The Pirate's Daughter (33 page)

Wilson seemed to be invisible. No one noticed him standing there in the middle of the alley, gun in hand. He grew impatient, tired of the waiting that was his life. He longed to have an end to the drama, to be delivered up to the fate that had stalked him all the years since his mother was flattened in Commerce Street by a black girder that fell from the sky. He pointed the Webley-Vickers to the sky and squeezed the trigger. The pistol bucked and smoked, and an incredible cracking sound rolled out across the lake. In the ensuing silence Wilson called out, “Hey! Lose something?”

For another second no one moved, then there was a general surge and he was surrounded and Cricket was at his side. Wilson looked
into her face; her eyes were dull, without light. Her breasts were covered with a faint layer of grime from the dancing; her legs splotched with dried blood.

“Enjoy yourself last night?” he said.

Cricket didn't seem to understand.

“How does it feel to dance on the bloody innards of a hundred small men and women?” Wilson said.

“Wilson, what's happening?” Cricket said in a raspy voice. “Where are the Iwos?”

“Excuse me, Mr. Lander,” it was Major Mpongo, polite as the butler. “But have you seen our slaves? Five hundred and twenty-five Iwos to be exact. They appear to be gone.” He smiled, and his smile was perverse because it was lit by madness.

“Yes. I let them go,” Wilson said. “All of them.”

“You don't mean that,” Cricket said, frightened suddenly. “You're kidding.”

“I'm not kidding, Cricket,” Wilson said. “This is moral lesson number two—slavery is wrong!”

The pirate gave an inarticulate shout and pulled the 9 mm Beretta out of his shorts. Wilson saw the man meant to kill him this time. Without thinking, he brought up the Webley-Vickers, and another loud explosion reverberated across the lake. The pirate fell back dead, a powder-burned hole the size of a golf ball in his forehead a half inch above his eye patch.

“Scheiss!”
Wilson heard Schlüber say, “the bastard's gone and killed the captain!”

The first rank of onlookers were spattered with gore. Cricket looked from the end of Wilson's smoking pistol to her father lying dead in the dirt. Red blood pooled at her feet. Her face crumbled from the chin up, and she fell to her knees and began to wail. In the next second, Wilson brought the pistol level with Major Mpongo's eyes and cocked the hammer. The African blinked and stared down at the barrel in mild alarm, as if there were a bee on the end of his nose.

“Nobody move,” Wilson said, “this thing's got a hair trigger,” though he had no idea what this meant. Major Mpongo's men froze in place. Wilson heard them breathing, not two steps away. He could feel his hand trembling, the pistol growing heavier.

“When stout Cortez entered the Valley of Mexico at the head of two hundred brave Spaniards,” Wilson said, talking fast, “do you know what he found?”

Major Mpongo stared, wide-eyed.

“Do you know what he found?” Wilson repeated, and tapped the end of the barrel against the African's forehead.

“No, I do not know, Mr. Lander,” he said.

“He found the idols of the Aztec gods drenched with the blood of thousands of human beings,” Wilson said. “He found the bodies of men, women, and children lying in great heaps, their hearts cut out with stone knives. He found the Aztec priests wearing the skin of people they had just killed as you or I might wear a three-piece suit. And do you know what Cortez did when he found these things?”

Major Mpongo said nothing. Wilson darted a look to his left. The Bupus were inching closer.

“He smashed their idols,” Wilson said in a tight voice. “And he put their priests to the sword.” Then he closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger.

The African screamed, high-pitched and womanish. There was an airy bang, like someone slamming a school desk, and a searing heat in Wilson's right hand, and he opened his eyes to see the pistol lying in the ground in the dirt, dark smoke and yellow flames curling from the chambers. His hand was burnt and bloody; a deep gash cut the lifeline in two, and the tip of his thumb hung from one bloody strand of skin.

Major Mpongu looked at Wilson's bloody hand, and he looked down at the gun smoking in the dirt and he began to laugh, a shrill, obnoxious cackle. In a second, he was echoed by his men, and the sound of laughter filled the still morning.

Wilson clenched his fist and jammed it into his pocket. Blood
seeped through the fabric of his shorts, began to run down his leg. He felt faint with the pain.

When Major Mpongo had finished laughing, he gave a friendly smile and leaned close. His breath was unspeakably foul.

