His hand slid under the cloth and moved lower down my back. I turned sharply and drew the cloth over my body. I lay face down, legs clamped together. He slipped his hand onto my back again. I turned over, sat up and hissed at him.

"Don't do that, or my father will return from the dead to strike you down," I said. "I have just eleven rains."

The toubab had no idea what I was saying, though he must have sensed my anger and fear. When some animals smell fear, they attack all the more fiercely. But the medicine man turned away sharply, head in his hands. After a moment, he reached for a white object on a table and clutched it to his breast. It was an oddly simple carving, with one stick running down and the other across. He pressed this to his chest, mumbled something softly and covered me with the cloth. He patted my shoulders and kept mumbling. His hand did not drift down my back again. I stayed rigid, lying on my back so I could watch him, incommunicative. Finally, I must have fallen asleep.

I awoke in the darkness. I had been shoved over to the far side of the bed, right up against a wall, and I was not alone. Beside me two figures, one atop the other, rocked back and forth. Both breathed loudly. One had a high, protesting, frightened voice. She was a homelander woman, gasping and uttering words I could not understand. She was underneath. The medicine man lay on top of her, grunting and pushing, up and down, up and down. I pressed myself flat against the wall and closed my eyes. I knew that a man was never to touch a woman like that, unless she was his wife. Even if Papa had not taught me parts of the Qur'an, I would have known that.

"Aaaaah," the toubab sighed. The bed grew still.

I felt the medicine man's weight fall into the space between the woman and me, while she gasped and cried. Eventually his breathing slowed and so did hers. I watched their chests rise and fall in the night for a long time, until I too must have fallen asleep.

I awoke with light streaming through the window. The medicine man was gone. The woman was gone. I pulled the red cloth tight around me. The window was shut. On the table beneath it, I found some cowrie shells and three hard metal objects. Not even the thickness of a ladybug, they were round like my thumbnail, but bigger. They were silver coloured. I bit into one of them, but it would not give. A man's head was sculpted into one side of each object.

OVER THE NEXT DAYS, the orange-haired toubab showed me how to get out of the cabin and go up on the deck, and where to find compartments there for the male and the female captives. The women could visit the men's area, but the men remained chained and couldn't leave theirs. Armed sentries were posted to keep them to their small patch on the deck.

By day I moved freely on the deck, but at night I was expected down in the medicine man's room. He showed me how to care for his bird. I was to cover the birdcage with a cloth at night and to remove it in the morning. I had to clean out the cage, feed the bird nuts, and give it any other treat that the toubab brought into the room. Banana. Cooked meat. Yams, millet, rice. That bird ate anything. When the medicine man wasn't around, I ate the food myself. The bird squawked when I ate the nuts, so I gave him some of them. If I ever made it back to Bayo, the people would never believe me. The toubab medicine man loved a bird. Let it perch on his arm. Loved it so much he taught it to speak the toubabu's language. I could only imagine their reaction. They would throw things at me and howl in laughter and talk about it for two moons straight. Tell me again about the man and his bird.

The medicine man never tried to touch me when the bird was watching. First, he made me slip the cloth over its cage. There are men whose eyes burn with the intention to hurt, but this toubab had weak, blue, watering irises-even when the bird could not see us. Whenever he put his hand on my shoulder or back, I gave a sharp shove and an angry shout. He would recoil like a kicked dog and begin to read from a book that he kept in the room. He read out loud. It sounded as if he was saying the same words, over and over again. Oddly, in those moments, he would give me whatever I asked for. Food. Water. Another arm's length of cloth from the wooden trunk in his cabin. Or one of his mysterious metal discs with a man's head sculpted into one side.

THE TOUBABU BROUGHT THE HOMELANDER men up from their hold in small groups every day. I would see them emerge from the darkness, stumbling, wincing in the blazing sunlight and covering their eyes with the crook of their arms. Confined in their little compartment on deck, the men were given water and food, and sometimes allowed to wash themselves. I saw one older man tumble over face-forward as he attempted to wash himself. He could not get up. His ribs were showing and he looked utterly spent. A homelander woman-also older, and also weak-was tending to him, caressing his forehead and tipping a calabash of water to his lips. Four toubabu pushed her aside and seized him by his knees and armpits. He sagged in their arms, and barely had the strength to resist. The woman screamed and pleaded and tried to loosen the toubabu's fingers. They bumped past her, lugged him to the side of the ship and threw him over.

