“They already know,” Talia said. “They’ve been watching us since we first spotted the island.”
It took fifteen minutes of inefficient rowing to get within fifty feet of the beach. If the Sentinelese didn’t see the Sea Tiger, they certainly heard the wood-on-wood clunking from the oars striking the small boat’s sides.
“Stop here,” Talia said, standing at the front of the boat like the American paintings of George Washington crossing a river.
“Do you see something?” Mahdi asked.
“Shhh.” Talia crouched, eyes squinted. Something about her body language became feral. “They’re here.”
Winston groaned. “I don’t—”
A fluttering noise, like a fast approaching bird, filled the air. Mahdi saw a blur of motion before he was knocked back out of his seat. When he looked up, he saw Winston’s loose neck skin quivering with fear, his eyes wide. In front of him stood Rowan, riot shield in hand, a long white scratch in its surface.
Talia lunged to the boat’s port beam, nearly flinging herself in the water. When she came back up, she clutched a three foot long arrow in her hand. It was straight, featherless and tipped with a scooped triangle of iron. Talia glared at Winston. “You don’t what?”
Winston shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Good,” Talia said. “Now back us up another twenty-five feet, and we’ll see if the next arrow reaches us.”
8
Talia Mayer thought it was fitting that their expedition had nearly begun the same way National Geographic’s had ended. She had watched the lone arrow sail over her head on a course that would have plunged the tip into Winston’s thigh. She was disappointed it hadn’t found its target—the man was disruptive and unnecessary—but Rowan was better at his job than she would have guessed, and that shield of his was an ingenious idea. Winston would have survived, but she doubted he would have had the fortitude to join them again after having a hole punched in his leg.
“How should we handle this?” Rowan asked, calm as ever, but focused in a way she had yet to see.
“We wait,” Talia said. Meetings like this couldn’t be rushed. The arrow was a blatant warning. It said, ‘stay back or die.’ She had no intention of staying back, but wouldn’t push until the message changed.
“We should go the hell back,” Winston said. His hands shook on his knees, which were bouncing up and down.
“You’ve never been shot at before?” Talia asked.
Winston looked like she’d just asked him if he was a tentacle-armed ape wearing MC Hammer pants singing, ‘U Can’t Touch This.’ “What kind of question is that?”
“I’d say it was a prerequisite when choosing people to visit a tribe known for shooting arrows into people.” Talia looked forward again, watching the island and the shadows beneath the tall trees lining the beach. “I’m pretty sure it’s the only thing the rest of us have in common.”
Winston scoffed. “How many of you have been shot at?” He looked from one face to the next, seeing only serious expressions.
“Even better,” Talia said. “How many of us have been shot?”
She turned her leg over, revealing a straight scar. “It was just a graze, but the tip was poisoned. Took a month to recover.” She slapped Rowan’s knees. “Show him yours.”
She had spotted the circular entry and exit wounds on the beach the previous day.
Rowan pulled his shirt collar down, revealing the scar in his trapezius. “Nine millimeter. If it had been a fifty cal, we wouldn’t be talking right now.”
“I have a scar,” Chugy said from the back. She turned over and patted her butt. “Spear in my cheek. The Jarawa were not happy that my family left the tribe. They do not like us. Do you want to see it?”
“Please don’t,” Mahdi said, eyes closed and hand raised.
Chugy looked disappointed, but then gave Mahdi a playful shove. “Your turn then.”
Mahdi frowned, but he didn’t move.
“C’mon, now,” Chugy said with another shove. “We’re bonding.”
Mahdi showed just a hint of a grin, but it slipped away when he began unbuttoning his shirt. He moved with slow, smooth motions, moving from one button to the next. Then he slipped the shirt off.
Talia looked him over, seeing nothing of interest, but Chugy gasped.
Mahdi turned around so the others could see. There were two long scars, knife wounds perhaps, and three round bullet scars. No exit wounds, Talia noted. He had to have had the bullets removed, and given the scars’ placements, he was lucky to be alive.
