Desperately I called it after him. The man hesitated, glanced back at me, and I couldn’t be sure whether I still saw that look about him or not. Dry-throated, I raised my tethered hands to him. But then Don Pedro cried out Carrefour! again, and the crowd echoed the name like thunder. The dancers stiffened, straightened, no longer leant on their sticks. Rising to their full height and onto their toes, they spread their arms in great sweeping gestures of blocking and defiance, their faces settling into a mode of grim negation. The crowd crowed in welcome.
The man before me laughed a horrible bubbling laugh that seemed entirely his own, took a vast swig of rum – and spewed it out over the still-glowing stick at me.
Fire showered down on me like a rush of stinging hornets; I thrashed and yelled in my bonds. Stryge caught some, and snarled his anger. The man just laughed again, vindictively. ‘Pou’ faire chauffer les grains, blanc!’ he spat, and shuffled back to the dance. To warm up my –? My balls. Nice of him. But momentarily, as he’d turned away, I could have sworn I’d seen his face twist, as if in the throes of some terrible doubt or agony – and there was that Legba look again! Something more than malice had flashed into that slack malevolent face, something different – as if he were pleading to me?
Me again – always me. What did they want of me? What could I give?
‘Calling on him?’ muttered Stryge darkly. ‘You might have saved your damned fool’s breath.’
‘He helped me in New Orleans!’ I protested.
‘Maybe! Though how or why –’ Stryge wagged his head grimly. His voice rattled like the açon gourds. ‘But here he will not. He cannot. The haut chant was fed with living blood. He could not resist. It called his shadow-self, his distorted form – the Dark Guardian. Carrefour. Not the Opener of the Ways, but the Watcher at the Crossroads. And Carrefour is no man’s friend.’ He hunched his head down into his shoulders. ‘Now the ways stand open. And the Others must follow, when it’s blood that calls …’
Lines of maize flour traced out another, more complex vever pattern. The drums boomed and stuttered, the crowd swayed – and suddenly another hellish libation of rum flared over the fires. Men and women in the crowd dragged a few goats forward, and others some dogs – miserable skinny mongrels, but pitiful in the way they wagged their tails uncertainly and snuffled about. Don Pedro’s reedy howl rose high again.
The crowd flung the name back to him.
‘Voodoo rites,’ muttered Jyp. ‘I’ve seen a few – but nothing like this one, not ever! It takes the goddam cake! The prayers are the same – the words, anyhow – but the whole tone’s wrong! They’re not praying to the loas, they’re damn well ordering ’em!’
‘Ordering indeed!’ Stryge said huskily. ‘Power is abroad here. This is Don Pedro’s own tonnelle, the heart of his cult. This is the rite of which the other Petro rites are shadows, echoes, imitations half understood – the central rite. Blood draws the Invisibles, living blood, and his power ensnares them. Their natures are fluid, he cannot change and his power ensnares them. Their natures are fluid, he cannot change them – but he can bind them in a form governed by their worst aspects. Damballah is a force of sky, of rain and weather, but they make him the Coulevre, the Devouring Serpent – a thing of storm and flood –’
He stopped, or more likely was drowned out by Clare’s scream. With brutal dispatch the goat was flung up to the altar, spreadeagled and bleating desperately. Don Pedro’s sword made one slow lopping slice down the hindquarters. The trussed beast jerked and shrieked and the worshippers yelled; my stomach heaved. It seemed like an eternity before the blade struck again. Blood fountained up, and the yelling crowd leaped to catch it and taste it, sucking at their hands, their robes or those of their neighbours for the least spot more. The headless body, still kicking, was flung down among them, but they trampled it carelessly in their rush to see the next one sacrificed.
The ritual was the same each time – the two cuts, one to castrate, the other, after a savoured moment, to behead. I shrivelled at every thud of the blade. This was how he would work along the pathetic line of victims, driven frantic now by the chanting and the shrieking and the reek of blood. And when they were gone it was how he’d offer up his cabrits sans cornes, his special goats without horns – Clare, and Mall, and Jyp, and Le Stryge, and all the others. But not me, it seemed. For me he had something really special in mind.
All I’d have to do was sit and watch.
I saw horrible things done. When he killed the dogs it seemed worst of all – illogical, maybe, but that’s how it felt. And each time we saw the sacrifice’s legs kicking and fresh blood spurting and steaming down the runnels in the stone, we thought he’d start on us next. At each new round, as each new vever was traced in the paste of maize flour and blood and trampled soil, new libations were poured, new names shrieked to the skies, new rhythms battered from the drums; the dancers, humans and Wolves alike, flung themselves into new frenzies, and the barren earth shivered under their pounding feet.
Against the pulsating firelight their threshing shapes, milling like a shattered anthill, really did look like a vision of hell. So far most of the dancers hadn’t done anything significant, just scream and sing and stamp with the rest. But it came as no surprise when some of them began to run amok altogether, cavorting and gibbering and falling down in fits. Others ran this way and that in transports of ecstasy, or exploded into screaming hysterics so violent that their neighbours were forced to grab them and pin them down. But the fits soon passed; and more and more of the crowd began to change. Just as the first few had mimicked old men, they took on attitudes as they danced; they chanted in hoarse assumed voices, strutted and capered with peculiar gestures, almost ritualized. They looked like actors auditioning for the same roles. It was as if some other identity had settled over them like a veil, hiding their own.
Disturbing enough in itself, the sight unnerved me horribly. This was possession – the possession I dreaded so much, the distorted loas descending to mount their followers. But they seemed to court it, to embrace it. One or two of the acolytes around the stone snatched up a few props laid ready, as if they knew already what other self would seize upon them. Some of the crowd, too, stayed in the same guise, dancing in the same way, even smearing their faces into improvised masks with charcoal, blood or the spilled flour. But most of the dancers let each new name, each new god’s descent, wash over them like breaking waves of emotion. In the blink of an eye they’d shift from one mood to another, wild whooping wrath or serpentine grace, in a kind of shivering exaltation, half hysterical, half sexual, that burst all everyday bounds of behaviour.
One minute, as the chant of Gbedé! went up, they jerked and ground their thighs in crude spasmodic mimicry, ritualistic, robotic – like disjointed skeletons mocking the movements of the flesh. The next, to the cry of Zandor!, they trenched the stony soil with their feet, like ploughs – then, crouching, spilled their guts and trampled it in. When the name Marinette! was called from the altar, the dancers stalked and rolled their eyes in grotesquely seductive attitudes, posturing before the altar, each other, even us where we lay bound. A Wolf woman strutted and cavorted up and down before us in her rags, flinging her straggling purple hair against her long limbs, mocking us with gestures, movements, tearing her robes; others came to join her, women and men, either sex flinging and flaunting themselves carelessly in our faces. The things they did were just crude in themselves – no worse than a whore’s show or a lover’s game, even. But to us they were aggressive, meant to deride us, to humiliate us – and that made them really brutally obscene.