Ned cranes his neck to watch them. And Martyn, stiff-backed as ever though girded in rags and pockmarked with insect bites, has emerged from his nest beneath the canopy to shield his eyes and gaze solemnly at the black suspended forms, at the rigid wings and clamped beaks. Even M’Keal, sodden with drink and still half-crazed from the loss of his ear, the heat, fever, monotony or whatever, is standing there motionless, gawking up at the sky like a rube at the big top. The shadows swoop over them, eclipse them. Ned is uneasy. Whatever it means, it can’t be good. He grits his teeth and spits into the river in disgust. Since they passed Yaour things have been looking up. There’s been no rough water, they’ve seen no one, and the river, as far as he can tell from his observation of sun, moon and stars, is taking them due south. It’s a pity something like this has to come along and spoil it. A real pity.
These last three weeks or so have been peaceful, pleasant, the steady wash of the river like the pulse of the womb, eternal, lulling, reassuring. He’s begun, in a perverse way, to wish it would go on forever. London. What’s London to him anyway? A place where he’s been hounded, abused, persecuted, condemned. He has no relatives, no friends, nothing but enemies — Ospreys, Mendozas, Bankses. Billy’s dead, Fanny’s a memory. What’s the use? Though the others talk of nothing else, Ned has begun to lose interest in going back — why kid himself? Medals, rewards: what a joke. It’ll be the same old story. Pain and sorrow, loss and deprivation. Would the high and mighty Mungo Park even give him a second glance on the streets of London?
Homeless, fatherless, with neither prospects nor hope, Ned has begun to see this bleak, stinking, oppressive continent in a new light, as a place of beginnings as well as endings. All he’s been through these past two years, all the heat and stink and disease, all the suffering and strangeness — it must have some purpose, some hidden meaning, some link to his life. He is thinking that maybe he won’t return to London when they reach the coast. He’ll stay on as a trader, or maybe he’ll rest up and then work his way back into the interior, explore on his own, search for whatever it is he’s been spared to find. .
Of course the whole thing is just wishful thinking, daydreaming, mystic and elusive. The important thing — the bottom line — is still survival. He hasn’t given up his post at the tiller, hasn’t stopped battling the explorer for control of his own destiny, though the battle is as masked and subtle as it’s been from the beginning, from the blistering day he and the blond hero first crossed paths over an open grave at Goree. No, he hasn’t given an inch, and yet the issue is almost dead at this point. Perhaps it’s the sun, the vestiges of fever, the lulling serenity of the past three weeks, but Ned has softened a bit toward his employer and fellow traveler. He is certain now that he will survive, that the worst is over, that there is nothing more this mad ass of an explorer can do to endanger him — and that certainty takes the defensive edge off his relationship with the man. Besides, Mungo trusts him so implicitly he’s begun to confide in him, just as Ned had dreamed back at Goree; for what it’s worth, he has become the right-hand man — superseding Martyn, Johnson, Amadi or any of them — as close to the great white hero as the puny brother-in-law had been.
They’ve talked, man to man. Still nights, mist on the water, forty-one men dead and the equatorial moon sitting on their shoulders like an immovable weight, they’ve talked. Mungo bared his heart, told him of his marriage, his children, of the pain of separation, of his ambitions. He talked as if he were talking to himself, for hours at a time, and then, apropos of nothing, he would turn to Ned and ask him how he’d lost his fingers or acquired the scar at his neck—”You know,” he’d say, “it almost looks like a rope burn.” Ned, his face frank and open, his gaze steady, would lie. “Butcher shop,” he’d say, “cutting out steaks.” Or, fingering the scar at his throat, “Oh, this. Nothing really. Got my head caught in an iron fence when I was a kid. No more than five or six. They had to fetch the blacksmith to loosen the bars.”
No, worming his way into the explorer’s confidence was barely a challenge. The man was easy, a self-centered fool. If Ned hadn’t got a grip on the reins long ago they’d all be dead by now. Still, he bears the man no malice. In fact, he’s all right in his own way — at least he’s committed himself to something. That’s more than Ned can say for himself. Mungo Park may be conceited, mad with ambition, selfish, blind, incompetent, fatuous — but at least he’s got a focus for his life, a reason for living. That’s the kernel of truth Ned has dug out of the motherlode of the past three weeks of drifting in the sun: there must be a reason, an organizing principle, to each man’s life. For M’Keal it’s booze, for Martyn weapons and bloodshed, for Park it’s risking his fool hide to open up the map and get his name inscribed in history books. And for himself, Ned Rise? Mere survival isn’t enough. A dog can survive, a flea. There must be something more.
But these birds. They cloud the picture, they complicate things. Suddenly a gunshot snaps out behind him, and he wheels round at the quick sharp surprise of it. It is Martyn, nearly on top of him, a musket smoking in one hand, the other clenched in a fist. Almost instantaneously a vulture slaps down on the deck. Stunned, bleeding, one wing askew, the bird scrambles to its feet and lifts its gleaming beak with a hiss. The lieutenant is grinning. He closes in, swinging the stock of his gun like an executioner’s axe, M’Keal cheering him on. The bird leaps once, twice, like a rooster dodging a cart, and then Martyn catches it across the back. Bones crack, the claws rake reflexively at the floor of the canoe, and Martyn hits it again. There is a moment of silence, the bird motionless, and then M’Keal plucks up the carcass, a splash of feathers, blood and excrement, and presses it to his chin. “Look at me,” he crows, “look at me. I’ve sprouted feathers!”
No one is looking. Something far more arresting than a swarm of carrion birds has suddenly caught their attention. A distant, moaning roar, the sound of white water beating at rock, the sound of waves and surf and the dead man’s tide. Rapids. Mungo glances down at the crude map Amadi had etched for him in the burnished wood of the hull, then looks up at Ned with a cold flat helpless expression, the expression of a fettered prisoner in the hands of his enemies. His voice is hushed, barely audible over the approaching roar — one word, a whisper: “Boussa.”
♦ ♦ ♦
It closes in on them, this din, it boxes them in, booming with a hollow deep-throated resonance, exploding with sudden startling claps and peals, until it seems as if they’re being swept into a battle at sea. Within minutes the river’s surface has begun to tilt forward, stretching its neck, tapering, while the high-walled banks are suddenly askew, out of plumb, rearing back at a crazy angle. Ahead the channel is seething and white, great strips of rock moving beneath the surface like bone under skin. And almost imperceptibly, a new sound has begun to emerge from the muddled roar, a sucking, rushing sound, as of some unfathomable volume of water — a lake, a sea — sucked down a drain.
There is no time to fight it. No question of easing into shore, no hope of backing out. The only recourse is to lash down the movables — guns, powderkegs, foodstuffs — and ride the chute. Meanwhile, the river gets rougher by the second, tearing at them from every direction, tossing the boat like a twig, hauling it back down as if it were petrified. Ned jerks the tiller right and left, impossible to see over the bow, the flimsy stick all but useless in his hands, while Mungo scrambles up and down the deck, lashing things across the gunwales, muttering to himself, shouting out unheeded commands. Martyn, the tough and unshakable twenty-year-old, the bloodspiller, looks frightened, and M’Keal — buffoon, drunkard, madman — has flung down the dead bird in favor of lashing himself to the nearest canopy strut. High above, safe, placid, patient, the vultures hover like a swarm of monstrous gnats, like harpies, keeping watch.