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SOLOMON KANDIE : THE WITCH
Solomon Kandie was lean and tall and as pale as her beloved
ash trees of Devonshire of so long ago. So far away.
She moved with an efficient grace that was sparse of any
exaggeration or studied form in both body and mind.
A Puritan, she fled certain death for slaying a Master of
Swords and his Honor Guard who had taken a like for treating
all the women in a small Irish village as their personal
whores.
He had been shirt tail royalty from Spain sent across the
Channel to cool his hot head. She left it cold indeed on the
end of a pike. Though she mused it might be hot once again
rolling about the floors in the cinders of Hell.
Now outlawed from England and with a hundred Castile blades
ever at her back the young teen girl found herself upon the
distant shores of Africa. A land that could swallow anything
whole and spit out nary a shard of bone or a scrap of cloth.
Entire regiments had disappeared into this omnivorous belly
of shadows. One was as likely to kick up a carved stone
fragment of an entire civilization devoured by the jungle and
time as one might a poisonous snake with the toe of a boot.
Solomon Kandie left the sounds of creaking rigging and
snapping sails and plowed past the steady buzz of insects and
men and did not linger on the shore settlement but pushed
along the rough hewn road that lead inland to the nearest
friendly river tribe.
She had fled Venice less than a week a head of her pursuers.
And once upon the open sea one could never tell who's ship
would reach land first. Her's had but no less than three
sails dotted the horizon. The land was rich in ivory and gold
and slaves and ships raced fore and aft.
But sooner than latter a hundred blades would be once again
pressing their attack and no mater what her skill she could
not face such a number and live. She quickly loaded up on
supplies and pressed inland following the winding wagon
tracks.
The track never ventured far from the river bank and as such
she enjoyed a constant rain of mosquitos and biting sand
flies.
The humming of insects and the beating of the sun set a tight
white iron band around her forehead but she strode on with
her large bounding stride; making no attempt of camp even as
the sun dimmed, fluttered, and then died as sudden as a
sputtering spent candle.
By lantern light she progressed and reached the first river
village by mid-night.
Her arrival on foot and alone and in the dark made quiet an
impression. The whole village stirred and a procession led
her to the head man where she paid her tribute and was
eventually well received. For a pound of salt and a good all
steel hatchet, knife, and wet stone; she was fed a small meal
of goat and cheese and dried smoked fish and through the
local interpreter given the rites of welcome.
The interpreter was a middle aged missionary who did not like
her for more reasons than he could even muster into speech.
But at least she was devout and worshiped the correct God; if
not quiet in the right way.
But she was a young woman; alone, dressed in man's garb, and
wielding a rapier and dirk and two flint lock heavy butted
pistols. Even the natives found her odd but after her paying
tribute and the rites of welcome made they took it all in
stride and the oddness was replaced by that unruffled
acceptance that all nature has hidden in every unbroken
shell.
The sour faced priest became far more cordial and lose
tongued once he set into drinking. Solomon Kandie of course
as a Puritan never drank a drop of alcohol; but after months
in exile and clandestine pursuit she had learned its merits
in negotiations and trade. She had bought several leather
bound glass flasks of the stuff before heading inland. One
was now given to the priest who thanked her heartily.
He had looked green and sweaty and ill even by fire light and
his breath had the stench of the local honey mead and sour
mash. At least the whisky on his breath smelled more
medicinal and it seemed to produce some inner glow back into
his sallow flesh.
Soon the other natives had returned to their mud and reed
huts and alone with the priest at the smoky hastily lit camp
fire the priest unburdened his soul.
It was rambling at first. Chatter about good and evil and the
complexities of the entwining of the two. But as the moon
rose round and full and bathed the muddy shore with a pale
almost brilliant light he seemed to find himself again and
the monologue became precise and clear and then stopped.
He rose and disappeared into one of the mud huts and Solomon
Kandie was left alone in puzzlement and a slight touch of
fear.
The priest did not emerge with the sun and after making her
daybreak pantomime partings with the tribe she headed down
the makeshift road to the next village.
She traveled about what she guessed to be half the distance
when she stopped and shed an extra shirt from her pack taking
her dirk to it and slicing it to ribbons and then casting it
on the edge of the trail. She then doubled back a hundred
yards and entered the jungle parting from the path on the
side away from the river shore.
She doubted such a simple and rather obvious trick would trip
up her pursuers but it might buy her a few hours of precious
time.
She had a few goals in breaking from the path and heading
further inland into the raw jungle its self. The first was
that the road only lead to six villages along the river
before it petered out. There were cataracts at the fifth
village and muddy flats and sandbars from the fifth to the
second. River travel being thus difficult until after one
passed the sixth village. But after that the river wound and
pierced into the jungle far better than any road could.
The six villages were relatively close together. One could
use the road by wagon and reach from the coast to the sixth
in less than three days time.
She might be overtaken if she continued upon the wagon track.
