The Pirate's Daughter

by Robert Girardi

  “Yes, very pleased to meet you,” the major said, rolling his eyes like somebody in an Oscar Wilde play about to consume the last cucumber sandwich. Wilson hesitated, then stepped over and held out his hand. How often, he thought, do you get to meet the devil?

  “Wilson Lander, sir,” he said.

  The major looked surprised. The officers made a jumpy move forward; he waved them away and offered a limp handshake. He smiled, but his eyes were on fire.

  “That name sounds familiar,” he said. “Have we met?”

  “I can’t think where,” Wilson said.

  “In London perhaps.”

  “Never been to London,” Wilson said.

  “Wonderful city when it’s not raining,” the major said. “Quite pleasant in the spring.”

  When Wilson stepped aside, he shook the ashtzisi, and the officers gave an assenting shout and settled on the ground.

  “Please sit,” the major said politely, and Wilson and Cricket and the pirate squatted at his feet. “There are a few things I would like to discuss with you before the festivities commence.”

  “This may take awhile,” the pirate whispered in Wilson’s ear. “We’ve been listening to the bastard all night. Better have a cigar.” He handed over a dark-leafed Cuban that Wilson recognized from Captain Amundsen’s private collection. Wilson thought of refusing, then thought better of it and took the cigar in memory of the man. As he lit up, the major rose and began his oration.

  “Some years ago the great Sequhue—may we revere his name—bid the nation return to the old ways, the ways of our ancestors. The magnificent Sequhue knew what was inscribed in our hearts. We Bupus are not like the pale, passionless Europeans who honor the sale of men with a handshake, then go off to the bank counting their money. How immoral—worse, how banal! We Bupus know that when we sell the blood of our blood into bound servitude, our bloody God must be propitiated in the old way with sacrifice, with dancing, with passion.”

  He shook the ashtzisi again, and the officers gave out with another assenting shout.

  Wilson blew smoke rings into the blue. A cloud in the shape of George Washington went by up there, followed by one that looked like an old Buick.

  “I have known life in the West.” The major continued, his voice rising to a rant. “I have been a prisoner of your cities, a passenger in your buses and taxis. I was once a student at the London School of Economics, where I studied the ebb and flow of world currency as today I study the liver of virgins for the will of God. I slept with many of your women, I ate your bland food, your bangers and mash, your hamburgers, and I am here to tell you that the world you have built is a hollow one! Your hearts are hollow; your women are hollow, passionless creatures who no longer desire to bear children. You have fallen from the grace of your ancestors, who once built roads and schools and tamed the land and deciphered the languages of the earth. You honor nothing; you believe in nothing. Your God has turned his face from you.…”

  The major went on in this vein for the next two hours. Half the time he hopped around on one foot, gesticulating wildly, his voice falling from a growl to a whisper and rising to a shriek and falling back again. Wilson fell asleep for a while. The woman at the stake revived from her stupor and began a shrieking that provided a gruesome counterpart to the major’s words. At last he finished what he had to say, and with a shake of his ashtzisi, the gate opened, the enclosure filled with soldiers and naked Bupu women, and the dancing began.

  The strange glow of Lake Tsuwanga faded with a shudder in the west, and a thousand dancers danced by torchlight to the headache rhythm of drum and kalimba gourd and the chanting of a thousand voices. Wilson could no longer see the dancing after the first three hours. The dancer and the dance merged into one sweat-streaked nightmare of flesh and rattling beads. The thick air smelled like hell itself. The stars flickered up, red in the glow of the torches. A bottle of tejiyaa was passed around, and Wilson swallowed a mouthful and his toes went numb. He felt the power of it and fought to keep himself from being absorbed into their trance. The red moon hung like a question mark over Mount Mosumbawa.

  Suddenly Cricket stripped off her shirt and got up and joined the dance, her breasts pale and obscenely animate in the red light of the moon. Wilson shrank back into the shadows. The night was a shroud that hid the shameful works of men. In the middle of everything Major Mpongu let out a meaty fart and threw back his head and laughed, a long, monotonous howl. Then, all at once—silence. The dancers stopped on the beat. Wilson heard the wind rise from the lake, the fast panting of the dancers. Torches flickered against the wall of bones.

