And when the rain began to fall, it almost seemed appropriate—at least at first. But instead of tapering off by mid-day as it had in the past, it only rained harder and harder. The placid river began to swell, the current increasing until we were no longer paddling to propel our vessels, but merely to control them. The rain fell in sheets, blinding us and throwing a thick veil over the world.
Through the downpour, I could dimly make out Eyahue’s canoe ahead of ours veering sharply to the left. In the prow, Bao loosed a shout of alarm at the sight of a nearly submerged boulder.
“Left! Left, as hard as you can!” he yelled.
Paddling madly, we managed to pass it, calling out warnings to the vessels behind us. Ahead of us, Eyahue pointed frantically toward the shore. It took all our strength to paddle hard enough to cut across the current.
Alas, not everyone behind us was as fortunate.
I was helping drag our canoe ashore when the cries went up on the river. Shielding my eyes against the rain with one hand, I saw that one of the vessels had struck the boulder and overturned. Free of its burden, the canoe shot away downriver, carried by the swift current, leaving four men struggling against it.
Others were trying to help, but it was impossible to fight the current long enough to drag them into the canoes. Two of the men began swimming hard toward the shore, making slow headway. One was clinging to the boulder, and I could no longer see the fourth.
Bao plunged into the river without hesitation, wading armpit-deep into the water and shouting encouragement to the swimmers. How he kept his footing in the current, I couldn’t imagine. All I knew was that it terrified me.
“Your husband is a madman,” Balthasar muttered before going after him, picking his way with obvious difficulty.
Together, they managed to help the exhausted swimmers to shore, and I do not think those men would have made it to safety without them.
“Who’s left out there?” Balthasar gasped.
The L’Agnacite Jean Grenville coughed and retched and spat out river water. “De Montague’s on the rock,” he said hoarsely. “Didn’t see what happened to Longchamps.”
One by one, the remaining canoes reached the shore. The downpour continued unabated. In the middle of the rising river, Mathieu de Montague wrapped his arms around a boulder that would soon be wholly submerged.
“Can we reach him on foot?” Bao asked Jean Grenville.
He shook his head. “Too deep.”
Balthasar pushed the sodden hair from his eyes. “Can he swim? If he can’t, in another ten minutes, he’ll be swept away.”
Jean gave a weary nod. “A little, I think. Just not well.”
“We’ll get as close as we can,” Bao said decisively. “Link arms, make a chain. It’s our only chance.”
I watched with my heart in my throat as ten of our strongest men put Bao’s plan into action, clasping each other’s wrists and plunging into the raging water in a long chain, a bit downriver of where Mathieu clung to his increasingly tenuous perch, straining to keep his head above water.
Our redoubtable Jaguar Knight Temilotzin anchored the chain, his feet planted firmly on the shore.
Of course, Bao led it.
Once again, he waded up to his armpits in the fierce current. Balthasar maintained a hard grip on Bao’s left wrist, his other hand clasped around Brice de Bretel’s wrist. Bao reached out his right hand in Mathieu de Montague’s direction.
Between the hissing rain and the torrent of the river, I couldn’t hear what Bao shouted to the lad, but Mathieu shook his head in terrified refusal. The rain fell harder and the river rose further.
Bao shouted at him again.
Whatever he’d shouted, it didn’t matter. A fresh surge of water dislodged Mathieu from his rock. Paddling dog-wise, his neck craned at an awkward angle, he made his way toward Bao’s extended right hand.
Ah, gods!
It was close, so close. Peering through the rain, I saw Mathieu sputter and put out his hand with only a few feet between them. Bao lunged for him and came up short, his empty fingers grasping at air. The entire chain of men lurched forward, staggering in the current, every last one of them in danger of losing their footing and being swept away.
On the shore, Temilotzin grunted and heaved backward, stabilizing the chain.
Bao made one last desperate lunge in vain, his effort curtailed by Balthasar Shahrizai’s death-grip on his wrist.
