Down in The Bottomlands (and Other Places)

by Harry Turtledove

  But bored he was, in short order. Neither the Muura nor the Huurwa was a big enough river to be impressive in its own right, and one stretch of jungle looked much like another. Of the riverboat’s crew of three, only Iispaka the pilot spoke Ketjwa, and he was so taciturn he might as well have known no language at all.

  Thrown back thus on his own resources, Park plunged into his books. By both inclination and training he was a creature of the printed page; he was convinced the answer to the endless strife between Tawantiinsuuju and the Emirate of the Dar al-Harb was set forth there, could he but find it.

  Monkey-face had learned to leave him severely alone when such fits came upon him. In them, he often bit his thane’s head off. Other times, as when he was learning Ketjwa, he insisted that Dunedin share his zeal. To his servant, that was worse.

  Even the air of good cheer Ankowaljuu cultivated wore thin as Park kept his nose in his books and spoke almost as little as Iispaka. Only the swarms of mosquitoes that buzzed endlessly round the steamboat made him sit up and take notice — their bites roused him to brief spasms of insecticidal frenzy.

  Then one day, about a week after they had left Iipiisjuuna, Park slammed shut the volume in which he’d been lost.

  “Tell me,” he asked Ankowaljuu, his voice suddenly so mild that the tukuuii riikook gave him a suspicious glance, “does your faith out-and-out forbid you from writing down what you believe in?”

  “No one ever does,” Ankowaljuu said after a moment of frowning thought. “As you’ve seen, we of Tawantiinsuuju pride ourselves in heartlearning everything we need to know.”

  “Aye, aye,” Park said impatiently, “but that’s not what I asked. I want to know if you may, not if you do.”

  “But why would we want to?” Ankowaljuu persisted.

  Park rubbed his chin. “Hmm. Reckon you had an upgrown man like, like me, say, who wanted to become a changer to the faith of Patjakamak. Upgrowns aren’t as good at heartlearning as children. Would you be allowed to put things in writing to help him grasp your faith?”

  “Like you?” Ankowaljuu said. “Is that why you’ve been toiling so hard: because you’re thinking on joining the brotherhood of the sun and the All-Maker?” His English failed him; with shining eyes, he switched to Ketjwa: “We would welcome you, my friend.”

  “I thank you.” Park felt like a heel — he had no intention of converting — but plunged ahead: “Could you make such a writing for me?”

  “Aye, and I will,” Ankowaljuu promised. After that first moment of emotion, he had his English back. “You are rick: the writing in itself is naught shameful nor sinful, and so you will have it as quick as is doable.”

  That did not prove so quick as either Ankowaljuu or Park, for rather different reasons, hoped. A search of the ship revealed only three or four sheets of paper. “Why more?” Iispaka demanded when the two eager men upbraided him for the lack. “I don’t write.”

  “Where’s the nearest storehouse?” Ankowaljuu asked. Public storehouses in the towns and along the highways of Tawantiinsuuju kept vast quantities of all sorts of supplies against time of need.

  “Next town is Tejfej,” Iispaka said. “Maybe two days away.”

  Ankowaljuu fumed at the delay. He spent as much of the intervening time as he could preaching at Park, perhaps expecting oral argument to work as well as written. To the tukuuii riikook’s disappointment, Park responded by diving back into his books. While he was studying, he could ignore distractions.

  He could not so escape Eric Dunedin. When they were bedding down on deck under mosquito netting, his servant whispered, “Do you really have truck with that heathen foolishness? I ken you’re truly no hallow, and even if you were, you left the church to take up your judgeship. But I thock you still a Christian wick.”

  “I am,” Park said after some moments’ thought. “All the same, though, I need to learn as much as I can about faithly dealings here, for the strife between Tawantiinsuuju and the Emirate is ungetawayably tied up in ’em.” He paused again. “D’you believe me?”

  The answer mattered to him. Dunedin was friend as well as thane. Relief flowed through him as the small, wrinkled man said, “Reckon I do. If I can’t trust you, I can’t trust anyone.”

  “Thanks, Eric,” Park said softly. He got no reply and repeated himself, a little louder. Still no answer, only soft, regular breathing. Monkey-face was asleep. Park let out a snort of laughter and joined him.

