The Sot-Weed Factor (41 page)

But the savage remained impassive. "Shall I rejoice to find an Englishman with mercy?" He pointed to his evil-smelling knee. "Which is more merciful, a spear in the heart or this poisoned knee, that I cut while fleeing like a rabbit in the night? If my sons are dead, I starve; if they live I die of this poison. Your heart is good: I ask you to kill Quassapelagh."

Presently Bertrand and the Negro returned, marching at the points of their spears the two young boys, who seemed to be suffering only from bruises and sore heads.

"It is enough that my sons live," Quassapelagh said. "Tell your man to kill me now."

"Nay, I've better work for him," Ebenezer said, and to Bertrand he declared, "Drakepecker will remain here with the king and mind his wants while we sound the temper of these English bandits. The boys can lead us to the outskirts of their settlement."

" 'Tis not mine to argue," Bertrand sighed. "I only hope they've not snatched all the goden towns and set themselves up as gods."

Ebenezer then made clear to the Negro, by means of signs, that he wished him to feed the King and dress the infected knee; to the latter item, presented more as a query than a command, the black man responded with bright affirmative nods and an enthusiastic chatter that suggested acquaintance with some prophylactic or therapeutic measures. Without more ado he removed the dirty dressing and examined the malodorous inflammation with a clearly chirurgical interest. Then, in his own tongue, accompanying his orders with enough gesticulation for clarity, he directed one of the boys to clean and cook the rabbits and sent the other to fetch two crockery pots of water.

" 'Sheart!" Bertrand said respectfully. "The wight's a physician as well! 'Tis an honor to be his god, is't not, sir?"

The poet smiled. "Haply he merits a better, Bertrand; he is in sooth a masterly creation."

Before two hours had elapsed, the rabbits were cooked and eaten -- along with raw oysters provided by the youths and a kind of parched and powdered corn called
rockahominy,
of which the King had a large jarful -- and Quassapelagh's wound had been lanced with his own knife, drained of pus, washed clean, and dressed with some decotion brewed by the Negro out of various roots and herbs which he had gathered in the woods while the rabbits were roasting. Even the savages were impressed by the performance: the boys fingered their lumps with more of awe than of resentment, and Quassapelagh's hard eyes shone.

"If the English are not far distant, I should like to have a look at them ere dark," the Laureate announced. When Quassapelagh replied that they were not above three miles away, he repeated his orders to the Negro, who, kneeling as usual at the sound of his name, acquiesced tearfully to the separation.

"If we find them to be pirates or highwaymen, we'll return at once," Ebenezer told the King.

"The Emperor of the English will not harm you," Quassapelagh said, "nor need you fear for my sons, who are unknown to him. But speak not the name of the Anacostin King to any man unless you wish me dead, and do not return to this cave. Your kindness to Quassapelagh will not be forgotten." He spoke in the native tongue to one of the boys, fetched him a small leather packet from the rear of the cave.

" 'Tis a map of the Seven Cities he means to show us!" Bertrand whispered.

"Take these," said the King, and gave to each of the men a small amulet, carved, it appeared, from the vertebra of a large fish -- a hollow, watery-white cylinder of bone perhaps three quarters of an inch in width and half that in diameter, with small projections where the dorsal and ventral ribs had been cut off and the near-translucence characteristic of the bones of fish. Bertrand's face fell. "It seems a small repayment for my life," Quassapelagh said sternly, "but it was for one of these that Warren turned me free."

"This Warren is a fool," grumbled Bertrand.

The King ignored him. "Wear it as a ring upon your finger," he told Ebenezer. "One day when Death is very close, this ring may turn him away."

Ebenezer too was somewhat disappointed by the present, the rude carvings of which could not even be called decorative, but he accepted it politely and, since the outside diameter was too large for comfort, strung it upon a thin rawhide thong and wore it around his neck, under his shirt. Bertrand, on the other hand, stuffed his ungraciously into a pocket of his trousers. Then, it being already late in the afternoon and the beach in shadow from the cliffs, they bade warm goodbyes to the big Negro and Quassapelagh and, with the savage boys as guides, ascended to the forest and struck out more or less northwestward, moving slowly because of their bare feet.

"Thou'rt not o'erjoyed at traveling to our countrymen," Ebenezer observed to Bertrand.

