“Aye, mademoiselle!” Bellingham chirped, stopping on his way aft after Tomaj had called for him to take over the tiller. “That sounds like some of that hugger-mugger what they preach in the geology book Mister Zaleski teaches me.”
Dagny and Sal shared wide-eyed looks of approval. Dagny allowed Sal to speak first. “He does now, does he?”
“Aye!” Bellingham cried, shaping his hand into an approximation of a rock. “Cap’n Balásházy lets us into his library when he’s not using it, and you know he’s got the biggest library in all of Madagascar—after the king, I expect. The Cap’n can take any book he wants! Anyway, I think I’ve got a bent toward natural science, but on expeditions the Cap’n barely lets me ashore.”
“He doesn’t?” Dagny frowned. “That’s a shame. Young men shouldn’t be cooped up on a ship all day—you should be allowed to roam, explore, to learn!” She flashed an indignant glance at Sal that she knew he instantly understood. “How we wished we had the opportunities to do that in our youth, instead of being cooped up in a city! And what branch of natural science do you bend toward? Geology? Botany? Astronomy? Horticulture?”
With his impudently questing button eyes and tiny nose that twitched, the cabin boy brought to mind the diminutive tenrec. Hooking his thumbs in the waistband of his trousers, he looked sheepishly at her. “Why, I rather fancy the creatures myself, Mademoiselle. I know some of them like the palm of my hand. If the Cap’n would let me, I could help you search for that aye-aye. I’ve got a devilish good idea what to find monkeys with. Their brains is too small—I’m sure you’ve seen that—which means they’re stupid. You take a gourd with a narrow neck and bait it with a boiled bird’s egg. I’d get scrubbed, though, if you was to take me along.”
Dagny sat up straight. “Scrubbed? Why, my dear Bellingham. If you fancy the critters, then I shall bring you along. I’ve lost my man Izaro anyway, as my other brother needs him to be aide-de-camp for his new inn—”
“Maître d’,” Sal corrected.
“Oh, Mademoiselle!” Bellingham said. “I should like that very much—”
“Call me Miss Ravenhurst. Oh, look! What is that plant?”
“Bellingham!” Tomaj hollered from the stern. “Cease shooting a line, boy, and lay aft!”
Bellingham leapt to the tiller, but for a moment the helm was clearly hard a-lee with no steersman, as Tomaj clambered to squeeze himself between Dagny and the two oarsmen. She was bowled rudely into the oarsman who sat just inches from her, nearly braining him with the glass, and Sal’s funnel spread sand onto his lap as he sprawled sideways.
The sudden heat of Tomaj’s thigh against her thinly clad one produced an instant frisson of excitement. Her abdomen fairly fluttered with expectant thrills, and she nearly forgot about the strange plant ashore.
Tomaj looked at Sal and patted him on his sandy knee. His fine eagle’s nose was especially erotic here in the out-of-doors, under the white muslin turban he’d wrapped around a red tarboosh, Zouave style. His legs dovetailed with Sal’s, the tops of his boots turned down insouciantly. With his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, the tightly strung forearm muscles stood out in sharp relief, and Dagny was so inordinately heated she had nothing to fan herself with but the glass.
Tomaj said, “Here, my dove,” as he handed Sal a rock. “Broadhecker passed this along to me. Said it’s to be found where we’re going. We’re standing on for Berenty.” Tomaj turned his aristocratic face to Dagny and continued without missing a beat, “Those plants you’re looking at are the nopale, the Barbary fig from Mexico. A Frogman was sent from the Mauritius five decades ago to establish an outpost, and instead began this invasion of figs across the spiny forest.”
“Oh, is that what the ‘spiny forest’ consists of? This strange fruitlike cactus from Mexico?”
“No.” He spoke at her as though they were the only two people on the longboat, as though not surrounded by sweaty men who pulled oars with slick muscles. The movement lulled them into a sort of dreamy rocking. “This isn’t the spiny forest. That starts about three leagues upriver. This cactus jungle, as it turned out, was a vast blessing for this arid desert. It raised the level of the water so the wells, springs, and even this river flow every day of the year. The Mahafaly can plant their fields and depend on a harvest. The tortoises you wanted to see, the lemurs—they all can find food now.”
