Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

“O Legba,” Adam cried, no longer dancing, “let the loa descend into this temple and mount their horses. We call for Agarou, god of ancestors, and Aïda Ovedo, virgin wife of Damballa, and for Damballa himself, whose serpent we have propitiated. Let them descend and ride their horses. Let their horses run with them like thoroughbreds!”

Someone yanked my head back. Erzulie, I think. Over my split lip, she poured orgeat , a syrupy drink with a tang of almonds. This, Adam said, was another offering to Damballa and his wife, consumed by us prostrate horses so that the loa could enjoy it once they’d mounted us and brought us to our feet. If nothing else, the taste of the orgeat routed the sickening odors of couleuvre and slaughtered chicken. Then I could smell rum. A habiline drummer splashed it about, renewing the baptism of the already baptized ceremonial drums, being prodigal with the native clairin simply because Les Gens had it to be prodigal with.

“Come, Agarou! Mount your horse!”

The center post shook. Brian reached out to steady it. The electricity coursing through the poteau mitan galvanized him, and Caroline, and battered me like a thousand tiny tidal waves working to erode my identity. One moment, I was Paul Loyd; the next, I was obedient meat for the loa possessing me. In short, I was a horse.

Agarou, the vaudun god of ancestors, leapt down the lightning rod of the poteau mitan to convulse the robed body of the human being gripping its base. From this person, the god passed into Caroline Hanna, who kicked out, and on through her into the terrified consciousness of her husband. Agarou mounted Loyd. Racked by the god’s spiritual horsemanship, Loyd thrashed, as a mustang ridden by a determined cowboy will buck for its pride’s sake, foreknowing itself tamed. In just that way, Loyd thrashed. He threw himself far from Caroline. He writhed so violently on the hard-packed floor that his gown erased or smeared portions of the vevés drawn there.

Where stars had earlier shone, storm clouds massed in bands above the mountain. Still putting up a token fight for his body, Loyd heard thunder cannonading across the sky as if from the ramparts of the Citadelle Laferrière, south of Cap-Haïtien on Haiti itself. And with each new roll of thunder, the mounted man convulsed. Even as they continued to drum or dance, the habilines watched Loyd. Hector, the blind one, had moved into a corner to escape being knocked down by the flailings of his arms and legs. Erzulie, however, had taken his predicament as a challenge to her skill as a dancer. Above him, she leapt from foot to foot, guessing well where to place her feet without stepping on him. Adam, meanwhile, had renewed his plea for Aïda Ovedo and her husband Damballa to come down the center post into the temple.

The thunder above the mountain boomed louder, and the hidden kernel of Paul Loyd’s consciousness realized that the storm noise would completely drown that of the vaudun service—no more hope for rescue by sympathetic islanders. Agarou had him.

“Up, Agarou!” Adam urged the loa . “Ride your horse to revelation! Show your horse the god who showed himself to our ancestors!”

Loyd felt himself giving in to the inevitable. His movements became less violent. He bridged his loa -possessed body so that his heels and the back of his head held him off the ground. He searched the trinket-hung pavilion for sympathy. Where was RuthClaire? At last, he saw her—in the corner opposite Hector’s, regarding him with a grimace of appalled compassion. How must he look to her? He could scarcely hold his eyeballs still enough to focus her image. Maybe she’d never seen a possession like this one. She was frightened as well as appalled.

“Adam!” she cried, to be heard over the drumming and the thunder. “Adam, stop it! I think it’s killing him!”

Killing me, thought Loyd dispassionately. This is killing me.

The habiline in top hat and tails turned to his wife. “Oh, no, it is bringing him to life, to a knowledge that he could not otherwise so vividly acquire.”

Loyd placed his forearms on the floor parallel to his arched body. Pushing with them, he sprang off the ground like a limbo dancer who has just crept beneath the lowest level of the bar. Upright, his body swayed in the temple’s candlelit geometries. Caroline and the anthropologist lay beside the center post, entranced but not yet possessed, their blood-spattered gowns making them resemble murder victims: an interesting, but not too disturbing sight, for they weren’t dead, and once Aïda Ovedo and Damballa mounted them, he would have company in his spiritual slavery.

“Aaaawwgh,” he said. Spit ran down his lip and chin.

In his Baron Samedi costume, Adam made an ironic bow. “Welcome, Agarou. Welcome, Agarou. Welcome, Agarou.”

Agarou did a scissoring dance step.

“After such an entrance,” Adam said, “you must have great hunger.” He swept a headless chicken up, dug the nails of his hands into its breast, and broke it open with a wicked popping motion. From this bloody rent, he pulled entrails such as Loyd had never used in his cooking at the West Bank. Adam handed these items to Agarou, who, to Loyd’s consternation, began to eat them. Warm and slippery, they were hard to chew, but Agarou got them down almost as fast as the couleuvre had engorged the entire unplucked body of the other chicken.

RuthClaire (Loyd noticed, stealing a look through the vaudun god’s eyes) had left the houngfor . Why? Once, not so long ago, she had tolerated the barbaric eating habits of her habiline husband. Rain sheeted down, rattling the palm-frond thatching of the tonnelle . It blew in through the open tops of the peristyle’s walls. It dripped from the eaves and from seams in the roof’s underside. No longer inhibited by the need to play softly, the drummers beat their instruments with abandon. The noise inside the swaying building crescendoed and crescendoed again. So did the noise outside. In Loyd’s benumbed body, Agarou turned his face up and opened his bloodied mouth to the life-giving waters of which his fellow loa Damballa was the presiding deity. He had led his horse to water, and had made him drink.

Loyd drowned not only in this deluge, but also in the ancient personality of the loa astride him. Rain veiled his eyes. It penetrated the tonnelle ’s roof and extinguished the candles in their plastic pots. The pots hissed their dismay. Or maybe it was the python hissing, swimming toward him in the downpour like a great ruby and golden eel. Of all the former inhabitants of the structure dissolving in the rain, the serpent was the only one that Loyd could see. He knelt—Agarou made him kneel—to embrace the creature, which lifted its head and kissed him on the lips with a double flicker of its tongue. Then the rain ceased, and the dripping echoes of its cessation thrummed, and Agarou found himself alone on the flank of his Caribbean Olympus.

“Giddyup, horse,” the loa said.

Loyd began to walk uphill, as did Agarou. He felt himself two consciousnesses at once, and had the further conviction, as he strode away from Prix-des-Yeux (which had dissolved in the rain along with the vaudun temple), that he was climbing not one but two mountains. First was the mountain on the tip of Pointe d’Inagua here in Manzanillo Bay, but superimposed spiritually on that landscape were the lineaments of Mount Tharaka in the African nation of Zarakal. Each time Loyd stopped to look back down the mountain, he saw—by lightning flashes—first the ebony ripples of the Atlantic and then the vast antelope-dotted expanse of the Zarakali plains. They alternated, these features, and with them Loyd’s present and East Africa’s Pleistocene past likewise alternated—so that, ridden by Agarou, he was two different minds at two different places at two different times. How could such a thing occur? Well, the vaudun service had done its work: the drumming, the chanting, the dancing. And then the python had kissed him, both to acknowledge Agarou’s power over him and to link his fitful self-awareness to distant places and earlier times.