I offered her next toward Kinguri, who smiled most frigidly upon me and scarce more warmly to her, and then to the other lords; and we were seated, and given wine; and they placed before us vegetables and porridges, which we both did toy at much uninterestedly, neither of us having great appetite under these pressures; and the witches did their dance, and lit fires of strange colors, and sang their screaming hymns in praise of the Imbe-Jaqqa.
And Dona Teresa looked out upon all this quite as if she had been transported to the nether Pit, and was witness to the terrible celebrations and rites of Belial and Beelzebub and Moloch and Lucifer. Yet did she remain outwardly calm, though tautly held and trembling like the tuned string of a harp.
She said at length, “How many months have you dwelled among these creatures?”
“I think close upon two years. It is not easy to retain account of the passing of the time.”
She held her wine-bowl, and looked into it as though into a wizard’s sphere, and swirled it about.
“Why have they not slain you, Andres? They do slay everything in their path.”
“It is not so,” said I. “They are philosophers—”
“Ha! Are you drunken, or only mad?”
“Philosophers,” I said again, “and follow a great mission, to bend the world to their way.”
“That much I know, but it is not philosophy.”
“I tell you it is!” I cried.
“You are mad, then.”
“Listen to me: they mean to reshape the world into something that is holy by their way of seeing. They slay as need and appetite demand; but they do not slay indiscriminately. They serve a higher cause than mere destruction.”
She looked about her, at the riotous roaring Calandola, at cool scheming Kinguri, at the dancers, at the witches.
“Then they are greater devils,” she said, “than even I had thought.”
“I think you are right in that, Teresa.”
“And yet you serve them.”
“I serve them, yes.”
“What use have they for you? Strong though you are, you are nothing next to a demon Jaqqa.”
“Ah, I have a musket,” I said.
“That is it. I had overlooked it. They desire you for your musket, Andres.”
“Aye, my musket, and me for myself, also. I am the white mokisso with golden hair, and they think I have divine force within me.”
She looked me inward long and steady. A server came by with wine, and offered us; and she took, making him fill her bowl to the brim, and drank of it deep, and asked for more. It was not the blooded wine. I think I would not have told her, had it been that stuff. But here only Calandola was drinking it.
After a time she said, “I am much astounded by all this, Andres.”
“For a time, so was I. But I am alive: that is the justification for everything.”
“Sometimes it may be preferable to accept death.”
“Sometimes,” said I. “But I have not met that sometimes yet.”
“How came you to them?” she asked.
I laughed a sour laugh, and replied, “By the usual treacheries of your brothers the Portugals, who left me as pawn to a blackamoor king, and did not redeem me. Then the blackamoors would have slain me, and I slipped away, and gave myself up to the man-eaters, who seem the most honest of the peoples of this land, since they alone pretend to no virtue they do not possess.”
“Ah. And so you enrolled in their number.”
“I was welcomed gladly there. They gave me a place, and a rank, and one of the king’s own wives for my own—”
“A wife?” cried she in amaze. “But now I am your wife!”
“Then I have two.”
“Ah,” she said. “I understand. You are heathen through and through, deeper ever all the time.”
“I could have had more wives. I took only one. I would still have only one, Teresa, but that I saw a way to save your life. If you prefer, you need not be wife to me. As you said only a moment before, sometimes it can be preferable to accept death. And death is waiting for you in those kettles. Eh?”
“I am your wife,” said she sullenly.
“Then cry me no shame, for having two of them here.”
“Where is this first wife of yours? Why is she not at your side, then?”
“She is dancing, there, with the other women. See, the young one, with the reddened hair?”
Dona Teresa followed my pointing finger, and squinted some in the smoky dark, until she spied Kulachinga, who did prance and leap most grandly, her breasts swaying, her body shining with sweat and oils. To me did Kulachinga seem quite fine; but an instant later I saw her through Dona Teresa’s eyes, with her cicatrice-scars, her thick lips, her heavy rump all crying forth her jungle birth.
“That one is your wife?” said Dona Teresa. “You lie with her, Andres?”
“Aye, that I do.”
“When first you came to this African land, you held yourself proudly apart, and thought even me to be too foreign for you. Yea, and now you couple joyously with greasy cannibal wenches that put red clay in their hair.”
“I came to this land many years ago, Teresa.”
“How you are transformed!” And in a lower voice, husky, quavering, she said, “I cannot put aside my fright of you. And I cannot abide feeling fear of you.”
“Am I so frightening still, then?”
She turned to me, and her nostrils were aflare, and her eyes hard and bright, and I knew that she feared me, and that she hated herself for fearing her old dear Andres that could be so easily led about once by the nose. “I am part African, you know,” she said after a moment, “although I pretend that I am not, and hide that side of my blood even from myself, and put on the airs of a Portugal lady. But you! You, who are pure fair-skinned English: you have become three-quarters savage, and most devilish savage at that. I knew you when you had a boy’s way about you, a kind of schoolboy honor that was most charming in you, if a bit foolish. It is a metamorphosis most terrifying.”
“Is it? I did not ask it. I could have been living quietly in England years ago, and doing none of this.”
“Is there anything left of England in you now, Andres?”
“It is deep below.”
“Do you think so?”
“It is my hope,” said I, not sure at all. To her most intently I said, “I adapt to my surroundings, Teresa. It is my way of surviving, and surviving is a high goal for me, as I think it is for you. We are more alike than different, I think, and that is why we were drawn once so close, and that is why you struck at me that time, when you thought you had lost me.”
“Speak not of that time, Andres. You said we would not be enemies over that.”
“Ah. So I did. And we are not enemies, eh? Are we? Now you are my wife, are you not?”
“Truly?”
“Truly,” said I.
“I and also the cannibal woman, your wives.”
“Two wives, aye. The king has some forty. I can have two.”
“In England, do they take their wives two at once?”
“This is not England.”
“I think you speak sooth,” said she. And she smiled, and seemed to ease a little, withal. “You are so strange, Andres, as you are now. But I think I grow used to it. I will be your wife here, though you frighten me some. I will lie on the one side of you, and the man-eater woman— what is her name?”