  That night, they passed from the Huurwa to what Park persisted in thinking of as the Amazon. It was as if a giant hand had pushed the jungle back from either side of the steamboat: the Great River was a couple of miles wide. Its own mighty current added to the speed the steamboat’s engine could produce.

  As Iispaka had predicted, they reached Tejfej toward evening of the second day after Ankowaljuu had asked for paper. The little town lay on the south bank of the Amazon, just past a tributary smaller than the Huurwa. A few Kuuskoo-style public buildings of massive stonework contrasted oddly with the huts of leaves and branches all around them.

  One of the massive buildings was the storehouse. Using his authority as tukuuii riikook, Ankowaljuu requisitioned a ream of paper. He would sooner have commandeered an airwain, but Tejfej had none.

  “Maybe this is for the better,” Ankowaljuu said as they steamed away the next morning. “Now I will in sooth have the time to write out what you need to know.”

  And write he did, with a furious intensity that reminded Park of his own obsessive leaps into projects. Each evening he delivered to Park the pile of papers he had filled that day. Then Park had to wrestle with written Ketjwa, for Ankowaljuu expected him to read every word and absorb it with proper convert’s zeal.

  “How can you keep track of so much?” Eric Dunedin asked one night, seeing his boss studying by lamplight and occasionally batting away the big bugs the lamp attracted.

  Park looked up, grinned wryly. “It is rather like baptism by thorough indunking, isn’t it?” He wondered for a moment what the real Bishop Ib Scoglund would have thought of that comparison, then went back to his labors.

  Even in the first couple of days, he saw how much constant exposure to Tawantiinsuuju’s written language improved his command of it. He also learned enough about the local religion to develop a considerable respect for it.

  Patjakamak, Ankowaljuu wrote, was the creator and sustainer of the earth and heavens. He had placed the sun above all the stars and made them the sun’s handmaidens. The moon was the sun’s sister and wife, a pattern echoing that of the ruling house of Tawantiinsuuju, which sprang from the sun.

  The sun’s warmth and light was the medium Patjakamak used to shape the world and everything in it. The sun deserved worship for its light, heat, and beauty, and also for its legendary descent to earth to give rise to the empire’s royal family.

  Patjakamak, by contrast, did not allow himself to be seen. Nevertheless, he was the supreme god and lord, worshiped inwardly by every Tawantiinsuujan. That appealed to Park: the sun’s cult had more show, but the invisible god behind it was the more powerful.

  Patjakamak judged the souls of the dead. Those of the good went up to a heaven — literally, an anan patja, an upper house — of rest and pleasure, while those of the bad went to hell-uuka patja, the lower house — where they had toil and pain and sickness forevermore.

  It was, in short, a faith about as sophisticated as Christianity or Islam, though growing from different roots. It had its own pride; Ankowaljuu wrote tartly, “Christians say God’s Son died; we know Patjakamak’s Sun lives.” A man who followed its tenets would live a good life by any reasonable standard.

  None of that was enough to convince Allister Park that he needed to switch religions, but he didn’t see that the Tawantiinsuujans needed to have their beliefs changed, either. He carefully stowed away every sheet that Ankowaljuu gave him.

  A little more than a week after they left Tejfej, they came to Manaus, at the junction of the Great River and the almost equally imp
ressive Black River. Iispaka moored the steamboat at one of the floating docks that let the town cope with the river’s ever-shifting level. “You find airwain here,” he said.

  Park felt sure he was right. Manaus was a real city, nearly as big as Kuuskoo. Bigger ships lay to either side of Iispaka’s vessel; though Manaus was a thousand miles from the Atlantic, ocean-going craft could sail up the Amazon to it.

  None would, though, not any time soon, not if the war went on: the mouth of the Great River lay inside the Emirate of the Dar al-Harb.

  As soon as Ankowaljuu was off the docks and on ground that stayed at the same level, he stepped in front of a wain. The driver slammed on the brakes, though the tukuuii riikook was not that close. He stuck his head out the window and loudly wished Ankowaljuu down to uuka patja; the orderly Tawantiinsuujans did not take kindly to having order flouted.

  Then Ankowaljuu announced his rank and demanded to be driven to the residence of the local kuuraka. The Skrelling in the wain sang a different tune. He jumped out, helped Park and Dunedin load their trunk inside, and whizzed off to the governor’s palace.

