Lord of Darkness

by Robert Silverberg

  I said, “I meant you no harm. But this you must understand: the carving is mine, and it is precious to me, and I will not destroy it, and I will have you do it no harm.”

  “Then it will do you harm. I would not have that.”

  “Let me be, Matamba. I ask that you let me be.”

  “If you will keep it, then keep it. You are the master. But it has mokisso in it. It is not Christian. It can harm you.”

  “I will risk that,” said I, and I ended the matter. And for some days I carried the carving about so she could not get rid of it; but then I saw she respected my wish, and I returned it to its place in the cottage. Whenever she saw it she crossed herself many times, but she did not raise the issue again.

  Some few days after my homecoming Don Jeronymo d’Almeida sent for me, to offer me a new task. To him I did go in an ill grace, knowing him to have treacherously conspired the deaths of those two my friends, and wanting to have no warmth between me and such a Judas. But yet I had to swallow back my qualms, for he was governor and I was at his mercy; I could upbraid him all I liked over Don João and Dona Teresa, and still at the end of it he would only have me flogged, or buried away in the dungeon and forgotten, and what would that have availed me, what would it have availed Don João, Dona Teresa?

  Don Jeronymo greeted me brusquely and in his usual harsh and fierce way. He was intending now, he said, to launch his expedition into the troublesome province of Kisama, that had altogether thrown off Portuguese rule. That province has its beginning on the south bank of the River Kwanza, and runs southward from there in the direction of Benguela, where there is an important stopping-place for the refreshing of Portuguese ships headed around the Cape of Bona Speranza.

  It was perilous in the extreme to allow that province to remain in rebellion, and so, as soon as the São Tomé men arrived, Don Jeronymo meant to lead a large force into that land. His plan was to go by ship up the Kwanza to the former presidio of Muchima and rebuild it, and then to march overland due south to a place called Ndemba, where rich salt mines were. At Ndemba he would found another presidio, and garrison it with one hundred men: this would become his base for the reconquest of Kisama Province.

  My role in all this was simply to serve as ferry-pilot. I was to take troop-ships up and down the Kwanza, delivering his soldiers to Muchima and to the larger presidio farther up the river at Masanganu.

  Well, I had no great craving to go anywhere near Masanganu, where I had contracted that terrible fever that had me raving and feeble for the better part of a year, and like to have cost me my life altogether. But I reminded me of Pinto Cabral’s words, that once one has survived such a fever, one does not take it again, if one has a sturdy frame. So a new voyage to Masanganu seemed to me more bothersome, on account of the awful heat, than in a real way dangerous to me. Yet I did hate the place and would gladly have been sent elsewhere, even to that salt-mine town of Ndemba. But that could not be reached by water and in Don Jeronymo’s mind I was reckoned to be a pilot, not a soldier.

  I was put in thought once again, also, of Don João’s promise to let me go home to England after I had done him some month’s service as a seaman here. Already that promise was some two years old, or nearly, and I saw no sign of its fulfillment. For it had been cast in abeyance during the strife between Don João and the d’Almeidas, and surely it was suspended entirely by Don João’s death, or rather made entirely null and void: Don Jeronymo would hardly release a useful pilot in time of war. That gave me great bitterness. But I dared not bring the issue to Don Jeronymo, knowing his ferocity and the precariousness of my position. I had no choice now but to go on serving my Portuguese masters in all that they demanded of me, while awaiting God’s grace in a change of my fortune.

  So once again I did voyage to Masanganu, with a flat-bellied frigate that seemed to me more like the ugly boats that the Dutch call scows. We loaded it up with Portugals who looked most gloomy and distraught, for they felt sure they were going to their deaths, if not from native spears and arrows then from the plagues and black fluxes of Masanganu; and up the river we went, past the sluggish evil coccodrillos snoring on this shore and that, past the thick green walls of vegetation that concealed God knew what terrible mysteries and horrors, past the places where the hippopotamuses yawned and the long-legged water-birds stalked about like things of ill omen.

