Lord of Darkness

  Torner and I were prodded like sheep, or more roughly than that, through the midst of this place, down dusty mazes of scurfy streets. Everything was hot and dry, the rainy season having given way to the long time of no rain that is the only way to tell winter from summer in these latitudes, the winters being parched. As we proceeded, some Africans came out to stare, first a few, and then great crowds, like floating swarms of bulging white eyes in a cloud of blackness.

  “Why do they look so fiercely at us?” I said to Torner. “Is it such a miracle, then, that two Englishmen should be paraded here?”

  “It is your hair, Andy, your yellow hair!” he answered me.

  Beyond doubt it was, and soon the boldest of the blacks crept forward to touch it lightly, as if to find out whether it was made from spun gold, I suppose. White skins were no longer strange show for these folk; but fair hair, I trow, must be a vast novelty, the Portugals all universally being a dark-thatched people. So they stared at me and I at them. What a splendid complex world, where some are pink in our fashion, and some are red and some yellow-skinned, and some are ebon! These Angolans were pure black, both the men and the women, some of them somewhat inclining to the color of the wild olive. Their hair was curled tight and black, though I saw in a few a slight red tint. Their lips were not as thick as those of such other blacks as I had seen in other lands, and their cheekbones were precious sharp. The stature of the men was of an indifferent bigness, very like that of the Portugals. The women looked strong, with deep and heavy breasts, which they exposed without shame.

  What would become of me in this place was utter mystery to me. I knew not why the Portugals had troubled to ship me here nor what use they would find for me, and nothing was certain save that I would be a long time in seeing England again.

  They thrust us forward to the fortress. The sun was fire in my eyes, blinding them, and then I fell blinking and muddled into a dungeon both damp and chill, carved out of the earth. Torner and I lay side by side in a great dusky mildewed chamber, with a barrier of sharp stakes between us. Our ankles were bound with light chains, so that we could not run without stumbling, but our hands were left free. The Portugal soldiers hovered around us, stinking of garlic and oil, poking their faces close upon ours, prodding us here and there to see if we had bones and ribs, and finding that we did, and prodding us again. Like superstitious heathen they made the sign of the cross often at us, and waved their beads and other toys about, and spoke to one another in a Portuguese so barbarous, so crusted with nonsense, that I could make little of it, except that they were instructing each other that we were to be kept without comfort.

  And then they left us. “God bless Queen Elizabeth!” I called after them. “Dieu et mon Droit! England, England, England!” and more such things.

  There we remained in darkness and misery for three or four days, receiving meals from time to time but otherwise ignored. Insects paid us visits, spiders with fur, and small chittering things, and lizards of the night. The stink of piss and shit was all we breathed. Barbosa had said, as we parted from him in the plaza of the town, that we would soon know our fates, but I wondered if these ill-gendered Portugals had simply forgotten us. Finally, though, came a clanking of gates and a rattling of distant locks, and Barbosa appeared, holding a guttering taper. Two of our jailers were with him, but they lay back some paces.

  The good man was kind enough to bring for us a bowl of the wine of the country, which is made from palm-juice: for such courtesy may his saints give him peace, may his Madonna hold him in the bosom of her repose. The wine was milky and powerfully sweet, and had a tingle to it.

  “Are you being fed?” Barbosa asked.

  “Not often, and not well, but we are not being starved,” I said. “They give us a sort of porridge, mainly. Are we to be left in this hole forever?”

  “There is a problem,” said Barbosa. “The old governor is dead, and all is confusion here, and warfare with the blacks is threatening. The King of Matamba and the King of Kongo and the King of Angola have made league against us, and the Jaqqas lurk on the other side, hungry for evil meat. There will be war. At such a time the officials here can give little thought to you.”

  “Then let us go, if we are too much trouble!” Torner cried. “Set us free to make our own ways toward home!”

  Barbosa shook his head sadly. “You would not live a week, my friend. This is no country for such adventures. You must stay in São Paulo.”

  “Why are we kept?”

