Cinnamon and Gunpowder (38 page)

Finally we crested a hill and entered a valley fed by a wide river. The trees here were thick and shady.

At first it looked like an avalanche site, but as we neared, the shape of the temple emerged from beneath the creeping vines and cascading boulders. The heads of the stone Buddhas had been knocked off by the vandals, who had, no doubt, dispatched the monks as well. The place was haunted by long-faced monkeys who rocked on their haunches and eyed us warily. Several of them squatted where the statue’s heads had been.

Behind the temple was a low hill bestrewn with chips of brick and rotting wood, and beyond that lay a scab upon the earth—San Lazaro. Even from a distance I could tell that the town was a misbred place where we would not find any rudiment of civility. As we moved past the sun-blighted fields and ramshackle hovels of the outskirts, a pair of half-feral dogs circled our party and snarled at us, practically choking themselves on their outrage. I half hoped Mr. Apples would shoot them, but apparently Mabbot and her crew were used to such welcomes and they ignored the beasts.

San Lazaro was a model of Babel after the fall—a cacophony of cultures. The foundation of the town was crumbling cob and wattle, little more than holes of mud painted with grey lime, like something crabs might make on a riverbed. The warring empires had built over, around, and through the cob leaving a haphazard quilt of architecture and influence. Board-and-batten structures from bygone eras leaned conspiratorially against half-built Romanesque towers. A stockade, built in a hurry for a fight that ended decades ago, was occupied now by rats and muddy children who peered at us through the cracks. Several houses in a row were made of red brick, probably as officers’ quarters, and now served as stables for squat spotted horses. The sour smoke of burning dung hung over the mottled rooftops. At one intersection there was a proper English house, complete with columns and shutters on the windows, but it looked as if the original owners were long gone—the entire building had been painted an oxblood brown and was bedecked with mirrors and ideograms dangling on strings from the moldings.

The people here were as varied as those on Mabbot’s ship but—and I thought I’d never say this—less welcoming. Their races were impossibly muddled from generations of careless rutting.

Cackling men baked adobe bricks in the sun while, nearby, a bearded ancient offered songbirds and crickets in tiny wooden cages. A water buffalo ate lazily from a pile of filth in the middle of the street despite the whipping the boy on its back was giving it. A stooped Oriental sold skewers of blackened meat from a cart to passing ruffians.

I considered buying a basket of red melons from a street hawker when it struck me how easily one might get lost in such an environment. Here, among these thieves and rascals, was my opportunity, at last, to take my leave of Mabbot. I decided that I must approach the situation with the utmost care.

We watched an elephant, every bit as monstrous as they say, carrying a load of bricks, herded by a man with nothing but a bamboo switch. I marveled that such a powerful frame could be thus humbled. In a story, I would have leaped upon its back, and we would have bounded to our freedom together.

We passed a vacant lot where penned sheep were nosing in the dust for whiskers of dry grass. Seeing this, Mr. Apples gave a start and shouted, “Sheep! Cap’m, may I? Cap’m, with your permission?”

Mabbot sighed and said, “With speed, and mark our direction. We’ll not wait.” At this Mr. Apples set off looking for the shepherd.

Joshua saw my grimace and asked with his hands, “Where is Mr. Apples going?”

I tried to explain, with my limited signs, that a man, particularly a vulgar pirate, had appetites of the flesh and that, in the absence of a rightful marriage, those appetites could turn toward his fellow man or, worse, beasts. I then explained hell as best I could, though in all our lessons I hadn’t learned the appropriate signs for such things. And so I made do with invented gestures and the little vocabulary I had. I was at it for some time. For all of my effort, my morality lesson emerged thus: “All men body hunger bad. God becomes sad. Hot place bad, long time very hot…” and etcetera. Joshua gave me a look that told that he seriously doubted my sanity. Then he signed, “You need more practice.”

I couldn’t argue. In any case, the time to act had come. With Mabbot preoccupied and Mr. Apples having his fun, I had my first real opportunity for flight. Remembering my vow to free myself, I seized on the moment and asked Mabbot for a silver piece to buy melons. She didn’t even look at me. “Take Joshua and be back with Mr. Apples or we’ll leave you here.” Obviously more concerned with finding the Fox than with any of my doings, she carelessly dropped three silver pieces into my palm. I pocketed them with a pounding heart. They would go a long way toward passage back to England on some merchant ship.

