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.
FIFTY
It wasn’t just Balthasar Shahrizai. Over the course of days, seven other men began showing signs of fever, alternating between shivering despite the day’s heat, and sweating even more profusely than the rest of us. I was sorry to see that Jean Grenville, one of our steady L’Agnacites and best foragers, was among them; but Balthasar was the worst of the lot by far, his condition deteriorating at an alarming rate.
Ah, gods! Truth be told, all of them worried me, more than I cared to let on. Every night, I prayed.
We reached stretches of perilous rapids that took all our hard-won skill to navigate, twisting and plunging through narrow passages between rocks. Whenever possible, we disembarked and transported the canoes and their goods manually along the shore, which was infinitely more exhausting, but far less dangerous.
All of us were weaker than we had been for lack of food, but the sick men labored harder at both chores. When we made camp at night, they lacked the strength to do aught but sweat and shiver.
I was afraid for them, and afraid for the rest of us, too. If the disease passed to our entire company, we wouldn’t be able to continue. We would simply starve to death here in the jungle.
“It is not that kind of sickness,” Eyahue told me. “It does not pass from one person to another.” He blew out his breath. “Bad spirits in the air cause it.”
“Is there anything we can do?” I asked him.
He nodded. “Smoke will help drive them away. Put green wood on the fire.”
Whether or not it helped, I could not say. No one else took ill, but those who were already sick continued to worsen.
When we found a campsite not far from a slow-moving segment of river where the whiskery fish were particularly abundant, I called for a day’s rest. While others foraged for frogs and grubs and the sick men rested, Bao and I spent the entire day downriver cloaked in the twilight, catching fish.
By the day’s end, we had over two dozen. We wrapped them in leaves and steamed them over the fire, everyone cramming the slightly gamey flesh into their mouths with their fingers. I made sure all of the sick men had an entire fish to themselves, hovering over Balthasar to be certain he ate every last bite while he scowled at me, squinting against the green-wood smoke of our campfire.
I hoped it would help.
It didn’t.
Come daybreak, the sick men were no better, and Balthasar’s condition had worsened markedly. He was shaking so hard he could barely sit upright, and in the clear light of dawn, I was shocked to see that the whites of his eyes had turned a vivid hue of yellow, eerily bright in contrast to his dark blue irises. Until that moment, I’d doubted Eyahue’s talk of bad spirits, but now I wondered.
The old pochteca called me aside. “Your friend is going to die before we reach Vilcabamba,” he said bluntly. “Maybe others, too. Today’s journey will be very hard. They are too sick. It would be better to leave them now.”
My heart ached. “Is there nothing else we can do? No way to save them?”
He hesitated.
“Eyahue!” I grabbed his scrawny shoulders and shook him. “If you know something you’re not telling me, I swear by stone and sea and all that they encompass, I will kill you myself!”
“All right!” He fended me off. “Yes, maybe. Maybe! But it is dangerous.” He pointed downriver. “First, we must pass through a gorge with fast rapids. There is no place to carry the canoes and your sick men will be no help. But if we make it through, there is a tree that grows in the heights whose bark is poisonous to the bad spirits.”
“It will cure them?” I asked, hoping against hope.
Eyahue scowled at me. “If I can find it, and if I do not get killed trying. Where it grows, there are hostiles for sure, the last of the wild forest tribes before we reach Vilcabamba.”
“We have to try,” I said. “Please?”
He sighed. “If we survive the rapids, I will try.”
I kissed his wizened cheek. “Thank you, Eyahue.”
I explained the situation to the others. No one wanted to leave ailing men behind, although Balthasar protested the decision.
“As one of the sponsors of this expedition, I must advise against this as a bad investment,” he said in a wry tone that did nothing to belie his underlying seriousness. He regarded us with those uncanny yellow-and-blue eyes and tried unsuccessfully to fight off a violent bout of shivering, his teeth chattering. “I’ll only be a burden to you.” He clenched his jaw to silence them, gritting out his words. “Leave me. I’m not jesting. This is a bad idea. Save the others who aren’t as far gone.” He coughed. “If you want to give me a fitting tribute, gather a few flowers of surpassing beauty to strew over my impending corpse before you go, won’t you?”
