They had begun the long trek back to Lagos on the coast, the morning, several months earlier, when the steamer ran aground at an island near the headwaters of the great river, and sank, and they were forced to abandon the expedition. There were over two hundred men in the caravan of shipwrecked landfarers. There were naval officers, sailors, merchants, together with a team of stokers, porters, interpreters, cooks and other assistants; there were medical doctors, naturalists and geologists; there were linguists and lexicographers, like the old man, and missionaries, like Dandeson. Many, like the old man, who was better known as a clergyman, wore more than one hat.
Weeks on the trek turned into months; four weeks became four months. Gently rising hills and tablelands gave way to steep, conical mountains towering over deep, serpentine ravines; meandering trails of mud-caked riverbeds sloped into miles, endless miles upon miles, of lush vegetation.
The old man was over seventy years old and didn’t look a day younger; his soft, baby face looked every inch the soft, baby face of an old man, a baby-faced man in his seventies, but there were days during the long trek when Dandeson, in his thirties, who insisted on walking alongside the old man, and carrying the old man’s battered goatskin shoulder bag, found himself having to work hard to keep up with him. The old man walked at a steady, unhurried pace – some would say slow, even – but it was resolute and unflagging; once he got going, it seemed perfectly conceivable that he could keep on walking forever.
They sent messengers ahead of them to the towns and villages along their path – heralds to announce their approach – so that their arrival would neither be cause for surprise to anyone nor the occasion for a precipitation of poisoned missiles being let loose on them. As in all the land, there was good reason for the deep suspicion of unannounced visitors in these parts: from hamlets on the Atlantic coast and villages and towns in the rainforests and the savannah and cities at the edge of the Sahara Desert, thousands – tens of thousands – had been abducted and sold into slavery by marauding squads of Filani soldiers, mercenaries whose most versatile weapon was stealth and surprise. In the early days, such raids had been carried out in the name of God, but the raiders themselves, most of whom were not yet born in those early days, had long ceased to use the pretext of jihad as justification. They were born into plunder as a way of life and bred with beggar-thy-neighbour as the first rule of survival, as were their fathers and their fathers before them. To these men, being a plunderer was a trade no different than being a weaver or a cattle-rearer; it was just a lot more rewarding. Those of their targets who could do so robustly defended themselves, but most were no match for the fighting prowess of the raiders.
In pockets of the vast swathes of the lands stretching along the banks of the mighty rivers, the soldiers now ran a protection racket, a monthly communal toll where the people were made to pool together their ladan aiki – the fruits of their labour – to pay off the soldiers. Failure to do so meant that a village had to surrender a number of its inhabitants to the soldiers to be sold. It was kidnapping for ransom in all but name: those sold in this manner could be bought back by their families if they could raise the ransom.
This could be fiendishly difficult. The story was told of the man who sold his land which was all he had to his name and then had to sell himself to raise the ransom for his family.
The voyagers certainly did not want to be mistaken by anyone for people-rustlers. And so, they sent the runners ahead to proclaim their good faith: ‘We come to you in peace,’ and also their pedigree: ‘We come to you in the name of our Sarauniya, the Sarauniya of England, who is also the Sarauniya of the coast country.’
If the response was warm – if it was an invitation to sup with the chief, as was often the case – they stayed the night. It sometimes happened, too, that the response to their peace offering was an arrow within a hair’s breadth of the messenger’s feet, a warning shot. This seldom happened. Sarauniya Victoria was a byword for the pinnacle of imperial might and prestige; every monarch in these parts had had dealings with one or other of her messengers. Or with the missionaries who often had come calling on them long before either the imperial messengers or the merchants showed up. Sometimes, that missionary also happened to be part of an approaching contingent. Oftentimes, that missionary was the old man.
At the entrance to one such town, a town the old man first visited during another expedition some forty years earlier, he enquired of the emissary from the king who had come to bid them welcome, an elderly eunuch, whether the old king was alive or dead. The question seemed like a bolt of lightning charging through the courtier’s veins; leaping out of the bamboo palanquin he had arrived in, he rose to his full height – his back, hunched with age, now ramrod straight; his eyelashes bristling, shimmering with kohl – and tersely informed the old man, ‘The king never dies,’ before sashaying back into his carriage and being lifted up and carried away by his four attendants.
At supper that night, in the caravanserai right next door to the king’s palace where they were lodged as His Majesty’s special guests, the visitors reflected on the eunuch’s exquisitely regal and haughty departure. The following morning, they were invited to an audience with the king. His Highness looked immaculate and deathless in his emerald-green, elegantly tailored, pure-silk velvet gown. He couldn’t have been a day more than twenty-one years old.