“These men my companions are Portugals. I am an Englishman!”
“And what is that?”
For answer I swung my head vigorously from side to side, so that my long golden hair did fly about and sparkle most brightly in the sun, and the Jaqqa, at that, did widen his eyes and look deeply amazed.
With my arms uplifted and my hands outstretched I cried, “An Englishman is a son of Albion, and a lord among men. And we serve Her Most Protestant Majesty Elizabeth, who is paramount among the princes of the globe.”
This fine speech did cow the Jaqqa by a trifle, as it was meant to do. Coelho, who comprehended not a word, leaned close to me and said, “What is all this babbling about?”
“We are in no danger, I think,” said I. “For these are Jaqqas who have never seen white men, and know of Portugals only by rumor and repute, and may believe me a god, for the color of my hair. I think they will not dare harm us.”
“Let us pray you are right,” said Coelho sourly.
The long-shanked Jaqqa spoke again. I did not follow his words; but it was some flowing grand announcement. Then there was a stir among the general mass of cannibals, they moving back and away from the center, and I saw that a new figure had arrived among us, led by the messengers who had gone to the camp. He strode into the middle of our group and stood regarding us with the deepest attention.
I think this man was the most frightful vision I had ever beheld, as terrifying as the fiercest of coccodrillos or the most savage of howling wolves. He was of great size, a true giant, and black as the darkest of nights. Yet for all his blackness his face looked something other than pure Negro, with a straight nose and narrow harsh lips that made him all the more cruel of visage, somewhat like a Moor, though much darker. His hair was curling and very long, embroidered richly with knots of the shells called mbambas, which are whelks or trumpet-shells. About his neck was a collar of other large shells of shape of twisted turrets, that I know are sold on these shores for the worth of twenty shillings a shell; and about his middle he did wear a string of beads cut from the stuff of ostrich-eggs. His loins were wrapped in a blazing bright swath of scarlet palm-cloth, fine as silk. The rest of his body was bare, but was painted with red and white ornaments of the most terrifying kind, and where he was not painted, his skin was carved and cut to raise it with sundry decorations that rose a startling height in relief, as if it were a branched damask, all covered over with pretty knots in divers forms. And he gleamed with a high gloss, so that I thought almost I could see a reflection in his skin, like unto a mirror. In his nose he wore a piece of copper two inches long, and in his ears also. In sum he was naught but the utmost image of barbarism.
And his eyes! God’s death, those eyes! They were pools of night surrounded by a field of dazzling white, and they drew me and held me like the most powerful of lodestones. I felt weak of the knees when I saw those eyes.
I was minded once again of that time long ago in the isle where I had been cast away by Abraham Cocke’s treachery, when a vast allagardo or coccodrillo did step from a river and smile at me and put out its tongue, and I stood transfixed, and then had gone not away from it but toward, like one who has been magicked. This Jaqqa king magicked me in the same way.
The tall cannibal who spoke Kikongo said, “You are in the presence of the great Jaqqa, Imbe Calandola.”
And I felt as though I had fallen rather into the presence of the Lord of Darkness himself, the Prince of Hell, the Great Adversary, the vast Lucifer of the Abyss: Satan Mephistopheles Beelzebub, the Archfiend, the King of Evil.
6
In the silence of the beach the crashing of the surf was a noise like the roll of the drums of Judgment. This Calandola did come forward and stand by me, so that I smelled the reek of his skin, which I learned afterward came from his being daily anointed with the fat of human victims, to give him that burnished gloss. Yet I dared not flinch from him as he inspected me close.
The bigness of him was overpowering. I saw now that he was not in sooth the tallest of this company, and indeed was only two inches greater in height than I, I being of no mean stature myself; but what gave him his look of great size was the enormous breadth of his shoulders and the thickness of his neck and the power of his arms and hands, which could easily seize two men by their heads and crush them at the same time like eggshells.
And those great hands did go to my own head, but not in any violent way. He scooped up my hair and let it drop again, and ran his hands through it, most lightly as if handling a fabric so fragile that it would melt at a harsh breath. He stared me deep in the eyes, as though seeking to read my soul. Rarely have I been stared so deep. He walked around me, studying me from every side, and touched my hair with the tips of his fingers, and my beard, and drew his fingers even across my eyebrows, which are thick and very golden. While so doing he muttered words to his high princes, and to himself; and when he had done with me he clapped his hands and let forth a loud diabolical laugh, as if to say, “Your strange hair gives me a great pleasure, Englishman!”
Then he swung round and marched up the beach to his camp, and Jaqqa Longshanks made a signal to me that I should follow, with my companions.
Which we did, and came before Imbe Calandola again when he was seated upon a sort of high stool in a tent. Five of his princes stood to his side, and two man-witches, and two women that might have been sisters, for both had heavy breasts, and the same face, with four of their teeth pulled out for beauty’s sake and their hair piled high with mbamba-shells thrust into it.
A great bowl of palm-wine was brought, and Calandola drank of it, and then it was proffered to me. And when I had had some sips of it Calandola did dip his hands into it, and shake the sweet heavy wine out onto my hair, as though he were anointing me. After I was thoroughly drenched in the stuff he took my head very gently between his hands, and rubbed the wine deep into my scalp, all the while saying things in his language, with a low rumbling voice, to the man-witches beside him. To which I submitted without hesitation, for when one is in the camp of the cannibals and their king would bathe your head with wine, and they are five hundred and you are one of but a very few, one does not play the fastidious fop and refuse the honor.
When I was thus soaked, the long-legged Jaqqa who spoke the Kikongo tongue said, “Imbe Calandola would know why you have come to this place.”
“To trade upon the coast,” I replied. “We deal in goods of all kinds, and mean to purchase cattle and any other useful merchandise.”
This he told to Calandola, who made a reply.
To me the Jaqqa said, “The Imbe-Jaqqa makes you welcome here, and instructs you to have your people come on shore with all your commodities.”
I did translate this for Coelho, who showed great sign of relief, and would at once have boarded the longboat to return to the safety of our ship. But first there were certain rituals, and more passing about of the palm-wine; and then when it was plain we could go, Calandola gestured that I stay behind, with two others of the Portugals.
At this I sank into leaden despond, for my despairing imagination at once threw forth a likely sequence of event, by which Captain Pinto Dourado, fearing some trap, took his ship and crew away from these waters the instant his longboat returned, abandoning me and my two fellows here. I was an old hand at being abandoned, and ever mistrusted my position. And I doubted much that Pinto Dourado would want to march his own precious self into a den of man-eaters. Even did I take the picture a little farther, and see myself as the grand feature of the cannibal feast, at which all these Jaqqas did jostle and shove to get themselves some morsel of the flesh of the golden-haired god.