Lord of Darkness

by Robert Silverberg

  The next pair to wrestle was Kaimba and Ngonga—for high lords of the Jaqqas did eagerly take their turns in the arena—and after them, the venerable Ntotela, with a man nearly his age, much muscled and brawned, by name Kulurimba. And they all were elegant and splendid in their movements, and I did envy and admire them, thinking, Lord, give me the grace and skill to wrestle as they do! And I wondered what would befall me if I were to go into the arena, which never yet had I done.

  I looked to Dona Teresa, and in faith she was moved as I was moved by the beauties of this sport. Her eyes did gleam and her face was held fixed and her breathing came slow, and her lips were a little apart, and as one man or the other gained briefly the supremacy, she did clench and unclench her hands in silent concern. And at last turned to me, when Ntotela knelt upon his opponent’s chest, and said in a thick whispering voice, “Ah, they are like angels, when they wrestle! How can that be, that devils may be like angels?”

  “It is the great art amongst them, this combat.”

  “And have you learned it?”

  “I? I have watched, but I have never fought.”

  “But would you, Andres, if you were called out?”

  “That I would, and most gladly,” said I. “And God guard me well, for I fear the callowest of these Jaqqas would be my master at it, but yet would I joy to engage with one.”

  “Why, see, then, the high lord devil is looking about for the next wrestlers, this moment. Go you, Andres!”

  “Ah, not this night,” said I, and would not meet Calandola’s questing eye.

  For indeed I had a different sort of wrestle in mind. Now I had me two wives, and my mind did dwell uncomfortingly on what would occur when I brought Teresa together with Kulachinga. We are not trained in England, after all, in the keeping of harems.

  “Will you not fight, then?” Teresa asked, and I saw her blood stirred by the battles that had been enacted.

  “I tell you, not this night. Come: the festivity is entering its late hours, and I would have you meet my Kulachinga.”

  I took her by the arm, and led her down into the midst of the Jaqqas. And lo! there was no chill between them. My Jaqqa wife only smiled without rancor, for it was the custom for these people to take wives by the score, and perhaps she had thought me overdue. And Dona Teresa, who once had given me grief enough over her rival Matamba, now greeted Kulachinga most graciously. Though neither spoke a word of the other’s language, they seemed instantly to enter into a communication.

  Together we went to the habitation the Jaqqas had set aside for me in this new camp of theirs outside Agokayongo. It was a fine fair wicker-work cottage, with straw strewn over the ground, and some brocaded scarlet-and-purple draperies on the wall that I had carried with me since being given them by Kinguri in the town of Shillambansa that we sacked. I was weary with long travel and much excitement of the evening and the heavy wine, and upon entering the place I sank down upon my knees to the ground. My two women did come to me then and ease me with caresses, which was passing strange to me, to be with two at once. For there they were, the handsome Portuguese woman in her torn finery, and the strong-bodied black woman with her skin all greased and her hair thick with clay. One could scarce conceive a stranger tripling of souls than we.

  There was a difficult moment at the outset, when I did feel the closeness of Dona Teresa by me. For there had been a great gulf of years and feeling between us since our fiery early love, and such gulfs are not readily bridged. So many seasons had swept through time’s great brazen gate, since last our flesh had met in this sort of embrace, that I felt sore estranged from her, and uneasy at resuming our lovemaking.

  But old skills well learned do swift return. I put my hands to her breasts, and my lips to her lips, which drew a giggling burst of laughter from Kulachinga, to whom kissing was strange. And then Dona Teresa and I were pressed body to body from thighs to chest, and her fingers did dig deep into my flesh, and mine into hers, as though with one great seizure of one another we could atone for all the years apart.

  Yet was there also Kulachinga, and I would not spurn her. So I did ease my grip on Teresa after a bit, and turn to the Jaqqa woman, and we embraced also in our different manner. During this, Dona Teresa did stroke her oiled skin most familiarly, most lovingly, with no show of shame at the handling of another woman’s body.

  The two of them then drew me down together with them.

