“My mother was a Yuwipi medicine woman. Her assistants would tie her wrists behind her back and tie up her ankles and then roll her up into a rug and tie the rug up as well. The lights would be doused, the singers and drummers would begin. The ceremony takes hours, usually starting at nightfall and ending at dawn. My mother, with the help of her spirit guides, was released from her bonds. She then prayed for the person whom the ceremony was for. Usually, that person was there in the room. There could be five, ten or fifty people sitting in that room, taking part in the ceremony. Lights would dance through the place. Horns would sound. The spirits brushed the attending people with their paws, their wings or tails. All prayers from everyone were directed to the person who was ill.”
Inca nodded. “A powerful ceremony. And did the person get well?”
He smiled a little and put his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “They always did when my mother conducted the ceremony. She was very famous. People came to her from around the world.” He glanced at Inca’s shoulder, where the splinter had wounded her. “And your clan heals with touch?”
Inca nodded. “You could say that.”
“And healing is your calling? Your vision?”
“It is my life,” she said simply. Lifting her hand, she watched as the dolphins sped away from the tug, finished with their play. “I took a medicine vow when I became a woman at age twelve. The jaguar priestess who was training me at that time inducted me into the service of our mother, the earth. She then prepared me to go to the clan’s village for training, which began at age sixteen.”
Roan shook his head. “It sounds like you were passed around a lot, from person to person. Did you ever find out who your parents were?” Instantly, he saw her close up. Her eyes grew opaque with pain and her lips compressed. Roan mentally kicked himself. He’d asked the wrong damn question. “Forget it,” he said quickly. “You don’t have to answer. That’s too personal….”
Touched by his sensitivity, Inca found herself opening up at his roughly spoken words. She saw so much in his large eyes, in those glinting black pupils. Normally, if someone broached a question regarding her past, she’d shut down, get angry and stalk off. Not this time. Inca couldn’t explain why her heart felt warm in her breast, or why her pulse quickened when he gave her that special, tender look. Always, she felt that blanket of security and warmth automatically surround her when Roan met and held her gaze. She was unsure of how to react, for she’d never met a man quite like this before. She wanted to be wary of him, to remain on guard, but his demeanor, and the fact that he was Indian like her, made her feel safe. Safe! No one had ever given her that sense before.
“No, I will answer your question.” Inca sat down and leaned against the bulkhead. The last of the shakiness that always inhabited her after a confrontation left her. Being with Roan was soothing to her hard-wired nervous system, which was always on high alert. She crossed her legs, her hands resting on her thighs. Roan did the same, keeping a good six feet of space between them. Inca sighed. There was always something soothing about the gentle rocking of a boat in the arms of the Amazon River. “At times like this, I feel like a babe in my mother’s arms,” she confided throatily. “The rocking motion…somewhere in my memory, a long time ago, I recall being rocked in the arms of a woman. I remember fragments of a song she sang to me.”
“One of the priestesses?”
“No.” Inca picked at a frayed thread of the fabric on her knee. “I remember part of the song. I have gone back and asked each woman who helped to raise me if she sang it, and none of them did. I know it was my real mother….”
Roan heard the pain in her low voice. He saw her brows dip, and her gaze move to her long, slender, scarred hands. “I was abandoned in the rain forest to die. As I told you before, a mother jaguar found me. I was told that she picked me up in her mouth and carried me back to where she hid her two cubs. When the first jaguar priestess found me, I was a year old and suckling from the mother jaguar. I have some memories of that time. A few…but good ones. I remember being warm and hearing her purr moving like a vibrating drum through my body. Her milk was sweet and good. The woman who found me was from a nearby village. In a dream, she was told where to go look for me. When she arrived, the mother jaguar got up and left me.”
Inca smiled softly. “I do not want you to think that the people who raised me from that time on did not love me. They did. Each of them is like a mother and father to me—at least, those who are still alive, and there are not many now….”
“You were on a medicine path, there is no doubt,” Roan said.
“Yes.” Inca brightened. “It is good to talk to someone who understands my journey.”
