Daniel ordered the boat lowered, with one box of the trade goods loaded into it. This time there was no trouble persuading the crew to remain on board. Daniel went back to his cabin, took both sealed envelopes from his desk, then went back on deck and climbed down into the boat. Frederick was already there, along with Latour and one of the crewmen.
“One of us ought to stay on the ship,” Daniel said.
“There’s not enough food aboard to get back down the river,” Latour said. “They won’t go anywhere.”
“So I should expect the crew to act rationally, in their own self-interest?”
Latour crossed his arms. “We don’t know what’s happened here. You need someone with you.” He threw a glance at Frederick. “Someone you can trust.”
Daniel nodded. “All right,” he said, signalled for the ropes to be untied. Latour and the other crewman took the oars, moving the boat slowly towards the shore. Earlier Daniel had noticed that the pyramid had a row of more closely spaced tiers, like a giant staircase, running down part of its length towards the river; he guided the boat towards its foot.
A crowd was beginning to gather on the shore, a mix of whites, blacks and Indians, with the costumes of all three peoples mixed promiscuously. As the boat struck the bottom the crowd parted, a half-dozen men in Indian garb moving to the fore to greet them. Each of these carried a rifle, and Daniel saw that many others in the crowd were armed with bows, knives or hatchets.
Standing up, Daniel held his hands high to show they were empty. “We come on behalf of Onontio,” he said.
One of the Indians who had come to meet them nodded. “Very good,” he said in flawless French. “We will take you to see him.”
The armed Indians waited until all four were on shore and then surrounded them, leading them towards the pyramid. Two others followed with the chest full of trade goods. The staircase was steep, lined on either side with tall, straight poles: those at the bottom were topped with skulls, as the ones at Sainte-Genevieve had been, but as they rose higher the heads grew progressively more fresh and fuller-fleshed.
The top of the pyramid was freezing, a constant wind from the north chilling the humid air. Two squat buildings stood there, one at the eastern end and the other at the west. A dozen old men, all wearing long white feathered cloaks, stood outside the western building; once Daniel and the others had been led to them they turned towards the building’s door and howled like wolves. A small shape emerged from the doorway as they did so, a stooped, sickly, balding man wrapped in a red cloak. It was only by the nose and eyes that Daniel recognized Coeur-Lion.
“So you’ve come,” Coeur-Lion said, wheezing each time he drew in breath. His face was covered with dry pocks, and he reached up to scratch one with a wooden tool shaped like a shallow cup. Two women followed Coeur-Lion out of the building, one black and one Indian, each one young and broad-hipped.
Daniel opened his mouth, found himself speechless. While he was still struggling to find words Frederick stepped forward, threw himself at Coeur-Lion’s feet. “It’s been eleven days,” he said. “I don’t have the plague, sir, you can see that.”
“You brought them here,” Coeur-Lion said. His mouth was toothless, his voice slurred. “Do you know if they have the plague?”
“But—they’re your people,” Frederick said.
Coeur-Lion shook his head. “These are my people,” he said, gesturing feebly at the white-cloaked men. “No matter. You are forgiven.” He turned to Daniel. “You brought goods, to trade?”
“Yes—there are more on the ship—”
“Give me one of those blankets. It’s too cold up here.”
Daniel opened the chest that they had brought from the ship, pulled out one of the striped wool blankets that were a staple of the Republic’s trade. He handed it carefully to Coeur-Lion who wrapped it around himself, seeming to disappear within it.
“That’s better,” Coeur-Lion said. He made a small gesture at the armed men who had brought Daniel and the others, and they started back down the pyramid. “Come with me,” he said to Daniel, turning back towards the dark doorway.