  Ah, I was hard put to know what to do, I having but one member and they each a hole! But the wine and the weariness made my head swim, so that I gave no heed to difficulties, but merely allowed myself to float on the flow of the instant, going whithersoever I found myself journeying, just as a mariner cast into the sea gives himself over to the bosom of the water, if he be wise, and makes no attempt to direct his passage.

  God’s blood! It was a wondrous time! Their hands were upon me, here and there and everywhere. Their bodies, so various of shape and sensation and odor, encompassed me close. I had one hand between these thighs, and one hand between those; my fingers moved busily; there was warmth and wetness upon them; I heard sounds; I closed my eyes; fingers traveled the length of my yard, and back again; someone bestrode me and impaled herself upon me; someone else put hard-tipped breasts to my lips; I fondled one woman and futtered the other; and withdrew, or was withdrawn from; and futtered one and fondled the other; and my senses were engulfed, and my mind dissolved, and my soul was swept away, and all the universe became but a sea of action, of gasping and thrusting and laughing and writhing, with streams of hot sweat making slippery our skins; and a moment came when I discharged my lusts with a ferocious explosion, into the one or the other woman and I could not, for all the gold in Peru, tell you which; and I dropped into sleep as though I were a man drugged, and when I awoke, on account of the whimpering, or so I thought, of some jungle animal prowling near by me, I beheld by dawn’s thin light the two of them in one another’s arms, breasts against breasts rubbing, and legs intertwined like those of wrestlers. But they were not wrestling. And I smiled, and watched Teresa and Kulachinga at play for a while, and shook my head in wonder, and turned from them and closed my eyes, and fell into a heavy sleep from which, God wot, the arms of Venus herself could not have pulled me.

  TEN

  ON THE morrow I found me Golambolo, and asked him if he had heeded me, in telling Imbe Calandola that the Portugal prisoners he had brought were to be held for questioning. Most aggrieved that I should suspect him of a default, he swore by the mother-mokisso that he had done so, and begged me to slay him if I found it was not so.

  “Why then were some killed?” I demanded.

  “Ah, it is the hunger of Calandola, that brooks no check,” said he, and I knew that to be the case, so I dismissed him with my pardon.

  Then went I to the surviving pair of Portugals. They were not men I knew: one was named Benevides, and the other Negreiros, and they had only lately come to São Paulo de Loanda, in the retinue of this new governor Coutinho. From what they had witnessed the night before they were well-nigh dumbstricken with fright, and the sight of me in my Jaqqa ornaments gave them no great ease. I knelt down beside them and offered them some comfort, telling them I would see to their freedom if they could tell me of the army that was gathered near Ndala Chosa, how many men it contained and for what purpose it had assembled. But they knew no more of it than that it was there, though they strived most piteously to invent a few scraps of news that would be of value to me. They wept, and begged for their lives, and implored me to spare them from the stew-pot. But I could only offer them the hope of God’s mercy, and a swift release from suffering. And they saw there would be no salvation for them forthcoming of me, and turned away, and said no more, and they were silent still until the last. At the next feast did they perish for the fulfillment of Jaqqa appetites.

  I lived in those days in strange double matrimony, and there were no discordancies out of it, miraculous to relate. Why it was that Teresa and Kulachinga should have found so easy
affinity, I cannot say, except perhaps that there is some innate lubriciousness of womanhood, that came to them at the time our first mother did accept the apple from the serpent in Eden, by which they glide easily and without reluctance into such amorous interknottings. Or else it was only a happy combining of traits, Kulachinga being a natural child of the jungle, and Teresa being wanton and insatiable in passion, and thus the two of them did conjoin out of wholly separate motives, one from sheer innocence and the other from deep craft. Whatever it was, they seemed to enjoy one another as powerfully as either of them did me, or I either of them.

  In the early days of reunion Dona Teresa and I did strive to span the gap of event that had opened between us over the years. Of my own adventures it was swiftly told, for she knew of my voyages south to Benguela by order of Don João de Mendoça, and after that I had naught to tell but my captivity under Mofarigosat and my going to dwell among the Jaqqas. What she had to tell moved me deeply, for it was the death of Don João, that had already been ill when last I was in São Paulo de Loanda. “He came upon a bloating disease,” she said, “that turned him into a swollen ball, and we could not recognize his features. Toward the last he did lose his mind, and hold long conversations with his fathers, and with King Philip and many others, and with you.”

