Galapagos Regained (62 page)

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Boiler roaring, propellers swirling, the
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
pursued a steady course towards Mephistropolis. Whilst Capitaine Léourier manned the helm, Chloe, dressed in her buccaneer regalia, pushed back the starboard hatch and fixed it open by wedging a maul between the door and the jamb. In a gesture not unlike the dropping of a death-egg, she unfurled the rope ladder into the turbulent air, so that the threaded rungs dangled from the gondola like the tail of a stupendous kite.

Oddly enough, the aeronaut was exhibiting greater anxiety now than he had when attacking Castillo Bracamoros, even though the impending escapade would involve far fewer armed adversaries. As the
Lamarck
traversed the range of cinder cones, Léourier revealed the source of his distress, a madness of the very strain that had affected Mr. Chadwick.

“
Chère mademoiselle,
I realize I have not selected
le moment parfait
for you to consider a proposal of marriage.”

“Marriage?” said Chloe. “What are you talking about?”

“
C'est-à-dire,
these are hardly ideal circumstances under which we might pledge our troth. Nevertheless, I'm hoping—”

“Hoping? Hoping?
I'm
hoping to save my friends,
mon Capitaine
! Troth—bosh! Bosh and double bosh! Have you taken leave of your senses?”

“I have not lost my mind but rather my heart.
Je vous aime, mademoiselle
. For you I would walk on burning coals, tie a knot in the Devil's tail, insult a Bonaparte to his face. Oh, such glorious adventures we shall have as we sail the skies of Amazonia in search of El Dorado—and after we find our golden utopia, we shall seek out other treasure cities: Quivira, La Canela, Cibola!”

“Do me a favor,
s'il vous plaît
.”

“Anything.”

“Say not one word more of burning coals or golden cities until Ralph and Solange are safely on board.”

“
D'accord.
”

Placing the glass to her eye and leaning out the larboard window, Chloe observed the harems of Eggwort, Tappert, and Hatch racing through the main gate towards Minor Zion, doubtless intending to collect their children and bear them away from the angry mountain. Act two was now in progress, a skyrocket taking flight every thirty seconds. Throttle wide open, the
Lamarck
cruised over the brick wall, its shadow slithering across the ground like a devil-ray gliding through a mangrove glade.

An instant later the airship arrived in the exercise yard, site of an unnerving tableau: Ralph and Solange, poised on the gallows, bound and blindfolded, necks encircled by nooses. Gripping his black hood, a bare-headed Executioner Ordoñez leaned over the scaffold rail, alternating his gaze between Kommandant Hengstenberg and Orrin Eggwort, the former using his monocled eye to scan a tattered tract printed on yellow paper, the latter standing on his throne chair as if seeking to evade Amazonian fire ants. Stopsack, meanwhile, charged back and forth between the scaffold and the Supreme Emperor like a cricket batsman scoring runs.

“For the last time, Señor Ordoñez, pull the woman's lever!” cried Eggwort.

“For the last time, Your Excellency, I shall not!”

Abruptly the curtain rose on act three. A tremendous
ka-boom
echoed off the mountain slopes, followed by the abrupt arrival of a boulder in the exercise yard. The projectile landed with a reverberant
thud
not twenty feet from the ranks of inmates, sending up a plume of dust. In a single clockwork motion scores of human heads, some belonging to frightened convicts, others to stupefied guards, still others to bewildered Duntopians, turned towards the fallen rock.

“Every man for himself!” screamed Ben the horse thief.

“
Merde!
” cried Léourier. “We put too much guano in the bombs!”

A second
ka-boom
rattled the vale. Another boulder crashed into the yard. Stationed at the base of the scaffold, a petrified drummer boy began to cry.

“The mountain's coming apart!” yelled Joe the poacher.

“The whole world's coming apart!” shrieked Tim the anarchist.

“I shall never underestimate excrement again!” declared Léourier.

Eggwort jumped off his throne chair and scuttled towards the corps of guards. “Shoot any man who attempts to flee!” he instructed Capitán Machado.

“Spoken like the depraved bourgeois pig you are!” shouted Kommandant Hengstenberg.

“Pig?” said Eggwort, perplexed. “What?”

