Then Don João shook his head slowly and said, “Andres, Andres, how long has it been?”
“Very long, Don João.”
“It seems forever.” He stared at me interminably in silence, so that I thought he might have fallen to sleep with his eyes not closed, and after a time he did say, “You know I never would have hanged you, don’t you?”
“It was my prayer that you would spare me.”
“It was a bad time, you know. That time when Dona Teresa said you had abused her, and screamed most fiendish, and offered to display her injuries. And Souza was clamoring like a fury for your neck, Souza who never was more than a pimple in fancy dress, and now of a sudden was full of spirit and rage. I might have had to string you up, if Souza had pressed more sternly; but he is a weakling, and the fire went swift from him. And then Teresa admitted it was all a lie about your forcing her, a lie coined out of anger and jealousy, which much abashed her in the telling of how she had slandered you, and—well, Andres, well, it matters very little now, does it not? Nothing matters. I shall soon be dead, I think. I promised to send you home, eh? And I never did. I’m the one going home instead—in a box, d’ye follow, a long box of dark African wood, plainly joined.”
“Good Don João—”
“Nay, say me no kindnesses. Can’t you see the bony hand about my throat? Going home, Andres, taking with me all the elephanto meat and manatee meat and the thick wines of this place and everything else that’s gone into the making of this great vile belly of mine.” He grinned, showing me a gaping snagtoothed hole of a mouth. “You fought well for us, Velloria tells me. You were ever in the midst of it, no mind to the risk. You were one of his most valiant soldiers. I wonder: why did you war so hard for Portugal, eh?”
“I fought because it was my trade, Don João.”
“Ah. I should have foreseen that answer. You always affect the blunt and simple way. But your trade is the sea, so I did believe.”
“When I am at sea, my trade is the sea. When I am a soldier, my trade is war.”
“You say it so calmly. What has happened to you, Andres? Have you no anger in you?”
“Aye. Anger enough, I trow.”
“Then why this doldrum calm? Why not rage and roar, and play the lion? This land has stolen half your life away from you.”
“But it is too late for raging, Don João.”
“Is it? You could leap this room and choke the life from me in a minute, if you could but find my throat beneath all this swaying flesh. You could slit me like a swollen coccodrillo. The way they did in Loango when it ate those slaves, eh?”
“I would not do that,” I said.
“Why not? I am at your mercy.”
“Killing you will not give me back those years, but only cost me the ones I have remaining.”
“Ah. Always the philosopher, Andres!”
“And I bear you no malice, Don João.”
He did look genuinely surprised by that: animation for the first time came into his face, a light did glimmer in his small reddened eyes.
“No malice? No malice? But I could have sent you home, and I did not.”
Sighing, I said, “I soon ceased to think you would. It makes no difference. Would you send me home now?”
“Will you do one more voyage for me, first?”
“I have heard that aforetimes,” I said, with a little laugh.
“Indeed. Well, and I have no ship going to Europe this year. But later there will be one, and we’ll go on it together, eh? I in my coffin, and you to guard it. And in Lisbon they’ll set you free. That I pledge you, and this is a true pledge: by God, who will have the disposal of my soul soon enough, that pledge is true. The next ship to Portugal, for both of us. How do you feel about that, Andres?”
“I feel nothing, sir.”
“Lost interest of going home, have you?”
“Nay, I would never lose my interest of that. But I have lost belief in pledges.”
He nodded solemnly. “As well you might. But this one’s sincere. One more voyage, and then home! By the cross, Andres! By all my hope of heaven, slender though that may be!”
“Just one more voyage?”
“Just one.”
“And where am I to go, then?”
“Southward,” he said. “Benguela, and beyond it. Will you do that?”
“How can I refuse?”
“Nay, do it gladly, Andres!”
“I will do it,” I said. “Let that be sufficient, Don João.”
So it befell that I did go to sea again, in a frigate to the southward with sixty soldiers, on a trading voyage, with all kind of commodities. My assent to this task did gladden Don João greatly, and he pressed my hand between his clammy fleshy ones, and I knew I would never see him alive again, which he also must have known. As for his promise to free me, why, I had heard that music before, and cared not to hum the tune again. I thought only that it was better to go to sea than once more to face the arrows of the blackamoors while wearing Portugal armor under that hot inland sun, and God would bring me to England again in His own good time.
I embraced Matamba, who said, “We are always bidding each other farewell,” and I had no answer to that but to hold her close against me. “You are only newly returned to me,” she said, “and now you must go again. What will I do? What will I do?”
“You are under the protection of Don João de Mendoça,” I said to her, for so had I engineered it with the governor. “No one will harm you. You will not be forced back into your old sort of life.”
“And when Don João dies, as you say soon will happen?”
“God will provide,” I said, not knowing what else.
She and I did have a most passionate and tempestuous last night together, and by dawn I slipped away in morning mist and down to the docks, thinking the fondest thoughts of this slave-girl who had so deeply entered my soul. I thought of our talking English together, and her learning my bits of poetry, and her devout Christian way, that had her kneeling every day to her little shrine, and her skill at the venereal arts, which she performed with gusto and force and subtlety. And it seemed to me odd that the track of my life should have passed through such diverse women as Rose and Anne Katherine and Dona Teresa and Isabel Matamba, that had so little in common one with the other save their womanhood: yet had I loved them all, and they me, each in a different way.
We rode our frigate easily to the southward until we came into twelve degrees below the Line. The people of this place brought us cows and sheep, Guinea wheat and beans; but we stayed not there, but came to Bay of Vaccas: that is, the Bay of Cows, which the Portugals also call Bahia de Torre, because it hath a rock like a tower. Here we rode on the north side of the rock, in a sandy bay where any ship may ride without danger, for it is a smooth coast. Here all ships that come out of the East Indies refresh themselves. For the great carracks of the Portugals heavily laden with goods now of late come along this coast, to the town called Benguela, to water and refresh themselves.
This province is called Dombe, and it hath a ridge of high serras, or mountains, that stretch from the serras or mountains of Kambambe, wherein are the supposed silver mines, and lie along the coast south and by west. Here is great store of fine copper, if the people would work it in their mines. But these people, who are called Ndalabondos, have no government among themselves, and are very simple folk, though treacherous, and do not do mining, taking no more copper than they wear for” a show of bravery. The men of this place wear skins about their middles, and beads about their necks. They carry darts of iron, and bows and arrows in their hands. They are beastly in their way of living, for they have men in women’s apparel, whom they keep among their wives. This I saw, those simpering foolish queans, among the women, which did not please me. Some of the Portugals caught one of these men-women and did strip him of his robes, the silly creature whimpering all the while in fear, and we saw the male parts underneath, just like any other man’s, though we had thought these disguised women might be hermaphrodite.