Naamah's Blessing

Even with so many willing hands and the aid of the villagers, it was a considerable job, and we were at it for days. The men worked in shifts, taking turns with our limited number of tools.

My offers to help were rebuffed, so I spent the time in the village getting to know its inhabitants as best I could without a shared tongue, relying on the knack of nonverbal communication I’d developed during the long winter I’d spent among the Tatars.

The women were hard at work knotting sturdy hammocks out of sisal fiber, part of the supplies for which Eyahue had bartered. They showed me how to tie the intricate knots, although I could not match the swift dexterity of their practiced fingers. They also showed me how to weave palm fronds into mats. They used the mats for seating, but the women indicated to me with gestures that they could also provide shelter from rainfall.

Between the outskirts of the savannah and the inner verges of the jungle, the villagers grew a fair number of crops. There was no maize here, but there were many of the other fruits and vegetables I’d come to know since we’d landed on Terra Nova: nourishing sweet potatoes, rich, silken-fleshed avocados, tart fruits that resembled overgrown pinecones topped with a tufted shock of leaves, papayas like melons that grew on trees.

Using nets and basket traps, they caught a variety of fish: big whiskered bottom-dwellers, long eel-like fish, fierce little fish with deceptively sharp teeth. I learned quickly to be wary of the latter.

All in all, it was a rather idyllic existence; but Eyahue warned us time and time again not to be deceived.

There would be no crops in the jungle save those stores we brought with us. What could be cultivated within its depths was guarded by wary, hostile natives who did not welcome intruders. There were fish and game, but hunting was notoriously difficult in the dense undergrowth, and even fishing was likely to prove an exhausting endeavor after a hard day’s travel.

And so I paid attention to the village children. When they weren’t engaged in play, they spent much of their days gathering less orthodox fare to augment the village’s diet. They taught me how to chisel open rotting palm logs using a sharp-edged rock to get at the thick, wriggling grubs inside, which they plucked out and wrapped in palm leaves to cook.

Balthasar Shahrizai stared at me in outright horror when I sampled one. “Elua have mercy! That may be the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.”

The flesh was chewy, but the taste was palatable. “If it’s a matter of survival, you’ll eat them too, my lord,” I said to him.

He shuddered. “I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather die.”

Bao reached over and popped one in his mouth, chewing with relish. “Not so bad,” he pronounced.

The children also caught lizards and frogs when they could, showing me which were good to eat. When I spotted a brilliant blue fellow with black speckles clinging to the bark of a tree with his webbed feet, I indicated it inquiringly. They batted my hand away with alarm, shaking their heads vehemently.

One of the older boys pointed into the depths of the jungle, then smeared his palms over his cheeks in a gesture I didn’t fully understand, although its meaning seemed clear to the others. He acted out a stealthy pantomime of hunting and stalking, raising a clenched fist to his lips and blowing sharply through it in the direction of one of his mates, who clutched at his throat and toppled over in mock rigor.

I got the message.

Later, Eyahue confirmed it. “Oh, yes. Anything brightly colored is like to be poisonous. Snakes, frogs, lizards.” He shrugged. “Here’s a simple rule. If it’s pretty to the eye, don’t touch it, lady.”

“The hostiles hunt with poison?” I asked him.

He nodded. “Blowpipes and arrows. But don’t worry.” The old pochteca patted my arm in a fatherly gesture. “They are very skillful in the ways of the jungle. If they decide to kill you, you’ll never even see it coming.”

This was not exactly comforting.

FORTY-EIGHT

Several days after our arrival in Tipalo’s village, we took our leave of it.

We had nine dugout canoes built of marupa wood; light and brittle, excavated and hewn to sophisticated sleekness with a combination of native expertise and Septimus Rousse’s knowledgeable counsel, each vessel capable of sitting up to four men.

We left behind two pack-horses, but we had replenished food stores, as much as we could carry stuffed in satchels lashed to a cross-bar in the center of each canoe. We had a woven sisal hammock for each man among us, and an assortment of nets and fish-traps.

I prayed it would be enough.

