The Voyage of the Destiny

by Robert Nye

  I never yet saw a ghost. Did Elizabeth Tudor? Did these blood-bedaubed victims of lust make her cling to her virginity as if it were life itself?

  I don’t know. I never dared ask her. And she never spoke of it.

  The fog at the door of my cabin, this ship and my whole life suspended in some kind of limbo, my last word on the subject is just that Queen Elizabeth’s vicious vaginal innocence had no visible or tangible cause.

  But the mind and the heart may have membranes.

  22

  24 April

  Still fog. Such fog! I have never known anything like it. A confusion of the elements, a convulsion of nature that makes midnight out of noon. And this fog has got into my spirit, inhabiting my judgment, eclipsing sense, so that it seems I grope about in an inward darkness, blind to circumstance, having to fight to distinguish the dream from the fact. Dream and reality, in any case, have come together in the last few hours in a manner that makes all a kind of nightmare.

  God damn this fog! God save this fog of a world!

  Amen. That will do. No more curses or prayers. Just tell the story.

  I must use my pen as I just now used my sword. To establish some true order, to keep command.

  It will help if I go back to the beginning. Relate the whole mad bad business just as it happened

  *

  First, then, I fell asleep with my head on these pages. Heaven knows what the time was. But it can’t have been far short of the start of the morning watch. About seven bells, perhaps -which is half-past three.

  I was dog-tired, more dead than alive, my soul spent with that writing about Elizabeth. I snapped the book shut. I used it for my pillow. I collapsed.

  I dreamt a dream in that deep and exhausted sleep. Now, dreams have never overmuch interested me: What are they but excretions passed from our waking minds? Other people, I concede, hold higher opinions - my wife Bess among them. She always adhered to that teaching of Dr John Dee’s, that a dream may foretell actuality, or cast light upon the present fortunes of its dreamer if correctly interpreted. I consider such beliefs mere superstition, yet confess that this particular dream has given my scepticism a shaking.

  In my dream I was standing in the square at San Thome. The Indian was sitting bareback on a horse in front of me. His hands were tied together behind his back. He had a noose around his neck. The rope went up and over the branch of a tree. There were two black slaves who were holding the other end of this rope. Now and again in my dream one of these slaves would give a tug on the end of the rope and the Indian’s head would jerk. But the Indian seemed indifferent to their antics. He took no notice of the slaves at all. Whenever they made his head jerk he made it look as if he had intended to nod or shake his head in any case. There were two of our English soldiers in my dream also. They stood holding the horse by its bridle, one on either side of it.

  This dream scene was uncommonly vivid. Plainly it has features which derive from my memory of the story told to me by my nephew George, concerning what happened in San Thome on the morning after our forces occupied it. But Keymis was not present. And I was. I was the white man standing under the burning hot sun interrogating the Indian.

  ‘Gold,’ I said, in the dream. ‘You understand gold? You know what I’m talking about?’

  I was wearing that cloak which Elizabeth once walked on. I had this baton of polished wood in my right hand. I kept cutting at the air with it. (Keymis carried a baton like that. I gave it to him when he departed upriver. It was his symbol of authority as my Commandant.)

  The Indian said nothing. He stared at me.

  I was sweating like a pig. Then I started weeping. The tears rolled down my cheeks. In my dream I could taste them. They had a vile sweet taste. Like the taste of blood.

  ‘Christ! Christ!’ I started shouting. ‘I know there’s a mine here. I know there is gold and I know that you know where it is. Are you going to show me the mine? If you don’t, I shall hang you! Hang you, you fool. You understand? Hang you by the neck until you’re dead!’

  The Indian nodded. He didn’t say anything. His face was expressionless. Its bright copper skin was a criss-cross of red and black painted patterns. In my dream I couldn’t tell if he really understood what I was saying to him, or if he kept nodding like a puppet only because the slaves holding the rope kept making his head jerk.

  I managed to check my tears. I gestured to the slaves to stop their game. The Indian gazed at the sky. I looked up also. The sky was gold. The sun was a ball of gold fire.

