Galapagos Regained (34 page)

Shortly after dawn on the eighth day of their Marañón voyage, the
Pulga
reached a sector of the jungle from which rose torrents of black smoke, each twisted ribbon indicating a rubber depot. In his mind's eye Malcolm beheld a
seringueiro
: a skinny brown wretch seated before a brazier amidst a haze of creosote fumes, methodically turning the paddle on which the cured
caucho
lay spitted like a roasting boar, the Indian pausing only to pour on more latex to fatten the
bola
. No act of imagination was required to apprehend the stench of the curing process. It penetrated the entire plantation, a toxic pall that, by forcing the birds to flee, had brought to the valley a funereal silence broken only by the
Pulga
's throbbing engine.

Malcolm now grew preoccupied with a mystery. At no point since lending him the transmutation sketch in Codajás had Miss Bathurst solicited its return. Did she not trust herself to keep the manuscript safe? Left alone with those thirty-five pages, might she set them on fire or pitch them over the stern? Unpalatable as Mr. Darwin's theory might be to an apostle of the Presence, the thing deserved better, and she surely knew as much.

“You've neglected to reclaim your essay,” Malcolm reminded her.

“Giving it to me would be like handing pistol and ball to a melancholic,” Miss Bathurst replied, thus corroborating his conjecture. “Might I appoint you guardian of the Tree of Life for the duration of our travels?”

Much to Malcolm's satisfaction, her hair had grown back sufficiently to halo her face with soft chestnut curls. “You may—but allow me to offer you something of arguably comparable value,” he said, pressing his Bible into her grasp.

“A gift gratefully received,” she said.

No sooner had twilight descended than an island appeared, dense with vegetation: Isla de los Loros, according to the chart. They navigated the wider channel without mishap. The gloom thickened. Torresblanco ordered turtle-oil lanterns deployed in the prow. The boat chugged onward, clattering past the Rio Huallaga tributary, until finally, shortly before ten o'clock, the bell tower of the Misión del Misterio Bendecido emerged against the spangled expanse of the moonlit sky.

Limned by a palisade of torches, the wharf held four steam launches and a flotilla of canopied
tolda
canoes. Whilst Torresblanco moored the
Pulga
, a party of
ribeirinho
militia dressed in mud-flecked green uniforms appeared on deck, equipped with crowbars and claw hammers. Swarming towards the contraband, the soldiers uncrated the cannon, revolvers, and Lepage carbines. Briefly Malcolm contemplated the exposed artillery piece, its barrel carved with laurels and blossoms. Such a paradoxical thing, designed to assuage men's appetite for carnage yet decorated to gratify their love of beauty.

Torresblanco strode across the pier, his parrot perched on his shoulder like an outsized epaulet. Malcolm and the other
Pulga
sailors followed, toting their duffels. Counterpointing the militia's frenzy was the stillness of three Indians huddled together on the dock, their gracile frames wrapped in white muslin robes turned to silver cocoons by the lunar light, their black hair glowing like inverted obsidian bowls.

“Prince Gitika?” inquired Torresblanco, approaching the frozen figures. Each Indian was modestly adorned with a toucan-feather headband and a quartz amulet suspended from a leather thong.

“
A su disposición, señor,
” said the male Indian, evidently one of the fugitive royal children of whom Torresblanco had spoken, “and here are Akawo and Ibanua, my sisters.”

“What do you call your parrot?” asked Princess Akawo. Although their tribe was reputedly of a pacific disposition, the stately demeanor of Prince Gitika's sisters evoked for Malcolm the warrior-women from whom the Rio Amazonas had taken its name.

“Miguel,” said Torresblanco.

“
Puta madre!
” cried the macaw.

“Are there more volunteers on your boat, Capitán,” inquired Prince Gitika, “or is this the whole of your army?”

“At Olivença we lost a man to an anaconda,” Torresblanco replied. “The rest of my company stands before you—our first mate, Señor Dartworthy, our chaplain, Señor Chadwick, and our
bichos da seda
: Señorita Bathurst and Señorita Kirsop.”

“We hope to make ourselves useful to you,” said Malcolm, “but only Capitán Torresblanco intends to take up arms.”

“
No es verdad,
” said Miss Bathurst. “I, too, am prepared to join Padre Valverde's army.”

