River of Eden

by Glenna Mcreynolds

  A smile flickered across his lips. He'd gotten his guns back, by God, and only lost one man doing it. Whatever protection Travers had enjoyed these last couple of years hadn't quite left him, or that giant caiman would have had him for dinner instead of one of Fat Eddie's boat captains.

  Travers had gone after the woman, Fat Eddie knew, and he'd been in a hurry to do it.

  Taking the woman away from him might not be so easy. Guillermo had lied and stolen his way into an early grave for Annie Parrish, and he'd jumped into the Rio Marauiá with a twenty-foot caiman in order to go after her.

  Eddie was beginning to think his old friend was in love, but love wouldn't be enough to save either one of them. It never was. When Eddie got back to his boat, he would radio the band of men he'd left on the Marauiá. They'd had a day to track the pair through the jungle and must be closing in. The woman he would bring to Reino Novo.

  And Guillermo?

  Fat Eddie had told Vargas he was dead, more for Guillermo's sake than his own. He liked the man too much to kill him. Guillermo was no fool, not like the major. Guillermo knew the jurijuri and the brujos. There were times when Eddie wondered if Guillermo was a brujo himself. There was a look he got in his eyes sometimes that reminded Eddie of his father, a brujo from Ecuador. Like Eddie's father, Guillermo had blood on his hands. Not the weak blood of women, like Vargas, but blood rich with power.

  No, Guillermo was not to be underestimated.

  A movement in the tank caught his eye, drawing his attention, and Fat Eddie had to admit that Vargas had gotten himself a fine snake, big and brutish looking, its coloring dark and splotchy, its head blockishly large without any of the delicacy or fineness of the other rain-forest serpents.

  His glance strayed back to Vargas, sizing him up. The snake was big, and the major was a skinny son of a bitch. A good fit, he thought, his face splitting into a big grin.

  Yes, he would be back in a week.

  CHAPTER 20

  Will passed his hand over a circle of burned wood in a rain-forest clearing, feeling the warmth left by the fire. Tutanji and his group were no more than two hours ahead of him, and Fat Eddie's men were still somewhere behind him—and somewhere behind Fat Eddie's men was another group. He'd heard them when he'd circled back to see how many jagunços Eddie had put on his tail. There were fifteen men from Fat Eddie's boats, and the group following the fifteen had sounded much larger than that. Either way, the drainage between the Marauiá and the Cauaburi was getting damned crowded. He looked up at the circle of sky outlined by the canopy trees. It would be dark before he caught up with the Dakú.

  A soft scrabbling in the forest brought his head around, his gaze quickly scanning the perimeter of the clearing. When a paca, a spotted rodent, trotted out of the deepening shadows of the trees and made a beeline for the overgrown gardens, Will looked back to the fire ring.

  He'd been in the camp before… before he'd killed the jaguar and set himself free. He'd lived in the clearing with the Dakú during the first few months after his encounter with the anaconda. He'd done his healing here beneath the peach palms, before they'd all headed farther north.

  He sifted his fingers through the cooling ash before slowly rising to his feet.

  Tutanji was heading north again and had been for the last four days with his band of men and Annie. Will had lost the trail the first night at a stream crossing, but found it again at dawn. Fat Eddie's men hadn't been far behind him then, but had been losing ground ever since. The larger group would be moving even more slowly. He hadn't heard Eddie's men for the last night and a day, but he didn't doubt that they were still there, any more than he doubted the others were still behind the jagunços, tracking them with the same diligence he was using to track the Dakú.

  Marcos was good. Damn good.

  Tutanji was better, but he'd lost his advantage when he'd reached the clearing and taken on women and children.

  Will looked around the area again, noting signs of domestication: manioc gratings on the ground, a half-finished basket woven from palm fronds. The Dakú's women and children had waited here while the men had gone south to get Annie. She must be exhausted by now. It had been a long time since he'd run night and day through the forest. He doubted if Annie had ever had to push so hard.

