by James Morrow
“To quote my favorite line from Siren of the Nile,” said Chloe, “‘Sarcasm is but the piety of cynics.’”
Under Léourier’s direction the company collected the scattered pieces of the flying-machine and wrapped them up securely in the silk envelope, whereupon Akawo pointed towards the river, declaring that it would take the company directly to the Huancabamba village.
As the journey progressed—the fogbound Jequetepeque on one side, glossy black rocks on the other—Mr. Chadwick cupped his hand about his cracked rib, Ralph palliated his injured ankle with a crutch improvised from a eucalyptus branch, and Solange soothed her hurt wrist by complaining about it. The farther Chloe and her companions traveled, the more signs they saw of the imminent Indian community. Whereas the river displayed a succession of weirs (walls of woven palm stems affixed to upright posts, forming labyrinths from which no pirarucú or tambaqui fish could hope to escape), the banks featured maize fields, cassava plots, and sarsaparilla arbors. Beyond these agricultural enterprises spread a savannah scored by arroyos and dotted with trident-shaped plants bearing fruits not unlike the cactus pads so beloved of Mr. Darwin’s tortoises.
At last the village emerged from the mist, a sprawling settlement in the form of a wheel, its hub a plaza of crushed stone, each spoke a row of adobe dwellings. Akawo’s unheralded appearance amongst her people prompted the sort of incredulous laughter and joyful weeping that might attend a person’s return from the dead, which was in fact how the Indians perceived her arrival, enslavement on the Pacopampa Rubber Plantation being equivalent (as the princess explained to the adventurers) to captivity by Bora-Chi, god of the underworld. No one laughed louder or wept more copiously than Akawo’s parents—the portly tribal leader, Nenkiwi, and his fine-boned wife, Andoa—who managed to retain a certain regal bearing despite their intoxication by bliss.
Solemnly Akawo recited the names of the thirty-two Indians who’d died from either battle wounds or the late General Zumaeta’s malevolence. As the victims’ relations slipped into the shadows to grieve, Akawo announced that if all went well some three hundred liberated seringueiros in Princess Ibanua’s keeping would soon return to the Jequetepeque valley, followed shortly thereafter by another five hundred under Prince Gitika’s protection. Not surprisingly, this news sent cheers resounding through the village, but then the atmosphere turned somber again, as Akawo reported that amongst these survivors was a score of rubber tappers blinded or maimed on orders from the devil Zumaeta.
With the coming of dusk the Indians began feasting and dancing, a celebration that rivaled in frenzy the carnaval de la victoria back at the Dominican mission. There was much epená sniffing, of course, especially by Mr. Chadwick, who found in the resin a balm for his cracked rib, and the revelers also consumed many calabashes of masato, a beverage fermented from cassava roots soaked in human spittle. In time Akawo bid the Europeans good night, explaining that she wished to tell her father about the Lost Thirteenth Tribe scenario. Chloe elected to remain near the bonfire—an ill-considered decision, as it happened, for the flames conjured up the fall of Castillo Bracamoros, including the sobering truth that, for all the distress she’d endured whilst dropping death-eggs on the mercenaries, the whole business had also been rather thrilling.
According to the vicar’s pocket watch, the celebration ended shortly before 2:00 a.m. As the Huancabambas retired to their homes, so that the god of sleep, Cona-Caina, might cure them of exhaustion and cleanse them of epená, Mr. Chadwick explained to his fellow adventurers that they were permitted to occupy the empty huts on the rim of the village (or so he’d inferred from his fractured conversation with the princess’s cousins). Thus did Chloe and her friends fall asleep that night in separate quarters, each such dwelling guarded by a doll-sized image of a local god. She could not identify the stout wooden figure poised at the foot of her pallet, but from his carnal smile she fancied he might be the Huancabamba equivalent of Dionysius—call him Suisynoid: lord of misrule, author of illusions, director of masquerades so persuasive as to deceive even the Reverend Simon Hallowborn.
* * *
At first light Ralph appeared outside Chloe’s hut and announced that, having borrowed a donkey cart from the Huancabambas, he was on the point of departing for Puerto Etén, where he would attempt to persuade a whaling master or survey-ship captain to ferry the troupe from Peru to Galápagos. When Chloe praised Ralph for his loyalty to the Encantadas Salvation Brigade, he told her that saving the jeopardized species was the noblest of endeavors, “or so my tattooed octopus believes, despite the gulf separating cephalopods from vertebrates.”
