Beauty (19 page)

The nearer trees were decked with orchids, their cloying fragrance spiced by scents of lemon and clove. Though the perfume beckoned, the jungle did not welcome, nor did the water. The scene was not there to be entered but to be observed, like a splendid backdrop for some as yet unplayed drama. Seen thus, with the sun filtered through rising veils, the scene was one of somber loveliness, of profound melancholy, of aching nostalgia, as though I-or everyone-had known this place, in youth, or in dream, or in richest imagining.

I had told the boots to take me to my mother. If she were anywhere near, her presence was hidden from me. Given that I still wore the boots, I could have gone striding off in search of her, but all directions seemed equally magnificent and mysterious, and along with the heady fragrance of the orchids and spices came the stench of swamps, an odor which recommended caution.

Time in this place was not equivalent to ordinary time. Hurry had little meaning. Impatience had none. I resolved to wait upon matters. The cloak hid me well enough that I was not afraid of predators; the sand spit was dry and warm; I had set out not long after supper and I had eaten reasonably well. So I sat down and waited, bringing my book up to date, letting the slow surge of the flood before me lull me into a daylong doze broken only when a tribe of quarrelsome monkeys came down to drink. The water was silent.
Altissima quaeque flumina minimo sono labi,
Father Raymond had been fond of saying: deep rivers are quietest. He usually said it when the aunts were chattering. Or when I was. This river was quiet enough to be very deep.

When something changed at last, I sensed it only gradually as a remote dissonance adding itself by tiny increments to the sounds of birds and monkeys. A splashing sound. A clattering yet liquid noise. Something upon the water, or within it. Something far off to my right and slightly behind me, in the direction of the water flow, coming upriver though as yet hidden by the towering screen of trees.

Should I become visible or remain invisible? Should I appear miraculously out of nothing? I considered the alternatives without moving as I watched the bow of a great riverboat emerge from behind the jungle, a tall, many-decked boat with two huge wheels at its sides, thrashing its methodical way against the flow, its decks cluttered with folk. In this case invisibility would not aid me. I slipped off the cloak and boots and stood forth in my simple gown to summon attention with my ruffled sunshade.

It was some time before anyone saw me, then everyone saw me at once. The ship shuddered as it changed direction. The riverboat's whistle screamed, making me put my hands over my ears. A small boat was put over the side and came darting in my direction like a water bug, walking upon its oars. The two rowers ran the little boat up onto the sand and then sat in it staring at me as though I were some kind of exotic animal, though I was no more strange in my way than they in theirs, they being dwarfish and dark-skinned men with narrow ears.

"My name is Beauty, Lady Wellingford," I told them. "I have been abandoned here and need transportation to the nearest town or city."

They muttered. I understood them well enough for they spoke a kind of bastard Spanish with a great deal of Latin in it. At last one of them got out of the boat and offered to carry my baggage. I smiled prettily and let him, somewhat astonished to find I had baggage. We got into the boat, they pushed off with the oars, and we went skimming over the water toward the riverboat, which beat slowly at the current, holding itself in place.

The lower deck protruded fore and aft of the upper ones, making the upper decks look rather like the upper layers of a wedding cake set down upon an uncompromising loaf of something darker and more practical, pumpernickel, perhaps. The lower deck carried cargo. The upper ones carried passengers. So much was obvious from the faces peering at me over every rail. I ascended a ladder to the second deck, then had only time to straighten my skirts before being confronted by the captain, a gold-bedecked, large-headed, stocky person who might as well have been carved out of wood for all the solicitude he expressed.

"Ma'am!" he said, in a threatening tone. I repeated my self-introduction in a lingua franca of my own, what Spanish I remembered from school plus Latin and a smattering of Saxon and medieval French, at hearing which he glared at the sand spit as though it had been guilty of hatching me of its own malicious will.

"Never before!" he asserted. "I've been ferrying people, man and boy, so many years I can't count, and never before has there been anyone picked up along the way."

"I have some resources if it's a question of payment," I suggested.

