Authors: William Dietrich
The drums grew louder.
“Damballah!”
The crowd gave a shout that was almost a sigh, and I startled to see a snake slither into our gathering. No one jumped away. The serpent was thick as my arm and longer than my body, but undulated across the dirt toward Ezili as if trained like a pet. Her eyes gleamed welcome, and its tongue flicked in and out. I glanced at Cecile. The tip of the
mambo
’s tongue was between her lips.
“Damballah blesses us with his visit!” she shouted.
The snake seemed to have no more fear of people than they had fear of it, and came on toward the woman at the post as if to squeeze or devour her. I was transfixed, horrified, fascinated. Would no one rescue the beauty?
But no, Ezili stooped, held out an arm, and the snake slithered up as if climbing a tree limb, the congregants moaning in appreciation. Woman and animal entwined, the snake curling around her shoulders. Its diamond-shaped head dipped as if to explore her torso, a tableau both revolting and erotic.
“Damballah says it is time,” Ezili told her audience in a clear, commanding voice. Men stepped forward, took the serpent from her, and carried the snake back to the surrounding jungle with reverence befitting the Ark of the Covenant. They dropped the reptile into foliage, and it swiftly slithered away.
Now there was a squeal and a scrabble of small hooves. A black pig was dragged into this jungle church, straining against a red leather rope. The animal was scrubbed clean as a cat, its tail and ears tied with ribbons. The eyes were wide as if guessing its fate, its body heaving.
Ezili’s eyes—and that’s how I thought of her now, Ezili Danto the
loa
, the compelling beauty goddess of the voodoo world—shut in welcome.
The pig skidded into the designs Cecile had drawn to call down the gods, and the old woman waddled forward with a bright steel knife. She called to the congregants; their chorus chanted in reply. Call and chant, call and chant. It was a sacrificial song. Now the goddess-girl was holding a silver bowl—when had it been brought to her?—and when Cecile bent to expertly slit the animal’s throat, the assembly roared and sang. Ezili caught the arc of blood in her metal receptacle, and when the spurt subsided and the pig lay in the dust (with the tired dignity of sacrifice, I thought), she lifted the bowl high and danced a twirl, as spritely as an Irish jig. The Haitians raised their own arms and whirled to mimic her.
Then she brought down the crimson liquid and Cecile threw in herbs, salt, and a hearty splash of rum. Ezili danced around the edge of their church with this pagan communion. Some dipped fingers in the bloody broth and sucked them dry, while others scooped up enough to paint a cross on their own foreheads.
It was blasphemy, and yet blasphemy synchronized with the life-and-death truths of our earth, like the symbol of wine at Communion.
Blood was sprinkled on the post, on the trampled designs, and on the instruments of the musicians, bright droplets flung from Ezili’s fingers. She laughed as she danced.
I was the last to be served. The goddess twirled and stopped before me, hair and dress settling as she posed. She gave me a seductive smile, eyes probing. What was I supposed to do? But I knew what, and as she and everyone else in the assembly watched I dipped my fingers and sucked the blood as the others had done. It was salty, fiery with rum, and the herbs made my vision waver even more. The congregation roared, the drumming grew even louder, and then I was dancing round and round the periphery with Ezili, not touching her but somehow turning with her, as if the drums of Africa themselves had instructed me in the dance. I was hopelessly drunk by her beauty and wondering if I’d just become damned.
Cecile suddenly gripped my shoulders, her old claws strong as talons. “The answers come from her, monsieur,” she whispered fiercely.
“I want her. I’m terrified of her.”
“You must follow her to learn what you want to know.”
What you seek.
Without conscious decision I trailed Ezili out of the peristyle and into the jungle, moving as if in a dream. Once more she floated ahead but never so far that I couldn’t keep up my pursuit. She led me from swamp into low jungle hills, farther and farther from the drums, up along ridge crests and down into small ravines, her gown aglow like fairy light.
