Island in the Sea of Time (50 page)

Martha saw a warrior in the lead catamaran set an atlatl dart in his spear-thrower. The arm whipped forward and the American hung upside down, pinned to the side of the schooner like an insect in a collector’s cabinet. More of the darts whistled by in flat fast arcs, and slingstones cracked. The schooner’s engine gave a cough and died. Martha went down behind the meager protection of the low deckhouse; some impulse made her pull Lisketter down beside her. The catamarans swept in on either side, throwing grapnels pronged with wood and stone. They bound fast to the bows of the
Bentley,
and the rowers threw themselves flat. Over them, vaulting off their backs, came the warriors in their garb of feathers and skins and painted wood. What followed could hardly be called a fight. She saw one Olmec slam a three-pronged pick shaped like claws into an American’s shoulder, haul him close like a gaffed fish, and stab into his belly with a knife of volcanic glass. Another crewman reeled back with his chest gashed open by a sharktoothed rake.

The noise died, except for a screaming that went on and on until a warrior stabbed downward to end the annoyance. A few of Lisketter’s followers fled belowdecks. Olmecs followed them, poking ahead gingerly with their spears and holding torches high. Others scoured the deck. Martha came to her feet cautiously, holding up empty hands, trying not to shake. The onslaught had been so quick and brutal that it was hard to grasp; it seemed impossible that people who’d been whole just a few seconds before were now bleeding lumps of meat. Eyes turned toward her, and toward Lisketter where she crouched in shock-driven silence. Pride stiffened her spine; she crossed her arms on her chest, resisting the impulse to lay protective hands over her swelling belly.
They can kill me, but I’m the only one who can make myself act like a disgrace,
she told herself. And she didn’t think that groveling would do much good with this bunch.

The warriors seized her, and hauled Lisketter to her feet. They were hustled forward to the clearer space near the bow; there was only one other living prisoner, dazed, bruised, and battered. The Indians were laying a gangway from one catamaran to the deck of the schooner. The man from the platform at the rear stepped up onto it, and it shuddered under his tread. He was big, tall and massively built, heavy muscle moving under a generous coat of fat. Cross-straps over his shoulders held an ornate pectoral of colored woods inlaid with rosettes of stone. Over it hung a concave mirror that she recognized as polished hematite, iron ore, polished until it reflected torchlight as brightly as glass might have done. On his head was a mask-helmet in the shape of a jaguar’s head cunningly fashioned from wood, bone, and real fur, with his own thick-lipped, heavy-featured face staring out through the fanged muzzle. A cloak of jaguar skin half-hid his massive upper arms, and one hand bore a curious ceremonial weapon, four basalt claws fixed at the end of a yard-long shaft.

He walked with an odd swaying gait, each foot turned a little sideways as it went forward.
Of course,
Martha thought, dazed.
He’s trying to imitate a panther . . . no, a jaguar.
Her glance darted aside. The warriors were much like the folk she’d seen on visits to the Yucatan over the years; darkish brown, of medium height, their faces almond-eyed and big-nosed; these men were tremendously lithe and muscular as well, many of them hideously scarred under their finery. She remembered how they’d advanced howling into gunfire, undaunted by death utterly mysterious and supernatural. Their commander looked different enough to be of a separate race, even discounting the obesity.
Or maybe an inbred royal family? Priest-king,
she decided. It was a label no more likely to mislead than any other.

There was no mistaking the look in his eyes, though. Power, raw and absolute. It showed too in how the warriors bowed low as he passed. Others held the prisoners forward for his inspection. A word, and they were stripped as well, and torches brought close to examine them. The big man seemed fascinated by the strangeness of their skin and hair, pinching and tugging. When he came to Martha his eyes lit and he touched her rounded belly, smacking his lips as he did so. His teeth were filed to points; they glittered in the torchlight. The pupils of his eyes were wide, wider than the dimness would have made them. Next he turned to Lisketter.

“We came to help—” she began.

There were shocked cries from the warriors, and raised weapons. Evidently you didn’t speak until spoken to, with Big Chief Baby-Face. The back of his meaty hand smacked across her mouth, leaving blood trickling in its wake. Lisketter’s eyes went even wider with shock; she looked around, as if the blow had brought her out of a stupor and made her realize that this was
real.
The priest-king’s hand rose to strike again, and then froze. He gave back a step, pointing at Lisketter’s face. He shouted something in his own language, a tongue that seemed to consist mostly of “u,” “x,” and “z” sounds.

No, not at her face!
Martha thought, with a trickle of desperate hope.
At her eyes, that’s what he’s frightened by.

What . . .
of course!
Lisketter had greenish-yellow eyes, about as close as a human could get to the way the eyes of one of the big cats looked.
Were-jaguar cult.
Nobody knew for sure, but the Olmec myths—or at least some of them—seemed to center on a mating between a woman and a divine jaguar that produced a race of part-felines. Evidently the archaeologists and anthropologists had guessed right this time.
I get off because I’m pregnant, and Lisketter because she’s cat-eyed.

Spared. Who knew for how long, and for what purpose? But every moment you were alive was one you weren’t dead. . . . The fat chieftain recovered his composure, enough to signal again with his claw-pick. The warriors holding the two American women dragged them back a few paces. More forced the next captive to his knees and pulled back his head. A flat-bottomed ceramic bowl was brought forward, one big enough to hold gallons. She closed her eyes and swallowed hard, heard the brief desperate gasping and a long scream cut off in a gurgle. Slowly—it was the hardest thing she had ever done—she forced the lids open again. The warriors were dragging the corpse away by its ankles—away to the catamaran, with the other bodies, those killed in the fighting. She thought she knew why. The priest-king held the flat-bottomed bowl up to his lips and drank deeply, trickles of red running down from the corners of his mouth, then passed it to his followers. Then what she had expected happened; fire on a big wooden ship was a menace they’d be unlikely to understand, not having anything with enclosed decks. Flame belched out of a porthole, and the remaining Indians poured up the companionways, yelling in panic.

