Empire of Fear

by Brian Stableford

  There was a third howl, not so much a scream of anguish this time as a cry of pure animal wildness with as much exultation as fear in it. Ntikima looked up in time to see a fan-like array of sunbeams, separated by the dark boughs, touch the bounding figure of the Turk Selim as he ran downhill through a clearing which interrupted the twisted trees. His sword was waving giddily in the air, yet somehow it stubbornly refused to catch and reflect the light. The capering figure was in view for one brief second, and was gone. Noell Cordery took three strides in that direction, then stopped, and looked back at Ntikima, who could see that he understood well enough what had happened.

  Noell came to Ntikima’s side. He looked down at the elemi and Msuri, at their hacked-about heads. He knelt to touch Ghendwa’s throat, which was torn almost completely across, though it was Msuri’s blood which was running over the black rock and mossy earth in a great spreading lake.

  Quintus had followed Noell from the tent, and the monk came quickly to kneel beside the vampire, pushing Ntikima aside. Ntikima gladly surrendered all initiative and authority to the white babalawo.

  ‘We should not have left him alone,’ whispered Noell, as Ntikima reached out to take hold of his sleeve. ‘Poor mad thing! We should have done what we could to care for him. Langoisse would not have let us abandon him to rave alone, if he had been well.’

  ‘He has done a terrible thing,’ said Ntikima bitterly.

  ‘Nay,’ said Noell, in a sorry tone. ‘I have done it. The fault is mine, that I could not stand to be near him.’

  Quintus turned to look up at him.

  ‘Will he die?’ asked Noell.

  ‘Msuri is dead,’ replied the monk. ‘But Ghendwa is a vampire. He cannot die of such wounds as these. ’

  Ntikima looked down at the stricken elemi, whose eyes were wide open, though they seemed not to see. Despite the gaping flesh, Ghendwa had lost very little blood by comparison with poor Msuri. He watched Quintus place his hands gently to either side of one of the gashes in Ghendwa’s flesh, and ease the edges of the cut together. The babalawo had to hold the wound for a few moments, but the flesh did knit.

  The great wound in the chest was not so easily persuaded to close, and the monk worked at it with his fingers, pressing and coaxing with what seemed like practised efficiency, though Ntikima could not imagine that Quintus had ever tended a stricken elemi before. But Ntikima was not unduly surprised. Whatever god or magician had taught the white babalawo his craft must have entrusted him with such secrets as this, in readiness for the day when they would be required.

  Ngadze was weeping, and shivering with distress, but Ntikima could not tell whether it was sympathy for the elemi that made him cry, or fear of what reprisals might be taken against those who were party to the maiming of an elder of Adamawara on the very threshold of that sacred place.

  When he had done what he could to help Ghendwa’s cuts, Quintus reached up to draw down the vampire’s eyelids, covering the staring eyes.

  ‘Is he entranced?’ asked Noell.

  ‘I think so,’ Quintus replied. ‘The stab-wound in his chest may have pierced a lung, or even touched his heart. I cannot tell how long it might take to mend, but I am certain that he will sleep for a long time. Perhaps months.’

  Noell looked around, and Ntikima followed the roaming of his gaze. The place where they were seemed as still and darkly safe as it ever had, with no birds calling or flying insects humming. For Ntikima, though, and perhaps also for Noell, It had taken on the quality of a limitless tomb. It was as though they were outside the world, on the way to Ipo-oku, where their spirits would now be sure of a stern reception.

  Shigidi is coming, Ntikima said to himself, silently; but even as he said it he realised that Shigidi had already come, and had claimed the monstrous Turk for his own, setting free all the foul hatred which had long been seething in his soul.

  Leilah stood outside the tent now, looking back and forth between the place where Quintus knelt and the place where the mad Turk had vanished. Ntikima watched her for a little while, to measure her reaction, but then turned to look at the donkeys, which were oddly calm in spite of the manner of their awakening. Perhaps they had been so long in the service of men that there was nothing in the quality of a merely human scream which could alarm them.

  Noell went to Leilah, to explain what had happened, ‘It was Selim who screamed,’ he told her. ‘He murdered Msuri and attacked the vampire. The festering of his wound has taken away his senses.?