“My mother set me on a path to become a medicine man, but I’m afraid I disappointed her.” Roan laughed a little and held up his hands for a moment. “I didn’t have her gift.”
“Humph. You have a spirit cougar, a female, who is at your side. Medicine people always have powerful spirit guides. Perhaps you will wait until middle age to pick up your medicine and practice it. That is common down here in Amazonia. Most men and women do not even begin their training until their mid-forties.”
“You were trained from birth, which means you brought in a lot of power and skills with you,” Roan said. He saw Inca smile sadly.
“There are days when I wish…” Her voice trailed off. Shaking her head, she muttered, “To be hunted like an animal, with a price on my head…to be hated, feared and misunderstood.” She glanced over at him. “At least the Indians of the basin understand. They know of my vow, know I am here to help protect them. The white men who want to destroy our rain forests want my life. The gold miners would kill me if they saw me. The gaucqueros, the gem hunters, would do the same. Anyone who wants to rape our land, to take without giving to it something equal in return, wants me dead.”
Roan felt her sadness. Quietly, he said, “It must be a heavy burden to carry. I hope you have friends with whom you can share your burdens and dreams.”
Rubbing her brow, Inca whispered, “I am all but thrown out of the Jaguar Clan. Grandfather Adaire has sentenced me and told me never to return to the village where all clan members train. I—I miss going there. Grandmother Alaria…well, I love her as I’ve loved no one else among those who have raised me. She is so kind, so gentle, all the things I am not…. I am like a rough-cutemerald compared to her. She is so old that no one knows how old she is. I miss talking to her. I miss the time we spent together.”
“Then you’re an outcast?” Roan saw the incredible pain in every feature of Inca’s face. In some part of his heart, he knew she was opening up to him in a way that she rarely did with anyone. The energy between them was tenuous…fragile, just like her. He found himself wanting to slide his arm across her proud shoulders, draw her into his arms and simply hold her. Hold her and comfort her against the awful weight of pain she carried. In that moment, she was more a hurting child to him than a warrior woman.
“No, not exactly an outcast…Oh, to be sure, some members have been cast permanently out of the clan.” She gave him a pained, one-cornered smile, and then quickly looked away. “My sentence is an ongoing one. Grandfather Adaire says I am walking on the dark side with some choices I have made. And until I can walk in the light all the time, I am not allowed to return to the village as a full member of it.”
Roan frowned. “Light and dark? Familiar words and themes to me.” He opened his hands. “Where I come from, in our belief system, light does not exist without darkness, and vice versa. You can’t have one without the other. And no human being is ever all one or the other.” He glanced over at her. “Are they expecting you not to be human? Not to make mistakes?”
She laughed abruptly. “The Jaguar Clan is an honorable part of the Sisterhood of Light. There are rules that cannot be broken…and I broke one of them. It was a very serious thing. Life-and-death serious.” Inca frowned and tugged at the frayed thread on her knee until it broke off in her fingers.
&nb
sp; “Mike Houston said you saved his life,” Roan said. He ached to reach out to her now. There were tears swimming in her eyes, although Inca’s head was bowed and slightly turned away from his in an effort to hide them from him. In her softened tone he could hear the wrenching heartache she carried. She moved her hands restlessly.
“That is why I was asked to leave my own kind, my home…. Michael was dying. I knew it. And yes, I broke the rule and went into the light where the souls of all humans who are dying go. I pulled him back from the Threshold. I gave my life, my energy, my heart and love, and drew him back. If not for Grandmother Alaria, who revived me because I was practically dead after saving Michael, I would not be here today.”
“So, you saved a life? And Grandfather Adaire kicked you out of the clan for that?” Roan had a hard time understanding why.