  It had been even longer since the first time he'd journeyed into the low mountain ranges at the base of the Serra da Neblina, into the lost world where Tutanji's anaconda had found him. The shaman could be taking her there, to the misty headwaters of the rivers.

  It was a land under siege, like all the Amazon, and Will knew Tutanji would go to any lengths to save it from the white man's incursions, even share its secrets with him if that would save it from gold miners' greed and rampant scientific exploration, both of which tore away at the Dakú's way of life, upsetting balances and creating discord. The mere act of observing, however objective the gaze, changed what was observed. Tutanji knew this and had kept his people hidden, a people known only by myth and rumor, until gold had been discovered on the Cauaburi and the demon Corisco Vargas had brought in his hordes of garimpeiros, his diesel-powered engines, his hoses and planes and began tearing up the earth and poisoning the rivers with mercury. No woman was safe from the garimpeiros, no settlement safe from attack. Many of Tutanji's people had already been lost, much of their once rich hunting grounds decimated by the hundreds of miners needing food, the fish-poor black-water rivers giving less every year. Soon there would be nothing but starvation and hardship and disease left in the land between the rivers.

  The wind picked up, rustling through the palms, and with one final look around, he turned back to the trail. The Indians were moving too fast for anybody to be getting any jaguar-bait ideas about her—which was going to save Tutanji a whole lot of trouble when he finally caught up to the old man.

  A tired Annie he could handle. A hurt or raped Annie would make him cruel.

  Annie ran in her dreams, chased through the forest by a thousand demons, purple agoutis with sharp, tearing teeth; bloodred caimans of enormous size, hungry and searching; orange frogs with poisonous skin leaping at her from every direction; scorpions glowing blue underfoot, their tails raised to strike.

  Run. Run. Run.

  She jerked awake in her hammock, her heart racing, ready to flee.

  But the night was not full of demons, only a warm wind and the chirping of tree frogs. All around, the Indians were sleeping under miritisabas, temporary palm-thatched roofs, mothers with babies at their breasts, children snuggled together, men with their wives. Fires burned at regular intervals around the camp. Men guarded the perimeter, some with bows and spears in their hands, others carrying her guns with rounds of ammunition slung across their chests.

  Two men sat by the closest fire, talking in low voices. One was Tutanji, the paint on his legs and arms glowing red in the light of the flames.

  The other was William Sanchez Travers, his blond-streaked hair unmistakable.

  He'd come.

  Relief washed through her in a slow-moving wave, easing the tension from her body.

  He'd come.

  He'd found her.

  Her hand went to the necklace she wore, his necklace. The chunk of quartz was jagged without being sharp.

  The teeth were smooth, weighted around her neck. There had been no snakes in her dreams, no giant anacondas, and no jaguars, only the lesser demons.

  Will had found her, and now everything would be all right.

  Her eyelids, so heavy, drifted back down over her eyes. A sigh left her mouth.

  Everything would be all right… everything would be all right.

  Will glanced over to where Annie slept, checking for himself one more time that she was okay. Being the only towhead for a good five hundred miles, and the only person wearing clothes, she was easy to spot among all the hammocks full of naked Indians. She was also still wearing her fanny pack.

  For himself, he'd long since stripped out of his own clothing, tearing his shirt into a
makeshift sling and stuffing his shorts inside. He'd come to the Dakú as one of their own, with a loincloth strung around his waist and toucan feathers tied into his hair. The transition—as always—had been disturbingly easy, like walking into warm water, making him wonder if he only fooled himself on the river, pretending to be a civilized man, when at heart he'd been claimed forever by the rain forest.

  It had been six months since the last time he'd been with the Indians, too long, perhaps, and he didn't want Tutanji to make any mistake about who and what he still was, the man who had run the shaman's jaguar to ground and cut the cat's fangs out of his skull, the man who had killed the shaman's anaconda. There was blood on his hands, powerful pasuk blood, and Tutanji forgot it at his peril, especially where Annie was concerned.

  “The Dakú do not sell their women,” he said, his voice utterly emotionless, his gaze fixed on the paper Tutanji had given him.

