In the second barracoon Robyn thought that she had at last discovered the first plague victims, for the low thatched sheds were crammed with rows of prostrate naked figures, and their low moaning and whimpering was a heart-breaking sound, while the smell of corruption was thick and oily on the palate.
It was Tippoo who corrected her. 'China birds, he grunted, and for a moment Robyn did not understand, and she stooped over the nearest body, then straightened immediately. Despite her training cold blisters of sweat formed on her forehead.
By Imperial Decree from Peking, no black African slave could be landed on the shores of China unless he had been rendered incapable of reproducing his own kind. The Emperor was concerned that future generations would not be plagued by the growth of an alien population in their midst. The traders found it expedient to castrate their purchases in the barracoons, so that losses caused by the operation could be absorbed before the expense of the long voyage was incurred.
It was crudely done, a tourniquet applied to the root of the scrotum and then the entire scrotal sack removed at a single knife stroke and the wound cauterized immediately with a heated iron or a daub of hot pitch.
About sixty percent would survive the shock and subsequent mortification, but their price per capita was so enhanced that the trader could face forty percent losses with equanimity.
There was nothing that Robyn could do for so many, she felt overwhelmed by the suffering and misery all around her, and she stumbled out on to the muddy pathway, blinded by her own tears. In the next barracoon, the one nearest to the central auction block, she found the first plague victims.
Once again the sheds had been deserted by the slavemasters, and the dimly lit thatched sheds were filled with naked figures, some squatting motionlessly, others lying on the damp earthen floor, knees drawn up, shaking with the cold of fever, and powerless to lift themselves out of their own bodily wastes. The sound of delirium and suffering was murmurous as of insects in an English orchard on a hot summer's day.
The first sufferer that Robyn touched was a young girl, just beyond puberty, and her skin was burning hot. She rolled her head from side to side, endlessly and senselessly, mouthing snatches of gibberish. Swiftly Robyn ran her fingertips down the girl's naked bulging stomach and immediately she felt the tiny lumps under the hot skin, like pellets of buckshot. There could be no doubt.
Smallpox, she said simply, and Tippoo drew back fearfully. Wait outside, she told him, and he went swiftly and with obvious relief. She turned to Nathaniel. She had noticed the little pitted scars in his folded sun-toughened skin, and now there was no fear in his expression.
When? ' she asked. When I was a boy, ' he said. 'It killed my old ma -and my brothers.'
We have work to do, she told him.
In the gloomy stinking shed the dead were piled with the living, and on some of the wracked and furnaceheated black bodies the plague had already burst into full flower. They found it in all its stages. Papules beneath the skin had erupted into vesicles, bubbles of clear thin fluid that thickened into pustules, which in turn burst and released a custard-thick trickle of matter. These will live, ' Robyn told Nathaniel. 'The plague is purging from their blood. ' She found a man whose open pocks had already crusted over.
While Nathaniel held the man from moving, Robyn scraped away the crusty scabs with a spatula and gathered them in a wide-mouthed glass bottle that had once held quinine powder.
, This strain of the disease has been attenuated, Robyn exp lamed impatiently, and for the first time she saw fear in the flecked eyes of Mungo St. John. 'The Turks first used this method two hundred years ago. 'I would prefer to sail away from it, Mungo St. John said quietly, staring at the stoppered bottle which was half filled with damp yellow matter in which were s mall flecks of blood. It would be no use. The infection is already aboard-.'
Robyn shook her head firmly. 'In a week or less Huron would be turned into a stinking plague-ship filled with dying men.'
Mungo turned away from her and went to the ship's rail. he's stood there one hand clasped -into a fist behind his back, the other still in its sling staring at the shore where the thatched roofs of the barracoons just showed above the mangroves.
You cannot leave those poor wretches, ' Robyn said. They will starve.
I alone could never find food to feed that multitude. You are responsible for them.'
He did not answer her for a moment, then he turned back to study her curiously. if Huron sailed, with her holds empty, would you stay here on this fever and smallpox-ridden coast to tend this multitude of doomed savages? ' he asked. Of course. ' She was still impatient, and he inclined his head. His eyes no longer mocked, but were sober, perhaps even filled with respect. If you will not stay for common humanity, then stay for self-interest. ' She scorned him with her tone. 'A million dollars' worth of human cattle, and I will save them for you.'
. 'You would save them to be sold into captivity? ' he insisted.
Even slavery is better than death, she replied.
Again, he turned away from her, taking a slow turn of the quarterdeck, frowning thoughtfully, puffing on the long black cheroot so that wreathes of tobacco smoke drifted behind him, and Robyn and half Huron's crew watched him, some fearfully, others with resignation. You say that you have yourself undergone this, this thing. ' His eyes were drawn back, with loathing fascination, to the little bottle that stood in the centre of his chart table.
For answer Robyn lifted the sleeve of her shirt and showed him the distinctive deeply pocked scar on her forearm.
A minute longer he hesitated, and she went on persuasively, 'I will give you a strain of the disease that is 'passant' that has been weakened and attenuated by passage through another man's body, rather than the virulent form of the plague which you will breathe on the very air and which will kill most of you. There is no risk? ' She hesitated and then replied firmly, 'There is always risk, but one hundred, nay a thousand times, less risk, than if you take the disease from the air With an abrupt gesture Mungo St. John ripped open the sleeve on his left arm with his teeth and offered it to her. Do it, he said. 'But in God's name do it quickly, before my courage fails.'
She drew the point of her scalpel across the smooth deeply tanned skin of his forearm and the tiny crimson droplets rose behind it. He did not flinch, but when she dipped the scalpel into the bottle and scraped up a speck of the noisome yellow stuff, he blanched and made as if to jerk his arm away, then with an obvious effort controlled himself.
She smeared the pus over the tiny wound, and he stepped back and turned from her. All of you. ' His voice was
