Beyond Sunrise (8 page)

At the thought, India felt a fresh tide of panic swell within her, but she resolutely pushed it down and concentrated, instead, on slowly moving her hands as soon as the bent old woman looked away again. She would not think about what they were going to do to her. She could not think about—

A blast from a conch shell cut through the murmuring voices and desultory activity in the village. India froze, while all around her, hands weaving palm mats stilled, heads lifted, squabbling children broke apart and stared at the entrance to the village clearing.

A man strode from out of the jungle gloom, a tall, dark-haired, sun-bronzed white man carrying a half-grown, squealing, thrashing pig slung across his shoulders the way a shepherd might carry a tired lamb.
"Me kum buyim dim-dim meri,"
he said, lowering the pig before the tall albino with the ginger hair who stood in the center of the village, flanked by some half a dozen cannibals, their war clubs held at the ready.

India blinked away a film of sweat mingling with sudden, startled tears.
Dim-dim
was what the Melanesians called a white, while a
meri
was a woman. And she realized, with a swift, joyous surge of incredulity and exultation, that Jack Ryder had come to rescue her, after all. He was proposing to buy her. For a pig.

Chapter Ten

In the next instant, that brief wild flare of joy disappeared beneath a surge of renewed horror and despair so overwhelming, it took India's breath.

They're going to kill him,
she thought with a sickening twist of her stomach. He might have come—unexpectedly, unbelievably—to rescue her, but these savages had no reason to bargain with him. They would simply kill him, and then they would eat him, too. The man had to be mad, India decided, watching him stand there, his hands resting lightly, almost casually on his hips. Only a madman would stroll into a camp full of cannibals and expect to achieve anything other than his own death.

She sat tensed, waiting for the thrust of a spear, the dull thud of a falling war club to end his life. Instead, the albino prodded the bawling pig at his feet with one bare big toe and said something India didn't understand, but which Jack Ryder answered with a flood of Pidgin. The albino shook his head and held up two fingers. And India began to realize with a resurgent spark of hope that the men were wrangling over her price.

The problem, evidently, was the size of the pig. It wasn't big enough. India's own command of Pidgin was limited, but there was no misunderstanding the derisive way the albino sneered down at the poor, bawling animal at his feet, then held up his hands some six inches apart. The men in a half circle around him laughed, their hideously carved war clubs jiggling menacingly up and down.

Jack Ryder shook his head and said something India couldn't catch, something about copra, and the
Sea Hawk.
The albino jabbered quickly in response. Reaching into the bag he wore slung across one shoulder, he pulled out a round, flat object that he thrust in Jack Ryder's face. It was a curious bag the albino wore, made of some pale leather, and the longer India stared at it, the more convinced she became that it was made of human skin. A white man's skin.

The Australian blinked at the ship's biscuit held just inches from his nose.
"Orait,"
he said. All right.

All right? India's hopes soared so high she was practically wriggling in the mud, tethered only by the plaited vines tying her to the tree. Did that mean they'd come to an agreement? Had he actually, somehow, managed to save her?

Abruptly, the albino withdrew the biscuit and tucked it away in that revolting bag. Turning, he called to a nearby woman, who scuttled forward, back bent nearly double, to take possession of the pig. The half circle of men drifted away, swinging their war clubs in idle boredom, while the women of the village turned their attention back to their work.

From the time Jack Ryder had first sauntered into the clearing, he had looked at her only once—a quick, assessing glance thrown her way before he'd tossed that poor pig at the albino's feet. Now he swung toward her, and what India saw in his face was enough to make her wish for one, craven instant that he hadn't rescued her.

He stopped in front of her, his arms crossed at his chest, his gaze traveling over her, from her loose, tangled hair to her ripped bodice to her crumpled, mud-streaked tartan skirt. His eyes were cold and hard, but it was the wry smile of amusement twisting his lips that dried up every word of profuse gratitude that had been trembling on the tip of her tongue.

"Don't say it," she snapped, her neck arching back awkwardly as she stared up at him.

"Say what?" Easing his machete from its sheath, he hunkered down beside her to slice neatly through the twisted vines binding her ankles. "That you must be six kinds of an idiot, to go running off by yourself into a jungle full of cannibals?" He cut the cords holding her arms suspended high over her head. "Or that it would have served you right if I'd let them eat you?"

Whatever retort she might have made was lost in the agony of the sensation of the circulation flowing back into her cramped arms and numbed hands. She bit her lip to keep from crying out.

