Black Pearl

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘We still have to move pretty quickly,’ insisted Richard, easing off his suit jacket and crossing to hang it in the wardrobe. ‘It’s like a multiple pile-up. She’ll be fine till the wheels come off. Then she won’t be fine at all. All within a second or so. You know how quickly it can happen.’

  ‘Don’t I ever!’ answered Robin, with feeling. She beckoned him back so that he could unzip her dress for her. As Richard pulled the long zip down, his mind was miles away from the warm, silk and lace-encased flesh that the parting teeth revealed. Robin had been kidnapped – with Anastasia – some years earlier in Benin La Bas, before Chaka took over and restored order. One moment she and Anastasia had been going to a party, the next they had been helpless prisoners, and it had taken all of Richard’s courage and cunning to get them safely back.

  ‘But give the woman credit,’ Robin continued a little ruefully as he moved back to allow her to step out of the crumpled material, clearly lost in thought. ‘She lives here. Has done for ages. She knows the score – probably better than you do. And she can look after herself. Better than most, I might add.’

  ‘Even so …’ countered Richard, pulling his tie off. ‘She can be unexpectedly fragile. Look what happened the minute she got back from the kidnapping. She went off the rails completely – hanging out with that rock group Simian Artillery, then going on drugs and what-not.’ He began to undo his shirt, frowning with paternal concern.

  ‘As I understand it, she developed quite a passion for the lead singer …’ Robin remarked as she hung up her dress.

  ‘Even though the band themselves had been involved in the drug-related death of her brother …’ He nodded, pulling the crisp cotton out of his waistband.

  ‘No explaining the vagaries of the female heart, my love …’ she observed wistfully, sliding her half-slip down with a wiggle of her hips.

  ‘Says you, Mills and Boon and Barbara Cartland!’ he said, loosening his belt.

  ‘Says me at least. And when the lead singer blew his brains out, she was the one who found him.’ She folded her slip over the back of the chair and paused, looking across at him, regretting the sheer tights. If she had been wearing suspenders, she thought, it would have been easier to get him in the mood. But then again, it was never too hard once he realized what was on her mind.

  ‘Or what was left of him,’ he was saying as he put one foot up on a chair to untie his shoelaces.

  ‘Splattered all over the bathroom walls, floor and ceiling. You can see why she went off the rails. And, I think, why Max just gave up on her and let her get on with it.’ She slid out of the treacherously unromantic tights and kicked them across the room.

  ‘That’s as may be. But we pulled her out of all that so we’re in loco parentis now. We’re responsible for her.’ He stepped out of one shoe and turned to the other.

  ‘You worked in China too long,’ she observed, reaching behind her to unhook her bra. ‘Isn’t that what the Chinese say? You save someone then you owe them, not the other way round?’

  ‘Perhaps. But in this case it’s true. If anything happened to us, you’d want someone like us to watch out for Mary, wouldn’t you?’ He stepped out of his trousers and folded them over the back of his chair.

  ‘And William, though they’re good kids. They’ve never given us a moment’s worry,’ she added, stepping out of her underwear and wondering whether it would be too unromantic to clean her teeth. Her breath smelt of orangey Grand Marnier and lemony wine, with a smoky coffee overlay.

  ‘Precisely my point,’ he said, hopping from foot to foot as he pulled off his socks. ‘We pulled Anastasia back. Now we’re the ones who need to look after her – if she needs looking after. And I just think she may, that’s all. She’s strong. But she’s not that strong. And anyway, there are limits.’

  ‘And the resurrected Army of Christ the Infant is well beyond anyone’s limits. OK, I get your drift.’ She decided to risk it and sat down on the bed, surprised to find herself a little unsteady.

  ‘So we need to get upriver as fast as we can, at least as far as the orphanage, which – if you remember – is named for the last two people who ran it. Both slaughtered and one eaten by the last incarnation of the Army of Christ while Anastasia was forced to look on!’ He stepped out of his underwear and looked across at the bed because his pyjamas were under the pillow. The pillow that Robin was lying on, in fact, looking like a naked blonde Maja waiting for Goya to paint her.

