by J. D. Davies
An hour or so later, the three search parties took leave of each other outside Kasang town. Kit and I set off for the north-west at the head of an eclectic little army. A dozen men of the Seraph's crew came along with us, all volunteers: my old comrades-in-arms Polzeath and Tremar, desperate to redeem themselves for O'Dwyer's escape; Treninnick, who also felt guilt for his part in it, albeit needlessly; Macferran, four other Cornishmen, two Londoners and even two of the formerly obstreperous Bristol draft, Ayres and Brownjohn. The two last had the makings of good men, and evidently recognised the hard truth that with Castle dead, their futures in the navy depending on ingratiating themselves with a new patron. Despite all my imprecations, Francis Gale and Phineas Musk also insisted on accompanying me. I could understand Francis's sentiment: it was a heaven-sent opportunity to see something of the country, and as he had said, before him stretched only long years of preaching sermons to the unresponsive congregation of Ravensden. Musk, who favoured comfort so mightily, should have been expected to be averse to some nights of sleeping under the stars, but as ever Phineas Musk was a law unto himself. He would grumble ceaselessly about the discomforts of the expedition, yet would never consider not being a part of it. We had with us a native guide, a young savage recommended by the King of Kasang and named by Belem after the Portuguese fashion as Joao Paz, although he also answered to a name in the local tongue that might have been Mamadou. Communication between us was not easy, but he understood a little Dutch thanks to all the butterbox crews that traded upon the river, and we were just able to make ourselves intelligible to each other.
We moved away from the river into broad grassland interspersed by huge trees that seemed to grow upside-down, their branches resembling roots thrusting out into the air: baobab, said Mamadou. It was now the late afternoon, but the hot breeze from the north-east made our progress uncomfortable. This was an alien land. We scanned every bush for signs of threat; jumped at each new noise. My discomfort was increased by the knowledge that when darkness fell, the beasts of those parts would come into their own. We had not gone far when we saw a lion far off, lying languidly in the shade of a baobab, but fortunately it seemed unconcerned by our presence. Mamadou gestured for us to continue. We white men looked at each other uncertainly, but our guide's assessment of the lion seemed accurate enough. Whether he and his kin remained so uninterested in the cool of the night was, by contrast, of interest to us all.
'The Irishman had time to thieve a horse, that he did,' said Musk. 'Five hours' start he's had, maybe six. If he's on a horse, on firm ground like this he could be thirty or forty miles ahead of us now, maybe even more. Getting further ahead by the minute. And all we're doing is bidding fair to be a lion's supper.'
'Musk has a point,' said Francis. 'Even on foot, and even in this heat, O'Dwyer could be—what?—ten miles ahead of us by now. After all, he is more accustomed to this climate than we.'
'I know it,' I said. 'In truth, it will take a miracle to rank with the loaves and fishes for us to find the renegade. But honour demands that the effort be made.'
Ah, honour,' said Musk wearily. '"What is honour? A word. What is that word, honour? Air. A trim reckoning. Who hath it? He who died o' Wednesday." The First Part of King Henry the Fourth, as I recall, not that I can abide that over-rated scribbler from Stratford. 'And what's today? Wednesday. Methinks yonder lion has a Musk-eating look about him.'
'Well, Musk,' I said with as much jollity as I could muster, 'you are, in truth, the most fleshy of all of us. I think yonder lion would gladly feast on you before any of the rest.'
My jest fell on stony ground. In truth, I was probably the only man in our party who conceived of honour as our chief reason for pursuing O'Dwyer. All the rest, even the normally amiable Kit Farrell, were set upon revenge: Francis Gale explained animatedly to Horning, a Londoner who was one of the more godly in the crew, how Our Lord's words in Matthew and Saint Paul's in Romans did not preclude the wreaking of our rightful vengeance upon the treacherous renegade O'Dwyer.