"I'm not o'erjoyed at walking into a pirates' nest, when we could as lightly search for golden towns," the valet admitted. "Nor did we drive a happy bargain with that salvage king, to trade Drakepecker for a pair of fishbones."

" 'Twas not a trade, nor yet a gift," the poet said. "If he was obliged to us for his life, then saving ours discharged his obligation."

But Bertrand was not so easily mollified.

" 'Sbody, sir, I mean nor selfishness nor blasphemy, but 'tis precious rare a valet gets to be a god! Yet I'd scarce commenced to take the measure of the office, as't were, and get the hang of't, ere ye trade off my parishioner for a pitiful pair of fishbones! I wanted but another day or two to god it about, don't ye know, ere we turned old Drakepecker loose."

"Not I," the Laureate said. " 'Tis a post I feel well quit of. We found him cast up helpless from the sea and left him helpful in a cave; he hath been slave to a god and now is servant to a king. Whither he goes thence is his own affair. We twain did well to start him on his journey -- is that not godding it enough? Besides which," he concluded, "you had not the chore of keeping him occupied, as I did, or you'd not complain; I was pleased to find that work to set him to. If we reach our golden cities, my own shall be republican, not theocratic, nor have I any wish to be its ruler. That much Drakepecker hath taught me."

Bertrand smiled. "Ye've been not long a master, thus to speak, sir! D'ye think I mean to fill my head with dogmas and decretals, once I'm in my temple? That is the work of the lesser fry -- priests and clerks and all that ilk. A god doth naught but sit and sniff the incense, count his money, and take his pick o' the wenches."

"Methinks your reign in Heaven shan't be long," Ebenezer observed.

"Nor doth it need be," said his valet.

After a while the woods thinned out, and to westward, through the trees, they saw a cleared field of considerable size in which grew orderly green rows of an unfamiliar broad-leaved plant. Ebenezer's heart leaped at the sight.

"Look yonder, Bertrand! That is no salvage crop!" He laid hold of one of their guides and pointed to the field. "What do you call that?" he demanded loudly, as if to achieve communication by volume. "What is the name of that? Did the English plant that field?"

The boy caught up the word happily and nodded. "English. English." Then he launched into some further observation, in the course of which Ebenezer heard the word
tobacco.

"Tobacco?"
he inquired. "That is tobacco?"

"How can that be?" Bertrand wondered.

" 'Tis not so strange, after all," said the Laureate. "Captain Pound was wont to sail the latitude of the Azores, that ran to the Virginia Capes, and any isle along that parallel would have Virginia's climate, would it not?"

Bertrand then demanded to know why a band of pirates would waste their time on agriculture.

"We have no proof they're pirates," Ebenezer reminded him. "They could as well be sot-weed smugglers, of which Henry Burlingame declares there are a great number, or simply honest planters. 'Tis a thing to hope for, is't not?"

A contrary sentiment showed in Bertrand's face, but before he had a chance to voice it the two boys motioned them to silence. The four moved stealthily through a final grove of trees to where the forest ended at a riverbank on the north and a roadway paved with bare logs on the west. Sounds of activity came to them from a large log structure like a storehouse, obviously the work of white men, that ran from the roadside back into the trees; at their guide's direction they crept up to the rear wall, from which point of vantage, their hearts in their mouths, they could safely peer down the road toward the river.

"I'God!" Ebenezer whispered. The noise they had heard, a rumbling and chanting, was made by several teams of three Negroes each, who, barefoot and naked to the waist, were rolling enormous wooden hogsheads over the road down to a landing at the river's edge and singing as they worked. On a pier that ran out from the shore was a group of bareheaded, shoeless men dressed in bleached and tattered Scotch cloth, who despite their sunburnt faces and generally uncouth appearance were plainly of European and not barbaric origin, they were engaged in nothing more strenuous than leaning against the pilings, smoking pipes, passing round a crockery jug (after each drink from which they wiped their mouths on the tops of their hairy forearms), and watching the Negroes wrestle their burdens into a pair of lighters moored alongside. At sight of them Ebenezer rejoiced but more marvelous still -- so marvelous that the beholding of it brought tears to his eyes -- out in mid-channel of the broad river, which must have been nearly two miles wide at that point, a stately, high-pooped, three-masted vessel rode at anchor, loading cargo from the lighters, and from her maintop hung folds of red, white, and blue that could be no other banner but the King's colors.