  “They will find uses for you,” said Barbosa.

  “What?” shouted Torner. “Never!” said I, in the same instant.

  “Uses,” said Barbosa. “We are so few, and the blacks are so many. The administrators have decided to employ captive English here, of which you are the first.”

  “It is folly,” I said. “We will never serve. And if they send enough of us to this place, we will rise and swarm upon your pitiful troops, and take this empire for Queen Bess.”

  “I pray you, no such talk,” said the Portugal mildly, “or the hotbloods here will have your heads.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It might, to you, when the moment comes.”

  Torner said, “What counsel can you give us?”

  “Patience, endurance, silence. Offer no defiance, and hope for better days. The death of the governor puts everything into paralysis here, for he was such a man as holds the center of all authority, and when he is gone there is only empty air, a vacuum through which whirlwinds swirl.”

  This governor who had lately died, he told us, was one Paulo Dias de Novais. The garrison had elected its captain-major, Luiz Serrão, to his place. “Serrão in his time was a fine soldier. But he is old and weary,” said Barbosa, “and he is forced to fight a war little to his liking. I think he will make no disposition of you twain until his other problems are behind him. And that day may never arrive.”

  “So we will rot here without limit?” I demanded.

  “Jesus and Mary give you comfort,” the good Portugal said gently. “Better for you that you had never left England, but here you are, and I will remember you in my devotions, for I think it will be long before you see daylight again.”

  In that, however, the kind Barbosa was mistaken.

  Hardly a day later we were called out of our dungeon and summoned to the governor’s palace for an audience with this Serrão. He was old and heavy, and he sat in a slouching way, breathing thickly, for that he was fleshy and ill, with unhealthy grayish skin and beads of sweat bright all over him. For a long while he stared at us as if we were some strange beasts of foul stench, and I looked back at him with rage and detestation, for that this man was our single foe here, the one with power of life and death over us, and stood between us and home, and I knew he would not set us loose.

  At last he said, “The letters tell me you are dangerous brigands, that sought to overwhelm the government of the Brazils. Is this so?”

  “Brigands, yes,” I answered. “But all we sought was some of the gold of the Indies, out of the treasure-ships of the Rio de la Plata.” There seemed no purpose in holding to the pretense that we were innocent Virginia settlers, when we were plainly condemned here.

  “You speak our language well, though your accent is poor.”

  “It is the language that is poor. I speak it as well as it deserves.”

  “Oh? Are you so full of fire, then? That you rail at the man who owns your life?”

  “I rail at you because you own my life, sir.”

  “I did not ask for you,” said Serrão. “To me you are a burden, a thorn in my side.”

  “We did not ask for you, either.”

  Serrão peered into my eyes. “Shall I feed you to the coccodrillos, and be rid of your nation? You are a buzzing in my ears. Saint Michael spare me from receiving more of you.”

  “And Saint George spare us from dwelling long among you.”

  “Be silent!”

  At that sudden outroar from the sluggish and ail
ing Serrão, Torner looked toward me and said, “For Jesu sake, Andy, don’t enrage the old man!”

  Serrão said, “The other English, he understands nothing of our speech?”

  “Very little,” said I. “Afterwards will I convey the meanings to him.”

  “Is he as full of wrath as you?”

  “More,” I said. “His tongue trembles with disgust of all your kind, but he can say it only in English.”

  Serrão nodded, as though hardly caring that we were such firebrand rogues, and fell silent again. He toyed with some carving at his belt, and picked at his nails with his dagger: a fat old soldier, who must once have been valiant and quick, though there was little sign of that now. Very likely he was sore vexed with Paulo Dias for dying at such a time. He looked up after a while and said, “What am I to do with you.”

  “Put us aboard the next ship for Lisbon, and we will find our way from there to England.”

  The old man laughed. “Yes, and give you a thousandweight of ivory to recompense you for your time in our hands, also. Are you good sailors, brigand?”

  “Excellent good.”

  “What skills do you have?”

