One of the other Portugals had fetched an arquebus, and was aiming the thing now at the creature on the riverbank. Henrique hissed and pushed the snout of the weapon aside, saying, “Nay, fool, would you have us all in the stew-pot by nightfall?”
In another moment the river took a hard curve, and the Jaqqa was gone from our sight. But the image of him was burned into my mind and lingered long.
Henrique said, “They are a plague. They come and go like ghosts in the wilderness, or like locusts, rather, devouring everything in their path, destroying, showing no quarter. And yet we know not if they are our enemies or our friends, for sometimes they serve our purposes, and sometimes they fall upon our encampments like the hounds of Hell.” He shuddered. “These Angolese people, and the Kongo folk, are but human beings with dusky skins and woolly hair, and we understand them, and when we look into their eyes we see souls looking back, and when we touch their flesh we feel the flesh of mankind upon them. But the Jaqqas—!”
He left the words unsaid.
Onward we went through the killing heat, which wrapped around us like a heavy cloth. On the sixth day we stopped at a village called Muchima, where the Portuguese had founded a presidio, or fort, in order that we might get medicines for our man who had fallen ill, the other having already died. Only three Portugals lived at this presidio, which indeed was more of a hut of boughs than any sort of fort. But all about them was a village of blacks, fifty or eighty souls, of a friendly sort, innocent and gentle, that lived mainly by fishing. We passed a night there.
For company that night all of the Portugals, even Henrique, took girls of the tribe as bed-partners, except for the one who was too ill for such sport, and one other who I think had taken an oath not to touch woman that season, in return for some favor granted him by his beloved Virgin Mary. Torner also was offered a woman, and most gladly accepted, and I, too, but I refused. My refusal was the occasion of some merriment among the Portugals, since I was so robust of body and rich of health that they could not understand it. “Are you a sworn monk?” Henrique asked me. “Or is it that you prefer the love of your own sex, in which case I think we must slay you and feed you to the coccodrillos, lest you corrupt our voyage.”
“Neither the one nor the other,” I made answer. “But I feel no urge toward woman in this foul heat.”
In truth that was no truth. My loins ached, and in my dreams I saw only breasts and thighs and buttocks and fleecy loins. But the fleece that covered those loins was the golden wool of my Anne Katherine. God wot I am no saint, and had taken no vows of fidelity neither, and yet I could not at that time put myself into the body of some stranger woman merely for the easing of my lusts, not when the palm of my hand could serve the same purpose with lesser sin. Especially when the stranger woman was of black skin and oiled with some rancid stuff, and had strange scars carven on her cheeks by way of decoration, and perhaps a bone thrust through her nose. To use such a woman would be almost like using cattle, that is, not a fitting partner for an Englishman. So I thought—God forgive me!—in my haughtiness, me only a year and some months gone out from Essex at that time.
Therefore I slept by myself that night, which I was greatly weary of doing, a year and some months being a long while to sleep by one’s self. In the morning when we resumed our journey Torner came to me, as we poled our way through a place of shallows and rocks, and said, “They gave me for my pleasure a girl of thirteen years. Her breasts were new, and stood out straight from her chest like this, and felt like globes of a firm spongy stuff. Among these folk it is a sin for a married woman to lie with other than her husband, even as it is with us, but their girls they pass freely around.”
“And had you delight, Thomas?”
His eyes gleamed like beacons. “Aye, Andy! Aye! Not that she was greatly skilled at it, and she had an odd way of wanting to receive me, crouching on her knees. But I turned her over and spread her fairly, and oh! Andy, it was so good a feeling, after this long a while.”
“Although she had no skill?”
“What matters is that? I was not marrying her,” said Torner, “only relieving my need. She lay there with her eyes open and her legs apart, and did little, so that I yearned for a good London wench that knows her arse from a table. But yet, Andy—but yet—!”
“What of her teeth, filed to points? Did that not unnerve you?” I asked.
