The Book of the Heathen

by Robert Edric

  ‘All three men were naked and with their faces painted red, and all were anointed with rancid tallow: black lines around their eyes and mouths. They came and went in and out of the forest, but always returned to the same place, and it occurred to me then that they were waiting for something or someone, a rendezvous.

  ‘As I recovered further and felt something of my strength returning, I tried to communicate more with them. The two hitherto silent ones started to approach me. They brought me fruit. They caught fish in the river which they ate raw. One of them caught a small snake, which he skinned alive and then chopped up and ate while each of its cut lengths was still flexing in spasms in his hands. He approached me with a small piece and I ate it. I chewed it as little as I could – my mouth was raw even then – and after swallowing it I swear I could feel its movement, its dying throes in my stomach. I vomited shortly afterwards, so I imagine I lost most of what I had eaten.’ He raised a hand to his throat at the memory.

  ‘Did it never occur to you that these men might have considered you a prize catch and that they were waiting to decide what they might do with you?’

  ‘At first I believed it possible. But they could easily have killed me where I slept. Or perhaps it is true what is said about white flesh being repulsive to them. I don’t know. My impression was still that they were waiting for someone. Why, otherwise, would they stay so close to the river? And why would one or other of them be endlessly watching for the arrival of a boat? No, I was only an unwelcome interloper, a chance find.

  ‘After three, possibly four, days of this, I sensed a growing excitement among them, a new urgency. Now all three of them stood at the water’s edge and searched. I tried, of course, to ask them who or what they were expecting, but either they did not understand me or they refused to tell me; I suspect the latter. And in all that time they constantly re-applied their paints, attending meticulously to each other’s faces.’

  ‘And did someone come?’

  ‘A canoe. Late one afternoon.’ He cleared his throat, still a painful thing for him.

  It was plain to me that he did not want my interruptions, that what he was telling me set an unstoppable pace of its own.

  ‘A canoe. In which sat the feather-gatherer with small bundles of his wares. Some cages of live birds, but mostly their snapped-off wings and tails and heads to save space. At first I thought the man was alone, and that perhaps these three others either had their own hidden birds and feathers to trade with him, or were collecting something from him.’

  His pause now was a long one.

  ‘And then I saw that there was another bundle on the floor of his canoe. The man was alarmed by my unexpected presence and at first he refused to come to the shore. But the others shouted some reassurance to him and eventually he came. It seemed to me that the four men were already acquainted. The boatman showed no sign of fearing the cannibals, and remained more wary of me than of them. I tried to speak to him, to determine if he too was Aruwimi, but he dashed at me and struck me with the club he carried. He, too, was as naked as they were. I thought at first one of my three reluctant companions might defend me or tell him to stop, particularly as I had imagined they had shown some solicitude towards me.’

  ‘And did they?’

  ‘No. They watched him as he continued to beat me and they laughed at what he did and called out to him, encouraging him to even greater violence. I passed out after several minutes of this – there were often long delays between the blows while he circled me – and when I came round I saw that the four men were sitting together and that they had lit a fire on the high part of the bank. I lay still and quiet, watching them. They smoked and drank from gourds the feather-gatherer gave to them. By then – I reckoned it to be early evening – he too was painted red. Whatever it was they drank must have been potent, for I saw that they were often retching and sick, and that they did this where they sat, making no effort to move back to the river or away from the fire.’

  ‘Another of their liquors,’ I said.

  ‘I imagined so at first. But I realized afterwards that what they were doing was purging themselves, that it was some part of their ritual, and it occurred to me, despite my beating, how fortunate a position I so suddenly found myself in, that I was witnessing the very thing I had set out to find.’

  ‘They were going to eat human flesh? Whose? Did it not even cross your mind that you were—’

  ‘The bundle in the boat was the body of a small girl.’

  ‘A girl.’

  ‘Or at least I imagined it was a body, that she was already dead, but when the feather-gatherer returned to retrieve what lay there, I saw that the child was still alive, that she was trussed and gagged and paralysed with fear and by the understanding of what was happening to her.

  ‘I must have made some involuntary noise at seeing her, because at the same moment she was uncovered, the three others turned to me. I raised my arms to cover my head, but this caused them only to laugh. No-one came to me. Instead, they occupied themselves by smothering the mound of their fire with leaves. This caused the few remaining flames to produce an immense amount of smoke, which drifted low over the river and through the trees, and which hung in a dense pall above us, a low roof beneath which we sat. Only where it floated across the water did this show any sign of clearing. I remember choking on it as it blew around me before rising. They laughed at this, too, and I saw that they were damping down the blaze to contain and increase its inner heat.

  ‘The feather-gatherer picked up the girl by a rope which ran the length of her curved back, tied between her neck and her ankles, as though he were lifting a small suitcase from the canoe. She struggled at being picked up like this, but she was so securely bound that it had little effect. He brought her closer to the fire and threw her down there. I imagined her age to be seven or eight, but it was difficult to be certain because of how she was tied and contorted. I knew that she was still a young child by the thinness of her limbs. She was considerably paler than any of the men, another tribe completely.’ He paused again and took several deep breaths.

