Beneath the World a Sea Page 2

  ‘So this is it,’ Ben said softly on the afternoon of the second day, trying to anchor himself in this place which still seemed too peculiar to fully believe in. ‘The Submundo! The Submundo Delta.’

  Hyacinth looked over at him and smiled. ‘You have to remind yourself it’s real, don’t you? I’ve been to the Delta seven times now and I still have to.’

  From the cargo hatch to the rear came the sound of Rico’s unhinged laughter.

  ‘Of course Delta is really a misnomer,’ said Mr de Groot, who was just returning to the deck after settling his wife into one of her drugged sleeps. He was a man who took comfort in facts, and liked to recite them whenever a chance presented itself. ‘The appearance is of solid ground with channels passing through it, but actually the water continues beneath the forest as well. It would be more accurate to call it an inland sea with trees growing up from the bottom of it. They put out side roots above its surface and these roots join together to create the dense mat that gives the impression of solid—’

  He broke off, hearing a faint cry from his wife in their cabin below. With a sigh, he went back down to her.

  There were just five crew on the boat. The captain, Korzeniowski, with his thick grey beard, dined with the passengers every night, and was courteous but completely unsmiling; Lessing, the engineer, never spoke to any of the passengers, and when they saw her at all she was usually fixing something or smoking by herself at the back of the boat in her blue overalls or making notes in a grimy little book; the cook and the two other hands were all Mundinos, local men from the Submundo itself, speaking to each other in their own idiosyncratic Portuguese Creole. (Hyacinth was fluent in this language and would sometimes chat to them but, though Ben had taken intensive Portuguese lessons before he set out, he quickly realized he was going to have to unlearn most of what he’d so laboriously acquired.) At night, when the boat was moored to one of the crumbling jetties that punctuated the banks of the Lethe, all five of the crew took turns to keep watch on deck, as they had apparently also done at Nus. But this time it wasn’t to protect the passengers and cargo from criminals, but to fend off any duendes that might otherwise disturb everyone’s sleep by climbing on board with their suckered hands and feet.

  Down in his tiny cabin, Ben rather enjoyed listening to the footsteps of the allocated member of the crew pacing the boards over his head. It was a soothing sound, and there were very few other sounds at all, for there were no night birds in the Submundo to cry or scream and the local creatures were completely silent. But sometimes creaks and groans came from the forest’s roots and branches and Ben would sleepily wonder about the source of these pulses of tension passing through that enormous woody mass. Were they the result of wind blowing through the canopy, perhaps, or rainfall in the surrounding mountains changing the flow of water through the submerged trunks? Or was it the tugging of the moon, whose light crept in through his porthole to shine on the neatly folded clothes he laid out each night for the next morning?

  The Lethe was truly serpentine. You might pass some distinctive landmark – a half-collapsed jetty, a rusty signpost – and apparently leave it far behind you as you chugged slowly onwards through the river’s twists and bends, only to find yourself looking through a narrow neck of forest at that very same jetty or sign, and realize you were only a matter of yards away from a stretch of water you’d been through several hours before.

  Two or three times a day, the boat came to riverside settlements – clusters of simple, usually flat-roofed cabins, joined on to one another, propped up by poles above the water, and often decorated with brightly coloured murals. The many-armed and many-eyed water creature was a constant theme. So were the skeleton gravediggers, lowering their caged victims into the ground. And often a sinister white-faced figure stood watching in waistcoat and top hat, stick-thin and immensely tall.

  From time to time the boat moored at the jetties of these villages to take on fresh vegetables or a few chickens, which the cook, rather than buy for cash, would barter for small items specially brought for the purpose, such as knives, enamel mugs or plastic buckets. The Mundino people, so Ben had learnt from the material sent to him from Geneva, had Iberian, African and Native American origins, and had been shipped into the Delta back in the 1860s by a wealthy Portuguese aristocrat called Baron Valente with the idea that, if any of them were fortunate enough to survive, they and their descendants would be useful in the future as a ready-made labour force when the time came to open up this remote and unexplored region to civilization.

