Lord of Darkness Page 5

  The friar sighed. He was not a cruel sort. “We could keep you here at our College, if you took up our way. But otherwise you are to be sent from here, for they want no heretics at the mill.”

  “Where are we to be sent?” asked Thomas Torner.

  “São Paulo de Loanda,” replied the Jesuit.

  “Jesu!” cried Torner. “To Africa?”

  FOUR

  TO AFRICA, indeed, to that dark and steamy land from whose vast bosom gushes a milk of mysteries and horror.

  The Portugals had seized a foothold there long ago, sailing south and south and south until they rounded the continent’s tip, that was the Cape of Bona Speranza, and went on to India. Thus they had built a vast empire the spread of which makes the mind grow dizzy in contemplation of it. This was at a time when we English foolishly had no interest in going far to sea, but were content to sail only to Flanders or Portugal or France, or sometimes to Iceland or Newfoundland for the fishing. Up and down both coasts of Africa the Portugals had founded cities and fortresses for their trade, which was in all the wondrous goods of the land, gold and spices and the ivory of elephantos, but most especially slaves: and it was to one such outpost, nine degrees south of the equinoctial line in the land called Angola, that Torner and I now were shipped.

  It was a long and worrisome voyage, for the winds were contrary and the gales blew in our teeth much of the time. We rode a broad and heavy carrack, some three hundred fifty tons or maybe larger, with an ingenious great lot of sail, spread on masts patterned after the Dutch scheme. That is, there were topmasts with caps and fids, carrying topsails of great size and topgallants above them, which I had never seen before at close inspection. But for all that, the vessel was hard pressed to beat her way eastward, and we wallowed miserably in rough and sinister seas.

  Cold furies and hot rages ran through my spirit. I could not bear being a prisoner. I wanted England, and Essex, and Anne Katherine, and my patch of land; and I could not have them; and often I thought of throwing myself into the sea, if only I had the chance. But that was only hollow bravado, I knew. For all my pain I would not have surrendered myself to death, not then or ever.

  Torner was my bulwark. This sole remaining companion was ten years my elder, a staunch weatherbeaten man who had sailed in many seas. Ofttime he lost heart himself, but at a different time from me, so that we cheered one another alternately. “See, now, we’ll be home before you can say Jack Sprat!” he cried. “As we strike forth into the Atlantic some good English brigand will swoop upon this old scow and take it prisoner, and ship us aboard!”

  That did not befall. But it was pleasant to dream upon it.

  The first three days Torner and I were kept in chains, as though the Portugals feared we would seize the ship if left to our own. The metal was rusty and rough and chafed us most cruelly, so that our wrists bled and blazed with pain. We lay on deck like cords of timber, bound and stacked, and the seamen walked around us and paid us no mind, or sometimes glared and spat, or made the horns at us with their fingers, or did the cross with their hands as if to ward off the malign influence of demons.

  I hated that hatred of theirs. What had I done to them? Refused to praise God in the Romish way? Sworn my allegiance to an English Queen instead of to their crazed King Philip, whom they despised themselves? That was the only true difference between us, that I was an Englishman and they Portugals, and yet they looked upon me as if I were a Turk, or some ravening fiend out of the nether hells. Why? Why? God’s truth, I had no hate for them, only for their religion. I do plead guilty to a certain dislike for their oily Portugal looks, but that only because such folk were unfamiliar to me and I preferred the good clean open-hearted look of Englishmen.

  The sea-spray stung my eyes and in the rolling of the ship I was often bruised and once some great bird with a white breast and blazing red devil eyes flew slowly across the deck and dropped its dung on my forehead. Which gave the Portugal sailors much to laugh upon, and they did pound the decks with the flats of their palms in amusement at my expense.

