Lord of Darkness

  God’s death, the foolishness of it! Ah, the silly man I was!

  In the fury of the moment they turned each on me, just as had the cats, and I found myself assailed and beleaguered in a madness of bounding breasts and raking nails. They did not know nor care who it was they attacked now, but only wished to vent their rage. Aye, and vent it they did! I know not how long our triple combat lasted, but that we smashed everything in the room, as thoroughly as if we had turned a brace of bull-elephantos loose in it, and my shirt hung in rags and the hot rivulets of blood did run in channels on my arms and chest, and I was so kicked and pummeled and bruised that I feared destruction altogether, until at last I flung them into opposing corners of the room and stood panting between them, periling them with my arms lest they come at each other again or at me.

  In that first moment of calmness, the three of us breathing hard and dazed from the violence, Dona Teresa did begin to cry out some new vituperation, which I silenced with a command; and Matamba muttered something dark in her own language, which also I cut off. “I will hear no more,” said I. “I have had enough of this uproar!” I remained as a wall betwixt them, and beckoned to them to rise to their feet. They were both of them all but stripped bare, and sweat made their bodies shine, Teresa’s dusky one and Matamba’s black one, and I saw the blood all over them, but more of it on me. Yet no one was badly injured.

  “Clothe yourself,” I said to Dona Teresa. “And you, Matamba, stand back, let her take her leave. And not a word from either of you!”

  Wearing only her outer garments, Dona Teresa went from my cottage, glaring most murderously at us both. Matamba stood rigid until she was gone, and then did begin to tremble and shake with a violence that astounded me.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked.

  “Blessed Virgin!” she cried. “I am bewitched! She has put the Fiend upon me, and I will wither, I will shrivel!”

  “Nay, it was only words,” said I, though without the fullest conviction.

  I went to her and took her in my arms and comforted her, and she me, and she stood sobbing a while, and then went to fetch the sponge, so we might cleanse our bloody scratches. But the terror remained in her. I had never seen her so pale, a new color of skin altogether, the ruddiness wholly gone from her. “It is the Devil’s own mokisso she has called down on me,” said she.

  “God is stronger, Matamba. God will be your shield.”

  “So I pray.” She clutched at my arm. “I beg you, burn that idol of hers, today! Render it into ashes!”

  “It is but a carved thing,” said I. “It has no power.”

  “Destroy it! Hurl it into the sea!”

  “Ah, Matamba, I would not do it.”

  “Even now? Even after what you have seen?”

  I stroked her back, and the nape of her neck. Even now, I knew, I could not bring myself to part with that little statue, though its maker had shown herself to me in all her deep darkness of soul. And it shamed me to reveal to Matamba how fond I was of that idol, and of its maker. Yet did I say, “I have no faith in the strength of idols, and neither should you, if you be a Christian. It is but a trinket. Give it no mind. Come, let us bathe, and clothe ourselves, and put all witchery from our minds.”

  But she still trembled, as did I. I found myself more frighted by what had just befallen than I had been all during the attack by the warriors of Kafuche Kambara. For now Dona Teresa was my sworn enemy, and she would be no hollow braggartly foe such as the brothers Caldeira de Rodrigues had shown themselves to be. She would, I feared, cause me more grief than either of them and a whole regiment of painted savages with lances, if she did put her subtle mind to the task.

  FOURTEEN

  IN THE whole of my stay in Africa I had given no serious thought to escaping. That had never seemed in any way possible, there being no English ships passing within hundreds of miles of this coast, and the interior of the country being wild and unknown. Better, I had thought, to wait and serve, and have faith in Don João’s pledge to free me, or in some favorable alteration of conditions between England and Portugal, that might bring me my freedom.

