Down in The Bottomlands (and Other Places)

Even the air of good cheer Ankowaljuu cultivated wore thin as Park kept his nose in his books and spoke almost as little as Iispaka. Only the swarms of mosquitoes that buzzed endlessly round the steamboat made him sit up and take notice — their bites roused him to brief spasms of insecticidal frenzy.

Then one day, about a week after they had left Iipiisjuuna, Park slammed shut the volume in which he’d been lost.

“Tell me,” he asked Ankowaljuu, his voice suddenly so mild that the tukuuii riikook gave him a suspicious glance, “does your faith out-and-out forbid you from writing down what you believe in?”

“No one ever does,” Ankowaljuu said after a moment of frowning thought. “As you’ve seen, we of Tawantiinsuuju pride ourselves in heartlearning everything we need to know.”

“Aye, aye,” Park said impatiently, “but that’s not what I asked. I want to know if you may, not if you do.”

“But why would we want to?” Ankowaljuu persisted.

Park rubbed his chin. “Hmm. Reckon you had an upgrown man like, like me, say, who wanted to become a changer to the faith of Patjakamak. Upgrowns aren’t as good at heartlearning as children. Would you be allowed to put things in writing to help him grasp your faith?”

“Like you?” Ankowaljuu said. “Is that why you’ve been toiling so hard: because you’re thinking on joining the brotherhood of the sun and the All-Maker?” His English failed him; with shining eyes, he switched to Ketjwa: “We would welcome you, my friend.”

“I thank you.” Park felt like a heel — he had no intention of converting — but plunged ahead: “Could you make such a writing for me?”

“Aye, and I will,” Ankowaljuu promised. After that first moment of emotion, he had his English back. “You are rick: the writing in itself is naught shameful nor sinful, and so you will have it as quick as is doable.”

That did not prove so quick as either Ankowaljuu or Park, for rather different reasons, hoped. A search of the ship revealed only three or four sheets of paper. “Why more?” Iispaka demanded when the two eager men upbraided him for the lack. “I don’t write.”

“Where’s the nearest storehouse?” Ankowaljuu asked. Public storehouses in the towns and along the highways of Tawantiinsuuju kept vast quantities of all sorts of supplies against time of need.

“Next town is Tejfej,” Iispaka said. “Maybe two days away.”

Ankowaljuu fumed at the delay. He spent as much of the intervening time as he could preaching at Park, perhaps expecting oral argument to work as well as written. To the tukuuii riikook’s disappointment, Park responded by diving back into his books. While he was studying, he could ignore distractions.

He could not so escape Eric Dunedin. When they were bedding down on deck under mosquito netting, his servant whispered, “Do you really have truck with that heathen foolishness? I ken you’re truly no hallow, and even if you were, you left the church to take up your judgeship. But I thock you still a Christian wick.”

“I am,” Park said after some moments’ thought. “All the same, though, I need to learn as much as I can about faithly dealings here, for the strife between Tawantiinsuuju and the Emirate is ungetawayably tied up in ’em.” He paused again. “D’you believe me?”

The answer mattered to him. Dunedin was friend as well as thane. Relief flowed through him as the small, wrinkled man said, “Reckon I do. If I can’t trust you, I can’t trust anyone.”

“Thanks, Eric,” Park said softly. He got no reply and repeated himself, a little louder. Still no answer, only soft, regular breathing. Monkey-face was asleep. Park let out a snort of laughter and joined him.

That night, they passed from the Huurwa to what Park persisted in thinking of as the Amazon. It was as if a giant hand had pushed the jungle back from either side of the steamboat: the Great River was a couple of miles wide. Its own mighty current added to the speed the steamboat’s engine could produce.

As Iispaka had predicted, they reached Tejfej toward evening of the second day after Ankowaljuu had asked for paper. The little town lay on the south bank of the Amazon, just past a tributary smaller than the Huurwa. A few Kuuskoo-style public buildings of massive stonework contrasted oddly with the huts of leaves and branches all around them.

One of the massive buildings was the storehouse. Using his authority as tukuuii riikook, Ankowaljuu requisitioned a ream of paper. He would sooner have commandeered an airwain, but Tejfej had none.

“Maybe this is for the better,” Ankowaljuu said as they steamed away the next morning. “Now I will in sooth have the time to write out what you need to know.”

And write he did, with a furious intensity that reminded Park of his own obsessive leaps into projects. Each evening he delivered to Park the pile of papers he had filled that day. Then Park had to wrestle with written Ketjwa, for Ankowaljuu expected him to read every word and absorb it with proper convert’s zeal.

“How can you keep track of so much?” Eric Dunedin asked one night, seeing his boss studying by lamplight and occasionally batting away the big bugs the lamp attracted.

Park looked up, gri

Even in the first couple of days, he saw how much constant exposure to Tawantiinsuuju’s written language improved his command of it. He also learned enough about the local religion to develop a considerable respect for it.

Patjakamak, Ankowaljuu wrote, was the creator and sustainer of the earth and heavens. He had placed the sun above all the stars and made them the sun’s handmaidens. The moon was the sun’s sister and wife, a pattern echoing that of the ruling house of Tawantiinsuuju, which sprang from the sun.

The sun’s warmth and light was the medium Patjakamak used to shape the world and everything in it. The sun deserved worship for its light, heat, and beauty, and also for its legendary descent to earth to give rise to the empire’s royal family.

Patjakamak, by contrast, did not allow himself to be seen. Nevertheless, he was the supreme god and lord, worshiped inwardly by every Tawantiinsuujan. That appealed to Park: the sun’s cult had more show, but the invisible god behind it was the more powerful.

Patjakamak judged the souls of the dead. Those of the good went up to a heaven — literally, an anan patja, an upper house — of rest and pleasure, while those of the bad went to hell-uuka patja, the lower house — where they had toil and pain and sickness forevermore.

It was, in short, a faith about as sophisticated as Christianity or Islam, though growing from different roots. It had its own pride; Ankowaljuu wrote tartly, “Christians say God’s Son died; we know Patjakamak’s Sun lives.” A man who followed its tenets would live a good life by any reasonable standard.

None of that was enough to convince Allister Park that he needed to switch religions, but he didn’t see that the Tawantiinsuujans needed to have their beliefs changed, either. He carefully stowed away every sheet that Ankowaljuu gave him.

A little more than a week after they left Tejfej, they came to Manaus, at the junction of the Great River and the almost equally impressive Black River. Iispaka moored the steamboat at one of the floating docks that let the town cope with the river’s ever-shifting level. “You find airwain here,” he said.

Park felt sure he was right. Manaus was a real city, nearly as big as Kuuskoo. Bigger ships lay to either side of Iispaka’s vessel; though Manaus was a thousand miles from the Atlantic, ocean-going craft could sail up the Amazon to it.

None would, though, not any time soon, not if the war went on: the mouth of the Great River lay inside the Emirate of the Dar al-Harb.