There was a great bowl of palm-wine, mixed in the royal fashion, that is, stiffened with human blood. We all did drink of this, as the first step of the rite, and we drank freely of it throughout.
Also was there the wicker vat that contained human grease. I removed my ornaments and my loin-cloth, and Calandola nodded to two of his man-witches, who begreased me thoroughly with this stuff, leaving no inch of my nakedness unoiled. All the others in the group also submitted themselves to this greasing. At the first I found the reek of it loathsome, and the slipperiness disagreeable, but after some short time I ceased to notice it.
Now the Imbe-Jaqqa turned to me and said, “Swear to me, by wind and sky and the bones of the great mother, that what occurs here will remain forever secret. And if you violate this oath, your body will crumble and you will be eaten upon forever by ants, but you will remain eternally alive while they do eat. Swear upon this!”
And he did put into my hand a talisman, that was carved from some ebon-black wood of great weight, and was in the form of a yard and a pair of ballocks. This I gripped by the middle of the yard, and he said, “Do you swear?”
“I so swear,” I replied. “By wind and sky and the bones of the great mother, that I will divulge to no man what occurs in this house today.”
So did I swear. Yet am I telling all, in setting down these words. And if I am to be eaten forever by ants, so be it, but I have sworn unto myself a higher oath, to be true in all that I relate of my adventurings. I think that oath does take precedence above my oath to Imbe Calandola. And I shall tell you all.
Having sworn, I was given to drink a cup that contained some bitter fluid, a potion made from certain dried roots and leaves, I know not which. Swallowing this stuff was not easy. Before long I grew flushed and mine eyes refused to serve me properly, but showed me everything in double or triple. And I felt a great strange uprushing with my brain, as though I had become a copious waterfall that rose heavenward, and poured and poured into the sky. And my hearing grew more sensitive, so that the drums and fifes outside grew swollen and immense, and I could detect also the little harsh chittering sounds of insects, and—so I thought—the whispering noise made by the growing of the grass. And flaming colors streamed in the air, a wild blazing torrent of red and green and purple banners that had no substance, but only hue.
As I sat muddled and dazzled by these things, all the others began to dance most threateningly about me and about Imbe Calandola, who sat by my side. They waved their arms and shook their fists and lifted their feet as though to kick me, but they never once touched me, and only kept churning round and round me. This part lasted some long time.
Then I drank again, a cooling draught out of a new cup of high burnish, that had the figure of a male member rising from it on the one handle, and the shape of the female parts on the other, with long lips extended. When I had had my drink of it, Calandola took it from me, and drank also. This beverage we had had, he told me, was a kind of strong wine into which the dried powder of the sex parts of a dead witch had been sprinkled. What, you recoil? Aye, so do I, now. But I tell you I did not find it strange just then, or in any way displeasing.
Now everyone danced once more, and I with them, hard put to keep my legs from tangling; but they gripped me by my wrists and drew me along as we pranced around the circle, faster and faster, to louder and louder music. They sang all the while, in a language I did not know, which I took to be some holy kind of Latin that these people spoke in their rites.
At the end of the dance we fell down exhausted to the ground. The man-witches lit a fire, and threw powders on it to make colors rise like ghostly phantoms in the air, and for a long while there was a chanting in a low mumbled way. Their voices never left the same one or two tones, as they said again Yumbe yumbe nimbe hongon, or words much like that. By the ten thousandth repeating of it I was saying it along with them, Yumbe yumbe nimbe hongon, and they did smile and encourage me to do that by gestures of their hands. And then they stood, still doing the Yumbe, and lifted me to my feet, and rocked me back and forth a bit, and led me into an inner room of the same house.
It was entered through a broad arch that was draped with red and raw entrails, that I thought quite calmly were probably human ones. But they were only the intestines of a sheep. Beyond, decorated with the shining bluish leaves of a sacred bush, were the sexual organs of that sheep, which was female, and other parts of the sheep attached. And kneeling beside the sheep were two of the wives of Calandola, naked except for the abundance of beads they wore. I thought I could see even beyond the sheep, and it was an open shadowy place, a great blue space stretching far to the horizon and over the sea; but perhaps I dreamed that.
