Call of the Raven

by Smith, Wilbur

  He wondered if Methuselah had come from this part of the world, if some of their blood flowed in Camilla’s veins. He touched the locket at his throat, and tried to forget the old man’s dying words. Beware the dark heart, and the thirst that never quenches. Heading upriver on this terrible mission, it was hard not to think of what the prophecy might mean.

  The blistering sun rose in the sky and fell again towards the ocean they had left behind. The forest crowded around them, the trees still but never silent, the eyes of many creatures watching as they glided by. Mungo saw white herons and kingfishers with brilliant blue breasts, and river terns that darted about as if dancing on the water. Occasionally he saw monkeys scampering in the treetops, and elephant and buffalo ranging along the shoreline. Sometimes snakes swam by, their heads poised above the water. On a rocky beach, Mungo saw a giant lizard sunning itself. It eyed the canoes, as if gauging the threat, then fled into the forest at such a pace it seemed simply to vanish.

  Towards the end of the day the Punu warriors in his canoe wrinkled their noses and passed a word around that sounded like ‘ibubu’.

  Mungo shook Pendleton awake from where he had been dozing in the bow of the canoe.

  ‘What does ibubu mean?’

  Pendleton turned to the nearest tribesman and said something in Portuguese. The African pointed with two fingers to a cluster of giant trees across the river whose boughs were draped with vines as thick as a man’s arm. Pendleton used a hand to shade his eyes and searched the trees.

  ‘Ibubu means great ape,’ Pendleton said. ‘They are the lords of the forest, as dangerous as lions when provoked. The ancients called them gorillas.’

  Although Mungo could see nothing in the shadows, the gorillas could see them. A scream rent the air, then another. The shriek was almost human, like a man on the torture rack crying out in agony. All the Punu ceased their chanting and peered into the forest. The sailors glanced around in fright, as if the sound had been uttered by a demon.

  Mungo retrieved his spyglass, training it on the giant trees. He saw the silverback, sitting on one of the low-hanging branches like a king perched on his throne. He was a majestic animal, black except for the silver around his knees and neck and the bronze on his forehead. He had a broad, hairless chest, as muscular as a blacksmith, shaggy hair that hung from its arms like a shawl, and a craggy face that seemed to carry the wisdom of a thousand years. It was shocking to Mungo how closely the gorilla resembled a man. It was as if they were cousins, that somewhere in the forgotten past their ancestors might have been brothers.

  He watched the gorilla until the canoes rounded a bend and he could see it no longer. He stowed his spyglass and listened as the Punu warriors took up their chant and carried on up the river. As the orange sun descended into the trees, they ran the dugouts onto a sandy embankment and Wisi ordered everyone to disembark. The tribesmen started down a path into the forest, singing all the way. The sailors from the Raven followed them with hands on their knives, eyes wide with fear, as the shadows extended and swallowed the light.

  They reached the edge of the forest as the first stars began to appear. Beyond the trees was a wide savannah with a village at the centre. The glow of torches formed a halo around the encampment, beckoning them like a hearth. The sound of distant chanting came through the air, along with the beat of many drums. Closer to the village, the music was louder, and the noise seemed to take on a physical dimension, as if it was the pulse of the earth itself. There was a density to the air, a presence that Mungo couldn’t name.

  He saw the bonfire and the dancers encircling it, stamping their feet on the dirt and twirling about with burning fronds in their hands. All of them were men, bare-chested, faces covered by elaborate white masks, their loins wrapped with blood-red cloth. The drummers were also men. The women of the village stood on the periphery, clad in skirts of grass, their breasts bared. Their hair and skin gleamed as if oiled, and their long necks and arms and legs glittered with jewellery.

  In their midst, surrounded by young women, sat the Nganga. Like the dancers, he was wearing a carved white mask, but his was embellished with a crown of feathers and a beard of scarlet cloth. Around his wrists and ankles were bangles of polished gold, and hanging from his neck was a bejewelled necklace with a golden pendant, inlaid with a huge rose-coloured diamond. Most extraordinarily of all, his throne was not African but European – a high-backed chair of gilded wood and brocade upholstery, the sort found in the courts of Lisbon and Paris.

