I stared at the thing I held in my hand, that warm and most tender piece of meat, as though never had I seen meat before, of any sort whatsoever.
I will eat of it, I told myself. And if I gag and retch and puke it forth, and give offense to the Imbe-Jaqqa, why, let him slay me and cast me next into the pot, and it will not matter to me, it will not matter to me, it will not matter.
I put my teeth to the forbidden flesh and took a hesitating bite, and closed mine eyes a moment, and swallowed it down.
I did not gag, I did not retch. That was the greatest amazement I have ever known. The meat was succulent and well seasoned, and had a flavor of it not unlike a fine degree of pork, from a pig well nourished. I felt it pass my tongue and make the juices of my mouth flow forth, and I swallowed it down, and all of this was strangely easy for me. It is only meat, I thought. And meat of a passing good taste, which the Lord hath created and put upon the earth.
“Andubatil!” cried Imbe Calandola in loud delight and approval. “Eat, Andubatil!”
I had accepted of their hospitality, and now I knew I was free to hand back the haunch, and ask for some other meat more closely kin to my usual choice. And yet, and yet, and yet: I had not eaten meat of any kind but for those pitiful few scraps of monkey, and so easy was the first bite, and so surprising to my palate, that I thought to myself, If I am to go to Hell for this, the one mouthful will have damned me, so there is no reason not to have another.
God grant me forgiveness, said I within, and took for myself a second serving of the meat.
“Andubatil!” cried Calandola again. “Andubatil Jaqqa!”
And the cry went up on all sides, and became general, as they beheld me eating of their feast, that no other stranger had ever shared with them, and that made me now one of their number: “Andubatil Jaqqa! Andubatil Jaqqa!”
BOOK FOUR: Jaqqa
1
And so that night was I entered into the man-eater tribe, and became one among them: the first white Jaqqa that has ever walked this earth, and, God grant it, also the last.
I had shared their monstrous meal. Within my body now lay shreds of meat that a few hours before had been the flesh of a child of God, a son of Adam. So be it. I made no orations upon that in the inwardness of my souclass="underline" for if I had learned anything in this my African sojourn, it was to take each thing as it comes, and ask not to live in English ways in a place that was so alien to all that was English. And thus I might hope to survive until the next morn.
All that raucous evening the Jaqqas feasted and drank and danced, and I among them did the same. They asked me to dance an English dance for them, but I was hesitant at that, it being so long since I had been in England that I had forgot most of their amusements. Then I recalled the dance that is called the hornpipe, that is done by our sailors aboard the ships, and that I had learned of my brothers Henry and John so long ago in Essex by the water.
“Dance!” cried Imbe Calandola.
“Ah, I must fain have music, if I am to dance.”
He waved to his musicians, telling me to take my choice of them, whichever met my need.
I went down the ranks of all those painted and gleaming gargoyles and cacodaemons, and lit upon one that took my fancy, a fife-player, that did play the mpunga, which is fashioned from elephanto-tusk.
“You,” said I. “Give unto me your instrument, so that I can show you the melody I require.”
He laughed and handed me his instrument, and put my hands into the fingering. I found it not hard to bring a sound from this barbarous fife, though what I made at first was doubly barbarous, harsh and awkward, that drew great gawfing bellows of amusement from the man-eaters. But then did I find the tune, and played it most lively, with a nodding of my head and a prancing of my feet, and gave back the fife to its owner so he could essay the same.
And lo! he caught the music by its heart, and delivered it so well in a moment that he displayed himself five times as skilled as any Englishman that fifed. The hornpipe that he did play was of course a strange and most discordant one, the Devil’s own hornpipe tune, but yet it had a wild delightful strength in it. And as the sound of it rose high above the Jaqqa camp all of them fell solemn still, and I did my dance.
Ah, such a dance it was! In the dread frozen silence of these man-eaters I did jig up and down, kicking high my legs, and putting now this hand afore my belly and now that, in the hornpipe manner. The Jaqqas had never beheld its like, and they were thrown into stupor by it, statue-still, amazed, as the long-legged white-skinned man in beads and shells and a palm-cloth loin-clout hopped about amongst them, up one row and down the next, to the wailing melody of that eerie fife.
“Andubatil Jaqqa!” they began to cry, when the surprise had lifted some from them. “Andubatil! Andubatil!”
And they rose, and danced behind me, a band of frightful black apparitions with great long spectral legs and arms. They flung out their limbs, they threw back their heads, they shouted, they cried, they stamped their feet. “Ooom-day!” they called. “Oom-da ooom-day ooom da! Ooom-Jaqqa Ooom-Jaqqa ooom ooom ooom! Andubatil! Andubatil! Ooom!”
When they had had their full share of that, and the fife-man was compelled to stop from soreness of the lips and an excess of laughter, for this was a passing riotous dance, and a most rollicking sight withal, these Jaqqas doing the hornpipe, Kinguri did turn to me and say, “Do you know another dance, Andubatil?”
“Aye, that I do,” said I.
And I bethought me of the dance of our village known as the longways dance, and called forth eight Jaqqas to take part, and tried to instruct them in the movements, while telling certain musicians how best to imitate the rhythm of our tabor and the squirling of the pipes and the shrill sounds of the fiddle. All this brought great merriment, and the huge black men did leap and fling like Bedlam lunatics, in a dance, God wot, nothing at all like anything the village greens of Essex had ever seen. But they danced until they were sore weary, and would have had more. And I saw myself becoming their dancing-master, and teaching them square dances and round dances and maybe even the morris-dance, too, with tuned bells fastened to their legs and a Robin Hood and a Friar Tuck and a Little John, and one of the Imbe-Jaqqa’s heavy-breasted scar-faced wives to dance the Maid Marian. And then in all this high jollity there came a sudden halt. For Calandola had risen from his throne-stool and was handling my musket, that all this time had lain to one side, unheeded.
He fingered it most close, the lock and the stock and the barrel, admiring its workmanship, sniffing it at both ends, hefting it to have the weight of it. I thought then he would put it to his shoulder and mimic the firing of it, but he did not seem to comprehend the holding of it.
Then he looked to me and said, “Show us how.”
I took the gun from him and put the powder to it, and rammed a ball down the barrel, and saw to my match, and looked about for a place to shoot. A night-owl stood perched on a dark-leaved tree high above the camp, and it croaked its ill-omened sound, and I turned my gun to it. It is no small feat to strike an owl from its perch by night with a musket, but in my time as a soldier of the Portugals I had learned some little skill with that weapon. And so I took my aim and pulled my trigger, and the Jaqqas did gasp aloud at the sight of the flash of the powder in the pan, and I struck the owl fair in his breast and knocked him aflutter to the ground.