by James Morrow
“I once heard a rumor that El Dorado lies near a Peruvian coastal town—Puerto Etén, as I recall,” she told Léourier. “Perhaps you should look there for your fabled city.”
“I am not acquainted with that theory,” the Frenchman replied.
“Neither is Miss Bathurst,” said Ralph.
Léourier grasped the syringe and inhaled a puff of virola resin. “Mademoiselle, if you wish to avail yourself of my ship and its crew,” he admonished her, “simply say so.”
“I wish to avail myself of your ship and its crew.”
“Granted!” cried Léourier. “How to explain my courtesy? Call it chivalry—a French word, as it happens, chevalrie from cheval, horse. My cheval du ciel is at your disposal.”
“Monsieur le Capitaine, you are my aeronaut in shining armor!” exclaimed Chloe. “The sooner my company reaches the Pacific Ocean, the sooner we can hire ourselves out to a brigantine headed west along the equator.”
“And if you fail to secure such a passage, I shall consider transporting you to Galápagos myself,” said Léourier. “You see, mademoiselle, your desire to save the Encantadas creatures touches me deeply. Like yourself, I am a lover of the natural world—for why else would a man christen his airship the Jean-Baptiste Lamarck?”
“The lizards of Albemarle will sing your praises,” said Chloe absently, suddenly aware that she’d never before heard anyone speak the balloon’s full name. Jean-Baptiste—that is, John the Baptist, four syllables that now set the machinery of her mind to whirring. Reaching for the epená syringe, she eased the nipple into her nostril and squeezed the bulb. Her brain became a hive of incandescent bees. John the Baptist, crying in the wilderness, wielding his ax against the forest of the petrified past. But what if, two millennia later, God had started sending prophets of John’s quality to certain far-flung Hebrew communities, amongst them a clan of Jewish ribeirinhos living on the Rio Jequetepeque—a people who were in fact descended from the Lost Thirteenth Tribe of Israel? And what if this messenger to the Huancabambas one day collected some of her followers together and traveled to the Encantadas, straightaway tracking down Simon Hallowborn and telling him of the Almighty’s disdain for the Great Winnowing?
“Hallelujah!” shouted Chloe, passing the syringe to Solange.
The courtesan delivered a blast of snuff to her psyche. “Was that an epená hallelujah, an antichrist hallelujah, or a light-of-eternity hallelujah?”
“I see how we’ll outfox Mr. Hallowborn! I promise you a role in the masquerade, Solange, and you as well, Ralph”—Chloe lurched towards Mr. Chadwick—“and you, too, Reverend.”
“Thereby making amends for neglecting to cast me in your equatorial pageant,” said the vicar in a jocular tone.
So potent was virola resin, Chloe noted, it could elicit whimsy from even so straitlaced a person as Mr. Chadwick. “Before he can raise a hand against the reptiles and birds, Mr. Hallowborn will find himself standing before a mysterious Englishwoman—call her Lady Omega, dispatched by God to enlighten the Lost Thirteenth Tribe of Israel. This prophet will have in train her most stalwart disciples, to be portrayed by six or seven particularly clever Huancabambas.”
“I can’t imagine who’ll be playing Lady Omega,” said Solange with a hyperbolic smile.
“By combining charm with theology,” Chloe persisted, “I shall persuade Mr. Hallowborn that God abhors his intention to harrow the archipelago.”
Léourier relieved Solange of the syringe, partook of its pleasures, and pressed the implement into Ralph’s grasp. “You’re going to have Peruvian Indians represent themselves as Jews, mademoiselle? Merveilleux!”
“Incroyable!” said André. “Formidable!”
“The sooner we take to the air, the better, oui?” said Léourier. “S’il vous plaît, give André and myself the whole of tomorrow to repair and provision the Lamarck. Our party will leave for the Jequetepeque valley the following day.”
“Owing to this preposterous scheme, this scenario as the Italians would say, I feel as if my darling Chloe has been restored to me,” said Solange. “If I can’t have my she-devil, I’ll settle for an English mystic.”
“You will essay the role of Miss Bianca Quinn, a cripple made whole by the healing hand of Lady Omega,” Chloe told Solange, then winked at Ralph. “I’m casting you as Professor Edward Cabot, the anthropologist who discovered the Hebrew river-folk and their prophet.” She faced Mr. Chadwick. “In time Mr. Hallowborn may question my claim to the mantle of divine messenger, at which juncture you will appear and beguile him with your talent for distinguishing true prophets from false.”