  ‘Will the vampire die?’ she asked. It was odd, thought, Ntikima, that the question always sprang so readily to mind, though everyone knew that to kill an elemi was difficult in the extreme.

  ‘He will live,’ said Noell. ‘But a vampire sore wounded must slip into a deep kind of sleep while his body is repaired.?

  Her face was almost devoid of expression. ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘My father’s friend William Harvey,’ said Noell, unnaturally calm in this moment of crisis, ‘mapped the circulation of the blood in its vessels. He said that if the blood became still, the mind must lapse into unconsciousness. He proposed that vampires can tolerate the stilling of the blood, and even induce it, while their active flesh heals itself.’ After a pause, he added: ‘Ghendwa will live, and unlike the Turk, will show no scars to tell the story of his ordeal. But I do not know whether it will need days or months to make him whole again. In the meantime, we have no guide. Nor do we know how to use his medicines, which have been helping to keep us alive.’

  ‘We are lost in this dire place,’ she said, seizing upon the worst of it, ‘and might wander here until we die. And if we are found, how will they punish us, when we have allowed a vampire to be attacked in Adamawara itself?’

  They turned, together, to look at Ntikima, who realised that the eyes of the white babalawo were also on him. They did not look at Ngadze, but at him, because he was Ogbone.

  ‘I do not know,’ he said to them. He made as if to shrug his shoulders, but the gesture suddenly seemed inadequate. Instead, he said: ‘I cannot tell which way Adamawara lies. But we must take Ghendwa there, if we can, so that he may rest in Iletigu.’

  He could not entirely understand why the Turk, moved by Shigidi or no, should turn against Ghendwa in this fashion. The white babalawo had told him once that the elemi of Gaul were cruel and harsh, and would kill those who offended them, but he had thought of that as he thought of Oro, as the working of a law, not as something which might inspire hatred and lust for revenge. He had not entirely trusted the tale, either, even though the arokin told their own stories of the desert lands where the men were demon-led sorcerers who would butcher and burn elemi, and spurned their healing gifts. He had seen that the white men feared and mistrusted Ghendwa, even when he gave them medicine, but he had not imagined that anything like this could happen. His thoughts were swirling in confusion.

  The white babalawo stood up, and said to Ntikima: ‘Perhaps you are right. We certainly cannot go back, so we must go on to Adamawara. But how will they receive us there, when we bring Ghendwa to them in this fashion? Will they not be angry?’

  ‘I do not know,’ Ntikima replied. ‘Perhaps they will. Perhaps they will punish us all.’

  ‘What shall we do?’ asked Leilah, anxiously.

  ‘There is nothing we can do,’ Noell Cordery told her. ‘There is nowhere we can go but Adamawara. We are here, and the elemi is hurt, and we must take whatever consequences come. How could we hide?’

  ‘We must go forward,’ said Ntikima. ‘We know the direction from which we have come. We must go on, up into the mountains. We know that Adamawara is near.’

  ‘He is right,’ said Quintus. ‘We must eat, and then we must go on. We must carry the elemi – and Langoisse too, if he is too ill to walk.’ Ngadze was ready enough to obey instructions now, and to begin preparing food. Ntikima helped him, preoccupied with the questions which Quintus had asked. How would they be received in Adamawara now? What would the Ogbone expect of their servant Ntiki
ma? Would they punish the white men? Would they punish him? These questions had to be put aside. Msuri was dead, the Turk was gone, and Ghendwa was now a burden to be carried, not a carrier. There was no more food to be found in the forest, so they had to carry all that they had, and their pots and water-bottles too. They dared not leave the tent or the blankets, with the nights so cold. The white men would not leave their guns and powder either, nor what remained of their tools and instruments for making fire. They had precious little left, and it was very difficult to name anything which they could leave behind to lighten their load.

  ‘Ngadze and I can carry the vampire,’ said Noell to Ntikima, when they made their plans, ‘and we must all carry packs besides. We must load the donkeys as heavily as we can, and hope that they can answer our need. Do you agree?’

  Ntikima looked at the white man gravely, unused to consultation. He was surprised that he had been so easily conceded this authority. Yet he did not feel strange in accepting the responsibility. After all, he was Ogbone.

