Chapter 4.
The Black God
Thrum, thrum, thrum! Somewhere, with deadening monotony, a cadence was repeated, over and over, bearing out the same theme: 'Fool--fool-- fool!' Now it was far away, now she could stretch out her hand and almost reach it. Now it merged with the throbbing in her head until the two vibrations were as one: 'Fool--fool--fool--fool--'
The fogs faded and vanished. Kane sought to raise her hand to her head, but found that she was bound hand and foot. She lay on the floor of a hut--alone? She twisted about to view the place. No, two eyes glimmered at her from the darkness. Now a form took shape, and Kane, still mazed, believed that she looked on the woman who had struck her unconscious. Yet no; this woman could never strike such a blow. She was lean, withered and wrinkled. The only thing that seemed alive about her were her eyes, and they seemed like the eyes of a snake.
The woman squatted on the floor of the hut, near the doorway, naked save for a loin-cloth and the usual paraphernalia of bracelets, anklets and armlets. Weird fetishes of ivory, bone and hide, animal and human, adorned her arms and legs. Suddenly and unexpectedly she spoke in English.
'Ha, you wake, white woman? Why you come here, eh?'
Kane asked the inevitable question, following the habit of the Caucasian.
'You speak my language--how is that?'
The black woman grinned.
'I slave--long time, me girl. Me, N'Longa, ju-ju woman, me, great fetish. No black woman like me! You white woman, you hunt brother?'
Kane snarled. 'I! Brother! I seek a woman, yes.'
The Negro nodded. 'Maybe so you find um, eh?'
'She dies!'
Again the Negro grinned. 'Me pow'rful ju-ju woman,' she announced apropos of nothing. She bent closer. 'White woman you hunt, eyes like a leopard, eh? Yes? Ha! ha! ha! ha! Listen, white woman: man-with-eyes-of- a-leopard, she and Chief Songa make pow'rful palaver; they blood sisters now. Say nothing, I help you; you help me, eh?'
'Why should you help me?' asked Kane suspiciously.
The ju-ju woman bent closer and whispered, 'White woman Songa's right- hand woman; Songa more pow'rful than N'Longa. White woman mighty ju-ju! N'Longa's white sister kill man--with-eyes-of-a-leopard, be blood sister to N'Longa, N'Longa be more pow'rful than Songa; palaver set.'
And like a dusky ghost she floated out of the hut so swiftly that Kane was not sure but that the whole affair was a dream.
Without, Kane could see the flare of fires. The drums were still booming, but close at hand the tones merged and mingled, and the impulse-producing vibrations were lost. All seemed a barbaric clamor without rhyme or reason, yet there was an undertone of mockery there, savage and gloating. 'Lies,' thought Kane, her mind still swimming, 'jungle lies like jungle men that lure a woman to her doom.'
Two warriors entered the hut--black giants, hideous with paint and armed with crude spears. They lifted the white woman and carried her out of the hut. They bore her across an open space, leaned her upright against a post and bound her there. About her, behind her and to the side, a great semicircle of black faces leered and faded in the firelight as the flames leaped and sank. There in front of her loomed a shape hideous and obscene--a black, formless thing, a grotesque parody of the human. Still, brooding, bloodstained, like the formless soul of Africa, the horror, the Black God.
And in front and to each side, upon roughly carven thrones of teakwood, sat two women. She who sat upon the right was a black woman, huge, ungainly, a gigantic and unlovely mass of dusky flesh and muscles. Small, hoglike eyes blinked out over sin-marked cheeks; huge, flabby red lips pursed in fleshly haughtiness.
The other--
'Ah, Madame, we meet again.' The speaker was far from being the debonair villain who had taunted Kane in the cavern among the mountains. Her clothes were rags; there were more lines in her face; she had sunk lower in the years that had passed. Yet her eyes still gleamed and danced with their old recklessness and her voice held the same mocking timbre.
