Entangled (55 page)

Ria stepped over to her, took her hand and helped her to her feet. ‘Come,’ she said in the Merell language, ‘there’s something you need to do.’

She led the young woman around the fire to where the Illimani brave, scowling and struggling, lay bound tight amongst the forking exposed roots of an ancient tree. He had a big discoloured bruise on the side of his head where Ria’s throwing-stone had connected but otherwise was uninjured. Vibrations of violence, lust and threat rose from him like a bad smell. The Merell woman’s hand, still clasped in Ria’s own, trembled and grew slick. She sobbed, her whole body racked with pain and grief, and tears streamed down her face. This was hardly a sexual moment but the Illimani’s fat penis stirred in his loins as he witnessed her misery. He began to bellow with laughter and barked in his barbaric language: ‘Shall I pleasure you some more, slut? Come here, suck my cock first.’ And he looked suggestively at his crotch.

Ria did not translate his words but spoke calmly in Merell. ‘This one has taken much from you,’ she told the shaking woman. ‘Now take something from him. It will not heal your pain but it may help.’

Through her tears the Merell seemed confused. She didn’t comment on Ria’s ability to speak her language but asked: ‘What shall I take from him?’

‘His manhood,’ Ria replied. She unsheathed her long flint knife and put it into the woman’s hand.

It was a bad death.

The woman was not quick and when she was done her husband took up the knife and cut out the Illimani’s still-beating heart.

‘I don’t like this,’ Grondin pulsed to Ria. ‘It’s wrong to kill a bound prisoner.’

‘Even after what happened here last night?’ Ria could never quite second-guess Ugly logic. ‘It’s like you said, Grondin. The Illimani murdered her child. They raped her in front of her husband. Both she and he needed this revenge. Think of it as my contribution to their healing.’

Ria led the couple away from the blood-spattered scene and sat down to question them at the edge of the little copse, looking out at the open grassland beyond.

The man said his name was Sebittu and claimed to be one of the seven Speakers of the Merell – a high position, if true. Despite the beating he’d taken, and the humiliations of the night, he carried himself with pride and the air of one used to power.

His young wife was called Tari. She had seemed a fragile, broken creature before she had mutilated the Ilimani, but now, with her bruises already responding to the magic of the Uglies, high spots of colour had appeared on her cheeks and she held her head up.

Like the Naveen, the Merell were divided into nomadic bands, each a few hundred strong, whose tepees could be pitched almost anywhere and carried from camp to camp – to stay for a year or a moon or a day as the hunting allowed. There were seven bands, hence seven Speakers.

So much Ria knew from Clan lore about the Merell.

She asked Sebittu about his own band.

They were called the Fox, he replied, and they had numbered less than three hundred – men, women, children, young and old, all added together. Poor hunting had forced them to leave their last camp and seek out a new one.

Yesterday, on the march, they had been ambushed by an overwhelming force of strange and terrible barbarians who slaughtered their men and women, but rounded up and dragged off their children. Sebittu and Tari, carrying their own one-year-old son, had been amongst the few who had escaped the battlefield, but they’d been tracked and captured before the day was out. Ria had witnessed the rest. ‘We owe you our lives,’ Sebittu concluded. ‘Without your courage – you and your friends – we would be dead now.’

When Sebittu fell silent Ria told him of the fate of her own Clan, and of the Naveen, and she spoke of the character of the Illimani and the
demon named Sulpa who led them, and the horrible truth of what he did with captured children. ‘He’s destroying us by picking us off one by one. We have to unite the tribes to bring him down.’

Deep-set in his battered face, Sebittu’s grey eyes seemed to weigh her up: ‘Who can unite the tribes?’ he asked, as though the task were of the same order as flattening mountains or draining the sea.

‘I can,’ Ria replied. After her encounter with the Naveen hunter Aarkon she knew she risked ridicule with such talk. But this was a time for risks. Besides, she’d shown what she could do: ‘I’m building an army to fight Sulpa, and there will be no tribes in it. Just people of these valleys united against the evil one.’

As she spoke a strange look, swiftly hidden, seemed to pass between Sebittu and Tari. ‘You are of the Clan,’ Sebittu said to Ria: ‘Who taught you to speak the Merell language so well?’

‘No one taught me …’

‘You speak the language of the Illimani also?’

Ria shrugged. ‘It’s a gift I have. When I hear a language I can speak it.’

‘Quite a remarkable gift if I may say so. Some might call it a gift from the gods. Perhaps you will indeed unite the tribes.’

Aware of Bont glowering in the background, Ria got to her feet: ‘I intend to try. It will be a good beginning if the Merell will join us.’

‘If any of us are left alive,’ Sebittu answered, without making any commitment, as he helped Tari to stand. ‘We’re heading south-east. Last I knew the Lynx and Wolf bands were camped up that way. Our best hope is they haven’t been hit yet …’

‘What if they have?’

‘Then we’ll look for survivors. And you? Where do you go now?’

‘The Gate of Horn.’ Again Ria noticed that strange, furtive glance pass between Sebittu and Tari. Were they mocking her? Let them. She didn’t care: ‘I wish you good fortune finding your people,’ she said. ‘Join us or not, if they need a place of safety and shelter we can offer it. We’ll be back this way tomorrow. Look for us on the trail.’

Ria saw how Tari clung to Sebittu as they turned their feet to the south-east. Despite the healing, the willowy young woman walked with pain, her husband supporting her, so much unspoken between them.

Ria and her companions turned north-east towards the Gate of Horn,
trekking in single file through rising country. It was already bright morning. None of them had slept and the Uglies were drained by the healing. Ligar knew the area well and took the lead, warning that a long day’s march still lay ahead before they entered the unclaimed wilderness of the Gate. ‘So this time no stopping,’ growled Bont. ‘I’m going to find Sabeth and the kids tonight.’