  But when the first heavy weather struck, there was need for all hands to work the rigging, even us. We were set free, rubbing our cramped tethered limbs to ease some blood back into them, and sent aloft to tug at the cords. And so we toiled beside those who had mocked us so sharply. It would have been no huge task to nudge one or two of them with an elbow and send them tumbling to their dooms as we scrambled about the topmasts; but that was madness, gaining me nothing but a watery death myself, or worse, and I forgot the scheme. And in a day or two the hatred of these men for us subsided: now we were fellow hands, was all. Though we ate apart and dined on slops, we were not again chained, and no one seemed to care that we were supposed to be prisoners. Aye, and where could we have escaped in mid-sea, save into the mouths of the sharks?

  Our shipmates were a sullen and a surly lot. They fought often with one another and spoke in foul curses, and made mock of their officers behind their backs. Sometimes to their faces as well, and one morning in mid-ocean I heard loud shouts between a black-bearded crookbacked seaman and the second mate, which grew more angry until suddenly the seaman struck the second mate to the deck with a blow that shattered his nose and sent blood spurting an amazing distance. When that happened everything stood still upon the ship: the men in the rigging froze, and those working the pumps stood like statues, and those tightening the lanyards and tackles let go the ropes. The man who had struck the blow looked at his own hand as though he had never seen it before. For one does not strike officers at sea and live.

  The man was seized and within an hour he was tried and his fate was set, and it was to be the lash. Every hand not needed to work the ship was called into assembly, and the seaman was tied to a mast, and a gigantic Portugal with arms as thick as anyone else’s legs was the wielder of the whip.

  Now I am not one of your Londoners who goes out to every execution and stands with the crowd from earliest dawn, waiting to get a good view. I see no entertainment to be had from attending a beheading, with all that gore and welter and the dead head held high afterward, or going to a burning, and seeing good human flesh char to a crisp while hideous cries break the air. And though I know the favorite of the crowds is the drawing and the quartering, where they hang some poor soul until he is half dead, and cut him down and cut from him his privy parts and take from him his entrails and burn them in his view, and only then to behead him and divide his body in sections, it was never my pleasure to witness such a festivity. It is not that I am overly womanish and finicky and easily sickened by harsh sights, but only that I am a man of Essex, never raised to enjoy the city amusements: let the wicked be properly punished, say I, but I will take my sport elsewhere. But this flogging I did watch—I had no choice, for all hands attended, and I could not help but look on. The crookbacked sailor was one I notably disliked: he was one of those who had most jeered us when we were in chains, and I had felt his spittle and worse, and once when Torner and I were given a little wine to drink he had knocked my bowl from my hand, in seeming accident. So I scarce regretted that they were doing him to death. Yet flogging is a terrible way to die.

  They ripped from him his shirt, laying bare his ill-matched shoulders and his little hump, and the lashes commenced falling. You know that the whip used at sea is no small horse-flicking thing, but a great horrific leather monster, and as it rose and fell and rose and fell it cut the villain’s flesh apart like a saber. Sweat oiled the body of the enormous whipper until he glistened like a buttered statue. I heard the whistling of the whip in the air and the crack against flesh and muscle, and on the fifteenth lash the man seemed to lose consciousness, and on the twentieth he stopped moaning, and still the whip descended, with scarce a pause for the whipper’s breath. It cut the man to tatters. There was no need to go all the way to one hundred, for bone was showing by the fiftieth or earlier, and the deck was stained; but to the end they went, and then the ship’s priest gave Popish blessings to what certainly was a dead man, a
nd they sacked him and put him over the side. For days afterwards I saw when I closed my eyes that whip coursing through the air. And I saw also the anatomy lesson that they had made out of the sailor’s back, that discourse on flesh and muscle and bone. To Torner I said, “If they ever ask me to choose my death, remind me to select the headman’s axe.”

  “Aye. Who would not? But only a fool strikes an officer, and a flogging is a good education for a fool.”

  “And for all the other fools who saw it done,” I said.

  After that there was less bickering on board, and ready obedience to the orders of the mates. The stains remained in the boards for many a day. Well, and the English fleet must do its floggings just as grimly; but I am in no hurry to observe the niceties of the method a second time.

