‘These are just diversionary tactics,’ scoffed Murgh. ‘There are no outlanders. The only battle she’s been in was with us when we captured her last night. She cut up a few of our boys. That’s where the blood came from – and from herself – not from some make-believe enemy …’
‘Where’s Hond?’ Ria screamed. ‘He fought the Illimani too. He’ll back me up …’
Murgh nodded as though he’d been expecting this, and beckoned to one of his followers standing at the edge of the crowd. The man came over and they exchanged whispered words. When the man retreated Murgh turned to Ria, a smug and gluttonous smile on his face. ‘I regret to inform you,’ he said, smirking, ‘that your brother died of his injuries during the night. On the journey. It was too much for him.’
‘Oh, you piece of shit!’ Ria shrieked. ‘You murdering piece of shit!’
Murgh turned at once to the elders: ‘I request that the prisoner be silenced while we present our case to your excellencies.’
‘That is the correct procedure,’ admitted Rotas. He turned to Ria: ‘Be silent, girl. I will demand the same of your accusers when your time comes to speak.’
Ria wasn’t listening because Brindle was thought-talking in her head. ‘Murgh lying,’ he said. ‘I carried Hond’s stretcher. He did not die …’
As Rotas and Torga returned to their stools, Grigo began to give his evidence and Ria pulsed to Brindle: ‘Are you certain Hond’s alive?’
‘Alive when reached camp. Not just alive. Getting better. Healing worked …’
Ria was doubtful: ‘That doesn’t mean much. They could have killed him since then …’
‘He still alive, Ria. I know it.’
She was desperate to believe him: ‘So why are they saying he’s dead?’
‘Don’t know. Maybe they think he dead?’
While she thought-talked with Brindle, Ria’s attention had drifted from Grigo who was marching up and down in front of the elders with his chest puffed out, holding forth in a booming voice. He was describing his idyllic hunt in the far valleys with his good mates Duma and Vik, and when he reached the episode of their accidental discovery of Ria having sex with an Ugly he glared at the miserable captives tied to the stake and wagged an accusing finger at Brindle: ‘That one with the withered leg!’ There was a sigh from Murgh’s faction in the crowd. ‘He had his cock in her up to the root.’ Grigo pointed again and performed an obscene mime of sexual intercourse. ‘But when we tried to arrest them more Uglies came and Ria told them to kill us. They got Duma and Vik’ – he bared his broken teeth at the elders – ‘but I fought my way out.’
For a count of twenty there was silence. Then Krant, the wrinkled, pot-bellied elder seated to the right of Rotas, cleared his throat. ‘How do we know any of this is true?’ he asked.
At first Grigo didn’t seem to realise that the question was for him.
‘How do we know you’re telling the truth?’ Krant repeated. His voice was quavering and petulant. ‘Isn’t this whole thing just your word against Ria’s?’
‘But Ria was caught with the Uglies,’ protested Murgh. ‘That proves Grigo’s story.’
‘I say it proves no such thing.’ It was the elder named Ezida, tiny and humpbacked, with eyes as bright as a bird’s.
‘Well, it does prove she was with the Uglies,’ added Otri, ‘but that by itself proves nothing else.’
‘For the rest it is Ria’s word against Grigo’s,’ confirmed Rotas. ‘Now I would like to hear the girl.’
Ria was beginning to understand what was happening. Beneath the immediate crisis was the deeper issue of the leadership of the Clan which, by long tradition, was vested in the assembly of elders. Murgh and his group made no secret of their disrespect for tradition and their view that the assembly should be dissolved and its powers taken over by the council of braves, which they dominated.
Murgh was an opportunist. He’d obviously expected that his side would gain, though Ria couldn’t immediately see how, from the spectacle of hunting her down, lynching her if he’d had his way, and then burning the Uglies in the meeting ground in front of the whole Clan. Things had started to go wrong when Bahat and the others had stood up to him and stopped the lynching. And now it had come to a trial after all, rather than just the persecution of a group of helpless subhumans, the elders sensed an opportunity to fight back, perhaps even to humiliate their arch-enemy in public.
