Lord of Darkness

by Robert Silverberg

  “Indeed. And I did not know you at first, true. Yet you should have known me, since I am less changed by time than you.”

  I gave her close scrutiny. Her cheeks were like the map of the world, all lines and notations. I thought of all the old women of Leigh that I could recall, and she was none of them; and then I thought of the younger women, those that might well be seventy or thereabouts now, the mothers of my friends; and then the truth broke through to me, and I was overcome with shame for my folly, that I had searched all about the barn, and had not gone straightaway to the essence of her identity.

  “God’s blood! Mother Cecily!”

  “Aye, child.” And she laughed and dropped her broom, and gathered me close, and we did embrace. For who was this, if not my father’s wife, that had raised me from a babe, and taught me my first reading, and walked with me by the Thames mouth to give me my early taste of the salt air? Without thinking had I taken it as granted that she was dead, since that so many years had passed; but she had been much my father’s younger, and must now be no more than six-and-sixty, or even less. Why then should she still not live, and in the same house?

  When at last I released her, we stood back and looked at each other anew, and she said, “Once I held you at my breast. And now we are two old people together, more like brother and sister than mother and son. Oh, Andrew, Andrew, where have you been, what has befallen you?”

  “It would take me twenty year more to tell it all,” said I.

  We went within the house. It was all much the smaller with time than I remembered, and darker; yet was it familiar, and beloved. I had me a long look in silence, and stood before the portraits of my father Thomas and my mother Mary Martha, and bowed my head to them as a greeting, the father I had revered and the mother I had never known, and said, “I am come back, and I have done much, and I tell you, the blood of yours in my veins is good substantial blood, for which I am grateful.”

  And then I remembered that I had the blood of the Jaqqa Kinguri in my veins as well, by solemn transfusing, and I turned away, confounded and shamed.

  To Mother Cecily I poured out questions so fast she could scarce answer them, of this person and that, playfellows and schoolmasters and all, and some were dead and some were gone to London and some, she said, were still to be found in Leigh. Lastly I asked her the question that should have been first, save that I did not have the strength to confront it without long postponement:

  “And tell me also, mother, about my betrothed of years ago, Anne Katherine. What became of her, and how did her life unfold, and did she ever speak of me? Where is she now?”

  And I waited atremble in the long silence that was my stepmother’s reply to me.

  Then at last she said, “Wait here, and have yourself a little ale, and I will return anon.”

  So did I sit there in the kitchen of that ancient house, and my heart was racing and my lips were dry, and I did not dare to think, but sat as stiff as a carven statue. Long minutes went by, and the boy Francis wandered off, touching walls and floors in wonder, and putting his lips to the windows, and the like. Then did I hear footsteps on the stairs, and my stepmother came back into the house. And with her was such a miracle that I received it as a thunderbolt.

  For she had brought Anne Katherine. And I mean not the wrinkled aged Anne Katherine I might expect to see in this Anno 1610, but the fair and golden maid of long ago, of no more than sixteen or seventeen year, or even younger, with hair like shining silk and bright blue eyes, and about her neck, resting on the sweet plump cushion of her breasts, was the pearl that looked like a blue tear, dangling from a beaded chain, that I had had of my brother Henry an age ago and had given as a gift to her, by way of betokening our betrothal.

  I trembled and shrank back and threw up my hands, and cried out, “God’s death, woman, are you a sorcerer now?”

  “Andrew—” cried my stepmother, afraid. “Andrew, what ails you?”

  The girl, in fright at my wild outburst or perhaps at my rough looks, did back away most timidly, she who had been smiling a moment before.

  “How can this be?” said I in a thick and fearful voice. “She is unchanged, in one-and-twenty years! What nganga-work is this, what wizardry?”

  My stepmother, understanding now, came to me and said in a sharp short voice, “The sun has addled your wits, boy! D’ye take her for your Anne Katherine?”

  “She is the very image.”

  “That she is. But it’s folly to take the image for the reality. Girl, tell him your name.”