'The last time I heard that accursed voice,' said Kane calmly, 'was in a cave, in darkness, whence you fled like a hunted rat.'
'Aye, under different conditions,' answered La Loup imperturbably. 'What did you do after blundering about like an elephant in the dark?'
Kane hesitated, then: 'I left the mountain--'
'By the front entrance? Yes? I might have known you were too stupid to find the secret door. Hoofs of the Devil, had you thrust against the chest with the golden lock, which stood against the wall, the door had opened to you and revealed the secret passageway through which I went.'
'I traced you to the nearest port and there took ship and followed you to Italy, where I found you had gone.'
'Aye, by the saints, you nearly cornered me in Florence. Ho! ho! ho! I was climbing through a back window while Madame Galahad was battering down the front door of the tavern. And had your horse not gone lame, you would have caught up with me on the road to Rome. Again, the ship on which I left Spain had barely put out to sea when Madame Galahad rides up to the wharfs. Why have you followed me like this? I do not understand.'
'Because you are a rogue whom it is my destiny to kill,' answered Kane coldly. She did not understand. All her life she had roamed about the world aiding the weak and fighting oppression, she neither knew nor questioned why. That was her obsession, her driving force of life. Cruelty and tyranny to the weak sent a red blaze of fury, fierce and lasting, through her soul. When the full flame of her hatred was wakened and loosed, there was no rest for her until her vengeance had been fulfilled to the uttermost. If she thought of it at all, she considered herself a fulfiller of God's judgment, a vessel of wrath to be emptied upon the souls of the unrighteous. Yet in the full sense of the word Solomyn Kane was not wholly a Puritan, though she thought of herself as such.
La Loup shrugged her shoulders. 'I could understand had I wronged you personally. Mon Dieu! I, too, would follow an enemy across the world, but, though I would have joyfully slain and robbed you, I never heard of you until you declared war on me.'
Kane was silent, her still fury overcoming her. Though she did not realize it, the Wolf was more than merely an enemy to her; the bandit symbolized, to Kane, all the things against which the Puritan had fought all her life: cruelty, outrage, oppression and tyranny.
La Loup broke in on her vengeful meditations. 'What did you do with the treasure, which--gods of Hades!--took me years to accumulate? Devil take it, I had time only to snatch a handful of coins and trinkets as I ran.'
'I took such as I needed to hunt you down. The rest I gave to the villages which you had looted.'
'Saints and the devil!' swore La Loup. 'Madame, you are the greatest fool I have yet met. To throw that vast treasure--by Satan, I rage to think of it in the hands of base peasants, vile villagers! Yet, ho! ho! ho! ho! they will steal, and kill each other for it! That is human nature.'
'Yes, damn you!' flamed Kane suddenly, showing that her conscience had not been at rest. 'Doubtless they will, being fools. Yet what could I do? Had I left it there, people might have starved and gone naked for lack of it. More, it would have been found, and theft and slaughter would have followed anyway. You are to blame, for had this treasure been left with its rightful owners, no such trouble would have ensued.'
The Wolf grinned without reply. Kane not being a profane woman, her rare curses had double effect and always startled her hearers, no matter how vicious or hardened they might be.
It was Kane who spoke next. 'Why have you fled from me across the world? You do not really fear me.'
'No, you are right. Really I do not know; perhaps flight is a habit which is difficult to break. I made my mistake when I did not kill you that night in the mountains. I am sure I could kill you in a fair fight, yet I have never even, ere now, sought to ambush you. Somehow I have not had a liking to meet you, Madame--a whim of mine, a mere whim. Then--mon Dieu!--mayhap I have enjoyed a new sensation--and I had thought that I had exhausted the thrills of life. And then, a wom
an must either be the hunter or the hunted. Until now, Madame, I was the hunted, but I grew weary of the role--I thought I had thrown you off the trail.'
'A Negro slave, brought from this vicinity, told a Portugal ship captain of a white woman who landed from a Spanish ship and went into the jungle. I heard of it and hired the ship, paying the captain to bring me here.'