"These are no brigands, but honest English planters!" Ebenezer laughed. " 'Tis some island of the Indies we have hit on!" And for all the others warned him to be silent, he cried out for joy, burst out onto the roadway, and ran whooping and hallooing to the wharf. The young savages fled into the forest; Bertrand, filled with gloom and consternation, lingered by the warehouse wall to watch.

"Countrymen! Countrymen!" Ebenezer called. The Negroes stopped their song and left their labors to see him go by, and the white men too turned round in surprise at the outcry. It was indeed a most uncommon spectacle: even thinner than usual from the rigors of his months on shipboard, Ebenezer bounded down the log road like a shaggy stork. His feet were bare and blistered, his shirt and breeches shred to rags: bald and beardless at the time of his abduction from the
Poseidon,
he had let his hair grow wild from scalp and chin alike, so that now, though still of no great length, it was entirely matted and ungroomed. Add to this, he was more sunburnt than the planters and at least as dirty, the very picture of a castaway, and his haste was made the more grotesque by the way he clutched both arms across his shirt front, wherein he carried still the curling pages of the Journal.

"Countrymen!" he cried again upon reaching the landing. "Say something quickly, that I may hear what tongue you speak!"

The men exchanged glances; some shifted their positions, and others sucked uneasily on their pipes.

"He is a madman," one suggested, and before he could retreat found himself embraced.

"Thou'rt English!
Dear God, thou'rt English!"

"Back off, there!"

Ebenezer pointed jubilantly seawards. "Where is that vessel bound, sir, as thou'rt a Christian Englishman?"

"For Portsmouth, with the fleet --"

"Praise Heav'n!" He leaped and clapped his hands and called back to the warehouse, "Bertrand!
Bertrand!
They're honest English gentlemen all! Hither, Bertrand! And prithee, wondrous Englishman," he said, and laid hold of another planter who, owing to the water at his back, could not escape, "what isle is this I have been washed to? Is't Barbados, or the far Antilles?"

"Thy brains are pickled with rum," growled the planter, shaking free.

"The Bermoothes, then!" Ebenezer cried. He fell to his knees and clutched the fellow's trouser legs. "Tell me 'tis Corvo, or some isle I have not heard of!"

" 'Tis not the one nor the other, nor any isle else," the planter said. " 'Tis but poor shitten Maryland, damn your eyes."

The Laureate Pays His Fare to Cross a River

"Maryland!"
Ebenezer released his victim's trousers and looked back toward the woods he'd emerged from, at the fields of green tobacco and the Negroes grinning broadly beside their hogsheads. His face lit up. Still kneeling, as though transfixed, he laid his right hand over his heart and raised his left to the gently rolling hills, behind which the sun was just descending. "Smile, ye gracious hills and sunlit trees!" he commanded. "Thine own sweet singer, thy Laureate, is come to noise thy glory!"

This was a disembarkation-piece he had composed aboard the
Poseidon
some months before, deeming it fit that as Laureate of Maryland he should salute his bailiwick poetically upon first setting foot on it, and intending also to leave no question among his new compatriots that he was poet to the bone. He was therefore not a little piqued to see his initial public declamation received with great hilarity by his audience, who guffawed and snorted, smacked their thighs and held their sides, wet their noses and elbowed their neighbors, and pointed horny fingers at Ebenezer, and broke wind in their uncouth breeches.

The Laureate let go his pose, rose to his feet, arched his great blond eyebrows, pursed his lips, and said, "I'll cast you no more pearls, my friends. Have a care, or I'll see thy masters birch you one and all." He turned his back on them and hurried to the foot of the landing, where Bertrand stood uncomfortably under the scrutiny of several delighted Negroes.

"Put by your dream of seven cities, Bertrand: you stand upon the blessed soil of Maryland!"

"I heard as much," the valet said sourly.

"Is't not a paradise? Look yonder, how the sunset fires those trees!"

"Yet your fellow Marylanders would win no place at Court, I think."

"Nay, who shall blame them for their disrespect?" Ebenezer looked down at his own garb and Bertrand's, and laughed. "What man could see a Laureate Poet here? Besides, they're only simple servants."

