Galapagos Regained (43 page)

Ralph returned at dusk, shrouded in gloom. As far as he could determine, Puerto Etén was little more than a fishing village, never visited by ocean-going brigs of the sort that might take them to the Encantadas.

“Our best hope, my fair philosopher, would be to repair the
Lamarck
with all deliberate speed, praying that Mr. Hallowborn does not make landfall in the meantime.”

“Chloe will do more than pray,” said Solange, joining the conversation. “She will arrange for the universe to intervene on her behalf.”

“My dear Solange, here's a conundrum for your irreverent mind to ponder,” said Chloe. “Take Yahweh's most famous line from Exodus, ‘I am what I am,' translate it into French, and it becomes, ‘
Je suis celui qui suis.
' Remove the egotistical ‘I' from ‘
Je suis,
' and the result is Jesus.”

“You may remove your egotistical ‘I' if you wish,” said Solange. “As for myself, I believe I'll go catch some fish. I'm told that Monsieur Léourier can use the swim-bladders.”

The following morning Akawo collected the Europeans together and announced that Chief Nenkiwi would receive them at noon. When the appointed hour arrived, the princess led the explorers to an adobe structure shaped like a plum pudding: the council lodge, she explained—the place where her father “listens thoughtfully to his advisors before doing as he pleases.”

Chief Nenkiwi sat on a fan-back wicker chair that put Chloe in mind of the throne she'd occupied in
Siren of the Nile
. He was a large and bulky man, like a golem wrought from a hillock of Rio Jequetepeque clay, his teeth as bright and uniform as the white keys on Emma Darwin's piano. A half-dozen courtiers milled about in the shadows, along with the village shaman—“our
pagé,
” the princess noted—wearing a caiman-tooth necklace and grasping a scepter capped with a peccary skull.

The audience proceeded apace, Akawo rendering the Quechua speeches into their English equivalents and likewise interpreting the adventurers' words. Evidently the princess had explained the
scenario
lucidly to her father, for he began by declaring that he'd already cast the six roles reserved to Huancabambas. Hearing this boast in translation, Chloe realized that the Indians she'd taken for courtiers were actually the chief's choices to portray Lady Omega's followers.

“It happens I know about Israelite tribes,” said Nenkiwi. “Back when Chief Caquinte ruled this village—I speak now of my father's father's father—a band of black-robed Jesuits appeared one day, having sailed here from a place called Panama. Their desire was to tell my ancestors about the sky god Jehovah, the Hebrew patriarchs, and the Savior from Nazareth. Those priests are still with us. Would you like to meet them?”

At a nod from Nenkiwi, the shaman stepped forward bearing a reed basket. He removed the lid. Four diminutive human heads lay on a rubber mat like a clutch of Encantadas tortoise eggs. The mouths were sutured shut, as if to prevent the martyred Jesuits from crying out to their Creator as had Jonah from the belly of the whale.

“Good Lord!” moaned Mr. Chadwick.

“Étonnant!”
gasped Capitaine Léourier.

“So Chief Caquinte killed them?” asked Chloe.

“He gave the command, yes,” said Nenkiwi.

“And then he shrank their heads?” asked Ralph.

“Not personally. We have specialists.”

“In my former profession,” said Solange, “I often dealt with men whose heads I would have liked to cut off and shrink, also their pizzles,” a sentence that Akawo declined to translate.

“I understand why Chief Caquinte did it,” said Nenkiwi. “He believed the Jesuits wanted to destroy our gods.”

Like a father putting his quadruplets to bed, the shaman patted each little head, then solemnly closed the basket.

“Am I to infer that the Huancabambas
still
shrink their enemies' heads?” asked Mr. Chadwick, pressing rigid fingers against his cracked rib.

“On occasion, yes, and then we burn their bodies and mix the cinders into our nightly calabashes of
masato,
” said Nenkiwi. “Did the four priests end up in Chief Caquinte's kiln? The historians are silent on this question—but this I know: Jesuit teachings entered our lore only in bits and pieces. I can tell you just three or four stories. The plagues of Eden, Samson and Goliath, the resurrection of Adam—”

“Eve, actually,” said Solange.

“Señorita Kirsop makes a joke,” Akawo told her father. “The messiah-man Jesus is the one who came back.”

