Rebels of Babylon (32 page)

Of a sudden, Queen Manuela cried out. The sound reminded me of the calls of tribal women perched above the Khyber. At once, her followers hushed and cowered as if they wished to hide themselves in the earth.

She did not secure the leash by which she led her naked slave, but merely left him standing by the altar, dead-eyed and grim. Plunging into the midst of her flock with exaggerated strides, she took no care of where she placed her feet, but let the worshippers squirm out of her way. Producing a pouch from the folds of her gown, she tossed a handful of dust in the nearest bonfire.

Her offering flared green, sparking and sizzling. I caught a scent that might have put me in mind of India’s incense, had it not conjured up a matching odor of death.

With the mass of worshippers teeming against one another, careless of indecency, Queen Manuela proceeded from blaze to blaze, offering a tribute of dust at each. I saw bright clouds of purple, rose and blue, then green again.

The aromas grew confusing and complex. First, they bid you breathe deeply and take your pleasure. Then they gagged you like a pit of corpses.

Queen Manuela paid me no further attention, but paced thrice round her star of roaring fires. With the snake rising up from her turban, as if on watch for dangers to her rear.

Returning to the altar, she began to chant in a voice as strong as a man’s, leading her flock through a queer, corrupted
liturgy. Spreading her arms in mockery of a priest, she let her purple vestments trail like wings. Eyes closed, she raised her face to greet the darkness. The way an honest Christian greets the light.

Beside her, the tethered negro stood inhumanly still, while the tatterdemalion king stroked his lamb and smiled.

The queen raised the empty bowl to the sky and shrieked.

Her adherents roared out a sudden response so mighty it made me recoil. I had to remind myself of Mr. Barnaby’s warnings to keep myself upright and within the circle.

The incense changed aromas as it burned, beginning to smell of nameless fruits gone off. The fragrance hinted of lures, of intoxication.

A prayer broke on my lips. I retreated to the greater strength of the Gospels.

Back and forth they went, the queen and her congregants, in call and response that might have suited the noisier sort of Baptists. The sound was disconcerting. It carried a sort of undertow, like the tides of the Bristol Channel. I laid my hand over my breast pocket. Where my Testament resided. As if I feared to end a drowning man.

She must have called to the mock-king with the lamb. He bowed his head and, bending low, meekly approached the altar.

I expected a blood sacrifice, for that is the general practice of primitives everywhere. But the meanness of their actions soon astonished me.

Queen Manuela stepped toward the king, who seemed to shrink and cower. Slipping to his knees, he offered the lamb. Standing before the trembling fellow, the voodoo priestess raised the skirts of her gown, allowing him to slip the animal underneath the folds.

Queen Manuela screamed, as if in agony. Gingerly, the king withdrew the lamb.

Twas a pantomime of birth.

Then he placed the beast upon the altar.

Animals have more sense of things than we credit. The little creature trembled so hard that I could see it quivering from my circle. All beings want to live.

I thought that one of them would cut its throat. Instead, the priestess took the great, insensate fellow by the leash and drew him behind the altar, until his massive torso framed the lamb.

The queen had lowered her voice, whispering secrets to her soulless slave. I never saw him blink. Stiffly, like a great mechanical doll, he extended his arms and took up the lamb, lifting it to his mouth.

I will spare you excessive description. Suffice to say he skinned the beast alive. With his teeth. Over the altar bowl.

The poor thing bleated longer than I thought possible.

The snake in Queen Manuela’s turban rose to watch the world beyond the sacrifice, as if it were a sentinel in a tower.

The meat and bones and pelt of the lamb were discarded. Twas only the blood that mattered. The priestess thrust her slave back into the shadows, rudely and confidently. Gore trailed down his jaw and over his chest.

The king turned from the altar, scurrying off like a child who fears a beating. The worshippers had grown ever more restive, some of them trembling like the lamb, others writhing in torment and demanding some vague blessing of the darkness. Choosing the most demented among them, the king tapped one head then another.

The fortunate crabbed their way toward the altar.

