He made one effort, and failed, before finally forcing himself to turn over. He said, though it surprised him a little to find that he had a voice: ‘Who is it?’
There was a small cry of alarm, quickly strangled. ‘Cordery? Master Cordery? Is it thee, in truth?’
The voice was not easily recognisable, but the words told more than the quality of the sound.
‘Langoisse?’ he said, trying to sit up. He realised that he could feel all of his own body again, the right-hand side as well as the left, and that he had command of his every muscle.
‘Thank God!’ exclaimed the pirate, almost sobbing. ‘Master Cordery, I have been in Hell! I have burned, friend Noell, and how the devils have tormented me!’
‘Aye,’ said Noell, still more concerned with the fact of his self-awareness than the nearness of his visitor. ‘I have been there myself, and am only now certain that I am not there still.’ He peered into the darkness, trying hard to see something of the pirate’s face. The night was clear, and there were stars visible in the rectangle which was cut out of the wall by the window. Their light was feeble, but the room was not utterly gloomy. When a hand reached out, groping at Noell’s face and then moving down to discover and grip his arm, he could see a vague shadow. The head was lower than his own, and the arm had reached upward, so he knew that Langoisse had indeed dragged himself across the floor, presumably unable to walk, or even to crawl.
‘Help me,’ begged Langoisse. ‘For the love of God, help me!’
Noell could not imagine what help he could give, but as Langoisse gripped his right arm, so he reached over with his own left hand to grip the pirate’s wrist, to steady it with his clutch.
‘Be still, man,’ he said ‘Thou’rt returned, now, from that Hell to which thy dreams have taken thee. This is the world again, and the silver death is quitting thy tired flesh. We‘ll be bleached as white as bone before we know it.?
‘If I am not in Hell now,’ said the pirate, ‘then I have surely but recently returned, and will go there again if I fall asleep.’ He did not seem to believe that Noell knew whereof he spoke in uttering his reassurances.
‘This Hell is inside us all,’ Noell told him. ‘We have been ill, man, and that is all. The silver death has given us a taste of the hereafter which we fear.’ He remembered, while he spoke, that Langoisse had been sick even before the dark discolouration had appeared in his own flesh. Langoisse had walked all through that long last day, sweating and near-delirious, showing an excess of strength and courage in his resistance to exhaustion and collapse. He realised that Langoisse probably did not remember that the Egungun had come to meet them, or that he had tried to kill the risen dead. Langoisse might not know that they had been brought to Adamawara.
‘Did they question you?’ he asked.
‘The imps of Hell tormented me,’ Langoisse complained, ‘in a cursed tongue I have all but forgot.’ Langoisse had been an educated man in his youth, and must have learned Latin then, but that had been a long time ago. The pirate knew no more than a handful of Uruba words. Whatever information the elemi had gathered from Quintus and himself, they must have had to be content with a leaner ration from Langoisse.
‘Where is this place?’ whispered the pirate.
‘A citadel in Adamawara,’ Noell told him. ‘A palace of vampires. Have you not seen a Persian who calls himself Kantibh, or the woman Berenike whose house this is?’
‘Master Cordery,’ Langoisse replied, in a throaty whisper, ‘I do not know what I have seen, or what has been done to me. Until I found thee, I would have sworn that I had been in Beëlzebub’s palace in the City of Dis, where his Satanic majesty made vicious play with my flesh and my soul, and I’d have sworn, too, that I repented all that I have ever done, and made confession of all my sins. ’Sblood, I would have begged forgiveness of Richard himself, had he come like the noble knight he pretends to be, to release me from that misery!’
‘Hush,’ said Noell, gently. ‘If Quintus were here, he’d accept your repentance and hear your confession, but I am only Noell Cordery, who holds sins to your credit he cannot quite forgive, and who would not ask you to repent your enmity for Richard Lionheart and the tyranny of Gaul. I wish there was a lamp nearby – or a candle and a way to light it.’
‘Oh no,’ said Langoisse, with a sob. ‘I am not what I was, and you would not like to see me. If I am not dead, Master Cordery, I am certainly clad in foul black leprosy, and more hideous to the eye than faithful Selim ever was.’