“You try to kill me, you cannot kill me,” the African said in a reasonable tone. “Your gun explodes like a toy. My bloody God protects me. He knocks the sword from your hand. Do you know who my bloody God is, Mr. Lander? I am a Christian, you see. My bloody God is your bloody God! You may wish to kill me in the name of Divine Justice, but who makes justice in this world? Not us poor creatures, but God Himself. Perhaps He has a different end in store for me than the one you had planned. Perhaps you are not His instrument as you think. Perhaps it is I who do His will more perfectly.”

Then Major Mpongo stepped back, and his face twisted up into something not recognizably human. The raised scars on his stomach seemed to spell out a familiar phrase: Was it “Fear Ascendant”? Wilson looked down to where Cricket knelt in the dirt, bloody hands pressed against her father's forehead, and he felt bad for what he had done. Their eyes met. She mouthed the words “You're dead.”

“Beat him and throw him into the cages,” Major Mpongo said.

Wilson almost didn't feel the blows when they came.

A gentle clicking sound filtered through the blackness. The pain in Wilson's hand reached all the way up to his shoulder. His face felt on fire. The clicking sound grew more insistent. He opened one eye with some effort and saw the timber bars of the cage as a dark silhouette against the glare. Then he moved his head
in the direction of the clicking and made out a squirming, moist sluglike something, suspended half an inch away from his nose. He groaned and pushed himself back, but the little monster followed him and the clicking expanded into croaks and sighs.

“Please, sir, stay still.” A voice came from his right. “Your face is the size of a kalimba gourd. He puts the mswimbe to draw the blood away. Mswimbe is ugly, but a good little creature.”

Wilson felt hands holding him down, then a cold animal wetness on his cheek and a slight sting. After that they opened his fist, and there was a slithering sensation between his fingers—and he passed again into blackness.

A while later—Wilson couldn't say how long—he woke up feeling better. It was bright outside the cage. He sat up and looked around and found that he shared his prison with two other occupants: The closest, a wizened Iwo man, squatted a few feet away, staring at him with an expression of intense concentration. He was no more than three feet tall, small even by the standards of his people, and he wore three plastic flashlights around his neck on a strand of woven vine and a helmetlike headpiece of dried mud. A rough leather pouch hung from his waist. The other was a normal-size African, slumped in the far corner in a heap of khaki rags that had once been a military uniform. He had a long skinny-horsey face and a crooked nose and bloodshot yellow eyes that showed he had not eaten recently, and he smoked a foul-smelling cigarette in small, greedy puffs. When he saw that Wilson was awake, he made a vague gesture and leaned forward.

“Your face is much better,” he said. “And your hand, how does that feel?”

Wilson looked at his hand, wrapped in a bandage of fresh green leaves. He wiggled his fingers; the pain was a bare fraction of what it had been before.

“Not bad, I guess,” Wilson said. “Who did this?”

The soldier nodded at the Iwo.

Wilson waved his leafy hand in the little man's direction. “Thanks, mister,” he said.

The Iwo did not make a sound, continued to stare.

“I only have a few cigarettes left,” the soldier said to Wilson, “but after what you've been through, I am happy to share. Do you want one now or later?”

Wilson shook his head. “That's O.K. I'm not a big smoker. In fact I didn't smoke at all until recently.” Then he noticed the gold officer's insignia still attached to the man's tattered collar. “What are you doing in here?” Wilson said, and he waved his bandaged hand at the brightness beyond the cage. “You should be out there with them.”

The soldier pulled the collar away from his neck so Wilson could see it better. “This is the staff and crescent moon,” he said. “Not the staff and star. I am Colonel Jokannan Saba of the Anda Patriotic Front. These Bupu bastards ambushed my platoon on the far side of Lake Tsuwanga near Imbobo about two months ago. A few of the men got away, I think, but I did not.” He gave a sad shrug. “Everyone they could not sell, they killed in the blood ceremonies at Lungwalla. I'm the highest-ranking officer, so they brought me here for special treatment. They're going to boil me alive—privilege of rank, you know. But to tell the truth, I don't really care. I am sick of the war. Been sick of the war for years now. Got to end someplace for me. This place is as good as any.”

“I know the feeling,” Wilson said, and was about to say more when he was interrupted by a trill of clicks and croaks from the Iwo. The small man duck-waddled forward on his haunches and reached into his pouch and withdrew a handful of leaves. Five leeches, black and shiny, wiggled at the damp center.

