Henrique trembled as he pointed toward the small stone fort. “This is a terrible place,” he said. “It is the unfirmest country under the sun. You shall see men in the morning very lusty, and within two hours dead. Others, that if they but wet their legs, presently they swell bigger than their middles; others break in the sides with a draught of water. I dread this place.”
“Are we to be here long?” I asked.
“Some weeks.”
“That could have been worse.”
He looked full upon me. “O, if you did know the intolerable heat of the country, you would think yourself better a thousand times dead, than to live here a week. Here you shall see poor soldiers lie in troops, gaping like camels for a puff of wind. Husband your strength, Englishman: you will need it.”
“Why then is there a fort in such a place?”
“To keep check on the blackamoors, that they do not invade us from without. If anyone is to descend on São Paulo de Loanda, they must needs come this way, or else along the river that lies to the north, the Mbengu, which is not so easy for transit. And there is another reason. There is beyond here a place called Kambambe, as far inward as Muchima lies behind us, and in Kambambe, they say, great mines of silver exist.”
“Indeed?”
Henrique guffawed. “See, the pirate is excited at once by talk of treasure! Know you, English, that we have not yet managed the discovery of the mines of Kambambe. But we know the silver is there. We think that it is the outermost of the mines of King Solomon, in fact.”
“Aye?”
“Aye. Some there be that will say that Solomon’s gold, which he had for the Temple of Jerusalem, was brought by sea out of these countries. And as we make our way to the heart of this land, O English, we will have ourselves Ophir and its treasures, to match the treasures of Peru and Mexico that the Spaniards have had.”
I listened attentively to all Henrique’s talk of the mines of King Solomon, and made note to bring such news to the ear of Queen Elizabeth if ever I returned home. I would have liked to place upon her hearth another Peru, another Mexico.
Poor Henrique saw no golden treasure. Under the ghastly weight of the hotness of Masanganu, which hung upon us like a falling sky, he took a flux and lay shivering with ague in the little house where the Portugals keep their sick there, and every week the surgeon came to him and did a letting of blood, but it gave him no surcease. I visited him and saw him growing into a skeleton day by day, the flesh burning away in his sweat. He had begun by being a plump and hearty man, and now he was a death’s-head and bones, an awful sight, death in life. At the end of two months there was nothing left of him, and he succumbed.
Then an officer at the Masanganu garrison whose name was Vicente de Menezes came to me and said, “You are described in the journals as a pilot, English.”
I was taken aback an instant; and then I recalled the lie I had lied to Luiz Serrão.
“Aye,” I said.
“Well, then,” said this Vicente de Menezes, who was gaunt and green-complexioned and seemed to have the hand of death on him as well, “the pinnace must now be returned to São Paulo de Loanda, with despatches and certain goods, and Henrique is dead. You are commanded to carry her down the river in his place.”
I did not debate the point. No pilot was I, but I had some smattering of the art, and none of the Portugals about here looked to be even faintly skilled. And I think at that point I might have done many things to get myself alive out of Masanganu’s furnace heat, even unto kissing the image of the Madonna, or mumbling Romish jargon—aye, even that, I think. Merely to take command of a Portugee pinnace was a small thing in the saving of my life. So I moved another inch toward my transformation: it might now be construed that I had become an officer in the service of King Philip. God’s blood, the twists and turns life inflicts on us!
And the twists and turns of the river: those at least I remembered, for I am gifted that way. What enters my mind sticks there with a fearful grip. We loaded our cargo, and took our leave, with a crew half the size of the one that had set out upriver, for Henrique and two of his men were in their graves now, and one other was too ill to depart. Those under my command showed no disdain toward me for my Englishness. Why should they, who only wanted to flee this hellish place? They would take orders from the Antichrist if he stood on the quarterdeck.
So we embarked. When we came to Muchima, a day and a half downstream, we saw smoke rising above the palm-trees long before the village appeared, and then came the village. A destroying angel had visited it; or a pack of demons, more likely. A hurricane of murderers had swept through here. The place was sacked and wholly ruined, with corpses everywhere, and steaming mounds of torn-out entrails, and other charnel horrors. It was a hideous sight. The palm-trees that give the wine had been cut down at the root, and the plantations had been dug and rendered waste, and all the fish-nets torn, and the bodies of the people were most hellishly mutilated and sliced apart. So much blood soaked the black earth that it was as crimson underfoot as though we walked on gaudy carpets, or the robes of Cardinals. The Portuguese presidio, too, was sacked and one of the Portugals lay dead and weltering in it, and the other two were gone.
“The Jaqqas, it was,” said one of my men.
Thus I came to understand that the lone black prince we had seen standing on the bank was a forerunner, perhaps a Jaqqa scout and perhaps a notifier of impending doom. The devilish scourge had come to this town and taken all life, even the cattle and dogs. We sought for the bodies of the missing two Portugals, but did not find them. “They are eaten,” a yeoman said, and the others all nodded their agreement.
Torner amazed me by showing tears. For the Portugals? Nay, for the girl he had had, the file-toothed wench on whose unenthusiastic body he had vented his cravings. From one smoking hut to another he wandered, looking for her remains among the frightful carnage. I came to him and took him by the arm and said gently, “What, are you so concerned for her?”
“She was warm and soft in my arms. I would at least give her a proper burying.”
A Portugal came up to us to inquire when we would be going on. I explained quickly that first we sought this certain girl’s body, and he shook his head.
“Nay,” he said. “The Jaqqas kill everyone, but not the boys and girls of thirteen or fourteen years. Those they take captive, and raise as their own. All the rest they slay, and many they eat, but not those.”
This I repeated to Torner. We returned to the pinnace. Such total destruction stunned and froze me. What, was such evil upon the earth in our Christian day? These happy folk snuffed out, and for what? For what? Their very palm-trees cut down, that gave sweet wine? I thought on it, and it was like staring into a wizard’s glass, and seeing such a realm of deviltry and monstrosity that I was thrown into sore fright, as if Pandemonium had broken through upon the earth and would conquer it all, one spot at a time. I felt a sickness of the soul. And in time another kind of sickness; for the next day the first throbbings of fever announced themselves in me, and as we hurried downriver, my head pounded and my skin ran with sweat and my bowels gave way, and I saw things all in pairs, so that I was hard put to steer my craft safely free of the banks of coccodrillos, and by the time I came upon São Paulo de Loanda I was filthy sick. I thought my last hour was galloping toward me.