Later, on the verge of sleep, with Robin snoring contentedly beside him, Richard suddenly had a darker thought arising from their little love game. For Lancelot was not just Sir Lancelot. He was — and this suddenly struck Richard as oddly sinister — Lancelot du Lac.
Nightmare
Anastasia Asov struggled against the hands that held her helpless. The clapping and the stamping were overwhelming. Ngoboi, the great raffia-cloaked, ebony-masked, seven-foot-high god of the jungle’s darkest places, whirled and stamped in front of her. Two of his acolytes capered around him, tending to the restless strands of his costume. Apart from Sister Faith, the nun round whom the god was circling like a shark, Anastasia was the only woman there. It was death for a woman to look on Ngoboi — and Anastasia knew she was as good as dead. As dead as poor Sister Faith was doomed to be.
The Army of Christ the Infant were ranked around the orphanage’s central compound. Those holding guns were stamping in rhythm. Those carrying matchets in their belts were clapping. Their eyes were burning with a mixture of religious awe, murder-lust and cocaine. The boys in Anastasia’s charge were all held captive as petrified spectators behind them. The girls were locked away in the dormitory ready to be raped and slaughtered. And, many of them, butchered and eaten.
As though etched in silver and jet in the light of a full moon, the army’s terrifying leader was sprawled at his ease on a chair taken out of the chapel. The priest’s chair — for which the poor man would have no further use. Silver-lensed Ray-Bans sat wrapped round his head below the beret and above the ridged horrors of his cheeks, lined with massive Poro secret society initiation scars. Like those on his naked chest that gleamed between the flaps of his gaping shirt. Two hulking lieutenants also in dark glasses stood behind him, one at either shoulder. All three of them, like Ngoboi, held heavy, steel-bladed matchets more than a metre long.
The heat, like the noise and the terror, was overpowering. Anastasia’s body was running with perspiration as thick and hot as blood. Her ears rang and her head throbbed. She felt like someone watching the approach of a tornado she could never escape. Sister Faith knelt at the heart of it, at the centre of Ngoboi’s whirling dance, in the middle of the compound, the still point of the spinning world, until the leader’s Ray-Bans moved fractionally up and down and their movement was echoed horrifically by Ngoboi’s matchet. Up and down went the matchet into the body of the woman kneeling at his feet.
The mouth between the scarred cheeks below the silvered Ray-Bans split into a huge grin. Anastasia saw that the khat-stained teeth between them were sharpened to needle points, like crocodiles’ teeth. And she realized she was no longer dripping sweat — she was covered in blood. Bathed in the hot, sweet-smelling, iron-tasting thickness of it. Drenched with it. Drowning in it.
Ngoboi’s hand came down on her shoulder. ‘Miss Anastasia,’ he said, in a soft, female voice. ‘Wake up, Miss Anastasia, you’re dreaming.’
But the mad god’s coke-wide black eyes still stared at her, white-rimmed and bloodshot, from out of the rough-hewn horror of the ebony mask. The mouth still moved — and now it, too, had those terrible, brown-stained, crocodile teeth, sharpened to tear at human flesh. And the hand on her shoulder still held that red running, gently steaming matchet. ‘Miss Anastasia,’ said Ngoboi, more forcefully. ‘Wake up. Please! You’re having another nightmare.’
Anastasia opened her eyes. Blinked. Began to focus. Ngoboi’s face slowly became that of newly-arrived Sister Georginah: ebony dark — emphasized by the perfect white of her headdress, illumined by the silver moonlight streaming through the thin-curtained window, but otherwise the opposite of the jungle god’s. Wide, gentle brown eyes, soft lips, square white teeth, a frown of sisterly concern. A silver crucifix instead of a steel matchet in her fist. The hands that held her so relentlessly resolved themselves into tangled bed sheets wrapped around her like a straitjacket strapped round a lunatic. And these in turn explained the sweat-inducing heat. The orphanage’s meagre funds did not run to air-conditioning. Or ceiling fans. Anastasia realized with something akin to horror that, because she had gone to bed naked, she had no idea how much of her was on show between the bindings of the sheets. ‘Thank you, Sister,’ she said gently. ‘I’ll be fine now.’
