“Ah, and is it so?”
“It is so.”
“Very well,” said he. “I will go on alone. And if I have not time enough for my task, why, there will be other Imbe-Jaqqas after me. I know not who they are, and peradventure they will be Jaqqas with white skins, born in your Europe, or in lands yet unknown. But they will rise, and come forth, these kings of the sword, and they will complete my work, and sweep away that thing which is known as civilization, and then will the earth be happy again. That I do foretell, O Andubatil. That I see quite clear. And now farewell: but I think I will return to you again.”
And he did turn once more to black fog, and was gone, and I sat alone with my tankard.
I pray he be wrong in his vision.
Yet with a part of my soul, that is perverse and mysterious to mine understanding, I do almost welcome such a sweeping away. It would be like unto the flood of Noah, ridding the world of evil. You see, do you not, how intricate I am, that talks in one breath of building empires, and in another of purging them? But you know from the tale of this my long adventure that I am a man of opposites, and great inner differences. I would not have the world despoiled; and yet I see the strange beauty of the Imbe-Jaqqa’s dream. And if the end is to come, and he is to have his way, why, perhaps it will be for the best, since that it would give us a new beginning, if only the best of us survive and endure and prevail, to build again. For so the eternal cycle goes, from building to destroying to building again.
But it will all happen without me. I sit here and write, and dream on far lands, and grow old, and the world moves about me. They say Walter Ralegh will lose his head, for having given offense to Spain by going to search for the land of El Dorado. God’s death, but his fate rings strange in mine ears! And I can hear what Queen Bess would say, if she knew that her Ralegh would be chopped for being overly unkind to Spain. But this is a new time, and it is not much like her time, nor Ralegh’s, nor mine. I do write my book, only, and think, and sometimes shake my head.
My sweet Kate Elizabeth has brought a man to see me, a little dreary pedantic man named Samuel Purchas, who is the vicar in Eastwood, that is two miles from Leigh. This Purchas is a dry and pious fellow, forty or fifty years of age, that has his degree in divinity out of Cambridge, and pretends to scholarship. He has inherited the papers of Master Richard Hakluyt, that compiled so great a volume of the travels of the famed voyagers, and this Purchas means to put together a new work, even larger.
Now, I have read the Hakluyt books, and a great epic they are, the work of a supreme compiler; and I do not think this Purchas can fashion their equal, for though he is industrious he also seems haphazard and hasty of ambition. He talks of “abridging the tedious” from his narratives, by which I think he means to take out all the details of routes and pilotage, and leave only the wonders and marvels. Master Hakluyt was wiser. But Master Hakluyt is dead, and Purchas is our only hope for bringing our tales to print. I have talked several times with him, he pumping me thoroughly about my adventure, and taking copious notes. He will write about me, and tell the world where I have been and what I have done. God grant he get it true.
And he will take my big book and slice it down, to put it in his collection of voyages, and I think he will mangle my words into some silly garboil, and put everything out of order, for that seems to be his way; but I pray that he will not. I know these scholars, that take a man’s book and change it all around, so it bears no more resemblance to what he has written than a discarded greatcoat does to the earl who wore it. But we shall see. I will not see, for I think I will not much longer be here; but perhaps my words will outlast me. And if not, why, it may not matter, if the Imbe-Jaqqa Calandola has its way, and all this our world is swept to oblivion under the tide of destruction.
That my time is close gives me no dismay. I have fared far, and seen much, and done my best. I went forth, as England and Her Majesty required of the men of my day, and I was sown upon the earth like good English seed: and, God willing, I shall have left some crop behind me, and some increase of the realm. I am reminded now of some words of Marcus Aurelius, that are much like other words that I heard in Africa near the end, from the old ndundu-wizard that said I had made my voyage and come to rest, and all was well within me. For what Marcus wrote is near the same: “Thou hast embarked, thou hast made the voyage, thou art come to shore; get thee out.”
So I will do, when I am called.
Almighty God, I thank Thee for my deliverance from the dark land of Africa. Yet am I grateful for all that Thou hast shown me in that land, even for the pain Thou hast inflicted upon me for my deeper instruction. And I thank Thee also for sparing me from the wrath of the Portugals who enslaved me, and from the other foes, black of skin and blacker of soul, with whom I contended. And I give thanks, too, that Thou let me taste the delight of strange loves in a strange place, so that in these my latter years I may look back with pleasure upon pleasures few Englishmen have known. But most of all I thank Thee for showing me the face of evil and bringing me away whole, and joyous, and unshaken in my love of Thee. This is the book of Andrew Battell of Leigh in Essex, that went voyaging on the Spanish Main in Anno 1589 and was carried to many another place before he found safe harbor. It is offered to Thee, to whom be all glory, and praise everlastingly, world without end: Amen.
Afterword
ANDREW BATTELL and many of the other characters of this novel actually existed. But all we know of Battell is that he went to sea with one Abraham Cocke in 1589, was captured in Brazil and shipped to Angola, and had twenty years of adventures there; and that when he returned to England in 1610 he dictated a memoir to the geographer Samuel Purchas. An abridged and apparently garbled version of that memoir was published in Purchas’ vast compendium, Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625), and a modern edition of it appeared in 1901: The Strange Adventure of Andrew Battell, edited by E. G. Ravenstein (London, The Hakluyt Society.)
I have used that brief narrative of Battell’s as the foundation for Lord of Darkness; but I think it is best to regard this book not as a volume of history, but rather as a historical fantasy. For I have taken the liberty of reinventing Andrew Battell, since he left only the scantiest of information about himself, and no one has been able to learn even the dates of his birth and death, or what the outlines of his life were like before and after Africa. I have imagined a family background for him, and some wives, and several lovers, and a philosophy, and a great deal more, much of which he might find scandalous or even libelous if he were to read this book. I have followed the broad outlines of his tale of adventure, making only minor changes in the order of events for the sake of dramatic force; but I have filled in those broad (and often vague) outlines with a world of imagined detail. For that, I hope the real Andrew Battell will forgive me. The man in the book is my own creature, whose life story overlaps in some aspects that of the other Andrew Battell who sailed the seas in the reign of Elizabeth. My purpose was to show what it might have been like for an English seaman to have spent twenty years in the jungles of West Africa in the late sixteenth century; Andrew Battell’s true but sketchy story was useful for illustrating my theme; and since Purchas did not deign to give us more than the outline of what Battell told him, I have invented the rest.
—
Robert Silverberg
California, October 1982
ROBERT SILVERBERG’s other works of fiction include: World of a Thousand Colors and Majipoor Chronicles, both published by Arbor House, as well as Lord Valentine’s Castle and Nightwings; he is also co-editor of the Arbor House Treasuries of modern science fiction, of science fiction short novels and of The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction Masterpieces.
Robert Silverberg, Lord of Darkness
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