by Gabriel Hunt
To the right was a row of steaming natural pools that gave off a faint odor of sulfur beneath the heady masking scent provided by hundreds of white blossoms floating on the water’s surface. In the largest of the pools, a group of women clustered around a single platinumhaired bather who, at the sound of Millie and Gabriel’s arrival, slowly stood, water and petals sluicing from her glistening nude form.
Her body, Gabriel noted with unwilling admiration, was extraordinary. The flickering light and smoky shadows only served to highlight the trim musculature of her arms and thighs, the taut abdomen below her strong rib cage, the fierce, proud breasts from whose engorged tips hung decorations made of polished bone. At the juncture of her thighs a slender curl of wet hair, as pale as the locks on her head, did little to cover her sex.
“Ah, hell,” Millie said. “You can’t dress me in a skirt and show me something like that.” Glancing over, Gabriel saw the reason for his embarrassment. “Eyes front, boss,” Millie said. “If you don’t mind.”
Gabriel watched as the woman’s attendants, rising equally naked from the water behind her and climbing out onto the surrounding ledge, helped her into a flowing golden garment. It revealed more than it covered. Two of the attendants lowered an intricate woven headdress of flowers and bones upon her white-blonde head and, balancing it without any apparent effort, she slowly approached the two men.
Her face had a regal, almost aristocratic cast, though Gabriel couldn’t say whether it was a matter of physical structure or just the way she held herself. Her eyes were the familiar pale blue, her features not measurably different from any of the huntresses they’d watched bring down the bird. She didn’t even look as old as they did—she was twenty at most, more likely in her late teens—and she had a smaller frame. But her striking platinum hair set her apart from the others, as did her garment and headdress and bearing, and of course the deference all the others showed her. She was clearly the ruler of this village of women.
“Man,” Millie said out of the corner of his mouth. “This just keeps getting more and more…”
“You are…English?” the woman said with a pale eyebrow arched. Gabriel and Millie exchanged a glance. Her husky voice was flavored with some strange, unfamiliar accent, but the language she spoke was recognizable.
“American,” Gabriel replied.
Her eyes narrowed at this bit of information.
“How is it that you speak our language?” Gabriel asked.
“My grandmother’s grandfather teach to her many language. She teach to me,” she said. “To me and to my sisters. I am Uta. I am Queen of Kahujiu.”
“Uta,” Gabriel repeated. “I am Gabriel Hunt. This is my friend Maximillian Ventrose. We came here to find another American who was lost near here—”
She waved dismissively.
“How many child do you make?” she asked.
Gabriel frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“Child,” the queen said again, impatiently. “How many child do you have?”
“None,” Gabriel said. “I don’t have any children.” She turned to Millie.
“And you, do you make any chil…children?”
“No, ma’am,” Millie replied. “None that I know of.”
She scowled and spoke to her attendants in their native language.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Gabriel told Millie.
“Silence,” the queen spat. “You do not speak together, only to me.”
“Queen Uta,” Gabriel said again, trying to keep his tone respectful. “We came here with two others, two women. Where are they? We would like to see them.”
“The females are useless to me,” the queen replied. She took a step closer to Gabriel and reached out to touch his painted chest. “You are useful. You and your friend.” She looked over at Millie, not at his eyes or face, but at the very spot he’d asked Gabriel to politely look away from. A grimace curled one corner of her lush mouth and he heard her breathing quicken. Gabriel couldn’t be sure in the amber light, but he thought Millie was blushing.
The queen returned her gaze to Gabriel, her expression once again sober. “Our tribe, we die. You understand? Our boy children. They begin strong, but grow weaker every year. They do not become men. Men who come here from beyond the sky can only make children for one-half of one cycle of light and darkness. After that, they too become weak and useless. It is the anger of the god Unterg that takes away their strength and their power to make children. You are strong, big. You last more than one-half cycle. You provide much seed, so our tribe live.”
