Lord of Darkness

  At the sight of me they all did give salutes and cheers, and Calandola raised his hand toward me and cried out, “What, Andubatil, back among us just in time for dinner?”

  “Aye, and what feast is this?”

  “Why, we shall dine well tonight, on plump white meat! Come, take your place with us, and swiftly!”

  He laughed and gestured, and I looked toward the other side of the clearing. On the ground behind the kettles lay the dead bodies of three white men, naked and bloodied, with their torn clothes in heaps about them. And three more, in Jaqqa manacles, did huddle together in terror and fright against a thick tree. Because the air was dark with smoke and the encroachment of night, I could not see those three clearly from the distance at which I stood, but it was plain from their garb that they were Portugals, and surely they were the ones Golambolo had caught, and brought back to be prisoner here. Prisoner: not dinner.

  To Calandola I said, bluntly and forgetting all diplomacy, “This is a great wrong, O Lord Imbe-Jaqqa.”

  “What do you say?” he answered, in a growl and a snarl.

  “There is a new army of Portugals camped beyond Ndala Chosa, and I know not why. I have come all this way from Ndala Chosa to speak with these Portugals, and interrogate them on the movements of that army, which is why I plucked them from the desert and had them borne here. And I find you cooking them, O Imbe-Jaqqa, as though they were mere beasts!”

  “Ah, is that the reason you are so angered? Not that you mislike the boiling of Portugals?”

  I shrugged. “Boil them, roast them, do as you like. But not before I have spoken with them!”

  Calandola’s great booming laughter floated downward to me like the white water that tumbles down some mighty waterfall-cascade, and he said, “Ah, we have saved a few for you to give questions to, Andubatil! Feast with us tonight, and you can speak with them tomorrow, and then another night we will feast on them as well, Eh? Does that suit you, Jaqqa prince?”

  The butcher-Jaqqas were already at work readying the dead men for the kettle. Well, and that was beyond any remedy: whatever information I might get from them was perished, and would not rise to the kettle’s skimmings when they were cooked. My anger at Calandola was extreme, and another time I might have suffered for reproaching him this way before his people, but it seemed that tonight he was in high good humor. Yet I had best master my fury, since that even in good humor Calandola would accept only so much reproach, even from me, and then he would grow ugly.

  I said, “I will join you in a moment, Lord Calandola. I ask leave to speak with the captives first.”

  He nodded and turned from me, to take a bowl of wine from one of his wives. I walked to the far side of the kettles to inspect the prisoners, whether I knew any of them from my days amongst the Portugals.

  And when I went to them I had a mighty surprise, that shook me to the foundation and base of my soul: for two of the Portugals were men, but the third, that I did not expect, was a woman. It was unmistakable, even though she had her hair bound tight in back, so that it looked no longer than a man’s. Her garments were in shreds and tatters, and by the coppery gleam of the firelight I was able to see her bare breasts rising steeply, full and round and most beautiful, and dark tipped. Aye! and those were breasts I knew most excellently well, by my faith. I knew the feel of them in my cupped hands, and the taste of them to my lips. For this woman was that dark-souled witchy creature Dona Teresa, that I had loved and been loved by when I was Andrew Battell the English seaman of Leigh in Essex, and by whom, also, I had been most shamefully betrayed, what seemed like half a lifetime ago. I could not have been more dumbstruck nor appalled to find her here, than had that woman chained to the tree been my mother.

  In the dimness of the heavy twilight she did stare at me, and her reddened eyes grew bright, and she made a gesture of amaze. And in a voice choking with astonishment did she say, “Andres? Andres, is it possible? Is that who you are? Andres, in those savage beads?”

  “Aye,” I said. “I am Andres.”

  Her lips trembled. “You are much changed, Andres!”

  “Aye,” said I. The Portugal words came hard and uncouth to my mouth, after these long months of speaking the Jaqqa tongue. “I am much changed, indeed. I am scarce Andres any longer.”

  “If you are not Andres, then what are you?”

  “I am Andubatil Jaqqa,” I answered her.

