“Nothing could make me glad I came to Iipiisjuuna,” Park said, but in English. Eric Dunedin and Ankowaljuu, the only two people who understood him, both nodded.
The food these jungle Skrellings ate was different from what Park had grown used to in Kuuskoo. He hadn’t tasted tomato sauce in this world till now. The sauce in question was heated with chilies; it smothered several roundish lumps nearly the size of Park’s fist.
“What are these?” he asked, poking one with his knife. “Stuffed peppers?”
“Stewed monkey heads,” Mankoo told him. “The brains are a rare delicacy.”
“Oh.” Park wished the rare delicacy were extinct. But with the chief expectantly watching him, he had to eat. The monkey tasted like flesh; the clinging spicy sauce kept him from knowing much more than that. Just as well, he thought.
He spent the night in a hammock. The Iipiisjuunans seemed ignorant of any other way to sleep. From the size of the cockroaches he’d seen before he blew out his lamp, he suspected he knew why. He wouldn’t have wanted anything that big crawling into bed with him without an invitation.
Reliable as an alarm clock, Dunedin woke him while it was still dark. “If you’re bound for this heathen church, you’d best be on time,” he said primly.
“Mrff.” Park, always grumpy in the morning, wondered how Monkey-face would look slathered in tomato sauce.
The service to Patjakamak and the sun went on and on and on. As at the festival of Raimii, everyone but Park (and now Dunedin) had all the prayers and responses memorized. After things finally ended — it was nearly noon — Park asked Ankowaljuu, “How do you folk heartlearn all those words, all those songs?”
The tukuuii riikook also used English: “By beginning with them as soon as we begin to speak, of course. How else would one do such a thing? We have a saying: ‘Everyone is a faithly kiipuukamajoo’ — a knowledge — keeper, you might say.”
“I’ve seen that you speak sooth,” Park agreed, admiring such diligence without sharing it. He continued, “Now we have one mair thing to do.” His stomach rumbled, interrupting him. “No, two mair-first lunch, then on to the steamboat.”
“You’d never make a worshiper of Patjakamak,” Ankowaljuu chuckled, glancing at Ib Scoglund’s incipient bay window (all along the wheel of if, Park’s analogs ran to plumpness). “For some of our festivals, we fast three days straickt.”
That idea did not appeal to Park at all. Eric Dunedin came to his defense: “Aye, Judge Scoglund’s not thin-”
(“Thank you too much, Eric,” Park said, but Monkey-face was going on) “-but he’s wild for bodily fitness: he drills himself most mornings, with sitting-ups and I don’t ken what all else.”
“Is that so?” Ankowaljuu stood face-to-face with Park, set his right foot next to the judge’s, and seized his right hand. “Let’s see what his swink has got him, then.” He locked eyes with Park. “First man to pull the other off kilter wins.”
“All rick, by God!” Park said, going into a half-crouch. “Eric, count three, to give us a mark to begin at.”
He almost lost the match in the first instant, when the absurdity of Indian-wrestling a veritable Indian hit him. But the painful jerk Ankowaljuu gave his arm made him stop laughing in a hurry; He and the tukuuii riikook swayed back and forth, tugging, yanking, grunting. Finally Park, with a mighty heave, forced Ankowaljuu to take a couple of staggering steps to keep from falling. “Ha!”
Ankowaljuu opened and closed his hand several times to work out the numbness. “You cauckt me by surprise there, Judge Scoglund,” he said reproachfully.
“I didn’t know that wasn’t in the rules.” Park grinned.
Ankowaijuu raised an eyebrow. “You should be a tukuuii riikook yourself. You look to getting around rules that make trouble, not just blindly carrying them out.”
“Not so much to getting around them. That would be bad in a judge. But in reckoning the rick onputting of them-”
“Aye, there’s the rub,” Ankowaljuu said. Park blinked; Ankowaljuu, most certainly, had never heard of Shakespeare. The Skrelling went on, “I will own, this not being any hick holy day, my belly could do with filling too. Shall we see what good food Mankoo has in store?”
“Not mair monkey heads, I hope,” Park and Dunedin said in the same breath. Ankowaljuu laughed. “Sooth to tell, so do I.”
Had anyone told rising young prosecutor Allister Park that within three years he would be sailing down tributaries of the Amazon, he would have called the teller crazy. Had the fellow gone on to say he would be bored doing it, he would have laughed in his face.
But bored he was, in short order. Neither the Muura nor the Huurwa was a big enough river to be impressive in its own right, and one stretch of jungle looked much like another. Of the riverboat’s crew of three, only Iispaka the pilot spoke Ketjwa, and he was so taciturn he might as well have known no language at all.
Thrown back thus on his own resources, Park plunged into his books. By both inclination and training he was a creature of the printed page; he was convinced the answer to the endless strife between Tawantiinsuuju and the Emirate of the Dar al-Harb was set forth there, could he but find it.
Monkey-face had learned to leave him severely alone when such fits came upon him. In them, he often bit his thane’s head off. Other times, as when he was learning Ketjwa, he insisted that Dunedin share his zeal. To his servant, that was worse.
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.