T. Boyle - Water Music

But then something jolts him upright, something like anger, rage, a towering fury fed with adrenalin and hate: in all that crowd, through the thicket of weapons and limbs and jockeying torsos, he has suddenly, startlingly, isolated a single face. The face of the one man in all the fathomless universe he can hate with something approaching purity, with an absolute, implacable, merciless hatred, the one man who has thwarted him and barred his way like some cousin of the devil, unreasoning, cold and deadly, the one man he would have strangled in the cradle had he been given the chance: Dassoud . The two hissing syllables catch in his throat, slap at his face, and all at once Mungo is on his feet, lurching with the boat, dipping into the bright tatters of his shirt for the smooth ivory grip of his secret weapon, his pis aller, the gleaming silver-plated pistol Johnson had pressed on him with a parting benediction.

He’s saved it, pressed close, through all these months. The hoarder’s secret, tucked deep in the waistband of his ragged breechclout, concealed in the folds of the silly spangled shirt he’s fashioned from the tatters of the Union Jack. If it came to the worst, if the river evaporated beneath his feet or he fell into the hands of the Moors, he planned to use it on himself. One bullet, one only. The bridge of the mouth, the soft pocket of the ear. But now, in a moment arranged in heaven, he sees what that bullet has been designed for, understands why it was dug from the ground, melted down, cast and hardened, appreciates why Johnson — salt of the earth — forced the pistol on him. In three minutes he will be dead. So will Dassoud.

Seventy-five yards. Fifty. The rabble is shouting now, pink mouths like wounds in the dark pinguid faces. Ten thousand pairs of lungs, plangent, a roar that for one fraction of a second crashes over the otherworldly din of the river, only to subside almost immediately into mute gesture.

Dassoud is there, waiting, perched not over the archway with the others, but clinging to a ledge at water level, out front, the single nearest man to the onrushing canoe. A knife is clamped between his teeth, a musket leveled in his hands. The tagilmust dangles at his throat, as if he has purposely exposed his face for the occasion, a tight triumphant smile drawn across his lips, his eyes a conflagration, bridges burned behind him. He has given up everything for this moment — his elite cavalry, his hegemony over the desert tribes, the soft fecund wash of Fatima’s flesh. For four and a half months — since the day he failed at Sansanding — he has driven himself, obsessed, horses dying under him, his skin blistered and throat parched, to reach this spot. Haunting the land of the Kafirs, killing strange chattering things and sucking at the raw meat as he rode — no time to stop — inflaming the local chieftains with his news of the white men, the Nazarini , waking, eating, drawing breath for this moment, this place, this Boussa.

Twenty-five yards. Martyn firing a musket into the sea of faces, spears like a forest in motion, M’Keal down, the boulders tipped back on their fulcrums. Mungo dips into his shirt and whips out the pistol in a fluid burst of light, the weapon flashing like a sword drawn from stone. He levels it at Dassoud’s face, both arms steady, but the boat is lurching, difficult to draw a bead, swirling closer, the roar. . a stone grazes his cheek, spears begin to sprout from the deck, somewhere behind him Martyn cries out over the thunder in his private agony. .

In the rear of the boat, stunned and disbelieving, Ned Rise is frantically turning over the alternatives: should he jump and risk the current or wait to be battered to death, squashed like an insect against the hull? Breathing hard, his eyes dissolved in his head, he clings to the tiller out of habit, postponing the moment, staring up into the massed black faces and seeing the hangman all over again. Jump! he shouts to himself. Jump! But he can’t, the water like the teeth of a saw, chopping and grinding at the rocks with a fierce frenzied buzz. . and then the first arrows begin to strike the canoe, M’Keal hit again and again, mouth open in a silent scream, blood like a surprise. . and still Ned sits there. Milliseconds tick by, the boat heaving and rocking: Ned Rise, former clarinetist, ne’er-do-well, hangee and African explorer, dead man. He is fevered, panicky, in the mouth of the beast, every muscle frozen. And then he sees Mungo in the bow of the boat. Mungo, drawing something from his shirt in a storm of spears, arrows and stones. Long-nosed, slender, silver barrel, something out of a distant nightmare: a dueling pistol. Tumblers click in his mind. Barrenboyne. Johnson. His wasted life. And then, in a daze, he’s up and dodging the spears and arrows, rushing for the bow of the boat, mad, mad, mad, struggling into the thick of it.

Fifteen yards. The boat dips violently and then rides up clear of the water, suspended for one giddy lingering instant, and Mungo has it, a clear shot, Dassoud’s face big as a wagon wheel — but suddenly his hand is arrested, the pistol jerked from his grip. Ned Rise is there, soaked, insane, spear-grazed, clutching at the pistol as if it were the key to the universe, the Holy Grail, the deus ex machina that could lift him up out of the doomed boat and hurtle him to safety. “Give it to me!” Mungo shrieks over the pounding furious roar of the river, frantic, a fraction of a second left. He snatches the pistol, Ned wrestles it back, the boat spinning for the abutment, the world coming down round their ears. . “Barrenboyne!” Ned shouts, as if it were a battlecry, his features contorted, wet hair splayed across his face. Ten yards, five, all the explorer’s hopes riveted on a silver cylinder, a fragment of lead: “Give it to me!”

“Poison!” Ned cries. “Anathema! A bad joke, it’s a bad joke!”

“Eeeeee!” call the vultures, swooping low. “Eeeeeeee-eeeeeee!”

“What?” The explorer is shouting — bawling — a damp dismal wind howling through the tunnel in breathless sobs. “What?”

And then they’re over the side.

It is like leaping into the teeth of a hurricane, dancing with an avalanche. They are buried, instantly, under the crashing countless tons of water, the very rocks quaking with the force of it. Dassoud’s shot goes wild, the Joliba founders and in the next instant is dashed to splinters on the near abutment, Martyn and M’Keal, corpses already, are tossed briefly into the air and then sucked down the throat of the gorge as if they’d never existed.

Above, on the rocks, ten thousand voices whoop in triumph and exaltation. Barefooted, naked, their faces disfigured with ritual scars and gashes of paint, black faces, black bodies, the tribesmen embrace, kiss their sworn enemies, dance in one another’s arms. The shout goes up, again and again, and the bonfires burn late into the night.

And the Niger, the Niger flows on, past the tumult of Boussa, past Baro and Lokoja, through rolling hills and treeless plains, playing over the shallows like fingers on a keyboard, stirring the reeds with a strange unearthly music, flowing on, all the way to the sea.

Disquieting rumors began to trickle back to the coast toward the end of 1806, rumors of Mungo Park’s demise and the disintegration of his expedition. By January of 1807 they reached England, and shortly thereafter — like wind-borne microbes — they began to spread through Scotland. Ailie confronted these rumors — every last wild word — and refused to believe them. Mungo dead? It was impossible. A mistake, that’s all, the upshot of giving the least particle of credence to the irresponsible jabber of those black aborigines, those abhorrent little Seedys with their disfigured faces and rotten teeth: what would they know of her husband’s courage and resihence? After all, he’d been gone nearly three years the first time, and no one — not even her father, not even Zander — had believed he would survive. No. The rumors were foundless, ridiculous.