“Miss Kirsop is right—this scheme is preposterous,” said Mr. Chadwick.
“I quite agree,” said Chloe.
“By sunrise tomorrow, you’ll be embarrassed by the whole thing.”
“Embarrassed,” echoed Chloe. “Of course,” she said. “Syringe!” she cried, whereupon the epená went around once more, graciously depriving the Castillo Bracamoros veterans of their immediate recollections—for there was nothing in the day’s mélange of blood, fire, serpents, entrails, pain, and death that a person would do well to remember.
* * *
Against the odds and in defiance of Mr. Chadwick’s prediction, the dew of early morning did not dampen Chloe’s enthusiasm for the Lost Thirteenth Tribe masquerade. Quite the contrary. Awakening in the sacristy, her friends snoring beside her, she concluded that only by playing a character so unearthly as Lady Omega might she thwart a plot so depraved as the Great Winnowing.
Within the hour she visited the Huancabamba encampment and outlined the scenario (as Solange called it) for Prince Gitika. Not surprisingly, he could make little sense of her desire to protect the Encantadas fauna when thousands of South American animals were slaughtered each year by hunters and trappers. She responded with the arguments she’d made in the Manáos café whilst organizing her friends into the Encantadas Salvation Brigade—even the Oxford Diocese had no right to exterminate whole species; back in England she’d formed bonds of affection with the blood kin of the endangered creatures; a child named Miss Annie would want her to save the birds and beasts. Gitika replied that her reasoning still eluded him, but if this Hebrew river-folk chicanery was the best way for his people to repay the English adventurers, then so be it.
“Did Señor Chadwick tell you the scope of my debt?” he asked. “During the battle he saved my life, shooting a flaming arrow into one of Zumaeta’s soldiers, and he also rescued Sargento Jiménez.”
Chloe heaved a sigh, absorbing Gitika’s revelation with mixed emotions. Though delighted to learn that the Huancabambas were even more beholden to her fellowship than she’d realized, she was saddened by the probability that Mr. Chadwick would never forgive himself for acting so valiantly. “If I know the vicar’s troubled soul,” she said, “he has taken the blood of those mercenaries on his head.”
Before their conversation ended, Chloe and Gitika agreed that, rather then accompanying her sister on the overland trek, Akawo must join the balloon expedition. Thus would the Jequetepeque valley natives learn of the victory in a timely manner, and from the princess’s credible lips—even as she persuaded her father that the fall of Castillo Bracamoros traced in no small measure to their European guests, and he must therefore fulfill Señorita Bathurst’s peculiar desire to borrow six tribesmen and take them to the Encantadas.
Knowing that Chloe intended to spend the rest of the day helping Capitaine Léourier prepare the Lamarck for its Andes crossing, Gitika suggested that before searching out the aeronaut she should first visit Padre Valverde. “Mr. Chadwick told me of your own malaria ordeal,” the prince explained. “An encouraging word from someone who survived the disease may lift our warrior-priest’s spirits.”
Thus did the noon hour find Chloe headed towards the infirmary, Gitika at her side. Their route took them through the church that was now a hospital. Attired in gore-spattered smocks, like a community of artists whose preferred medium was b
lood, Dr. Ruanova and his Huancabamba nurses subjected their patients to the cruelest compassion imaginable, dutifully sawing off shattered limbs, realigning fractured bones, and probing perforated flesh for bullets. Akawo and Ibanua acknowledged their brother with fleeting glances, then returned to the desperate business of saving lives and palliating deaths.
Padre Valverde’s private sickroom was a crepuscular place, the walls covered with spasming shadows cast by turtle-oil lanterns. Teeth chattering, flesh quivering, he occupied a straw mattress at the nexus of a death watch whose members included Mr. Chadwick, Capitán Torresblanco, Comandante Cuarón, and a half-dozen Dominican clerics. Quinine fumes suffused the thick tropical air to create a miasmal vapor laced with the drone of mosquitoes and the screams from Ruanova’s clinic. As Chloe and Gitika joined the vigil, Valverde, propped on his elbows, addressed the gathering in the faraway voice of a man recently embarked on the good ship Epená.
