No one answered, which earned a mean snicker from the sergeant. 'Okay,' Kostos said. 'I didn't think so.' He pointed to Private Camera. 'Why don't you take our fragile little doctor back to camp? This is men's work:'
'Yes, sir.' Camera waved Nate to the path, and together they continued down toward the village. Once out of earshot, Camera grumbled under her breath. 'What an asshole. . :'
Nate nodded, but truthfully, he was only too glad to leave the massacre site. He couldn't care less what Sergeant Kostos might think. But he understood Camera's anger. Nate could only imagine the hassles the woman had to endure from the all-male force.
The remainder of the journey down the trail was made in silence. As they neared the shabano, voices could be heard. Nathan's pace quickened. It would be good to be among the living again. He hoped someone had thought to light a fire.
Circling around the shabano, Nathan approached Private Eddie Jones, who stood guard by the entrance. Beyond him, limned against the water, a pair of Rangers was posted by the river.
As he and Camera reached the roundhouse's door, Eddie Jones greeted them and blurted out the news. 'Hey, you guys ain't gonna fuckin' believe what we fished out of the jungle:'
'What?' Camera asked.
Jones thrust a thumb toward the door. 'Go see for yourselves:'
Camera waved her rifle's barrel for Nate to go first.
Within the shabano, a small congregation was clustered in the roundhouse's open central yard. Manny stood somewhat to the side with Tor-tor. He lifted an arm when he spotted Nate, but there was no greeting smile.
The voices from the others were raised in argument.
'He's my prisoner!' Captain Waxman boomed. He stood with three Rangers, who all had their weapons on their shoulders pointing at someone out of sight behind the group of civilians.
'At least remove the cuffs on his wrists,' Kelly argued. 'His ankles are still bound. He's just an old man.'
'If you want cooperation,' Kouwe added, 'this is no way to go about it:'
'He'll answer our questions,' Waxman said with clear menace.
Frank stepped in front of Waxman. 'This is still my operation, Captain. And I won't tolerate abuse of this prisoner:'
By now, Nate had crossed the yard and joined them. Anna Fong glanced to him, her eyes scared.
Richard Zane stood slightly to the side, a satisfied smirk on his face. He nodded to Nathan. 'We caught him lurking in the jungle. Manny's big cat helped hunt him down. You should have heard him screaming when the jaguar had him pinned against a tree:'
Zane stepped aside, and Nate saw who had been captured. The small Indian lay in the dirt, his ankles and wrists bound in strips of thick plastic zip lies. His shoulder-length white hair clearly marked him as an elder. He sat before the others, mumbling under his breath. His eyes flicked between the rifles pointed at him and Tor-tor pacing nearby.
Nate listened to his muttered words. Yanomamo. He moved closer. It was a shamanic prayer, a warding against evil. Nate realized the prisoner must be a shaman. Was he from this village? A survivor of the slaughter?
The Indian's eyes suddenly flicked to Nate, his nostrils flaring. 'Death clings to you,' he warned, in his native dialect. 'You know. You saw.'
Nate realized the man must smell the stench of the massacre on his clothes and skin. He knelt nearer and spoke in Yanomamo. 'Haya. Grandfather. Who are you? Are you from this village?'
He shook his head with a deep scowl. 'This village is marked by shawari. Evil spirits. I came here to deliver myself to the Ban-ali. But I was too late:'
Around Nate, the arguing had stopped as they watched the exchange. Kelly whispered behind him. 'He's not spoken a word to anyone, not even Professor Kouwe:'
'Why do you seek the Blood Jaguars, the Ban-ali?'
'To save my own village. We did not heed their ways. We did not burn the body of the nabe, the white man marked as a slave of the Ban-ali. Now all our children sicken with evil magic:'
Nate suddenly understood. The white man marked by the Ban-ali had to be Gerald Clark. If so, that meant . . . 'You're from Wauwai.'
He nodded and spit into the dirt. 'Curse that name. Curse the day we ever set foot in that nabe village:'
Nate realized this was the shaman who had tried to heal the sick mission children, then burned their village down in an attempt to protect the others. But by his own admission, the shaman must have failed. The contagion was still spreading through the Yanomamo children.
'Why come here? How did you get here?'
'I followed the nabe's tracks to his canoe. I saw how it was painted. I know he came from this village, and I know the trails here. I came to seek the Ban-ali. To give myself to them. To beg them to lift their curse:'
Nate leaned back. The shaman, in his guilt, had come to sacrifice himself.
'But I was too late. I find only one woman still alive:' He glanced toward the site of the massacre. 'I give her water, and she tells me the tale of her village:'
Nate sat up straighter.
'What is he saying?' Captain Waxman asked.
Nate waved off his question. 'What happened?'
'The white man was found by hunters three moons ago, sick and bony. They saw his markings. In terror, they imprisoned the man, fearing he would come to their village. They stripped him of all his belongings and tethered him in a cage, deep in the woods, intending to leave him for the Blood Jaguars to collect. The hunters fed and cared for him, fearing to harm what belonged to the Ban-ali. But the nabe continued to sicken. Then, a moon later, one of the hunter's sons grew ill:'
Nate nodded. The contagious disease had spread.
'The shaman here declared them cursed and demanded the death of the nabe. They would burn his body to appease the wrath of the Ban-ali. But that morning when the hunters reached the cage, he was gone. They thought the Ban-ali had claimed him and were relieved. Only later that day would they discover one of their canoes was missing. But by then it was too late:'
The Indian grew quiet. 'Over the next days, the hunter's child died, and more in the village grew ill. Then a week ago, a woman returning from gathering bananas from the garden found a marking on the outer wall of the shabano. No one knew how it got there:' The Indian nodded to the southwest section of the roundhouse. 'It is still there. The mark of the Ban-ali:'
Nate stopped the story and turned to the others. He quickly recounted what the Indian shaman had told him. Their eyes grew wide with the telling. Afterward, Captain Waxman sent Jorgensen to check that section of the outer wall.
As they waited for him to return, Nate convinced Captain Waxman to slice the wrist bindings off the prisoner. He agreed, since the man was clearly cooperating. The shaman now sat in the dirt with a canteen in hand, sipping from it gratefully.
Kelly knelt beside Nathan. 'His story makes a certain sense from a medical standpoint. The tribe, when they kept Clark isolated in the jungle, almost succeeded in quarantining him. But as Clark's disease progressed, either the man became more contagious . . . or perhaps the hunter, whose son got sick, had somehow contaminated himself. Either way, the disease leaped here:'
'And the tribe panicked:'
Behind them, Jorgensen ducked back into the shabano, his face grim. 'The old guy's right. There's a scrawled drawing on the wall. Just like the tattoo on Agent Clark's body.' His nose curled in distaste. 'But the damn thing smells like it was drawn with pig shit or something. Stinks something fierce.'
Frank frowned and turned back to Nate. 'See if you can find out what else the shaman knows:'
Nate nodded and turned back to the shaman. 'After finding the symbol, what happened?'
The shaman scrunched up his face. 'The tribe fled that same night . . . but . . . but something came for them:'
'What?'
The Indian frowned. 'The woman who spoke to me was near to death. Her words began to wander.