Queen Manuela lifted the bowl of blood and filled her mouth, then set the vessel down reverently. Lunging forward, she spit quick streams of blood onto her disciples, staining their faces and frocks, their heady nakedness. Each took the unholy baptism as license to a frenzy.

The maddest rose and danced. Others chanted, raggedly but fiercely. The drums surged. There was no fear of intruders now. Their spirits had come among them.

The priestess drank again. And then again. Treading among bodies as tormented and bloodied as soldiers in a field hospital.
Yet, for all the intoxication, I noted that a few of the men remembered to add more wood to the bonfires.

The gourds and bottles of liquor reappeared. Splashed from mouth to mouth, their contents glazed over chins and down dark necks.

By the time she had drained the last blood from the bowl, Queen Manuela’s features were slimed crimson. As she moved about the crowds, men and women alike caressed her legs below the knee, moaning and begging.

Her eyes were not of this earth.

Now, I have stood punitive hours on parade. I know that a fellow must bend his knees to avoid toppling in a faint. I drew on my soldier’s tricks to remain erect. But queer it was. I had to fight back wave after wave of dizziness, as if I had been plied with their savage liquors.

I did not want to lose my footing or, still worse, my consciousness. I was not certain I would be allowed to rise again.

The world lost its clear edges. They danced and drank, calling to the darkness and each other. The fellow got up as a motley king had fulfilled his liturgical function. He stripped himself down to obscene, excited nudity, then plunged into the round.

Time lost all its dignity and order. It answered to the drums, not the other way round. Some among the dancers reminded me of a corporal who had been gnawed by a rabid dog near the Lahore cantonment. The regimental surgeon ordered the poor fellow bound up, he had no choice. The corporal took a long time to die, reduced to a raging animal, shrieking in pain and anxious to fix his teeth into the flesh of his fellow man. Even the bravest men watched from a distance.

Twas odd. Our regulations would not let us put him out of his misery. There was no provision for such a case, although the lads agreed he should be shot. In the end, some Musselman fellow cut the corporal’s throat in the night. Perhaps it was only to put an end to the screams, which could be heard far away, among the natives. But I like to think it was done from human kindness.

Let that bide. The demonic possession of my fellow creatures was unlike anything I had ever seen before. Even the vigor and savagery of battle has purpose and some wild order. But the dancing, if so I may call it, grew crazed and lurid.

The men and women became less careful of the distance between them. Clothing fell away, what little there was of it. Pairs declined to the earth. Some staggered to the far side of the bonfires, still possessed of a vestigial modesty. The brutes among the crowd dropped where they pleased.

No Christian man should witness such events. Nor did I wish to watch, nor did I gloat. I turned my eyes away from the vilest acts. But I feared to shut them. I feared it as I rarely have feared anything.

And strange it was. I could not dismiss the foulness before me by telling myself that, after all, they were negroes. I had a hateful sense that what I saw lurked below the accident of skin. Lads in my own regiment in India did things to native women that no man among us ever will write down. And they were boys from Chepstow or from Chester. I did not wish to remember those things, but I did. How bright-faced boys tormented brown-skinned lasses during the Mutiny, killing them after their pleasure was all spent.

For all the devilish doings that night, the only creature killed was that poor lamb. At least thus far.

They rushed at me without warning, spurred by some command I did not hear. I had no time to draw my Colt and barely raised my cane.

My pale attempt at defending myself was useless. Crazed and crowding, male and female, spattered with blood and reeking of fleshy sins, they raged about me, dancing and shrieking, shaking tawny fists.

I could no more have stopped them than I could have stood against a locomotive. The truth is I was helpless as a babe.

Yet, not a one put a toe inside the circle.

They howled and screamed, ogling me as if that lamb had merely served as practice. Plunging about and snarling, the
mass of them might have torn me limb from limb. They seemed to long to do it.

But not one finger violated the circle. For all their wildness and savagery, they had a certain grace, that I will give them. They danced to the edge of insanity, pressing themselves within a fraction of an inch of that outer ring of shells, artful in their abilities to come ever so close, yet still avoid desecration. Male and female alike, a number revealed their body’s parts to me, mocking, teasing and threatening. Some laughed, while others raged.