  “I am a pilot,” I said coolly, “and my companion is a gunner.”

  These lies did I tell to make us seem more important, for had I said we were mere deckhands I feared the Portugals would value us little, and perhaps slit our throats to have no more trouble of caring for us. In this I think I was right. Serrão said in a mumble, “A pilot. Good. Very good. Our pinnace that plies between here and Masanganu is short-handed of crew, and we will let you serve aboard it.”

  “That we will not do,” I replied.

  “Are you defiant?”

  “Indeed.”

  He made a scowl, as though I had struck him with my fist in the rolls of fat at his belly, and had let some air out of him. I kept my eyes glittering cold. Yet strangely I found my loathing of him difficult to maintain: he was old, he was ailing, he was weary, he was mortal, and by an accident of fate he sat in judgment over me, which perhaps he liked no more than I did. I took this to be weakness and softheadedness in me, and attempted to banish such a way of thinking, and glowered down upon him as I might upon some sly and cozening Italian Cardinal who lay nightly with his own sister.

  Serrão said, “Why do you refuse?”

  “I am Queen Bess’ to command, but not yours, and surely not King Philip’s.”

  “Talk not to me of King Philip. He is no king of mine, except by distant decree, of which I know nothing. I ask you to go on our pinnace, that has need of crew.”

  “Crew it yourself, old man.”

  He seemed to be holding himself in check. In a slow steady way he said, “What are my choices? I could slay you out of hand, and say you were determined heretics that preached falsely to the blacks. But no, I am not hot for that path. I could send you to your dungeon, and let you stink and moulder down there until your bones shine through your skin. Is that to your liking? But then I must feed you once in a time, and otherwise give care to you. Or else you could serve under our command.”

  “That we will not, if we must rot for it, or feed your coccodrillos with our flesh.”

  Serrão lapsed back against his chair and drummed with his fingertips on its arm, which was made of some scaly serpent-skin, and said, “You are stubborn and you are stupidly stubborn. So be it: back to your cell.”

  The guards began to tumble us from the room.

  Torner looked to me and said, “What is it?”

  “We are offered berths on some ships of theirs. I have told him nay, we will not serve.”

  “Brave fellow!”

  Brave indeed, but perhaps not without folly. For as we hied ourselves back through the soul-frying sticky heat toward the depths and bowels of the fortress, I felt an alteration of my position coming over me. I thought to myself that I was being noble but nobly foolish in my patriotism. They could well leave us in the dungeon a year or five or forever. We might conceivably die down there of the damp, or of a spider’s bite, or of some inner flux, in two more weeks. How would that serve the Queen? How would that serve our own needs and dreams? Was it not better to obey these Portugals, and come up into the sunlight, and do their bidding until perhaps they pardoned us? I would find it hard to enter their service, but it might be either that or perish, and to perish out of stubborn patriotism may be a fine thing, but not half so fine as seeing England again.

  To Torner I said, “I have changed my mind.”

  “What?”

  “In the dungeons we stand no chance. Aboard their pinnace we may find the beginning of the way home. What say you, Thomas?”

  “Will you serve them?”

  “Aye, I will. I think it is wiser.”

  “Then so will I, Andy.”

  I halted and said to the Portugals who were prodding and pushing me in the kidneys with their truncheons, “Wait, I would see the governor again.”

  “Another day,” one guard replied.

  “No!” I cried, thinking it might be months. “Go to him, tell him we reconsider, or it be on your head!”

  The Portugals conferred; and then they relented, and took us back to Serrão, who looked that much older and more weary for the ten minutes that had gone by.

  “I yield,” I said. “We will serve.”

  “You are shrewd to do so. So be it.” And he waved us out.

  Once more we were conducted to our dungeon, and now I explained to Torner all that had passed between Serrão and me in our earlier conversation. He shrugged when I said our choices had been to serve or to die miserably in our chains, and laughed at my promoting him to gunner and me to pilot; but he blanched when I named Masanganu as the place where we were to be shipped.

  “You know it?” I asked.

