by Neil Gaiman
It would be eighteen years before she spoke any part of the formula aloud.
Sergeant Osterman drank palm wine in the shade of a baobab as usual while Baloko oversaw the weighing of the village’s rubber. This time the Baenga had ordered M’fini, the chief, to wait for all the other males to be taken first. There was an ominous silence among the villagers as the wiry old man came forward to the table at which Baloko sat, flanked by his fellow Forest Guards.
“Ho, M’fini,” Baloko said jovially, “what do you bring us?”
Without speaking, the chief handed over his gray-white sheets of latex. They were layered with plantain leaves. Baloko set the rubber on one pan of his scales, watched it easily overbalance the four-kilogram weight in the other pan. Instead of setting the rubber on the pile gathered by the other villagers and paying M’fini in brass wire, Baloko smiled. “Do you remember, M’fini,” the Baenga asked, “what I told you last week when you said to me that your third wife T’sini would never sleep with another man while you lived?”
The chief was trembling. Baloko stood and with his forefinger flicked M’fini’s latex out of the weighing pan to the ground. “Bad rubber,” he said, and grinned. “Stones, trash hidden in it to bring it to the weight. An old man like you, M’fini, must spend too much time trying to satisfy your wives when you should be finding rubber for the King.”
“I swear, I swear by the god Iwa who is death,” cried M’fini, on his knees and clutching the flapping bulk of rubber as though it were his firstborn, “it is good rubber, all smooth and clean as milk itself!”
Two of the askaris seized M’fini by the elbows and drew him upright. Baloko stepped around the weighing table, drawing his iron-bladed knife as he did so. “I will help you, M’fini, so that you will have more time to find good rubber for King Leopold.”
Sergeant Osterman ignored the first of the screams, but when they went on and on he swigged down the last of his calabash and sauntered over to the group around the scales. He was a big man, swarthy and scarred across the forehead by a Tuareg lance while serving with the French in Algeria.
Baloko anticipated the question by grinning and pointing to M’fini. The chief writhed on the ground, his eyes screwed shut and both hands clutched to his groin. Blood welling from between his fingers streaked black the dust he thrashed over. “Him big man, bring no-good rubber,” Baloko said. Osterman knew little Bantu, so communication between him and the Guards was generally in pidgin. “Me make him no-good man, bring big rubber now.”
The burly Fleming laughed. Baloko moved closer, nudged him in the ribs. “Him wife T’sini, him no need more,” the Baenga said. “You, me, all along Guards—we make T’sini happy wife, yes?”
Osterman scanned the encircling villagers whom curiosity had forced to watch and fear now kept from dispersing. In the line, a girl staggered and her neighbors edged away quickly as if her touch might be lethal. Her hair was wound high with brass wire in the fashion of a dignitary’s wife, and her body had the slim delight of a willow shoot. Even in the lush heat of the equator, twelve-year-olds look to be girls rather than women.
Osterman, still chuckling, moved toward T’sini. Baloko was at his side.
Time passed. From deep in the forest came rumblings that were neither of man or of Earth.
In a London study, the bay window was curtained against frost and the gray slush quivering over the streets. The coal fire hissed as Dame Alice Kilrea, fingers tented, dictated to her male amanuensis. Her dress was of good linen but two buttons were missing, unnoticed, from the placket, and the lace front showed signs of lunch bolted in the library. “…and, thanks to your intervention, the curator of the Special Reading Room allowed me to handle Alhazred myself instead of having a steward turn the pages at my request. I opened the volume three times at random and read the passage on which my index finger fell.
“Before, I had been concerned; now I am certain and terrified. All the lots were congruent, referring to aspects of the Messenger.” She looked down at the amanuensis and said, “Capital on ‘Messenger’, John.” He nodded.
“Your support has been of untold help; now my need for it is doubled. Somewhere in the jungles of that dark continent the crawling chaos grows and gathers strength. I am armed against it with the formulas that Spiedel found in the library of Kloster-Neuburg just before his death; but that will do us no good unless they can be applied in time. You know, as I do, that only the most exalted influence will pass me into the zone of disruption at the crucial time. That time may yet be years to come, but they are years of the utmost significance to Mankind. Thus I beg your unstinting support not in my name or that of our kinship, but on behalf of life itself.
