‘No!’ Brindle protested. ‘It’s not that!’ He projected a thought-image of the blue woman into Ria’s mind. ‘There’s a fourth gift,’ he explained. ‘Our Lady of the Forest gave three to you last night, but the fourth one she gave to me. That’s why I must stay. She wants me to build it at once – right here at Secret Place. It’s to help us fight Sulpa.’
‘I don’t understand …’
For a moment Brindle looked exasperated. ‘The fourth gift is an idea,’ he said. ‘It’s a picture Our Lady of the Forest put in my head.’ As he spoke he shared the image. It came through with enormous force and Ria gasped at the richly textured bird’s-eye view he had sent her of three huge concentric circles of tall upright stones. ‘This is what I’m supposed to build,’ he said. ‘What do you make of it?’
Ria found she could move around Brindle’s thought picture to examine it from different perspectives, and felt herself reacting as though it were really there. It was deeply strange. Even as an image it seemed to radiate a brooding and menacing power.
She counted an outer ring of thirty grey stones, all massive, some rising to twice the height of a man, and thick around the base where they were set solidly into the earth. Their shapes were irregular, rough, weather-beaten. They were patched with lichen like any natural rock. But their arrangement into a perfect circle a hundred paces across was obviously designed. A second circle, made up of twenty black stones – these ones about Ria’s height – was placed inside the first. It was fifty paces across. At the centre of the whole contraption was a third circle, twenty paces across, of eight gigantic, roughly conical white stones, each one almost four times the height of a man.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Ria said as the amazing thought-picture evaporated. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. But how’s it going to help us fight Sulpa?’
‘It’s a stone gateway …’
‘Which means what?
Brindle shrugged: ‘Our Lady didn’t tell me that. She just told me to build it.’
To Ria the whole mysterious task seemed impossible, beyond natural power. How could so many stones that big ever be found – let alone moved?
‘Our Lady told me where to find them,’ said Brindle picking up her thoughts. ‘She told me how Uglies can lift them, how we can make them stand up. She told me where I must place them.’
‘Where?’
Brindle turned to indicate the entrance of the vast cavern behind them. ‘Inside the Cave of Visions,’ he said. ‘That’s where they have to go.’
* * *
Brindle wanted to send a war party of a hundred braves to escort Ria but she declined. ‘We need to stay out of sight,’ she said. ‘A hundred is way too many for that, but it’s nowhere near enough if we get dragged into a pitched battle with a larger force.’
Over Brindle’s objections she insisted a small group was much safer and since she and her companions had forged a strong bond over the past days they were the ones who should go. ‘Give me Grondin,’ she said. ‘He’s my rock. I need him with us, Jergat and Oplimar as well. I’ll be taking Bont and Ligar, of course. Driff, too. That makes seven including me. We’ll move fast, leave no trail, find the survivors and we’ll all get back here alive.’
‘OK, Ria,’ said Brindle, ‘I know you always do things your way.’ He shrugged and changed the subject: ‘You accept Driff now?’ he asked.
Ria thought about it: ‘I guess so. But I can’t figure him out. What did you do to him? How did you get him to turn traitor on his own people?’
A look of mild annoyance flared in Brindle’s eyes: ‘Driff is the first of the Illimani to do the right thing. That doesn’t make him a traitor. Could be it makes him a hero. All I did was help him see the truth.’
‘Would be nice if more of them could be helped to see the truth. That many less for us to fight.’
Brindle considered the proposition: ‘I made a rope with Driff, remember? He thought you were a crazy woman who would kill him for sure. I took his side, protected him from you. He saw I was his friend. From then on I could reach him. It won’t be so easy to get close to other Illimani. If we can’t get close to them we can’t make a rope with them.’
Feeling suddenly awkward, Ria embraced Brindle. ‘Make the stone circles,’ she said, ‘whatever they’re for.’ She feigned a stern look. ‘I expect to see them complete when I get back.’