“You have
already
made yourselves useful,” said Princess Ibanua to Malcolm.

“Because of the Cabanagem cannon,” added Princess Akawo, “the tide of the war will now turn in our favor.”

“That's the finest artillery piece I've ever seen,” said a wild-eyed
ribeirinho,
stepping off the
Pulga
. He flourished his newly acquired carbine. “And this is the finest rifle.”

“
Mierda!
” squawked the parrot.

Prince Gitika introduced the soldier as Sargento Jiménez, then presented him to Torresblanco and the
Pulga
's company, whom the prince insisted on calling “our brave volunteers from Manáos.”

Malcolm lost no time apprising Jiménez of his ambivalence towards the Marañón valley campaign, prompting the sargento to reply, “I understand your doubts, Padre, but I can promise that you will never fight in a war more holy than this one.”

“Christ blessed the peacemakers, not the avenging angels,” said Malcolm.

“Whatever our Savior's present opinion of avenging angels,” said Jiménez, “I feel certain he holds them in higher regard than he does the slave masters of the Pacopampa Rubber Plantation.”

Fixing on Torresblanco, Gitika proposed to escort him to the Centro de Mando, Comandante Cuarón being anxious to learn how many gunboats the capitán had counted in Iquitos. “When we meet again, Padre,” said the prince, turning towards Malcolm, “may it be at the public execution of General Zumaeta!”

Jiménez snapped his fingers, inspiring an aide-de-camp to hand him a turtle-oil lantern. Holding the luminous globe aloft, the sargento marched Malcolm and his friends along an ascending path through the forest, its dark reaches concealing multitudes of insects serenading one another with chirrs and chitters. After negotiating a succession of clay dykes, the party passed through the main gate, beyond which stretched a flagstone plaza where the
ribeirinho
militia and the Indian volunteers were bivouacked in huts and shanties. Campfires blazed everywhere, each ringed by soldiers enacting a curious rite involving a latex syringe. When a given fighter's turn came, he would insert the nipple in his nostril and squeeze the bulb. Instantly the communicant winced and gasped, but his pain soon subsided, leaving him with a countenance as serene as that worn by Miss Bathurst during her Manáos revelation.

“They appear to be taking snuff,” Malcolm observed.

“A resinous euphoriant from the
virola
tree,” said Jiménez, nodding. “The campfires keep the mosquitoes away, and
epená
keeps the rest of the world away.”

It had been a night of vague and sinister shapes, of bizarre tableaux caught by flickering torches and guttering lanterns, but now Malcolm beheld the strangest scene of all. In the center of the courtyard sat a closed wicker carriage the size of a railway coach, its shafts harnessed not to horses but to an oblong pool of silk spread across the ground like a vast
bicho da seda
canopy. Painted on the surface of the deflated bladder was a grinning face embedded in a lunar sphere—the legendary Man in the Moon—accompanied by the words
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
: a good French name for a Montgolfier hot-air balloon, Malcolm decided, for that was surely the species to which the contraption belonged.

“Do I correctly infer you plan to attack Zumaeta from the sky as well as the ground?” asked Dartworthy, pointing towards the balloon.

Jiménez nodded and said, “By means of his extraordinary flying-machine, Capitaine Léourier will assault the enemy with Cuzco death-eggs.”

The sargento guided his party along a columned arcade to a sacristy that now functioned as a barracks, its dirt floor checked with mattresses set on wood frames. Probed by the light of Jiménez's lantern, the niches disclosed stores of thuribles, chalices, ciboria, and vestments. Tonight, mused Malcolm, he and his companions would sleep under circumstances befitting Miss Bathurst's arguably sacred ambition—her campaign to rescue a precious sector of Creation from the ravages of theology.

“Cuzco death-eggs,” said Miss Bathurst to the sargento. “Are they a kind of weapon?”

“
Sí,
” replied Jiménez, entrusting the lantern to Dartworthy. “Between our aeronaut's bombs and Torresblanco's cannonballs, we are certain of victory.”

Having spent the past thirty-eight nights in a damp and filthy hammock aboard a vibrating engine-boat, Malcolm was pleased to find himself staring at a grid of dry and stable mattresses. If the others wished to stay awake and chatter, so be it, but he would discard his consciousness without delay. Stretching his grateful bones across the nearest pallet, he soon found himself aloft, dream-borne, navigating a scarlet sky aboard Capitaine Léourier's fabulous flying-machine. At length he landed back home in Wroxton, a man without a parsonage, a flock, a faith, or an income, yet deliriously happy to be so far away from the bedeviling ambiguities of the Great Rubber War.

