So did the months and years pass. I felt sure I would give up all the rest of my life in this place, and, curious to relate, I do confess that for some span of time I did not resent that at all. What, you say? Andrew Battell resigned to captivity, a mere passive drudge? Yea, so it was. But I pray you remember that I had left my home in the spring of ‘89 and this was six and seven and eight years after, and for most of those years I had been a prisoner—sometimes under comfortable circumstances, sometimes less so, but at scarce any moment my own master. That had not broken me, but it had dulled my sharp edge of spirit. Though ever yet I dreamed of escaping this dark and sultry land and going again to England, that became little more than a will-o’-the-wisp to me, as remote from reality as is the hope of heaven to a small child.
I labored. I ate. I slept. I sweated. Those were the boundaries of my life at Masanganu. And I tell you, it let the time fly faster by, if I did not give resistance to my captivity. In that place where there is scarce any change of season, where even day and night are nigh the same length all the year round, when only by alternation of wet and dry seasons can one tell winter from summer, and the terrible heat dominates everything, time does indeed appear to glide by in a single unbroken sheet of hours, and I knew not whether the year was 1595 or ‘96 or ‘97. Somewhere far away was an England where yet they had the Easter and the Christmastide and the midsummer frolic, where a Queen ruled in grace and glory over a sparkling court of dukes and lords and knights, where maids were wed and turned into mothers, where constant change and transformation was the rule: and here I toiled in a timeless place of the greatest discomfort and dreariness, and each day was the twin of the last.
Only one interruption in our life of routine occurred, when King Ngola, that was the greatest of the enemies of the Portugals in these parts, did rise up and lay blockade against our presidio. That was in Anno 1597, I do believe.
We had ample warning of this, for our scouts all through the province did tell us an army was massing, with drums of war beating, and a great shouting and flourishing of weapons and ringing of wooden bells by the sorcerers, that are the preliminary rituals of war among these folk. Then they came upon us, first a procession of wizards and warlocks with their bodies wrapped in the strong leaves of the matteba, a tree much like unto the palm, so that it seemed the forest itself did walk toward us; and then the warriors themselves, in all their wild battle-dress, their high headdresses and iron chains and jingling bells and such, the like of which I had seen before in the attack by Kafuche Kambara. There were thousands of them, capering like grotesque phantasms and incubi before us, letting fly with their arrows and darts, and crying out in hoarse whooping tones, and doing a dance of death.
But we had builded well, and were not vulnerable behind the walls of our fort, so that they did rage and bluster for week upon week while doing us no harm. Nor could we harm them, I do add, and had the siege continued many weeks longer we should all have perished of starvation if not of the plagues of the place. We dared not come out of the presidio to our burying-ground, so whenever one of our number died of a malady we did burn his body and scatter the ashes, which may not have been pleasing unto God and Church but which spared us from the spreading of disease. And after a time the main force of the Portugals came up from São Paulo de Loanda under the command of the general Balthasar Rebello de Aragao, and drove off the blackamoors as though they were nothing more than vapors, and set us free. After which, this Rebello de Aragao did descend the Kwanza and build a new presidio near the village of Muchima, in the constructing of which I did take a part.
But then we returned to the old weary life at Masanganu, and again I lost count of the months and the years. There was a day when I learned by chance that I was now living in the November of 1598, so that it was my fortieth anniversary of my birth. That seemed a very great age for me to have attained, especially in the teeth of such many hardships. “I am forty years old,” I said aloud to myself several times over, and strange it sounded in my ears. And then also it was the fortieth year of Her Protestant Majesty’s glorious reign, if indeed she still held the throne. But did she? God save me, I might have been on some other star, for all the news of England I had. Did the Queen still live? And if she had gone on, who now held the throne? Was it James of Scotland, or some French prince, or the King of Spain, or someone altogether other? Nay, I could not imagine anyone else on our throne but she, that virgin and miraculous she; and I could not imagine myself being forty, which meant that my lost Anne Katherine, whose maidenhood I had had from her when she was fifteen, must now be seven-and-twenty, long past the bloom of her youth, almost a matron. Did she still wait for my return? Only a fool would think so. Perhaps she grieved for me, but certain it was she had given her love to someone else, and had by now two children or three, and was growing plump and had a little line of golden hair sprouting on her lip, eh? November of 1598! Forty years old, aye, and a slave in Masanganu!
So the time journeyed, and I grew ever harder and more enduring, and I came up out of my long resignation and bestirred myself to think of escaping this place, before my life’s time was utterly expended.
There was a certain Gypsy of Masanganu that over the years I had come to trust, and he the same for me, because that we had labored long side by side, suffering much and sharing much. He called himself Cristovão, though also he had a Cigano name in their own language, that he did not offer to others. This Cristovão was a small man, very dark of skin, with a hawk’s nose and eyes of the most penetrating sort, and the strength of his body was extraordinary, he being able to lift weights of the heaviness of myself, though being but half my size. On one day of amazing heat, when he and I and some few other Gypsies did labor to rebuild a breach in the wall of the fort, suffering like Jews under Pharaoh, an overseer named Barbosa—but surely no kin of my fallen friend—came upon us as we paused a moment to refresh ourselves. Cristovão had a leathern flask of palm-wine, that he drank from by holding it high overhead and letting a stream of the sweet fluid squirt to his open mouth; and he took a deep draught of it and handed it to me, saying, “Here, Andres, it is time you learned how it be done.”
Whereupon I imitated him, but badly, getting the stream of wine on my cheeks and throat, and he laughed and the other Ciganos also, and Cristovão took the flask from me to show me the trick of it. And while he held it above him, this taskmaster Barbosa appeared and did strike the flask from Cristovão’s hands, crying, “Why are you drinking, and not working?”
I saw the fury in Cristovão’s eyes. Humbly did he stoop and pick up his flask, the wine of which was mainly spilled, and then he cleansed his face where the wine had stained it, and he took several deep breaths of the hot air to constrain his temper, so that he did not strike the taskmaster dead, as Moses did in the land of Egypt. And quietly he murmured curses in the Cigano tongue, for he did seethe with hatred and rage.