The Wine-Dark Sea (25 page)

'A good omen is always welcome: yet if it were not presumptuous I should feel inclined to say that there is comparatively little doubt about the outcome of these conversations, three of the high ecclesiastics and four governors being already wholly committed to us, together with those for whom they speak; while the officers in command of the regiments that must be moved are tolerably venal men, and we have ample funds at hand. Yet at the same time certain forms must still be observed: there must be persuasion, a gentle violence, before they can decently fall.

'We are to have a preliminary meeting without these gentlemen on Wednesday to arrange the details of payment and to decide whether Castro should be invited to the main conference on Friday. He is being very discreetly sounded at this moment, in the palace itself: the empty palace, for the Viceroy is hurrying to quell a disturbance in far northern Peru. He left with his military household and some other troops soon after I had met the last of our friends here who were still in Lima and he is already ten days' journey along the road.

'I could not have come at a more fortunate moment, when the Viceroy had alienated so many of the Creoles and so much of the army; when the desire for independence had risen to such a height; when he was about to remove himself and his surest friends from the capital; and when the ground had been to a certain extent prepared. It would perhaps have been wiser to start with Chile, where Bernardo O'Higgins (close kin to our Vicar-General) has so considerable a following; but given the present aspect of affairs, to say nothing of my direct, explicit instructions, I believe we may do very well here. It is true that time is all-important, with that smooth coordination of troop-movements, declarations, and the summoning of a Peruvian council that will present the Viceroy with a fait accompli on his return, a very well established fait accompli, with all these movements carried out and an overwhelming force in the citadel; yet most fortunately General Hurtado has an unusual sense of the passing hour, and he is a most capable chief of staff, the most capable in the Spanish service.

'How I wish I could give you the results of the full conference or even of the preliminary meeting, but I am to ride into the mountains directly, and the messengers who carry this to the Atlantic coast will be gone before I can be back. May I beg you to send the enclosed half-sheet down to Hampshire?'

'My dear,' he wrote on the half-sheet in question, 'this is the merest hasty scribble to bring you both my fondest love from our most recent port of call, and to tell you that all is well with us, except for poor Martin, who has been obliged to be sent home for his health. With the blessing, this note will reach you some three months before he arrives: please tell his wife that I am confident she will see him quite restored.

'This is a pleasant climate, for gentle sea-breezes temper the heat; but they assure me it never rains at all, not at all, ever; and although there are damp fogs throughout the winter they are not enough to relieve the almost total sterility of the desert, stony or sandy, that lies along the coast, the virtual absence of life, animal or vegetable. Yet I have already achieved one of my greatest ambitions: I have seen the condor. And you will be pleased to learn that I have already collected seven distinct species of mouse (five inhabit the fringe of the desert, one its very heart, and the seventh was making a nest in my papers), while the rivers, of course, which are fed from the high far-off snows and which therefore flow their strongest in the summer, provide their valleys and their irrigated fields with a valuable flora and fauna. But it is the high mountain that I long to see, with its plants and creatures unlike any others in the world; at this moment I am booted and spurred for a journey to the moderate heights. My mule stands in a courtyard close at hand, and across his saddle-bow he bears a poncho, an oblong piece of cloth with a hole in the middle, through which I shall put my head when I reach five or six thousand feet.

'Now God bless you, my dearest love; and pray kiss Brigit for me.