  Into the zone of heavy foul stinking wet heat we traveled, and indeed the men began to sicken. But that was no business of mine, and I delivered them dead or alive at Masanganu or at the restored fort at Muchima, and went back for more, and did it all again. The chief thing that I remember of this onerous and dreary shuttling is my first sight of one of the gigantic serpents of this land, the which I would not have credited had I not seen it with mine own eyes.

  This monster I did behold at Masanganu, when we were unloading our cargo of soldiers. The blacks of the place gave a great shout of a sudden, and waved their arms and did a kind of dance in their fright, and then we saw it coming through the low bushes along a foot-path much used by us. It was, without any hyperbole, twenty-five feet in length, I assert, and it had a head as big as a calf, and when it moved from side to side in its coilings it disturbed the bushes as much as though twenty people were advancing through them. We drew back in alarm at the sight of it, fearing that it might gobble one of us with a sudden lunge, or smite at us with its immense yellow tail; but then some among us took their muskets and fired bullets into it, which halted its advance.

  It was a monstrous long time in dying, too, beating both its great head and its nether end against the ground in a slow hammering way. I think it did not know it was mortally wounded, but thought only that it had been set upon by some kind of stinging flies, or angry bees, if it thought anything at all. But at last its life left it and the natives, jumping forward most boldly now, hacked from it its head, after which it convulsed anew and continued to move for some minutes.

  The meat of these serpents is eaten with great enjoyment by the blackamoors, who claim it to be a delicacy. They offered a share to us, but found no takers. Afterward I saw the bones of it, amazing delicate and beautiful, littered out over what seemed to be half an acre of the town. One Portugal who had had experience with these beasts told us a tale of a somewhat smaller one, but still immense, that was encountered near São Paulo de Loanda in the early days of its founding. A soldier did cut this one in two pieces by a lusty stroke of its scimitar, he said, but even that did not kill it, and both pieces crawled away in the thick bushes. And soon afterward, two other people happening by, the half that bore the head did crawl out again and seize upon them, devouring them almost whole. I cannot attest that I saw such a marvel with mine own eyes, only that the tale was told to me; but I am inclined to believe in its verity, knowing what I have come to know about the strength and persistence of these animals. The same Portugal told me that the Jaqqas, when they took one of these serpents alive, would urge it to gulp down one of their prisoners, and then would eat snake and man themselves, together at a single feast. This, too, I never witnessed, though I witnessed plenty else among the man-eaters.

  I did my Masanganu service, finding the place plaguey hot and discomforting, as always, though I suffered not at all from its fevers. This took me all through the late months of Anno 1593 and the early seasons of ’94.

  Meanwhile reports came to us that Don Jeronymo, supplemented by soldiers of São Tomé, had carried out a great sweep through Kisama and had reduced nearly all of the rebellious sobas to submission. The work was done and I was looking toward an end to my river-shuttling, and a return to São Paulo de Loanda and the arms of my sweet Matamba. It would be a joy again to breathe the sea-breezes of the coast, I did tell myself, for even a torrid place like São Paulo de Loanda seems but a jolly holiday-place when it be compared with such an outpost of Satan’s realm as Masanganu.

  But then came messengers with deep disheartening news. Don Jeronymo, having completed his military work and founded his new presidio a
t Ndemba, had elected to go in quest of the silver mines of Kambambe in the east. Many a brave fool had been broken in the search for these mines, which for all I know are mere myth; and on his way toward them Don Jeronymo was smitten down by an ague, and had been taken back to São Paulo de Loanda gravely ill. Upon making this hasty retreat the governor had placed command of his soldiers in the hands of Balthasar d’Almeida and Pedro Alvares Rebello, two men whose judgment was not highly praised by their fellow Portugals; and those two, seeking, I suppose, to win quick fame through some independent exploit, had gone hallooing off into most bleak and inhospitable terrain in search of a certain wild native chief, Kafuche Kambara by name. That determined rebel was roving somewhere southward of Masanganu; and in the better hope of snaring him, they were summoning nearly all the garrison from that town, leaving only a small force there.

