Ned grits his teeth — and hangs in there. The month wears on. They climb ridges, traverse plains, pass through a succession of identical shit-stinking villages. Strange birds fly up in their faces, carnivores rush out at the asses in a tawny blur, herds of huge lunging deer with striped flanks and twisted horns fly off at the sound of their voices. They eat honey badger and woodrat, bathe in puddles infested with leeches, bilharzia and guinea worm. The world stinks of humus and creeping mold.
In one miserable two-day period they ford three rain-whipped rivers: the Wonda, the Kinyaco and the Ba Lee. Each booms along like an angry god, prickling with uprooted trees and tangled nests of brush, hiding snags and snakes and crocodiles, the water brown as a turd, ribbed and rushing. At the first one — was it the first? — Jimmy M’Inelli, a decent sort who could handle a deck of cards better with one hand than most people could manipulate a knife and fork with two, was gobbled up by a crocodile as if he were a bit of cheese and cracker. Ned was standing right next to him at the time, waist-deep and not ten feet from the far bank, when the thing plowed into the poor fool like a log coming down a sluiceway, flipped open its jaws in an awesome mechanical way, and sank into the brown stew of the current. One second he was shouting to M’Inelli to take his hand, the next he was looking at a ripple in the water. Ned never hesitated. He was an acrobat, he was an eagle. As he shot through the air he let out a short sharp bark of surprise, and then found himself on the bank, dripping and shuddering, heaving for breath like a steam engine. His mind was racing. He saw Billy’s face, Shaddy Walters’, Jonas’, M’Inelli’s. Fear seized him like a pincer: somehow, by force or persuasion, he had to circumvent Park.
♦ ♦ ♦
One night, just outside a town called Bangassi, Ned is crouched beside the watchfire drying his shirt on a stick and tootling dreamily on Scott’s clarinet. (A note on the clarinet: the explorer thought a little music would be a good idea, sweet melodies to soothe the local negroes and beckon to the coffle’s stragglers, guiding them in like lost sheep. When he found that Scott was too sick to stand, let alone tongue a reed or sustain a half note he asked for volunteers. The men groaned. Ned, always on the lookout for a chance to ingratiate himself, stepped forward.) The night is dank, a light drizzle feathering down like the breath of fallen angels. Jemmie Bird, assigned to the second watch, is sleeping soundly at Ned’s feet; the others are whimpering and snoring in their sodden tents.
It is preternaturally still. So still Ned fancies he can hear the individual droplets as they coast down through the haze. He has just finished a moving rendition of his old standby, Greensleeves—the last sad crystalline note still hanging in the air — when he is startled by a low insistent rasping, repeated at intervals, and coming from the direction of the tents. He turns his head, eyes straining: is someone calling him?
The firelight is unsteady, rising and falling like the slow chop of waves against a pier, but yes, there is someone back there, on the far side of the command tent. He rises to his feet and starts forward, silent and inquisitive. But wait. It could be Smirke, that son of a bitch, out to waylay him again. He brings his feet together and leans forward, searching the shadows. “Hello?” he calls, half-expecting one of the boys to spring out at him with a laugh. . but then the boys are a bit too sapped to be playing games — they’ve got to save their energy for dying. He’s about to call out again when in a sudden flash of apprehension he sees it — that face — the same one that had stared out at him from the briars a fortnight ago. But now there are two, no, three of them. And that sound again, a sort of hsssst: are they calling him?
“Jemmie,” he whispers, kicking out at his sleeping companion.
“Ma!” Jemmie bellows suddenly, “Mama!”
When Ned glances up again the faces have vanished, and Jemmie Bird is rubbing his eyes, muttering “damnedest dream,” over and over. “Thought I was back ‘ome in Wapping, suckin’ at me mum’s tittie — frightenin’ is wot it was.” There is a moment of reflective silence, the flames snapping at the air, and then Bird laughs out loud—”Ha!”—as if he’d just played a joke on himself, his head already dipping back toward his chest, the first of a mounting series of snores catching in his throat.
Jittery, Ned lays down the instrument and picks up his musket. He’s about to step into the shadows and confront his demons when suddenly someone lays a hand on his shoulder and he whirls round in a panic to find himself staring into the astonished face of Serenummo, one of the nigger guide’s servants. But where’d he come from?
E ning somo, marhaba, the slave says.
Ned returns the greeting. He and Serenummo have become chums of a sort, sharing an occasional pipe and chatting in Mandingo, Ned to improve his command of the language, Serenummo to probe the cat-eyed white man about the wonders of Enga-lond and the great salt sea. But now, before the slave can settle himself beside the fire, Ned takes him by the elbow. “Did you see anything out there a minute ago?”
Serenummo is tall and rigidly muscled, the veins standing out in his arms like lianas choking a tree. His face is keen and inquisitive, and when he talks, he talks in spate, tugging at his right ear for emphasis. Like most Mandingos he has only a vague idea of how old he is, but Ned guesses he must be about thirty-five. “See anything?” Serenummo echoes.
“Faces. I’m not even sure if I saw them myself.”
The black man eases down beside the fire and draws a calabash from the folds of his toga. He waves the stoppered neck vaguely, offering a drink.
“Wildmen,” Ned says, ignoring the calabash. “Naked and painted, with filed teeth. I think they’ve been following us.”
“Ah,” says Serenummo, “you mean the Maniana.”
“Maniana?”
The black man nods. “Nothing to fear,” he says, “they’re just hoping to conduct a little business with you.”
Ned is stung to the bone with doubt and apprehension. Business? What kind of business could he possibly have with these kinky monsters? Garroting and transfixion? Rape, torture and dismemberment? Like a street cat he’s always managed to land on his feet — whether as fisherman, entrepreneur, resurrected Christ, grave robber or convict — but this African nonsense has him stumped. The filth and savagery of it — sometimes he wishes he were back in London dodging Osprey, Banks and the hangman. At least they’re not going to slit you open and fill you with sand. Before he realizes it, he’s shouting: “Well why don’t they come out and show themselves then? Why hide in the bushes like a bunch of painted devils?”
“Not their style. You see,” Serenummo says, pausing to tip back the calabash and search Ned’s face, “not many tribes will trade with them, so naturally they’re a little shy. What they want is, well — they like to consume their fellow man: heart, kidney, brain. We call them Maniana.”
“Cannibals,” Ned whispers, breaking into English.
Serenummo is lecturing now, tugging at his ear, eyes bright: he hardly notices the interruption. “They live far off to the east along the Joliba. When they fight a war, they gather up the dead and wounded and consume them. In times of peace their king sends out parties to ambush solitary travelers along the road, or failing that, to purchase a slave or two for the pot.”
Ned has crouched down beside the black man, as rapt and horrified as a child drinking in tales of witches and hobgoblins. He can’t help thinking about the men left beside the road, about the stragglers out there now. In the night.