For a moment all was tranquil in the place where we stood. My friend did turn to me with warm gratitude in his eyes, and he began to speak. But such calm on the battlefield is both deceptive and perilous, for oft it leads to worser things. All of a sudden a shower of arrows burst upon us in our clearing. One of them pierced me, taking me high in the back just where my left arm grows from my trunk. It passed through the flesh while not hitting vital parts. But so intent was I on other matters that I think I did not take the trouble to feel the fire of it; for in the same instant another arrow caught Barbosa through the throat, standing out on both sides of his neck like some new kind of ornament that I hope unto God does not become the fashion in any land where I may end my days. He said something that was only half a sound, all bubble and gurgle, and his eyes went very bright and then lost their sheen. I caught him as he fell, but there was no saving him: his wind was interrupted and he was already choking on his own phlegm and blood, or perhaps even then dead. All I could do was lower him gently to the ground.
In so doing I perceived for the first time the pain of my own wound. It burned like the stinging of a thousand thousand bees all biting in the same place. The shaft was slender but long, and jutted cumbersomely about me. But one of the Portugals, running up, employed some trick of chopping off the feathered end and driving the main part of the shaft swiftly through the wound, which knocked the breath from me but freed me of the arrow.
“Come,” he said. “There is still a moment for fleeing.” I looked about. Barbosa was wholly beyond my help. The archers were aiming elsewhere at the moment, for other bands of Portugals were deployed on the far side of the crest. Most of our people had begun their flight to safety, and now I would do that also. I turned me away from that place of horrors and ran, stumbling and falling, rising again, stumbling, rolling once headlong into the warm sand, getting up, stumbling onward. I did not think I would live another ten minutes; and just then I was so weary and so sick at heart that I almost welcomed my release.
11
I reached the far crest; I dropped to the ground and wriggled once more through an infernal hedge of those leafless thorny plants; I arrived to the far side, where all was quiet, and looked back and saw the battle raging in the distance. It was moving ever onward away from me, and now was only a muddle of distant shouts and bells and drums, an event seen through a haze. I crouched there and suddenly I began violently to weep—not from grief, I trow, nor from fear, but only from the complete black weariness of my body and spirit, in every bone, in every fiber. But I took some kind of healing from the tears.
When that fit was done, and it was only a brief one, I did examine my wound and I found it to be ugly and raw but not in a large way damaging: there was a numbness about the place where the arrow had ripped through the flesh, and I knew that later on I would feel a pain and an aching where now I could feel nothing, but it would not otherwise hamper me. For the moment I was in more of discomfort from the hundred fiery cuts and gouges in my skin than from that wounding.
I scouted about and found seven Portugals, all wounded in great or slight fashion, that were hiding nearby in the sands. We gathered ourselves together, a sad and battered remnant. I knew none of them, for they all were the soldiers of São Tomé; but two of them recognized me, having seen me during my visit to that island. One, that had a horrid wound to his jaw, did a sort of grin with half his face and said, “We could use that slave-girl of yours here now, English, to bind up our injuries, eh?”
I made a shrug my sole reply. At that time I did not think I would see my Matamba ever again, and I was heartsore over the death of Barbosa, who of all the Portugals I had encountered in these years of my captivity had been the truest and gentlest of friends, and whose body I had not even been able to rescue from the vultures that already were darkening the sky.
Shortly afterward came two more Portugals to us, men of São Paulo de Loanda, who told us that Balthasar d’Almeida and his fellow general had made their escape by horse, but that nearly all the other Portugals had been slain by the remorseless warriors of Kafuche Kambara.
“The dead ones are the happy ones,” said one of the São Tomé men. “Theirs was a swift going. Ours will be slow and very thirsty, I wager you.”
With that he commenced an uttering of gloomy prayers.
“Wait,” I said. “In five days we can be at Masanganu, can we not?”
“Do you know the way?” asked another Portugal.
“And where will we have food or drink?” said another.
“The blackamoors will hunt us down,” muttered one other. “We are already dead men, only we still do move about, and deceive ourselves thus that we live.”
I wanted to make some inspiring speech, as I had long ago made when I was a castaway in Brazil and found myself also with men of melancholy and defeated aspect. But I could not force the words past my lips. I was too morbid of soul myself just then, too close to mine own defeat. Even though the heart of the battle now had passed us by, and we were not likely again to be molested by our enemy, we now faced a task beyond all possibility, of marching back without supplies and without knowledge of the route across this terrible desert, having no weapons to fend off beasts of prey, and bearing wounds that from day to day were sure to sap such little strength as now we had. I did not intend to give myself up to despair, for giving up is not my style and despair is not my favored tipple. But neither am I prone to embracing folly, and folly it did seem indeed to think we would come alive out of this place. And so I had little to say or think by way of good cheer.
The Portugals went at their praying. They passed around some beads that one man had, and a crucifix of another. I did not partake of the comforts of those objects.
For all their devotions, though, these men had little true faith. For one did declare, “God hath forsaken us,” and the others nodded and took up the theme and embellished it, with many a somber statement that we had for our sins been cast into this valley of the shadow. And at this sort of dark talk something rose up in me that I think is wholly English within me, that does not like to rush forward and claim defeat as a bride, and, though I had not changed my own estimates of the chances of our surviving, I burst out with, “Nay, what good do such words do us? We are alive thus far, are we not? When all our comrades are dead? Rejoice in that much, that we yet live.”
“Not much for rejoicing am I, Englishman, when I know I have but days to live.”
“Fear not,” I said. “God will provide.”
“Aye,” said the Portugals bitterly. “He will provide more torment, and He will provide more pain, and a lingering slow brutish death.”
There was no use disputing it with them. We sat and stared and waited in silence for the day to end, for in our weakened state it seemed best to move about only in the cooler night hours. One of the Portugals, who had some skill as a surgeon, moved among us, binding wounds and offering bites of fruit from a pouch he carried. I marveled at that—that he would share his food and not save it all for himself, as I imagined a Portugal would do; but that was not right of me to think, for Portugals are not vile people, even if they have not in every way our English notion of honor. The sweetness of the fruit did refresh me, and I stood and walked about, though my head was swimming with my tiredness.