“The Deluge story especially fascinated my ancestors,” said Nenkiwi. “Some even built a replica of Noah's ark in which to enact secret rites. They believed that if a man spent enough time inside the hull chanting hymns and inhaling
epená
, he would enter the realm of the gods. When the Jesuits found out about the cataclysm sect, they forced it to disband—but the temple remains intact, moored in a swamp near the river.”

The chief assured Chloe that, even though his forebears' encounter with the Jesuits had left few contemporary traces, the actors he'd chosen would make excellent Israelites. As Nenkiwi introduced them to Chloe—wise Cuniche, wily Nitopari, honest Pirohua, brave Ascumiche, stalwart Yitogua, steadfast Rapra—she found herself pondering the cataclysm sect. If the ark replica had once functioned as a temple, it would be considerably larger than the catamaran that the children had made for their Noah pageant back at the Jesuit mission. She imagined loading the thing onto a raft and hauling it to the archipelago via a towline leading from the bow to the
Lamarck.
On reaching the archipelago, the Serugites would explain how, long before the coming of Lady Omega, they had constructed a model ark in homage to their primordial ancestor, Noah's son Shem, whose descendants included Jacob, progenitor of the Thirteen Tribes.

“I should like to see your ancestors' temple,” Chloe told Nenkiwi. “If it's a credible facsimile of Noah's vessel, we'll want to bring it with us.”

“The replica is
very
believable. The cataclysm sect built it to dimensions specified in the Hebrew Bible.”

“The
precise
dimensions?” Mr. Chadwick inquired. “You mean three hundred cubits long?”

“Oh, yes,” said the chief.

“Fifty cubits wide?” asked Chloe. “Thirty cubits high?”

“Quite so,” said Nenkiwi.

Chloe's pulse quickened. Her muscles tensed. Bit by bit, a new version of the
scenario
took shape in her brain. This time around, the Serugites were no longer simply itinerant Hebrews who'd found their New Canaan in Peru—no, now they were the appointed keepers and anointed guardians of the vessel that had saved the world.

“Was your ancestors' temple seaworthy?” she asked.

“To best of my knowledge,” said Nenkiwi.

“And is it still seaworthy?”

“I imagine so.”

“Might it cross six hundred miles of open water to Galápagos?”

“Most probably.”

“Mademoiselle Bathurst, I know what you're thinking, and I salute you,” said Léourier brightly.

“You have made our improvident plan more improvident than ever,” said Mr. Chadwick approvingly. “Well done.”

“Our English mystic is a clever creature indeed,” said Solange, kissing Chloe's cheek. “In that regard she is rather like a fox, or a freethinker, or the Covent Garden Antichrist.”

*   *   *

As magnificent as its Bronze Age counterpart, the Huancabamba ark rose before Chloe and her fellow adventurers in all its epic splendor. Afloat in a secluded fen, the reed-wrapped hull suggested an immense basket—swollen descendant, perhaps, of the bassinet in which the infant Moses had drifted down to Thebes. Although Chloe regarded the Genesis flood as mythical (the Old Testament had not figured in her Manáos epiphany), this aquatic cathedral was certain to provide the masquerade with an extra measure of credibility. She christened it the
Covenant.

After subjecting the ark to his professional scrutiny, Ralph declared that only a madman or a deity would attempt to pilot the thing to the Encantadas ere equipping it with masts, spars, sails, helm, and rudder.

“And how much time must we devote to refurbishing the
Covenant
?” Chloe asked.

“I shall defer to the genius who built the flying-machine,” said Ralph.

“I would estimate three weeks,” said Léourier. “Obviously we must create two teams of aboriginal laborers
immédiatement
. Even as Ralph's men add rigging to the
Covenant
, mine will make the
Lamarck
rise from the ashes.”

“A worthy plan,
Monsieur le Capitaine,
” said Chloe. “If your team completes its mission first, then we shall go to Galápagos aboard the
Lamarck
. Otherwise, the next vessel to figure in our adventures will be this wooden behemoth.” She gestured towards the
Covenant
, then added, in a sportive voice, “Thus spake the leader of the Encantadas Salvation Brigade.”