After their night in the Cave of Visions, Bont and Ligar had both opened up to the thought-talk of the Uglies and begun to converse with them in a rudimentary way. Perhaps this enhanced level of communication was a natural effect of the Little Teachers – or perhaps it was because the blue woman had done exactly what she’d promised when she implanted the crystal – but Ria soon found herself exchanging images with Driff, then words and phrases. By the end of the first morning of the march they were thought-talking with increasing fluency, occasionally slipping into out-loud speech. And to the surprise of the others in the group, what they were speaking was his guttural alien language. Soon Ria stopped noticing how weird this was and began using her new gift to learn about the enemy.
Before Sulpa’s coming, Driff told her, the Illimani were a nomadic, warlike, hunting people who saw all other humans as prey to be exploited by force or guile. They took what they wanted from them – women, supplies, slaves – and moved on. So it had been for as long as anyone could remember. Then in Driff ’s sixteenth summer, two years previously, Sulpa had appeared amongst them.
‘You mean he just walked into your camp?’ Ria asked.
‘No, it wasn’t like that.’
It seemed an Illimani warrior called Beche, renowned for his physical beauty, was mortally wounded during a raid on another tribe. He was brought back to camp and died in the night. At dawn, as was the Illimani custom, his body was placed on a funeral pyre, but before the brands were lit he returned to life, his face still corpse-white, his eyes rolling, his muscles moving strangely beneath his skin and all his injuries miraculously healed.
‘Beche exists no longer’ he roared from the midst of the pyre. ‘You will call me Sulpa now.’
Driff had witnessed these events, and what happened next.
Sulpa leapt down from the pyre. The colour had returned to his features and he seemed like a new person entirely. A person remade. A person who looked like Beche, but was not Beche. A person filled with danger and power. He reached out into the air and by some magic a huge black knife appeared in his hand – an obsidian knife as long as a man’s leg. He whirled it around his head, walked five paces to where the old king stood, and chopped him in half at the waist with a single blow. ‘I am your king now,’ he told the Illimani while the dying man’s blood fountained around him. The king’s three sons, who were mighty warriors, contested the claim but he killed them all in hand-to-hand combat and no one else cared to stand in his way.
Thereafter raids on other tribes stopped being about murder and mayhem with the purpose of securing women, slaves and supplies, and became exclusively about murder and mayhem. Killing, which before had been a means to an end, became an end in itself, and a new way of death was born for the Illimani. Without exception everyone who crossed their path, and everyone they could hunt down, was killed. Entire peoples were exterminated, wherever possible by means that were agonising and long-drawn-out. Any Illimani who displeased Sulpa likewise suffered a slow painful execution. ‘He is the Eater of Souls,’ Driff explained. ‘He feeds on pain and death.’
From the day he took over Beche’s body Sulpa began to speak of the cause that would bring the Illimani into Ria’s land.
He told them he was mobilising them and would make them stronger than every other tribe because they had a sacred purpose to fulfil.
To them had fallen the honour, and the responsibility, of extinguishing the Light in the West.
He did not tell them what this Light in the West was but as the moons went by they all began to notice he was leading them ever westwards, towards the ice deserts and the vast unknown lands tha
t lay beyond.
Before crossing the ice the Illimani numbered almost thirty thousand men, women and children, and when they reached the other side fully twenty thousand of them still lived. Of these, seven thousand were tough, battle-scarred braves. They fell like ravening beasts on the peaceful and unsuspecting valleys beyond, killed all their inhabitants, took the new lands for themselves, and settled their families there.
Sulpa sent scouts and spies ahead – the Light in the West was close now – and after three more moons had passed he led out his seven thousand braves and marched them towards Ria’s homeland killing everyone in their path. Mass sacrifices of captured children were staged almost daily. Sulpa butchered the victims himself, with his long black knife, and drank their blood.
Ria gasped in horror, remembering how she had seen the Illimani sparing the children during the massacre of the Clan.
‘Yes,’ said Driff, sharing the image, ‘that’s what we …’ He hesitated. ‘They …’ He hung his head. ‘That’s what we’re trained to do. Children aren’t to be killed on the battlefield. They’re rounded up and brought to Sulpa for sacrifice.’
