Lord of Darkness

by Robert Silverberg

  I have told you already something of this place, which lies at the meeting of the waters of the Kwanza and the Lukala, toward the inner side of the Angolan coastal plain, in a region both foggy and most stifling hot. Among the swamps and marshes of Masanganu stands the pale stone fort of the Portugals upon a little headland, in a zone where the heat is greatest, the sun hanging overhead all the day long, and, I trow, half the night as well, since it is no cooler in the hours of darkness than at noontide. This fort is well situated to guard the inner lands, for it looks toward the mountains that rise in Angola’s interior, and any hostile force descending out of those jungled uplands must of necessity come within notice of Masanganu before it can hope to menace São Paulo de Loanda. So there is at Masanganu a permanent garrison to guard against any intrusion of enemies from the east or north.

  Permanent, that is, in the sense that there always are men stationed at Masanganu, to a number of several hundreds; but the men themselves are far from permanent, being constantly carried off by the maladies of the place. That God chose to excuse me from those ailments is, I suppose, an example of His great mercy toward me, that He showed in many ways during my adventures in Africa; but all the while I was there, I moved among men who had been stricken horridly by this plague or that, and I learned not to form fast friendships, since there was slender chance that any such would last. There is in that place a colic that is most deadly, and a bloody flux, and a kind of headache that gives a pain beyond all understanding; and there is also the fever that smote me on my first visit, which I saw carry off any number of others, though it left me alone after the one time. And as well there is a kind of worm in Masanganu that covertly enters the body, most commonly in the fleshy parts, as the thighs, the haunches, the breasts, or even the scrotum and the yard, and I think the malady this worm causes is the most worst of all. The worm generally shows itself by the swelling of the flesh; in some it causes violent agues, with great shiverings; others it torments with intolerable pains all over the body, so that they cannot rest in any posture; others it casts into a violent fever, and continual deliriums. But those men that are afflicted in their private parts suffer beyond any others, and in their torment grow perfectly mad and outrageous, so that it is requisite to bind them very fast. The only way to cure this loathly disease is to take hold of the worm very gingerly as soon as the head has made its way out of the swelling, and make it fast to a small piece of wood, on which it is slowly and carefully drawn forth by winding the stick, sometimes for a whole month, until it emerges entire. If the worm should happen to break by being too hastily drawn out, that part which remains in the body will soon putrefy or break out at some other part, which occasions double pain and trouble. I saw men thus served, for whom no other remedy could be found to preserve their lives than cutting off a leg or an arm, or the privy parts; and if the worm is lodged in the trunk of the body, and broken, it is almost a miracle if the man does not die of the gangrene working to the vital parts. From my arrival in Masanganu in the latter part of 1594 until my departure from it early in Anno 1600 there was no single day on which I did not search my body for the intrusion of this worm, with fear and tremblings until I was sure it had not penetrated me.

  Strange to say it was the Portugals at Masanganu who suffered worst from these maladies, but the blacks were rarely touched except by the worm; and there were various Moors and Gypsies there who also seemed safe against the fevers. These men had been sent to Masanganu by banishment, even as I. The Gypsies or Ciganos had been expelled from Portugal by King Philip, under pain of death if they did not quit the kingdom four months after his decree, and many of these folk had gone to seek their fortunes in Africa, which is where their kind originally did proceed from, they being Egyptians by ancestry. The ones at Masanganu were all criminals sent down from São Tomé or the Kongo, and a dangerous bunch they were, that would cheerfully slit you open just to see the color of your inner organs. As for the Moors, they were Moriscos from the land of Morocco, who did compete with the Portugals in the trading of slaves along the Guinea coast, and these had been captured and imprisoned for their pains. I never knew many of these Moorish men, who were proud and aloof and spoke a language among themselves that they would not teach to others. But I did befriend a few of the Gypsies, simply because they and I, not falling victim to the evil diseases of the place, were thrown together over a long span of time and grew accustomed to one another.

