The Viceroy of Ouidah by Bruce Chatwin

rest in peace. Then they ate the meat, grilled over a grid of green saplings.
    A leopard barked in the bushes. He crawled to the edge of the clearing and barked back, and for a second they saw the spotted face flickering in the firelight.
    â€˜My father,’ he said, and stretched out to sleep.
    For the next five days they went out hunting together, feeling for affinities to break the lines of colour and custom.
    Kankpé showed him the spoor of various antelopes — gazelles, kobs, waterbuck, guibs and bubals. He would steal up on a herd, now running, now crawling, now freezing motionless as an anthill if an animal reared its snout to sniff the wind. He would plunge into a marsh to drive out a wart-hog, or clamber up a tree to keep clear of a buffalo. He never threw his spear unless certain of his target. He despised the hunting gun as the weapon of a coward.
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    ON THE FIFTH night they swore a blood pact.
    The moon in its final quarter smeared its light over the lumpy trunk of a baobab. Somewhere a hombill rattled its beak and, not far off, there was a jackal howling.
    The two men knelt facing each other, naked as babies, pressing their thighs together: the pact would be invalid if their genitals touched the ground.
    The moon glinted on the black thighs and biceps, but white skin absorbs the moonlight evenly.
    Kankpé fumbled in a leather bag and took out a skullcup. He set it in the space between their knee-caps and added the ingredients of the sacrament: ashes, beans, baobab pith, a thunderstone, a bullet taken from a corpse, and the powdered head of a horned viper.
    He half-filled the skull with water. Then they split each other’s fingers and watched the black blood fall.
    They drank in turn, running their tongues over the bullet and thunderstone.
    Kankpé rolled his eyes and muttered curses: ‘ A dâ la . . . A dâ la . . . ’: blood-brothers live together and together they must die.
    Francisco Manoel drank with the light-heartedness of the man who has skipped from certain death. It took another thirty years for him to realize the extent of his obligations.

FIVE
    HE MADE HIS way to the coast at Anecho, a slave port to the west of Ouidah in the territory of the Popos. The factory beside the lagoon belonged to a Mr George Lawson, a hunchback mulatto and son of an English captain called George Law. The house was still full of English knick-knacks, but the English ships no longer came and guinea-fowl had nested in the saloon.
    He wanted to get out, to forget, to begin again. He would scan the horizon with Mr Lawson’s telescope, watching for a blur to break into the two half circles of grey, but a ship was a long time coming. In the evenings he played chess, and the stories he told about Abomey distracted his partner from his moves.
    At last, an old felucca flying Portuguese colours dropped anchor and sent a boat ashore. She was bound from Lagos to Bahia but a storm had washed her water-kegs overboard and she needed replacements. The Captain agreed to take him: the crew took him for yet another madman in an African port.
    On his last night ashore, he could not sleep for thinking of Bahia. Already he saw the harbour, and the churches and the grog-shops of the waterfront. But towards daybreak he remembered he would be going back a pauper. He remembered his promise to help Prince Kankpé and, by morning, he was in the mood for revenge.
    His letter to Joaquim Coutinho made light of his sufferings and told the syndicate of their chance to rid Dahomey of a monster and replace him with a candidate of their own.
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    THE SYNDICATE REPLIED with a shipment of muskets, rum and tobacco. Teams of porters met Prince Kankpé’s partisans on the frontier. A length of scarlet silk, torn into pennons, became the symbol of the revolt.
    Francisco Manoel waited and went on playing chess: he had just begun a game with Mr Lawson when the new King’s