“What can I expect inside?” I asked my host, trying to control the tremor in my voice, leaning one arm on his shoulder for support.
“I dare not tell you,” he said with a smirk. “Except to say, welcome to my world.”
As we passed native warriors on guard, I saw they were covered head to toe in cumbersome iron. How could they possibly fight freely in battle dressed so?
Once inside the wall, Byakatonda informed me that he had won the natives’ favor through keeping up a steady supply of buyers for the slaves they captured for him, although he liked to go out on the hunt himself from time to time.
Several winding paths branched out from the gates with square-shaped wooden dwellings lining either side. Yes, square!
Natives loitered in the guttering like slugs in their own slime.
All were emaciated and wore rags darkened with vile filth.
Some lay stiff on the ground, flies buzzing around the death gasp of open mouths.
Occasionally one of the cadavers stirred, which was rather a shock.
Supplicant hands begged as we passed.
Swaddled infants were held out by withered mothers who sat back on their haunches like chimpanzees.
The first little bundle I looked into contained something so gray and still that it was more stone than child.
I asked my host if mental illness was also rife in these parts.
He replied that they were called the poor.
I was most relieved when we came to a crowded square. But yet again I was at a loss for words when I witnessed a mad spectacle of many colors.
Females paraded around wearing garments whose torso frames crushed their ribs so tightly that breathing must have been impeded. The material on these garments tightened around the neck appearing to choke the wearer. Circuitous structures hung from their lower halves, which expanded their hips to ridiculous proportions, and shoe objects were so narrow and pointed as to deform their feet.
Quite how they managed to stay alive is beyond my comprehension.
The males strutted about in torso garments that were nothing like our stylish lion or tiger pelts, but were designed to make their shoulders appear twice their normal width. Upon their bottom halves were leg garments that came down to the knee, in some cases tied with ribbons! Objects upon their heads were so wide their faces fell into shadow.
That they should dress like this
and
go abroad in daylight?
“It is called ‘the fashion,’ ” my host chortled, slapping me on the back as if we had become great companions as well as mere compatriots. “For which they are prepared to suffer pain and even permanent disfigurement. Come! Let us go to the gallows where that crowd is amassing over there.”
At the far end of the square, hundreds of jeering natives were jostling for position. Byakatonda deftly wove his way to the front.
“Perfect timing. This lot are burglars. You may not approve the punishment, but we’ll all sleep a lot better without that bunch of ne’er-do-wells roaming the streets at night.”
Directly before us was a horse-drawn cart on which stood five blind-folded natives whose necks were attached to ropes hanging from a single beam.
A gong was sounded and the cart sped off, leaving the victims dangling by the neck, writhing and gurgling for an eternity, until they eventually went limp.
At which point the crowd settled down into a satisfied silence and began to disperse.
I had barely digested what had happened when, at the opposite end of the square, another crowd raised a loud cheer.
“I spared you that one. They put a fellow’s head on a block and chop it off.”
In the next breath Byakatonda told me that soon enough he would take me to his house for a hearty meal and thereafter we could begin the business at hand.
To be quite frank, Dear Reader, I had quite lost my appetite.
Yet no one could have prepared me for what I saw next.
I smelled a terrible burning.
Perhaps they are roasting one of their strange animals,
I wondered.
Byakatonda conducted me to the third corner of the square, and as we neared I saw that one of their females, of middle years with a skein of black hair, had been tied to a stake in the middle of a fire.
She was being burned alive.
Yes, alive.
Whoosh! Her hair went up in flames and although she screamed, no sound came out.
My body went into convulsions for a third time but my stomach was empty.
What can I say, Dear Reader, but the horror, the
horror
…
She was apparently a woman who is called a witch, that is, one accused of consorting with their chief demonic figure, called the Devil.
The fate of a witch is to be bound, weighted and thrown into the river. If she sinks she is innocent, although she is by now of course dead. If she floats she is considered guilty of witchcraft and they will set her alight.
Did anything in this hellhole make sense?
MURDER IN THE SQUARE was the settlement’s Saturday-afternoon entertainment. The next day they went to the temple to worship the god who told them not to carry out any of these unspeakable acts.
“You have to remember that they are not like us, Captain, not like us at all,” Byakatonda said, studying me intensely to gauge my reaction.
“I do not need reminding of that,” I countered, looking up at a sky drained of color, drained of life, drained of humanity, drained of sanity.
Would that I were gone from this abominable place.
I had seen and heard enough.
BYAKATONDA LIVED SOME DISTANCE from the market, and although the landscape was bleak I was relieved to be invigorated by a light breeze. As we made our way there, he continued to fill me in on more of the other customs and traditions of this foul society.
The previous Saturday, Byakatonda had seen a native strapped into a basket filled with wasps until he was stung to death; a couple of months earlier, one was put into a barrel spiked with nails and rolled downhill. The rack was popular for forcing confessions too—stretching a person until their bones popped out of the sockets.
Unable to hear any more, I decided to put an end to this litany of evils and asked what the hell this thing called a Saturday was. He explained that it was the natives’ system of ordering time into what they called days. Seven of these days constituted something called a week, and four of these weeks constituted a month, although the amount of days in a month varied from between twenty-eight and thirty-one. And three hundred and sixty-five of these days constituted a year. Except in the years when they didn’t.
I tried to see the reason in it.
I’m
still
trying.
I asked why he had chosen to spend his life among the heathen tribes, to which he replied, “Here I am someone—the big blak chief among the little whyte natives. In Great Ambossa I was a nobody. So why do you think?”
