“It is in the land of Kongo. He left three months ago, and I think he will not return. They said he had urgent business to do there, but I think he is only in fear of the Jaqqas, who are said to be gathering strength to invade this territory.”
“So there’s no governor here at all?”
“None.”
“Who rules?”
“No one. All is without center or motion here. They say a new governor is on his way from Portugal, but we are not sure. We wait. We live. Time goes by.”
Once more I felt helplessness overcome me. These Portugals! The fat old governor dead, the new one fled, the next one not yet come, and what of me, what of me? Was I to rot forever, while they went about their ninnyhammer foolery? Well, and well, there was no use fretting myself over that now. So long as I had not the strength to walk as far as my own pisspot three feet away, it mattered little whether I was in the hospice or in the dungeon. And perhaps by the time I was strong enough to rise, the new governor would be here.
My strength did indeed come quickly back to me, in the weeks that followed. I was served occasionally by Dona Teresa, but more often by black nuns of the hospice, and always it disappointed me when one of them came into the cell and not she.
But she was there often enough, and slowly I learned things from her about herself. She was in fact just eighteen: I was right in that. And she was no Portugal, or rather, only by parts. I found that out by asking her how long it had been since she had come out from the mother country, and whether she had been born in Lisbon, which made her laugh. “Ah, nay, Andres”—so she called me, Andres—“there are no women of Portugal in this place.”
“What are you, then, a witch-child? A changeling blackamoor?”
I was closer to the truth than I knew. She told me that she had been born in the Kongo, in that same city of São Salvador where Governor Pereira had now sequestered himself. The Portugals had arrived in that neighboring kingdom to the north nearly a hundred years before, had settled there and had extended themselves into the blood and veins of that land in a peaceful invasion, filling the Kongo folk with Portuguese ideas and ways, and filling the Kongo women with something else, which you can imagine. Taking the black women for their wives, they brought forth a race of mixed blood, and then later Portugals married into those, and so on and so on until a strange interbreeding became the rule, producing such wonders as Dona Teresa. To my eye she looked a pure Portugal. But some of the blood in her veins was Kongo blood.
Knowing that of her, I understood my early moment of fear. She had done nothing but serve me, dutifully and without cavil, in my illness. Yet I misdoubted her for being a Portugal, and now I misdoubted her worse, since I had no idea where her real loyalties might lie, except to herself, and to the mixed blood that coursed within her. The jungle had its savage imprint upon her somewhere.
She had not been in Angola long—I think she had arrived only some months before my coming. What she chose not to tell me was that she was the mistress of a certain great fidalgo or grandee of the Portugals in the Kongo, one Don João de Mendoça, and upon the death of Governor Serrão this Mendoça had removed himself to Angola, thinking to make himself powerful there.
When she had told me these things of herself, I asked her also to tell me of events in the Angolan land during my time of delirium.
That was much, and none of it good. Shortly before Christmas Governor Serrão had completed his preparations for the war he had so little stomach to fight, and moved against the enemy. His army came to just one hundred twenty and eight Portuguese musketeers—with three horses—and some fifteen thousand native allies, armed with bows. That sounded to me like a mighty force indeed, but Dona Teresa shook her head, saying, “The black folk here are gentle, and frighten easily. And when they are faced with the armies of King Ngola their loyalty to Portugal quickly melts.”
This King Ngola was the ruler of the place, for whom the Portugals gave the land its name. Serrão took his army across the River Lukala and advanced east to a place far inland, where Ngola was waiting for him with a huge force of his own and the troops of the King of Matamba and a detachment sent by the King of Kongo and also, said Dona Teresa, certain forces of the Jaqqas known as the Jaqqa Chinda.
“Do the Jaqqas then make alliances with other peoples?” I asked.
“When it suits them,” she replied. “Just as the wind makes alliances with seamen, when it fills their sails and sends them where they wish, and other times comes upon them in gales and snaps their masts. We never know, until we find out.”
