The Canopy

by Angela Hunt

  If this wasn’t reality, it was a pretty clever counterfeit. But if these things were real—if she really had descended the tree with a mysteriously healed patient—then something had skewed reality and defied the laws of nature and science.

  If Shaman’s Wife had experienced a genuine cure through the perfect mix of sunlight, elevation, biological elements, and whatever else her cursed disease demanded, Alex should have been cured, too.

  “Why w-w-wasn’t I?”

  Hugging her knees, she curled into a tight ball, then knocked her fist against her head. Why hadn’t the cure affected her? Kenway swore it had healed Ya-ree, the natives of this village declared that it worked even for their children, and it had rejuvenated a woman only hours away from death. Yet Alex was far weaker than she had been, for the exertion of the climb had severely taxed her remaining strength.

  She didn’t need to examine the waistband of her trousers to know she had lost three inches of badly needed fat reserves from her waistline. Her illness was eating her alive, just like . . . Shakespeare’s sailor.

  She dipped into the well of memory and came up with a scene from Macbeth, quoted from the lips of Janice Williams, the spectacled professor who had captivated her in English Literature. Closing her eyes, Alex could hear Professor Williams’s crackling voice as she recited the curse Shakespeare’s three witches placed upon a sailor:

  I will drain him dry as hay:

  Sleep shall neither night nor day

  Hang upon his pent-house lid;

  He shall live a man forbid:

  Weary se’nnights nine times nine

  Shall he dwindle, peak and pine. . .

  If Kenway was right and God did control the universe, then the Almighty had cursed her, denying her sleep and condemning her to dwindle, peak, and pine until nothing but a spent shell remained. But that same God had chosen to heal a primitive, illiterate woman who had probably done nothing more significant in her lifetime than bear a couple of children.

  “Why did she d-d-deserve healing,” Alex asked the air, “while I didn’t?”

  The question brought a hushed silence to the shabono. The children playing nearby stopped laughing; an old woman who had wandered in to tend the fire lifted her head and looked in Alex’s direction. She might have spoken, but her attention was distracted by a sharp cry from the field outside.

  Paralyzed by weariness, Alex watched as the woman tensed, then hurried toward the exit.

  An impulse of alarm shot up Alex’s spine as the silence filled with women’s screams and the cry of angry men. A primal instinct propelled her to her feet and compelled her to follow the woman who had fled the roundhouse.

  Where was Caitlyn?

  After stumbling through the alana in a blind panic, Alex reached the opening and stared in horror at the scene beyond. White-painted warriors fringed the fields, bows and arrows and clubs in hand. The shaman of the Angry People stood in the center of the advancing warriors, his fist wound in the hair of a native child who hung lifeless from his grip. Thumping his free hand against his painted chest, he lifted his face to the sky and cried out a challenge.

  Alex glanced left and right, but Caitlyn was nowhere in sight. “Oh God, help!” Dropping to her hands and knees, she crawled through the grasses toward a group of children who had taken refuge behind a stand of banana trees.

  Peering through the long, drooping leaves, Alex watched as Alejandro Delmar stepped into the field to answer the chief ’s challenge. His iron hand encircled the wrist of Shaman’s Wife, who wept with every step, digging her heels into the ground and flailing uselessly as she resisted.

  Alex lifted her head as high as she dared, searching for the other members of her team. Corpses littered the field, the brown bodies of a woman and children who had been dancing only moments before. The woman seemed to be leaning on nothing but air; then Alex realized that six or seven arrows had pin-cushioned her chest and now held her partially aloft.

  She could see no one else from her group—perhaps they had all fled at the first sign of attack. The warriors of Keyba Village had disappeared like shadows, but she knew they had to be watching and waiting nearby.

  Delmar called to the enemy, then the vengeful shaman lifted his arm. The green wall of foliage parted and Deborah Simons appeared, her clothing torn and her hands bound together. She stumbled as if she had been pushed, then blinked in the strong sunlight and lifted her head.

  “Come,” Delmar called. “It has been arranged.”