  ‘I agree,’ said Ntikima. ‘I will carry as much as I can bear. I think we have not far to go’

  ‘We must surely be very near to our goal,’ answered Noell, ‘unless this dreadful land in boundless.’

  ‘The gods will guide us,’ Ntikima told him, ‘If we cannot guide ourselves. They know that we are here, and are waiting for us to come to them.’

  Noell Cordery managed a wan smile, and said: ‘I hope their appetites are blunt, and they have had their fill this season of the sacrifice of blood.’

  ‘In Adamawara,’ Ntikima assured him, ‘the gods, and those who share the heart of Olorun, have all the blood they need.’

  TEN

  When they began the march, Noell took the lead, despite the fact that he was helping to bear Ghendwa’s makeshift stretcher, with Ngadze behind him. The way was not easy; they trod such uneven ground that they seemed always to be going uphill or down, and had often to skirt great outcrops of rock. Noell was careful to keep the morning sun always before him, steering directly into its garish light.

  Every time they came to the crest of a ridge Noell hoped that some evidence of civilisation would come into view: a rocky fortress or a planted field, or a trail where the imprint of human feet could be seen. But there was no such sign, and he saw nothing moving in the forest save for a flattened beetle with a polished carapace which stirred beneath his boot, and a few other crawling things of indeterminate character. Once, they heard a distant cry as of a predatory beast, but when they looked at one another, Noell could see that they all knew what it must be. Selim still lived, lost in the hell of his own delirium.

  Quintus took Ngadze’s place after an hour, and then Ntikima took a short spell before the Ibau man resumed the burden. Noell would not let anyone take his own place, though his arms ached terribly and the makeshift straps securing his pack chafed the skin of his back even through his shirt, scraping his shoulder-blades every time he looked up to measure their course. The sweat that he shed made him thirsty, though their supplies of boiled water were low and they had not found a spring or stream for a long time. He knew that it was now the middle of the dry season, and remembered almost with a shock that the beginning of the new year could only be a day or two away, though Quintus, who was surely keeping track of the calendar, had not reminded them of it.

  At noon they stopped, shadowed by a tall, broad column of black rock, which hid the afternoon sun. They ate ground-nuts, and pasty balls of millet-flour, all dry because they had very little water, and what they had they used to make coffee.

  Ghendwa remained quite still, breathing very shallowly. Quintus could detect only a very weak and slow heartbeat, but pronounced himself satisfied that the vampire was well and might soon recover. He was not so satisfied with Langoisse, who was now without the aid of Ghendwa’s medicine, and seemed both desiccated and exhausted. When the sun was low, in a sky barely tinted at its distant edge by the haze of the harmattan, the monk told Noell that they could not possibly continue for more than one day, and that might easily kill the pirate. Thirst would then rob them all of their last reserves of strength. Leilah tried to ease Noell’s aching muscles with the pressure of her hands, but his skin was raw in too many places, and he had to ask her to desist.

  Before the sun set, Noell found a way to climb the jutting crag, and drove himself to make the ascent, hoping that the last red rays of sunset would light for him some builded wall or tower, to show him that the journey was near enough done. But when he stood atop the bare mount, and looked about him, he could see nothing but the grim canopy of dark green, rippling like a turbid ocean about its grey islands of rock and scree, roiled by the slow, cooling wind. It seemed infinitely more empty and soulless than any other country he had ever looked upon.

  There is no city of the vampires, he told himself, sourly. Ghendwa brought us here only to abandon us to desolation. Had he not been hurt, he would have vanished by now, to go down and not up, back to the welcoming waters of the Logone and its streams. He did not believe it.

  He wondered whether this wilderness could possibly be worse than the desert across which Moses had led the Children of Israel, and whether it was on a mountain such as this that the prophet was given the Ten Commandments. But when he looked up into the darkening sky he could find no sign of the merciful presence of God.

