Entangled (54 page)

He was not a prepossessing physical specimen. Barefoot, wearing mud-spattered cotton trousers and a torn work-shirt, he was balding and ugly, with squashed froglike features, his nose almost flat against his face, bulging brown eyes, short thin legs, thick muscular arms,
powerful shoulders and a hunched back. It was hard to guess his age – perhaps fifty? – but so much experience, strength and warmth overwrote his ugliness that he made a strong, immediate and positive impression on Leoni.

Speaking perfect English, he commented on the similarity of their names, both meaning ‘lion’. He had a deep, rumbling, gravelly voice, with strangely formal New England undertones. When she complimented him on his mastery of the language he replied: ‘The Protestants taught me well.’

‘Protestants?’

‘Missionaries.’ A hint of anger. ‘Americans. They’ve infested the whole of the Ucayali basin as though they have a personal feud against our culture. They persuade us our spirituality is evil and convince us with money and food – and education – to accept Christ.’

‘Sounds like they didn’t convince you!’

‘No.’ A wry smile: ‘I escaped them.’ He looked to Don Emmanuel: ‘I passed through a personal crisis. This great man accepted me as his pupil and I learnt the path of the shaman from him. It turned out to be the right path for me.’

In the background Mary had been giving Don Emmanuel the gist of the conversation in Spanish. Now Don Emmanuel made a remark and Mary translated it into English: ‘The pupil long ago surpassed his master.’ It seemed that immense discipline and determination, an intense focus of the will, and long periods spent alone in the jungle seeking visions with Ayahuasca had transformed Don Leoncio into an adept of the highest order. He claimed no special credit for his skills and spent nine months of each year travelling from village to village as an itinerant healer, accepting only food, shelter and peasant wages. For the other three months he retired to this homestead in the middle of nowhere and lived the life of a hermit. Only Don Esteban and one other close friend knew where to find him.

In the next hour a simple meal of fish and plantains was prepared and eaten. Leoni found it strange, but perhaps a matter of Shipibo etiquette, that at no point in the conversation was any explanation asked, or given, for their visit.
For fuck’s sake,
she thought,
get to the point!
She was here for only one thing – to drink Ayahuasca with Don Leoncio and get back to Ria’s side.

But she stopped herself from blurting this out and finally, after dinner,
Don Emmanuel drew Don Leoncio aside and they sat cross-legged near the rear of the small
maloca,
speaking in Shipibo.
At last!
Leoni thought. She couldn’t understand what they were saying but she heard her own name mentioned several times and felt the conversation grow tense and serious. Don Emmanuel must be filling Leoncio in on everything that had happened.

She felt tired, as though she’d been awake for a week, and curled up in a hammock slung between two of the
maloca
’s support posts.

She heard the two men’s voices droning in the background. Nearby Mary and Matt were also talking.

Leoni didn’t plan to close her eyes but sleep overwhelmed her in seconds and returned her at once to the cheap motel room of her dream, sitting on the edge of the bed, watching the flickering television screen from which that horrible whispering, crackling voice still emanated.
‘Kill yourself … Do it now. You know it’s the right thing.’

Though repulsed, she was again seized by a sense of the inevitability and rightness of this command and by a powerful compulsion to obey. ‘I am ready,’ she answered.

‘Are others present? Do they observe you?’

‘Yes.’

‘The jungle is near?’

‘Yes. Very near.’

There was a pause and the voice fell to a hiss that was almost lost amidst the static: ‘When those around you are asleep you will walk into the jungle. Go quietly, be certain you are not seen and DO NOT STOP …’

A hand touched Leoni’s shoulder and she woke with a shock, baring her teeth in a silent snarl. Don Leoncio, Matt, Bannerman, Mary and Don Emmanuel were all gathered round her hammock, their faces set. Her whole body was soaked with sweat, her brow and hair slick with it. A sudden sob shook her and she sat up shaking. She knew she was breathing too fast, as though she’d been running for her life, but she couldn’t stop herself sucking in more air in great heaving gulps.

Don Leoncio asked the others to step back. He produced and lit a big
mapacho
and began to chant a deeply strange and otherworldly
icaro
while at the same time blowing clouds of fragrant smoke over Leoni.
She felt a little calmer. Within half an hour she had composed herself and was ready to talk about what had happened.

It seemed that she had only slept for a very short while. However, in those few moments, said Don Leoncio, he became aware – ‘It is a sense I have cultivated’ – that some negative entity was trying to exploit her vulnerable liminal state. ‘It is intelligent, this entity, but it is not human …’

‘It’s Jack,’ groaned Leoni, scrambling out of the hammock. ‘He’s a fucking demon. He got to me in a dream. Convinced me I had to kill myself.’

Don Leoncio chuckled: ‘A fucking demon, eh? No doubt the same one Emmanuel has been speaking of? In what form did he appear to you?’

‘He has no appearance. Today he’s just a shadow – didn’t Don Emmanuel tell you? – not even a shape. He spoke to me out of the snow on a TV screen.’

‘What did he say? Try to remember exactly.’

Leoni replayed the dream in her mind: ‘He kept telling me I had to kill myself. He asked me if other people were around. He asked if they were observing me. He even asked if the jungle was close.’

Leoncio’s face broke into a broad smile and he pounded his fist into the palm of his hand. ‘I thought so!’ he exclaimed. ‘He doesn’t know where you are.’

‘How sure are you of that?’ Leoni asked. ‘He was right there in my dream.’

‘He lost contact with you when I woke you up. If his eye were on us now I’d feel it.’ The shaman’s expression became more sombre: ‘But let’s not underestimate him. Even to track you in the dreamscape must have required enormous power …’

‘Jack
is
powerful,’ said Leoni. ‘I know that already.’