“Paragraph, John. As for the rest, I am ready to act as others have acted in the past. Personal risk has ever been the coin paid for knowledge of the truth.”
The amanuensis wrote with quick, firm strokes. He was angry both with himself and with Dame Alice. Her letter had driven out of his mind thoughts of the boy whom he intended to seduce that evening in Kettners. He had known for some time that he would have to find another situation. The problem was not that Dame Alice was mad. All women were mad, after all. But her madness had such an insidious plausibility that he was starting to believe it himself.
As presumably her present correspondent did. And the letter to him would be addressed to “His Royal Highness.…”
In most places the trees grew down to the water edge, denser for being able to take sunlight from the side as well as from above. The margins of the shallow backwaters spread after each rain into sheets thick with vegetable richness and as black as the skins of those who lived along them. In drier hours there were sand banks and easy expanses on which to trade with the forest folk.
Gomes’ dugout had already slid back into the slough, leaving in the sand the straight gouge of its keel centered in the blur of bare footprints. A score of natives still clustered around Kaminski’s similar craft, fondling his bolts of bright-patterned cloth or chatting with his paddlers. Then the steamship swung into sight around the wooded headland.
The trees had acted as a perfect muffler for the chuffing engine. With a haste little short of panic, the forest dwellers melted back into concealment. The swarthy Portuguese gave an angry order and his crew shipped their paddles. Emptied of its cargo, the dugout drew only a few inches of water and could, had there been enough warning, have slid up among the tree roots where the two-decked steamer could never have followed.
Throttled down to the point its stern wheel made only an occasional slapping, the government craft edged closer to Gomes. On the Upper Kasai it was a battleship, although its beamy twenty-four meters would have aroused little interest in a more civilized part of the world. Awnings protected the hundreds of askaris overburdening the side rails. The captain was European, a blond, soft-looking man in a Belgian army uniform. The only other white man visible was the non-com behind the Hotchkiss swivel-mounted at the bow.
“Messieurs Gomes and Kaminski, perhaps?” called the officer as the steamship swung to, a dozen yards from the canoe. He was smiling, using his fingertips to balance his weight on the starboard bridge rail.
“You know who we are, de Vriny—damn you,” Gomes shot back. “We have our patent to trade and we pay our portion to your Societe Cosmpolite. Now leave us!”
“Pay your portion, yes,” de Vriny purred. “Gold dust and gold nuggets. Where do you get such gold, my fine mongrel friends?”
“Carlos, it’s all right,” called Kaminski, standing in his grounded boat. “Don’t become angry—the gentleman is doing his duty to protect trade, that is all.” Beneath the sombrero which he had learned to wear in the American Southwest, sweat was boiling off Kaminski. He knew his friend’s volcanic temper, knew also the reputation of the blond man who was goading them. Not now! Not on the brink of the success that would gain them entree to any society in the world!
“Trade?” Gomes was shouting. “What do they know about trade?” He shook his f
ist at de Vriny and made the canoe rock nervously, so that the plump Angolan woman he had married a dozen years before put a calming hand on his leg. “You hold a rifle to the head of some poor black, pay him a ha’penny for rubber you sell in Paris for a shilling fourpence. Trade? There would be no gold coming out of this forest if the tribes didn’t trust us and get a fair value for the dust they bring!”
“Well, we’ll have to explore that,” grinned the Belgian. “You see, your patent to trade was issued in error—it seems it was meant for some Gomez who spelled his name with a ‘z’—and I have orders to escort you both back to Boma until the matter can be resolved.”
Gomes’ broad face went saffron. He began to slump like a snow figure on a sunny day. “They couldn’t take away our patent because of a spelling mistake their own clerks made?” he whined, but his words were more of a sick apostrophe than a real question.
The Belgian answered it anyway. “You think not? Don’t you know who appoints the judges of our Congo oh-so-Free State? Not Jews or nigger-wenching Portu-gees, I assure you.”
