Roan had a lot of questions. But asking questions was a sign of disrespect, too. If Inca wanted to tell him what she’d done to heal herself, she would in her own good time. Mike Houston had told him that she was a healer. Well, Roan had just gotten a firsthand glimpse of her powerful talents.
“How far do we go downriver?” Inca demanded of him. Despite the tone she used, she was enjoying his company. Normally, men managed to irritate her with their arrogant male attitude, but he did not. Most men could not think like a woman; they were out to lunch instinctually and jammed their feelings so far down inside themselves that they were out of touch completely. Inca found the company of women far preferable. But Roan was different. She could see the remnants of his worry and concern over her wounding. He didn’t try to hide or fix a mask on his feelings, she was discovering. The only other man she knew who was similar was her blood brother, Michael. Inca liked to know where a person stood with her, and when that person showed his feelings, whether they were for or against her, Inca appreciated it.
Roan smiled a one-cornered smile. At least she was still talking to him. He saw the frosty look in her eyes, the way she held herself, as if afraid he was going to touch her again. Remaining where he was, he said, “Let me get the map out of my luggage.” He brightened a little. “And there’s a gift in there for you from Mike and Ann, too. I think things have calmed down enough that we can sit and talk over the mission while you open it.”
Inca nodded. “Very well. We will sit on the shady side of the boat, here.” She pointed to the starboard side of the tug. Suddenly, she found herself wanting to talk to Roan. Why did he have the name he did? How had he earned it? She watched as he moved to the bow of the tug to retrieve his luggage.
Settling her back against the splintery wall of the cockpit, Inca waited for him. Roan placed the canvas bag, which was tubular in shape, between them and slowly sat down, his legs crossed beneath him. As he unzipped the bag, she watched his deft, sure movements and recalled his touch.
Men did not realize their touch was stronger and therefore potentially hurtful to a woman or a child. Mentally, she corrected herself. Not all men hurt women, but she’d seen too much of it in South America, and it angered her to her soul. No one had the right to hurt someone frailer or weaker.
“Here,” Roan said, digging out a foil-wrapped gift tied with red ribbon. “Mike said this was special for you.” And he grinned.
Inca scowled as she took the gift. She made sure their fingers did not touch this time. Oh, she wanted to touch Roan again, but a large part of her was afraid of it, afraid of what other wild, unbidden reactions would be released in her body because of it.
“Thank you.”
Well, at least Inca could be civil when she wanted to be, Roan thought, laughing to himself. He was discovering it was all about respecting boundaries with her. He watched covertly, pretending to search for the map, as she tore enthusiastically into the foil wrapping. She was like a child, her face alight with eagerness, her eyes wide with expectation. The wrapping and ribbon fluttered around her.
“Oh!”
Roan grinned as she held up smoked salmon encased in protective foil. “Mike said you had a love of salmon.”
For the first time, Inca smiled. She held up the precious gift and studied it intently. “My blood brother knows my weaknesses.”
“I doubt you have many,” Roan said dryly, and caught her surprised look. Just as quickly, she jerked her gaze away from him.
“Do not be blinded by the legend that follows me. I have many weaknesses,” she corrected him throatily. Laying the package in her lap, she took out her knife and quickly slit it open. The orange smoked fish lay before her like a feast. Her fingers hovered over it. She glanced at him. “Do you want some?”
“No, thank you. You go ahead, though, and enjoy it.” Roan was pleased with her willingness to share. Among his people, it was always protocol to offer food first to those around you, and lastly, help yourself.
She stared at him through hooded eyes. “Are you sure?” How could he resist smoked salmon?
She was reading his mind. He could feel her there in his head, like a gentle wind on a summer day. For whatever reason, Roan felt no sense of intrusion, no need to protect his thoughts from her. He grinned belatedly as he pulled the map from the plastic case. “I’m sure. The salmon is your gift. Mike and Ann said you love it. I don’t want to take a single bite of it away from you. Salmon’s a little tough to come by down here,” he joked, “and where I come from, there’s plenty of it. So, no, you go ahead and enjoy.”