“Five point five six millimeter,” he said, turning back to look Talia in the eyes. “Fired by a Tavor TAR-21 assault rifle.”
“Shit,” Rowan said, understanding what that meant just as quickly as Talia did.
Like all Israeli women over the age of eighteen, she had spent two years in the Israeli Defense Force. It was how she escaped her past, and it had hardened her for the trials and tribulations that came from the life in the jungle that had followed her schooling in America. It also meant that she had trained with a TAR-21. Had shot it, and felt its deadly potential. She had never fired the weapon at a person, but she knew people who had. Perhaps even the person who had fired at Mahdi.
At his back, she thought. He was running away.
“I am sorry,” she said.
He buttoned his shirt again. “It was not your fault.”
It had been a long time since Talia had communicated with a Palestinian. For him to have been shot by an Israeli soldier, and not despise Israel and everyone born there, revealed an impressive strength of character that went beyond being an intellectual.
“Movement,” Rowan said, voice hushed.
Heads ducked, but there were no arrows in the sky.
Not yet.
“Where?” Talia asked. Her eyes were keen and accustomed to spotting living things amidst a jungle’s shadows. But she saw nothing other than towering trees, ground shrubs, and stationary shadows.
“Everywhere,” he said. “Broaden your focus.”
She had been peering at one individual location after another that looked like good hiding spots. She sat up and took in the island as a whole, letting her vision blur a little. Then she saw it. The shadows just inside the jungle moved as one, like a massive, living thing, but too slowly to notice when focused on a single spot. It almost looked like the dance of light caused by wind moving through trees, but the skies were calm and the trees still.
“I don’t see anything,” Winston said.
“Try looking through your camera,” Talia grumbled. She had noticed that the man had yet to unzip his camera bag.
“I see them,” Chugy whispered.
“Is this normal?” Rowan asked, looking back at Chugy. “Is this something the Jarawa do?”
With a slow shake of her head, Chugy said, “Nothing like this. The island looks alive.”
Winston fumbled with his camera, hands shaking. He whispered curses to himself and searched for the power button. When he turned the camera on and looked through the viewfinder, he cursed again and removed the lens cap.
Talia shared a glance with Rowan, the message between them easy enough to understand: Winston is not a filmmaker.
Who he was and why he was really with them was a question for another time. Right now, they had visitors to attend to.
Mahdi pointed to the beach on the far right, where a sandy path curved up into the jungle. “There.”
A lumpy black ball rolled toward the beach.
“Is that a rock?” Rowan asked.
“The Andaman Islands aren’t volcanic, and the soil is deep. There aren’t any rocks here that big, and they’d have no way to transport it.” Talia lifted a pair of binoculars to her eyes. “It’s not a rock. It’s a man.”
She handed the binoculars to Rowan, who looked toward the lone Sentinelese man, curled up in a ball, arms wrapped around his bent up legs. Every time his feet touched the path, he’d propel himself forward, rolling in a
chaotic pattern, down toward the beach. He stopped upon reaching the deep sand, and began waddling, legs still bent, throwing arcs of sand over his head with each step.
Rowan lowered the binoculars and looked at Talia. “What. The Fuck?”
Though she could now clearly see the man on the beach, she took the binoculars back and continued watching. “Best guess, it’s a kind of deimatic behavior.
“A what?” Winston asked.
“A threat display. Praying mantises raise their arms. Frilled lizards expand their hoods, making themselves look bigger. Cats raise their backs and hackles, and hiss.”
“You are suggesting that these people behave…like animals?” Mahdi seemed uncomfortable with the idea.
“People are animals,” Talia said. “A man in a bright yellow Lamborghini is no different than a male peacock flashing its bright feathers. He’s saying, ‘Look ladies, I’m successful and worth mating with.’ Spend time in any bar, or a school, in any part of the world, and you’ll see a dozen examples of threat displays. Some are subtle, but many are overt.”