‘But why?’ Ria asked. She was having trouble grasping the concept. How was it possible for anyone to be so depraved he would murder children and drink their blood?
‘He is the Eater of Souls,’ Driff repeated, as though that explained everything. ‘He kills the innocent and the good to increase his power … That’s why he brought us into your lands.’ He looked around at their Ugly companions – Grondin, Oplimar and Jergat. ‘He brought us here to kill them,’ he said, making sure she got his meaning clearly. ‘To kill all the Uglies. They’re the Light in the West.’
By mid-afternoon they were deep inside the territory of the Naveen, following the course of a mountain stream along the bottom of a stony valley, when they saw vultures and ravens circling up ahead.
A great many vultures and ravens.
This was more than just some rotting deer carcass.
And there was the smell of smoke in the air.
Like most people in these parts the Naveen were hunters, gatherers, fishermen and raiders who spent their lives migrating in bands of a few hundred between a series of transient camps. It was one of these that had been hit, just around the next turn of the valley – a huddle of conical tepees standing amongst trees on a narrow stretch of flood plain overlooking the stream.
Many of the tepees had been gutted by fire; those few that had not seemed isolated and out of place. Smoke still curled up into the air, but there was no sign of movement nor sound of human life anywhere – not a child’s cry, not a lookout on the alert, not the chop-chop-chop of flint being knapped.
It seemed they approached a camp of the dead but only as they drew closer did they grasp the true extent of the horror.
Judging from the signs on the ground, and the injuries they had sustained, the Naveen who had been trapped here – somewhat less than two hundred of them – had surrendered and been disarmed without a struggle. All had multiple wounds but without exception these resulted from the peculiar way they had been put to death.
They had been nailed to the trees that grew throughout the camp by means of long, narrow flint spikes hammered through their hands and feet, ankles and wrists. They dangled from the lower branches like clumps of strange, bruised, rotting fruit and clung in contorted freakish poses to the thick upright trunks. The tallest tree was festooned with twenty of them, their mouths open in silent screams, their eyes already plucked out by ravens, their flesh rent by vultures. But not a single tree had been left innocent of the carnage. On three of them there were Naveen – two men and a woman – who still clung to life.
As even the Uglies admitted, the injuries these unfortunate people had suffered were beyond healing. None of them had any hope of survival, and withdrawing the flint spikes would cause insufferable pain. It was surely kinder to kill them now.
The two men, both unconscious, were quickly dispatched by Bont and Driff. The woman, nailed head down to a tree near the middle of the camp, one eye pecked out, one still intact, was the strongest of the three. She spoke in the Naveen language, repeating the same words over and over. By the third repetition Ria understood: ‘They have taken our children! Spirits help us. They have taken all our children.’
It was true: there wasn’t a single child amongst the dead here.
Ria questioned the woman. How many braves had attacked them? When did they attack? In which direction did they go? But she spoke no more sense. At last, with a reluctant grimace, Ria unsheathed her knife to put her out of her misery when a man’s voice, hoarse and emotional, bellowed from beside a smouldering tepee: ‘Touch her and die.’ As Ligar nocked an arrow and drew his bow in a single fluid motion, and Bont unslung his war axe, a dozen Naveen hunters, seven with bows drawn, the rest brandishing spears and hatchets, strode towards them from all directions through the trees.
Chapter Seventy
Mary Ruck’s boat was a twenty-footer, with two fixed benches towards the rear seating six passengers under a tarpaulin canopy and an open storage area in the bows. Mary was at the back, controlling the big Yamaha outboard motor. ‘I’ve got two hundred horses here,’ she said, and the boat leapt forward as she thumbed the throttle. ‘I think we can outrun them.’
‘That’s a fast engine,’ commented Matt. He, Leoni and Bannerman were just in front of Mary, occupying the rearmost of the two benches. ‘But, with due respect, your boat’s a tub and we don’t know what the other guys have got. In fact, we don’t even know who the other guys are. We think it’s Don Apolinar but it could be someone else. Could be nothing to do with us at all.’