In the next days, the woman's sadness was so great that nobody wanted to stand near her on the deck, or crouch beside her at the food bucket. From Sanu, I heard that one day the woman would not come up on the deck any longer. After two more days, she was no longer moving. She was carried out and thrown into the deep, the same as her man. Nobody fought or pleaded for her. And nobody wanted to speak of her, when she was gone. I asked Fanta if she thought the woman had died, at least, before they took her out of the hold.

"Shh," she said, and turned away.

AS THE DAYS WENT BY, I saw that the more the women were free to move about, the more they risked. Fanta told me that I was a fool to go with the medicine man. She said she would rather sleep by the shit buckets in the hold than in the bed of a toubab. She usually stayed in the hold, and because she was so big with child, the toubabu let her do so. But I didn't have much choice, and many of the other women were made to spend nights, or parts of nights, with the toubabu leaders. The medicine man took a woman into his bed every few nights. He had three or four favourites, and made me stay in the bed even when he had a woman. I would push myself up against the wall and plug my ears and hum loudly and try to ignore the heaving and vibrations. I knew that almost as soon as his body quit shuddering, he would fall into a short sleep. The woman would get out of bed as gingerly as she could, and rustle around the medicine man's room, sometimes pulling an object out of a storage box and slipping it inside her wrap. The toubab would wake with a start, get up, give the woman some food or water or coloured cloth and send her out.

In his room at night, the women never looked at me or met my eyes. I understood that I was not to speak to them. I would never tell that the homelander women stole whatever they could from the boxes brought daily in and out of the medicine man's cabin. I saw iron files disappear inside cloth wraps. I saw one woman take an orange with his consent, wait for him to turn his back, pick a nail off the floor and plunge it deep inside the fruit.

Up on the top deck of the ship, I heard the women talking. They said that the grand chief of the toubabu was built like a donkey and never gave the women anything but the stink of his body. The women said that hair covered his neck, his back and even his toes. Fanta just grunted, warning that one of us would surely end up in his stomach, right next to his hairball.

After ten days at sea, the toubabu removed the irons from some of the men allowed up on deck, but reshackled them later when they were pushed back down the hold. Biton encouraged me to learn all the toubabu words that I could, so that I could give him information. And he was always telling me to take objects from the medicine man's cabin.

"If Biton loved you like a father," Chekura warned, "he wouldn't try to put you in danger. Tell him you can't find anything."

FOMBA STAYED SILENT AND CHAINED. I knew that Biton had told me not to ask for favours for Fomba, but I couldn't bear looking at the raw skin and the blood on his ankles. He wouldn't even complain to me. I got the medicine man to understand that Fomba could be trusted to be let out of chains and slop the food from the cooking pots into the buckets. I also managed to get a waistcloth for Fomba. But after that, it worried me to see women sometimes approaching Fomba and passing him objects when the toubabu were not looking. Keep away from trouble, I imagined my father telling me, and stay safe.

I saved food from the medicine man's cabin for Fomba, Chekura, Fanta and Sanu, passing it to them on deck. One day, when I brought Chekura an orange, he ripped it apart, slurped out all the guts, and threw the remains overboard. He had juice and pulp all over his lips and face, and he looked like a child just learning to eat with his own hands, but he didn't care. He was bursting with news.

"Fomba may not speak, but he sure can use his hands."

"What did he do?"

"Down in the hold, he brought out a nail and snapped off his shackle. Biton thought it was a fluke. Fomba closed it back up, and snapped it off again. Biton tried to do it, but couldn't. All night, he tried to open his own shackle with the nail. Couldn't do it. Called over Fomba, who did it for him in an instant."

ON DECK ONE AFTERNOON, before the captives' meal, the toubab chief showed up carrying the carcass of a picked-over chicken. He tossed it into the thick of the male captives. The men kicked and fought for the remains, licking and sucking what they won, combing bones for scraps of meat and crunching them for marrow. Another chicken carcass was thrown into their midst, and once more the men wrestled. The sailors doubled over in laughter, then threw in another.

Biton was among the group of homelanders on deck. I heard him issuing orders, and saw the men stop fighting and back away from the third carcass. Biton picked it up and threw it back at the toubab chief.

"You don't dare kill me," Biton shouted. "I'm too valuable."

The toubabu had no idea what he was saying, but they whipped him anyway. Ten lashes, on the back. I watched the first lash tear into his flesh, and then I went to the medicine man's room. I couldn't bear the sight of Biton being whipped.

