Empire of Fear

by Brian Stableford

  Ngadze and Ntikima went foraging for fruit that evening, but when they returned to the camp Ghendwa insisted on sorting through their haul. They had brought back a number of unfamiliar fruits, some of which Ghendwa hurled away, telling the travellers not to touch their like.

  Higher up in these hills, they found the course of another river, which Ghendwa called the Logone, but it was virtually dry, with only a stretch of moist and sticky mud in its bed. Beyond the river, the forest became stranger still. Its undergrowth thinned out almost to nothing, and the layered canopies were so high that it was easy to walk on the forest floor; but in spite of the ease of their passage this was not a pleasant place to be. There were very few birds, and they saw no monkeys at all. There were numerous insects, but there were few scented flowers to attract their notice. Indeed, the most colourful things lit by the sunbeams which filtered through the layers of the canopy were ledge-fungi growing in the clefts formed by the twisting of the tree-trunks, which were often orange or yellow, and sometimes white streaked with purple or blue. Such fungi often clustered on the leafless hulks of dead trees, and the further they went into this region the more it seemed to Noell that every familiar species of tree was represented only by twisted and decaying lumps of dead wood.

  They crossed a number of small streams which fed the Logone during the rainy season, and a few had water in them, but they were entirely free of what Noell had come to think of as universal inhabitants of African waters – crocodiles and leeches. Nor were there any water birds, and as far as he could tell, no fish either.

  They went north-eastwards after crossing the Logone, tramping through the ugly forest for many miles, but discovered no native villages. They camped twice beside the turbid waters of tiny streams, and found the nights eerily silent. Langoisse suffered a relapse into deeper fever, making Noell frightened for his life, but Leilah had gradually shaken off her own sickness.

  ‘Is this the lifeless forest of which you spoke?’ asked Noell of Ntikima, when they camped in an open space on a mountain-side. ‘It seems an unearthly region, and one which men would not readily visit. An unlikelier place to find the Garden of Eden I could not imagine.’

  Ntikima confirmed that this was indeed the great forest which surrounded Adamawara: a bad place, where no one lived. It was not entirely lifeless, for there were insects here as well as trees, and there were great black bats which found some kind of fruit in the treetops. There were chimpanzees, too, and Ntikima reported that among these chimpanzees there were ancient beasts which lived long past their natural time, taking blood from females and children as the elemi did among humans. Noell was not sure whether or not to believe this.

  In due course they came to a ridge – a black, rocky cliff perhaps three-quarters of a mile across. Here there would be a waterfall in the wet season, perhaps forty or fifty yards across, though five times broken by jutting teeth of rock, but now the stream was dry there was no water at all trickling down the face. There was a long ledge, which must, when the rains fell, be behind the fall; but it was easy to cross over now. The face of the cliff alongside which they walked was pitted with caves and coverts. It was not so easy for the donkeys, being not wide enough to make them comfortable, and they had to be led across the cracked and muddied bed beneath.

  Beyond the cliff was another steep ascent which was more difficult for the animals than the slope which had taken them up to the Bauchi plateau. They had to be unburdened, and even so one slipped and broke a leg, and had to be butchered for meat. Everyone, by this time, had a pack to carry, and everyone had now to carry even more, except Langoisse, who found it difficult even to carry himself. Ghendwa would not let them leave anything edible, implying that the foraging would become more difficult as they went on, and Noell became anxious about their water-supplies.

  Their path now wound its way up into rockier terrain. The trees were far fewer here, but the way much more difficult, for they were climbing very steeply into a mountainous region. They were exposed for much longer periods to the glare of the sun, but the air was not so humid, and the more altitude they gained the less oppressive the heat seemed. Their veils became unnecessary, as they came into a region which was as devoid of insects as the lower forest had been empty of birds.