So she had to part ways with it sooner than latter. Let the
horde of men who tracked her race on to the second village
and then back track to her clue. Let them push into the brush
hundreds of yards from her actual trail. Let them search let
them wander let them die by God's grace and design.
Let them die by God's serpents rather than her steel.
Her other reason to leave the wagon track now instead of at
the sixth village as she had hopped was the priests
meandering story and the hints it had made in the night
shallows just before dawn.
He had spoke of another group of missionaries. Heading into
the jungle to bring God to tribes who dwelt deeper in the
reaches. He had spoke of improper things. He had spoke of
ancient sorceries. He had spoke of cannibals.
Solomon Kandie was a tall strapping lass. Standing over six
feet in height in her thigh high heeled Corinthian leather
boots. She towered over most men and women.
Her build was slender and slim but to this hand of God had
added a disproportional bust where each full round firm
breast was large than her head and a full round almost
jutting backside. The pair of added cantilevered weight
tended to make her back bend; pulling her shoulders back and
buttocks high so her overall aspect was 'S' shaped in her
spine's silhouette.
She wore a wide brim Puritan hat. With her long silver white
hair pulled back into a simple sliver barrette. Her face was
beautiful. With large flashing gray eyes. Small thin straight
nose. Thick full naturally red lips. High round cheek bones.
Her neck was slender and long and despite the fact that she
wore a heavy full coat and jacket and white blouse the sure
size of her massive breasts ensured a décolletage that
modesty and purity could only shrug and accept.
She wore a harness for her rapier and dirk and shoved her two
braces of pistols into the harness without holsters.
She wore tight pants that her thigh high leather boots
swallowed up.
Across her back she wore a backpack of constantly shriveling
supplies.
She wore no undergarments. And her travels had already worn
away considerably at her skin tight pants and blouse to such
an extent that she was as much naked as clothed.
To all this must be added the very pale nature of her skin.
For she had skin the color not unlike a corpse. As if all
drained of blood and not even the African sun could tan it to
any other hue than this pale white with a tinge of ashen gray
which it constantly remained.
The missionaries she was looking for had been in the region
for over two years now. They had traveled and returned and
traveled some more and had returned yet again to the various
villages along the river and the small port town of white men
on the coast.
And in their wake they left strange tales of stranger sights
and stranger actions and deeds.
They had ventured back out into the cannibal tribe lands
leaving the coastal town just a few days before Solomon
Kandie had arrived.
The priest had given her a general direction and some
landmarks of hearsay. The group consisted of a woman and
seven very heavily armed men.
If she could just pick up their trail at one of the nearer
landmarks then she was certain she could catch up with them.
She doubted that even a hundred blades could follow her into
cannibal lands!
As the slender and fearless teen girl bucked brush and slid
rapidly with agile grace through the jungle tangle she
pondered upon the priests words in his moment of clarity.
He had been talking about horror and redemption. About black
souls and damnation before he had suddenly frowned and then
with absolute normalcy had spoke briefly about the
missionaries and the questionable aspect of their methods and
goals.
Solomon Kandie had of course assumed the priest was referring
to the cannibal tribes and the work of the missionaries to
convert them to God. That such wretches who readily fed upon
human flesh could be somehow saved in face that they would no
doubt go on eating human flesh! As it was so ingrained into
their beliefs. A quandary indeed. Can one be saved if one
continues in such horrors? To save one or two who might set
aside such practices but who must go on living and marrying
and working along side the rest of their community who do
carry on such practices; is that enough to be saved? My wife
and children commit humane sacrifice and eat of human flesh
but I do not. Am I saved?
But then she found the first fetish marker. The boundary
marker of the first cannibal tribe. Piles of skulls and
stones and a freshly butchered man who's body had been so
mutilated and rearranged as to look more like some
fantastical creature than any man. In fact, it looked like
there were several men and women used in the abstract horror.
But it was here pausing to study this monstrosity that
Solomon Kandie had a first doubt of her understanding of the
priest and her first brief shudder of the consequences if she
had indeed misunderstood him. For the rib cages of at least
two of the slaughtered men showed they had died by lead balls
and not stone knives.
This gave the young girl momentary pause before she took up
the search for fresh tracks. She pondered further as she
searched. The animal path was a mix of fresh spores of beasts
of all kinds. She would have to press on to the next landmark
and hope for better luck there.
She followed the track one hand pushing back the lower brush
limbs the other firmly upon one of the heavy butts of her
pistol.
The missionaries could have shot the tribesmen as they
attacked them.
Then the remaining tribesmen had used the dead for their
boundary marker. It could be as simple as that. Those bodies
seemed very fresh though. Red meat still upon the bone in
places. In a land with more scavengers than predators or prey
that surly meant that they had been shot upon the
missionaries latest entry into these lands?
But they had been here several times before? Why would they
still be under attack? But they must have been? They must
have been attacked and defended themselves and then the tribe
had made use of the dead to freshen up their boundary
markers.
It was a logical premise. She did not however believe it.
There was something odd in the air. The hairs on the back of
her neck stood up and she felt the eyes of a million life
forms peering at her with cold indifferent malice.
