From the Heart of Darkness

by David Drake

  Dame Alice was unarmed by contrast. Like the men she wore trousers, hers tucked into low-heeled boots. De Vriny looked at her and, shaping his mocking smile into an expression of friendly interest, said, “It surprises me, Dame Alice, that a woman as well born and, I am sure, delicate as yourself would want to accompany an expedition against some of the most vicious sub-men on the globe.”

  Dame Alice lifted the faintly bulbous tip of her nose and said, “It’s no matter of wanting, Captain.” She eyed de Vriny with mild distaste. “I don’t suppose you want to come yourself—unless you like to shoot niggers for lack of better sport? One does unpleasant things because someone must. One has a duty.”

  “What the Captain is suggesting,” put in Trouville, “is that there are no lines of battle fixed in this jungle. A spearman may step from around the next tree and snick, end all your plans—learned though we are sure they must be.”

  “Quite,” agreed Dame Alice, “and so I brought Sparrow here—” she nodded to her servant—“instead of trusting to chance.”

  All heads turned again toward the little American. In French, though the conversation had previously been in English to include Sparrow, de Vriny said, “I hope he never falls overboard. The load of iron-mongery he carries will sink him twenty meters through the bottom muck before anyone knows he’s gone.”

  Again the Belgians laughed. In a voice as flat and hard as the bottom of a skillet, Sparrow said, “Captain, I’d surely appreciate a look at your nice pistol there.”

  De Vriny blinked, uncertain whether the question was chance or if the American had understood the joke of which he had been made the butt. Deliberately, his composure never more than dented, the Belgian unhooked the flap of his patent-leather holster and handed over the Browning pistol. It was small and oblong, its blued finish gleaming like wet sealskin in the firelight.

  Sparrow rotated the weapon, giving its exterior a brief scrutiny. He thumbed the catch in the grip and stripped out the magazine, holding it so that the light fell on the uppermost of its stack of small brass cartridges.

  “You are familiar with automatic pistols, then?” asked Trouville in some surprise at the American’s quick understanding of a weapon rarely encountered on his native continent.

  “Naw,” Sparrow said, slipping the magazine back home. His fingers moved like those of a pianist doing scales. “It’s a gun, though. I can generally figure how a gun works.”

  “You should get one like it,” de Vriny said, smiling as he took the weapon back from Sparrow. “You would find it far more comfortable to carry than those—yours.”

  “Carry a toy like that?” the gunman asked. His voice parodied amazement. “Not me, Captain. When I shoot a man, I want him dead. I want a gun what’ll do the job if I do mine, and these .45s do me jist fine, every time I use’um.” Sparrow grinned then, for the first time. De Vriny felt his own hands fumble as they tried to reholster the Browning. Suddenly he knew why the askaris gave Sparrow so wide a berth.

  Dame Alice coughed. The sound shattered the ice that had been settling over the men. Without moving, Sparrow faded into the background to become an insignificant man with narrow shoulders and pistols too heavy for his frame.

  “Tell me what you know about the rebellion,” the Irishwoman asked quietly in a liquid, attractive voice. Her features led one to expect a nasal whinny. Across the fire came snores from Osterman, a lieutenant by courtesy but in no other respect an officer. He had ignored the wine for the natives’ own malafou. The third calabash had slipped from his numb fingers, dribbling only a stain onto the ground as the bearded Fleming lolled back in his camp chair.

  Trouville exchanged glances with de Vriny, then shrugged and said, “What is there ever to know about a native rebellion? Every once in a while a few of them shoot at our steamers, perhaps chop a concessionaire or two when he comes to collect the rubber and ivory. Then we get the call”—the Colonel’s gesture embraced the invisible Archiduchesse Stephanie and the dozen Baenga canoes drawn up on the bank beside her. “We surround the village, shoot the niggers we catch, and burn the huts. End of rebellion.”

  “And what about their gods?” Dame Alice pressed, bobbing her head like a long-necked diving bird.

  The Colonel laughed. De Vriny patted his holster and said, “We are God in the Maranga Concession.”

  They laughed again and Dame Alice shivered. Osterman snorted awake, blew his nose loudly on the blue sleeve of his uniform coat. “There’s a new god back in the bush, yes,” the Fleming muttered.