Gomes was probably bracing his sagging bulk against the thwart, though he could indeed have been reaching for the Mauser lying across the pack in front of him. Presumably that was what the Baenga thought when he fired the first shot and blew Gomes into the water. Every Forest Guard with a rifle followed in a ragged volley that turned the canoe into a chip dancing on an ornamental fountain. Jets of wood and water and blood spouted upward.
“Christ’s blood, you fools!” de Vriny cried. Then, “Well, get the rest of them too!”
Kaminski screamed and tried to follow his paddlers in a race for the tree line, but he was a corpulent man whose boots punched ankle-deep into the soft sand. The natives had no chance either. The Hotchkiss stuttered, knocking down a pair of them as the gunner checked his range. Then, spewing empty cases that hissed as they bounced into the water, the machine gun hosed bullets across the other running men. Kaminski half turned as the black in front of him pitched forward hemorrhaging bright blood from mouth and nose. That desire to see his death coming preserved the trader from it: the bullet that would otherwise have exited through his forehead instead drilled through both upper maxillary bones. Kaminski’s eyes popped out as neatly as oysters into a gourmet’s silver spoon. His body slapped hard enough to ripple the sand in which it came to rest face up.
The firing stopped. Capsized and sinking, Gomes’ shattered dugout was drifting past the bow of the steamer. “I want their packs raised,” de Vriny ordered. “Even if you have to dive for them all day. The same with the packs on shore—then burn the canoes.”
“And the bodies, master?” asked his Baenga headman.
“Faugh,” spat the Belgian. “Why else did the good Lord put crocodiles in this river?”
They did not take Kaminski’s ear because it was white and that would attract comment. Even in Boma.
Time passed. Deep in the forest the ground spurted upward like a grapefruit hit by a rifle bullet. Something thicker than a tree bole surged, caught at a nearby human and flung the body, no longer distinguishable as to sex or race, a quarter mile through the canopy of trees. The earth subsided then, but in places the surface continued to bubble as if made of heated tar.
Five thousand miles away, Dame Alice Kilrea stepped briskly out of her solicitors’ office, having executed her will, and ordered her driver on to the Nord Deutscher-Lloyd Dock. Travelling with her in the carriage was a valise containing one ancient book and a bundle of documents thick with wax, ribbons, and gold foil—those trappings and the royal signatures beneath. On the seat across from her was the American servant she had engaged only the week before as she closed her London house and discharged the remainder of her establishment. The servant, Sparrow, was a weaselly man with tanned skin and eyes the frosty color of lead cast in too hot a mold. He said little but glanced around frequently; and his fingers writhed as if with separate life.
Occasionally chance would merge the rhythm of mauls and axes splitting wood in a dozen parts of the forest. Then the thunk-thunk-THUNK would boom out like a beast approaching from the darkness. Around their fire the officers would pause. The Baengas would chuckle at the joke of it and let the pounding die away. Little by little it would reappear at each separate group of woodsmen, finally to repeat its crescendo.
“Like children,” Colonel Trouville said to Dame Alice. The engineer and two sergeants were still aboard the Archiduchesse Stephanie, dining apart from the other whites. Color was not the only measure of class, even in the Congo Basin. “They’ll be cutting wood—and drinking their malafou, wretched stuff, to call it palm wine is to insult the word ‘wine’—they’ll be at it almost till dawn. After a time you’ll get used to it. There’s nothing, really, to be done, since we can only carry a day’s supply of fuel on the steamer. While they of course could find and cut enough dry wood by a reasonable hour each night, when one is dealing with the native ‘mind’.… ”
De Vriny and Osterman joined in their Colonel’s deprecating laughter. Dame Alice managed only a preoccupied smile. During the day, steaming upriver from the Stanley Pool, she had stared at the terrain in which her battle would be joined: heavy forest, here mostly a narrow belt fringing the watercourse but later to become a sprawling, barely penetrable expanse. The trees climbed to the edge of the water and mushroomed over the banks. Dame Alice could imagine that where the stream was less than the Congo’s present mile breadth the branches would meet above in laced blackness.
