Jaguar (35 page)

Rafferty watched Ruckus ruffle himself into his hunting dance as the Roam positioned their vehicles for the streamside encampment. The crow was sorely tired of dried meat. As soon as he’d set up his van and seen to Old Cristina, he took Afriqua Lee by the arm and whispered, “Get your darts, meet me at the stream.”

“I will meet you here,” she said, “for all the Roam to see.” She squared her dusty shoulders. “We are a team, you and I. If we choose to break tradition and hunt together, it’s time they got used to it.”

Rafferty grinned.

“Right. If they don’t like it, they can leave their plates empty. More for us.”

Women of the Roam did not hunt, but Rafferty had seen how well Afriqua Lee popped a dart. He needed cover as he activated their defenses, and he trusted her. They would show the Roam a new partnership, a new tradition, a union that would outwit the Jaguar and his priesthood.

Afriqua Lee stepped from the Romni’s tent, parked beneath a sprawling ceiba tree, and he thought that no woman in this world or the other could possibly be as beautiful.

She had borrowed one of his hunting scarves to tie back her mane of curly black hair. The black scarf was trimmed with a small embroidered border of green quetzals. The green intensified when she wore it, and electrified the green in her eyes.

Rafferty never wanted to lose a moment of his life together with Afriqua Lee. The matter had aired at a kris romani, during a trial of two traitors to the priesthood. The Roam feared their dreams, what their dreaming had brought down on their heads. Most of all, they feared the offspring of two dreamers, but the challenge to their marriage was beaten by the Romni Bari. The grumblings didn’t cease with the gavel and the token sacrifice of blood from the tongue.

Ruckus squawked his impatience, and lifted off. They shrugged into their bandoliers of darts and charges, and followed.

“The green-eyed girl goes hunting,” an old woman called after them.

“Watch out for the trouser-snake,” another called, her cackle swallowed by the white device.

Rafferty darted a large paca, eight kilos or more, a dozen paces from the camp. He motioned Afriqua to wait, then hurried back to hang the paca by a leg from the Romni Bari’s ceiba tree and bleed it.

“Start on this one,” he told the onlookers, “there will be plenty tonight. Musicians, get your strength up.”

Many of the men dropped their setup squabbles to gather up their darts and traps.

Good,
he thought.
Now they’ll remember how to hunt.

Rafferty had spoken once at a meeting of the kumpania, saying that their custom of trading with other communities was too dangerous, their route too predictable.

“They’re not very smart,” he told them. “We can trap the priests if we think of me and my bride as bait. We’ll go a season early to the highland stakedown. It’s heavy jungle at its hottest, true, but we know they’ll be there, drumming up an ambush for us. Let’s not disappoint them.”

Now was time to turn the tables. Rafferty sensed the priesthood close by, plying the dreamways, growing stronger.

Afriqua Lee bounded across the camp in her long strides, another paca across her strong shoulders. She dumped it between the feet of Alma, the quick-tongued old woman.

“I thought a little hot meat between your legs might cool you down,” she said, and turned on a heel to join Rafferty.

The other women shrieked and laughed at Alma’s surprise, then hurried to admire the plump animal and to help her dress it out. By then, Rafferty and Afriqua Lee were already hunting the stream, setting out perimeter scouts and activating their defense.

As morning wore on, they activated two white devices buried in switchboxes. These insured the Roam a wide radius of strategic cover. They needed one more switchbox farther upstream.

Rafferty took a reading on the locator signals and checked the status of the “protect device” modifications that he had built into all units. Everything checked out. Rafferty planted several of the smaller, more potent protection units by themselves along their trail. The battle cadre could follow easily with their hand-held sensors, and these sensors would not trigger the protection devices as long as the scouts entered the correct code.

A precaution.

“I saw tapir tracks,” Afriqua whispered. “Up here, where I shot the last paca.”

His gaze followed the direction of her pursed lips to a limp silhouette hanging head-down, out of reach of animals from below. The jungle beyond the dead paca walled them away from the extreme highlands. Trails throughout the region were notoriously rocky and steep. The stoneworks lay nearby, where he anticipated finding the priesthood. No sign, physical or electronic, showed any defenses.