Fat old Governor Serrão was so shitstricken by fright that he desired to retreat before this preponderous enemy army, but his officers impelled him to attack. One of those who urged the battle on him was the same Captain-Major Pereira now in hiding in the neighboring land. On the last Monday of the year the Portugals met their foe and were most terribly defeated, and fell back many leagues toward Masanganu. In this withdrawal, it is said, Governor Serrão fought valiantly against his pursuers and ably protected the rear guard of the Portugals. For some time the army lay besieged at Masanganu, until reinforcements came up from São Paulo de Loanda and relieved them. Soon after this disastrous campaign Serrão took to his bed and yielded up the ghost, and was succeeded by Pereira.
“And now?” I asked. “With Pereira fled, will the city be invaded?”
“We wait,” she said. “We pray. We watch for omens.”
I thought secretly it would be no great disaster for me if King Ngola or the Jaqqa Chinda or any other of these heathens came in here and put São Paulo de Loanda to destruction. With luck I would show them I was no enemy to them, and my yellow hair might be the flag of my freedom. And if the ocean ran red with Portugals’ blood, what was that to me? I held no love for them; I had not yearned to be here; what had I had from them, in these two years, but chains and dungeons and mush to eat, when I would fain have been in England?
Yet I kept these thoughts to myself.
There was no invasion that month, or the months thereafter. My strength grew under the care of Dona Teresa and the black nuns of the hospice. I took my first few tottering steps; I held down solid food, and even some wine; I washed and dressed myself; I left my cell, under guard, and walked weakly in a courtyard of the hospice. Once I came to a place where a mirror was, and I saw my face and knew how close I had come to death: for I was haggard and weathered, with deep seams in my cheeks and a raccoon’s rings around my eyes, and my color was bilious and my look was rheumy—and this after months and months of recovery! I have always known that my Protector watcheth over me, for in our harsh world it is a triumph simply to live beyond childhood, but I think I must have more lives than most cats, and that I surrendered one or maybe two with that plaguey ailment that I got in fever-cursed Masanganu.
Now the return of my health brought me little joy, though. For as soon as I was seen to be walking and putting meat to my bones, a fine-feathered captain of the Portugals came to me and said, “You are transferred to the prison. Make yourself ready and come with me.”
I protested, but in vain. I demanded to speak to the governor, but of course there was no governor. I urged that I was already enrolled in the service of the colony, as a pilot on the governor’s pinnace. Was that madness, to beg to toil for the Portugals, and be shipped, if I won my suit, back to Masanganu, that had all but slain me? I think not. For it is hateful to moulder in a dungeon, and pride must be put aside when freedom, or a semblance of freedom, can be had.
This captain, who was a decent man as Portugals go, felt sympathy for me. But Governor Pereira had ordered that I be imprisoned, and a prisoner I must be, since there was no governor here to countermand Pereira’s foolish order, and no one else dared take it upon himself to find another disposition for me.
So I was hauled roughly back to the presidio on the heights of São Miguel overlooking the town. And when I angrily pulled my arm free from one of the Portugals who was conveying me thither, another struck me from behind wi
th his cudgel such a blow in the kidneys and I fell gasping and vomiting, and thought I would give up my spirit there in the dust.
They returned me to the same beshitten subterraneous dungeon where Torner and I had been penned on our first arrival in São Paulo de Loanda. And the gate closed. And there I sat in the dimness and the stench. And there I was forgotten once more. My jailers brought me food twice a day, and water, and once a week they asked if I wanted to have a priest hear my confession, which I declined. Of other human contact I had none, for more weeks than I care to sum.
I thought I would go mad.
I wondered if it were better to have died.
It was one of my deepest testings. I had no Torner to amuse me with rough seaman’s talk and gossip of home; Dona Teresa did not visit me; the kind Barbosa, who had brought me wine on my first stay in this stinking keep, was no longer in Angola, or else had given up concern for me. I petitioned my jailers constantly for an audience with some authority of the colony, and they answered me with jeers, or spittle, or sometimes with their fists, which split my cheek and cracked a rib another time.
