River of Eden

by Tara Janzen

  That had been sex, pure, unadulterated sex. Animal need had met animal need and refinements had gone out the window. Tutanji had been right, though. She was about as calmed down as he’d ever seen her. For that matter, so was he, more relaxed than he’d been in years.

  With a little bit of effort, he got her shorts back on her and zipped and buttoned without precisely waking her up. She’d mumbled a little bit, and complained, and made him feel like some sort of pervert for having unadulterated sex with someone who hadn’t been precisely awake—but then he remembered where her hands had been before he’d even thought about her shorts, and absolved himself of all guilt.

  Amazon Annie.

  Good God, he thought, a tired grin spreading across his face. They were a long way from a first-class hotel suite with hot towels, clean sheets, and room service, but she was reminding him of all the luxuries he’d been so long without, and of a luxury he’d never had.

  Her, with her tough-girl reputation, her Israeli rifles, and the softest mouth he’d ever kissed. He hoped like hell she didn’t hate him in the morning when she realized what had happened, because he was afraid he’d just fallen in love in a hammock.

  CHAPTER ~ 21

  Corisco walked along a jungle path bordered by a hundred flaming torches, one for each cordeiro to be sacrificed on the noite do diabo. He was carrying a well-wrapped package close to his chest. Soot wafted up into the trees in smoky ringlets, blending into a night lit by a bare sliver of moon. In two nights, there would be no moon at all, only a dark circle in the sky, an opening to the netherworld and the hell he would bring into the glade.

  Excitement thrummed through his veins. His long years of labor would soon be rewarded. Major Vargas would no longer exist. In his place would be King Corisco, sovereign of four thousand miles of river and three million square miles of mountains, and forest, and plains. Fear would rule where politics forever failed.

  No government truly understood power. Bureaucracy tied their hands and their minds. He’d been in the army long enough to see firsthand what kind of mess bureaucracy created. Half-measures were the hallmark of government.

  But not in Reino Novo. In Reino Novo, he ruled, and because he ruled, he was creating what other men had only imagined—a true El Dorado, its central plaza already in place, the keystone of all that would come, and all of it in gold.

  The path flared at the end, opening onto the golden plaza, the torches continuing around its outer edge, their light caressing the sinuously curved statue rising out of the middle of the square—El Mestre in the shape of a truly giant anaconda, ten feet wide and towering twenty feet above the forest floor, its mouth open and gaping, its fangs—like the rest of it—glinting gold in the flickering light.

  The emeralds and diamonds Fat Eddie had brought had been added to the statue’s eyes, completing Los Olhos de Satanás, making them shine with demonic life. The coils of the snake made up the base of the building. A spiral of stairs incised into the snake’s scales led to a door in the serpent’s throat.

  All around the plaza, he heard the sounds of fear, wailing women and the mutterings of old men. Indians and caboclos alike became afraid when he lit the torches at night. In a very real way, the torches illuminated their fate, to be consumed by El Mestre, their blood to flow over the plaza. He knew they whispered of it. How could they not? He’d made no secret of his plans.

  The cages ringed the plaza, a circle of iron bars set into concrete pilings. As a concession to the weather, he’d had thatch roofs laid on top of the top bars to keep out the rain. In the short time since he’d constructed his prison, the rain forest had added its own touches, sending up shoots and vines to twine around the rusting bars and leaf out, making the whole thing nearly picturesque.

  He took the stairs up the snake tower to the first level and the small room he’d had built into the golden anaconda’s throat. The upper level was the snake’s mouth, built like a platform and flanked on either side by seven-foot-high fangs. He’d killed a small paca earlier in the day, using the slightest amount of ground beetle carapace, and the bowl of blood would be well congealed by now. He would build a fire under it, get it boiling and steaming, add a few select ingredients, some powders and pastes he made himself from jungle plants, and one highly poisonous and highly hallucinogenic frog skin. It was a risk to drink the blood potion. It was always a risk, but he was in need of visions, of a night given over to strange pleasure and carefully skirted terror. Uyump the frogs were called, vision beasts—and the visions they gave were beastly, indeed. Less than an inch long, the tiny frogs exploded a man’s mind into an infinite number of pieces. Only the truly strong came back whole.