  In the hasty assembly of soldiers no one healthy was spared from the service. And to my surprise and dismay I found myself compelled to take part in this rash expedition. There on the list was my name pricked out:

  Andres Battell, Piloto.

  Of the arts of foot-soldiery I had never known much. That is not a great English skill, we being an island race. When enemies have come to our shores we have fought valiantly but, I do admit, with little success, which is why the Romans of Caesar were able to subdue us, and the Angles and Saxons who came later, and the Normans of William. We are a brave folk—the bravest, I think, in all the world—but we have never given heed to mastering the drills and maneuvers of combat by land, that require us to march like a single animal with many heads that think alike, for that is not the English way. We are too much independent. And therefore, knowing this weakness or fault in ourselves, we have since King William’s time taken good care that no enemy shall ever reach our shores again, and none ever has, and I suspect that by God’s grace and the strength of our bold seamen we will be protected forever in England against further invasion.

  In my own family they say there was a grandfather of my father who fought well in the wars between Lancaster and York, but other than that one we have been all of us men of the sea, as befits a family of the Essex shore. So it was a new and most unwelcome thing to me to find myself decked out in Portugee armor, with a gleaming polished casque to keep my head asweat and a great hulking breastplate and all those other foolish massive things, and then to have to go marching in one plodding step after another over an interminable wasteland. God’s bones, how repellent unto me! Yet had I no choice in the matter. I could not say, “My contract with you Portugals is to be a sea-pilot for you.” I had no rights whatsoever among these people. I lived by their sufferance alone. I was a prisoner of war, that could be clapped in dungeon by any commander at any time. So when I was told to march, why, I did march, and no grumble of it.

  And O! the grievous dismal land we marched into! Here were no lush and leafy jungles, here were no steaming heavy vapors rising from ponds and swamps. This was a dry land in a dry season, a place where it was easy to believe that rain had fallen last in the time of King Arthur, and before that perhaps in Julius Caesar’s day. The soil was a parched orange thing, cracked like old plaster where the sun had riven it, and it was all but barren. Bleached skulls and bones of animals lay scattered on the ground as omens of mortality. On that seared plain terrible crookbacked thorny trees did sprout, and other low vegetation that might have been engendered in the troubled dreams of some disordered deity. It was an empty land, except here and there where the earth was less brutal and a few native settlements clung to a sort of life: dome-shaped huts of flimsy branches and leaves, arrayed in circles of seven or nine, occupied by sad-eyed scrawny blackamoors who fouled their own territory with scatterings of bones and seeds and broken calabashes and other rubble, and hung withered chunks of smoked meat in the leafless branches of the trees.

  Only once was there during that dreary miserable march any moment of beauty or joy, and that was when we entered a zone of grassy pasture that was grazed by the animal called here the zevvera, which is wondrous to behold. This beast is like a horse, but that his mane and his tail and his body is distinguished by streaks of black and white that are most highly elegant, and look as if it were done by art. These zevveras are all wild and live in great herds, and will suffer a man to come within shot of them, and let them shoot three or four times at them before they will run away. When they do run, it is in huge number, and the sight is something that not the most doltish dullard would ever forget, for they dazzle the eye with the movement of their white and black stripes, that seem to have an inner motion of their own beyond the motion of the animal itself.

  We startled these zevveras and brought down a few with our muskets, and the rest fled, so as to create that miraculous effect of a river of stripes moving away from us. No man has ever tamed one of these striped horses to ride upon him, and I think no one ever will. For they do have a fierce independence of spirit, that I admire greatly.