“Oh, no!” Wilson said.

“The Iwo says it's time for your medicine again,” Colonel Saba said. “Got to put the mswimbe back on your face.”

“You can understand his clicking?” Wilson said.

Colonel Saba shrugged. “More or less. I was officer in charge of
the Hruke Forest District for three years. There I came into contact with many Iwos. Their language is not that difficult, really. Very primitive. You learn to use your tongue and the back of your throat in ways you never thought possible.”

“Tell him I've had enough of the leeches,” Wilson said. “Tell him to forget it.”

The colonel made a few hesitant croaks, and the Iwo trilled back.

“He says he is your physician. And your physician tells you to take the mswimbe right now,” the colonel said. “Otherwise your face may fall off. Infection sets in very quickly in this climate.”

Wilson lay back and submitted to the treatment. He shuddered as the slimy creatures slithered around his face and fought down images from his worst nightmares.

The colonel crawled over to take a look. “You should see the little blighters work,” he said. “Very amazing.”

“No, thanks,” Wilson said.

“Your face was a purple mess of bruises when they brought you in here. Now it's almost normal.”

“Great,” Wilson said. “I'll look nice when they boil me alive.”

“I'm afraid that is a fate reserved for officers,” the colonel said. “It is not so bad from what I hear. You pass out from the heat before it really starts to burn.”

“What are they going to do to me?” Wilson said, and the dread took hold of his guts.

“Best not to think about that,” the colonel said. He settled back into the corner and extracted another cigarette from the crumpled pack concealed in his rags. “This Iwo, he is a brave man,” he said as he lit up. “He's too old for the slave traders; he knows the Bupus will kill him. But about an hour or so after they brought you here, he walked out of the jungle, and he sat down in front of the cage and sang a song in his language until they came and threw him inside.”

“Why the hell did he do that?” Wilson said.

“I will tell you the name of the song he was singing, and you will understand,” the colonel said. “It's called ‘The Ghost Man from Far
Away Who Set Free the Forest People on the Night of the Red Stars'; that's a loose translation, of course. This song will be sung by their children and their great-grandchildren. The song is about you, my friend. You are an epic hero now, a great man, like Sequhue or Odysseus. This Iwo was chosen to come and take care of you here before the end. Perhaps if you are lucky, he has a drug in his pouch that will dull the pain of the torture.”

Wilson couldn't think what to say, then the leech slithered over his lips, and he held his breath. When it moved away again, he said, “Tell him thanks a lot for his help. But tell him I'm not the great man here. He is.”

Colonel Saba delivered this message in halting clicks.

The Iwo smiled suddenly, and it was as beautiful and strange as a smile on the face of a leopard in the heart of the jungle.

Wilson heard a sad music on the wind at dusk. He thought he made out the strains of “Amazing Grace” played to the calliope lilt of a Tinka band. Then, the sky went bloody beyond the cages and his fellow prisoners grew indistinct and there was the distant boom of cannon out on the lake.

“What do you think that is?” he said half to himself.

Colonel Saba blew the smoke of his last cigarette into ephemeral freedom through the roughhewn timber of the cage. “Nothing that will do us any good,” he said. “Prepare yourself for the inevitable, as I am prepared.”

Wilson remembered the air thick with blood in the bone palisade and felt despair creep into his heart.

“You're right, we've all got to die,” he said, but his voice
sounded thin and pitiful. “I guess sooner or later doesn't matter. Like the poet says—Accursed! What have I to do with days?”

“Not their way!” Colonel Saba said bitterly. “These Bupus are goddamned savages!” Then he caught himself and sighed. “Though I suppose we Andas are no better. You see, I was present at the soccer stadium in Bandali when we killed sixty thousand of them in one day. This was several years ago, at the beginning of the war. We advertised a free game between Bitumac and the Seme All-Stars—two very popular teams in those days—and we moved through the Bupu neighborhoods handing out free tickets. We had two dozen fifty-caliber machine guns hidden under canvas tarps around the top row of the stadium, and when it was packed with Bupus, we opened fire. There were a lot of families, kids—you know how kids like soccer. When we ran out of bullets, we moved in with sticks and machetes, and when it was done, we burned the bodies in a great stinking bonfire.” His voice sank to a guilty whisper. “After something like that, I suppose one shouldn't mind so much being boiled alive.”