I was by now very uncertain on my feet. Calandola came behind me, supporting me by his arms under mine, and holding me up as easily as though I were a babe. He walked me to the center of the room and put me down kneeling before the sheep, and stayed crouched just behind me.
I smelled many smells. There was the odor of a dry hillside overgrown with rare herbs, and the charred musky perfume of seared flesh, and the sweet heavy scent of oils of Araby. There was a wine-smell; there was a meat-smell; there was a woman-smell. All these fragrances went to the roots of my soul, and tugged at them, and hauled me loose of my moorings.
The two women held bowls, one of blood and one of milk. With these they proceeded to lave me, first my arms and my legs, and then most lovingly my private parts, doing it so cunningly with their wetted fingers that most swiftly my yard did rise. The potions I had drunk were at their height in me now, so that I scarce knew whether I waked or dreamed, and did not care.
“Forward, and enter the gate,” murmured Calandola, and tipped me toward the mounted parts of the sheep, so that my member did penetrate the swollen hole of the dead beast. I rocked back and forth in it, while the Imbe-Jaqqa sang a low song that was much like a long groan, into my ear. But also he whispered, “Be of great care not to spill your seed just yet,” and so I strived to withhold it, though I was in great excitement from all the wine and potions and throbbing music and the hands of the women upon me. As I coupled with that dead sheep’s cunt, other Jaqqas did place rings of sheepskin about my wrists and ankles, and about those of Calandola.
I thought for sure the Devil would appear in that room, out of the smoke and haze. I thought also that he would have my soul from me, and I was lost forever, damned by my willing entry into these diabolical rites. Yet did I take those fears most lightly. If I was become a slave of the Devil, so be it. If I was now enrolled in the company of witches, so be it. Prudence had fled from me. I was a Jaqqa of the Jaqqas in all truth, at that moment. I do confess before God and His Son that I felt no shame in what I did, though I suppose it was because I was so mazy with their strong potions. But peradventure it was not that, but only that I had lived so long in the Devil’s jungles, far from the realm of the good Jesus. In such places even a saint could turn by easy passages into a witch, and I had never been a saint.
There was more. I have sworn to tell all.
They withdrew me gently from the sheep before I had spilled my seed, and a ram was brought into the room and slain with a great sword. The blood of this animal then they poured over me and over Imbe Calandola. The male member of the ram was cut loose, and it was thrust some several times into the hole of the female sheep, and taken from it, and roasted upon a sharp stick; and the meat was divided into morsels, and each of us did eat a morsel of it. And the blood of the ram and the ewe were mixed together, and pounded fruits and grains were put into it, and of this porridge we all ate, except for the two women. When we had done with it, the remainder was poured into the laps of the women, and Calandola and I came forward and knelt, and licked it all from their thighs and bellies and from their private parts. And then the women were sent from the room. I had supposed that we would couple with them, but I was wrong in that.
Night had come, I do think. Certainly I perceived the world to have grown dark, but by this stage
of the ceremony I could not have told the sun from the moon. My memories of it now become confused. One of the women did return, I believe, bearing an ivory box that held two shriveled worms, and I was told to take one of those worms and thrust it into her arse with my finger, and Calandola did put the other into her cunt; but perhaps it was I that gave her the front worm and he the rear, I can no longer remember. And I think there were other such rites, using objects of witchcraft such as dried leaves and amulets, but I am not sure. It may be the case that my mind has expunged from itself the most horrid and dreadful of these witcheries, by way of protecting me against mine own doings: but I am concealing nothing, God wot, of what I can recall. I gave myself fully up to all of this, the way one surrenders oneself fully to the experiences that come in a dream.