  “Kate Elizabeth,” answered she in a tiny voice, but sweet.

  “And your parentage?”

  “The daughter of Richard Hooker and Anne Katherine Hooker, that was Anne Katherine Sawyer before.”

  “Ah,” said I. “Her daughter! Now is it made clear! But you are just like her, Kate Elizabeth!”

  “So it is often said. Only they tell me she was beautiful, and I think I am not so beautiful as she was.”

  “Was?”

  “Aye,” said the girl, “my mother is long dead.”

  “Ah,” said I. I came a little closer to her, and looked, and said, “I thought you were her image, but it is not so. For you are even more fair than your mother, girl.”

  Color blossomed in her cheeks, and she looked away. But she was smiling. And excited, for her breasts did rise and fall most swiftly beneath her frock, as I could not help but see.

  “And when did your mother die?” I asked.

  “It was seven years Michaelmas.”

  “I will visit her grave. You know, that she and I were once betrothed?”

  “I heard tell, there was that sailor she loved, that went to America apirating.”

  “I was that sailor.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That I know.” Her shyness and her fear of me were melting swiftly. She touched the pearl and said, “My mother often spoke of you, when I was a child. She said you gave her this, and promised to come back from the Spanish Main with caskets of doubloons, but that you were lost at sea, and perished in some raid against the Brazils.”

  “Ah. So it was reported, eh?”

  “She would not believe it, when they said you were dead. She waited long for you, looking toward the sea, hoping you would come in from Plymouth some afternoon.”

  “This is true, Andrew,” said my stepmother Cecily. “Every day did she go down to the water, and look, and pray. And she was urged to marry, but she said she would not. Until at last it was certain you must be dead, and then she did at last bestow herself to Richard Hooker, the lawyer’s son.”

  “I think I recall him. A dark-haired man, very brawny, with a gleaming good smile?”

  “Aye, that was he!” cried the girl.

  “I trust he cherished her well, then.”

  “Aye, he was a most loving husband. And he gave her two sons and a daughter, and then she died, and he was sore bereft. Which I think led to his too early death as well.”

  “Then he is also gone. I see.”

  “These three years past.”

  “How old are you, girl?”

  “Fifteen, sir.”

  “Fifteen. Aye. And you keep the household yourself, as the eldest?”

  “That I do,” said she.

  Fifteen. Well, and then Anne Katherine must have waited three or four years in hope of me, and then had yielded to Hooker’s suit in ’92 or ’93, if this girl had been born by ’95. So I did calculate. Well, and that was as good a display of love as anyone need make, to wait those many years. And I was not grieved that she had married at last, for had I not done the like, with my Kulachinga and my Inizanda, and also my Matamba and my Dona Teresa, that never were my wives, but might just as well have been?

  I said, “This gives me great pleasure, to see that my Anne Katherine is reborn in you, with all her grace and beauty unaltered, or perhaps enhanced.”

  “You are very kind, sir.”

  My stepmother said, “Kate, have the goodness to go outside a moment, wil
l you, girl?”

  She curtseyed and departed; and when she was gone, Mother Cecily did say, “It is almost like sorcery, is it not, Andrew? She is Anne Katherine come again, indeed. I comprehend now why you looked so amazed when I fetched her.”

  “Aye. The same age, even, as when first I fell in love with her mother.”

  “She is fatherless, and bears the toll of keeping her house.”

  “So she just has said, aye.”

  “And you are far from young, and newly returned from great adventures, and I think would settle down and spend your years quietly.”

  “So I would, Mother Cecily.”

  “Well, then—”

  I looked to her in utter amaze. “What are you saying?”

  “Is it not plain?”

  “That I am to take her as wife?”

  “Ah, you are slow, Andrew, but you do find the answer in time.”