The next day, he was back up on deck, walking stiffly but without complaint. From that day forward, Biton was the undisputed chief of the captives.

THE HOMELANDERS HATED NOTHING more than being made to dance over a whip that the assistant raked over the deck. One day, when the toubabu's helper had taken ill and left a toubab sailor in charge of the whip, I began to sing a song while we danced, naming all the people I saw. I tried to name every single face, and give the name of the person's home village. Already, I knew a few.

"Biton," I began, "of Sama."

"Chekura," I sang, "of Kinta. And Isa, of Sirakoro. Ngolo, of Jelibugu. Fanta, of Bayo." The homelanders' spirits picked up, a little. When I sang out a name, a man or woman would clap if I got it right, and the others would call it out, once. When I got a name wrong or didn't know it, the person would clap twice and dance a little with me and sing out his or her name and village. Everybody took to this activity, and on other occasions when we were made to dance, homelanders took turns calling out the names and villages of the people around them. Some of the others were able to count out as many as fifteen names and villages, but after several days I could call out the names of almost every person I saw.

Biton made us sing the naming game and dance so lustily that the toubabu would come closer to admire us. The toubabu assembled in their natural order, with the toubab chief, his second in command, the medicine man and other leaders in the front of the other toubabu. Biton would do a dance himself and sing for us all to hear.

He began with a question, which he made to sound like a song. "Is the toubabu's helper here? Please tell me that, my friends." "No," someone sang back, "the helper is not here." "Look again, my friends, to be sure," he called out. And when he was reassured that the helper was not present, Biton stepped up his dance and sang some more: "This one, with the hairs just on his chin, is Second Chief. He operates the ship. He lives. And this second one, with the belly as big as a woman with child, he is Toubab Chief, and he dies. But first, we wait for Fanta's baby."

WE HAD BEEN ON BOARD for a full cycle of the moon. Homelanders were dying steadily, at a rate of one or two a day. The dead were shown no respect. The splash of a man or woman hitting the water horrified me more each time and insulted the spirits of the dead. It was worse, to my way of thinking, than killing them. I listened for the splash, even though I dreaded it, but the one thing that disturbed me even more was not hearing it at all. To me, silent entry suggested that the bodies were sinking into oblivion. At night, my dreams were haunted by images of people falling from the edge of Bayo, disappearing without warning and without sound, as if they had walked blindfolded over the edge of a cliff.

Toubabu sailors died too, on board. I saw some of them, sick and dying, on days when I followed the medicine man around. They had gums rotting and overgrown, spit full of green phlegm, black spots breaking out on their skin, and open sores that stank terribly. When a toubab leader died, he was thrown overboard with his clothes on. When a toubab sailor died, he was stripped of his clothing and tossed to the sharks that trailed us like water vultures. Sailors tossed all sorts of garbage overboard daily-pails of shit, split barrels disgorging rotten food, swollen rats-but it got so that every time I heard a splash, I feared the worst.

There were no children my age on board. There was no one to play with. Other than a few babies, it was just men and women. I was lucky not to be confined with the others in the hold, but too often there was nothing for me to do. Alone in the medicine man's cabin, sometimes I would sleep to pass the time. Or I would amuse myself by throwing peanuts at the parrot, or teaching it words such as the toubab will pay in Fulfulde. And I staged conversations between my parents. I would have them argue, back and forth, about me. She will sleep with the women, in the hold. No, she won't, it's better to leave her with the toubab because he's harmless. Harmless? Is he harmless with the women, at night? When that sort of conversation made my head pound, I would steer the subject toward home. You spend too much time visiting women in other villages and we haven't planted enough millet. The women complain every time you avoid going to the fields with them. I am not visiting women. I am catching babies, and I bring home chickens and pots and knives, and once I even brought a goat. I don't care about your stupid women in the fields. Do they plant chickens, out there? Do they plant goats?

One evening on the top deck, Fanta told me that her belly was in convulsions and that she was ready to have her baby. I signalled to Chekura, who was just being led back down into the hatch for the evening with the other men. He nodded when he saw me point to Fanta, cup my hands together and thrust them out from my lower belly.

I had been coming and going every day between the deck and the medicine man's cabin below, and nobody had dared stop me because I belonged to him. This time, I brought Fanta with me. It was the first time she had descended into the toubab's living space. She saw the cooking pot for the toubabu leaders, and said, "We should kill them before they boil us all."