‘I think not,’ said Noell, still trying to make his voice as soothing as could be. ‘I too was stained, and as I have told thee, cleanness is returning to our flesh, though it might never return to our immortal souls. Hell cannot have us yet awhile, and we may one day make our bid for the breath of life.?
‘My God,’ moaned Langoisse. ‘Thou dost not … thou canst … oh, what truck hath the likes of me with the vengeful Lord? Curse God and all his work! But thou must forgive me, Master Cordery, forgive me for all that I….’
Noell knew that he did not want to hear much more, and did not altogether like it that Langoisse should first curse God and then ask him instead for that forgiveness he desired. But Langoisse was unable to finish his plea in any case. His voice decayed to racking coughs, and then he slumped upon the floor.
Then came more sounds, and Noell knew that others were entering the room. Langoisse released him, gradually, from his insistent hold, and Noell let go of the pirate’s wrist.
The flicker of candle-light reflected from the stone walls, and two men loomed as great black shadows above the bed. Then the flame itself appeared, and behind it the face of the Persian, Kantibh.
Langoisse raised his head from the floor, with difficulty, and turned his face towards the light. He seemed for an instant no more than a ghastly caricature of a man, his face still blotched with fading grey, his lips limned with black and his eyes wild with lunacy. It seemed to Noell that he had taken on the aspect of the risen dead, and become a painted mask, in expiation of his act of violence against Egungun.
‘It is Satan!’ sobbed Langoisse. ‘Oh Master Cordery…!’ He turned to Noell, to stare him straight in the eye.
Noell looked at the pirate’s terrified expression, and the echo of Egungun which he had seen there faded away. The features, mottled with grey though they were, lost their symbolism of the unearthly world, and became instead mere signs of fear and misery. It was as though Langoisse was filthy with streaks of soil, but not deep-stained by sin, as he seemed to imagine. Noell saw that the flesh of the pirate’s hand and arm had also been blackened by the silver death, but was returning to its normal state. The sickness within him had now the aspect of a retreating shadow, instead of an all-consuming blight.
‘It is not the devil,’ said Noell, not so gently, because he was trying to force the pirate to hear him. ‘It is only a man. A vampire, but a man.’
He had never before seen Langoisse in such a state, stripped of all anger, all cruelty, and all haughtiness. But Langoisse was a man, after all, and a man of great courage in spite of this and other fallibilities. Though he did not speak aloud, Noell forgave Langoisse those things for which he had once hated him.
Langoisse seemed somehow to see that it was so, for his agonised face relaxed, and he tried instead to smile. ‘Why, Master Cordery,’ he whispered. ‘Tis only thee. I have been dreaming, friend Noell … dreaming …?
The black servitors raised the pirate gently, and Noell could see that he did his best to help them.
‘Langoisse,’ he said, ‘we are in Adamawara. Whether we are guests or prisoners, I cannot tell, but they do not mean to let us die yet. Go with them, and I will come to you when I can.’
After he had said it, he wondered whether he was free to make such a promise. How could he know what Kantibh’s intentions might be, now that the elders of Adamawara must know the greater part of what Quintus and Noell could tell them? What would happen tomorrow? Was he a welcome guest or a fruit wrung dry, to be d
iscarded?
‘Tis a sickness,’ said Langoisse, as though trying to fix the news within his memory. Then he laughed. It was a weak, thin laugh, but a laugh nevertheless. ‘Are there microscopes in Hell?’ he asked, and seemed to collapse into himself again, slumping unconscious in the arms of the white-clad men who held him. They picked him up – without much difficulty, for he had become very thin – and carried him away.
Kantibh followed, but did not close the door. Berenike came in, carrying a candle of her own, and looked down at Noell. She did not say anything, and there was a strange expression in her eyes, as though her thoughts were very distant, trapped in the world of dreams, unable to find proper release.
It was not the first time he had looked at her with conscious eyes, measuring her beauty with wakeful attention, but when he had done so before he had been under the spell of his affection, and had seen her only as an object of desire. Now, there was a distance between them. She was not one whit less beautiful, with her perfect skin, her full lips drawn back a little from her neat white teeth, and her bright coppery hair, whose like he had never seen. She was so beautiful, in fact, that his breath caught in his throat as he looked at her. But he saw now what he had not seen before – that she looked at him in a very different way, which held no tenderness and no admiration, but only a kind of greed.
