Free The Viceroy of Ouidah by Bruce Chatwin

coast, and a locust got caught in the rigging. On his last night aboard, Francisco Manoel woke up covered in his own vomit: the ship had narrowly missed the tornado that covered the shore with dead fish.
    He brushed aside the krumen who helped him from the canoe. He refused to ‘dash’ the outstretched hand of the fetish-man. He refused to let the porters carry him across the lagoon, and with black ooze coating his thighs he strode up the track to the Captains’ Tree.
    Waiting in the shade of this decrepit ficus were some underlings of the Yovogan, the Dahomean Minister for the Slave Trade. Decanters of claret, madeira, rum and distilled palm-wine were laid out on a card table missing most of its baize.
    He drank their toasts and soldiers fired their muskets in the air. A royal eunuch with silver horns on his temples tilted his head, asked what presents he had brought from Brazil, and gasped when the answer was ‘None!’
    A palaver followed, and everyone seemed quite friendly, but when he reached the Fort he found the place in ruins.
    The flagstaff was broken, the Royal Arms defaced. Walls were roofless and smoke-blackened. The shutters were wrenched off their hinges and the cannon had come adrift of their emplacements and were sinking through the swish walls.
    Turkey buzzards flapped off as he stepped into the yard. A pig was teasing the rind off a jackfruit. A dog pissed against a tree and started howling.
    Through the door of the chapel came a gangling poxpitted figure in a drum major’s shako and the remains of a Turkish rug. He blinked at the newcomer; then, curling his lips back over a set of loose yellow teeth, whooped, ‘Mother of Jesus Christ and All the Saints be praised!’ and bounded over to paw the apparition and make sure it was real.
    Taparica the Tambour was the only survivor of the garrison.
    A Yoruba freeman who had joined the 1st Regiment of Black Militia, he told his sad story in the lilting cadences of plantation Portuguese: of how the Governor died of fever, the lieutenant in a skirmish by the shore; and how the King had let his soldiers loot the Fort.
    They stole the bells, cut the eyes from the Prince Regent’s portrait, unstoppered the rum barrels, buggered a cadet, and marched the men off to Abomey where, for all he knew, their heads were on the palace wall.
    Thinking he knew the secret of buried treasure, the Dahomeans put ants on the Tambour’s chest, pepper under his eyelids and burned his tongue with the tip of a red hot machete. They were about to do their worst when someone explored the powder magazine with a lighted firebrand. Seven bodies were taken from the wreckage, and they left him thereafter in peace.
    In the last of the light he walked his rescuer round the garden where there were mounds of red earth, each set with a rough wood cross. Then they barricaded the gate with palm-trunks.
    Francisco Manoel slung his hammock and lay under a muslin net listening to a symphony of frogs and mosquitoes. And he congratulated himself: for the first time in forty-seven days, he rocked to his own rhythm, not that of the ship.
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    AT SEVEN IN the morning the Yovogan’s messenger came with an order for the Brazilian to present himself at once.
    Taparica shook his head.
    â€˜King him need gun,’ he said. ‘Yovogan him come you.’
    The Kingdom, it so happened, was passing through one of its periodic bouts of turmoil. The people had had enough of the King’s blasphemous ways. He had failed to ‘water’, with blood, the graves of his ancestors. He was a coward and a drunk. Food was scarce, the army was out of ammunition while, from the east, the Alafin of Oyo was threatening to invade.
    The messenger shouted abuse and went away, only to return with word of an official visit.
    Puffs of musket smoke preceded the Yovogan, a frail octogenarian who rode to the Fort in a costume of pink satin, propped up by the grooms,