FORTY-NINE
It rained for three days.
Our campsite was a sodden, miserable place plagued by guilt. For a surety, there was plenty of it to go around. We had lost two men in the accident—Mathieu de Montague, whose fate everyone had seen, and a fellow named Uriel Longchamps, who had sunk and vanished without a trace after the canoe had overturned. Although we’d searched along the bank of the river until nightfall, there was no sign of either of them.
“It is my fault,” Eyahue said in a morose tone. “I knew the river was too high. I should have called for a landing sooner.”
Bao studied his hands. “I was so close! I should have had him.”
“Mathieu de Montague wanted to turn back,” I murmured. “He was afraid. And we talked him out of it.”
“I did,” Balthasar corrected me. “I shamed him. I should have let him go.”
“You should have let me go after him in the river,” Bao accused him.
“I should have done no such thing, messire!” Balthasar retorted. “Are you strong enough to swim for two in that current?” He shook his head. “None of us are. You would either have been carried away with him or forced to let him go. I’ll not apologize for sparing you that choice.”
While we grieved and bickered, the rain continued to fall. Our food stores were dwindling at an alarming rate, fruit rotting in the incessant damp, and a portion of our supplies lost in the canoe that had been swept away. With current running as high and fast as it was, fishing proved a futile endeavor.
Gear rusted, soaked clothing began tearing at the seams. Insects plagued us day and night. Their bites itched and festered. Minor injuries, cuts and scrapes and blisters, grew dangerously infected. My own palms were badly blistered from all the paddling, great water-logged blisters that showed no sign of healing. At times I could have wept for the sheer physical misery of it all.
But I reminded myself that we were all lucky to be alive to endure it, and distracted myself by weaving mat after mat of palm fronds, teaching some of the men to do the same. With his Siovalese affinity for engineering, Denis de Toluard directed others in building a rough shelter on the verge of the jungle where at least we could huddle beneath the scant protection our mats afforded.
And on the second day, Eyahue vanished into the jungle for several hours, borrowing a sword to hack his way through. He returned with a satchel full of leaves that released a crisp, astringent odor when bruised, ordering us to grind them to a paste to smear on any open wounds.
It stung like fury, but it seemed to help. By the next day, my blisters were no longer seeping.
“Is that one of your secret herbs?” I asked Eyahue.
He nodded reluctantly. “The ticitls pay a great deal for this medicine.”
I smiled wearily at him. “Thank you for sharing it with us.”
After three straight days of rain, waking to clear skies seemed like a gift of the gods. The rain had stopped in the small hours of the night, and already the river was visibly lower, no longer a raging torrent.
Everything sparkled in the light of dawn, rain-washed and glistening, drops still sliding from the leaves. It was like being in a vast green temple, and for the first time in days, my sense of wonder at the enormity of the jungle returned.
For a mercy, it was an uneventful day on the river. Although we’d lost one canoe, sadly, due to the casualties we’d sustained, there were enough seats to go around in the remaining eight. We searched in vain for the bodies of our lost men as we paddled, regretfully concluding by the day’s end that there was no chance of retrieving them.
At Septimus Rousse’s suggestion, we built a small cairn in their honor, and he once again gave the invocation.
Our journey continued.
Some days after our loss, we had our first encounter with hostile natives—or at least a near-miss of an encounter. We were some hours into the day’s travel when I heard a series of sharp buzzing sounds. Glancing around to see what new swarm of insects had come to torment us, I realized belatedly that the sound I’d heard was arrows in flight.
There was no telling where they’d come from. On either shore, the jungle looked as impenetrable as ever. Even as I searched, a second flight was launched. There was a metallic ping and a startled cry behind us as an arrow struck someone’s helmet.
In the lead canoe, Eyahue was shouting. “Get low! Get low and paddle hard!”
My pulse hammering, I hunched as low as I could, paddling awkwardly. The dugout canoe afforded little in the way of protection. For once, I envied the men their heavy steel helmets.
A third volley hissed above us, and then there was silence. Still, we paddled in a crouch until Eyahue announced it was safe to sit upright.
Shouting up and down the river and taking stock of the situation, we determined with relief that our company had sustained no casualties in the attack. It was a Namarrese fellow named Marcel d’Aubrey who had taken a strike to the helmet, and although he was shaken, he was unharmed.
Once we had ascertained that there were no injuries, I asked Bao to bring us alongside Eyahue’s canoe.
“You said if the hostiles decided to kill us, we’d never see it coming,” I reminded the old pochteca. “So what passes here?”
“That?” He rested his paddle across his knobby knees and scoffed. “Oh, that was just a warning. They were just telling us to keep moving.”
“If Messire d’Aubrey hadn’t been wearing a helmet, they would have killed him,” I observed.
Eyahue sucked his teeth. “True,” he admitted. “I imagine they were curious about those shiny head-pieces.” He shrugged. “Now they know.”
It was an effective reminder of the myriad dangers the jungle held, but in the days that followed, it grew obvious that hostile natives were the least of our concerns.
First and foremost was the shortage of food. Already, we were eating but two meals a day while expending considerable energy. The last of our fruit was long gone, and if our stores were to last until we reached Vilcabamba, we were down to half a roasted sweet potato a day for every person in our company.
It wasn’t enough.
Our bellies complained, and our strength waned, leaving us weak and listless. Our efforts to fish with nets and traps yielded meager results. I had better luck fishing with my familiar childhood methods, calling the twilight and coaxing fish into my bare hands; but where a catch of four or five good-sized fish would have provided a veritable feast for my mother and me, it didn’t go far among thirty-some starving men.
