound I heard during our final seconds of daylight, and when I looked down all that I saw was the powdery dirt curling over my toes and against my ankles. It was nothing more than dust, but felt very precious to me because it was my last sight of the world. When we swung along the front of the chieftain's house, and one of our guards ran ahead to remove a wooden locking-pole from the prison door, it still danced in front of my eyes. And still danced when the door slammed shut behind us, and the log scraped back into place, and we were drowned in darkness.

I lost my balance, covering my face with my arms to shield myself. But there was nothing. Just pinprick lights and cobwebs tickling my skin—and stink. A warm, sweet, cloying stink of putrid flesh, and I did not like to think what else.

Then there was Natty, my fingers sliding through her hair and over her forehead and mouth, brushing her neck, the collar of her shirt, taking hold of her shoulders. I tugged her toward me and held her close; when I pressed my face against her cheek it was wet with tears.

“My love!” I whispered, and she leaned more heavily against me. Farther off in the world, in the world that did not belong to us any more, footsteps retreated and a dog whimpered.

“I told you,” Natty said at last. “They will hurt us—they will.”

I was too tired to encourage her any more; I merely straightened a little, then eased away from her.

“Where are you going?” she asked, in a flurry of panic.

“Nowhere,” I told her, and might have smiled. “I'm looking.” I let my hands fall from her shoulders because my instinct, like an animal in a cage, was to see how far I could move in any direction. I could not think properly until I knew how much space we had, or how little.

“How can you do that?” Natty asked, more composed now. “How can you look, when you can't see?”

“Easy,” I said, as if I felt more confident myself, and raised my fingers to the ceiling, poking them into a mesh of cobwebs.

I estimated it was seven foot high, then I groped my way from one side of the hut to the other.

This time, ten foot.

Then I started from the door—the one door, built in the wall that faced the village—and set off toward the farthest end of the hut. My eyes were adjusting now and I could see that the darkness was not absolutely black as I had thought at first; the cracks in the walls meant it was shot through with little darts and slivers of sun, which filled the whole cabin with an airy sort of twilight. I stopped in a narrow beam that showed the floor covered in silvery dust, scooping up a handful and holding it close to my face. It was oyster shells, ground into powder.

I walked on, but even more cautiously than before, because the stench in this farther part was much worse. Fifteen paces. Twenty—then something brushed my bare ankle. Rags, I thought; something soft, anyway, ashily soft and then suddenly hard, with a burst of flies like fat in a pan.

“Ah!” I reeled away, my stomach heaving.

“Jim!” Natty called. “What is it, Jim? Are you all right?”

“I'm not sure,” I said, struggling to keep from choking. “There's something here.”

“What sort of thing?”

“I don't…” I staggered backward another few steps, expecting to end up beside Natty again, but she did not want this. She was suddenly back in command of herself, and as I retreated she pushed ahead, floating into the gloom with her white shirt glimmering like a moth.

Then her breathing faltered. “Come here,” she mumbled. “I've found someone.”

Immediately, I put my hand over my mouth and went forward to kneel beside her. Although the light here was very dim I could see she was stooped over a man, though more a corpse than a man: lank hair, gaunt face, markings on both cheeks. By peering more narrowly, I saw these markings were painted in straight lines, not circles like the warriors in the village. This told me he must be a stranger, probably an enemy captured in battle.

I blinked once or twice, clearing my eyes as much as possible, and a clay bowl swam into focus—resting on his stomach with his hands clamped around it. Apart from that tight grip, there was nothing lifelike about him. His eyes were closed and his chin had sunk onto his chest; a string of saliva gleamed in the corner of his mouth.

“Why is he kept like this?” I asked, which was a stupid question. What I meant was: why haven't they killed him already?

Natty clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “You tell me,” she whispered. There was none of her mockery in this, just acceptance; we were both equally at a loss. “But we might say the same of ourselves, don't you think? Why haven't they killed us already? What are they keeping us for?”

Her voice was steady, as though her questions had nothing to do with anything that mattered, and when I did not answer—when I could not think how to answer—she merely prised the bowl away from our friend and passed it over to me. Then she smoothed the hair on his head as if to say she would soon return, and led us back to our place by the door.

Here she told me to put down the bowl and sit side by side with her; she was breathing more easily now, we both were.

“He'll die soon,” she said, perfectly composed.

“And we—” I broke off as a large blue-fly droned toward us from the end of the cabin, circled heavily over our heads, then buzzed back toward the invalid and settled again.

“And we will die soon as well,” Natty went on. “That's what you were going to say, isn't it?”

I paused again; the question was too enormous. “It depends on their chieftain,” I said at last. “He'll decide.”

Natty considered this. “And when will that be?” she wondered. “You saw his house—no one's been there for weeks. We've no idea where he is. We don't even know he exists.”