  But this grave new breach with Dona Teresa threatened me utterly, and I felt dear need to protect myself from her; and under that necessity I did suddenly see that God’s providence had given me a way to take my departure from this madhouse of a land. If I acted now, I might well be saved. If I let the moment pass, I would be at Dona Teresa’s mercy: and if she persisted in her sudden hatred of me she would be an implacable foe that could do me much harm. So when I was washed and clothed and rested some, I summoned my bearers and went down to the harbor, and sought out the Dutchman Cornelis van Warwyck, that I had appointed to be the agent of my salvation.

  He greeted me with warmth, a lusty clap on the back, a hearty laugh, an offer of tobacco and the good strong Dutch genever spirits that he carried in casks in his cabin. I declined the pipe but gladly took the spirits, being in severe need of its potency. We drank in the Dutch fashion, tossing the clear fiery stuff down our gullets in a quick wrist-flipping gulp, and gasping our delight and filling the glasses again.

  Then Warwyck said, “You are troubled, Battell?”

  “Is it so easy to see?”

  “Two hours ago you looked at your ease. Now storms do rage in your face, and contrary winds rush about your head.”

  “Aye,” I said. “You judge me shrewdly. There is trouble.”

  “With the Portugals?”

  “With women,” I said.

  At which he smiled, and seemed greatly relieved, for I think he had feared some overthrow among his hosts, and his own position in this city was a delicate and easily unbalanced one.

  He puffed his pipe and contemplated me in his unhurried way, and I studied him close, weighing him, for I meant to make a heavy request of him.

  After a time I said, “Have you wondered at all, captain, what an Englishman is doing among these Portugals in Angola?”

  He looked amused. I saw a twinkling of his eye through the vile clouds of pipe-smoke.

  “It did cross my mind that you were unusual here,” he said most calmly. “I thought it was not my place to ask questions. I am here to do trade, not to conduct inquiries into matters which do not concern me.”

  “Of course.”

  “Yet I did wonder. Be you some sort of renegado?”

  “Nay, captain. A prisoner.”

  His eyebrows lifted a small part of an inch. “Are you, then?”

  “Taken captive off the Brazils, while privateering. Shipped here in irons four years past.”

  “Ah, you English! You do love piracy so!”

  “It was my first voyage in that line,” I said. “And, I think, my last.”

  He puffed some more. “You have landed comfortably enough here, I trow. You wear no irons these days. I see you travel about on the backs of slaves when you go through the town. They tell me you have commanded their vessels in sailing along the coast and up their rivers.”

  “I did not go gladly into the service of the Portugals,” I replied. “It was either that or stay in their dungeons. As time passed, they gave me employ and came to trust me, which is fair enough, for I am not a devious man.”

  “Ah. Certainly not.”

  There was silence between us a long while. He poured me yet another genever, and one for him, but held his glass in his hand, studying me. Nor did I drink then, either.

  I said finally, “I can scarce tell you how much joy it gives me that I can speak with someone again in my own English tongue, Captain van Warwyck.”

  “It is a pleasing language, yes. It has much music to it. Next to Dutch I like it best.”

  “I would fain go, captain, to a land where English is more commonly spoken than it is in Angola.”

  “Ah.”

  “It has been a comfortable imprisonment here, for the most part. But it is imprisonment, all the same.”

  “Ah. Of course.” Much judicious puffing of pipe.

  “Captain,” I
said, “when do you set sail from here?”

  Again the small raising of the eyebrows. “Three days hence.”

  “And for what port, if you will tell me?”

  “We are not decided. Perhaps Sierra Leona, or Cape Verde, or the islands off that cape. Thence to the Azores to take wood and water. And to Holland.”

  “You will pass greatly close to England, as you make for your home port,” I said.

  “I take your meaning, Battell.” He let his eyelids droop in a thoughtful way, and fiddled most damnably long with the embers in the bowl of his pipe, and said at long last, “There are risks in this for us.”

  “I comprehend that.”

  “And no reward, that I can perceive. You know, it has never been my custom to take risk without hope of reward.”

  “I have no wealth. I own a black slave-girl, but nothing else.”

  “Ah. Yes. I would not want your slave.”

