To Torner I said, “I have changed my mind.”
“What?”
“In the dungeons we stand no chance. Aboard their pinnace we may find the beginning of the way home. What say you, Thomas?”
“Will you serve them?”
“Aye, I will. I think it is wiser.”
“Then so will I, Andy.”
I halted and said to the Portugals who were prodding and pushing me in the kidneys with their truncheons, “Wait, I would see the governor again.”
“Another day,” one guard replied.
“No!” I cried, thinking it might be months. “Go to him, tell him we reconsider, or it be on your head!”
The Portugals conferred; and then they relented, and took us back to Serrão, who looked that much older and more weary for the ten minutes that had gone by.
“I yield,” I said. “We will serve.”
“You are shrewd to do so. So be it.” And he waved us out.
Once more we were conducted to our dungeon, and now I explained to Torner all that had passed between Serrão and me in our earlier conversation. He shrugged when I said our choices had been to serve or to die miserably in our chains, and laughed at my promoting him to gunner and me to pilot; but he blanched when I named Masanganu as the place where we were to be shipped.
“You know it?” I asked.
“Barbosa told me of it once, when we were at sea,” said Torner. “It is a fort somewhere in the hot interior of this land, which guards against the wild tribes beyond. The Portugals all dread it, he said, and no man will go thither if he can prevent it, for it is a place where men die like chickens of fevers and plagues.” Torner looked to me and I saw more anger than fear in his eyes. “That fat old villain has found the easiest way to rid himself of us. Masanganu! A place where men die like chickens, Barbosa called it. Where men die like chickens.”
5
This pinnace of the governor’s was a modest vessel even as pinnaces go, with a spar awry on its foremast, and its mainsail baggy in the Arab fashion, so that it tended to bury the bow. I was glad we were not called upon to take it to ocean water, for I suspected such a craft would yaw unpredictably with a following sea or with slight changes of wind. But all we had to do was sail it somewhat up the River Kwanza, a distance of one hundred thirty miles.
This river has his mouth a short way below São Paulo de Loanda on the coast. The pinnace that waited there had a small crew indeed, barely enough men to cast free the anchor and set the sails: small wonder they were pressing Englishmen into their service. These Portugals were sadly overextended in Angola, but a few hundred of them to fill all the garrisons, and enemies congregating on every frontier. Aboard the pinnace the master and pilot were one man, a fleshy-faced Portugal named Henrique, and the others were but common yeomen who did as they were told, nothing more.
Nine days we were going up the river of Kwanza, in which time one Portugal yeoman died and another fell mortally ill. The country here is so hot that it pierceth their hearts. We moved slowly in terrible silence broken by terrible sounds: by day the wild screams of birds, by night the ghastly music of the leopards and lions and jackals and hyenas. “We have but one blessing,” said Henrique to me, for he was courteous and showed us no disdain, “that we are making our voyage in the dry season. For in the wet, black flying insects come at us thick as clouds, and we breathe them and eat them and blink them in our eyes.”
Coccodrillos lurked on muddy banks, smiling their coccodrillo smile that I remembered so well from Brazil. When we drew near them, they silently slid off into the dark water. In riverside lagoons water-birds by thousands waded about, feeding on hapless small creatures. There were black-and-white storks of sinister aspect, which to me seemed harbingers of death; and also another great bird with a bill strangely shaped like unto a great spoon. And along the shore was reedy green papyrus with tops like fans, far taller than a man. While beyond that the jungle lay, palms and vines and such intertwined into an impenetrable wall. Sometimes we saw the river-horse or hippopotamus, only its huge nose above the water, and its broad glistening back. And sometimes the coccodrillos were so thick on the banks that their heavy musk made us want to puke.
The strangest sight of all that we beheld was neither coccodrillo nor river-horse, though, but a man of human kind. This was perhaps halfway up the winding course of the river, just beyond a great lake called Soba Njimbe’s Lake. Here, on a flat place of land by the edge of the thick jungle, stood alone by himself a black of enormous height and huge depth of color, pure jet in hue, with a purplish undercast to him. He was altogether naked but for a girdle of beadwork that did not at all conceal his privy parts, which were frightful in size. He wore on one hip a kind of dagger and on the other a longer weapon, and leaned on a heavy target or shield of much size, and stared off into the distance, taking no more notice of our passing craft than if we were beetles on a drifting strand of straw.
There was about this one man a strangeness and a presence most commanding, and such a sense of silent menace, that made him a sort of Lucifer or Mephistopheles, and I knew at first instant he was nothing ordinary. Beside me one of the Portugals made a little grunting sound and he dropped to the planks and began such a crossing of himself, such a torrent of Ave Marias and Pater Nosters, that I saw I was not the only one to have such a feeling.
To Henrique I said, “What is that person?”
“Some prince of the Jaqqas,” replied the pilot. “We see them of times along this road, making pilgrimages that are outside our knowledge.”
“Jaqqas? The man-eaters?”
“The very same,” said Henrique. “Followers of the Lord of Darkness, devils out of the pit!”
One of the other Portugals had fetched an arquebus, and was aiming the thing now at the creature on the riverbank. Henrique hissed and pushed the snout of the weapon aside, saying, “Nay, fool, would you have us all in the stew-pot by nightfall?”
In another moment the river took a hard curve, and the Jaqqa was gone from our sight. But the image of him was burned into my mind and lingered long.
Henrique said, “They are a plague. They come and go like ghosts in the wilderness, or like locusts, rather, devouring everything in their path, destroying, showing no quarter. And yet we know not if they are our enemies or our friends, for sometimes they serve our purposes, and sometimes they fall upon our encampments like the hounds of Hell.” He shuddered. “These.Angolese people, and the Kongo folk, are but human beings with dusky skins and woolly hair, and we understand them, and when we look into their eyes we see souls looking back, and when we touch their flesh we feel the flesh of mankind upon them. But the Jaqqas—!”
He left the words unsaid.
Onward we went through the killing heat, which wrapped around us like a heavy cloth. On the sixth day we stopped at a village called Muchima, where the Portuguese had founded a presidio, or fort, in order that we might get medicines for our man who had fallen ill, the other having already died. Only three Portugals lived at this presidio, which indeed was more of a hut of boughs than any sort of fort. But all about them was a village of blacks, fifty or eighty souls, of a friendly sort, innocent and gentle, that lived mainly by fishing. We passed a night there.
For company that night all of the Portugals, even Henrique, took girls of the tribe as bed-partners, except for the one who was too ill for such sport, and one other who I think had taken an oath not to touch woman that season, in return for some favor granted him by his beloved Virgin Mary. Torner also was offered a woman, and most gladly accepted, and I, too, but I refused. My refusal was the occasion of some merriment among the Portugals, since I was so robust of body and rich of health that they could not understand it. “Are you a sworn monk?” Henrique asked me. “Or is it that you prefer the love of your own sex, in which case I think we must slay you and feed you to the coccodrillos, lest you corrupt our voyage.”