In Antarctica, half of one light and dark cycle would be six months. Gabriel had no intention of spending even another six hours in this village. He had to find some way out.
“But first, to settle roles, we have ritual,” Uta said.
“What ritual?” Gabriel said.
“It is law: when more than one come from beyond the sky, they shall fight, prove who will make stronger children. The winner, he is mine. The loser, to the women of the tribe, each of them in turn.” She looked over and down again, and this time Gabriel thought he saw her shiver slightly, perhaps thinking of her small frame and the prodigious instrument jutting between the plates of Millie’s kilt. She took Gabriel’s chin in her hands and leaned in close till her lips were nearly touching his.
“You,” she said. “Fight hard.”
Gabriel pulled his chin from her grasp. A flare of anger flashed across the queen’s face. She gave a command to her guards and then turned away as Gabriel and Millie were led away by their rope leashes.
Chapter 18
Instead of being returned to the men’s hut, Gabriel and Millie were brought around to the other side of the village. An enormous tree of some species Gabriel didn’t recognize grew thick and twisted on the edge of the eucalyptus jungle and dangling from its heavy branches like huge wicker fruit were a cluster of spherical cages. The sight gave him a start—just a few months back, on a rescue mission to Borneo, he’d found the woman he was looking for in a cage suspended from a tree, about to be sacrificed by the remnants of an ancient Hittite cult. Now here were Velda and Rue, sitting hunched and apparently naked, each in her own tiny cage, unable to stand or stretch out their legs inside the woven spheres. A massive bonfire burned in a shallow pit nearby. The smoke was thick and black, making his eyes sting. It was not the sort of déjà vu he liked.
“Gabriel!” Velda cried, but one of the guards silenced her with a swift jab upward through the woven bars.
Two cages sat empty on the ground, their gates open. The guards sliced through the cord connecting Gabriel’s ankles to Millie’s and forced Gabriel at spear point to climb into one of the spheres. No amount of prodding and screaming was going to get Millie’s massive frame into a four-foot-diameter cage, so as Gabriel was sealed inside his cage and hauled up using a heavy rope-andpulley arrangement, the women resorted to lashing Millie securely to the trunk of the tree. Gabriel watched the process through the side of the cage. In their cages beside him, Rue and Velda were watching as well, he saw.
Giving the ropes connecting the cages to the tree one last going over to be sure they were secure, the guards left the team to dangle like aging meat.
Gabriel looked from side to side; Rue was on his left, Velda on his right.
“Thank God you’re both okay,” Gabriel said. “You are, aren’t you?”
“We’re alive,” Rue said.
“They were pretty rough on us,” Velda said. She turned one arm toward him to display a darkening bruise. “And they took our packs and clothes, and all our equipment.” She nodded toward the large, smoky bonfire. “They burned everything.”
“Now even if we could make it back up to the surface,” Rue said, “we’d be dead of exposure in minutes.”
“What did they do to you?” Velda said.
“Nothing good,” Gabriel said. “Except clean us off. And they fed us a little,” he admitted. “And gave us these loincloths.”
“He
ll of a lot better than the treatment we got,” Rue said.
“Yeah, well, they’re not looking to breed you.”
“To breed—” Velda said.
Gabriel swiftly filled the women in on what had transpired: the sickly men, the queen and her demands, the ritual combat. When he finished, he fished the pocket watch out from under his kilt and, facing Rue, held it to a space between the bars of his cage. With one finger he flicked it open. He couldn’t see Velda behind him, but he heard her sob.
“That’s him,” she said, her voice unsteady. “It’s his. My god. I gave it to…Gabriel, do you think he’s…”
“I don’t know,” Gabriel said firmly. “We didn’t see him. All we know is that they had his watch.” He replaced the watch under his kilt.
“Millie?” Gabriel called down. “Millie, how you holding up down there?”
“I got ants the size of my thumb using me for an expressway,” Millie replied between clenched teeth. “So far no bites, but I’m gonna try to keep really still and not piss them off.”