  “We are both Protestants, captain. Take me from these Papists if only so that I can go properly to my church again, for it is too many years since I have heard a true blessing.”

  He did look indifferent to that.

  “I am a Protestant, yes, but not so godly, Battell, that it matters much to me how long you have been unchurched. To snatch you from the terrible Papists is not reason enough to hazard a breaking of my courtesies here, where the Portugals have been so good as to let me trade, although I am their foe. God can spare one Protestant here and there, but can Holland spare the income of my voyaging?”

  I felt some rage at being thus entered among the profits and the losses, but I throttled it back.

  “Then you will not take me?” I asked.

  “Did I say that, Battell? Here, we hold full glasses in our hands, and the stuff will evaporate off and be wasted in this damnable heat. Drink, man, drink!” He hoisted his genever and saluted me with it, and said, “Of course I will take you,” and did gulp down his glassful as if it were water.

  “You will?”

  “How many thousands of men has England sent to the defense of liberty in my country, eh? How many hundreds of thousands of pounds has your Elizabeth poured into the saving of Holland from the Spaniards, as though into a sieve? And one Englishman comes to me and says, ‘Cornelis, take me home, for I am sore weary of serving these Portugals,’ and I shall say him nay? Do you think so? Drink your genever, Battell! Drink!”

  My hand trembled so that I near spilled the stuff, which he had filled into the glass clear to the brim. But I drank most lustily, and said, “If ever I can be of some service to you or to your country—”

  “I understand that. Aye.” He leaned close and said, “Wednesday at sundown do you come to the harbor, and we will take you on board and hide you deep in the cargo, which is so plentiful that they will never find you, though they look all month. And at sunrise we will pull ourselves out of this place and put to sea, and that will be that. We will not discuss this thing further, eh, Battell?”

  “I am most eternally grateful.”

  “Of course you are! I’m saving your life, man! I say we should waste no words on such talk. Shall we drink another?”

  “I think we should not.”

  “I know we should not,” said Warwyck. “But that was not my question. Shall we drink another, is what I asked.”

  And we did, and I think there was one more after that, and we may have sung a few Protestant hymns, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” and something else, he in Dutch and me in English, and then I think both of us in Dutch, to much laughter. And then he put me into his longboat and I was taken to shore, where my bearers waited like a team of patient mules, and thus onward to my cottage.

  A great joy did sweep through my soul at the thought of returning to my true home, and an end to this close heat and this servitude and this speaking the Portugal tongue and all the rest.

  In the few days remaining to me in Angola I walked about as though I were already halfway to England. I feared nothing, and no dismay entered my spirit. Even Dona Teresa and her vengeful intent meant nothing now to me; she was a mere harpy at a vast distance, who would not have time to strike. I did feel some sadness at abandoning Matamba, for plainly I could not bring her with me, and I could not come to tell her that I was leaving, because of the pain it would cause us both. And even for Dona Teresa did I suffer, the losing of her, though that had already taken place; but yet I remembered our hours of coupling, and all the great joy of that, and also the deeper union we once had had, when we spoke of our lives and our inner selves in the days of our first love in São Paulo de Loanda. All that did burn in my memory. But I comforted myself with the knowledge that I could carry her with me wheresoever I went, her breasts and her thighs and the taste of her lips and the scent of her body and the feel of her rump in my hands, as vivid and as real to me as if were still together, and also the sound of her voice, that was so rich and musical and melodious. But I did not have to remain mired forever in Angola in order to enjoy such pleasures of the remembrance.

