The Fall of Tartarus (23 page)

Her
sixteenth birthday came and went, though, with no sign of Bobby. In the days
that followed the longed-for hour of liberation, she told herself that he had
been delayed, that
today
he would come for her, and like this weeks and
months passed by. She had not received a letter from him since before her
birthday, and every month, as often as she could afford, she wrote to him,
imploring him to get in touch. Six months later, with no sign of Bobby and
still no word from him, she admitted to herself that life on Draconis was too
good for Bobby to waste time and money rescuing his kid sister ... So she let
her studies slip, and dodged lessons when she could. Then one morning she
skipped literature studies, went swimming in the river, and then caught the
express to the coast.

The
sun had set by the time she rose, showered, and made her way to the bar for the
breakfast of fruit and coffee, which she would eat in silence with the old man
and woman. It was the seventh day of the journey, and they were due to dock at
Lapierre’s Landing at midnight. After breakfast, Katerina resumed her station
on the chesterfield by the open window, drank beer and stared out at the dark
jungle beneath a fiery night sky.

She
was on her third beer when her attention was attracted by movement on the bank
of the river. She made out the fleeting glimpse of a human figure dashing
through the foliage. As she leaned forward and stared, she caught fight of more
and more figures, perhaps a dozen, as they ran swiftly through the jungle,
paralleling the course of the boat. They emerged upon a projecting,
moss-covered rock at a bend in the river, stood in absolute silence and watched
as the boat passed by. Katerina was up and filming, aware of the quality of the
shot. The tribesmen were tall and sun-bronzed, with fair hair and blue eyes.
Some wore loincloths, others went naked. All carried spears or bows and arrows.
They stood in a still and silent tableau, watching the slow passage of the boat
with no sign of either hospitality or Hostility. The river turned again and the
tribesmen passed from sight. Katerina resumed her beer and contemplated
existence in such hostile terrain.

One
hour later, as they approached the rotting timber settlement that was
Lapierre’s Landing, she activated her camera and composed an establishing shot.

She
had expected a small town, at least a settlement of a hundred or so cabins. Her
heart sank when the boat pulled into the L-shaped jetty and she made out a
dozen ramshackle timber huts in a clearing surrounded on three sides by jungle.
There was no sign of activity on the shore, though trails of smoke did rise
from a couple of the cabins. Katerina collected her pack and carefully
negotiated the precarious gangplank.

She
spotted a crude sign nailed to a timber construct on the river’s edge. The sign
read,
‘Sook’
- with the remaining three letters,
‘ie’s’,
hanging
on a loose board at right angles. Katerina made her way along the muddy bank,
the humidity sapping her strength, and ducked into the doorway beneath the
dangling sign.

Tables
and benches, constructed from the ubiquitous timber planking, filled the gloomy
interior - the crowded seating arrangements suggesting that Sookie’s had seen
busier days. An old woman, her European face lined with wrinkles, sat beside a
huge, throbbing refrigerator. She stared with an expression of frank amazement
as Katerina sat herself down on a bench and mopped the sweat from her brow.

There
was no sign of Old Henrique.

Recovering
her composure, the woman hauled open the fridge door and pulled out an ice-cold
beer. She removed the cap with an opener tied to the hinge of the fridge door
with a length of twine, and passed the bottle to Katerina.

Liquid
had never tasted so good. Katerina held up the empty and nodded for a second bottle.

Two
beers later, she lined up the empty with the others and smiled at the old
woman. ‘Look. I’d like to go on drinking all day, but I came here for a reason.
I’m looking for Henrique. Old Henrique.’

The
woman stared and shook her head. She muttered something in a language Katerina
did not understand, perhaps corrupted German.

‘Old
Henrique,’ she spoke loud and clear. ‘Where can I find him?’

Enlightenment
showed on the woman’s face. ‘Ah, Henrique?’ she said, then babbled on and
pointed towards the jungle.