Throwing a glance back at Latour and the other crewman Daniel followed, into the low building. It was a single room inside, an apartment with a couch, stools, rope bed and an open, foul-smelling privy. A torch guttered in a sconce on the wall, below it a table scattered with paper and birch bark. Coeur-Lion gestured to Daniel to sit on the couch, then lay himself down on the bed; he nodded to one of the young women who opened her top, presented a nipple for him to suckle at. As Coeur-Lion drew milk, wheezing and sucking and smacking his lips, Daniel found himself paralyzed, his mind unwilling to process what was before him. Finally, when the woman had silently covered herself and withdrawn from the building, he was able to draw out the first of the sealed orders.
“I was given this to give to you, M’sieu,” he said, “and to see that you read it.”
Coeur-Lion nodded, reached out a hand; Daniel had to stand to deliver the envelope to his grasp. “And your orders?” he asked.
“M’sieu?”
“There are always two sets of orders,” Coeur-Lion said. The envelope Daniel had given him lay in his lap, its seal unbroken. “Have you read yours? You look like an honest man, so I would guess not. But I imagine you’ve guessed what they are.”
Daniel said nothing.
Coeur-Lion picked up his envelope, broke the seal with a sharp fingernail. He squinted in the flickering light, reading the orders with rheumy eyes, then finally nodded. “As I expected,” he said. “And now you.”
“M’sieu Coeur-Lion . . .”
“No matter,” Coeur-Lion said, giving a small wave of the hand. “I am dying, anyway, and your orders are as false as mine.” He reached up to scratch at his pocks once more with the wooden tool, careful to catch the flaking skin in its bowl. “When LaSalle came here, you know, in the days of the Ancien Regime, he found the whole valley depopulated: the Spanish had been through a century before, and the Indians were only then starting to recover from the diseases they brought. It was the weapon that won the Spaniards Mexico, of course, though they didn’t know it.” He took a deep, laboured breath, drew the blanket more tightly around himself. “That is the great difference between them and us.”
“They are saying disease will be a thing of the past, thanks to M’sieu Pasteur.”
“And do you believe this?” Coeur-Lion asked.
Daniel shrugged.
“The French hygiene,” Coeur-Lion said. “We used to say that the English killed their Indians and the Spaniards enslaved theirs, but we taught ours to reason. Wherever we tread, the world becomes more rational. How can it be otherwise?”
“I’m sorry,” Daniel said. “I don’t understand—all this—”
“I was here—in Sainte-Genevieve, I mean—only a year before they began to get sick,” Coeur-Lion said. His voice was fading, his gestures growing most spastic. “A ship had come like yours, bearing cargo from Nouvelle-Orleans. Beads and blankets. . . . At first I didn’t understand what was happening, and when I did it was too late. I make strong medicine, I said, convinced them to quarantine their sick, but in the end that failed too.” He coughed. “It was Frederick who gave me the idea of taking on their sickness. The Turkish method of variolation, they take the dry pustules up through their noses and become immune. I had the pox as a child of course, had to starve myself until I was weak enough to catch it a second time . . .” He scratched at his forearm again, this time letting the dry flakes of skin shower to the floor. “M’sieu Pasteur would say my methods are unsound. Do you think my methods are unsound?”
When Daniel did not respond Coeur-Lion fell silent, and Daniel sat and watched his chest rise and fall until it was clear the man was asleep. Daniel got up, took the envelope from Coeur-Lion’s hand, drew out his orders and read them. Then he held the paper in the torch’s flame until they were burned. As he did he looked down at the table be
low, glanced at the scraps of paper and birch bark. He was only able to make out one fragment: it read Nous sommes tous sauvages.
There was no need for his orders now: Coeur-Lion would be dead within days. When both envelopes had burned Daniel returned to his chair to wait for the sunrise.
Some time after that he heard a muffled shot, jolting him to wakefulness. The torch had gone out while he dozed: it was only by his tread that Daniel recognized Latour as he came into the building.
“Is he dead?” Latour asked.
“Yes,” Daniel said.
Daniel could just see Latour nodding in the dim light. He followed Latour out onto the broad roof of the pyramid, past the fallen bodies of the two guards outside. Then Latour reached into his coat, drew out a white envelope and let the fierce winds snatch it from his hand. It was gone before Daniel could see if the seal had been broken, vanished into the darkness.