At dusk, we lit a fire, cooked and devoured some guinea-fowls that Mamadou had downed, and made our arrangements for the night. O'Dwyer would probably not press on through the darkness on his own; that, at least, gave us an advantage. We would take two hours sleep, with three men standing guard, then press on a few hours more before sleeping another two hours just before dawn, when the guards from the first shift could have their slumber. By taking another two hours' sleep in the middle of the next day, and then repeating the process anew, we could both march for eighteen hours in every twenty-four, a rate that I doubted O'Dwyer alone could sustain, and also distribute the watch-keeping duties fairly among all. And I truly meant 'all'; this was no time for officers to stand upon the privilege of their rank. As a signal of my intent, I moved that Francis, Kit and I should have the first watch. This caused some astonishment and protest among the men, who held that it was not right for the captain or a Reverend to do such menial work, and stand guard over rough tarpaulins such as themselves. But I held my ground, although in truth I was tired enough after the previous night's exertions.
Thus I stood my watch, musket in hand, upon that desolate plain, listening to the myriad sounds of the night from the clicking of insects to the distant roar of lions. It was a bright night, and I tried to identify stars that Kit had once taught me. Was that Aldebaran or Os Baleni? And that—the Horn of Aries, surely? But looking too long into the night sky brought on an overwhelming urge to sleep, and I turned my thoughts elsewhere; I had already fallen foul of enough of the Articles of War without adding a breach of the twenty-seventh by sleeping on watch. But when it came to my turn to sleep, just before dawn and after a few hours of night marching, I never knew a more comfortable pillow than the earth of Africa, nor experienced a deeper slumber than during those two blessed hours when I slept beneath the stars.
We pressed on at dawn. Privately, I was convinced that we had no hope of overhauling O'Dwyer, even if he had come in this direction to begin with: the entire plain was a highway, many miles broad, so the chances of finding one man within it beggared belief. But out of honour, a thirst for vengeance or sheer cussedness, we went on. Musk talked with Francis Gale of the folly of the doctrine of predestination, of the relative merits of port wine and sack, and of God knows what else. I talked with Kit of the prospects for a Dutch war, and of how to handle a ship in the shoal waters of a lee shore. I talked for an hour or more with Ayres and Brownjohn; it occurred to me that knowing good men in Bristol might be to my advantage when the new Dutch war that all expected eventually began. They were wary at first, unused to conversing with any captain, let alone an earl's brother, but in time they lowered their guards and talked freely of their hopes and fears, of the prospects of war, of the king's poor treatment of his sailors by way of bad pay and victuals. Brownjohn in particular impressed me: he was a young man of twenty or so, but he knew his business, hoping to prosper in it to provide for his young wife, and I marked him down for promotion to a petty officer when a vacancy permitted.
All the while, the heat sapped our strength, the beasts of the plain roamed about us and the birds circled above us, taking no notice of us at all. At last, when the noonday sun demanded that we halt and rest, Mamadou recommended that we shelter by bushes that would provide shade and a good stock of edible berries. There we settled, with Musk as one of the duty watch. Before settling onto the scorched ground, I went into the bushes to piss, and coming into the clearing beyond...
Disturbed by my sudden appearance barely four yards in front of it, a great lion raised its head and looked me full in the eyes.
I stood stock still and stared back at the beast. I felt my heart pound furiously within my chest. The beast still stared. The rest of its body, from its neck to its tail, was perfectly still. As was I; for somewhere in the depths of my memory, perhaps in my reading of the tales of the Christian martyrs or in Uncle Tristram's explanations when we had gone to see the great cats in the Tower menagerie, I recalled that a man
confronted by a lion should endeavour not to move at all, and should show the beast no fear.
I can state with some authority that this is not easy advice to follow when faced by leo magnus. Every sinew in my body seemed to be pulling me into the posture of turning and running. I barely breathed. I thought of my friends, but a few yards away and yet ignorant of my plight: of Francis Gale, who would have to say a prayer over my stripped bones; of Musk, who would declaim that it served me right for ordering this foolish pursuit; of Kit Farrell, who had saved me from death by drowning only to attend my death by devouring. I thought of Cornelia, and her tears when she learned of my end. I thought of my place in the history of the Quintons: not a great warrior, like my grandfather, nor even a poet-martyr, like my father, but the only one of the name to be eaten alive by a wild beast. Tristram might even laugh.
