“By the vodun, why does it smell so bad?” he asked in Espan when the original man finally seemed capable of conversation.
“Guano,” the original man replied faintly.
“What?”
“Bird shit.” The original man gestured in a feeble circle, as if trying to take in the beach, the cliff above them, and everything beyond. “It’s everywhere.”
Amadi sat up to study his surroundings. Seen this close, the island wasn’t pure white. There were brown bits and hints of red. But nothing green. He couldn’t see a plant anywhere.
And by the vodun, how it stank. “All of this?”
“All three islands,” the original man confirmed. “Blanketed in shit. We dig for shit, we sleep on shit, we die on shit.” He took a deep breath. “But not me. Not anymore.” And with that, he sprang up and ran back toward the water.
He only made it five steps before Amadi caught him, but the original man struggled like a leopard to take a sixth.
“You really want to die that badly?” Amadi asked once he’d finally pinned the original man.
“I’m not doing it again!” the original man shouted. “Not another wheelbarrow, you hear me? I’d rather be in Huancavelica!”
He went on like this for another minute or two, but the energy went out of him soon enough, and eventually Amadi judged he could stop restraining the man. “You know the way to Huancavelica?”
The original man wheezed out a morbid laugh, looked at Amadi’s face, and flinched. “I don’t actually want to go back. No one does.”
Was this luck? It didn’t smell like it. Still … “Promise to take me, and I’ll get you off this island.”
The original man glanced at the water again, as if he still preferred that option.
“Do you want to die like your friends,” Amadi asked quietly, “or do you want to reach the mainland?”
“There’s no way off,” the original man muttered. “Not unless you have wings.”
“I saw ships moving between the islands.”
“Those are for white men. ‘Coloreds’ like you and I don’t leave.”
“We’ll see. First, you tell me what this place is.”
* * *
Capac—the original man—wasn’t lying. The Chincha Islands were shit.
All three islands were coated in layers and layers of white shit from cormorants, boobies, and pelicans. But the shit was valuable. Guano had recently become highly prized as a fertilizer.
“Before, white farmers used bone meal,” Capac explained as he and Amadi crept to a better vantage point.
“Ground-up bones?”
“Yes. Usually from their slaughterhouses, but sometimes from battlefields or graves. Guano is better.”
And the Chincha Islands had tons of it. Tons on top of tons on top of tons. Birds liked to roost on the islands, and rain came so rarely the resulting shit didn’t wash away. So it just piled up and dried, coating all surfaces in concentrations too rich for plants to grow. On some portions of the islands, the heaps rose as high as a hundred feet.
“And they make you mine it?” Amadi asked once he could see some of the operations, which seemed to consist of dusty laborers loosening guano with picks and then shoveling it into wheelbarrows and sacks.
“Four tons a day,” Capac confirmed. He sounded more fatalistic than suicidal now. It wasn’t much progress, but it was something. “We have to gather it and carry it up to the mangueras.”
“What are those?”
Capac pointed to a cliff on the other side of the island. “Canvas chutes. The guano slides down them into the holds of waiting ships. Very dangerous. If men fall into the chutes, they die.”
“And where do the ships go?”
“I don’t know. Probably back to wherever they came from. They wait here for months. Sometimes there are two hundred ships down there, all complaining about the delay and demanding compensation. They’d load faster if the crews helped, but they mainly tend the bowlines and fish. Locals from the mainland bring other ships to sell supplies.”
“Good. How many slaves are on the islands?”
“Not many. Most of us are indentured servants. But we might as well be slaves. Do anything wrong, and you get flogged. Or hung up to bake in the sun. Or tied to a buoy until you almost drown.”
Amadi winced. The brutality was always the same. On a plantation or in a mine—it didn’t matter. White masters swung the whip just as hard. “All the workers are original?”
“Han, mostly. Some are Afrii, like you. A few are free laborers.”
“Not a job I’d choose.”
Capac spat to the side, hitting a small pile of guano that absorbed his spittle as soon as it landed. “You might if you were lied to before you signed your contract.”
Amadi nodded and studied the workers he could see for another minute. “What are they wearing on their faces?”
“Hemp masks smeared with tar. They’re supposed to block the dust, but it doesn’t help much. Breathing still burns after a while.” Capac looked back the way they’d come, gazing at the water once more. “You really think you can get to the mainland?”
“I have to.” But could he leave such barbarity behind? He’d already abandoned souls in need on the Messippi …
Yet Isaura needed him in Huancavelica, as quickly as possible.
Capac spat again. “So what do we do?” When Amadi didn’t answer, the original man balled his hands into fists. “I’m not going back. I’ve been here too long to meet my quota today, and I won’t let them flog me again.”
“You won’t have to. Is there somewhere workers can gather without raising suspicion?”
“The gambling shed. Some fools waste their wages there, which aren’t much after food and lodging’s subtracted.”
“Ask anyone you trust to meet us there during lunch—do you get lunch?”
“Not much of one, and it’s not long.”
“Then we’ll have to be quick.”
Capac cast another look at the water, shook his head, and gestured toward the middle of the island. “This way.”