  He leaned forward and peered at the new arrivals. Behind the mask, Mungo saw two eyes alive with the same predatory intelligence he had seen in Wisi.

  ‘Tell him we have come to help him fight his enemies,’ said Mungo.

  He had spent the long hours travelling up the river thinking over Pendleton’s warning. The Nganga will expect payment.

  ‘And to make him rich,’ Mungo added.

  Pendleton translated. The Nganga was unmoved. He said something offhand; the women around him laughed.

  ‘He says he is at peace with all his neighbours. The only people he doesn’t trust are the white men.’

  Mungo nodded. ‘That’s wise. White men come, they steal his people and they hunt on his land.’ He saw Pendleton hesitate. ‘Say it,’ Mungo ordered.

  He could not be sure what Pendleton said. But the words made the Nganga sit back thoughtfully.

  ‘I know the Nganga wants to protect his people,’ Mungo continued. ‘But how can he do that with spears and sticks and rusted guns?’

  Pendleton looked appalled. A curt command from the Nganga forced him to relay the message.

  ‘What do you have to offer?’

  Mungo held up his gun. It was one of the Hall rifles they had brought from Baltimore, stamped with the mark of the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. Wisi stepped forward and spoke, waving his musket.

  ‘He says they have guns.’

  ‘Not like this.’ Mungo looked at Pendleton. ‘Tell him I am going to give a demonstration.’

  ‘If you think you can intimidate these people—’

  ‘I am not trying to intimidate anyone. But if you do not warn him what I am about to do, he may very well get the wrong idea when I open fire.’

  Reluctantly, Pendleton relayed Mungo’s words.

  ‘Tell him I challenge Wisi to a contest. You will time one minute, and we will see which of us can let off more shots in that time.’

  Pendleton translated. The Nganga nodded in approval, while Wisi hefted his musket defiantly. The Punu warriors cheered. A tree, about a hundred paces away, was chosen as a target. Mungo and Wisi loaded their weapons and laid out their powder and ammunition, while Pendleton pulled out his gold pocket watch.

  ‘Ready?’

  Mungo and Wisi nodded.

  ‘Begin.’

  The two guns fired almost simultaneously. Both men were good shots – splinters flew from the tree as both balls hit the target. Mungo and Wisi did not pause to admire their marksmanship. Both were already reloading. Wisi tipped powder down the barrel from a flask, then took the long ramrod and rammed home the next ball.

  He was still ramming it when Mungo fired his second shot. At the sound, Wisi looked up in disbelief. He was less than halfway through reloading, but Mungo had hit the tree a second time and had already begun to prepare for his next shot. Instead of loading the ball down the full length of the muzzle with the unwieldy ramrod, the Hall rifle had a second lever in front of the trigger guard that lifted out a short chamber from the stock. You could load the ball in there with your finger, slam it shut and it was ready to fire. While Wisi poured powder into the pan of his flintlock, Mungo simply placed a small percussion cap onto the steel nipple that stuck out for the hammer to strike.

  Both men sighted their rifles again and fired. It was Mungo’s third shot, but only Wisi’s second, and while Mungo’s ball hit the target yet again, Wisi’s went wide.

  ‘Fifteen seconds left,’ said Pendleton.

  The Punu prince’s face
darkened. He grabbed his powder horn and, without pausing to measure the charge, tipped it down the barrel. He dropped the ball in and snatched the ramrod, nearly taking out the eye of one of the watching warriors. With the briefest tap that could barely have touched the ball, he extracted it again, primed the rifle and pulled the trigger.

  There was a soft crack as the flint struck skin and bone. Wisi looked up in shock, turning to rage as he saw that Mungo had put his hand over the frizzen, stopping the flint from striking a spark.

  He threw the rifle aside and pulled a knife from his belt, bellowing a stream of obscenities. Everyone was shouting. The warriors around him took up their spears and beat their hafts on the ground, closing around Mungo. The Nganga rose from his chair.

  ‘What have you done?’ said Pendleton in a panic.

  Mungo remained perfectly still, his hand bleeding where the flint had struck it.

  ‘Tell Wisi he put too much powder in his gun,’ said Mungo. ‘And he did not ram the paper wadding down after the ball. If he had pulled the trigger, the blowback would have taken his head off.’