Ria looked at her four friends roped together to the stake in the midst of the unlit bonfire. ‘I’m going to win this thing,’ she told them. ‘I won’t let them burn you. I’m going to make them set you free.’ Then she turned back to Rotas and to out-loud speech: ‘I can prove Grigo’s lying,’ she said.
‘How so, my child?’ The elder leaned forward again to hear her better.
‘He said that the Ugly had sex with me.’ Despite herself she blushed. ‘But I’ve never had sex with anyone in my life. I’m a virgin.’
A cornered look slithered into Grigo’s eyes, and Ria felt a little thrill of triumph. When he’d been describing the sex scene with such relish the brainless thug had obviously forgotten – but now equally obviously remembered – that there were certain old women of the Clan who were infallible experts in the matter of a girl’s virginity. ‘Lying bitch,’ he yelled. ‘That Ugly was screwing your brains out.’ But it was all bluster, and he knew it.
She was just about to call in the midwives to witness she was intact when she caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye. It was Murgh signalling to his brother Grine who was still lurking at the rear of the bonfire.
Grine blew on the head of the brand he was carrying, until it sparked and flamed. Then he stooped to thrust it into the kindling.
Chapter Forty-Four
Bannerman said a word that Leoni didn’t immediately recognise. It sounded something like ‘Ayawaska’.
‘What’s that?’ she asked. ‘Never heard of it.’
‘Aya-hwaska,’ Bannerman pronounced the strange word carefully, ‘spelled a-y-a-h-u-a-s-c-a. From the Quechua language of the Incas, “Aya” meaning “dead”, “Huasca” meaning “vine”. Thus the Vine of the Dead or the Vine of Souls. It’s a foul-tasting witch’s brew of two different plants that shamans in the Amazon cook up when they want to leave their bodies and travel to the spirit world.’
‘The Blue Angel wants me to use DMT,’ Leoni said. ‘That’s why she operated on me …’
But Bannerman seemed to ignore her. ‘As I was saying, Ayahuasca is a mixture of two plants. One is the vine itself. I can tell you more about that later if you want to know about it. It’s extremely interesting. But it’s the second one that’s really responsible for getting shamans to the spirit world. Its botanical name is Psycotria viridis – they call it chacruna in the Amazon – and its leaves contain DMT in a pharmacologically pure form. That’s the Ayahuasca brew – the vine and the hallucinogenic leaf both boiled together with water. In most of South America it’s still legal to drink it. In fact, its use is protected under laws of religious freedom. So here’s my thought.’ He fixed Leoni with his spaniel gaze. ‘How about—’
Horrified, she held up her hand to silence him. ‘Please tell me you’re not suggesting I go to the Amazon and actually drink this – what did you call it? – this witch’s brew?’
‘You got it!’ said Bannerman.
Ever since she could remember, Leoni had been afraid of jungles. Insects from hell. Venomous reptiles. Exotic diseases. She didn’t want to know about them. Nevertheless, as she listened to Bannerman’s proposal to get her to the biggest jungle in the world, she had to admit that it made a weird and unexpected kind of sense. There was no way they were going to be able to continue with any kind of legal DMT research in the United States, and breaking the law would pose huge additional risks for Bannerman’s career. But Ayahuasca was basically DMT and the fact that it was legal in the Amazon meant that he could carry on supervising and analysing her sessions there much as he would have done if the project
had continued at Irvine. It would be an unorthodox way to gather data but at least he’d be on the right side of the law.
Another advantage was that it would be easy to arrange.
Bannerman had a colleague in Peru, an American anthropologist named Mary Ruck who for five years had been doing fieldwork amongst the mestizos – people of mixed indigenous and Spanish descent, often living in extreme poverty, who make up the majority of the inhabitants of the modern Amazon. Mary’s special interest was the use of Ayahuasca by mestizo shamans, a subject on which she had become a great expert. But she herself also sometimes arranged Ayahuasca sessions for visiting academics at a jungle lodge she had established on the banks of the Amazon, twenty miles upriver from the city of Iquitos. If Mary could be persuaded to make it available to them it would offer a discreet, controlled setting in which Leoni could be given Ayahuasca under the guidance of an experienced shaman.
‘So what do you think?’ Bannerman asked.