That was a smart plan for a nearly naked man tied to a tree that was crawling with ants. But a plan like that—keep still, do nothing, hope you don’t piss off your enemies—was not one the group as a whole could afford to use.
Gabriel pushed his fingers through the weave of his cage and clenched his bound fists, pulling at the bars. What ever kind of wood the cages were made of, it was both flexible and strong—it moved under his grip, but didn’t break. He hissed with frustration and shifted his trapped and folded legs into a slightly less uncomfortable position.
Gabriel squinted through the bars at the red ice overhead. In the distance, he could see the thick shaft of white light pouring through the opening in the ice but could not see the opening itself.
“We’ve got to get over there,” he said. “Somehow. Rue, if we made it to the plane, do you think you’d be able to pilot it through that opening?”
“Are you kidding?” Rue replied. “I can pilot a 747 through a hula hoop.”
Rue sounded as cocky and confident as ever, but Gabriel could hear a brittle undertone of fear in her voice. And it only made sense. From the little they’d seen of the plane, it had looked like a vintage number, possibly from the 1960s, maybe older. Even if it were still functional after all this time and still had fuel—two very big ifs—depending on the exact make and model of the plane, Rue could have as little as twelve inches of clearance to make it out through that narrow opening. It would be a difficult enough stunt in a modern plane in mint condition with modern navigation tools. Who knew what sort of condition this plane would be in? Always assuming, of course, that they managed to get to it at all.
“We’ll wait till they take us out for the ritual,” Gabriel said. “If they want us to fight, they’ll presumably give us weapons. Even if they want us to fight bare-handed, at least they’ll have to untie us first. That’ll be our chance to rush them. We should be able to grab a spear or two at least.”
“They’ll be expecting it,” Rue said. “They’ll be on their guard.”
“These are twenty-year-old women,” Gabriel said. “Between Millie and me—”
“Don’t underestimate them,”Velda snapped.“They’re seasoned, coordinated fighters—you saw how they took down the bird that killed Nils. You and Millie weren’t able to do that. And there are dozens of them and only two of you.”
“There are four of us,” Rue said. “Unless you’re too frightened to fight, princess.”
“No, Rue,” Gabriel said. “If you get free, I don’t want you wasting any time getting involved with the fighting. First chance you get, you run. You understand? You run as fast as you can and you get to that plane. We’re all stuck here for good otherwise. Getting to that plane and getting it running has to be your top priority. And if you succeed—if you manage to get it up and running—and you don’t see any sign that we’re on our way—” Gabriel’s voice trailed off. “We’ll try to make it. I promise. But if we don’t, you get the hell out of here and don’t look back. You hear me? Get out and get back to safety.”
“I won’t do it, Gabriel,” Rue said softly. “I won’t leave you here.”
“Well, let’s hope you won’t have to,” Gabriel said. The emotion in Rue’s voice touched him. Maybe she still had some feelings for him after all. “But if you have to, you do it. Someone has to survive to tell the world about this place.”
A sound of footsteps from below indicated that the guards had returned.
Gabriel craned his neck to see what was happening. He could hear Millie swearing, and the women speaking to him in the local tongue, and then Gabriel saw Millie being led off by his leash.
Seconds later, he felt his own cage shudder and sway and then begin to lower.
Chapter 19
As the guards led Gabriel though the village, all the inhabitants turned out again, lining the pathways between the huts, tagging along behind Gabriel or reaching out to touch him as he passed. When they arrived in the center of the village, several women were hauling aside a heavy woven mat about ten feet in diameter. Beneath the mat was a stonelined pit. Gabriel couldn’t see the bottom, but he could hear Millie’s angry voice coming up from below.
The guards slung a rope under Gabriel’s arms and used it to lower him into the pit, dropping him the last six feet to the hard-packed dirt floor. Millie hurried over as the women up at the top yanked the rope away.
“You okay?”
“Dandy,” Gabriel replied, getting to his feet again and taking stock of his new surroundings.