  Selim’s head would not heal, despite Ghendwa’s best efforts. The festering wound must have been extremely painful, for the Turk, who was an unusually stoical man, jabbered continually and angrily in his private language of squeaks and groans. Noell imagined this babbling to be a lonely, acrimonious argument with the vengeful deity which had cruelly afflicted him. Beside the wound a strange stain had begun to spread beneath the Turk’s skin, extending down from his neck on to his shoulder and arm. It was as though something were growing in the layer of the flesh below the skin. Quintus had never seen its like before, but the Oni-Osanhin looked at it with great anxiety. To Noell the stain seemed to be coloured black or dark grey, and it did not immediately occur to him to connect it with the silver death of which Ntikima had spoken, but the boy told him that this was what it was.

  ‘Shigidi is coming,’ said Ntikima dolefully, by no means for the first time.

  Msuri and Ngadze were having problems with much smaller wounds which they had sustained, and which would not heal, growing worse with every hour’s passing. The abrasions themselves were trivial, but it was not long before Noell could see the tell-tale signs of something spreading through the flesh. Against their ebon skin the stain seemed much lighter and greyer, and he saw why black men called it the silver death. Though Ghendwa fed medicines to all three of the afflicted men, there was no apparent improvement in their condition, and the elemi seemed not to expect any, though he evaded questions about the likely development of the disease.

  When they made camp that night, in the highest place they had yet reached, Noell went in search of wood for the fire, and found a group of corpses nestling in a small cave in a rock face, clustered around the ashes of a long-dead fire. Dried and shrivelled by the sun, the bodies were little more than skin stretched upon bone, but it was easy to see that the remaining skin was not brown or black, but had an ashen hue like the stains on the bodies of his companions. Quintus was quick to point out to Noell the fact that these bodies, though they must have lain here for many years, had never been molested by scavengers. No leopard, jackal or vulture had come to strip the flesh from the bones, nor even leisurely maggots to devour the putrefying remains.

  Noell was disturbed by this discovery, though he was sure that by now they must be at the very threshold of Adamawara. It seemed that Langoisse might not be able to cling on to life long enough to reach their destination, and the silver death could easily claim the Turk before another day was through. Noell wondered whether even he could survive until the fateful meeting which still lay, frustratingly, ahead of them, and he searched his flesh by the light of the fire for the signs of the sickness which seemed to him more fearful than any fever. He saw Quintus doing likewise, anxious about every scrape or bruise.

  Later, Noell walked away from the fire in company with Quintus, and confessed these fears to the monk, as though seeking absolution from his anxieties. Quintus calmed him, seeming himself to be quite invulnerable to any terror. ‘Ghendwa says that one more day might take us to the gateway of Adamawara,’ said the man of God. ‘At the most, it will be two. We have come so far, and endured so much, that the Lord will surely deliver us now. Even Langoisse, who is a great sinner and a sick man, has so far been preserved from the silver death. Trust in providence, Noell, for I believe that the angels still watch over us.’

  Noell touched the older man on the shoulder by way of thanks. They sat down together on a great boulder, and looked up at the star-filled sky above them. The air was very clear here, far beyond the reach of the harmattan’s incisions dust, and Noell thought that he had never in all his life seen the stars so bright and sharp.

  ‘Their cold light makes our warmth seem feeble,’ said Noell. ‘Sometimes, the stars make me f
eel terribly tiny, as though I were beneath a microscope, lost in an infinite wilderness.’

  ‘It is your unbelief which makes you tiny,’ Quintus told him. ‘Without faith, all men are lost.’

  ‘No doubt,’ answered Noell, ‘but I wonder whether you have cause and effect the right way around. I think it is the consciousness of being so tiny – and so lost – which forbids me to believe. And yet … ’

  He paused, and Quintus said: ‘Go on.’

  ‘Sometimes … if I stare at the sky for long enough … the sensation changes. I begin to feel huge instead of tiny, as though the stars were within me as well as without … as though something of me is in them and something of them in me. And then I feel stretched, as though my body were the cosmos, and every moment an eternity, and I do not know the difference between everything and nothing.’

  Quintus opened his mouth to reply, but then turned, having heard the noise of someone approaching. Noell grew tense for a moment, but then relaxed when he saw that it was Leilah and Ntikima, come to find them.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ asked the gypsy.