Now at night, blackness was complete even on the lower river. It chilled her soul. The equatorial sunset was not a curtain of ever-thickening gauze but a knifeblade that separated the hemispheres. On this side was death, and neither the laughter of the Baenga askaris nor the goblets of Portuguese wine being drunk around Trouville’s campfire could change that.
Captain de Vriny swigged and eyed the circle. He was a man of middle height with the roundedness of a bear, a seeming softness which tended to mask the cruelty beneath. Across from him, Sparrow dragged on the cigarette he had rolled and lit his face orange. The captain smiled. Only because his mistress, the mad noblewoman, had demanded it, did Sparrow sit with the officers. He wore a cheap blue-cotton shirt, buttoned at the cuffs, and denim trousers held up by suspenders. Short and narrow-chested, Sparrow would have looked foolish even without the waist belt and the pair of huge double-action revolvers hanging from it.
Dame Alice was unarmed by contrast. Like the men she wore trousers, hers tucked into low-heeled boots. De Vriny looked at her and, shaping his mocking smile into an expression of friendly interest, said, “It surprises me, Dame Alice, that a woman as well-born and, I am sure, delicate as yourself would want to accompany an expedition against some of the most vicious sub-men on the globe.”
Dame Alice lifted the faintly bulbous tip of her nose and said, “It’s no matter of wanting, Captain.” She eyed de Vriny with mild distaste. “I don’t suppose you want to come yourself—unless you like to shoot niggers for lack of better sport? One does unpleasant things because someone must. One has a duty.”
“What the Captain is suggesting,” put in Trouville, “is that there are no lines of battle fixed in this jungle. A spearman may step from around the next tree and snick, end all your plans—learned though we are sure they must be.”
“Quite,” agreed Dame Alice, “and so I brought Sparrow here—” she nodded to her servant—“instead of trusting to chance.”
All heads turned again toward the little American.
In French, though the conversation had previously been in English to include Sparrow, de Vriny said, “I hope he never falls overboard. The load of iron-mongery he carries will sink him twenty meters through the bottom muck before anyone knows he’s gone.”
Again the Belgians laughed. In a voice as flat and hard as the bottom of a skillet, Sparrow said, “Captain, I’d surely appreciate a look at your nice pistol there.”
De Vriny blinked, uncertain whether the question was chance or if the Am
erican had understood the joke of which he had been made the butt. Deliberately, his composure never more than dented, the Belgian unhooked the flap of his patent-leather holster and handed over the Browning pistol. It was small and oblong, its blued finish gleaming like wet sealskin in the firelight.
Sparrow rotated the weapon, giving its exterior a brief scrutiny. He thumbed the catch in the grip and stripped out the magazine, holding it so that the light fell on the uppermost of its stack of small brass cartridges.
“You are familiar with automatic pistols, then?” asked Trouville in some surprise at the American’s quick understanding of a weapon rarely encountered on his native continent.
“Naw,” Sparrow said, slipping the magazine back home. His fingers moved like those of a pianist doing scales. “It’s a gun, though. I can generally figure how a gun works.”
“You should get one like it,” de Vriny said, smiling as he took the weapon back from Sparrow. “You would find it far more comfortable to carry than those—yours.”
“Carry a toy like that?” the gunman asked. His voice parodied amazement. “Not me, Captain. When I shoot a man, I want him dead. I want a gun what’ll do the job if I do mine, and these .45s do me jist fine, every time I use’um.” Sparrow grinned then, for the first time. De Vriny felt his own hands fumble as they tried to reholster the Browning. Suddenly he knew why the askaris gave Sparrow so wide a berth.
Dame Alice coughed. The sound shattered the ice that had been settling over the men. Without moving, Sparrow faded into the background to become an insignificant man with narrow shoulders and pistols too heavy for his frame.
“Tell me what you know about the rebellion,” the Irishwoman asked quietly in a liquid, attractive voice. Her features led one to expect a nasal whinny. Across the fire came snores from Osterman, a lieutenant by courtesy but in no other respect an officer. He had ignored the wine for the natives’ own malafou. The third calabash had slipped from his numb fingers, dribbling only a stain onto the ground as the bearded Fleming lolled back in his camp chair.