Leoncio hesitated: ‘So the question then becomes – I mean no offence – why is such a powerful demon interested in you at all? Doesn’t he have, how do you put it, bigger fish to fry?’

‘He’s not interested in me. Not directly. But there’s someone else, a girl, twenty-four thousand years ago, who I’m connected to … It’s her he’s really after.’

It was not clear how much Leoncio had already learned from
Emmanuel but he seemed to want to hear the whole complicated story from Leoni herself. She compressed it into the shortest possible telling: what Jack had wanted from her childhood, the connection between Jack and Sulpa, her near-death experience and subsequent experiences with Ayahuasca and other substances, her encounters with the Blue Angel – Our Lady of the Forest – and her entanglement with Ria and the fate of the Neanderthals.

She was describing her last Ayahuasca journey and her desperate attempt to save Ria from Sulpa’s spy creatures when Don Leoncio leapt to his feet and made a pantomime of slapping himself on the forehead. ‘Of course,’ he exclaimed, ‘I should have guessed sooner …’

Leoni gazed at him open mouthed.

‘After such a long connection with you, the question we must ask ourselves is why Jack is suddenly going to such lengths to track you down? And why now?’

‘My parents are part of his cult?’ Leoni proposed. ‘Maybe he fears I’m going to expose what they did to me?’

Don Leoncio made a dismissive sound –
‘Fauugh!
He wouldn’t care. Think about it. It’s something new, something unexpected, that he fears.’

‘My connection to Ria! The Blue Angel said we possess great strength together. She said we have to find it and use it.’

‘To destroy Sulpa …’

‘Yes.’

‘And therefore Jack …’

‘Yes.’

‘Then we have our answer. If you are willing, I believe we should attempt to take the battle to the enemy tonight …’

Ria threw her first stone with all her anger behind it. It smacked into the side of the rapist’s head and he collapsed in mid-thrust. The brave who’d been helping him to hold the woman down surged to his feet but an arrow from Ligar’s bow, fired from close range, pierced his heart before he could take a step. The Illimani who’d been turning the spit died snarling under Driff ’s hatchets. The brave with the tattoos had dropped the child’s arm and snatched up a knife when Bont stepped out of the darkness swinging his war axe and chopped him to the ground with two huge blows.

‘Well,’ said Ria in out-loud speech, ‘that was easy.’ She hadn’t even thrown her second stone and the Uglies hadn’t needed to kill anyone since the humans had done the job so efficiently.

‘Sorry we’re not as quick as you, Ria.’ It was Oplimar’s thought-voice.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ she replied. ‘You’re learning. We’re learning too. We’re all living in a new world.’

She hastened to the side of the Merell woman and with Grondin’s help pulled away the body of the man Ligar had shot. The brave she’d brained with her stone was still alive. His eyes flickered open and Ria unsheathed her knife to cut his throat. Then another idea came to her so she had the Uglies drag him to the base of a tree and bind his hands and feet.

He lay there, muscular, hairy, naked and tightly trussed. He’d regained full consciousness while he was being tied and now he glared murder at Ria.

‘I’ll be back,’ she promised him. Surprise crossed his face as she spoke in Illimani.

She turned to attend to the woman.

Bont was for pressing on immediately but Ria disagreed. The couple they’d saved had suffered savage beatings and would have to be given healing to have any hope of survival.

‘I don’t care whether they survive or not,’ said Bont, his face streaked with the blood of the brave he’d killed. ‘We saved them, OK? Now let’s get the fuck out of here.’

‘Your problem is you’re not thinking long-term,’ Ria replied, ‘and we have to think long-term – all of us – or we won’t survive.’

Bont rolled his eyes in frustration but Ria was adamant: ‘We need to make an alliance with the Merell,’ she said. ‘That’s going to be easier if these two walk out of here in the morning and speak well of us to their tribe – which we’ve just given them every reason to do … Are you with me so far?’

There was no response from Bont.

Ria felt almost as though she were talking to a child: ‘But here’s the problem. If we get out of here now, like you say, and leave them the way they are, then they definitely won’t walk out of here in the morning. They’ll die, in amongst these trees, and no one will ever know what we did for them …’ She paused: ‘That wouldn’t be very helpful to us, would it?’

Bont groaned: ‘I don’t know what’s helpful. I don’t know what’s not helpful. I just want to get Sabeth and the kids back. I can’t think of anything else … It hurts my head.’

Ria rested a sympathetic hand on the big man’s arm. ‘I understand,’ she said, ‘and we
will
get them back. But first we need to let the Uglies heal these good people.’

With so few Uglies to administer it, the healing took a very long time. Dawn light had flushed the sky before it was done. Both the man and the woman had been kicked and beaten half to death, the woman additionally had been brutally and repeatedly raped in the presence of her husband, and they had witnessed the Illimani murdering and roasting their child. Their minds had been damaged much more terribly than their bodies, Grondin explained, and such damage was not easy to heal.

The couple now sat by the ashes of the fire. Their son’s pitiful corpse, wrapped in a deerskin, lay between them.

‘Can they walk? Ria asked Grondin.

‘Yes, if they have the will. We have healed their bodies.’

Ria guessed the husband’s age at forty summers, although it was hard to be sure. His nose and teeth had been broken by blows and one
eye was swollen closed. His thick black hair, which curled down over broad shoulders, was shot through with streaks of grey.

His wife was much younger, sixteen or eighteen, close to Ria’s own age. She was slender with long, long legs, now folded birdlike beneath her. Her pale skin was freckled and her dark red hair tumbled almost to her waist. Her face was so bruised and battered it was impossible to tell if she was beautiful. Her huge green eyes, still full of pain and terror, darted from side to side as though she expected at any moment to be attacked again.