She was food the minute she bled.
In nature there is no top or bottom to the food chain. There
is no chain. There is only food.
The young girl was having all sorts of small epiphanies about
a world suddenly vast and small all at once. And none of them
were bringing her the slightest comfort.
The trail reached the next landmark. A massive tree so great
in its girth that twenty men locked hand in hand could not
ring its base with out ten more being added. The lowest limb
was forty feet off the ground but above that only a few dozen
massive limbs held court. For the tree looked more dead than
alive.
A small meadow of grass land lay around its Kraken knots of
roots. The grass was long tall and brown and filled with fox
tail and wild wheat. The trail here split into four well worn
animal tracks. Leading no doubt to water as all such tracks
do and usually man as well.
The entire expanse of the jungle fell away to the South East
according to her compass dangling at her hip. The tree thus
sat upon a rise and from it one could see the forest in that
direction bleed away into more and more grasslands golden and
brown with dots of bare rock and hills and clumps of trees.
A lone wisp of smoke pillared upon the still air in that
direction. It was also the only direction that booted heels
had recently traversed.
Solomon Kandie cinched her harness belt tighter and with a
grim sense of dread headed rapidly in the direction of the
smoke.
She needed to reach it before dark fell for as soon as the
trail heading in that direction left the shadow of the tree
it debouched and vanished.
The grass lands were not any less dangerous than the jungle
had been. Here predators slunk in the grass that varied in
height from waist high to suddenly shoulder high in clumps
and patches. They hunted by sight, sound, and smell. And they
always were aware of you before you were aware of them.
They hunted the vast herds of herbivores who moved as swaying
amebas across the patches of shadow thrown down by clouds the
size of cities.
Most of the predators that hunted them hunted in packs as
well. And most of them could climb trees and any rock that
she could climb.
She moved rapidly toward the lone tender wisp of smoke. She
had no doubt it would be the campsite of the eight white
people she had been tracking.
No one else would be stupid enough to make camp while there
was still daylight upon a grass plain full of herds that
could stamped and predators who could simply drop by for
supper.
She moved rapidly and thus clumsily with little thought to
stealth as there was only a couple hours of daylight left and
the pillar of smoke was further away then it looked. Still
she kept her approach angling back and forth to keep a clump
of trees or a rocky outcropping within sprinting distance as
best she could. Not that there was anything she could think
of that could not out sprint a young girl in the African
wilds.
Night fell and gasping with exhaustion the teen girl was
relived to see that she had made it close enough that she
could make out the red pinpoint of the camp fire through the
cloudy dark.
She lessened her pace out of caution and tiredness and out of
the fact that often the pitch and rise and roll of the land
placed the shimmering coal of her destination out of her
immediate eyesight.
The sudden cough of a lion impossibly close froze her limbs
for several long seconds before she could recover their use
and she moved faster than she liked through the inky uneven
grass land afterwards. She had been shocked and surprised
that her body had frozen up refusing her minds racing
command; she who had faced death so many times before and
this made her uneasy and tinged with uncertainty that was new
to her and far from welcome.
She reached the camp without incident though and breathing
hard and with leaden limbs and nerves burning with the tint
of anxiety she made bold her approach in hopes of not being
shot before being acknowledged.
She called out and hailed and crashed through the remaining
yards of darkness to the ring of light. But before she
crossed it she stopped, hunched down, and made a silent
transition of her location circling the ring of light.
It was not a campsite. It was a pyre of charred bodies. Still
a glow in ash and cinder of what must have been dozens of
dead men, women, and yes even children.
A few crows and vultures exploded into the dark as she slowly
inched around the pyres lighted edge. But the active flames
had kept much of the carrion birds at bay and the carnivores
as well. But the fire was dying down now and soon they would
encroach and feed.
She had been traveling in the dark without lantern or torch
as she had not thought it possible to see the camp light
within a ring of light of her own.
Now she set about making up a makeshift torch from the
materials at hand as a torch was a better deterrent than a
lantern and it would save her precious oil reserves.
With torch in hand she scoured around. There was no need
checking the bodies for musket balls or sword wounds. A trail
any halfwit could follow lead away from the funeral pyre made
of booted feet.
Unless the natives had recently been shod with leather and in
the English square toe style; the eight whites had at least
burned these bodies and then passed this way.
Perhaps they had not killed them? Perhaps they had come
across the dead and burned them out of a sense of decency?
Why twenty to thirty dead natives would be found in the
middle of a savannah grassland was an utter mystery to her
but she was still new to this continent. Perhaps things like
this were even common here?
She looked at one of the skulls that had rolled away from the
pile. It still housed its pointed filed teeth. Cannibals
then. Maybe they had been attacked again? But children? The
teen girl shook her head in perplexity and set off after the
whites following their trail which even the dark could not
hide from her. They had not even walked single file but had
trampled down the grass in a large group almost shoulder to
shoulder?!