Still my heart pounded. The creature seemed to be studying me, serenely contemplating my smell, my strength and my will. It would surely pounce—its jaws opened...
Keep your eyes open, boy, face it down...
There was a noise to my left. I saw Brownjohn, his hands at his breeches, coming into the bush for the same purpose as myself. But he blundered into the vegetation too loudly, and when he saw the beast he cried, 'Lion! Oh sweet Jesu, save me!' before turning and running. The lion's stare turned in a moment from me to the Bristolian. The creature that had seemed so still, so somnolent, sprang up and moved with astonishing speed. Barely half-a-dozen great strides .
The lion's mouth bit into Brownjohn's leg, severing it. Blood spurted onto the soil of Africa. The young man's scream was unearthly. He turned as though to fight off the beast, but the move only sealed his fate. A great paw came up, claws ripping eyes and face from the skull as the teeth sank into the Bristolian's side.
I stood like a statue, seemingly unable to move, unable to do anything but watch the horror unfolding before me. Only the familiar roar of a flintlock musket stirred me into action. I turned and saw Phineas Musk, already recovered from the recoil and preparing to reload with a suspiciously practised manner that I would never have credited to him. Behind him, Kit and some of the men were also loading and aiming. But although the beast had not been hit by Musk's shot, it had taken fright from the noise and was already bounding majestically across the plain at inconceivable speed. To this day, that lion remains the fastest object that I have ever seen move upon the surface of God's earth.
We ran to Brownjohn. Even then, so early in my life, I had seen many men dreadfully torn and maimed in battle, but I had never seen a human being in such a sickening state as the poor man before me. His face and half his body were gone, yet somehow, he still breathed. One eye, hanging in the bloodied remnants of a socket, still blinked at me. He tried to speak, but that last effort was too much, and poor Matthew Brownjohn went to his maker. He and I shared the same name, and but for him, I might have been the corpse upon the baked soil of Africa.
We buried Brownjohn in the shade of a baobab, digging deep down in the hope that the corpse would not be dug up by a ravenous beast of the field. Francis Gale stood at the head of the grave and from memory intoned the order of service for the dead. The rest of us made the responses and the amens: a curiously correct manifestation of the Anglican faith in such an unlikely and terrible place.
Brownjohn's terrible death shook every man in the party, their captain included, but at first it did not weaken the resolve to press on after the treacherous O'Dwyer. However, another afternoon and night in the wild proved sufficient to test that resolve to its very limit. My body was sore and cried out for proper sleep, yet still the sun beat down. Still there was no sign of Brian Doyle O'Dwyer. Still beasts roared nearby and far away, and inwardly I began to dread the thought that they would devour us one by one, emulating the fate of poor Brownjohn. Still the vultures circled. Awakening from an inadequate slumber to find insects crawling over one's flesh proved almost as great a terror as confronting the lion. Worse, my men were starting to grow testy; even the best and most loyal, Polzeath and Tremar, began to murmur that they no longer looked on our journey as a quest for revenge and redemption, but as an almighty fool's errand. I assured my party that we would turn back at noon, as agreed with the other two parties, and they seemed content with that. Thus we pressed on for a last few hours.
It was perhaps an hour before noon when we emerged from the scrub into a great clearing, wherein stood a vast stone circle not unlike our Stonehenge, at the edge of a great cliff looking out over an expanse of country beyond; we had been climbing almost since leaving Kasang, though so slowly as to be barely noticeable. In his broken Dutch, Mamadou told me that this had been a sacred place of the old nations of those parts. The sight revived some of my Cornish lads, who said there were also many such places in their own county, and we walked among the stones with wonder. Finally, we all went to the edge of the cliff and looked out.
'Perhaps Eden looked very much like this,' said Francis Gale, nodding in appreciation of the biblical spectacle before us.
