Entangled (62 page)

Leoni’s thoughts turned to Ria. She’d left her in danger, trekking into wild country infested with Illimani patrols. What had happened to her since then? A night and a day had passed here. How much time had passed in Ria’s world and how had she used it? Was she even still alive? Or had she been caught and slaughtered by Sulpa’s army?

Ignoring the throbbing pain of her cuts and bruises, Leoni stepped out faster. The only way she was going to be able to answer such questions, the only way she was going to be able to do anything more for Ria, was to get to the village Leoncio had spoken of and drink Ayahuasca again.

They had no packs and therefore no supplies, no bottled water – pretty much nothing except two pistols, one of them still fully loaded, stuffed in Matt’s belt, two knives, a machete, and a leather bag of Leoncio’s containing certain bottled potions and other objects he had somehow held on to through all the craziness.

There was one piece of good news, he said. Now at least they were on the right side of the river – for they would have had to cross it anyway further along their route – and the going would be easier here because the trees were much taller and grew wider apart.

‘Do you even know where we are?’ Leoni asked him, looking around at the riotous profusion of green palms and soaring hardwoods that stretched away as far as the eye could see in all directions. Again there was a kind of emerald half-light down here, a blissful, diffused shade rather than the glaring sun that had beaten down on them when they were in the river. But it was also humid off the scale, and Leoni knew that within minutes she’d be pouring with sweat.

Leoncio reassured her he visited these forests often to hunt and gather medicinal plants, and that the loss of their packs should be viewed as an inconvenience, not a fatal blow. There were numerous streams where they would be able to drink and cool themselves, and he could provide food for them from wild plants and roots they’d find along their way. ‘I lived three years here as a wild man,’ he said without elaborating further, ‘so I think we will survive until we reach the village.’

‘Which will take how long?’ Leoni asked.

‘About another thirty hours,’ said Don Leoncio.

Leoni was stunned:
‘Thirty
hours?’

‘Yes. Perhaps a little more, perhaps a little less.’

The rain began shortly before nightfall, diffusing through the canopy into a constant dripping shower of fat drops. Leoncio helped Matt and Leoni to improvise personal shelters of palm leaves on frames of branches which they set up close to the trunk of a large tree, but Leoni was uncomfortable from the outset. The shelters were very small and whereas Leoncio and Matt somehow remained still, Leoni’s joints were so stiff she was unable to hold any position for more than a few moments. Yet as the hours of discomfort passed and the cold of the night settled into her bones she found an unexpected resolve. OK, she couldn’t sleep but at least that meant Jack wouldn’t get to her in her dreams.

Long before dawn they ate a scant breakfast of strange pungent fruits, slaked their thirst from a stream and were on their way again.

Leoni just kept on putting one foot in front of another, one foot in front of another, and the day wore on in a daze.

Finally, around mid-afternoon, they hit a definite track and straggled along it, Leoncio a few feet in front, Leoni leaning heavily on Matt. Soft dappled light came down through the canopy and a raucous flock of gaudy parrots, green with yellow heads, settled in a huge brazil-nut tree. They distracted Leoni for just a second but as she looked back to the trail a band of naked men, brown-skinned and barrel-chested, with hard, flat faces and suspicious eyes, stepped out of the forest and menaced them with blowpipes.

‘Call me a bitch again and you’ll have to fight me …’

After shouting the words in Merell, Ria repeated them in Naveen for the benefit of any of Balaan’s men who might not have understood.

She intended the public ultimatum to be a challenge to his honour, but at first he laughed it off: ‘You? Fight me? A gnat would fight a mammoth sooner. Don’t waste my time, little girl.’ In a ringing voice everyone could hear he addressed himself to Sebittu: ‘I repeat my offer: ‘get rid of the BITCH and we will unite our forces.’

Ria felt the ranks of her Merell followers watching, waiting for their ‘harbinger of light’ to prove herself. Failure would destroy her, but success would stamp her authority on the minds of everyone here – Merell and non-Merell alike – and that was a prize worth risking her life for.

‘I’m challenging you to fight me, Balaan!’ she yelled. ‘If you’ve got the stomach for it.’ She pulled one of her throwing stones from her pouch and showed it to him, and to the crowd: ‘Your spears against my stones,’ she said.

Balaan roared his laughter, tears of amusement dripping from his eyes: ‘Stones! Ha! Ha ha! What do you think you can do with those little things?’

‘They’re bigger than your balls,’ Ria answered, drawing back her arm. She repeated the words in Naveen and one of Balaan’s braves gave a bark of laughter, cut short when the commander turned and glared. Another guffaw broke out behind Ria, from deep in her own column, and she saw Balaan flush and grind his teeth. ‘All right, bitch,’ he roared, ‘that’s ENOUGH.’ But as he lunged at her with his spear Bont lumbered forward, slapped the point aside with the flat of his axe and stood eye to eye with him, daring him to strike again.

‘Get out of the way, Bont,’ Ria snarled in the Clan tongue. She switched to thought-talk. ‘I have to fight this guy myself, you oaf. Don’t you see that?’

Bont was swinging his axe, keeping Balaan at bay but not engaging him: ‘He’s going to kill you,’ he pulsed to Ria, ‘that’s all I know.’

‘Get OUT of the way,’ she yelled, reverting to out-loud speech. This time, shaking his head, Bont stepped aside.

Ria repeated her challenge to Balaan: ‘My stones against your spears,’ she screamed. ‘If you’ve got the balls for it, you piece of shit.’