“God’s death, but it would if she had gone crawling on my body with her face! I’d have shriveled to a thumb’s-length, with those devil-teeth gaping around my yard! But that is not the style of loving here, I think me. And merely the looking at the teeth caused me no distress, for after the first glimpse I kept my eyes elsewhere, and later I kept them closed.” Torner laughed and pummeled my arm. “And you? Too proud to tup a black wench?”
“Too much mindful of my Essex maid,” I said softly.
“Ah. Essex is far away, and will you remain chaste until you get there again?”
“How can I know that?”
“But for now you do, is that it?”
I nodded. “For now. I’ve kept chaste this long, at no small cost; maybe the habit of it is settling in on me.”
“Nay. I’ve heard you groan in desire many a night, Andy.”
Color came to my face. “Have you, now? Go to!”
“It’s truth! Why, in that dungeon last week you lay moaning and sobbing in your sleep, and then you snorted, and then you were still. Don’t you think I know those sounds, lad?”
“Perhaps you do.”
His hard blue eyes were close to my own, and his smile was a wicked one as he said, “D’ye think Anne Katherine lies chaste while you rove the seas?”
I struck him.
I hit him with the flat of my hand, against the cheekbone, a hard push rather than a blow, but hard enough to buckle his knees and send him reeling. Three or four Portugals came upon us, not wanting a brawl among us English, but Torner rose, shaking his head to let the bees loose from his ear, and grinning, and saying, “You slap with good force, lad.”
“You spoke out of turn.”
“Aye, and I’m sorry for it. It was a shameful thing I said.”
“She is no maid. I had her myself more than once, but I was the first, Thomas. I know that for certain, and I think I am yet the only one.”
“I pray that you be right. I wish you all joy of her love.”
“And the years will pass and I will not return,” I said, “and a time will come when she thinks me dead, and then she will go on to another man. But I think that time is not yet. I choose to think it, Thomas. She is but nineteen, or perhaps twenty by now, and I think she will give me another year.”
“You are betrothed?”
“Aye. I had a wife once that died of the pox, and now I fear I have lost a second before we were wed, and while we both still live. Are you married?”
“I am,” said Torner. “With three boys from her.”
“And does she stay faithful to you while you voyage?”
“I make no inquiries of that, good Andy. My trade keeps me apart from her long months at a time, and now may keep me from her forever. Am I to stay pure for such lengthy spans? And if I am not, should she? But I make no inquiries on that.” He laughed broadly. “How old do you be, Andy?”
“I was born in the month of Queen Bess’ accession.”
“So you are thirty, I think. A man of middle years, and yet you seem very young, in some ways.”
“Aye,” I said. “I had a late start, and I lost a few years through grief and confusion in my early manhood, when no wisdom entered my head. But fear not, Thomas: I am no fool. Filed-teeth wenches with breasts that stand straight out do not arouse me this week, that is all.” And we laughed and embraced, with pummeling of backs, and went on with our deckside chores.
But a heavy melancholy settled over me. I saw Anne Katherine shimmering in the air before me, and she was weeping and garbed in widow’s weeds. And I thought me, How strange, that I am here in this land of filed
teeth and scarred cheeks and coccodrillos and Lucifer standing naked on a riverbank, and England so far away, lost to me belike forever. It is the price of empire, as Francis Willoughby long ago said, that some of our people be scattered like seed into strange ground: but why was it me that was so scattered? Torner might well be right, to console himself with whatever consolation lay at hand, for our lives that we knew in England were gone from us, and we were something other in this place, stripped of vows and identity, as naked to our pasts as that Jaqqa by the river is naked to the air.
And then I thought, Nay, I am Andrew Battell of Leigh in Essex, and I will remain Andrew Battell to the last, a man of Essex, and, God grant it, I will see Essex again, and Anne Katherine, and my family’s own house.