Feng gave me a suspicious look as I walked away but did not move to intercept me. I gave her my foulest moue and she just shook her head in disgust.

Only a minute later we had rounded a warehouse and were out of sight. My chest grew tight at the thought of liberation, and for a moment my fear was gone. I clapped Joshua over the shoulder and hurried down the alley. We found our way to the ruin of a burned cathedral. Ducking behind its only remaining wall, we finally slowed and Joshua asked, “Where are we going?”

Glorious freedom. I was shaking like an aspic and felt a rush of pleasure at being on my own for the first time in months.

“We’ll just wait here for a moment,” I signed.

I wandered a bit farther through a narrow passage of stone and saw what looked to be a civilized portion of San Lazaro. The sun shone on several brick houses and not a few fruit trees. In the distance a woman was hanging laundry from a line, and this simple vision of domesticity was enough to bring tears to my eyes. By the time Mabbot became suspicious, I would be hidden in a small but clean room, paying some family handsomely for my keep. Eventually the
Rose
would have to leave port, and then I would be free to find work on a civilian ship and begin my journey home.

This was it. My heart had already begun down the happy lane, but I turned to say goodbye first to Joshua. I gave him a manly slap on the back and issued a stern command: “Wait here for five minutes, then go join Mabbot.” I didn’t have time to explain, and I couldn’t have the boy following me, so when he started to ask questions, I gave his shoulders a stiff squeeze and let him see the stern resolution in my eye. “Five minutes,” I signed. “Then go find Mabbot.”

My opinion of the auspicious street went sour almost as soon as I began to clump down it. The glares I got from the men on their stoops told me it would be folly to ask for shelter. The woman I had seen hanging clothes had ducked inside and slammed the door. Two thick-armed men had come out of their homes to follow me. As soon as I could, I turned back toward the main thoroughfare. I’d thought that any city would be preferable to life aboard a ship, but now I began to miss the company of our muscled crew. I went at a quick pace, looking for signs of an inn or boardinghouse where I might hide until the
Flying Rose
had left the harbor.

I found myself in a labyrinth of stinking alleys and cul-de-sacs, which forced me to move like a rat through filthy puddles and narrow overhangs. Wanting only to put distance between myself and Mabbot, I lost my orientation and rounded a corner to find I had made a circle and was looking down an alley I had already traversed. This time, though, a child in rags, even younger than Joshua, stood in the middle, as if to bar my way. In his right hand he held a bone—from the looks of it, a thighbone. He raised it to his face, sighted over the pocked gnarl at the end, and pretended to shoot me. I hurried on, coming close enough to confirm that the bone was probably human. Even as I passed him, he filled me with imaginary shot, pausing only to reload with invisible powder. The child did not smile or even seem to be enjoying the game.

That was when I heard Joshua wail. A most distinctive noise. The boy never used his voice except to laugh, and I knew at once that he must be very scared. The sound brought me full about and now, finally, the bone-bearing child smiled.

Joshua would, no doubt, find his way back to Mabbot; his mind was excellent and full of resource. I turned and resumed my winding hunt for shelter. My knee and hip were already burning with friction and fatigue from the uneven ground, but I ignored them, half galloping, my free arm swinging as a counterbalance to every stride.

Seconds later I heard Joshua again. This time it was a long howl. Maybe he was only looking for me, but he sounded truly scared or in pain. Poor Joshua needed me. Escape would have to wait. I reversed my course and began to run, if my clumping lope could be called a run, toward his voice.

Trying to plot the straightest course back to Joshua, I was obliged to cut through the alley with the odd child again. As I passed, the urchin caught my peg with the crook of the bone, and I went sprawling into a puddle bubbling with algae. I rose, snatched the bone from the child, and might have given him a good thrashing with it if I had not heard the wailing again. I kept the bone and made for Joshua.

