by Robert Nye
All that followed is no less than bloody nightmare. I can pray to forget it, but I think that I never shall. I’ll set down the barest details. The whole is too horrible.
Not shouting now, the Indian went after his enemies. He hacked and he cut. Some fought back. But they hadn’t a chance. He was wielding the axe like that angel that’s in the Book of Genesis. He came on; unkillable. His opponents went down; they were not.
I dropped to the deck, drew my sword, fought beside him. Head was firing his pistol at us. He hit nothing in the fog. He ran out of shot, hurled his gun away, seized a boathook. He waited for me. I didn’t waste his time.
I remember the shrill wail of the boatswain’s whistle. Then the call-to-arms of Mr Burwick’s trumpet. But by the time our soldiers appeared on the scene the fight was over.
Fight? It wasn’t a fight. It was straightforward massacre. I never saw so much blood spurt and fountain since that slaughter in the Irish fort at Smerwick. The deck was a slaughterhouse floor. The fog itself rained red.
I killed only two men. Head was one of them. His patch came off. There was some sort of pimple underneath.
The Indian took care of the other five. Five? Maybe five. Who knows? He slashed their miscreant heads from their broken shoulders. He made meat of their mangled tangled bodies, and carved up the bits most meticulously. When he’d finished there was nothing left that remotely resembled a man.
*
Here’s blood still sticking thick between my fingers. Smutches and smudges of blood from my hand where it moves across the paper. A snail’s bright wake streaked with blood trailing down the page
I am stunned, I am brainsick, used up.
I can write no more now.
Tomorrow will be soon enough to make sense of it. Sense of the dream. Sense of the waking nightmare.
If there is sense to be made.
If there’s tomorrow—
23
25 April
Sun like a lump of coughed-up blood in the sky. Rifts and shifts in this hell-born mist. The fog is lifting. Yet the ship hardly stirs. There’s no relief of a wind from any quarter. We idle as though tethered, transfixed, weighed-down by a cargo of doom and unpardonable sin. The sea’s like black milk. If I could spy but one bird in this wilderness of water and vapour it would raise my heart. There is none. Not even the boatswain bird that sleeps on the sea. (But then no doubt they don’t venture this far north.) The only living creatures to witness our present involuntary vigil are a number of water-snakes, ringed yellow and black, which swim round and about my Destiny in great circles. Vile vassals! Odious attendants! What do they wait upon? If I were a superstitious man I could believe that their wrigglings obeyed the pattern of some enchanter’s wand, his hand tracing a magical web in which we lie trapped, bewitching us where we stand, forbidding all further motion either forwards or back.
I am no novice of fate, servant of bad stars or omens, no rhapsodist. I reject all such fancies.
I wait for the sun to grow strong and the wind to come back.
This morning I authorised Mr Burwick to instruct Simon Taverner to issue each remaining loyal gentleman of my crew with half a gill of brandy diluted in three gills of water from the rain barrels, with a little juice of lemons and sugar added. (The presence of this brandy cask in my cabin has been my best-kept secret. Lord Boyle, the Earl of Cork, made me a gift of it, the night before we sailed from Kinsale, oh so long ago! He knows my own abstemiousness, but foresaw the benefits of such liquor in an emergency.)
I have not imbibed myself. I have not even succumbed to the comfort I could find in eating another of the khoka leaves. A long pipe of tobacco is sufficient. That helps to clear the brains, to make a necessary distance between the whirlpool of my wits and the worse-than-any-whirlpool which was yesterday.
*
It is a precious jewel to be plain.
First, then, a few facts. Truths that stick in my throat. But I must spit them out. Forgive me, my son, if I dash this down like a herald arrived full of insults. You will see, in any case, that what I have to say insults myself.
I was wrong about Richard Head. Quite crazily wrong. I had him dismissed as a worm who would never dare take action. Worms turn. This one did. He waited his moment, the devil. I had humiliated him in the eyes of his fellow creatures. I should have foreseen that a man like that would seek some twisted way to get his revenge.
