by Robert Adams
"Ah, we two were indeed glory-hungry, we two, brand-new-made caballeros, Don Abdullah and I, in those long-ago days, Don Felipe. Although the expedition had been as much a failure as had all those which had preceded it—and, alas, all those which have followed, over the courses of the years since—so very rich is that land that few of us came back completely empty-handed from it."
"As soon as we had paid a call upon the secretary of the council of the Indies and deposited the fifth of our wealth for the King, then visited Monsignor Hassan and given him a tenth of our own four-fifths that he might apply them to the Lord's work, we two outfitted ourselves as befitted our new ranks, hired on a brace of squires each—mine having died and Abdullah's having lost most of an arm—then began to search out new expeditions."
"It was one expedition or campaign after another, then, some lucrative, some not, but all valuable in terms of experience and reputation. We took part in the raid upon the Oyster Coast, fought the Portuguese, the French, the Irish, and once even the Norse, far to the north where white mountains of ice float upon the seas. We both took part in Don Ricardo de las Murasverdes' second expedition against the indios of Mexico, indeed, that unfortunate caballero died in my arms, his very lifeblood pumping out of his terrible death-wound onto my cuirass. Abdullah was wounded sorely while we and some few others fought to hold off the indios until the bulk of our force might be taken off by our ships."
"He still lay abed recovering of his wounds when I sailed off on the Rio Viboro Campaign to drive the accursed French back from the southern coast of the northern mainland—it was those swine, trespassing excommunicants, who built the older part of this very fort, you know, Don Felipe—and when I returned to Habana, he was already wed to the daughter of a well-heeled creole merchant. It was through him and his in-laws, in fact, that I acquired my own richly dowered wife."
"It was with the better part of that dowry that I organized and financed my own first expedition at Mexico. Rather than landing on the War Coast as had the most of the caballeros, I put my force ashore in the northeastern-most province and marched on south, at a general parallel to the coast, with my ships pacing me. God was most generous to me in those months, my boy, for the most of the forces of the armies of the indios was far to the northwest, locked in fierce battle with certain rebellious subjects and other indios who had invaded from the north, so with but trifling losses—and the most of them wrought by illness, accident, disease, and the like—I marched clear down to the old War Coast, looting with blessed success for all the way, living well off the country and attracting not a few indios as irregular troops before I met any sort of real, organized resistance."
"All whetted keen for action against the pagans, my force cut into the scratched-up force of the indios like thin wire through cheese, that day. For all that these were not in any way the best army of the indios of Mexico, still has it been recorded as a very notable victory and a partial revenge for the massive losses of poor Don Ricardo's last expedition there."
"Knowing our desires of old, the leaders of the defeated indios proffered me gold and other riches to board my ships and sail away, being aware that they could not raise enough force to again meet me in battle. Now I had sworn to the indios who had joined me that I would march on to conquer their Aztec overlords, did they aid me, but of course oaths sworn to pagans are never more than empty words to a good Christian, and so, rather than chance having to fling my remaining force against the main force of the indios who were even then hurrying down from the northwest, I accepted the metals and the pounds of jewels and enshipped for Habana."
"We sailed back in triumph, with gold, silver, gems, and slaves enough to give even the lowliest pikeman or seaman a fairish amount. My officers and I were feted by the governor-general himself, and His Excellency offered me a commission to raise a force and drive out the last French bastion in the southern coast, this one, here at the Boca Osa. Of course, I grieved much then that my old comrade Abdullah was not there to share with me in my glory and good fortune, but it then was believed that he had been lost at sea along with ship and ship's company while returning from a slaving venture financed by his father-in-law against the pagans of southwestern Afriqah."
"Again, my boy, God favored me, for the accursed French had been decimated and seriously weakened by a pest of some sort and had had no time to bring in reinforcements ere I and my brave men were upon them with fire and sword and cannon. Since the town had surrendered before a single ball needed to be fired into it, I forbade an actual sack. The commandant of the fort, unable to offer any effective resistance, sent everyone out of the fort under flags of truce, then locked himself in the main magazine and discharged a pistol, one supposes, into an opened keg of gunpowder. That was why the new section of the fort had to be built ere we could occupy it."
