by Zach Neal
Temple of the Jaguar God
Zach Neal
Copyright 2016 Zach Neal and Long Cool One Books
Design: J. Thornton
Original cover image by z-m-k, Wiki Commons.
ISBN 978-1-927957-99-8
The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person living or deceased, or to any places or events, is purely coincidental. Names, places, settings, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. The author’s moral rights to the proceeds of this work have been asserted.
Table of Contents
Act One
Act Two
Act Three
About Zach Neal
Temple of the Jaguar God
Zach Neal
Act One
They were in the sixth form at Rugby. The end of term was coming up fast.
Richard Hamble, a year older, threw the letter down. He stared off into space.
“What an extraordinary fellow.”
They’d been having a bit of a nosh-up in the privacy of Jeremy’s room. The two of them had pooled all kinds of hoarded private tucker when Hamble, always with his nose into everything, scooped up what was another fellow’s private and personal mail. He was a big, hulking fellow with a heart of gold. Jeremy was grateful for his odd friendship—and a bit of protection.
“Floreat Rugbeia. Yes, he really did say that.” Hamble shook his head in disgust at the fancy, monogrammed letterhead. “Fellow of the Royal Society, member of the Explorer’s Club.”
Throwing his feet up on the coffee table, he stuck his hands into his waistcoat pockets in a characteristic pose.
“Hah.”
Hamble was from a family of genteel county aristocracy, at least to hear him tell it, up Shropshire way. He could be, or beat on a ruffian whenever he wanted to, which was as often as he thought no one was looking and he could get away with it. Not so much evil, as amusing, thought Jeremy. And why not. Other than school, this part of the world—Rugby School in Warwickshire, was as boring as any other place he’d ever been.
Uncle Harry, Doctor Harold C. Fawcett, Ph.D., was an alumni of their good old alma mater. Not that Jeremy Crowe was so fond of it. Not hardly, always with the low grades, and not a snow-ball’s chance of shining at either the letters or the games. If it wasn’t for Uncle Harry, Jeremy wouldn’t even be there. The financial support was more than welcome. Otherwise he would have had to go out and muck and toil for his livelihood, something Jeremey wasn’t all that enthused about. He was still young enough to dream of better things.
Harry was his mother’s younger brother and had made his name quite young, with a fortunate dig in Mesopotamia.
To be good at games was everything, but sweat and strain as he might, run like hell after the ball, bigger fellows, not all of them older men, made him look decidedly sick.
“And he’s a doctor?”
“Yes. Of a sort.”
“Are you going?”
Jeremy raised his eyebrows.
“Egads. I hadn’t really thought all that much about it—” There was that family connection, and some sense of obligation.
Which was something he’d always hated.
“Well, you’d better make up your mind. Pretty damned quick, old cock.”
“Yes! I suppose I should.” Jeremy raised the tea cup and drained it.
Hungry as always, no matter how much he ate, it never seemed to translate onto his lanky five-foot, eight-inch frame.
Flipping longish blond hair out of his right eye, Jeremy picked up the letter and read that last part again.
“Wire me soonest. Will provide money and tickets. We leave from Southampton on the ninth. You have to do something for the summer holidays and this is the opportunity for a little adventure. Yours, your Weird Uncle Harry.”
He sighed, deeply. The thoughts of another long and lonely summer at home in Norfolk drained all resistance. Stuffy country society versus the Spanish Main—or so it seemed. Yet at one time he might have looked forward to it, but most of his friends had moved on as well. That was one side of the coin.
There was another—
His mother fussing around, all things great and small, and his father’s evil eye upon him.
Disapproval, questions, what is your big plan in life young man—
Hmn.
Perhaps not—
Harry was at least fun.
The bugger always had been.
“Huh. I suppose there’s nothing else for it.”
Venezuela—some sort of mad archaeological expedition.
The Temple of the Jaguar God.
And why not?
Why not indeed.
Harry always had been his favourite uncle.
Last Christmas, the last time he’d been around the manor, Jeremy’s facetious name for his father’s rectory, he’d been spouting Lewis Carroll.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.”
One thing he knew for sure—his father would always be poor.
If he wasn’t careful, so would Jeremy.
Whereas Uncle Harry seemed to have the knack of doing whatever he wanted.
“Venezuela, you say. Hmn.”
***
After the cooling breezes and azure seas of the crossing, and they had been lucky to have good weather for that, the jungle clad hills and olive waters of the Orinoco were a stark contrast. So was the heat. As the old steamer chugged along, painfully wheezing its way upstream, there was little to do but to try and stay cool and get to know the other members of the party.
