“What are those men singing?” demanded
Gender. “I didn’t think they
had anything to sing about.”
“A slave song, Patrao.” Silva’s tapering hand, with the silver bracelet at its wrist, made a graceful gesture of dismissal. “It is nothing. One of the things that natives make up and sing as they go.”
Gender struck his boot with his coiled whip of hippopotamus hide. The afternoon sun, sliding down toward the shaggy jungle-tops, kindled harsh pale lights in his narrow blue eyes. “How does the song go?” he persisted.
The two fell into step beside the caravan as, urged by a dozen red-capped drivers, it shambled along the trail. “It is only a slave song, patrao,” said Silva once again. “It means something like this: ‘Though you carry me away in chains, I am free when I die. Back will I come to bewitch and kill you.’ ”
Gender’s heavy body seemed to swell, and his eyes grew narrower and paler. “So they sing that, hmm?” He swore again. “Listen to that!”
The unhappy procession had taken up a brief, staccato refrain:
“Hailowa—Genda! Haipana—Genda!”
“Genda, that’s my name,” snarled the planter. “They’re singing about me, aren’t they?”
Silva made another fluid gesture, but Gender flourished his whip under the nose of the Portuguese. “Don’t you try to shrug me off. I’m not a child, to be talked around like this. What are they singing about me?”
“Nothing of consequence, patrao,” Silva made haste to reassure him. “It might be to say: ‘I will bewitch Gender, I will kill Gender.’ ”
“They threaten me, do they?” Gender’s broad face took on a deeper flush. He ran at the line of chained black men. With all the strength of his arm he slashed and swung with the whip. The song broke up into wretched howls of pain.
“I’ll give you a music lesson!” he raged, and flogged his way up and down the procession until he swayed and dripped sweat with the exertion.
But as he turned away, it struck up again:
“Hailowa—Genda! Haipana—Genda!”
Whirling back, he resumed the rain of blows. Silva, rushing up to second him, also whipped the slaves and execrated them in their own tongue. But when both were tired, the flayed captives began to sing once more, softly but stubbornly, the same chant.
“Let them whine,” panted Gender at last. “A song never killed anybody.”
Silva grinned nervously. “Of course not, patrao. That is only an idiotic native belief.”
“You mean, they think that a song will kill?”
“That, and more. They say that if they sing together, think together of one hate, all their thoughts and hates will become a solid strength—will strike and punish for them.”
“Nonsense!” exploded Gender.
But when they made camp that night, Gender slept only in troubled snatches, and his dreams were of a song that grew deeper, heavier, until it became visible as a dark, dense cloud that overwhelmed him.
The ship that Gender had engaged for the expedition lay in a swampy estuary, far from any coastal town, and the dawn by which he loaded his goods aboard was strangely fiery and forbidding. Dunlapp, the old slaver-captain that commanded for him, met him in the cabin.
“All ready, sir?” he asked Gender. “We can sail with the tide. Plenty of room in the hold for that handful you brought. I’ll tell the men to strike off those irons.”
“On the contrary,” said Gender, “tell
