“You’re white,” he said, his voice cracking. “Don’t let them take me. You don’t know what they’ll do.”
Krysty pointed a finger at him. “I’ve seen what your brutish gangs do. Anything that happens to you from these people’s going to be triple deserved.”
He tried to scream at them, but the native woman stooped and picked up a clump of dirt and grass and rammed it hard into his open mouth, tying it tightly into place with two more of the rawhide strips, silencing him. Fresh, brighter blood showed against the dark patch where he’d been stabbed, the wound that had obviously resulted in his being left behind by Bivar.
“OUR HOME,” said the stocky native, pointing ahead of them with his good arm.
“Where we will bury our dead ones,” the woman added. “We could not carry them now. But in morning bring them to homes.”
Ryan had wondered about that, surprised that they hadn’t made any effort to bury their own dead. The corpses of the slavers had all been dragged together while the male natives urinated on them, then they had been lifted by wrists and ankles and thrown into the pool.
“Look over there,” J.B. said. The muzzle of the Uzi indicated an amazing structure about a quarter mile off, to the right.
It was a kind of pyramid, more than a hundred feet in height, with steps scaling its four sides. The top was flattened and seemed to have some kind of altar on it. The structure lay to the east of the fenced village, which stood on the edge of a large lake.
There looked to be about seventy huts, nearly all of them thatched with wide palm leaves. The light was mostly gone, and the cooking fires looked as bright as diamonds. Ryan sniffed, starting to salivate, scenting the delicious odor of what he guessed was probably roasting pork.
“Food smells good,” he said, smiling at the native with the wounded arm, but the man looked back at him with no change of emotion.
“Meal for dead. Those taken by slavers are dead to us and to the gods. It is hard for those left behind to walk tear-blinded on path between night and day.”
“Yeah, guess it is.”
One of the other men with them had run ahead, calling out in the language that was a strange mixture of harsh gutturals and liquid syllables. It didn’t take an expert translator to know that he was warning the village about the arrival of strangers, of the battle and of the deadand of the slim youth whose eyes glowed like smoldering coals in a fire of ash and whose hair was whiter than the eternal crest of snow on the high peaks.
Drums began to beat in a fast staccato rhythm, totally unlike the slower meter of the drums of the Native Americans on the high plains.
And there was the strident sound of a brass trumpet, ripping apart the quiet of the evening.
“Giving us a welcome,” Dean said, walking closer to his father.
“Yeah. We got nothing to fear, son. All we’ve done them, so far, is a big favor.”
“Long as they don’t reckon us for slavers,” J.B. said softly.
Ryan had already considered that one, and he’d been glad to see that native go racing ahead, babbling out the tale of what had happened that afternoon. The village would already be stricken by the loss of so many of their number at the hands of Bivar and his men, and any pale-complexioned outlanders were likely to risk a hostile reception.
“By the Three!” Doc was wiping perspiration from his forehead, but he hastily put away his swallow’s-eye kerchief as he saw the reception party coming toward them through the high, spiked gates. “It’s either the Akond of Swat or the great panjandrum, or perhaps it’s Atahuallpa himself, long-dead monarch of the Inca people.”
Ryan had been met by some bizarre-looking men and women in his time, but he’d never seen anything to match the arrival at this obscure, isolated village, somewhere in Central or South America.
There were eight of them making a stately progress toward the strangersall males, judging by their height and build.