  ‘The feather-gatherer told Hammad she was his daughter,’ I said.

  ‘I know. Nash told me. An interesting sequence, wouldn’t you say: the feather-gatherer told Hammad, who told Nash, who told me.’

  ‘Is it true? Was she his child?’

  ‘I doubt it. I imagine she was someone he had taken in a raid and kept alive solely because he believed he might sell her.’

  ‘Do you believe Hammad told the man to say she was his daughter?’

  ‘It would certainly add weight to the case against me.’

  ‘But why? What does Hammad hope to gain by it?’

  He turned to look at me for the first time since he’d started talking. ‘A year ago, I might have said your naïvety did you credit, James.’

  I acknowledged this in silence.

  He waited.

  ‘Go on,’ I said.

  ‘The man who had dropped her by the fire removed her gag and she screamed. I knew by her voice that I was close in my guess of her age. This screaming only served to increase the pleasure of the four men. They were still smoking and drinking and vomiting, and occasionally one of them threw up on the girl, or emptied some of their milky liquor over her. You can imagine how this also added to their pleasure. They were beyond control of themselves, literally out of their senses with their stimulants and purges, and for the first time I began to fear for my own safety. I knew that my pistol was still in my satchel and that it remained loaded. I felt its outline against the wet canvas, convincing myself that if one of them did come to me with the intention of doing me harm, then I would at least be able to shoot either him or myself. If they could treat a small child in such a way and derive such great pleasure from it, then I was in no doubt what they might afterwards do to me. I pushed myself upright until, though still sitting, I was supported between the high roots of the tree beneath which I sat.

  ‘Then they began to pull th
e leaves from the fire, inspecting the ashes beneath, encouraged by what they saw there. They took branches and spread these glowing embers over a wide area. The girl resumed her screaming at seeing this, and having let her continue for several minutes, the feather-gatherer then went to her and kicked her violently in the face, concussing her briefly and silencing her.

  ‘When she came round her nose and mouth were bleeding and she began to sob convulsively. This seemed to offend the men less than her screaming and she was allowed to go on while they attended to their fire. I could see that they were close to being ready, that they had driven themselves to the pitch of their excitement.

  ‘Throughout all this, I found myself mesmerized by what I was seeing. Do you see, I was perhaps the first Englishman to witness this ritual from start to finish? Perhaps I even contributed to their excitement, to whatever perverse pleasure they took in what they were doing. Imagine that, James, I was participating – not willingly, perhaps, and with no true understanding of the part I played – but I was there, I was watching, I wanted to watch, I wanted them to go on doing what they did. It was what I had gone in search of, what I had found.’

  ‘No!’ I shouted, unable to stop myself. ‘No, it wasn’t; not that. You were ill, you were unable to be anywhere except where you were, unable to do anything except witness whatever they performed in front of you. You were no part of it, no part of it.’

  He allowed me to finish before going on. Everything I said he had known I would say.

  ‘But what did I imagine I was doing there in the first instance?’ he asked. ‘How did I imagine I was going to find what I went in search of and yet remain detached from what I saw?’

  I shook my head in despair at his reasoning. ‘Go on,’ I said.

  ‘They dragged her closer to the fire and started to untie her ropes. They released her feet first, and the girl, perhaps imagining she might still escape her fate, attempted to run from them, dashing only a few yards before stumbling and falling and being caught and dragged back to them.

  ‘Then, with her hands and neck untied, they passed her from man to man, prodding and squeezing her like the meat she was to them. The feather-gatherer pretended to bite into her arm and then collapsed with the laughter this occasioned. Another of them kicked her feet from under her and then stood with his foot on her back, pressing her small naked body to the ground as though she were some trophy he had just acquired. They played with her like this for a further hour.

  ‘I tried several times to intervene – though this amounted to nothing more than shouting out to let them know that I was still watching them – but this had no effect on them other than to cause them to shout back at me and taunt me, helpless as I was to divert them from their course. One of them even brought the child close to me and swung her from side to side by holding her arms and lifting her off the ground. She cried out at the pain of this, and the man holding her made it clear to me that I was the cause of that pain, that my attempt to intervene had prolonged the child’s suffering. I covered my eyes to let him know I understood him, and he dropped her beside me and she landed awkwardly across my legs. She was again crying almost continuously. I felt her grab my leg and then be pulled from me, her head striking the ground as she was dragged away.

  ‘Back at the embers, another of the men, the man who had previously attended to me, gave a cry and I saw that this was a signal to begin. They gathered together. One of them took a long blade from among the bird-cages in the canoe. The girl was held by two of the men now, each holding an arm and a leg and stretching her until her limbs were pulled straight, and presenting her to the man with the blade. She fell silent at her first sight of this and began gasping, convulsing with fear. I imagined he would plunge it into her heart, or perhaps slit her throat and that she would be killed quickly. But he did neither of these things, and instead he started a drunken dance around the stretched child, jabbing at her so that only the very tip of the blade pierced her, opening up wounds, and then drawing the edge of the blade back and forth over her, scoring lines into her back and chest and thighs, and again drawing blood while doing her no mortal harm. I screamed at them again, but they paid me no mind.