  Of all the Portugals only one spoke sociably to us the whole voyage. This was a certain Barbosa, a peaceful man with a pleasant way, who was some sort of tax-collector for King Philip, and traveled an endless weary route between Brazil and Africa. He was older than the others, with a fine taste in clothing and an elegant broad-brimmed hat that he wore cavalier-fashion, shoved down over one eye. He spoke good English, and often at dusk he came to us as we stood by the rail, and talked of the land toward which we were going.

  The Portugals, he said, had but a tiny purchase there. They had gulled several of the African kings into taking them in, and even into swallowing the holy bread and wine of the Romish rite and christening themselves with Portuguese names, so that this blackamoor monarch was now Don Affonso and that one Don Alvaro, and the Duke of This and That, the Marquess of That and This. But for all that there were mere little islands of Portuguese civilization on the African coast surrounded by great dark pools of monstrous night, and warfare was constant between the Portugals and their unwilling hosts, and also with a cannibal tribe called the Jaqqas that roved like demons in the back country. Barbosa was of two minds of all this. “It is a deadly land, full of vile malarias and secret venoms. And yet it has beauty and riches, and we will make of it, if God give it to us, another Mexico, another Peru.”

  “King Philip has enough of those already,” I said.

  “Aye, but this will not be King Philip’s! He does not meddle in the lands overseas that were Portugal’s before the two kingdoms were joined,” said Barbosa, “and King Philip will not rule Portugal forever.” And he looked about, perhaps wondering if he had been overheard, though why any other of these Portugals should mind that Barbosa was treasonous toward the Spanish king is hard for me to comprehend.

  A day came when Africa darkened the horizon, weeks later. And as our vessel glided on a glassy sea into the harbor at São Paulo de Loanda in the land of Angola, the boatswain came to us with our chains and indicated with tosses of his head that we should submit to them once more.

  This São Paulo de Loanda lies on a great bay, called the Bay of Goats, that provides a tolerable haven for shipping. The closing of this harbor is made by a certain island known as Loanda, which means in the language of the place “bald,” or “shaven,” because it is a very low place without any hills. Indeed, it scarce raises itself above the sea. This island was formed of the sand and dirt of the sea and of a rivermouth a little south of the town, the River Kwanza, whose waves meeting together, and the filthy matter sinking down there to the bottom, in the continuance of time it grew to be an island. It may be about twenty miles long, and one mile broad at the most, and in some places only a bow-shot’s width from side to side.

  As we passed by this island Barbosa said to Torner and me, “On that isle the black King of the Kongo has his money-mine, and pulls forth each year great store of wealth.”

  “Gold, you mean?” said Torner.

  This Barbosa laughed. “Nay, good friend. Shells of the sea is what these simple folk prize the most!”

  He laughed as if to scorn it, a great curling hard-eyed laugh of contempt, and told us how women go on the beaches and at depths of two fathoms and more they scoop up sand in their baskets, and afterwards take little curved shells, smooth and bright, from the waste matter. These are the money of the land. “Gold and silver and other metals are not money here,” declared Barbosa. “In sooth, with these shells you can buy gold and silver, or anything else! But these are only silly savages, do you see?”

  We laughed with him, Torner and I, for we saw it as comic, and passing strange, that pretty-colored shells should be valued even above gold.

  But at that time I was still new to the far corners of the world, and I looked at everything with the blinkered eyes of ignorance and narrow compassion. Time has given me a shade more of wisdom, and I think now that there is no one righteous path in anything, but that each path is righteous in its own way, and so why should pretty shells not be beloved to these people even as pretty yellow or white metals are to us? All are scarce goods to find, that must be scavenged from the earth with toil, and all have beauty, and none has much use except as an article of commerce. Yet I could not have argued such matters with Barbosa at that time. Nor, by the bye, do I share with him now the thought that the people of this land are mere silly savages; but all this wisdom was very costly in the learning.

  Angola shimmered in the clear torrid daylight like a land of dreams, none of them happy ones.

  Torner had drawn me a rough map. Angola sits along the southwestern coast of Africa, about midway between the great bulge of Guinea to the north and the Cape of Bona Speranza to the south. Running above Angola on the coast is the kingdom of the Kongo, joining to it as Spain joins to Portugal, and above that is another kingdom known as Loango, and there are sundry other smaller kingdoms inland from these three in those parts.

