Every third girl brought a tray of food, crisp young vegetables plucked moments before from the garden behind the house, green onions and fresh tomatoes, mainly, along with a steaming bowl of soup that looked like vichysoisse but tasted far stronger, thickened perhaps with brains. With an appetite fiercer than any he had known since childhood, Bucky devoured the food, washing it down with long drafts of ice water, or lesser gulps of the sweet, guava-tasting wine that the girls offered in chilled, crooked kongoni horns. For ten minutes they encouraged him to eat. Then they went to work.
Tok women were strangely built below the waist. They were equipped with a natural skin skirt—the tablier egyptienne, Clickrasp had told him it was called, during one of the chieftain’s few visits since the mating had begun—that dropped loosely from the top of the pubic mound and covered the front of the genitalia. “It’s found also among the Bushpersons of southern Africa, or the lady Bushmen if you prefer,” Clicky had winked. “Damned if I know what it’s supposed to do. Perhaps it was a failed attempt to reduce female sexuality, by keeping the genitalia covered and thus removing a source of temptation. Could have come in handy in days when early man could not afford frequent pregnancies. Desmond Morris and Robert Ardrey make much of the labia and vagina as surrogate lips. This tablier egyptienne might well be our species’ equivalent of the Moslem veil.”
“Yeah,” Buck had answered, “but it kind of puts a damper on the old missionary position.”
“Not really,” Clickrasp replied. “They don’t mind it a bit, belly to belly. The whole thing just kind of shifts up toward the navel. I think they get a bit of a thrill out of the crinkling.”
By now, though, Bucky had done them every which way—frontward, sideways, upside down—and he knew from experience that they liked it any way they got it. By itself that was a revelation to him. What’s more, they were teaching him the language. Like most good things, it happened quite by chance.
“X’gt’kqhl,” exclaimed the first Toklette he penetrated. “What does that mean?” he asked, a bit fearful that he might have hurt her.
“Nottink a-much,” she had replied, gazing up lovingly at him. Fortunately she spoke a bit of English, as did most of the Tok, though none so fluently as Clickrasp. “Only tat iz feel gootz.”
“I mean, precisely,” Buck continued, pressing her now in more ways than one. “That word. Say it again and tell me, if you can, exactly what it means.”
She had done so, repeating it every time Buck thrust into her, then falling back into her heavily accented English during the respites between thrusts. Later she relayed the word of his linguistic turn-on to the other females who were awaiting his services. Each one taught him a few more words. With the influence of the drugs that kept him sexually eager working also on the level of intellectual curiosity, he soon had a vocabulary of workable Tok phrases, and a vague idea of how their language was structured. Not to mention the creatures themselves.
His favorite was the girl he called Ticklette the Tocklette. Her name actually was X’zqk’, but it came off her palate like a tick. At first Bucky had felt bad about making jokes to himself with the Tok language, but soon he realized that if he took them too seriously, he would not be able to fulfill his function—not just as stud, but as sincere believer in their tiny revolution. Tick, as he first called her, spoke much better English than the others, and loved it when Bucky applied the diminutive to her name.
“Sounds like Chicklet,” she laughed, reaching for his crotch. “But who chews whom?”
She was the grand-niece of Clickrasp, a princess of the Tok, and thus much better educated in the ways of outlanders than the other women. After their first coupling—all mating had been carefully timed by Mrs. Rasp, Click’s number one wife, to coincide with the height of the estrus cycle, the “heat” as Clicky called it—Buck had thought he might have seen the last of her. But Clicky had asked him if any of the ladies deserved a return engagement.
“I feared it might get boring, just one after the other,” he said. “You’re doing extremely well so far, much better than I’d expected, so if you find any one of these fair creatures compelling enough, don’t hesitate to ask for her again.”
Buck had said that he would like to see Ticklette at least once a day, whether they “made it” or not. He liked her company. And she taught him good words.
“You too loom large,” she laughed now, walking up to him as he lay on the hide bed, “at least as large as the buffalo’s horn.” She stood before him, ankles together, pert as an Olympic gymnast. Her smile was wide, and the hair sprawled loose across her smooth shoulders, vaguely masking the luminous, pale-pink nipples that stood erect under the caress of her fingertips. Bucky’s eyes flicked to the wall. He squinted and cocked his head slowly. His focus lay on a mural that depicted a coupling, female astride, her head tossed back, mouth agape, hair flying down her back and across her neatly turned shoulders.