They don’t believe it possible that we survived,
he thought.

Rafferty heard a call from Ruckus, but ignored it when he saw the fresh tracks at streamside. They spanned more than a hand, and a bit of dirt crumpled into one as he watched. The sunken earth still filled with water. He sniffed, and got nothing.

“It must’ve climbed out here,” he pointed up the bank, “and probably went up that slope.”

Rafferty planted the last of his protection units at the base of the backline switchbox. He activated the switch and received confirmation from the battle base at Romni’s tent. The return signal included coordinates for his nearest scout and cadre—less than a kilometer behind them.

Good.

Three hillsides sloped up from the other side of the stream. A tapir would love to doze in those thick, broadleaf ferns. Brush was a favorite place for tapir to hide, and a lot of brush fringed the uphill side of the ferns. The villagers called them “mountain cows,” but they didn’t look like any cow that Rafferty had ever seen. He’d seen one a few seasons back, on a trek through the southern highlands. It sniffed the air once with its flexible nose and trampled off into the thickest brush. The brush would knock a jaguar off its back, and made a dart shot nearly impossible.

“Do you think our charges are heavy enough?” she asked. “Tapir hide is mighty thick.”

“Load green,” he said. “I pressed them myself, they’re all heavy.”

“But, still. . . .”

“Still,” he smiled, “don’t shoot for bone. It’s best if we flank it and we both get a shot.”

They tracked the tapir through its brush-trail and found dozens of paca dens along their way.

We will eat well here,
he thought.
The Roam will have a chance to pull together.

Afriqua Lee made that tiny clicking noise with her tongue just when he noticed a peculiar odor on the breeze. Before he could react, the wild-eyed tapir burst from the brush ahead of them. Its path dead-ended into a stone wall, and they were blocking two hundred kilos of churning fear.

Just as he’d said, they stepped aside, let it charge between them, then they turned as one and each placed a dart between the tapir’s ribs. Inertia carried it another dozen meters before it crumpled without a squeal.

In the stillness that followed, Rafferty heard Ruckus again, somewhere above the jungle canopy, hollering his alarm call, and then his flocking call. In the same moment, dozens of crow voices rose around them, with dozens others echoing in the distance.

Afriqua Lee started towards the dead tapir, but Rafferty stopped her with a hand motion and put his finger to his lips. Once again, that odor on the breeze.

Spleef,
he thought.

He remembered Nebaj, and the constant smell of burned spleef at his camp, mixed with the thick incense of copal that the Roam called “pom.”

Now Afriqua Lee smelled it, too.

Something about the regular angularity of the three hillsides now made sense to him.

Temples
, he thought.
Overgrown temples!

Ruckus sounded his distress call again, and a cacophony of crows filled the air. All else was silent.

Rafferty motioned for Afriqua Lee to follow him back up the trail. The stone wall was not a cliff face, but a wall of cut stones. One layer of stones had been delicately carved into skulls, no two alike.

Stoneworks littered the jungles of the southern highlands, former ceremonial centers and cities of the old Roam. This, the oldest, was the temple of the gate of Xibalba. Talk of it frightened the old folk, and they had been vocal in their fears about the stake-down here.

Maybe they were right,
he thought.

On the left the stonework abutted the dirt hillside. Rafferty followed the wall to the right, working his way under the overgrowth, and Afriqua Lee followed. She’d switched to a multiple-fire magazine in her weapon. That dampened the punch, but she could fire twenty darts without reloading. He made the switch to multiple himself, and Afriqua Lee smashed a scorpion on the wall next to his neck.

He flashed her the sign of the martyr for “thanks.”

Another half-dozen paces and they encountered a steep stairway. The wall continued on the other side of the stairs and disappeared into the brush. The odor of spleef was much stronger here, and the granite stairway was neither overgrown, nor dirty. Someone had recently swept it clean. Rafferty raised his eyebrows and indicated the stairway.

Afriqua Lee shrugged, glanced around, then pointed her weapon up the stairway.

Rafferty smiled.

Afriqua Lee blew a hair from her face and smiled back.

I love you,
he thought, and hoped that she felt it.