“Will you have a priest?” they asked again and again.
“Nay,” I said, “he will not free me, will he?”
SEVEN
IN THESE dark months of bitter solitude I found only one entertainment, which was to hold conversation with imagined companions out of my lost happy life.
Anne Katherine I often addressed, saying, “This gold of the Indies I bring to you, to hang between your breasts and dangle from your ears and shine on your wrists.”
To which she replied, “And will you go to sea again, Andrew, now that you have won this treasure?”
“Nay, never. All that hauling of ropes and lines, all that furling and unfurling, the tarring and mending, the sun and the black thirst swelling my tongue—nay, nay!”
“But it was your great adventure, love.”
“Indeed so, and I would not have missed it. But the harbor is reached, and now it is time to sow and reap, and dine on cheese and wine, and see increase, and give thanks and sleep in a good soft bed, and one day to die in bed, too, full of years. Come here to me, sweet.”
And her breasts in my hands, and her lips on my lips, and our tongue-tips touching and our breaths mingling, and our bellies meeting—yea! Our seed rushing one to the other, and her sighs soft in my ear—
I spoke with my father. “Tell me the secrets of your craft,” I begged him, “so that I can be of use to these Portugals, and lever myself into freedom.”
“And would you aid them, then?”
“It is not so bad a thing. Do I serve God better working at a trade at sea, or lying in my own piddle in this black hole? Tell me of piloting, I pray.”
“You must first learn the tools,” he said. “Your task it is to know the water, the capes and shoals, but also your position in the universe, and for that you must have tools. Here: this is your cross-staff. See, hold the end to the eye, and move the cross-piece thus, until it corresponds exactly to the distance from the horizon of the star you observe, and that will tell you your altitude from the horizon. Do you see? At dawn and at dusk this is your guide. And this, here: this is your astrolabe, that you hang from this ring, and move the disk so. And here: study this book, the treatise of the Jew Pedro Nunes, on the uses of the compass, and such fine matters.”
“There is so much to know, father!”
“Aye. Twelve years, to make a proper pilot. Caping from one landfall to the next, taking the soundings of lead and line, telling the hours, making your memory into a rutter for all the world, mastering the currents and tides, keeping your charts safe and adding to them for those who follow after you—so much, so much! And you will be a pilot for the Portugals?”
“Nuno da Silva piloted for Drake, father. And Simon Fernandes, the Portugal, was it not he on Walter Ralegh’s Falcon in ’78 in that doomed venture of Sir Humphrey Gilbert?”
“Aye, boy.”
“Why, then, an Englishman can pilot for the Portugals, or for the Dutchmen, or for the Egyptians, if need be. What matters is serving God through properly doing your task. D’ye see that, father? D’ye see that?”
And Rose Ullward I summoned out of the shades, my dark little first wife, whose father had the tavern in Plymouth. She peered at me, squinting in the darkness, and said, “You be Andrew that was my man, be you not?”
“That I be.”
“I knew you so little. Our time was so short. Be I remembered well by you?”
“In faith, not very. But I loved you, that I know.”
“Now you love another.”
“Because you were taken from me by death. God’s breath and eyes, woman, will you be jealous from the grave?”
“I am not jealous. I was betrayed by fortune. When you return from captivity, will you return to her or to me, then?”
“How can I return to you?” I asked.
“We will meet on the farther shore. You and I, and the good Jesus, and Great Harry the old King, and everyone else who ever lived and bled. Will we not? You said you loved me, Andrew.”
“And that I did. And you are the only wife I ever had. But when you went from me, I found another.”
“Aye. The way of the world. I wish you joy of her. But think of me, from time to time?”
“That I pledge,” I said, and sent her back into the realm of shades, for this imagined conversation was leading me into turbulent waters.