  When I looked once again at the Indian he seemed likewise to have turned to solid gold. Yet the horse that he sat on was still real enough. It shivered in the sunlight, flicked its ears.

  ‘Who are you?’ I demanded, in the dream.

  The Indian said nothing. He nodded his head. This time it wasn’t because the slaves had made him nod. He was nodding his golden head at something behind me. Something or someone. I knew in the dream what it was.

  I knew what it was, but I still turned to look where he was looking.

  I saw the church on the other side of the square. The doors of the church were broken. They were hanging like black snapped wings on their broken hinges. Wat’s body lay on a litter in the shadow of those doors. I saw the pearl ear-ring that dangled from his left ear-lobe. There was blood on the pearl. There was more blood all over his face. An English flag covered the rest of him.

  I turned back to the Indian.

  ‘You know who that is?’ I said quietly.

  The Indian nodded.

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Excellent. So you do understand me.’

  I rapped my own chest with the baton. ‘Now then, who do you think I am?’

  The Indian smiled, as if finding my question absurd. His eyes had not left poor Wat’s young corpse.

  A bird was shrieking somewhere in the jungle.

  ‘Are you dumb, man?’ I cried out. ‘I asked a question. Do you want to end up like your master over there?’

  I pointed with my baton. In the middle of the square there was another corpse. The corpse of Palomeque. Long. Fat. Enormous. Palomeque was stark naked, sallow-skinned. There was this great wound in the left-hand side of his skull. It extended right down to the gaping jaw. Flies were at work in the wound, busy and buzzing.

  The Indian shrugged. He didn’t even glance at the second corpse. Instead, he shut his eyes. Gold fell from his eyelids.

  Then the Indian spoke in my dream.

  ‘Hang me,’ he said.

  His voice was no more than a whisper.

  ‘Hang me,’ he said. ‘I am a half-caste. Can’t you see that I’m a half-caste? Why, look ‘

  His face was melting as I stared at it. The red and black paint came away, then the gold skin also. Great flakes and scabs of pure gold seemed to drop from it. I saw his cheek-bones, his jaw-bones, his skull. Soon he had no flesh left. But his bones were gold. His eyes were two orbs of quartz in a head like an ingot.

  One of the slaves started giggling. He pulled on the rope. The Indian’s golden head jerked. An eye fell out of its gold socket.

  The other slave said: ‘Take no notice. He’s lying. He’s a dirty liar. He’s not any half-caste. He knows where the mine is It was the Indian’s eye that now held my attention. A sudden wind whirled sand across the square. The eye rolled with the sand. It came to a stop beside my feet. I knelt and picked it up. And then all at once, cupped in the palm of my hand, it was Keymis’s eye! Poor Laurence Keymis’s eye, pale, bloodshot, with the cast in it, there in the palm of my hand. The feel of that eye was horribly real in the dream. Indeed, all my senses were quickened. I could hear every insect in the undergrowth - their chirping chirping chirping hurt my eardrums. My nostrils stung with the smells that came to them on the breeze: smoke, pineapples, decaying flesh. I felt sick. I turned aside to vomit.

  How to define the transitions that obtain only in dreams? If I say that I seemed to vomit up all my past life, my very identity, perhaps that makes some sense of what n
ow happened. For as soon as I stood erect again, there in the sanded square of the Spanish outpost, I was not Walter Ralegh any more. My splendid cloak had gone. I was wearing some oat-coloured jacket and breeches. There were black boots on my feet. Mud and blood on the boots.

  The Indian suddenly shouted:

  ‘What of your son?’

  The eye that had been in my hand was now in my head. Keymis’s eye. When I looked at the Indian I was Keymis looking up at the Indian. All sense of my own true identity had been drained from my body. I knew that the Indian saw Keymis there standing in front of him. That the soldiers saw Keymis. And the slaves. That they’d always seen Keymis. I knew this for certain.

  That horrible alchemy by which the Indian’s face had been transmuted into a gold skull was now reversed. He had his natural features back again. The incalculable dark eyes. The black and red patterns streaking his cheeks and his forehead. The disc-shaped pendant dangling from his nose.

