Great Britain -- History -- James I, 1603-1625 -- Fiction; Witchcraft -- Fiction
He stood off and regarded them. Joan with the child sat on the earth,
in the hot sunlight. The child’s terrified crying had hushed; in her
mother’s arms she had sobbed herself to sleep. She lay half covered
by Joan’s skirt, shadowed by her mother’s bending breast and face.
The Spaniard’s countenance twisted until it was like a gargoyle’s for
cruelty and ungenial mirth. Without a word he stooped and with one
great slashing stroke of his dagger slew the child....
They bound Joan, and she lay at last, prostrate upon the earth, her
forehead touching the child’s still feet. Aderhold sat beside the dead
and the living love.... Around was heat and glare, huge suffering,
brute indifference, brute triumph, life brought low, life iron-shod
trampling life, a battlefield of instincts, a welter of emotions,
tendencies in impact, old and deep ideas opposed to ideas ... and all
with which he and Joan were ranged in time and space,—their stream and
current—here and now, as often before and often to come, the loser,
the loser drowning in defeat.... He felt the wide cold, the check, the
bitter diminishing, felt it impersonally for the enormous current, the
stream where there were so many drops; then, because he was man, felt
it for this childish people, felt it, a bitter and overwhelming tide,
for himself and Joan. Woe—woe—there was so much woe in living....
All the rest of that day the enslaved brought food and rolled casks of
water for the ships. When night came they were let to sleep, lying on
the ground, in a herd. Now and again through the darkness rose a sharp
cry of grief, or ran from one to another a sobbing and groaning. But
the most slept heavily, without movement. Dawn came, and the slaves
were roused. They were permitted to eat a little food—and then they
were driven to the shore and into the boats.... Their dead, their
village, their island were severed from them. They were left naked to
the beating of new tides....
Joan and Aderhold were put upon the ship with the darker sails—the
ship that had come first to the island. The hold of this ship was
inexpressibly, fearfully crowded with the enslaved. When the hatches
were closed, it was a black pit, a place of gasping, fighting for
breath. When morning came the Spaniards, seeing that otherwise much
of their property would die and become no man’s property, drew out
several score and penned them in a narrow space upon the deck. Aderhold
and Joan were brought forth with the others, driven here with them,
pressed by the mass close against the ship’s side.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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