by James Morrow
“Time did not permit the Yamunas to prepare more death-eggs, but we shall make do,” said Léourier. “An ingenious weapon. The shell is formed of fired clay and packed with grass. Dropped from a sufficient height, the egg splits open on hitting the ground.”
“Cependant, owing to the grass cushion, the two poisonous snakes remain unharmed,” said André, assuming his place at the helm.
“Poisonous snakes?” said Chloe, bewildered. “Pardonez-moi, but that’s absurd.”
“Quite so,” said Léourier, rising. “And thanks to their absurdity, Cuzco death-eggs are amongst the most terrible weapons ever devised. Confronted with a sudden plague of fer-de-lances, bushmasters, and coral snakes, a soldier will freeze in his tracks and tell himself he’s hallucinating, thereby losing time much better spent running away.”
Chloe said, “Dropping snakes on people, even ghastly people like Don Rómolo’s mercenaries—I must confess, the thought distresses me.”
“All’s fair in love and dialectical materialism, or so Père Valverde informs us.” Léourier abandoned the chart table, approached the open starboard window, and cried, “Cast off!”
Outside the gondola, the one-armed Huancabamba detached the anchor from Santo Domingo’s ankles. Burner roaring, the Lamarck began a slow ascent, seeking the sky like a bubble rising through a glass of champagne. André worked the windlass, drawing the anchor into its berth beneath the gondola. Once the airship had attained an elevation of perhaps fifty feet, Léourier instructed his helmsman to shut off the burner. André turned the valve. Silence suffused the carriage, palpable as the acrid and ubiquitous fragrance of kerosene. The balloon climbed another twenty feet, then melded with the wind, an event that for all its balletic grace did nothing to calm the tumult in Chloe’s stomach.
On orders from the capitaine, André reignited the burner and channeled the steam to the pistons. As the propellers spun frantically, the helmsman piloted the Lamarck along the muddy and meandering course of the river. From Chloe’s lofty vantage the rain forest appeared forlorn and haunted, the vines like nooses fashioned to hang innocent souls, the palm trees suggesting the splayed hands of a green ogre—though she allowed that her revulsion traced largely to fear: on another day, under different circumstances, the jungle might have seemed paradisaical, and she would have exalted in soaring across it as if borne by infinity’s angels.
Approaching the observation port, Léourier ordered a course correction of ten degrees. André turned the wheel, whereupon the capitaine clasped Chloe’s hand and explained the key strategic maneuver. First the dangling anchor would “rip open the thatched roof of the enemy barracks.” Then the mademoiselle would lean out the aft window and hurl the capsules towards the mercenaries’ cots: a simple offensive action—though in handling each egg she must “take care not to drop it on the carriage floor and prematurely release its tenants.”
Within an hour the Lamarck reached a thickly forested mass bisecting the frothy river: Isla del Jaguar, Léourier revealed—the staging area. At the capitaine’s command, André dampened the burner. The propellers spun to a halt. The airship glided soundlessly over the island. Despite a camouflage of vegetation, Chloe glimpsed the brass cannon, its barrel glinting in the sun like a seam of gold flashing through El Dorado’s soil. On the far side of the channel rose the fortress, its spiked walls guarded by weary sentries in blue uniforms, their eyes fixed straight ahead, oblivious to the cannon, oblivious to the ribeirinho militia crouching behind the banyan trees—and to the Bawuni incendiaries hunkered down amidst the mangroves (reinforced by Ralph, Solange, and Mr. Chadwick)—and to the archers and blowgunners hiding in the reeds, each aborigine adorned with lurid smears of black and yellow war paint.
“Hard right rudder!” shouted Léourier.
André turned the wheel, and the Lamarck glided over the ramparts, its palisades so sharp and fearsome as to make Castillo Bracamoros seem not so much a stockade as some fantastical catapult poised to release a thousand spears.
“Activate boiler!” cried Léourier, and André fired up the burner.
Upon spotting the flying-machine, the sentries simply stood and gaped, apparently uncertain whether this contraption belonged to the Peruvian navy or to one of Zumaeta’s enemies. An instant later the Lamarck reached the barracks, the balloon’s shadow gliding across the ground like the incarnation of some dread disease.