  In those years the Portugals did often make war against the black nations of the interior. The mainmost of these expeditions was led by Don João himself, who had, I think, never gone before into battle. This was an entry up the River Mbengu, which lies north of São Paulo de Loanda a little way, and the purpose of it was the pacifying of the blacks along the upper reaches of Angola’s boundary. In this excursion the shrewd and farsighted Don João proved himself every bit as rash as the unlamented Don Jeronymo, for against all advice he commenced it at the worst time of the year, which is March, and very quickly he lost two hundred men by fever. This I know because reinforcements were summoned from the Masanganu garrison upon these fatalities, though I was not one of those chosen. With these additional men Don João did conquer the district, and, as though to revenge himself on the natives for his own losses through diseases and ignorance of the country, he treated the defeated chieftains with unusual severity. I have it on good authority that many of the hapless sobas were placed in his heavy guns and blown forth by a charge of powder, to the terrible sundering of their limbs.

  Well, and I suppose the Portugals may treat their fallen foes in any manner they wish, but I could not come to see Sir Francis Drake ever blowing enemies from guns, nor any other Englishman so doing. Why, I think not even our crookbacked King Richard III, that was the great enemy of our Queen’s grandfather, and is said to have committed such foul crimes in our land an hundred years ago, would have stooped to such a villainy. But the souls of most of these Spaniards and Portugals, methinks, are deficient in the substance that makes other men shrink from monstrous cruelties. Perhaps it is the hot dry air of their forlorn Iberian Peninsula that bakes the mercy out of them, or possibly it is the Popish teachings by which they are reared, that cause them to hold the lives of those of other faiths to be of no account. But I doubt that latter, for the Genoese and the Venetians and the Burgundians and many others are Papists just as well, and they do not stuff their conquered adversaries into cannons.

  While Don João was engaged in these pastimes, his captain-major João de Velloria, the Spaniard, was marching through the land of Lamba, which lies between the Rivers Kwanza and Mbengu, and he was doing many the same things. For these triumphs Velloria was nominated as a member in the Order of Christ, which is some holy confraternity of the Portugals, and was granted a pension of twenty thousand reis, which be six pounds a year, and was named to the office of Marcador dos Esclavos, or administrator of slaves, that brought him a fee for every slave taken in this territory. How many blacks he slaughtered in the campaign that won him these honors I cannot say. But at least none of them went to be slaves in the sugar-mills of Brazil, so to that degree he gave them a kindness: it is a quicker death to perish on the field of battle than to bleed your life away cutting cane and hauling millstones.

  And I did take no part in all these heroic and pious exploits, being penned up in the hellish presidio at Masanganu. My chief duty there was to bury the dead. The colic or the flux or the fevers carried them off, and then I was summoned, along with three Gypsies and two Portugals who also were reputed to be proof against these diseases, and we did dig a grave and carry the bloated and blackened and sickening corpse to it, and give it its interment. For a time I counted the number of these dead that I saw into the earth, but then I lost the tally, when it was well above an hundred. For indeed this Masanganu was a place, as Thomas Torner had declared in fright long before, where men do die like chickens. But when a chicken dies, no one need labor to dig a great buggardly hole in the ground to put it into, under a sun that
gives the heat of a thousand thousand furnaces at once.

  Beyond such activities there was little. We marched patrol; we repaired the fort, which was constantly crumbling, owing to the poorness of the mortar in this clime; we made clearings in the jungle, to what end I never was told; we cleaned our guns and swept out the streets. Sometimes we hunted for coccodrillos or river-horses by way of small diversion. We had for our pleasure the native women, many of them poxed, and the soldiers did use them freely, in whatever way that suited their fancy, including one that I think would have had them burned at the stake if the Jesuits got wind of it, that is, by sodomizing them. This became the common fashion at Masanganu at a time, so that when one heard a woman screaming painfully at a distance, one could be sure that some merry Portugal had flipped her on her belly and was ramming himself between her hinder cheeks. This I never chose to do, thinking that it was folly to go poking about in the hole of foulness and excrement when God had afforded us a much sweeter and more natural entrance nearby. From time to time I did take me a woman by the ordinary usage, rarely the same one twice, and never more often than the fires of lust within me did absolutely require. A Gypsy of my acquaintance kindly showed me a remedy for the venereal pox, that was to make a sort of ointment of palm-oil and a new-laid egg, and to rise after carnal doings and immediately to rub that substance all over one’s yard and ballocks and thighs. The which I unfailingly did, despite the foul sliminess of the medicine, and I had me no poxes at Masanganu, though I cannot say whether that was owing to the efficacy of the Gypsy medicine or to my own good fortune.