It was well into the early morning hours when the air
suddenly takes on that dank chill and dew forms on all the
slumping shadows that she found their campsite.
It was deserted. Sitting on the edge of the grasslands near
an animal trail leading into Jungle again. A brook flowed
nearby. They had buried their coals and burned their trash
and buried that too. They had even buried their bodily waste.
So much caution and care to make their camp site disappear to
the casual eye and yet they had left a funeral pyre burning
in the heart of the grasslands. If the winds had picked up
they could have set a blaze thousands of acres of grasslands
and scrub?!
Their actions were so bizarre to her and left her in confused
perplexity. The contradictory actions and strange proceedings
of course could be explained away easily once she caught up
with them. She was certain they were not far ahead of her
now. But her body had hit its limits of endurance and too
tired to follow a foot further she forced herself up a tree
into the higher boughs and fastening herself there with her
own harness she was soon fast a sleep.
She slept far into the afternoon and woke sore and stiff and
hungry.
It was easy enough to backtrack out into the plains and shoot
a small herd animal for a meal but she was in a hurry and
decided to ease her hunger on some of her precious dried
salted goods out of her pack. She ate jerky and hard tack
soaked in brook water before setting off again after the
elusive party of white missionaries.
However she did not overtake them before nightfall. The
jungle causing her to lose and have to search again and again
for their trail. As sloppy as they had been and as careless
upon the grasslands they were now obviously making new
efforts to hide their track in the jungle.
With nightfall the young teen once again climbed a tree that
looked as it would scarcely bare her weight let a lone
another's and fastened herself again for sleep a hundred feet
off the jungle floor.
She did not sleep as deeply or as well this night. A worry of
snakes and a few pestering ants kept waking her so she was
not in good humour when the sun finally rose.
She was descending down into the more sturdy branches of the
lower part of the tree when she heard the voices. Spanish!
They had found her!
She pressed against the trunk of the tree and pulled a limb
full of leaves before her and held them there as she watched
first two men and then three and then a dozen enter the area
directly below her hiding place. They had not seen her, yet.
But they had obviously had no problem following her trail to
her very root step!
They were looking about the ground and conversing. Some where
yawning and stretching. After a few more minutes of this they
retreated back a few dozen yards to where a small clearing
sat and here they were joined by dozens more men all wearing
foils and daggers and pistols and some carrying muskets and
some in chest plates of steel with steel gorgets protecting
their throats.
Here they were eventually joined by native porters and a
campsite was set up. It became obvious that a second campsite
was being set up somewhere slightly ahead of her from the
sounds of it. All one hundred blades must have been present
and loosely scattered around the jungle where space would
allow!
She quickly slipped down out of the tree and took her
discrete leave.
She abandoned all attempts to follow the missionaries now as
her idea to join up with them and hide in their number now
seemed pointless. Instead, the scattered location of her
pursuers as they set up their camps for the night dictated
her movements or lack there of.
She slunk and slipped as silent as a jungle cat between wood
cutting parities and native bearers with pails gathering
water from the small brook and a few whites shooting birds
and small game to add to the pot.
As fate would have it this circumvention brought her suddenly
upon the obscured remains of the missionary camp. Again
giving a brief study of it and picking up their trail Solomon
Kandie made yet another strange discovery. The group of eight
whites seemed to be camping during the daylight and moving at
night?! They had only been a few hundred yards from her in
her tree when she had slept but they had been packing up and
leaving while she had been tying herself into her aboral
cradle.
She was thus a full day/night behind them?!
The young teen now had a choice to make. She could slip into
the jungle and try not to leave any track; it would be
agonizingly slow going with a mob that would spread out and
no doubt find one footprint one broken leaf and be soon upon
her in their fast rush to her show crawl escape.
Or she could quickly follow the path of the missionaries. Her
boot prints would blend in with theirs well enough. She had
no doubt that the Spanish would follow any track they saw and
had perhaps even been following the missionaries all this
while assuming she had already joined them?
She was leaning toward making her own lone escape when the
sudden bray of a mastiff shook her to a stand still. They had
brought hounds! No wonder they were pursing her so easily.
True, the jungle must be full of strange scents for the
animals but once they had her scent there was little for it!
The teen girl made a rapid progress along the missionaries
track. Just a shift of the wind and the hounds would scent
her and all surreptitious courses would be lost!
She held her breath and made as fast a motion as her hunched
over knees slapping her tits crouching jog would allow
through the jungle growth.
They wouldn't need dogs to follow the path she was leaving
now. She only hoped she could make enough distance between
her and her pursers to slow down and perform some tricks to
lose them again.
They would be resting for a few hours of daylight it
appeared. They must have been pushing through the night in
the grass lands as she had done and had continued pushing
into the jungle in hopes of over taking her and now needed to
recover their strength before setting off again. She needed
to use those few hours to her best advantage and the first
thing she needed was some distance between her and them.
Her so clever ploy to leave the tattered remains of her
garment and lead the hundred swords upon a false trail had
utterly backfired. They had brought hounds! Blood hounds and
she had left something for them to scent!