“Oh … my.” Dagny wanted to look through the glass to see if any tortoises fed beneath the shade of the paddle-shaped red cactus fruit, but she couldn’t turn her face from Tomaj. His dazzling irises stayed fixed on her, a slight smile turning up the corners of his delicious mouth. Sal was obsessed with the rock Tomaj had handed him, and attempted to crack it with a small hammer upon the thwart behind an oarsman’s ass. He wouldn’t notice if she leaned over and gently kissed Tomaj’s luscious mouth. Perhaps only Bellingham would take note, having to stand on the helmsman’s seat in order to see the river over the tops of everyone’s heads.
Tomaj lifted a hand to her chin. “Ich werde Dich immer lieben. I want to make you happy until all’s blue.”
Her lower jaw dropped, and as Tomaj’s thumb crept to her lip with sly fervor, a bowman burst into song.
It was a low, booming, mournful song with the oddly lilting cadence of the American South, and both Dagny and Tomaj froze, both perhaps stunned to hear such a familiar sound. All of the verses were almost identical, and went:
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
A long ways from home.
Apparently only a few other men, including Broadhecker, the waister Stephen Miller, and Bellingham, knew the tune, for they immediately joined in on the second verse. The youth’s voice drifted high above the mainmast, like a mezzo-soprano castrato belting it out, the boatswain vibrating the oars with his baritone.
Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone
Way up in the heavenly land
Tomaj’s eyes dazzled with that sorrowful way of looking directly at her, at the same time askance as though he saw right through her to the glimmering white bow waves. He always seemed about to say something monumental that would alter her life for all time, yet he withheld it out of malice and a sort of arrogant superiority. Dagny leaned into him, giving the oarsman more room to pull, and slid the glass into Tomaj’s lap. Today he smelled of vanilla and berries; the musty library books were an indoor scent.
“I’m always happy when with you,” she said, as quietly as she could.
He briefly squeezed his eyes shut. The smile vanished from the corners of his mouth, and when he looked at her again, he was the fearsome “King of the Betsimisaraka,” the powerful Black Picture. He shook his head as though to rid it of addled cobwebby nightmares. “You’ve come into my life like a guest who needs no invitation, but… I cannot bear to be near you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I can’t stand being near you and not being able to touch you.”
Sal shrieked like a silly schoolboy. “Dagny, look! What are those trees, Tomaj?”
Tomaj craned his neck and was suddenly all smiles again. “Rowed of all!” he bellowed, and simultaneously all rowers halted and boated their oars. They ceased singing, and Broadhecker handed a water skin around.
Over the larboard bow was a forest of trees, or such Dagny supposed they were, sticking out from the neighboring tamarind and acacia, resembling gigantic stone coral branches set willy-nilly on shore, at the whim of one of those aberrant winds that could scoot impossibly heavy boulders across the desert floor.
“They seem upside down,” Dagny told Tomaj. “The roots spread out to reach the sky.”
Tomaj told her these were baobab trees that stored water during the long dry season in their bulbous trunks. The trunks were smooth-skinned and absent of branches until six stories aboveground where they forked out into a ragged coiffure of crazed limbs that were far too insufficient for such a royal trunk. And, indeed, the Mahafaly called it the “upside down tree,” as well as “the forest’s
mother” for its life-giving ability to cache about two hundred gallons of water, and they used the water-soaked pulp for their zebu cattle.
Dagny clutched Tomaj’s bare forearm. “Can we not go ashore, Tomaj? See, look. Stormalong wants to go ashore, too.” When the men had boated their oars, the massive bronze dog assumed they were mooring, and jumped up with her front paws on the gunwale, staring intently into the thicket of upside down trees, her beady golden eyes flickering with intelligence, her large shaggy ears cocked forward with anticipation.
“She’s a life-saving dog,” Tomaj said. “She expects that we stopped rowing because there’s something out there to be saved.” He whistled without putting his fingers into his mouth. “Stormalong—come!”