Chloe passed the remainder of the day immersing herself in Old Testament narratives—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and onward—the better to instruct her disciples in their Israelite heritage. She quickly decided that the Book of Judges must not figure in these lessons, for the thing was a horror story from first to last, featuring such gruesome episodes as Jael pounding a tent stake through Sisera’s head, Gideon tearing the elders of Succoth apart with briars, and Samson tying three hundred foxes together by their tails prior to setting them on fire.
Ralph returned at dusk, shrouded in gloom. As far as he could determine, Puerto Etén was little more than a fishing village, never visited by ocean-going brigs of the sort that might take them to the Encantadas.
“Our best hope, my fair philosopher, would be to repair the Lamarck with all deliberate speed, praying that Mr. Hallowborn does not make landfall in the meantime.”
“Chloe will do more than pray,” said Solange, joining the conversation. “She will arrange for the universe to intervene on her behalf.”
“My dear Solange, here’s a conundrum for your irreverent mind to ponder,” said Chloe. “Take Yahweh’s most famous line from Exodus, ‘I am what I am,’ translate it into French, and it becomes, ‘Je suis celui qui suis.’ Remove the egotistical ‘I’ from ‘Je suis,’ and the result is Jesus.”
“You may remove your egotistical ‘I’ if you wish,” said Solange. “As for myself, I believe I’ll go catch some fish. I’m told that Monsieur Léourier can use the swim-bladders.”
The following morning Akawo collected the Europeans together and announced that Chief Nenkiwi would receive them at noon. When the appointed hour arrived, the princess led the explorers to an adobe structure shaped like a plum pudding: the council lodge, she explained—the place where her father “listens thoughtfully to his advisors before doing as he pleases.”
Chief Nenkiwi sat on a fan-back wicker chair that put Chloe in mind of the throne she’d occupied in Siren of the Nile. He was a large and bulky man, like a golem wrought from a hillock of Rio Jequetepeque clay, his teeth as bright and uniform as the white keys on Emma Darwin’s piano. A half-dozen courtiers milled about in the shadows, along with the village shaman—“our pagé,” the princess noted—wearing a caiman-tooth necklace and grasping a scepter capped with a peccary skull.
The audience proceeded apace, Akawo rendering the Quechua speeches into their English equivalents and likewise interpreting the adventurers’ words. Evidently the princess had explained the scenario lucidly to her father, for he began by declaring that he’d already cast the six roles reserved to Huancabambas. Hearing this boast in translation, Chloe realized that the Indians she’d taken for courtiers were actually the chief’s choices to portray Lady Omega’s followers.
“It happens I know about Israelite tribes,” said Nenkiwi. “Back when Chief Caquinte ruled this village—I speak now of my father’s father’s father—a band of black-robed Jesuits appeared one day, having sailed here from a place called Panama. Their desire was to tell my ancestors about the sky god Jehovah, the Hebrew patriarchs, and the Savior from Nazareth. Those priests are still with us. Would you like to meet them?”
At a nod from Nenkiwi, the shaman stepped forward bearing a reed basket. He removed the lid. Four diminutive human heads lay on a rubber mat like a clutch of Encantadas tortoise eggs. The mouths were sutured
shut, as if to prevent the martyred Jesuits from crying out to their Creator as had Jonah from the belly of the whale.
“Good Lord!” moaned Mr. Chadwick.
“Étonnant!” gasped Capitaine Léourier.
“So Chief Caquinte killed them?” asked Chloe.
“He gave the command, yes,” said Nenkiwi.
“And then he shrank their heads?” asked Ralph.
“Not personally. We have specialists.”
“In my former profession,” said Solange, “I often dealt with men whose heads I would have liked to cut off and shrink, also their pizzles,” a sentence that Akawo declined to translate.
“I understand why Chief Caquinte did it,” said Nenkiwi. “He believed the Jesuits wanted to destroy our gods.”
Like a father putting his quadruplets to bed, the shaman patted each little head, then solemnly closed the basket.
“Am I to infer that the Huancabambas still shrink their enemies’ heads?” asked Mr. Chadwick, pressing rigid fingers against his cracked rib.