  “With me, forsooth?”

  “Aye, he spoke in his ravings with you about England, and said he would send you there by the next ship, as his ambassador, for he would be King of Africa. The poor man! And then he died, in the dry season of 1602, and it took a coffin fit for an elephanto to hold him, and ten strong men to carry it.”

  “The dry season of 1602,” I said, in a wondering way, for I had given the numbers of the years little thought in my Jaqqa time. “And what year does this be?”

  “It is the mid-part of the year 1603.”

  “Ah,” said I, revolving that in my mind, and striving to make some sense of it. “It was fourteen years this season that I left England, though it seems fourteen hundred, betimes, to me. The boy-babes who were born that day have beards now, and the girl-babes are sprouting breasts! And Queen Elizabeth is an old woman, if still she hold the throne. And if she do not, who has come to take her place?”

  “I know nothing of that,” said Dona Teresa. “But King Philip is dead in Spain.”

  “What, that old monk? I thought he would live forever. How long since?”

  “Five years,” said she. “It was in 1598.”

  “But why did I not hear, then? No one spoke of it in São Paulo de Loanda, and I was there at that time.”

  She shrugged and replied, “The news was slow in coming. And then another Philip his son came to take the crown, and for a time we thought it was the same Philip as before.”

  I laughed at that, seeing now Angola as a place at the end of the world, where the mightiest king in Christendom might die and his own far-off subjects not get the true report for years. Well, and I had no illusion that we were at the heart of things here. In sooth I scarce cared about these matters: they were white man’s business, Europe-man’s business. Some other Philip was on the Spanish throne, and he was said to be a weak and silly man when he was prince, and might be a weak and silly king as well, which would allow England to make an end of the war with Spain that was such a waste of English substance. I gave that some moment of thought. But it was like a filmy thing blowing in the gale, a mere inconsequential tissue, all this talk of kings and nations. I could find no fullness of texture in them now. My world was bounded by cauldrons and drums and ollicondi trees.

  “Tell me of events in São Paulo de Loanda,” I asked, to be cordial.

  “The city is much enlarged. There is a grand new church, and the governor has made his palace greater.”

  “This governor is your Don João Coutinho, you say?”

  “That is the one. When Don João fell ill, the new King Philip sent him to us, with authority to conquer the mines or mountains of Kambambe. To perform that service, the King of Spain has given him seven years’ custom of all the slaves and goods that are carried from Angola to the West Indies, Brazil, or whithersoever, with condition that he should build three castles—one in Ndemba, where the salt mines are, another in Kambambe, and the other in the south, at Bahia das Vaccas.”

  “And will he come to Kambambe, while these Jaqqas lurk so close?”

  “He knows nothing of the Jaqqas. It was Don Fernão’s commission to investigate these provinces, and report to him. Well, and I see there is large report to make.” She leaned near, and plucked at my arm. “What is this army the Jaqqas have formed, in league with Kafuche Kambara?”

  “It is as you see: an army.”

  “To what end?”

  “The usual end,” said I. “War.”

  “But who is left for Calandola to conquer, if he has made peace with Kafuche? Will he march against King Ngola in Dongo?”

  “I think not,” said I.

  She was silent a time. Then she said, “But there is only São Paulo de Loanda otherwise.”

  I made no reply.

  “Is that the scheme? Will they march westward, and attack the city, as in my father’s time they attacked São Salvador of the Kongo?”

  I could not lie to her. “I think they will,” I said after some troubled hesitance. “It has been discussed.”

  “More than discussed! It is determined, is it not?”

  “That it has,” I said.

  “How soon?” said she fiercely. “When will they march?”

  “I cannot tell you this, Teresa.”

  “Come, come, hide nothing from me! How do you say, you cannot tell me?”