He put his hand to his head, as though to test his fever. His mind was clouded now, as though the effort of helping Langoisse had driven him too far.
‘Leave me, I beg of you,’ he said. ‘Let me sleep … let me sleep.’
She bowed, politely, and withdrew, but he called out after her then, and asked her to leave the candle in his room. She returned, and placed it on the table made from the bole of a tree, which rested solidly beside the place where he laid his head.
‘I will be better soon,’ he promised. ‘Very soon.’
But when she had gone, and he slept again, he dreamed that she had surreptitiously returned, and was with him in his bed, and that she cut him about the throat, and sucked his blood while they tossed and rolled together, until a pain grew in him and drove his soul from his body to haunt endless corridors where it swam like a silvery eel through empty air, thrusting itself on and ever on, without prospect of an end or memory of a beginning.
While he dreamed this dream, it seemed real enough, but when he woke again in daylight it evaporated as all dreams should, and let him look with steady eyes at the grey walls of his little cell, and the great blue canopy of the sky beyond the window.
FOUR
The sun was already high in the sky, and Noell rejoiced in a feeling of well-being such as he had not experienced for a very long time.
He sat up, thrusting aside his blanket in order to inspect his body. He was not naked, being dressed in some kind of light chemise, but his arms were bare, and he saw that the discolouration beneath his skin was very faded there, and that the ordinary colour was nearly returned, though paler for the lack of recent exposure to the sun. When he pulled the hem of the nightshirt up to his waist he was able to see that his legs were still somewhat darker, and there was not the ordinary degree of feeling in his calves or his feet. His legs were much thinner than he remembered them, and the flesh on his arms was reduced, as though the muscles had wasted.
He found that he could stand up, with a little difficulty, and managed to limp across the room to the alcove. Then he looked for his clothes, in order to dress himself, but while his other possessions, including the microscope in its box, were still at the foot of the bed, his clothes had been taken away. He sat down again, greatly enfeebled by comparison with his former state.
Later, he was able to sit up to eat a breakfast of cool porridge and fruit, and he asked one of the black men who brought the food if he could have his clothes again. The servant did not understand the words he used, but gestures helped supply the meaning, and his clothes were brought, along with water to wash himself.
As the sun reached its zenith he was visited by Kantibh. Berenike was not with him, but there were two ancient vampires, who were introduced by the Persian as Aiyeda and Nyanya. Aiyeda was the Oni-Shango that Noell had seen several times before, though he could not entirely recall the occasions or the circumstances.
‘Are you well enough to talk with us?’ asked Kantibh, in Latin.
Noell reflected that they had tried him with as many questions as they could even when he was not well enough to provide coherent answers, and told them that.
‘It is true,’ admitted Kantibh, squatting on the mat with the elemi to either side of him. ‘We have found out much of what the elders asked us to discover. But there are many things which you could not communicate in your former state. We would like to hear more reasoned arguments, which can only come from a calm mind.’
‘Are we prisoners here?’ asked Noell, abruptly.
‘You are prisoners of circumstance, certainly,’ replied Kantibh, smoothly. ‘When the Logone and the Gongola are in flood, the journey to the headwaters of the Kwarra is very difficult. You could not reach Bauchi before the wet season is at its worst.’
Noell stared at the man suspiciously. ‘The wet season! The wet season will not begin until April.’
‘By your calendar,’ said Kantibh, serenely, ‘it is the month of May. You have been in Adamawara one hundred and forty days.’
Noell tried to hide his astonishment, but Kantibh must have known what effect the revelation would have. He added: ‘The silver death brings a special sleep – a sleep not unlike the sleep into which the elemi must go when the breath of life is weak within them. You have been very ill.’
Noell recalled the way that the Mkumkwe had picked up Langoisse when he collapsed, and looked again at his slender arms. It was not the wasting of days, but he had not thought it the wasting of months, either. In his season of dreams, he had lost all contact with ordinary time, in body as well as in spirit.
‘Why did you bring us here?’ asked Noell, quietly.
‘It was your intention to come,’ Kantibh pointed out. ‘Without Ghendwa, you would have perished on the way. The elemi helped you because they were curious as to what manner of man the greater world is breeding now. Quintus, whom the tribesmen called the white babalawo, was represented to the elders as a man who could instruct us in the world’s wisdom as well as its history, and Ekeji Orisha directed that his way should be made easy.’