In the medicine man's room, I covered the bed with extra cloths and brought close a pail of water. I hoped this birth was going to be fast.

"I could be here all night, if this takes a long time," Fanta said. "And I will not spend the night in bed with any toubab. I will die first. Or he will."

I put my hand on her shoulder and told her to think about the baby. She grunted.

"I stopped caring about that a long time ago. No toubab will do to this baby what they have done to us." A shiver ran through my body.

I had to get away from Fanta for a moment. I had to collect myself, so I did what the medicine man had shown me before. I took a wide metal wash bucket from the room, stepped out for a moment and motioned to the junior toubab working at the cooking fire to throw two red-hot iron bricks into the bucket. I returned with them to the cabin. Inside, Fanta was pointing at the bird with her mouth wide open. The bird was squawking at her. I tossed it a few peanuts and hung a sack over the cage to make it shut up.

"Don't give food to that thing," Fanta said. "Take the food for yourself. Give it to the others. Or give it to me."

"I have to feed this bird or it will die. And if it dies, the medicine man-"

"I know, I know," she said.

I dumped several pails of water into the metal bucket and got Fanta to step in. She crouched, careful to avoid the red metal.

"I haven't had warm water like this since we were back in Bayo," she said.

"Hmm," I said.

"Do you do this?"

"Sometimes."

"Does he watch you?"

"Yes."

"Touch you?"

"He has tried, but I won't let him."

"You can do that?"

"He stops when I look in his eyes and speak fiercely."

"He's a weak toubab. And the weak die first."

I did not dare ask which weak people Fanta had in mind. Homelanders or toubabu?

Fanta relaxed a little. I watched her ride out a few convulsions. She finished with the bath, dried herself off with a cloth I handed her, shivered and climbed onto the bed.

"Do you call him anything?" Fanta asked.

"Who?"

"The medicine man. Do you call him by a name?"

"He has a name. Sounds like 'Tom.'"

"Do you call him that?"

"No. I never call him anything. I just speak to him. No name."

"Good."

The convulsions shook Fanta for some time, but eventually they diminished and she fell asleep. During that time, the medicine man came into the room. His arms flew up. He looked shocked.

"Baby," I said. "Catch baby." He had taught me these terms.

"No."

I stood up. Looked him in the eyes. This was the only way. It had worked when I pushed his hands away from me, and I hoped it would work now. "Catch baby," I said again, and in Bamanankan, said firmly, "Go. Mother sleep."

"When?" he asked.

"Catch baby soon," I said.

He removed an orange from his pocket and unsheathed from his belt a long knife with a handle made from elephant tooth. Then he sliced open the fruit, set the knife and fruit down on a small table and indicated to me that Fanta and I could eat the food. He turned, picked out another cloth from his trunk and left it near Fanta's feet. My eyes fell on the knife. The medicine man had forgotten it on the table. He drank quickly from a bottle, stuffed it back under the cloth in his trunk, gathered a few more things and left the room.

I sat on the bed and waited for Fanta to wake. She snored. I thought about teasing her later, and telling her that she sounded like a wild boar. When she finally awoke, she sat up quickly, looked around and remembered where she was. She moaned and lay back. Her breathing was speeding up. I rubbed her back.

"You need to know something," she said.

"No one will be eaten, so stop thinking about that now," I said.

"In just a rainy season or two, you were about to become my husband's next wife," Fanta said.

My mouth dropped, and I yanked my hand away from her. "That's a lie."

"That's why I never liked you," Fanta said. "You were so young, not halfway a woman yet, and I knew that one day you would be my husband's favourite." Beads of sweat had broken out on her forehead, but I did not move to wipe them. "I would have made your mother leave you at the door," Fanta continued, "and as soon as we were alone, I would have given you a royal beating. I would have made you pay."

"I don't believe you," I said. "My father and mother never would have agreed."

"No? What do you think a jeweller would tell the village chief? Wouldn't it be better to accept and to negotiate good terms?"

"I don't believe you."

"Don't you want to know what you went for?"

"No."

"One day you will hate people just like me. You won't have that childish look on your face that makes everybody want to love you and clap their hands with pride that a little runt like you can already catch babies. You know what, Aminata? Anyone can have a baby, and any idiot can catch one."