* * *
Capac spoke discreetly with a few laborers while Amadi stayed hidden. Then, while they waited for the lunch bell, he and the original man followed a roundabout path to the little cliff opposite the mangueras enclosure. Once they’d nearly reached the smaller slope’s peak, they crawled on their bellies until they could see the ships below.
The view was hazy.
Every minute or two, one of the chutes shook with a load of guano. The white stuff roared down the canvas slide, trailing dust all the way before slamming into the connected ship’s hold. The resulting cloud of powdery bird shit coated everything within reach, rendering most of the ships unidentifiable and fogging the air.
It also gave Amadi an idea.
No one else liked it. Not Capac, and certainly not the three men who brought their meager midday meals to the gambling shed a half hour later.
“You’re risking a flogging for this?” a slender original named Rimak hissed at him.
“What about An and Biming?” Laquan, a Han, cut in. “Are they chancing the lash for it too?”
“They jumped,” Capac whispered.
No one spoke for a moment, but then Weza, a dark Kongan, wondered, “Did they jump before or after you suggested this plan?”
Amadi let them vent their doubts. The gambling shed was small, but the other groups were also talking in low voices, and no one seemed interested in what the five men in the corner were saying as long as they kept rolling dice.
“Have you heard of the Black Resurrection?” he asked once the first wave of skepticism had receded.
Most of the group shook their heads or look confused, but Weza snorted. “The avenging spirit who can’t die?”
Amadi motioned for Weza to elaborate.
He snorted again. “They say he was once a slave in the North, but then he ran away and took others with him. Slave catchers came for them. He was the only one to
survive. Now he raids plantations, killing the overseers and freeing the slaves. He walks with a limp, but his anger shields him from other injuries.”
“I have a limp,” Amadi said mildly.
The other men looked at him, doubt evident on their faces even in the shed’s dim lighting.
Amadi suppressed a dark laugh. He hated trading on his reputation like this, but he didn’t have time to wage a long recruitment battle. So he held up his right index finger, gripped it with his left hand, and yanked backward.
The sound of his bone snapping was loud enough to draw eyes from the shed’s other patrons, but Amadi kept his hand in front of him. No one but Capac and his friends could see the white shards jabbing through his skin, then retracting, then fitting back together as the ruptured flesh closed atop them.
“By Confucius’s tears,” Laquan breathed.
“I’m no spirit,” Amadi said as he flexed his restored finger. Even though the healing process had taken longer than it used to, it still worked. For now. “But I am the Black Resurrection, and I’ve freed hundreds of slaves like you. I don’t have time to get everyone off this forsaken island. I’m not even sure I have time to get you four off. But I need a boat for myself, and I’m willing to share it.”
Capac, his expression still transformed with awe, nodded first, and his friends followed suit soon after.
“Where will you take us?” Weza asked.
Amadi kept up appearances by tossing the dice. No one looked at the result. “I’m headed to Huancavelica.”
Rimak blanched. “La Mina de la Muerte.”
“Yes. You know it?”
The original man started to stand, as if he was going to walk away, and quickly. But Amadi held up his arm—the one featuring his remade finger—and stared the guano miner back down. “It can’t be as bad as here.” Capac’s words on the beach came back to him. “You dig for shit, you sleep on shit, you die on shit.”
Rimak paled further. “The Chincha Islands are everything I imagine the demon half of the uku pacha to be.”
“The uku pacha?”
“The world below: suffering, torment, evil. But …”
“But what?”
The original man had a wild look to him now.
Amadi glanced at Capac, who muttered and turned away. “But what?”
Rimak lowered his head, gasped, and tapped the dice frantically. “You see! They all came up bones!”
“So?”
“So the Chincha Islands may be uku pacha, but Huancavelica is worse!”
Chapter Twenty-Three
A Duel
“No one will go there,” Chase reported. “They keep calling it the ‘Mine of Death’ and saying it’s haunted.”
Da grit his teeth. In the last few months, he’d picked up enough Espan to understand what Lima’s mercenaries were telling Chase, but hearing the translation was still infuriating. “Keep asking. We’ll want help when we get to Huancavelica. Especially with Amadi loose again.”
Chase didn’t even have the grace to look guilty. He’d admitted letting Amadi go and accepted renewed use of the spores as just consequence. (Only Jie’s intervention had saved him from worse.) The Anglo’s motives remained mysterious, though. Da had tried to compel an explanation, but Chase had managed to keep his reasons hidden. The spore’s influence was definitely waning.
But not its physical effects.
Hai and Lok had died within minutes of each other the previous day, red and purple fluids seeping from the animals’ mouths to stain the arid coastal road they’d trod since stumbling onto the old Inkan highway system in Ikwadur. As he’d ordered Fara to take the beasts’ place and pull them the last few miles to Lima—a tiring task even with the big man’s new grafts—Da had done his best to avoid thinking about the blood he’d coughed up himself that morning.
Yet there had been no ignoring the dark spots Jie had hacked up a few days earlier.
Not because of the wasting disease. He wasn’t responsible for that. But the puppet spores were his doing. His creation, his application, his betrayal. Every time she coughed, he wanted to kill himself.