As I followed I sensed another presence as well, predatory and looming. This wasn’t the devils I’d sensed with Cecile before, but something huge, dark, ill intended; it was stalking me, its breath hot. Except when I furtively looked around, I couldn’t see its eyes or anything else, only feel it in my imagination. It was not an animal that tracked me but a man, a sorcerer, a
loa
, unshakable as a shadow or the guilt of a horrible secret. I whirled about, again and again, but nothing was there. At least, nothing that I could see. The forest shut out the sky; I had no sense of stars, moon, or direction. I hurried after Ezili, panting now. Her dress had become almost transparent, accentuating every curve of her body. I dimly remembered I was married and that I was here for my wife, but could no more stop following this apparition than I could stop breathing.
What was I thinking? Nothing at all.
The drumming of the ceremony had grown so faint that it was overtaken by a new sound, pouring water. Ferns six feet high were a door that Ezili pushed through. I followed into a grotto of cliffs, a phosphorescent waterfall dropping thirty feet down a fern-fuzzed cliff into a pool of dark water. Now I could see stars, thousands of them, reflected in the water’s mirror. It was cooler here, the air moist, and she stopped at the edge of the pool and turned to me.
“This is our sacred spring. What do you want to know, Ethan Gage?” Her voice was like music.
Mine was a croak. It was difficult even to remember my question. “What is the diamond?” I finally managed. Did it even matter?
I could feel the man-beast behind me, crouched in the shadows.
“Come, and I will tell you.” Her clothes slid off her body without a touch. She was, of course, perfect, but so flawless as to seem eerie, forbidden. Her form was regal, her skin what we lost in Eden, and her breasts, belly, thighs, and dark triangle all hopelessly seductive. She was sex incarnate. I groaned with lust and longing. Ezili waded into the water, the ripples seeming to reflect her flowing form, her posture as graceful as a swan’s neck. I stumbled forward like the fool I am, all sense gone, my mind as engorged as my erect member.
The dark thing loomed high and dark behind and over me, but if I could only reach and fuse with Ezili, it would leave us alone, wouldn’t it? She was a goddess! A
loa
! Every dream, every fantasy. The enchanted water was midway up her thighs, accentuating the nudity of what was still visible.
“Wait,” I gasped.
I reached to strip off my clothes. She smiled the smile of a seductress.
And then I lurched to a stop, blinking.
Astiza.
The name exploded into my muddled consciousness like a shattering of glass.
I staggered. My God, I was married, and not just married but melded to the mother of my son, the most wonderful woman in the world, an epic beauty in her own right. I had taken vows! I had grown up!
Suddenly I felt sick. It was as if a blow hit my stomach, and I groaned, leaned, and heaved, vomiting up the noxious stuff I’d tasted so that it splattered all over the water. It smelled vile.
Ezili watched me despoil her pool with disdain. I stepped back, emptied, ashamed, confused, my body shaking with illness and humiliation.
Her seductive smile vanished, and with it her luminescence. The pool had gone dark, the reflected stars winking out. She’d become a silhouette. The waterfall was merely a line of gray in the dark. Had I offended the supernatural?
“What’s the matter?” she asked across the water, watching me with a cool objectivity.
She was still achingly beautiful, but something had fundamentally changed. I could not betray my captive wife. And with my resolve, a spell had been broken. “I’m married.”
“And?”
“I’m trying to save my wife. I can’t do this.”
“It is your choice, to seek and resist me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I just wanted an answer to L’Ouverture’s riddle.”
Her head rose slightly, and she looked at me squarely. “The diamond is in Martinique.”
“What?”
“The diamond,” she repeated slowly, “is in Martinique.”
“How will I find one diamond in an entire French island?”
“It will be right in front of you, Ethan.”
My mind was whirling. The dark shadow arched like a cloud, ready to pounce, but furious at being suspended. Ezili receding. Had I made an irrevocable mistake? Or saved us all?
“But how could emeralds be inside?”
“They carry the curse of Montezuma.” Her voice was distant now. “They’ve carried death for nearly three hundred years. Are you ready to risk?”
“For Astiza. For my son.”
She was becoming insubstantial. “But will you save her?”
Something evil, potent with malevolence, reaching for me. “Wait! Please . . .”
She was fading like dreams at dawn. “Strength, Ethan. But if you choose wrong, what you most love will be gone forever.”
“Wait . . .”
