Grey looked at Accompong and politely raised his brows. The headman barked a few words of something not quite Spanish, and the boys reluctantly fell back, though they continued to make faces and rude arm-pumping gestures.
Captain Accompong put out a hand to his lieutenant, who hauled the fat little headman to his feet. He dusted fastidiously at the skirts of his coat, then walked slowly around the little group of prisoners, stopping at Cresswell. He contemplated the man, who had now curled himself into a ball, then looked up at Grey.
‘Do you know what a loa is, my colonel?’ he asked quietly.
‘I do, yes,’ Grey replied warily. ‘Why?’
‘There is a spring, quite close. It comes from deep in the earth, where the loas live, and sometimes they will come forth, and speak. If you will have back your men – I ask you to go there, and speak with whatever loa may find you. Thus we will have truth, and I can decide.’
Grey stood for a moment, looking back and forth among the fat old man, Cresswell, his back heaving with silent sobs, and the young girl Azeel, who had turned her head to hide the hot tears coursing down her cheeks. He didn’t look at Tom. There didn’t seem much choice.
‘All right,’ he said, turning back to Accompong. ‘Let me go now, then.’
Accompong shook his head.
‘In the morning,’ he said. ‘You do not want to go there at night.’
‘Yes, I do,’ Grey said. ‘Now.’
‘Quite close’ was a relative term, apparently. Grey thought it must be near midnight by the time they arrived at the spring – Grey, the houngan Ishmael, and four maroons bearing torches and armed with the long cane-knives called machetes.
Accompong hadn’t told him it was a hot spring. There was a rocky overhang, and what looked like a cavern beneath it, from which steam drifted out like dragon’s breath. His attendants – or guards, as one chose to look at it – halted as one, a safe distance away. He glanced at them for instruction, but they were silent.
He’d been wondering what the houngan’s role in this peculiar undertaking was. The man was carrying a battered canteen; now he uncorked this and handed it to Grey. It smelled hot, though the tin of the heavy canteen was cool in his hands. Raw rum, he thought, from the sweetly searing smell of it – and doubtless a few other things.
. . . Herbs. Ground bones – bits o’ other things. But the main thing, the one thing ye must have, is the liver of a fugu fish . . . They don’t come back from it, ye ken. The poison damages their brains . . .
‘Now we drink,’ Ishmael said. ‘And we enter the cave.’
‘Both of us?’
‘Yes. I will summon the loa. I am a priest of Damballa.’ The man spoke seriously, with none of the hostility or smirking he had displayed earlier. Grey noticed, though, that their escort kept a safe distance from the houngan, and a wary eye upon him.
‘I see,’ said Grey, though he didn’t. ‘This . . . Damballa. He, or she—?’
‘Damballa is the great serpent,’ Ishmael said, and smiled, teeth flashing briefly in the torchlight. ‘I am told that snakes speak to you.’ He nodded at the canteen. ‘Drink.’
Repressing the urge to say, ‘You first,’ Grey raised the canteen to his lips and drank, slowly. It was very raw rum, with a strange taste, sweetly acrid, rather like the taste of fruit ripened to the edge of rot. He tried to keep any thought of Mrs Abernathy’s casual description of afile powder out of mind – she hadn’t, after all, mentioned how the stuff might taste. And surely Ishmael wouldn’t simply poison him . . . ? He hoped not.
He sipped the liquid until a slight shift of the houngan’s posture told him it was enough, then handed the canteen to Ishmael, who drank from it without hesitation. He supposed he should find this comforting, but his head was beginning to swim in an unpleasant manner, his heartbeat throbbing audibly in his ears, and something odd was happening to his vision; it went intermittently dark, then returned with a brief flash of light, and when he looked at one of the torches, it had a halo of coloured rings around it.
He barely heard the clunk of the canteen, dropped on the ground, and watched, blinking, as the houngan’s white-clad back wavered before him. A dark blur of face as Ishmael turned to him.
‘Come.’ The man disappeared into the veil of water.
‘Right,’ he muttered. ‘Well, then . . .’ He removed his boots, unbuckled the knee-bands of his breeches and peeled off his stockings. Then shucked his coat and stepped cautiously into the steaming water.
It was hot enough to make him gasp, but within a few moments, he had got used to the temperature, and made his way across a shallow, steaming pool toward the mouth of the cavern, shifting gravel hard under his bare feet. He heard whispering from his guards, but no one offered any alternative suggestions.
Water poured from the overhang, but not in the manner of a true waterfall; slender streams, like jagged teeth. The guards had pegged the torches into the ground at the edge of the spring; the flames danced like rainbows in the drizzle of the falling water as he passed beneath the overhang.
The hot, wet air pressed his lungs and made it hard to breathe. After a few moments, he couldn’t feel any difference between his skin and the moist air through which he walked; it was as though he had melted into the darkness of the cavern.