  ‘It’s that bloody Galahad complex again, isn’t it?’ purred Robin indulgently. ‘You really should have left that in the last millennium, my love.’

  ‘Galahad complex?’ asked Richard speculatively.

  ‘Galahad. Knight in shining armour. See a maiden. Assume she’s in distress. Get your lance up and off you charge …’ She settled her hips and wondered whether to go for the Rokeby Venus pose.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t put it quite like that …’

  ‘I would. And if you’re getting your lance up, then I’m first in the queue.’

  He laughed. ‘You always will be. Especially lying around looking like that.’

  ‘You’d better believe it. But there is a problem …’ She pouted.

  ‘Do tell,’ he demanded, crossing towards the bed.

  ‘Galahad had no maiden fair. No one to get his lance up over. I’d rather you were someone else.’

  ‘Lancelot, perhaps?’ he asked, one knee on the duvet beside her.

  ‘Oh, yes. Lance a lot! That’ll do me fine!’

  ‘I can see where this is heading.’ He straddled her easily. ‘Are you Elaine or Guinevere?’

  ‘Both! So you’ll have to be pretty active, sir knight,’ she said, reaching up for him.

  ‘Well, let’s see what we can do …’ He leaned down towards her.

  Later, on the verge of sleep, with Robin snoring contentedly beside him, Richard suddenly had a darker thought arising from their little love game. For Lancelot was not just Sir Lancelot. He was – and this suddenly struck Richard as oddly sinister – Lancelot du Lac.

  Nightmare

  Anastasia Asov struggled against the hands that held her helpless. The clapping and the stamping were overwhelming. Ngoboi, the great raffia-cloaked, ebony-masked, seven-foot-high god of the jungle’s darkest places, whirled and stamped in front of her. Two of his acolytes capered around him, tending to the restless strands of his costume. Apart from Sister Faith, the nun round whom the god was circling like a shark, Anastasia was the only woman there. It was death for a woman to look on Ngoboi – and Anastasia knew she was as good as dead. As dead as poor Sister Faith was doomed to be.

  The Army of Christ the Infant were ranked around the orphanage’s central compound. Those holding guns were stamping in rhythm. Those carrying matchets in their belts were clapping. Their eyes were burning with a mixture of religious awe, murder-lust and cocaine. The boys in Anastasia’s charge were all held captive as petrified spectators behind them. The girls were locked away in the dormitory ready to be raped and slaughtered. And, many of them, butchered and eaten.

  As though etched in silver and jet in the light of a full moon, the army’s terrifying leader was sprawled at his ease on a chair taken out of the chapel. The priest’s chair – for which the poor man would have no further use. Silver-lensed Ray-Bans sat wrapped round his head below the beret and above the ridged horrors of his cheeks, lined with massive Poro secret society initiation scars. Like those on his naked chest that gleamed between the flaps of his gaping shirt. Two hulking lieutenants also in dark glasses stood behind him, one at either shoulder. All three of them, like Ngoboi, held heavy, steel-bladed matchets more than a metre long.

  The heat, like the noise and the terror, was overpowering. Anastasia’s body was running with perspiration as thick and hot as blood. Her ears rang and her head throbbed. She felt like someone watching the approach of a tornado she could never escape. Sister Faith knelt at the heart of it, at the centre of Ngoboi’s whirling dance, in the middle of the compound, t
he still point of the spinning world, until the leader’s Ray-Bans moved fractionally up and down and their movement was echoed horrifically by Ngoboi’s matchet. Up and down went the matchet into the body of the woman kneeling at his feet.

  The mouth between the scarred cheeks below the silvered Ray-Bans split into a huge grin. Anastasia saw that the khat-stained teeth between them were sharpened to needle points, like crocodiles’ teeth. And she realized she was no longer dripping sweat – she was covered in blood. Bathed in the hot, sweet-smelling, iron-tasting thickness of it. Drenched with it. Drowning in it.

  Ngoboi’s hand came down on her shoulder. ‘Miss Anastasia,’ he said, in a soft, female voice. ‘Wake up, Miss Anastasia, you’re dreaming.’