  I scarce believed mine ears. She was altogether serious. I blinked and gaped, and imagined myself in the marriage bed with that girl, the old leathery hide of me rubbing against her tender bare skin, and my hand that had groped so many strange places probing her maiden fleece, and my yard that had warmed itself by Jaqqa loins and so many others gliding into her tender harbor—aye, it was tempting, but it was also monstrous, was it not, such a mating of April and November! I played the idea in my mind as I had played the bringing of the nun Sister Isabel to England, and found it just as impossible. And shook my head, and turned to my stepmother, and said softly, “She is not Anne Katherine. And I am not the Andy Battell of five-and-twenty years ago, that gave Anne Katherine that pearl. I do love this child, but not as my wife, Mother Cecily. I could not ask that of her.”

  “I told her you might ask it, when I went to fetch her.”

  “You did?”

  “She is of an age, almost. You would be husband and father to her at once. I thought it was a good match.”

  “And did she?”

  “So I believe. Though you dismayed her a little, with your wild hair and beard, and that cry you made, when she came in. But you were taken then by surprise; and the hair can be trimmed.”

  “Nay,” I said. “It is beyond thinking.”

  “She would do it.”

  “So I know. But I could not. It would not fit my sense of the Tightness of things. But I have a different idea. Summon her back, Mother Cecily.”

  Which she did, and the girl came into the room, and I saw the fear still in her eyes; for I knew she would marry me if I asked, since she needed a man’s protection, but that she did not greatly crave so old and worn and rough a seafarer as I.

  I said, “Kate, I have come home to live, and I am weary by my adventures, and I would not live alone. Will you dwell with me, and be my daughter?”

  “Your—daughter?”

  “Aye. The child I might have had by Anne Katherine, had fate treated us another way. For I have no one else, save old Mother Cecily and this black boy my servant. And this world of England now is greatly strange to me. So we can aid one another, you and I, in facing the mysteries ahead, for that I have some hard-won wisdom, and you have youth and vigor. If you share my house we can share our efforts and our strengths. Shall we?”

  “Your daughter,” she said in wonder.

  “Stepdaughter, let us say. I will adopt you as mine own. Will it be thus, Kate Elizabeth?”

  “Aye,” she said. “Aye, let us do that, for I like it very much!”

  And her eyes did glow with happiness, as much, I trow, of relief as of joy.

  SIX

  THUS HAVE we lived, these three years past, in the old house of the Battells: Kate Elizabeth in her bedroom and I in mine, and Mother Cecily in her own, until death came for her last Easter quietly in her sleep. Kate Elizabeth cares for me, and I for her, and we both for her two young brothers and my blackamoor Francis, who serves us well. And to the world we are father and daughter, and so shall we be until some swain comes and takes her from me. Which I suppose will be any month now, so much courting does she do.

  I wonder often whether I should have wed her when I could. For she is warm and beautiful and loving, and would have gladdened my bed greatly; and I am not yet entirely without lust, for once I did see Kate Elizabeth by chance at her bath, and the sight of her breasts and thighs and golden loins did awaken in me a desire so fierce as to wring tears from me; but it was quickly enough quelled. She knows nothing of that, nor will she ever.

  I have occupied myself in these years by setting down this my memoir of all that befell me. It is a great long tale, I know, but for that I make no apology, since much befell me, and I would record it complete. Not that I am anything unusual in myself, only a simple and fortunate man, honorable enough to win God’s grace, and sturdy enough to have endured mine adversities. But where I have been and what I have seen are not unimportant, and I would make record of it, just as other travelers of the past have made their records, from Marco Polo of Venice onward.

  For I do have a vision of a new world of England overseas, and I hope to advocate it with my words in a way that will leave an imprint. This is a very small island, and it has little wealth of its own, only some sheep and some grass and some trees, and the like. But we are English, which means we have an inner strength that has not been given to most other folk, and I believe that we should go forth upon the world, and shape it to our pattern, and put it to our increase and the general good.

  It is not a new idea. When that I was a little lad I heard Francis Willoughby saying to my father that the time had come for us English to be scattered upon the earth like seeds: or thrown like coins, he also said, bright glittering coins. That is a prettier image, but I like his one of seeds better, for seeds do in time have great growth into mighty oaks. Well, and many of us have been truly scattered upon the earth: but it is time to think what the deeper purpose of that scattering is to be.

