Ancient of Days (45 page)

“Come, Agarou! Mount your horse!”

The center post shook. Brian reached out to steady it. The electricity coursing through the
poteau mitan
galvanized him, and Caroline, and battered me like a thousand tiny tidal waves working to erode my identity. One moment, I was Paul Loyd; the next, I was obedient meat for the
loa
possessing me. In short, I was a horse.

Agarou, the
vaudun
god of ancestors, leapt down the lightning rod of the
poteau mitan
to convulse the robed body of the human being gripping its base. From this person, the god passed into Caroline Hanna, who kicked out, and on through her into the terrified consciousness of her husband. Agarou mounted Loyd. Racked by the god’s spiritual horsemanship, Loyd thrashed, as a mustang ridden by a determined cowboy will buck for its pride’s sake, foreknowing itself tamed. In just that way, Loyd thrashed. He threw himself far from Caroline. He writhed so violently on the hard-packed floor that his gown erased or smeared portions of the
vevés
drawn there.

Where stars had earlier shone, storm clouds massed in bands above the mountain. Still putting up a token fight for his body, Loyd heard thunder cannonading across the sky as if from the ramparts of the Citadelle Laferrière, south of Cap-Haïtien on Haiti itself. And with each new roll of thunder, the mounted man convulsed. Even as they continued to drum or dance, the habilines watched Loyd. Hector, the blind one, had moved into a corner to escape being knocked down by the flailings of his arms and legs. Erzulie, however, had taken his predicament as a challenge to her skill as a dancer. Above him, she leapt from foot to foot, guessing well where to place her feet without stepping on him. Adam, meanwhile, had renewed his plea for Aïda Ovedo and her husband Damballa to come down the center post into the temple.

The thunder above the mountain boomed louder, and the hidden kernel of Paul Loyd’s consciousness realized that the storm noise would completely drown that of the
vaudun
service—no more hope for rescue by sympathetic islanders. Agarou had him.

“Up, Agarou!” Adam urged the
loa
. “Ride your horse to revelation! Show your horse the god who showed himself to our ancestors!”

Loyd felt himself giving in to the inevitable. His movements became less violent. He bridged his
loa
-possessed body so that his heels and the back of his head held him off the ground. He searched the trinket-hung pavilion for sympathy. Where was RuthClaire? At last, he saw her—in the corner opposite Hector’s, regarding him with a grimace of appalled compassion. How must he look to her? He could scarcely hold his eyeballs still enough to focus her image. Maybe she’d never seen a possession like this one. She was frightened as well as appalled.

“Adam!” she cried, to be heard over the drumming and the thunder. “Adam, stop it! I think it’s killing him!”

Killing me, thought Loyd dispassionately. This is killing me.

The habiline in top hat and tails turned to his wife. “Oh, no, it is bringing him to life, to a knowledge that he could not otherwise so vividly acquire.”

Loyd placed his forearms on the floor parallel to his arched body. Pushing with them, he sprang off the ground like a limbo dancer who has just crept beneath the lowest level of the bar. Upright, his body swayed in the temple’s candlelit geometries. Caroline and the anthropologist lay beside the center post, entranced but not yet possessed, their blood-spattered gowns making them resemble murder victims: an interesting, but not too disturbing sight, for they weren’t dead, and once Aïda Ovedo and Damballa mounted them, he would have company in his spiritual slavery.

“Aaaawwgh,” he said. Spit ran down his lip and chin.

In his Baron Samedi costume, Adam made an ironic bow. “Welcome, Agarou. Welcome, Agarou. Welcome, Agarou.”

Agarou did a scissoring dance step.

“After such an entrance,” Adam said, “you must have great hunger.” He swept a headless chicken up, dug the nails of his hands into its breast, and broke it open with a wicked popping motion. From this bloody rent, he pulled entrails such as Loyd had never used in his cooking at the West Bank. Adam handed these items to Agarou, who, to Loyd’s consternation, began to eat them. Warm and slippery, they were hard to chew, but Agarou got them down almost as fast as the
couleuvre
had engorged the entire unplucked body of the other chicken.