Under Akawo's guidance, Chloe and her friends climbed through the hull portal and into the yawning hollow beyond. Raising their torches high, the adventurers saw that the ark's builders had followed God's instructions precisely, creating three interior decks subdivided into scores of stalls, corrals, and coops. Never before had Chloe found herself in so cavernous a space. If Mr. Darwin had sailed around the world not in a ninety-foot brig but rather in the present vessel, and if he'd discovered on his journey a lost continent teeming with Professor Owen's dinosaurs, he'd have experienced no difficulty bringing back a hundred such dragons.

Because the new fittings would increase the ark's weight and unwieldiness, the transformation could not begin until the Indians had dragged it seven miles west through the Jequetepeque gorge to the sea. Thanks to Ralph's knowledge of ropes and pulleys, Léourier's expertise with rollers and winches, and Chief Nenkiwi's requirement that every able-bodied male Huancabamba volunteer for the job, the thing proved surprisingly mobile. From dawn until midnight the Indians cleaved to their task, hauling the ark through shallows, over sandbars, around boulders, and finally into Pacasmayo Harbor, until at last it lay moored to the main pier, aglow in the moonlight like an albino sperm whale.

The vessel's renovation began on a morally equivocal note, with several score aborigines making an unauthorized journey to Puerto Etén and returning the next morning bearing improbable quantities of timber, canvas, and nails—plus two launches: a longboat and a cutter. The Indians insisted that all these materials had come from a graveyard of sunken fishing boats, a tale to which Ralph did not so much assent as acquiesce. If the project must be accomplished with stolen goods, then so be it.

The gods of ambiguity likewise attended the
Lamarck'
s rehabilitation. It turned out that Léourier had woefully underestimated the number of fish that must be trapped before his team could repair the observation port with cured swim-bladders. The aeronaut's men would have to sacrifice no fewer than three hundred
pirarucús
and
tambaquis
if the airship were to live again.

“At least our Huancabambas will be banqueting on the gutted fish,” Mr. Chadwick told Chloe. “I'm quite certain Mr. Hallowborn has no intention of feeding anybody with the creatures that die in the Great Winnowing.”

“There will be no Great Winnowing,” she said.

Whilst the ark and the flying-machine underwent their respective transmutations, Chloe, Akawo, and Mr. Chadwick herded Lady Omega's six disciples into the council lodge. Before the tutorials began, Akawo unfurled a white cotton robe, elegant as the gown Chloe had worn as the Southern belle in
Lanterns on the Levee
. “Our
pagé
has soaked these fibers in his magic,” the princess explained, presenting the garment to Chloe, “so that you will not be nailed to a tree.”

“I have never received a finer gift,” said Chloe, hoping that, just as her pirate regalia had made her feel like an adventurer, so might this robe turn her into a prophet.

She elected to begin the aborigines' Hebraicization with some of the biblical narratives she'd studied whilst Ralph had undertaken his fruitless expedition to Puerto Etén. The day did not go well. With its odd stories of gods inciting fratricide by preferring mutton to bread—of prideful towers reaching into the clouds, brothers swindling brothers out of birthrights, and fathers binding sons to sacrificial altars—the Book of Genesis mystified the Indians. On the second day they became belligerent, and Chloe found herself substituting Nenkiwi's flattering epithets for sardonic designations, so that her roster of students now comprised stubborn Cuniche, sneering Nitopari, pigheaded Pirohua, quarrelsome Ascumiche, haughty Yitogua, and fickle Rapra.

Compounding the nascent Jews' theological confusion was Mr. Chadwick's belief that they should understand Lady Omega's advent in the context of the Fall of Man. Christ had come to free the Hebrews of Palestine and the Gentiles of the East from bondage to Adam's disobedience, and now the English mystic was performing that same service for the Lost Thirteenth Tribe—or so the Huancabambas must feign to believe.

“Here is what you are telling us,” complained Cuniche as translated by Akawo. “One day the universe decides, ‘I, Jehovah-Jesus, shall become a Creator, making a planet called Earth and a first man called Adam, fated to disobey me and thus infect himself and his children and his children's children with a sickness called sin.'”

“‘Then I shall cause a human version of myself to grow inside a woman,'” Nitopari continued, “‘so that, thirty years later, my Creator side can murder my human side and offer up the corpse as a gift to the fallen angel Lucifer, thereby ransoming Adam's descendants from that same demon.'”