Foolish! Foolish girl! She berated herself and with some
surprise broke suddenly from the jungle into grassland again.
The grassland was not a huge plain this time but stopped
abruptly after a few hundred yards at the rocky shore of a
crater lake.
She ran to the lake. Judging its size to be a bowl shaped few
miles easily and seeing a break in its far end and the white
head water of a waterfall she raced to its edge taking in as
much as she could.
Worse case scenario, dogs and blades could not reach her if
she plunged into deep water. Musket balls on the other hand?
Still it was the only 'tree' she could scamper out of a
hundred sword pursuit if she could not make the end of the
valley break and its falls at the far end.
The whole of the lake was indeed like a large crater. The
jungle rimmed the top and it sloped down in grassland before
breaking into sharp rough rock and then the placid lake it's
self.
She sprinted as fast as her young legs and lungs could carry
her toward the far edge of the broken rim and obliquely down
toward the lake it's self.
She was breathless and her clothes were melded to her body by
heavy sweat when she rounded a large jutting outcropping and
saw out of the corner of her eye the missionaries.
They were standing serenely and chatting with a small knot of
natives. Since all the natives in the area were various
cannibal tribes these half naked black men must have been of
one of those tribes or else guides from one of the river
tribes. She hoped they were guides. For being seen she drew
up short and came to a stop lest the natives instinctively
fell into a pursuit.
It may sound funny to stop instead of continuing to run but
in her wide ranging travels she had seen a number of innocent
men panic and run and for no other reason or crime than to
flee drew other men in chase after them and it always ended
in either their receiving a beating in the least or death.
The young beautiful teen stopped therefore not because she
thought these were savages who would like predatory animals
instinctively chase her down for no other reason than she was
running past them, but she stopped because they were men and
that is what men do; especially if you are a beautiful young
girl.
Several of the missionaries were armed with muskets and at
least one of the natives as well. She had yet to meet anyone
who could out race a musket ball and live to tell the tale.
She stopped and as it was a somewhat steep slope to the lake
she found herself placing her hands on her knees and clasping
her still quaking thighs and panting open mouth and wide eyed
at the group of men.
The woman missionary parted the men and came toward her a few
of the male missionary men coming a short distance behind her
while the rest continued their interrupted muted
conversation.
The woman was obviously in full command. The nameless priest
at the first village had inclined it so.
But she would have known even by this first glance. She
walked wide eyed and smiling and with absolute power and with
nothing, nothing, of God or salvation in that beautiful face,
that heaving bosom, that switching of her full hips.
She wore the garment of a hooded priests robe. Belted not by
simple rope but a gold chain that cinched her hour glass
narrow waist and fell almost to her knees before her bouncing
stride.
She moved with sexual grace but not with somnolence. She
moved with youthful agility but not pious accord. Her motions
were languid and haughty. The movements of the spider or the
snake but never the fly or the rabbit.
She was a devourer of souls and not a savior of them. She may
have savored a few but she had never saved them and she could
be all this so openly because she had that intense ethereal
beauty that could ensnare any man's heart and a wicked
sensual allure that promised she would know exactly what to
do with that heart more so than any other woman alive.
She was fit to be Queen of this primitive world. And Solomon
Kandie had to give a sharp horse laugh as she drew close
under the jutting crag's shadow and shake her tired head at
the thought that any man was ever fool enough to think he
could throw a net over a woman and call her his!
This approaching enchantment may have been exemplar in all
things unequally 'woman' but all women possessed to a much
lesser degree all these self same things!
To see them so engrossed so emblazoned so raw under the huge
sky of Africa was to be made suddenly aware at how dangerous
a well any man comes to drink from of the lips of any woman
anywhere.
Even in her own Puritan heart Solomon heard the whispers of
feminine mystery and shuddered with joy and fear.
She could have been the Queen of any civilized nation so why
here? Why hidden away in the endless expanse of nowhere? But
then no. As the woman stopped before her with her flashing
deep blue eyes that could swallow an army of men. Solomon
realized that no court could hold her desires, no country was
big enough, she was the mother of endless wars of conquest,
and some men would see that and kill her before any crown
could touch her brow.
She was not hiding out here in the empty wilds. She had fled
Europe and the thrones she could not have and came to Africa.
Not to be its Queen but to be its Goddess.
If Solomon Kandie had the strength she would have raised her
sword arm and plunged her Spanish steel hilt deep into things
bosom before it could speak. But she did not. She could only
half stand half stoop there gasping.
The woman spoke. Her voice was as bewitching as her eyes. She
asked no questions. She only told Solomon Kandie how lucky
she was that she had found her as this was fierce country to
any and all. Then she told her that she would accompany her
and her fellows to the local village which was on the shore
of the lake and they would have more time to talk there.