  The others stared at him as if he were a frog declaiming Shakespeare. “How would you know?” de Vriny demanded in irritation. “The only Bantu words you know are ‘drink’ and ‘woman’.”

  “I can talk to B’loko, can’t I?” the lieutenant retorted in a voice that managed to be offended despite its slurring. “Good ol’ Baloko, we been together long time, long time. Better fella than some white bastards I could name.…”

  Dame Alice leaned forward, the firelight bright in her eyes. “Tell me about the new god,” she demanded. “Tell me its name.”

  “Don’ remember the name,” Osterman muttered, shaking his head. He was waking up now, surprised and a little concerned to find himself center of the attention not only of his surperiors but also of the foreigner who had come to them in Boma as they readied their troops. Trouville had tried to shrug Dame Alice aside, but the Irishwoman had displayed a patent signed by King Leopold himself.… “Baloko said it but I forget,” he continued, “and he was drunk too, or I don’ think he would have said. He’s afraid of that one.”

  “What’s that?” Trouville interrupted. He was a practical man, willing to accept and use the apparent fact that Osterman’s piggish habits had made him a confidant of the askaris. “One of our Baenga headmen is afraid of a Bakongo god?”

  Osterman shook his graying head again. Increasingly embarrassed but determined to explain, he said, “Not their god, not like that. The Bakongos, they live along the river, they got their fetishes just like any niggers. But back in the bush, there’s another village. Not a tribe; a few men from here, a few women from there. Been getting together one at a time, a couple a year, for Christ … maybe twenty years. They got the new god, they’re the ones who started the trouble. They say you don’ have to pay your rubber to the white men, you don’ have to pray to any fetish. Their god gonna come along and eat up everything. Any day now.”

  Osterman rubbed his eyes blearily, then shouted, “Boy! Malafou!”

  A Krooman in breeches and swallow-tailed coat scurried over with another calabash. Osterman slurped down the sweet, brain-stunning fluid in three great gulps. He began humming something meaningless to himself. The empty container fell, and after a time the Fleming began to snore again.

  The other men looked at one another. “Do you suppose he’s right?” the Captain asked Trouville.

  “He could be,” the slim colonel admitted with a shrug. “They might well have told him all that. He’s not much better than a nigger himself despite the color of his skin.”

  “He’s right,” said Dame Alice, looking at the fire and not at her companions. Ash crumbled in its heart and a knot of sparks clawed toward the forest canopy. “Except for one thing. Their god isn’t new, it isn’t new at all. Back when the world was fresh and steaming and the reptiles flew above the swamps, it wasn’t new either. The Bakongo name for it is Ahtu. Alhazred called it Nyarlathotep when he wrote twelve hundred years ago.” She paused, staring down at her hands tented above the thin yellow wine left in her goblet.

  “Oh, then you are a missionary,” de Vriny exclaimed, glad to find a category for the puzzling woman. Her disgusted glance was her reply. “Or a student of religions?” de Vriny tried again.

  “I study religions only as a doctor studies diseases,” Dame Alice said. She looked at her companions. Their eyes were uncomprehending. “I…,” she began, but how did she explain her life to men who had no conception of devotion to an ideal? Her childhood had been turned
inward to dreams and the books lining the cold library of the Grange. Inward, because her outward body was that of an ugly duckling whom everyone knew had no chance of becoming a swan. And from her dreams and a few of the very oldest books had come hints of what it is that nibbles at the minds of all men in the darkness. Her father could not answer or even understand her question, nor could the Vicar. She had grown from a persistent child into an iron-willed woman who lavished on her fancy energies which her relatives felt would have been better spent on the Church … or, perhaps, on breeding spaniels.

  And as she had grown, she had met others who felt and knew what she did.

  She looked around again. “Captain,” she said simply, “I have been studying certain—myths—for most of my life. I’ve come to believe that some of them contain truths or hints of truths. There are powers in the universe. When you know the truth of those powers, you have the choice of joining them and working to bring about their coming—for they are unstoppable—or you can fight, knowing there is no ultimate hope for your cause and going ahead anyway. Mine was the second choice.” Drawing herself even more rigidly straight, she added, “Someone has always been willing to stand between mankind and Chaos. As long as there have been men.”

