6
Phantoms visited me in my fevered sleep.
First came a horde of lanky Jaqqas, led by one who was a veritable Jack-o’-legs, nine feet tall and black as night. I lay tossing and moaning on some foul straw pallet and out of the darkness of the jungle appeared these diaboli, with their eyes blazing like circlets of white flame. About me they marched, round and round and round. One of them played on a flute fashioned of bone, and one wore over his head and shoulders a coccodrillo mask, all snout and teeth and smile, and one beat on a drum that was made of human skin, still showing birthmarks and other such blemishes. And they sang to me in their Jaqqa tongue, but I understood their song, which was a song of death, a song of fury.
And so forth, long skeins of doggerel imbued with a hellish vigor and enthusiasm.
Before my dreaming eyes these black fiends fell upon the village, and I knew it to be the village of Muchima, where I saw them arrange in a secret circle and burst inwardly on the hapless fisher-folk, and strike them with their spears, and slit their gullets with knives of bone or polished wood, until the dead lay in heaps. Whether I closed my eyes or kept them open I saw the same sight, a slaughter most dread, followed by a feast much like the one I had viewed in Brazil, of human meat. There was one difference, that instead of devouring their victims one by one, these Jaqqas took an immense cauldron the size of a barque or caravel, and filled it with water that at once bubbled and sparkled, and thrust the villagers into it by the dozen, so that they floated and drifted while they boiled, and the meat came loose from the bones. And when it was cooked the greatest of the Jaqqas, the giant one with a body like a god’s and a dangling long member like a black serpent, took to me a thigh and an arm and said, “Here, English. Take and eat! Take and eat! In this flesh will you be healed!” And I had no choice but to eat, but lo! the meat was tender and graceful, and power poured into my ailing body, until I rose from my bed and danced among the Jaqqas through the smoking ruins of the harmless village.
Such was my phantasm. There was no truth in it but only that of a disordered mind. But there was prophecy in it, I would discover. There was vision and oracle. A day would come when I would witness at close range the Jaqqas at their play, and though what took place was very little like that of my fever-dream, yet there were certain monstrous similarities indeed.
The Jaqqas sang and danced and feasted and were gone. And I lay sweating and vomiting, thinking, I must not yet be dead, because I feel pain in every joint, and death is said to bring relief from such dismay.
After the Jaqqas, there came into my room Her Protestant Majesty Queen Elizabeth.
She was garbed all in resplendent white, with sparkling gems set into her robe, and a trim of white ermine that had been brought her from the dukedoms of Muscovy. The crown was on her head, with spikes of gold that rose as high as long fingers, and atop each spike was a little ruby or emerald carved most cunningly in the shape of a man’s head, just like the pickled heads of the traitors that stand on pikes along London Bridge. She carried the scepter and the orb as well, but these she put down, and she leaned over my bed so that her lustrous red hair dangled in my face and I felt her cool sweet breath and saw the luminous wonder of her smile.
“Poor Andy,” she murmured. “How you suffer for me!”
And took my hand in hers, and stroked it to draw the heat from my flesh, and said softly, “I remember how it was, when I had the pox and was like to die of it, and everything was alpha and omega for me all at once. It’s like that for you, is it not? But I recovered and you will recover of it, too, and grow strong, and when you return to me I will name you Duke, eh, Andy? The Duke of Angola. The Earl of Masanganu. And give you land and castles and ten thousand pound a year, for you are my only son, in whom I am well pleased.”