“On occasion, yes, and then we burn their bodies and mix the cinders into our nightly calabashes of masato,” said Nenkiwi. “Did the four priests end up in Chief Caquinte’s kiln? The historians are silent on this question—but this I know: Jesuit teachings entered our lore only in bits and pieces. I can tell you just three or four stories. The plagues of Eden, Samson and Goliath, the resurrection of Adam—”
“Eve, actually,” said Solange.
“Señorita Kirsop makes a joke,” Akawo told her father. “The messiah-man Jesus is the one who came back.”
“The Deluge story especially fascinated my ancestors,” said Nenkiwi. “Some even built a replica of Noah’s ark in which to enact secret rites. They believed that if a man spent enough time inside the hull chanting hymns and inhaling epená, he would enter the realm of the gods. When the Jesuits found out about the cataclysm sect, they forced it to disband—but the temple remains intact, moored in a swamp near the river.”
The chief assured Chloe that, even though his forebears’ encounter with the Jesuits had left few contemporary traces, the actors he’d chosen would make excellent Israelites. As Nenkiwi introduced them to Chloe—wise Cuniche, wily Nitopari, honest Pirohua, brave Ascumiche, stalwart Yitogua, steadfast Rapra—she found herself pondering the cataclysm sect. If the ark replica had once functioned as a temple, it would be considerably larger than the catamaran that the children had made for their Noah pageant back at the Jesuit mission. She imagined loading the thing onto a raft and hauling it to the archipelago via a towline leading from the bow to the Lamarck. On reaching the archipelago, the Serugites would explain how, long before the coming of Lady Omega, they had constructed a model ark in homage to their primordial ancestor, Noah’s son Shem, whose descendants included Jacob, progenitor of the Thirteen Tribes.
“I should like to see your ancestors’ temple,” Chloe told Nenkiwi. “If it’s a credible facsimile of Noah’s vessel, we’ll want to bring it with us.”
“The replica is very believable. The cataclysm sect built it to dimensions specified in the Hebrew Bible.”
“The precise dimensions?” Mr. Chadwick inquired. “You mean three hundred cubits long?”
“Oh, yes,” said the chief.
“Fifty cubits wide?” asked Chloe. “Thirty cubits high?”
“Quite so,” said Nenkiwi.
Chloe’s pulse quickened. Her muscles tensed. Bit by bit, a new version of the scenario took shape in her brain. This time around, the Serugites were no longer simply itinerant Hebrews who’d found their New Canaan in Peru—no, now they were the appointed keepers and anointed guardians of the vessel that had saved the world.
“Was your ancestors’ temple seaworthy?” she asked.
“To best of my knowledge,” said Nenkiwi.
“And is it still seaworthy?”
“I imagine so.”
“Might it cross six hundred miles of open water to Galápagos?”
“Most probably.”
“Mademoiselle Bathurst, I know what you’re thinking, and I salute you,” said Léourier brightly.
“You have made our improvident plan more improvident than ever,” said Mr. Chadwick approvingly. “Well done.”
“Our English mystic is a clever creature indeed,” said Solange, kissing Chloe’s cheek. “In that regard she is rather like a fox, or a freethinker, or the Covent Garden Antichrist.”
* * *
As magnificent as its Bronze Age counterpart, the Huancabamba ark rose before Chloe and her fellow adventurers in all its epic splendor. Afloat in a secluded fen, the reed-wrapped hull suggested an immense basket—swollen descendant, perhaps, of the bassinet in which the infant Moses had drifted down to Thebes. Although Chloe regarded the Genesis flood as mythical (the Old Testament had not figured in her Manáos epiphany), this aquatic cathedral was certain to provide the masquerade with an extra measure of credibility. She christened it the Covenant.
After subjecting the ark to his professional scrutiny, Ralph declared that only a madman or a deity would attempt to pilot the thing to the Encantadas ere equipping it with masts, spars, sails, helm, and rudder.
“And how much time must we devote to refurbishing the Covenant?” Chloe asked.
“I shall defer to the genius who built the flying-machine,” said Ralph.
“I would estimate three weeks,” said Léourier. “Obviously we must create two teams of aboriginal laborers immédiatement. Even as Ralph’s men add rigging to the Covenant, mine will make the Lamarck rise from the ashes.”