Everyone with any kind of skill with a paddle had been assigned a vessel. The rest had been decided by lot. Wary of being dragged down and drowned by the weight of their armor, most of the men had elected to pile it in the bottoms of the canoes, wearing only their helmets with the chin-straps unbuckled.

One by one, our canoes were launched.

Standing along the banks of the big river, the villagers waved farewell to us, calling out encouragement.

Eyahue’s canoe went first, with Captain Rousse following close behind him. Bao and I were in the third vessel, Temilotzin in the fourth. After that, it was catch as catch can.

On the morning of the first day, it began to rain, fat drops dimpling the milky-green surface of the river. We paddled through the rain. An hour or so after it had begun, the skies cleared and the sun returned.

Come noon, the sun stood high overhead, beating down on us like a hammer. The jungle steamed like a temazcalli, the air thick and hard to breathe. Everyone sweated profusely, and clouds of mosquitoes and gnats enveloped us.

“Gods!” Balthasar, seated behind me, leaned over and spat into the river. “Seems I’ll be eating my share of insects after all.”

I was hot, itchy, and miserable, my arms aching with the unfamiliar strain of paddling, but I did my best to bear it without a complaint. Eyahue reckoned we had three weeks on the river before we reached the city of Vilcabamba, the easternmost stronghold of the empire of Tawantinsuyo. With the worst yet to come, there was no point in complaining at the outset of this leg of the journey.

With an hour’s daylight left, Eyahue spotted a stretch of rocky shoreline large enough to beach all nine canoes and ordered us to make camp. It felt as though we’d travelled a great distance into the jungle. Tipalo’s village might have been only a day’s journey behind us, but it lay upriver and would not be so easily regained. Assuming we survived, our plan was to return via a land passage. According to Eyahue, there was another river farther south that flowed from west to east through the jungle, an even greater river with hundreds of tributaries, but not even he had traversed it.

In the absence of other human inhabitants, or at least none we could see, the jungle seemed denser and more wild. To me, it felt like one great living creature, the trees and plants growing so thick and close-packed that I couldn’t pick out individual senses among them—just one enormous green being with its own heartbeat pulsing, inhaling and exhaling in long, slow breaths.

Despite my fatigue and aching muscles, I found it exhilarating.

The rest of our company did not.

Almost to a man, they found the jungle ominous and frightening. Only Eyahue seemed inured to it, selecting the best place to sling his hammock and nap while the rest of us endeavored to make camp and prepare a meal.

With thirty-odd folk in our company, it was necessary to spread out and venture some distance into the jungle to find sufficient sites for our hammocks. A full half the men elected to forgo them, clearing spaces on the rocky shore and wrapping themselves in cloaks.

I had to own, when night fell, even I was uneasy. Beneath the canopy of the jungle, the darkness was absolute. Creatures that slept during the day came alive under the cover of darkness, and the night was filled with sounds—small sounds like the incessant whine of insects, and other, more menacing sounds.

Thanks to my sojourn in the palace gardens in Tenochtitlan, I recognized the deep, coughing roar of a jaguar.

“Moirin?” Bao whispered from his nearby hammock.

“Aye?”

“It’s going to be all right,” he said with an assurance I knew he didn’t feel. “We’re going to be fine.”

Grateful for the lie, I returned it. “I know.”

In the morning, those who had chosen to sleep on the ground regretted their decision, waking to find themselves stiff and bruised from sleeping on the stony shore, and bitten by an array of insects that hadn’t troubled those of us in hammocks. Denis de Toluard in particular scratched himself furiously, his nose twitching all the while.

“Gods, man!” Balthasar, who had slept in a hammock and looked reasonably well rested, eyed him. “What ails you? Have you got the palsy?”

“Ants,” Denis said briefly. “They’re everywhere.”

I winced, having forgotten. The fallen spirit Caim with his owl’s eyes and a bird’s nest in his antlers had taught the language of ants to all the members of the Circle of Shalomon save me—and it had proved nothing but a plague and a nuisance to them. It was the reason Lianne Tremaine, the former King’s Poet, lived in a tower chamber at Eglantine House. Given the terrain through which we’d already passed, the fact that Denis hadn’t evinced his discomfort until now was a testament to his will.