  “Mother of God,” she said softly. “I am lost, then!”

  NINE

  I CAME close to her, this woman who had done me so much wrong, and who before that had given me such pleasure, and I let her have a good look upon me by the light of the leaping blazing fire.

  And I saw the wild panic fear in her eyes, that was as revealing to me as the most costly of polished mirrors. How frightening the man that she beheld must have been! For what stood before her was a kind of man-monster, near naked, with paint on his body and barbarous beads and bangles and a host of battle-scars, I must have looked like something out of the wild dawn of time. She stared at the certain tribal marks that I had let the Jaqqa witches carve into my skin with most excruciating pain, and a new brightness of horror shined on her face. My hair hung well past my shoulders and was a tangle of great snarls; my beard was as rough and shaggy as a goat’s; my hands and feet were unkempt; and though I had not had any mirroring of my own face for more months than I had counted, I knew I must now have a savage countenance, with fierce hard eyes and sparse flesh and all the corners hard and sun-baked by that merciless tropic orb, so that my Englishness was fair roasted from me. Dona Teresa shivered and made to cover her breasts with the one arm of hers that was unfettered. Such a gesture of shame never had I seen before from the haughty and imperious and lustful Dona Teresa.

  And I, what did I feel, looking upon her?

  Hatred, first and primary, and the craving for revenge. For I might have been at sea to England, but for her, who had plucked me from the Dutcher’s ship on that false libel of a rape, and sent me off for six years of soul-breaking torment at the presidio of Masanganu. And all for jealousy, a petty spitefulness over my living with Matamba: for that she had stolen my life from me, as much so as Cocke that had abandoned me to the Portugals, and all those perfidious whoreson Portugal governors that had made me their servant in my long years of Angola. I am, God wot, a man of even keel: but yet I have feelings, I am no stone statue, and I do hate those who give me over to injustice, and I did rejoice just then to see this Dona Teresa in peril of her life, with the kettles already heating for her companions and her boiling soon to come.

  But that was the first moment only, that hatred: for her beauty melted my heart, withal how long I had yearned to be revenged on her. That seemed so long ago, her crime against me. I could not, try as I might, hold my vengefulness in my grasp that long. It did slip from me, like some writhing eel, even as I glowered at her and tried to take pleasure in her downfall.

  How, and am I so light of resolve? I think not: but it was her beauty undid me. I tell you, her beauty melted my heart, for all that she was soiled and disheveled and tear-streaked, and for all that she had given me into that terrible six-year servitude out of petty spite, and that there was the brimstone reek of witchcraft somehow about her.

  She was magnificent in my eyes.

  That time when first she came to me in my prison cell in São Paulo de Loanda, she had even then been queenly in her poise. But in the thirteen or fourteen years that intervened she had grown superb, a woman of imperial splendor, and not even her present sad state could disguise it.

  Standing before her, peering eye to eye, I found myself trembling and unmanned with the surprise of resurgent love. Yet had she no inkling of this, seeing as she did only the strange Jaqqa-monster that I had become. And another thing began to happen, which was that the wondrous beauty of her began to wash from me not only my long-cherished anger toward her, but also the strangeness that I had put on, the Jaqqa self within which I had cloaked myself: I had come before her a
s Andubatil, but I heard the voice of Andrew Battell within my skull, speaking with her in English most playfully, such words as “scavenger” and “stonemason” and “turnip-greens,” in our games of love. Which brought a confusion over me, a slipping and a sliding of my soul, so that I felt like one who is battered and pummeled by heavy surf, and knocked to his knees whenever he tries to rise, and loses his strength in the struggle and begins to drown. What was I, Jaqqa or Englishman? And did I hate her or love her? I was drowning in the contraries and antitheticals of mine own bewildered soul. But as one who feels himself drowning may begin at the last to swim upward to salvation, so, too, did I out of that maelstream of fuddlement commence the ascent toward some measure of understanding. For I knew that I was more English than Jaqqa, for all my journey into the man-eater’s ways, and that I held more love than loathing for this woman. And I swore then a mighty vow within myself, by God the Redeemer and by every mokisso of this somber jungle, that I would see her spared from the cannibal kettle, or go into that kettle myself. Nor was this any witchcraft at work upon me this time, but mine own free decision.