  ‘Gold,’ I said. Keymis said. I spoke as Keymis: that slow pedantic voice, the halting lisp. ‘Gold,’ my dream-self Keymis said once again. ‘That’s all I want, that’s all I came here for. I’ll set you free, do you hear me? You’re free, you can go back home to your tribe. But I must know where the mine is!’

  ‘Your son!’ the Indian shouted. ‘What of your son?’

  Then I realised that while all the time in the dream I had been Laurence Keymis to the others, nevertheless the Indian must have believed from the start that this balding Commandant with the baton in his fist was Walter Ralegh. I hope I make it clear what I am saying. Dreams have no logic, but in any event if you try to imagine the real-life scene at San Thome that morning of January 3rd in this very year, then no doubt the actual Christoval Guayacunda did make such an assumption. He had heard from his Spanish masters that Ralegh was coming. When the English appeared up the river, and took the town, it would be quite natural for him to believe that their leader was me.

  I tapped at my chest with the baton, ‘Listen,’ I said. (Keymis said!) ‘You have it wrong. I’m not who you think I am.’

  The Indian was staring at me. For the first time, he appeared disconcerted. ‘You are Guattaral.’

  ‘No. I am not Guattaral. My name is Keymis. I am Guattaral’s general. Do you understand? I am the friend of the man you call Guattaral.’

  The Indian looked around.

  He said: ‘Guattaral is not here then?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Where is Guattaral?’

  ‘He is with his ship.’

  ‘Where is this ship?’

  ‘Down river.’

  ‘Far?’

  ‘Yes. Very far.’

  ‘But why did Guattaral not come himself?’

  Keymis, myself-as-Keymis, hesitated. Then, in the dream, this answer from my lips, words cold and clear:

  ‘Because he is a coward. That is why.’

  The Indian’s mouth curved down in disbelief.

  ‘That’s the truth,’ I heard myself say. ‘He has a fever. But the fever is just an excuse. If there had been no fever, then be sure Sir Walter Ralegh would have found some other reason for not coming. He’s a coward. All his life he’s been a coward. He doesn’t know it. He’d never admit that to himself. But I know Sir Walter. I know Sir Walter’s secret heart. That’s his secret, that’s the truth about him.’

  All this, in the dream, I uttered with the strictest sobriety. There was no contempt in my voice, and neither passion nor compassion. I felt nothing. I spoke as an oracle might speak. These words came through my lips, rather than from them. Having spoken them, I turned and I looked at Wat.

  There was a long silence. Then I heard the Indian say:

  ‘But that is Guattaral’s son.’

  It was not a question. A mere statement with the emphasis on the is.

  ‘Yes,’ I said in my dream. ‘That was Sir Walter Ralegh’s son.’

  Another silence. The sweet sickly smell of death. A drum that started beating in the jungle. ‘Hang me,’ the Indian said.

  The drum getting louder. Drum, drum, drum. Like a heartbeat. Like the beating of my own heart as I looked at Wat.

  ‘Hang me!’ the Indian cried. ‘Hang me! Hang me!’ I didn’t turn round. I couldn’t take my eyes off Wat’s dead body.

  Drum, drum, drum.

  ‘Hang me’

  ‘Let him go,’ I said.

  ‘Sir?’ (One of the soldiers.)

  ‘I said let him go,’ I shouted out.

  In my dream I spun around to make sure that my order was being obeyed. As I did, the Indian kicked hard with his heels and the horse started forwards. The soldiers let go of the bridle. The horse bolted. For a moment the Indian hung from the tree with the rope round his neck. I took four quick strides, slashing at the slaves with my baton. They howled, letting go of the rope. The Indian fell in the sand.

  I, Keymis, stood over his body. The Indian lay still. I poked at him with my baton. He did not budge.

  ‘The crazy bastard’s dead,’ said one of the soldiers. ‘His neck broke. I heard it go snap.’

  One of the black slaves kicked at the Indian’s body.

  The Indian opened his eyes.

  He laughed.

  Then he started to shout—

  *

  He shouted. The Indian shouted. I heard him. Not in the dream. He shouted.

