Naamah's Blessing (43 page)

“Why didn’t you accompany the Dauphin, my lord Shahrizai?”
Mathieu de Montague asked with curiosity. “It seems you knew him so very well.”

Balthasar smiled wryly. “Cowardice.”

Bao scoffed.

“I don’t think anyone’s going to believe that excuse anymore, my lord Balthasar,” I observed.

He shrugged. “All right. Mayhap I’m not a coward, but I like my comfort and luxury. I don’t mind a stiff challenge so long as at the end of the day, there’s a hot bath and silken sheets, and some pretty lad or lass begging for sweet discipline. Thierry knew that about me. He never expected me to go.”

“Do you suppose he ever imagined you’d come after him?” Mathieu asked.

Balthasar laughed with genuine amusement. “No.” He ran one hand over his sweat-streaked, grimy face, flicking his fingers with disgust. “No, I think Thierry de la Courcel will be surprised as hell to see me when we find him.”

“If we find him,” someone on the far side of the fire muttered.

“
When
we find him,” Balthasar corrected him. He glanced at me. “He’s still alive, right?”

I stared into the dusk falling over the savannah, the trackless sea of grass rippling in the evening breeze. I wished we’d had a confirmed sighting to assure us we were on the right path; and I wished that Jehanne had returned to my dreams to tell me once more that her step-son lived, or give me any kind of guidance.

Bao nudged me. “Right, Moirin?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Without a doubt.”

FORTY-SEVEN

W
e marched across the savannah.

Our gratitude at having reached dry land with ample grazing soon gave way to frustration at the lack of drinking water. Eyahue had cautioned us to conserve our stores, but he hadn’t fully reckoned on the needs of our pack-horses, being unaccustomed to taking them into consideration.

At every stream and drinking hole, we drank our fill and refilled our waterskins, doling out the contents parsimoniously to men and horses alike on the long stretches in between. Onward we marched beneath a broiling sun, throats parched and dry. Eyahue taught us the trick of holding pebbles in our mouths to generate saliva.

“Keep going, keep going! You’ll have plenty of water on the river.” The old
pochteca
chortled. “More than you ever wanted!”

On the tenth day, one of our pack-horses foundered. We had done our best to tend to the horses, but this one had developed an infection in the frog of its hoof on the left foreleg after slogging through the swamp, and it had only worsened over the course of the journey. When it began to limp too badly to keep pace with our caravan, we made the decision to put it down.

The Jaguar Knight Temilotzin did the deed, cutting the big vein that pulsed alongside the pack-horse’s neck with a keen-edged obsidian dagger. The horse sank to its knees and toppled slowly
onto its side, its eyes rolling in what looked like relief, bleeding profusely into the grass. Its sides rose and fell several times, and then went still.

We butchered it and ate the meat. We redistributed its load among the men and continued onward. And we still had no confirmation that the Dauphin’s party had passed this way.

“What if they misread the map?” I asked Eyahue. “What if they missed the river?”

He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter if they read the map wrong. Sooner or later, they will meet the river.”

And sooner or later, we did, too.

Even as the swamp had given way to savannah, the savannah gave way to the jungle once more.

There were signs of cultivation on the outskirts of the jungle. It was Brice de Bretel who let go a startled cry, pointing. “Look!”

At a glance, it seemed an unremarkable sight. One of the local inhabitants was tilling a field, walking behind the patiently plodding horse that drew his rough-hewn plow, the fellow’s strong hands gripping the handles as the two-pronged wooden plow dug furrows in the earth. I had to look twice before it struck me.

His
horse
.

There were no horses native to Terra Nova, and the Aragonians hadn’t explored this far. There was only one explanation for it: Thierry’s party had been here before us.

“Do you suppose we’ve found them?” someone asked nervously. “Or… what became of them?”

I asked Eyahue what he thought.

“No,” he said dismissively. “I know these people. I speak their tongue. They are peaceful farmers and fishers.” He pointed toward the jungle. “The river is only an hour’s walk away. It is likely that your prince traded horses for canoes.”

Temilotzin scowled. “So your people will give horses to peasants, but not to the Emperor?”

“I doubt they had a choice,” I said. “Nor will we. It’s barter or turn them loose. But they’re geldings, not breeding stock.”

That mollified the spotted warrior. The fellow with the plow had caught sight of us, and he and a handful of others working the field were staring. Eyahue went to speak with them, then beckoned us over, grinning from ear to ear.

“Yes, your white-faced strangers were here,” he informed us. “Tipalo says many months ago. They traded two horses for help building canoes. One of the horses died. He would like more.”

At last, I let myself feel relief. “Does he have any idea what happened to them?”

“No,” Eyahue said. “They paddled down the river and never came back. That is all he knows.”

“It’s more than we knew yesterday,” Bao said pragmatically. “We know they reached the river, and we’re still on their trail.”

Whether it was due to innate hospitality or eagerness at the prospect of gaining two more horses, the folk of Tipalo’s village gave us a generous welcome. The village was located some distance into the jungle, before it began to thicken to the point of impassability, near a river that Eyahue said was a tributary of the big river.

It was a rustic place with a circle of wooden huts sporting roofs of thatched palms built on hard-packed earth, but the folk seemed relaxed and agreeable. Dozens of near-naked children regarded our sweltering men in their steel armor warily, but they swarmed Temilotzin, giggling and scattering when he roared and waved his arms and stamped his feet in mock-threat. Remembering the casual ease with which our Jaguar Knight had beheaded Pochotl, I could not help but marvel at the contrast and think that human beings were complex and contradictory creatures.