  “Barbosa told me of it once, when we were at sea,” said Torner. “It is a fort somewhere in the hot interior of this land, which guards against the wild tribes beyond. The Portugals all dread it, he said, and no man will go thither if he can prevent it, for it is a place where men die like chickens of fevers and plagues.” Torner looked to me and I saw more anger than fear in his eyes. “That fat old villain has found the easiest way to rid himself of us. Masanganu! A place where men die like chickens, Barbosa called it. Where men die like chickens.”

  FIVE

  THIS PINNACE of the governor’s was a modest vessel even as pinnaces go, with a spar awry on its foremast, and its mainsail baggy in the Arab fashion, so that it tended to bury the bow. I was glad we were not called upon to take it to ocean water, for I suspected such a craft would yaw unpredictably with a following sea or with slight changes of wind. But all we had to do was sail it somewhat up the River Kwanza, a distance of one hundred thirty miles.

  This river has his mouth a short way below São Paulo de Loanda on the coast. The pinnace that waited there had a small crew indeed, barely enough men to cast free the anchor and set the sails: small wonder they were pressing Englishmen into their service. These Portugals were sadly overextended in Angola, but a few hundred of them to fill all the garrisons, and enemies congregating on every frontier. Aboard the pinnace the master and pilot were one man, a fleshy-faced Portugal named Henrique, and the others were but common yeomen who did as they were told, nothing more.

  Nine days we were going up the river of Kwanza, in which time one Portugal yeoman died and another fell mortally ill. The country here is so hot that it pierceth their hearts. We moved slowly in terrible silence broken by terrible sounds: by day the wild screams of birds, by night the ghastly music of the leopards and lions and jackals and hyenas. “We have but one blessing,” said Henrique to me, for he was courteous and showed us no disdain, “that we are making our voyage in the dry season. For in the wet, black flying insects come at us thick as clouds, and we breathe them and eat them and blink them in our eyes.”

  Coccodrillos lurked on muddy banks, smiling their coccodrillo smile that I remembered so well from Brazil. When we drew near them, they si
lently slid off into the dark water. In riverside lagoons water-birds by thousands waded about, feeding on hapless small creatures. There were black-and-white storks of sinister aspect, which to me seemed harbingers of death; and also another great bird with a bill strangely shaped like unto a great spoon. And along the shore was reedy green papyrus with tops like fans, far taller than a man. While beyond that the jungle lay, palms and vines and such intertwined into an impenetrable wall. Sometimes we saw the river-horse or hippopotamus, only its huge nose above the water, and its broad glistening back. And sometimes the coccodrillos were so thick on the banks that their heavy musk made us want to puke.

  The strangest sight of all that we beheld was neither coccodrillo nor river-horse, though, but a man of human kind. This was perhaps halfway up the winding course of the river, just beyond a great lake called Soba Njimbe’s Lake. Here, on a flat place of land by the edge of the thick jungle, stood alone by himself a black of enormous height and huge depth of color, pure jet in hue, with a purplish undercast to him. He was altogether naked but for a girdle of beadwork that did not at all conceal his privy parts, which were frightful in size. He wore on one hip a kind of dagger and on the other a longer weapon, and leaned on a heavy target or shield of much size, and stared off into the distance, taking no more notice of our passing craft than if we were beetles on a drifting strand of straw.

  There was about this one man a strangeness and a presence most commanding, and such a sense of silent menace, that made him a sort of Lucifer or Mephistopheles, and I knew at first instant he was nothing ordinary. Beside me one of the Portugals made a little grunting sound and he dropped to the planks and began such a crossing of himself, such a torrent of Ave Marias and Pater Nosters, that I saw I was not the only one to have such a feeling.

  To Henrique I said, “What is that person?”

  “Some prince of the Jaqqas,” replied the pilot. “We see them of times along this road, making pilgrimages that are outside our knowledge.”

  “Jaqqas? The man-eaters?”

  “The very same,” said Henrique. “Followers of the Lord of Darkness, devils out of the pit!”