After her I summoned my brother? Henry and Thomas and John, and even Edward, who drowned before I was born, and talked long and earnestly with them about their lives and hopes and their skills, their fears, their purposes. I had Sir Francis Drake to lunch and John Hawkins and Sir Walter Ralegh, who was overbearing and shrewd and frighted me some. I spent a few hours discussing matters of state with Her Majesty. I had King Philip to my cell, that dour and bleak old monk of a king, and quizzed him on his creed and made him admit the Papist way was false and a mockery to the Gospels. I roved farther afield, and had the Great Khan and Prester John and the Sultan of the Turks. I got me poets, Kit Marlowe and Tom Kyd and others of the sort, and bade them read me plays, which I made up out of my own head, the play of Queen Mary and the tragedy of Samson and the play of the King of Mexico and the Spaniard conqueror. Oh, and they were such plays as would not have disgraced the Globe in London, I trow, but I can tell you not a line of them today.
In such fanciful ways my months ebbed by. Also did I pace my dungeon and count its paces, and get such other exercise as I could, and breathed as deep as I was able to make myself, despite the stench of the place, to keep my lungs in trim. And I think after my early despair I came to a kind of tranquility, like a friar in the desert: no longer bewailing the discomforts and disappointment of my life, but only taking one day at a time, as God’s decree upon me. I am in my way a fair philosopher, I suppose: I seek not to rail against the unalterable, nor to spend my energies moving the immovable.
One day at last I had a visitor other than my jailers. Dona Teresa it was, like a ray of golden sunlight lancing through the thick mud walls of my prison.
Her dark beauty glimmered and glistened in the shadows. Her eyes had a wondrous gleam and her lips, so full and broad, were shining, moist, heavy with the promise of delights. And I had mistaken this woman for a nun, once, in my sickness!
“I thought you had abandoned me,” I said.
“Poor Andres. I could not get leave to visit you, until a certain friend returned to the city from duty in the north, and by his authority granted me access. Do you suffer?”
“Nay, it is a glorious palace, and the feasts are beyond compare. It is only that I miss the hunt sometimes, and other little pleasures not available to me here, the morris-dancing and the games of bowls on the village green.”
“These words are mysteries to me.”
“What season is it?”
“The rains are upon us.”
“But not the armies of King Ngola?”
“N
ay, there is peace. A new governor is coming to us, Don Francisco d’Almeida.”
My heart quickened. “Will you petition him for my freedom?”
“That I will,” she said. “And I will speak with another great man of the colony, Don João de Mendoça, who is known to me. I will bring you out of this place, Andres.”
“I pray it be soon.”
“What will you give me, if I have you set free?”
I could not fathom that. “Give you? What have I to give? You see me in rags, and less than rags. Where is my hidden store of gold, Dona Teresa? Do you know a secret that is secret even from me?”
“I know where your gold is,” she said.
“Then tell me.”
She came to my side and put her hands to my hair, coarse and tangled and foul, but still yellow, still the fair English hair so scarce in these lands.
“This is gold,” she said. She touched my beard. “And here is more of it. Holy Maria, but you are filthy!”
“There is little bathing here, Dona Teresa.”
“I will remedy that,” she said, and stroked my hair again. And looked long and strange at me.
I had not seen such forwardness from her in my hospital days. For certainly there was flowing between us now such currents as I know pass between man and woman, and my long solitude had not deceived me in that: a woman does not toy with a man’s hair, and fondle his beard, to no purpose. In the hospital I lay withered and naked before her, fouled by my own body’s foulnesses, and she seemed no more than a helpful woman of the city, doing a service to a hapless ailing man. But this was something quite other, now, this sly flirting, this playing at the game of coquetry and subtle desire.
As she stood close beside me she reached into her garments and took forth some small object, that she rubbed most lovingly against each of her breasts in turn, and then pressed to her belly and downward to the joining of her legs. After which she took this thing and put it in my hand, and folded my fingers over it, and, smiling secretly, stared most hotly into my eyes.