As the voyage was ending, so was the pretense.
They stood on under topsails until they were in among the ships, ships of every size, from two-man canoes to big English and Portuguese slavers, all scattered along several miles of shoreline.
There was some kind of settlement on the shore, and boats going in and out of the surf and plying between ships, but they were a mile or more to the east of the big city they had seen. The people crowded the rail and stared, silent. They were here, and words did not seem adequate.
The French pilot said to Madshaka, “Anchor there,” and pointed, and this time Madshaka turned to James and glared, because what the pilot said was beyond Madshaka’s ability. James turned to the helmsman and pointed to the patch of water that the pilot had indicated and the helmsman nodded and pushed the tiller over.
The ship turned up and up into the wind and the leeches of the square sails began to shiver and James said to Madshaka, “Tell them to clew up the fore and main topsails,” and once again Madshaka stepped forward and gave the orders as if they had originated with him.
The fore and main topsails came down on the run and the mizzen topsail came aback and the ship stopped on that spot of water.
“Let go!” James called forward. Cato waved his acknowledgment and let the ring stopper fly and the best bower plunged into the water with a great splash and the ship, that floating community of disparate tribes, was fast by her anchor to the shore of Africa.
And then one of the men was coming aft, yelling something at Madshaka, waving his arms and pointing toward the shore. He stopped a foot from Madshaka, still yelling. His tone was accusatory.
Madshaka stepped back, held his hands up, as if to ward off blows, and with a quick word he silenced the man. He turned to the Frenchman. “This fellow, he say this not Kalabari. Where you take us?”
The Frenchman shook his head slowly, side to side, stammered, “Whydah…this is Whydah…”
“Bastard!” Madshaka’s arm moved like a great black snake, too fast for anyone to react, almost too fast to see. He jerked a pistol from his belt, brought it up, drew the hammer back with his big thumb and shot the pilot in the forehead from three feet away.
It was too fast for the pilot to say anything, too fast for him to react at all. The blow from the.69-caliber ball knocked him off his feet and blew his skull and brain apart, showering the bulwark with gore, and he was dead even before he fell in a bloody swath across the deck.
“Bastard!” Madshaka shouted again, and he took a step forward and kicked the dead man hard, the smoking gun in his hand. He turned toward the stunned men and women and children who were looking aft at them and shouted something in one language then another and another, pointing at the shore and the dead man.
When he was done he turned to King James. “This bastard,” he pointed at the dead pilot, “he trick us. We tell him we go to Kalabari, he take us to Whydah. He have friends here, I wager.” He waved the discharged gun at James. “You, you supposed to know this navigation, you supposed to watch him! How he do this?”
James scowled, shook his head. God, would it stop? He had only taken cursory looks at the chart when the pilot had showed it to him. The track marked there had been one heading to Kalabari, but there was no way for James to know if the course the pilot had marked on the chart was the same as the course that the ship was actually sailing. And here was the result.
Whydah. What would they do in Whydah, in the heart of what the white men called the Slave Coast?
Now Madshaka was shouting at the people and pointing to James and the people were looking at James with hateful eyes and for once James understood completely what Madshaka was saying.
He folded his arms, looked at the crowd facing him. He did not doubt they would fall on him, beat him to death, but he could not seem to move himself to care.
But Madshaka stopped the tirade, paused, glanced over at the shore. He raced to the rail, leaned against it, seemed to be studying the buildings, the beach. There was something artificial in the performance, something contrived about his stance, his concentration, but James could not see on the faces of the others if anyone besides himself felt as much.
Then Madshaka turned back to the people. He pointed toward the shore and he spoke again, but this time his voice was pleading and sad with just a hint of his former anger and James could not imagine what he was saying.
He spoke for ten minutes and by then the other men were nodding in agreement and were themselves looking at the distant shore. Then Madshaka said something with a tone of finality and the men nodded again, their faces grim, and then they dispersed.
Madshaka turned aft, and in doing so caught James’s eye. He stopped short and the two men stared at each other for a moment, then Madshaka said, “This where I was taken. Whydah, where I was put into slavery. I tell them I know where the factory is, just there, where they keep the slaves. I tell them we go ashore, free them all, take them away.
“Tonight, we go ashore, free our brothers. You come too, King James? Or are you afraid?” He let the question hang, grinned at James, and his expression was gloating and victorious, not that of a man selflessly risking his life to emancipate his brothers in chains.
“Yes, I’ll come.”
He thought of that old sailor’s rhyme. Beware, beware, the Bight of Benin…
The warning was supposed to be for white men, he thought.
Chapter 25
Madshaka walked fore and aft, fore and aft, like a lion preparing to charge. He liked the feel of the still-warm deck planks under his hard, bare feet, liked the slap of the cutlass, the slap of the dirk, the thump of the pistols across his chest. He had to remember not to smile with delight at it all. This was a solemn moment. The people believed that. He had told them so.
Before him, in uneven ranks, his army. The nucleus of his army. Sixty men. Well trained. Vicious. They had already followed him in enough attacks that he knew he could count on them. He had taught them how to be merciless, how to butcher any resistance, how to roll over any confrontation. They would do it again.
Of the sixty men before him, seventeen were Kru, like himself. It was too bad they were not all Kru, did not all speak Kwa, did not all have that loyalty that came of an ancient bond of kinship. Then he would really have something.
But they were not, and he had no use for the others, the Yoruba, the Ibo, the Bariba, the Aja, all the rest. He had no use for the English speakers, no use for the women. No use after that night’s work.
“The factory, two miles from the shore,” he told them. “I know the way. No sound until we there. The King of Whydah has army, he will fight us, because he is an evil man. We must not be discovered until we victorious.”
He saw grim faces. The men nodded their understanding as he spoke.
“It will be easy, if we surprise them. Not many men there. We overrun them, kill only who I say. I open the prison, we go in, help our brothers out, take the white men’s gold, and come back to the ship.”
A noble cause and one that would further enrich them. He could see the effects his words were having, words he translated into the various languages of his army. English too, for he had convinced King James and the other Virginians to go with them on their righteous crusade.
King James. Madshaka could well imagine what a hell his life had been. Stolen from a noble family of the Kabu Malinke, forced to endure the Middle Passage, a slave for two decades. His bold, selfless act of saving all those aboard the blackbirder turning into such a nightmare. Madshaka knew that a man’s mind could endure only so much, and he knew that James must be near the breaking point.
And after all that, King James’s life would end here, on the African shore, on that night, in the slave port of Whydah.
Another man might have felt sorry for him. But then, another man might have found pity for those people stolen into slavery and forced on to the hellish voyage to the New World, especially after he himself had just been made to endure its living death.