An ungentle hand closed around her upper arm, hauled her to her feet. "Can you walk?"

The muscles in her legs were cramped, her feet tingling painfully, and the long hours of unspeakable terror had left her feeling weak and shaky, but she tightened her jaw and nodded resolutely. "I can run if I must."

"That's good, because thanks to your little adventure, we're probably going to have to." He eased the machete back into its sheath, then tightened his hold on her arm, jerking her toward him so that she half fell against him, her free hand splaying against the solid muscles of his chest. She stared into narrowed, dangerous blue eyes, and knew a stab of renewed fear. "But understand this," he said, his lips drawing back into a nasty smile as he enunciated each word with awful clarity, "You run away from me again, and you're on your own." He threw a telling glance over one shoulder, to where some of the natives had begun to gather together again and were now staring at India with an expression on their dark, sullen faces she didn't like. "They can baste you in butter or sacrifice you to the gods of Mount Futapu if they want, and I won't lift a finger to stop it. Is that clear?"

India met his icy stare without flinching. "Quite clear."

"Good." He thrust a satchel at her, and she realized with a sense of shock and profound gratitude that it was her own knapsack. She had dropped it back on the trail, when the cannibals had seized her, but until this moment she'd scarcely given it a thought.

"My notebook," she said, her still-numb fingers clumsy as she tried to open the satchel's flap. Most of the material she'd gathered for her book so far was safely back in Neu Brenenberg with her trunk, but she'd been writing and sketching in this particular notebook for over a week now, and the thought of how close she'd come to losing it made her sick. "Is it—"

"It's there." He thrust her forward with an ungentle push. "Jesus Christ. You can do an inventory later. Let's get out of here before your friends change their minds and decide to have us both for supper."

"Why didn't they eat you?"

It was a puzzle that had been bothering India ever since they'd left that squalid village with its sullen man-eaters and darkly huddled huts and smoking cookfires. Now that her legs had finally stopped shaking, and the constriction of terror squeezing her throat had begun to ease, she asked the question out loud.

Up ahead, Jack Ryder paused, his machete held high, a small quirk of amusement lifting his lips when he glanced back at her. "What do you mean?"

The obvious amusement in his face irked her to no end. She'd found a straight pin at the bottom of her knapsack and used it to repair the damage to her blouse. She'd washed her face, and made an attempt at putting up her hair again, but she was uncomfortably aware that she still looked more like a waterfront doxy who'd just lost a catfight than the coolly efficient travel writer who'd set sail from Neu Brenenberg that morning.

"The cannibals," she said severely. "One look at me, and all they could think about was dinner. Yet they never laid a hand on you."

He brought his machete down in a practiced swipe at the thick stand of fern that all but obscured the narrow track they'd been following. "I do business with them."

"You
what?"

"The women harvest copra from fallen coconuts and haul it down to the bay. I buy it from them."

India stared at the broad back of the man ahead of her, the muscles beneath his sweat-stained shirt bunching and flexing with each swing of his machete. He did business with cannibals. Traded with them. Regularly. "What do you pay them with?"

He shrugged. "Different things. You cost me an extra crate of ships' biscuits."

They were revolting things, ships' biscuits, a kind of hardtack—inevitably infested with weevils—that was traditionally fed to sailors on a long voyage. A sudden and unaccountable wave of indignation swept through her. "You bought me for a crate of ships' biscuits?"

"Mmm. And a pig. Don't forget the pig."

India thought about that bawling, terrified pig that would be eaten in her stead, and she wondered if she would ever be able to bring herself to touch meat again. "I'll never forget that poor pig."

He had a crooked way of smiling that brought an unexpected dimple to one tanned, lean cheek. "Made you feel a certain kinship with the edible beasts of the world, did it?"

"Yes, it did."

A silence fell between them, filled only with the swish of Jack Ryder's machete and the hot steamy drip around them. The track they followed had at first dipped downward, but it seemed to India that they'd been climbing sharply now for half an hour or more, the thick stands of fern and creeper-choked ironwood, sandlewood, and pine allowing only occasional distant glimpses of a sun-sparkled, cobalt blue sea. And she realized, suddenly, that this was not, as she'd first supposed, the same track down which she'd been carried by the cannibals.

"Shouldn't we have made it back to the main trail by now?"

"We're not going that way."

"We're not?"