  I woke. His shouting woke me. It was real. The Indian was shouting and shouting. The shout was terrible. I never heard anything like it.

  I was soaked in my own sweat. The drum of my dream was my heart. I was lying sprawled over the table. That barbarous shouting went on.

  I leapt up, kicking over my chair, I ran to the door of my cabin. It was locked! It was locked from outside….

  There is an axe I keep by me. In the sea-chest that’s under my bed. Dragging out the sea-chest, I laid hold of the axe. I smashed down the door in a minute.

  Sam King lay slumped outside the door. My first thought was that he was dead. He wasn’t. He’d been clubbed into unconsciousness. He lay there in a pool of his own blood.

  Day had dawned, but the fog still made it hard to see properly. I blundered forwards in the direction from which the shouting came. Our decks were slippery. I fell down the steps from the poop.

  There was a sudden silence. All seemed ghostly. For a moment, dazed by my fall, I thought I might still be dreaming. Then, crisp through the curtain of fog, the crack of a pistol shot. And following it, piercing my skull with its loudness, the incredible blood-curdling power of that shout. The sound seemed more than human lungs could manage. Yet nor was it like the roar of a wounded animal. I knew who was shouting. I think that I also knew why.

  They had strung the Indian up from the starboard yardarm. ‘They’ being Richard Head and some six of his cronies. Head, pistol in hand, had command of the lynching-party. Command? The word flatters the anarchy of the scene I now ran upon. It was a turmoil of would-be murder. Pure pandemonium.

  Head’s accomplices scuttled about with their hands to their ears. They’d succeeded in binding the Indian, getting the noose round his neck, and attaching the rope to the spar. He was hanging up there in the fog. But someone had underestimated the man’s strength. He’d torn one arm free of its bondage, and was clutching at the rope above his head. He was spinning round and round, and he was shouting. Not gagging him was no doubt their biggest blunder.

  The Indian had told me of that shout of his. The shout of the Golden Man - that’s what he called it. He attributed some demoniacal power to the shout. He said it made men mad. I’d not believed him.

  Do I believe him now? It’s not important. I only know what I saw with my own eyes. What I saw, what I heard, what I witnessed.

  Those wretches were racing about like Gadarene swine. Their faces were contorted, their eyes bulged. They looked like men on the rack. And the shout was their torture. They dared not take their hands from their ears when he shouted. Each time the Indian drew breath they ran towards him, sw
arming up the rigging, struggling to clutch at his legs and drag him down to death. Every fresh shout drove them back, knocked them down like rotten apples crashing from a tree in the blast of some great wind, set them whirling on the deck like dervishes or victims of an epileptic fit.

  Head himself held something to one ear in an attempt to shut out the Indian’s shouting. I recognised what he was holding. It was the Indian’s cap, that curious conical bonnet woven of the grey fibres of the cabuya plant. With his free hand, Head fired off a flintlock pistol. His purpose may first have been to counter-act the sound of the shout, or to spur on his henchmen. But now he was trying to shoot the Indian.

  I have pictured this scene at some length because it was complicated. It took me small time, all the same, to resolve its complexities. Axe in hand, battering riff-raff to left and to right of me, I leapt into the rigging and swarmed up the lifts to the parrel. Using that iron collar for purchase, I hacked with the axe at the spar from which the Indian was hanging. It splintered, it smashed, he went hurtling down to the deck. I acted swiftly and instinctively, blind with rage. On reflection, I did the right thing. If I’d chopped at the rope I might have hit the Indian. To do it carefully would have taken too long. Besides which, my body supported by the parrel, I could bring all my weight and strength down with each blow of the axe. Of course, I was running the risk that the fall might kill the Indian. It didn’t. He rolled over and over on the deck. Then he crouched like a cat, shaking himself, and sprang to his feet. One hand still bound behind him, the rope with its scrap of shattered spar flailing out from his neck as he shook his head, he raised his right hand high and he screamed at me. What he screamed I don’t know - the words must have been in the language of his people. But I knew without words what it was he wanted. I tossed the axe. He caught it on the run.