  Strange names. Rumbling mouthfuls of sound. Mpemba, Mbamba, Mbata, Nsundi, Mpangu, Soyo. The province of the Ambundu. The territories of Wembo, Wando, Nkusu, Matari. The regions of the wild men, the flesh-eating Jaqqas, Calicansamba, Cashil, Cashindcabar. Devil-names. Names of harsh music, full of drums and shrill skirling outcry.

  Some of these names Torner told to me, as we peered on the map he had scrawled. Some of them I heard later after, whispered to me in the forest by frightened men. I bear scars to remind me of those names now. Drops of my blood lie in the dark moist soil of those places, and from my blood great ollicondi trees have sprouted in these years past, and cedars and palms, and trees without any names at all. I have seen with my eyes the province of Tondo and the great city of Dongo and the river called Gonza, and more, so much more that my brain fills and overflows with the bursting memories of it all. Kingdoms: Angola, Kongo, Loango. Dreamlands.

  Nay, though, not dreamlands to their own people, but right and proper dominions, such as are Portugal and France and Sweden in our world, or England herself. The King of the Kongo is the supreme monarch, whose title is Manikongo, and both Angola and Loango are deemed subject to him. But the powers of that king have greatly been diminished of late, and in any event the Portugals have made a jest of all the solemnities of these kingdoms by imposing their own government and their own worship and their own customs as far as possible upon the black folk.

  Captive though I was, dismally far from home with no hope of returning, yet did I behold this new place with eyes of wonder. And the sky-high green-crowned trees ashore were things of miracle to me, and the heat of the air, and the smells, the sounds, the dazzle of the light.

  Our weighty vessel made its way as deep into the harbor as it dared, and cast its anchor. And then small boats with oars and sails came to fetch us. These were made of palm-tree wood, joined together and framed after the manner of our boats. As we were conveyed to the mainland we saw the channel full of these boats, taking fish, for these are rich waters, heavy with sardines and anchovies, and also sole and sturgeon and an abundance of wholesome crabs.

  We drew up to the shore. And saw a grim platoon of somber-faced Portugals waiting for us, dark-haired, dark-eyed, swarthy-skinned little men, sweltering in their full armor under the terrible sun. As though we were a company of great Judases, Torne
r and I, that durst not be let escape.

  They glared most foully at us. Their hard cold staring eyes were stones that they would have hurled at us to pierce our skins. I felt the pressure of their hatred, that dull heavy hostile weight, as I had those first few days of our ocean crossing. And I gave them glare for glare, scowl for scowl. Am I your enemy? Porque? Because my country is your country’s enemy? Because my Queen is the Pope’s enemy? Because we will not sit and mumble at our devotions, and call upon the saints and other false gods? Because we loathe the Latin singsong, and have our own lawful book of prayer? Well, then, so be it, Portugals, I am your enemy! But only because you choose to be mine.

  They jeered. They shouted things in their thick-mouthed lingo, not knowing that I understood the half of their foulness. They cursed the Queen as an excommunicated whore and the daughter of a whore and witch. They said the same of my mother and Torner’s. I kept my peace, though it was hard. Jesu, it was hard! I would have cried things at them of the Pope and the stinking luxuries he wallows in, and the monks who fill themselves on altar wine and couple in the cloisters like devils, and such stuff, but worse. Yet I kept my peace.

  I said only at last, in my best Portugee, as they marched me onto the dry black earth of their city, “The Devil will chew your souls, ye Papist swine,” and left them gasping in amazement that I knew their tongue.

  The town, for the supposed capital of a supposed great empire in the making, was small and shabby. This part of Angola yieldeth no stone, and very little wood, and the buildings I saw were largely made of bulrushes and fronds of palm, covered with earth. There were of course certain structures much more grand, the governor’s palace and the houses of government, and the great-steepled red-walled church, and the high-palisaded fort.