T. Boyle - Water Music

♦ ♦ ♦

That night she finds a locket on her pillow. Gold, in the shape of a heart, Cupids jessant round the perimeter. She flips it open. There is a portrait inside. She recognizes herself, naked to the waist. Beside her, his arm stretched across her chest in a gesture of protective modesty, is Gleg. Naturally.

♦ NITTY-GRITTY♦

They come for him in the dead of night, like demons or apparitions. Three of them. Daggers, dirks, falchions, muskets. “Get up, slave.” The voice is throaty, remorseless. “Ali wants you.” He’d been dreaming of Scotland, of emerald slopes and glacial lakes, of silver salmon cakewalking up the falls where the Gala soughs into the Tweed. And now he’s wrenched from sleep like an infant from the womb, a sudden deep primordial panic beating at his ribs. Fatima, he thinks. The jig is up. He is instantly seized with attacks of perspiration, indigestion, gas, guilt and fear. Will they try him by fire? Brand his chest with an A ? No, of course not. The dark ages reign out here. Justice and retribution are synonymous, swift and sudden. No time for such niceties as peer pressure, no room in the system for rehabilitation. They cut out the tongue of a har, hack the hand from a thief. . And an adulterer?

There are hands under his armpits. He is jerked roughly to his feet and shoved through the flaps of the tent, propelling him over the supine forms of the seven narcoleptic guards in the entranceway. ‘‘ Wallah! ” they cry.

‘‘ Shaitan! “ “Son of a bitch!” The night air is dry as an oatcake, and surprisingly cold. He finds himself trembling. Behind him, his escort joke in low tones, feet hissing through the sand, weapons jangling and clanking like an armory in motion. Should he run for it? — or buck up and face the music? When he was eight he and his brother set fire to the henhouse. Adam denied it. Mungo faced the music — and took a thrashing that would have melted iron and fused rock. Even now the memory of that thrashing tingles in his thighs and buttocks, implanted deep in the nerve fibers and knotted cords of muscle, a memory beyond words, beyond reason. All at once it hits him: he’ll run for it.

Unfortunately, however, the men at his heels are members of Ali’s elite cavalry, known for their courage, decision and quickness of reflex. Before he can so much as spring from the block a musket is introduced between his legs and he finds himself face down in the sand. The hands grope beneath his armpits again, hoist him up as if he were a drunk or a toddler learning to walk, and steer him through the still, silent camp — past tethered horses, sleeping dogs and ghostly blocks of canvas — right on up to the cookfire snarling before Ali’s tent.

Ali is surrounded by counselors and courtiers. Dassoud is there. One-Eye. The Nubian. He is squatting beside the fire, dirk in hand, toasting bits of meat. The leaping garish light plays off the hook of his nose, cuts into the cheekbones, narrows his deadly eyes. Crouching there before the fire, testy and watchful, greedily gobbling up the kill at his feet, he looks like a colossal bird of prey, something terrible and leathery left over from the Saurian Age. The explorer expects the worst.

Ali blows at a piece of meat, takes a sip of hoona tea. Then bares his teeth, drawing the morsel into his mouth. He gestures at the explorer with the point of his knife. “Saddle—” he begins, breaking off to gnash at a piece of gristle, “saddle your. . horse.” He swallows with a click and grunt, then turns back to the fire with another hunk of raw flesh, “We leave for Jarra in an hour.”

Mungo is stunned. Jarra! Why that must be sixty or seventy miles south of here! For weeks, as the monsoon season drew closer and Ali’s withdrawal to the north more imminent, the explorer had been begging Fatima to intercede in his favor — to petition for his release, or at least for the opportunity to make short forays from Benowm. He shuddered to think what would happen if he were still a prisoner when Ali gathered his herds and tents and horses for the summer migration to the skirts of the Great Desert. They’d skin and disembowel him. Cut his throat. Stake him out on the dunes to shrivel up like a fig. His bones would whiten in the sun like the sad remains of the slaves Johnson had told him of, like Houghton’s bones, shattered by the years, no longer Irish, Celtic, Caucasian — merely bones, the bones of a man, the bones of an animal. He has a quick image of his own skull, wind-burnished, half buried in sand, and the slink and shuffle of a spotted hyena, its face blank and stupid, raising an unhurried leg to piss in the empty eyesocket. The explorer blinks, shakes his head as if to clear it — and then realizes that they’re all watching him. Jarra! He grabs for the hem of Ali’s burnoose, thinking to kiss it, but Dassoud slaps his hand away. “ An’ am Allah ‘alaik ,” blurts Mungo, thanking the Emir profusely amid a flurry of bows and curtsies. Ali, impassive as a stone, stares into the fire, and chews.

♦ ♦ ♦

It is said that when a Sahelian Moor dies and finds himself amidst the searing fires of hell, his spirit invariably returns to earth — for a blanket. Mungo can believe it. They’ve been on the road for nearly eight hours now, and the sun is directly overhead. It must be a hundred and forty degrees in the shade — if there were any shade. The creatures who live here — the golden gopher, the white lady spider, various beetles, bugs and stinging things, scorpions, skinks and mole rats — are of course buried deep in the sand. Mungo, in his beaver top hat, nankeen trousers and blue frockcoat, is out in the sun, traveling, the swollen bundles of his restored tradegoods rattling at his back. He is hemmed in by scrub and cactus, sandbur and euphorbia, a landscape of the palest green and a thousand shades of brown, from khaki to ecru to russet. The hills are pale and scoured, ribbed like the remains of antediluvian beasts stretched across the horizon. There are baboons in these hills, purple-assed, crew-cut, short of brow, long of tooth. “Yeek-a-yeek-a-yeek!” they screech. “Chip-chip-chip!”

In a month it will be green here. There will be rivers, ponds, puddles. Deadly cobras will part the grass side by side with three-step adders and the crested lizard called tomorrow-never-comes. Duikers will appear, skirting from shade to shade. Pangolins, guibas, caracals and chamas. Wood storks, gaunt as refugees, secretary birds with their ragged braids and hawk’s legs and partiality for cold-blooded lunches. Addax, puku, eland and oribi. Aoudads, korins, mhorrs and mambas. Hartebeests. Wild asses. Rats the size of piglets. .

But for now, it’s pretty bleak. And dry. So dry the saddles crack with a groan, hairs fall like leaves, a stream of urine evaporates in mid-arc. This is where the business of exploring gets down to the nitty-gritty.

Sitting at the foot of the big mahogany table in St. Alban’s Tavern and gazing up into the rapt, florid and bewhiskered faces of the African Association, the explorer never dreamed it would be like this — so confused, so demeaning. And so hot. He had pictured himself astride a handsome mount, his coat pressed and linen snowy, leading a group of local wogs and half-wits and kings to the verdant banks of the river of legend. Yet here he is, not at the head, but somewhere toward the rear of the serpentine queue wending its way through all this parch, a prisoner for all intents and purposes, his horse wheezing and farting, his underwear binding at the crotch. Is there no sense of proportion in the world?

Half a mile ahead, spatters of white and black, Ali and Dassoud undulate over the plain on their chargers. The two hundred members of the elite cavalry, mounted on equine panthers and lions, fan out behind them for nearly a mile. Some of the younger and more enthusiastic horsemen make forays into the scrub to run down the occasional monitor or skink, lop a bush here, a succulent there. For the others, despite the heat, the whole thing is nothing more than a party on the hoof. They’re busy passing pipes and guerbas , telling dirty tales about camels and veils and virgins, jolting the solemn hills with explosions of laughter.