The New World Read Free Page A

minute.
    Then suddenly our guards began strolling toward us, swinging their arms with insolent slowness, stopping only when their faces were inches from our own. I smelled fish on their breath and winced away, but they would not allow this and one of them seized my chin; he made me face him again and began fiddling inside my shirt, along the waistband of my breeches, pinching me and prodding me. The other guard did the same with Natty, and giggled as he touched her.
    “Jim…?” Natty’s voice was trembling. “What shall we do?” Both guards had finished their inspection and now they were leering at her, wiping their hands across their mouths.
    “Nothing,” I said, still as steady as possible.
    “Nothing again?”
    “There’s nothing we can do.”
    “What do you mean? We have to do something!” Natty spun round to face toward the waves and I followed, thinking our guards would haul us back. In fact they seemed pleased, because now we had to watch the rest of their troop, the savages along the shoreline who while our backs were turned had all stripped naked and begun scouring the water, launching themselves forward whenever a body appeared. They did this very nimbly, gleaming through the waves with their warpaint fading along their arms and shoulders, seizing a prize, then wrenching it up the beach as though it weighed nothing at all.
    The first two or three of our friends they landed in this way, including Mr. Creed, were poor creatures who never owned anything valuable in their lives, not even a bracelet or an earring; their bodies were tossed aside as worthless. But when one of the men found the remains of Bo’sun Kirkby, who wore a gold band that remembered the wife waiting for him in London, he pulled the knife from his belt and sliced off the finger as if he was cutting a rose from a rose-bush.
    As easily as that; the butcher had no human feelings at all. He slipped the ring onto the middle finger of his own left hand, then without pausing he lunged forward again to jerk the bo’sun’s head from the stones and flourish his knife. Once he had addressed himself to his task in this way, with relish, he sliced around the crown of the bo’sun’s head to strip the bald white skin from the scalp, pursing his lips to show it was a delicate job and required him to concentrate. Then he hoisted his trophy into the air; then he tucked it into his belt alongside his knife; then he turned back to the waves, looking for his next victim.
    “No!” Natty whispered. “What’s happening, Jim?”
    She meant me to comfort her but I was dumbstruck. I thought I had seen our own death. I thought it must come soon.
    “Should we tell them about the silver?” Natty was desperate now, but still thinking more clearly than me.
    “Why would we do that?” I spoke in a kind of trance.
    “Jim. Listen to me.”
    “I am listening.” I might not have been; I was looking toward the cliffs, but when I saw the stone creatures writhing inside their rock-prison I swung away again, scanning the gulls as they flocked above our wreck, or the sails of the
Nightingale
blooming underwater like colossal flower-heads, or the day’s first weak sun-shafts lancing down through the waves toward our silver on the seabed, or anything except our guards.
    Then they were stampeding forward again, spinning us apart and separating us. We staggered on the stones, we floundered, and a moment later we all stood in line: one guard, me, Natty, the other guard.
    “Speak to him,” Natty said, meaning our leader who had turned to confront me; her voice was imploring. “Be simple, Jim. Be kind as you are.”
    I felt touched by this, and another time would have said so. Now I only cleared my throat, and said what had always been in my mind, speaking slowly and clearly.
    “We come as friends.”
    There was no reaction, no light in the hard brown eyes.
    “We are your friends,” I said again, louder this time but still meaningless.
    Meaningless and apparently