Bao poked him with the butt-end of his staff. “No. Don’t be stupid. Now get up and get in the canoe.”
Balthasar smiled bitterly, holding out one trembling hand. “What if I can’t?”
“I’ll carry you,” Bao retorted. “Shall I?”
It was a test of wills, and I daresay it may have been the first Balthasar Shahrizai lost in his lifetime. Beneath Bao’s unrelenting stare, he heaved himself upright with a considerable effort, wavering on his feet. Bao handed him his bamboo staff and Balthasar leaned on it, breathing hard, his breath rasping in his lungs, his free hand on Bao’s shoulder to steady himself. “You’re a stubborn one, aren’t you?”
“He is,” I agreed.
Bao looked sidelong at me, a world of fond intimacy in a single glance. “No more than you, Moirin.”
For what felt like the hundredth time, we launched our canoes. At Septimus Rousse’s sensible suggestion, we had redistributed our company so that every canoe held but one of the fever-stricken men, seated in the third slot.
In the first hour of our journey, we paddled along the serene face of the river. It rained for a time, and then the skies cleared once more. And then the river began to quicken. The banks rose and narrowed, the current picking up pace. Protruding boulders began to place obstacles in our path, water breaking around them in telling patterns.
At first, I tried to pay attention to the entire company, but once we entered the rapids, it was impossible. Stony walls rose around us, the river hurtling us onward beneath their shadow. In the prow, Bao called out orders.
“Left!” he called, digging his paddle in at a sharp angle. “Now right, right, hard right!”
The river rose and fell, crashed and thundered.
Everywhere, spray spurted, stinging my face.
I narrowed my eyes and kept paddling. Behind me, Balthasar huddled and shivered. In the stern, Brice planted his paddle as ordered, grunting with the effort of trying to keep us in a clear channel through the raging waters.
In the prow, Bao had risen to his knees, paddling fiercely on either side of the canoe, maneuvering us around boulders. Master Lo’s magpie had always claimed he could do whatever was needful. As ever, he was as good as his word. Our canoe shot through the rapids like a cork.
We emerged into a scene of tranquil beauty. Beneath towering cliff walls covered with emerald moss, the river widened once more, turning placid despite the influx of a slender waterfall that spilled over the crags, sparkling in the sunlight. Ahead of us, Eyahue’s canoe was making landfall on the rocks at the base of the cliff.
Instead of following him, Bao turned us sideways to the rapids behind us, idling on the water and watching to make sure the other six vessels made it safely through the dangerous passage.
The first four made it through without incident, canoes bucking and plunging like wild horses, shooting through the final gap into the calm bay.
The fifth was not so lucky.
The fellow in the prow, an Eisandine fighter named Gaston Courtois, misjudged the angle of his approach. There was a sharp, splintering crack as the canoe struck the rocks on the starboard side. The force of its momentum carried it into the calm waters, where it drifted slowly into two pieces, the entire hull split in half. Dazed men clung to the pieces of their broken vessel while four sets of armor sank slowly to the floor of the river.
And behind them, the sixth canoe was making its inexorable way through the rapids, unable to slow its progress.
“Get out of the way!” Bao cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted. “Get out of the way!”
Gaston Courtois and the fellow behind him heard Bao and kicked frantically, propelling their half of the broken vessel clear of the gap.
The other half floundered, one man barely able to cling to the splintered wood, the other helping him keep his head above water, neither able to get out of the path of the oncoming final vessel.
“It’s Jean,” Brice said in anguish. “He’s too weak!”
Bao stood with care, our narrow canoe rocking as he balanced on the balls of his feet. “Hold steady,” he cautioned us before diving into the water, setting the canoe to rocking further.
Once again, it was a near thing. But this time, luck and the gods favored us.
Swimming strongly, Bao reached the shattered half of the canoe. Swearing and cajoling, one arm draped over the splintered marupa wood, his legs kicking, he did his best to drag it out of the collision path as the last vessel shot through the gap, daylight showing between its hull and the water.
And for a mercy, the very capable Septimus Rousse was at the helm in the prow of that vessel, anchoring our lineup along the course of the river with his expertise.
“Starboard!” he roared, digging in with his paddle and suiting actions to words. “Starboard!”
There was no collision.