  He had... barely. After the first time, he’d had to struggle to regain his sanity, and yet he’d been drawn back to the shaman’s shack up on the Rio Papurí again and again, until one night he’d seen his shining path to greatness open up and spread out like a path of stars.

  He opened the door to his sanctuary and was greeted by a heartening sight. Beetles, everywhere, scuttling over tables and walls. Thousands of five-inch-long kingmaker beetles, their iridescent carapaces adding a surreally colored and ever-shifting surface to everything inside the room.

  Hungry beetles, he thought, moving to the nearest table and ripping open the package. A pile of raw and bloody monkey parts spilled out, and the beetles descended in a horde to feed on the fresh kill.

  A thoroughly satisfied smile curved the corners of his lips. Even without his gold, he was a rich man, a very rich man—and he was unstoppable.

  CHAPTER ~ 22

  Annie was awakened at dawn by a soft touch on her shoulder, the woman Ajaju coming to take her to the river as she had every morning. She looked around as she swung her legs over the side of the hammock. The camp was breaking up, everyone packing and shouldering whatever they would carry for the day.

  At the river, the same sense of urgency prevailed. Children were part of the women’s morning time, and mothers quickly washed their broods in the pool of clear water below the waterfall rushing over a rocky ledge in the river.

  The morning was lovely and cool, with mist pooling along the forest floor and rising off the water. Birds were awake and taking to the air from their nighttime roosts.

  With the children washed up, the women hurried back to the camp. Being the only one with clothes to put on left Annie alone at the riverbank, a surprising occurrence it took her a moment to realize. She hadn’t been alone since the Indians had caught her. The possibilities weren’t lost on her, but as she slipped on her shorts and looked around the forest, the realities weren’t lost on her, either. Striking off on her own might not be in her best interest. The Indians hadn’t harmed her, and Will—

  Will.

  She stopped with her shirt only half on.

  Will had come into the camp.

  How could she not have remembered? She’d been so relieved to see him. So incredibly relieved.

  Maybe too relieved.

  She finished slipping on her shirt, and clipped her fanny pack back around her waist, her gaze going to the trail the women had followed back to the camp. A warm blush coursed up her cheeks. She’d had a dream in the night, an incredibly erotic dream in which William Sanchez Travers had played the starring role, his body lithe, and lean, and hard—and for a few, brief, wondrous minutes, a part of hers.

  Inexplicably, a warm blush coursed over her cheeks. The dream had felt real, damned real.

  Maybe too damned real.

  A birdcall to her right brought her gaze back to the waterfall just as a flock of egrets burst out of the trees on the shore. As one the birds took flight, flashes of white against the blue sky, dipping over the misty falls to the water, and then rising again against a backdrop of lush, green forest. At the top of the canopy, they turned, changing direction, and came flying down the river.

  And there he was, standing on a slab of rock jutting into the water at the top of the falls, nearly invisible within the rising mist of early morn
and the long shadows of the rain-forest trees. Her heart slowed in her chest. He had feathers tied into his hair, green parrot and blue macaw, and long, black toucan. His face had been painted with genipa stripes on both cheeks. Another line of paint went down the whole side of his body, all the way to his foot. He was armed with a spear and his machete, its long blade hanging down the length of his thigh tied by a strip of twisted cloth, a line of white against his body. A bamboo quiver and a bow were slung diagonally across his chest.

  He was naked except for a loincloth, and the sight of him started a tumult of longing inside her.

  It had been no dream. Looking at him, she knew. They had made love, and it had been wonderful—the taste of his mouth, being cradled in the strength of his arms, that first slow thrust of his body into hers.

  The memory washed through her, turning longing into an ache of desire she wouldn’t have believed herself capable of feeling, not after Yavareté.