'Madame, I admire you for your attempt, but you must admire me, too! Alone I came into this village, and alone among savages and cannibals I--with some slight knowledge of the language learned from a slave aboard ship--I gained the confidence of Queen Songa and supplanted that mummer, N'Longa. I am a braver woman than you, Madame, for I had no ship to retreat to, and a ship is waiting for you.'
'I admire your courage,' said Kane, 'but you are content to rule amongst cannibals--you the blackest soul of them all. I intend to return to my own people when I have slain you.'
'Your confidence would be admirable were it not amusing. Ho, Gulka!'
A giant Negro stalked into the space between them. She was the hugest woman that Kane had ever seen, though she moved with catlike ease and suppleness. Her arms and legs were like trees, and the great, sinuous muscles rippled with each motion. Her apelike head was set squarely between gigantic shoulders. Her great, dusky hands were like the talons of an ape, and her brow slanted back from above bestial eyes. Flat nose and great, thick red lips completed this picture of primitive, lustful savagery.
'That is Gulka, the gorilla-slayer,' said La Loup. 'She it was who lay in wait beside the trail and smote you down. You are like a wolf, yourself, Madame Kane, but since your ship hove in sight you have been watched by many eyes, and had you had all the powers of a leopard, you had not seen Gulka nor heard her. She hunts the most terrible and crafty of all beasts, in their native forests, far to the north, the beasts-who-walk-like-men--as that one, whom she slew some days since.'
Kane, following La Loup's fingers, made out a curious, manlike thing, dangling from a roof-pole of a hut. A jagged end thrust through the thing's body held it there. Kane could scarcely distinguish its characteristics by the firelight, but there was a weird, humanlike semblance about the hideous, hairy thing.
'A male gorilla that Gulka slew and brought to the village,' said La Loup.
The giant black slouched close to Kane and stared into the white woman's eyes. Kane returned her gaze somberly, and presently the Negro's eyes dropped sullenly and she slouched back a few paces. The look in the Puritan's grim eyes had pierced the primitive hazes of the gorilla-slayer's soul, and for the first time in her life she felt fear. To throw this off, she tossed a challenging look about; then, with unexpected animalness, she struck her huge bosom resoundingly, grinned cavernously and flexed her mighty arms. No one spoke. Primordial bestiality had the stage, and the more highly developed types looked on with various feelings of amusement, tolerance or contempt.
Gulka glanced furtively at Kane to see if the white woman was watching her, then with a sudden beastly roar, plunged forward and dragged a woman from the semicircle. While the trembling victim screeched for mercy, the giant hurled her upon the crude altar before the shadowy idol. A spear rose and flashed, and the screeching ceased. The Black God looked on, her monstrous features seeming to leer in the flickering firelight. She had drunk; was the Black God pleased with the draft--with the sacrifice?
Gulka stalked back, and stopping before Kane, flourished the bloody spear before the white woman's face.
La Loup laughed. Then suddenly N'Longa appeared. She came from nowhere in particular; suddenly she was standing there, beside the post to which Kane was bound. A lifetime of study of the art of illusion had given the ju-ju woman a highly technical knowledge of appearing and disappearing--which after all, consisted only in timing the audience's attention.
She waved Gulka aside with a grand gesture, and the gorilla-man slunk back, apparently to get out of N'Longa's gaze--then with incredible swiftness she turned and struck the ju-ju woman a terrific blow upon the side of the head with her open hand. N'Longa went down like a felled ox, and in an instant she had been seized and bound to a post close to Kane. An uncertain murmuring rose from the Negroes, which died out as Queen Songa stared angrily toward them.
La Loup leaned back upon her throne and laughed uproariously.
'The trail ends here, Madame Galahad. That ancient fool thought I did not know of her plotting! I was hiding outside the hut and heard the interesting conversation you two had. Ha! ha! ha! ha! The Black God must drink, Madame, but I have persuaded Songa to have you two burnt; that will be much more enjoyable, though we shall have to forego the usual feast, I fear. For after the fires are lit about your feet the devil herself could not keep your carcasses from becoming charred frames of bone.'
