T. Boyle - Water Music

No one knows quite what to say. Mungo is red with shame and guilt and frustration, and the crocodile reference is too arcane for the others — nothing more than idiosyncratic gibberish, the crazed mutterings of an old black bushman. The fact that Isaaco speaks English is surprise enough — who would have thought to hear anything but mumbo jumbo this far into the interior? Ned Rise, in particular, is struck by it. There is something in the old savage’s manner that brings the nasty buried past heaving to the surface of his consciousness like a moldering log belched up by an eddy in a placid river. That belly, those eyes, that voice. They make him think of a day years ago when he stood beside the Serpentine and watched his future bleeding into the turf. They make him think of Barrenboyne. They make him think of revenge. But no. It’s absurd. A London dandy — the first negro he’d ever seen — translated out here into the asshole of nowhere? No. These blacks all look alike, that’s all. Or do they?

“Johnson,” the explorer is saying, and then immediately corrects himself—”Sorry: Isaaco . What’s past is past. But this time we’ve nothing to worry about, not crocodiles or Moors — we’ve got an armed guard with us.”

Without blinking Johnson throws it back at him. “You think a handful of men is goin’ to intimidate Mansong or Ali? Or Tiggitty Sego for that matter? You think they goin’ to sit still for a whole platoon of white men stormin’ ‘cross their borders and insultin’ the populace? Hah. Armed guard. Mansong could raise three thousand men for every one you got.”

Mungo looks down into his cup as if it contained some fascinating new species of animal life. He has nothing to say.

“And what about Dassoud? What happens when he gets wind of you traipsin’ through Bambarra again?”

Scott and Zander have begun to eye one another uneasily. Martyn squats over his heels, unconcerned, picking at the leftovers with his knife. “For old time’s sake, Johnson,” Mungo pleads. “For friendship. For what we went through together.”

Johnson’s face seems to soften. He takes a long reflective sip of tea, then tips the cap back on his head and puckers up his lips as though stifling a grin. “It’ll cost you dear,” he says finally. “I want Milton, Dryden and Pope. Leather-bound, gilt titles.”

It takes a moment for this to sink in. The explorer sits there, his mouth working, and then leaps to his feet so suddenly he startles two of Johnson’s elderly retainers and sends a dog yipping off into the bushes. “You mean you’ll go?”

The soul of decorum, Johnson rises with a sigh and holds out his hand. Amuta and the twelve-year-old have produced calabashes of palm wine and are busy pouring out healthy drams into the cupped hands of black and white alike. Everyone is smiling. The startled retainers have rejoined the group and the insects and amphibians have started up again, raucous and celebratory.

Johnson takes the explorer’s wrists and pulls him forward. “Listen,” he says, his voice low, confidential, “the Pope I want signed.”

♦ THE BEGINNING OF SORROW

(PLISH, PLASH) ♦

This time of year, bleak, blistered and relentless, when the wells are dry, trees wilted and granaries barren, when the savanna is like a shaven cheek and the dust devils dance in your face, when you eat dirt till your tongue is thick with it and your tears run black, this time of year you pray for rain. Mandingo, Serawooli, Foulah, Moor, Maniana and Ibo, you pray for rain. In each parched village the witch doctor purses his lips, serious business, and sows the fields with rat embryos or sloshes buckets of fetal blood on the cracked blanched faces of graven idols. Dogs go hungry, goats pull up their stakes and attack bamboo, wicker and thatch. The villagers tighten their belts and cook up a paste made from the yellow powder of the nitta pod and then turn their expectant faces to the sky. At sundown, when the moon is a bloody eye on the horizon, the women gather to strip naked and haul plows through the crusted fields while the local hyetologist chants his rain song in a piercing clamorous falsetto:

Burst heaven, bleed water,

Borongay.

Swell melon, plump kernel,

Borongay.

Hey-hey, hey-hey,

Borongay.

Born to the cycle, Johnson is as much attuned to it as the sheep of the field and the jackals panting in the bush. But this year, for the explorer’s sake, he’s hoping the rains will hold off just a bit longer — at least till they get through the mountains. Of course it’s going to be bad whenever the clouds let loose, but up here pussyfooting along the perimeter of toothy cirques and dead drops of anywhere from eighty to three hundred feet, it would be a disaster. No two ways about it. Categorically a mess. And so, model of prudence and preparedness that he is, Johnson has taken measures to insure against an untimely deluge: that is, he has concocted a potent antipluvial fetish consisting of the chucked scales of a small dune-dwelling lizard, a square inch of camel tripe, a pinch of sulfur and six lines of Milton’s “L’Allegro.”

As he rides now at the head of the coffle, however, the saphie dangling from a cord round his neck and his four manservants following immediately behind on their respective asses, he is beginning to have misgivings about the efficacy of his charm. The reason is simple: he smells rain in the air, a scent as rich and unmistakable as the aura hanging over a lake at dawn. He sniffs twice more to be absolutely certain, then wheels his horse round and works his way down the line of the coffle in search of the explorer. He finds him at the base of a rock-strewn hill, bent over an expiring ass. The ass is lying on its side, ribs heaving, forelegs jactitating. Sacks of nails, a pair of two-man saws, a wadded canvas sail and barrels of pitch and oakum are scattered over the stiff yellow grass beside the dying animal, looking as if they’d been dropped from a great height. “Come on, twenty-one,” the explorer coaches, “come on old girl. Get up. You can do it.” Behind him, looking sheepish, arrogant and stupid all at once, is the massive ginger-haired carpenter, the one called Smirke, his nose and cheekbones sunblasted to a slick tender strawberry.

“Mr. Park,” Johnson calls, his voice sharp and urgent, “I got to have a word with you.”

The explorer straightens up, rubbing his hands together like a floury baker, and turns to his dragoman with a smile. “Why certainly. . Isaaco. What’s on your mind, old boy?”

“In private, Mr. Park, sir, if you don’t mind.”

Smirke looks up sharp, either glaring or shading his eyes, Johnson can’t tell which. The ass moans like a bedridden grandmother.

“Carry on here, Smirke, will you?” the explorer says, slipping into his saddle and setting his horse in motion with an easy flick of his wrist.

As they amble off, Johnson’s smooth silken bellies rippling under his toga, the explorer turns to him, amiable and expectant. “Well?”

“Well, it’s just this, Mr. Park—”

“Call me Mungo, old boy.”

“Mr. Park, I think it’s goin’ to blow up one hell of a fierce thunderstorm within the hour and I say you better give the order to pitch camp right here and now or half these white boys’ll be puking bile before nightfall.”

The explorer cranes his neck to scan the sky. It is a deep, transparent blue from horizon to horizon, no speck of moisture in sight. The heat is so intense it seems to lift him off the horse and hold him suspended, like a bit of ash floating on the thermal currents above an open furnace. “You’ve got to be joking.”

“No joke. I can smell it. Rain. Within the hour.”

“But there isn’t a cloud in the sky.”