“
Schwein! Porco! Cerdo! Cochon!
” Holding his tract aloft like a centurion brandishing a sword, Hengstenberg faced the capitán and yelled, “Hear me, Comrade Machado!” Enlarged by the glass, the pamphlet proved to be the ubiquitous
Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei
. “All men are brothers!” Hengstenberg's intended audience, Chloe realized, included not only Machado but also his soldiers, the disgruntled executioner, and the weeping drummer boy. “We must acknowledge our universal humanity, make common cause with our prisoners, and together escape the volcano!”

“Let's start with the escape!” suggested Machado.

“
Una idea excelente!
” added Ordoñez.

Now Hengstenberg addressed the assembled convicts. “I offer you complete and total amnesty, as do Comrade Machado and Comrade Ordoñez! With the help of Comrade Jesus, we shall flee this doomed island! Unite with your former oppressors! You have nothing to lose but your chains!”

“If we're losin' our chains,” cried Ben the horse thief, “let's have Machado's men lose their guns!”

“The guards must remain armed!” insisted Hengstenberg. “What say you, prisoners? Are you with us?”

“We're with you!” shouted Pete the highwayman.

“All for one and one for all!” cried Tim the anarchist.

“
Kommandant,
this is an outrage!” exclaimed Eggwort.

“No, it's a revolution!” retorted Hengstenberg. “Under the tyranny of the bourgeoisie, all that is solid melts into air! All that is holy is profaned!” He thrust his riding crop in the direction of Post Office Bay. “To the wharf, comrades!”

A third rock came screaming into the yard, landing at the base of the watchtower.

“The
Hippolyta
is ours!” shouted Harry the panderer.

Before Chloe's astonished eyes the guards and their charges fused into a collective entity, Hengstenberg in command. The sentries in the watchtower, their compatriots on the wall, and the trembling drummer boy abandoned their posts and joined the insurrection, even as Ordoñez fled the gallows and merged with the revolutionaries. Although Machado's men retained their weapons, they truly seemed to regard the convicts—Englishmen and Ecuadorians alike—in a fraternal light, just as Marx and Engels would have wished. It was a remarkably harmonious mob that now streamed through the gate, trampled down the perimeter fence, and surged towards the bay, taking care to avoid the falling chunks of Mount Pajas. For an instant Chloe imagined the late Padre Valverde peering down from Heaven and smiling to behold the inexorable Wheel of History turn once again.

“Come back here!” screamed a livid Eggwort at the Marxians in general and Ordoñez in particular.

Whilst the guards were busily forging bonds of brotherhood with their former prisoners, Léourier had deftly maneuvered the
Lamarck
so that it now hovered above the scaffold like a hummingbird poised to siphon nectar from an orchid. Léourier dropped his anchor, catching one prong on the rail. Drawing forth her bayonet, Chloe exited the gondola and descended the rope ladder rung by rung even as Eggwort turned his attentions to the stalled executions.

“Reckon I'll have to do it myself!” he declared, charging up the scaffold steps, Stopsack at his heels.

As Chloe jumped from the ladder to the platform, she recalled her final appearance at the Adelphi Theatre. Evidently her tropical adventure would end as it had begun: the headstrong Miss Bathurst, standing on a scaffold, determined to strike a blow against the status quo—only this time she needn't make a speech denouncing the prevailing economic order, Hengstenberg having already done that for her. Instead she yanked off Solange's blindfold and lifted the noose over her head.

“My darling she-devil!” cried Solange.

A boulder landed squarely atop the brick wall, gouging a breach worthy of a cannonball.

Arriving on the platform and noting to his dismay that Solange was no longer tethered to the crossbeam, Eggwort undertook to facilitate Ralph's execution. The Supreme Emperor grabbed the far lever, pulling it with murderous intent, abandoning the endeavor when Stopsack kicked him soundly in the shins.

Chloe plucked off Ralph's blindfold and, extending her bayonet arm, brought the blade to rest midway between his noose and the crossbeam.

“‘O little, fragile, laughing soul that sings'!” he cried, giddy with his deliverance.

Frantically Chloe sawed, the hemp fibers parting like flesh under a surgeon's knife, even as Eggwort retaliated against Stopsack, punching him repeatedly in the face. The Governor was soon supine on the planks, stunned and spread-eagled. Eggwort finished pulling the lever. The trapdoor opened, hurtling Ralph into the void. From the thumps and coughs that followed, Chloe surmised that the shredded rope had snapped beneath his weight, depositing him, abused but alive, under the platform.

“My precious sea-witch!” she cried, slicing the thongs from Solange's wrists.