Certainly, the vast expanse could have populated many Arks: herds of elephants roamed within our sight, and antelopes, leopards, and God knows how many more beasts, marching or racing across the great grassland that stretched to the furthest horizon and the great blue curtain of Heaven itself. What it apparently did not contain was humanity, and least of all one cursed Irish renegade.
I contemplated that glorious, deadly sight one last time, then turned to face my loyal party. 'Well, men,' I said, 'we have done our duties to our king, to our slaughtered shipmates and to ourselves, I think. If O'Dwyer came this way, then he has his freedom. Perhaps he may yet encounter a lion with a hunger and meet the same fate as poor Brownjohn. Or if it truly is Eden, then perhaps he, too, will encounter a serpent that will do for him.' There was a thin laugh at that. 'Whereas we, my friends, can now return with honour to our ship, and to old England.'
'Amen to that,' said Phineas Musk.
And with that, we turned and began to retrace our steps back to the river. There was time, now, for reflection.
I talked with Francis of the mountain of gold, and how the king might react to the news that he had been duped by O'Dwyer. My old friend was sanguine; Charles Stuart was unreadable, he said, and would either dismiss it with a jest or clap us all in the Tower, depending on how well he had bedded his latest whore that morning. I talked with Kit of our coming voyage downstream, of the hazards to be expected and of what obstacles My Lord Montnoir might attempt to throw in our way. Although O'Dwyer and the chimera of the mountain of gold were as lost to him as they were to us, I had little doubt that the Knight of Malta would not see it that way, and would look for any opportunity to humble Matthew Quinton. And then, as I stood my watch at night upon the African plain, looking up at the moon and listening to the innumerable strange noises of the place, my good-brother Venner Garvey's words came back to me, just as he had spoken them to me that day in the undercroft of Ravensden Abbey.
This mission will not succeed.
Well, Venner, you have had your way. God damn you to Hell for it.
Our return took us less time than our going out; barely a day and a half. Although already exhausted and burned, we were all more willing to forsake rest and sleep in order to get back to our little wooden world than we had been to pursue a long-gone traitor. However, our unexpectedly early return meant that when we arrived in Kasang at dusk on the following evening, the night watch aboard Seraph had already been set, and no boat waited at the water side to take us out. By the time the ship responded to our hail, Mamadou had already found a large canoe and a party of his kinsmen willing to row us out, and it was in that condition that I approached my command once again. As we neared the ship, I looked up, and by the dusk-light I saw a peculiar sight upon the deck of the Seraph: two Arabs and a near-naked black slave were standing there, watching our approach. I was hot, exhausted, and not thinking clearly. My first reaction was that in my absence, Lindman and my other officers had sold the ship to th
e Arabs. By the time I hauled my sore body onto the deck to be greeted by the pipe of Lanherne's whistle, I was in thoroughly peevish mood. It took me a moment to realise that every man on the upper deck of the Seraph was grinning broadly. Every man but one.
It is a peculiarity of the human senses that we can sometimes look directly at another man that we know well enough, and because we do not expect to see them in some such place, or some such garb, we look straight through them as though they are perfect strangers. Thus it was that evening on the deck of the Seraph. It still took me a moment more to recognise the slave as Julian Carvell, Coxswain of the Seraph, and the two Arabs as Ali Reis and Brian Doyle O'Dwyer. The latter was manacled.
'What in the name of Heaven—' I spluttered.
All their idea, sir,' said Lanherne. 'Carvell and Ali Reis, between them.'
Even by his standards, the Coxswain's grin was particularly broad. 'Well, sir, we reckoned there was nothing to be lost by trying our luck to the south, to see if the Colonel, here, had gone that way.' The erstwhile officer in question kept his eyes fixed on the deck, and said nothing.
Ah, it was more than luck, Captain,' said Ali Reis. 'I reckoned that if this Omar Ibrahim was seeking to rejoin the Arab race, then he would think as an Arab once again. And an Arab would not make the obvious move expected by infidels—' He bowed his head to me and my fellow officers—'with due respect, of course. After all, sirs,' smiled Ali Reis, 'it was we Arabs who introduced chess to Europe.'