  Alex’s heart twisted as Deborah limped forward with stiff dignity. Bruising had mottled the woman’s clear complexion; one eyelid sagged over a purple cheekbone. One sleeve of her blouse had been ripped away; the exposed arm glistened wetly with blood.

  Though she radiated bleakness, Deborah’s tormented face seemed to soften as she approached Shaman’s Wife. Her trembling lips parted in what might have been the beginning of a smile had she not winced and closed her mouth around bloody gums.

  When Deborah reached Delmar, the guide touched her shoulder, then strode forward, dragging the shaman’s woman toward the invaders. The shaman came forward to take his protesting wife, then held her while two warriors bound her wrists. Finally he brandished his fist at Delmar, then turned to lead his weeping wife away.

  “Deborah!” Emboldened by the exchange, Alex lifted her head. “Over here!”

  Sobbing in relief, Deborah stumbled forward. As Bancroft and Kenway materialized from behind a stand of plantains and rushed toward her, an arrow sailed out of the jungle.

  Alex tilted her head as she heard the sound of a knife entering a ripe melon, then realized she had heard the arrow strike.

  Deborah fell to her knees, her mouth opening. For an instant her forehead knit in puzzlement, then she pitched forward into the grass. Kenway cried out; Bancroft shouted a bloodcurdling oath, and the Angry People vanished into the rainforest.

  “Mom!”

  Alex turned to see Caitlyn leap up from her hiding place in the grass. “Cait?”

  She reached out and pulled her weeping daughter into a close embrace, patting her back and murmuring the only phrase that came immediately to mind: “Don’t cry. We’re all right.”

  Caitlyn’s grip was like iron, her arms locked against Alex’s spine. “Mom, I want to go home.”

  “So do I, sweetie. S-s-so do I.”

  The carnage had not ended with the departure of the Angry People. As the natives of Keyba Village gathered their dead, a group of warriors returned with another body they had discovered on the trail. They laid the corpse at Michael Kenway’s feet.

  Shaman’s Wife.

  Delmar snorted when he recognized the face. “Stupid thing wouldn’t cooperate,” he said, propping his hands on his hips. “No man wants a woman who doesn’t want him. She brought dishonor to her man by resisting.”

  Feeling as though her knees had turned to water, Alex sank to the ground as Kenway knelt by the woman’s body. She had not been cut, but bruises marked her neck.

  Somehow Alex found her voice. “Strangulation?”

  Pinching the bridge of his nose, Kenway nodded. “I’ve seen this type of marking once before, in Iquitos. A drunken man came home and threw his wife to the ground, then placed a broom across her throat and stood on it.”

  He sat in silence for a moment, then drew a deep breath and turned to Emma Whitmore, who had approached with a look of shock on her face. “You know their burial customs?”

  She nodded. “I think so.”

  “Will you help me tend to her? She has no family in this tribe.”

  Alex pushed herself up from the ground. “I’ll h-h-help, too.”

  Emma nodded toward Bancroft. “I think someone needs to help him. Kenway, if you and Olsson can construct the funeral biers, we’ll prepare the bodies.”

  Following the example of the Keyba villagers, Kenway, Olsson, and Baklanov constructed elevated burial platforms from vines and branches. As Emma helped the distraught Bancroft tend to Deborah Simons, Alex
washed mud from the native woman’s face, then fingercombed her long, tangled hair. Caitlyn wanted to help, but Alex sent her away to comfort the children who wandered through the scene of carnage. Their mothers were helping with the funeral biers, pausing occasionally to scoop up handfuls of sand and drizzle them over their heads and shoulders as they keened the dreadful ululation of mourning.

  The natives’ grief was difficult to witness, but Alex had to particularly steel herself to the heart-rending sound of Bancroft’s weeping. Odd, that a former Navy SEAL could feel so much and so deeply for a woman he’d known only a few days. Then again, love was a strange little monster. . .

  A few moments later she looked up to see Bancroft crossing the field with large strides, his jaw set in determination. He walked directly toward the shaman, who was kneeling in the grass as he helped the men lash poles together for the funeral biers.

