Night had come, I do think. Certainly I perceived the world to have grown dark, but by this stage of the ceremony I could not have told the sun from the moon. My memories of it now become confused. One of the women did return, I believe, bearing an ivory box that held two shriveled worms, and I was told to take one of those worms and thrust it into her arse with my finger, and Calandola did put the other into her cunt; but perhaps it was I that gave her the front worm and he the rear, I can no longer remember. And I think there were other such rites, using objects of witchcraft such as dried leaves and amulets, but I am not sure. It may be the case that my mind has expunged from itself the most horrid and dreadful of these witcheries, by way of protecting me against mine own doings: but I am concealing nothing, God wot, of what I can recall. I gave myself fully up to all of this, the way one surrenders oneself fully to the experiences that come in a dream.
Though I have forgotten some of these latter events, there is one I cannot forget. Nor do I dare shrink from imparting it here, though it be the worst of all. It was far into the night, and I had had other drugs to drink, and more of the blood-wine, and fires were lit all about the room, and low chanting went forward, when suddenly I did feel a hand upon my yard. The touch was light and supple, and in my bemusement I thought it must be one of Calandola’s wives returned to caress me, and I moved in slow thrusts against its grip, deriving great pleasure of it.
“Mine,” said a thick heavy voice. “Do the like to mine.”
The voice was Imbe Calandola’s, and the hand on my yard was Calandola’s also, sliding up and down the shaft of it with great skill. And he sat alongside me, his huge body pressed close upon mine, and as I sharpened my eyes in the dim smoky haze I came to see that his member did stand upright like a giant black scepter, frightsomely thick and high.
I did not draw back from that which he offered.
I put my hand to his yard as he had to mine. I opened my fingers wide to span that immensity, which seemed to me as thick as an arm, and I wondered fleetingly how any woman ever could take him into her without being split by him. And I stroked him up and down, having no more sense of sin about it than if I had been stroking mine own yard, or the railing of a stair. This was the deepest point of my voyage toward that Lord of Darkness, the Imbe-Jaqqa Calandola: for I was wholly his creature, totally in submission to his will, entirely unknowing of the existence of myself as an independent being. My hand was to him, and his was to me, and nothing else did I perceive. And the last shred of that innocent English boy who had set to sea on the seventh day of May of Anno 1589 was lost now in the beating of the drums and the rising of the many-colored smoke and the wild swirling of the drug in my veins. I had become altogether a thing of the jungle. I was swallowed up in this mystery. I was truly Andubatil Jaqqa, that never had had a former life as anyone other.
Ah! The spurting of my seed did come, with a power and an intensity I had not known since I was a rammish boy. It wrung from me a great shout, that must have sounded none too different from a cry of pain, though it sprang from the supremest of pleasure. I felt myself covered with my hot outpouring from belly to mid-thigh.
And still my hand moved in its unchanging motion, grasping that mighty black rod; and soon from Calandola came a deep rumbling sound, something like the sound that I imagine a volcano-mountain to make as it prepares to loose its molten rock. And then I felt the heavy quiver and shake of his flesh, and the spurt, and his outcries split the air most thunderously.
He cried my name, and I cried his, and we let go of one another and fell backward against the warm moist earth, and lay there unmoving. I think that was the end of it. At any rate, I remember no more.
I was as one stunned. The fires died down, the music trailed away into silence, and all was still.
Whatever happened in the late hours of the night, if there was anything, it was without my knowledge, for I lay in the deepest of slumber. I have told all that I know of that night. So did I vow; so have I done. I have told all.
8
It was midday before I awoke, and found myself still in the house of the ceremony. Two Jaqqa warriors sat beside me as a kind of guard of honor, but Calandola was not there. I looked at them the way a man looks when he has been half drowned, and comes to himself. They said nothing, neither Kasanje nor old Ntotela. I rose, feeling like the merest burnt husk of myself, and with an uncertain stride I made my way out of that place, and down to the river’s edge, and washed myself free of all the greases and stains of the night’s revelries, and washed and washed, scrubbing myself most thoroughly in that fast-rushing stream.
At the first I had no clear memory of what I had done, but then gradually at first, and then in a torrent, it all came back to me from the first to the last. And I did feel a kind of numb frosty amaze, that I had done such things, and especially that I had done the last thing. But I gave myself no shame over them. It was too late for shame. Some while back, so I knew, I had passed a certain boundary within my soul, and I lived now, in the inner sense, in a land other than my native one.
Only one thing that troubled me, and that was that I might henceforth be expected to be Imbe Calandola’s constant paramour. I was not yet so wholly transformed that I was ready to reckon myself a willing catamite, gladly given over to sodomy. I am well aware of the evils of the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah, and I have never known any inclination toward the same within my soul. Many times aboard ship during long voyages I have been covertly approached by men of that sort, who did risk their lives to offer me invitations, saying they would give me pleasure with their hands, or their mouths, or their bums, any part I liked, and would I peradventure care to play some buggery with them as well? It was easy enough to say them nay, for that was not my game: it is the soft moist hole of women that draws me, and for the rest, why, it is all so much dead meat, that interests me not at all. I would not burn the buggers upon the stake, or skewer them from the rear as is often done, or hurl them into the sea, for that also is not my way. And I know many great men have had that vice and still been great, aye, some even being King of England. But it is not my pleasure. I did not wish to indulge it again. But there my fears proved needless, since the Imbe-Jaqqa was no more dedicated to buggery than I: what had passed between us was a ritual deed, of some high spiritual meaning, and it portended no change in our relations. He went back to his many wives, and I went back to my one.
But other things had changed.
Kinguri came to me that morning, and said, looking remote and much cast down, “Well, and so he has taken you for his own, brother.”
“It was for the making of me into a deeper Jaqqa.”
“Aye, so it was. And are you the deeper Jaqqa now?”
“I have seen new things, brother,” said I. “But look you: nothing has altered between us, and I am still your brother, and your nearest friend, and we will spend long hours still speaking of the laws of England and how they differ from the laws of France, and such matters.”
“We are brothers still, but you are now his.”
“He is the Imbe-Jaqqa. I had no refusal.”