‘I think yes,’ Leoni replied at once. The Amazon was a hideous prospect but she was willing to go there if it got her back to the Blue Angel. ‘The only condition is that Matt comes as well.’
Bannerman looked at Matt and appeared to be asking him a silent question.
‘It’s OK,’ Matt told him.
Leoni felt confused. ‘What’s OK?’
‘To tell you something you don’t know yet,’ Bannerman said. ‘Matt’s a bit more than just a volunteer on the DMT project. Actually he funded the whole thing.’
Leoni’s confusion deepened. Matt was Bannerman’s funder? How could that possibly be? ‘But you’re broke,’ she protested.
David laughed and Leoni turned on him: ‘What’s so funny?’
‘The idea of Matt being in any way broke,’ David replied. He dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper: ‘He’s low-profile, but he’s loaded.’
‘Loaded’ could mean anything but Leoni also remembered Bannerman saying his funder was a ‘very rich guy’. So did Matt have millions? Hundreds of millions? Billions?
‘I feel deceived,’ she told him.
‘I didn’t deceive you,’ Matt protested. ‘If you made judgements about me because of how I look that’s your problem, but I never claimed to be broke.’
Leoni thought about it. ‘I guess you didn’t,’ she admitted after a moment. She grinned: ‘So how rich are you?’
Matt winced. ‘Look, I have some money. It’s no big deal and I really don’t want to talk about it. But I’m excited about taking this research to the Amazon and I’m honoured you asked me to come along.’
‘Oh, shit.’ A sudden thought struck Leoni. ‘I don’t have my passport. This is bad …’
But David was already waving her to calm down. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘When I did the legal work to get you out of Mountain Ridge I made sure that Sansom gave us all your documents back.’ He pulled a large envelope out of his briefcase. ‘Your passport’s right here.’
David couldn’t leave his one-man law office at such short notice and remained in Los Angeles, but Leoni, Matt and Bannerman caught the six a.m. flight from LAX to Peru.
On the journey Leoni told Bannerman everything she’d already told Matt about her childhood: the rapes she’d suffered, the mysterious connection between Jack and her adoptive parents, and the long-term interest the Blue Angel appeared to have taken in her life.
Gritty-eyed from lack of sleep, they landed in Lima and connected from there to the Amazonian city of Iquitos on a creaking LAN Peru Airbus. After they crossed the Andes – jagged white peaks under a clear blue sky – it was just jungle, jungle, jungle in all directions, as far as the eye could see, until the plane began to lose height. It went into a long turn, the pilot made an announcement in Spanish and English, and Leoni had her first look at the wide muddy swirl of the great river Amazon. It made her feel sick. She could only imagine what sort of creatures, large and small, with and without teeth, lay in wait beneath those waters.
The plane banked again and an implausible landscape came into view. On the west bank of the Amazon, at a bend where the river seemed miles wide and looped around a pair of islands, the primal jungle gave way without warning to a city. Maybe she’d been taking too many drugs but just for a moment, as she sat poised in the sky looking down at it all, she could have imagined that the buildings, square and blocky, painted in pastel shades, with glittering tin roofs, weren’t even made by human hands but were some sinister new growth that the forest itself had brought forth.
The plane was coming in for its final approach. Leoni leaned over Matt and peered out of the window. From this new angle she could see a clear reflection of Iquitos in the waters of the Amazon. It was almost as though there was a city above and a city below the river. Two different cities in two different worlds.
She shivered. Which one would she end up in?
Chapter Forty-Five
There was a commotion near Grine, shouts and exclamations, a ripple of movement, and Hond burst forth from the crowd, naked from the waist up, his thick brown curls dishevelled, his body streaked with fresh blood. He brandished a stabbing spear tipped with a heavy flint spike and at once plunged it into Grine’s shoulder, bearing him down and pinning him squealing to the ground. Without interrupting the single continuous flow of his attack he stepped in on the fallen man, kicked down hard into his face with his heel, stooped to retrieve the brand – it had fallen only a hand’s breadth short of the pyre – and threw it far into the crowd.