In the space of a single heartbeat, the moment passed and the opportunity vanished. The ferocious current carried Mathieu de Montague downriver past Bao’s reach, his open mouth gaping in dismay.
The river swallowed him, and he was gone.
Depressed and defeated, our men retreated, helping one another straggle ashore, dropping with exhaustion once they reached it.
The green walls of the jungle rose around us in mockery.
And the rain kept falling.
FORTY-NINE
It rained for three days.
Our campsite was a sodden, miserable place plagued by guilt. For a surety, there was plenty of it to go around. We had lost two men in the accident—Mathieu de Montague, whose fate everyone had seen, and a fellow named Uriel Longchamps, who had sunk and vanished without a trace after the canoe had overturned. Although we’d searched along the bank of the river until nightfall, there was no sign of either of them.
“It is my fault,” Eyahue said in a morose tone. “I knew the river was too high. I should have called for a landing sooner.”
Bao studied his hands. “I was so close! I should have had him.”
“Mathieu de Montague wanted to turn back,” I murmured. “He was afraid. And we talked him out of it.”
“I did,” Balthasar corrected me. “I shamed him. I should have let him go.”
“You should have let me go after him in the river,” Bao accused him.
“I should have done no such thing, messire!” Balthasar retorted. “Are you strong enough to swim for two in that current?” He shook his head. “None of us are. You would either have been carried away with him or forced to let him go. I’ll not apologize for sparing you that choice.”
While we grieved and bickered, the rain continued to fall. Our food stores were dwindling at an alarming rate, fruit rotting in the incessant damp, and a portion of our supplies lost in the canoe that had been swept away. With current running as high and fast as it was, fishing proved a futile endeavor.
Gear rusted, soaked clothing began tearing at the seams. Insects plagued us day and night. Their bites itched and festered. Minor injuries, cuts and scrapes and blisters, grew dangerously infected. My own palms were badly blistered from all the paddling, great water-logged blisters that showed no sign of healing. At times I could have wept for the sheer physical misery of it all.
But I reminded myself that we were all lucky to be alive to endure it, and distracted myself by weaving mat after mat of palm fronds, teaching some of the men to do the same. With his Siovalese affinity for engineering, Denis de Toluard directed others in building a rough shelter on the verge of the jungle where at least we could huddle beneath the scant protection our mats afforded.
And on the second day, Eyahue vanished into the jungle for several hours, borrowing a sword to hack his way through. He returned with a satchel full of leaves that released a crisp, astringent odor when bruised, ordering us to grind them to a paste to smear on any open wounds.
It stung like fury, but it seemed to help. By the next day, my blisters were no longer seeping.
“Is that one of your secret herbs?” I asked Eyahue.
He nodded reluctantly. “The ticitls pay a great deal for this medicine.”
I smiled wearily at him. “Thank you for sharing it with us.”
After three straight days of rain, waking to clear skies seemed like a gift of the gods. The rain had stopped in the small hours of the night, and already the river was visibly lower, no longer a raging torrent.
Everything sparkled in the light of dawn, rain-washed and glistening, drops still sliding from the leaves. It was like being in a vast green temple, and for the first time in days, my sense of wonder at the enormity of the jungle returned.
For a mercy, it was an uneventful day on the river. Although we’d lost one canoe, sadly, due to the casualties we’d sustained, there were enough seats to go around in the remaining eight. We searched in vain for the bodies of our lost men as we paddled, regretfully concluding by the day’s end that there was no chance of retrieving them.
At Septimus Rousse’s suggestion, we built a small cairn in their honor, and he once again gave the invocation.
Our journey continued.
Some days after our loss, we had our first encounter with hostile natives—or at least a near-miss of an encounter. We were some hours into the day’s travel when I heard a series of sharp buzzing sounds. Glancing around to see what new swarm of insects had come to torment us, I realized belatedly that the sound I’d heard was arrows in flight.
There was no telling where they’d come from. On either shore, the jungle looked as impenetrable as ever. Even as I searched, a second flight was launched. There was a metallic ping and a startled cry behind us as an arrow struck someone’s helmet.
