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Night winds rattle the window panes and the shutters as the oil lamp flickers. Returning to the present moment, Van Djik blinks back tears and quietly refills the shot glasses, the smell of juniper alcohol as potent as the smell of Death stalking the ancient dwarf.
”It was a dark time for me. I could not look myself in the eye, all my prayers felt like ash in my mouth, my correspondence with my family diminished. You could have lit me aflame with a match I was so soaked in jenever. Then the Englishman they call Blackbeard came to me. He had a ship, a schooner called The Coral Curse, and he wanted me to strike against the Spanish, to teach a crew of pirates all that I’d learned commanding a fleet of privateers. And seeing my chance at redemption, I set to the task. At first, we had many good years…” A fleeting smile passes over his cragged face as Van Djik recalls bygone times.
”My old 2nd Mate Beck, he’s still alive. Dr. Flichard, that cheeky bastard, even served aboard for a time before settling as Nassau’s physician. Ghede, my aide, began as my lookout,” he gestures towards the closed drawing room doors after his manservant.
”Others too…but they keep me at arm’s distance after what I wrought…”
Bitterly finishing his shot glass, Van Djik suppresses a cough with his kerchief, fingers of his gloved prosthetic hand clenching the arm of his chair.
”It was off the coast of Hispaniola that we came across a sinking slave ship. All my years in the Spanish galley returned to me. Those poor Spanish navymen who weren’t taken by the sea died at the end of our rifles and bayonets. We brought many surviving slaves aboard, and I offered them a chance to join us, but their leader Sambo refused.” Van Djik’s brow twitches, his face beginning to contort into a hateful expression before he heaves a sigh,
”Said I was cursed. The Black Spot. Not one among them would serve under me. I tell you, it gnawed at some dark doubt in my mind, but in my hubris I buried that doubt. We were preparing to liberate more slaves trapped in the galley when the Achéron, captained by Jacques Cassard, came to respond to a call for help from the sinking ship. I knew this French privateer well, for he’d destroyed the Dutch vessel Leeuwin earlier that year. A real fight it were. Smoke and blood, all cannons a pounding, screams, death…”
His voice diminishing to a raspy strangled hush, Van Djik gazes across the table to Katerina and Old Zef,
”Sambo demanded we rescue the galley slaves, but we had to sail or be blown to smithereens. A lucky shot killed half the men in my own galley, and so I demanded Sambo’s people get on the oars. The black bokor (warlock) refused, his pride even greater than my own, demanding we first rescue the others.” Looking down shamefully, Van Djik’s lower lip pulses as his yellowed eyes search for some meaning.
”I had Beck and the others make them go below at gunpoint, and I chained them to the galley myself. If the chain was all they understood, I told myself, if that was what it took for them to save themselves and to save us, then it was the chain they’d get. And that man, that serpent-tongued leader of the slaves, he leveled a dead-eyed stare on me and tells me that I’ll live to regret my choice for the rest of my days.”
”We drove off the Achéron, but the sounds of those drowning slaves crying for mercy from their gods… I can still hear them, just there, as if they were right outside the window, waiting, calling for me…” Again, Van Djik’s breathing slows, his milky jaundiced eyes growing distant. Even the temperature of the drawing room has dropped several degrees, surely from the dropping evening temperature. Though his eyes water, Van Djik is drained of tears. He continues in a haunted monotone,
”That’s when the sickness struck. Limping back to Nassau, half dead, the mast damaged, and then yellow fever overcame us. We’d be given no safe harbor in any port. We’d become that most dreaded of fates awaiting a sailor: Trapped on a hospital ship. Each night, the slaves would be praying, and that bokor of theirs, that Sambo, just watching me with all the wickedness of Cain in his eyes. Nightmares and madness began to overtake my crew. There were shadows, things in the corner of the eye. It was a djab (dark spirit), my man Ghede told me, summoned by the bokor. And so one night, in a drunken fit, I grabbed my axe and I went down to the galley to demand the bokor break the spell or take his life… And he was nowhere. Vanished into thin air.”
Clenching his fist, the ancient dwarf fights back a tick from curling his face into a snarl.
”How could that palm-reader all those years ago have known? It's a miracle any of us survived. The disease ran its course, and eventually we were allowed to make berth in Nassau, but the men under me – those who survived – never looked at me the same. And the surviving slaves whispered I was the Devil behind my back. Blackbeard’s hopes for me were dashed, as was his ship upon the beach. I was finished, done for. But somewhere in the Caribbean that bokor roams free, somewhere, maybe even on this island, Sambo works his dark magic, beguiling his people toward meaningless sacrifice, taking lives with his silver-tongued words…” Eyes squinting, Van Djik’s voice drops to a whisper,
”And I will find him. I will show them I did what I did to save us. I haven’t betrayed myself…” And yet his words ring hollow, for Van Djik knows that the palm-reader was right all along. He’d betrayed everything he held most precious, languishing in misery and infirmity.[/SECTION]
| GM: | So [MENTION=4936]Shayuri[/MENTION] you can tell that Van Djik's need to stave off his death is torn between two motives. He is haunted by things left undone; one seems to be atoning for his misdeeds with the slaves, while the other seems to be taking revenge on the bokor that summoned the djab.
Moreover, the charms festooning the drawing room predominantly seem to come from the Dagara peoples of French West Africa (including present-day Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Cote d'Ivoire). Many Dagaran color wheels of blue, white, red, and green framing a golden circle are incorporated into the charms, signifying water, mineral, fire, nature, and earth – the five types of people and constituents of human beings in that tradition. Unlike the traditional Dagaran color wheel, however, some of these contain a pinpoint of blackness at the center of the earth, as if some dark energy is being bound by the forces of life. Mambo Asizwe on New Providence Island hails from the Dagara tradition, so many of these could have been fashioned by her. |
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