Crows gathered in twos and threes in the jungle canopy above the steps. Their raucous cries squawked louder as he and Afriqua Lee approached the top.

The only sounds were the crows, the rustle of trees in the breeze and the stream about a hundred meters away. They crept to the last set of stone stairs on their hands and knees, and peered over the top with their weapons ready.

Six jaguar priests sat in a column of smoke-twined sunlight at a stone table set with chairs and pipes for seven. Rafferty recognized an aged Nebaj among them. Spleef-smoke and pom lay over the scene like hot mist. Dozens of crows took their turns attacking the somnolent priests, flapping at their faces and pecking at their eyes. The priests did not even fight back out of reflex, but stirred towards waking. The small guard troop busied itself flailing clubs at the crows in defense of the helpless priests. The stubborn crows kept it up.

Dream,
he thought.
It’s got them.

He’d been in a stone place before, a table and chairs much like this. . . .

Rafferty glanced back at Afriqua Lee, who arched a quizzical brow.

“This looks familiar,” she whispered, “Maryellen’s dream, the marble columns and the stone table and chairs.”

“But this is granite,” he said. “And we’re not dreaming.”

She rubbed the stone step, just to be sure.

A series of
put put puts
exploded the rock beside her and sprayed fragments into her face. Rafferty snapped off a low, fast shot and blew up the guard’s knee. A clip of darts unloaded from the raider’s weapon into the sky, then he threw it away in frustration and grabbed at his wound with a shriek.

Afriqua Lee followed her roll down the steps with a pair of quick shots that knocked one raider over backwards and broke another’s arm.

Body armor
, Rafferty signaled.
Watch out!

She popped an orange marker into the heavy ferns where the first raider fell and positioned herself behind cover. Rafferty finished a quick sweep and she swept once herself. Something black dropped to the stone plaza behind Rafferty’s back.

Afriqua Lee signaled
Ruckus
to him, and pointed.

Rafferty lay down his weapon and picked up the limp bundle of black feathers. He frowned, then set the dead crow on the top step of the gray stone temple.

He shook his head and signaled back,
No, not Ruckus.

The crows stepped up the fury of their mysterious attack. Rafferty scooped up his weapon and scanned the sky for Ruckus. He spotted the crow’s ruffed-up silhouette high up a tree that bordered the ruins.

He looks sick, or. . . .

Suddenly the crows’ attack made sense.

“Ruckus on the dreamways,” he muttered in amazement.

Rafferty heard cries in the brush beneath him, the flat-toned discharge of hunting darts and heavy
thuck
of full-combat explosive tips.

“Must be leftover raiders,” Afriqua whispered. “What about those priests?”

“What about them?”

The crows were wearying, but they had forced the lethargic priests to come around. Clearly, the ones who came to a consciousness awakened in extreme, searing pain. Rafferty knew that pain all too well, as did Afriqua Lee.

“They’re not going anywhere,” she said, “but are you sure they can’t . . . you know . . .
dream
us dead or something? And what about the Jaguar, won’t he come looking for his little pets?”

“If we stop the priests, we stop the Jaguar,” Rafferty said. He leaned his back against the vine-covered stone of the temple.

Rafferty sucked in a deep breath. No one was sniping their way. A few wild shots from across the acropolis snapped off branches, intended for crows. The battle cadre of the Roam silenced those. From his vantage point at the rim of the acropolis, the six priests made easy targets.

“No,” he whispered, “they can’t hurt us. We need them alive if we’re going to learn anything, but it’s more important to stop the Jaguar.”

He hand-signaled Finn to go in silently. Presently, two of their men crested the acropolis, then four, then a dozen of the Roam circled the priests and trussed up the somnolent captives without a fight.

“Easily done,” she laughed, and they joined the others with the trussed-up, lethargic priests. The skinny Nebaj was one of them. As the sleep-disorientation left him, the young priest’s face contorted into absolute fear.

“This is the power center,” his voice rasped, “you can’t do this.”

“Your power days are over,” Rafferty said. “Besides, you’re just the instrument. We want the Jaguar. . . .”

“You don’t understand,” the priest hissed, his voice thick with the influence of the dream. “He protects himself . . . you are killing us. . . .”