“Stone and sea! I’m so sorry, my lord,” I said to him with genuine remorse. “This must be the worst place in the world for you.”

Denis gave me a wry glance. “It’s no more than I deserve, Moirin. Raphael must have suffered the same.” He shrugged. “Mayhap it’s the gods’ way of allowing us to atone for our sins.”

Balthasar examined his fingernails. “As a scion of mighty Kushiel, I assure you, he does not use ants as an instrument of atonement.”

I ignored him, approaching Denis and laying one hand on his cheek. “My lord, you have atoned and more,” I said softly. “You have saved us twice over—once aboard the ship, and secondly when the Cloud People attacked us. Were it not for your warning, they would have slaughtered us in our sleep. I daresay the gods have forgiven you.”

His eyes brightened with emotion. “You truly think so?”

I nodded. “I do.”

Denis let out his breath and rubbed his twitching nose. “Let’s go find Thierry and the others,” he said with renewed resolve.

Once again, we launched our canoes, carrying them over the rocks, mindful of the brittle wood.

The first few days on the big river were days of sameness. The river unfurled before us like a broad, milky-green ribbon, leading us ever deeper and deeper into the depths of the jungle. We rode atop its breast in our canoes, paddling, ever paddling. Our arms and shoulders grew stronger, muscles toughening as we journeyed.

It rained almost every day, but not for long. We grew accustomed to ignoring the rain, bailing out our vessels as necessary, trusting that the rain would end. Sooner or later, the sun came out and steamed us dry. By day we paddled; by night, we made camp along the banks of the river, eating fruits and roasted sweet potatoes and sleeping in hammocks strung between trees, all of us doing our best not to heed the sounds of the jungle at night. Bit by bit, we began to relax a little.

That was a mistake.

I was fishing when we took the first casualty of our river journey. Calling on the skills of my youth, I’d gone a few dozen yards downstream with Bao, summoning the twilight once we were out of sight. Lying on my belly on a rocky promontory, I coaxed the bottom-dwelling whiskered fish into my hands, grabbing them and tossing them to Bao, who stuffed them deftly into a reed creel.

While immersed in the business of procuring food, we heard cries from the campsite behind us.

Bao and I exchanged a glance. “We’d better go,” he said.

I nodded, releasing the twilight. “Don’t forget the fish.”

When we reached the campsite, we found one of our men on the ground, his chest heaving as he struggled futilely for air—Eric Morand, a mercenary from Camlach province.

My own throat tightened. “What happened?”

“Went gathering firewood and got bitten by a snake.” Eyahue nodded at Temilotzin, who held up a headless, writhing length of crimson-banded serpent, his broad face dispassionate. “I told you, if it’s pretty to the eye, don’t touch it.”

I stared in horror at Eric Morand, who stared back at me with wide, stricken eyes. “Can’t we do something? Anything?”

Eyahue shook his head. “Nothing but give him the mercy blow,” he said gently. “Do you want it?”

Kneeling beside the Camaeline mercenary, I asked him if he wanted the mercy blow. “Can you blink?” I asked, tears streaming down my face. “If you can, blink once for yes.”

His eyes closed once, and opened.

I beckoned to Temilotzin, who stooped beside me. He placed one hand on Eric Morand’s brow with unexpected tenderness. With the other, he placed the tip of his obsidian dagger over his heart, driving it home with one efficient thrust.

Eric Morand went still forever.

A stark mood settled over the camp that evening. It was impossible to dig a grave in the dense, root-packed floor of the jungle, so we built a cairn instead, gathering stones and heaping them over our fallen comrade’s body. Once again, Septimus Rousse gave the invocation. This time, there were no fond jests.

No one had much of an appetite for the fish I’d caught, but we roasted them and ate them anyway, doling out a few bites for everyone, aware that we couldn’t afford to waste food. The cairn loomed in the gathering darkness, a harsh reminder of the day’s tragedy.

When we launched our canoes the next morning, I felt as though Eric Morand’s stricken gaze followed us from beneath the cairn, watching as we journeyed farther down the river, abandoning him. ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">