Hell's Gate(47)

“What did these voices sound like?” the cacique had asked, leaning toward her.

At first there was only silence in the medicine man’s smoky hut, but then there came a sound. It started as a soft hiss of air, then rose in pitch until it had transformed into a series of short notes, a melody lasting several seconds.

Leila realized that the sounds were coming from her. She closed her eyes and drew another long breath.

She was standing inside the antechamber.

Serebur? was walking away from her.

The dim passageway.

The light from her husband’s torch throwing wild shadows onto the rock walls.

The clicking of claws on stone.

A flash of movement up ahead.

Something crawling along the ceiling.

Moving toward Serebur?, horrifyingly fast.

More than one. There were—

Leila gasped, interrupting her own strange melody.

Her eyes shot open. The elders were sitting motionless; even the cacique appeared to have been paralyzed. What have I done?

The tribal leader spoke a single sentence.

“She belongs to the Demons.”

These were the last words Leila was ever to hear from him, or from anyone else among her people.


After the exile, Leila and her mother struggled to build and maintain a tiny thatched dwelling. It clung precariously close to a terrace on a steep hill overlooking the Valley of Mists. But even before the hut was completed, Leila knew that she was pregnant.

As the days passed, she took on duties usually reserved for men, becoming adept with the blowgun and bringing down peccary and capybara with curare-tipped darts. Her mother gathered nuts, fruit, and edible roots. Against all odds, their lives began to find a rhythm.

When the time came for Leila to give birth, the older woman helped with the delivery. And although Leila took a measure of pride from the fact that Serebur? finally had his son, it soon became apparent that the child had not escaped his parents’ curse. As an infant he barely cried, and four years later he had yet to utter a single word. Physically, the boy had always been undersized, but lately he had begun to lose weight, his eyes sinking deeper and deeper into his skull.

Leila’s mother, too, seemed weaker. Her once-beautiful face was now drawn and creased like an old mango, and she looked much beyond her forty-five years.

We will die soon . . . all of us, Leila thought, and as if to drive the point home, one day the old woman returned from another backbreaking trip to fetch water with a fantastic tale.

“Many warazu have come,” she said. “They climbed from the belly of a giant fish.”

Leila reacted to her mother’s words with fear, though the fear had not been brought on by the magical arrival of strangers. Leila had heard similar confused talk from some of the old people whom she had loved and respected as a child. Their minds seemed to have gone suddenly soft.

“The old ones have run out of wise words,” Leila’s mother had told her then, “and now they are becoming children again.”

Could this be happening to her mother?

Leila knew that people from a strange and heavily armed tribe had been arriving and departing for more than a year now. They came on rafts, laden with what appeared to be long vines of metal, heavy sacks of gray earth, and the makings for stiff metal huts. She had no idea why they had come or what the material was for, but she was sure that these men did not emerge from a fish.

“These warazu are different,” the old woman continued. “Some of them have golden hair. And they worship a crooked cross.”

Even as she spoke the words, Leila’s mother could see the disbelief in her daughter’s eyes, so she took Leila by the wrist, half-dragging her to a vantage point along the river’s edge.

With a mixture of relief and dread, Leila saw that her mother had not slipped back into childhood. There were warazu, many of them. And their giant fish was actually a great black canoe of some kind, the likes of which she had never seen. A portion of the canoe even extended upward like the fin of a great fish. It was this particular fin that bore a pole, and from this pole there hung a cloth painted with the strange crooked cross her mother had described.

For the first few days, Leila watched the strangers from the fringes, and the more she watched, the more puzzling their behavior became. She also noted that the warazu were divided into several castes—like ants. Some were of normal height with straight black hair. Like her people, these men were quiet as they went about their work. Some of the warazu, though, were giants and indeed her mother had been right: Several of them did have golden hair. They spoke loudly, and in a harsh-sounding language that reminded her of spitting. Leila also noticed that both groups wore clothes that seemed well made but far too heavy to be practical.

From the start, and even when viewing them only from the edges of their encampment, Leila could see that most of the warazu acted more like conquering gods than visitors. And surprisingly, her people treated them like gods, accepting them and even working with them side by side. And work they did, from dawn until dusk and beyond, putting groups of newly arrived captives to the task of cutting and clearing the forest. Others used a giant arm to transfer strange objects from their enormous canoe to the shore. Their constant movement was another way that the warazu reminded Leila more of ants than men. They even used flying machines to carry their goods and, though the contraptions resembled gigantic dragonflies, the horrible noise and wind they produced were nothing like the delicate air dance of real dragonflies.