The two of them then drew me down together with them.
Ah, I was hard put to know what to do, I having but one member and they each a hole! But the wine and the weariness made my head swim, so that I gave no heed to difficulties, but merely allowed myself to float on the flow of the instant, going whithersoever I found myself journeying, just as a mariner cast into the sea gives himself over to the bosom of the water, if he be wise, and makes no attempt to direct his passage.
God’s blood! It was a wondrous time! Their hands were upon me, here and there and everywhere. Their bodies, so various of shape and sensation and odor, encompassed me close. I had one hand between these thighs, and one hand between those; my fingers moved busily; there was warmth and wetness upon them; I heard sounds; I closed my eyes; fingers traveled the length of my yard, and back again; someone bestrode me and impaled herself upon me; someone else put hard-tipped breasts to my lips; I fondled one woman and futtered the other; and withdrew, or was withdrawn from; and futtered one and fondled the other; and my senses were engulfed, and my mind dissolved, and my soul was swept away, and all the universe became but a sea of action, of gasping and thrusting and laughing and writhing, with streams of hot sweat making slippery our skins; and a moment came when I discharged my lusts with a ferocious explosion, into the one or the other woman and I could not, for all the gold in Peru, tell you which; and I dropped into sleep as though I were a man drugged, and when I awoke, on account of the whimpering, or so I thought, of some jungle animal prowling near by me, I beheld by dawn’s thin light the two of them in one another’s arms, breasts against breasts rubbing, and legs intertwined like those of wrestlers. But they were not wrestling. And I smiled, and watched Teresa and Kulachinga at play for a while, and shook my head in wonder, and turned from them and closed my eyes, and fell into a heavy sleep from which, God wot, the arms of Venus herself could not have pulled me.
10
On the morrow I found me Golambolo, and asked him if he had heeded me, in telling Imbe Calandola that the Portugal prisoners he had brought were to be held for questioning. Most aggrieved that I should suspect him of a default, he swore by the mother-mokisso that he had done so, and begged me to slay him if I found it was not so.
“Why then were some killed?” I demanded.
“Ah, it is the hunger of Calandola, that brooks no check,” said he, and I knew that to be the case, so I dismissed him with my pardon.
Then went I to the surviving pair of Portugals. They were not men I knew: one was named Benevides, and the other Negreiros, and they had only lately come to São Paulo de Loanda, in the retinue of this new governor Coutinho. From what they had witnessed the night before they were well-nigh dumbstricken with fright, and the sight of me in my Jaqqa ornaments gave them no great ease. I knelt down beside them and offered them some comfort, telling them I would see to their freedom if they could tell me of the army that was gathered near Ndala Chosa, how many men it contained and for what purpose it had assembled. But they knew no more of it than that it was there, though they strived most piteously to invent a few scraps of news that would be of value to me. They wept, and begged for their lives, and implored me to spare them from the stew-pot. But I could only offer them the hope of God’s mercy, and a swift release from suffering. And they saw there would be no salvation for them forthcoming of me, and turned away, and said no more, and they were silent still until the last. At the next feast did they perish for the fulfillment of Jaqqa appetites.
I lived in those days in strange double matrimony, and there were no discordancies out of it, miraculous to relate. Why it was that Teresa and Kulachinga should have found so easy affinity, I cannot say, except perhaps that there is some innate lubriciousness of womanhood, that came to them at the time our first mother did accept the apple from the serpent in Eden, by which they glide easily and without reluctance into such amorous interknottings. Or else it was only a happy combining of traits, Kulachinga being a natural child of the jungle, and Teresa being wanton and insatiable in passion, and thus the two of them did conjoin out of wholly separate motives, one from sheer innocence and the other from deep craft. Whatever it was, they seemed to enjoy one another as powerfully as either of them did me, or I either of them.
In the early days of reunion Dona Teresa and I did strive to span the gap of event that had opened between us over the years. Of my own adventures it was swiftly told, for she knew of my voyages south to Benguela by order of Don João de Mendoça, and after that I had naught to tell but my captivity under Mofarigosat and my going to dwell among the Jaqqas. What she had to tell moved me deeply, for it was the death of Don João, that had already been ill when last I was in São Paulo de Loanda. “He came upon a bloating disease,” she said, “that turned him into a swollen ball, and we could not recognize his features. Toward the last he did lose his mind, and hold long conversations with his fathers, and with King Philip and many others, and with you.”
“With me, forsooth?”
“Aye, he spoke in his ravings with you about England, and said he would send you there by the next ship, as his ambassador, for he would be King of Africa. The poor man! And then he died, in the dry season of 1602, and it took a coffin fit for an elephanto to hold him, and ten strong men to carry it.”
“The dry season of 1602,” I said, in a wondering way, for I had given the numbers of the years little thought in my Jaqqa time. “And what year does this be?”
“It is the mid-part of the year 1603.”
“Ah,” said I, revolving that in my mind, and striving to make some sense of it. “It was fourteen years this season that I left England, though it seems fourteen hundred, betimes, to me. The boy-babes who were born that day have beards now, and the girl-babes are sprouting breasts! And Queen Elizabeth is an old woman, if still she hold the throne. And if she do not, who has come to take her place?”
“I know nothing of that,” said Dona Teresa. “But King Philip is dead in Spain.”
“What, that old monk? I thought he would live forever. How long since?”
“Five years,” said she. “It was in 1598.”
“But why did I not hear, then? No one spoke of it in São Paulo de Loanda, and I was there at that time.”
She shrugged and replied, “The news was slow in coming. And then another Philip his son came to take the crown, and for a time we thought it was the same Philip as before.”
I laughed at that, seeing now Angola as a place at the end of the world, where the mightiest king in Christendom might die and his own far-off subjects not get the true report for years. Well, and I had no illusion that we were at the heart of things here. In sooth I scarce cared about these matters: they were white man’s business, Europe-man’s business. Some other Philip was on the Spanish throne, and he was said to be a weak and silly man when he was prince, and might be a weak and silly king as well, which would allow England to make an end of the war with Spain that was such a waste of English substance. I gave that some moment of thought. But it was like a filmy thing blowing in the gale, a mere inconsequential tissue, all this talk of kings and nations. I could find no fullness of texture in them now. My world was bounded by cauldrons and drums and ollicondi trees.
“Tell me of events in São Paulo de Loanda,” I asked, to be cordial.
“The city is much enlarged. There is a grand new church, and the governor has made his palace greater.”
“This governor is your Don João Coutinho, you say?”