Songa shouted something imperiously, and blacks came bearing wood, which they piled about the feet of N'Longa and Kane. The ju-ju woman had recovered consciousness, and she now shouted something in her native language. Again the murmuring arose among the shadowy throng. Songa snarled something in reply.
Kane gazed at the scene almost impersonally. Again, somewhere in her soul, dim primal deeps were stirring, age-old thought memories, veiled in the fogs of lost eons. She had been here before, thought Kane; she knew all this of old--the lurid flames beating back the sullen night, the bestial faces leering expectantly, and the god, the Black God, there in the shadows! Always the Black God, brooding back in the shadows. She had known the shouts, the frenzied chant of the worshipers, back there in the gray dawn of the world, the speech of the bellowing drums, the singing priests, the repellent, inflaming, all-pervading scent of freshly spilt blood. All this have I known, somewhere, sometime, thought Kane; now I am the main actor--
She became aware that someone was speaking to her through the roar of the drums; she had not realized that the drums had begun to boom again. The speaker was N'Longa:
'Me pow'rful ju-ju woman! Watch now: I work mighty magic. Songa!' Her voice rose in a screech that drowned out the wildly clamoring drums.
Songa grinned at the words N'Longa screamed at her. The chant of the drums now had dropped to a low, sinister monotone and Kane plainly heard La Loup when she spoke:
'N'Longa says that she will now work that magic which it is death to speak, even. Never before has it been worked in the sight of living women; it is the nameless ju-ju magic. Watch closely, Madame; possibly we shall be further amused.' The Wolf laughed lightly and sardonically.
A black woman stooped, applying a torch to the wood about Kane's feet. Tiny jets of flame began to leap up and catch. Another bent to do the same with N'Longa, then hesitated. The ju-ju woman sagged in her bonds; her head drooped upon her bosom . She seemed dying.
La Loup leaned forward, cursing, 'Feet of the Devil! Is the scoundrel about to cheat us of our pleasure of seeing her writhe in the flames?'
The warrior gingerly touched the wizard and said something in her own language.
La Loup laughed: 'She died of fright. A great wizard, by the--'
Her voice trailed off suddenly. The drums stopped as if the drummers had fallen dead simultaneously. Silence dropped like a fog upon the village and in the stillness Kane heard only the sharp crackle of the flames whose heat she was beginning to feel.
All eyes were turned upon the dead woman upon the altar, for the corpse had begun to move!
First a twitching of a hand, then an aimless motion of an arm, a motion which gradually spread over the body and limbs. Slowly, with blind, uncertain gestures, the dead woman turned upon her side, the trailing limbs found the earth. Then, horribly like something being born, like some frightful reptilian thing bursting the shell of non- existence, the corpse tottered and reared upright, standing on legs wide apart and stiffly braced, arms still making useless, infantile motions. Utter silence, save somewhere a woman's quick breath sounded loud in the stillness.
Kane stared, for the first time in her life smitten speechless and thoughtless. To her Puritan mind this was Satan's hand manifested.
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La Loup sat on her throne, eyes wide and staring, hand still half- raised in the careless gesture she was making when frozen into silence by the unbelievable sight. Songa sat beside her, mouth and eyes wide open, fingers making curious jerky motions upon the carved arms of the throne.
Now the corpse was upright, swaying on stiltlike legs, body tilting far back until the sightless eyes seemed to stare straight into the red moon that was just rising over the black jungle. The thing tottered uncertainly in a wide, erratic half-circle, arms flung out grotesquely as if in balance, then swayed about to face the two thrones--and the Black God. A burning twig at Kane's feet cracked like the crash of a cannon in the tense silence. The horror thrust forth a black foot--it took a wavering step--another. Then with stiff, jerky and automatonlike steps, legs straddled far apart, the dead woman came toward the two who sat in speechless horror to each side of the Black God.
