Free Mr. Eternity by Aaron Thier Page B

preserve us. It was food for nothing! But there were some disagreements about the proper way to prepare the horse blood. One man argued that horse blood was best with this kind of herb, but another said that it was better with a certain root, and there could be no consensus. No one had starved to death yet, and the three or four Christians who’d died since we left Quito had died only in the usual way, boiled into a broth by the ravenous air of the jungle, except of course poor murdered Diego Lopez y Barra. But now men did begin to die as a result of these culinary ambitions. Some died in combat with one another as they argued about their recipes. Others died as you might expect, from eating the poison herbs and roots they used to season their blood.”
    He talks and talks. I have trouble listening. At midday the sun makes so much noise that it isn’t easy to hear anything. In the river I can see a vulture ripping open the belly of a dead caiman. They float together, the caiman on its back, the vulture balanced on its rib cage.
    “Do you mind if I smoke the tobacco weed?” I say. A concubine should never ask such a thing, but I am impatient. I was never impatient before I became a Christian.
    “I beg you not to,” says the alcalde. “You may do what you wish but I beg you not to.”
    “Well,” Daniel de Fo continues, “now things in the jungle started to get bad. Now arrows rained down from every quarter, and some of the men were killed on the spot, and others died later, in screaming misery, because the arrows were poisoned.”
    But if this was bad, he says, then what came next was worse. Now they attempted to travel down the Rio Equus in stolen dugout canoes, and in rafts they bound together with sturdy lianas. The canoes overturned, and the rafts were dashed to pieces in the rapids, and they lost twenty more men this way. But if that was terrible enough, and it was, then the days that followed were even more terrible. Now Death walked beside them and jeered and shouted and pointed his bony fingers. Two men, whose names were Rodrigo de Salamanca and Juan Carvajal, were taken by a dragon, and then Aloysius Federmen, a German, stepped into theriver and was devoured by ravenous fish, and then one morning they turned out to find Giacomo Fontesecca, a Venetian, reduced to a clean white skeleton inside his armor. This calamity had befallen him without him even crying out.
    “He made no sound?” says the alcalde. “Amazing. Such courage.”
    Then it pleased God to let fall a stone from Heaven, which killed Francisco Morales. Then one day another man was boiling a piece of aromatic wood and speaking of the three sheep he was going to buy with his share of the treasure, and suddenly he gave an expression of disgust, as if he had tasted something unpleasant, and burst open, like a seedpod, in an explosion of dark spores.
    “This can happen,” I say, making encouraging gestures. I pretend to know about the forest, although I know nothing about the forest. “These are common problems. The forest is an evil place. But don’t you want to tell the alcalde what you told me? The cities, the king, the pearls.”
    Daniel de Fo nods. “I am coming to that,” he says. And yet he is at ease. He takes his time. No one would know that his life depends on what he says. He asks the alcalde if it is not remarkable that you always remember the good things more clearly than the bad.
    “So much bloodshed,” he says, “and yet I woke this morning and remembered the smell of the forest, and the taste of the coffee fruit.”
    The alcalde is not troubled by this digression. He agrees. He says that he now finds himself remembering his wretched time in Salamanca with fondness.
    “Once,” says Daniel de Fo, “long ago, I was sold for a slave on the coast of Africa. I spent four years in the house of a rich merchant in Rabat. But when I think of that time I think of tea and chickpeas and the clear warm sunlight in January.”
    “But