I admired his honesty, if not his sarcasm.
We passed barren fields draped in a sinister diaphanous mist. Evil-looking pagan idols had been stuck in the center of the fields. Wooden sticks attired like natives with hair made of straw.
As my head began to clear, Byakatonda’s conversation took a more humorous turn. I was told that the natives were awfully superstitious. This is what they do for good luck.
They must touch a piece of wood, cross two fingers over each other, hang a horse’s shoe on the front door, pass a black cat in the street, and repeat “white rabbit” three times as soon as they wake up on the first day of each month.
“Why not a pink pig?” I joked, beginning to feel myself again.
Conversely, it was considered unlucky to walk under a ladder, to break a mirror, wear the color green, spill salt or pass another person while walking upstairs, and the thirteenth day of their creation called a Friday is so unlucky some never get out of bed on that day for fear of what might happen to them.
By the time we arrived at his dwelling, my spirits had been lifted.
It was all quite hilarious.
My host revealed that when he eventually returned to GA to live a life of luxury, he planned to form the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Beliefs and Customs.
One began to warm to him, finally.
Dear Reader,
We have now arrived at that part of my story concerning the purchase of slaves.
Byakatonda’s domicile was, thank goodness, constructed in the Ambossan mode of architecture. It did not imprison like a square box but its walls curved into a circle. It was not built of flammable wood, but of solid, high-quality, low-maintenance mud.
Annoyingly, rather than our sitting cross-legged on the ground and eating with our fingers like normal people, I was directed to sit at a table and forced to struggle with steel implements more suited to farming or warfare than eating.
A “winter stew” was served, which contained the following: meat so tough and stringy its threads got trapped in my teeth, a cabbage-vegetable-thing that consisted of thin, green, watery membranes as tasteless as wet leaves, and floating on top of the stew were dumplings made of flour and water that rather resembled the corpses of bloated mice.
When I asked for chilli pepper to spice it all up, my gracious host retorted that his palette could no longer take it and if I wanted it I should have brought some off the ship with me.
Charming!
He was a loathsome, cantankerous fool after all.
I was offered a drink called tea, which looked like dirty water and tasted like boiled straw.
I do assure the Reader that somehow, however, I managed.
It transpired that my host lived with one official wife and knocked up as many unofficial ones as he could muster. The official wife, who went by the appellation of Janet (JAAA-NET), was, unsurprisingly, a native. Wisely, she was kept out of sight.
He boasted that he had spawned many half-breeds whom he occasionally caught sight of as they scampered around the lanes and fields of the settlement like little orangutans.
“Dinner” over, we ventured behind the house to a massive yard where the slaves (chained, slothful, thankfully docile) were corralled in a cattle pen. Apparently it was no longer safe to store them in cages on the beach due to the warmongering northern tribes who created such a nuisance.
Byakatonda complained that the all-powerful Association of Ambossan Slave Traders planned to build a fort on that very coast in the near future, which would probably scupper the nice little business of independent traders such as himself.
He introduced me to his trusted “boy,” Tom, a stumpy, wrinkled, white-haired Europane of some sixty seasons.
I immediately clasped my own hands firmly behind my back so that he could not grab one and shake it.
“God-days Capitin-sir. Wi gotte fyne bunsh wiggas fo yoo. Strang, helthie buks ind wenshez. Wi bin waytin longe tyme yoo aryve. Wi alle redy fo yoo. Me beete thim if git oute of hande sew yoo goh and chooz, sir. Jesh goh rite on in ind pik em oote.”
Yes, indeed I would.
I entered the pen and embarked upon the task at hand. I prodded for fast reflexes, squeezed muscles for strength, joints for pliancy, inspected private parts for venereal taints, teeth for good health, and carefully assessed the young females for the curvacious potential that could triple their price.
The chosen ones were led by Tomashara-whatsit to the empty pigs’ pen on the other side of the yard.
The procedure was going tolerably smoothly when all of a sudden one of the natives, just as I was bending him over to examine his anus, erupted in a fit of pique. He spun around and shook his fist in my face.
I had already noted that he was sinewy but solid, not in the first bloom of youth but not too old to do a good day’s work in the fields of West Japan either. Lurid red hair loitered past his shoulders.
Two of the guards immediately pinned his arms behind him while he frothed and fumed in Mumble-Jumble, which Byakatonda translated for me, so that I would know what I was dealing with.
I rather wished he hadn’t.
“You must help me, sir! You are my only hope. I am Jack Scagglethorpe, a hardworking, God-fearing, law-abiding citizen from the north. This lady here is my dear wife, Eliza, and these are my girls, Alice and Sharon. Those kidnapping devils came into our cottage while we were at dinner, and before I could get up and protect my family I was sent flying to the floor with a blow to my head that knocked me out. They’d already taken my Doris last spring, and on the way here they dragged my eldest Madge into the woods. We heard her screams. Oh Lord, we heard her screams.
“We are good folk, simple folk, poor folk. I beg you, get us out of here. We only want to go home and live in peace. Oh dear Lord, let us go free! Let us go free!” At which point Byakatonda sent the fist of his hand into the fellow’s cheek—whtch shut him up.
I told my host that it was obviously beyond this creature’s comprehension to understand that he was being removed from Abject Misery. Perhaps my host needed to educate the stock before sale?
He told me that it wasn’t his job to inculcate the stock with the benefits of Ambossan civilization, thank you kindly.
He then ordered the native to be gagged, dragged out of the pen and put in a very clever wooden contraption through which his head and arms were inserted.
There he would remain until he had learned his lesson.