The gangway thundered under the chief’s steps as he retreated to his own vessel. His followers hustled the Americans in his wake and the rest poured after. The oarsmen rose from the crouch where they had waited like statues and pushed their craft away. By then fire was licking upward from every door and porthole, red tongues of flame casting a flickering light on the river, and the roar became loud. Martha watched motionless, ignoring the grip on her arms. Beside her Pamela Lisketter stood as silent, weeping slow tears that fell from her face. The canoes rowed for the land, with a last fierce heave by the oarsmen that sent the keels of the twin hulls riding up on the slick mud.

Out on the river the masts of the schooner fell into the blaze; there was chanting and singing ashore, dancing, fires built high in the hot insect-swarming night. Martha and Lisketter were dragged up to the earthen mound, past larger buildings of wood and thatch, past hearths being prepared for cooking. Behind a massive wood table was a cage; hands thrust them inside, and spearmen stood as guards. The giant priest-king seated himself on the table—
throne, perhaps?
—and sat like a statue with legs crossed. His warriors stood before him, then went to a resting posture on one knee, weight back on that heel. Their feather crests bobbed in the slight breeze, casting grotesque shadows as the feast was prepared; they and the platform-throne cut off sight of what was being done.

A little later a woman came with bowls of food: cakes of maize and cassava, fish, beans, and a small bowl of meat. The two Americans began to eat mechanically, after a while.

“I wouldn’t touch that,” Martha said quietly when Lisketter reached for the bowl of meat.

The kidnapper looked up dully. “Why not?” she said.

“You can’t smell what’s cooking out there, stuffed up like that.” The other woman had been weeping until her nose ran. “I can.”

Lisketter’s eyes and lips framed a question. There was no need for speech. After a moment she pushed the bowl violently away and curled around herself on the earth platform stacked with cut grass that served the cage as a bed. Martha doggedly forced down as much as she could. There was a gourd of fermented maize as well, like a thin gruelbeer. She drank that too. Tomorrow and in the days that followed she would need strength, and the baby had to be fed.

When the time came . . . she looked around.
They’ll need to know we’re alive.

Alston lowered her binoculars. “No sign of them,” she said, keeping her face carefully blank. It was illogical to feel disappointed. Not sensible to expect the
Bentley
to be trapped neatly here, but there was a feeling of letdown all the same.

“They’ll have gone upriver, Captain,” Ian said. “That’s definitely the Coatzacoalcos.”

“Or they foundered on the way here, or passed on farther south, or stopped farther north,” Alston noted. Still, this was the maximum probability. . . .

“Ma’am!”

The forward lookout called. “Something floating!”

The winds were faint, and the echo sounder showed these waters to be shallow. It took some time to maneuver the
Eagle
close to the debris, and a few minutes more to lower a boat to hook onto it. Alston stood like stone, feeling the sweat trickling down her flanks even under the light tropical uniform with its short-sleeved shirt. The heat didn’t particularly bother her; it was even a little homelike—summers in the Carolina low country were much like this. Her gathering suspicions of what they would find, however . . .

The sailor in the ship’s boat next to the flotsam prodded at something. “There’s a body here, ma’am, legs tangled in something. Looks like one of ours, from the clothing. Been in the water a while, couple of days.”

“Well, you were right,” she said quietly to Arnstein. To the sailing master: “We’ll anchor here, Mr. Hiller.”

Tom Hiller looked around at the estuary of the Coatzacoalcos. The land was low and flat, and the sea stretched behind them like hammered metal. “We could get a nasty blow out of the Gulf any time, ma’am,” he said. “It’s hurricane season.”

“That’s not the only nasty thing ’round here,” she said, nodding downward.

The body was—had been—an American; the clothing was unmistakable. She heard Doreen swallow a retch behind her, but the Coast Guard officers were all familiar with the bloating that went with a submerged body and the way the sea life ate its way in. What drew her eye was the broken-off shaft that protruded from the dead man’s ribs.

“Think of a few thousand of the locals coming out under cover of darkness,” she said. “Especially if we were farther in, where the banks are close and there’s no room to maneuver.”

He nodded. “How are we going to get up the river at all, then, Captain?” he asked.

“Cautiously, in small boats, and with difficulty, I suspect, Mr. Hiller,” she said thoughtfully. “But first we’ll have to find out what went on, and where everyone is. Call Mr. Toffler, and get his transport ready.”

 

Assembling the ultralight was difficult in the cramped quarters of the
Eagle
’s waist deck; the wings were long enough to overlap the rails on both sides. It was essentially a big hang glider with an aluminum trapeze below, a tiny pusher prop and engine behind the seat, and rudimentary controls.

Sort of like a beginner’s sketch of an airplane,
the Kentuckian pilot thought. A far cry from going “downtown” in an F-4 Phantom; more like being a forward air controller, not a trade he’d ever wanted to take up before. The sodden heat was familiar enough, though, and the look of the shore. They were all sweating hard, and in this oily humidity it didn’t evaporate, just got into your shorts and chafed.

Sailors and cadets finally mounted the frame on the cut-down metal canoes that served for floats and bolted the wing to it. The boom came around; two dozen hands held steadying ropes, while others hauled at the line that hoisted it free of the deck.

“Careful, there,” he muttered; no point in saying it aloud.

They slid it out sideways, threading the wings between the rigging and then swaying them around bit by bit until they were parallel to the ship. After that it was fairly simple to pay out the ropes until the
God Help Us
lay bobbing slightly beside the big windjammer. He’d named it himself, after the first flight back on the island.