Reaching the ruin, finally, I saw two men had cornered Joshua and were stripping him of his clothes, despite his struggling and screaming. His nose had been bloodied, but Joshua fought them with undiminished fury. They seemed to be enjoying the challenge of picking him slowly naked, taking their time and making sport of his terror. The brutes had not seen me, and I crept behind the largest one and raised the femur to take a crack at his head. Before I could swing, though, the odd child leaped onto my back and clawed my face. Blood and grime blinded my right eye as the ruffians turned on me. In the scuffle I managed to get my back to the wall and pull Joshua protectively under my arm. The men facing me had, each of them, been branded between the eyes. By the dimensions of the scars on their brows, I’d guess that the tool was a red-hot coin. What manner of fraternity meted out this kind of initiation, I did not care to know.

The scarred men, silent in their duty, began to wallop me, each in turn, about the face, belly, and groin.

Falling upon my back, I covered Joshua with my body and tried to kick the men with my peg, but I was quickly reduced to simply rolling away, as best I could, from the worst blows. The men said not a word, and with the clarity that comes of fearing for one’s life, I saw when they laughed that their tongues had been cut out. These were escaped convicts.

A kick to my head clapped my teeth closed on my own tongue, and as blood filled my mouth, I fought to stay conscious.

Then the beating stopped, and, peering between my fingers, I saw Mr. Apples breaking the men apart with the thighbone. Not a word was spoken, and the sounds of that grim weapon powdering their jaws and necks was worse even than the pain of the beating. Joshua tried to kick me off but, wanting to spare him this sight, I kept his head beneath me until the men had fallen and Mr. Apples, hardly even sweating, reached down to pull us to our feet.

“Having a good time?” He coughed as he shook the gore from the bone. “Do ye want this for your stewpot?”

I spat a stream of blood and reassured myself that my tongue was still attached at the root. Joshua was weeping and I held his wet cheek with one hand and with the other signed, “Sorry, sorry!” The blood on my hand left a crimson circle on my chest.

Mr. Apples considered the bone for a moment, then handed it back to the odd child, who immediately aimed it at him.

“Captain will be waiting,” Mr. Apples said.

He picked up his backpack, which was stuffed so taut with wool that it looked like a giant tick. This he slung over his shoulder and headed off whistling as if on a Sunday picnic. After helping Joshua with his shirt and sandals—to my great relief, the boy had no serious injuries—we made after Mr. Apples as quickly as we could. My body still tingled with the acrid liquor of fear, and I knew when that subsided, I would feel the bruises I had received. Worse, though, was the guilt. My stubborn thoughts of home had almost gotten Joshua killed.

In my gratitude for his intercession, I tried to make conversation with Mr. Apples.

“That is,” I huffed, “some fine wool, Mr. Apples … You’ll do beautiful things with it.”

“I’ll have to wash and comb it first. Wish I could get my hands on some proper dye.”

“I could give you some turmeric, perhaps. It makes a fine color, and a pinch goes a long way. Or we’ll find you some lichen. The monks used to dye their robes a handsome ocher with nothing but boiled lichen and urine … I must ask you, why didn’t you use your gun on those men? No complaints from me; I’m grateful just the same.”

“I like to use broad strokes. A gun jams, a gun misses, and often as not, even if it hits, the thing will just keep coming. My hands don’t jam nor miss—”

Joshua interrupted us to sign, “See? He only wanted wool. He didn’t want to fuck sheep—”

“You’re right!” I signed with my one free hand.

Joshua considered me for a moment before signing, “Your brain is cracked.”

I couldn’t argue.

We caught up with Mabbot at a great banyan tree whose trunk had been decorated in patches with hammered lead and crude figurines. When she saw Mr. Apples, she yelled, “Where have you been? I’ll not be kept waiting on account of your fondness for— What in bloody heaven happened to them?”

“They were making friends,” Mr. Apples said.

“Enough! The tavern is just there,” said Mabbot, pointing to a brooding windowless building with a small red door. Above the door hung a flag that featured a writhing serpent eating its own tail.

Braga said, “If the Fox is here, it is because he wants to be found.”

“And I want to find him,” said Mabbot.

“I don’t trust it.”

“Then stay here with them.” Mabbot chose ten men to stay with Braga. The rest of us followed her into the tavern.

22

THE BRASS FOX FOUND

In which Mabbot’s hunt ends