The Pirate's Daughter (32 page)

The cook hesitated; then he shrugged and went over to the controls. Soon there was the comforting thud of the diesels, and Cricket took them a mile or so out into the center of the lake. She killed the engine and dropped anchor in the dark water, but it would not strike bottom. Lake Tsuwanga is impossibly deep, one of the deepest lakes in the world. The anchor fell through the cold fathoms as through space. The
Dread
listed against the black outline of Mount Mosumbawa.

“So we stay up all night, to keep her off the rocks,” Cricket said. “I wasn't planning on going to sleep anyway. You?”

“No,” Wilson said.

“I was,” the cook said, and disappeared below.

The automatic winch brought the anchor back into the bow casing, and the
Dread
drifted through the black toward morning. There was no light but the inconsequential flickering of the stars and the faint glow of the console.

Cricket unbuttoned her shirt and stepped out of her shorts. In a moment, she stood naked beneath the pale stars, her body glowing with its own phosphoresence.

“Remember this is supposed to be a working honeymoon,” she said.

“Yeah,” Wilson said.

“So I want you to make love to me,” she said, her voice lowering an octave, then she settled back onto the bench and opened her legs.
“We'll say it's five, ten years from now. This is a pleasure cruise. We're in the middle of some tame body of water, Lake Geneva, say. Better, Lake Como. It's a beautiful night in late summer, our children are sleeping below. I am your wife and I love you and you love me—”

“Shut up,” Wilson said. He walked over to where she was sitting, legs apart, and dropped to his knees.

Two long skiffs motored out to the
Dread
across the cool surface of the lake at noon the next day.

Six BPF soldiers, done up in a startling combination of combat fatigues and primitive jewelry, climbed aboard. Wilson saw a necklace of dried fruit that wasn't dried fruit but shriveled human ears, headbands of teeth and finger bones. One of the soldiers gave a few harsh commands in Bupu and gestured toward the shore. The others milled around the deck, bored and dangerous.

“What's going on here?” Wilson said. He couldn't help the tremulous note in his voice.

“Steady,” Cricket said. “We're going over to participate in what you might call the, uh, ceremonies closing the deal. Considered a necessary thing. Seals the contract between buyer and seller. I'll warn you, it's pretty disgusting. Don't do anything stupid and try not to vomit.”

“You're kidding,” Wilson said. The back of his neck felt cold.

“I'm not kidding,” Cricket said.

Wilson buckled on his pistol and bayonet, put extra cartridges in his belt, and got into the lead skiff. The smell of blood rose in his nostrils as they landed on the beach of glossy stones and went up through the village. No one spoke. Reddish smoke hung faint as a
sigh in the air, and there was the acrid, sweet pungence of roasting meat. A yellow dog gnawed at a long bone in the middle of the street. They came up past the far Quonset hut and turned down a narrow alley lined with small cages of untreated timber. Wilson had to look twice to realize human beings were packed into these cages. Men and women no taller than four feet high stared out as the soldiers passed. A few extended their hands, and the air was filled with a sad, reproachful clicking sound.

When they reached the palisade, Wilson saw it was not made of wood, as he had thought, but constructed from human bones lashed to iron girders anchored in the ground. Across the gate, skulls hung in a clever pattern like an inverted pentagram. Wilson made a quick calculation and guessed that the bones of thousands had gone into this gruesome construction. Horror welled up like an ache in his heart. Inside, the ground of packed earth was red and slippery-looking. A naked Iwo woman sagged at a stake before a wide stone table. At her feet a goat with broken legs foundered around in the red mud.

Captain Page and the others waited beneath an awning made from an old parachute. Schlüber squatted in the dirt, a blank expression on his face. Beneath a larger awning off to the left, a group of BPF officers stood grouped around a naked African seated in an old floral-print La-Z-Boy recliner. The African wore three strands of human molars around his neck and a five-foot-tall headdress of ribs and feathers. His skin was scrawled with tattoos and raised scars, his eyes wide with madness. In his right hand he held an ashtzisi made from carved human bones wrapped in gold foil. Two naked teenage boys stood at attention directly behind his chair. Their uncircumcised penises were moored to their thighs with braided leather thongs.

“At last your family has arrived, Captain,” the African called out in a polite British-accented English. “We have been waiting. Please introduce us.”