“Do not be judgmental of Grandfather Adaire. He was only following the code of the clan. You see, we are trained in the art of life and death. Because we have the power, that means we must walk with it in strict accordance to the laws of the universe. I broke one of those laws. Michael had made his choice to die of his wound. I had been caring for him for a week, and for the first time in my life, I felt as if I had met my real brother. Oh, he was not, but that was the bond we had from the moment we met. It was wonderful….” She sighed unhappily. “I saw him slipping away daily. My heart cried. I cried alone, where no one could see me. I knew he would die. I did not want it to happen. I knew I had the power to stop it. And I knew it was wrong to intervene.” Inca smiled sadly as she looked at the shore, which was a half a mile away on either side of the chugging tug.
“I wanted a brother just like Michael. I’d been searching so long for a family—I was so starved to have one—that I did it. I broke the law. And I did it knowingly.” Gravely, Inca turned her head and met his dark blue eyes. “And that is why I was asked to leave. What I did was a ‘dark side’ decision. It was selfish and self-serving.”
Roan choked as she finished the story. He felt anger over it. “Didn’t Grandfather Adaire realize that, because you were abandoned, family would mean so much more to you than it would to others?”
She hitched one shoulder upward and looked out at the muddy river. “That is an excuse. It is not acceptable to the clan. I broke a law. It does not matter why I broke it.”
“Seems a little one-sided and unfair to me,” he groused.
“Well,” Inca said with a laugh, “my saving Michael’s life, in the long term, had its positive side. He asked to become my blood brother. And when he fell in love with Dr. Ann, and she had his baby, Catherine, I became a godmother to their child.” The tears in her eyes burned. Inca looked away. She wanted to wipe them away, but she didn’t want Roan to know of her tears. No one ever saw her cry. No one. Choking on the tears, she rasped, “I have a family now. Michael and Ann love me. They accept me despite who I am, despite what I do for a living.” She sniffed and reached for a pouch on her right side. “Look…here…let me show you baby Catherine….”
Roan watched Inca eagerly fumble in the pouch. The joy mirrored in her face was like sunlight. She valiantly tried to force the tears out of her glimmering willow-green eyes as she handed him a frayed color photo.
“This is Mike and his family,” he said.
“Yes,” Inca replied, and she leaned forward, her shoulder nearly touching his as she pointed at the baby held between them. “And this is Catherine…I call her Cat. She has a male jaguar spirit guide already! That is very special. She is special. Ann and Michael know it, too. Little Cat is my goddaughter.”
The pride was unmistakable in Inca’s passionate voice. It took everything for Roan not to respond to her excitement. She was so close he could smell her. There was a wonderful, fragrant scent to Inca. It reminded him of the bright pink Oriental lilies that grew behind his cabin, where Sarah had planted them. Looking up, he smiled into Inca’s glimmering eyes as he handed her the photo.
“You should be proud of Catherine. She’s lucky to have you as a godmother. Very lucky.”
A sweet frisson of joy threaded through Inca’s heart at his huskily spoken words. When she met and held his dark blue gaze, Inca’s heart flew open. It caught her by surprise. A little breathless, she quickly put the photo back into the protective plastic and snapped the pouch shut.
“In my mind,” she said, “what I did to save Michael’s life was not wrong. It hurts to think I can never go home, but now my home is with him and his family, instead.”
The sweet bitterness of Inca’s past moved Roan deeply. “I don’t know how you handle it all,” he admitted. “I’d be lost without my family, my parents…. I don’t know what it’s like to be an orphan.”
“Hard.”
He nodded and saw that she was frowning. “I can’t even begin to imagine….”
Inca found herself wanting to talk more to Roan. “You are a strange man.”
He grinned. “Oh?”
“I find myself jabbering to you, making my life an open book to you. Father Titus was such a talker. He would tell me everything of what lay in his heart and feelings. Being Indian, we are normally quiet and reserved about such things. But not him. He made me laugh many times. I always thought he was a strange old man with his bird’s nest of white hair.”
“He was vulnerable and open with you.”
Sobering, Inca nodded, “Yes, he was…and still is, even though I do not visit him as often as I would like because my duties are elsewhere.”
“So…” Roan murmured, “am I like Father Titus?”