  I had one other pleasure on this journey, most unexpected, which was the companionship of my gentle friend Lourenço Barbosa, the tax-collector. Certainly he was no military man. But when I arrived of Masanganu on that last voyage in the scow I found him already there, to make some sort of enumeration or survey of Portuguese settlement in the inland region; and when generals Alvares Rebello and d’Almeida sent forth their request for an assembly of troops to conquer Kafuche Kambara, Barbosa chose to go with them instead of to remain in Masanganu. I believe he simply wished to taste a little of the excitement and fury of war, after having spent all his days traveling about the borders of the realm making lists and registers and entries in his ledger.

  I did not even know until the second day out of Masanganu that he was among us. But then I saw in the column just before mine a distinguished older man with an elegant purple plume to his hat, instead of a metal helmet, and though scarce believing it could be he, I hurried ahead and found him. And we did have a cheering reunion, each being greatly surprised to find the other in such an unlikely place.

  We shared wine, which he had brought with him in a hamper, and we spoke of what had befallen us in the ten months or thereabouts since last we had met. Barbosa had been all over the inland, into such provinces as Malemba and Bondo and Bangala and Matamba, where scarce any Portugal ever went, and I marveled at his diligence in making surveys of such remote places. He told me many a tale of these lands: such as the great province of Cango, fourteen days journey from the town of Loango, which is full of mountains and rocky ground, and full of woods, and has great store of copper. The elephantos in this place do excel, and there are so many that the warehouses do overflow with the teeth of them being stored to go for market in Loango. And I heard from him of certain monster apes of the inland, the great one called the pongo and the smaller one named the engeco, which are much like wild hairy men, but cannot speak and have no more understanding than a beast.

  When he told me this and much else, that astonished me beyond words, I related of my voyage to São Tomé, and that I had acquired a slave-girl from Matamba who was a Christian and had become my bedfellow, and such. Then Barbosa asked me what news I had from São Paulo de Loanda, for that he had not been in the capital of the colony in many months. In particular he craved to know whether Don João de Mendoça had returned from Portugal, and if so what had befallen between him and Don Jeronymo d’Almeida.

  At this I grew most downcast, for I had not yet come round to telling him of this matter owing to the painfulness of it to me. Gravely I said, “Nay, I think Don João will never return, for Don Jeronymo has plotted to do him to death.”

  “What is it you say?”

  “So I heard it from one of my sailors,” I declared, and repeated what had been said to me by Mendes Oliveira, that two rascals had been hired to throw Don João and Dona Teresa overboard in the voyage to Europe. At that, Barbosa did cross himself several times and looked much moved, with the beginnings of tears in his eyes just showing.

  He said, “Don João was the
only hope of this land, to govern wisely and with effect.”

  “Aye. So I felt also.”

  “But can it truly be? He is so shrewd, surely he would have guarded himself against such an attack!”

  “I do pray so,” I replied. “I know only what was told me, that the scheme was so ordered by Don Jeronymo, and that when I departed last from São Paulo de Loanda there was no word of the return of Don João.”

  “But none of his death, either?”

  “Nay, no news of that.”

  “Then there is still hope for him,” said Barbosa. But that hope seemed scant to me.

  Having this man by my side as I marched made the burden of it much more light. Within a few days more we arrived at the camp where the main body of the Portuguese army had assembled, and a fine grand force it was, filling half the plain. There must have been seven to eight hundred Portugals there, along with an army of their black allies that I could not count, it was so huge, to a number of twenty thousand or even thirty or forty thousand. All these were arrayed in a long confused mass, the Portugals in their tents with some horse grazing about, and the Negro auxiliaries to the side.

  The way it is done with these auxiliaries is that the Portugals have out of Kongo a black nobleman, which is known to be a good Christian and of good behavior. He has brought out of Kongo some one hundred Negroes that are his followers. This Macikongo, as he is known, has the rank of tandala, or general, over the black camp, and has authority to kill, to put down lords and make lords, and has all the chief doings with the Negroes.