  Yet was I slow to reveal that to her. Merely did I circle her from side to side, like leopard contemplating trapped prey, and study her in all regards. She hovered on the borderland between fear and boldness, mastering with wondrous strength the terror that she must feel.

  “Well,” she said at last, “have done with it, drag me to the pot and hurl me in, Andres!”

  “Do you think I will do that?”

  “You are so rigged and geared for savagery that it would amaze me if you did not.”

  “Ah, you are fierce, fierce, Teresa!”

  “Am I, then? But not fierce enough to gnaw through these bonds, I fear.”

  “How has this befallen you? To be in captivity here?”

  “Don Fernão and I were journeying through the interior,” said she. “From Ndemba to Masanganu to Kambambe, to inspect the presidios, at the behest of the governor.”

  “Don João de Mendoça still?”

  “Nay,” said she. “He is long dead, poor sweet man, and there is a new one come from Portugal, Don João Coutinho by name, that is very bountiful and well loved. He is to build new castles in this land, and conquer it supremely, by order of the King of Portugal. And so are there armies marching now through all parts of the province.”

  Ah, I thought. That explained the troop I had seen beyond the city of Ndala Chosa.

  She went on, “And so this governor sent us outward here—but our horses perished, and the Jaqqas came upon us in the road—” Her lips trembled, and her strength broke a moment, and she began to snuffle and weep, which was strange to behold in that regal woman. But only a moment, and then she had her strength again. “Don Fernão is slain, and we are to be eaten,” said she bitterly. “And are you to feed upon us as well, Andres? Are you transformed into a man-eater? For that is what I believe you now must be.”

  “Which is Don Fernão?” I asked.

  She indicated, with a gesture of her head, one of the dead Portugals, that even as we spoke were being quartered and thrust into the bubbling kettles. And as she looked that way, such a revulsion and terror came upon her that her gorge did rise, and she writhed in nausea and turned her head from me to choke back the tide of vomitus that was surging upward in her. I felt nigh the same way, to think of that finely garbed vain foppish man Souza, that had had little real harm in him, cut to pieces by my Jaqqa brothers and put up to boil like so much mutton; for though he had been weak and trifling, he had been Dona Teresa’s husband these many year, and for that long companionship she doubtless felt a deep pang to see him perish so before her eye.

  Then once more she regained herself and said, “How much longer am I to live? And can you bring me a swift death, so I need not endure this limb of Hell in which I am?”

  Most gently I did say, “I mean to preserve you from doom.”

  “You? The capering painted jigging naked man-eater?”

  “I am indeed much changed, as you see, Dona Teresa. But something in me remains, of the man you knew.”

  “This is no moment to mock me, Andres.”

  “I do not mock. I will save you from this feast.”

  Her eyes went wide. “Jesu Cristo, and can you do it?”

  “I have much power among these people, for I am become close kin to the Jaqqa king, and to his brother as well.” I put my hand to her arm, and gripped it most fondly; from which touch she shrank away at first, but then yielded and softened against it. Aye, how could I let her be slaughtered? That were too heavy vengeance for the wrong she had done me: and she had done me much benefit, ere that one betrayal. I would right then have pulled free her bonds and taken her against my bosom to comfort her, in the midst of all that cannibal nightmare. But first I needs must beg her liberty from the Imbe-Jaqqa.

  Softly I said, “I cannot save your comrades. But your life I will at once make venture for. Fear no more: you shall be spared from the kettle.”

  On the far side where the lords of the Jaqqas did sit, all was wild and merry. They swilled their blooded wine and laughed most uproariously and showed much joy over their feast. I approached the Imbe-Jaqqa. He looked upon me with a little display of anger or at least displeasure, and said, “I told you, Andubatil, you might interrogate the prisoners tomorrow. Come, now, join us, and share our wine!”

  “By your pardon, my Lord Calandola, but I was not interrogating the prisoners.”

