Galapagos Regained (37 page)

What the pen writes for you, it can never

Unwrite, so there's no use being clever,

Don't weep overmuch; let your heart not rage,

Your fate is your fate, now and forever.

Whether one believed in Allah, Jehovah, Brahma, the Buddha, the Presence, or mere brute circumstance, the sage was telling her, the past was irredeemable. By this time tomorrow, the Battle of Castillo Bracamoros would be a fixed point in history, recorded in impervious ink on a sheet of immortal parchment, each pen stroke immune to human will. An unnerving thought, and yet she soon drifted off to sleep.

The Earth kept turning, the pen kept writing, and a wan light seeped into the sacristy. Chloe awoke and, gaining her feet, slipped into her pirate costume, pleased to note that her brain now seemed free of
epená
. Presently André Hervouet appeared, bearing a steaming mug of coffee and two ripe bananas. She consumed her breakfast standing upright, then followed the helmsman across the plaza through the chilly predawn mist towards the
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck,
where a one-armed Huancabamba refugee stood ready to assist in the launch.

The flying-machine rocked in the wind, its mooring line held fast by an anchor hooked about a sandstone statue of Santo Domingo. The kerosene burner snorted and growled, filling the sausage-shaped balloon with heated air and giving the decorative Man in the Moon the broadest of smiles. Just then the
Lamarck
seemed to Chloe almost a living thing: a belligerent Spanish bull, anxious and expectant, waiting in his chute for the matador to enter the ring.

André guided her onto a stepping stool and thence through the larboard hatch into the wicker carriage. The rear compartment, surprisingly commodious, housed the anchor windlass, a compass binnacle, and a table at which Philippe Léourier sat inspecting a map of the valley, whilst the forward section served as the bridge, complete with helm, throttle, and a circular glass observation port. Glancing up from his chart, the capitaine welcomed Chloe aboard, then pointed to a loosely woven sack slung beneath the open aft window. At least twenty ceramic globes, peppered with tiny holes, lay snared in the webbing like sea urchins caught in a fishnet. Upon closer inspection she saw that each ball consisted of two hemispheres glued together with yet another miraculous Amazonian resin.

“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 reassuring 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.