At
last she climbed to her feet, took Katerina by the hand and led her outside.
She walked her to the centre of the clearing and pointed up the slight incline.
Katerina made out a raised timber walkway disappearing into the jungle. ‘Down
there? I’ll find Henrique down there?’

The
woman nodded, almost pushing Katerina on her way. ‘Ja, Henrique.’

Shouldering
her pack, Katerina walked from the river, passing timber huts on stilts, mangy
dogs sleeping in their shade and filthy, naked children watching her silently
from doorways.

The
walkway was a death-trap of treacherous mould and missing planks. She clutched
a loose handrail and inched her way forward, peering into the gloom ahead for
any sign of habitation. A hundred metres further on, the walkway terminated at
the front porch of a long, low hut. The door was open and an orange light
glowed within.

Katerina
knocked on the timber frame, only then remembering the old woman’s advice to
present Henrique with a bottle of
feti
to keep him sweet. Damn - she’d promise
him an entire crate if he could help her.

‘Enter,’
a gravelly baritone sounded from inside.

She
stepped into a one-room building entirely in shadow but for a globe of light
which illuminated a big man seated in an armchair. She had expected some diseased
and weather-worn trader in his hundreds. Old Henrique, despite his title, was
perhaps fifty, massive-chested, bald-headed and emanating, even when seated, an
awesome sense of power.

‘Don’t
tell me,’ he said in French. ‘Lizzie sent you, right? And she suggested you
bring
feti
as a gift. But Sookie’s doesn’t sell the stuff, and you’re
wondering if you’ll still get your interview.’

‘Almost
right,’ she said. ‘But I don’t want an interview.’

‘You
don’t? You’re not a journalist?’ He smiled to himself at some personal joke.
‘You’re not here to quiz me about what it’s like to be afflicted?’

‘Well,
I am a journalist, but I haven’t come to ask about your health.’

‘That
makes a change, girl. I get medical hacks come from all over the Thousand
Worlds to pry and poke and ask a hundred stupid questions. Then of course they
all want the photograph.’ He stared at her, his eyes large beneath his bald
head. His stare seemed to challenge her.

She
accepted the challenge. ‘
The
photograph?’

Smiling,
he lifted his hands from the arms of the chair and slowly unfastened his shirt.
Despite herself, Katerina stared. His chest and belly was covered with a
thousand blood-red writhing tentacles, each perhaps as long as a finger,
embedded in his flesh.

He
smiled in satisfaction at her expression, and then slowly fastened his shirt.

‘I
was way down south one night and I hadn’t fumigated the tent, and in the
morning something had laid its egg in my chest. By the time I got to
Apollinaire it was too late. Yekini’s, after the prospector who was first
afflicted. It’s a symbiotic creature which usually lives on Leverfre’s
mandrills, but humans’ll do at a push. It isn’t life threatening, and the pain
can be kept in check with pills. On the plus side, it releases a mild
hallucinogen into my bloodstream, which I must admit I find rather pleasant.’
His expression hardened. ‘Now, you’ve got what you want, so why don’t you go
back to where you came from?’

Katerina
matched his stare. ‘I’m a journalist,’ she said, ‘but I’m not a ghoul. I didn’t
come here because of the Yekini’s.’

He
gestured at her to explain herself, his expression half-amused.

‘Lizzie
told me you know Kruger territory and the Bourg people.’

He
bunched his lips in contemplation. ‘And if I do?’

‘I
need your help. I can pay, and pay well.’

Henrique
was silent for long seconds. At last he asked. ‘Pay for what?’

‘Information,
first - then maybe advice and help.’ He rested his head on the back of his
chair, the tanned skin of his face highlighted by the lamp beside his chair,
‘What do you want to know?’

Hesitantly,
picking her words with care, Katerina told him about her brother and the
crash-landing. Then she asked Henrique if he had heard or seen anything that
might corroborate the fortune-teller’s claim that Bobby is still alive.

