“Do the Jaqqas then make alliances with other peoples?” I asked.
“When it suits them,” she replied. “Just as the wind makes alliances with seamen, when it fills their sails and sends them where they wish, and other times comes upon them in gales and snaps their masts. We never know, until we find out.”
Fat old Governor Serrão was so shitstricken by fright that he desired to retreat before this preponderous enemy army, but his officers impelled him to attack. One of those who urged the battle on him was the same Captain-Major Pereira now in hiding in the neighboring land. On the last Monday of the year the Portugals met their foe and were most terribly defeated, and fell back many leagues toward Masanganu. In this withdrawal, it is said, Governor Serrão fought valiantly against his pursuers and ably protected the rear guard of the Portugals. For some time the army lay besieged at Masanganu, until reinforcements came up from São Paulo de Loanda and relieved them. Soon after this disastrous campaign Serrão took to his bed and yielded up the ghost, and was succeeded by Pereira.
“And now?” I asked. “With Pereira fled, will the city be invaded?”
“We wait,” she said. “We pray. We watch for omens.”
I thought secretly it would be no great disaster for me if King Ngola or the Jaqqa Chinda or any other of these heathens came in here and put São Paulo de Loanda to destruction. With luck I would show them I was no enemy to them, and my yellow hair might be the flag of my freedom. And if the ocean ran red with Portugals’ blood, what was that to me? I held no love for them; I had not yearned to be here; what had I had from them, in these two years, but chains and dungeons and mush to eat, when I would fain have been in England?
Yet I kept these thoughts to myself.
There was no invasion that month, or the months thereafter. My strength grew under the care of Dona Teresa and the black nuns of the hospice. I took my first few tottering steps; I held down solid food, and even some wine; I washed and dressed myself; I left my cell, under guard, and walked weakly in a courtyard of the hospice. Once I came to a place where a mirror was, and I saw my face and knew how close I had come to death: for I was haggard and weathered, with deep seams in my cheeks and a raccoon’s rings around my eyes, and my color was bilious and my look was rheumy—and this after months and months of recovery! I have always known that my Protector watcheth over me, for in our harsh world it is a triumph simply to live beyond childhood, but I think I must have more lives than most cats, and that I surrendered one or maybe two with that plaguey ailment that I got in fever-cursed Masanganu.
Now the return of my health brought me little joy, though. For as soon as I was seen to be walking and putting meat to my bones, a fine-feathered captain of the Portugals came to me and said, “You are transferred to the prison. Make yourself ready and come with me.”
I protested, but in vain. I demanded to speak to the governor, but of course there was no governor. I urged that I was already enrolled in the service of the colony, as a pilot on the governor’s pinnace. Was that madness, to beg to toil for the Portugals, and be shipped, if I won my suit, back to Masanganu, that had all but slain me? I think not. For it is hateful to moulder in a dungeon, and pride must be put aside when freedom, or a semblance of freedom, can be had.
This captain, who was a decent man as Portugals go, felt sympathy for me. But Governor Pereira had ordered that I be imprisoned, and a prisoner I must be, since there was no governor here to countermand Pereira’s foolish order, and no one else dared take it upon himself to find another disposition for me.
So I was hauled roughly back to the presidio on the heights of São Miguel overlooking the town. And when I angrily pulled my arm free from one of the Portugals who was conveying me thither, another struck me from behind with his cudgel such a blow in the kidneys and I fell gasping and vomiting, and thought I would give up my spirit there in the dust.
They returned me to the same beshitten subterraneous dungeon where Torner and I had been penned on our first arrival in São Paulo de Loanda. And the gate closed. And there I sat in the dimness and the stench. And there I was forgotten once more. My jailers brought me food twice a day, and water, and once a week they asked if I wanted to have a priest hear my confession, which I declined. Of other human contact I had none, for more weeks than I care to sum.
I thought I would go mad.
I wondered if it were better to have died.
It was one of my deepest testings. I had no Torner to amuse me with rough seaman’s talk and gossip of home; Dona Teresa did not visit me; the kind Barbosa, who had brought me wine on my first stay in this stinking keep, was no longer in Angola, or else had given up concern for me. I petitioned my jailers constantly for an audience with some authority of the colony, and they answered me with jeers, or spittle, or sometimes with their fists, which split my cheek and cracked a rib another time.
“Will you have a priest?” they asked again and again.
“Nay,” I said, “he will not free me, will he?”
7
In these dark months of bitter solitude I found only one entertainment, which was to hold conversation with imagined companions out of my lost happy life.
Anne Katherine I often addressed, saying, “This gold of the Indies I bring to you, to hang between your breasts and dangle from your ears and shine on your wrists.”
To which she replied, “And will you go to sea again, Andrew, now that you have won this treasure?”
“Nay, never. All that hauling of ropes and lines, all that furling and unfurling, the tarring and mending, the sun and the black thirst swelling my tongue—nay, nay!”
“But it was your great adventure, love.”
“Indeed so, and I would not have missed it. But the harbor is reached, and now it is time to sow and reap, and dine on cheese and wine, and see increase, and give thanks and sleep in a good soft bed, and one day to die in bed, too, full of years. Come here to me, sweet.”
And her breasts in my hands, and her lips on my lips, and our tongue-tips touching and our breaths mingling, and our bellies meeting—yea! Our seed rushing one to the other, and her sighs soft in my ear—
I spoke with my father. “Tell me the secrets of your craft,” I begged him, “so that I can be of use to these Portugals, and lever myself into freedom.”
“And would you aid them, then?”
“It is not so bad a thing. Do I serve God better working at a trade at sea, or lying in my own piddle in this black hole? Tell me of piloting, I pray.”
“You must first learn the tools,” he said. “Your task it is to know the water, the capes and shoals, but also your position in the universe, and for that you must have tools. Here: this is your cross-staff. See, hold the end to the eye, and move the cross-piece thus, until it corresponds exactly to the distance from the horizon of the star you observe, and that will tell you your altitude from the horizon. Do you see? At dawn and at dusk this is your guide. And this, here: this is your astrolabe, that you hang from this ring, and move the disk so. And here: study this book, the treatise of the Jew Pedro Nunes, on the uses of the compass, and such fine matters.”
“There is so much to know, father!”
“Aye. Twelve years, to make a proper pilot. Caping from one landfall to the next, taking the soundings of lead and line, telling the hours, making your memory into a rutter for all the world, mastering the currents and tides, keeping your charts safe and adding to them for those who follow after you—so much, so much! And you will be a pilot for the Portugals?”
“Nuno da Silva piloted for Drake, father. And Simon Fernandes, the Portugal, was it not he on Walter Ralegh’s Falcon in 78 in that doomed venture of Sir Humphrey Gilbert?”