His gang overpowered Sam King at the door of my cabin. They left him for dead - but not before my gallant friend, half-conscious, bludgeoned to his knees, had managed to lock my door from outside and throw the key overboard. This much I learned from Sam himself, badly battered, his skull fractured, yet with a good chance (may it please God) that he will recover from his wounds.
Head might have sent for a battering-ram to smash my door down. If he did, he wasn’t quick enough about it. For at this point - certainly before any of his mutineers had got down the steps from the poop deck - the Indian emerged from his cabin, Wat’s old cabin, and the scene was transformed.
Why? How?
I have only Guayacunda’s own account to go by. His version of what happened is bizarre to say the least of it. Yet I believe what he tells me. Why should he lie, after all?
Head seems for some reason to have panicked. The swine spoke little Spanish, but as he held the Indian at pistol-point, talking frantically all the while to his accomplices, the Indian heard him saying, over and over, the single word: brujo.
Now, brujo means, in the Spanish tongue, a witch or a sorcerer, someone believed to possess uncanny or supernatural powers.
I asked the Indian:
‘You mean that he considered you a sorcerer?’
‘Yes.’
‘For God’s sake, why?’
The Indian shrugged. ‘Who knows? Perhaps he was mad. Perhaps he heard the talk in San Thomé.’
‘What talk?’
‘Some of the female slaves.’ ‘They called you a brujo?’
The Indian nodded. ‘It means nothing,’ he said. ‘They called me that because they did not understand.’
I did not care to ask him what it was that these superstitious females had failed to understand. I was more interested in why Head had suddenly switched his murderous attentions to this fellow as a sort of surrogate for me. Did the Indian have any theories on that subject? I put it to him. His answer was startling.
‘The man with the patch - he tried to hang me once before.’
‘At the Spanish fort?’
‘Yes. There were two soldiers. They held the horse. He was one of them.’
I found myself foolishly recalling my dream, trying to remember if this detail had been reflected in it. I am sure that it was not. But it doesn’t matter. The Indian, after all, was talking about the reality.
‘So Head tried to hang you once,’ I said. ‘That doesn’t explain why he should try to hang you again—’
‘He believed I was a brujo? the Indian said. ‘He believed I had power, that I was a man of power. Perhaps he thought that he must find out if I could be killed. Perhaps he thought that by killing me he could take power away from you.’
‘But that is absurd!’
The Indian fingered his neck. The skin there was still raw with the mark made by the noose.
He said: ‘Perhaps he thought that I made him throw his knife in the sea.’
‘What?’
The Indian smiled. ‘When the white men first came to my country, people thought that they were gods. Perhaps the fear can work the other way.’
The notion was ridiculous. I rejected it.
‘I think Head was mad,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said the Indian.
‘You agree then? That all this talk of sorcery and power is so much nonsense? Head was a madman! He had no motive at all for trying to hang you from the yardarm. You admit it? That Head was insane? That he didn’t know what he was doing?’
‘Yes,’ said the Indian.
I questioned him further.
I was driven by a need to know every detail of what had happened before I burst upon that horrifying scene. How had Head and his accomplices managed to force him down from the poop deck? By holding the pistol to his skull, the Indian said. How did they manage to bind him and string him up from the spar, when I had seen for myself the great strength he could exert when he chose to? Still by the threat of a pistol ball, the Indian said. His answers seemed rational enough. It was all quite reasonable, all understandable, even if the actual context - the horrendous pantomime of the attempted hanging - was insanity itself. But then I came to the shout.
‘You shouted,’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘That was what woke me.’ The Indian said nothing.
‘I never heard anything like that shout,’ I said. ‘You spoke once before of it. You said it drove men mad, that it made them kill. You said it was the shout of the Golden Man.’
The Indian’s eyes gave nothing away.
‘I told Guattaral the truth,’ he said.
I picked my next words with much care. ‘That shout. Is that sorcery?’ ‘No,’ said the Indian.