“No, I am! I blather on to you. As if I have known you lifetimes. I bare my soul to you, my heart—and I do not ever do that with anyone.”
Wanting to reach out and touch her hand, Roan resisted. Instead he rasped, “Inca, your heart, your soul, are safe with me. Always and forever.”
Regarding him gravely, Inca felt his words. She was afraid of him for some unknown reason, and yet, at the same time, drawn to him just as a moth is driven to dive into the open flame of a campfire. “You are of two worlds, Roan Storm Walker. One foot stands in the white man’s world, the other in the Indian world. Yet you are not a two-heart. Your heart belongs to Mother Earth and all her relations.”
“Judge me by my actions,” he cautioned her. “Not my skin color.”
Inca gazed at him raptly, before she suddenly felt the pull of the jaguar’s warning.
Danger!
“Something is wrong.” Inca was on her feet in an instant. When her spirit guide jaguar gave her such a warning, her life was in danger. “Get up!” she ordered Roan. Running around the stern of the tug, Inca grabbed her rifle.
Roan struggled to his feet. The soft, vulnerable Inca was gone in a heartbeat. Shaken by her sudden change, he stared at her. Secondarily, he felt the stinging, burning heat of the blue stone at the base of his neck throbbing in warning—only he hadn’t felt it until now because he was so taken with Inca.
“What’s wrong? What is it?”
“My guardian has warned me. We are in danger.”
Before Roan could say another word, he heard the heavy, whapping sounds of a helicopter approaching them at high speed. He turned on his heel. Coming up the river, directly at them, was an olive-green, unmarked helicopter. It flew low, maybe fifty feet off the water’s surface. His eyes widened. This was no tourist helicopter like the one he’d seen plying the skies of Manaus earlier. No, this was a helicopter, heavily armed with machine guns and rockets. The lethal look of the dark, swiftly moving aircraft made his heart rate soar with fear.
“Captain Ernesto!” Roan called. Before he could say anything, the blazing, winking lights on the guns carried by the military helicopter roared to life. Roan cursed. He saw two rows of bullets walking toward them like soldiers marching in parallel lines. The tug was right in the middle of the two rows.
“Jump, Ernesto!” Roan roared.
Inca positioned herself against the cockpit. She aimed her rifle at the charging helicopter. The fir
st bullets hit the tug, which shuddered like a wounded bull. Wood splinters exploded. Crashing, whining sounds filled the air. The thick thump, thump, thump of the blades blasted against her ears. Still she held her ground. Aiming carefully, she squeezed off a series of shots. To her dismay, she watched them hit the helicopter and ricochet off.
“Inca! Jump!”
At the urgency of his tone, she jerked a look toward Roan. Before she could say anything, he grabbed her by the arm and threw her into the water.
Choking, Inca went under. She was heavily weighted down with the bandoliers of ammunition she always carried. Panicked, she gripped her rifle. Wild, zinging, whining bullets screamed past her as she floundered, trying to kick her way back up to the surface. Impossible! She had to remain cool. She had to think. Think! If she could not focus, if she could not concentrate, she would drown and she knew it.
Kicking strongly, her booted feet also weighing her down, Inca felt the current grab her. The water was murky and opaque. She could see nothing. Bubbles streamed out her open mouth as she lunged toward the surface.
Where was Inca? Roan looked around as he treaded water. The helicopter was blasting the tug to bits. Ernesto had not gotten off in time. Roan suspected the man did not know how to swim, so he’d stayed with his tug. Jerking at his boots, Roan quickly got rid of them. Inca? Where was she? He saw some bubbles coming to the surface six feet away from him. Taking a deep breath, he dove, knowing she was in trouble. She was too weighted down by the ammo she wore and she’d drown. Damn! Striking out in long, hard strokes, he followed the line of bubbles. There! He saw Inca, a vague shape in the dim, murky water.
Lunging forward, his hand outstretched, Roan gripped her flailing arm. Jerking her hard, he shoved her up past him to the surface.
Morgan's Mercenaries: Heart Of The Warrior Page 7
