Doc took the opportunity to clean his swallow’s-eye kerchief, rinsing out blood and crusted sweat.
“The talk of this ceremony tonight,” he said. “It likes me not, brothers and sisters.”
“Sacrifice?” Mildred asked.
“Means they’ll chill the three prisoners they’ve got, doesn’t it, Dad?”
“We don’t have to go,” Krysty said, trying to dry her hair on an inadequately small towel of linen.
Mildred shook her head. “Trouble is, I only did Native American sociological grouping as my minor. But I know that all of the main cultures of Central and South America were seriously big on their rituals.”
“Aztecs, Maya and Inca,” Doc said. “I know something of them. During the long hours I spent in durance vile at the various safehouses of the white-coat time scientists, I had ample opportunity to catch up on my neglected reading. I believe that it was probably in the Victorian Gothic frame house in rural Maryland, or was it the military-intelligence mansion in the misty hills of Virginia ? It matters not.”
“Get on with it, Doc,” Ryan said.
“Of course. There was a library there and I remember reading an excellent tome on this very subject.”
“What subject, Doc?” Mildred asked, looking bewildered. “You’ve been rambling so far and so long that I’ve plain forgotten what it was you were talking about. Could it possibly have been the Mayan, Inca and Aztec civilizations?”
Doc sniffed. “I choose to ignore that pettish and peevish interruption. I dismiss it as being of less moment than the cheeping of demons in a dry gutter. The book was called The Sun, the Pyramid and the Knife , by a scholarly author whose name was Let me see Yes, Jedediah Alnwick. He gave great detail of the barbaric murders these people carried out in the name of their religion. Still, I suppose that it was ever thus.”
“So?” Mildred said. “What’s your point, Doc? Supposing you have a point at all.”
“I remember that everyone was required to attend these sacrifices. Everyone . I think it might be unwise to reject any invitation.”
THE AFTERNOON DRIFTED BY.
Dean fell asleep, giving his father and Krysty the opportunity to make hurried love beneath a long embroidered blanket that was trimmed with the colorful feathers of a bird of paradise.
After they’d finished, Ryan went quickly and washed himself in an unglazed pottery bowl. Neither of them had bothered to take off their outdoor clothing, simply unbelting their pants and rolling them down to the knees.
“That was nice,” Krysty said, lying on her back on the bed, watching Ryan.
“Yeah.”
“Though I reckon I’d always take a slowie over a quickie any day of the week. Any week of the year. Finished with the water, lover?”
“Sure. Yeah, I agree.” Both of them were keeping their voices pitched low to avoid waking the boy, sleeping behind the beaded curtain.
“We going to help these people?”
Ryan sat on the bed, checking the action of the SIG-Sauer. “Don’t see why we might not help them out a little on a raid of these Jaguar people. And if the slavers were to come calling” He let the rest of the sentence trail off into the moist heat of the thatched hut.
“What’s that stuff that J.B. and Doc were playing around with out back of their place?”
Ryan holstered the heavy automatic and stood, stretching. “I reckon it’s likely going to turn out to be a primitive explosive of some kind.”
“Someone’s coming.” Krysty quickly pulled up her pants and fastened the belt.
“I don’t hear them,” Ryan said.
“Didn’t hear them. Felt them.” She paused. “Now I hear them. Two men.”
Ryan caught the sound of bare feet padding across the open ground toward their hut.
“Dean!”
“What is it?” the boy asked sleepily.
“Company.”
The boy swung off his bed, appearing through the beaded curtain with his 9 mm Browning gripped in his right fist, looking as big as a cannon.
The men swept into the hut without bothering to knock or call out a warning.
One of them was a young boy, wearing a mask of a human skull, fleshless, with empty holes where the eyes should have been. The teeth were inlaid chips of turquoise.