T. Boyle - Water Music

Ned staggered to his feet and took a look. Twit lay contorted below, impaled on the iron pickets. A crowd was gathering. Two men bent over him with a torch. “ ‘Ee’s dead,” one of them said.

Mendoza’s face was ashen. Suddenly he had hold of Ned’s arm. “It’s murder then,” he shouted. “Call out the watch.”

♦ A SHOT IN THE DARK♦

For a moment there is nothing, no sound at all, the black of the forest and the slow drip of the rain. The dark is so absolute and impenetrable, so much an absence, he might as well be blind. This is what it’s like to live in a cave, he thinks, to live without fire and candlewax, this is what it’s like when you reach the seventh circle of hell. And then it begins again: a branch displaced, the tentative footfall, the low soughing snarl like a tocsin: I am afraid but I will kill.

In the leaves and mold, Mungo frantically casts about for a rock or treebranch, a bit of root, the jawbone of an ass, anything he could lift up to his face when the growling thing comes at him in a rush of tooth and claw. The loam beneath his fingers is rich and saturated, like coffee grounds or the black muck at the bottom of a grave; wormlike things slip through his fingers, a spider runs up his arm. But there, he has something, a stick certainly — no, it’s thicker and heavier, the size of a club. He tugs to dislodge it, but it seems to be stuck. And now all of a sudden the snarling grows more animated, as if his reaching for the stick were a provocation. Coming closer, warning, threatening, cursing, the hot breath of it, the spitting and hissing. He jerks at the stick for his very life, in a fever, the snarling thing nearly beside him now, growls turned to roars, bloodstarved, maddened, raaaaaaaaoowwwwwwww!

But of course the darkest hour comes just before the dawn. At that moment the scene is lit by the flash of a pistol, inundated by the report. There is an instant of revelation — the carcass of the horse, its stiffened leg in his hand, the searing venomous eyes and curled lips of the beast dissolving into the night — and then the black pall drops again, the gunshot echoes in the trees.

“Mr. Park — you okay?”

What can he say? Naked, bludgeoned, beggared and horseless — yet not mauled and devoured? Lost, but not alone? “Johnson,” he says.

Johnson’s voice comes back at him from nowhere, disembodied. “You got any bones broke?” It’s like playing hide-and-seek in a coal cellar.

“Where are you?”

He starts at the touch of Johnson’s hand. “Right here, Mr. Park. Right here.”

Now he says it like a lover: “Johnson.” And then: “What about you — you all right?”

There is a concatenation of violent respiratory sounds — throat clearing, spitting, hacking and drooling — followed by a series of groans and wheezes. “I am about as tore up as it is possible to be without being laid out for the undertaker — and that’s no lie.”

A wave of depression crests up out of the void and washes over the explorer. His shoulders are slumped, his privates chilled, ribs shrieking for attention. And his left knee. It seems to be out of joint. When he speaks, his voice is nearly inaudible: “What now?”

“Say what?”

“What do we do now?”

“Find a tree.”

“A tree?”

“Climb up and wait for light. You don’t want to be hanging around down here when that cat comes back for his horsemeat, do you?”

Mungo considers this for a minute. Things have begun to chirrup a bit, crickets or frogs or something. “Actually,” he says finally, “I don’t know. At least it would be quicker down here.”

♦ HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE DEAD?♦

In the morning Mungo wakes with a start, and finds a tiny bald-headed monkey staring at him out of eyes the size of golf balls. When he moves to shoo it away the branch dips violently, then springs back to jar him loose. There is a moment of pure weightlessness — ethereal, almost exhilarating in its detachment — immediately succeeded by a gut-wrenching panic and a quick but focused image of the high-wire artist at Bartholomew Fair. The first branch slaps him in the face, the next gives way; but finally, after a drop of twenty feet or so, he manages to ram a projecting limb into his armpit and stabilize himself. Grunting, cursing his mother, his Maker and the African Association, he works his way along the length of the branch until he reaches the trunk. Which he embraces like a lost lover. But then he detects a movement out of the corner of his eye — just above him, dangling by its left arm, is the monkey. The wizened little creature gives him a quizzical look, then reaches out a cautious finger and touches him, soft as a kiss, on the brow.

The explorer works his way, limb by limb, to the ground. Johnson is sitting there beneath the tree, waiting for him. He is wrapped in his toga, but his sandals are missing. It is, given the fact of the rainy season in the rain belt, raining. Mungo stands there a moment in his shirt — feet, legs and buttocks bare. His pubic hair is the color of mashed turnips. “I was going to say good morning,” he says, “but under the circumstances it would be an obscenity.”

Johnson grunts. His right eye is swollen closed and there is blood caked in the hair over his ear. “You look terrible,” Mungo observes.

“I feel like I been dragged behind the London mail from Bristol to Covent Garden — and then pounded with mallets on top of it.” He licks his split lip and spits between his teeth. The spittle is red. “Here,” he says, producing the crushed top hat from behind his back. “They left this behind. Wasn’t worth the trouble.”

“Worth the trouble? All my notes are crammed in here.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“I see they left you your toga.”

“It ain’t worth nothin’ either. Took my sandals though, the bastards. And my ass.”

At the mention of the ass, the explorer wheels round, a look of disbelief on his face. “But — where’s the horse?”

Johnson shakes his head.

“You don’t mean to tell me that one leopard put away a whole horse — in a single night?”

“Look close, Mr. Park. You can see where he drug it away.”

The explorer looks. A swath has been cut through the vegetation, as if someone had dragged a rowboat across it: shoots and tendrils crushed, branches snapped off, plants flattened. “Well don’t just sit there, man — let’s go after it. I haven’t had a joint to gnaw on for days, weeks.”

“Can’t. He’s gone and hauled it up a tree someplace. Common practice with leopards. They eat what they can hold, then stash the rest way up high where the dogs and hyenas and such can’t get at it. When I was a kid we was asleep in the hut one night when a leopard carried off my aunt Tota. Next day we went out lookin’. Nine years old, I found her. She was stuffed up a tree, half-eat away, her eyes all covered over with flies. It was her head I saw first — hangin’ there like a melon or somethin’.”

“All right, I get the picture. So what do we do — starve?”

“What we do is we get on down that road to Kabba and beg us some alms, then decide how we are goin’ to get ourselves back to Dindikoo.”

“Back? Without completing my mission?”

“Hey, let’s face it. You almost finished it right here. With the rains it’s goin’ to be about three shades of impossible to travel anywhere — shit, we might not even be able to get back. Plus you got the Moors to contend with the farther up you go. Sansanding’s a Moorish town, from what Eboe says. And Timbuctoo too. They’ll Nazarini you alive up there. That what you want?”

The explorer’s jaw is set. His voice is shot through with emotion. “I’ll chart the course of this river if I have to dance naked in hell first.”