Though I have forgotten some of these latter events, there is one I cannot forget. Nor do I dare shrink from imparting it here, though it be the worst of all. It was far into the night, and I had had other drugs to drink, and more of the blood-wine, and fires were lit all about the room, and low chanting went forward, when suddenly I did feel a hand upon my yard. The touch was light and supple, and in my bemusement I thought it must be one of Calandola’s wives returned to caress me, and I moved in slow thrusts against its grip, deriving great pleasure of it.
“Mine,” said a thick heavy voice. “Do the like to mine.”
The voice was Imbe Calandola’s, and the hand on my yard was Calandola’s also, sliding up and down the shaft of it with great skill. And he sat alongside me, his huge body pressed close upon mine, and as I sharpened my eyes in the dim smoky haze I came to see that his member did stand upright like a giant black scepter, frightsomely thick and high.
I did not draw back from that which he offered.
I put my hand to his yard as he had to mine. I opened my fingers wide to span that immensity, which seemed to me as thick as an arm, and I wondered fleetingly how any woman ever could take him into her without being split by him. And I stroked him up and down, having no more sense of sin about it than if I had been stroking mine own yard, or the railing of a stair. This was the deepest point of my voyage toward that Lord of Darkness, the Imbe-Jaqqa Calandola: for I was wholly his creature, totally in submission to his will, entirely unknowing of the existence of myself as an independent being. My hand was to him, and his was to me, and nothing else did I perceive. And the last shred of that innocent English boy who had set to sea on the seventh day of May of Anno 1589 was lost now in the beating of the drums and the rising of the many-colored smoke and the wild swirling of the drug in my veins. I had become altogether a thing of the jungle. I was swallowed up in this mystery. I was truly Andubatil Jaqqa, that never had had a former life as anyone other.
Ah! The spurting of my seed did come, with a power and an intensity I had not known since I was a rammish boy. It wrung from me a great shout, that must have sounded none too different from a cry of pain, though it sprang from the supremest of pleasure. I felt myself covered with my hot outpouring from belly to mid-thigh.
And still my hand moved in its unchanging motion, grasping that mighty black rod; and soon from Calandola came a deep rumbling sound, something like the sound that I imagine a volcano-mountain to make as it prepares to loose its molten rock. And then I felt the heavy quiver and shake of his flesh, and the spurt, and his outcries split the air most thunderously.
He cried my name, and I cried his, and we let go of one another and fell backward against the warm moist earth, and lay there unmoving. I think that was the end of it. At any rate, I remember no more.
I was as one stunned. The fires died down, the music trailed away into silence, and all was still.
Whatever happened in the late hours of the night, if there was anything, it was without my knowledge, for I lay in the deepest of slumber. I have told all that I know of that night. So did I vow; so have I done. I have told all.
EIGHT
IT WAS midday before I awoke, and found myself still in the house of the ceremony. Two Jaqqa warriors sat beside me as a kind of guard of honor, but Calandola was not there. I looked at them the way a man looks when he has been half drowned, and comes to himself. They said nothing, neither Kasanje nor old Ntotela. I rose, feeling like the merest burnt husk of myself, and with an uncertain stride I made my way out of that place, and down to the river’s edge, and washed myself free of all the greases and stains of the night’s revelries, and washed and washed, scrubbing myself most thoroughly in that fast-rushing stream.
At the first I had no clear memory of what I had done, but then gradually at first, and then in a torrent, it all came back to me from the first to the last. And I did feel a kind of numb frosty amaze, that I had done such things, and especially that I had done the last thing. But I gave myself no shame over them. It was too late for shame. Some while back, so I knew, I had passed a certain boundary within my soul, and I lived now, in the inner sense, in a land other than my native one.