  She looked like hell in the photograph. Even in the poorly made black-and-white copy, he could tell she'd been hit. Her cheek was bruised. What he thought was blood matted her hair, and even though the picture had been cut off just below her shoulders, she didn't seem to be wearing a shirt—details he'd missed in Santa Maria.

  “She is not Dakú,” Tutanji said, the words coming out softened on the edges, the result of many missing teeth.

  “She is mine, and I am Dakú.” He brought his gaze up to meet the old man's. “You have seen the truth of my blood. It is the same as yours.” Through a yagé vision, they had watched their histories twine together, backward to an ancient Dakú ancestor. Neither of them had doubted what they'd seen at the time. Will wasn't going to let the old man doubt it now. When Tutanji had gone looking in the forest for a white devil apprentice, it was not a stranger he'd been looking for—and the shaman knew it.

  “You've had many women on your boat and claimed none of them in all these years.”

  “I have claimed this one.” And a fine mess he'd made of it, losing her on the river to an old friend who wanted to sell her to Corisco Vargas for ten thousand reais. Where in the hell, he wondered, had Tutanji gotten hold of a wanted poster while the ink was practically still wet? Vargas had worked fast. There had been no wanted posters in Barcelos.

  “No, little brother,” the old man disagreed. “No one has claimed this woman. She is still wild.”

  “Wild or not, she is mine,” he said, knowing by Dakú standards Annie was wild. Hell, even by his own standards she was pushing the envelope—not such a bad thing considering that they'd ended up in a camp with a bunch of Indians who had been pushed to the edge of desperation by forces neither their shamans nor their warriors could control.

  That, of course, was where he was supposed to have come in, and a damn lousy job he'd done of it so far. He'd been fooled by the pace of life on the river, fooled into believing time ran on forever and he could take as much as he wanted.

  His glance strayed back to the wanted poster in his hand.

  He'd been wrong. He should have taken care of Vargas a year ago, before the bastard had gotten his hands on a blond-haired Wyoming botanist who'd been minding her own business making the plant find of the century.

  But a year ago, he hadn't known it was Vargas that he wanted. The mine bosses on the Cauaburi had been reporting to a man named Fernando, and the connection between Vargas and Fernando had taken a long time to make—too damn long.

  Without Fat Eddie, he might still be looking.

  “Merda,” he whispered under his breath.

  She hadn't had the scar on her right temple before Yavareté. The fresh wound showed up in the photograph as a black line on her pale, frightened face.

  He forced himself to take a deep breath, looking for a calm that wouldn't be his until Corisco Vargas was dead.

  No shirt.

  Blood on her face.

  Yes. He would kill Vargas.

  “The Dakú have never wanted white man's money or trade goods before,” he said, glancing back up at the old man. “Why now?”

  “Kiri and Wawakin, Shatari and Mete, they are all gone, along with many others. We will buy them back with the money we get for the white woman.” Tutanji spoke in the punctuated rhythms of the Dakú language. “Look around you and see all the missing faces. We hear their cries at night in our dreams, but we cannot find them.”

  Will had already noticed how many people were missing from the tribe, and wondered if they'd stayed at another camp. If they'd truly all been stolen, things had gotten far worse in the last six months than he'd imagined.

  “Buy them back from whom?”

  “The pishtacos,” Tutanji said, using a Quechua word for white men who came into the rain forest and killed Indians to extract their fat. They were a horror to the Dakú, whether they existed or not, and Will wasn't putting any money on it. Not even Corisco Vargas would kill Indians for their slim resources of body fat. There simply wasn't enough to make it worth anybody's while. Anybody who wanted human fat would be better off in Manaus, lying in wait on the Praça de Matriz.

  “Pishtacos? Or garimpeiros?” he asked.

  “Are they not one and the same?” Tutanji said. “They raid. They steal. They kill. Then they run to their motored boats and fly up the rivers with our people in chains.”

  “Where do they go?”

  “To the mines. A Tukano man saw many Indians and caboclos at the Cauaburi mines. A hundred, he said, Tukano, Desana, Dakú, Yanomani. The mine bosses work them until they are broken, the women in their whorehouses and the men in the pits, then they put them in cages, cages built around a small gold mountain.”