He raised his arms slowly and opened them. Ticklette the Tocklette bestrode him as she might the balance beam.
“Teach me a few more phrases,” he groaned.
Later, when Ticklette had gone, Bucky decided to take an evening stroll. The night was cool so he donned a heavy woolen greatcoat, cut in an early-nineteenth-century manner, that Clickrasp had given him. It had been Mungo Park’s greatcoat, the Tok chieftain said, and Bucky was pleased to see that it fit him perfectly. Park had been a big man for his day. He walked down the winding road toward the village square, passing a few Tok along the way. They bowed and smiled, as he did in return. Two of the women made eyes at him, and he recognized them as former clients of the Blackrod Stud Service (“Satisfaction Guaranteed or You Can Have My Head for Breakfast.”).
At the far corner of the square, over a low, sprawling, half-timbered house with leaded diamond windowpanes, through which glimmered a million shafts of multicolored lamplight, hung a sign that represented the Moor’s Head Inn. It was the only public house in town. The sign was a wish fulfillment of Dr. Park’s, who had built the inn in 1826. It showed the severed head of a beturbaned and ugly despot—that very Ali, ruler of Ludamar, who had held Park captive during his first visit to Africa and nearly starved him to death before the good doctor managed his escape. “Unchristian as it may seem,” Park wrote in his Tok Journal, “I would like nothing better than to see my small compatriots glutting themselves on the brains of that Moorish fiend. Even today, I sometimes wake in the middle watches of the night and imagine myself once more hopeless in his tent. May he and his kind spend all eternity staked out over an anthill—and may God forgive me my thirst for vengeance.”
Though that thirst remained forever unslaked, Park’s less vengeful taste for strong English ale had been amply satisfied. No sooner had he arrived in the capital city of the Tok, initially as their captive and later as their valued sage and friend, than he taught them how to brew beer. “I had with me some few grains of the native corn, Holcus spicatus, and in this salubrious clime it was but a matter of two months before a healthy crop stood ready for malting. My botanical training enabled me to discover a local root containing a bitter principle, which I employed in lieu of hops. Stored in hardwood casks of my devising, it is as fine and strong and frothing a brew as any to be found in Britannia.”
How right you are, Good Doctor, thought Bucky as he pushed through the low oaken door of the Moor’s Head. Inside, the pungent smoke of a juniper fire mixed with guttering yellow light from oil lamps. The customers, Tok warriors and elders, greeted Buck warmly. Three of them interrupted their dart game to come over to the bar and inquire, not unsolicitously, as to the state of his, ah, love life. The innkeeper, a plump, elderly Tok named Tschamm, drew a stoup of ale from the barrel behind the bar and slid it across the dark, scarred, teakwood surface. “Lead in your pencil,” he said, deadpan, and they all laughed.
Bucky took the tankard to a low table in the corner of the inn, under an oil lamp. It was an early-nineteenth-century lamp, of the sort that was designed to burn whale o
il, but Park’s version was fueled instead with shea butter, a compressed vegetable fat from the nut of the karite, or shea tree (Butyrospermum parkii), which the great man himself had discovered and named. With bark like a chestnut and leaves like a pear, the shea tree produces a peachlike fruit the flesh of which is eaten, while the fat surrounding the nut is pressed and strained into a hard white butter which keeps a whole year without turning rancid. The nut has the color, taste, and aroma of cocoa, whose odor in the inn now mixed with that of woodsmoke and beer. Other Parkian memorabilia adorned the inn—portraits in oil and watercolor of various Tok warriors and chieftains, of strange plants and animals peculiar to the high country of Kansdu, a self-portrait done late in his life which showed the explorer gazing steadfastly over a huge bushy beard at a panorama of thorn veldt through which wound the mighty river—was it the Kan, or the Niger? In the yellow light, Park’s eyes looked huge, beatific. Bucky studied the face as he himself chewed absently on a gingerbread cake. Actually, it wasn’t gingerbread, but another Parkian invention. Using the berries of the Rhamnus lotus, a thorny shrub that bears sweet yellow fruit, he had dried them, ground them in a mortar to separate the flour, mixed this with water, and baked cakes that tasted much like gingerbread. Park himself believed that the Rhamnus was the very lotus mentioned by Pliny as the food of the Libyan “Lotophagi.” Bucky was not about to gainsay him.
