T. Boyle - Water Music

Perhaps Amadi’s betrayal has been good for them in a way, the explorer is thinking as he holds a match to his pipe and gazes out over the coruscating surface of the river. It’s brought them together as nothing else could — four stalwart never-say-die Britishers rallying to confront a slippery treacherous world of blackamoors, cannibals and backstabbing, two-timing negro lackeys. And they’ve done it. They’ve succeeded. Amadi’s treachery was the straw that didn’t break the camel’s back, didn’t even bow it. They can handle anything, they know that now. Rain, disease, open warfare, perfidy, the loss of friends and brothers and companions at arms, the heart-sinking uncertainty of following the river northward into the desert — they’ve been through it all. The rest will be nothing, a piece of cake.

It is at this juncture that the first shadow drifts across the explorer’s face — skirting the periphery of his consciousness like an insect hovering over a plate of pudding, and yet not quite intruding on it. His mind has made the associative leap from heading south to piece of cake to London, glory, Selkirk and Ailie, and he is scratching meditatively at his ankles, stuck on this last little imaginative nugget. Ailie. He wonders what she’s doing with herself, if she’s bored, angry, disappointed. She has every right to be disappointed, he’ll admit that. It’s been twenty months already, and how many more only God can tell. Poor thing. He can picture her pining away for him, haunting the post office, reading and rereading his Travels till the leaves dissolve. Well he’ll make it up to her. He will. She can come down to London while he writes the new book — dedicated to Zander, and to her of course — and he’ll give her anything she wants: a coach, jewelry, gowns, menservants, microscopes. . It is then that the second, third and fourth shadows flit across his face and he raises his eyes reflexively to scan the sky.

Ned has already seen them. Vultures. Eight, ten, twelve of them already, and more coming. Dispersed like leaves, they hang in the still air, wings stiff and mute, gliding, rocking, spinning over the boat as if they were part of some towering mobile. It is a convocation, a synod of scavengers. Black wings against white torsos, eyes like talons, the pedestrian Egyptian vultures circle beneath the big regal griffons, wings spread seven and a half feet across, and the even bigger Nubians that scrape the roof of the world like something left over from the age of reptiles. And now, rushing to them like remoras to sharks, like flying hyenas, are flocks of crows and kites and great gangling marabou storks with their beaks like butcher’s knives. In ten minutes the sky is dark with them, wheeling, silent, dozens upon dozens of hot yellow eyes intent on the blistered canopy and chiseled hull of the Joliba .

Ned cranes his neck to watch them. And Martyn, stiff-backed as ever though girded in rags and pockmarked with insect bites, has emerged from his nest beneath the canopy to shield his eyes and gaze solemnly at the black suspended forms, at the rigid wings and clamped beaks. Even M’Keal, sodden with drink and still half-crazed from the loss of his ear, the heat, fever, monotony or whatever, is standing there motionless, gawking up at the sky like a rube at the big top. The shadows swoop over them, eclipse them. Ned is uneasy. Whatever it means, it can’t be good. He grits his teeth and spits into the river in disgust. Since they passed Yaour things have been looking up. There’s been no rough water, they’ve seen no one, and the river, as far as he can tell from his observation of sun, moon and stars, is taking them due south. It’s a pity something like this has to come along and spoil it. A real pity.

These last three weeks or so have been peaceful, pleasant, the steady wash of the river like the pulse of the womb, eternal, lulling, reassuring. He’s begun, in a perverse way, to wish it would go on forever. London. What’s London to him anyway? A place where he’s been hounded, abused, persecuted, condemned. He has no relatives, no friends, nothing but enemies — Ospreys, Mendozas, Bankses. Billy’s dead, Fanny’s a memory. What’s the use? Though the others talk of nothing else, Ned has begun to lose interest in going back — why kid himself? Medals, rewards: what a joke. It’ll be the same old story. Pain and sorrow, loss and deprivation. Would the high and mighty Mungo Park even give him a second glance on the streets of London?

Homeless, fatherless, with neither prospects nor hope, Ned has begun to see this bleak, stinking, oppressive continent in a new light, as a place of beginnings as well as endings. All he’s been through these past two years, all the heat and stink and disease, all the suffering and strangeness — it must have some purpose, some hidden meaning, some link to his life. He is thinking that maybe he won’t return to London when they reach the coast. He’ll stay on as a trader, or maybe he’ll rest up and then work his way back into the interior, explore on his own, search for whatever it is he’s been spared to find. .

Of course the whole thing is just wishful thinking, daydreaming, mystic and elusive. The important thing — the bottom line — is still survival. He hasn’t given up his post at the tiller, hasn’t stopped battling the explorer for control of his own destiny, though the battle is as masked and subtle as it’s been from the beginning, from the blistering day he and the blond hero first crossed paths over an open grave at Goree. No, he hasn’t given an inch, and yet the issue is almost dead at this point. Perhaps it’s the sun, the vestiges of fever, the lulling serenity of the past three weeks, but Ned has softened a bit toward his employer and fellow traveler. He is certain now that he will survive, that the worst is over, that there is nothing more this mad ass of an explorer can do to endanger him — and that certainty takes the defensive edge off his relationship with the man. Besides, Mungo trusts him so implicitly he’s begun to confide in him, just as Ned had dreamed back at Goree; for what it’s worth, he has become the right-hand man — superseding Martyn, Johnson, Amadi or any of them — as close to the great white hero as the puny brother-in-law had been.

They’ve talked, man to man. Still nights, mist on the water, forty-one men dead and the equatorial moon sitting on their shoulders like an immovable weight, they’ve talked. Mungo bared his heart, told him of his marriage, his children, of the pain of separation, of his ambitions. He talked as if he were talking to himself, for hours at a time, and then, apropos of nothing, he would turn to Ned and ask him how he’d lost his fingers or acquired the scar at his neck—”You know,” he’d say, “it almost looks like a rope burn.” Ned, his face frank and open, his gaze steady, would lie. “Butcher shop,” he’d say, “cutting out steaks.” Or, fingering the scar at his throat, “Oh, this. Nothing really. Got my head caught in an iron fence when I was a kid. No more than five or six. They had to fetch the blacksmith to loosen the bars.”

No, worming his way into the explorer’s confidence was barely a challenge. The man was easy, a self-centered fool. If Ned hadn’t got a grip on the reins long ago they’d all be dead by now. Still, he bears the man no malice. In fact, he’s all right in his own way — at least he’s committed himself to something. That’s more than Ned can say for himself. Mungo Park may be conceited, mad with ambition, selfish, blind, incompetent, fatuous — but at least he’s got a focus for his life, a reason for living. That’s the kernel of truth Ned has dug out of the motherlode of the past three weeks of drifting in the sun: there must be a reason, an organizing principle, to each man’s life. For M’Keal it’s booze, for Martyn weapons and bloodshed, for Park it’s risking his fool hide to open up the map and get his name inscribed in history books. And for himself, Ned Rise? Mere survival isn’t enough. A dog can survive, a flea. There must be something more.