Naamah's Blessing - By Jacqueline Carey Page 0,126

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,