He sat back, reflecting with the utmost tenderness upon his wife Diana, that fierce, spirited young woman, and upon their daughter, whom he had not seen but whom he pictured as a very small child in a pinafore, walking by now, perhaps already conversable. Once again his watch broke in upon his wandering thoughts: a watch that would have been a more valuable guide if he had wound it the night before. He folded his papers, carried them into Gayongos" private room, and rehearsed his direction once more. 'You cannot miss it,' said Gayongos, 'but I wish you may get there before nightfall. You are starting more than three hours late.' Stephen bent his head; he could not but admit it. 'And there is a cruel wind blowing right in your face,' added Gayongos. He led Stephen through a daedal of passages and stables to a courtyard where the mule was standing, a tall, intelligent animal that recognized their destination after their first two or three turns through Lima streets, making his way through the gate beyond the Misericordia convent without guidance and striking into the road that ran a little north of east towards the mountains along the left of the river, a fine turbulent great stream, growing day by day as the season advanced. The road was not much frequented at present, though on Friday and Saturday it would be full of people going up to the shrine of Our Lady of Huenca; and it grew less beyond the limits of irrigated land. The mule was an ambler with a long easy motion and Stephen sat quite relaxed upon his back: the river-banks had a reasonable population of birds, while the occasional reptile crossed the road and large flying beetles were common as long as the carob-groves lasted. Part of Stephen's mind recorded them, but the strong east wind and the dust made it hard to see with any sharp definition and in any case the rest of his being was so taken up with the possibility, indeed the strong probability, of a brilliant success for his mission within the next eight days or even less that he never stopped or reached for his pocket-glass. The whole scheme had matured so quickly, because of his excellent relations with Hurtado and O'Higgins and above all because of the Viceroy's departure, that his spirits, usually so well under control, were now in something of a fluster. This was a condition he had seen often enough in his colleagues, but finding it in himself put him somewhat out of countenance.

Once more he went over the various moves, the replacing of stated regiments by others, the convocation of wholly committed supporters, the summoning of a council, the issue of a proclamation, the rapid dispatch of guns to command three essential bridges: as he named them in order they seemed simple enough, and his heart beat so that he could hear it. Yet he had some acquaintance with the military mind, the Spanish military mind, and with that of the Spanish conspirator; and before now he had seen a series of actions that were simple in themselves, but that had of necessity to be carried out in sequence, fall into hopeless chaos for want of a sense of time, for want of common efficiency, or because of hidden jealousies.

He wished he had not used such confident, presumptuous words in writing to Blaine. From very early times men had believed that it was unwise, even impious, to tempt fate: the ancient generations were not to be despised. The confident system of his youth - universal reform, universal changes, universal happiness and freedom - had ended in something very like universal tyranny and oppression. The ancient generations were not to be despised; and the seamen's firm belief that Friday was unlucky was perhaps less foolish than the philosophe's conviction that all the days of the week could be rendered happy by the application of an enlightened system of laws. He wished the main conference had not been set for Friday.

Blushing at his momentary weakness, he turned his mind to Hurtado. The General might have some small absurdities such as a delight in being fine (he wore the stars of his three orders at all times) and setting an inordinate value on pedigree: he took more pleasure in recounting the stages of his descent, through his maternal grandmother, from Wilfred the Shaggy than in speaking of the four brilliant victories he had won as commander or the other battles in which he had served with such distinction. On all other subjects however he was not only a rational being but one with an unusually acute and ready mind: an active man, a born organizer, and an uncommonly effective ally in such a concern. His abilities, his known honesty, his high reputation in the army, and his influence throughout Peru made him the most valuable friend that ever Stephen could have found.

The white milestones filed by, and many crosses commemorating death by earthquake, murder, accident. For some little while the mule had not been pacing uphill with the same steady determination. He had been gazing from side to side; and now, giving Stephen a significant look, he turned off the road into the last carob-trees. By this point the road had wound some way from the Rimac, which could be heard roaring in the gorge below, but a small tributary stream ran through among the trees and in this Stephen and the mule drank heartily.

'You are a good honest creature, sure, and you bear an excellent character,' said Stephen, 'so I shall take off your saddle, confident you will not play the fool.'