A frozen coldness brushed my cheek, a touch clammy as death, but it didn’t seize hold. It was like the scale of a caiman, the slither of Damballah, the cold steel of the French guillotine . . . and then gone, retreated.
I staggered to the bank a drunken man, looking into the most profound darkness I’d ever seen.
What wrong choice could she mean?
Then I fainted.
I
came to with what I thought was wind in my ears, the blades of the great mills of Antigua churning fragments of nightmare. Then I realized I was hearing water and feeling sunlight. I winced, squinting up.
There was a dome of sky above the pool where I’d followed the goddess Ezili. Trees all around, a bright green well. Bright birds sang and flew in paint-box colors. Flowers curled like little gold trumpets. Ripples radiated out from the falls in bands of silver. An enchanted place, with no enchantress.
Groaning, I sat up. The beautiful woman was gone, leaving behind a sense of gaping relief and irretrievable loss—of temptation I’d never be offered again. I felt hollowed. I’d also, I believed, passed a test, and in passing it somehow saved myself. That dark presence waiting to devour me had gone.
My head ached, instead of swam.
But wait, someone
was
present. Stiffly, I turned on the muddy bank. Sitting on a stone was Cecile Fatiman, old, rotund, and serene.
“You drugged me.” My mouth was cotton, my cheeks still numb.
“I showed you the opening.” She smiled, the gaps in her teeth making her seem more matronly in daytime, and less devious.
“I hallucinated. I thought I was following a woman here.”
“You followed Ezili. She does not lead just anyone. She liked you, white man.”
“A
loa
? She is not, could not, be real.”
Cecile said nothing.
“She was too perfect to be real.”
Cecile still said nothing.
Groggily, I took stock. My clothes were damp and dirty, my face covered with stubble. My stomach was too queasy to feel hunger. I did feel fiercely thirsty so drank some from the clear pool.
Cecile kept watching me.
“What are
you
doing here?” I finally asked.
“Deciding if you are a zombi,” she said matter-of-factly.
The word had a feeling of wickedness about it, and for just a moment the jungle seemed to darken. I remembered that hideous spirit. “What’s a zombi?”
“People risen from the dead, or rather, never dead at all.”
I was puzzled. “Like Lazarus?”
“No. You don’t want to meet the zombi. They are cursed slaves of their masters, the magic priests known as
boko
. The
boko
give a potion to their enemies that make the enemy lie as if dead. The enemy is buried. Then the
boko
dig out the grave and revive the enemy, but only as the zombi, the living dead who must serve their master. Instead of returning to Guinea for reunification with their ancestors, the zombi is an eternal slave, trapped in Haiti. No revolt will ever free them. It is a curse far worse than death.”
“Your drink was a zombi potion?” I was appalled, and more than a little offended.
“No, and apparently you did not take what
was
offered. A
boko
followed you and Ezili. Did you lie with her?”
“No, of course not. I’m married. Faithful. The newly reformed Ethan Gage. She disappeared.”
Cecile regarded me with dubious surprise. “Ezili is not accustomed to being rejected.”
“I’m not accustomed to turning a woman like that down.”
“Maybe there’s more strength to you than I suspected, white man. I think your loyalty warded off the
boko
. Ezili wouldn’t let him touch you, because you didn’t touch her. The
loa
, she protect you, saving you for something else. But she’s a jealous spirit, and there is always a price.”
“Then I’m not a zombi?”
“Still foolish, perhaps, but not stupid like the zombi. They have slack mouths, vacant stares, and clumsy walks. They are ugly and smell of the grave. You not that bad.”
I take compliments where I can.
“It means the
loa
have greater uses for you, which will surprise Dessalines. You did not impress him. But now, perhaps, he will take you into his army. Did Ezili solve the riddle for you?”
“I’m begging you to clarify. That woman was not
really
Ezili, was she?”
Cecile said nothing, regarding me with mild impatience.
“She was? I mean, how could that be?”
“You did not answer
my
question.”
“She told me to go to Martinique. That I would find the diamond that holds the emeralds there. I don’t even know what that means. And even if I figure it out, it means going to a French-controlled island and trying to wrest a treasure from under their noses while rescuing Astiza and Harry. I don’t know if I can do that without help.”