Harry Turtledove - Down in The Bottomlands (and Other Places)

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, grinned wryly. “It is rather like baptism by thorough indunking, isn’t it?” He wondered for a moment what the real Bishop Ib Scoglund would have thought of that comparison, then went back to his labors.

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.

As soon as Ankowaljuu was off the docks and on ground that stayed at the same level, he stepped in front of a wain. The driver slammed on the brakes, though the tukuuii riikook was not that close. He stuck his head out the window and loudly wished Ankowaljuu down to uuka patja; the orderly Tawantiinsuujans did not take kindly to having order flouted.

Then Ankowaljuu announced his rank and demanded to be driven to the residence of the local kuuraka. The Skrelling in the wain sang a different tune. He jumped out, helped Park and Dunedin load their trunk inside, and whizzed off to the governor’s palace.

Impressed at such complete and instant obedience, Park asked, “How often does someone get into hot water for feigning that he’s a tukuuii riikook ? He could have a rare old time till he was cauckt.”

“Only seldom,” Ankowaijuu said. “Most folk here would never think of it.”

“It’s not like that in New Belfast,” Park said.

“So I ken, but our way suits us.”

The kuuraka of Manaus was a thin, aging man named Anta-Aklja. He hustled the tukuuii riikook and his companions out to the airfield with breathtaking celerity. Park again spoke in English to Ankowaljuu: “Is he falling all over himself to be helpful, or does he have something going on here that he doesn’t want a tukuuii riikook to see?”

“You have a mistrustful turn of thock, Judge Scoglund,” Ankowaljuu said in the same language. “Were my sending with you less weighty, I might want to infollow that more closely. As is-” one eyelid fell, rose “-well, I am not the only tukuuii riikook in Tawantiinsuuju.”

The airwain to which Anta-Aklja’s minions hurried the newcomers was of the same model as the plane that had crash-landed at Iipiisjuuna. Eric Dunedin crinkled up his face at it. “I’d not like to have this twoth one fail,” he said, also in English.

“What’s that?” Waipaljkoon asked in Ketjwa. Monkey-face made the mistake of translating. The pilot burst out; “You keep quiet! It was just after you came out with your cursed patjam kuutiin that the other airwain had trouble. Are you some jatiirii , some coca-leaf reader, trying to illwish everything we do?”

He took several minutes to calm down. So, Park thought: under the fine cult of Patjakamak and the sun, superstition lives. He was unsurprised, as anyone who has ever decorated a Christmas tree would be.

Manaus’ airfield was smoother than Kuuskoo’s. Park’s teeth rattled only a couple of times before the airwain climbed off the ground. Below, he could see the Black River’s clear dark water flowing side by side with the red-brown stream of the Great River; only after some miles would they fully mix together.

“Where now?” Waipaljkoon asked as he swung the airwain northward.

“The Son of the Sun flew to Mavaka, near the head-waters of the Ooriinookoo,” Ankowaljuu said. To Park, that meant they were heading for southern Venezuela. Here, though, it was a town in the province Tawantiinsuuju had wrested from the Emirate after their last clash.

Waipaljkoon gradually shifted course to the northwest. “This would be a faster, easier flight if we hadn’t had to sail halfway down the Great River to find another airwain,” he grumbled.

“When next you tell Patjakamak how to order the universe, I suggest you take that up with him,” Ankowaljuu said. Waipaljkoon grunted and shut up.

The flight was as boring as the earlier one had been — until that plane’s engine went out, Park reminded himself. He too hoped this leg of the trip would not be so strenuously interrupted. He sat back and watched jungle go by below, now dark green, now yellow-green. Again it reminded him of the sea with its unending not-quite-sameness.

Then, suddenly, not long before Waipaljkoon expected them to reach Mavaka, they saw a great cloud of smoke rising high into the air from below. The pilot scowled, pursed his lips. “I’ve seen big fires before, aye, but seldom one that size,” he said.

“That’s no fire!” Ankowaljuu said as they got closer. “That’s a cursed battle, is what that is!” He got the words out only an instant before they burst from Allister Park. He too had seen the flashes from exploding shells down there. Men were too small to spot from several thousand feet, but goodwains and machine-gun-carrying warwains were visible in clearings carved from the jungle.