*   *   *

Shortly after daybreak, a
ribeirinho
corporal with a walrus mustache and skin the ochre of the lower Amazon strode into the sacristy and informed the
Pulga
's company that at 7:00 p.m. they should betake themselves to the refectory, where Hernando de Valverde would serve them a meal and offer his gratitude. One hour later, the same soldier appeared and announced that their audience with Padre Valverde had been postponed by forty-eight hours. This change of schedule hardly surprised Chloe. Obviously the warrior-priest must attend to matters more pressing than thanking a disheveled band of English explorers for inadvertently supplying his army with a cannon.

On the morning of her fellowship's scheduled dinner with the priest, Chloe donned her Pirate Anne regalia and explored the mission grounds, observing Prince Gitika and the polyglot Indian army preparing to bring down the fortress. The prince divided his energies amongst three Marañón valley tribes, offering advice and encouragement as, minimally dressed in tree-bark vests and painted
tangas
aprons, they readied their weapons. Decorated head to toe with spirals of red and purple dye, the Bawuni incendiaries applied pitch to the barbs of their arrows and spears. Proudly flaunting their elongated ears, an enhancement they'd accomplished by implanting cassava discs in the lobes, the Ucharu blowgunners cleaned their preferred implements of war—hollow palm-wood tubes outfitted with conical mouthpieces—and anointed the darts with curare. Distinguished by the braided queues running down their backs, the Yamuna archers methodically strung their six-foot bows, then filled their wicker quivers with arrows, each tipped with the serrated spine of a ray-fish.

Flying firebrands, poison darts, deadly arrows: to Chloe's untutored eye this exotic arsenal seemed fully capable of creating whatever quota of dead mercenaries Comandante Cuarón's strategy demanded. No less industrious than Prince Gitika was Sargento Jiménez, presently drilling the
ribeirinho
militia and its attached Huancabamba irregulars, the soldiers and refugees taking up the recently arrived carbines and practicing their aim on life-size figures sculpted from straw and mud. Torresblanco, meanwhile, having seconded himself to the artillery squad, taught his soldiers how to load, prime, aim, and fire the cannon. As the mission walls shook with the percussive thunder of discharging ordnance, Chloe realized she was witnessing a kind of theatrical rehearsal, a run-through for what would surely be the bloodiest melodrama ever staged in Peru.

Eventually her wanderings brought her to the Man in the Moon airship, the
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck,
as fabulous in its own way as Mr. Darwin's steam-heated zoological dome. Two Frenchmen presided over the deflated silk bladder, one dressed in the black-and-white striped shirt of a Breton sailor, the other wearing the gold-braided blue jacket of an aeronautical commander, both balloonists scanning the fabric whilst talking at breakneck Gallic speed. Finding a tear in the silk, the sky-sailor dropped to his knees and sutured the gap with needle and thread, whereupon his superior, an elegant man sporting a mustache suggesting an
accent grave
and its
accent aigu
complement, approached Chloe and introduced himself as Philippe Léourier, master of the flying-machine, and his assistant as André Hervouet, helmsman.

“I am Miss Chloe Bathurst, a well-traveled British naturalist who found it expedient to join the crew of the
Pulga Feliz
.”

“You are a long way from England, mademoiselle,” noted Capitaine Léourier.

“As are you from France,” Chloe replied. “By this time next month I hope to have placed another thousand miles between myself and London, landing in the Galápagos archipelago.”

“Why do you seek the Encantadas?” asked Léourier.

“Originally I'd intended to collect specimens of scientific import, but now I wish only to protect these same reptiles and birds from a fanatical gang of poachers.”

“My own quest has likewise been a journey from the sublime to the political,” said the capitaine. “André and I have lived in Amazonia for two years now, seeking the fabulous lost city of El Dorado. Day after day, week upon week, we have peered down into the jungle, hoping to glimpse golden spires piercing the mist.
Hélas,
despite excellent resources—the maps I commissioned, the rumors I purchased—we have found nothing, so I decided to lend the
Lamarck
to the cause of defeating Zumaeta.”