  The present way of England, in pirating and such, is futile. We cannot grow great by stealing the wealth of others. Nor can we merely go into tropic lands and take from the people there the treasures they have. We must settle, and plant ourselves, and build; and we must create an empire that sinks deep roots everywhere, like the most lofty of trees. For in that way will we achieve the greatness that is marked and destined in our blood.

  The Portugals have done a fine thing by opening Africa, by the efforts of their valorous explorers of more than an hundred years ago. But they have opened only its edge, with their ports widely spaced, and have made no successful ventures to the inland.

  I think the Portugals could be displaced with ease—or, better, peacefully contained and overmastered—if we were to move from the Cape of Bona Speranza upward, and through the interior. Then the wealth of Africa would be ours: not its slaves, nor its elephanto teeth, but the truer richness of its farmland and its pasture. We could build a second England in that wondrous fertility, an England fifty times as grand as ours.

  And if we went among the blacks not as tyrants and overlords but as elder brothers, giving them our wisdom and forcing nothing upon them, I think we might incorporate them into our commonwealth as partners, rather than slaves. This is a most bold and strange idea: but I do know those people, more closely than anyone else of England, and I tell you it could be done, if only we grasp the nettle now, and seize our moment. For in another fifty years it will be too late; the Portugals and Dutch and French will have sliced Africa amongst themselves, and they will destroy it, as in the New World so much has been destroyed already by the coming of greedy men of Europe.

  So that is my vision. Of course, there is another vision as well, which I may not forget, and that is the vision of the Imbe-Jaqqa Lord Calandola.

  That dark being comes to me yet, in my sleep or sometimes even as I sit by the fire, drowsing over my ale. He visited himself upon me just a week before, turning solid out of a pillar of smoke, in the way of magic, and filling my sight, that enormous hulking mass of power, black as night, shining with the evil grease on which h
e dotes.

  “Andubatil?” he said, in that voice deep as the deepest viol.

  “Aye, Lord Imbe-Jaqqa!”

  “Are you comfortable, there in England? Look, the white snow falls outside. Do you not freeze?”

  “I am inside, Lord Calandola.”

  “Come back. Come and join me, and bring a hundred English of your quality, and many muskets. For we will soon march. The world cries out for destroying.”

  “I have no taste for destroying, Lord Calandola.”

  “Ah, Andubatil, Andubatil! I thought you were one of us! I thought you had adopted my wisdom. Look ye, you dream of building great empires as you sit there dozing: that I know. But it is altogether wrong, Andubatil! Tear down! Build nothing! Make pure the earth! The great mother is stained and defaced by all this building. Can you not hear her weeping? By my mokisso, it is loud as thunder in my hearing! I still see my task, and I yearn to complete it.”

  “I think you will not succeed, O mighty Imbe-Jaqqa!”

  He laughed then his diabolic laugh, and said, “I sometimes fear you may be right, Andubatil. There is not time, there is not strength enough. I have had defeats, and they have wasted years for me. But I will persevere at it. It would have been easier, had you been loyal, and not betrayed me. But I do forgive you. Did not your Lord Jesus know betrayal, and forgive his Judas?”

  “You are not content with being Satan, you must be Jesus as well, O Imbe-Jaqqa?”

  “I am the world and all it contains,” said the Lord of Darkness unto me. “I grant you forgiveness, and I call you back to my side, and we will be brothers, you and I, the white Jaqqa and the black.”

  “Nay, Calandola. That is all over for me.”

  “Is it, then? But there is Jaqqa in you. There is Jaqqa in every man, Andubatil, that I know: but especially is there Jaqqa in you. It is a part of you and you can never escape it.”

  “But I can resist it, Lord Calandola. That is my pride: that I do resist the Jaqqa within my soul, and put him down, and triumph over him. Go, Lord Calandola, let me be: I am old, I have no wish left to wage war, and I have defeated you within my heart.”