‘You’re bigger. Your nipples are darker.’
She buried her eyes in the underside of his arms, not wanting him to read them.
‘Julia?’
She said nothing but he felt her heart accelerate under his palm.
‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’
She nodded, her hair brushing his skin. Klaus sat up, instantly pulling away from her. ‘Great.’
She looked up to see his face buried in his hands.
‘It’s what we’ve always wanted, isn’t it?’
‘It’s just that the timing’s so wrong. You have this commission; I have this possible television series.’
‘When is it ever right?’
He looked at her then, and smiled uncertainly.
‘Klaus, I want this baby.’
Kneeling, he placed his head against her belly. ‘Uwl moeder is een genie,’ he murmured to the unborn child.
‘I’m not sure that’s going to make him bilingual. But it’s a good beginning. And no, I’m not a genius.’
‘Your Flemish is impr
oving. How do you know it’s a boy?’
‘Feminine intuition. What do you think of the name Aidan James—after my grandfather and great-grandfather? James Huntington.’
‘Okay, my love, Aidan James Huntington-Dumont it is. Julia, Klaus and Aidan—fantastic. Life is good. It’s all going to be okay.’
For one small moment Julia wondered whether he wasn’t just trying to convince himself.
5
The Amazon, 1856
COLONEL JAMES HUNTINGTON STOOD taller than the men around him, a good foot taller. Gilo, his assistant and translator, adjusted the large box camera that perched awkwardly at the edge of the clearing. Amid the plumes of white curling smoke and against the thick green jungle foliage it looked absurdly incongruous: an icon of a modern world set in a primordial landscape. The anthropologist worried whether Gilo would be able to capture a clear image. The Bakairi had agreed to allow the Colonel to be photographed during the ritual but not themselves. After the Colonel had explained the workings of the camera and assured them it would not steal their spirit—which seemed to be their prevailing fear—and that the instrument would carry their story around the world, the shaman had reluctantly allowed the photography of the villagers in all other practices, but not this—the conjuring up of Evaki, their goddess of day and night.
The tribesmen had insisted that the Colonel be near naked for the ceremony, his white skin smeared with ochre. He felt as though he were now in the skin of another man—a creature of instinct, despite his scientific bent, his bare feet anchored against the spongy moss and undergrowth, the earth throbbing beneath him as the hallucinogenic trickled through his veins like a thick honey. Already, the branches above him writhed and the sky had begun to turn.
He was to be initiated as the twenty-second in a group of shamans, and, in keeping with the tribal laws, had fasted the day before to purify his spirit. There was little James Huntington wanted more than this—to be invited to participate in an ancient ritual no white man had been involved in before. The lure of both experience and knowledge was irresistible. The anthropologist’s knees trembled, and his stomach clenched in rhythm with the drums that four young boys—no older than ten—played beside the fire that burned in a shallow pit in the centre of the cleared arena. The other twenty-one initiates stood around him, forming a circle. In the centre stood the chief shaman, his broad wizened face solemn with concentration, the band of red ochre across his cheekbones highlighting the piercing intelligence of his black eyes.
The shaman—the wise man of the village—sensed conflict within the Colonel. Awed by the age and muscularity of the veteran soldier, he perceived the white man had a valuable soul. As he traced the facial scar the Colonel had received in the Crimea, he promised that the half of the soldier’s soul that had been torn away from him in battle would come back to him if he had the strength to face the Goddess.
With the help of two boys, the shaman lifted the ritual mask—an elongated face with huge lidded eyes, a streak of yellow ochre for a nose, a screaming circle for a mouth, and fringed by reeds that hung to the ground—and solemnly placed it over the white man’s head and body.
The heavy scent of the oiled wood mixed with the smell of the pungent soil, filling the Colonel’s nostrils. The mask hung heavily; it felt as if it were fused to his skin. His heart thumped as he mimicked the movements of the dancers around him: arms arching up to the heavens, evoking the spirit of each of the Gods their masks represented—the earth, the river and the rising moon, a pale coin suspended above them. The dancers’ arms whirled about him faster and faster, until they transformed into feathered limbs and he felt the Goddess becoming him, he becoming her—the great bird that delivered man at birth and took him up at death. And now, infused with the drug, the Colonel saw how Time could be broken down into a series of moments, each layered upon the next, and how those moments need not be linear. ‘I am Evaki!’ he screamed out, encouraged by the shaman who whirled a torch around and around, creating a spiral of trailing embers and light that seemed to arch up to the very heavens. At the centre of that burning helix Huntington suddenly saw himself as a child, then at the age he was now, and finally the terrible spectre of his own death. The panting breath of his fear filled his eardrums, as, stumbling, he struggled to stay in rhythm with his companions, the dancing messengers, their shiny legs and arms making a cradle for his terror as the Goddess rose from the smoke of the fire with nothing but her eyes—vast and recognisably human, floating like leaves swept up in the heat.
Where there is death there must be life, she whispered and the Colonel felt the words through the rattling cage of his ribs, through his very bones, and knew then that he must beget an heir, a son, and that within this revelation lay his deliverance.
6
Ireland, 1858