  “Why?” Bancroft shouted, apparently thinking he could penetrate the shaman’s understanding by the sheer volume of his voice. “Where were your sentinels? How did the Angry People slip by your guards?”

  The shaman blinked at Bancroft as Delmar hurried to intervene in what had the potential to become a messy altercation.

  As Bancroft threw back his head and jacked his fists to his hips, the Indian tracker stuttered out a translation.

  The shaman stood, his head bowed, then spoke slowly and clearly, his voice carrying to the edge of the field. Alex caught Emma’s eye, hoping for some clue as to what he was saying, but the anthropologist only shook her head.

  “He said there were no guards because all the people were celebrating,” Delmar answered. “To honor the Spirit of keyba, they must all celebrate when someone is healed.”

  “The Spirit is flat-out stupid, then,” Bancroft muttered. “Why would he have them celebrate when an enemy is practically upon them?”

  Delmar cast Bancroft an uncertain look, then interpreted the question. The shaman closed his eyes and nodded slightly, then spoke, his hands lifting as he looked to the kapok tree.

  “He understands your sorrow,” Delmar said, “but he says the Angry People are no more threat than annoying gnats. The greater danger lies in not celebrating the Spirit of keyba’s goodness.”

  The Brazilian tracker placed his hand on Bancroft’s arm. “Let it go, Bancroft. It is finished.”

  Bancroft turned and walked toward Alex, his eyes red. Sensing his discomfort, she shifted her gaze to the grass, granting the man a measure of privacy. It would be hard for a man of action to accept that he had been helpless and unprepared during a moment of attack, but Delmar was right. They could not undo the past.

  Kenway and Baklanov had just finished elevating the funeral biers when Alex’s mind, numbed by the day’s horror and her own weariness, exploded into sharp awareness. “Emma,” she said, tugging at the anthropologist’s sleeve, “when will they light the f-f-funeral fires?”

  Emma glanced around, then shook her head. “I can’t say, Alex. Probably near sunset.”

  Biting her lip, Alex followed Kenway, who had gone for water.

  “Kenway,” she said, watching him fill a gourd from a clay pot, “we’re m-m-missing the obvious.”

  He hesitated, the gourd halfway to his lips. “What do you mean?”

  “Brain tissue from Shaman’s Wife. If we could examine it, we would know for certain if what she had was kuru or some other prion disease. Knowing that, we’d know if her cure was genuine.”

  He sipped from the dipper, keeping his eyes on her, then lowered it. “I can’t believe you, Alexandra. First you doubt her cure; now you doubt her disease.”

  “One night in a tree fort can’t cure a prion disease.”

  “But it did. You saw the evidence yourself.”

  “It can’t. So she must have been suffering from something else, maybe even some psychosomatic disorder. She was cured because she believed she’d be cured.”

  Kenway gave her a hard eye, and from his expression she gathered that he thought she’d taken leave of her senses. “That’s a load of codswallop.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Dr. Pace,” he crossed his arms, “may I remind you of what you said to me not so many days ago? Consider the principle of Occam’s razor—when two theories compete, the simpler is more likely to be correct. The simplest explanation for what happened in the tree is that Shaman’s Wife was healed, just as the natives said she would be.”

  Alex clenched her fingers, resisting the urge to throttle him. “But that’s scientifically impossible. If the result we witnessed was a genuine restoration of health, I should have been affected, too. So we need a sample of the woman’s brain tissues—”

  “No.” He dropped the gourd back into the pot, then crossed his arms. “I’d love to humor you, but we haven’t the tools necessary for an autopsy.”

  “Couldn’t we—”

  “Absolutely not. You are not taking this woman’s head, nor her brain, nor any part of her. She deserves a decent rest among people who appreciated her.” His tone softened as he looked into her eyes. “We failed her, Alex—she was a person, not a case study, and we used her as a pawn in our experiment. Even if we could get a sample—which we can’t, not in these conditions—I’ll not use her as a specimen.”

  “You used Ya-ree.”

  “He had no family. These people have adopted this woman, and they wouldn’t understand.”