The pirate took Wilson and Cricket over to the chair. Wilson assumed he was being presented to the devil himself.

“Major Charles Mpongu and staff,” the pirate said. “My daughter and son-in-law.”

“Yes, very pleased to meet you,” the major said, rolling his eyes like somebody in an Oscar Wilde play about to consume the last cucumber sandwich. Wilson hesitated, then stepped over and held out his hand.
How often
, he thought,
do you get to meet the devil?

“Wilson Lander, sir,” he said.

The major looked surprised. The officers made a jumpy move forward; he waved them away and offered a limp handshake. He smiled, but his eyes were on fire.

“That name sounds familiar,” he said. “Have we met?”

“I can't think where,” Wilson said.

“In London perhaps.”

“Never been to London,” Wilson said.

“Wonderful city when it's not raining,” the major said. “Quite pleasant in the spring.”

When Wilson stepped aside, he shook the ashtzisi, and the officers gave an assenting shout and settled on the ground.

“Please sit,” the major said politely, and Wilson and Cricket and the pirate squatted at his feet. “There are a few things I would like to discuss with you before the festivities commence.”

“This may take awhile,” the pirate whispered in Wilson's ear. “We've been listening to the bastard all night. Better have a cigar.” He handed over a dark-leafed Cuban that Wilson recognized from Captain Amundsen's private collection. Wilson thought of refusing, then thought better of it and took the cigar in memory of the man. As he lit up, the major rose and began his oration.

“Some years ago the great Sequhue—may we revere his name—bid the nation return to the old ways, the ways of our ancestors. The magnificent Sequhue knew what was inscribed in our hearts. We Bupus are not like the pale, passionless Europeans who honor the sale of men with a handshake, then go off to the bank counting their
money. How immoral—worse, how banal! We Bupus know that when we sell the blood of our blood into bound servitude, our bloody God must be propitiated in the old way with sacrifice, with dancing, with passion.”

He shook the ashtzisi again, and the officers gave out with another assenting shout.

Wilson blew smoke rings into the blue. A cloud in the shape of George Washington went by up there, followed by one that looked like an old Buick.

“I have known life in the West.” The major continued, his voice rising to a rant. “I have been a prisoner of your cities, a passenger in your buses and taxis. I was once a student at the London School of Economics, where I studied the ebb and flow of world currency as today I study the liver of virgins for the will of God. I slept with many of your women, I ate your bland food, your bangers and mash, your hamburgers, and I am here to tell you that the world you have built is a hollow one! Your hearts are hollow; your women are hollow, passionless creatures who no longer desire to bear children. You have fallen from the grace of your ancestors, who once built roads and schools and tamed the land and deciphered the languages of the earth. You honor nothing; you believe in nothing. Your God has turned his face from you.…”

The major went on in this vein for the next two hours. Half the time he hopped around on one foot, gesticulating wildly, his voice falling from a growl to a whisper and rising to a shriek and falling back again. Wilson fell asleep for a while. The woman at the stake revived from her stupor and began a shrieking that provided a gruesome counterpart to the major's words. At last he finished what he had to say, and with a shake of his ashtzisi, the gate opened, the enclosure filled with soldiers and naked Bupu women, and the dancing began.

The strange glow of Lake Tsuwanga faded with a shudder in the west, and a thousand dancers danced by torchlight to the headache rhythm of drum and kalimba gourd and the chanting of a thousand
voices. Wilson could no longer see the dancing after the first three hours. The dancer and the dance merged into one sweat-streaked nightmare of flesh and rattling beads. The thick air smelled like hell itself. The stars flickered up, red in the glow of the torches. A bottle of tejiyaa was passed around, and Wilson swallowed a mouthful and his toes went numb. He felt the power of it and fought to keep himself from being absorbed into their trance. The red moon hung like a question mark over Mount Mosumbawa.

Suddenly Cricket stripped off her shirt and got up and joined the dance, her breasts pale and obscenely animate in the red light of the moon. Wilson shrank back into the shadows. The night was a shroud that hid the shameful works of men. In the middle of everything Major Mpongu let out a meaty fart and threw back his head and laughed, a long, monotonous howl. Then, all at once—silence. The dancers stopped on the beat. Wilson heard the wind rise from the lake, the fast panting of the dancers. Torches flickered against the wall of bones.