Only one thing that troubled me, and that was that I might henceforth be expected to be Imbe Calandola’s constant paramour. I was not yet so wholly transformed that I was ready to reckon myself a willing catamite, gladly given over to sodomy. I am well aware of the evils of the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah, and I have never known any inclination toward the same within my soul. Many times aboard ship during long voyages I have been covertly approached by men of that sort, who did risk their lives to offer me invitations, saying they would give me pleasure with their hands, or their mouths, or their bums, any part I liked, and would I peradventure care to play some buggery with them as well? It was easy enough to say them nay, for that was not my game: it is the soft moist hole of women that draws me, and for the rest, why, it is all so much dead meat, that interests me not at all. I would not burn the buggers upon the stake, or skewer them from the rear as is often done, or hurl them into the sea, for that also is not my way. And I know many great men have had that vice and still been great, aye, some even being King of England. But it is not my pleasure. I did not wish to indulge it again. But there my fears proved needless, since the Imbe-Jaqqa was no more dedicated to buggery than I: what had passed between us was a ritual deed, of some high spiritual meaning, and it portended no change in our relations. He went back to his many wives, and I went back to my one.
But other things had changed.
Kinguri came to me that morning, and said, looking remote and much cast down, “Well, and so he has taken you for his own, brother.”
“It was for the making of me into a deeper Jaqqa.”
“Aye, so it was. And are you the deeper Jaqqa now?”
“I have seen new things, brother,” said I. “But look you: nothing has altered between us, and I am still your brother, and your nearest friend, and we will spend long hours still speaking of the laws of England and how they differ from the laws of France, and such matters.”
“We are brothers still, but you are now his.”
“He is the Imbe-Jaqqa. I had no refusal.”
“That is so,” said Kinguri. “You had no refusal. And you are one with him now.”
“We are all one with him,” said I, finding this conversation most awkward and discomforting, like the conversation a man might have with his wife after he has left her for a new lover. “Come, Kinguri, reproach me not! I had no refusal.”
“So I am given to understand.”
“Have you had the same rite with him?”
“It could not be. I am his mother-brother.”
“But you have had the rite?”
“I have,” said he.
“And with whom?”
“With Ngonga, once. And with a man who is dead.”
“But yet they did not become your brothers?”
“Nay,” said he, “I have only Calandola for my brother, and you.”
“Then the brother-rite is a closer one than this other, so why do you reproach me? I am dearer with you than I be with him, even afterward.”
“Ah, so you are,” said he.
“But what you had with Calandola, no one else has had with him ever.”
And therefore was he sulky and wounded, and felt betrayed and cast off. It is like all lovers, and in a way that was not of the flesh we were surely that: he had shared me with another that was more powerful, and felt now that something had been spilled that could not be put back in the bowl. All the same he could not have been greatly surprised that it had happened, knowing that Calandola did hold him to be a rival, and thus that he coveted all that Kinguri did have; and from the first I had to Calandola been something most precious, a giver of light and brightness in the dark of the jungle, as I had seen from his handling of my fair hair. So there was no repairing it: I was the plaything of these two powerful brothers, and I had to take care for myself, that they did not tear me asunder in their struggle for me.
So thereafter Kinguri was polite with me, and I with him, but we were cool, and did pretend that nothing had changed while both aware that a great change had come. And no longer did he invite me to go hunting with him, or come to my cottage to draw me into deep discourse, which I lamented. But we sat side by side at the feasts, and smiled, and gave outward show of warm brotherhood, even so.
With the other Jaqqas was I altered also, in another way. Owing to my golden hair and white skin they all had taken me to be some kind of ndundu-creature, an albino of a new sort, with warlock powers. That had been greatly heightened by my becoming blood-brother to Kinguri, and now was elevated even more by my having shared this deep rite with the Imbe-Jaqqa. So I walked among them now like a man eleven feet tall, whose feet did not touch the ordinary ground. They made a hand-gesture to me of obeisance, and cast down their eyes, these swaggering devilish cannibal lords and princes. And at their feasts I had the finest morsels and all the wine I chose to drink, and I am certain I could have taken any woman, too, though I was content with Kulachinga.