“Did we destroy Zumaeta’s army and free a thousand slaves?” said the priest, sweat rolling down his brow like blood from a crown of thorns. “Yes! Does our victory spell the doom of Don Rómolo and his wicked ambitions? No! Do a hundred Cuzco death-eggs lie beneath my bed? Yes!”
“Drink this,” said a weeping novitiate, offering Valverde a draught of quinine.
“Crack, go the eggs!” cried the priest, spurning the medicine. “Crack, crack, crack, and the snakes burst forth, hisssss, wriggling into a world ruled by rubber barons, hisssss, rubber earls, hisssss, rubber kings! Is that Señorita Bathurst over there?”
Chloe glided soundlessly to Valverde’s side. “You will not die,” she told him. “Ten weeks ago I was myself stricken with malaria. Look at me, Padre. I am recovered in full.”
“A spectre is haunting South America—the spectre of capitalism!” wailed Valverde. “Hisssss, and the snakes become capitalisssssmo, writing each ess with their bodies, capitalisssssmo, capitalisssssmo!”
“There are no snakes in the room,” noted Torresblanco.
“You must take some quinine, Padre,” the novitiate pleaded.
“I can see it all!” cried Valverde. “Europeans living in rubber houses, drinking rubber wine, eating rubber food, laying their dead in rubber tombs! And what do the masters of la técnica make next? A man with latex skin, latex tendons, latex bones—a latex brain! He is coming, I promise you!”
“Lie still, Padre,” said the novitiate.
“Try to sleep,” said Mr. Chadwick.
“In thrall to el hombre de caucho, the vampires of commerce will suck from Amazonia every last kilo of white gold!” the priest shouted. “They will flay from our Indians every last pound of flesh!” he predicted. “Aplassssstado, write the snakes, aplassssstado, squashed, aplassssstado, squashed, aplassssstado!” declared Hernando de Valverde, and then with a strangely mechanistic cry, like a shriek from the engine of the Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, he crashed back into the mass of pillows, released a final breath, and surrendered his soul to his Creator.
10
Touching upon an Ancient Theological Riddle: After Resting on the Seventh Day, Did God Appropriate Adam’s Foreskin on the Eighth?
Aeolus blew from the east, in soft yet ceaseless gusts, and so the crowded company of the Jean-Baptist Lamarck simply drifted, borne by the aether, the better to conserve their fuel. During the flight to Castillo Bracamoros, Chloe had been too frightened to perceive the paradox of flotation in a hot-air balloon: at one with the wind, the voyager has no sensation of forward movement—but now she savored it. Seeking to experience the illusion in full, she peered downward through the larboard window, then invited Princess Akawo to do the same. Below the seemingly immobile gondola, the jungle was sliding west to east. Indeed, the whole planet appeared to be in motion, just as Galileo Galilei had insisted before the custodians of Christian physics, waving their torture instruments in his face, suggested that he might prefer to believe otherwise.
“Now I know how it feels to be an eagle,” said Akawo.
“Or an angel,” said Chloe.
Doubtless there were differences between life aboard a flying-machine and imprisonment in Mephistropolis, but just then Chloe could not imagine what they might be. In these congested quarters lifting one’s arms was a challenge, stretching one’s legs a tribulation, appeasing one’s bladder a precarious matter of negotiating a chamber pot occluded by a Chinese screen. At least their company numbered only six instead of the expected eight. (Although Monsieur Grenier had survived the attack of yellow fever, he was not yet on his feet, and André had remained behind to nurse him.) But this was cold comfort under colder circumstances, the mountain breezes having already found the Lamarck and penetrated the carriage.
Darkness brought a brilliant gibbous moon, shining with such intensity that Léourier declined to drop anchor. Instead he decreed that the Lamarck would sail through the night, thus increasing the company’s chances of reaching Puerto Etén within three days. From their perch beside the larboard window Chloe and Akawo surveyed the nocturnal forest, which by moonlight suggested the bottom of the sea, the gleaming palm trees and shining vines arrayed across the terrain like luminous starfish living intimately with electric eels.