Leaping over the thwarts with only the fringes of her limbs brushing the wood, the sturdy dog loped as though born in a boat. She sat her behind onto Sal’s foot and placed a regal paw on Tomaj’s knee. In that instant, Dagny saw love in Tomaj’s face, and she was heartened to know he was capable of it. Chucking the dog behind her silken ears, Tomaj said, “No, we cannot stop now. We shan’t make candle-lighting if we go ashore now, and I want you to see everything.”
So they continued upriver, running what Tomaj called “off and on,” approaching the windward shore on one tack, and leaving it on another. Dagny turned her face into the warm wind, lifting the glass every minute or so to view a new species of tree or animal that was, unaccountably, thriving in this bizarre part of the world.
Tomaj stayed by her side on the narrow bench, unusually loquacious in the admirable manner he explained the sights to her. She finally understood that here he was “in his element,” as they said, his panther’s limbs at ease in the boat, his balance perfect, as though with an inner instrument he could detect every small wave and pitch. She saw he was at home with his men and they with him, as when he sent Firebrand, the Negro spiritual singer from the West Indies, diving off the gunwale, there to grab some unfortunate ptarmigan creatures that had wandered too close to shore.
The brotherhood among the men was unfamiliar to Dagny. She and Zeke had left their birth families in Solsbury Hill, Pennsylvania, in order to find such a fraternity they imagined existed in the great city of New York.
A part of her life had been truncated, and she wanted to grow that back. She wanted a family, like these sailors appeared to have. When they had discovered Sal in New York, they had taken him in readily. Sal left his birth family behind, as well, in South Carolina, and he was the most unsophisticated, pathetic, and appealing young wraith, lacking the armor necessary to survive in a city. Once they’d banded up, they’d protected each other.
“Captain!” Reaching out blindly, Dagny touched some part of his warm, moist skin. She looked through the glass at the most unusual plant yet. “What is that?”
The boat veered toward larboard as if this was their destination, a forest of thirty-foot-tall spindly plants whose arms appeared covered with thousands of tiny green butterflies.
“That is the man-eating octopus plant,” Tomaj said.
Awestruck, Dagny lowered the glass to see that, fortunately, she touched only his collarbone, and she quickly removed her hand as if burned. “Man-eating plant? Impossible. I have seen the Nepenthe plant, with pitchers of water that lure insects, but it could hardly accommodate more than a man’s finger.”
They stood in for the barren shore. “I thought so, too, until I ran across a few corpses trapped between them, their thorns piercing the bodies in the worst way imaginable.” Tomaj waxed contemplative as he regarded the grove of seemingly benign trees. “Men told me they’d been fleeing from the ghosts of fruit bats when they were eaten by the trees, stabbed right through the eyes and mouths, their entire bodies run right through in dozens of places.”
With the glass, Dagny could now see that the innocent green butterflies arranged in parallel tracts spiraling up the trunks were really bladed disks, and as the men anchored, she noted the leaves hid lethal thorns.
“My, the trees here have such defenses—they’re all armed and fanged. So this is what you take me to see, corpses mangled in armored trees? A romantic notion, Captain.”
Hopping onto the gunwale, Tomaj smiled artlessly. “Nobody has ever accused me of being romantic. Practical, perhaps.” He leapt into the water.
Dagny scrambled up to follow suit with her skirts bunched in her fist. She laughed with delight to see Tomaj standing hip-deep in the hot, clear water, glassy turquoise fish swimming about him, his arms uplifted to her. “I hardly think you can catch me, Captain! Why, I’d flatten you like a pressed specimen if I was to try that!”
Tomaj waved his arms in invitation. “Try it anyway.”
“Jump, Dagny,” Sal said. “I’ve seen him lift boulders, boulders it would take two of me to lift. Jump.”
Dagny jumped. Sal was right, Tomaj barely bent at the knee when he caught her, and just the tips of her shoulder bow’s long streamers got wet. He stared intimately into her eyes, as though imagining what she looked like undressed, his eyes moist and pleased. “See? You’re the most delicious thing I’ve caught in years.” A sly smile crept onto his face as he walked to the beach. “Perhaps I’ll have you for dinner tonight.”