Eyahue found my success suspicious. “How do you and your husband catch more fish than anyone?” he asked. “Why do you always go away alone to do it instead of sharing your secret?”
“It’s a gift from my mother’s people,” I told him. After the way the Emperor had reacted to the small gift of magic I had displayed in his gardens, I was wary of the pochteca’s response if I told him the whole truth. “It cannot be taught, and the fish will not come if there are others present.”
Gods knew, that was true enough, and it seemed to mollify Eyahue.
It was a good thing I’d paid attention to the children in Tipalo’s village, for it wasn’t long before we were relying on their lessons. Several of our men became quite expert grub-hunters, and we discovered that they were slightly more palatable when skewered and roasted. True to his word, Balthasar held out and refused such fare. I wished he wouldn’t, for he was developing a feverish look I didn’t like. More than once, I’d caught him shivering in the heat and trying to hide it.
“Bao’s right,” Denis said to him, chewing a mouthful of grub-worm with fierce determination. “It’s not so bad.”
“Not so good, either,” someone muttered.
Although we scoured the outskirts of the jungle and plundered the river for edible game as best we could, it still wasn’t enough. There were just too many of us.
The day we spotted a herd of capybaras wallowing and grazing along the edge of the big river, I thought mayhap our luck had changed. They were odd-looking beasts; extraordinarily oversized rodents with coarse coats, squealing and grunting and nudging one another as they swam and rooted among the weeds.
“Bao!” I whispered, setting down my paddle. I scrabbled for my bow and nocked an arrow. “Bring us close!”
He nodded, paddling.
We drifted sideways alongside the herd. They ignored us. Rising carefully to one knee in the narrow vessel, I picked my target and took aim at a big, fat, well-fed fellow. I thought to myself that he would make a meal for all of us, and if I were quick, I might even be able to kill two of them.
Before I had a chance to loose my arrow, the water erupted. To call the creature that emerged a snake didn’t begin to do it justice. It was a snake, but it was far, far bigger than any snake I’d ever seen in my life, as long as two of our canoes placed end to end, a thick, sinuous, shining length of mottled yellow and black.
I let out a scream.
Everything seemed to happen at once. The snake lunged at the fat capybara I’d chosen as my prey, sinking its teeth into it and twining around it. In a trice, it had the creature wrapped within its coils.
The canoe rocked violently to one side as all of us recoiled in shock, then pitched hard to the other as everyone overcompensated in an effort to stabilize it. If I’d been seated, I daresay it wouldn’t have mattered, but I was kneeling and unbalanced, and the momentum flung me overboard.
I hit the water. It was churning with the force of the snake’s attack, the flight of the other capybaras, the splash of my impact. Underwater, the snake’s yellow and black coils rotated before my open eyes through the rising sediment, impossibly thick.
Flailing backward, I got my head above water and found myself face-to-face with the serpent, its dull eyes regarding me impassively above the jaws locked onto its prey. Having a good rapport with animals, I’d never been one to harbor an unreasonable fear of them, but the suddenness of the snake’s attack and the incomprehensible enormity of it, coupled with my very, very vulnerable position, struck terror into my heart.
In the canoe, everyone was shouting. I felt hands grasp beneath my arms as Bao and Balthasar hauled me forcibly into the canoe.
“Go!” Bao shouted to Brice de Bretel in the stern. “Go, go, go!”
Paddling frantically, Brice managed to propel us some yards away, the canoe rocking dangerously as the others scrambled to regain their positions. I sat on the floor of the dugout, gasping and shuddering, my bow still gripped in one hand.
Behind us, the snake unhinged its jaw to an unholy degree as it commenced the process of swallowing its prey whole.
That night at camp, the giant snake was the topic of much discussion. Temilotzin was disgruntled. “You should have killed it once it began to feed,” he said to me, making a chopping gesture with one hand. “Cut off its head. That is when they are the least dangerous.”
“I’m sorry,” I said humbly. “We didn’t know.”
Temilotzin pointed at the three men who shared his canoe. “After we passed you, I tried to make them turn back so I could do it myself. But they pretended not to understand.” He jerked his chin in disdain. “They were scared.”
“We all were,” Bao murmured.
Eyahue assured us that the giant snakes very rarely attacked humans. “Unless you’re stupid enough to fall right on top of it,” he added, laughing at his own jest. “Lucky for you he already had his prey! Too bad, though.” His expression turned rueful as he rubbed his sunken belly. “We could have been eating meat.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated.
“How did you not see somewhat so big?” Denis asked me.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “If I caught a glimpse of it, I must have thought it was a log. I was concentrating on the capybara.”
“None of us saw it,” Bao agreed. “It wasn’t Moirin’s fault.” He stroked my hair. “Please do not frighten me so again.”
“Believe me, I’ll try not to.” I sighed, rotating a skewer of sizzling grubs over the campfire. “Gods bedamned snake! I had a clean shot, too.” I glanced over at Balthasar, who was unwontedly quiet, his arms wrapped around his knees, trying to suppress a shiver in the warm evening air. “Will you not try them, my lord?” I entreated him, holding out the skewer. “Just once?”
He shook his head. “I’m not that hungry.”
“How can you not be?” one of the men grumbled on the far side of our campfire. “Name of Elua! Send them my way, won’t you?”
“You’re not well,” I said softly, ignoring the complaint. “You need to eat and keep your strength up.”
Balthasar lifted his head and glared at me. Famine had whittled away at his beautiful features until his cheekbones stood out like blades, his dark blue eyes set in sunken hollows above them. “Leave be, won’t you? I’m fine, Moirin!”
He wasn’t.
And that was the second worst of our problems.