  But the mad god’s coke-wide black eyes still stared at her, white-rimmed and bloodshot, from out of the rough-hewn horror of the ebony mask. The mouth still moved – and now it, too, had those terrible, brown-stained, crocodile teeth, sharpened to tear at human flesh. And the hand on her shoulder still held that red running, gently steaming matchet. ‘Miss Anastasia,’ said Ngoboi, more forcefully. ‘Wake up. Please! You’re having another nightmare.’

  Anastasia opened her eyes. Blinked. Began to focus. Ngoboi’s face slowly became that of newly-arrived Sister Georginah: ebony dark – emphasized by the perfect white of her headdress, illumined by the silver moonlight streaming through the thin-curtained window, but otherwise the opposite of the jungle god’s. Wide, gentle brown eyes, soft lips, square white teeth, a frown of sisterly concern. A silver crucifix instead of a steel matchet in her fist. The hands that held her so relentlessly resolved themselves into tangled bed sheets wrapped around her like a straitjacket strapped round a lunatic. And these in turn explained the sweat-inducing heat. The orphanage’s meagre funds did not run to air-conditioning. Or ceiling fans. Anastasia realized with something akin to horror that, because she had gone to bed naked, she had no idea how much of her was on show between the bindings of the sheets. ‘Thank you, Sister,’ she said gently. ‘I’ll be fine now.’

  ‘Can I get you something? Some water perhaps?’ Sister Georginah was a sweet, naive creature, with absolutely no social sensitivity at all.

  ‘No. Thank you.’ Anastasia wondered whether to struggle into a sitting position; whether to start untangling her body from the sheets. But she didn’t know Sister Georginah well enough to start doing a striptease in front of her.

  ‘Perhaps you would like to pray,’ suggested the young nun anxiously. ‘We can pray together, here and now if you would like. Your dream must have been very horrible. You were screaming and crying most terribly. And you talked of matters that were simply devilish.’

  ‘Perhaps I’ll pray later,’ said Anastasia, and she half meant it. ‘But if you could leave me now, I just want to catch my breath.’

  ‘Of course.’ The sister nodded, straightened, half-bowed and stepped back, as though taking leave of a queen. But now that the crisis was over she clearly had the opportunity to use her eyes in a way she hadn’t when she’d rushed in to wake the dreaming woman. ‘Miss Anastasia! What is that? That thing on your …’

  For an instant the nightmare threatened to return. What thing could the horrified nun possibly mean? Was she still spattered with Sister Faith’s blood? Had Ngoboi scarred her in some way? Then Anastasia understood. ‘It’s a tattoo,’ she said. Her fingers explored her naked belly and found a strip of cloth mercifully across her loins. ‘A big cat. I’ve a gorilla on my back. Result of a misspent youth. Remind me to show you sometime.’

  Sister Georginah turned and fled. Mission accomplished, thought Anastasia wryly. But she’d have to do some serious apologizing and fence-mending later. She pulled herself out of bed and unwrapped the sheet from round herself. It was wet. And her long, lean body was still running with moisture. She padded across to the window, towelling herself with the wet cotton. She stopped. Threw the sheet back on the wreckage of her bed. Stretched her stiff muscles, reached up and peeped out past the edge of the curtain. Her room faced due south across the river, and she could see that the moon was setting between the trees of the delta low in the west down towards Granville Harbour just as the sun was preparing to heave itself up over Mount Karisoke far away in the east.

  On the far side of the river the wild jungle reared, huge and black-hearted. Timeless. Unvarying. Cold and terrifying. The exact, precise opposite of the waxing and waning lights on either side. The place where Ngoboi lived. With a shiver she looked back upriver towards the rising sun. It would soon be time to get up anyway, she decided.

