Fear crawled. ‘The others? Mall – Clare –’
‘I’ve seen Clare. Zombies dumped her up there a ways – awake and okay, so far. Mall I didn’t see …’
‘She – they hit her pretty hard, Jyp.’ I didn’t want to say more; nor he to hear it.
He was silent awhile, against the background of jabbering Wolf voices. ‘Skipper’s here, anyhow, and what’s left of the crew.’
‘Jyp – did you see? May Henry –’
‘And the mate – and Gray Coll, Lousy Macllwine, Dickon Merret – yeah, I saw. Lord, that was a neat trick they pulled. There was I half afraid the ship’d been hit first – right from the moment I saw the castle was a trap. It made sense – but when I saw them all waving, natural as kiss my ass … There’s more’n Wolves behind this, or these Injuns. There’s a brain.’
I shivered in the chill breeze. ‘The Indians – who are they, anyhow?’
‘Amerinds. Caribs – what the dagoes named the sea for. After wiping them out, mostly, or enslaving them. They’re regular guys enough, the ones left; but this isn’t them.’
‘You mean – these are the originals? Another hangover in time?’
‘Kind of looks that way.’ He fell silent as footsteps approached, stopped a moment, then hurried on. ‘You said – they hit Mall real hard?’
‘She – she may be dead, Jyp.’
‘That could be the worst mistake they ever made,’ he said at last – thoughtfully, not vengefully. ‘She –’ I heard him choke and gasp at the thud of a boot. I got the same treatment next, not hard but right in the kidneys. Writhing, I was only dimly aware of being untied from the pole. My hands and legs still bound, I was dragged bodily through the grass till it vanished abruptly on bare rocky ground, where I was dropped. I lay blinking, thinking how bright the torchlight seemed; then a hand in my hair hauled me to my knees, and I saw the two tall fires, and the white stones between, and the dark silhouettes passing to and fro.
More than that I didn’t make of them, just then, because chains rattled suddenly, and ice-cold iron snapped around my throat, pinching the flesh painfully. I pulled away instinctively – and found I wasn’t alone. Clare and all the rest of the crew, Pierce and Hands and the crabbed little steward among them, were slumped in rows on the cold ground beside me, fastened together with what looked like old slave collars. And next to me, uncomfortably close, sat the Stryge himself. He curled his lip in something like a sarcastic greeting, but I paid him no more attention, because next in line sat Mall. Alive; but her head hung, she was deadly pale, and a thick clot of blood caked her curls at the forehead. Her lowered eyes were dull and glazed, and my heart sank; I saw concussion there, if not a fractured skull. A biker had looked like that, after a pile-up I witnessed; and he’d died in the ambulance.
Stifled cursing told me Jyp had been dumped just behind me. ‘So what’s this?’ he demanded. ‘We in line for service, or what?’
‘Undoubtedly,’ grated Stryge through his stained teeth. ‘Though I should be in no haste about it, if I were you.’
I knew what he meant. My eyes were adjusting to the light, and the more I saw of the crowd that was gathering the less I liked it. Apart from the Wolves there were ordinary men and women both among them, more than a few evidently Haitians. Not all were the dark-skinned villager types, though, and those looked better fed and complacent. The rest were mulattoes, Haiti’s powerful aristocracy – well-groomed creatures who could have jetted in from London or New York. Gold gleamed around their necks and their fingers, jewels flashed in the firelight; some wore elegant powdered wigs and carried quizzing-glasses, but others sported hornrims and chunky Rolexes on their wrists. The heavy robes they all wore looked well cut, and the vevers and other strange symbols swirling about them shone with sequins and gold bullion. These elegant creatures mingled grotesquely with the naked Caribs in their war-tracery, and yet they jangled with ornaments just as valuable; not only brass bangles and spirals about arm and neck and ankle, but rings of pure soft gold weighing down their distorted ear-lobes, plugs of gold through lips and nose catching the fire redly. Here and there, too, white faces gleamed among the crowd, white of all shades, sallow as old parchment or bleached albino-pale; many of them, too, wore heavy earrings and ornaments in styles long forgotten, others unmistakeably modern hairstyles, glasses even. One blue-rinsed matron had upswept diamanté frames, pure Palm Beach chic that looked incredibly grotesque and sinister here. I had the odd feeling I was watching a gathering from far away, from long years apart in the island’s terrible history; and I knew it could be true.
But whatever their origins, swaying, jostling to that soft sinuous beat, they all looked alike, horribly alike. If ever I doubted the brotherhood of man, I saw it paraded before me that night – at its worst and darkest. Kinship is a terrible thing when it lies in cold, devouring looks, merciless, ruthless, utterly selfish or actively malign, weighing us up like prospects for a show. I could imagine Romans looking that way at captives in the arena, or predatory Western tourists at some of the nastier Bangkok cabarets, more with cruelty and delight in degradation than plain old lust. It had less effect on me than it might; I was too worried about Mall and Clare. But it did cross my mind momentarily that there were worse ways to be than empty. If my life had been hollow, fuelled by nothing but ambition, at least it hadn’t been filled with that sort of feeling, driven by those drives. At least emptiness was neutral – not a good thing maybe, but not a bad one either, depriving nobody but myself. Or was it?
It was as blinding in its way as that crack on the head, the sudden shock of recognition. They might have been ambitious, too, these people, just as I was. They sure as hell looked it; they looked just like the types I knew. They might have cut everything else out of their lives, just as I had; got what they wanted, where they wanted – and what then? A plateau. Nowhere else to go; or a long, long wait. And what could they do then? I’d been sensing it already, that emptiness in my life, that gnawing discontent – right from that moment at the traffic lights. Sheer ambition – casual sex – they’d been growing less enjoyable all the time, these sterile pleasures of mine. When they finally waned, what then? What would I have gone looking for, to fill up my hollow life? What short-cuts to rewards I felt I deserved, to fulfilments I felt cheated of? What else, that I mightn’t have known was evil, because I hadn’t left myself enough feeling, enough empathy, to judge? Suppose I came across something like this … Would I have woken up, one bright morning, and seen that look in my shaving mirror?
Back and forth they swirled, chattering, drinking, reaching up a hand to caress the tall white stones as they passed them. The stone was stained and scarred with what looked like firesmoke; it highlighted some sort of markings on them, rough crude scratchings hardly worth being claimed even as primitive art. They looked childish, moronic almost, and yet this elegant, excited crew was greeting them with an almost sensuous reverence.
‘Take me out to the ballgame!’ remarked Jyp laconically. ‘What’s the big attraction, old man? This is some sort of houmfor, right?’
Stryge sneered. ‘More than that, infant! Can you read the signs on those stones? I thought not! That is the work of these red savages, these Caribal apes, carved before other men came to these islands. This is a sobagui, an altar, one of their ancient shrines – and their cult, you will remember, was amusing.’
‘Wait a minute,’ I said, with a sudden sinking feeling. ‘It’s not only the sea that’s named for them, is it? Caribals … Cannibals?’