They made their way down the staircase on their hands and knees, gripping the steep steps to keep from falling. Finally they reached the ground and covered the short distance to the boat. Neither one mentioned the other crewman.
“We don’t have enough supplies to get back to Nouvelle-Orleans,” Latour said as they climbed back onboard the Eugénie.
“Dump the cargo in the river,” Daniel said. “We should make better time that way.”
Latour was silent for a moment. Daniel wondered how much his orders had told him: each set of orders, he supposed, would hold a bit less information than the last, so it was unlikely that Latour knew why they had really made their journey.
“Very good.”
“Wake the stokers and the engineer,” Daniel said. “I’d like to get going as soon after dawn as possible.” He wondered if Latour had ever questioned his orders. Probably not: the logic behind them was flawless.
Once Latour had gone Daniel turned back towards the east bank, saw the first light touching the top of the pyramid. He thought about the long-vanished people that had built them, in worship or propitiation of the sun or moon or Reason knew what else. What had they thought, he wondered, when the Spanish came, when they began to get sick? Did they think that their gods had abandoned them, or that the newcomers’ gods were stronger? I make strong medicine. He thought of the statue, the Goddess of Reason, and of what Coeur-de-Lion had written: Nous sommes tous sauvages.
Then the dawn arrived in earnest, and the mist of dreams dissolved. The sun was up, and there was work to do.
JUMP, FROG!
To an unnamed correspondent; found in the effects of Samuel Clemens (“Mark Twain”) after his death, apparently unsent. Dated December 20, 1881.
You will recall, I think, a story I wrote some years back, about Smiley’s jumping frog, how it was the subject of a peculiar bet, and how a fellow took an underhanded way to win it. It has done pretty well for itself, having had the good fortune to be translated into French and the better to be translated out of it. I put forth that it was a true story, and so it was, though many doubted it. Since then I have gained reason to believe, though, that I never did know the whole truth of it—until now; that I shall ever be able to tell anyone that truth, however, I much doubt.
I have, as you may know, recently returned from a short stay in Canada; having to reside there for a certain time in order to claim ownership of my own work, I chose to visit Montreal and Quebec, on the grounds that a place that makes claims to being a separate nation ought to at least have a different language. I gave a speech there that was pretty well received, most likely due to it having as its main competition the weather. It was after the speech that I was approached by an odd little fellow, an old gentleman with a thick black moustache and a fringe of hair circling his bald skull. Standing very near, and mumbling into his chest, he said, “Meester Clemens”—but I will cease there with reporting his words as he spoke them; recent experience with French has shown me how easily a man can be made to look a fool in a language not his own, and this was a man of great intelligence and education, as you will see.
His tale, then, began like this: “Mr. Clemens, I have long wanted to meet you. My name is Luigi”—but there, with his last name, we get into the unbelievable part of the tale; and so I will pass over it—“and I believe I may cast some light on a story of yours.”
My interest piqued, I nodded for him to continue. “I should like to hear about it,” I said.
“You are an educated man, so I am sure you recognize my name; you are a rational man, so I feel certain you know something of my work. But you should know that it was not always as a scientist that I imagined myself: instead, as a young man, I imagined I would study theology, and join one of the monastic orders. For I had a hunger, you see, to study those questions which, at that time, the natural sciences did not even hope to answer. Above all, I wished to answer the question of life!
“Practical considerations took hold, however, and I followed my father’s advice in becoming a doctor. I married my darling Lucia, made a steady living as a lecturer at the University of Bologna, and for a time was happy. For many years I focused only on the smallest parts of the matter that had formerly been my obsession, studying the bones and organs that made up men and animals. In that time I learned much about how things lived, but still I was no closer to the question of why. What force gave vigour to things once lifeless? What was it that departed the body at death, leaving it no more alive than a stone?