He shook his large head, drawing his brows together, considering what this might imply. At last he said, "No need. Traveler in distress is enough reason to stop. Got an empty cabin, so no difference." And he stalked away, muttering mysterious oaths in what I took to be Hebrew and Greek, shaking his head, plunking his stumplike legs down as though to force them through the planks. Despite his assurances, I did not feel welcomed.

There was time to catch only a glimpse of the other passengers: some, behind a barricade, burly and small, brown-skinned and dark-haired, dressed fancifully in what appeared to be ethnic garb; others, walking about the deck, lighter-skinned, dressed in uniforms or simple gowns. It was a colonial group, obviously. The ruled and the rulers.

While those behind the barricade stared and pointed, one of the boatmen led me to the empty cabin, a small, cool room with a wardrobe and dressing table along the inner wall, a narrow, netting-canopied bed, and shuttered windows looking out upon the deck. It was there the captain joined me when he had had time to compose himself and become more cheerful about my rescue. The intervening moments spent alone allowed me time to decide upon a story of kidnapping and abandonment. I had been taken from my home, I did not know by whom. I had been left upon the sandbank, I did not know where. Some of it was more or less true, and the rest could not be disproven.

The captain shook his head at all of it, while claiming he was delighted to be of service. His name was Karon, he told me, and the boat was the
Stugos Queen,
currently bound for Nacifia in the land of Chinanga, which country surrounded us. He asked me if these geographical locutions sounded at all familiar to me, and I could only reply honestly that they did not. I had expected to be in Ylles. I had expected to be in Faery. Perhaps this was Faery. Certainly it was not Ylles.

"Is the land of Ylles near Chinanga?" I asked.

"By St. Frog," he said, "do they have their own land now?"

Wondering if I had heard the oath he had used correctly, I let the matter go. He evidently did not know of Ylles. He led me out upon the deck and introduced me to my fellow passengers before conducting me upon a tour of the vessel. The passengers were more than merely interested in me. I gained the impression that matters in Chinanga were not always amusing. One very old and wizened lady held my hand long in hers, cocking her head to get a good look at me. "Hello, a beauty," I think she said. Surely she could not have said, "Hello, Beauty," for I was introduced as Lady Wellingford. She smiled engagingly, but her manner was a little forbidding in that it was quite intense and focused. She was a stranger, and yet with something familiar about her, as though her voice or face, perhaps, resembled someone else's. Someone I had known well.

The forward hold, said the captain, was full of raw rubber from the plantations downriver. The after hold was stacked with sacks of coca leaves and coffee and stalks of plantain, swarming with flies. At the extreme upriver end of the voyage, she would take aboard exotic fruits and wines from the sunny hill plantations of Baskarone, sent down through Joyafieur.

"Baskarone?" I asked. The word set up a strange reverberation inside me, that almost-recognition I had felt for the old woman. "Baskarone?"

"Our neighboring country," he said. "Up there." He pointed upward with a peculiar gesture. I assumed he meant at a higher altitude, though the river mists prevented my seeing mountains, however close they may have been.

We stood at the rail together. The Stugos was in flood, he said, as it was at least half the time, but the torrential waters were more moody than usual even for floodtime, full of strange eddys and streams of bubbles emitting violet fogs. The crew, he said, seemed to be spending half its off-duty time at the river altar on the taffrail, propitiating one or another of the water devils or begging St. Frog to protect them.

"St. Frog?" I asked, wondering once again if I had heard him correctly.

He nodded. "We bought relics of St. Frog from the Cathedral of Helpful Amphibians last time we were in Nacifia." He scratched his buttocks reflectively, wondering out loud if it might be worth the trip up a tributary river to a particular one of the mighty falls at the very border of Chinanga where one might make an offering at the shrine of Our Toad of the Intermittent Torrents, perhaps, or to Saint Serpent of the Sandbanks.

I was reminded of my father. "Is such a pilgrimage thought to be efficacious?" I asked wearily, a question I had many times asked Papa.

He shook his head gloomily. "Don't know," he replied. "Some say yes, some say no."

He might have explained further, but he was hailed by a crewman and left me to go to the lower deck and put his ear to one of the hatches, listening, no doubt, for the rubber or coca leaves to declare themselves. I knew then that he had lied about what was in the holds.