The pit was approximately twenty-five feet deep, damp and claustrophobic. There was a bad smell, like fear-sweat and spoiled meat. The stones of the pit walls were slick and mostly featureless except for what looked like some kind of asymmetrical drainage hole, about a foot wide, off to one side. Even in the dim light, Gabriel couldn’t help but notice the brown stains of dried blood on the stones surrounding it.
A shout came from above and something was slowly lowered on a rope: a stone knife, the rope looped through a hole in its broad handle. A second rope followed, with another blade. When they had descended enough for Gabriel and Millie to grasp them in their bound hands, the men set to work sawing through the ropes around their wrists. Gabriel freed his hands and bent to cut his ankles free as well, but before he could, the rope from which the knife hung was abruptly yanked upward and the knife shot out of his grasp, slicing his palm on its way up.
Gabriel raised his gaze and saw that Millie had also had the knife wrenched from his grasp. Gabriel wiped his bloody palm on his barkcloth kilt and began working on the knots at his ankles. He saw Millie doing the same.
“Christ,” Millie said when he finally kicked the rope off. “Now what?”
Gabriel looked up. The walls were too steep and slick to climb. “Even if I stood on your shoulders, it still wouldn’t get us out of here,” he said.
“You will fight,” said the voice of Queen Uta from above.
Gabriel saw the queen’s face peering over the edge. Her platinum hair was piled up into a complex braided coif.
“The man who cannot get up is the loser,” Queen Uta said. “The winner will make royal daughter to be my heir. The loser will be given to my sisters. To make more daughters. There is much work to be done before jealous Unterg takes away your manhood.
“You shall not kill,” Uta continued, “and you shall not harm the organs of generation. Failure to observe this rule shall be punished by your most slow and painful death.”
“What if we refuse to fight?” Gabriel called up.
“You must fight. It is the law.” Uta’s voice sounded more puzzled than angry.
“And if we don’t?”
She thought it over. “You shall be punished,” she said, “by your most slow and painful—”
“Death, right. No, I don’t think so,” Gabriel said. “That would deprive you of our seed. If it’s true that your tribe is dying, killing us would be like killing yourselves.�
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There was no response to this. Queen Uta’s face vanished, and the silence went on long enough that Gabriel started to think they’d been abandoned in the pit. Perhaps that would be their punishment: a slow death of starvation at the bottom of this crude oubliette.
Then he heard a clamor up above, the sound of something being dragged to the pit’s edge. Two new faces appeared: Rue’s and Velda’s. They were lying facedown, their throats pressed against the ground, a fist tangled tightly in each woman’s hair.
“You fight,” Uta’s voice resumed, as though there had been no interruption, “or your women die a slow and painful death.”
“Ah, hell,” Millie muttered.
Gabriel saw several women come into view around the perimeter of the pit, Uta among them. They looked down eagerly, expectantly. Impatiently.
He bent forward in a grappler’s stance. Millie bent forward to match. When their faces drew close, Gabriel whispered, “New plan. We put on a good show for them, I win, and then when I get her majesty there alone, I should be able to overpower her. Once we have her, we should be able to control her subjects.”
“There’s just two problems with that plan, boss,” Millie said. “To start, you’re assuming they’ll let you be alone with her. More likely, they’ve got some sort of ritual for getting the queen pregnant that involves all her handmaidens standing around with spears pointed at your ass.”
“I’ll take that chance,” Gabriel said. “What’s the other problem?”
“No offense,” Millie said, “but nobody in their right mind is gonna believe that you could win a fight against me down here.”
“Why, Millie,” Gabriel said, “I’m surprised at you. It’s not like you to get a swelled head.”
Millie shrugged. “Just stating the facts. Up on a castle wall somewhere, with swords or guns or ropes to swing from, there’s no one better than you. But down here, with nothing but our fists and no room for anything fancy? I’m just saying, Gabriel. It’s not plausible.”