RuthClaire (Loyd noticed, stealing a look through the
vaudun
god’s eyes) had left the
houngfor
. Why? Once, not so long ago, she had tolerated the barbaric eating habits of her habiline husband. Rain sheeted down, rattling the palm-frond thatching of the
tonnelle
. It blew in through the open tops of the peristyle’s walls. It dripped from the eaves and from seams in the roof’s underside. No longer inhibited by the need to play softly, the drummers beat their instruments with abandon. The noise inside the swaying building crescendoed and crescendoed again. So did the noise outside. In Loyd’s benumbed body, Agarou turned his face up and opened his bloodied mouth to the life-giving waters of which his fellow
loa
Damballa was the presiding deity. He had led his horse to water, and had made him drink.

Loyd drowned not only in this deluge, but also in the ancient personality of the
loa
astride him. Rain veiled his eyes. It penetrated the
tonnelle
’s roof and extinguished the candles in their plastic pots. The pots hissed their dismay. Or maybe it was the python hissing, swimming toward him in the downpour like a great ruby and golden eel. Of all the former inhabitants of the structure dissolving in the rain, the serpent was the only one that Loyd could see. He knelt—Agarou made him kneel—to embrace the creature, which lifted its head and kissed him on the lips with a double flicker of its tongue. Then the rain ceased, and the dripping echoes of its cessation thrummed, and Agarou found himself alone on the flank of his Caribbean Olympus.

“Giddyup, horse,” the
loa
said.

Loyd began to walk uphill, as did Agarou. He felt himself two consciousnesses at once, and had the further conviction, as he strode away from Prix-des-Yeux (which had dissolved in the rain along with the
vaudun
temple), that he was climbing not one but two mountains. First was the mountain on the tip of Pointe d’Inagua here in Manzanillo Bay, but superimposed spiritually on that landscape were the lineaments of Mount Tharaka in the African nation of Zarakal. Each time Loyd stopped to look back down the mountain, he saw—by lightning flashes—first the ebony ripples of the Atlantic and then the vast antelope-dotted expanse of the Zarakali plains. They alternated, these features, and with them Loyd’s present and East Africa’s Pleistocene past likewise alternated—so that, ridden by Agarou, he was two different minds at two different places at two different times. How could such a thing occur? Well, the
vaudun
service had done its work: the drumming, the chanting, the dancing. And then the python had kissed him, both to acknowledge Agarou’s power over him and to link his fitful self-awareness to distant places and earlier times.

Loyd-
loa
continued his hike uphill. The fragrance of coffee blossoms hovered over everything, wonderfully fresh after the rain. Where was Agarou going? If the
loa
riding him tried to take him very far, he—his body—would collapse. (You
can
’t ride a dead horse.) He had worn himself out crawling through the habiline caves, and a forced diet of chicken innards was not likely to counteract his body’s fatigue. Then Loyd heard himself laugh. Or was Agarou laughing through him, having found his ignorance of the mechanism of possession amusing? His body would do whatever Agarou demanded for as long as Agarou spurred and controlled it. (You can ride a dead horse—at least until its last vestiges of mind have decayed into insentient randomness.) Loyd resigned himself to a long hike, and an even longer captivity.

At last the horse came to a palisade of mastodon skulls, sabre-tooth tiger tusks, and chalicothere skeletons twenty or thirty feet high. These bones were locked together like pieces of an enormous ivory puzzle, grim and dazzling in the lightning-riven night. Loyd-
loa
approached them, intent on finding a solution. He gripped a pair of weather-polished tusks and swung between them into the labyrinthine heart of the puzzle. Inside the barrier, he ducked and climbed and twisted to find passage through the bones. A spur on a set of wildebeest horns stabbed him in the side, and he cried aloud,
Let me out of here!
His plea was for escape from both Agarou and this treacherous ivory maze. I’m in the picket of sablier trees, not a pile of interlocking tusks and antlers, Loyd thought, more coherently. And he was. The image of a bone-surrounded Mount Tharaka had disguised the reality of the Haitian mountain. It was Agarou who preferred the surrealism of the ancient African past, and because of Agarou’s ascendancy, Loyd had not seen the sablier hedge. Well, they were through it now, scrambling uphill in the open toward the shrub-lined cut where the entrance to the caves was hidden. Agarou-on-Loyd halted in a three-point stance and in a gust of ozone-heavy wind looked downhill at Inagua Bay. Sea and savannah did their dizzying switch, a sail boat metamorphosing into an albino elephant and a flight of bats into a flock of prehistoric flamingos.

