Beneath the World, a Sea by Chris Beckett

Author:Chris Beckett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

Boa Sorte was the only village on a side channel of a side channel of the Corrente, and was one of the most remote and northerly human settlements in the whole forest, only a couple of miles away from the formidable black escarpment of the Montanhas de Vidro that sealed off the Submundo Delta from the north. As usual, a row of cabins extended over the water, propped up by poles, but there was no one there to see or hear the boat arrive because the whole village was occupied. Hyacinth could hear guitars and singing from the central square behind the cabins, and see the smoke of a fire. What was going on, as she and Horga both knew, was a Cabeça party, an impromptu celebration of a fresh crop of duende heads.

Horga watched her face with a degree of anxiety as he turned the boat towards the jetty. He himself had been born in a neighbouring village but he lived in Amizad now, and she knew he’d know about the decision of the committee in Geneva, and the arrival of the British policeman, and even about Hyacinth’s own friendship with the British policeman, for the two of them would have been observed talking on the quay and walking together in the forest, the latter being, in traditional Mundino society, tantamount to a commitment to marry. And she knew that all of this would have been talked about by now across much of the Delta, for the Mundinos kept a very close watch on the outsiders who had arrived half a century ago to establish the Protectorate. What they were being protected from was rather unclear, as several Amizad Mundinos had sourly observed to Hyacinth, particularly now that the outsider community seemed to have taken the side of their traditional enemies from beneath the forest floor.

‘Don’t worry, Horga,’ Hyacinth said, ‘I’ve no intention of getting involved in this. They sound like they’re winding down. Why don’t you take the boat back up the channel a bit and we’ll wait?’

They moored beneath some trees round a bend in the channel. Horga rolled home-grown tobacco into a fat cigarette and, as he smoked, strolled about collecting a handful of nectar flowers. He offered one of them to Hyacinth, but she didn’t feel hungry, so he tossed back the honey-milk himself. Then they waited, her on her back in the soft waterside vegetation, him with his bare feet dangling in the water, picking his teeth and listening to the music. Cabeça parties, as they both knew, didn’t usually last more than an hour or two, unless there’d been a really bumper crop. The singing carried on while the heads were smoked to preserve them but, once that had been accomplished, people usually returned to their normal activities.

‘They say there’s a jaguar in these parts,’ Horga said after a while. She was half asleep by then, and his deep voice broke through into thoughts and images that were just beginning to seal themselves off from the outer world and become dreams.

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