T. Boyle - Water Music

Smirke has grown thinner over the past months, his bulk reduced by disease and exhaustion. Most of his twisted coppery hair has fallen out, and his skin, where it isn’t burned, is the color of tallow. He is still big, brawny and stupid — and hence dangerous — but he hasn’t given Ned much trouble in recent days. Ned, favored by Park with a lighter load, is generally near the front of the coffle, while Smirke, saddled with an extra ass and two thirds of the carpentry equipment, invariably brings up the rear. After a ten-hour march in the rain, Smirke just doesn’t seem to have the energy to settle his accounts.

Which is as it should be — because the time has come for Ned to settle his own. Forget that Smirke had beaten him lustily, stolen his hard-earned cash and ruined his chance with Fanny. Forget that he’d perjured himself to see Ned sent to the gallows those long years ago. It’s of no consequence.

What matters is that the madman is here, waiting his chance: it’s kill or be killed. Just three weeks back, as they were saddling their asses on a grim sodden morning, Smirke had come for him without provocation. It seemed the canvas girth had snapped in his hand as he attempted to tighten it, and his temper snapped along with it. Hulking and enraged, he kicked the ass, flung down the useless strap and threw himself on Ned. The attack was brutal, calculated to stun and kill. He hit Ned in the lower spine without warning, drove him forward into a shallow pool reeking of urine and forced his face down. If Park and Martyn hadn’t been on them in an instant, Ned would have drowned. As it was he got a lungful of fluid and a deep bone bruise that kept him stooped over for days. Smirke, raving and gibbering, had to be bound up like a bale of hay and slung across an ass’s back. “I’ll kill you for this, Rise!” he bellowed, again and again, till someone put a sock in his mouth.

Looking at him now, hunched over his meal like a slobbering beast, the close-set pig’s eyes gone dead with fatigue and malarial asthenia, Ned has an inspiration. He holds his breath till Smirke and Frair are snoring in unison, the two of them splayed out before the fire like hounds after a hunt, and then leans over Jemmie Bird to check for signs of consciousness. Bird is dead to the world. Heart slipping, throat dry, Ned checks the priming pan of his musket and slips Jemmie’s pistol into his belt. Then tiptoes away from the campfire, gradually melding with the shadows back of the tents. “Hsssst,” he calls. No response. He tries again. Still nothing. And then, thin as a bristle, the call comes back.

The Maniana are there, fragments of the darkness. He can smell them — sweat and grease and the musk of some wild animal — a smell that startles him with its pungency and pervasiveness, a smell that dredges up ancient racial memories, at once atavistic and sematic. Then he sees them, grinning, their teeth hanging in the emptiness as if independent of jaws and faces. As they draw closer he backs toward the circle of firelight, the musket leveled at the nearest set of sharp gleaming teeth.

They emerge from the shadows as if from a pool, the dark sucking back at them. There are five of them, young and lean and wild-eyed. The smell grabs at his stomach. He motions them forward, and the nearest savage, the one with the cobra-head necklace, edges closer. Ned points down at the sleeping Smirke. “Trade?” he says in Mandingo. The cannibal looks down appraisingly at the big sunburned man, and then glances up at Ned. His teeth seem to champ and he snatches at his shoulders to suppress a tremor of anticipation. Suddenly his face becomes a question, a prayer, and he holds up three fingers.

Ned is puzzled at first. . and then it hits him. He’s asking if all three are for sale — Bird and Frair as well as Smirke. One of the others has come forward now, lean and hungry-looking, peering down at the sleeping men like a housewife at the poulterer’s. No, Ned motions emphatically, and holds up a single finger before pointing again to Smirke. The first man looks a bit disappointed, the wolfish grin flickering momentarily, but then the second says something, sharp and flat, and both nod their heads quickly, like carrion birds dipping into a carcass: it’s a deal.

Ned watches from the shadows as the five silently bind the slumbering Smirke with hemp cords, wrapping him like a mummy. When they’ve got him secure, the man in the cobra-head necklace slaps the big whiskered face awake, simultaneously plugging the pink bud of the blooming mouth with a wedge of cotton and beeswax. Smirke struggles against the cords as they haul him off, trussed like a pig, a string of mad protestations and cries for help mired deep in his throat. “Mmmmmmmm,” he grunts, “mmmmmmmmm,” as if he were sitting down to a candlelit supper.

Electrified, Ned has drifted closer, fatally drawn like moth to taper, until he catches himself with a jolt — if he doesn’t watch it he’ll wind up in the pot alongside Smirke. Suddenly Cobra-head whirls round, one eye twitching, lips pulled back in a lewd unholy grin, the grin of one conspirator to another. Ned flinches as the savage holds out his hand. The smell of him, this close, is unbearable: Ned wants to tear his clothes off, run whooping through the trees, drink blood. There is something in the Maniana’s hand, a black leather purse, small and smooth as a pear. Take it, he gestures, dipping his head and extending his arm. Ned reaches out for the soft black bag, wondering, and then realizes with a rush of giddy joy that this is his payment — Judas Iscariot — and he laughs deep in his head as he slips the bag into his pocket. He feels evil, powerful, exhilarated. A partner to demons and devils and things of the night.

He steps forward and looks Smirke square in the eye. The big man lies there like a whiskered baby, his mouth squawling against the gag, neck craning, arms drawn tight to the body as if swaddled in linen. Tendons ripple in his jaw, his throat swells with wasted breath. And the eyes: beating wildly from face to face, stark and terrorized, until they settle on Ned with a look of wrath and hatred and utter hopelessness. Ned responds with a wink, snapping a hand to the side of his head and waving a pair of fingers like an old maid seeing a crony off at the docks. And then, slow as the sun rising over the hills, the corners of his mouth begin to lift, in a smirk.

♦ FROM THE EXPLORER’S NOTEBOOK ♦

Bamhakoo on the Niger

19 August, 1805

At long last, after all our trials and tribulations, we’ve made it: thanking the Lord for His guidance and protection, I’ve lived to duck my head in the Niger a second time and thrill once again to the soft swirl of its music as it rushes past my ears. And what a glorious stream it is, bursting with the precious cargo of the monsoon, black with silt, as expansive and majestic as any river on earth — even here in its extreme upper reaches.

The one lesson this arduous trek has taught us is this: that a party of Europeans, bearing trade goods, can penetrate to the interior with a minimum of friction, thievery and native antipathy, and the loss of no more than three or four out of fifty men, if proper precautions are observed and seasonal vagaries taken into account. As it is we’ve made it through with six stout-hearted and brave lads from among the soldiers at Goree— Martyn, M’Keal, Bird, Rise, Frair and Bolton — and a fine skillful carpenter come all the way with me from Portsmouth, one Joshua Seed, who is currently delirious. Unhappily, we lost the big fellow, Smirke, to noctivagant predators some days back, and Mr. Scott, feeling a bit under the weather, was forced to stay behind at Koomikoomi — a picturesque alpine village not forty miles distant — until such time as he should feel well enough to rejoin us.