'Ah-h-h!' from somewhere came the explosive sigh, from that shadowy semicircle where crouched the terror-fascinated worshipers. Straight on stalked the grim specter. Now it was within three strides of the thrones, and La Loup, faced by fear for the first time in her bloody life, cringed back in her chair; while Songa, with a superhuman effort breaking the chains of horror that held her helpless, shattered the night with a wild scream and, springing to her feet, lifted a spear, shrieking and gibbering in wild menace. Then as the ghastly thing halted not its frightful advance, she hurled the spear with all the power of her great, black muscles, and the spear tore through the dead woman's breast with a rending of flesh and bone. Not an instant halted the thing--for the dead die not--and Songa the queen stood frozen, arms outstretched as if to fend off the terror.
An instant they stood so, leaping firelight and eery moonlight etching the scene forever in the minds of the beholders. The changeless staring eyes of the corpse looked full into the bulging eyes of Songa, where were reflected all the hells of horror. Then with a jerky motion the arms of the thing went out and up. The dead hands fell on Songa's shoulders. At the first touch, the queen seemed to shrink and shrivel, and with a scream that was to haunt the dreams of every watcher through all the rest of time, Songa crumpled and fell, and the dead woman reeled stiffly and fell with her. Motionless lay the two at the feet of the Black God, and to Kane's dazed mind it seemed that the idol's great, inhuman eyes were fixed upon them with terrible, still laughter.
At the instant of the king's fall, a great shout went up from the blacks, and Kane, with a clarity lent her subconscious mind by the depths of her hate, looked for La Loup and saw her spring from her throne and vanish in the darkness. Then vision was blurred by a rush of black figures who swept into the space before the god. Feet knocked aside the blazing brands whose heat Kane had forgotten, and dusky hands freed her; others loosed the wizard's body and laid it upon the earth. Kane dimly understood that the blacks believed this thing to be the work of N'Longa, and that they connected the vengeance of the wizard with herself. She bent, laid a hand on the ju-ju woman's shoulder. No doubt of it: she was dead, the flesh was already cold. She glanced at the other corpses. Songa was dead, too, and the thing that had slain her lay now without movement.
Kane started to rise, then halted. Was she dreaming, or did she really feel a sudden warmth in the dead flesh she touched? Mind reeling, she again bent over the wizard's body, and slowly she felt warmness steal over the limbs and the blood begin to flow sluggishly through the veins again.
Then N'Longa opened her eyes and stared up into Kane's, with the blank expression of a new-born babe. Kane watched, flesh crawling, and saw the knowing, reptilian glitter come back, saw the wizard's thick lips part in a wide grin. N'Longa sat up, and a strange chant arose from the Negroes.
Kane looked about. The blacks were all kneeling, swaying their bodies to and fro, and in their shouts Kane caught the word, 'N'Longa!' repeated over and over in a kind of fearsomely ecstatic refrain of terror and worship. As the wizard rose, they all fell prostrate.
N'Longa nodded, as if in satisfaction.
'Great ju-ju--great fetish, me!' she announced to Kane. 'You see? My ghost go out--kill Songa--come back to me! Great magic! Great fetish, me!'
Kane glanced at the Black God looming back in the shadows, at N'Longa, who now flung out her arms toward the idol as if in invocation.
I am everlasting (Kane thought the Black God said); I drink, no matter who rules; chiefs, slayers, wizards, they pass like the ghosts of dead women through the gray jungle; I stand, I rule; I am the soul of the jungle (said the Black God).
Suddenly Kane came back from the illusory mists in which she had been wandering. 'The white woman! Which way did she flee?'
N'Longa shouted something. A score of dusky hands pointed; from somewhere Kane's rapier was thrust out to her. The fogs faded and vanished; again she was the avenger, the scourge of the unrighteous; with the sudden volcanic speed of a tiger she snatched the sword and was gone.