Free Nobody's Slave by Tim Vicary Page B

contained a beam of wood instead of a body. As they swung it over the rail Tom almost forgot to let go, so that the bundle swung with its head inward towards the ship as it fell. I cannot even bury my cousin properly, he thought.  I promised his father to take care of him, and this is what happens. He stepped back out of the way, staring dully out over the glittering, emerald sea.
    As soon as the last body was over, the Jesus' orchestra struck up a hymn, and the deep voices of the sailors joined in with the gentlemen's lutes and viols. Tom tried to sing too, but found he could not; instead he wept, as several other sailors did for their friends, glad of the hymn to cover the sound. Simon had irritated him nearly every day with his fears and frailty and smugness; but he had been his cousin for all that, whom he had known since childhood. And there had been nothing frail about the way he had died. Tom remembered Simon’s mocking laughter when they had been attacked, and the light of adventure in his eyes, when others had panicked. Then at the last it had been Simon who had seen the archer, and pushed Tom down to save him. Simon had died saving Tom’s life.
    He saw splashes at the side of the Minion too, and the William and John , and even the little Judith . All the ships’ crews had suffered. He saw the fin of a shark cruising in from the sea, and hoped the current of the river would bring his cousin's body quickly under the mud.
    All the boats had returned from the raid, but few slaves had been captured; and the casualties, already heavy, soon became worse. Over the next few days, as the fleet crept south, several more men died. Always it was the same way - a man who had been wounded by an arrow developed a raging fever, a ferocious thirst, and then became paralysed, so that his jaw was locked tight and could only be held open by inserting a stout piece of wood or a spoon between his teeth. Clearly the arrows had been poisoned. They feared for the Admiral, who had been hit in the neck; but his scratch must have been lighter than the others’, or the surgeon's care for him better, for he survived when others died.
    They looked for easier targets, creeping into estuaries and inlets, sending surprise parties ashore when they saw a village, but they had little luck. Sometimes they met Portuguese ships from whom they could buy or steal a few slaves, but never enough. At night they heard the drums talking among the dark trees to their left, telling of the approach of the fleet, and in the morning the Africans who might have been there were gone. Tom volunteered to go ashore on these raids as often as he could. He took a fierce vengeful joy in herding the few bound, terrified captives into the boats, or burning the abandoned villages. And several times a day he found some excuse to go below to the hold, and gloat over the slowly increasing mass of black figures chained there, as though their imprisonment could somehow atone for Simon's death.
    But the hold was still half-empty after a month; there were only about 150 slaves in the whole fleet. The Admiral began to frown, and lose his usual good humour; and they sailed a hundred miles further south, to try to escape the damaging rumours the drums were spreading. Then, when they anchored in a large bay one afternoon, it seemed their luck had finally begun to turn.
    Tom was on the quarter-deck, reeving a new rope to the mizzen shrouds when a gun fired from the Minion , which was anchored further inshore. He looked up, and saw the lookout in the Minion's maintop waving to attract their attention and pointing eagerly inshore.
    At first they saw nothing; then a canoe shot out from at the mouth of the river. In it were four African warriors, paddling straight towards the fleet. They balanced the narrow little craft expertly as it came out of the sheltered water of the river and began to lift to the rock and sway of the ocean waves.
    ‘So.’ Master Barrett chuckled, laughter rumbling