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.
But Madshaka was not such a man, and he was proud of that fact. Every horror that he lived through made him stronger, every new circle of hell through which he passed made him more contemptuous of those who were broken by it. Some men were hunters and some the hunted.
He looked up at the moon, saw that it was settling toward the horizon. It would remain long enough to get them through the surf and then it would set, leaving them to approach in darkness. Perfect. It was time to go.
On his word the army, his army of pirates, dressed as they were in their plundered sailor garb, colorful swatches of cloth bound around heads and waists, climbed silently down the boarding cleats and into the longboat below.
Madshaka felt Kusi’s loss for the first time since shoving him into the sea. It would have been good to have another grumete, another boatman who could have taken the gig through the surf, so the longboat would not be so crowded. But it was a small thing, and did not measure up to the convenience of having Kusi drowned.
Madshaka came last. He took the last steps down the ship’s side and stepped into the stern sheets of the longboat. He unshipped the rudder, which was useless in the big surf, and took up a spare sweep, holding it at his side like a soldier holding a pike as he stood on the after thwart and called, “Give way!”
The rowers were clumsy and inexperienced, save for James and his people, and the boat was so packed with armed men that movement was difficult, but with Madshaka calling cadence they managed to get it under way. Once it was clear of the ship’s side Madshaka slipped the sweep into the tholes on the transom, using the long oar like a rudder, a rudder with considerably more leverage and turning power than the former one.
They pulled through the dark and they made no noise, save for the creak of the oars, the drip of water from the blades. All along the dark shore were spots of light, lanterns or cooking fires still burning at that late hour.
In the moonlight the surf flashed gray, and soon the pounding of the water on the beach drowned out the sound of the longboat’s oars, despite their being a half mile yet from the first breakers. The smells of the forest enveloped them, the high-pitched cry of a bird or an animal occasionally piercing the roar of the surf. It was his