  A moment later, the skull gate swung open, and a miserable coffle of about a hundred Iwo men and women were led into the enclosure. The plastic flashlights around their necks had long since gone out. A low plaint of sighs and clicks rose in the gloom.

  “Seems like such a goddamned waste of horseflesh.” Wilson heard the pirate’s voice from somewhere. “But it’s their culture. Who are we to tell them what to do?”

  At this Wilson remembered the pirate’s comment about Carthage, and he remembered the rest of the story from old books: how the Romans had been horrified when they came across the Fields of Tanith—acre upon acre of the bodies of children sacrificed by the Carthaginians to an evil god—how it was for this they destroyed that great city and sowed the ground with salt.

  Then he heard Cricket’s voice low in his ear, and she said, “Feel sorry for them if you want. But last week they sold their neighbors to the same fate.”

  “What fate?” Wilson whispered, but in the next second the major hopped up from his floral-print La-Z-Boy and raised the bone ashtzisi to the dark sky. The dancers scattered. A soldier with a machete stepped up to the stake and decapitated the woman with a single stroke. Blood sprayed in a wild arc from her neck; the head toppled, blinking and insensible, into the mud. The major let loose a guttural cry. This was the signal. The Iwos were dragged clicking and croaking like sick frogs to the stone table, and the slaughter began. A bloody mist filled the air. Wilson tried not to hear the high-pitched animal screaming, the crack of breaking joints, the slither of viscera—the sound of the butchers at work. From behind the floral-print easy chair, the major’s adolescent attendants stared out at the scene in openmouthed ecstasy, their uncircumcised penises straining at the braided thongs.

  Wilson shrank back into the blackness. No one saw him slip away, along the edge of the palisade and through the open skull gate. There were no guards at the slave cages. An iron lever released the weights that lifted the cage doors. Wilson took the bayonet from his belt and busied himself with the bonds of the prisoners. The captive Iwos blinked up at him like sleepy children, afraid, not understanding. He carried the first few out into the alley and pushed them along their way. He pointed to the jungle not fifty yards distant.

  “Go,” he said, “get out of here. Go home,” talking as you would to a stray dog.

  The Iwos still didn’t understand. Gently as possible, Wilson took a plastic flashlight from around the neck of a small old man and clicked it on and swung the frail beam toward the green tangle of vegetation. “Go home,” he repeated. “Go and sin no more.”

  Slowly the Iwos turned and walked into the darkness. It took Wilson about two hours to release all the prisoners. He counted five hundred; then he stopped counting. When it was over and all the cages were empty, he sat down in the dirt against the last cage, exhausted. The sky was still black, but the stars had faded and the red moon had set and dawn was not far.

  A moth, its body covered with delicate pink and yellow fur, fluttered down from somewhere. Wilson slid the Webley-Vickers from his holster. He loaded the chambers with bullets, cocked the hammer, and set it across his knees. Then, without knowing why, he took the Iwo flashlight and put it under his chin and clicked on the beam. Pale light touched his cheeks like a benediction.

  PART SIX

  BLOCKADE

  SQUADRON!

  1

  The pink
and yellow moth woke him up.

  “They’re coming,” the moth said in a voice like silver in water, and Wilson staggered to his feet as the bloodstained crowd pressed through the skull gate.

  Dawnlight above the dark bulk of Mount Mosumbawa showed the color of bruised peaches. The vacant expanse of Lake Tsuwanga gleamed like a burnished spear. Wilson squinted out the sleep junk in his eyes and saw Major Mpongo in the lead, his arm around the pirate’s shoulder. Cricket was followed close by Schlüber, who looked dazed and beaten; behind them came the crush of soldiers, exhausted from the night’s exertions.

  They were about twenty yards from the alley of the cages. This gave Wilson time to scoop the Webley-Vickers out of the dirt where it had fallen. He spun the chamber once and looked over his shoulder for advice, but the moth was gone, flown off to become a caterpillar—or was it vice versa? His head felt muzzy with sleep. The ancient pistol was dead weight in his hand, and he let his arm drop and held it against his leg. The cages stood open at his back like the tomb in the rock. Disbelief and anger spread through the crowd. The pirate’s face went white, then red, and he began waving his hands and shouting at Major Mpongo, who alone remained calm.

