"The Pedra Pintada... based in the caves, and painted the insides of them at Monte Alegre, who used triangular arrowheads like your Madame Isis blade tip - same folks who'd been there over 12,500 years before the conquistadors discovered it." She looked up and closed her book. "President Roosevelt's daughter, Anna Roosevelt, studied them, too, and took a Brazilian team with her. These peoples that they found the remains of were skilled navigators, and artists, Damali. A woman was the one to find it. Female energy is all in this situation."
"Open the book," Damali said, her eyes glued to it, "and read, Marlene."
"I know what it says," Marlene protested. But she gave in and looked down and read. "All right, in the footnotes it says that when Anna Roosevelt went in, she found mummified bodies that suggested a stratified society of rulers and leaders." She looked at Damali. "These people had it going on, before they were wiped out, and there was a thousand years of calm where they created art and music. They still don't know how to make sense of these people's agricultural techniques that were so advanced. The last of them were massacred during the fifteen hundreds, during the conquistador invasions."
"Talk to me, Mar... Follow the thousand years of peace, and read it directly from the text."
Marlene conceded on a tired sigh. "There was major movement upstream of the peoples from the Amazon Basin during 2000 to 3000 BC, from a stretch of river between Santarem and Manaus in modern Brazil." She glanced up at Damali.
"Didn't the newspapers say that there'd been killings centralized near that area, and near those caves? The other similar ones had stopped, but these over here hadn't."
"Yeah, and a thousand years comes up - a Neteru is born every thousand years to create a reign of peace. If a Neteru was born in that span of 2000 to 3000 BC to peoples untouched by outside cultures, then ancestors of that tribe had heavy concentrations of Neteru in them. Maybe enough of the recessive gene to create another actual birth of a Neteru - at least a serious female guardian - that would come to those same peoples, one would think, during the end of their era to help them. But that couldn't happen, because the timing would be off. She'd be born five hundred years too early for what happened with the conquistadors. Plus, she isn't in the book."
Damali froze and kept her gaze locked within Marlene's. "What if for some reason she was born, though? Like in the conquistador era?"
Marlene rubbed her chin. "But she's not in the book, even though those conquistador guys invaded paradise. They were running rampant, just running amuck with these old civilizations that had been cool for thousands of years, until they bumped into these two huge jaguar totems at the mouth of the Rio Negro, the black river, which is how it got its name. The newbies to this region renamed everything in their language." Marlene's expression was incredulous as she pointed out the information to Damali with her finger. No matter how many times she read the history of old cultures, the arrogance of men never ceased to amaze her. "Further downstream from that they ran into a tribe of women warriors, otherwise know as - "
"Amazons."
Marlene smiled in triumph. "Guardians. Carvajal, the Spaniard expeditions' chronicler, wrote of ten to twelve women warriors near Monte Alegre, close to Caverna da Pedra Pintada, where there were these gorgeous villages - you know women ran that, right... Okay, I digress for editorial comment, but he wrote that the female warriors were out in front of the men, leading the native troops. The Amazons were said to have fought so courageously that the Indian men didn't dare turn back - the sisters killed anyone who turned back, dig? He described them as tall, with braided hair, wearing white, and could each fight like ten men." She looked at Damali.
"Sounds like a female Neteru team to me. Or, at the very least, an all-female guardian team."
"What are you wearing... or I should say, what possessed you to put on that outfit?"
Damali looked down at her all-white outfit and then back up at Marlene. "I just wanted to wear this color today for traveling here. You think a Neteru was with them, the Amazons? Sounds suspiciously like the stuff of legends - and they have actual historical accounts of these women, too?"
"No lie, girl. But it's not in the book! All of that last battle Father Pat told me about went down in June 1542 through September 1546, or thereabouts... the massacres continued, but the Amazons held their own against the expedition crew that was trying to plunder their villages, after being cool for over twelve thousand years - you following me?"
"The Raise the Dead concert happened between those months, just like the subsequent mountain-climber deaths, and within the new millennium same years - right in the middle, 2003." Damali rubbed her hands over her face. "Back then, women were leading the charge, the men followed, it's all in the same area. Shit, Mar... but what's come back from the dead - the good guys, or the bad guys? And, how the hell do we tell?"
"After we do this gig, we gotta go north to the spiritual city桞ahia, also known as Salvador... to get a bead on this thing before we go in deeper. September here is their spring, and although it's now October, I wanna ask the folks in Bahia if they noticed anything deep when they went through their normal spring fertility rites ceremonies - for us, the third week of September is when fall equinox happens - "
"Mar... Carlos and I, uh... that third week. Uhmmm. It was a month after my birthday, plus ten nights when we hooked up."
"Harvest... The fall harvest rites." Marlene covered her mouth. "Something over here is waxing, as you were waning... you were coming out of your ripening, as something here was going into its ripening - right before the rainy season of rebirth here. This is female energy, girlfriend. This ain't male - that's why our mostly male team is jacked up. Probably what's messing with Carlos's head, too."
"Now, I'm really scared, Mar." Again her arms went around her waist and Marlene came to her, placing an arm of support about her shoulders.
"All right. Let's not freak ourselves out here. From Bahia, we can fly into Belem, the capital of Para state in Brazil to get close to the first maul citing. From there, we're gonna have to trek down the Amazon the old-fashioned way - by small planes and boat to hit the 'interior where this stuff has been going on in Santarem and farther west beyond Manaus, near where the Amazon and the Rio Negro meet梖emale Amazon warrior country. Ya oughta be at home, kiddo, with the same DNA and peoples all running through your veins. You'll be our lead tracker. Always will be since the last major battle."
Massaging her temples, Damali sat slowly on an overstuffed chair, abandoning Marlene's arm. "You remember the Raise the Dead concert?"
"How could I forget it?" Marlene scoffed and went to put her book away carefully.
"The energy was to open portals, but also the ritual in the music was to make a Neteru, me at that time, able to merge with male vampire energy - "
"For a mating ritual."
Damali nodded. "A highly sexually charged event. One that happened on the onset of their spring rites of fertility here, too. Now, we know there are energy zones in the world that have - "
"A lot of history," Marlene said, finishing her sentence. "Could it be that the people didn't even know - maybe nobody ever intended... but the dates, the times, the cultural norms of what was going on, the stellar constellation, and crazy Fallon Nuit messing with the cosmic order of things..."
"Ya think?"
Marlene stood and began pacing. "What if something backfired? It happened before, that's how Fallon Nuit got out of vampire incarceration before to form an alliance."
"Yeah, but I drove a sword through his evil heart myself," Damali protested, still rubbing her temples.