  Can this be Eden? he asked. Where are those trees pleasant to the sight which God planted there? Where are the fruits good to eat? Where is the fabled tree of life? Where is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, of which Eve was tempted recklessly to eat? Where is the breath of life, which God put into Adam’s clay, that he might be an emperor over all the birds and the beasts which God had made? Are these God’s trees, or are they Satan’s, rooted in Hell itself, whose shrivelled fruits bear the bitter knowledge of failure and damnation? If Adamawara ever was the Eden to which our scriptures refer, then God has surely abandoned it; and even the serpent which betrayed mankind no longer keeps its vigil in this wilderness.

  He reached up to brush a lock of hair from his eye, and caught sight of his sore hands. On his right palm there was a burst and bloodied blister, and around it in his pale flesh was a dark halo.

  A thrill of horror went through him when he saw it, and he was suddenly very conscious of all the aches of his body. Quickly, he opened his shirt and looked down at his breast. There was no sign of the blackness there, but on his right shoulder, where the strap of his pack had chafed, there was a thin black rivulet, like a black snake creeping patiently towards his throat.

  In that moment of despair, these marks were to him a symbol of impending death. He did not curse God, or ill fortune, or the curiosity which had brought him to this pass; he was too lonely for curses. Nor did he pray for deliverance, for his desolation was not sufficient to light the flame of faith in his unbeliever’s soul. He went down again, because the bottom of the sun’s disc was already beneath the jagged horizon, and he did not want to make the descent in darkness.

  When he reached the base of the rock-face, he found Quintus pulling his white robe from his shoulder, and he saw that the monk’s back had two black stains spreading from the shoulder. He went to his friend, and traced the imprints of the silver death with his forefinger, so that Quintus could feel their extent across his shoulder-blades.

  ‘I have spoken to Ntikima,’ said the monk. ‘He says that the sickness is called silver, though its stains are not silvery in hue, and despite that it is called by the name of death, it rarely kills. He warns me, though, that Shigidi will come to me when I sleep.’

  ‘Thou art armed against nightmares,’ Noell told him. ‘Better armed than I, no doubt.’

  His next thought was that he must look for the gypsy, and discover whether her body too was prey to this monstrous pollution, but as he turned away his eye was caught by a strange light in the darkening forest. He stared at the spot, and again the glimmer came into view for a moment, between the distant boles, like a will-o’-the-wisp. T
hen another flame flickered, and a third, and he realised that men with torches were coming through the trees towards the black rock.

  Men, or monsters.

  Quintus had seen the torches too, and he quickly gathered his habit about him, as though fearful of the shame of being seen bare-shouldered, with the devil’s stigmata about his body. The monk took a step forward, as though to go to meet these visitors, but he stopped when he too realised that they had not the appearance of men.

  The figures which bore the torches were very tall, dressed in long grass robes, with giant faces which were hideous caricatures of human features. They had great red-painted mouths jagged with sharpened teeth, and vast staring eyes with huge pupils, black as pitch.

  Noell looked swiftly around.

  Leilah was not to be seen, and must be in the tent with the stricken Langoisse. Ngadze and Ntikima had been busy with the fire, but now they knew something was amiss, and they stood up, each to his full height, waiting to see what would happen.

  It was Ntikima who came to Noell’s side, and said: ‘Egungun!’

  Noell had never seen Egungun, though Ntikima had told him what it was. Like Oro, Egungun had his appointed days, when he would come to a village and dance through the streets, supposedly having returned from Ipo-oku, the land of the dead, to interrogate the living on behalf of their ancestors. To touch him was death, and to be accused by him was a terrible denunciation, marking those who must be punished for giving offence to the parents of their tribe. But in the Uruba villages Egungun always came alone. Here there was a whole troop of Egungun, nine in number: a veritable regiment of the living dead, come to discover them.

  They are only men in costumes, Noell instructed himself, but he knew that there was more than a comedy of masks to this affair. When Ntikima had met the god Aroni in the forest, he had met him in the person of a priest or magician wearing regalia such as this, but in the eyes of the Uruba boy, the magician had not been in any way pretending to be the god; he was the god. These approaching figures were not pretending to be the risen dead; they were the risen dead. In the Uruba way of thought, they did not have to be one thing or the other; they could be both. They were costumed men – Mkumkwe warriors or elemi – but they were also the risen dead, come to settle their accounts with the living.