The stout and sweaty Señor Hernandez owned the boat they were on, skippered by a bald-headed, fiercely mustachioed captain constantly chewing on an unlit cigar. He was a small, slender man with a wide round head. For some reason no one could quite catch the name, no matter how many times they asked. The captain’s nephew, a boy about a year younger than he, Paolo, was the only other hand apparently required for what was almost a small ship.
There was his uncle, of course, looking raffish in a newly-sprouted beard and a bush jacket with an incongruous straw hat of local manufacture. Khaki shorts with a hundred pockets, Argyll socks and desert boots. A monocle on the right eye and a watch-chain hanging. That was his uncle, all right.
William Syrmes, about thirty-five years old, was his uncle’s secretary and trained in archaeological documentation. He would be doing drawings and cataloguing of artifacts as well as being in charge of the digging. If in fact they found anything. He was still young enough to be boyish still, in spite of his height.
It struck Jeremy that he was there to dig. All expenses paid, of course.
Syrmes had broad shoulders, a bull neck and looked like a handy lad in a pinch.
This was even more so regarding Kevin Smith although he was shorter. Uncle Harry had introduced him as a former soldier. He’d been at the Somme. This one had a couple of scars on his upper lip. Long and rangy, there was slouch in the walk that belied the steel-grey eyes.
His role was guide and adv
enturer. He was being paid very well for his time, which was sort of unique among them.
Apparently he’d been up the river before on unspecified errands. In Jeremy’s opinion it had to be either gold or gems…something to do with poaching perhaps. Selling guns and whiskey to the natives, although he might have been thinking of a different frontier.
This was all his own imagination, but.
This one could look after himself.
Gerald Day, impeccably dressed, always the perfect gentleman, was paying his own way as he put it. There was a bit of family money there. With an interest in antiquities and primitive South American peoples in particular, he was an occasional journalist.
With no real need to work, he had described it as a kind of vanity. Jeremy hadn’t actually seen any of his work, but that meant nothing.
He and Uncle Harry had some sort of gentlemen’s agreement on an exclusive, whether or not they ever found anything. Venezuela, and especially the hinterland, was like the other side of the moon to the average reader. According to Mister Day, a certain kind of person ate up a certain kind of sensationalized adventure.
Jeremy had nothing better to do than listen.
Most interesting of all, were Mister and Mrs. O’Dell. An American millionaire, thickening up in the middle according to him, easily late fifties or early sixties, Peter was a collector. He was looking forward to the thrill of discovering evidence and proving the existence of an unknown people and culture. This was rumoured to exist in the high hills a hundred miles inland. It would make his name as he put it. His wife, Melody, quite a bit younger, was the most perfectly decorative woman Jeremy had seen in quite some time. Yet there was the spark of a deeper intelligence in behind those quiet eyes, and it was interesting to note the sick thrill when he caught her examining him in some kind of assessment, possibly even amusement.
Hopefully he didn’t appear too callow in her eyes, although he knew he was young, very young.
Especially when she looked at him like that—
That didn’t necessarily make him a fool.
So far, nothing much had happened, other than being sleepless from hot steamy nights, queasy from sleeping on a boat, always in motion, bitten by bugs, afraid to drink the water, and almost afraid of going ashore at all. Not after seeing the biggest snake in the world poke its head up and then swim along, outpacing the boat on her port side and then disappearing into the low, overhanging branches and into the dappled green shadows where land presumably met water at some mysterious and unknown point.
Once he’d seen a half a dozen crocodiles, sunning themselves on a sandbar, and heard one or two stories of unknown creatures taking people in the night, he’d been pretty much convinced. He’d seen some very large spiders, and those were in a hotel room in Caracas. They were all over the boat as well.
The jungle was a place of disease, blood-sucking bats, foot-fungus, dysentery and uncivilized tribes, some of whom had not yet been discovered.
***
Jeremy had to marvel. London to Southampton to New York, New York to Caracas. Local steamer east again, then down to Guyana City, after threading the maze that was the Orinoco Delta. Days at sea, days on a coastal steamer. Days aboard the Paloma, her shallow draft designed for river travel, and now he stood on the red, gravel soil of the riverbank.
It was a completely different world and he knew nothing of it.
Unfamiliar birds and possibly monkeys screeched unseen in the trees overhead. Insects buzzed and hummed. Sweat trickled down.
It never seemed to stop and after a while one stopped worrying about it. Your socks and your underwear were never completely dry.
The village of Buena Vista, population maybe fifteen hundred, wasn’t much to look at. Now, they were going up the Rio Cuao, by motor-canoe, and after that, overland to the area where the temple of the Jaguar god was said to exist, at least in those legends that the doctor had heard and so had Mister Smith.
