T. Boyle - Water Music

“Mansong the Magnificent finds your gifts acceptable,” the ambassador announces. “Have you any message for the king?”

Serenummo rises slowly, loosening the strings of his saphie bag in order to extract the letter. But then he hesitates, remembering the explorer’s injunction. He can feel the Moors’ eyes on him.

“Well?” the ambassador snaps. “Mansong is waiting.”

Serenummo fumbles in his pouch and produces the letter. He bows, and steps forward to hand it to the king, but suddenly the big Moor is on his feet, quick as some pouncing beast. The royal hand is outstretched, the letter raised and proferred, when the Moor intercedes. “I’ll take that,” he growls in Arabic, brushing back the extended hand of Mansong the Puissant as if it were the importuning hand of a beggar, snatching the letter from the air and depositing it in the folds of his jubbah with a look of rage and contempt.

No one, not even the fiercest of the guards, says a word.

♦ DASSOUD’S STORY, PART II ♦

A nobleman, as proud as he was fierce, representative of a culture light years in advance of the tabala -thumping, goat-sucking Sahelian Moors, a man who had gazed on the Mediterranean and traversed the Sahara, Dassoud was not the sort to be long content in the role of henchman and human jackal. Second fiddle might be all right for a young man, someone footloose and untried, but as Dassoud matured he came to expect a bigger slice of the pie. Where before he’d been content, now he began to chafe in his subsidiary role. He found himself resenting Ali’s authority, coveting his prerogatives, criticizing his tactics on the battlefield and at the peace table alike. But the real key to his dissatisfaction, if the truth be known, was Fatima. As she grew in years, so she grew in bulk. She blossomed, tucking away kouskous and seedcakes, twenty meals a day, waking in the night to call for milk and honey. By the time she reached her late twenties, the queen had put on another eighty pounds. At four-sixty, she was irresistible. Dassoud decided to make his move.

He came for Ali in the night, just as sixteen years earlier Ali had come for his own predecessor. Dispatching the Nubian guard and separating Ali’s head from his body was nothing, the work of a minute — the real trick had been locating Ali in the first place. For the Emir, reasoning that the night would inevitably come when the new usurper would stalk Benowm with scimitar or garrote, had made it his practice to postpone retiring until the latest possible hour, and to tell no one — absolutely no one — whose tent he would grace with his recumbent presence. One morning he might emerge from Mohammed Gumsoo’s tent, the next from Mahmud Imail’s. It was a game of musical tents, and a practice of such long standing that the Emir’s people found it as natural a part of waking as the smell of cooksmoke.

For two weeks, Dassoud had quietly visited each of the tents from which Ali had appeared in the morning, remarking the servants who bundled the Emir’s bedclothes, rolled up his rugs and carted off his hookah. The servants varied from day to day, but one — an old woman whose jubbah hung on her like a winding cloth — was there to clean up nearly every morning. Dassoud took her aside and threatened her: betray Ali or he would crush her like a dung beetle. She was a twisted thorn root, her skin almost pale, one eye as cloudy as a puddle of semen. A tarnished ring glinted on her lip as she threw her head back and laughed. “I’ll betray him,” she hissed, “gladly.” Later, after mounting Ali’s head on a stake in the center of camp, Dassoud went to his queen, the blood still wet on his hands.

With Fatima’s support, Dassoud was able to establish a broad base of power. As the widow of Ali, she lent him legitimacy in the eyes of the Moors of Ludamar; as daughter to Boo Khaloom, she gave him a blood tie to the Al-Mu’ta tribe of Jafnoo. It was a beginning, and Dassoud pursued it for all it was worth. Where Ali had been satisfied with rapprochement, Dassoud pushed for an active alliance; where Ali had overlooked encroachment on his borders, Dassoud sought to extend them. He went to great lengths to assure himself of Boo Khaloom’s allegiance, and then, dealing from a position of strength, he approached the fierce Il Braken and Trasart tribes of the northwest and challenged their leaders to single combat. Remorseless, mechanical, he hacked them down one after another.

Within the year Dassoud was able to command a force of some fifteen hundred horsemen; from among these he picked two hundred men to serve as his elite cavalry. They were the best the desert had to offer. From Jafnoo and Ludamar and Masina, from the Il Braken and Trasart and Al-Mu’ta tribes, they came to Dassoud’s tent, savage and skillful, quick lithe athletes, crack shots, superlative horsemen. No one could stand up to them. With Dassoud in the van like some hellish apparition, like a black shaitan , they ranged the length and breadth of the western Sahel, from Gedumah to Timbuctoo, pounding the earth to dust and terrorizing Foulah, Mandingo and Wolof alike. Even the mighty Mansong was cowed.

Dassoud was content. He was Emir of Ludamar, lord and husband to Fatima, commander of a private army and conciliator of the desert tribes. He had consummated his dreams, achieved his ambitions. What more was there? Before long he had settled into a comfortable routine of aggression and extortion, of raiding to the east and west and south, raiding to pacify recalcitrant villages, to acquire slaves and cattle, raiding for the sheer joy of it. It was a good life. He was content.

Until the sleepy afternoon he was sequestered in Fatima’s tent, awash in the rich ferment of her flesh, soft music playing, the harsh sun and the cries of the battlefield a distant memory, until that afternoon when his idyll was shattered by the news that white men— Nazarini —were back in the Sahel. It was Ahmed, the one-eyed Bushreen , who stood respectfully before the tent and called to him in a low urgent voice. Dassoud parted the flaps almost instantly, a scowl on his face, weapon in hand. Ahmed could barely catch his breath. White men, an army of them, had just entered Bambarra at Bambakoo, he gasped. They had firearms, they were killing blacks, taking slaves, pillaging the countryside.

The news hit Dassoud like a quick savage blow from the hoof of a camel. He stood there, stupefied, until surprise turned to anger. White men: Nazarini . He hated them to the bottom of his soul, hated them as he had never hated anything in his life. The one white man he’d ever laid eyes on — that groveling sneak of a cat-eyed explorer — had escaped him. Outwitted him. Beaten him. It was the only contest Dassoud had ever lost, and the memory of it was an open sore, as wet and raw as the day it first erupted. He clenched his teeth, remembering the humiliation it had cost him, remembering how he’d ridden into camp, empty-handed, in rags, and how, though no one dared say a word, a thousand eyes told him what they were thinking. And then there was Fatima — the way she’d coddled the freak, sitting by the hour and listening to his gibberish as if he were a marabout or a sage or something, while he, Dassoud, son of a Berber sultan and terror of the battlefield, was nothing. The thought of it, even now, so many years later, galvanized him with rage and hatred. He turned to the nearest thing at hand — Ahmed’s camel — and knocked it flat with a single blow of his balled fist. Then he sprang on his horse and thundered off for Segu.

Two weeks later he was the happiest man alive, giddy with joy. Of all the Nazarini in the world, it was Mungo Park himself who had come back within reach of the Emir’s long arm. And the letter. He laughed to think of it, even then circulating among the tribes of the north, stirring them to blind and irrational peaks of fury, fanning up the sort of deadly, implacable, bloodlusting rage that no assault on religion, cattle — even women and children — could so instantaneously arouse: the Nazarini were striking at their pocketbooks. What could be more perfect? He didn’t care how big the white man’s army was — he, Dassoud, Scourge of the Sahel, would have fifteen hundred frenzied horsemen at his disposal before the month was out.