And now I think, knowing the things that that young man on the river-pinnace could not know, knowing all that I have done and had done to me in these twenty years and more gone by since then, Am I still Andrew Battell of Leigh in Essex, or am I transformed, am I magicked into a changeling? And I answer, Yea, I still am Andy Battell, but a larger and more strange Andy Battell than ever was planned for me when my father engendered me. And though I have done such deeds as an Englishman would hail as monstrosities, yet am I still God’s own man, and mine own, for aye. Do you comprehend that? I comprehend that. And, God willing, so will you, by the time I come to the end of my tale.
A bleak river-fog descended, making our voyage perilous, and in that heavy grayness my melancholy lifted. I found myself too much occupied with my duties to care that I was an exile and a prisoner, and in stray moments I even found myself wondering what it would have been like to lie with some blackamoor girl. We skirted the muddy shores. Out of the mists came fearful mooings and bellowings, of such creatures I knew not what, but that they were not the sheep and cattle of England. The mist raised a bit, and we saw that a second river was pouring into the Kwanza. This was the Lukala, flowing from the north-east, and just beyond this meeting of the waters lay the presidio of Masanganu.
Henrique trembled as he pointed toward the small stone fort. “This is a terrible place,” he said. “It is the unfirmest country under the sun. You shall see men in the morning very lusty, and within two hours dead. Others, that if they but wet their legs, presently they swell bigger than their middles; others break in the sides with a draught of water. I dread this place.”
“Are we to be here long?” I asked.
“Some weeks.”
“That could have been worse.”
He looked full upon me. “O, if you did know the intolerable heat of the country, you would think yourself better a thousand times dead, than to live here a week. Here you shall see poor soldiers lie in troops, gaping like camels for a puff of wind. Husband your strength, Englishman: you will need it.”
“Why then is there a fort in such a place?”
“To keep check on the blackamoors, that they do not invade us from without. If anyone is to descend on São Paulo de Loanda, they must needs come this way, or else along the river that lies to the north, the Mbengu, which is not so easy for transit. And there is another reason. There is beyond here a place called Kambambe, as far inward as Muchima lies behind us, and in Kambambe, they say, great mines of silver exist.”
“Indeed?”
Henrique guffawed. “See, the pirate is excited at once by talk of treasure! Know you, English, that we have not yet managed the discovery of the mines of Kambambe. But we know the silver is there. We think that it is the outermost of the mines of King Solomon, in fact.”
“Aye?”
“Aye. Some there be that will say that Solomon’s gold, which he had for the Temple of Jerusalem, was brought by sea out of these countries. And as we make our way to the heart of this land, O English, we will have ourselves Ophir and its treasures, to match the treasures of Peru and Mexico that the Spaniards have had.”
I listened attentively to all Henrique’s talk of the mines of King Solomon, and made note to bring such news to the ear of Queen Elizabeth if ever I returned home. I would have liked to place upon her hearth another Peru, another Mexico.
Poor Henrique saw no golden treasure. Under the ghastly weight of the hotness of Masanganu, which hung upon us like a falling sky, he took a flux and lay shivering with ague in the little house where the Portugals keep their sick there, and every week the surgeon came to him and did a letting of blood, but it gave him no surcease. I visited him and saw him growing into a skeleton day by day, the flesh burning away in his sweat. He had begun by being a plump and hearty man, and now he was a death’s-head and bones, an awful sight, death in life. At the end of two months there was nothing left of him, and he succumbed.
Then an officer at the Masanganu garrison whose name was Vicente de Menezes came to me and said, “You are described in the journals as a pilot, English.”
I was taken aback an instant; and then I recalled the lie I had lied to Luiz Serrão.
“Aye,” I said.
“Well, then,” said this Vicente de Menezes, who was gaunt and green-complexioned and seemed to have the hand of death on him as well, “the pinnace must now be returned to São Paulo de Loanda, with despatches and certain goods, and Henrique is dead. You are commanded to carry her down the river in his place.”
I did not debate the point. No pilot was I, but I had some smattering of the art, and none of the Portugals about here looked to be even faintly skilled. And I think at that point I might have done many things to get myself alive out of Masanganu’s furnace heat, even unto kissing the image of the Madonna, or mumbling Romish jargon—aye, even that, I think. Merely to take command of a Portugee pinnace was a small thing in the saving of my life. So I moved another inch toward my transformation: it might now be construed that I had become an officer in the service of King Philip. God’s blood, the twists and turns life inflicts on us!