“Fix bomb one!” ordered Léourier.
Chloe drew an egg from the sack, transferring it from one perspiring hand to the other and back again. “One fixed!”
Léourier grasped the windlass crank and deftly lowered the anchor towards the barracks, until the ventral prong pierced one corner of the reed canopy covering the sleeping mercenaries. Caught by the wind, the flying-machine pursued a diagonal course, its anchor slitting the thatched roof like a plow turning soft earth.
“Drop one!”
Drop one. So simple a request, though surely repugnant to the Presence. Leaning into the rushing air, she closed her eyes and pictured the tortured Huancabambas back at the mission. She blinked, released the egg, and watched with intermingled revulsion and satisfaction as it disappeared into the chasm.
“One away!” she shouted.
“Bomb two!” ordered Léourier.
She seized a second egg. “Two away!” she cried, surrendering the serpents to gravity.
“Bomb three!”
“Three away!”
“Bomb four!”
“Four away!”
Thus it went, the uncanny mission of the Lamarck, egg after egg, until Chloe had sown the ragged furrow with forty serpents.
“Withdraw!” ordered Léourier.
The helmsman engaged the propellers and pushed the throttle lever. The vanes spun furiously, and soon the airship was outrunning the wind.
“Hard a-starboard!”
André obeyed. The retreating Lamarck swerved around a cluster of gaol houses, their grounds planted with pillories holding the twitching, moaning, and—in some cases—dead bodies of Huancabamba rubber tappers. Continuing on its ever curving course, the ship scudded over a range of five latex pyramids, each formed of several hundred bolas, soon reaching the plaza on which stood the breached barracks.
At first it seemed that the bombing raid had failed to produce the intended pandemonium, but then the doors burst open and the mercenaries poured forth, a cataract of terrified soldiers, only half of whom had thought to grab their rifles. Although some of the newly hatched snakes remained inaccessible to Chloe’s gaze—doubtless they’d been dispatched by machetes and bayonets—many appeared in the courtyard, their fangs embedded in ankles, thighs, calves, wrists, and forearms. Each variety of venom had its own characteristic effect. Wracked by pain so great that death seemed a preferable condition, the coral snakes’ prey placed revolvers to their heads and pulled the triggers. Driven mad by the toxins in their blood, the bushmasters’ victims threw themselves to the ground and implored the Blessed Virgin to save them. The fer-de-lances’ quarry endured massive gastronomical disruptions, vomiting copiously and defecating prolifically.
Within the ranks of the panicked army a principle of rational self-interest finally emerged, inducing the more enterprising soldiers to use their rifle butts in pulping the snakes until they resembled externalized entrails. Shortly thereafter an enraged lieutenant came forth and, assuming charge of the chaos, gestured skyward, thus inspiring several infantrymen to raise their weapons and take aim at the hovering Lamarck.
“Full speed ahead!” cried Léourier.
André opened the throttle. Now the bullets arrived, effortlessly finding the flying-machine’s ovoid bladder, probably the easiest target these troops had ever marked, each strike accompanied by a hiss of escaping air.
“Left full rudder!”
True, the Lamarck might have managed a safe retreat without assistance from the ground forces, and yet Chloe was greatly relieved when Capitán Torresblanco’s artillery squad fired the cannon. As the reassur
ing boom echoed up and down the valley, the ball traced a precise trajectory from Isla del Jaguar to the fortress, blowing the left gate off its hinges and distracting the mercenaries from their efforts to bring down the flying-machine. Torresblanco’s men loaded and launched a second ball, thus destroying the right gate, whilst the Bawuni incendiaries facilitated the Lamarck’s escape with a salvo of flaming arrows and spears, so that in a matter of minutes the blockhouses became indistinguishable from funeral pyres.
“Mademoiselle, I salute you for so skillfully executing your orders,” said Léourier as the ribeirinho militia stormed into the ruptured stockade, followed by the blowgunners and archers.
“Merci,” rasped Chloe.