  From where he stood on a rock in the river, he turned and caught her gaze with his own. A warm blush coursed up her cheeks. They had made love. It seemed impossible to her that she’d let him get that close, even more impossible that she might have been the one to initiate their closeness—but she remembered the way he’d felt beneath her hands, the tautness of his muscles, the silken softness of his skin, all of him hers to explore—and explore him she had.

  Her blush deepened. The more she looked at him, the more she remembered.

  He started down the rocks at the side of the falls, and she let herself look her fill, her gaze trailing over a landscape of lean muscles and brown skin to his face. He was beautiful, physically elegant, an animal in his prime, and looking at him, she was afraid what she was feeling was more than lust, a truly disturbing turn of events.

  Coming up off the, trail, Will stopped in front of her, his body sheened with morning mist.

  “Good morning,” he said. “Tudo bem?”

  “Vou bem.” With him standing close, she was fine.

  She had an intellectual passion for his mind, too, and had for years, ever since she’d first read his Medicines of the Milk River and the Healing Forest, long before they’d started putting his photograph on his book jackets. But it wasn’t the thought of having intellectual discourse with him that was making her heart race. It was the way he smelled—very warm and masculine, very different from her, like genipa and earth with traces of smoke from the morning fires. It was his hands and the tendons that ran down his forearms and met like the confluence of a river at his wrist. All she had to do was look at the taut plane of his abdomen and the arrow of dark hair that started at his navel and disappeared beneath his loincloth, and her mouth went dry.

  There were probably dozens of scientifically biological reasons for what she was feeling. She’d read some of the published material on the genetic forces at work in mate selection, the literal chemistry of sexual attraction—and at the moment couldn’t have cared less.

  “Come with me,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

  Annie followed him up the path beside the waterfall to the calmer water upriver, intensely aware of his nakedness as she walked along behind him. He was a six-foot-tall gringo, a white man burned brown by the equatorial sun, his hair bleached to near whiteness in a wild disarray of streaks, his muscles long, and lean, and powerful. The loincloth barely covered him in front and wasn’t even meant to cover him in back. Every step he took was a study in grace, long flanks of smoothly flexing muscle moving under his skin. She remembered how it had felt to have him hot and hard inside her, the pulsing beauty of his release—and she wanted to feel it all again.

  He glanced back over his shoulder, offering her his hand. When their eyes met, she blushed, and he smiled, slow and easy, like a promise—and Annie suddenly understood that whatever he wanted to show her was only part of the reason they were walking away from the camp.

  Anticipation washed through her in a lush wave, heightening her senses, making them hum with awareness. Her hand was small in his, his palm rough against hers, his fingers longer and bluntly squared. The strength of his whole arm was in his light grasp, and she felt that as a promise, too. His strength was hers. It was something she’d never had on her side, a man’s strength, something she’d never truly understood.

  She understood it now, her gaze drifting over Will’s broad shoulders. She understood it even better when she followed the trail of his tattoo. Black snake, white snake, twined in a serpentine spiral down the length of his back. The old shaman had marked him for life, using palm spines and black dye. She saw the scene in her mind’s eye: the dark of a rain-forest night, Will lying on the forest floor, the snake’s blood and his own running down his body, and Tutanji chanting hour after dark hour until dawn, his old hands guided by a caapi vision through wreaths of smoke.

  Knowledge, he’d told her, had been the shaman’s promise. For three years of his life and the destruction of Corisco Vargas, he would be given shamanistic knowledge. He was a smart man, brilliant, and for the sacrifices he’d made, Tutanji must have made a damned convincing case.

  “What exactly is the old man going to give you, if you overcome Vargas?” More than curiosity prompted the question. She wanted to know everything about him, especially what had changed him.

  “A map,” he said, stopping and looking back at her. “A map to an ancient, sacred place somewhere north of where we are now.”

  “The lost city of gold everybody mentions whenever your name comes up?” The rumors about him were near legend in themselves, and the lost city of gold was the most persistent.

