The butcher-Jaqqas were already at work readying the dead men for the kettle. Well, and that was beyond any remedy: whatever information I might get from them was perished, and would not rise to the kettle’s skimmings when they were cooked. My anger at Calandola was extreme, and another time I might have suffered for reproaching him this way before his people, but it seemed that tonight he was in high good humor. Yet I had best master my fury, since that even in good humor Calandola would accept only so much reproach, even from me, and then he would grow ugly.
I said, “I will join you in a moment, Lord Calandola. I ask leave to speak with the captives first.”
He nodded and turned from me, to take a bowl of wine from one of his wives. I walked to the far side of the kettles to inspect the prisoners, whether I knew any of them from my days amongst the Portugals.
And when I went to them I had a mighty surprise, that shook me to the foundation and base of my souclass="underline" for two of the Portugals were men, but the third, that I did not expect, was a woman. It was unmistakable, even though she had her hair bound tight in back, so that it looked no longer than a man’s. Her garments were in shreds and tatters, and by the coppery gleam of the firelight I was able to see her bare breasts rising steeply, full and round and most beautiful, and dark tipped. Aye! and those were breasts I knew most excellently well, by my faith. I knew the feel of them in my cupped hands, and the taste of them to my lips. For this woman was that dark-souled witchy creature Dona Teresa, that I had loved and been loved by when I was Andrew Battell the English seaman of Leigh in Essex, and by whom, also, I had been most shamefully betrayed, what seemed like half a lifetime ago. I could not have been more dumbstruck nor appalled to find her here, than had that woman chained to the tree been my mother.
In the dimness of the heavy twilight she did stare at me, and her reddened eyes grew bright, and she made a gesture of amaze. And in a voice choking with astonishment did she say, “Andres? Andres, is it possible? Is that who you are? Andres, in those savage beads?”
“Aye,” I said. “I am Andres.”
Her lips trembled. “You are much changed, Andres!”
“Aye,” said I. The Portugal words came hard and uncouth to my mouth, after these long months of speaking the Jaqqa tongue. “I am much changed, indeed. I am scarce Andres any longer.”
“If you are not Andres, then what are you?”
“I am Andubatil Jaqqa,” I answered her.
“Mother of God,” she said softly. “I am lost, then!”
9
I came close to her, this woman who had done me so much wrong, and who before that had given me such pleasure, and I let her have a good look upon me by the light of the leaping blazing fire.
And I saw the wild panic fear in her eyes, that was as revealing to me as the most costly of polished mirrors. How frightening the man that she beheld must have been! For what stood before her was a kind of man-monster, near naked, with paint on his body and barbarous beads and bangles and a host of battle-scars, I must have looked like something out of the wild dawn of time. She stared at the certain tribal marks that I had let the Jaqqa witches carve into my skin with most excruciating pain, and a new brightness of horror shined on her face. My hair hung well past my shoulders and was a tangle of great snarls; my beard was as rough and shaggy as a goat’s; my hands and feet were unkempt; and though I had not had any mirroring of my own face for more months than I had counted, I knew I must now have a savage countenance, with fierce hard eyes and sparse flesh and all the corners hard and sun-baked by that merciless tropic orb, so that my Englishness was fair roasted from me. Dona Teresa shivered and made to cover her breasts with the one arm of hers that was unfettered. Such a gesture of shame never had I seen before from the haughty and imperious and lustful Dona Teresa.
And I, what did I feel, looking upon her?
Hatred, first and primary, and the craving for revenge. For I might have been at sea to England, but for her, who had plucked me from the Dutcher’s ship on that false libel of a rape, and sent me off for six years of soul-breaking torment at the presidio of Masanganu. And all for jealousy, a petty spitefulness over my living with Matamba: for that she had stolen my life from me, as much so as Cocke that had abandoned me to the Portugals, and all those perfidious whoreson Portugal governors that had made me their servant in my long years of Angola. I am, God wot, a man of even keeclass="underline" but yet I have feelings, I am no stone statue, and I do hate those who give me over to injustice, and I did rejoice just then to see this Dona Teresa in peril of her life, with the kettles already heating for her companions and her boiling soon to come.
But that was the first moment only, that hatred: for her beauty melted my heart, withal how long I had yearned to be revenged on her. That seemed so long ago, her crime against me. I could not, try as I might, hold my vengefulness in my grasp that long. It did slip from me, like some writhing eel, even as I glowered at her and tried to take pleasure in her downfall.
How, and am I so light of resolve? I think not: but it was her beauty undid me. I tell you, her beauty melted my heart, for all that she was soiled and disheveled and tear-streaked, and for all that she had given me into that terrible six-year servitude out of petty spite, and that there was the brimstone reek of witchcraft somehow about her.
She was magnificent in my eyes.
That time when first she came to me in my prison cell in São Paulo de Loanda, she had even then been queenly in her poise. But in the thirteen or fourteen years that intervened she had grown superb, a woman of imperial splendor, and not even her present sad state could disguise it.
Standing before her, peering eye to eye, I found myself trembling and unmanned with the surprise of resurgent love. Yet had she no inkling of this, seeing as she did only the strange Jaqqa-monster that I had become. And another thing began to happen, which was that the wondrous beauty of her began to wash from me not only my long-cherished anger toward her, but also the strangeness that I had put on, the Jaqqa self within which I had cloaked myself: I had come before her as An-dubatil, but I heard the voice of Andrew Battell within my skull, speaking with her in English most playfully, such words as “scavenger” and “stonemason” and “turnip-greens,” in our games of love. Which brought a confusion over me, a slipping and a sliding of my soul, so that I felt like one who is battered and pummeled by heavy surf, and knocked to his knees whenever he tries to rise, and loses his strength in the struggle and begins to drown. What was I, Jaqqa or Englishman? And did I hate her or love her? I was drowning in the contraries and antitheticals of mine own bewildered soul. But as one who feels himself drowning may begin at the last to swim upward to salvation, so, too, did I out of that maelstream of fuddlement commence the ascent toward some measure of understanding. For I knew that I was more English than Jaqqa, for all my journey into the man-eater’s ways, and that I held more love than loathing for this woman. And I swore then a mighty vow within myself, by God the Redeemer and by every mokisso of this somber jungle, that I would see her spared from the cannibal kettle, or go into that kettle myself. Nor was this any witchcraft at work upon me this time, but mine own free decision.
Yet was I slow to reveal that to her. Merely did I circle her from side to side, like leopard contemplating trapped prey, and study her in all regards. She hovered on the borderland between fear and boldness, mastering with wondrous strength the terror that she must feel.