“Hear me now, Orrin Eggwort!” Regaining his feet, Stopsack used his white linen cuff to absorb the blood leaking from his ruptured lip. “Perhaps we're about to sink beneath the sea like Atlantis of old—perhaps not—but in any event this island isn't yours! Every stone, tree, beach, bird, and beast lies within Her Majesty's realm!”

But Eggwort was not to be so easily disenfranchised. He wrested the bayonet from Chloe's grasp and, hugging Stopsack, thrust the blade into his stomach. Blood splattered forth, painting the planks. The Governor broke the embrace, the bayonet protruding from his solar plexus like a croquet peg, and collapsed in a hemorrhaging but otherwise inert heap.

“This is
my
island!” screamed Eggwort, addressing the corpse. “I have a deed from Ecuador!”

Climbing onto the platform, Jethro Tappert dashed towards the Supreme Emperor and said, “The Assistant Emperor and me got a bone to pick with you.”

“More than a bone,” said Linus Hatch, likewise gaining the platform. “A whole skeleton, really, coccyx and all. This seems a purty good time fer discussin' the matter.”

“I just killed a man!” cried Eggwort. “It ain't a purty good time fer discussin'
anythin'
!”

“It concerns our women,” explained Tappert. “I happen to know you been conjugatin' with my Mildred and my Patricia.”

“You also been seen gavottin' with my Kitty and my Meg,” added Hatch. “As if you ain't got wives enough already!”

“Joseph Smith is angry with you, and Jesus is mighty displeased as well, not to mention Linus and myself!” Tappert pointed to the noose that had almost broken Solange's neck. “In accordance with God's will, this rope won't go to waste!”

“No!” protested Eggwort. “I'm the Supreme Emperor!”

A boulder crashed through the wall and rolled into the yard, leaving behind a trail of shattered bricks.

Dazed but buoyant, Ralph staggered onto the crowded platform. Solange plucked the bayonet from the corpse and applied the blade to the thongs binding the mariner's wrists. After instructing her friends to climb the rope ladder—an order they obeyed without hesitation—Chloe unhooked the anchor, ascended rung by rung, and hoisted herself into the gondola. As Léourier opened the throttle, she scrolled up the ladder, and the
Lamarck
flew free of the gallows.

“Evidently Lady Omega has been touched from on high after all,” said Solange, setting the dripping bayonet on the empty chart table.

Wheezing and sweating, Chloe closed the starboard hatch. She slumped against the compass binnacle, caught her breath, and, grasping her bayonet, used her pirate kerchief to wipe Stopsack's blood from the blade. Another cactus bomb detonated, followed by the thunder of a boulder smashing through an upper window of the keep.

“
Excusez-moi, mon Capitaine,
but we seem to be headed for the volcano,” noted Ralph. “Surely that's a bad idea.”

“The eruption isn't real,” Léourier explained. “We made it from bamboo and bat shite.”

“Where's our favorite vicar?” asked Solange.

“On the summit, geologizing,” Léourier replied.

Chloe glanced through the aft window. As the airship soared away from the penal colony, a gruesome dumb show unfolded on the gallows. Acting in complete and wordless harmony, Tappert and Hatch employed the discarded bindings to tie Eggwort's hands behind his back. The Associate Emperor inserted Eggwort's head into the noose once intended for the blaspheming Bianca Quinn. The Assistant Emperor pulled the lever. The trapdoor opened. The Supreme Emperor vanished from view, plunging towards oblivion, or perhaps the maw of Hell, or conceivably the gates of Heaven, though from Chloe's present vantage in time and space the latter two fates were obviously synonymous with the first.

*   *   *

As the
Lamarck
cruised along the silicate-coated shores of Post Office Bay, the noonday sun caught the notice board beside the Colnett barrel, causing the broadsheets and bulletins to glow like the gold plates of Cumorah. The carriage, Chloe noted, had not been this crowded since the guano expedition to Chatham, jammed with not only herself, Léourier, and the defendants in
Duntopia versus Cabot and Quinn
but also Mr. Chadwick and his four Huancabamba vulcaneers. The engine issued corresponding objections. Throughout the flight across the cinder field, Ralph and Solange lavished praise on their saviors, complimenting Chloe on her ingenious
scenario
, the capitaine on his knowledge of chemistry, the Peruvian aborigines on their industry, and the vicar on his management of the eruption.