“Aside from the insects, this isn’t as bad as I imagined,” Balthasar remarked, swatting at a swarm of mosquitoes.

“No,” Denis said. “But I daresay there’s worse to come.”

“I’m sure there is, my doom-saying friend,” Balthasar said mildly. “So let me enjoy myself while I can, won’t you?”

Over the course of our journey, Eyahue had endeavored to teach us a bit of Quechua, the native tongue of the folk of Tawantinsuyo.
I’d hoped that when it came time to barter, I’d be able to understand a bit, but we had not yet reached the boundaries of the empire, and these folk spoke a dialect of their own.

So it fell to our crafty old
pochteca
to barter for us; and in all fairness to him, it appeared he struck a decent bargain.

“Tomorrow, we will go to the big river,” Eyahue announced. “Tipalo and the others will help us fell
marupa
trees and build canoes.” He cast a critical eye over our company. “At least nine will be needed. It is a great many trees. For this and additional supplies, we will give them your horses. If we survive and return to reclaim these horses…” He shrugged. “Well, then we will strike a new bargain.”

“Do you not expect to survive this journey?” I asked him.

Eyahue sucked his remaining teeth in a meditative fashion, rocking back on his heels and reaching out to sling one wiry arm around the waist of a giggling village woman who may or may not have been part of the bargain he’d struck on our behalf. “I have survived it before,” he admitted. “Many times. But I am old now.”

“Not
that
old,” Balthasar observed.

“Old enough.” He squeezed the woman’s buttocks, eliciting further laughter. “But young enough, too!”

On the following day, we hiked deeper into the jungle and got our first look at the big river. At a glance, it didn’t look as intimidating as I’d feared. It was a wide swath of slow-moving milky-green water that led deeper and deeper into the depths of the jungle. But Eyahue had proved himself right time and time again, and when he assured us that the placid river would develop deadly rapids in the leagues ahead of us, I did not doubt him.

The
marupa
trees grew tremendously tall, with very straight trunks ideally suited for making long dugout canoes. The villagers indicated two that would be acceptable and set out scouring for others while our party began the task of felling and hollowing the first two trees, sharpening hatchets and adzes dulled in the digging of a mass grave after the attack of the Cloud People.

Even with so many willing hands and the aid of the villagers, it
was a considerable job, and we were at it for days. The men worked in shifts, taking turns with our limited number of tools.

My offers to help were rebuffed, so I spent the time in the village getting to know its inhabitants as best I could without a shared tongue, relying on the knack of nonverbal communication I’d developed during the long winter I’d spent among the Tatars.

The women were hard at work knotting sturdy hammocks out of sisal fiber, part of the supplies for which Eyahue had bartered. They showed me how to tie the intricate knots, although I could not match the swift dexterity of their practiced fingers. They also showed me how to weave palm fronds into mats. They used the mats for seating, but the women indicated to me with gestures that they could also provide shelter from rainfall.

Between the outskirts of the savannah and the inner verges of the jungle, the villagers grew a fair number of crops. There was no
maize
here, but there were many of the other fruits and vegetables I’d come to know since we’d landed on Terra Nova: nourishing sweet potatoes, rich, silken-fleshed avocados, tart fruits that resembled overgrown pinecones topped with a tufted shock of leaves, papayas like melons that grew on trees.

Using nets and basket traps, they caught a variety of fish: big whiskered bottom-dwellers, long eel-like fish, fierce little fish with deceptively sharp teeth. I learned quickly to be wary of the latter.

All in all, it was a rather idyllic existence; but Eyahue warned us time and time again not to be deceived.

There would be no crops in the jungle save those stores we brought with us. What could be cultivated within its depths was guarded by wary, hostile natives who did not welcome intruders. There were fish and game, but hunting was notoriously difficult in the dense undergrowth, and even fishing was likely to prove an exhausting endeavor after a hard day’s travel.

And so I paid attention to the village children. When they weren’t engaged in play, they spent much of their days gathering less orthodox fare to augment the village’s diet. They taught me how to chisel
open rotting palm logs using a sharp-edged rock to get at the thick, wriggling grubs inside, which they plucked out and wrapped in palm leaves to cook.

Balthasar Shahrizai stared at me in outright horror when I sampled one. “Elua have mercy! That may be the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.”

The flesh was chewy, but the taste was palatable. “If it’s a matter of survival, you’ll eat them too, my lord,” I said to him.

He shuddered. “I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather die.”

Bao reached over and popped one in his mouth, chewing with relish. “Not so bad,” he pronounced.

The children also caught lizards and frogs when they could, showing me which were good to eat. When I spotted a brilliant blue fellow with black speckles clinging to the bark of a tree with his webbed feet, I indicated it inquiringly. They batted my hand away with alarm, shaking their heads vehemently.

One of the older boys pointed into the depths of the jungle, then smeared his palms over his cheeks in a gesture I didn’t fully understand, although its meaning seemed clear to the others. He acted out a stealthy pantomime of hunting and stalking, raising a clenched fist to his lips and blowing sharply through it in the direction of one of his mates, who clutched at his throat and toppled over in mock rigor.

I got the message.

Later, Eyahue confirmed it. “Oh, yes. Anything brightly colored is like to be poisonous. Snakes, frogs, lizards.” He shrugged. “Here’s a simple rule. If it’s pretty to the eye, don’t touch it, lady.”

“The hostiles hunt with poison?” I asked him.

He nodded. “Blowpipes and arrows. But don’t worry.” The old
pochteca
patted my arm in a fatherly gesture. “They are very skillful in the ways of the jungle. If they decide to kill you, you’ll never even see it coming.”

This was not exactly comforting.

FORTY-EIGHT