Quintspinner (49 page)

She inhaled the tropical fragrances hanging in the humid air and closed her eyes, willing herself to relax. The scent here was captivating–moist and earthy mulch mixed with heavy floral tones–and she could almost taste the air’s sweetness on her tongue. The slow slide into meditation was momentarily intoxicating and she was caught off guard by the intensity of an unexpected vision. Its content caused her to startle and she choked on a panicked cry of surprise in her throat.

“What is it?” William’s worried eyes were drawn tightly with renewed tension.

Tess blinked, confused as what had seemed so real inside her head only a heartbeat ago.

“I had thoughts of–a battle of sorts ….” The idea sounded so stupid out loud that she let her words die away. “Just starting to dream, I guess.” She looked up at William and saw that her words had not been convincing.

“A battle?” His forehead creased in further worry and his nostrils flared slightly, as though he were picking up on the scent of her building anxiety.

The image had been only a fragment but there had been flickers of fighting. Of blood. Screams of pain. Most frightening of all, she thought that the screams had been hers.

Tess shook her head as though clearing her mind of the thoughts. “Just too tired, I guess.” She smiled wanly at William. “I must have started to doze off. It was just a bad dream.”
More like a waking nightmare,
she told herself.

Jacko and Mambo openly stared at her and then, glancing at each other and sharing an unspoken thought, jumped to their feet.

“We go! Now!” Jacko hissed the order through clenched teeth and he spun around, sending Mambo vaulting past him up the streamside trail with an urgent shove to her back.

The attack happened without further warning.

Before the rest of their small group could stumble to their feet, the air around them roared with the deafening blasts of musket fire. Giant philodendron leaves exploded, then shuddered and fluttered to the ground, shredded to pieces. Clouds of gunpowder smoke billowed through ragged holes that had been blasted in the thick leafy curtains.

Through her confusion and fear, Tess had not quite risen from her seat at the base of the tree, and panic-stricken, she dove under the thick foliage at her feet, scrambling to tuck her legs under the low boughs. Her own scream was lost among those filling her ears–the howls of the maroons as the musket balls hit, tearing away flesh and shattering bones. Their vocal misery was punctuated with the cheers of the slave hunters as their ammunition felled their quarry.

Dear God! The vision–the nightmare–it’s coming to life!
Curled into a tight ball, Tess watched, paralyzed, as Jacko pivoted and leapt after Mambo, following her fleeing form into the jungle’s thick cover. Before he could take a second stride, however, he seemed to rise straight up in the air, his body stiffening as his left buttock burst open with a spray of blood and muscle. He fell with a sickening thud and did not move from where he lay.

The bloody onslaught was over in mere minutes. Tess remained frozen in her spot, hidden from the attackers for the moment, praying that they did not have another tracking dog along.

William!
Silently she shrieked his name. Was he alive or not?
Please, please,
she begged silently,
let him be alive! She
hadn’t seen him since the first volley of musket balls had sent everyone sprawling.

“Fer Chrissakes, ya’ buggerin’ bloodthirsty idiots!” a voice snarled. “Ya’ was supposed to capture them, not kill them! How the hell is a dead one gonna’ lead us to their goddamn camp? Hmm? Ya’ tell me that!” A small wiry man stepped into view and kicked at the body lying at his feet. “See if any of these sonsabitches still lives!” he ordered, and from where she lay, Tess counted three more pairs of legs stepping past her. A remaining hunting party of four.

That’s why they’d been able to surround us!

The men moved noisily around, slicing into the flesh of the downed bodies with heavy cutlasses, waiting to see if the pain of fresh wounds roused any of them. It did not. When they came to Jacko’s body, Wiry Man himself plunged his blade into Jacko’s uninjured thigh. A strangled wail made them all jump.

“Ah ha!” Wiry Man snorted with glee. “We have a live one!” and as if to convince himself, or perhaps just for the cruelty of it, twisted his knife blade a half turn in the new wound. Jacko screamed in agony.

Suddenly Wiry Man toppled forward, falling with all of his weight upon Jacko, who shrieked again with renewed pain from the pressure on his injuries. The three other slave catchers gawked at their boss lying crumpled on top of the wounded slave. For a moment they stood dumbly, not comprehending, and then with a strangled gurgle, one of them staggered forward, falling heavily face first into the jungle matting at his feet.

“Fer Chrissakes! What the hell–?” one of the two still standing on his feet blurted out before stumbling back from his fallen companion’s body. “Oh shit!” he bellowed, pointing alternatively at a dark object protruding from the back of each of the fallen men’s necks. From behind the thin veil of foliage, Tess squinted at the bodies. Even from where she was, she recognized the blade handles of William’s daggers.

He’s alive! Oh my God–he’s alive!
For a split second Tess felt an immense jolt of relief before she slid back down into her cold pool of terror. The two remaining hunters dropped instinctively into a protective crouch and their heads swiveled wildly as they searched for the source of the weapons.

Use the guns you have, William! Use them now!
Tess sent out a silent plea of desperation. These men were trackers–trained to spot even the most insignificant signs of their prey–and she knew her ragged breathing was going to give her away at any moment. She had no sooner registered that thought when one of the men suddenly twisted and sprang out of his crouch, smashing into her with a heavy crash. A calloused hand muffled her scream and at the same time forced her head back. She felt the burn of the sharp edge of his hunting knife as it sliced into her skin just below the corner of her jaw. Her world spinning in terror, Tess’s vision clouded and she felt herself blacking out. She prayed the faint would overtake her before he cut any further.