And the twists and turns of the river: those at least I remembered, for I am gifted that way. What enters my mind sticks there with a fearful grip. We loaded our cargo, and took our leave, with a crew half the size of the one that had set out upriver, for Henrique and two of his men were in their graves now, and one other was too ill to depart. Those under my command showed no disdain toward me for my Englishness. Why should they, who only wanted to flee this hellish place? They would take orders from the Antichrist if he stood on the quarterdeck.
So we embarked. When we came to Muchima, a day and a half downstream, we saw smoke rising above the palm-trees long before the village appeared, and then came the village. A destroying angel had visited it; or a pack of demons, more likely. A hurricane of murderers had swept through here. The place was sacked and wholly ruined, with corpses everywhere, and steaming mounds of torn-out entrails, and other charnel horrors. It was a hideous sight. The palm-trees that give the wine had been cut down at the root, and the plantations had been dug and rendered waste, and all the fish-nets torn, and the bodies of the people were most hellishly mutilated and sliced apart. So much blood soaked the black earth that it was as crimson underfoot as though we walked on gaudy carpets, or the robes of Cardinals. The Portuguese presidio, too, was sacked and one of the Portugals lay dead and weltering in it, and the other two were gone.
“The Jaqqas, it was,” said one of my men.
Thus I came to understand that the lone black prince we had seen standing on the bank was a forerunner, perhaps a Jaqqa scout and perhaps a notifier of impending doom. The devilish scourge had come to this town and taken all life, even the cattle and dogs. We sought for the bodies of the missing two Portugals, but did not find them. “They are eaten,” a yeoman said, and the others all nodded their agreement.
Torner amazed me by showing tears. For the Portugals? Nay, for the girl he had had, the file-toothed wench on whose unenthusiastic body he had vented his cravings. From one smoking hut to another he wandered, looking for her remains among the frightful carnage. I came to him and took him by the arm and said gently, “What, are you so concerned for her?”
“She was
warm and soft in my arms. I would at least give her a proper burying.”
A Portugal came up to us to inquire when we would be going on. I explained quickly that first we sought this certain girl’s body, and he shook his head.
“Nay,” he said. “The Jaqqas kill everyone, but not the boys and girls of thirteen or fourteen years. Those they take captive, and raise as their own. All the rest they slay, and many they eat, but not those.”
This I repeated to Torner. We returned to the pinnace. Such total destruction stunned and froze me. What, was such evil upon the earth in our Christian day? These happy folk snuffed out, and for what? For what? Their very palm-trees cut down, that gave sweet wine? I thought on it, and it was like staring into a wizard’s glass, and seeing such a realm of deviltry and monstrosity that I was thrown into sore fright, as if Pandemonium had broken through upon the earth and would conquer it all, one spot at a time. I felt a sickness of the soul. And in time another kind of sickness; for the next day the first throbbings of fever announced themselves in me, and as we hurried downriver, my head pounded and my skin ran with sweat and my bowels gave way, and I saw things all in pairs, so that I was hard put to steer my craft safely free of the banks of coccodrillos, and by the time I came upon São Paulo de Loanda I was filthy sick. I thought my last hour was galloping toward me.
SIX
PHANTOMS VISITED me in my fevered sleep.
First came a horde of lanky Jaqqas, led by one who was a veritable Jack-o’-legs, nine feet tall and black as night. I lay tossing and moaning on some foul straw pallet and out of the darkness of the jungle appeared these diaboli, with their eyes blazing like circlets of white flame. About me they marched, round and round and round. One of them played on a flute fashioned of bone, and one wore over his head and shoulders a coccodrillo mask, all snout and teeth and smile, and one beat on a drum that was made of human skin, still showing birthmarks and other such blemishes. And they sang to me in their Jaqqa tongue, but I understood their song, which was a song of death, a song of fury.