Chase the Morning

Damballah! Damballah Oueddo!
Ou Coulevre moins!
Ou Coulevre!

The crowd flung the name back to him.

Damballah!
Nous p’vini!

‘Voodoo rites,’ muttered Jyp. ‘I’ve seen a few – but nothing like this one, not ever! It takes the goddam cake! The prayers are the same – the words, anyhow – but the whole tone’s wrong! They’re not praying to the loas, they’re damn well ordering ’em!’

‘Ordering indeed!’ Stryge said huskily. ‘Power is abroad here. This is Don Pedro’s own tonnelle, the heart of his cult. This is the rite of which the other Petro rites are shadows, echoes, imitations half understood – the central rite. Blood draws the Invisibles, living blood, and his power ensnares them. Their natures are fluid, he cannot change and his power ensnares them. Their natures are fluid, he cannot change them – but he can bind them in a form governed by their worst aspects. Damballah is a force of sky, of rain and weather, but they make him the Coulevre, the Devouring Serpent – a thing of storm and flood –’

He stopped, or more likely was drowned out by Clare’s scream. With brutal dispatch the goat was flung up to the altar, spreadeagled and bleating desperately. Don Pedro’s sword made one slow lopping slice down the hindquarters. The trussed beast jerked and shrieked and the worshippers yelled; my stomach heaved. It seemed like an eternity before the blade struck again. Blood fountained up, and the yelling crowd leaped to catch it and taste it, sucking at their hands, their robes or those of their neighbours for the least spot more. The headless body, still kicking, was flung down among them, but they trampled it carelessly in their rush to see the next one sacrificed.

The ritual was the same each time – the two cuts, one to castrate, the other, after a savoured moment, to behead. I shrivelled at every thud of the blade. This was how he would work along the pathetic line of victims, driven frantic now by the chanting and the shrieking and the reek of blood. And when they were gone it was how he’d offer up his cabrits sans cornes, his special goats without horns – Clare, and Mall, and Jyp, and Le Stryge, and all the others. But not me, it seemed. For me he had something really special in mind.

All I’d have to do was sit and watch.

I saw horrible things done. When he killed the dogs it seemed worst of all – illogical, maybe, but that’s how it felt. And each time we saw the sacrifice’s legs kicking and fresh blood spurting and steaming down the runnels in the stone, we thought he’d start on us next. At each new round, as each new vever was traced in the paste of maize flour and blood and trampled soil, new libations were poured, new names shrieked to the skies, new rhythms battered from the drums; the dancers, humans and Wolves alike, flung themselves into new frenzies, and the barren earth shivered under their pounding feet.

Against the pulsating firelight their threshing shapes, milling like a shattered anthill, really did look like a vision of hell. So far most of the dancers hadn’t done anything significant, just scream and sing and stamp with the rest. But it came as no surprise when some of them began to run amok altogether, cavorting and gibbering and falling down in fits. Others ran this way and that in transports of ecstasy, or exploded into screaming hysterics so violent that their neighbours were forced to grab them and pin them down. But the fits soon passed; and more and more of the crowd began to change. Just as the first few had mimicked old men, they took on attitudes as they danced; they chanted in hoarse assumed voices, strutted and capered with peculiar gestures, almost ritualized. They looked like actors auditioning for the same roles. It was as if some other identity had settled over them like a veil, hiding their own.

Disturbing enough in itself, the sight unnerved me horribly. This was possession – the possession I dreaded so much, the distorted loas descending to mount their followers. But they seemed to court it, to embrace it. One or two of the acolytes around the stone snatched up a few props laid ready, as if they knew already what other self would seize upon them. Some of the crowd, too, stayed in the same guise, dancing in the same way, even smearing their faces into improvised masks with charcoal, blood or the spilled flour. But most of the dancers let each new name, each new god’s descent, wash over them like breaking waves of emotion. In the blink of an eye they’d shift from one mood to another, wild whooping wrath or serpentine grace, in a kind of shivering exaltation, half hysterical, half sexual, that burst all everyday bounds of behaviour.