Entangled (51 page)

It seemed they approached a camp of the dead but only as they drew closer did they grasp the true extent of the horror.

Judging from the signs on the ground, and the injuries they had sustained, the Naveen who had been trapped here – somewhat less than two hundred of them – had surrendered and been disarmed without a struggle. All had multiple wounds but without exception these resulted from the peculiar way they had been put to death.

They had been nailed to the trees that grew throughout the camp by means of long, narrow flint spikes hammered through their hands and feet, ankles and wrists. They dangled from the lower branches like clumps of strange, bruised, rotting fruit and clung in contorted freakish poses to the thick upright trunks. The tallest tree was festooned with twenty of them, their mouths open in silent screams, their eyes already plucked out by ravens, their flesh rent by vultures. But not a single tree
had been left innocent of the carnage. On three of them there were Naveen – two men and a woman – who still clung to life.

As even the Uglies admitted, the injuries these unfortunate people had suffered were beyond healing. None of them had any hope of survival, and withdrawing the flint spikes would cause insufferable pain. It was surely kinder to kill them now.

The two men, both unconscious, were quickly dispatched by Bont and Driff. The woman, nailed head down to a tree near the middle of the camp, one eye pecked out, one still intact, was the strongest of the three. She spoke in the Naveen language, repeating the same words over and over. By the third repetition Ria understood: ‘They have taken our children! Spirits help us. They have taken all our children.’

It was true: there wasn’t a single child amongst the dead here.

Ria questioned the woman. How many braves had attacked them? When did they attack? In which direction did they go? But she spoke no more sense. At last, with a reluctant grimace, Ria unsheathed her knife to put her out of her misery when a man’s voice, hoarse and emotional, bellowed from beside a smouldering tepee: ‘Touch her and die.’ As Ligar nocked an arrow and drew his bow in a single fluid motion, and Bont unslung his war axe, a dozen Naveen hunters, seven with bows drawn, the rest brandishing spears and hatchets, strode towards them from all directions through the trees.

Mary Ruck’s boat was a twenty-footer, with two fixed benches towards the rear seating six passengers under a tarpaulin canopy and an open storage area in the bows. Mary was at the back, controlling the big Yamaha outboard motor. ‘I’ve got two hundred horses here,’ she said, and the boat leapt forward as she thumbed the throttle. ‘I think we can outrun them.’

‘That’s a fast engine,’ commented Matt. He, Leoni and Bannerman were just in front of Mary, occupying the rearmost of the two benches. ‘But, with due respect, your boat’s a tub and we don’t know what the other guys have got. In fact, we don’t even know who the other guys are. We
think
it’s Don Apolinar but it could be someone else. Could be nothing to do with us at all.’

Leoni looked back to the north again. The lights were definitely closer.

‘So do you have a suggestion?’ Mary shouted. She was barely audible above the sound of the outboard and the slap-slap-slap of the river racing by.

‘Yes,’ Matt yelled. ‘Throttle back – get into the shelter of the bank NOW! Where it’s overgrown with trees … Right here will do.’

‘Do it, Mary,’ Bannerman urged.

‘We’ll take cover,’ Matt continued. ‘Keep absolutely silent, show no lights. If they whiz past your jetty and carry on upriver we’ll know they’re not here for us. If they stop … well, it might be an interesting idea to let the current carry us down to them. I’d like to have a go at scuppering their boat while they’re searching the lodge.’

Mary had already throttled back and was turning towards the nearby bank. ‘Sounds dangerous,’ she muttered.

‘But in my opinion less dangerous than leaving them behind us,’ said Matt. ‘Out on the open water we’ll be sitting ducks if they’ve got guns.’

The jungle grew thick here, gigantic ferns spreading like fans, huge
trees looming into the darkness, sinuous mossy creepers hanging down. Mary cut the engine and let the boat’s remaining momentum carry it beneath an immense palm that had toppled sideways over an undermined bank and lay part in and part out of the water. Standing in the bows, Don Emmanuel reached up and slung a rope around the palm’s trunk, bringing them to a halt.

Behind the lights were much closer and with their own engine silent they could all hear the powerful throaty roar of the other boat.

They’d have caught us in five minutes,
Leoni thought.

She guessed the jetty lay about quarter of a mile downstream and that the approaching boat must now be very close to it. She found herself praying for it to pass by but instead, with awful inevitability, she heard the engine note change and saw the lights veer towards the bank.

‘OK,’ said Matt, ‘That settles it. Is everyone with me on this?’

There was no point in trying to escape upriver. Their engine would be heard as soon as they started it and they would be overhauled and caught. There were no other options that Leoni could think of. ‘I’m with you,’ she said.

‘Me too,’ said Bannerman. ‘It’s risky but so is anything else we could do.’

Mary and Emmanuel conferred in Spanish and agreed. There was no alternative. ‘When you are cornered by a hungry jaguar,’ Emmanuel said, ‘it is best to attack it.’

This was all going to be very tight, Leoni thought as the current whisked them downstream. Apolinar would suspect they had fled, since their own boat wasn’t at the jetty. On the other hand that might be a trick – so he couldn’t afford to leave the lodge unsearched. Even men in a hurry would take five minutes to get from the jetty to the lodge, perhaps another five to search it and find it empty, and five more to get back to the boat.