Despite the leaking bladder, Léourier successfully piloted the Lamarck back over the river, then set the ship on a course for the Misión del Misterio Bendecido. A throng of snakebitten soldiers filled the theatre of Chloe’s mind. Briefly she thought of Lady Athena, protagonist of her equatorial pageant, for that indomitable goddess had famously sent serpents on a mission to kill the impious priest Laocoön and his sons. “But I am not a goddess,” she muttered to herself. She was not even a worthy apostle of the Presence. The sooner she exited Amazonia—the sooner she left behind these sickly winds and demented birds and fleurs du mal—the sooner she reached Galápagos—the more fully her sanity would be served.
* * *
Just as Alexander had kept the Iliad close to hand whilst conquering the known world, so did Malcolm Chadwick carry Charles Darwin’s transmutation essay into battle, its sandalwood box strapped over his heart like a breastplate. Though under no illusion that the receptacle would protect him from the mercenaries’ bullets, he believed the sketch’s proximity might help him to think clearly about certain philosophical matters—questions of justice, mercy, and honor—as the clash of arms played out. The previous night’s frustrating conversation with Miss Bathurst continued to plague him, most especially her failure to understand her mentor’s preoccupation with the Malthusian struggle for existence. How could she imagine that Charles Darwin sought to celebrate predation, when he so obviously meant to elucidate the material conditions to which all flesh was heir? No matter how horrible the imminent battle proved to be, its justification would have to come from elsewhere than “An Essay Concerning Descent with Modification.”
A man whose military education was heretofore limited to Tacitus and other classical sources, Malcolm had not anticipated this wrenching spectacle of mercenaries crying for their mothers, losing sovereignty over their bowels, and shooting bullets through their own arms so that they might be evacuated from the field as casualties. Neither Thucydides nor Livy had prepared him for the Indian archer who, his belly ripped open by a mercenary’s bayonet, his viscera spilling out like grain from a torn sack, begged a fellow archer to murder him. Malcolm was equally dismayed to see ribeirinhos aim their carbines then lose their nerve (firing impotently at the sky), blowgunners accidentally kill their fellow tribesmen with badly aimed curare darts, and Zumaeta’s men accept an incendiary’s surrender only to think better of the idea and slit the Indian’s throat, the blood rushing down his chest like latex from a caucho tree. This was not a just war after all—it was just a war: yet another exercise in consecrated barbarity and sanctified slaughter.
Having resolved to get through the fight without harming anyone, Malcolm practiced the most innocuous arson imaginable. Thrice he nocked an arrow along the string of his Bawuni bow, ignited the pitch-coated head with the torchbearer’s flame, and fired at the northeast blockhouse, knowing the place was empty (the guards having joined the mêlée in the courtyard). In the case of his fourth shot, however, he felt compelled to plant a flaming arrow in the abdomen of a mercenary who’d taken aim at Prince Gitika. The failed assassin died shrieking amidst the stench of his own immolation. An instant later Malcolm thwarted an attempt on Sargento Jiménez’s life—another screaming death, again the odor of charred flesh. The blood on his hands, he realized, was of the very worst sort, being both anonymous and easily absolved. These nameless burning mercenaries had taken milk from their mothers, caught fish in the Marañón, sported with their dogs, and kissed their children, but now none of that mattered, because they’d all chosen to become foot soldiers, a career that put a premium on being no one in particular.
The enemy infantry had formed three concentric circles between the barracks and the workers’ compound. At the hub stood a towering figure with a scar running from his temple to his cheek like the hands of a clock at five minutes past seven—General Zumaeta himself, no doubt, employing the mercenaries as his personal citadel. To Malcolm the soldiers seemed a single organism, an evolutionary error possessing two thousand arms and as many eyes. The blowgunners attacked first, their darts peeling away the front line like a caboclos skinning an anaconda. Next the archers joined the fray, gutting the freakish creature. Finally a majestic officer appeared, his ribbon-bedecked uniform announcing him as Comandante Cuarón, and exhorted the militia to fire their carbines—an order that, obeyed, shattered the heart of the beast.
And suddenly it was over, the still vertical remnant of Zumaeta’s ruined army lifting their hands aloft and waving white kerchiefs, the general reaching highest of all, even as the northeast blockhouse collapsed in a fiery sphere as large as Léourier’s balloon. Though less coordinated than their surrendering comrades, the horizontal mercenaries were almost as active, their damaged bodies twitching amidst the heaps of corpses, some casualties screaming, others moaning, still others simply waiting to die, having arrived at a place beyond pain.