  As Pendleton translated, the look on Wisi’s face turned from fury to embarrassment. The Nganga leaned forward and spoke curtly.

  ‘He demands that you prove it.’

  Mungo spread his hands in impotence. ‘I could not prove it without doing myself a mortal injury.’

  The Nganga nodded. But it did not seem to have satisfied him. He beckoned one of his warriors forward and gestured him to pick up Wisi’s gun.

  ‘I would not do that,’ Mungo cautioned.

  The warrior shouted out a defiant battle cry. He took the gun, aimed it at the tree and pulled the trigger.

  The weapon exploded. A tongue of flame shot back out of the touch-hole, sending fire and shards of flint straight into the eye of the man who had fired it. He dropped the gun and stumbled away, clutching his face and screaming. One of the women went after him. Otherwise no one moved.

  Wisi sheathed his knife, his face almost as grey as his war paint. The warriors put down their spears and shuffled back. Behind his mask, the Nganga stared at Mungo with something more like respect.

  ‘There is no shame in losing to me,’ said Mungo. ‘I did not want to prove I was the better man. I wanted to show I have the better weapon. And that is why I have come here,’ he went on. ‘To give the Punu these weapons.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re doing,’ Pendleton said, aghast. ‘If you give these niggers modern weapons, proper guns, it changes the balance of power.’

  ‘You’re underestimating them,’ Mungo retorted. ‘They will use the guns against their own neighbours, just as men do the world over. And when they have won their battles you will have an even richer seam of captives to mine for slaves.’

  ‘What if they turn the guns on us?’

  ‘Then they will soon find they have nothing to shoot.’ Mungo did not lower his voice, or change his tone; outwardly, he kept smiling at the Nganga. ‘Didn’t you see how I primed it. The rifle is useless without a percussion cap, and I guarantee you there is nowhere within a thousand miles of this place that will provide them. So any man who can supply the caps will always be someone the Punu will do business with.’

  Pendleton shook his head. ‘You’re the damnedest son-of-a-bitch I ever met,’ he said.

  Mungo ignored him. He went forward to Wisi and presented him with the Hall rifle. Wisi took it reverently, examining the mechanism.

  ‘Amigo,’ said Mungo.

  Wisi nodded. For the first time since they had met, his face broke into a broad smile.

  ‘Amigo.’

  The Nganga stood up and opened his arms in welcome. Tippoo and rest of the Raven’s crew joined the party around the throne. A group of women dispersed to one of the huts and returned with garlands of dried leaves. They handed a pair of these to each of the sailors and showed them how to fit them over shoulders and under arms to form a crosswise sling. Other women brought around baskets of dried roots to be chewed. Mungo hesitated.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘They call it iboga,’ said Pendleton. ‘It’ll open your eyes to visions you’ve never seen.’ He lowered his voice conspiratorially. ‘It’ll also make you rock hard and ready to fuck like a bull in heat.’

  Mungo hesitated. It looked like nothing more than a pile of wood shavings. He took a small handful and chewed.

  ‘I don’t feel anything.’

  ‘Give it a few minutes,’ said Pendleton.

  The men of the village resumed their dancing and drumming. Wisi took Mungo’s hand and led him towards the fire, bringing him into the dance. The other sailors joined in. Mungo’s feet began to move without conscious thought, as if he were a marionette and someone else was handling the strings. The universe in all its vastness shrunk to the space of his body as he whirled and pranced and stomped and swayed.

  He realised the drug must be taking effect. His body seemed to lighten, as if partially liberated from gravity, and the world around him began to undulate. The sparks of the bonfire coalesced into shapes as they climbed into the starlit sky. He saw the shadowy faces of animals and humans, images he recognised and others he had never seen, at once inviting and terrifying. He felt a stirring in his loins, the power of it making him forget everything else.

  When the women came for them, Mungo experienced neither inhibition nor control, only the pure compulsion of desire. A girl led him to a hut, so dark he couldn’t see her. But he felt her when she pressed herself against him, her hands and mouth and breasts and buttocks, and he felt her heat when he entered her and the wave of ecstasy as she drew him towards climax.

  In the dark, in the grip of the drug, he suddenly realised who she was. It was Camilla – she was alive, he had found her, and they would never be parted again. The wave inside him crested and crashed with such force that he cried out as if in pain.