  ‘No,’ said Quintus. ‘We are only measuring the size of the universe, and the greatness of the human soul.’

  ‘The stars are the grain from the mill which Olorun grinds,’ said Ntikima, ‘while he walks around the world with the sun in his heart.’

  ‘I do not think so,’ Leilah told him, taking him by the shoulder in a curiously maternal fashion. ‘Langoisse has told me that it is the earth which turns, and stars which are still. Is it so, Father Quintus?’

  ‘It is the round earth which spins,’ Quintus confirmed, ‘and the cycle of the seasons marks its progress around the sun. The fixed stars may turn around some other centre, a very great way from here, but we cannot see the central sun of Creation with our limited vision, any more than we can see the hand of God at work in its mechanism.’

  Ntikima did not seem to believe it.

  The gypsy sat beside Noell. ‘And the stars are very far away — more miles than you or I could ever count, if we began now and continued until we died. Are they not as far as that, Father?’

  ‘The planets are millions of miles away,’ answered Quintus, ‘and the stars so far beyond them that I doubt we shall ever measure their remoteness. They are suns with worlds of their own, where there are seas and forests, men and beasts. On some other earth, invisible in the firmament, other travellers are coming near to their own Adamawara, in search of the breath of life and the light of wisdom.’

  Ntikima looked up, then, as if suddenly seized by the wonder of the notion, and Noell wished that there was light enough to see the expression on his dark face.

  ‘Are there then a million worlds,’ asked the boy, ‘where Shango casts his thunderbolts? Is the heart of Olorun to be found in every world, to make the best of men strong and wise, and chain Shigidi in the darker corners of sleep, calming his anger?’

  ‘A million worlds and more,’ Quintus told him. ‘And the heart of God within every one of them, nourishing the souls of men, and guiding to the kingdom of heaven those who have the will to go.’

  NINE

  Ntikima and Ngadze had to huddle together within a single blanket that night. They sat close to their meagre fire, because the darkness was bitterly cold. Noell Cordery, Quintus and Leilah had all crammed themselves into the single tent with the stricken Langoisse, leaving Msuri to borrow what warmth he could from Ghendwa, and Selim to lie alone, with a blanket which no one cared to share. No one but Langoisse could bear to be close to Selim at the best of times, and now he was made madly restless by his unhealing wound he was set even further apart from his fellows.

  ‘I do not like this strange land of Adamawara,’ said Ngadze to Ntikima. ‘Its lifelessness is frightening. I had thought that the world was everywhere alive, but these ugly trees have poisoned the land, and I would be glad to see a scorpion or a snake.?

  Ntikima was himself oddly disturbed by the unnatural forest. The forest where he had lived his early life, and where he had met Aroni, was very different – not without its dangers, but in essence hospitable. The gods one might meet in a region such as this were more sinister even than Aroni, who was himself a destroyer of those he did not favour. This was surely, as he had been told, the true home of Egungun; this was the domain of the risen dead, and he had no doubt that he would soon be face to face with one who spoke for his ancestors, who would judge him on their behalf, as he had been judged before in the Uruba villages where he had spent his childhood.

  Ntikima had warned his companions that Shigidi would come to them now, first in the delirium of their fevers, then in the deeper and darker sleep of the silver death. Ghendwa had warned him of this. He could not help but ask himself whether Shigidi might have a greater power here than in the lands from which they had come. Did Elegba live here too? he wondered. Elegba, a god of wild maleness and angry lust, had surely been banished from Adamawara, where the tigu had nothing of him, but perhaps that was all the more reason for him to prowl these desolate spaces which surrounded the space which Shango had made for the breathers of life.

  Ntikima would have asked these questions of Ghendwa, but the elemi had become anxious and uncommunicative. Perhaps too many had died, and he was anxious lest he fai

  l in his mission to bring the white babalawo to Iletigu, the place of the finished. Perhaps even an elemi could be weakened by such a journey as they had taken – Ntikima could not tell.