He
heard her out without a word, staring up at the thatched ceiling of the hut,
his face impassive. The silence continued long after Katerina had finished
speaking.

At
last he said, ‘Chances are if he came down in Kruger territory, was injured and
wandered off into the jungle, then he’s dead.’

‘Not
according to the fortune-teller.’

Henrique
closed one eye and regarded her askance. ‘And you believe in fortune-tellers?’

Sophia
told me I’d go places, Katerina thought, and I did: perhaps it was only because
someone believed in me, after the disappointment of Bobby’s broken promise,
that I began to believe in myself and strove to succeed.

She
shrugged. ‘Yes. I don’t know. Perhaps it’s because I want to believe so much
that I do.’

Henrique
listened without mocking her, then nodded. ‘When did your brother go down? What
time of year?’

Katerina
calculated. ‘Three years ago, St Bede’s month.’

‘High
summer. Golden fruit’s harvested in summer, so the Bourg people might’ve been
in the area.’

‘But
if they’d found him, then surely you’d have heard about it?’

‘Not
necessarily. I trade with the Bourg. I barter knives for golden fruit, but we
talk about nothing other than the goods. They’re an insular, suspicious
people.’

‘So
Bobby might have been found by the Bourg?’

Henrique
scowled and shook his head. ‘If he survived, then why didn’t he return to
civilisation? On their yearly migration, the Bourg come within twenty
kilometres of Lapierre.’

‘So
maybe he didn’t survive. Maybe he died. I need to find out, whatever happened.’
She paused, then asked, ‘Can you take me to the Bourg people? Maybe they can
tell me what happened to Bobby?’

He
seemed to consider her request for a long time. ‘What month is it?’ he asked.

‘St
Mary’s.’

He
smiled. ‘I lose track. Sometimes, Yekini’s puts me out for days at a time. Get
me that.’ He indicated a worn map on a nearby table.

Katerina
passed him the map and he pored over it, tracing a route through the jungle
with a blunt forefinger and talking to himself.

‘The
Bourg’ll be here,’ he said, pointing, ‘two hundred kays south of Lapierre.’ He
looked up at Katerina. ‘There’s no reason why I can’t take you. But my services
don’t come cheap. There’s the hire of my flier, my fee as a guide and
translator . . .’

‘How
much?’

‘Five
thousand shellings, Tartarean.’

She
would have paid ten times that amount for information about her brother. ‘That
sounds reasonable,’ she said.

She
reached out and shook Old Henrique by the hand.

For
the first two hours of the journey south they flew above the jungle, a dark
expanse that rolled away for hundreds of kilometres in every direction. Above
them, the heavens were afire, the night sky streaked with great arching
blood-red and amber cloud formations. Later, at the first sign of dawn on the
far horizon, Henrique lowered his battered, open-top flier through the jungle
canopy and into a jade-tinted twilight.

She
took her mind from what lay ahead by filming their passage through the jungle.
At one point Henrique dropped her on a fan-shaped cantilever of fungus growing
at right angles from a tree trunk, then turned back and repeated his approach,
so that she could get a shot of the vehicle in flight.

Resuming
their journey, she provoked Henrique into conversation and filmed him.

‘The
traders at the Ace of Spades called you “Old” Henrique,’ she said. ‘I was
expecting some grizzled ancient.’

Sitting
back in the driving seat, Henrique glanced at her. ‘I had a son, also named
Henrique. Young Henrique.’

For
the sake of the film, she asked, ‘What happened to him?’

Henrique
stared straight ahead, his big hands wringing the apex of the steering wheel.
‘He died. We worked together, trading. He was attacked by a chowl. He was
twenty.’

She
murmured her condolences.

He
flashed her a glance that said he could do without her spurious sympathy.

The
white light of day fell through gaps in the foliage high overhead like great
probing searchlights, illuminating motes of dust, air-borne seeds and the
occasional giant butterfly and insect.