  De Vriny snickered audibly. Trouville gave him a dreadful scowl and said to Dame Alice, “And you are searching for the god these rebels pray to?”

  “Yes. The one they call Ahtu.”

  From the score of firelit glades around them came the thunk-thunk-THUNK of axe and wedge, then the booming native laughter.

  “Osterman and de Vriny should have their men in position by now,” said the Colonel, pattering his fingertips on the bridge rail as he scanned the wooded shore line. “It’s about time for me to land, too.”

  “Us to land,” Dame Alice said. She squinted, straining forward to see the village the Belgian force was preparing to assault. “Where are the huts?” she finally asked.

  “Oh, they’re set back from the shore some hundreds of meters,” Trouville explained off-handedly. “The trees hide them, but the fish weirs—” he pointed out the lines of upright sticks rippling foam tracks down the current—“are a good enough guide. We’ve stayed anchored here in the stream so that the villagers would be watching us while the forces from the canoes downriver surrounded them.”

  Muffled but unmistakable, a shot thudded in the forest. A volley followed, drawing with it faint screams.

  “Bring us in,” ordered the Colonel, tugging at the left half of his moustache in his only sign of nervousness.

  The Archiduchesse grated as her bow nuzzled into the trees, but there was no time now for delicacy. Forest Guards streamed past the Hotchkiss and down the gangplank into the jungle. The gunner was crouched behind the metal shield that protected him only from the front. Tree boles and their shadows now encircled him on three sides.

  “I suppose it will be safe enough on the shore,” said Trouville, adjusting his harness as if for parade instead of battle. “You can accompany me if you wish—and if you stay close by.”

  “All right,” said Dame Alice as if she would not have come without his permission. Her hand clutched not a pistol but an old black-bound book. “If we’re where you think, though, you’ll need me very badly before you’re through here. Especially if it takes till sunset.” She swung down the companionway behind Trouville. Last of all from the bridge came Sparrow, grimy and small and deadly as a shark.

  The track that wound among the trunks was a narrow line hammered into the loam by horny feet. It differed from a game trail only in that shoulders had cleared the foliage to greater height. The Baengas strode it with some discomfort—they were a Lower Congo tribe, never quite at home in the upriver jungles. Trouville’s step was deliberately nonchalant, while Dame Alice tramped gracelessly and gave an accurate impression of disinterest in her physical surroundings. Sparrow’s eyes twitched around him as they always did. He carried his hands waist-high and over his belted revolvers.

  The clearing was an anticlimax. The score of huts in the center had been protected by a palisade of sorts, but the first rush of the encircling Baengas had smashed great gaps in it. Three bodies, all of them women, lay spilled in the millet fields outside. Within the palisade were more bodies, one of them an askari with a long iron spearhead crosswise through his rib cage. About a hundred villagers, quavering but alive, had been forced together in the compound in front of the chief’s beehive hut by the time the force from the steamer arrived. Several huts were already burning, sending up shuddering columns of black smoke.

  Trouville stared at the mass of prisoners, solidified by fear into the terrible, stinking apathy of sheep in the slaughtering chute. “Yes…,” he murmured appreciatively. His eyes had already taken in the fact that the fetishes which normally stood to the right or left of a well-to-do family’s doorway were absent in this village. “Now,” he asked, “who will tell me about the new god you worship?”

  As black against a darkness, so the new fear rippling across faces already terrified. Near the Belgian stood an old man, face knobbed by a pattern of ritual scarring. He was certainly a priest, though without a priest’s usual trappings of feathers and cowrie shells. Haltingly he said, “Lord, l-lord, we have no new gods.”

  “You lie!” cried Trouville. His gloved fingertip sprang out like a fang. “You worship Ahtu, you lower-than-the-apes, and he is a poor weak god whom our medicine will break like a stick!”