  Ntikima was frightened of the silver death, which had already made its mark on Msuri and Ngadze. He had no doubt that it would come in its own time to claim him too, for he had been promised a meeting with Shigidi which would test his courage, but he had no real understanding of the summons which had brought him here with the white men. Ghendwa had said nothing to explain what was being done, and Ntikima had begun to wonder whether the Oni-Osanhin himself had been told. Perhaps only Ekeji Orisha, who was next to the gods themselves, knew what was wanted of the white healer and his friend; perhaps only the gods knew, and Obatala, the lord of the white cloth, would descend to earth himself to confer with the disciple who called him by another name. That would be an opportunity for eavesdroppers! Having met Aroni, Ntikima was enthusiastic to see more of his gods walking on the earth – and where else but Adamawara would Obatala set his foot upon the soil, or Shango Jakuta come to see what his stone from heaven had wrought?

  Something moved out in the night, and Ntikima shuddered suddenly, made nervous by his runaway thoughts. But it was only the man without a face, tossing and turning in his sleep. Ntikima could hear him murmuring impassionedly. He knew that Selim could not pronounce real words, even in his own mysterious language, because his tongue had been cut, yet the babble which he made to voice his suffering sounded so full of meaning, like the talk of some soft and spirited drum, or the chatter of a messenger bird.

  In time, Ntikima slipped into a shallow sleep, despite the coldness in his feet and in his haunches. He waited for Shigidi, but Shigidi did not come, and time passed, in its dissembling fashion.

  He knew not what hour it was when he was abruptly shocked awake by the sound of a terrible scream, and sat bolt upright in the pitch darkness. Ngadze came suddenly awake too, and leapt to his feet, carrying the blanket with him, and exposing Ntikima’s flesh to the cold strike of the night air.

  At first, the character of the scream suggested that the voice was Leilah’s, for it was a thin and panicked thing, and not a masculine roar. Then he realised that the cry had come not from the tent, but from the place where Msuri and Ghendwa had been sleeping.

  For one dreadful instant, he thought that it was the elemi who had screamed, and the idea that there was anything in the world which could wring such a cry from a breather of life was a terror such as he had never before imagined. He scrambled blindly to his feet.

  He could hear the man Langoisse groaning with the fever, and cursing foully; even he had been awakened. Then he caught a glimpse of Noell Cordery’s silhouette as
he hurried to leave the tent, and the pale gleam of the white babalawo’s habit.

  Above, the stars still shone brightly in a cloudless sky, but there was no moon, and only the merest hint of pre-dawn light near the eastern horizon. There were tall trees to either side of the campsite, which cast long starshadows, and the fire had burned down to mere embers, giving no light even though Ngadze was now trying to stir up the ashes and light a torch which had been placed there, ready for an emergency. Ntikima looked about him wildly, the cry still echoing in his mind.

  The silence was split again by a second cry, and now he had to whirl about to face its source. Something hurtled at him out of the darkness, and he crouched, suddenly angry that he had no weapon at all with which to meet the charge. But then he threw himself sideways, and whatever monster it was blundered past in the dark, bowling Ngadze over and scattering the remains of the fire as it went. It bounded down the slope and into the trees, gone as quickly as it had come.

  At that moment, the rim of the sun breached the horizon, and sent a sliver of light flashing across the forest canopy.

  Noell Cordery took Ntikima by the arm and tried to draw him upright, but Ntikima shook off the helping hand, scrambled to his feet without aid and ran to where Ghendwa and Msuri had huddled together against the cold, near to the place where the four remaining donkeys were tethered.

  Ghendwa was still there, but in the gathering light Ntikima saw that blood was leaking, with unnatural slowness, from a great wound in his chest. There were slashes about his arms and head. His eyes were wide and staring, the whites catching the glimmer of the nascent sunlight.

  Beside Ghendwa, with his arms enfolded around the elemi’s waist in a futile gesture of protection, was Msuri, bleeding much more copiously from wounds to the head which had surely battered all the life out of him. Msuri tried to look up, but could not; he must have died in the space of that very moment.