He took another swipe with his machete, and grunted. "Too risky. In the time I spent tracking down you and your friends and finding that damned pig, Simon and his boys could have easily made it back to their ship and re-outfitted. You might be anxious to run into them again, but I'm not."

"So we're striking out
overland?"

He swung his machete with a hefty
whack,
and grunted. "There's a trail here. It should intersect with the main track just before the river."

India tipped back her head and stared up at a jungle canopy so thick that only a faint suggestion of daylight filtered through to bathe the air around them in an eerie greenish glow. "There used to be a trail," she said, unable to resist the urge to goad him. "I think either it has petered out or you've lost it."

He replied with a muttered oath and a savage swing of his machete that told her he'd been thinking the same thing. "Hell, if it hadn't been for that stupid stunt of yours, I'd be halfway to La Rochelle by now."

She stopped short. "If it weren't for me?"

"That's right." He turned to face her. He was drenched with sweat, his shirt open halfway down the front to show a bronzed chest that lifted with each breath. Swinging a machete was hard work. "If you hadn't got yourself nabbed by cannibals—"

Jerking her gaze away from that exposed, aggressively masculine chest, India stabbed the air in front of his nose with one pointed finger. "If you hadn't forced me to go with you, none of this would have happened."

"Bloody hell!" He swatted her accusing finger away as if it were an annoying gnat. "If it hadn't been for me, those cannibals would have grabbed you off the summit of Mount Futapu."

"Right." She rocked back on her heels, her hands on her hips. "So they grabbed me at the base of Mount Futapu instead!"

He leaned into her, his strong jaw clenched tight enough that she could see the muscles throbbing along the line of his lean cheeks. "If you'd just stayed with me instead of running off at the first chance you got, you'd have been fine."

"And that's supposed to make what happened to me all my own fault, is it?"

"A share of it. You know, you might try being just a tad grateful for what I did. You haven't even bloody said thank you."

India let out a low, derisive laugh. "Indeed, Mr. Ryder? Would you have me believe your rescue was motivated by chivalrous impulses?"

"What the hell else do you think
motivated
me?"

"Pure self-interest, of course."

He flung back his head. "Self-interest?"

"That's right. You believed possession of a hostage would facilitate your escape, and so you were—"

"Facilitate
my escape?" Swearing foully, he swung away to take a series of vicious swipes with his machete at the tangled undergrowth before spinning back around to face her again. "Jesus, woman. Do you always talk like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like you're delivering a bloody lecture to the local scientific society or something."

India held herself quite still. "You shock me, Mr. Ryder. Do you mean to imply that you have actually
attended
such lectures? Judging by your language, I had assumed your exposure to conversation must be limited to barrooms and seamen's quarters."

For a long, charged moment, he stared at her, his chest heaving, his nostrils flaring with each indrawn breath, a faint, unexpected stain of color appearing to ride high on his cheekbones. "Sonofabitch," he said suddenly, and turned uphill again, his machete chopping savagely at every creeper in their path.

She followed him, the silence between them heavy, the steamy jungle hushed and oppressive around them. After a moment, he said, not slackening his pace, "You know what's wrong with you, don't you?"

"No," said India, pushing determinedly after him. "But I've no doubt you have every intention of telling me."

"It's the same thing that's wrong with every spinster I've ever met. It makes you all sour and cranky, and—"

"I am not sour and cranky—"

"—frustrated."

India stopped short. "And precisely what is that meant to imply?"

"You know what I'm saying." He didn't miss a beat with his machete.

Muttering softly to herself, India pushed after him up the steep, overgrown mountainside, swatting angrily at every stray branch and hanging liana in her way. So he thought she was sexually frustrated, did he? He thought all she needed was to allow her body to be frequently used to sate some man's revolting lust, and she would turn into the kind of gentle, docile imbecile men seemed to prefer? "Indeed, Mr. Ryder?" She glared at that broad, hateful back ahead of her. "Judging from the evidence I've seen, you could hardly be said to be suffering from any such
frustration,
yet you are still as cranky and sour as they come."

"Judging from what evidence?"

"Your numerous half-native offspring!" she snapped before she could stop herself.

She expected him to laugh at her, maybe even make fun of her for her shock. Instead, he went very still, his arm arrested in midswing. Then he let the machete fall in a smooth, carefully controlled arc, and his voice, when it came, was cold and hard and more precisely modulated than she had ever heard it. "I have but one half-native offspring, Miss McKnight, and as I haven't seen her myself for almost ten years, I wonder how you came to be aware of her existence."