  ‘In much the same way,’ Mr de Groot observed over dinner one evening, snuffling with the amusement that his store of facts provided him, ‘sailors in those days would leave goats or pigs on uninhabited islands, so there would be a food supply in the future in case of need.’

  Every Mundino settlement was surrounded by vegetable gardens, shockingly bright green against the pinks and purples of the ever-encroaching forest. Chickens, pigs and small children wandered about and, in an open space in the centre of every village – a sort of town square, separated from the river by at least one row of cabins – there invariably stood a carved representation of the Mundino god, Iya. The wood was rubbed with fat to preserve it, which made the images shiny and black, and even shinier black stones – pieces of obsidian from the Montanhas de Vidro at the northern edge of the Delta – were set into them to form the small pointed nipples and eyes.

  On one occasion, Ben walked over to the central square in one of the larger villages and just stood there looking up at Iya’s stone eyes and her strange fixed smile. Children were pestering him for sweets or pens, but he did his best to shut them out of his mind, absently patting curly heads, and gently detaching his fingers from sticky little hands that took hold of his. And, as he looked up at the god, it struck him, not for the first time, that it was impossible to look at the image of a face without, at some level, seeing it as alive. He’d first noticed this with a teddy bear he’d had as a child. Even when he was much too old to really believe it, he could still not completely rid himself of the idea that the thing’s glass eyes could see. It was as if there was a primitive layer of the brain which took everything to be whatever it seemed to be.

  ‘She watches over them,’ Hyacinth said, coming to stand beside him. She was wearing a white T-shirt with her sunglasses tucked into the top, and was holding her sketchbook at her side. ‘She protects them against the duendes, and against floods, and she sees everything they do, good or bad, and stores it in her mind for the final reckoning.’

  Suddenly the children stopped tugging at Ben and Hyacinth and went running and shouting across to Rico. He’d brought his guitar and now, perching himself on the veranda of a hut in a single graceful movement, he proceeded to bash out songs and gurn for them, while Jael, all by herself, danced a little dance in a floaty green dress.

  Hyacinth raised her eyebrows slightly but said nothing.

  ‘Do you think they kill duendes in this village?’ Ben asked her.

  She laughed at the naïvety of the question. ‘Oh, for sure! They do in all the villages. For them it’s just like killing rats.’

  Presently, the captain rang his bell and they returned to the boat. The de Groots were already in their cabin, and Jael and Rico resumed their normal station on the cargo hatch, so Hyacinth and Ben had the deck to themselves again as they left the village behind.

  ‘I don’t know why I haven’t asked you this before,’ he said, ‘but what exactly is your reason for coming to the Delta?’

  She smiled. ‘I don’t blame you for not asking,’ she said. ‘Jobs, goals, objectives … It all seems a bit trivial, doesn’t it, compared to this?’ She gestured to a mass of white helical flowers, like tiny twisted saxophones, their bells opening towards the boat in a blast of silent crimson. ‘I think I told you I’m an anthropologist – yes? – but perhaps I didn’t explain more than that. I’m based at Columbia University in New York, but I have a small research grant from the Protectorate to study the
folk beliefs of the Mundino people. How about you?’

  ‘Well, as you know I’m a policeman …’ Ben began and hesitated. He remembered announcing this over dinner on the first leg of the journey. As a rule he enjoyed the slightly chilling effect this news typically produced, but in the context of a river boat travelling towards the Submundo Delta, the effect had been more of slightly absurd incongruity. In the faces of all of them – Hyacinth, Korzeniowski, the de Groots – he’d seen the same unspoken question: A London policeman? Here?

  ‘Yes, you did tell us,’ she said. ‘But why do they need you in the Delta? I didn’t quite get that.’

  A large flock of bright blue iridescent birds had suddenly appeared. They hovered briefly around the mouths of the flowers, stabbing into the naked upturned bells with long red tongues, and then headed off up the river ahead. Of course they were not really ‘birds’, Ben reminded himself, and the helices with their upturned bells were not really ‘flowers’. Life in the Delta was different. The birds had teeth. The flowers, as Mr de Groot liked to inform him from time to time, had no stamens and no known reproductive function, though they secreted a kind of golden milk, which could sometimes be seen dripping into the water from their lips, to disperse in creamy clouds.