  She needed a shower. Some food. And yes, maybe some spiritual comfort. She might do a lot worse than spending a few minutes in the little chapel clearing the satanic figures of Ngoboi and Odem out of her mind. And the pictures of Sister Faith and Father Antoine, both of whom the Army of Christ had killed in front of her. The whole nightmare, she reckoned, had probably stemmed from her Skype contact with Robin last night, passing on what she understood of poor old Richard’s concerns. Their anxiety for her was a burden she bore cheerfully enough, like any overprotected young adult treated as though they were still a child, though Robin was more like a big sister than a mother. And as for Richard! Well, that was another matter entirely … But still and all, she thought, it was better to have someone worry too much about you than to have nobody caring at all. What was it that had spooked Richard so badly, though? Nothing scared Richard, in her experience. Nothing. Ever. She had heard nothing on the grapevine. The jungle drums remained silent and, surely, if there was any real danger out there, an echo of it would have come out of the dark places, like a rumble of distant thunder. Wouldn’t it? With her mind still full of questions, Anastasia crossed the room again, grabbed her robe and towel from the back of the door, kicked her sandals into the light, watching in case anything unpleasant scuttled out of them, stepped into them, carelessly treading down the heels, then shrugged the dressing-gown on and went off to have her shower.

  As she slopped down the short corridor that took her out of the adult quarters and into the female showers, she tried to replace thoughts of the night with plans for the day – an enterprise she was helped with by the fact that the showers were walled with reeds rather than tile. And that the red-clay sluice, as usual, harboured a harmless grey house snake which she shooed away with a negligent toe before it got a nasty, soapy surprise. The shower was really just a bucket full of water that could be tilted by pulling a rope and whose outpouring was broken up by a rudimentary shower head so that it became a brief, tepid monsoon rather than a solid waterfall.

  She emerged, refreshed. Her mind, like her body, cleansed of the night. With her robe tight at her slim waist and her towel round her surprisingly broad shoulders, she returned to her room, towelled the short shock of her black hair dry and began to dress. In indulgently expensive panties and a bra that was hardly needed, she crossed to her modest desk and checked the old-fashioned paper diary she kept there. Today looked fairly typical. Long on paperwork and short on appointments. So she pulled on a cotton blouse and tucked it into denim shorts before stepping back into her brokeback sandals and – as she was now officially dressed – pulling the backs erect again and buckling them up properly.

  She finished her morning’s work at 11.30 a.m. and had an early lunch with the other orphanage staff. She listened to the reports from the teachers, the maintenance staff and the sisters, noting that Sister Georginah kept her eyes shyly downcast when speaking to her; then, like everyone else in the place, she returned to her room between 12 p.m. and 3 p.m. This time she slept without nightmares and arose, vibrant and refreshed. And it was just as well. At 4 p.m. she met the senior girls in the largest classroom of the orphanage school. The girls were led by a tall young woman called Ado and a young man called Esan – the only male in the room. Both Ado and Esan were technically too old to be kept at the orphanage and both should really have been sent downriver with others of their age to the Ishmael Bible Seminary and then the Benin La Bas University in
Granville Harbour to complete their education. But these young people were different. Esan – which meant ‘Nine’ in Yoruba – was an ex-soldier in the Army of Christ. He had no knowledge of his actual name. General Moses Nlong had called him Esan because he had been nine years old when he was accepted into the army by killing and eating others of his family. The ritual was less brutally pointless than it seemed. Esan had, by that one terrible act, put himself forever outside his family, clan and tribe. Beyond the reach of any of his tribal deities or the jungle gods – except for Ngoboi, whom the army’s brutal leader used to keep discipline and motivation high amongst his troops. Especially the young ones. Particularly when cocaine was in short supply. For all the boys had been introduced into the Poro secret jungle societies. They all believed in the powers of the jungle spirits.

  But Esan had changed sides. Come back into the fold. Used his Poro jungle training to do good instead of evil. He and Ado, also trained in female Sande jungle lore as a child, had helped Anastasia and Celine survive their last confrontation with the marauding army and Anastasia was doing her best to make certain that they would help her and her charges survive in the future. Later on Ado and Esan would take the girls through elementary weapons training and jungle lore. Anastasia would join in. And they would have a five-mile jog through the safe secondary jungle and out on to the farmland on this side of the river before returning for dinner. It was a simple daily routine which – if nothing else – kept the girls fit and confident. And kept the boys – and the local farmers, farmhands, families and occasional passers-by – all highly amused.