Inca studied him. He was a generous and unselfish person. Not only that, he was sensitive and thoughtful to others’ needs. Her heart warmed to him strongly. Few men had such honorable traits. “Very well.” She got to her feet and went over to the tug captain. Roan watched with interest. Ernesto, his chest sunken, his flesh burned almost tobacco brown by the equatorial sun, reached eagerly for part of the salmon. He took only a little, and thanked Inca profusely for her generosity. She nodded, smiled, and then came and sat back down. Lifting a flake of the meat to her lips, she closed her eyes, rested her head against the cockpit wall and slid it into her mouth.
Roan felt Inca’s undiluted pleasure over each morsel of the salmon. In no time, the fish was gone and only the foil package remained on her lap. There was a satiated look in her eyes as she stuck each of her fingers in her mouth to savor the taste of salmon there.
Sighing, Inca lifted her head and looked directly at him. “Your name. It has meaning, yes?”
Shocked at her friendly tone, Roan was taken aback. Maybe his manners had earned him further access to her. He hoped so. Clearing his throat, he said, “Yes, it does.”
“Among our people, names carry energy and skills.” Inca lifted her hand. “I was named Inca by a jaguar priestess who found me when I was one year old and living with a mother jaguar and her two cubs. She had been given a dream the night before as to where to find me. She kept me for one year and then took me to another village, where another priestess cared for me. When I was five years old I learned that my name meant I was tied to the Inca nation of Peru. Each year, I was passed to another priest or priestess in another village. At each stop, I was taught what each one knew. Each had different skills and talents. I learned English from one. I learned reading from another. Math from another. When I was ten, I was sent to Peru, up to Machu Picchu, to study with an Andean priest name Juan Nunez del Prado. He lived in Aqua Caliente and ran a hostel there for tourists. We would take the bus up to the temples of Machu Picchu and he would teach me many things. He told me the whole story, of what my name meant, and what it was possible to do with such a name.” She lifted her hand in a graceful motion. “What my name means, what my destiny is, is secret and known only to me and him. To speak of it is wrong.”
Roan understood. “Yes, we have a similar belief, but about our vision quest, not about our name. I honor your sacredness, having such a beautiful name.” Roan saw her fine, thin brows knit. “With such an impressive history behind your name, I think you were destined for fame. For doing something special for Mother Earth and all her relations. The Incas were in power for a thousand years, and their base of operation was Cuzco, which is near Machu Picchu. In that time, they built an empire stretching the whole breadth and length of South America.” Roan smiled at her. He saw that each time he met her gaze or shared a smile with her, she appeared uneasy. He wondered why. “From what I understand from Mike, you have a name here in Amazonia that stretches the length and breadth of it, too.”
“I have lived up to my name and I continue to live the destiny of it every day,” she agreed. Eyeing him, her head tilting slightly, Inca asked, “Have you lived up to yours?”
Inca would never directly ask why he had been given his name, and Roan smiled to himself. She wanted to know about him, and he was more than willing to share in order to get her trust. They didn’t have much time to create that bond.
“My family’s na
me is Storm Walker. A long time ago, when my great-great-grandfather rode the plains as a Lakota medicine man, he acquired storm medicine. He had been struck by lightning while riding his horse. The horse died, and as he lay there on the plain afterward, he had a powerful vision. He woke up hours later with the name Storm Walker. He was a great healer. People said lightning would leap from his fingers when he touched someone to heal them of their ills or wounds.”
“Yes?” Inca leaned forward raptly. She liked his low, modulated tone. She knew he spoke quietly so that the captain could not overhear their conversation, for what they spoke of was sacred.
“One member of each succeeding generation on my mother’s side of the family inherited this gift of lightning medicine. When our people were put on a reservation, the white men forced us to adopt a first and last name. So we chose Storm Walker in honor of my great-great-grandfather.”
“And what of Roan? What is a roan? It is a name I have never heard before.”