"After seeing all of the French on their way back towards the north, I left a garrison in the wrecked fort, prized some two-score indios for slaves, then sailed back south to Habana to render my report. You can imagine my great joy upon being greeted, shortly after first I set foot upon the quay, by my old friend Don Abdullah, looking a bit gaunt and bearing some interesting new scars, and with a most singular tale to spin."
As he lay in the brush under the trees, sweating, swatting desultorily at endless legions of insects and seeking to get some sleep on the soggy leafmold near to the riverside, Don Felipe could but think back to that day with his comandante—sipping cool, sweet wine in the breezy room wherein only a few stray flies and the occasional cucaracha were to be seen.
Recognizing his experience and basic intelligence, the conduct of the probing patrol had been left entirely at his discretion. He had recalled that he never had seen one of the silvery flying things in times of darkness, and so that had been when his boats had been upon the river. They had laid up throughout every day under trees and brush, preferably near to one of the countless little narrow false channels that lay here and there along both sides of the Rio Oso.
At sunset each day, they would set out and row mightily against the strong current until false dawn or a bit after, then steer to a bank or into one of the inlets and draw the boats up onshore with much groaning, cursing, sweaty effort and aided by a set of hardwood rollers brought along for just that purpose. After hacking down enough fresh vegetation to completely cover the boats from a casual bird's-eye view, he and his party would all seek out a covert in which to lie and, hopefully, sleep during the entire length of the day, to repeat the backbreaking form of river travel throughout the night.
Don Felipe allowed fires only on the rare occasions when they found a cache of dry, seasoned wood that would emit no smoke, so the party had subsisted mostly on pickled pork, rock-hard sea-biscuit, smoked stockfish, strong cheese, and river water, eagerly pulling and avidly devouring wild onions and edible greens whenever they chanced upon them. A real treat, about which some of the oarsmen still reminisced, had been the finding of a large, prickly thicket of bushes covered in sweet berries, ambrosiacal to them all.
Most miserable of all had been the days of rain and drizzle, when they lay chilled and uncomfortable and mostly sleepless throughout all of the day, to arise stiff and aching from out their hiding places, few of them not hacking, coughing, and spitting, to wash down a few forced mouthfuls of slimy cheese with swallows of gritty water, then set about the uncovering and launching of the boats so that they might begin another endless night of cruelly hard labor at the heavy oars. Of an early morning, the island that had for so long been base camp to the river slavers hove into view around a bend, and, following a brief reconnaissance that showed it to be completely untenanted, Don Felipe had seen the boats drawn up on the shelving beach. No need had there been to even attempt to hide them, not on a strand lined with similar boats that had been just left where they lay by those who had attacked and destroyed the base camp, months back.
An exploration of the battered, blackened fort in the pale light of dawn had revealed that, somehow, enough sound h
uts remained with whole or quickly repairable roofs to shelter the entire party for the day. One of these cabins had been Don Felipe's own, and, delving under a certain flattish rock sunk into the dirt floor, he was able to retrieve a deerskin pouch containing a scant handful of freshwater pearls, a very old silver coin punched with a hole and bearing on it the arms of France, plus two broken pieces of an Indian spear point knapped from a bright-red stone that he was sure was jasper.
Not all of the onetime garden of the base had been despoiled by animals, and the men were able therefore to gather enough squashes, tomatoes (some folk in Europe still averred that these so-called "love apples" were deadly-poisonous, but Don Felipe had eaten them and seen them eaten by hundreds of his own people and thousands of indios with no ill effects, so he could only assume that the Europeans' fear of both the tomate and the equally innocuous potato were but the ignorant terror of anything new and different), pimientos, and herbs. Using the plentiful charcoal to be found almost anywhere within the well-charred fort, and an earthenware pot gleaned from the tumbled and blackened ruins of the fort kitchen, a tasty stew of the pork, fish, and fresh vegetables was made up and all ate very well that day.