And it really was another world, where you could hire native bearers and boatmen for what seemed like pennies for a day’s work. It was brutally hard work, from dawn until dusk. They seemed cheerful enough for all of that.
Mister Smith was now satisfied with the loading and that they hadn’t missed anything. There was nothing where they were going—nothing. They would have to make do with what they had, which seemed pretty extensive in Jeremy’s observation. All of the dockside piles were aboard.
The labour had been paid, but they seemed in no hurry to leave.
They were all standing there watching.
“All right, lady and gentlemen—all aboard who’s coming along.”
With that, Smith stepped off the primitive wooden dock and carefully made his way to a place by the motor and the chief or whatever, the man in charge of this boat and their small native party.
They jibber-jabbered back and forth as Mister Smith pulled out his pipe and idly began filling it.
Someone pulled hard on a rope and the motor sputtered into life.
***
With his uncle in the second boat, for whatever reason Jeremy preferred to ride in the first boat, right up front in the prow. There was a brief estuary and then they wound their way upriver. It was fascinating to watch Mister Smith, totally confident in his abilities and in those of the natives, to whom he seemed like an uncle or something. He was that good, putting an arm around the shoulders of someone he was talking to, and handling the language like a native himself.
Other than Paolo, he was the only one of the party that could speak it. The natives didn’t seem to know what personal space was, and Smith was pretty good with hugs, and pats on the shoulder, even holding hands with the more affectionate. There was something charming in the innocence of the local tribesmen. They were like very dangerous children, according to Smith.
Whatever it took to get the job done. He was the only one other than Paolo to speak the native language, derived from Carib presumably. It was impressive, to see how dark, narrow and overgrown the Cuao was compared to the Orinoco. The Orinoco was a great river in every sense of the word, miles wide in some places. This little creek closed in rapidly, in a most oppressive fashion, yet there was said to be eighty or a hundred miles of this.
It was hard to believe they could keep going. Going by their rather skimpy maps, showing little more than a couple of prominent elevations and the winding blue line of the river itself, it appeared to go east, and then turn north again, with a line of big hills eventually appearing on the right. Everything else was a sea of green, on the map and in present reality both. This is where it would get really challenging, according to Smith. They had to find the correct fork.
After that, it was all over land, all uphill, and all unknown tribes and perhaps other hazards as well. The jungle was anything but friendly, according to him, something Jeremy had already figured out for himself. Within the first five miles, they had to stop twice to cut dead trees blocking the channel. The river only got narrower. What looked simple on a map was not going to be easy.
Knowing there were piranhas in there, it was a bit of a revelation to see the native men leap out with axe and saw and begin cutting. They were always laughing and chewing on something mysterious. With enough hands and strong, willing backs, the boats were dragged over every obstacle.
You only needed to see one big set of cat-tracks. Or see one big croc, going up to twenty-two feet. It was no joke. You wouldn’t sleep in a tent very well for a long, long time after.
Another complication was the need to take the left fork at exactly the right place. With sluggish sloughs and dark tunnels of water coming in regularly on each side, and a few small islands in the channel, this would be a bit of a headache. It was difficult to get good navigational fixes with the sun, the stars and the moon pretty much obscured at all times by triple-canopy rain forest growing hundreds of feet straight up on banks that were but a few yards away.
A small patch of blue sky was a rarity and the light was going anyways.
&nbs
p; Sooner or later they would have to stop for the night.
His guts churned at the thought. Sleeping, their first night in the jungle…
There was nowhere else to be.
He was committed.
***
They had all agreed, those who had an opinion. They had hit their fork and this was the correct branch of the river.
At times, the boat scraped the sides.
The air was very hot and very still.
They could go no further, the river was just too small.
Thirty or forty yards inland, they found a nice level spot and the natives began the process of unloading.
This would be their first base camp.
If the ocean crossing had been boring, if the trip upriver had been hot and interminable, if the Rio Cuao had been one big knot of tension in the gut for a full three days, then hacking their way overland was going to be something out of Dante’s Inferno.
According to Uncle Harry, one had to start somewhere.
It was morning.
It was already insufferably hot. It wasn’t even seven a.m. The buzz of insects never left them.
Things were always biting.
There was a rustle as tent-flaps were undone.
“Good lord.”
“Ah. Good morning, Uncle.”
With hot water brought in and a private tent, Uncle Harry was freshly shaved and scrubbed.
Jeremy bit his lip in amusement. Mrs. O’Dell, wearing about the smallest bathing suit that could legally be sold outside of a Hollywood glamour catalogue, was sensually draped across a thick blanket laid out in the only patch of sun that managed to make it in down from above.
