Empire of Fear

by Brian Stableford

  Noell seemed very startled by some of the things which he saw. He seized Ntikima and interrogated him about the habit which some nomadic groups of cattle-keepers had of bleeding their cattle as well as milking them. These herdsmen would make incisions on the necks of their beasts, and would mix blood and milk together into a frothy concoction. When this was offered to the travellers Ntikima found it quite palatable, but he saw that the white men were strangely reluctant to taste it, and seemed perturbed by the custom. Ntikima concluded that the white men subjected themselves to strange and strict taboos regarding the use of blood, which were not unconnected with their attitude to the elemi. But when he told Ghendwa of this discovery, the Oni-Osanhin was unimpressed.

  Travel across the plain was so easy that by the end of their second day upon it they were within sight of the place where they must cross the Kwarra and follow the Benouai, whose confluence with the greater river was near. There was no possibility of wading across the river, and they had to persuade the fishermen of one of the larger riverside towns to ferry them across. Even without Ghendwa to help them, this would have posed no great difficulty, for these tribesmen were well- experienced in the river trade. Many spoke Uruba, and some of them eagerly claimed that they had visited Burutu. They were not in the least astonished or frightened by the sight of the white men, unlike the forest tribesmen, many of whom had not liked to have them near. The headman of this village received the travellers far more hospitably than any of the chiefs of the forest-dwellers.

  Beyond the confluence of the rivers there was only a narrow strip of land between the Benouai and the hills, and along this strip they marched eastwards, following well-worn paths in common use by local traders. There were few cattle kept permanently in this strip; Ghendwa told him that this was because of the prevalence of the falling sickness. Only a few miles away on higher ground, however, cattle could graze with impunity, and the travellers occasionally driven down to the bank of the Benouai from the hill-country, which was becoming parched. The hillmen who came with their cattle on such occasions were feared and hated by the local people, for they often raided the riverside villages when they came, and even Ghendwa seemed wary of them. On more than one occasion they passed the ruined ditches and stockades of former villages, which had been utterly wiped out by such marauders.

  Two groups of Hausa traders from the west tagged along behind the donkey-train for three days, apparently trusting in Langoisse’s guns to deter any would-be attackers. Like the villagers at the confluence of the rivers these Hausas had seen white men before, and considered them no more alien than the local people. Normally, the Hausa traders would have continued to travel during the afternoon, but in the circumstances they were content to stop when the white men sought shelter from the sun. They would lodge their goods in the forking branches of trees, and come to sit with Ngadze and Mburrai, exchanging jokes and anecdotes. Ntikima kept his distance, preferring to be near the elemi. Ghendwa ignored these hangers-on. The Hausas went their own way when Ghendwa led the donkeys away from the river, heading north again through the hills, following the course of a small stream.

  When the journey came at last to seem tiresomely endless, Ntikima was inspired with the courage to ask how many days more their trek would take them – a question which Noell Cordery had already asked. But Ghendwa only told the boy, as he had told the white man, that they had barely begun, and that the fertile land of Adamawara was not easily to be reached by the kind of men which his travelling companions were.

  SIX

  Noell was roused from the relaxed state which preceded sleep by a distant whining sound, which cut cleanly through the still air of the tropic night. He raised his head immediately from the rough pillow which he had made from spare clothing, but then recognised the sound and knew that there was no cause for alarm. He rolled over on to his back and opened his eyes but made no attempt to rise. He knew that the noise would cease, in time, and then he could go back to sleep.

  Quintus, with whom he shared his tent, was similarly undisturbed – but he did sit up, pushing aside the hanging folds of his mosquito net, and pulling on his boots. His face was eerily lit by the tiny nightlight which burned on the ground between their beds.

  ‘It is Oro,’ said Noell. ‘No concern of ours.’

  ‘Langoisse will not know that,’ the monk replied. ‘He and his men must be warned to stay in their tents. The last thing we want is for a man with a musket to go running into the night in search of a wild beast. If there are to be dead men displayed in the morning, I would rather they were Hausa thieves or delinquent Urubas.’