  Impressed at such complete and instant obedience, Park asked, “How often does someone get into hot water for feigning that he’s a tukuuii riikook? He could have a rare old time till he was cauckt.”

  “Only seldom,” Ankowaijuu said. “Most folk here would never think of it.”

  “It’s not like that in New Belfast,” Park said.

  “So I ken, but our way suits us.”

  The kuuraka of Manaus was a thin, aging man named Anta-Aklja. He hustled the tukuuii riikook and his companions out to the airfield with breathtaking celerity. Park again spoke in English to Ankowaljuu: “Is he falling all over himself to be helpful, or does he have something going on here that he doesn’t want a tukuuii riikook to see?”

  “You have a mistrustful turn of thock, Judge Scoglund,” Ankowaljuu said in the same language. “Were my sending with you less weighty, I might want to infollow that more closely. As is-” one eyelid fell, rose “-well, I am not the only tukuuii riikook in Tawantiinsuuju.”

  The airwain to which Anta-Aklja’s minions hurried the newcomers was of the same model as the plane that had crash-landed at Iipiisjuuna. Eric Dunedin crinkled up his face at it. “I’d not like to have this twoth one fail,” he said, also in English.

  “What’s that?” Waipaljkoon asked in Ketjwa. Monkey-face made the mistake of translating. The pilot burst out; “You keep quiet! It was just after you came out with your cursed patjam kuutiin that the other airwain had trouble. Are you some jatiirii, some coca-leaf reader, trying to illwish everything we do?”

  He took several minutes to calm down. So, Park thought: under the fine cult of Patjakamak and the sun, superstition lives. He was unsurprised, as anyone who has ever decorated a Christmas tree would be.

  Manaus’ airfield was smoother than Kuuskoo’s. Park’s teeth rattled only a couple of times before the airwain climbed off the ground. Below, he could see the Black River’s clear dark water flowing side by side with the red-brown stream of the Great River; only after some miles would they fully mix together.

  “Where now?” Waipaljkoon asked as he swung the airwain northward.

  “The Son of the Sun flew to Mavaka, near the head-waters of the Ooriinookoo,” Ankowaljuu said. To Park, that meant they were heading for southern Venezuela. Here, though, it was a town in the province Tawantiinsuuju had wrested from the Emirate after their last clash.

  Waipaljkoon gradually shifted course to the northwest. “This would be a faster, easier flight if we hadn’t had to sail halfway down the Great River to find another airwain,” he grumbled.

  “When next you tell Patjakamak how to order the universe, I suggest you take that up with him,” Ankowaljuu said. Waipaljkoon grunted and shut up.

  The flight was as boring as the earlier one had been — until that plane’s engine went out, Park reminded himself. He too hoped this leg of the trip would not be so strenuously interrupted. He sat back and watched jungle go by below, now dark green, now yellow-green. Again it reminded him of the sea with its unending not-quite-sameness.

  Then, suddenly, not long before Waipaljkoon expected them to reach Mavaka, they saw a great cloud of smoke rising high into the air from below. The pilot scowled, pursed his lips. “I’ve seen big fires before, aye, but seldom one that size,” he said.

  “That’s no fire!” Ankowaljuu said as they got closer. “That’s a cursed battle, is what that is!” He got the words out only an instant before they burst from Allister Park. He too had seen the flashes from exploding shells down there. Men were too small to spot from several thousand feet, but goodwains and machine-gun-carrying warwains were visible in clearings carved from the jungle.

  Waipaljkoon needed no urging to steer wide of the battlefield. As the airwain was approaching from the southeast, he chose to fly more nearly due north, saying, “We’ll cross the line in a quieter place, then swing west to Mavaka.” That sounded good to Park, who had no desire to catch antiaircraft fire from either side in a war not his own.

  Unfortunately, though, airwains rushing up to the front to add their pinpricks to the fighting spotted the intruder. Two peeled off to give the strange aircraft a once-over. In a quavering voice, Eric Dunedin said, “They have the star and sickle moon on their tails.”