  The altar at Reino Novo. Nothing Tutanji could have said could have alarmed him more. A hundred caged Indians and caboclos, Corisco Vargas, and the Night of the Devil were a combination for disaster of nightmarish possibilities.

  Sweet Jesus, what was the man thinking of doing?

  “The dark moon is coming, little brother,” the shaman went on. “The woman may be our only hope. Ten thousand reais will buy many people and keep them from being slaves.”

  “No.” He pinned the shaman with his gaze, fearing far worse than slavery for the captives and Annie. “Vargas wants the woman for herself. The money he's offering means nothing to him. He won't trade or sell Indians for her.”

  Tutanji stabbed at the fire with the stick, his face set in grim lines. “No, brother. In this you are wrong. All white men want money. They tear the world apart and burn down the forest for money. This is true.” He stabbed the fire again, raising a shower of sparks, his voice rough with the forceful expulsion of his words. “I speak the truth.”

  It was true, but it wasn't the only truth.

  “And all men want power,” Will said. “There is power in sacrifice, in a man killing his enemies. The woman is the enemy of Corisco Vargas, the demon who takes our ancestors' gold, the demon who has stolen the Dakú and Yanomani, the Tukano and Desana. He will not give up the Indians or her for money, not when he already makes himself rich on Dakú gold.”

  He held the old man's gaze as his words sank in, watching the subtle play of emotions on the weathered and lined face. The shaman had magic, powerful magic in the Otherworld, but Vargas was in this world. It was why the shaman had taken Will that long-ago night.

  With a grunt, Tutanji looked away.

  “Can you take me to where they keep their boats?” he asked.

  “Yes. It is a long day from here. Two with the women and children.”

  “Then send them north with the warriors.” They didn't have time for women and children. “We will go alone.”

  “And the white-haired woman?” the old man asked.

  “She's mine,” he said succinctly. “She goes where I go.”

  The old man accepted his ultimatum with a sage nod. “The sucuri left your boat. It was best that I brought her with us, even if we don't get the money. She wasn't safe alone.”

  Hell, she wasn't safe anywhere, Will thought, and certainly not where she was now, practically in
Vargas's lap with Fat Eddie's men and God knew who else on their trail. He'd tried to get her out of it, but he was beginning to believe that in some inescapable way, Annie was as much a part of what was happening as he was—an unpalatable truth confirmed by Tutanji's next words.

  “I recognized her, you know, when I saw her on your boat.”

  “Recognized her?”

  “From before, when she was here and killed the monkey. She is wild, this woman you have taken, with a spirit anaconda of her own. She needs much working on.” Tutanji stabbed the fire again, and more sparks rose into the night.

  Unlike most tribes, the Dakú were truly nomadic. If Annie had spent any time at all on the Cauaburi when she'd collected her orchid, it was likely that they had known about her.

  But Will was more interested in what else the old man had said.

  “She has a spirit anaconda?”

  “Yes. She is wawekratin, a sorceress, I think. It could have been her snake on your boat all this time.”

  Nonplussed, Will could only stare. “I thought it was your snake on the Sucuri all this time.”

  The old man looked up from the fire, surprised. “You killed my snake, little brother. Don't you remember?”

  Of course he did, but sorcery and the metaphysical Otherworld always left him a little short of firm footing. The snake he'd killed had been real—powerful, bloody, and real. And the snake on his boat had been more of a vision, albeit one he'd never seen for himself. The way he understood things, their different corporeal states didn't necessarily make them mutually exclusive.

  Obviously, he'd been wrong, which left him to wonder why Annie's snake had been on his boat these last two years, protecting him, and why it had left just when the two of them needed protecting the most—questions he was unlikely to get answered anytime soon.

  “Why didn't you wait for me at the boat?” He was curious to know. “You must have known I would return.”

  “I did wait for you.” If anything, the shaman seemed a bit affronted by the question. “Didn't you see me there in the water, making all the noise and distracting your enemies?”