Chase the Morning

One minute, as the chant of Gbedé! went up, they jerked and ground their thighs in crude spasmodic mimicry, ritualistic, robotic – like disjointed skeletons mocking the movements of the flesh. The next, to the cry of Zandor!, they trenched the stony soil with their feet, like ploughs – then, crouching, spilled their guts and trampled it in. When the name Marinette! was called from the altar, the dancers stalked and rolled their eyes in grotesquely seductive attitudes, posturing before the altar, each other, even us where we lay bound. A Wolf woman strutted and cavorted up and down before us in her rags, flinging her straggling purple hair against her long limbs, mocking us with gestures, movements, tearing her robes; others came to join her, women and men, either sex flinging and flaunting themselves carelessly in our faces. The things they did were just crude in themselves – no worse than a whore’s show or a lover’s game, even. But to us they were aggressive, meant to deride us, to humiliate us – and that made them really brutally obscene.

Another minute, another name – and the dancers forgot us and flung themselves at their neighbours, snatching, clawing, mouthing at each other, mounting. But though some of it turned to sex, it took a vicious, nauseating turn, and they shrieked with laughter at the blood that flowed. It was an orgy without passion, without a trace of real lust, even. It turned my stomach. And the moment the little man shrieked out the name Agwé! they forgot, fell apart, rolled and swept their limbs as if swimming over the filthy soil.

I was swimming, too, fighting to stay afloat. Struggling to keep thinking, to work out what Stryge could possibly expect of me – something I could still do and he, with his strange powers, couldn’t. But the drums pounded my thoughts to pulp, my head ached and my concentration shredded. The flickering of dance and flame became hypnotic. I couldn’t force my eyes away from twisted rituals acted out before me. Hours and minutes had no meaning; there was only an endless bloody blur of night, alive with the roar and reek of the seething, manic crowd, doing mad things at a madman’s command. I tried to prove Le Stryge was wrong; I tried to pray. But what could I say? And who to? So much else was out here I’d never believed in, maybe gods were, too – some, any, all, maybe. But what had I to say to any of them?

My mind wandered. Again and again I caught myself swaying in time to the fearful music of drums and voices. I sank my teeth into my lip in a frantic attempt to keep awake, to keep thinking – at least to resist, somehow. But it kept on happening, and I couldn’t find the energy. Sitting on the cold ground like this was numbing me, slowing my circulation. A low voice kept distracting me, mumbling words I half understood. I tried to yell at whoever it was – and only then realized it was me. I thought I was cracking up, at first; then I knew the truth, and that was worse.

I flailed in panic. It was happening already. The thing I dreaded – it was coming over me, softly, insidiously, even as I sat there. Trying to resist that? I hadn’t a dog’s chance.

Frantically I bit down on my disobedient tongue, chomped hard to restrain it. That gave me a better point of pain to concentrate on – and then I knew that the Stryge had been right. There was one thing I could still do. One way I could thwart this Don Pedro, one way of escaping the destiny the little bastard was planning for me. But I also knew why he hadn’t told me what it was.

I could bite through my tongue, choke on the blood, and die.

Easy to think about; not so easy to do. I’d heard of people managing it, prisoners under torture, madmen in straitjackets. And I told myself I ought to have at least as much of a motive as they did, surely. Not that dying would save my friends – but it might save a lot of others. And it would save me from something worse; from being a puppet and a prisoner in my own body, the hollow shell of some predatory horror I could hardly imagine. So I tried. Oh yes, I tried, all right, clamped my teeth down on the thick heart of the muscle till the pain was appalling and the veins stood out – and no further. I couldn’t; I was ready, I had the strength … and I just couldn’t.

Call it cowardice, call it subconscious resistance – but I could no more do it than fly out of the chains that held me. I kept on trying, I bit sharply, I shook my head about; but nothing I could think of would force my jaws to close.