And much more drivel of the same sort, telling me tales of the court, the doings of the Earl of Leicester and Lord Burghley and Sir Walter Ralegh and all that crew, and then she spoke of her dread sister Spanish Mary, Mary Tudor, who died in the year of my birth, and who would have had us all Papists if she had lived. The Queen whispered to me of Bloody Mary’s chilly couplings with her husband, the very same Philip who has become King of Spain and Portugal, and told me such mocking gross things as I blush to reveal in this telling, for that they came not out of any true gossip but only out of the stews of my own mind, however fevered. She told me also similar tales of the Pope and his catamites, and then she said, “And if you die on this bed, Andy, take not the unction from the Portugal priest, but go with my own dispensation, that frees you of all blame, for I am God’s vicar in England,” and such stuff. And wiped my forehead with a damp cloth, and gave me sweet thick syrup to drink, and rested my head against her breasts, which were wondrous soft, contrary to the vile stories that are told of her. But I was fevered. For as the Queen cradled and caressed me she was transformed in my melting brain to my sweet Anne Katherine, whose breasts I knew well, and soft indeed they were. In the deep valley between them I had my repose, and she ran her fingers over my matted and tangled hair and sang of love and peace.
“Good Anne Katherine,” I said. “Take me to you!” Her body was bare, all pink and gold, and from it came the fragrance of grass in springtime and violets in bloom, or lilacs, and she opened her arms to me and gathered me to her. And my body rose to her, my manhood stiffened and I felt the warm wet place between her thighs where I was to go, and as I entered her something happened that was passing strange, for she darkened and grew smaller and became my other wife Rose Ullward, that had died of the pox. The change took only a moment from the fair woman to the dark, the tall to the small, and I cupped her breasts, which were wondrous round and full for so tiny a woman, and put my face into the hollow beside her cheek along her shoulder, and ran my lips along her skin, but the skin seemed cold to me. And well it might be, for the Rose I embraced was the Rose who lies to this day in the churchyard at Plymouth, all bone and staring eyeless sockets, which gave me great horror.
I screamed long and severely from that vision. And there came someone to comfort me, who patted my brow and spooned a medicine between my lips. I dared not open my eyes, fearing another skeleton, but a familiar voice said, “Have no dread, Andy, you are mending well.” It was my father. I looked to him and there he was as in life, dressed finely with tight dark hose and fine velvet breeches and a brown leather jerkin, and a doublet all chased with patterns of gold, and the cloak of a great gentleman, and leather purse at his waist, saying, “You were ever my pet, my favorite, the child of my late years, and I will guard you now, I will defend you against all harm, for I am your father and your mother both, and your pilot as well in this sea of storms.” I clasped his hand and he turned to smoke and was gone, which seemed to me to say, There is no true pilot except for yourself, and you must sail your own course in this world, where no other soul can truly aid you. But perhaps I am wrong to take such phantasms so earnestly.
I know not how long I tossed in these dreams. It may have been days or weeks or months.
There were many more. My mind was wholly cut loose from its moorings and I could not distinguish between dream and wake, day and night. Sir Francis Drake came to me and vowed to teach me all his craft of the sea, I know, and then there was a priest who offered me Romish comfort, with wafers and wine, which I think I may have accepted, and I do recall Thomas Tomer’s young Muchima bedmate, with her firm breasts, jutting in that manner of newly sprouted ones, and her little teeth filed to sharp wedges. She ran her mouth over me, kissing me and nibbling me, the way a barber might cup for the ague, raising little welts here and there, which I did not find objectionable. I found nothing at all objectionable, after a time, in anything. Let the Jaqqas dance in the room, let my Anne Katherine become my Rose become a skeleton, let Papist incense burn, it was all the same to me, for I was dying and the things of this world were all one, they had no heavy significance: baubles of air. I had sup with Bloody Queen Mary one hour and her father Great Henry the next. I had good Jesus and all His disciples, and Peter and James and Thomas did a juggling-show for me that made me laugh and clap. I danced with coccodrillos in a fine galliard. I dined at the court of the High Khan of Cathay and with the Grand Duke of Muscovy, and I walked down the long marble gallery of the lords of Byzantium, and I drank the golden wine of Prester John. I coupled with dolphins and serpents and the daughter of Pharaoh. I wandered into ages yet to come and into time gone by. I floated from one miracle to another, in a daze, in a rapture, and I had no wish for it ever to end.