‘What is it then?’
‘It is the shout of the Golden Man.’
‘Meaning what?’ I demanded. ‘That you are this Golden Man?’
The Indian shuddered. He drew up his right hand to cover his eyes as if I had threatened to strike him.
‘No!’ he cried. ‘No! No!’
I felt ashamed. I felt I was asking him questions that I had no right to ask. I felt like a trespasser. But I was in the grip of a compulsion. No idle itch of curiosity. A compulsion to know, to understand.
I had to go on with it,
I said: ‘Is the Golden Man your god then? Does the voice of your god speak through you? Is that what the shout is? The voice of the god of the Chibchas?’
The Indian brought his hand down slowly from his face.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
I was astonished. He had tears in his eyes. This man who just yesterday had fought like Sackerson the bear in the Paris Garden, who had torn and rent his enemies limb from limb, broke down now in front of me and started weeping wildly like a child.
*
I could not continue with this interview. I was filled with too much pity, too much puzzlement. I never saw the Indian so reduced. It occurred to me that - in his primitive way - he was as wounded as I am by the events of yesterday. Which is to speak of inward wounds, wounds of the heart and the spirit, as terrible in their fashion as the splintered bone and flowing blood of poor Sam King’s head.
All the same, the Indian had the last word.
‘I told Guattaral the truth,’ he said, between sobs. ‘I told him what I know and what I do not know.’ He drew himself up. He stared at me, his eyes blind with tears, more bright tears pouring ceaselessly down his face. ‘But there’s more truth to tell. What I know. What I don’t know. We shall speak of this again. Perhaps - tomorrow?’
His tone was at once proud and yet beseeching. As though he begged for time for our mutual good. I do not understand this, but I accepted it. I nodded. He turned on his heel. He ran. He ran away.
*
The swabbers out there are cleaning our decks of the blood. I can hear the brutes singing. Singing! They like their work, evidently. (Better than I like mine. Who can clean these pages? Who can purge my memory of the bloody images that befoul it?) No doubt the prospect of a little sour beer and cheese hard as horn makes them go about their business with a will. Or perhaps I underestimate the clods? These are men, whatever else, who did not align themselves with the mucilaginous Head and his gang of homicides. Perhaps even this bankruptcy which is all I have left for a crew is capable of some feeling? Such as? Such as that we are cleansing the decks of the Destiny of the spoor of mad murdering spirits, evil ghosts, men so possessed by hate that they sought in an utterly meaningless manner to bring about my downfall. By hanging the Indian! Why, they might as well have hacked a great hole in our hull, and drowned every one of us, themselves included! We are rid of an insanity. Those singing fools must realise that now at least there’s the chance that this voyage can have an end. A proper end. In port. In the harbour at Kinsale. Where they can draw their wages from me and then go. Scuttle away, the vermin, into whatever dark holes Ireland has always offered them and their like.
I can hear the sound of saw and hammer also. Nicholas Markham, our ship’s carpenter, employed on a fresh spar for the starboard yardarm. No song from him. An honest silent workman. He knows his job. He does it. God be praised.
Some nonsense just now from the Reverend Mr Samuel Jones. Should he or should he not recite a few words of Cranmer’s over the parcels of tangled flesh and bone the swabbers were busy slinging in the sea? I advised him to do whatever his conscience directed.
My own conscience makes me sit here writing.
*
I have tried to make some sense of the waking nightmare. But how, in God’s name, can I make any sense of my dream?
I don’t mean the fearful imagery - the Indian’s skin peeling off, his skull being gold, that eye which I fitted in my socket — Such horrors are the common stuff of dreams. I count them as nothing.
When I speak of making sense of the dream I mean two things.