  But now Ben spotted a more familiar-looking animal in the trees ahead: a large green lizard, a bona fide reptile, leaning down from the top of a branch shaped like a musical clef, to watch the boat approach. He wondered how it got here, so far away from anything remotely of its kind.

  ‘Why do they need a British policeman?’ he said. ‘It’s a good question, but there’s a particular problem that I’ve been recruited to assist with. I shouldn’t really say more than that.’

  She nodded. ‘A particular problem, which you can’t discuss. How mysterious! But let me guess. Would it by any chance be to do with duende killings?’

  As she obviously knew, after a campaign by the small research community in the Delta, the UN had decreed that the beings known as duendes, unique to the Submundo, should be categorized as ‘persons’ under Protectorate law, meaning that they were entitled to the same protections as human beings. Hyacinth was quite right in guessing that his appointment was a direct consequence of that decision, strange and rather daunting as that now seemed to him, so far away from that dreary office in Geneva where he’d been interviewed, but he smiled and told her he wasn’t yet at liberty to discuss his role.

  ‘You should try drawing those birds,’ he said to change the subject. It seemed that the creatures were interested in the lizard. They were hovering around it, and the boat was catching up with them.

  ‘That would be hard,’ she said. ‘They don’t keep still for one thing. And there’s something about them, isn’t there, that really isn’t of this world? It would be hard to get down on paper, I think. Those teeth, and the way the beak almost seems to mock.’

  ‘But they’re only animals after all,’ Ben said.

  ‘You think so? I don’t know what they are, myself. I don’t think anyone does. But I can’t look at any of this without thinking about how it must have seemed to those first inhabitants when they were dumped here. Imagine what that must have been like! They were all alone. No one else would come into the Delta for sixty years. They thought they’d been buried somehow in some hidden world beneath the world they knew, a world under an enchantment, with its own giant sun and moon.’

  The few books about the Submundo that Ben had managed to find were all written from the perspective of the scientists and explorers who had rediscovered the place in the 1920s, and so it was their reactions that he was familiar with. He’d never thought before about how the first Mundinos must have felt when they found themselves here back in the 1860s, but now he remembered the shock of emerging from the Zona, and asked himself what that might have been like if you had no idea where you were or what to expect. ‘They wouldn’t have remembered how they got here, would they?’ he said. ‘It must have been very scary.’

  They were passing the green lizard when suddenly one of the bird creatures darted forward and bit it. With blood running from the side of its head the frightened animal opened its red mouth to hiss and show its teeth, but another bird darted forward, and then another, each attacking from a different direction so that the lizard didn’t know which way to face and was unable to defend itself. Bleeding and torn, the creature backed off towards the trunk, but they cut off its retreat and kept on harrying it until eventually – it was some way behind now and Ben had to lean over the railings to see – it lost its grip and dropped into the water. The birds hovered over it in a swarm, watching the dying animal sink into the Lethe in a cloud of its own blood, and then, in what seemed a single movement, they darted back to their golden feast.

  ‘Yes it must,’ Hyacinth said. ‘It must have been absolutely terrifying.’

  She and Ben lapsed into silence, surrounded by that strange aroma that was a little like caramel and honey and bitter lilies, but was mostly like nothing else at all.

  ‘I should warn you, Ben,’ Hyacinth said after a few minutes, ‘it’s hard to see projects through in this place. People think they’ve come here for a particular reason, but somehow the momentum dissipates, and what was going to be a straight line becomes a meander and then, as often as not, it fizzles out completely.’

  (3)

  In the middle of the Delta, a cluster of small extinct volcanoes formed a kind of island, rising up out of the hidden sea. The main channel of the Lethe came right up to it, widening into a kind of lake, and looping round its northern tip before continuing westward towards the remote and impassable Valente Falls. A wall enclosed a harbour kept clear of weeds and lilies. A couple of launches were moored there, as well as a modest-sized tanker and a small, white two-person submarine with its name painted along its side in large blue capital letters: SOLARIS.

