“You will not deny the charge?” asked the Imbe-Jaqqa.
“Why waste the breath?”
Even now I could not let her so doom herself by acquiescing thus in the indictment. Even now I felt constrained to defend her, though she had put my life in jeopardy.
“Lord Imbe-Jaqqa!” I burst out. “I pray you, forgive this foolish woman! Whatever she may have done, it was done rashly and without thought, and was only an idle thing, for she has no understanding—”
“Silence, Andubatil. This nonsense ill becomes you.” To Teresa he said again, “You stand accused of treachery, by the words of this dead bondsman here, that we all did hear several times over since we captured him by the edge of our camp. He said you promised him many shells, to carry your message to the Portguals. Is this so?”
“I say nothing,” she replied, with a flash of wrath in her eyes, and an imperious look, for her courage seemed to be returning even though to me it was plain that all was lost.
The Imbe-Jaqqa now turned toward me. “And you, Andubatil, you are charged with conspiring also with her in this treason.”
“I know not a thing of it, O Lord Imbe-Jaqqa.”
“He lies,” said Kinguri.
“Do I, now? And did the slave name me? Did he speak of me before I came, yet in my presence did not know me?”
“Your guilt is known to us,” said Kinguri.
“Not so, brother, not so!”
“You are no brother of mine.”
“By this scar I bear, and yours also, Kinguri! What, will you reject me now, that you fondly once spoke with so late into the night, about the kingdoms and laws of Christendom, and so much else?”
“I am no brother to a liar and traitor,” said he, all ice and contempt. To Calandola he did cry, “You who are my brother of the flesh, do you not see the guilt of Andubatil?” “I see it not,” said Calandola.
“They had conspired together, the woman and the man! They both must die, O lord!”
“Andubatil has done no treason,” the Imbe-Jaqqa said.
“Nor has my woman!” I said, perhaps too rashly. “There is no proof! The slave was paid to perjure upon her!”
“The woman,” said Calandola, “surely has hatred for us. You take grave risk by defending her, except if you do it out of love. We think her guilt is certain, and we will put her to the trial to demonstrate it.”
“I beg you, good my lord, by all that passed between us on that night you remember, spare her!”
This I said in a low voice, to him alone. But he did not look pleased at being conjured by the force of that rite we had shared. Glowering most saturninely at me, he did continue, “She is a traitor. You stand accused by my brother of the same offense, the which you deny. It is a heavy charge, that may not be ignored. This must we examine with care, and there will be consultation of the witches. You will be prisoned until we arrive at our proper path.”
He lifted his hand, and Teresa and I were dragged away from that place, I to a wickerwork enclosure not far from the place of the great kettles, which was not a cheering sight unto me, and she elsewhere, beyond my vision. There I was left to ruminate in solitude upon these latest turns of fate.
It enraged me that she had forsworn me so, and, after I had given pledge she would do no harm, had tried to send word to her people of our attack on São Paulo de Loanda. For such a thing could only work my downfall along with hers, if it miscarried, and it had miscarried.
Of her guilt I had no doubt. Plainly she had hired that man to bear the warning to the Portugals; and plainly she would die for it. She stood incriminated and had no defense, nor would she attempt to devise one, whether out of overarching pride or a submission to inevitable destiny. She was in the hands of Jaqqas, and no claim of innocence would save her. She would die. And for all the pain she had given me, I found myself sore stricken with grief over that. How could she perish? She was so vital, so deep with life, so magnificent of beauty: if she was not a witch, then she was some sort of goddess. And yet she would die, nor was I at all sure I would survive this attainder of treason myself, with Kinguri now become my implacable foe. Surely he saw me as rival for Calandola’s affections, and enemy to his own ambitions; and with so potent an enemy at the court of the Imbe-Jaqqa, I would be hard put to come forth of this with my life.
For a day, and half a day more, I did remain in my cage, guarded all the while by silent Jaqqas and giving myself over to the most melancholy of thoughts, and to occasional moments of prayer. Then was I summoned once again to the council-hearth, where the same great Jaqqas as before were in their positions of state. And thither also was Dona Teresa brought, with her arms bound behind her, though I was unchained.
She looked to me, and in her eyes I saw no fear, but only strength, resignation, courage.
Imbe Calandola said, “My brother Kinguri has spoken with the nganga-men. They are of the verdict that treason is likely here, and must be searched out by the trial of ordeal.”
“Ah, then I am a dead man!” I cried.
“If there has been treason, then that is so,” replied Calandola most serenely.
“And which of us is to have the ordeal first, the woman or I?”
“There is only you to be tried,” said the Imbe-Jaqqa, “for the woman’s guilt is certain, and her doom is fixed.”
At this, Dona Teresa did utter the smallest of sounds of despair, a mere issuing-forth of air, quickly cut off; and then she did resume her staunch demeanor.
And I, seeing myself standing at the veritable brink of extinction, with the earth crumbling before me and bidding fair to pitch me into the abyss, what then did I feel? Why, once again I felt nothing at all, no fear, no dismay, I who had been at the same fatal brink so many times before: I was cold in my heart, numb like one who has clasped himself to the great ice-floes of the north, but I was wholly still at the center of my soul, and calm. For one can face death only so many times, and then the fear of it is gone from the spirit, and one becomes void and wholly at ease, like one who is so fatigated by constant warfare that he takes no notice of the deadly arrows singing past his cheeks. They would give me the ordeal by poison, which I knew from the testimony of Kinguri, when his lips were unsealed by wine, to be concocted aforehand by the will of the king. So the only question to be answered was whether the fraudulence of the ordeal would be the fraudulence of Kinguri, who wished me dead, or that of Calandola, who I believed did not associate me with Teresa’s treason, and meant to preserve me. Calandola was mightier; Kinguri was craftier; I had no notion which of them would prevail. But though I had not lost the love of life that has imbued me deeply since my first years, though I longed as passionately as ever to go on and on, and see what lay beyond the next headland and the next, yet was I untroubled by distress over the outcome of this test: whatever would befall would take its own course the same way, whether I fretted and worried over it or no. And so I was wholly tranquil.
“Bring now the fruit of the embd” said Calandola.
So it was to be the poisoned fruit, and not the snailshells to my forehead, nor the boiling water that I must drink, nor the singeing of my flesh with the red-hot iron.
A nganga in heavy paint and glistening grease did step forward, carrying with him the bowl of the fruits of these palm-trees, which were about the size and shape of a small peach-fruit, but smooth and shining of skin, with a golden hue and faint red streaks in it. As I had seen that time before, the witch-man did draw from the bowl one of these fruits and eat it himself for show, and spit out the hard kernel of it, and stand before us unpoisoned and hale, and smiling. Then did a second of these witches advance to him with a flask made of highly polished dark wood, that was meant to contain the poison, and he did dip a great lengthy black thorn into the flask, bringing it out dripping with a fluid, and this he thrust deep within one of the embá-fruits, and a second, and a third.