  “Because I do not know,” I did reply. “We will march when the auspices are proper, by Calandola’s lights, and no man knows that but Calandola. I do swear it, Teresa. I conceal nothing in this. There will be a war: but the time of it is not yet chosen.”

  “Ah,” she said, and looked most solemn. After a moment she said, “You know that these are the Jaqqas that slew my mother, and put her in their kettles. And they have slain my husband now also.”

  “Your husband, yes. But these are not the same Jaqqas as long ago slew your mother.”

  “That matters little. Jaqqas they be, all the same. I dread these folk, Andres. I would banish them to the dankest caverns of Hell, and be rid of them.”

  “They are much maligned, I think.”

  Her eyes went wide and she laughed most scornfully. “What? You defend the man-eaters? Are you altogether mad, Andres, from your jungle wanderings? They are monsters!”

  “Aye,” said I.

  “How can you speak aught that is good of them?”

  Softly and sternly I said, “This land is a den of monsters, both white and black, that do steal each other’s land, and take each other’s lives. The more I saw of Portugals, Teresa, the less I did loathe Jaqqas.”

  “And so you are become one of them, then? And will you fight beside them against my people, when they march on São Paulo de Loanda?”

  To that I gave her no answer.

  “Will you? What will you do, in that war? What have you become, Andres? What have you become?”

  As we exchanged these words, we did move along the perimeter of the Jaqqa camp, that did spread like floodwaters over the dry plain outside the town of Agokayongo. And on all sides preparations for war were going forth, the fashioning of blades and the stringing of bows, which Dona Teresa did not fail to note. Beyond us lay the second army, that of Kafuche Kambara that was joined with us in alliance, nearly as strong as ours. This, too, Dona Teresa did observe, and I knew that in the eye of her mind she was seeing this barbarian horde pouring in a torrent into São Paulo de Loanda, to the number of ten savages or more to each Portugal, and unleashing there a hecatomb and holocaust of terrible slaughter and rapine. I noted the somberness on her face, and comprehended the fears in her heart: yet did I proffer her no comfort then.

  Not far away from us I spied a towering figure moving slowly through the camp. It w
as the Imbe-Jaqqa, taking some survey of his men, alone but for a bodyguard that lingered some paces behind him.

  “Andubatil!” he called, upon the sight of me, and beckoned.

  “It is your king summoning you,” said Dona Teresa in a bitter way. “Go to him!”

  “Let us both go.”

  “I will not,” said she, and drew back, and lingered near a tree of great coiling roots like swollen serpents on the ground.

  I found Calandola to be in a reflective and somewhat tranquil frame of mind, with none of his great roaring manner about him; yet even so did he give forth that manifest sign of grandeur, of barely controlled power wound and ready to spring forth, that I think was the most terrifying thing about him. He rested his hand upon my shoulder and stared deep into my eyes with his cold glistening diabolical stare, and said, deep-voiced, awesome, “Well, Andubatil, and are you pleased to have your wife with you once more?”

  “That I am, and greatly, Lord Imbe-Jaqqa.”

  “It has cost me much fury out of my brother Kinguri, who dislikes her with a heavy disliking.”

  “This I know,” said I. “I would see Kinguri, and ease his fears of her, but he avoids me.”

  “You and he were deep friends, so I thought.”

  “So thought I as well, Lord Calandola.”

  “He is very wise, is he not?”

  “His mind is a searching one,” I said.

  Calandola smiled, and looked away, putting his hand to his vast bull neck and squeezing it, and after a moment he declared, “Kinguri is also a great fool.”

  To this I replied nothing.

  “A fool,” said Calandola, “because his mind is thick with thoughts of Portugal, and England, and Europe, and other places that are of no importance. And he wants to know of your God, and your Devil, and the other Christian mokissos. Why do such things matter? They are unreal. They are trifles.” All this still calm, though I sensed, as ever, the smouldering furnace within this man, or demon, or whatever he might be. He continued, just as calm, “All these things I will sweep from the world. And then will come a time of happiness and simplicity. There will be only one nation. There will be only one tongue. There will be only one king. It will be better that way.”