  For all of Africa, now that I was going from it, I do confess I felt an odd kind of yearning. In my years here I had drunk deeply of this land, though barely a sip off the surface of that colossal goblet that Africa is, and to my surprise a part of me wished to remain and drink even deeper. I was drawn to the wild jungle that I had not really closely seen, and to the great cities of the blackamoors of which I had only heard, and even to the Jaqqas that were such devilish mysteries. I thought fondly of the coccodrillos and the zevveras and the strange and beautiful birds of many colors and the great-mouthed gaping hippopotamuses, for never would I see such things again. It is curious how, when one is at last going from a place, it can become suddenly dear to one, even though it was not so before. And I had not detested Africa, ever. I was not so much fleeing Africa as I was being drawn back to England, I think. The only deep fault I could find in Africa, other than such bothers as the heat and the insects that crawled everywhere about, was that it was not England; and for that fault, I was quitting it. But all the same I had had great adventures in this place, I had commanded a pinnace and I had fought hand to hand with savages and I had journeyed with cannibals and I had loved two women that were very little like unto the women of England, and much more, without which I would have been far the poorer in experience. And though I now was closing the African chapter of my life, yet did I feel a shadow of regret for the going forth from this place.

  In my dealings with the Dutch merchants I gave no hint, by secret wink or smile, of the compact I had concluded with Captain van Warwyck, I went about my work of interpreting in a wholly businesslike way, concealing my joy and my anticipation. Yet within me I was all in ferment, madly counting the hours, telling myself that in forty-eight hours more I would be on my way out to sea, in forty, in thirty-seven, and so on, and that at such and such a time so many days hence I would be a hundred leagues off to sea, and the like.

  Then it was the Wednesday, and the Dutch ship had finished its trading here, and made ready to depart. As did I. I think my heart did beat in double time all that day long. The hours crept on snail’s feet, but I danced through my chores.

  In late afternoon I went to my cottage, and took Matamba to me, and in my chamber did draw her clothes from her, and look for the last time on her youthful vigorous body, her high full breasts and sturdy thighs and sleek dark skin, and the tribal marks on her face and the brand of the Portugals on her thigh and the scratches of Dona Teresa here and there.

  She smiled and said to me, “You are strange of mood today, are you not?”

  “Nay, I am most jolly.”

  And O! it was not easy to hold back the truth from her.

  I cupped her and caressed her and we did hold close and I begged from her a kiss, which she gave, seeing, I think, that something out of the ordinary was about to befall. And then her body opened to me and I went in unto her and we thrust and grappled and played the game of pleasure, which brought me close to weeping, for the knowledge that I was to di
sappear from her without favoring her with a word of explanation. Yet did I tell myself that I owed her nothing. I had bought her out of slavery and spared her from shipping to the New World, which was no small favor, and though I knew not what would happen to her in São Paulo de Loanda after I was gone, at least she was within range of her native land and might again return to it. So my account with her was balanced in my favor. And I did not want her lamentations, nor her pleas that I remain, which I was sure she would utter most piteously.

  Almost did I tell her the truth, as we clothed ourselves after that lovemaking, that I was leaving that night on board the Dutch vessel. But I thought me of all the tears and sorrow, and forbore. Also I thought it was best she knew nothing, for the Portugals would surely question her about my vanishing, and they would easily see she was ignorant of it, but if she tried to conceal something they might torture it out of her: better that I planted no knowledge at all in her.

  Darkness came. I summoned no bearers. I took my last look at São Paulo de Loanda and, by a roundabout route, went in the shadows through the back streets, and out the pathway to the harbor, where, in the sudden and complete blackness of night, I made out with joy the lights of the Dutch ship standing out by the roadstead. I whistled: it was the signal. There was the splashing of oars, and the longboat came for me, and soon I was on board the ship and Warwyck embraced me and himself took me through the vast cargo hold of that huge vessel, and we had one more round of genever to celebrate. And then I crouched down between the casks and bales of merchandise, all that stuff that I had helped to tally on the register-sheets in the days just past, and secreted myself in a hiding-place to wait for sunrise and the departure.

  England! Home!

  I bethought myself how strange a figure I would seem, with my scars and my sun-darkened skin and my gaunt hollow face well weathered by exploits, as I went sauntering through the streets of my native town. And I imagined conversations with the friends of my childhood, telling them tales of man-eaters and giant coccodrillos and the mines of King Solomon. A few hours more, and it all would have come to pass, too.