“I think the ol’ stare down works the best,” Rowan said with a grin. “Let the other guy try to imagine what you’re thinking.”
“But this…” Winston raised his camera toward the native scurrying across the beach, flinging sand all around. “This is…”
“Are you afraid?” Talia lowered the binoculars to look back at Winston. She was about ready to toss him overboard and let him swim back to the Sea Tiger. If it weren’t for the tiger sharks that populated these waters, or the just-as-dangerous salt water crocodiles that occasionally killed a vacationing snorkeler, she might have actually done it.
“The fuck do you think?” Winston’s finger pressed the zoom button, but the red light indicating that the camera was recording remained dark.
“Then it’s effective.” She turned back to the beach. The man had stopped his display and now sat in a squat, staring out at them. The man was unnerving in a way that Talia had never experienced before. While she had seen some strange things in the Amazon, she had never seen anything quite like this man. It was almost inhuman…which, she guessed, was the point. How many people would see such a thing and still decide to land on the island if given a choice?
Only the crazy, desperate, or very well paid. Aside from Winston, she believed most of the people in the dinghy were at least two of the three.
“Oh, gross,” Winston said, looking through his camera. “Look what he’s doing now.”
The man had stood to his five foot height, lifting his penis and revealing his testicles. He gyrated his hips, thrusting himself at the boat.
Talia had read reports of this behavior, including even more lewd acts, performed on the beach in clear view of all watching. The Sentinelese were the masters of repulsing visitors, at first through their strange behavior, and then with violence, but often in tandem.
She stood in the prow of the boat, making herself a target, but also allowing herself to be seen.
“What are you doing?” Rowan asked, beginning to lift his shield.
“This is where everyone else has gone wrong,” Talia said, and then she pointed to the man. “This isn’t simply a warning, or a rude gesture. It’s the beginning of a conversation.” She looked back at Mahdi. “No offense, but your kind of linguistic skillset might not be much use, at least not until we’re on the island.”
“On the island?” Winston said. “No freaking way.”
Talia noticed that he had yet to start recording, most likely because he didn’t know where the record button was, and she wasn’t about to tell him. She didn’t need the rest of the world to see what happened next.
“How do we respond?” Rowan asked.
“The only way we can, which also happens to be the only way no one has ever tried.” With that, Talia untied her bikini top and let it fall. Then she shimmied out of her shorts. While the rest of the crew either held their breath or gasped, she reenacted the man’s gestures, sans the external genitalia.
9
“Umm.” Rowan struggled to find the right words to express his cocktail of confusion, surprise, and apprehension. He knew Talia was unconventional. Had already seen her naked, living among the Peruvian tribe. But the ease with which she made the decision to strip down and reveal herself to the Sentinelese, and everyone in the dinghy, struck him as unbalanced, especially given her opinions on Peeping Toms.
As Talia thrust her hips toward the lone Sentinelese man, who had stopped his own display to watch, the words Rowan was searching for finally came to him. “What are you doing?”
Talia slapped her hands on her chest and then thrust them out at the man like it was some kind of practiced dance, and maybe it was. Was this something she picked up from the Mashco-Piro? A kind of sign language that was common to all the Earth’s ancient tribes?
He doubted it, but she had captured the man’s undivided attention.
“We approach tribes like this in boats with loud motors, with modern weapons, wearing modern clothing, and giving gifts made from plastic and colored with bright primary colors, with made-in-China paint. Remote tribes have no frame of reference for these things.”
She paused to thrust again and then said, “The result is that modern explorers are greeted in one of two ways.”
“As gods,” Mahdi said, his eyes diverted, a hand raised to help him resist temptation.