I stood at the railing, asking myself whether I should put on the boots and go in search of Mama. The old woman stood next to me, as she was to do often in the succeeding days.

"Have you come here to meet someone?" she asked me, a little surprisingly, for surely Chinanga was not the crossroads of the world.

"I have come here to meet my mother," I said. "But I have no idea where she is."

"We arrive in Nacifia in three days," the old woman told me. "You will undoubtedly be able to find out where she is, in Nacifia. Someone there will know."

I thanked her and she smiled at me, a smile of particular pleasure and joy. Nothing in our conversation explained her expression, and I went to my room thinking her even more strange than I had formerly done.

Strange or not, she had told me the truth. On the third day, just before dawn, the dome of the Cathedral of Helpful Amphibians in Nacifia loomed against the fading stars. Our arrival time, which may well have been purposeful, allowed the whistle to be used to maximum effect. While I watched our approach from near the rail, my hands held tightly over my ears, Captain Karon hauled on the whistle rope, hunching his head down between his shoulders to keep the reverberations from rattling his skull. The resultant howl was enough to wake the dead. Certainly the noise could do nothing less than bring the sleeping town to attention.

When he had hauled on the rope a few more times, sending great clouds of pigeons reeling skyward from behind the dome of the cathedral, to be turned into flying rose petals by the pink light of dawn, he evidently felt he had let off enough steam that he could tell the stokers to leave off, rake down, and tie the valves open. By the time we docked, the town was stirring like a disturbed anthill. I spied more than a few rude gestures aimed in our direction. The captain only grinned and hoisted his round belly over the top of his trousers, stroking it with one hand as he might some imperfectly tamed animal, raising the other in an ironic salute in my direction.

I went down onto the lower deck and looked about me with the keenest interest. The passengers were a motley lot, their oddities more evident than usual thus assembled in contiguity to one another, and their crated belongings were odder yet. Armadillos plated in gold and decked with jewels; chickens in shades of vivid emerald and aquamarine; turtles, their eyes awash with lugubrious tears. There were even stranger figures upon the pier, leaping men and women with painted faces, cavorting among the crowd in manic lunges. I pointed them out to the old woman, who was standing beside me. She habitually stood beside me. As though she did not want me to be out of her sight.

"From the clownery," she remarked, pointing to a brightly painted building along the river as she tapped her head with a meaningful gesture. "Every now and again they escape."

"Do you know Nacifia well, madam?" I asked her.

"I have explored it," she said. "Prior to choosing it as my place of residence for a time. I have a little house on the hill, there, up the Street of Immaculate Intentions. Perhaps you will visit me there."

"Perhaps, madam," I murmured.

"Captain! Ho, captain!" The call came from the pier, slightly below us and to our right. Captain Karon craned his neck to see the person waving her flowered umbrella at him. I had not seen her approach, though she was worth the seeing now she had arrived, a full-bodied and bright-haired woman, skin glowing ivory in the creamy shadow of her highly domed parasol. Her voice was softly rounded, an amorous moo, so solid and smoothly finished a sound that it seemed to writhe itself toward his welcoming ear, probably tickling all the way down as it demanded attention.

"Mrs. Gallimar!" he shouted in return, taking off his gold-bedecked cap and stumping toward the gangway where passengers were already clotting up like ants on a mango, waiting to disembark. Captain Karon slid behind the barrier and down the gangway to meet the lady on the pier. This was no doubt the lady he had mentioned to me-and to everyone-so frequently during the voyage.

She spoke clearly, making no effort to avoid being overheard. "Oh, Dear Captain Karney. Here you are again, but so late!" She tapped him on his chest with an extended forefinger, the finger bending backwards like that of an oriental dancer, flexible as cable, as she looked up at him through fringed eyelashes with an expression of admiring coquetry. "I expected you weeks ago." Her voice lowed, like that of an amorous bovine; it sinuated like a snake-a veritable cow-python of a voice.

The captain flushed and shifted from foot to foot, as though aware of a sudden warmth in various parts of his anatomy. I wagered idly to myself that Mrs. Gallimar, with her smooth skin and her smell like a garden full of flowers, had that effect on most males. "We're right on time," he objected. "Not even a day late."