From the pocket of the greatcoat, Bucky slid a heavy leather-bound ledger. In it, with the spiky well-formed hand now so well known to him, Park had recorded his final journal. It picked up shortly after Park’s “disappearance” under native attack at the Busa Rapids of the Niger, early in 1806, and ran up to the morning of his death on September 10, 1858—his eighty-seventh birthday. Bucky had read most of it, caught up in the explorer’s calm, thoughtful style, admiring him his courage and refusal to give up hope in even the most desperate situations. When Park had been swept down Busa Rapids and then washed ashore far below with broken ribs and a badly fractured tibia, and seen crocodiles approaching him in the mosquito-thick gloom, unable to move, he had recalled a trick his guide, Isacco, had used in a similar situation. When the first croc got within reach, he grabbed it and stuck his thumbs in its eyes. The crocodile slithered away, leaving a wake of reeking, disturbed muck that nearly suffocated the explorer. Then, when a hunting party of Tok discovered him the following morning, and he thought he was hallucinating, he almost wished the great saurians had finished him. But no—the Tok proved gentle, binding his wounds and giving him herbs that eased his suffering. They carried him on a litter deep into the rain forest, then out onto the veldt. For weeks, it seemed, they marched deeper, deeper into Africa. Then they climbed to a highland that reminded Park of his Scottish home—cool, green, pungent with crushed heather underfoot.
The years of his captivity—which soon shaded into willing house arrest, and finally into a commitment to live out his life with these wondrous people—were studded with botanical and zoological discoveries. In return for their kindness, Park repaid the Tok with his medical, botanical, and architectural knowledge. He taught them how to build sturdy cottages to replace the drafty caves and mud huts in which they had previously lived. He taught them sanitation and preventive medicine. He taught them how to play Scots bagpipes and sing Scots ballads. He taught them the warmth of good, strong nut-brown ale and the companionship of the public house. He taught them tea and gingerbread and darts. But he could not teach them Christianity.
“That is my sole regret,” he wrote in his last journal entry, to which Bucky now had turned. “Yet it is not so great nor grievous a regret as once I might have felt. After all, when I chose to return to Africa, knowing the hardships and dangers unto death that I needs must face, I did so from motives then obscure to me but which had nothing to do with the conversion of the heathen, nor the opening of the continent to British commerce, as the Africa Association and Sir Joseph Banks anticipated. I must now admit that I came to see the elephant, as it were, to see this power, this heady mix of life and death, for one last time—and, yes, to perish here. There is that in Africa, as in some narcotic, that addicts one for good or ill. Much as I miss the green hills of home, the winding Yarrow and the tidy cottages of Foulshiels where I was born, much as I miss my loving Ailie and my companions, Walter Scott with whom I rode the moors, my dear brother Arch, the good doctor Anderson who taught me surgery—much as I miss them, I missed this more when I was away. The celebrity which followed the publication of my Narrative only sickened me. The palliative was obvious—the hot sun, the fierce colors, the life-in-death of Africa.
“Here I must come, here I must stay, here I must die. It is a compulsion that overpowers even that of the Christian God, or the Muhammadan for that matter, the African compulsion. Here, I believe, and the Tok would seem to bear me out, man first blinked in wonder and comprehension of the world. Here, under this pounding sun, amidst these fangs and claws, with the blood of men and animals mingling to beauty—the ultimate beauty of the world—here is the only life. Untrammeled by the sordid competitions of commerce, unsullied by the crass pursuit of fame, unmarred by the deceits of politics and power-mongering. How fortuitous that I should have arrived among these people. Unlike the Moors and the tainted tribes I met along the Niger, the Tok, for all their initial ugliness, are pure. The Natural Man of whom the French Revolutionary Rousseau was writing when last I was in Europe. And I, the Man of Science, had something to give them, as they gave me their purity in return. Yes, the only life worth living. And the only death worth dying. Africa. Amen.”