A moment later, the skull gate swung open, and a miserable coffle of about a hundred Iwo men and women were led into the enclosure. The plastic flashlights around their necks had long since gone out. A low plaint of sighs and clicks rose in the gloom.

“Seems like such a goddamned waste of horseflesh.” Wilson heard the pirate's voice from somewhere. “But it's their culture. Who are we to tell them what to do?”

At this Wilson remembered the pirate's comment about Carthage, and he remembered the rest of the story from old books: how the Romans had been horrified when they came across the Fields of Tanith—acre upon acre of the bodies of children sacrificed by the Carthaginians to an evil god—how it was for this they destroyed that great city and sowed the ground with salt.

Then he heard Cricket's voice low in his ear, and she said, “Feel sorry for them if you want. But last week they sold their neighbors to the same fate.”

“What fate?” Wilson whispered, but in the next second the
major hopped up from his floral-print La-Z-Boy and raised the bone ashtzisi to the dark sky. The dancers scattered. A soldier with a machete stepped up to the stake and decapitated the woman with a single stroke. Blood sprayed in a wild arc from her neck; the head toppled, blinking and insensible, into the mud. The major let loose a guttural cry. This was the signal. The Iwos were dragged clicking and croaking like sick frogs to the stone table, and the slaughter began. A bloody mist filled the air. Wilson tried not to hear the high-pitched animal screaming, the crack of breaking joints, the slither of viscera—the sound of the butchers at work. From behind the floral-print easy chair, the major's adolescent attendants stared out at the scene in openmouthed ecstasy, their uncircumcised penises straining at the braided thongs.

Wilson shrank back into the blackness. No one saw him slip away, along the edge of the palisade and through the open skull gate. There were no guards at the slave cages. An iron lever released the weights that lifted the cage doors. Wilson took the bayonet from his belt and busied himself with the bonds of the prisoners. The captive Iwos blinked up at him like sleepy children, afraid, not understanding. He carried the first few out into the alley and pushed them along their way. He pointed to the jungle not fifty yards distant.

“Go,” he said, “get out of here. Go home,” talking as you would to a stray dog.

The Iwos still didn't understand. Gently as possible, Wilson took a plastic flashlight from around the neck of a small old man and clicked it on and swung the frail beam toward the green tangle of vegetation. “Go home,” he repeated. “Go and sin no more.”

Slowly the Iwos turned and walked into the darkness. It took Wilson about two hours to release all the prisoners. He counted five hundred; then he stopped counting. When it was over and all the cages were empty, he sat down in the dirt against the last cage, exhausted. The sky was still black, but the stars had faded and the red moon had set and dawn was not far.

A moth, its body covered with delicate pink and yellow fur,
fluttered down from somewhere. Wilson slid the Webley-Vickers from his holster. He loaded the chambers with bullets, cocked the hammer, and set it across his knees. Then, without knowing why, he took the Iwo flashlight and put it under his chin and clicked on the beam. Pale light touched his cheeks like a benediction.

The pink and yellow moth woke him up.

“They're coming,” the moth said in a voice like silver in water, and Wilson staggered to his feet as the bloodstained crowd pressed through the skull gate.

Dawnlight above the dark bulk of Mount Mosumbawa showed the color of bruised peaches. The vacant expanse of Lake Tsuwanga gleamed like a burnished spear. Wilson squinted out the sleep junk in his eyes and saw Major Mpongo in the lead, his arm around the pirate's shoulder. Cricket was followed close by Schlüber, who looked dazed and beaten; behind them came the crush of soldiers, exhausted from the night's exertions.

They were about twenty yards from the alley of the cages. This gave Wilson time to scoop the Webley-Vickers out of the dirt where it had fallen. He spun the chamber once and looked over his shoulder for advice, but the moth was gone, flown off to become a caterpillar—or was it vice versa? His head felt muzzy with sleep. The ancient pistol was dead weight in his hand, and he let his arm drop and held it against his leg. The cages stood open at his back like the tomb in the rock. Disbelief and anger spread through the crowd. The pirate's face went white, then red, and he began waving his hands and shouting at Major Mpongo, who alone remained calm.