The New World by Andrew Motion Read Free Book Online Page B

flooded our cabin then was so deep, we might have been locked inside a stone.
    “Natty,” I whispered, but she was asleep so I went back to my watching.
    Very soon another kind of light sprang up, a bonfire blazing in the pit in the meeting-ground fifty yards off, and streaking the faces of everyone clustered around: women and children in the background, men closer to the center.
    Then a steady pulse began—tom-toms, played by a group of warriors sitting on the ground—and the remainder of the men began to dance. Not as we dance at home, in pairs or rows or columns, but rushing forward to make a ragged circle, jerking up their knees and pumping their arms like runners. As the smoke blew across them, making their bodies appear filmy and transparent, I thought they might have been lunatics in Bedlam, all screaming and yelping and lunging at one another with their spears.
    Natty woke from her sleep at last, and so did our friend at the farther end of the prison; we heard him whimpering like a puppy as if he knew the meaning of everything we had heard outside, and how it would end.
    And sure enough, when the drumbeats began pounding more fiercely than ever, two of the dancers lurched away from their circle and raced up the slope toward us. After they had unlocked and opened our door, which made me and Natty scramble away into a corner, they stared around for a moment as if they really believed our friend might have escaped, which was merely a piece of cruel theater, then plunged toward the end of the cabin and seized him and hauled him outside, pausing only to lock our door behind them.
    As he sank down the slope away from us, I saw our friend forget his sickness and begin twisting between his guards like a wildcat—lurching and reeling, stumbling and rising, swaying forward and then heaving back. They dragged him straight to the meeting-ground and so to the fire, which had now sunk low in its pit and glimmered bright crimson, splashed with traces of pale ash.
    All this happened so quickly I had no chance to feel any horror; I just stared in silence, even when the guards took our friend to the far end of the pit, where he faced the crowd and our prison on the slope above, then lashed his left arm to a stake driven into the ground beside the fire and swung on the rope to make it tight. Once this was done, they seized his right arm and tied it to a second stake planted nearby, which meant he was canted forward like a diver, teetering on tiptoes to escape the worst of the heat. But this was no help, because the guards simply heaped fresh brushwood into the pit and made the flames revive. Everyone watching enjoyed this; they clapped and moaned and sighed like the crowd at a circus.
    Natty pushed away from her place beside me at our peephole. “Jim,” she said, in a shaking voice. “Don’t look any more!”
    I could not answer and I could not move.
    “Jim,” she said again, but muffled now, and glancing round I saw she had curled into a ball, closing her eyes and pressing her hands over her ears.
    I still did not move. I had the idea that I must see the worst, so I would be able to meet my own death more bravely when the time came, and looked back to the fire-pit again. The two guards were now standing either side of our friend, but a little behind him to escape the heat. The larger one was holding a knife—I saw the blade gleam—and I thought he was about to kill him. But the knife made only a casual sort of strike, a lazy stab and twist that left him still alive. Yet the wound was wide enough. Wide enough, that is, for the other guard to push his hand inside our friend’s stomach, and ferret around, and catch hold of a piece of gut, and drag it out, and keep dragging it inch by inch like a fisherman pulling in a line, until it lay at our friend’s feet in a slimy coil.
    Our friend made no sound in his agony, not a single cry, and I continued staring.
    I watched the guards take hold of a pair of wooden clubs given to