Leoni looked back to the north again. The lights were definitely closer.
‘So do you have a suggestion?’ Mary shouted. She was barely audible above the sound of the outboard and the slap-slap-slap of the river racing by.
‘Yes,’ Matt yelled. ‘Throttle back – get into the shelter of the bank NOW! Where it’s overgrown with trees … Right here will do.’
‘Do it, Mary,’ Bannerman urged.
‘We’ll take cover,’ Matt continued. ‘Keep absolutely silent, show no lights. If they whiz past your jetty and carry on upriver we’ll know they’re not here for us. If they stop … well, it might be an interesting idea to let the current carry us down to them. I’d like to have a go at scuppering their boat while they’re searching the lodge.’
Mary had already throttled back and was turning towards the nearby bank. ‘Sounds dangerous,’ she muttered.
‘But in my opinion less dangerous than leaving them behind us,’ said Matt. ‘Out on the open water we’ll be sitting ducks if they’ve got guns.’
The jungle grew thick here, gigantic ferns spreading like fans, huge trees looming into the darkness, sinuous mossy creepers hanging down. Mary cut the engine and let the boat’s remaining momentum carry it beneath an immense palm that had toppled sideways over an undermined bank and lay part in and part out of the water. Standing in the bows, Don Emmanuel reached up and slung a rope around the palm’s trunk, bringing them to a halt.
Behind the lights were much closer and with their own engine silent they could all hear the powerful throaty roar of the other boat.
They’d have caught us in five minutes, Leoni thought.
She guessed the jetty lay about quarter of a mile downstream and that the approaching boat must now be very close to it. She found herself praying for it to pass by but instead, with awful inevitability, she heard the engine note change and saw the lights veer towards the bank.
‘OK,’ said Matt, ‘That settles it. Is everyone with me on this?’
There was no point in trying to escape upriver. Their engine would be heard as soon as they started it and they would be overhauled and caught. There were no other options that Leoni could think of. ‘I’m with you,’ she said.
‘Me too,’ said Bannerman. ‘It’s risky but so is anything else we could do.’
Mary and Emmanuel con
ferred in Spanish and agreed. There was no alternative. ‘When you are cornered by a hungry jaguar,’ Emmanuel said, ‘it is best to attack it.’
This was all going to be very tight, Leoni thought as the current whisked them downstream. Apolinar would suspect they had fled, since their own boat wasn’t at the jetty. On the other hand that might be a trick – so he couldn’t afford to leave the lodge unsearched. Even men in a hurry would take five minutes to get from the jetty to the lodge, perhaps another five to search it and find it empty, and five more to get back to the boat.
So Matt had about fifteen minutes to pull this off.
The cloud cover was thinning out. Not good. Then a gap opened and a shaft of moonlight speared through it, illuminating the jetty a few hundred feet ahead. The gap closed again just as fast but not before they all saw the big twin-engined speedboat moored at the jetty. Steering with two stubby oars, Emmanuel and Bannerman guided their own smaller vessel towards the bank and Matt slipped into the water.
Moments earlier Leoni had tried to persuade him to rethink. Couldn’t this be done without swimming?
‘No,’ Matt had said. ‘There’s bound to be a guard on the speedboat. This is the only way to reach it without being heard.’
Before leaving Iquitos, Leoni had borrowed Bannerman’s laptop and run a series of Google searches about the Amazon. As a result she now knew that the great river and all its major tributaries seethed with monstrous creatures – hideous alligators called caymans that grew up to twenty feet long, anacondas like fire hoses, piranhas and even bull sharks that had adapted to fresh water.
It was suicide to get in this river – she checked the luminous hands of her Rolex – and Matt had been in it for more than seven minutes.
Where the fuck was he?
She glanced at Bannerman and Mary, crouching on either side of her and peering into the darkness. There was enough light coming through the clouds now to see the expressions on their faces, and they looked worried. Emmanuel was in the bow; he’d roped the boat to an overhanging branch and stood ready to release it on Matt’s signal.
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