  “Only the woman, eh! I saw you at it.” He slapped his great thighs and merrily rubbed his hands over his greased body and said, “She is fair and juicy, that Portugal! I will have her breasts, and Kinguri her rump, and the thighs, Andubatil, will you take the thighs?”

  His callous words did strike me to the quick.

  “Nay!” I cried in sudden heat. “Nay, Lord Calandola!”

  “Not the thighs, then?”

  I shook my head most vehemently. “No part of her! She shall not be eaten!”

  “What is this you say?” he asked, in his curious way, for it always amazed him much to have his will gainsaid, and he would stare at the gainsayer the way he might at a flea the size of an elephanto, or at an elephanto the size of a flea. “Not eaten, Andubatil, by your command?”

  “Good my lord,” I said, with more humility, “I crave a great boon. I ask you not to slay this woman.”

  “So that you may have her, is that it?”

  “O Imbe-Jaqqa, that Portugal woman was my wife, when I did live in São Paulo de Loanda.”

  “Ah, your wife,” said he, the way he might have said, Your boots, your cap, your drinking-mug. “Well, what of that? You have another wife now. You can have three or four more, or seven, if it please you.”

  “Nay,” said I, sweating freely and struggling to conceal my unease. “I loved her dear, and I preferred all other women before her. I beg you speak not so hungrily of her.”

  “Your wife, Andubatil?” said he, musing on the idea.

  “Aye, we were joined in the highest way before our God,” I lied most fervently, “and greatly did it amaze me just now to see her among your captives. For we have been parted these some years past, since my betrayal into the hands of Mofarigosat. But all this time have I yearned keenly for her, and now she is reunited to me.”

  Kinguri, leaning close, said in a dark voice, “You should know, Andubatil, that she clung very near and familiar to one of those Portugals, that now is dead and being readied for the feast.”

  “Her brother,” said I hastily.

  “Ah.”

  “Aye. Don Fernão da Souza: I knew him in my old life, a man of much fantastical taste in garments. They were very dear, the brother to the sister, the sister to the brother. Lord Imbe-Jaqqa, let me go to her now, and cut her free of her bonds.”

  Kinguri did say to his brother, but I was able to hear it, “The woman is dangerous. I saw her with the other Portugals, and they did look to her as though she was their queen. There is great strength in her. I fe
el it, I see it clear. If we let her live, she will bring us harm.”

  “She is the wife of Andubatil,” Calandola did rejoin.

  “He has another wife now.”

  I saw that this was becoming a dispute between the royal brothers, that had questions of power at the root of it, and perhaps also some question of my turning away from love of them toward the woman I said was my wife.

  Stretching forth my arms to Kinguri, I did cry, “Brother! How can you speak so callously before me?”

  With a frosty smile Kinguri did make reply, “I would not imperil all our nation to save one woman, even if she be your woman.”

  “And one woman, naked and frightened, imperils all the grand nation of Jaqqas? Fie, Kinguri, I thought you to be a man of wisdom!”

  “That I am, Andubatil Jaqqa, my wisdom and yours that mingles in my blood, and that shared wisdom tells me to fear this Portugal woman. I say, smite her while she can do no mischief.”

  I turned from him.

  “I appeal to you, Lord Calandola—”

  “You do cherish her?” the great Jaqqa asked me, still most curious, as if this sort of passion were a vast mystery to him.

  “That I do. I cherish her close upon life itself. I could not abide seeing her slain for this feast.”

  “My brother Kinguri dislikes her, and he is rarely wrong in such judgments.”

  “I tell you she will work no evil, Lord Imbe-Jaqqa.”

  Calandola shrugged. This was becoming tiresome to him, I saw. He lowered his face into his wine-cup, and took a deep draught, and when he emerged his cheeks and mouth were slavered with the purplish bloody fluid, that made him look ten times the monster he was. Yet was there now a benevolence to his smile, and he nodded amiably to his brother, saying, “Andubatil has served me well, and I would not deny him, brother. He craves the Portugal woman. I see the heat of him for her, and I would not deny him.”