As ever, her concern was only for Bolin. He’d also been sick of late. But his symptoms seemed ordinary—just a fever and a runny nose. Although it probably didn’t help that he kept being coddled by mothering animals. Yesterday, they’d found a pregnant snake curled up next to him in the back of the cart. Da was starting to think Jie was right. Maybe Bolin really could call to beasts. He’d certainly attracted a lot of them since they left Bayano, several of which had ended up as graft components.
“Did Jie find medicine for Bolin yet?” Da asked.
Chase rubbed the burn scar on his neck. “I don’t think so. Or at least, she and Fara haven’t come back from the Han neighborhood yet. I think she’s also hoping to get a new copy of The Peony Pavilion. Bolin tore up the first one pretty masterfully.”
Like Metica City, Lima had immigrants from all over the world. There were fewer Han here, but enough that Jie thought she could locate the herbs and books she wanted. She’d have to be quick. Da intended to have new oxen and guards by tomorrow morning.
“Keep looking for guards among the white men,” he told Chase. “I’ll check among the Han.”
Confusion was plain on the Anglo’s face, but he nodded anyway.
As he should.
Da didn’t need to justify his actions, didn’t need to explain why he was trying to hire each mercenary they found instead of sporing them. Yes, he’d make more puppets if he had to. There was no pretending otherwise, and they wouldn’t have escaped Bayano if he hadn’t infected Fara. He’d also continue using those he’d already condemned—he wouldn’t let their murders be meaningless.
But the spores had their limits. Haru had shown that, as had Chase. Willing, capable allies would be better. He just had to find them.
* * *
Da spent the next few hours walking through what passed for Lima’s Chintown. He identified several potential guards, but at the first mention of Huancavelica, they all “remembered” another commitment or made some other excuse. Cowards, every one of them.
He had better luck finding new oxen, since they couldn’t object to his destination, and their owners didn’t care. Still, it was a frustrating afternoon.
At least the weather was pleasant, aside from a bit of fog. Lima was surrounded by desert, but the city lay in a river valley, and the Pacific was close enough that the ocean’s cool waters helped regulate the temperature. Much better than the jungles of Panma. The Espan conquistador Pizzaro had chosen well in founding Biru’s capital here after overthrowing the Inkas.
During his search, Da also learned more about developments in Chin. According to the latest news, Li Zicheng, the rebel who’d caused the Emperor to despair and kill much of his family and then himself, had fallen to another group of insurgents. The Ming Dynasty had come to an end, with the Qing Dynasty rising in its place. The world was changing.
Returning to Lima’s main square only reinforced this point: on a hastily erected platform stood Jaxat, the former Afrii leader of Bayano, draped in chains. The crowd was pelting him with impressive quantities of rotten fruit.
He must have lost his struggle with Demba, the other runaway leader. Did this mean Bayano had made peace with the Espans? Were the Cimarrons recognized as an independent people now?
Da didn’t particularly care, but he wished he had something soft and rank to throw.
He also liked the look of the guards standing to either side of Jaxat, just out of splatter range. There was a hardness about them, a wary readiness that suggested these Espans were men who did what needed to be done. If they’d braved the jungles and runaways of Panma, perhaps they wouldn’t be intimidated by the mines of Huancavelica. To find out, Da needed someone to translate.
But when he found Chase on the other side of the square, the Anglo was red with rage. “Bastards,” he fumed.
“Who?”
“Those Espan fops over
there, with the group that brought in Jaxat. They disrespected Jie.”
Da looked around Chase and found Jie leaning against Fara, the giant easily bearing her weight and Bolin’s (the boy was strapped to Fara’s back and wiggling passionately, as if he thought someone might reward him for it). “What did they say?
“They called her a squint.”
“And you haven’t called us worse in your head?”
Chase winced, but still mumbled, “Not her.”
“Then let it go.”
He might have, except one of the Espans said something Da didn’t catch, and Chase responded with a universally crude gesture. After a string of insults, the Espan challenged Chase to a duel.
* * *
“Why didn’t you stop this?” Jie asked as the setting sun sparked an explosion of pinks and yellows—what the locals had called cielo de brujas (or “sky of witches”). “You could have made him shut his mouth or apologize. You could still do that.”
Chase took his position fifteen paces away from his opponent on the bank of the Rímac River, hefting a pistol he’d acquired an hour earlier before they left town. Beyond him, a lanky Han street vendor was setting up a portable stall. Was he selling snacks? How common were duels here?
Da shrugged. He, Jie, and Bolin were sitting in the front of the cart, well back of where the action was about to unfold. “Maybe, but I can’t control the Espans, and they seem pretty set on bloodshed. They wouldn’t even discuss my proposition until after the duel is fought.”
“Then spore them!”
He shook his head. He’d been franker with Jie since Bayano, explaining much of what he’d once hidden from her—aside from Bolin’s true parentage. It would have been nice to be clear of that too, but Jie had already made her choice about that bit of knowledge. “I can’t do them all at once. It takes time. The spores have to replenish.”
Jie hugged Bolin closer to herself. “So you’re just going to let him die? He’s still suffering from ague. Send Fara in to stop it.”
The Black Resurrection Page 19