While he lay, almost asleep with his belly full of warm food, Don Felipe let his memory slide back to that day in the comandante's office, hearing once more the strange adventures of Don Abdullah.
With a sailing master, good seamen, and a crew of veteran slavers, Don Abdullah had set sail from Habana aboard one of his creole father-in-law's ships in company with a sister ship commanded by his brother-in-law, Sancho Gomez—only one-quarter European and looking far more like an indio than any Spaniard or Moor. They had made directly for the mouth of the Rio Kongo and up the miles-broad river some leagues to the sprawling earth-and-timber fortress which Sancho Gomez called El Castillo de los Tres Hombres—a slave-brokerage establishment some twenty years in place, founded, built, and run by two Arabian and one Ghanaian former mercenary officers. The three kept a large army of black pagans officered by Arabs, Christian blacks from farther north, some Egyptians, and a few Europeans—all of these last criminals of one foul sort or another, outlawed and under sentence of torture and death in their own lands, for only the most desperate of men would willingly continue to serve in such a debilitating and disease-ridden place in so deadly-dangerous a line of work for any length of time.
In company with Sancho, who had made several trips and had come to know these traders well, Abdullah called upon the partners in their fortress. As they two sauntered ahead of the laden seamen who bore along samples of the goods they had brought to trade for the black slaves, Abdullah noted to himself that never had he seen so many heavy guns mounted on a single fortification as studded the riverside wall of this one. Like some immense ship of the battle line, the wall of baked mud and massive timbers bore three "decks" of batteries, with the heaviest—full cannon and some demicannon—on the lowest level, some thirty feet above the moat level, demicannon and long culverins above that, short culverins, demiculverins, and some long sakers on the highest "deck." The tops of the walls were platforms for both long and short lighter pieces—sakers, minions, falcons, falconets, and even a few robinets—plus at least one swivel gun every ten running feet of wall-top—patareros, portingal-bases, bases, drakes, port-pieces, stock-fowlers, sling-pieces, and murderers, as well as a few very-large-caliber calivers that had been swivel-mounted.
The corner-bastions and the half-bastions along the length of the walls were all defensive towers and so could be fought on even if the wall-tops fell to a foe or became untenable from bombardment or other causes. The entry way was S-shaped, with ironwood gates and portcullises at both ends, roofed over its entire length, with walls and ceiling pocked by murder holes. Emerging from the dim entry tunnel into the bright glare of the central plaza was to note the gaping mouth of a gigantic old-fashioned bombard on a stationary mounting. Abdullah thought that the ancient thing looked quite of a size for a slender man to crawl into, and he repressed a shudder at thought of just how many hundreds of pounds of langrage with which the thing was surely loaded. From the same strongpoint, two other equally venerable bombards glowered at the landward entry way and a smaller sallyport-gate.
For all the European flavor of the defenses of the place, the architecture of the buildings inside the high walls was far more in keeping with the equatorial climate, having high, steeply pitched roofs of thick thatch, but with "walls" of split reeds interlaced with cords that they might be rolled up easily for ventilation or unrolled to keep out rain. The visitors climbed steps made of huge halved logs to a broad, wide verandah raised to the height of a man above the ground, then passed into the residence itself, by way of a broad corridor in which lounged some thirty or so blue-black, heavily armed soldiers—some dozing, some chatting, a knot of them squatting and taking turns throwing knucklebones, but paying little if any apparent attention to the white and red men passing through.
Sancho was greeted warmly by a tall, very fat purple-black man seated in barbaric splendor on a backed and armed bench of richly inlaid hardwoods, having whole elephant tusks for corner supports and sections of them for arms. The back and seat of the bench were covered in leopard and zebra skins, and a garish Turkish-weave carpet covered the dais and the two steps leading up to its apex.
The black man who sat on this throne shared it with a large demijohn, which he frequently lifted to take a long, gurgling nip, and Abdullah suspected that the contents of that container were the reason why the man was sweating profusely despite the efforts of a quartet of chubby brown striplings employing wide ostrich-plume fans to keep air moving about their master and his outré pets.