  Wilson seemed to be invisible. No one noticed him standing there in the middle of the alley, gun in hand. He grew impatient, tired of the waiting that was his life. He longed to have an end to the drama, to be delivered up to the fate that had stalked him all the years since his mother was flattened in Commerce Street by a black girder that fell from the sky. He pointed the Webley-Vickers to the sky and squeezed the trigger. The pistol bucked and smoked, and an incredible cracking sound rolled out across the lake. In the ensuing silence Wilson called out, “Hey! Lose something?”

  For another second no one moved, then there was a general surge and he was surrounded and Cricket was at his side. Wilson looked into her face; her eyes were dull, without light. Her breasts were covered with a faint layer of grime from the dancing; her legs splotched with dried blood.

  “Enjoy yourself last night?” he said.

  Cricket didn’t seem to understand.

  “How does it feel to dance on the bloody innards of a hundred small men and women?” Wilson said.

  “Wilson, what’s happening?” Cricket said in a raspy voice. “Where are the Iwos?”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Lander,” it was Major Mpongo, polite as the butler. “But have you seen our slaves? Five hundred and twenty-five Iwos to be exact. They appear to be gone.” He smiled, and his smile was perverse because it was lit by madness.

  “Yes. I let them go,” Wilson said. “All of them.”

  “You don’t mean that,” Cricket said, frightened suddenly. “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not kidding, Cricket,” Wilson said. “This is moral lesson number two—slavery is wrong!”

  The pirate gave an inarticulate shout and pulled the 9 mm Beretta out of his shorts. Wilson saw the man meant to kill him this time. Without thinking, he brought up the Webley-Vickers, and another loud explosion reverberated across the lake. The pirate fell back dead, a powder-burned hole the size of a golf ball in his forehead a half inch above his eye patch.

  “Scheiss!” Wilson heard Schlüber say, “the bastard’s gone and killed the captain!”

  The first rank of onlookers were spattered with gore. Cricket looked from the end of Wilson’s smoking pistol to her father lying dead in the dirt. Red blood pooled at her feet. Her face crumbled from the chin up, and she fell to her knees and began to wail. In the next second, Wilson brought the pistol level with Major Mpongo’s eyes and cocked the hammer. The African blinked and stared down at the barrel in mild alarm, as if there were a bee on the end of his nose.

  “Nobody move,” Wilson said, “this thing’s got a hair trigger,” though he had no idea what this meant. Major Mpongo’s men froze in place. Wilson heard them breathing, not two steps away. He could feel his hand trembling, the pistol growing heavier.

  “When stout Cortez entered the Valley of Mexico at the head of two hundred brave Spaniards,” Wilson said, talking fast, “do you know what he found?”

  Major Mpongo stared, wide-eyed.

  “Do you know what he found?” Wilson repeated, and tapped the end of the barrel against the African’s forehead.

  “No, I do not know, Mr. Lander,” he said.

  “He found the idols of the Aztec gods drenched with the blood of thousands of human beings,” Wilson said. “He found the bodies of men, women, and children lying in great heaps, their hearts cut out with stone knives. He found the Aztec priests wearing the skin of people they had just killed as you or I might wear a three-piece suit. And do you know what Cortez did when he found these things?”

  Major Mpongo said nothing. Wilson darted a look to his left. The Bupus were inching closer.

  “He smashed their idols,” Wilson said in a tight voice. “And he put their priests to the sword.” Then he closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger.

  The African screamed, high-pitched and womanish. There was an airy bang, like someone slamming a school desk, and a searing heat in Wilson’s right hand, and he opened his eyes to see the pistol lying in the ground in the dirt, dark smoke and yellow flames curling from the chambers. His hand was burnt and bloody; a deep gash cut the lifeline in two, and the tip of his thumb hung from one bloody strand of skin.

  Major Mpongu looked at Wilson’s bloody hand, and he looked down at the gun smoking in the dirt and he began to laugh, a shrill, obnoxious cackle. In a second, he was echoed by his men, and the sound of laughter filled the still morning.

  Wilson clenched his fist and jammed it into his pocket. Blood seeped through the fabric of his shorts, began to run down his leg. He felt faint with the pain.

  When Major Mpongo had finished laughing, he gave a friendly smile and leaned close. His breath was unspeakably foul.