I lowered my cane. Useless it would have been to attempt to wield it. There was no sense in provoking them even further. There are times when a fellow simply has to stand erect with whatever aplomb he can muster. It is one of the few things Englishmen are good for, and although I am a Welshman born and bred, I never was too proud to take a lesson.

The negroes smelled of life, proud and unembarrassed.

I cannot say how long the trial endured, but it ended with a sort of ragged swiftness, as one then another retreated from the ring.

Twas then I saw her again. Standing in her purple robe, staring at me directly. As if nothing else in the world could draw her interest.

Her congregation grew sober with a suddenness more unnerving than their exuberance had been. They formed themselves in a great, uneven circle, with me at its center.

The drums relaxed, but did not quit. The rhythm slowed to the pace of a human heartbeat.

With dried gore crusted on her cheeks and her purple robe disheveled, Queen Manuela approached me. I do not know that I have ever suffered such a gaze. I have killed men, face to face, whose eyes had less intensity as we struggled. The dizziness welled up again, until I thought it would topple me from my feet. I leaned upon my cane, but felt as if unseen ropes and cords wished to pull me one way or the other. To tug me down and drag me from the circle.

Her stately progress aroused a greater fear in me than all the shouting and raging of the pack of them. The hands below her sleeves were a raptor’s claws.

But she, too, paused when she reached the edge of the circle. Still, she looked about to devour me whole.

The serpent in her turban rose. Looking toward the fires, not at me.

The priestess began to moan. Until the moan became an incantation. To my relief, she closed her eyes and looked about to swoon. As if a greater power had descended and put her in her lesser, mortal place. I cannot say why, but I felt the way a fellow feels as he bursts to the water’s surface and breathes again. Gasping I was, although I hardly sensed it.

Deliberately, she pulled apart the bodice of her gown, displaying her dugs and muttering at the sky. She rubbed first one, then the other, of her breasts, but their age of excitement was past and soon she covered herself.

She shrieked at me then. I almost tumbled backward. Again and again, she shouted in some foreign, satanic tongue. They were questions, judging by the tone, and I felt compelled to make some attempt to answer. But I recalled, in time, Mr. Barnaby’s warnings.

I only wanted to see some hint of the blessing of God’s daylight.

I could not say how many hours had passed, for time had lost the constancy of angels. We say time speeds or slows, depending on our terrors and excitements, on loneliness and absence from our loved ones. But that, I think, is only an illusion.

That night was different. Time cast aside its laws.

She turned from me and called into the murk beyond the fires. Bidding her slave approach her. He responded slowly, with the stiffness of the ancients. But come he did.

As he neared, he looked to me a giant.

She led him around my circle, anti-clockwise, seven times. Then she spoke to the darkness above the trees.

Her worshippers edged rearward. As if they had been warned of poisonous serpents.

Queen Manuela stepped back herself, but did not break the stare she fixed upon me. She eased toward the altar, but stopped before breaching the circle of her followers. At last, she unwrapped the snake from the folds of her turban.

Holding the creature above her head, then clutching it to her bosom, she finished by displaying it to her left side and her right. She did not replace it in her turban, but released it onto her shoulder. The creature docilely made its own way back atop her head, as calmly as a cat returns to its favored spot by the hearth.

They all chanted together then, the priestess and her flock. They did not dance, but trembled where they stood.

With neither warning nor provocation, the great, stiff fellow broke into a struggle against an invisible opponent. Twas as odd a thing as any I ever saw. The massive negro recoiled as if taking mighty blows from an airy nemesis, then pounded back at his ghostly, unseen enemy. The worshippers watched as raptly as privates at a boxing match upon which they have staked all their back pay. Their eyes were huge and grew wider still as the big fellow tumbled to earth in a death-grip with the transparent wraith he was wrestling.

You will not credit this, although I tell it you. And I will admit that I may have been deceived myself by the madness of the night. But the mighty negro was bleeding from nose and mouth, with claw marks elsewhere, as if he had been pummeled by a creature half-man, half-beast. He did not injure himself, I tell you, but recoiled from magical blows until he oozed gore.