He quelled his immediate reaction to her sudden warm and animated look. Her face was alive with curiosity, her eyes wide and beautiful. Roan had one helluva time keeping his hands to himself. He wanted to see Inca like this all the time. This was the real her, he understood instinctively. Not the tough, don’t-you-dare-touch-me warrior woman, although that was part and parcel of her, too. When there wasn’t danger around, she was wide-open, vulnerable and childlike. It was innocence, he realized humbly. And the Great Spirit knew, he wanted to treat that part of her with the greatest of care.
“Roan is the color of a horse,” he explained. “Out on the plains, my people rode horses. Horses come in many colors, and a roan has red and white hairs all mixed together in its coat.” He smiled a little and held her burning gaze. “My mother was Lakota. A red-skinned woman. My father was a white man, a teacher who has white skin. When I was born, my mother had this vision of a roan horse, whose skin is half red and half white, running down a lane beneath a thunderstorm, with lightning bolts dancing all around it. She decided to call me Roan because I was part Indian and part white. Red and white.”
Inca stared at him. She saw the vulnerable man in him. He was not afraid of her, nor was he afraid to be who he was in front of her. That impressed her. It made her heart feel warm and good, too, which was something she’d never experienced before. “That is why you are not darker than you are,” she said, pointing to his skin.
“I got my mother’s nose, high cheekbones, black hair and most of her skin coloring. I got my father’s blue eyes.”
“Your heart, your spirit, though, belongs to your mother’s red-skinned people.”
“Yes,” Roan agreed softly.
“Are you glad of this?”
“Yes.”
“And did you inherit the gift of healing?”
Roan laughed a little and held up his hands. “No, I’m afraid it didn’t rub off on me, much to my mother’s unhappiness.”
Shrugging, Inca said, “Do not be so sure, Roan Storm Walker. Do not be so sure….”
Chapter 4
Roan had excused himself and went to the opposite side of the tug from where she stood. Once he felt sure they were safely motoring down the Amazon, the shooters nowhere in sight. His adrenaline had finally ebbed after the firefight. He’d noticed her hands were shaking for a little while afterward, too. It was nice to know she was human. It was also nice to know she was one cool-headed customer in a crisis. Not too many people that he knew, men or women, would have been so efficient and clear thinking in that rain of hot lead.
Absently, he touched the medicine piece at his throat and found the blue stone was so hot it felt like it was burning his skin. It wasn’t, but the energy emanating from it made it feel that way. The stone always throbbed, hot and burning, anytime he was in danger. Roan knew without a doubt, from a lot of past experience, that the mysterious blue stone was a powerful talisman. There had been so many times in the past when it had heated up and warned him of forthcoming danger. One of his biggest mistakes had been not listening to his intuition the day his wife, Sarah, had gone climbing and died. On that morning, before she left, Roan had had a powerful urge to take off his amulet and place it around her slender neck. He knew she would have accepted the gift, but he’d never, ever entertained the thought of giving the stone to anyone. It had been ingrained by his mother and the tradition of his mother’s tribe that the medicine piece should remain with one person until near the time he or she was to die, and then be passed on to the next deserving recipient. Still, the urge to give Sarah the stone had been overpowering, but he’d fought it because of his ancestral tradition. He told himself that it was wrong to take the stone off and give it away prematurely. Sadly, he now knew why his cougar guardian had urged him through his intuition to give Sarah the necklace to wear that day. It might have saved her life. He would never know. Rubbing his chest, Roan frowned, the guilt eating at him even to this day.
When he’d grabbed a cab at the airport to head to the dock, the blue stone had begun to throb with heat and energy. Roan had thought the stone was warning him about Inca, but he’d been wrong. She wasn’t the one to fear; it was the gang that followed him to the dock that had brought danger.
He wanted to ask Inca a hundred questions now that things were calming down, but he knew Indian protocol, so he had to forego his personal, selfish desire to get nosy. Still, being in her company was like being surrounded by an incredible light of joy and freedom.
