“Neither the one nor the other,” I made answer. “But I feel no urge toward woman in this foul heat.”
In truth that was no truth. My loins ached, and in my dreams I saw only breasts and thighs and buttocks and fleecy loins. But the fleece that covered those loins was the golden wool of my Anne Katherine. God wot I am no saint, and had taken no vows of fidelity neither, and yet I could not at that time put myself into the body of some stranger woman merely for the easing of my lusts, not when the palm of my hand could serve the same purpose with lesser sin. Especially when the stranger woman was of black skin and oiled with some rancid stuff, and had strange scars carven on her cheeks by way of decoration, and perhaps a bone thrust through her nose. To use such a woman would be almost like using cattle, that is, not a fitting partner for an Englishman. So I thought—God forgive me!—in my haughtiness, me only a year and some months gone out from Essex at that time.
Therefore I slept by myself that night, which I was greatly weary of doing, a year and some months being a long while to sleep by one’s self. In the morning when we resumed our journey Torner came to me, as we poled our way through a place of shallows and rocks, and said, “They gave me for my pleasure a girl of thirteen years. Her breasts were new, and stood out straight from her chest like this, and felt like globes of a firm spongy stuff. Among these folk it is a sin for a married woman to lie with other than her husband, even as it is with us, but their girls they pass freely around.”
“And had you delight, Thomas?”
His eyes gleamed like beacons. “Aye, Andy! Aye! Not that she was greatly skilled at it, and she had an odd way of wanting to receive me, crouching on her knees. But I turned her over and spread her fairly, and oh! Andy, it was so good a feeling, after this long a while.”
“Although she had no skill?”
“What matters is that? I was not marrying her,” said Torner, “only relieving my need. She lay there with her eyes open and her legs apart, and did little, so that I yearned for a good London wench that knows her arse from a table. But yet, Andy—but yet—!”
“What of her teeth, filed to points? Did that not unnerve you?” I asked.
“God’s death, but it would if she had gone crawling on my body with her face! I’d have shriveled to a thumb’s-length, with those devil-teeth gaping around my yard! But that is not the style of loving here, I think me. And merely the looking at the teeth caused me no distress, for after the first glimpse I kept my eyes elsewhere, and later I kept them closed.” Torner laughed and pummeled my arm. “And you? Too proud to tup a black wench?”
“Too much mindful of my Essex maid,” I said softly.
“Ah. Essex is far away, and will you remain chaste until you get there again?”
“How can I know that?”
“But for now you do, is that it?”
I nodded. “For now. I’ve kept chaste this long, at no small cost; maybe the habit of it is settling in on me.”
“Nay. I’ve heard you groan in desire many a night, Andy.”
Color came to my face. “Have you, now? Go to!”
“It’s truth! Why, in that dungeon last week you lay moaning and sobbing in your sleep, and then you snorted, and then you were still. Don’t you think I know those sounds, lad?”
“Perhaps you do.”
His hard blue eyes were close to my own, and his smile was a wicked one as he said, “D’ye think Anne Katherine lies chaste while you rove the seas?”
I struck him.
I hit him with the flat of my hand, against the cheekbone, a hard push rather than a blow, but hard enough to buckle his knees and send him reeling. Three or four Portugals came upon us, not wanting a brawl among us English, but Torner rose, shaking his head to let the bees loose from his ear, and grinning, and saying, “You slap with good force, lad.”
“You spoke out of turn.”
“Aye, and I’m sorry for it. It was a shameful thing I said.”
“She is no maid. I had her myself more than once, but I was the first, Thomas. I know that for certain, and I think I am yet the only one.”
“I pray that you be right. I wish you all joy of her love.”
“And the years will pass and I will not return,” I said, “and a time will come when she thinks me dead, and then she will go on to another man. But I think that time is not yet. I choose to think it, Thomas. She is but nineteen, or perhaps twenty by now, and I think she will give me another year.”
“You are betrothed?”
“Aye. I had a wife once that died of the pox, and now I fear I have lost a second before we were wed, and while we both still live. Are you married?”
“I am,” said Torner. “With three boys from her.”
“And does she stay faithful to you while you voyage?”
“I make no inquiries of that, good Andy. My trade keeps me apart from her long months at a time, and now may keep me from her forever. Am I to stay pure for such lengthy spans? And if I am not, should she? But I make no inquiries on that.” He laughed broadly. “How old do you be, Andy?”
“I was born in the month of Queen Bess’ accession.”
“So you are thirty, I think. A man of middle years, and yet you seem very young, in some ways.”
“Aye,” I said. “I had a late start, and I lost a few years through grief and confusion in my early manhood, when no wisdom entered my head. But fear not, Thomas: I am no fool. Filed-teeth wenches with breasts that stand straight out do not arouse me this week, that is all.” And we laughed and embraced, with pummeling of backs, and went on with our deckside chores.
But a heavy melancholy settled over me. I saw Anne Katherine shimmering in the air before me, and she was weeping and garbed in widow’s weeds. And I thought me, How strange, that I am here in this land of filed teeth and scarred cheeks and coccodrillos and Lucifer standing naked on a riverbank, and England so far away, lost to me belike forever. It is the price of empire, as Francis Willoughby long ago said, that some of our people be scattered like seed into strange ground: but why was it me that was so scattered? Torner might well be right, to console himself with whatever consolation lay at hand, for our lives that we knew in England were gone from us, and we were something other in this place, stripped of vows and identity, as naked to our pasts as that Jaqqa by the river is naked to the air.
And then I thought, Nay, I am Andrew Battell of Leigh in Essex, and I will remain Andrew Battell to the last, a man of Essex, and, God grant it, I will see Essex again, and Anne Katherine, and my family’s own house.
And now I think, knowing the things that that young man on the river-pinnace could not know, knowing all that I have done and had done to me in these twenty years and more gone by since then, Am I still Andrew Battell of Leigh in Essex, or am I transformed, am I magicked into a changeling? And I answer, Yea, I still am Andy Battell, but a larger and more strange Andy Battell than ever was planned for me when my father engendered me. And though I have done such deeds as an Englishman would hail as monstrosities, yet am I still God’s own man, and mine own, for aye. Do you comprehend that? I comprehend that. And, God willing, so will you, by the time I come to the end of my tale.
A bleak river-fog descended, making our voyage perilous, and in that heavy grayness my melancholy lifted. I found myself too much occupied with my duties to care that I was an exile and a prisoner, and in stray moments I even found myself wondering what it would have been like to lie with some blackamoor girl. We skirted the muddy shores. Out of the mists came fearful mooings and bellowings, of such creatures I knew not what, but that they were not the sheep and cattle of England. The mist raised a bit, and we saw that a second river was pouring into the Kwanza. This was the Lukala, flowing from the north-east, and just beyond this meeting of the waters lay the presidio of Masanganu.