‘Can I get you something? Some water perhaps?’ Sister Georginah was a sweet, naive creature, with absolutely no social sensitivity at all.
‘No. Thank you.’ Anastasia wondered whether to struggle into a sitting position; whether to start untangling her body from the sheets. But she didn’t know Sister Georginah well enough to start doing a striptease in front of her.
‘Perhaps you would like to pray,’ suggested the young nun anxiously. ‘We can pray together, here and now if you would like. Your dream must have been very horrible. You were screaming and crying most terribly. And you talked of matters that were simply devilish.’
‘Perhaps I’ll pray later,’ said Anastasia, and she half meant it. ‘But if you could leave me now, I just want to catch my breath.’
‘Of course.’ The sister nodded, straightened, half-bowed and stepped back, as though taking leave of a queen. But now that the crisis was over she clearly had the opportunity to use her eyes in a way she hadn’t when she’d rushed in to wake the dreaming woman. ‘Miss Anastasia! What is that? That thing on your …’
For an instant the nightmare threatened to return. What thing could the horrified nun possibly mean? Was she still spattered with Sister Faith’s blood? Had Ngoboi scarred her in some way? Then Anastasia understood. ‘It’s a tattoo,’ she said. Her fingers explored her naked belly and found a strip of cloth mercifully across her loins. ‘A big cat. I’ve a gorilla on my back. Result of a misspent youth. Remind me to show you sometime.’
Sister Georginah turned and fled. Mission accomplished, thought Anastasia wryly. But she’d have to do some serious apologizing and fence-mending later. She pulled herself out of bed and unwrapped the sheet from round herself. It was wet. And her long, lean body was still running with moisture. She padded across to the window, towelling herself with the wet cotton. She stopped. Threw the sheet back on the wreckage of her bed. Stretched her stiff muscles, reached up and peeped out past the edge of the curtain. Her room faced due south across the river, and she could see that the moon was setting between the trees of the delta low in the west down towards Granville Harbour just as the sun was preparing to heave itself up over Mount Karisoke far away in the east.
On the far side of the river the wild jungle reared, huge and black-hearted. Timeless. Unvarying. Cold and terrifying. The exact, precise opposite of the waxing and waning lights on either side. The place where Ngoboi lived. With a shiver she looked back upriver towards the rising sun. It would soon be time to get up anyway, she decided.
She needed a shower. Some food. And yes, maybe some spiritual comfort. She might do a lot worse than spending a few minutes in the little chapel clearing the satanic figures of Ngoboi and Odem out of her mind. And the pictures of Sister Faith and Father Antoine, both of whom the Army of Christ had killed in front of her. The whole nightmare, she reckoned, had probably stemmed from her Skype contact with Robin last night, passing on what she understood of poor old Richard’s concerns. Their anxiety for her was a burden she bore cheerfully enough, like any overprotected young adult treated as though they were still a child, though Robin was more like a big sister than a mother. And as for Richard! Well, that was another matter entirely … But still and all, she thought, it was better to have someone worry too much about you than to have nobody caring at all. What was it that had spooked Richard so badly, though? Nothing scared Richard, in her experience. Nothing. Ever. She had heard nothing on the grapevine. The jungle drums remained silent and, surely, if there was any real danger out there, an echo of it would have come out of the dark places, like a rumble of distant thunder. Wouldn’t it? With her mind still full of questions, Anastasia crossed the room again, grabbed her robe and towel from the back of the door, kicked her sandals into the light, watching in case anything unpleasant scuttled out of them, stepped into them, carelessly treading down the heels, then shrugged the dressing-gown on and went off to have her shower.