In the lead canoe, Eyahue was shouting. “Get low! Get low and paddle hard!”
My pulse hammering, I hunched as low as I could, paddling awkwardly. The dugout canoe afforded little in the way of protection. For once, I envied the men their heavy steel helmets.
A third volley hissed above us, and then there was silence. Still, we paddled in a crouch until Eyahue announced it was safe to sit upright.
Shouting up and down the river and taking stock of the situation, we determined with relief that our company had sustained no casualties in the attack. It was a Namarrese fellow named Marcel d’Aubrey who had taken a strike to the helmet, and although he was shaken, he was unharmed.
Once we had ascertained that there were no injuries, I asked Bao to bring us alongside Eyahue’s canoe.
“You said if the hostiles decided to kill us, we’d never see it coming,” I reminded the old pochteca. “So what passes here?”
“That?” He rested his paddle across his knobby knees and scoffed. “Oh, that was just a warning. They were just telling us to keep moving.”
“If Messire d’Aubrey hadn’t been wearing a helmet, they would have killed him,” I observed.
Eyahue sucked his teeth. “True,” he admitted. “I imagine they were curious about those shiny head-pieces.” He shrugged. “Now they know.”
It was an effective reminder of the myriad dangers the jungle held, but in the days that followed, it grew obvious that hostile natives were the least of our concerns.
First and foremost was the shortage of food. Already, we were eating but two meals a day while expending considerable energy. The last of our fruit was long gone, and if our stores were to last until we reached Vilcabamba, we were down to half a roasted sweet potato a day for every person in our company.
It wasn’t enough.
Our bellies complained, and our strength waned, leaving us weak and listless. Our efforts to fish with nets and traps yielded meager results. I had better luck fishing with my familiar childhood methods, calling the twilight and coaxing fish into my bare hands; but where a catch of four or five good-sized fish would have provided a veritable feast for my mother and me, it didn’t go far among thirty-some starving men.
Eyahue found my success suspicious. “How do you and your husband catch more fish than anyone?” he asked. “Why do you always go away alone to do it instead of sharing your secret?”
“It’s a gift from my mother’s people,” I told him. After the way the Emperor had reacted to the small gift of magic I had displayed in his gardens, I was wary of the pochteca’s response if I told him the whole truth. “It cannot be taught, and the fish will not come if there are others present.”
Gods knew, that was true enough, and it seemed to mollify Eyahue.
It was a good thing I’d paid attention to the children in Tipalo’s village, for it wasn’t long before we were relying on their lessons. Several of our men became quite expert grub-hunters, and we discovered that they were slightly more palatable when skewered and roasted. True to his word, Balthasar held out and refused such fare. I wished he wouldn’t, for he was developing a feverish look I didn’t like. More than once, I’d caught him shivering in the heat and trying to hide it.
“Bao’s right,” Denis said to him, chewing a mouthful of grub-worm with fierce determination. “It’s not so bad.”
“Not so good, either,” someone muttered.
Although we scoured the outskirts of the jungle and plundered the river for edible game as best we could, it still wasn’t enough. There were just too many of us.
The day we spotted a herd of capybaras wallowing and grazing along the edge of the big river, I thought mayhap our luck had changed. They were odd-looking beasts; extraordinarily oversized rodents with coarse coats, squealing and grunting and nudging one another as they swam and rooted among the weeds.
“Bao!” I whispered, setting down my paddle. I scrabbled for my bow and nocked an arrow. “Bring us close!”
He nodded, paddling.
We drifted sideways alongside the herd. They ignored us. Rising carefully to one knee in the narrow vessel, I picked my target and took aim at a big, fat, well-fed fellow. I thought to myself that he would make a meal for all of us, and if I were quick, I might even be able to kill two of them.
Before I had a chance to loose my arrow, the water erupted. To call the creature that emerged a snake didn’t begin to do it justice. It was a snake, but it was far, far bigger than any snake I’d ever seen in my life, as long as two of our canoes placed end to end, a thick, sinuous, shining length of mottled yellow and black.