Presently the heroes of the day marched forth—the artillery squad and their stalwart leader, Alfonso Torresblanco, his parrot sitting triumphantly on his shoulder—followed by the incendiaries, including a dazed Dartworthy and an equally stupefied Miss Kirsop, gripping their Bawuni bows, and then came the medical unit, bearing stretchers, bandages, splints, and chloroform. Much as Padre Valverde sought to pursue a just war, so did Dr. Ruanova and his nurses now strive for an egalitarian peace, making few distinctions between allies and enemies as they extracted bullets, plucked out arrows, salved burns, and dressed wounds.
A scriptural tableau took form within the fortress—the war-painted Prince Gitika as Moses, the decorated Comandante Cuarón as Aaron, together freeing the Huancabamba seringueiros from their hard bondage to white gold. On orders from Cuarón, a detachment of militia blasted the padlocks from the gaol-house doors. Scores of workers shuffled into the sunlight, rubbing their eyes and surveying the carrion-covered plaza. Despite the din of battle and the smell of gunpowder, these slaves had thus far enjoyed no inkling of emancipation, or so Malcolm surmised from their puzzled faces. Not until Gitika strode into the compound, proclaiming the fall of Castillo Bracamoros in the Quechua language, did the rubber tappers dare believe in their deliverance, subsequently laughing and weeping as they bowed before the prince.
Gitika next turned his attention to the forest of pillories, half of them holding either a recently flogged worker or a dead body. He told the ribeirinhos to scour the stockade for hammers, chisels, and axes. The required implements materialized promptly, and the militia set about their task, separating the living Indians from the torture racks. The Huancabamba nurses applied balm to the victims’ lacerations, then encouraged them to drink from calabashes filled with an effervescent infusion of uzao bark, a medication that (as Jiménez explained to Malcolm) would exterminate the worms inhabiting their wounds.
Taking leave of his grateful subjects, Prince Gitika approached the prisoners of war, still huddled in the courtyard. He grabbed Zumaeta’s arm, then pushed and shoved him along a much deserved via dolorosa. An instant later, the general stood chained to a bloodstained pillory.
“Tráigame la balanza!” cried Gitika, addressing a liberated seringueiro.
The rubber tapper disappeared into a bamboo shed, then returned pushing a cart on which rested a machine resembling a discus fixed horizontally atop a clock. Gitika smile
d approvingly at the scales, then drew a machete from his belt, approached Zumaeta, and with a few deft strokes cut the beard from his chin. The prince set the whiskers on the weighing pan. The needle trembled, deviating from zero by barely a gram.
“For the past two years,” Gitika told Zumaeta in Spanish (whilst Jiménez translated for Malcolm), “you have required every plantation family to deliver eight kilos of rubber each week. Know that we Huancabambas are a fair-minded people. As compensation for our suffering, we shall subtract from your body a mere eight kilos of hair, muscle, flesh, and bone. Those whiskers are not an impressive start, but from small beginnings come great things.”
A queasiness spread through Malcolm like venom from one of Miss Bathurst’s snakes.
“No es necessario!” cried Dr. Ruanova.
“Gitika, no!” screamed Princess Akawo.
“Stop!” yelled Princess Ibanua.
“For God’s sake, listen to your sisters!” shouted Malcolm.
“Let me think—what do we cut away next?” Whistling a discordant tune, Gitika touched the machete to the side of his prisoner’s head. “The ears?” The blade hovered before Zumaeta’s face. “The eyes? Nose? Lips?” The prince glanced towards the general’s manhood. “Cojones?”
“Tenga misericordia!” wailed Zumaeta.
“Prince Gitika, enough!” cried Dartworthy.
“Eight kilos, General!” Gitika raised the machete high, slashing the air to ribbons, then brought the blade to within inches of Zumaeta’s belly. “By the time you meet the quota, your arms and legs will be sitting on the weighing pan.”
The rubber tappers, blowgunners, archers, incendiaries, and ribeirinhos cheered in unison.
“Para amor a Dios!” shrieked Zumaeta.
“Extract the quota, but kill him first!” pleaded Miss Kirsop.