Surprise slowed the slave catcher’s hand. The only thing dark about his victim’s skin was a strange mark trailing down the side of her neck. The rest of her skin was a creamy tan. Shock crackled though him as he realized that he had nearly killed a white woman. And with all of the runaways dead or dying, how could he have blamed it on anyone else?

“Stop right now, you bastard, or I swear it’ll be the last thing you do in this life. Drop. The. Knife.” William’s voice seemed so far away, yet it was clearly his. Tess blinked and tried to clear her pounding head. She focused on his voice. It was calm. Commanding. And coldly threatening. As the blade at her neck was withdrawn, Tess clasped at the slash in her skin with her own hands, trying to staunch the bleeding.

“You. Slowly stand up and step away from the lady. And you–don’t even so much as twitch or I’ll blow you both away.”

Tess peered at the scene before her. Her attacker was kneeling on the ground in front of William; the other hunter stood a few feet away, his hands raised shoulder high in submission. William held a pistol in each hand. One set of barrels was pressed firmly against the back of the kneeling man’s head, the other gun pointed squarely at the standing hunter’s chest.

“Easy now! We meant you folks no harm.” The standing man gave a limp smile and issued a nervous laugh. “We’ve no fight at all with you. T’was only them runaway darkies we was followin’ anyhows. We had no way of knowin’ they’d taken white folk prisoners.” He glanced at Tess and his eyes traced the trickles of blood that dripped from her wound as they ran down the front of her dress and clotted there in the material. “Yer Missus’ is needing a kerchief, looks like,” he nodded at William. “I’ve got just the thing in my chest pocket, if you’ll allow ….” Without waiting for permission from William, he slowly lowered his hand into the pocket of the lanyard strapped diagonally across his chest.

The dark glint of the tiny Queen Anne pistol looked nothing like the promised kerchief as the man withdrew it and in a flash, had it leveled at William. A broad toothless grin spread over the man’s face. “Now we is about even in surprises, ain’t we?”

William froze, with only his eyes flicking from Tess, who stared determinedly at her assailant still kneeling head down in front of her, and then back to the small but lethal weapon pointed directly at him. He slowly raised his eyes from the muzzle of the gun to the man’s face, and his eyebrows arched.

“Not quite.” William’s gaze never faltered as the swoosh of the machete struck the man’s ears, its blade biting into the side of his neck and slicing through. Mambo stood behind the headless body as it toppled forward, her chest heaving with the exertion of the heavy blade’s swing.

Tess’s simultaneous attack on the hunter still bowed at William’s feet attracted his attention though. Unsheathing the small dirk that had travelled all this way securely attached to her lower leg by the strength of her grandmother’s red ribbons, Tess lunged up from her squatted position and drove the blade deep into the man’s chest. The blade was minute in comparison to the machete but days of tending to fatal chest wounds aboard the
Mary Jane
had given Tess perfect anatomical understanding. A human heart was not hard to hit if one knew just where to aim.

Again the slave catcher’s bodies were stripped of all clothing and weapons, and their nude corpses were dragged away from the stream’s edge into the jungle’s undergrowth.

“Shouldn’t we bury them or something?” William asked.

Mambo shook her head. “De jungle spirits, dey hungry. Dey feast tonight.”

Tying a pistol and a powder horn to the sash at her waist, and slipping both the machete and a smaller dagger into leather sheaths taken from the hunters, Mambo held William and Tess in her gaze, before striking off into the foliage. She was expected to return with help to transport both Jacko and Tess to the village. She would, William knew, return with assistance for Jacko, even if she didn’t care about Tess’s or his own survival. He had seen how tenderly the woman had cared for the wounded man.
Her mate,
William corrected himself. Their relationship was apparent to him now. Being moved had been excruciatingly painful for Jacko, but he now lay on a bed of soft leaves gathered by Mambo. He was mercifully unconscious.

Mambo had packed his hip and leg wounds with a sticky mat of colorful crushed leaves and sap before she dressed them with strips of cloth torn from Tess’s dress. William, too, had carefully wrapped Tess’s neck wound, accepting Mambo’s offer of a poultice of the strange jungle plant mixture to lay overtop of the gaping laceration.

If only Tess hadn’t given that emerald ring to her grandmother! William
despaired. Tess may still not have been fully convinced of its ability to promote healing but often enough William had watched her use it nonetheless, among the sick and injured, and incredulous as the notion of its power seemed to be, he was, by now, unable to dismiss the possibility.
And the blue one–it warned her of the attack on us! She knew!

It was all so weird. The logical portion of his brain still resisted, and had done so since Tess had tried to explain the rings to him, but a deeper knowing tugged at him.
How else could any of this be explained?
he wondered.
Maybe there was some truth seeded in all legends. Maybe we aren’t supposed to, aren’t even able to, figure it all out.
His head was cramping with the doubts and questions that filled it. He sighed and decided he would probably never know how or even if, it was the rings that had worked.
And really does it matter?
he mused, looking down at Tess who rested quietly beside him. For now, life’s sweetest moments were also the unexpected ones.

After what seemed an eternity, Mambo returned with only two others, making it plain that Tess and William would walk. They were going to transport Jacko on a narrow stretcher constructed of thin branches woven into a fishnet. The flexibility of the device made portaging through the jungle’s maze possible where something less supple would have rendered passage impossible.

The tropical vegetation had blended into a forest of tall trees and stony crevasses when their small group traveling in single file stopped at the foot of a smooth vertical cliff. The stream they had been following seemed to gush out from the foot of its rocky face, which was dressed with a thick and tangled veil of hanging plants. Pulling this living curtain aside, the leader of the group stepped into a small opening in the rock and was swallowed up in its darkness. Those in front of William and Tess followed him.