Moving to the other side of the tug, he dug deeply into his canvas carry-on bag. Because he was Indian, and because it was only proper to introduce himself to the spirits of this new land, Roan pulled out a large, rainbow-colored abalone shell, a stick of sacred white sage and a red-tailed hawk feather fan. Native Americans did not presume that the spirits of the water, land or air would automatically welcome them into their midst. A simple ceremony of lighting sage and asking for acceptance was traditional.
Once the flame was doused, Roan placed the smoldering smudge stick in the shell. Picking it up, he faced the north direction, the place where Tatanka, the great white buffalo spirit, resided. Leaning down until the shell was near his feet, Roan used the fan to gently waft the thick, purling smoke upward around his body. The smoke was purifying and signaled his sincerity in honoring the spirits of this land. Fanning the smoke about his head, he then placed the shell back on the deck. Sitting down, his back against the cockpit, Roan closed his eyes and prayed. He mentally asked permission to be allowed to walk this land, to be welcomed to it.
As he said his prayers, his arms resting comfortably on his drawn-up knees, Roan felt a burst of joy wash over him. He smiled a little in thanks. That was the spirits of the river, the land and air welcoming him to their territory. He knew the sign well and was relieved. Roan didn’t want to go anywhere he wasn’t welcomed by the local spirits. It would have been a bad choice, and bad things would have befallen him as a result.
Opening his eyes, he dug into his tobacco bag, which he always carried on a loop on his belt. The beaded bag, made out of tanned elk hide and decorated with a pink flower against a blue background, was very old. It had been his mother’s tobacco bag. Digging into it, he held the proffered gift of thanks upward to the sky, and then to the four directions, to Mother Earth, before bringing it to his heart and giving thanks. Then, opening his hand, he threw the fragrant tobacco outward. He watched the dark brown flakes fly through the air and hit the muddy water, then quickly disappeared.
To his surprise, four river dolphins, sleek and dark, leaped within ten feet of the tug, splashing the peeling wood of the deck. Stunned, Roan watched the playful foursome race alongside the tug.
“The river spirit has taken your prayers and gifts to heart,” Inca said in a low, serious voice as she approached him from the left.
Surprised, Roan tried to hide his pleasure that she was coming to speak to him. He would never gain her trust if he kept going to her and plying her with endless questions; she’d slam the door to herself tighter th
an Fort Knox.
The dolphins leaped again, their high-pitched cries mingling with the sound of the foaming, bubbling water. They arced high and splashed back into the river.
Roan smiled a little. “Helluva welcome. I didn’t expect it.”
Inca stopped and gazed at him critically. He looked relaxed, his large, scarred hands resting on his narrow hips. His profile was Indian; there was no question. Only the lightness of his copper skin revealed his other heritage, through his father. “The dolphin people don’t often give such a welcome to strangers to their land, to their river,” she murmured. She saw and felt his amazement and gratitude. Maybe Michael was right after all: Roan stood apart from all other men she’d known before. He was more like a Jaguar Clan member, knitted into the fabric of Mother Earth and all her relations. Roan understood that all things were connected, that they were not separate and never had been. Her heart lifted with hope. It was a strange, wonderful feeling, and automatically, Inca touched that region of her chest. She studied the medicine piece that hung around his thickly corded neck. With her clairvoyant vision she could see the power emanating from around that beautiful sky-blue stone he wore.
“You said your mother was a healer, yes?”
Roan nodded and squatted down. “Yes, she was.” He saw that the smudge of sage had burned out. Tossing it into the river as an added gift, he took the abalone shell and placed it back into his bag.
“And did she heal by laying her hands on others, as we do in the Jaguar Clan?”
Roan wrapped the feather fan gently back into the red cotton cloth and placed it back into the bag as well, and then zipped it shut. He craned his neck upward and met her half-closed eyes. There was a thoughtful look on Inca’s face now. She was so incredibly beautiful. Did she know how attractive she was? Instantly, he saw her brows dip. Was she reading his mind again? Frustrated, Roan figured she was, as he eased to his full height once again.
Morgan's Mercenaries: Heart Of The Warrior Page 6