And it was dark. Completely. A faint glow came from behind him, but he could see nothing at all before him, and was obliged to feel his way, one hand on the rough rock wall. The sound of falling water grew fainter, replaced by the heavy thump of his own heartbeat, struggling against the pressure on his chest. Once he stopped and pressed his fingers against his eyelids, taking comfort in the coloured patterns that appeared there; he wasn’t blind, then. When he opened his eyes again, though, the darkness was still complete.
He thought the walls were narrowing – he could touch them on both sides by stretching out his arms – and had a nightmare moment when he seemed to feel them drawing in upon him. He forced himself to breathe, a deep, explosive gasp, and forced the illusion back.
‘Stop there.’ The voice was a whisper. He stopped.
There was silence, for what seemed a long time.
‘Come forward,’ said the whisper, seeming suddenly quite near him. ‘There is dry land, just before you.’
He shuffled forward, felt the floor of the cave rise beneath him, and stepped out carefully onto bare rock. Walked slowly forward until again the voice bade him stop.
Silence. He thought he could make out breathing, but wasn’t sure; the sound of the water was still faintly audible in the distance. All right, he thought. Come along, then.
It hadn’t been precisely an invitation, but what came into his mind was Mrs Abernathy’s intent green eyes, staring at him as she said, ‘I see a great, huge snake, lying on your shoulders, colonel.’
With a convulsive shudder, he realised that he felt a weight on his shoulders. Not a dead weight, but something live. It moved, just barely.
‘Jesus,’ he whispered, and thought he heard the ghost of a laugh from somewhere in the cave. He stiffened himself and fought back against the mental image, for surely this was nothing more than imagination, fuelled by rum. Sure enough, the illusion of green eyes vanished – but the weight rested on him still, though he couldn’t tell whether it lay upon his shoulders or his mind.
‘So,’ said the low voice, sounding surprised. ‘The loa has come already. The snakes do like you, buckra.’
‘And if they do?’ he asked. He spoke in a normal tone of voice; his words echoed from the walls around him.
The voice chuckled briefly, and he felt rather than heard movement nearby, the rustle of limbs and a soft thump as something struck the floor near his right foot. His head felt immense, throbbing with rum, and waves of heat pulsed through him, though the depths of the cave were cool.
‘See if this snake likes you, buckra,’ the voice invited. ‘Pick it up.’
He couldn’t see a thing, but slowly moved his foot, feeling his way over the silty floor. His toes touched something and he stopped abruptly. Whatever he had touched moved abruptly in turn, recoiling from him. Then he felt the tiny flicker of a snake’s tongue on his toe, tasting him.
Oddly, the sensation steadied him. Surely this wasn’t his friend, the tiny yellow constrictor – but it was a serpent much like that one in general size, so far as he could tell. Nothing to fear from that.
‘Pick it up,’ the voice invited him. ‘The krait will tell us if you speak the truth.’
‘Will he, indeed?’ Grey said dryly. ‘How?’
The voice laughed, and he thought he heard two or three more chuckling behind it – but perhaps it was only echoes.
‘If you die . . . you lied.’
He gave a small, contemptuous snort. There were no venomous snakes on Jamaica. He cupped his hand, and bent at the knee, but hesitated. Venomous or not, he had an instinctive aversion to being bitten by a snake. And how did he know how the man – or men – sitting in the shadows would take it if the thing did bite him?
‘I trust this snake,’ said the voice softly. ‘Krait comes with me from Africa. Long time now.’
Grey’s knees straightened abruptly. Africa! Now he placed the name, and cold sweat broke out on his face. Krait. A f**king African krait. Gwynne had had one. Small, no bigger than the circumference of a man’s little finger. ‘Bloody deadly,’ Gwynne had crooned, stroking the thing’s back with the tip of a goose-quill – an attention to which the snake, a slender, nondescript brown thing, had seemed oblivious.
This one was squirming languorously over the top of Grey’s foot; he had to restrain a strong urge to kick it away and stamp on it. What the devil was it about him that attracted snakes, of all ungodly things? He supposed it could be worse; it might be cockroaches . . . he instantly felt a hideous crawling sensation upon his forearms, and rubbed them hard, reflexively, seeing, yes, he bloody saw them, here in the dark, thorny jointed legs and wriggling, inquisitive antennae brushing his skin.
He might have cried out. Someone laughed.
If he thought at all, he couldn’t do it. He stooped and snatched the thing and rising, hurled it into the darkness. There was a yelp and a sudden scrabbling, then a brief, shocked scream.
He stood panting and trembling from reaction, checking and rechecking his hand – but felt no pain, could find no puncture wounds. The scream had been succeeded by a low stream of unintelligible curses, punctuated by the deep gasps of a man in terror. The voice of the houngan – if that’s who it was – came urgently, followed by another voice, doubtful, fearful. Behind him, before him? He had no sense of direction anymore.
Something brushed past him, the heaviness of a body, and he fell against the wall of the cave, scraping his arm. He welcomed the pain; it was something to cling to, something real.
More urgency in the depths of the cave, sudden silence. And then a swishing thunk! as something struck hard into flesh, and the sheared-copper smell of fresh blood came strong over the scent of hot rock and rushing water. No further sound.