Then reality came back.

How will I see down there? Loyd wondered. His hand raised a flashlight to face level (an instrument he could not recall the god picking up), but when he thumbed its button, no beam shot forth. This won’t do, Loyd told the god of ancestors.

Agarou replied, Do gods need eyes to see in your material darkness? We possess the second sight of divinity.

But—

Shut up, nag. Nag me no more. And Agarou laughed at the timidity and lack of faith of his human horse, and yanked him into the bush through which Hector habitually entered the caves, and pushed him down a body-worn slide into total darkness and the breathy cool of the buried past.

I can’t see! Loyd cried to his
vaudun
rider.

Open your eyes, mon! Open your eyes!

Not realizing that they’d been closed, Loyd opened his eyes. He could see. What he saw, though, came as if by ultraviolet illumination. The cave walls glinted silver and purple-red, as if each rock fracture disclosed a sweating seam of liquid mercury or grape jelly. Also, in order to make out the size and shape of surrounding objects, Loyd had to look at them peripherally. A direct gaze dissolved into mist whatever he sought to view. So, to unlock the gloom’s ultraviolet secrets, he did many quick or slow double takes, lifting or lowering his eyes, ducking and feinting. He felt like a soul in hell.

Yagaza, Agarou corrected him: Africa. The afterlife.

Finally, he realized that Agarou had permitted his own consciousness to resume control of his body. He was still possessed—the
loa
had not dismounted, had instead just dropped the reins—but now his own peculiar Loyd-ness was free to direct his steps here or there in these weird caves. Agarou had retreated to a spectator’s place behind his eyes. (Undoubtedly, it was Agarou who allowed him to see.) Thus it was now Loyd’s will rather than the
loa
’s that counted. My will be done, Loyd thought. My kingdom’s come, and it’s hell rather than heaven . . . .

Shadows in the ultraviolet told him that he was not alone. Habiline wraiths encircled him, a hunting party of naked Early Pleistocene males. He walked in their midst in his glowing cambric baptismal gown, a sunlit saint in a pit of resurrected time. He told himself to stop, to turn back and climb out of the gloom just as he’d entered it—but the habilines about him carried him forward against his will. My will, he thought. I can’t do my will. I do theirs. And although he marched with them in apparent freedom, a head and a half taller than the tallest of the ghostly hominids, he had no real choice but to follow their lead and to wish he were less gaudily dressed and a good deal smaller. And when the habilines began to run, they pulled him along: He tottered over them like an effigy on a shoulder-borne float in a religious procession.

They were in the caves and also in an arroyo on the African veldt. The paintings that Loyd had already photographed spun by on the walls like fissures and fault lines, intrusions and alluvial deposits. The habilines tracked a potential kill, carrying bone clubs and stone knives. A two-legged shadow before Loyd threw its club, which disappeared end over end into darkness—to strike something that yelped in pain. In the wake of this yelp, more clubs flew. If Loyd could trust the piteous ensuing sounds, many of these tosses hit their target. Excitement built among the hominids. Loyd was pulled along faster than before.

A gravity well, he thought. A singularity. I’m being sucked into bottomless night with a horde of protohuman spirits . . . . Agile ghosts scampered away from him, toward their kill, releasing him confused and breathless to the dark. Now, if he wanted, he could turn and grope his way back to the exit. No. No, he couldn’t. Curiosity about what the habilines had wounded in this pocket of space-time had him in its grip. He had to see—if seeing it was—their mysterious victim. And so, in his blood-spattered robe, biting his split lip, he walked toward the place that the habilines appeared to have gone. Gradually, the odd red light visible all about them flooded this hidden place, and he pushed his way through the befuddled hunters to look down on their prey.

It was a monstrous hyena, a prehistoric specimen. Or else it was a large quasi-human creature with a hyena’s head. In the bad light, Loyd could not decide. Whatever it was, the weirdness of its anatomy had halted the habilines. It sat against an outcropping of rock like a man recovering from a long run: hyena or hominid? The head gave one message, the body another. Chest, arms, pelvis, and legs suggested a deformed primate, but the ears, snout, and teeth said hyena . . . or dog . . . or jackal. The eyes had a pleading human twinkle that also confused things. The habilines knew that no wounded hyena had ever assumed this manlike posture, and they were chary of the beast.