First: How to account for the fact that my dream, as it were, came true? I dreamt of an attempt to hang the Indian. And, at the very same time that I was dreaming it, the devil Richard Head and his loathsome disciples were actually out there in the fog with the rope round the Indian’s neck. Prophecy? Coincidence? I dreamt that the Indian shouted. It was his real shout that woke me. But perhaps there is nothing so unusual in this? There is often a sort of hinge between the dream-world and the world of reality. The Queen told me once of a dream she had. Her half-sister Mary was burning her. Elizabeth dreamt that she had gone to join the ranks of the 300 Protestant ‘heretics’ done to death by fire in the filth that was Smithfield. Rogers, the Canon of St Paul’s, whose crime was that he had translated the Bible (with Coverdale and Tyndall), stood close beside the Queen in her terrible dream. He was bathing his hands in the flame as if it were cold water. He was urging her to do the same. That it would not hurt. Elizabeth woke. She found Mary Fitton at her bedside, throwing water on a bolster which had caught fire from the wick of a fallen watch-light. As fire and water at the point where the Queen’s dream met her waking, so the vast shout of the Indian both in my dream and out of it yesterday. And who has not dreamt that he walked through some oven of a desert, only to wake and discover his feet on a warming-pan? These analogies are some comfort. They seem reasonable. But the fact remains that I woke from a horror not to the lessening of it; rather, to the selfsame horror magnified, made worse, given substance and circumstance. I dreamt, in the essence of my dream, neither future nor past, but what was actually happening in the presentì So that— So that now, for the first time in my life, I fear to sleep at all. The necessary border seems gone. Is there to be no more clear distinction between what I imagine, asleep, and what I do, waking? The thought is ridiculous. I despise myself even for framing it. I sound like some fantastic in a Shakespeare play - his ‘Prince of Denmark’ perhaps, poor work, dashed-out, confused, neither drama nor true history. Dearest Bess, how I need you now to share my bed! (And I never said that before. Me! Whose cabin was his sanctuary—)
Fear. There’s the second crux of that abominable dream of mine.
‘Why did Guattaral not come himself?’ ‘Because he is a coward. That is why.’
In the dream, when I said that, I was Keymis. Keymis’s eye was in my head. I spoke with Keymis’s voice. Yet it appeared to me also that I spoke like an oracle. (Sir Robert Naunton! He once called me the Queen’s oracle!)
‘He has a fever. But the fever is just an excuse. If there had been no fever, then be sure Sir Walter Ralegh would have found some other reason for not coming. He’s a coward. All his life he’s been a coward. He doesn’t know it. He’d never admit that to himself But I k
now Sir Walter. I know Sir Walter’s secret heart. That’s his secret, that’s the truth about him.’
Would Laurence Keymis have said that?
No. He would not.
Did Laurence Keymis even think that? No. I stake my life on it.
But I was Keymis in the dream, I said it. I must have thought it. And if I spoke like an oracle does that not mean I spoke true?
NO.
I reject the dream utterly. Would any coward—
*
Too much introspection. It makes the heart sick. Literally. That must be it, for I broke off the self-tortured and self-torturing stuff above to blunder out of this cabin and to vomit. My arm about the swivel gun mounted on the rail of the poop deck, I leant over the ship’s side, unseen (thank God) in the thin shroud of fog which still clings to us, and I spewed up - what?
God knows. And the sea.
My stomach was empty to start with. I have taken just the one pipe of tobacco all day. Heartsick, was that it? Heartsick or lifesick.
Certainly not my usual bout of ordinary ugly seasickness. For how or why should I be seasick on a ship which scarcely moves?
Sir Walter Ralegh threw up. I record the wretched fact in the third person because that is how it felt to me. As if I was momentarily outside this poor racked body, standing beside myself, watching it go through its pathetic little act of mortal vileness.
Sir Walter Ralegh, that great Lucifer, famous and proud, once the world’s envy, courtier and soldier, explorer and founder of colonies, hero of Cadiz, Queen Elizabeth’s lover, the glass of fashion and the mould of form —
The same Sir Walter Ralegh.
Throwing up.
I threw up every gobbet of my self-esteem, the bitter-as-wormwood dregs of my life and my hopes, whatever secretions remained of a long feast on nothing.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
Nothing at all.