  So did the months and years pass. I felt sure I would give up all the rest of my life in this place, and, curious to relate, I do confess that for some span of time I did not resent that at all. What, you say? Andrew Battell resigned to captivity, a mere passive drudge? Yea, so it was. But I pray you remember that I had left my home in the spring of ’89 and this was six and seven and eight years after, and for most of those years I had been a prisoner—sometimes under comfortable circumstances, sometimes less so, but at scarce any moment my own master. That had not broken me, but it had dulled my sharp edge of spirit. Though ever yet I dreamed of escaping this dark and sultry land and going again to England, that became little more than a will-o’-the-wisp to me, as remote from reality as is the hope of heaven to a small child.

  I labored. I ate. I slept. I sweated. Those were the boundaries of my life at Masanganu. And I tell you, it let the time fly faster by, if I did not give resistance to my captivity. In that place where there is scarce any change of season, where even day and night are nigh the same length all the year round, when only by alternation of wet and dry seasons can one tell winter from summer, and the terrible heat dominates everything, time does indeed appear to glide by in a single unbroken sheet of hours, and I knew not whether the year was 1595 or ’96 or ’97. Somewhere far away was an England where yet they had the Easter and the Christmastide and the midsummer frolic, where a Queen ruled in grace and glory over a sparkling court of dukes and lords and knights, where maids were wed and turned into mothers, where constant change and transformation was the rule: and here I toiled in a timeless place of the greatest discomfort and dreariness, and each day was the twin of the last.

  Only one interruption in our life of routine occurred, when King Ngola, that was the greatest of the enemies of the Portugals in these parts, did rise up and lay blockade against our presidio. That was in Anno 1597, I do believe.

  We had ample warning of this, for our scouts all through the province did tell us an army was massing, with drums of war beating, and a great shouting and flourishing of weapons and ringing of wooden bells by the sorcerers, that are the preliminary rituals of war among these folk. Then they came upon us, first a procession of wizards and warlocks with their bodies wrapped in the strong leaves of the matteba, a tree much like unto the palm, so that it seemed the forest itself did walk toward us; and then the warriors themselves, in all their wild battle-dress, their high headdresses and iron chains and jingling bells and such, the like of which I had seen before in the attack by Kafuche Kambara. There were thousands of them, capering like grotesque phantasms and incubi before us, letting fly with their arrows and darts, and crying out in hoarse whooping tones, and doing a dance of death.

  But we had builded well, and were not vulnerable behind the walls of our fort, so that they did rage and bluster for week upon week while doing us no harm. Nor could we harm them, I do add, and had the siege continued many weeks longer we should all have perished of starvation if not of the plagues of the place. We dared not come out of the presidio to our burying-ground, so whenever one of our number died of a malady we did burn his body and scatter the ashes, which may not have been pleasing unto God and Church but which spared us from the spreading of disease. And after a time the main force of the Portugals came up from São Paulo de Loanda under the command of the general Balthasar Rebello de Aragão, and drove off the blackamoors as though they were nothing more than vapors, and set us free. After which, this Rebello de Aragão did descend the Kwanza and build a new presidio near the village of Muchima, in the constructing of which I did take a part.