The mule flung himself to the ground and rolled, waving his legs; and while Stephen sat under the lee of a carob's wall (each tree was surrounded by what looked like a well-head) grazed on what meagre herbage the grove could provide. Stephen ate bread and good Peruvian cheese with Peruvian wine; and in doing so he thought of the little girls, their apology the next day (Sarah: 'Sir, we are come to ask pardon for our wicked drunken folly.' Emily: 'For our wanton drunken folly.') and their words to Mr Wilkins, their voices piping alternately, clearly audible from below when Stephen had been chivvied right forward by Pullings and Mr Adams, who were bargaining with some merchants who wished to buy the Alastor: 'Yes, sir, and after Mass' - 'There was an organ: do you know what an organ is, sir?' - 'We went aboard a grand carriage drawn by mules with purple harness together with the Doctor and Father Panda'. 'There was a square with a lady on a column in the middle' -'The column was forty foot high' - 'And the lady was made of bronze' - 'She had a trumpet and water came out of it' - 'And it came out of eight lions' heads too' - 'Out of twelve lions' heads, booby' - 'It was surrounded by six huge enormous iron chains' - 'And four and twenty twelve-pounders' - 'The merchants paved two of the streets with silver ingots once' - 'They weighed ten pounds apiece' - 'About a foot long, four inches broad, and two or three inches deep.'

He had nearly finished his meal when he felt the mule's breath on the back of his neck: then the long, smooth, large-eyed face came down and delicately took the last piece of bread from his knee, a crust. 'You are a sort of tame mule, I find,' he said. And indeed the creature's gentleness, the kind way in which he stood to be saddled and his fine willing stride gave Stephen a higher opinion of his owner, the Vicar-General, an austere man in his ordinary dealings. The mule's name was Joselito.

Stephen mounted: out of the grove there was more wind now, more wind by far, right in their faces, and the road climbed, winding and for ever rising with tall, very tall, many branched columnal cactuses on either hand and little else apart from smaller cactuses with even crueller thorns. This was the first time in Stephen's life that he had ever ridden in a strange country paying so little attention to his surroundings; and although on occasion he had had a hand, even a directing hand, in matters of great importance, this was the first time that so much depended on his success, and the first time that the crisis, the decision, was drawing so near with such speed. He did not even notice two barefoot friars though the mule had been pointing his ears in their direction for a quarter of a mile until he was almost upon them and they standing on an outward corner, their beards streaming in the wind, looking back to the sound of hoofs. He pulled off his hat, called out a greeting and pushed on, hearing their 'Go with God' as he turned in yet another traverse, the road now high up on the steep side of the valley, with the stream a great way below.

He met a few small scattered groups, Indians coming down from the high pasture; and presently the road climbed to a saddle where the wind, a cold wind now, took them with great force. Before crossing it he steered Joselito into a less exposed hollow, where travellers before him had lighted fires, burning whatever little scrub they could find. Here, at what he judged to be some five thousand feet, he gave the mule his other loaf - no great sacrifice, since anxiety of a vague, diffused nature had eaten his own appetite - and put on the poncho, a simple garment with no sleeves, easier to manage than a cloak. The sky was still a fine light blue above them, unclouded here by dust; before him, when he turned, stretched the foothills and the plain, somewhat veiled, with the Rimac running through it to the immense Pacific, the coastline as clear as a map, and the island of San Lorenzo, beyond Callao, rising sharply from it, with the sun directly beyond, two hours from the somewhat blurred horizon. No ships in the offing that he could see, but below him on the road, no great way off, there was a party of horsemen, quite a large party, bound no doubt for the monastery of San Pedro or that of San Pablo, both of them in the mountains far ahead and both of them frequented for retreats, particularly by soldiers.

The poncho was a comfort; so was the way the road went down after they had crossed the saddle to a new valley with higher, farther mountains rising beyond, range after range. But this did not last long. Soon it began to rise once more and they climbed steadily mile after mile, sometimes so steeply that Stephen dismounted and walked beside the mule; and steadily the landscape grew more mineral.

'I wish I had paid more attention to geology,' said Stephen, for on his right hand on the far side of the gorge the bare mountainside showed a great band of red, brilliant in the declining sun against the grey rock below and the black above. 'Would that be porphyry, at all?'