The village could not be seen from where Kandie had entered
the grass plains or even from the point of the abutment of
rock. For the oval shape of the lake was an illusion created
by the grasslands slope. In fact, it widened out into a
jutting finger of a second lake almost half the size of the
first but which could only be seen upon rounding the top of
the large grass hill that hid it and created the illusion of
it being a continuous unbroken slope around the lake entire.
The village once seen was black and foul upon the edge of
such a beautiful lake and yellow grasslands. As one drew
closer and closer to it one was sickened by the inescapable
aura of evil.
The fact that much of its simple construction was augmented
with skulls of man and animals as well as the rest of their
skeletons did nothing to diminish this ill heavy invisible
dour of moribund animosity.
The whole village was grass huts set up off the ground on
raised wooden platforms and all was covered in a black grease
not unlike pitch or tar.
The woman simply smiled and dismissed the necropolis black
hue as being responsible for keeping away the fever carrying
mosquitos and bitting flies of the lake.
But Solomon, who had been swallowed up by the entourage of
the woman so that she was marched inside a column on either
side that stretched behind her as well as in front of her,
had serious doubts about this explanation for the mosquitos
were thick in the village and they seemed not to mind landing
upon the blackened buildings in the slightest.
Perhaps the presence of so many half butchered men and women
mixed in with piles of rotting bones of man and animal was
defeating the purpose of the black pitch paint jobs? For the
flies were even thicker than the mosquitoes. And almost as
thick of both were the large heavy black birds that did not
tremble or move as one walked past them but gazed with red
rimmed black eyes with all the knowledge of fallen angels.
The large abundance of human remains in the larder piles was
disturbing as the village had numerous goats wandering its
mud path 'streets' and dozen of ring-in-the-nose tethered
oxen as well. And as far as Solomon could see the entire
village population numbered less than a few dozen souls. In
fact, the black huts outnumbered the men and women and
children to such a degree; that they could spend a week, each
of them, sleeping in a different hut, and none in a hut slept
in by anyone else, each night, and have a dozen huts to spare
still unused at the end of the week.
The children were by far the most fearsome to look at. They
had oversized highly domed bald heads and eyes so dark they
looked like wells sunk into night shadow and teeth filed to
points just like the women and men.
And unlike the women and men who looked indifferent or
proudly down upon her as she passed along the maze of thatch
huts the children looked at her with open mouth smiles that
made her shudder.
No one was playing. No one was working. No one was weaving.
No one was tending the flocks. No one was tending any fires.
There were no lit fires. A first since she had first used the
captain's eye glass and spied the coast. One's first and
lingering impression of Africa was columns of smoke from
seemingly countless fires.
The village had a dead quality about it and the people in it
all looked thin and starving despite the huge piles of half
eaten food and numerous goats wandering about?
The woman caught Solomon staring at a pile of half skinned
men and she winked at her and gestured to her to enter up one
of the short ladders and into what was one of the larger
above ground grass huts.
She expected to find herself facing the chief of the tribe
and his wise council and maybe a few menacing warriors but
instead she only saw some quickly lit oil lanterns and
numerous boxes of provisions and stuffed duffle bags and
several empty hammocks hanging from the support pillars and
roof beams.
The woman and the twelve missionaries followed her in and
made themselves at home.
There apparently was no chief, no council, no menacing
guards. Solomon blinked at this and then quickly sat down
upon a reed mat and tried to be inconspicuous.
The group lounged about and opened tins and ate and drank
wine from demi-johns. They talked in a mishmash of languages
and Solomon tried to pretend she didn't know any of them.
The priestess slipped behind a hanging blanket and reemerged
in a blouse that hung down to her knees and slippers and
nothing else.
Apparently this was nothing new or scandalous to the twelve
men who ignored it and went on gruffly speaking about the
hardships of the journey behind and the journey ahead.
From what she could gather this was just a stop for the night
and the group planed to push on to a series of valleys that
the lake waterfall drained into and that it was in one of the
remote valleys that the party was destined. From the odd
mumbled speech between mouthfuls and slugs of wine the men
ruminated upon the lake and guessing at its source. The
current theory on 'this' trip was that a vast underground
river or spring fed the lake as there simply wasn't enough
rain to keep it full with the water falls constant drain upon
it. There was also a great deal of talk about the foul state
of the village and if it would still be 'useful' for them to
keep making it a stopping point. Next trip they mused they
might just tackle the falls and skip the rotten place
entirely.
The woman now turned to Solomon from her hammock perch and
spoke to her directly. She spoke English with a slight Slavic
accent. Solomon tired to remember what she had spoke when she
had first spoke to her out in the grasslands below the
outcropping but could not remember.
It made sense she would speak English. Her Puritan garb
though manly in attire would have shouted out her country of
origin to any European white or black or yellow or of any of
God's wondrous hues.
The Puritan's being a very suspicious if not xenophobic sect
it was rational for the males to think she did not speak
anything other than English, Welsh, a smattering of Celtic,
and maybe a bit of French and Spanish for cursing. But in her
travels she had mastered the spoken tongue of dozens of
nations if not learned to read them very well.