The following day the Lamarck passed through a succession of rainstorms spawned by, as Léourier explained the phenomenon, the collision between hot jungle vapors and frigid mountain air. As the wet winds swirled about the gondola, Chloe, seeking to embroider the Lost Thirteenth Tribe scenario, studied the Bible she’d received from Mr. Chadwick on the Marañón. Negotiating Genesis, she happened upon the name “Serug,” son of Reu and father of Nahor. Yes, that sounded right. She would call her Huancabamba followers “Serugites.” In her imagination the complete saga of the Hebrew river-folk unfolded, beginning with a heretofore unknown procreative act by Jacob—the fathering of a son beyond the dozen fated to sire the Twelve Tribes. (A full third of those progenitors had issued from the concubines Bilhah and Zilpah, either of whom might have easily conceived an extra patriarch.) After coming of age, Serug declined to follow his brothers to Egypt. Instead he took a wife, built a barge, and embarked on a perilous voyage, convinced that a New Canaan lay across the sea. His quest terminated in the Jequetepeque valley, where his children’s children’s children adopted the Quechua language of their Indian neighbors, even as their skin darkened under the rays of the tropical sun. And then, generations later, just as John the Baptist had arrived amongst the Old World Israelites, so was the Lost Thirteenth Tribe blessed with Lady Omega, their own private prophet.
When Chloe announced these flourishes, her companions were quick to praise them, including Princess Akawo, who’d evidently grasped the strategy behind the masquerade. “Six of our tribe will set off for the Encantadas with Professor Cabot, who is really Señor Dartworthy, and Lady Omega, who is really Señorita Bathurst,” she said, fingering the crucifix Hernando de Valverde had given her the day before he died: a wondrous silver artifact, complete with a sculpted Christ the size of a dragonfly. “After reaching the islands, Señor Dartworthy will tell the English shaman Señor Hallowborn that these Huancabambas are Hebrew ribeirinhos. Because Señorita Bathurst knows the mind of the One True God, Señor Hallowborn must listen when she tells him not to harm the animals.” Akawo squeezed Chloe’s palm. “This Lady Omega, she is rather like the Galilean rabbi of whom poor Padre Valverde so often spoke—am I correct? I hope your enemies do not nail you to a tree.”
“Crucifixion is not in the present draft,” said Chloe drily, “nor will it appear in the next.”
Shortly before noon on the Lamarck’s third day aloft, the wind lost its vitality. Undaunted, Léourier engaged the propellers. Like some immense aerial puffer-fish, the flying-machine swam above the Andean foothills, formations so massive that back in England they would have been called mountains. As the Lamarck ascended, the temperature plunged, the bitter air sowing a ragged crop of icicles along the engine struts and carriage ropes. In their quest for warmth the passengers embraced one another, stomped their
feet, and reached through the roof vents to thaw their hands in the heat of the kerosene burner.
Chloe did not so much fall asleep that night as allow the cold to stun her brain and numb her flesh. At dawn she roused herself. Climbing over the oblivious bodies of Akawo, Solange, and Mr. Chadwick, she stood before the glass observation port. An epic panorama met her gaze: the ice-capped Andes, a thousand times more wondrous than the grandest set ever erected at the Adelphi Theatre. The helmsman of the moment was Ralph, singing a ribald chantey as he steered the ship amongst the crags. Seated at the chart table, Léourier looked up from his map of Peru and cautioned Ralph not to let the Lamarck climb above the summits, for at that altitude the air became so thin that “whoever attempts to breathe it will soon grow faint, lose consciousness, and die.”
Hour by hour, mile by mile, the balloon negotiated the misty cliffs and snowy slopes, propellers churning, engine grinding. On all sides the Peruvian peaks rose like gigantic teeth, so that Chloe imagined herself as Jonah peering down the gullet of the whale. This notion so beguiled her that she revisited the original biblical narrative, finding herself deeply moved by the hymn Jonah had sung from his fishy prison.
“‘I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and He heard me’!” Chloe recited aloud. “‘Out of the belly of Sheol cried I, and Thou heardest my voice’!”
“Being willing to rescue somebody whom you yourself rammed down the throat of a sea monster does not strike me as the quintessence of compassion,” said Solange.
“In France these days, God is practically illegal,” noted Léourier. “I cannot decide whether we’re better off without Him, or worse.”
“We Huancabambas tell ourselves no such stories,” said Akawo, pointing to Chloe’s Bible. “When we wish to be with our gods, we walk along the river.”