Bucky sat back and pulled at his tankard of ale. So that’s where the torch was lighted, he thought. Ironic. The whole tradition of which Winjah was a final representation had begun here, with this one man, Mungo Park. The tradition of teaching, of bringing light to the so-called heathen. But it had been perverted along the way by commerce and the jealous demands of the Christian God. If only there had been more Mungo Parks.
Hell, he thought suddenly, I can be one!
He smiled and stared at the diamond-dance of the windows.
“Ahem!”
Tschamm, the innkeeper, was standing at Bucky’s shoulder, clearing his throat hesitantly.
“Sorry, guv, but there’s a young lady outside says she’s an appointment wif you. Up at the ’ouse.” Bucky rose and fumbled in his pocket for money to pay the tab, then suddenly realized where he was. The Tok had no money. He clapped Tschamm on the shoulder, winked at the other men, and slipped the book back into the pocket of his greatcoat—Mungo Park’s greatcoat.
“Work, work, work,” he sighed with mock exasperation. “If it’s not one chore, it’s another.”
The men were laughing as he walked out into the night.
26
AVARICE
Two bodies lay beside the ashes of the campfire. Only one was headless. The other, minus its legs from the hips downward, wore the penises of both as a dire bouquet that bloomed from its mouth. A note was pinned to the legless man’s nose.
“I regret to sey that my ordres require me to return to Palmerville if Tok get too tough,” the note read. It was signed “Abner Kodobe, Lieut., K.A.F.”
“Dumb frock can’t even spell good,” grumped Nordquist as he scanned the missive. He picked his teeth with the thorn that had pinned the note. “What it means, he’s yaller!”
The troops were gone, along with their weapons. During the night, after the guards who remained alive had found the bodies, the Kansduvians had decided to decamp. At this point in the campaign, they had been advised back in Palmerville, it could only get worse.
“At least they left all the gazarene,” said one of the ducklings.
“Well, we ain’t goin’ no further anyways,” another replied.
“Oh yeah?” asked the third, probably Heber. Proudly, the lad gazed at his daddy.
Nordquist père plucked his teeth.
“The bogus is still out there,” he said after a long pause. “We gotta stay quick now, caut
ious.”
Winjah glanced over at Donn, who was reclining against the tire of one of the ATCs. Donn winked back at him. Greed and gumption, sure ’nuf. Two days before, the morning after the lion hunt, they had come on fresh buffalo sign near the edge of the rain forest. All day they followed it, catching sight of the herd only infrequently in the heavy low brush that edged the jungle. No one had seen the Diamond Bogo himself, but the tracks indicated a few enormous bulls tagging after the main body. That night the Tok had taken the first guard. They must have moved with incredible stealth, as the man was found not ten yards from the spot beside the fire where Winjah was sleeping. The guard had been beheaded and emasculated.
The next day, still working northward, they had come on the buffalo herd in the open, at the edge of the brush. There were perhaps fifty animals, mostly cows, calves, and young bulls. The big herd bulls were no doubt still lurking in the jungle edges. They waited patiently for an hour, two hours, dead quiet, hoping that the big bulls would show themselves. The herd moved slowly through the tall grass, browsing as it went, lying up for sometimes half an hour at a time under stands of whistling thorn and juniper. Occasionally they caught glimpses of large dim shapes moving ahead of the herd, in the thick brush beyond the grass, but they saw no horns, no gleam of stone.
I’ll bet my butt he’s in there,” Nordquist hissed finally. “What we oughter do, we should set up the recoilless rifle that the troops brought along and just cut loose in there, along through that brush. Or maybe a fifty-caliber machine gun. Yeah, let’s do that!”
“The main herd is in your way,” Winjah said. “If you try to work your way around them, the big bulls will spook.”
“Well, shee-it! We can’t just sit here doin’ nothin’.” He whispered for the Kansduvian officer to come over to him. “Set up that fifty of yours,” he said. “Maybe the herd will move aside and we can get a shot.” The officer looked at Winjah, who cold-eyed him, but obeyed.
The Diamond Bogo Page 16