  ‘And just when I imagined there were no new horrors for the child to endure, that she would soon be insensible from her wounds and oblivious to what must now happen to her, the two men holding her took her closer to the fire and raised her until she was directly above the glowing ashes. Smoke rose off her hair, and her screams grew shriller and shriller and more animal than human. And then I watched as the men released their hold on the girl’s legs and these fell into the embers themselves, disturbing them and causing her to try to kick herself free, almost as though she were running through the fire in an effort to be free of it before it consumed her. But she was still held by her arms, and for every feeble effort she made to escape, so the two men pulled her back. The smell of scorching flesh filled the air. Her feet were firmly inside the embers, and I wondered how much longer, how many more of those endless seconds, she would remain conscious before her suffering became too great for her.

  ‘And then, just as I was about to call out again, she fell silent, and I thanked whatever cruel god was looking over her that her ordeal was over. I remained silent. I could not imagine how she had persevered for so long. But then, just as I anticipated that the four men might now drop her corpse into the embers, one of them threw a container of water over her face and revived her slightly. It seems they were not to be denied even a minute of their pleasure.

  ‘And having burned her legs, they grabbed her by her blackened knees and held her upside down over the flames so that she scrambled now with her arms to lift herself free. It was more than I could bear to see. What little remained of her hair burned quickly. Her face was only inches from the embers and she pushed through these with both hands in an effort to keep herself above them. The smell of her burning flesh grew even greater, and it was no longer possible to make out any of the punctures or lines on her scorched body.

  ‘And then, because all this had lasted too long, and because I had again remembered my pistol, I took it from my satchel and pointed it towards them, shouting for them to turn and look at me, to see what I was doing, but even though I attracted their attention this time, they were all by then so greatly excited by what was happening, that none of them took the slightest notice of me other than to glance across to where I sat. Perhaps they calculated their chances of being hit, or missed, and perhaps they had found my pistol and unloaded it. I no longer cared. And then, just as I picked out the feather-gatherer as my target, the two men holding the girl released their grip on her and she finally fell into the embers.

  ‘And seeing this, I knew immediately what I must do, and I aimed at the screaming, flailing body and I fired. There was still a bullet in the pistol, and the instant I fired the girl stopped screaming and struggling and so I knew that I had struck her and killed her. The small flames and grey dust rose all around her and she quickly lost her outline in the heart of the blaze. I saw where her head lay, and the bulk of her small body, but her legs and arms were quickly covered and lost to me. There was nothing else I could do, and the pistol fell from my hand. I waited for the men to dash to me and to kill me too, but in the few seconds of consciousness which remained to me, I saw that not a single one of them moved, that they remained by the fire, and that with various gestures of dismissal they turned away from me back to the body which now cooked at its centre. That was all I saw. I passed out immediately afterwards.’

  He stopped speaking, and for a few seconds the heartbeat of the drumming women filled the air, until that too fell quiet on a single beat and the overwhelming silence of the place descended upon us and laid itself over us like a shroud.

  Frere sat with his eyes closed, his fingers pressed tightly into the flesh of his face, as though they too were flames and he might himself now be consumed by them. I could not imagine the depth or the extent of the darkness into which his closed eyes gazed
. I considered putting my arm around his shoulders, but even that simple gesture was beyond me, and so, in yet another act of abandonment, I rose and left him where he sat.

  28

  I left the garrison in a daze, my mind filled with all that Frere had just told me. At the edge of the yard I was accosted by Bone, who emerged from the trees and grabbed my arm, demanding to know why I had left Frere alone and in the open. I pulled myself free of him and pushed him in the chest, causing him to stagger backwards, lose his balance and fall. He cursed me and scrambled back to his feet. He retrieved the rifle he had dropped and pointed it at me. He jabbed me in the stomach with it and I pushed back even harder. I told him that Frere had no intentions of going anywhere. He turned in a full circle and peered into the trees behind him.

  I saw that something other than Frere was on his mind. I asked him what was wrong and he told me that another of his men had been attacked earlier that morning, wounded in the leg by an arrow he believed to be tipped with poison.

  There had been reports of unknown men approaching the garrison yard during the night. Fires had been started in the surrounding trees to burn off the undergrowth. I knew he was over-reacting to the situation and told him so. I asked him where the wounded man was and he indicated the garrison house. I told him to send the man to Cornelius, but he said the man was too scared even to venture outdoors. Then let him die here, I told him, unwilling to indulge this fantasy of attack any longer.

  I left him and followed the path to the compound. Behind me, I heard him running and calling to Frere.

  Upon reaching my room, I rested. The walk had exhausted me. In places the blackened ground still smouldered and I had been forced to make detours. I was determined to go in search of Nash and demand to know why, having been told the same story by Frere, he still insisted on sending him to trial for murder.

  But despite my resolve, my exhaustion was greater than I realized and I fell asleep where I sat, surrounded by the last of my charts.