Thus have we lived, these three years past, in the old house of the Battells: Kate Elizabeth in her bedroom and I in mine, and Mother Cecily in her own, until death came for her last Easter quietly in her sleep. Kate Elizabeth cares for me, and I for her, and we both for her two young brothers and my blackamoor Francis, who serves us well. And to the world we are father and daughter, and so shall we be until some swain comes and takes her from me. Which I suppose will be any month now, so much courting does she do.
I wonder often whether I should have wed her when I could. For she is warm and beautiful and loving, and would have gladdened my bed greatly; and I am not yet entirely without lust, for once I did see Kate Elizabeth by chance at her bath, and the sight of her breasts and thighs and golden loins did awaken in me a desire so fierce as to wring tears from me; but it was quickly enough quelled. She knows nothing of that, nor will she ever.
I have occupied myself in these years by setting down this my memoir of all that befell me. It is a great long tale, I know, but for that I make no apology, since much befell me, and I would record it complete. Not that I am anything unusual in myself, only a simple and fortunate man, honorable enough to win God’s grace, and sturdy enough to have endured mine adversities. But where I have been and what I have seen are not unimportant, and I would make record of it, just as other travelers of the past have made their records, from Marco Polo of Venice onward.
For I do have a vision of a new world of England overseas, and I hope to advocate it with my words in a way that will leave an imprint. This is a very small island, and it has little wealth of its own, only some sheep and some grass and some trees, and the like. But we are English, which means we have an inner strength that has not been given to most other folk, and I believe that we should go forth upon the world, and shape it to our pattern, and put it to our increase and the general good.
It is not a new idea. When that I was a little lad I heard Francis Willoughby saying to my father that the time had come for us English to be scattered upon the earth like seeds: or thrown like coins, he also said, bright glittering coins. That is a prettier image, but I like his one of seeds better, for seeds do in time have great growth into mighty oaks. Well, and many of us have been truly scattered upon the earth: but it is time to think what the deeper purpose of that scattering is to be. The present way of England, in pirating and such, is futile. We cannot grow great by stealing the wealth of others. Nor can we merely go into tropic lands and and take from the people there the treasures they have. We must settle, and plant ourselves, and build; and we must create an empire that sinks deep roots everywhere, like the most lofty of trees. For in that way will we achieve the greatness that is marked and destined in our blood.
The Portugals have done a fine thing by opening Africa, by the efforts of their valorous explorers of more than an hundred years ago. But they have opened only its edge, with their ports widely spaced, and have made no successful ventures to the inland.
I think the Portugals could be displaced with ease—or, better, peacefully contained and overmastered—if we were to move from the Cape of Bona Speranza upward, and through the interior. Then the wealth of Africa would be ours: not its slaves, nor its elephanto teeth, but the truer richness of its farmland and its pasture. We could build a second England in that wondrous fertility, an England fifty times as grand as ours.
And if we went among the blacks not as tyrants and overlords but as elder brothers, giving them our wisdom and forcing nothing upon them, I think we might incorporate them into our commonwealth as partners, rather than slaves. This is a most bold and strange idea: but I do know those people, more closely than anyone else of England, and I tell you it could be done, if only we grasp the nettle now, and seize our moment. For in another fifty years it will be too late; the Portugals and Dutch and French will have sliced Africa amongst themselves, and they will destroy it, as in the New World so much has been destroyed already by the coming of greedy men of Europe.
So that is my vision. Of course, there is another vision as well, which I may not forget, and that is the vision of the Imbe-Jaqqa Lord Calandola.
That dark being comes to me yet, in my sleep or sometimes even as I sit by the fire, drowsing over my ale. He visited himself upon me just a week before, turning solid out of a pillar of smoke, in the way of magic, and filling my sight, that enormous hulking mass of power, black as night, shining with the evil grease on which he dotes.
“Andubatil?” he said, in that voice deep as the deepest viol.
“Aye, Lord Imbe-Jaqqa!”
“Are you comfortable, there in England? Look, the white snow falls outside. Do you not freeze?”
“I am inside, Lord Calandola.”
“Come back. Come and join me, and bring a hundred English of your quality, and many muskets. For we will soon march. The world cries out for destroying.”
“I have no taste for destroying, Lord Calandola.”
“Ah, Andubatil, Andubati! I thought you were one of us! I thought you had adopted my wisdom. Look ye, you dream of building great empires as you sit there dozing: that I know. But it is altogether wrong, Andubatil! Tear down! Build nothing! Make pure the earth! The great mother is stained and defaced by all this building. Can you not hear her weeping? By my mokisso, it is loud as thunder in my hearing! I still see my task, and I yearn to complete it.”
“I think you will not succeed, O mighty Imbe-Jaqqa!”
He laughed then his diabolic laugh, and said, “I sometimes fear you may be right, Andubatil. There is not time, there is not strength enough. I have had defeats, and they have wasted years for me. But I will persevere at it. It would have been easier, had you been loyal, and not betrayed me. But I do forgive you. Did not your Lord Jesus know betrayal, and forgive his Judas?”
“You are not content with being Satan, you must be Jesus as well, O Imbe-Jaqqa?”
“I am the world and all it contains,” said the Lord of Darkness unto me. “I grant you forgiveness, and I call you back to my side, and we will be brothers, you and I, the white Jaqqa and the black.”
“Nay, Calandola. That is all over for me.”
“Is it, then? But there is Jaqqa in you. There is Jaqqa in every man, Andubatil, that I know: but especially is there Jaqqa in you. It is a part of you and you can never escape it.”
“But I can resist it, Lord Calandola. That is my pride: that I do resist the Jaqqa within my soul, and put him down, and triumph over him. Go, Lord Calandola, let me be: I am old, I have no wish left to wage war, and I have defeated you within my heart.”
“Ah, and is it so?” It is so.
“Very well,” said he. “I will go on alone. And if I have not time enough for my task, why, there will be other Imbe-Jaqqas after me. I know not who they are, and peradventure they will be Jaqqas with white skins, born in your Europe, or in lands yet unknown. But they will rise, and come forth, these kings of the sword, and they will complete my work, and sweep away that thing which is known as civilization, and then will the earth be happy again. That I do foretell, O Andubatil. That I see quite clear. And now farewelclass="underline" but I think I will return to you again.”
And he did turn once more to black fog, and was gone, and I sat alone with my tankard.
I pray he be wrong in his vision.
Yet with a part of my soul, that is perverse and mysterious to mine understanding, I do almost welcome such a sweeping away. It would be like unto the flood of Noah, ridding the world of evil. You see, do you not, how intricate I am, that talks in one breath of building empires, and in another of purging them? But you know from the tale of this my long adventure that I am a man of opposites, and great inner differences. I would not have the world despoiled; and yet I see the strange beauty of the Imbe-Jaqqa’s dream. And if the end is to come, and he is to have his way, why, perhaps it will be for the best, since that it would give us a new beginning, if only the best of us survive and endure and prevail, to build again. For so the eternal cycle goes, from building to destroying to building again.