So Matt had about fifteen minutes to pull this off.

The cloud cover was thinning out. Not good. Then a gap opened and a shaft of moonlight speared through it, illuminating the jetty a few hundred feet ahead. The gap closed again just as fast but not before they all saw the big twin-engined speedboat moored at the jetty. Steering with two stubby oars, Emmanuel and Bannerman guided their own smaller vessel towards the bank and Matt slipped into the water.

Moments earlier Leoni had tried to persuade him to rethink. Couldn’t this be done without swimming?

‘No,’ Matt had said. ‘There’s bound to be a guard on the speedboat. This is the only way to reach it without being heard.’

Before leaving Iquitos, Leoni had borrowed Bannerman’s laptop and run a series of Google searches about the Amazon. As a result she now knew that the great river and all its major tributaries seethed with monstrous creatures – hideous alligators called caymans that grew up to twenty feet long, anacondas like fire hoses, piranhas and even bull sharks that had adapted to fresh water.

It was suicide to get in this river – she checked the luminous hands of her Rolex – and Matt had been in it for more than seven minutes.

Where the fuck was he?

She glanced at Bannerman and Mary, crouching on either side of her and peering into the darkness. There was enough light coming through the clouds now to see the expressions on their faces, and they looked worried. Emmanuel was in the bow; he’d roped the boat to an overhanging branch and stood ready to release it on Matt’s signal.

Which still did not come.

Eight minutes …

Nine minutes …

Was he dead?

Eaten by one of those fucking caymans?

Captured or killed by whoever was guarding Apolinar’s speedboat?

The searchers who had gone up to the lodge must return at any moment at which point, even if Matt was still alive, it would be too late for him to do anything. Leoni found she was counting the seconds, glaring into the darkness, whispering under her breath: ‘Come on, Matt! Come on! Come on!’

The Naveen hunters looked wild-eyed and frantic, half mad with grief, fearful for their own safety yet spoiling for a fight. It was a wonder arrows hadn’t started flying yet.

‘Stay your hands, brothers,’ Ria called out in the Naveen tongue. ‘We are not your enemies.’ She knew the Uglies wouldn’t rush to violence but she pulsed to Driff, Bont and Ligar to lower their weapons: ‘Don’t start anything. I’m going to try to talk our way out of here.’

Ria still held her long flint knife in her hand. She sheathed it now, gestured at the smouldering remains of the camp and at the trees festooned with bodies, then at her companions: ‘We are only seven,’ she told the Naveen. ‘We did not do this!’ She indicated the woman nailed upside down, her one eye rolling, gasping her last breaths. ‘I sought to give this poor one mercy, for she is beyond saving.’

The closest of the hunters, the same man who had challenged Ria moments before, dropped to his knees in front of the dying woman, his eyes level with hers, touched her face and began to murmur to her softly. ‘My love. Who has done this to you? Where are our children?’ He reached to where her hands and wrists were nailed to the tree and his fingers fluttered over the bloodied heads of the cruel flint spikes. He looked up. Each of her legs was pinned from the knee to the foot with three big skewers that had smashed her shin bones and disjointed her ankles. The futility of any attempt to free her must have become obvious to him, and his body was racked and twisted with great sobs and groans. ‘REVENGE!’ he shouted. ‘I SHALL HAVE REVENGE!’ Then he unsheathed his knife and cut the woman’s throat, kneeling silently by her while her lifeblood drained and the last of the light seeped out of the one eye the birds had spared.

The hunter was a tall broad-shouldered man of thirty summers or thereabouts. He had a heavy black beard, a fierce hooked nose, tawny eyes like a wolf, and tanned weather-beaten skin. Now he stood and
turned on Ria: ‘You!’ he hissed. ‘You speak our language. Who are you? What are you doing here? Why do you have Uglies with you?’

Ria looked around. The ring of Naveen hunters had closed tight. Some of the braves were young, nervous, lacking in experience, likely to be rash, and the seven archers were getting shaky holding their bows at full stretch. ‘Tell your men to unbend their bows,’ Ria said, ‘and then we’ll talk. If they fire on us it’ll come to a fight and everyone loses. There’s been enough dying here today.’

‘If it comes to a fight we’ll kill you all.’

‘You will. You have the numbers. But how many of your men are going to die doing it? That’s the question. And what’s the point? We’re just like you. We’ve lost loved ones to the same evil enemy who struck you here. We should join forces against him. It’s madness to fight each other.’

The hunter’s wolfish eyes stared at her for a ten count: ‘It seems this enemy has stolen our children away,’ he said. ‘Do you know why?’

‘When your men put down their bows,’ answered Ria, ‘I’ll tell you what we know.’

The hunter’s name was Aarkon. He wasn’t the only one of his band to have dead relatives nailed to the trees; they all did. Nor was he the only one whose children, or younger brothers and sisters, had disappeared. So they were all desperate to understand what had happened. But as Ria told them of the massacre of the Clan by the Illimani horde, and of how Sulpa collected children for sacrifice, their faces darkened. ‘We have to get after them,’ said Aarkon grimly, ‘We have to try and save our kids.’

‘It was a large band that smashed this camp,’ Ria reminded him. ‘Must have been hundreds of them, and the whole Illimani force numbers more than seven thousand. What can twelve of you do?’