I was so angry that I didn't know what to say. I wanted to stab her with the knife. I wanted to rip her hair out. I wanted to scream and shout that she was a liar and that my parents would never have let me go to that old man. Even if he was the chief. But I knew I couldn't hurt her, and I couldn't scream. My mother had taught me well. When you catch a baby, you are calm. The mother may behave like a tyrant or a wild child, but you cannot. When you catch a baby, you are not yourself. You forget yourself and you help the other. I gulped. I swallowed. I wondered if what Fanta had said was true. Sadness had been welling inside me during three moons overland and more than one moon in this stinking toubabu's vessel, and now it burst. Tears shot from my eyes and my breath grew short. I heaved and sobbed and stood there useless, while Fanta lay back and watched and waited. I shook terribly for a few moments, both feet planted beneath me, eyes shut, fists clenched. I swayed, and rocked, and finally settled down. I had nothing to do but to appeal, as I hadn't in a long, long time, to God. Allahu Akbar, I mumbled. God is great.

"Don't waste your time on that any longer," Fanta said. "Can't you see that Allah doesn't exist? The toubabu are in charge, and there is only madness here."

Perhaps it was true. Maybe Allah lived only in my land, with the homelanders. Maybe he didn't live on the toubabu's ship, or in the toubabu's land. I said nothing. I tried to shove all the things Fanta had said into a little room in my mind, and I tried to close the door. I imagined my mother's voice, calm and capable. We have a baby to catch.

Fanta's body started shuddering again. I offered to check with my hand to see if she was ready, but she refused. The contractions began rolling hard and long and often, and I left it to Fanta to decide when to push. I would not guide her. I would offer her water, and hold her hand, and wait for the chief 's wife to make up her own mind about what to do next.

She pushed for a long time, and then she lay back and rested. Something seemed to grab her body again, and she pushed once more. She rested again, then pushed so mightily that I could smell her bowels moving. "Now," Fanta said. She pushed three more times. I saw hairs on a head starting to part her, but the baby wouldn't come yet. She pushed once more, and the head came all the way out, blue and purplish and light coloured and specked with bits of whiteness and blood. Fanta pushed again, and out came the shoulders. The rest slid out quickly: a belly, a penis, legs, feet. I used the toubab's knife to slice the cord, then I wrapped the baby and gave him to Fanta. The baby cried, and Fanta let it howl good and long before allowing it to root for her nipple. She was not a proud mother, but an angry one. I tried to settle Fanta comfortably on the bed, but she pushed me away.

I turned my back and squatted over the waste bucket. The baby started to scream again and I whirled around to see Fanta unsteady on her feet, standing across the room. She flipped the hood off the birdcage, opened up the wide door and grabbed the bird by the beak. Its claws flew up and raked her, and she cursed, but she kept on.

"Stop," I called out.

Fanta ignored me. She had the medicine man's knife in her hand. She stabbed and stabbed until the claws stopped scraping at her and the body stopped quivering. She threw the mess back in the cage, closed the door, and covered it with the hood. After wiping the knife clean, she wrapped herself, and slipped the knife inside the cloth. Then she picked up her bawling baby and shoved its face against her nipple. Fanta and the baby eventually slept again, but I stayed awake, fearing what was going to happen when the medicine man returned and took the hood off the birdcage. But the little window showed light, and there was no sign of the medicine man.

I woke Fanta and the three of us went up on deck as the day was breaking. A pale moon hung low in the sky, at the very moment that the upper tip of a ball of fire crested the opposite horizon. Trouble was coming when the moon and sun shared the same sky.

The medicine man saw the baby and sang out words of pleasure. He patted me on the shoulder. He took a step toward Fanta, but the look in her eyes stopped him. Fanta was now steady on her feet. I thought about how she had walked for three moons with a growing baby in her belly, and about how she had sliced open that parrot even as it kicked and clawed and cut her wrist. The sun cleared the horizon. Now it was a furious ball of red. The moon began to fade in the sky and I had the feeling that it was leaving me to fend for myself.

The orange-haired toubab was so pleased with the baby that you would think he had pushed it out himself. He sent off some toubabu sailors, who returned with the toubab chief and the assistant. The three of them spoke. After taking instructions, the assistant spoke to me, but I could not understand. The assistant repeated himself. I realized that the medicine man wanted me to call out to the men below. I was to tell them that Fanta had had her baby.

A toubab drew up the door to the men's hold. I took a few steps down into the darkness. I could barely see.

"A son for Fanta," I called out in Bamanankan.

"Louder," the assistant told me.