‘And what will happen to us now?’ Noell persisted. ‘Are we free to go where we will in Adamawara? Are we free to leave it, when we wish to do so?’
‘In Adamawara, all are free,’ Kantibh replied, levelly. ‘Here, the gods are close to earth, and the undying walk with the risen dead. Few leave Adamawara, for there is no other place on the face of the earth where a man should prefer to be.’
‘But some have gone from here, have they not?’ asked Noell, speaking sharply because he felt resentful of the way that they had questioned him while he was delirious. ‘The aitigu who brought the breath of life to Walachia and Gaul were not content to walk with the risen dead and the gods of the Uruba and the Mkumkwe.’
Kantibh smiled. ‘They were intemperate men,’ he said. ‘They had not the gift of patience, nor the happiness of true wisdom. ’
Noell looked at Aiyeda, whose black eyes were fixed upon his face, watching very carefully, as though to calculate what measure of patience and wisdom might remain in Noell’s heart, now that he was returned from the void into which the silver death had cast him. Noell knew how difficult it was to obtain an honest answer to a direct question, if an African did not want to give it. They would not tell him what they intended to do with him. For all that he knew, he was still under the sentence of death which the Egungun had tried to pass before Langoisse had earned him his reprieve. He decided that he must find a different kind of question, which would bring him the reward for which he had come here: an understanding of Adamawara, and the breath of life.
‘So Adamawara is really the Eden where the vampire race began,�
� he said. ‘Whence came the Adam of the vampires? How and when did the conquest of pain and death begin?’
‘The arokin tell us that there were men in these hills before there were elemi,’ said Kantibh, speaking in Uruba now. ‘Those were the ancestors of the Mkumkwe and the Sahra, the Uruba and the Jawara, the Ibau and the Edau, and countless other tribes. Olorun commanded Shango to strike the earth with a great thunderbolt, and sent Shigidi and other messengers to trouble the dreams of men until the priests knew what sacrifice was required of them. Then Olorun gave the priests his own heart to share, so that the breath of life entered into them, and they were elemi. The elemi began Ogbone, the community of men, and sent them into the forests and the plains, to be guardians of the tribes.’
Noell watched the Persian while he spoke. It was exactly the kind of story Ntikima would have told, recited flatly, as though every phrase had been handed down from time immemorial, perfectly shaped and never to be altered, so that the story became a thing in itself, separate from any teller.
‘How long ago did all this happen?’ he asked.
‘In the beginning,’ replied the man with the turban.
‘And how are common men made elemi?’ asked Noell, determined that he ought to ask, though he could not expect to be told. ‘How are they made aitigu?’
‘The forging of the heart of Olorun is the greatest of the secrets,’ Kantibh told him. ‘It is not to be told, even to the elemi, until they join Ekeji Orisha in Iletigu. But in Adamawara, all are free, and may see the gods. It is permitted that men of all the tribes may take part in Ogo-Ejodun, to bear witness to the worthiness of the elemi, and the tribes of white men are not excepted. If it is your desire, you may go to Iletigu when the next day comes; that is the law. But you may not know the secret of the heart of Olorun; that is forever forbidden to you.’
Noell did not have to ask the meaning of Ogo-Ejodun, of which he had heard before. Ejodun, which meant season of blood, was the title which the Uruba gave to all their most important sacrifices. Ogo was ordinarily used to refer either to a knobbed club or to the penis. Noell had seen the mutilated genitals of Ghendwa and the Sahra elemi, and had already deduced part of the rite by which men became elemi. Ogo-Ejodun was the further ikeyika; the African vampire sabbat. That much he already knew. However important it might be in the eyes of the elders, Noell suspected that it had little to do with the more fundamental aspect of the transformation of man into vampire. Though he had never seen Kantibh naked, Noell surmised that that sense in which he was unfinished - aitigu - was that his prick was unmutilated. He had not undergone Ogo-Ejodun, and yet he was preserved from pain and death. Clearly, therefore, it was the heart of Olorun which freed men from pain and postponed the moment of death.
Empire of Fear Page 29