  Behind the harbour was Amizad, the Submundo’s only town, with its red-tiled roofs and white church tower, its very ordinariness strange. The crew threw ropes to Mundino dockhands. Hyacinth slung her bag over her shoulder. The de Groots emerged from their cabin. Ben thought Mrs de Groot seemed a little more cheerful than she had been at the beginning, and she smiled at him as her husband helped her down the gangway to a waiting taxi, an unexpectedly sweet, almost conspiratorial smile. Hyacinth strode off by herself into the town. Rico and Jael simply settled down on the jetty as if they had nowhere to go, him strumming some chords on his guitar.

  Ben had a delegation to meet him. ‘Wonderful to see you, Inspector Ronson,’ said the Chief Administrator, a squat, Australian woman called Katherine Tiler. ‘I hope you had a pleasant journey.’

  ‘Or what you can remember of it anyway,’ said Da Ponte, the Chief of the Protectorate Police, thickly moustached, glossy with a sheen of sweat, and also very short.

  The small stature of the two of them reinforced in Ben a growing sense that he’d arrived in Toytown. They had a car waiting, also small, and a driver – they insisted on Ben taking the front seat for his long legs – who took them along two shortish streets to the hotel where he’d be staying. The two-storey buildings had plastered walls that were either whitewashed or painted in pink or pale blue. They looked European, though which part of Europe exactly, Ben couldn’t say. A few were crumbling and empty.

  The Hotel Bem-Vindo stood on the town’s small central plaza, facing a brick clock tower that had been built to commemorate the establishment of the Special Protectorate. The Town Hall, where the administration was based, stood on the adjoining side of the square to the hotel’s right, and there was another hotel opposite, and a couple of cafés. As Ben climbed from the car, a little mechanical man in traditional Mundino dress came out of a door at the top of the clock tower, bowed and banged four times on a bell with a hammer before disappearing inside with a whirr. Just like Toytown, Ben thought, or perhaps a film set, its very familiarity and ordinariness made bizarre by the presence just across the water of life forms so unlike the life of the rest of Earth that t
hey were thought by many to have arrived five hundred million years ago on the same asteroid that created the Submundo basin.

  Ben’s two hosts insisted on walking him into the reception of the hotel.

  ‘So looking forward to working with you!’

  ‘No rush at all in the morning, obviously.’

  ‘You’ll need your sleep. That journey takes it out of you.’

  ‘Shall we say an eleven o’clock start?’

  They were very keen to come across as friendly and pleased to see him, but it seemed to Ben that they overplayed this, like a cheating husband trying too hard to act the part of a loving and attentive spouse.

  He turned away from them. The lobby of the Hotel Bim-Vindo also served as its bar but was completely empty. Fussy, fake antique furniture stood unused. The barman polished glasses. Mrs Martin, the proprietor, greeted them excitedly. She was an Englishwoman, it seemed, who had at one time been married to a local man. She was thrilled to see one of her compatriots, and rather obviously also thrilled that he should turn out to be a good-looking youngish man. (Ben was thirty-five, and he was good-looking, with his thick black hair, his blue eyes, and his slender, toned, physique.)

  ‘You feel so cut off here sometimes,’ she said. ‘What with planes not being able to get in, and no phones or TV or anything. It sometimes feels as if all the world’s going on without you. And it’s so nice to hear a proper English voice.’

  She came out from behind the reception counter to show him up to his room, which was also fussily ornate, with elaborate mirrors, big, heavy velvet curtains, and sepia-tinted photographs in heavy gilt frames. One of the pictures showed Baron Valente posing with twenty of his so-called ‘pioneers’, a tall, handsome white man in a richly embroidered waistcoat, one hand resting paternally on the head of the small, frightened-looking boy on his right, the other on the head of a tense little girl whose face was too blurred to make out at all.