  ‘Of course,’ Noell answered. ‘Shall I come too?’

  ‘There is no need. I will do what is required.’

  The monk straightened his white habit, and fought his way free of the meshes which confined his bed. As he left the tent he closed the flap behind him, but it did not long remain closed. Leilah came in, and scrambled under Noell’s net. He was startled by the invasion, but perversely relieved to see that she was dressed; the nights were cold now, and her night attire was fuller than the light clothes she wore in the fiery afternoons.

  ‘What makes the noise?’ she asked, nervously. She sat upon his bed, trying to appear calm, but was obviously alarmed.

  ‘It is Oro,’ he told her. ‘The word means fury, or perhaps fierceness. The tribesmen say that he is a kind of demon, who comes to punish the guilty, but the noise is made by a slotted piece of wood whirled around a priest’s head on a thong. He is probably not unlike Egungun, who appears at other feasts. He is summoned by the Ogbone to exact revenge on witches and other offenders against unwritten law. When they hear his voice all women must shut themselves up in their huts, for his business is only to do with men. The criminals who are given to him are often never seen again, but sometimes their twisted bodies are found in the branches of tall trees, where the demon is said to have thrown them away. Their blood is taken, though, and drunk by ordinary men and elemi alike, and smeared upon the big drums which they call gbedu, as a form of sacrifice.

  ‘Sometimes, when Oro comes, there are also sacrifices of slaves taken in war, or children, but that depends what feast it is. If it is the feast of Olori-merin, who is the god which guards towns, a new-born babe must be sacrificed. The day falls four times a year, but even if this is an affair of that kind it is no threat to us.’

  ‘It is not our coming which has roused them?’ she asked.

  ‘No. Our passing by is of no significance to these people. They may be glad to have the vampire Ghendwa at their ceremonies, and might put on a special show for him. He is an important person in the ranks of the Ogbone. But he is a priest of Osanhin, who is a kindly god of healing – his hand will not be turned to any murder.’

  ‘This is a horrid land,’ she complained, ‘where all are vampires whether they live long or no. The gods these black men fear demand the spilling of blood, and even the milk which their infants drink is stained by the blood of beasts. It is vile.’

  ‘These forests run no redder than the streets of any city in Gaul,’ he told her, cynically ‘and I doubt that the arab lands are any cleaner. Neither Christians nor Mohammedans show overmuch scruple in dealing with their enemies, and we all claim the sanction of our particular gods in what we do to them. Olori-merin is a dark god, to be sure, but there’s a kind of honesty in offering cruel deeds to the service of cruel gods whereas the pope’s inquisitors torture in the service the good and kindly God who is said to love and cherish us all.’

  Outside, in the distance, Oro’s voice faltered, and died slowly away.

  ‘Is that the end?’ asked the gypsy.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Noell. ‘There will be drums now – but we are some way from the town, and they will not seem so loud. We are safe, and we must try to sleep.’

  ‘If I could stay with thee,’ she said, ‘I would sleep sounder.’

  ‘Langoisse would miss thee,’ he replied, trying as best he could not to sound unkind.

  She
would have replied, and bitterly too, but Quintus came back then, and looked at the two of them, sitting uncomfortably apart in the folds of the protective netting. Leilah had an anxious reverence for Quintus, though he was never stern with her, and she drew further away from Noell because embarrassment was added to her annoyance.

  ‘Do not be afraid,’ said Quintus. ‘The camp is safe. Ngadze will watch. Ghendwa and Msuri are gone – Ntikima also. Perhaps it is only that he is Uruba.’

  Noell nodded, thoughtfully. Neither he nor Quintus believed that Ntikima had gone only because he was Uruba. They had come to the conclusion that he was Ogbone, and that he had from the very beginning been appointed to watch the traders of Burutu, and report to his masters their actions and their plans. They did not resent this as much as they might have done, for they both liked the boy, but it made them more careful in their dealings with him.