  “You try to kill me, you cannot kill me,” the African said in a reasonable tone. “Your gun explodes like a toy. My bloody God protects me. He knocks the sword from your hand. Do you know who my bloody God is, Mr. Lander? I am a Christian, you see. My bloody God is your bloody God! You may wish to kill me in the name of Divine Justice, but who makes justice in this world? Not us poor creatures, but God Himself. Perhaps He has a different end in store for me than the one you had planned. Perhaps you are not His instrument as you think. Perhaps it is I who do His will more perfectly.”

  Then Major Mpongo stepped back, and his face twisted up into something not recognizably human. The raised scars on his stomach seemed to spell out a familiar phrase: Was it “Fear Ascendant”? Wilson looked down to where Cricket knelt in the dirt, bloody hands pressed against her father’s forehead, and he felt bad for what he had done. Their eyes met. She mouthed the words “You’re dead.”

  “Beat him and throw him into the cages,” Major Mpongo said.

  Wilson almost didn’t feel the blows when they came.

  2

  A gentle clicking sound filtered through the blackness. The pain in Wilson’s hand reached all the way up to his shoulder. His face felt on fire. The clicking sound grew more insistent. He opened one eye with some effort and saw the timber bars of the cage as a dark silhouette against the glare. Then he moved his head in the direction of the clicking and made out a squirming, moist sluglike something, suspended half an inch away from his nose. He groaned and pushed himself back, but the little monster followed him and the clicking expanded into croaks and sighs.

  “Please, sir, stay still.” A voice came from his right. “Your face is the size of a kalimba gourd. He puts the mswimbe to draw the blood away. Mswimbe is ugly, but a good little creature.”

  Wilson felt hands holding him down, then a cold animal wetness on his cheek and a slight sting. After that they opened his fist, and there was a slithering sensation between his fingers—and he passed again into blackness.

  A while later—Wilson couldn’t say how long—he woke up feeling better. It was bright outside the cage. He sat up and looked around and foun
d that he shared his prison with two other occupants: The closest, a wizened Iwo man, squatted a few feet away, staring at him with an expression of intense concentration. He was no more than three feet tall, small even by the standards of his people, and he wore three plastic flashlights around his neck on a strand of woven vine and a helmetlike headpiece of dried mud. A rough leather pouch hung from his waist. The other was a normal-size African, slumped in the far corner in a heap of khaki rags that had once been a military uniform. He had a long skinny-horsey face and a crooked nose and bloodshot yellow eyes that showed he had not eaten recently, and he smoked a foul-smelling cigarette in small, greedy puffs. When he saw that Wilson was awake, he made a vague gesture and leaned forward.

  “Your face is much better,” he said. “And your hand, how does that feel?”

  Wilson looked at his hand, wrapped in a bandage of fresh green leaves. He wiggled his fingers; the pain was a bare fraction of what it had been before.

  “Not bad, I guess,” Wilson said. “Who did this?”

  The soldier nodded at the Iwo.

  Wilson waved his leafy hand in the little man’s direction. “Thanks, mister,” he said.

  The Iwo did not make a sound, continued to stare.

  “I only have a few cigarettes left,” the soldier said to Wilson, “but after what you’ve been through, I am happy to share. Do you want one now or later?”

  Wilson shook his head. “That’s O.K. I’m not a big smoker. In fact I didn’t smoke at all until recently.” Then he noticed the gold officer’s insignia still attached to the man’s tattered collar. “What are you doing in here?” Wilson said, and he waved his bandaged hand at the brightness beyond the cage. “You should be out there with them.”

  The soldier pulled the collar away from his neck so Wilson could see it better. “This is the staff and crescent moon,” he said. “Not the staff and star. I am Colonel Jokannan Saba of the Anda Patriotic Front. These Bupu bastards ambushed my platoon on the far side of Lake Tsuwanga near Imbobo about two months ago. A few of the men got away, I think, but I did not.” He gave a sad shrug. “Everyone they could not sell, they killed in the blood ceremonies at Lungwalla. I’m the highest-ranking officer, so they brought me here for special treatment. They’re going to boil me alive—privilege of rank, you know. But to tell the truth, I don’t really care. I am sick of the war. Been sick of the war for years now. Got to end someplace for me. This place is as good as any.”