James Nelson - The Blackbirder

James ran too, as fast as he could, more angry with Madshaka for charging off than worried about the fight. There were no more than a dozen white men on the merchant ship’s deck, terrified men, looking with wide eyes and gaping mouths at the black host, fifty strong, coming from the bowsprit above them and dropping to the deck, swords, cutlasses gleaming, all of them screaming in their alien and barbaric tongues.

James tried to push his way to the point of the attack but he could not get through the press of Africans racing for the bow and over onto the other ship. He leapt up on the foremast fife rail, craned his neck to see what was happening. Screams, white voices and black, blades raised overhead.

He leapt down again, raced around the larboard side of the bow, and clambered up onto the bowsprit that way, pushing his own men aside to gain his place. Up along the spar, hand on the forestay to balance him.

It was a slaughterhouse on the deck below. Madshaka was leading the charge aft, swinging his heavy cutlass like it was a twig, hacking away at any white man in front of him.

One of the crew threw aside the handspike with which he was defending himself, fell to his knees, arms raised in surrender, and Madshaka brought his cutlass down like an ax, catching the man right on the collarbone, all but cleaving him in two. He fell away and Madshaka jerked the weapon free, looked for the next man.

“No! No! Stop!” James shouted. “No!” His voice could just be heard above the screams of the warriors, the shrieks of their victims, but it did not matter because not one of the men, black or white, could understand him.

He leapt down to the deck, hit the planks with his bare feet, took the shock with his legs. Warm, wet, he was standing in a pool of blood. There was blood everywhere, great splattered patterns shot along the white deck, pools, sprays of blood against the deck furniture.

Running, screaming, chaos, swords hacking at anyone who lived. James leapt forward, eyes on Madshaka’s wide back. Madshaka’s arm lifted again, cutlass in hand, and James grabbed it, spun the man around, his own sword under Madshaka’s chin.

“Stop it! Tell them to stop it, or I kill you here!”

Madshaka’s face was terrifying, subhuman. White paint and red blood and dark skin swirled together, and through it those eyes, dark and bloodshot and utterly wild. He was heaving for breath, and he looked at James with no spark of recognition.

But James too was just hanging on to control, and the fury in which he had killed the captain of the blackbirder was gathering against Madshaka. The shaking in his hand was transmitted through the steel of his sword. The point trembled an inch from Madshaka’s Adam’s apple.

The big man moved his arm, a quick jerk, and James almost drove his sword through his throat.

Then Madshaka let his arm drop and his whole body seemed to relax. He smiled. “Yes, yes,” he said. He turned and addressed the men, shouted out, his voice commanding, cutting through what din was still echoing around the deck. He grabbed a cutlass-wielding African as he ran past, checked him, pushed him back against the bulwark, shouted something in the man’s language.

Fore and aft weapons were lowered, voices silenced, and soon the only sound was the groan of the dying, the crunch of the two ships still locked together.

And in James’s mind, he could see nothing but Madshaka’s face, smiling through the paint and blood. It was the most hideous sight he had seen on that hideous day.

“Congratulations, Captain.” Madshaka was looming over him again, his face a mask of humble admiration.

“You bastard!” James hissed. “I told you to tell them no killing unless we had to! You butchered them! You bloody butchered them!”

Madshaka frowned, shook his head. “I told them. I told them many time, like you say. They go crazy.”

“You led them. You led them and you started them on this!”

Madshaka took a step forward so he was looking down at James, his voice low, little more than a growl. “Look here, King James. You been too long with the white men. You don’t remember how much these people hate. Maybe I go crazy too. I just get stolen from my home, remember. I just come across the ocean on the death ship. You just try to remember how you feel, twenty years ago.”

The two men stood, eyes locked. Madshaka said, “When you kill the captain of that slave ship, I think then you remember.” He turned quickly away, moved down the deck, shouting orders in one language then another.

James stared out over the ocean. Madshaka was right, of course. Twenty years before there would have been no stopping him until every white man before him was dead. It was that same rage that had driven him to stick a knife in the slaver’s captain, to make them all outlaws, pirates.

Here he was cursing Madshaka when it was his own lack of control, his own fury, that had led to their being at that place, adrift on the trackless sea.

He would not have balked at slaughtering slavers, plantation overseers. Was it because these men were sailors, merchant sailors, that he felt differently?

He shook his head. So much to do, so many consideration still before him. So much blood on his hands already. How he longed for the Northumberland, his little crew, the simple freedom of plying the Chesapeake Bay.

I am getting old, he thought.

Madshaka was rounding the men up, gathering them together aft. There was talk now, quite a lot of talk, vigorous arguments with hands waving and fingers pointing around, men shouting back and forth, heads nodding in agreement, faces screwed up in expressions of incomprehension.

James felt like he had no part of it, like he was not a part of the crew. But that was not right, he goaded himself. He was in charge, he was their leader, and until he had taken them to safety he could not abandon that.

He walked aft, stepped up on the carriage of a small gun, and shouted, “Quiet, quiet!” Held his hands up over his head, and even though they could not understand him, the power of his voice, the commanding presence of a Malinke prince, brought the discussions to a halt.

“Madshaka, here.” The big man ambled over. “Tell them they fought well, they should be proud.”

Madshaka translated and heads nodded, faces looking not joyful but satisfied.

“We have done what we needed. We have food now, and water, enough to get us home.” There was no need to mention the pointless slaughter. It was done, there was no changing that, and they would not be attacking any other ships.

“We have work to do now-” James continued, but one of the men cut him off, shouting out a question that met with murmured concurrence from several others.

James turned to Madshaka. “He say, ‘Why don’t we take this ship now? Why we go back in the death ship?’ ”

Why indeed? Before James could formulate a response that might make sense to that man, Madshaka translated the question to the others, and James could see more nodding heads, more agreement.

Why not? It was piracy, robbery on the high seas. But what would that mean to these people, who had been stolen from their homes and sold into bondage? They were victims of the most depraved kind of robbery. They were Africans, what did they know or care of the Europeans’ customs and uses of the sea? Why should they ever think it was wrong to take a ship from white men, most of whom were dead?

Now Madshaka was talking again, addressing the assembled men. “Madshaka!” James cut him off. “What you telling them?”

“I telling them what you said.”

“No you ain’t. What you telling them?” His fury was met by Madshaka’s defiant eyes.

“I telling them they can vote. They can, can’t they, or you calling yourself king now? King James?”