Rage and indignation flushed the Naveen leader’s meaty face. Snarling his contempt, he spat a big gob of yellow phlegm at her, somehow missing. Then he stalked away, shifting his first spear from his left to his right hand.

‘Get back,’ Ria pulsed to Bont and Driff as everyone else around her scattered. She dipped her hand into her pouch and pulled out a second stone.

Balaan was still walking. At fifty paces he spun on his heel and launched the spear with a roar of fury. It was a good throw, fast and powerful, but Ria trusted her eye. At the last moment she swayed aside and the missile shot past, burying itself in the ground behind her.

From the Merell ranks there came a sigh of appreciation.

‘You spit better than you throw,’ Ria taunted as Balaan brandished his second spear. Twice he feinted – the man was not without some crude skill – but when he let fly she dodged again.

‘In fact,’ she yelled, ‘you throw like a bitch.’

The insult enraged him, as she had hoped, and he charged her with an explosion of energy, keeping hold of his last spear. As soon as he started to move Ria threw a stone with her right hand and –
CLUNK!
– it bounced off the side of his head just above the ear. A heartbeat later she hurled the second stone with her left arm, aiming for the same spot.
THWACK!
Another good hit.

He stopped in his tracks about thirty paces from her and touched his skull. He was bleeding, and there were more
oohs
and
ahs
from the crowd as he seemed to stumble and almost fall.

But Balaan was a big man and he kept on coming.

Ria snatched another stone from her pouch and threw it right-handed with all the force she could muster. It hit him between the eyes –
THWOCK!
Again he stumbled but again he failed to fall.

He kept on coming, just walking towards her, holding out his spear, blood gushing from his skull.

What was the matter with this guy? Was his head solid bone? Ria
had already palmed her last two stones when he shook himself, spraying blood, and broke into a run. She threw fast.
CRACK!
– a punishing shot to the temple, enough to kill a normal man – and
CRUNCH!
– the final stone broke his nose. Then he was on top of her, his eyes rolling, somehow still finding the strength for a last desperate lunge with the spear. She danced aside, unsheathed her flint knife, thrust the blade between his ribs and jerked it out as his momentum carried him by.

Ria didn’t need to look back as Balaan crashed to the ground behind her. She knew she’d found his heart.

Before high sun the column was on the move again, enlarged by the addition of Balaan’s men. They’d agreed he’d been killed in a fair fight and they had sworn allegiance to Ria, accepting her as their leader in all matters of war against the Illimani. She could see from the slightly awestruck look on some of their faces they’d started to buy into the Merell belief that she was the chosen one – the harbinger of the light – handpicked by the spirits to lead the tribes in a time of darkness.

Ria saw no reason to disillusion them. At a quick count she now had close to four hundred braves taking orders from her – the beginnings of a real army to fight Sulpa – so the prophecy was doing what the blue woman intended.

But she also had more than a thousand women, children, elderly folk and other non-combatants who still had to be brought to safety. She glanced at the sun. Although the going was slow with such a large group, a positive spirit seemed to have seized everyone after her victory over Balaan and for a long while there were no interruptions. They simply marched, making good time, seeing nobody. There was a brisk east wind blowing that cut the heat, and by late afternoon Ria had begun to hope they might reach Secret Place before the night was out.

They had entered a green flower-strewn valley and were streaming across its floor when three young Naveen women, wailing and tearing their hair, rushed down the valley side towards them out of a small cave in which they had concealed themselves. They’d all been badly beaten and were streaked and smeared with blood from multiple flesh wounds. Their eyes were wild, their hair was matted and their clothing was torn.

Ria halted the column and brought forward other Naveen to comfort and succour the women.

When they were calmer she talked to them.

They had seen terrible things.

Their names were Moiraig, Aranchi and Noro and it seemed they had been part of a large Naveen band, more than a thousand strong, camped half a day’s march to the south-east. With such numbers they had imagined themselves invulnerable to attack but early that morning, while most still slept, an Illimani force had fallen on them out of the mist and there had been a horrible massacre. It was clear from their descriptions that the attackers could only have been the five hundred of Martu and Sakkan.

Most of the Naveen hadn’t been killed in the first onslaught and the adult male survivors and the older females had been rounded up and marched into a makeshift pen of uprooted thorn bushes the Illimani had erected. Brutally separated from their screaming children, Moiraig, Aranchi and Noro had been herded into a second pen with the remaining females over the age of twelve, including many other young mothers. A third pen held mothers with nursing babes, together with all the other children of the camp.

For some time the women in the second pen weren’t clear about the function of the three enclosures. They took heart that sucklings had been allowed to stay at the breast – for surely their captors couldn’t be as bad as they seemed if they were so careful to keep innocent babes alive. They didn’t understand why they needed to be separated from their own children but at least nothing bad was actually being done to any of them.

Yet ominous preparations were under way. Around the camp the Illimani had forced a contingent of the male captives to chop down trees and strip trunks and branches to make sharpened stakes of different sizes. The smaller stakes, near the height of a man, were embedded point-up at random intervals across the camp’s meeting ground. In amongst them a dozen larger and thicker posts, twice the height of a man, were sunk point-down, and generous piles of firewood the Naveen had been accumulating in preparation for winter were arranged around them.

When all was complete the captives who had done the work were seized, bound and impaled through the anus on the sharpened points of some of the shorter wooden stakes. As this was happening the entire
Illimani war band, five hundred strong, gathered round, laughing and roaring in the most horrible way at the victims’ shrieks of torment. Having discovered the camp’s large underground cache of water skins filled with Storl, the intoxicating fermented-apple drink of the Naveen, many of the victorious fighters were already very drunk.