  Waipaljkoon turned west with everything his airwain had. That was not nearly enough. The Emirate’s fighters would have been sitting ducks for a Messerschmitt or Spitfire, but they were like sharks against a fat ocean sunfish compared to the slow, lumbering transport the Tawantiinsuujan was flying.

  One zipped past the airwain, so close that Park could see the pilot’s grinning, bearded face in the cockpit. The other came alongside, fired a burst from its air-powered machine gun. That fighter’s pilot made a come-with-me gesture, then fired his gun again. What he meant was depressingly obvious.

  “Slavery,” Waipaljkoon groaned as he followed the fighter eastward. The other one stayed on his tail, to make sure he didn’t try anything tricky. “They’ll sell us into slavery if they don’t kill us on the spot for following Patjakamak. That’s all we are to the stinking Muslims, fair game.”

  “They won’t kill us, and they won’t sell us either,” Park said confidently. “Remember, you’re with Judge Ib Scoglund of the International Court of the Continent of Skrelleland. If they harm me, they have an international incident on their hands.”

  “Let’s hope they bother to find that out,” Ankowaljuu said. “Or that they care.”

  “They’ll find out,” Park promised. He left the other half of Ankowaljuu’s worry alone; he didn’t much want to think about that himself.

  The fighter in front of them landed on a strip hacked out of the jungle. Waipaljkoon followed it down. Moors who had been standing around or working on other airwains came trotting over at the sight of the unfamiliar craft bouncing to a stop.

  “Some of them have pipes, Judge Scoglund,” Dunedin said. He didn’t mean the kind from which tobacco was smoked.

  “Of course they have pipes, Eric. They’re warriors, for God’s sake.” Hoping he sounded braver than he felt, Park unbuckled his safety harness. “I have to get out first,” he said. Shrugging, Waipaljkoon opened the door. Park ducked through it and scrambled onto the wing.

  The bearded fighter pilot was already out of his airwain and running toward the craft he had forced down. “These are my captives!” he yelled, brandishing a large knife. “They’re mine to keep and sell as the pagan dogs they are!”

  Park did not follow all of that, but he caught enough. He hoped the Moors would be able to understand his self-taught Arabic — Ketjwa, at least, he’d been able to practice over the past weeks. “Not captives!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Not pagans either!”

  The pilot understood, all right. “What do you mean, you’re not a captive? You’re here, lying fool, at our base, the Emirate’s base, at Siimaranja. And that’s a Tawantiinsuujan airwain, so you
’re a filthy Patjakamak-worshiping pagan!”

  “I’m no Tawantiinsuujan,” Park said. His fair skin, sandy hair, and light eyes told the truth of that better than any words.

  “Well, who in Shaitan’s name are you, then?” someone called from the ground.

  Park sternly suppressed a sigh of relief. If nobody asked that question, he would have had to plunge in cold. As it was, he had the perfect chance to give them his name and impressive title. Then, into abrupt silence, he went on, “I am a citizen of the Bretwaldate of Vinland, and a Christian by religion. You will treat me as Muslim law requires you to treat a Person of the Book.”

  The Moors started arguing among themselves. That was as much as Park had expected. The pilot’s voice rose above the babble, loud with outrage: “Well, what if he does belong to the Ahl al-Kitab, the People of the Book? Those other three I see in there don’t. They’re pagan Skrellings, and they’re mine!” When no one argued with him, he started toward the downed airwain again, still clutching that knife.

  “One is my servant from Vinland, and a Christian like me,” Park said. The pilot shook a fist at him. He continued, “The other two men are of Tawantiinsuuju, yes. But they fly me — I ask them to fly me — to help make peace between the Son of the Sun and your Emir. You should let us go on our way, free from harm.”

  He didn’t expect that to happen. He figured, though, that if he only asked for what he wanted, he’d end up with less. One thing he’d never been short on was gall. He stood on the wing, trying to look as impressive as possible, while the Moors kept on arguing. Finally, when they seemed about to come to blows, one of them said, “Let’s take it to the qadi.”

  “Yes,” Park said at once. “Take us to the qadi. He will judge the truth.”

  “They’re mine, curse it!” the frustrated fighter pilot said again, but most of the Moors on the airstrip shouted him down.

  “Come down,” one of them said to Park. “By Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful, you will all stay free and unhurt till the qadi lays down his judgment.”