Fortunately, Sancho had described these pets in advance, so that Abdullah showed little surprise and did not flinch when the pair of Persian running-leopards sat up from their doglike sprawls at the black man's feet, yawned toothily, stared at the white men, then resumed their sprawls and somnolence. He repressed his shudder when the bright green "shoulder sash" abruptly slithered down off the corpulent man to coil on the other side of the wide seat from the straw-covered demijohn, obviously in obedience to some unheard, unseen order or signal.
Appraising the slave dealer, Abdullah estimated that he must weigh in excess of two and a half hundredweight, possibly as much as three, but he would have been willing to wager that thick, firm muscles underlay all that fat, for weaker men did not choose as personal weapon the Danish axe, which required great strength to properly use, and a specimen of that fearsome weapon was precisely what lay in a decorative rack, near to the black man's hand.
In addition to ritual cicatrices on cheeks and forehead, all of the man's skin that was visible showed a network of old scars, hallmark of the veteran warrior. Each of his thick fingers bore at least one ring—massy things of gold or silver and all set with brilliant stones—and among all of the finger rings, arm rings, ear- and nose-bobs, ankle rings, and necklaces, a dozen or more of them, all heavy gold, Abdullah would not have been at all surprised had he been told that the array was worth the ransom of a duque grande or a principe.
The man's clothing was a rich mixture of both European and Afriqan. He wore finely tooled and inlaid jackboots into the tops of which were tucked the legs of a pair of baggy pantaloon trousers of loose-weave Egyptian cotton. The outsides of the boots also bore holsters for a matched pair of small Turkish wheel-lock pistols, while the inner sides sheathed four throwing knives. A loose-fitting, half-sleeved shirt of some cloth that looked a little like linen lawn, dyed an orangy-brown and adorned with Afriqan motifs, was secured at the bulging waist with a broad sash of a snow-white silk fringed with reddish gold. Thrust under the sash was a Yemeni jhambiya, its rhinoceros-horn hilt wound about with both silver and gold wire and its pommel capped with a big aquamarine in a gold setting.
Flanking the dais and ranked behind it were half a hundred more of well-armed blue-black soldiers like those lounging the length of the entryway. Over kilts and loose shirts, all w
ore knee-long mail hauberks, belted at the hips with thick leather bands sporting huge buckles of brass or polished steel from which depended a sword of some description—everything from native short swords and brass-hilted boarding cutlasses to European and Middle Eastern military brands—at least one each of dirk and dagger and one or more pistols, metal flasks of powder and cour bouilli boxes for lead balls and spanners. About a third of them held arquebuses or calivers; the remainder grasped the hafts of a miscellany of pole-arms. A few wore differing types of helmets to cover their shaven, oiled scalps, but most went bareheaded or wore a felt fez. Those two on either hand of and closest to the slave dealer leaned on the foot-long hilts of broad-bladed greatswords, four to four and a half feet of blade length.
The slave dealer's voice was a contrabasso growl, albeit a merry-sounding and eminently friendly growl. "Ah, Sancho Gomez, my lad, it is very good to see you again," he said in barely accented Spanish. "And how is your esteemed sire, Cristòbal?"
Sancho grinned. "Papa waxes fatter with the passing of every day, Captain Otei."
The slave dealer rumbled out a laugh that set most of his adipose body to jiggling. "Ah, yes, a man after my own heart, that is your sire, my lad. Conduct your life and affairs just as he has his and you'll wind up like him, rich as a pope." Pointing a thick thumb on which gleamed a broad band of chiseled gold set with opals, he asked, "And who did you bring to meet me, Sancho? He's no merchant, not him; I'd guess he's a veteran warrior. The way he moves makes me think of a master of the sword. Whose army did you steal him out of? Is he looking for employment, perchance?" The eagerness in the last question was ill concealed. "Poor ibn Azizi is dead of yaws since last you were here, and I am in sore need of a swordmaster, just now, as consequence. I can pay handsomely, you know that."
Sancho chuckled, "No, Captain, this is my new brother-in-law, Don Abdullah de Baza, a true hidalgo, from Spain."