The smattering of German, Russian, and Slavic tongues they
were using were all well known to her and she hoped they
would continue to think her unversed in them that she may
know a hint of her fate and act before it was made bold upon
her in the middle of the night.
The woman asked her name and they traded names. Her's was
Octavia. An ancient and Latin name. She was told. The name of
a Roman Empress. Solomon did not correct the woman and then
suddenly thought, she knew of only one woman of ancient Rome
named Octavia and that had been Augustus sister woefully wed
to Marc Anthony.
But then she realized other than the twelve Cesar's and a
hand full of others there were dozens if not more Roman
Emperors that she had no idea what their names were and it
was just as likely as unlikely that between East and West and
Rome and Constantinople that there may have been an Empress
named Octavia and with that thought she was suddenly glad she
had not corrected the woman.
The woman engaged her in small talk. She never quiet asked
her the most obvious questions anyone would think to ask;
such as, WHAT are you doing HERE? Or WHY are you dressed as a
MAN and wearing weapons? Or WHY are you so apparently alone
in such an utterly god forsaken place?!
Instead she asked about London and how the Parliament and
King were getting on and seemed most perplexed when she was
told the King had dismissed the Parliament and had done so
for several years now.
This was indeed a difficult thing for any English traveler to
explain when abroad and even on her best days she had found
it difficult to draw such steady questions to a close. And
this was NOT one of her best days.
Suddenly everyone stirred and the woman slipped behind the
blanket and emerged in her hooded robe with its gold belt and
promptly put on a pair of heavy sensible leather boots in
sans of the expected rope soled sandals.
Provisions were stumped into knapsacks and backpacks and the
whole party, which apparently she had now become attached,
left the hut and proceeded to the lake's far end and its
waterfall.
Solomon had misunderstood in her eavesdropping. They had not
intended to stay the night here but simply stopped to rest
for a few hours and restock on their provisions.
Once again the young girl was reminded that the party
inexplicably liked to travel at night and with dusk
approaching they lit torches and lanterns and proceeded on
their way.
The natives they had been talking to on the grasslands were
no where to be seen and the party of now thirteen left the
village without fan fare or good-byes.
Night fell with that theatrical stage drop curtain suddenness
as it only can in the wild places of the world and in
darkness they plodded on in their little boat of lights upon
the river of darkness.
They did not make any direction to the shore but went up into
the grassland hills and then upon a crown of these made their
laborious way around the double lakes. This was stated to be
because of hippos. Apparently these water bond creatures that
Solomon had never seen nor heard of before came ashore at
night and were something to be feared. Since the men telling
her that these things were something to be feared and they
petted the heads of cannibals as easy as that of any docile
cat or dog or domesticated horse she feared these night
fiends fiercely.
Thankfully these terrible beasts did not attack them during
the course of the night but the men often stopped and pointed
out the immense sound of their thrashing in the shallows and
their strange braying barks and Solomon would dutifully nod
her understanding and try not to let herself lose control and
begin firing blindly with both pistols into the dark.
They must have been the size of thirty gun war ships the girl
thought and swallowed hard dry swallows until sun rise
squinted her eyes and she found they were at the root of the
falls.
The falls were enormous and but were not one single giant
fall but dozens of falls that rushed pell-mell over the void
and dropped hundreds of feet into a turbulent churning river
that dashed quickly along down and down until it hit with a
rush the floor of a wide valley.
Before the tired party could descend they paused for a brief
rest and some food and drink. They drank wine in great
abundance and very little water. This was because the water
made 'whites' sick she was told by the men. She was uncertain
how to take such information.
But the missionary males all insisted she mix at least some
wine into her water pouch at every drink to 'kill' the white
man sickness.
As this progressed almost to the point of open argument one
of the men noticed the woman staring back along the lake and
soon they were all looking back at a long bending collumn of
smoke.
It was coming from the native village they had left several
hours before.
They natives often raid each other one of the missionaries
stated flatly. The work of a war party.
But Solomon knew it was the work of a hundred Spanish blades
and she chewed her lower lip over this.
The woman noted this but said nothing and they began their
step but not too difficult climb down into the first of what
would be seven valleys strung one after the other like a
charm necklace chain.
During the journey of the seven valleys. Each which had its
own decimated and shattered tribe living like ghosts in its
nearly empty village and where their group was welcomed by
silence and avoidance for the most part but always with a
little reception of a handful of natives who seemed to appear
just outside the village and then escort them into it and
then disappear; it became increasingly obvious that the group
was being followed. And that whatever was following them was
burning the native villages in their wake. In fact, it was
probably the stopping and burning of these villages that kept
what ever was following them from over taking them.
But over take them they must! For the seventh valley ended in
a dead end.
The group of missionaries seemed to grow only slightly more
anxious at this ghostly destructive force that followed them
and no one not even the woman ever came out and asked Solomon
if she had any idea in the slightest what it might be that
was following them or if she was indeed responsible for their
being followed.