" 'Tis an idle master lets 'em drink their afternoons, then," Bertrand said skeptically. "I cannot blame Quassapelagh --"

"La!" the poet warned. "Speak not his name!"

"I merely meant, I see his point of view."

"Only think!" Ebenezer marveled. "He was king of the
salvage
Indians of Maryland! And Drakepecker --" He looked with awe on the muscular Negroes and frowned.

Bertrand followed the thought, and his eyes welled up with tears. "How could that princely fellow be a slave? Plague take your Maryland!"

"We must not judge o'erhastily," Ebenezer said, but he stroked his beard reflectively.

All through this colloquy the idle Englishmen had wheezed and snickered in the background. One of their number -- a wiry, wrinkled old reprobate with clipped ears and a branded palm -- now scraped and bowed his way up to them and said with exaggerated accent, "Your Grace must pardon our rudeness. We're at your service, m'lord."

"Be't so," Ebenezer said at once, and giving Bertrand a knowing look he stepped out on the pier to address the group. "Know, my good men, that rude and tattered though I appear, I am Ebenezer Cooke, appointed by the Lord Proprietary to the office of Poet and Laureate of the Province of Maryland; I and my man have suffered imprisonment at the hands of pirates and narrowly escaped a watery grave. I shall not this time report your conduct to your masters, but do henceforth show more respect, if not for me, at least for Poetry!"

This speech they greeted with applause and raucous cheers, which, taking them as a sign of gratitude for his leniency, elicited from the Laureate a benign smile.

"Now," he said, "I know not where in Maryland I stand, but I must go at once to Malden, my plantation on Choptank River. I shall require both transportation and direction, for I know naught of the Province. You, my man," he went on, addressing the old man with the branded palm who had spoken previously. "Will you lead me thither? I'm certain your master shan't object, when he learns the office of your passenger."

"Aye, now, that's certain!" the fellow answered, with a glance at his companions. "But say, now, Master Poet, how will ye pay me for my labor? For we must paddle o'er this river here, and there's nothing floats like gold."

Ebenezer hid his discomfort behind an even haughtier mien. "As't happens, my man, what gold I have is not upon my person. In any case, I daresay your master would forbid you to take money in such a worthy service."

"I'll take my chances there," the old man said. "If ye cannot pay me, ye'll cross as best ye can. Is't possible so great a man hath not a ring or other kind of valuable?"

"Ye may have mine," growled Bertrand. " 'Tis a bona fide salvage relic, that I hear is worth a fortune." He reached into his breeches pocket. "Hi, there, I've lost it through a hole --"

"Out on't!" Ebenezer cried, losing patience with the Marylander. "Not for nothing am I Laureate of this Province! Ferry me across, fellow, and you shall be rewarded with the finest gold e'er mined: the pure coin of poetry!"

The old man cocked his head as though impressed.
"Coin o' poetry,
is it? Ye mean yell say me a verse for paddling across the river?"

"Recite?" Ebenezer scoffed. "Nay, man, I shan't recite; I shall
compose!
I shall
extemporize!
Your gold will not be soiled from many hands but be struck gleaming from the mint before your eyes!"

The man scratched one clipped ear. "Well, I don't know. I ne'er heard tell of business done like that."

"Tut," Ebenezer reassured him. " 'Tis done from day to day in Europe, and for weightier matters than a pitiful ferry ride. Doth not Cervantes tell us of a poet in Spain that hired himself a harlot for three hundred sonnets on the theme of Pyramus and Thisbe?"

"Ye do not tell me!" marveled the ferryman. "Three hundred sonnets! And what, pray, might a
sonnet
be?"

Ebenezer smiled at the fellow's ignorance. " 'Tis a verse-form."

"A verse-form, now!"

"Aye. We poets do not merely make poems; we make certain
sorts
of poems. Just as in coins you have farthings and pence and shillings and crowns, in verse you have quatrains and sonnets and villanelles and rondelays."

"Aha!" said the ferryman. "And this
sonnet,
then, is like a shilling? Or a half crown? For I shall ask a crown to paddle ye o'er this river."

"A crown!" the poet cried.

"No less, Your Excellency -- the currents and tides, ye know, this time of year."

Ebenezer looked skeptically at the placid river.