They carried dried meats and waterskins so they could eat and drink on the move, and soon they settled into a loping, far-striding hunter’s pace that brought the jagged mountain peaks on the distant horizon steadily closer. The terrain was uncompromising and at one point the only viable route – cliffs on one side, treacherous marshes on the other – forced them across a wide expanse of bleak open moors. They were exposed to view should any Illimani scouts be in the vicinity and Ria huffed with relief when at last they entered the sanctuary of an immense forest.

The respite was short-lived. After hiking a few bowshots they came upon the body of an old man nailed by his feet to the branch of a tree so that he hung upside down over the track.

What Don Leoncio meant, it soon became clear, was that Leoni should drink Ayahuasca again at once and return to Ria’s time to help her – ‘since it seems that is precisely what Our Lady of the Forest wants you to do and what the demon wants to stop you doing.’

Bannerman objected that Leoni had just eaten a meal: ‘Isn’t it better to wait until tomorrow and drink on an empty stomach?’

But Leoni was having none of it. ‘I’m ready to drink,’ she said to Don Leoncio. ‘My place is with Ria. I’ve been hoping you’d help me get back to her.’

Within forty minutes of forcing down a single small cup of the bitter brew – so much faster than the first time – Leoni began to detect a change in the moonlit jungle.

At first it was no big deal when this corner of the sky, or that tree over there, or even the pillars of the
maloca
itself slowly flowed, dissolved and dispersed. But soon the process speeded up, affecting every part of the scene, until, after a few moments, she felt herself suspended in a bubble of light and could see only a blur of shifting colours all around her as though the pixels of reality were being reshuffled.

Patterns of light and sunshine, swirling and coalescing, turned night into day, where the vast trees of the equatorial Amazon had swayed a forest of lofty pines now stood, and the wood and thatch dwellings of Don Leoncio’s homestead on the creek gave way to a glimpse of hell. By a stream in a clearing fifty large tepees had been reduced to their scorched conical wooden frames, the mutilated bodies of hundreds of men and women – mostly red-haired and pale-skinned, some naked, some wearing scraps of rough plaid – were heaped up in piles, and the ashes of a great bonfire were filled with charred human remains.

Although there had been no familiar tunnel of light to mark her transit, Leoni didn’t need the confirmation of the crude flint weapons that lay scattered about, or the ghastly tortures inflicted on the victims
before they died, to guess the Illimani had done this and that she’d returned to Ria’s epoch. And although the Blue Angel had not appeared as she had before to send her on her way, Leoni knew she was at work somewhere unseen, manipulating time and space, and remembered what she’d said: ‘Ria stands between Sulpa and the Neanderthals and I have entangled your life with hers. You are sisters in time now. Together you will find the way.’

The words were fixed in her memory but Leoni wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do and didn’t even know if her last attempt to help Ria had succeeded. Besides, was that all there was to it? Was all this time travel just about helping her sister out of tight fixes? Or had the Angel been speaking of something else when she said they possessed great strength together?

Invisible in the midst of the smouldering camp, Leoni felt panic seize hold of her. Had she failed, after all, to warn Ria of Sulpa’s tracking device in her leg? Had it brought him and the Illimani straight to her? And was this scene of mass murder the result?

Almost at once Leoni’s fears were laid to rest as she saw Ria approaching from amongst the trees with six companions. Though their lips weren’t moving they seemed to be communicating and she could almost imagine she heard words in some strange language, faint as whispers carried on the wind.

Three of the group were Neanderthal males, more varied in appearance and stature than she had imagined. The other three were all human. One held a bow with a long flint-tipped arrow half drawn. He was in his twenties, slim, almost delicate, dressed much as the others in a leather jerkin and leggings and tough simple moccasins. The kid to Ria’s left – black hair, wild blue eyes – looked a lot like an Illimani and gripped a hatchet in each hand.
Go figure!
To Ria’s right was a shaggy-haired giant, almost twice her height and girth, armed with a lethal-looking double-headed stone axe. He had massive shoulders and eyes that glinted with uncompromising belligerence.

They were obviously a team, all seven of them, used to working together and watching each others’ backs. They looked ready to defend themselves as they moved through the carnage of the clearing. The big guy had unslung his axe, Ria clutched a stone in her left hand and a flint knife in the right, and the Neanderthals all held weapons.

But Leoni could see no danger. The massacre hadn’t happened today, maybe not even yesterday and she hoped the killers were long gone. With a nudge of will she sent her aerial body soaring above the forest and scanned the ground in all directions. There was no threat in the immediate vicinity of the camp. Further off, the huge pines grew too far apart to hide large numbers of men but there might still be the risk of an ambush from a smaller group.

She dropped down again to take another look at Ria. Her thigh, where Sulpa’s tracking device had been, was hidden by her leggings but there was no swelling and she was lithe and balanced on her feet. Her lean, tough, sun-browned body had been ripped and torn by battle wounds when Leoni had last seen her but now every gouge and stab was fully healed, with only faint scars and bruises to mark their place.

It was just one more mystery amongst so many.

Close up, Leoni could still see the tomboy prettiness in Ria she’d noticed before, but what struck her about the other girl now – in fact, it took her breath away – was the wild and terrible beauty that shone from her face. There was sorrow there, mingled with pain. There was courage, determination, wisdom, experience, a cool, calculating intelligence – all far beyond her years. There was strength – strength of character, strength of will, strength of purpose. But above all there was an inner fire in Ria that burned bright, and something remorseless and unstoppable about her that the others in the band responded to – for it was obvious they all accepted her as their leader.