This utterly perplexed Solomon who found the almost
indifferent lack of reaction to this obvious closing threat
mind boggling and frustrating and wondered if they
missionaries were simply thinking they would hand her over
once this unknown force reached them? They certainly weren't
going to pray it away for the entire group of men and the
woman were about as godless as the heathens they seemed to
stride indifferently past.
All became clear only when the seventh and last valley was
reached. The river had flowed through all six previous
valley's and now it flowed into the last one and promptly
fell into a crack in the ground and vanished in a rising hiss
of spray and mist. The previous six valleys had all been lush
and green and full of animals and cultivated fields now grown
rank and woods and birds and fish...
But the seventh valley was nothing but barren rock. Torturous
to even walk upon as the rock was razor sharp and twisted and
shattered into razorback spines and ankle snapping hallows.
Nothing lived here; not bird not plant not animal.
But man was here.
The same group of natives appeared once the party entered the
barren seventh valley and promptly led them to a great
congested slave camp.
Here natives with spears over saw natives with nothing. Naked
men labored and worked and crawled into and out of the great
fissures in the earth. And when they came out the came out
with small reed baskets full of stones. And these stones were
diamonds!
Some as big as your fists. Most the size of your finger tips.
The men came out breathless and soaked. The diamonds were to
be found in the rivers great underwater stretches. Many men
did not come back out. Ever.
The depleted villages now made grim sense.
The missionaries explained that cannibals had no souls and
thus could not be redeemed. It had been obvious that none of
the tribes living in the six valleys had been cannibals but
apparently this was not worth debating and was waved off with
open hands and grunting scoffs.
The woman was more forth coming. She did not want to be a
goddess over black men in a kingdom of grass huts. She wanted
to be a goddess over white men in an empire of palaces. And
to do that she needed wealth of an unprecedented nature. The
uncut diamonds, which lay in heaps and piles, some as large
as bushel baskets, a round upon the ground, did indeed to
seem to hint at such possible wealth.
Her beauty was powerful enough to tame the savage soul but
she needed money to tame the corrupted soul of the civilized
man.
Her perfection of nature and domain over it stopped abruptly
at every paved street corner and busy intersection. She
needed an ocean of wealth to bring mankind to her knees in
pray and subjection and she had found it here.
Solomon Kandie felt a life time of arguments needing to be
made here but none was made and no word spoken for at that
very moment of the curtain being drawn aside the hundred
blades arrived and began to open fire with indiscriminate
hostility to any and all mortal life.
Musket balls that dared to miss their mark sparked and sling
shot off the barren rock again and again. Cold steel in
learned hands flashed thin bladed toothpicks into death's maw
and picked out the scraps of life and tossed them this way
and that with great arcs of blood.
Intestines spilled. Skulls shattered. Men fell where they
would lie grave-less before God naked upon the rock until the
elements and carrion eaters would vanquish them away into
smaller and smaller parcels. Until the dung droppings of tiny
field mice would be all the remains of a once proud man.
The men in priest robes, for it was impossible to call them
missionaries now, made no pretence of entreatment or
questioning, but being heavily armed, and their vast wealth
at their heels, stood and fired, and fought, and died, but
did not go alone into that great abyss of black silence. They
took a dozen or more blades with them, for these were indeed
men well versed in killing, if not so well versed in the
annuals of God.
The great hounds hobbled over the rock, their soft padded
feet, no match against the razor sharp rock, and were some of
the first the spears brought down.
Throwing sticks and clubs and spears and a few bow and arrows
rained down on steel bonnets and chest pieces and splintered
where they fell but several found the open neck or the arm
pit or the back of the knee and bit deep enough to draw out a
life and send it shrieking into the river spray.
It would have been an easy victory for the hundred blades.
Until the slaves realized that these white men were not here
to liberate them but where set upon killing them without
mercy or any regard.
This was a tremendous mistake that only a civilized race
could have made. For out of the cracks in the earth rose up a
tide of desperate men numbered in the thousands.
The slaughter, for never at any moment, not when the blades
were in control or when the slaves were, could it be called a
battle. Took hours. Unarmed men taring a man's limbs from his
body and then beating him to death with his own severed arms
and legs takes time. You can't rush it. Hours.
For some strange reason; though she was heavily armed and in
the thick of it, no one molested her even with the show of
violence. She could guess that when the blades were winning
they simply wanted to keep her alive for the pleasure of
torturing her latter at their leisure and when the slaves
were winning they simply did not see a white young girl no
matter how heavily armed a threat when all she did was stand
still and stare in shock and horror.
When it was over. When the killing was finally done. There
was a gasping rasping stillness. And in that moment of
stillness Solomon Kandie reached down and plucked up one of
the wicker baskets full of raw uncut diamonds and dumped its
contents into the river.
Soon others followed her lead and after a much shorter time
than the killing took all the diamonds were gone.
Then the surviving slaves, now free again, and the young teen
girl, now no longer hunted, headed out of the ugly gray and
black stone valley where noting lived and back into the lush
green six valleys and back to the ghost of home.
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