T. Boyle - Water Music

They spent a miserable night, waterless and riceless, their stomachs growling, the sentries jumpy, hyenas stealing into camp to plague the asses and make off with two sacks of salt beef and M’Keal’s leather hat. At eleven-thirty, Whulliri Jatta, the king of Wooli, sent out an emissary to discuss compensation and payment for the privilege of traversing his domain. The emissary was a shrewd-looking fellow of about forty-five, dressed in lion skins and a red-flannel nightcap. He strolled into the explorer’s tent as if he owned it, sat down and refused to open his mouth until he had been presented with twenty-two hundred cowries, three yards of scarlet cloth, eighteen linen napkins, six knives, a pair of scissors and a mirror. Up to his neck in gifts, the emissary began to smile. “I be Sadoo Jatta,” he said, “third son of Whulliri, and I am speak de King’s English.” Apparently satisfied at this, he clammed up and began sprinkling mutokuane leaves into a ceremonial pipe fashioned from the skull of a potto.

Mungo, Zander, Martyn and Scott leaned toward him. He gazed steadily at them, as relaxed and content as if he were sitting in his own bedroom. Finally Mungo cleared his throat, apologized at length for the damage to the cornfield, and asked what Sadoo’s father might want in recompense.

Sadoo listened attentively to the explorer’s recitation, from time to time nodding his head sagely. But when Mungo was finished the prince looked up at him blank as a wall. “Fadda?” he said.

The explorer repeated himself in Mandingo and Sadoo’s features rushed with the joy of comprehension. He nodded furiously, then broke into a wide grin. “My fadda want,” he said, “everyt’ing.”

Six hours later the negotiations ended. Whulliri would get one third the party’s amber and coral, forty thousand cowries, thirty yards of baft, a pair of silver-plated fowling pieces and Scott’s tam o’shanter, in return for which the damages would be considered paid in full and the party would be allowed to traverse Wooli from border to border. No mention was made of Boyles. The explorer offered to ransom him for an additional forty thousand cowries and a portrait of King George III. Sadoo held up his hand. “No can do,” he said, grinning amiably. And then in Mandingo: “You can come get him at dawn.”

The prince’s meaning became clear some two hours later when one of the sentries, awakened by the first rays of the sun, spotted something dangling from the wall beside the town’s main gate. Something white against the red clay. Ever alert, the man screwed out his telescope and held it to his eye for a full fifteen seconds before dropping it with a startled cry.

“My God,” he gasped. “Cap’n Park! Leftenant!”

♦ ♦ ♦

It was Ned Rise who cut Billy down.

The city was silent, the gates shut tight. While the men formed ranks and sighted down their muskets, Ned and Jemmie Bird approached the forbidding walls. A row of mute black faces looked down from above. Two vultures, suspended in the sky, began their descent in a slow wide helix. Somewhere a dog began to bay.

Boyles was dangling by one foot, about halfway down the wall, his arms hanging limp over his head. There was a silly grin on his face, as if the whole thing were the crowning moment of some superlative routine to hustle another drink. But he wasn’t hustling another drink: he was dead. Ned could see the long purpling scar running from Billy’s ribcage to his waist and disappearing into the folds of his trousers. They’d cut him open is what they’d done. Cut him open and stuffed him like a partridge. With sand.

Jemmie Bird cupped his hands and boosted Ned up the wall. Ned clung to the hard-baked clay like a cat, his fingers clawing for purchase, as he ground his pelvis into the wall and slowly made his way up. The sun was like a razor slash across the eyes. There was the low steady hum of swarming flies. In the silence and the heat, under the sky that fell back to the verges of deep black space and hid all that terror and emptiness beneath a specious screen of blue, Ned was undergoing a transformation. With each inch he rose, each crease and depression his fingers and toes sought out, he felt it charging him, this new sense of himself and the bleak bitter universe, as if the wall were some oracle, some Grail, some radiator of cosmic reality.

He thought of Billy, poor flat-headed sot, poor innocent, come to this. He thought of Fanny, Barrenboyne, his own miserable childhood that was a joy compared to what he’d come to now, in this instant, creeping up a rough stinging rock face on the far side of the earth, surrounded by savages and criminals and mooncalves, risking his life to cut down the mutilated corpse of the only friend he’d ever known. At any moment one of the blacks could drop a stone or a spear. They could pin him to the wall like a cockroach. Stream out of the gates and massacre the lot of them. Well, good. Let them. He would welcome it.

Creeping, clinging, fifteen feet above the ground now. Billy’s fingertips, curled in rigor mortis, brushing his face as he takes hold of his friend’s cold rigid forearm and hefts himself higher, higher, the weird strained grin, blowflies creeping from the dead man’s mouth and nostrils. What had Billy ever done to hurt anyone? For that matter, what had he, Ned Rise, ever done to hurt anyone? Who was keeping score? What did it matter? Ned reached out and hacked at the rope in a fury. I don’t deserve this, I don’t deserve this, I don’t — he repeated over and over, as if he were praying. He wanted to die, he wanted to live. Then it came to him, hard and sudden, in a flash of recognition — he had a mission on earth. He could almost hear the trumpets of the archangels, the crackle of ancient scrolls. Ned Rise, elected in a burst of radiance. He had a mission and this was it: to eliminate Smirke, seduce Park and take charge of the expedition. Or they were all doomed. Like Billy.

The rope tore with a whisper, and Boyles’ corpse, set free, fell to the earth like a side of beef. The black faces vanished over the lip of the wall. Dust rose. Ned didn’t move a muscle, just clung there under the vicious sun with the stink of death and hopelessness in the air, his body slimed with sweat, sticky as some half-formed thing jerked from the womb. He clung there, a man with a purpose, a man who would fight and scratch, manipulate and maneuver — a man who would survive.

♦ A.K.A. ISAACO ♦

The road to Dindikoo is long, dusty and dry. It takes the expedition along a well-beaten route, through Wooli, Tenda and Sadadoo, across the rainstarved Nerico and Falemé rivers, from regions where white men are no cause for concern to vast territories where they are no more than rumor, chimeras to frighten children and subdue recalcitrant slaves. As they straggle into this village or that, footsore and weary, their tongues thick with dust, eyelids locked in a sunblasted squint, Mungo and his geographical missionaries never know what to expect. Will the villagers turn tail and run as if they’d just seen the devil himself? Will they avert their eyes and go about their business as if oblivious to the fact that their front yards are congested with thirst-crazed asses and ragged white freaks just stepped down from another planet? Will they automatically reach for spears and quivers? Or will they come forward with a chicken or a goat, the women tall and bare-breasted and smelling of palm oil, the men as reassuring as parsons and squires? Each village is a cipher. Sometimes the explorer finds the key, sometimes he does not.

At any rate, he’s been able to avoid a repetition of the incident that cost him Boyles, a pair of asses and a small fortune in trade goods and cowries. A little timely diplomacy — consisting largely in showering Dooti es with gifts and compliments and keeping men and animals under a tight rein — has even allowed him to purchase water and provisions along the way, and to replace asses as they wear out. What’s more, he’s been lucky with the weather as well — thus far the rains have held off and the men seem relatively healthy. Though they gripe and moan ceaselessly. They want to turn round and head back, they’re sick of rice, they want triple rum rations, immediate discharges, hazard pay. Their feet hurt, the heat is intolerable, their throats are dry, brains frying, stomachs rumbling, they have earaches, headaches and toothaches, they feel dizzy and don’t want to turn out in the morning. The explorer has begun to wonder about some of his choices — especially Bird and M’Keal, both of whom have been consistently crapulent since they left Goree.