Grine was still conscious, whimpering and flapping like a harpooned fish. Hond stamped on his face again, this time silencing him, jerked the spear out of his body, and loped towards Murgh holding the dripping weapon at the ready. Murgh had been caught off guard and seemed frozen with shock. Now he grabbed Ria’s arm, almost jerking it from its socket, and pulled her in front of him, while Melam, a thickset warrior of his faction, charged at Hond, swinging a battleaxe. As the two men closed Melam bellowed, raised his axe and brought it whistling down on Hond’s head. Ria held her breath but Hond sidestepped the blow and tripped Melam with an outstretched foot as the other man hurtled past him, bringing him down with a crash that shook the ground.
More braves rushed forward to protect Murgh, blocking Hond’s approach and jabbing at him with spears. But then Bont roared ‘Enough!’ and in three paces he and Ligar were at Hond’s side. Bont held no weapon, but this would not be the first time he had killed men with his bare hands. Smaller and quicker on his feet, Ligar had unslung his bow and strung an arrow.
There was an instant of silence as the two groups squared off. They were so intent on one another that none of them saw Rotas rise from his stool. Then he stepped between them. ‘Stop!’ he shouted, a thunderous look on his face. ‘Stop now. I command it. Lower your weapons.’
Murgh’s braves weren’t ready to obey. One of them lashed at Hond with a dagger only to be felled by a single prodigious blow to the side of the head from Bont’s fist. In the same moment, wriggling like an eel, Ria broke free of Murgh’s grasp and dashed away from him, allowing Ligar to aim an arrow at his heart.
The morning air, filled with tension and pent-up hatred, seemed to seethe and boil. ‘STOP THIS, I SAY!’ Rotas ordered again. ‘Step back. Lower your weapons.’ Murgh looked at the arrow nocked against the string and at the fully stretched bow. Ria could see his mind working – Ligar had never been known to miss a shot, let alone at such close range. She wasn’t surprised when Murgh signalled his men to stand down.
At once Ria ran to Hond and embraced him: ‘Brother, you live! I knew it!’ Her hands went to the place in his side where the Illimani blade had pierced him but there was no longer any puncture wound between his ribs, not even a scar, only a livid black-and-blue bruise, spreading across his chest. ‘You were right,’ he said, kissing the top of her head. ‘The Uglies are our friends. They healed me with their magic. They brought me back to life.’
Bont was shouting at Murgh: ‘You told us Hond died during the night. What was that about
?’
‘A simple mistake,’ the older man replied.
‘Mistake, my arse!’ Hond exclaimed with a bitter laugh. Giving Ria a parting squeeze of encouragement, he looked Murgh in the eye: ‘You shitball. You ordered my murder.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Murgh spluttered.
‘Lisin, Imdug, Baba and Uras.’ Hond named four men well known as Murgh’s bully boys. ‘They’re the ones you sent to kill me.’ He pointed to the smears of blood drying on his body: ‘I killed them instead.’
‘What’s this about?’ snapped Rotas. ‘Why is Clan blood being spilled?’
Hond indicated the elders’ ceremonial ivory stools: ‘First tell me why my sister is on trial.’ He turned and pointed at the bonfire. ‘And why you’re planning to burn those Uglies.’
The five elders whispered to one another and Rotas reeled off a summary of Grigo’s accusations.
‘It’s all lies,’ Hond said when he was finished. ‘Ria is innocent. The Uglies are innocent. A savage people called the Illimani killed Duma and Vik, they killed my brother Rill, and the Uglies fought beside us against them. Many of them died for us. They should be welcomed as heroes here in our camp, not treated as enemies. So long as I live, I swear to you, I will never see them burned!’
Murgh tried to regain the initiative by stepping in on Hond and crowding him. ‘IT’S YOU WHO’S LYING,’ he shouted, spraying spit. ‘It’s obvious. You’d do anything to protect your sister.’
‘There’s a way we can settle this,’ Hond snapped back. And with a wolfish grin he backhanded the older man across the face.
Hond meant single combat. The ancient answer to all disputes.
In a trial, legal arguments might drag on for ever, but when one brave called another a liar, and neither would back down, it was the view of the Clan that a fight to the death would determine the truth. Ria knew that by striking Murgh in such an insulting way, in the presence of so large a crowd, Hond had made it impossible for him to refuse the challenge.
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