  Alex swallowed hard, her cheeks blazing as though a flame had seared them. He was right, of course. Perhaps they did owe Shaman’s Wife a measure of dignity. Besides, any brain tissue they might collect would deteriorate long before they reached civilization.

  Still . . . the researcher in her could not help regretting an opportunity lost.

  Several hours later, all of the dead—seven, by Alex’s count—had been arranged in a circle in the center of the field. As the shaman chanted and the women keened, somber warriors set fires beneath each pyre.

  Within their group, a red-eyed Bancroft clasped his hands and stared straight ahead at nothing while Kenway led their team in a memorial prayer for Deborah Simons. Because it would have been rude to ignore him, Alex bowed her head and tried to hold a positive thought for the woman who should have listened to her brain, not her heart. Deborah had sacrificed herself, and for what? She was dead, the shaman’s woman was dead, and so many innocents had been murdered, including some of the children Caitlyn had entertained.

  Wrapped in dire thoughts, Alex watched silently as the flames consumed the bodies. What if the healing they all witnessed had been entirely psychosomatic? Eventually the disease would have triumphed, but after exposure to the sun and whatever biological elements existed in the canopy, Shaman’s Wife’s brain might have produced psychotropic agents that somehow compensated for the effects of the disease. Kenway’s Iquitos patient might have experienced the same effect. These genuinely-diseased natives could “walk the tree” and experience natural euphoria at the sight of a sunrise over the rim of the earth. This remarkable rapture, combined with their religion, cosmology, and naturally-occurring elements found in the kapok canopy, might provoke a psychosomatic effect that enabled them to transcend the disease for a few hours or even days. . .

  Her nerves tightened as imponderables shifted in her brain like an uncooperative Rubik’s cube. Why hadn’t the canopy experience affected her? Because she knew a canopy sunrise, while extraordinary, resulted from the earth spinning on its axis and not the arrival of a great spirit. Though the beauty of the sun’s advent had moved her— perhaps biochemicals in the tree had affected her to some extent—her thought processes were too advanced to be influenced as Shaman’s Wife had been.

  She rested her chin on her fist, biting her knuckle as she considered the theory. As a scientific hypothesis, it would hold little merit without supporting data, but for now this latest premise seemed downright logical. The stuffy researchers who published papers for the leading scientific journals might scoff to think something as basic as a sunrise could
induce hysterical healing, but they had not walked in this jungle, witnessed the fervency of these people, or spent an eternal night in a nest that served to make a human feel small and insignificant.

  Her eyes sought and found Kenway, who stood with Caitlyn among the villagers watching the fires. Closing her eyes, Alex breathed in the searing scent of burning flesh and knew she would never forget this day or this odor.

  She hated knowing that her daughter would share this memory.

  20 APRIL 2003

  4:39 P.M.

  As Michael watched the shadows stretch across what had become a burial ground, he realized that he had never experienced such a range of emotions in a single day. The morning had begun with wonder and celebration; evening would fall on a people shattered by violence and grief.

  Caitlyn Pace held his hand as they stood with the other villagers around the funeral pyres. The shaman, still chanting, dropped an armload of dry twigs and leaves on one reluctant fire, sending a volcano of sparks into the deepening sky.

  “Will they come back, do you think?” Caitlyn’s voice had gone thin and reedy.

  “I think not.” He tightened his grip on her hand. “They got what they came for.”

  Her chin quivered. “Shaman’s Wife, you mean?”

  He nodded.

  “I wouldn’t have wanted to go with them, either. So I guess I’d be dead, too.”

  “Caitlyn.” Turning, he pressed his hands to her shoulders, then knelt to look her in the eye. “You don’t know what sort of plan God has for your life. You can’t waste time worrying about things that may never happen. You are special. And you can rest knowing your mum would never let anything like that happen to you. She’d give up her own life first.”

  The girl considered his answer, then cast him a look of helpless appeal. “My mom is sick, you know. She tries to pretend she isn’t, but I know how bad off she is.” She stared steadily at Michael, with only a single quiver of her chin to suggest the depth of her fear. “It’s the same disease that took my grandmother, I think. The disease Mom is working to stop.”