Shivering with anticipation of the gustatory mysteries in store for her, Dagny shrieked, spasmed, and nearly flopped into the water with hysteria, for she had seen a sight that astounded her to the core. Up in the spiny forest of octopus trees, a long-tailed white lemur with a black face vaulted from one thorny tentacle to another—in trees thirty feet apart!
“Tomaj! That lemur! That—that—”
“Yes, I know,” he said calmly. “Please stop squirming, you’re worse than a barrel of fish.”
Though she thrashed uncontrollably, Tomaj manfully carried her all the way to shore, only setting her down when they were on solid sand. Sliding down his arms, she clung to him for support and gazed open-mouthed at the furry sifakas making wild abandoned leaps ten times their body length, only to land on thorny trunks, seemingly without pain or inconvenience to their five-fingered hands.
“How …”
“How do they do it? No one knows. They’ve adapted, I suppose. See? They land feet-first, and somehow manage to avoid every single thorn.”
“Yes.” Dagny breathed. “If we let your lemur off the ship or out of your glass-house, they’d not know the first thing to do.”
Still clinging to Tomaj, Dagny walked forward quietly. The lemurs, never skittish in the worst of times, appeared not to notice her as they continued their captivating ballet, springing off the prickly branches with their long arms flung up on high, twisting in midair to descend perfectly balanced onto the next branch. They looked at her with their curious, furry black faces, their golden eyes the amber shade of Stormalong’s, their little black caps fringed with woolly white making them resemble English barristers. Leap after leap they executed for no apparent reason, merely playing or exercising, never once smacking into each other, landing so adroitly they barely disturbed the trunks.
It wasn’t until Dagny noticed her face hurt that she realized she’d been standing there smiling for a good ten minutes. “Tomaj,” she whispered, “can you sketch these creatures for me? You can draw people, and ships … can you also draw animals?”
“Aye.”
He turned to the longboat, and must have made a signal of sorts, for up until then everyone had been waiting patiently in the boat. Suddenly there was a general exodus of men splashing in the water, ordering others about, giving instructions. Glancing over her shoulder, Dagny saw the men set up on the foreshore, others going forward or aft to explore, but no one could prevent Stormalong from bounding into the spiny forest to bark at the monkeys—that is, until she tried jumping on a tree, and her sharp cry of pain sent all lemurs leaping into the highest reaches of the branches.
Tomaj laughed. “They think she’s a fossa.”
“Yes, and I’ll venture to say fossas can’t climb these trees, so they feel safe up there.
”
“You’re right. I’ve seen fossas down here, but never climbing one of those spiky trees.” Tomaj whistled for Stormalong, and she came gratefully, limping a bit. Moving closer to the trees to get a good vantage point, they sat, Tomaj inspecting the giant dog’s paw for thorns. “You must avoid the euphorbia. It has a sap that can blind a person.”
Bellingham brought up Tomaj’s sketch box. “We thought you’d like to see these particular monkeys, Miss Ravenhurst,” the boy said, almost shyly.
“Oh, yes! You are so thoughtful. Sit, sit. Do you paint, Master Bellingham?”
The waif rubbed his red nose with his knuckles. “Sometimes he lets me use the long tom.”
“Long tom? What’s that?”
Bellingham gestured. “It’s a long stick what you lash a paintbrush to, so you can paint places that’re hard to reach. Like, sometimes Hegemsness—he’s a Norway boy what we found hanging round the Cape of Storms—dangles me by the ankles over the stern rail, and I—”
“Now, now, Bellingham!” Tomaj interrupted as he sharpened a lead. “Of course, you paint! I give him free use of my sketchbox, and I must say he’s drawn some surprising things. He seems to excel at landscapes, but he’s sketched a creature or two. Bellingham, show her.” Tearing off a few pages of foolscap, Tomaj handed them to the boy, along with some leads.
“I can’t begin to match you, Cap’n! He’s a right world-renown artist, Miss. Mostly famed for his paintings of our old quartermaster.”
“She knows that, Bellingham,” Tomaj said in a low voice. “Shall I send you off to the ironmonger? Or do you want to sketch?”
The Strangely Wonderful: Tale of Count Balásházy Page 17