With Torner gone I felt monstrously alone in this strange dark land. He had been a boon companion, a man of my own kind with whom I felt comfortable, and a wise head against which to toss ideas; and now I was by myself among a wild stew of Portugals and Jaqqas and Kongos and all the dozen other kind of blackamoors, with no one to guide me but my own wit. That was a heavy burden, though I think I bore it well enough as things befell.
My talking with Dona Teresa left me weary and she went from me, which was to my regret, because her presence gave me vigor. She seemed then to me a saint of charity and kindness. I slept and woke and slept and woke, and others brought me food, and then on the third day she returned. I was stronger, strong enough to reach a hand toward her as she entered, and to try to sit up a bit.
When I had eaten I said, “I think I will soon be able to leave this bed, and walk a little. And then I want to go out into the sunlight and quit this hole.”
“Ah, you may not.”
“In truth? Why not?”
“Because you are imprisoned.”
“Nay,” I said. “I dealt on that matter with Governor Serrão. He invited me into Portuguese service, and I agreed, and I served as pilot on the governor’s pinnace when I brought it down from Masanganu. Why imprison me now?”
“No one knows. The decree was set down, and you are not to be freed. Outside this room a guard stands at all time, to restrain you from leaving.”
I had to laugh at that, me too weak to put my legs to the floor.
Then I leaned toward her and said, “Dona Teresa, are you my friend?”
“That I am,” she said. And in that moment I for the first time doubted her, because I saw a glint in her eye, a strangeness, a kind of Satanic mischief, even, and I wondered how much a saint she might truly be. Where came those thoughts I hardly know: I think it was her great beauty that frightened me, and a certain foreignness, the full extent of which I did not then understand, that made me wary of trusting a Portugal no matter how kindly. But even as I was having these misgivings of her she said warmly enough, “What service can I do?”
“Go to Governor Serrão,” I urged, “and remind him that he and I came to a treaty, and that I said I would serve faithfully and—”
“Governor Serrão is dead.”
“Ah, then! When?”
“Many months past. There was a war against King Ngola and his allies, which went badly for us, and soon afterward Serrão fell ill and died. The troops elected the captain-major once more, Luiz Ferreira Pereira, to take his place. It is Governor Pereira who ordered you imprisoned.”
“Why?”
She shook her head. “That is not known. Perhaps he simply did not want to think about you, since he had so much else on his mind. There was an order posted, that the Englishman is to be kept apart, as prisoner. Which made no difference to you, since you raved and dreamed, and everyone thought you would die anyway, though you did not. When you have your strength again you will be transferred to the prison at the presidio.”
“Nay, nay, nay! Will you go to this Governor Pereira for me, and tell him how Serrão dealt with me, and that I am more useful to him in his service than in his jail?”
“But Pereira is gone to São Salvador.”
I was blank at that name. “Where?”
“It is in the land of Kongo. He left three months ago, and I think he will not return. They said he had urgent business to do there, but I think he is only in fear of the Jaqqas, who are said to be gathering strength to invade this territory.”
“So there’s no governor here at all?”
“None.”
“Who rules?”
“No one. All is without center or motion here. They say a new governor is on his way from Portugal, but we are not sure. We wait. We live. Time goes by.”
Once more I felt helplessness overcome me. These Portugals! The fat old governor dead, the new one fled, the next one not yet come, and what of me, what of me? Was I to rot forever, while they went about their ninnyhammer foolery? Well, and well, there was no use fretting myself over that now. So long as I had not the strength to walk as far as my own pisspot three feet away, it mattered little whether I was in the hospice or in the dungeon. And perhaps by the time I was strong enough to rise, the new governor would be here.
My strength did indeed come quickly back to me, in the weeks that followed. I was served occasionally by Dona Teresa, but more often by black nuns of the hospice, and always it disappointed me when one of them came into the cell and not she.
But she was there often enough, and slowly I learned things from her about herself. She was in fact just eighteen: I was right in that. And she was no Portugal, or rather, only by parts. I found that out by asking her how long it had been since she had come out from the mother country, and whether she had been born in Lisbon, which made her laugh. “Ah, nay, Andres”—so she called me, Andres—”there are no women of Portugal in this place.”
“What are you, then, a witch-child? A changeling blackamoor?”
I was closer to the truth than I knew. She told me that she had been born in the Kongo, in that same city of São Salvador where Governor Pereira had now sequestered himself. The Portugals had arrived in that neighboring kingdom to the north nearly a hundred years before, had settled there and had extended themselves into the blood and veins of that land in a peaceful invasion, filling the Kongo folk with Portuguese ideas and ways, and filling the Kongo women with something else, which you can imagine. Taking the black women for their wives, they brought forth a race of mixed blood, and then later Portugals married into those, and so on and so on until a strange interbreeding became the rule, producing such wonders as Dona Teresa. To my eye she looked a pure Portugal. But some of the blood in her veins was Kongo blood.
Knowing that of her, I understood my early moment of fear. She had done nothing but serve me, dutifully and without cavil, in my illness. Yet I misdoubted her for being a Portugal, and now I misdoubted her worse, since I had no idea where her real loyalties might lie, except to herself, and to the mixed blood that coursed within her. The jungle had its savage imprint upon her somewhere.
She had not been in Angola long—I think she had arrived only some months before my coming. What she chose not to tell me was that she was the mistress of a certain great fidalgo or grandee of the Portugals in the Kongo, one Don João de Mendoça, and upon the death of Governor Serrão this Mendoça had removed himself to Angola, thinking to make himself powerful there.
When she had told me these things of herself, I asked her also to tell me of events in the Angolan land during my time of delirium.
That was much, and none of it good. Shortly before Christmas Governor Serrão had completed his preparations for the war he had so little stomach to fight, and moved against the enemy. His army came to just one hundred twenty and eight Portuguese musketeers—with three horses—and some fifteen thousand native allies, armed with bows. That sounded to me like a mighty force indeed, but Dona Teresa shook her head, saying, “The black folk here are gentle, and frighten easily. And when they are faced with the armies of King Ngola their loyalty to Portugal quickly melts.”
This King Ngola was the ruler of the place, for whom the Portugals gave the land its name. Serrão took his army across the River Lukala and advanced east to a place far inland, where Ngola was waiting for him with a huge force of his own and the troops of the King of Matamba and a detachment sent by the King of Kongo and also, said Dona Teresa, certain forces of the Jaqqas known as the Jaqqa Chinda.