“A worthy plan, Monsieur le Capitaine,” said Chloe. “If your team completes its mission first, then we shall go to Galápagos aboard the Lamarck. Otherwise, the next vessel to figure in our adventures will be this wooden behemoth.” She gestured towards the Covenant, then added, in a sportive voice, “Thus spake the leader of the Encantadas Salvation Brigade.”
Under Akawo’s guidance, Chloe and her friends climbed through the hull portal and into the yawning hollow beyond. Raising their torches high, the adventurers saw that the ark’s builders had followed God’s instructions precisely, creating three interior decks subdivided into scores of stalls, corrals, and coops. Never before had Chloe found herself in so cavernous a space. If Mr. Darwin had sailed around the world not in a ninety-foot brig but rather in the present vessel, and if he’d discovered on his journey a lost continent teeming with Professor Owen’s dinosaurs, he’d have experienced no difficulty bringing back a hundred such dragons.
Because the new fittings would increase the ark’s weight and unwieldiness, the transformation could not begin until the Indians had dragged it seven miles west through the Jequetepeque gorge to the sea. Thanks to Ralph’s knowledge of ropes and pulleys, Léourier’s expertise with rollers and winches, and Chief Nenkiwi’s requirement that every able-bodied male Huancabamba volunteer for the job, the thing proved surprisingly mobile. From dawn until midnight the Indians cleaved to their task, hauling the ark through shallows, over sandbars, around boulders, and finally into Pacasmayo Harbor, until at last it lay moored to the main pier, aglow in the moonlight like an albino sperm whale.
The vessel’s renovation began on a morally equivocal note, with several score aborigines making an unauthorized journey to Puerto Etén and returning the next morning bearing improbable quantities of timber, canvas, and nails—plus two launches: a longboat and a cutter. The Indians insisted that all these materials had come from a graveyard of sunken fishing boats, a tale to which Ralph did not so much assent as acquiesce. If the project must be accomplished with stolen goods, then so be it.
The gods of ambiguity likewise attended the Lamarck’s rehabilitation. It turned out that Léourier had woefully underestimated the number of fish that must be trapped before his team could repair the observation port with cured swim-bladders. The aeronaut’s men would have to sacrifice no fewer than three hundred pirarucús and tambaquis if the airship were to live again.
“At least our Huancab
ambas will be banqueting on the gutted fish,” Mr. Chadwick told Chloe. “I’m quite certain Mr. Hallowborn has no intention of feeding anybody with the creatures that die in the Great Winnowing.”
“There will be no Great Winnowing,” she said.
Whilst the ark and the flying-machine underwent their respective transmutations, Chloe, Akawo, and Mr. Chadwick herded Lady Omega’s six disciples into the council lodge. Before the tutorials began, Akawo unfurled a white cotton robe, elegant as the gown Chloe had worn as the Southern belle in Lanterns on the Levee. “Our pagé has soaked these fibers in his magic,” the princess explained, presenting the garment to Chloe, “so that you will not be nailed to a tree.”
“I have never received a finer gift,” said Chloe, hoping that, just as her pirate regalia had made her feel like an adventurer, so might this robe turn her into a prophet.
She elected to begin the aborigines’ Hebraicization with some of the biblical narratives she’d studied whilst Ralph had undertaken his fruitless expedition to Puerto Etén. The day did not go well. With its odd stories of gods inciting fratricide by preferring mutton to bread—of prideful towers reaching into the clouds, brothers swindling brothers out of birthrights, and fathers binding sons to sacrificial altars—the Book of Genesis mystified the Indians. On the second day they became belligerent, and Chloe found herself substituting Nenkiwi’s flattering epithets for sardonic designations, so that her roster of students now comprised stubborn Cuniche, sneering Nitopari, pigheaded Pirohua, quarrelsome Ascumiche, haughty Yitogua, and fickle Rapra.
Compounding the nascent Jews’ theological confusion was Mr. Chadwick’s belief that they should understand Lady Omega’s advent in the context of the Fall of Man. Christ had come to free the Hebrews of Palestine and the Gentiles of the East from bondage to Adam’s disobedience, and now the English mystic was performing that same service for the Lost Thirteenth Tribe—or so the Huancabambas must feign to believe.