“Oh, I am sure he exists,” I said.

“Really,” she said, with a definite smile in her voice. “We might be at home discussing our neighbors in London!”

The word “London” sounded so strange in my ears that I could not help smiling myself. “What else can we do?” I said, with a shrug.

But Natty's mood had changed again; now she was cold and matter-of-fact. “Nothing,” she said. “We can't do anything. You said so at the cliff.”

“I meant we should get their trust,” I said. “I meant we should fool them and make them lazy, then try to escape.”

“Escape from here?” Her incredulity roused her a little. “How will we ever do that?”

I ignored her question. “I expect if we're not killed we'll be sold,” I said. I had not wanted to seem angry. I wanted to sound cold like her, because I thought it was a sort of control. Instead I frightened her, and as soon as my last word sank in, my word “sold,” she suddenly pitched forward onto all fours and began scurrying around the perimeter of the prison, making a detour to avoid our friend but otherwise feeling along the timbers with her fingers, thrusting them into cracks, testing the foundations to see if they were well set in the ground, and eventually circling back to the door, which she banged and pounded until it creaked on its hinges. Then she collapsed beside me again, breathing quickly.

“Well?” I asked, still stubborn.

“Not possible,” she panted. “Like you said.”

“Not by disappearing through walls, no.”

“How then, Jim?” she said, her voice high and desperate. “How shall we ever escape? How?”

“Other ways,” I said, and when I heard how unhelpful this sounded, how mean-spirited, I knew I had hurt her. But in my unhappiness I did nothing. I hung my head and fell silent, listening to the life outside. I heard women summoning their children and arguing together, then men's voices giving orders until everyone stopped talking for a moment. And in that pause: birdsong, very brash and unlike our English birds, and the howling conversation of wild dogs beyond the village. The longer I listened, the more heavily every sound pressed down on me; each call, each growl and bark, crashing onto me like a stone, driving me into the earth.

I gave up and let my thoughts sweep me away. For miles in every direction, perhaps for hundreds or even thousands of miles, no one spoke our language or knew our customs. There were people, certainly: our fellow prisoner and our jailers and maybe other tribes scattered here and there. But no one we could appeal to for understanding. No one we could trust. The whole world was a wilderness.

I would certainly have continued in this way, falling and never reaching the end of my fall, if Natty had not saved me.

All her coldness had gone now, and her fear; the crackle in her voice, which was her thirst again, made my heart melt. “There will be other ways,” she said—my own words repeated, but calmly and kindly. “We will find other ways to escape from here, and reach England again.”

The words came to me like a blessing and I seized them in pure gratitude, stretching out my hand and laying it against Natty's cheek, curling my fingers into her hair and pulling her toward me. I kissed her, my mouth finding hers in the darkness and feeling her lips as dry as paper.

For a moment she yielded, relaxing a little, then turned away.

“Natty,” I said, my hand slipping down to my lap. “Please, Natty…”

“Jim,” was all she said. “We can't, Jim.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, my head spinning.

“Surely you know?” she said.

She was trying to protect me but I needed her to explain. “What?” I asked her bluntly. “You must tell me, Natty.”

She lifted her chin as though preparing for a struggle. “Very well.” Her voice was a little louder now. “If that's what you want. We are where we are—in prison. We have a dying man here. We are nearly dead ourselves. This is not—”

I interrupted her; I knew I would sound wheedling, but I could not stop myself. “So when, Natty?” I said. “When if not now?”

She hesitated, and even in the half-light I could see that her eyes were wet. “I can't,” she said at length. “I can't—that's all. And besides, we must be safe.”

“What do you mean, safe?” Again, I spoke despite myself.

Natty tipped her head backward and bit her lip; she would not let herself weep. “I mean they mustn't know anything about us,” she said. “These people. If they know how we feel, they will hurt us all the more.”

She reached out and took my hand. “Now, please,” she went on, more quietly still. “Understand.”

She let go of my hand and looked away from me, facing the door of our prison; her shoulders were slumped as though she had used up all her strength.

Again I could not help myself, and when I opened my mouth the words that escaped me were not the ones I had meant to use.

“I will die of this,” I told her.

Five short sounds, but I regretted them bitterly. I hung my head in the darkness and waited for her to rebuke me.

“No, Jim,” she said. “You won't die of this, not of waiting.” Then to show there was nothing to add she stretched herself out on the floor, as naturally as if it were her soft and familiar bed at home, folded her hands across her chest and closed her eyes.

A moment later I did the same, and the warmth of her body enveloped me as surely as if I held her in my arms. For a long time afterward my voice continued buzzing in my head, repeating the same words over and over. How would I not die of waiting? How would I not die of waiting?