  He slumped against the girl, and fell into a trance-like sleep.

  Mungo woke at first light with the vision of Camilla so fresh in his mind, he reached out and pawed the straw mattress next to him, expecting to find her there.

  Of course he was alone.

  He had dreamed of her before – many times – but the iboga had made it so vivid that even now he half thought he might see her duck under the door and come in, smiling that shy smile he loved so much.

  Then, with a twist of guilt, he remembered the girl from the night before.

  Two weeks ago you found out Camilla was alive, and this is what you do?

  Had he betrayed her? What if fate took notice, if it deemed him unworthy of the task he had set himself? What if he never rescued Camilla?

  He rubbed his eyes and told himself he was an idiot. The iboga root had addled his mind. There was no such thing as fate, he reminded himself, and the only limits on what a man could do were those he placed there himself. Conscience was merely a disguise for hypocrisy. If the encounter had meant anything, it was to stiffen his resolve for what he had to do that day. In order to free Camilla.

  He dressed slowly and stumbled out of the hut. There were pigs and goats in pens, chickens and dogs wandering about, roosters strutting, children scampering around the legs of their mothers. Women sat by cooking fires, making flatbread and stirring broth for stew, while old men brought in fish from the river. The young men were taking no part in the domestic chores. They were sitting by the embers of the bonfire, painting their faces and preparing themselves for war.

  Wisi was with them, as were Pendleton and Tippoo, checking the weapons and powder stores, and showing some of the young men how to handle and load the Hall rifles. The traditional weapons of the Punu were knives, short swords and spears, forged out of iron they had acquired from the Portuguese and the French, usually in exchange for slaves.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Mungo asked.

  Unlike alcohol, the iboga left no headache or nausea, but he felt as if his head were stuffed with cotton.

  ‘I spoke to the Nganga this morning.’ Pend
leton was all smiles and good humour – the iboga had put him in an ebullient mood. ‘He is so pleased with the gift you have offered him, he has decided his men will join our expedition.’

  ‘That is not necessary,’ said Mungo. ‘Tell him we have enough people already.’

  ‘I will tell him no such thing.’ Pendleton lowered his voice. ‘Your gift of the rifles has fired the Nganga with a certain entrepreneurial zeal. He sees opportunities that were not there before – the chance to extend his power and become rich. In short, he has decided to join our venture as an equal partner.’

  ‘That will mean fewer slaves for us.’

  ‘But with more men, we can take more slaves,’ said Pendleton. ‘And there is nothing we can do about it. We are on the Nganga’s land – we accept his terms. I told you there would be a price.’

  ‘It seems to go higher and higher,’ Mungo muttered.

  But his mind was already moving on. There was no denying that with more men, it would be easier to get the captives back to the ship. As long as the ship’s hold was full when she sailed, it did not matter how many people he had to take to pay his debts.

  Wisi had been appointed as the leader of the Punu war party. He was the firstborn son of the Nganga, and when he issued orders, they obeyed without hesitation.

  ‘They make a good army,’ said Mungo, admiring their weapons drill. ‘And he is a good commander.’

  After filling their bellies with the morning meal – rice, yams and stewed fish – they gathered their weapons and provisions and marched out of the village towards the rising sun, deeper into the wilderness. The jungle was dense with animal life and snakes hiding among the leaves, including a fat one with brown and black diamonds on its skin that Wisi identified as ‘the king of vipers’ before putting a lead ball through its head.

  In an ancient grove of the massive wing-rooted trees – according to Pendleton, they were called ceiba and were held sacred by the Punu – Mungo heard Wisi’s men using the word ibubu again. He took a breath and caught the whiff of a pungent odour. He craned his neck for a glimpse of gorilla but saw nothing but leaves and branches. The tribesmen waited in silence, their eyes roving the forest. One of them pointed and Mungo saw a miniature black form descending from the heights on a pair of thick vines. Mungo thought it was a monkey until it climbed onto a hunched shadow at the base of the tree. The mother gorilla turned towards them for an instant, then crashed away into the underbrush. A great roar split the air, sending Mungo’s heart pounding. Of the silverback he saw only a flash before it, too, vanished into the trees.