  ‘I will go to Langoisse,’ said Leilah, ‘though he does not need me any more. If he leams the secret which these black vampires have, it need give him no pause to wonder whether he might lose too much in the using of it.’ With that, she left the tent to go back to her own. Noell stared after her, momentarily puzzled.

  ‘What did she mean?’ he asked the monk.

  Quintus returned carefully to the shelter of his own bed, and pulled off his boots. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘she is trying to tell you that Langoisse is impotent, or nearly so. He has hinted as much in trying, delicately, to inquire about my healing talents.’

  Noell still stared at the monk, uncertainly, still not able to make sense of what the Maroc woman had said. ‘What has that to do with the secret of the black vampires?’ he asked.

  ‘Have you not seen beneath the elemi’s pouches?’ asked Quintus.

  Ghendwa was rarely without his pouches, or the cloth which he wore about his loins. He did not often bathe. Noell had not seen what was beneath; he always looked away when any man or woman stood naked.

  ‘His prick is mutilated,’ Quintus told him. ‘I thought when first I glimpsed it that he had been the victim of a bad circumcision, or an accident, which had happened so long before he was made a vampire that he could not be made whole again, but it may have been deliberately done. If ikeyika is the rite by which a boy is made into a man, there may be a similar ritual when a man becomes elemi, and this might be what is meant by Ogo-Ejodun. The elemi are revered for having risen above ordinary pleasures and ordinary temptations, and we know that the coloured scars which such tribes as the Mkumkwe inflict upon themselves do not entirely heal when their wearers become elemi. It is possible that the head of Ghendwa’s prick was cut off and anointed to prevent it growing again when he became a vampire.?

  Noell was surprised by the wrench which his stomach felt. For a moment, he thought that he might actually be sick. He had seen Edaus who had been injured by careless cutting during the ceremonies of initiation into their tribes, and he found the sight of an inflamed and suppurating penis uniquely disturbing. The idea that the process of elevation to the status of elemi involved a more radical castration was somehow more horrible than the thought of what might be happening only a mile or so away, where the blood of a tiny child might even now be draining into a calabash, to be placed on the earthen mound where the sliced flesh of the infant would later be buried.

  ‘It cannot be so,’ he said, in a harsh voice not much louder than a whisper. ‘It is some kind of buggery which creates vampires, or so my father believed.’

  ‘So others have believed,’ admitted Quintus, ‘though the Gregorians have always said that ’twas the devil who performed the act. I am sorely curious to see the private parts of other elemi, to see what might be missing.’

  With that, the monk lay down to sleep, and though the gbedu drums were already beating in the town not far away, he seemed to slip readily enough into the arms of Morpheus. Noell, by contrast, found his thoughts stirred up so violently by what he had been told that he tossed and turned for hours, and was still awake when the drums had stopped. In the morning, his eyes were red and tired, and he was unusually sluggish in his work, drawing vexed glances from Langoisse. The pirate never mentioned what had happened in the night, but plainly retained a certain curiosity as to what had passed between Noell and his mistress – who was, it seemed, no longer a mistress in the full sense of the word.

  The lowlands which the expedition had been crossing for some time were lush and prosperous, and the villagers’ herds were thriving, as were their patches of millet, cassava and yams. But the road now became stony and eventually petered out. The land and its inhabitants grew progressively poorer. The course of a day’s march took them from a land apparently flowing with milk and honey to a harsh country where the grass was withered, the trees sparse, and the tribesmen sullen. The sun went down that night with a strange lurid glow, the harmattan obscuring the purple horizon where the ridge of a plateau loomed over the plain like a monstrous cliff, stretching as far as the eye could see in either direction.