  But then we returned to the old weary life at Masanganu, and again I lost count of the months and the years. There was a day when I learned by chance that I was now living in the November of 1598, so that it was my fortieth anniversary of my birth. That seemed a very great age for me to have attained, especially in the teeth of such many hardships. “I am forty years old,” I said aloud to myself several times over, and strange it sounded in my ears. And then also it was the fortieth year of Her Protestant Majesty’s glorious reign, if indeed she still held the throne. But did she? God save me, I might have been on some other star, for all the news of England I had. Did the Queen still live? And if she had gone on, who now held the throne? Was it James of Scotland, or some French prince, or the King of Spain, or someone altogether other? Nay, I could not imagine anyone else on our throne but she, that virgin and miraculous she; and I could not imagine myself being forty, which meant that my lost Anne Katherine, whose maidenhood I had had from her when she was fifteen, must now be seven-and-twenty, long past the bloom of her youth, almost a matron. Did she still wait for my return? Only a fool would think so. Perhaps she grieved for me, but certain it was she had given her love to someone else, and had by now two children or three, and was growing plump and had a little line of golden hair sprouting on her lip, eh? November of 1598! Forty years old, aye, and a slave in Masanganu!

  So the time journeyed, and I grew ever harder and more enduring, and I came up out of my long resignation and bestirred myself to think of escaping this place, before my life’s time was utterly expended.

  There was a certain Gypsy of Masanganu that over the years I had come to trust, and he the same for me, because that we had labored long side by side, suffering much and sharing much. He called himself Cristovão, though also he had a Cigano name in their own language, that he did not offer to others. This Cristovão was a small man, very dark of skin, with a hawk’s nose and eyes of the most penetrating sort, and the strength of his body was extraordinary, he being able to lift weights of the heaviness of myself, though being but half my size. On one day of amazing heat, when he and I and some few other Gypsies did labor to rebuild a breach in the wall of the fort, suffering like Jews under Pharaoh, an overseer named Barbosa—but surely no kin of my fallen friend—came upon us as we paused a moment to refresh ourselves. Cristovão had a leathern flask of palm-wine, that he drank from by holding it high overhead and letting a stream of the sweet fluid squirt to his open mouth; and he took a deep draught of it and handed it to me, saying, “Here, Andres, it is time you learned how it be done.”

  Whereupon I imitated him, but badly, getting the stream of wine on my cheeks and throat, and he laughed and the other Ciganos also, and Cristovão took the flask from me to show me the trick of it. And while he held it above him, this taskmaster Barbosa appeared and did strike the flask f
rom Cristovão’s hands, crying, “Why are you drinking, and not working?”

  I saw the fury in Cristovão’s eyes. Humbly did he stoop and pick up his flask, the wine of which was mainly spilled, and then he cleansed his face where the wine had stained it, and he took several deep breaths of the hot air to constrain his temper, so that he did not strike the taskmaster dead, as Moses did in the land of Egypt. And quietly he murmured curses in the Cigano tongue, for he did seethe with hatred and rage.

  Then I said, taking him by the arm and leading him a little aside, “Can you bear this any longer? For I cannot. I am minded to flee this place, Cristovão.”

  “On your oath?”

  “Indeed. This very night will I go, for I think it better for me to venture my life for my liberty than to live any longer in this miserable town,” said I, the words rising up out of some powerful spring within my soul where they had too long been penned.

  He pressed his face close to mine and grinned widely, so that I saw a fortune in yellow gold inlaid into his crooked teeth, and he said, “I will go with you, Andres, and we will take our risks together.” And he clasped his arm against mine in an intricate and interwoven way that was, I think, a sign of blood-bond among the Cigano kind.

  So were we resolved, and then we were swept along in our own vigor, never hesitating. Whilst we worked we planned our plan, which was to steal a canoe and slip from the fort under darkness, not just the two of us but a whole band of escapers, for we agreed there would be safety in numbers when we were abroad in the jungle. Cristovão said he would procure ten of his fellows to go with us, and so he did, seven Portugals and three more Gypsies, all of them known to me as strong and trustworthy men.