  The crowd moaned and surged backwards from the Colonel. The old priest made no sound at all, only began to tremble violently. Trouville looked at the sky. “Lieutenant Osterman,” he called to his burly subordinate, “we have an hour or so till sunset. I trust you can get this carrion—” he pointed to the priest—“to talk by then. He seems to know something. As for the rest … de Vriny, take charge of getting the irons on them. We’ll decide what to do with them later.”

  The grinning Fleming slapped Baloko on the back. Each seized one of the priest’s arms and began to drag him toward the shade of a baobab tree. Osterman started to detail the items he needed from the steamer and Baloko, enthusiastic as a child helping his father to fix a machine, rattled the list off in translation to a nearby askari.

  * * *

  The evening breeze brought a hint of relief from the heat and the odors, the oily scent of fear and the others more easily identified. Osterman had set an overturned bucket over the plate of burning sulphur to smother it out when it was no longer needed. Reminded by Trouville, he had also covered the brush of twigs he had been using to spread the gluey flames over the priest’s genitals. Then, his work done, he and Baloko had strolled away to add a bowl of malafou to the chill, “Thank you, Lieutenant,” which was all the praise Trouville had offered for their success.

  The subject of their ministrations—eyes closed, wrists and ankles staked to the ground—was talking. “They come, we let them,” he said, so softly and quickly that Trouville had to strain to mutter out a crude translation for Dame Alice. “They live in forest, they not bother our fish. Forest here evil, we think. We feel god there, we not understand, not know him. All right that anybody want, wants to live in forest.”

  The native paused, turning his head to hawk phlegm into the vomit already pooled beside him. Dame Alice squatted on the ground and riffled the pages of her book unconsciously. She had refused to use the down-turned bucket for a stool. Sparrow paid only scant attention to the prisoner. His eyes kept picking across the clearing, thick and raucous now with Baengas and their leg-shackled prisoners; the men and the trees beyond them. Sparrow’s face shone with the frustrated intensity of a man certain of an ambush but unable to forestall it. Shadows were beginning to turn the dust the color of the noses of his bullets.

  The priest continued. The rhythms of his own language were rich and firm, reminding Dame Alice that behind Trouville’s choppy French were the words of a man of dignity and power—before they had brought him down. “All of them are cut men. First come boy, no have ears. His head l
ook me, like melon that is dropped. Him, he hear god Ahtu calling do what god tell him.

  “One man, he not have, uh, manhood. God orders, boy tells him … he, uh, he quickens the ground where Ahtu sleeps.

  “One man, he only half face, no eyes … him sees, he sees Ahtu, he tells what becoming, uh, is coming. He—”

  The priest’s voice rose into a shrill tirade that drowned out the translation. Trouville dispassionately slapped him to silence, then used a rag of bark cloth in his gloved hand to wipe blood and spittle from the fellow’s mouth. “There are only three rebels in the forest?” he asked. If he realized that the priest had claimed the third man was white, he was ignoring it completely.

  “No, no … many men, a ten of tens, maybe more. Before we not see, not see cut men only now and now, uh, again, in the forest. Now god is ripe and, uh, his messengers.…”

  Only a knife edge of sun could have lain across the horizon, for the whole clearing was darkening to burnt umber where it had color at all. The ground shuddered. The native pegged to it began to scream.

  “Earthquake?” Trouville blurted in surprise and concern. Rain forest trees have no deep tap roots to keep them upright, so a strong wind or an earth tremor will scatter giants like straw in the threshing yard.

  Dame Alice’s face showed concern not far from panic, but she wholly ignored the baobab tottering above them. Her book was open and she was rolling out syllables from it. She paused, turned so that the pages opened to the fading sun; but her voice stumbled again, and the earth pitched. It was sucking in under the priest whose fear so gripped him that, having screamed out his breath, he was unable to draw another one.

  “Light!” Dame Alice cried. “For Jesus’ sake, light!”

  If Trouville heard the demand against the litany of fear rising from the blacks, guards and prisoners alike, he did not understand. Sparrow, his face a bone mask, dipped into his shirt pocket and came out with a match which he struck alight with the thumb of the hand that held it. The blue flame pulsed above the page, steady as the ground’s motion would let the gunman keep it. Its light painted Dame Alice’s tight bun as she began again to cry words of no meaning to any of her human audience.