  Ngadze told Noell and Quintus that the Hausa traders who had travelled with them for a while had called this the Bauchi plateau, and had warned him against it because its people, the Kibun, were savages and cannibals. The Kibun men, the Hausas had told Ngadze, were red of skin, and their women had tails. These red men rode like demons across the dusty uplands, upon their lean ponies. Worse still, they were no lovers of elemi. Not only did they have none of their own, but they did not live in hope that one day the wise men would come to them. Instead, they gave thanks to their savage gods that the Ogbone had no power over them. Ngadze repeated tales which the traders had told him of vampires killed and devoured by these monstrous people, but when Quintus asked Ghendwa whether the people of the plateau posed a threat to them, the elemi seemed not in the least perturbed.

  As Ghendwa guided them across the last miles of the boulder-strewn plain toward the precipitous granite cliffs, Noell saw that they were heading for a gap in the rock-face, where there was a path beside a fast-running stream. This steep path took them up no less than eighteen hundred feet, and was very hard for the donkeys. The packs had to be taken from the animals during much of the ascent, and carried by the men, sometimes broken up into smaller parcels. But the climb was completed before the sun was at its worst, and the white men were able to pitch their tents at the summit while the others completed the transfer of goods from the foot of the cliff.

  On the following day they saw the first of the Kibun villages near which they must pass. It had no wooden wall or ditch, as the villages of the Nupai and their neighbours had, but instead was surrounded by a tall hedge of prickly cactus. The huts were small, and the compounds partitioned by lesser hedges, about the height of a man. Millet was growing inside the compound, and the fowls and ponies which were the Kibun’s livestock were penned up.

  Kibun men watched from the safety of their stronghold as the travelers passed by, but made no move to come out to attack them. Noell saw that they really were red in colour, but that this was because they smeared their naked bodies with some kind of dye. Their spears were light, not nearly as long as those the Mkumkwe warriors had carried. No women could be seen, and it was impossible to judge whether the Hausas were right to say that they had tails. At the closest point of passage, Ghendwa turned to the watching Kibun, raised his right hand high, and shouted at them: ‘Sho-sho! Sho-sho!’ To this greeting they replied in kind, raising their arms and crying out in unison: ‘Sho-sho, aboki!’

  Beyond this village there was a plain, on which few trees grew, and these wind-worn and stunted. The grass was short, yellowing, and sometimes blackened by fire. When they set camp that evening the only conspicuous green which Noell could see was the cactus hedge of the village, still visible on the southern horizon behind them.

  They made good headway when they went on, the bare ground offering little or no hindrance. The sun glared down at them from a cloudless sky, and the harmattan blew all day, but they were high enough now for the heat to seem less burdensome. The plateau se
emed sparsely populated by comparison with the lowlands, and when they passed the cactus fortresses which surrounded the Kibun villages the natives would usually hide in their compounds, responding in kind to the vampire’s greetings but never venturing forth to meet the travellers or to offer gifts of food. As Ngadze had predicted, the foraging was very poor, and there was little game to shoot. Without food from the villages, the supplies which the expedition carried had to be rationed, and they soon found themselves hungry. Sometimes they saw groups of Kibun hunters, mounted bare-back on their lean ponies, and Ngadze would try to signal them in the hope of trading knives and needles for fresh meat, but they would not approach.

  At night a cold wind would blow, which felt quite unlike the dusty harmattan as it played upon Noell’s skin and teased his hair; it made them all huddle in their blankets. There was little fuel to be found, and such fires as they were able to keep burned meanly, giving little heat. Ngadze and Mburrai slept sitting up, with their knees drawn up beneath their chins and blankets wrapped tight around their shoulders. Often they cradled their spears in their arms, with the blades pointing at the sky behind their shoulders, but they always refused the shelter of the tents. Ghendwa fought the cold – or so it seemed – with magical incantations; he would sway from side to side, reciting songs which often dissolved into long choruses in which a single phrase would be repeated countless times: ‘A-da-ma! A-da-ma!’

  Despite the clothes which Noell persuaded them to wear, the Ibau men shivered in the cool mornings, and when the donkey train started on its way they would jog and dance until the warmth was back in their bones. Ntikima seemed less bothered by the cold wind than his elders were, but eventually caught a chill, which the elemi’s medicines could not altogether ease; he had to ride instead of walking.