“Then you are wrong. He is truly of our kind, Machimba-lombo.”
I found it passing strange, to hear the man-eater king say this of me. But I kept my silence, and chewed inward a little upon those words.
“How, of our kind?” cried Machimba-lombo. “His skin is white! His hair is gold! He is Christian!”
“He is taken in with us, and adopted into our number.”
“Aye, and made a captain, even! But he is not of the blood, O Imbe-Jaqqa!”
“I say that he is blooded with us by his soul,” replied Calandola. Then impatiently he said, “I will not dispute this with you. You know that it is treason to raise your hand against a high Jaqqa.”
“He is no Jaqqa,” stubbornly said Machimba-lombo.
“Yet I say he is. And you have done treason; and therefore you are put down from all your high place, and we grant you only this one mercy, that you will have an elephanto-tail dedicated for you as though you had died in honor. For you were a man of honor before this.” To the captain Ti-Bangala he gestured, and said, “Bring to us the tail of the elephanto of the Jaqqa Machimba-lombo.”
At this, the face of Machimba-lombo turned stony and ashen, for he knew that his death was upon him. And I think he heard his mokisso singing to him out of the ground, which soon would draw him down to Hell.
I felt some sorrow for him, though he would have felt none for me. But I kept it locked within my breast, and only glared at him like an enemy. For I was Kimana Kyeer, and he had done treason against me and all my adopted nation.
Ti-Bangala returned. A great heavy hairy elephanto-tail was in his grasp. Calandola took it, and draped it like a whip about his shoulders. Then to Machimba-lombo he said, “We grant you the death of honor, Machimba-lombo Jaqqa.”
What next befell filled me with stupefaction and amaze. They did not put Machimba-lombo to death with weapons, as I had expected, nor any poison. Merely did Calandola lay the coiled elephanto-tail at the condemned man’s feet. And Machimba-lombo nodded, and looked downward most somber at it a moment; and then he swayed and went sinking down upon the earth like a puppet-doll whose strings had been let loose. For he simply did release his life, and let it from him upon a wish, and that was an end to him. It is a trick these Africans have, that I do not understand, that when they grieve extremely, or are dishonored and must die, they can do it by willing it alone, and saying to themselves, “Depart this world,” and they do depart.
Six of the high captains bore Machimba-lombo’s body away, and there was a ceremony that I did not attend, and they laid him to rest. And afterward another Jaqqa that was named Paivaga was named to be captain in his place, being slender and swift, with the thin lips and narrow nose of a Moor, though his skin was jet. For some days Calandola did keep to himself, thereafter, brooding on the death of Machimba-lombo, for he had been a great warrior. But his life had been forfeit, since it is forbidden for one high Jaqqa to harm another. And in the eyes of all in this nation, now, was I recognized to be a high Jaqqa: I Andubatil, I Kimana Kyeer.
5
Four days after the death of Machimba-lombo, Kinguri the Imbe-Jaqqa’s brother did summon me quietly, and say, “Tell no one, but make ready for a journey, and take nothing with you but a knife and a sword.”
“Not my musket?”
“Nay, it will be only a hindrance.”
Though I knew not what he had in mind, I did as he said, and at his orders I arose in the night and said to Kulachinga that I would return, but I knew not when. I went to the edge of the camp by dawny mists, and there I met Kinguri.
He and I left camp stealthily together, only us two, and made our way eastward across a broad open plain. By the sunrise hour we halted, and he said, “You told me once of the city of Rome, that is the Pope’s house, and sits on seven hills beside a river. Is it a splendid city?”
“So I have heard, though I have never seen it.”
“Is it as splendid, do you think, as that?”
And he led me a little way around a low grassy hill, and I looked beyond it and saw a city perched atop a stony mountain some seven leagues in compass, that had been hidden from my view by the winding of our path. Between that city and us lay rich green pastures, fields, and meadows, that surely did yield God’s own bounty of provision for everyone who dwelled therein.
Kinguri said, “It is the city of Dongo, that is the residence of King Ngola. Tell me, Andubatil, do you know anything so splendid in all of Christendom?”
What could I say? That Dongo is a mere squalid town of thatched cottages, and Rome is the capital of the world? Nay, I would not hurt him so. Besides, in its way this Dongo was a fair wondrous place, perched so high, like the habitation of the former gods upon Olympus, and in the early light it did shine with a pale beauty quite unearthly.
“Is it the Imbe-Jaqqa’s thought to assault that city now, instead of Makellacolonge?”
Kinguri smiled and shook his head. “Not yet, Andubatil, not yet! You see there: there is but a single passage into the mountain, and that is well fortified, so that in the forcing of it we would suffer great loss of life. The Imbe-Jaqqa is not ready for that forcing. First we must grow our numbers, threefold beyond what we are now; and then we will camp below Dongo, and cut its road to the fields, and starve it a little. And when it is enough starved we will burst into it, and take it, and remove it from the world. And that will be the end of King Ngola and his nation, whom we have hated a long while.”
This he said most calmly, seeming without blood-lust. It was much like Calandola’s talk of a divine mission to purge the world of its cities and farms: this did Kinguri also share, and in a dispassionate way he longed to turn everything back to the fashion of the beginning, to render Africa a new Eden of simple naked shepherds.
Well, and I suppose that is no worse a reason to go to war than any other, and better than some. For what profits it to march into a land simply to force Papistry upon its people, or to take Papistry from them, or to make a change of government that puts one lecherous greedy prince in place of another? And the war that the Spaniards did carry against the people of the Indies, stealing their gold from them and giving them poxes and plagues in return: was that any more noble than the Jaqqas’ dream of cleansing the world of everything that mankind had builded upon it? I was still under Imbe Calandola’s spell, and his monstrous ambition, though I did not truly share it, had substance in my eyes. I saw in it a kind of strange poetry, and a stark simplicity, that seemed to me to be in its way most deeply felt. Aye, clear them off, those who profaned the earth! Pull down the cities, push the perfidious Portugals into the sea! Why not? It had a merit. Dongo tomorrow, and São Paulo de Loanda the day after that: aye, why not, why not? And then the land would be at peace, and sheep might safely graze.
Kinguri now drew me onward toward the city of Dongo. I wondered if he meant to enter it, which would be sure death for us, I being as conspicuous in this land as a three-headed calf, and he with his Jaqqa stature and ornaments being scarce less visible.
But that was not his plan. When we neared the place where the path to Dongo turned upward into the mountain, he gestured to the left and said, “In that meadow live the sacred peacocks of King Ngola, that he prizes above all else. To take a single feather from one is to forfeit your life, if you are seen. Let us enter that meadow, Andubatil, and gather us some feathers.”
“And if we are caught?”
“Then we will die. But we will do it bravely.”
I could not see the sense of this effort. I had had one touch of death’s wings already this week, and the soreness of my struggle with Machimba-lombo was still upon my limbs. But it seemed most urgent to Kinguri to enter here, and having come so far with him I would not turn away now.