"He is a rogue and very Jew," Bertrand said.

"Ah well, no matter, Bertrand." Ebenezer winked at his valet and turned again to the Marylander. "But see here, my man, you must know a sonnet's worth a half pound sterling on the current London market."

"Spare me the last line of't then," said the ferryman, "for I shan't give change."

"Done." To the bystanders, who had watched the bargaining with amusement, he said, "Witness that this fellow hath agreed, on consideration of one sonnet, not including the final line, to ferry Ebenezer Cooke, Poet and Laureate of Maryland, and his man across the -- I say, what do you call this river?"

"The Choptank," Ebenezer's boatman answered quickly.

"You don't say! Then Malden must be near at hand!"

"Aye," the old man vowed. " 'Tis just through yonder woods. Ye can walk there lightly once ye cross this river."

"Excellent! Done, then?"

"Done, Your Highness, done!" He held up an unclean finger. "But I shall want my payment in advance."

"Ah, come now!" Ebenezer protested.

"What doth it matter?" whispered Bertrand.

"What warrant have I thou'rt a poet at all?" the man insisted. "Pay me now, or no ferry ride."

Ebenezer sighed. "So be't." And to the group: "A silence, now, an it please you."

Then, pressing a finger to his temple and squinting both his eyes, he struck an attitude of composition, and after a moment declaimed:

"Hence, loathed Melancholy,

Of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born

In Stygian cave forlorn

'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy!

Find out some uncouth cell,

Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings,

And the night-Raven sings;

There, under Ebon shades, and low-browed Rocks,

As ragged as thy Locks,

In dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell."

There was some moments' silence.

"Well, come, my man!" the poet urged. "You have your fare!"

"What? Is that a sonnet?"

"On my honor," Ebenezer assured him. "Minus the final line, to be sure."

"To be sure, to be sure." The boatman tugged at his mutilated ear. "So that is my half-pound sonnet! A great ugly one 'twas, at that, with all those shrieks and hollowings in't."

"What matter? Would you lift your nose at a gold piece if the King had an ugly head? A sonnet's a sonnet."

"Aye, aye, 'tis truth," sighed the ferryman, and shook his head as though outwitted. "Very well, then; yonder's my canoe."

"Let's be off," said the poet, and took his valet's arm triumphantly.

But when he saw the vessel they were to cross in, he came near to letting his ferryman keep the sonnet gratis. "Had I guessed this swine trough was to be our boat, I'd have kept the
dark Cimmerian desert
in my purse."

"Complain no more," the boatman answered. "Had I but known what a grubby pittance was your sonnet, ye'd have swum for all o' me."

Thus understanding each other, ferryman and passengers climbed cautiously aboard the dugout canoe and proceeded out onto the river, which lay as smooth as any looking glass. When well past mid-channel they found the surface still unrippled, the passengers began to suspect that the difficulty of the crossing had been exaggerated.

"I say," asked Bertrand from the bow, "where are those wicked tides and currents, that made this trip so dear?"

"Nowhere save in my fancy," said the ferryman with a grin. "Since ye were paying your passage with a poem, I had as well demand a big one -- it cost ye no more."

"Oho!" cried Ebenezer. "So you deceived me! Well, think not thou'rt aught the richer for't, my fellow, for the sonnet was not mine: I had it from one whose talent equals my own --"

But the boatman was not a whit put out by this disclosure. "Last year's gold is as good as this year's," he declared, "and one man's as good as another's. Though ye did play false upon your pledge, I'm nowise poorer for't. A ha' pound's a ha' pound, and a sonnet's a sonnet." Just then the canoe touched the opposite shore of the river. "Here ye be, Master Poet, and the joke's on you."

"Blackguard!" grumbled Bertrand.

Ebenezer smiled. "As you will, sir; as you will." He stepped ashore with Bertrand and waited until the ferryman pushed back onto the river; then he laughed and called to him: "Yet the truth is, Master Numskull, you sit fleeced from nape to shank! Not only is your sonnet not my doing; 'tis not even a sonnet! Good day, sir!" He made ready to flee through the woods to Malden should the ferryman pursue them, but the gentleman merely clucked his tongue, between strokes of his paddle.

"No matter, Master Madman," he called back. " 'Tis not the Choptank River, either. Good night, sir!"