  “No. Not gold, Annie. A place of plants, ancient plants, something from the fossil record that hasn’t been seen alive and growing for millions of years. Maybe a lot of ancient plants.” He started walking again, her hand still in his. “To be honest, the night I saw your orchid, I thought it might be part of Tutanji’s promise.”

  She shook her head. “There aren’t any orchids in the fossil record. You know that as well as I do.”

  “Yes, but your orchid is no regular flower. Something unusual is happening with its bioluminescence. Something I would love to research in a lab.”

  So would she, so help her God. So would she. “We’re going to need fresh material to get anything. I did a lot of tests on the flower while I was in Wyoming and didn’t find anything that hadn’t been found in other biologically luminescent specimens. Yet it is different. I can see that it’s different, and sometimes... sometimes—” Her voice trailed off.

  “Sometimes what?”

  She let out a short laugh. “Sometimes I think it’s trying to tell me something. That the light waves are some sort of Morse Code.”

  To her surprise, he agreed. “Yeah, I thought the same thing after spending a couple of hours looking at it.”

  A slow smile curved her mouth. “It is amazing, isn’t it.”

  “Yes,” he agreed again, his mouth curving into another smile.

  “Like your tattoo?” She had to know what it meant, or even if it meant more than what Gerhardt had once told her about the design up on the Rio Vaupes.

  A look of resignation came over his face, and his smile turned decidedly humorless. “The tattoo... what’s amazing about my tattoo is that I didn’t die getting it or from some horrific infection afterward. The rest is all Tutanji’s game. Basically, it represents the cerebral fissure of a man’s brain, like you said that night in Barcelos, but the way Tutanji did it, the drawing also represents the creation of man’s cerebral fissure by the cosmic anaconda, in essence, the awakening of man’s consciousness, the beginning of human existence, the whole Garden of Eden story from an Amazonian Indian point of view, which ties in with the sacred place from the beginning of time.”

  “Is it the map itself?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s more of a charm. I won’t get the map until after Reino Novo.”

  If there was an “after” after Reino Novo. Annie didn’t want to think about it, but the grimness of the
possibilities was impossible to ignore.

  Growing quiet, they walked on through trees drenched by mist, wading through shallow streams and ducking under overhanging vines. It was what she’d always done—walked through the rain forest, looking for plants, following little-used paths that only the most discerning eye would even have noticed. For all her fear of snakes, she’d actually seldom seen one in the wild. She’d been in certain regions of the tropics where iguanas dripped from the trees, and in the Brazilian Patanal where caimans crowded every beach, but her days in the lowland rain forests had been relatively free of snakes, and lately, so had her nights.. She hadn’t dreamed about the anaconda since putting on Will’s necklace. Whatever power he’d brought to himself by killing the big cat, the jaguar teeth worked.

  And there went another of her most dearly held scientific principles—straight out the window. She was wearing a charm she believed in, a charm whose power had been taken from a jaguar by Will’s strength and cunning.

  It was the strength that would protect him in Reino Novo. It was the strength that would protect her.

  Farther down the trail, they crossed another shallow stream, the muddy water lapping at their ankles, and scared up a flotilla of Morpho butterflies. Blue wings like unreefed sails caught the light drifting down through the shadows of the trees.

  Annie held her breath watching them flutter above the water with a delicacy reserved for forest sprites and spirit beings. She’d seen Morpho butterflies before, but never so many. The imperceptibly tiny scales on their large wings shone with saturated iridescence, more blue than the sky.

  The forest was full of riches. It always had been, and as they walked, she fell into the once familiar rhythm of her days, before the woolly monkey had changed her life, days spent walking through the jungle forests of the equator, always searching for plants.

  At a deep pool of water below another waterfall, Will gestured to a trail leading beneath a rocky ledge. Annie followed him along its edge, getting soaked by the cool water pouring down from the river above. They had to swim the last few feet to the far shore.