“It was one of your own countrymen, Dottore Franklin, who led me to the answer—for I read how he had, while trying to shock a guinea fowl, taken the charge meant for the bird into himself; rather than killing him, as it would have the bird, it did him no harm. Indeed, I suspected, it more likely had invigorated him: for all his great work was done after receiving that charge, and it is said that even as an old man, while ambassador to France, he was still able to—” (I omit the rest of this story, on the grounds that it is not right to say such things about a founding father, and you will have heard them already anyhow.)
“It was then that I began my researches into animal electricity. Fortunately the marshes of my home state of Bologna were at all times replete with frogs, simple creatures whom I could dissect and study in my quest for the nerveo-electrical fluid. You are, I am sure, already familiar with the part of my work that was published: how I showed that the fluid, present in the air during a thunderstorm, could be used to cause a frog’s leg to twitch, and that the same results could be obtained with a spark made by an electrostatic machine or held in a Leyden jar. What you will not know is that I published only the first part of my research: for it was while that first volume was in preparation, and I was preparing the second—my magister opus—that disaster struck. Was it my pride that caused me to be punished so—to lose all that I had, my work, my home, my love, in pursuit of my art?”
Some look of alarm on my face must have betrayed me, for the old man took a step back, then glanced around, perhaps to see if others were listening. Satisfied that they were not he moved yet closer, winding up only an inch or so from my face, and went on.
“My aim, you see, was to do on purpose what I suspected Dottore Franklin had done by accident—to charge a living body with nerveo-electrical fluid. In this way I hoped to perhaps double the lifespan, or at least give vitality well into old age, as Franklin had. My dear wife Lucia had always been sickly; as well as frogs, the swamps of Bologna hold many bad airs, and I knew it was only a matter of time before she, delicate flower, succumbed. A Leyden jar ought to hold enough fluid to achieve the effect I sought, but how much was too much? And would a charge sufficient for me be too much for her?
“To test my theory on a human being would be inconceivable: to apply the charge before I knew the correct amount would be equally so. I resolved, therefore, to determine the correct amount to apply to a smaller creature, and extrapolate from there. What sort of creature was obvious: I owed my little fame to frogs, and did not doubt they would do me greater service. I a
cquired a frog weighing precisely one pound, which I planned to etherize to a point just shy of death, then test how large a spark it would take to revive it.
“I waited until a night when there was a thunderstorm raging outside, that I might easily recharge my Leyden jar if I so needed. My first few attempts, using small sparks from the electrostatic machine, brought some animation to the frog; emboldened I continued, but the next time over-applied the ether, stilling the poor creature’s heart. In my panic I gave it a charge not from the electrostatic machine but from the Leyden jar—the one in which I stored the nerveo-electric fluid I hoped to use to invigorate myself and my sweet Lucia. Remembering Dottore Franklin’s experiments with the guinea fowl I feared that, rather than reanimating it, the charge would cook the frog; it had, after all, been given a dose meant for a man many times its size and weight. To my relief, however, the frog revived. More than revived, in fact; for I imagined as its eyes opened that I saw in them—what? A spark of understanding?
“You may imagine my study as it was then, with frogs and parts of frogs hanging from brass hooks, to draw the nerveo-electrical fluid from the iron railing in my garden; imagine, now, how that might look to a frog. Perhaps that was why the frog immediately set to jumping. When I say jumping, signore, I do not mean how you have seen a frog jump: I mean that it shot from the operating table like a ball from a cannon. Had I been in its way I likely would have been killed; as it was the frog touched a shelf holding much of my equipment, sending it crashing to the ground as it caromed off to the facing wall. Though I tried to catch it, my attention was quickly drawn by the bottle of ether that had fallen near the Leyden jar. When I saw that I forgot the frog and ran to separate them, but as I grabbed hold of the jar the remaining charge jumped into me, leaving me stunned; at the same time the spark that had passed from the jar to my body ignited the ether fumes, and a moment later fire broke out in my study. Out the window shot the frog; again I thought of catching it, until I remembered that my Lucia was sleeping in her bedroom.
Irregular Verbs Page 24