Moral traditions die hard, Rowan thought, even if you’re not a believer…or maybe Mahdi is just a better man than me. Rowan was doing his best not to ogle, but Talia was a beautiful woman, her body toned from years of hard jungle living. As much as her strange behavior made him uncomfortable, the ease with which she employed her body intrigued him. A woman like her was probably wild in bed…when she wasn’t talking to herself in strange languages.
Steer clear, he told himself. As exotic as Talia might be, he got the sense that she was also trouble. He looked up at her again. This was not the kind of woman you brought home to meet the parents, or even considered offering a ring to. She was…
“Devils,” Chugy said. “Evil spirits. That is what my ancestors believed. Some of them still do. That is why my father and I are no longer welcome among them.”
Talia ended her display with a final thrust and a slap of her hands on her hips. “The Sentinelese have seen giant ships wash up on their shores, and men wearing clothes created by technology we take for granted. They’ve seen helicopters descend from the sky, bending the jungle beneath them and pulling men to safety in the sky. These people’s knowledge of the world is pre-neolithic. In the past sixty thousand years, life on the island hasn’t changed. At all. But in the past forty years, they’ve encountered modern men who were either gods, or demons, and then had to make a choice between the two.”
“I think their choice is pretty obvious,” Rowan said, lifting his shield slightly as a second Sentinelese man stepped from the jungle, bow and arrow in hand.
“Our job…my job is to change that perception.”
“How do you convince someone you’re not a devil?” Rowan asked.
“Our skin and hair is different enough to cause concern, but strip away our modern covering and we at least look human.” Talia remained standing in the bow, watching the two men on shore, making no move for her clothing.
“Fallibility,” Mahdi said, eyes still diverted. “Gods and devils do not make human mistakes.”
Rowan didn’t like the sound of that. “If you’re planning on taking an arrow to prove you’re human, I’m not going to let that happen.”
Talia gave a nod. “I’m unconventional, not suicidal. We’re seventy-five feet out. The odds of them hitting me are—”
A fluttering sound was followed by a splash. Rowan turned fast enough to see the long arrow slide beneath the water, just two feet short of the dinghy.
“Good,” Talia said. “But not great. In the past, people have responded to Sentinelese arrows in one of three ways: speeding away with a loud motor-powere
d boat, firing back with modern guns—” She tilted her head toward Rowan’s black case. It contained an FN SCAR automatic rifle supplied by the expedition’s government benefactors. “Or by calling in a helicopter to rescue them. All this teaches the Sentinelese is that their assessment is correct, and that they are powerful enough to defeat demons.”
“So we need to respond…how?” Rowan asked.
“In kind,” Chugy said, reaching for a long case running down the center of the boat. It was already in the boat when Rowan boarded and it was long enough to look like part of the hull. “They understand a human body, and they understand arrows.”
Talia accepted the long case from Chugy, nodding her thanks to the woman who looked smitten by the attention. Inside the case was a long, unstrung, primitive bow. Lying beside it was a collection of arrows, not quite as long as the Sentinelese variety, and feathered at the back. These arrows would travel further with greater accuracy.
Rowan was beginning to understand Talia’s methods. The bow and arrow were superior to the Sentinelese variety, but the technology used to create them was not beyond their limited body of knowledge. They might not have thought to steady their arrows with bird feathers, but they would recognize them. If Talia had brought a compound bow with metal shaft arrows and laser-cut hunting heads, it would have only reinforced the Sentinelese belief that the people visiting their island weren’t people at all.
While Talia strung the bow, Rowan’s eyes traveled down her body, noting not just her beauty, but a collection of thin scars greater in number than she had previously revealed, probably because most of them were on her butt. There was also a smudge of red on her leg. It looked like old blood, or...
“Hey,” Talia said, looking down at him. “Try to stay on task.”
Rowan reddened, but said nothing. Understanding who Talia was and predicting what she might do, was integral to his protecting her. Her naked body revealed more about her violent past than she had yet to verbally explain. Perhaps that was the real reason she didn’t want him looking too closely.
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