Naamah's Blessing

until his cheekbones stood out like blades, his dark blue eyes set in sunken hollows above them. “Leave be, won’t you? I’m fine, Moirin!”
    He wasn’t.
    And that was the second worst of our problems.

FIFTY

    I t wasn’t just Balthasar Shahrizai. Over the course of days, seven other men began showing signs of fever, alternating between shivering despite the day’s heat, and sweating even more profusely than the rest of us. I was sorry to see that Jean Grenville, one of our steady L’Agnacites and best foragers, was among them; but Balthasar was the worst of the lot by far, his condition deteriorating at an alarming rate.
    Ah, gods! Truth be told, all of them worried me, more than I cared to let on. Every night, I prayed.
    We reached stretches of perilous rapids that took all our hard-won skill to navigate, twisting and plunging through narrow passages between rocks. Whenever possible, we disembarked and transported the canoes and their goods manually along the shore, which was infinitely more exhausting, but far less dangerous.
    All of us were weaker than we had been for lack of food, but the sick men labored harder at both chores. When we made camp at night, they lacked the strength to do aught but sweat and shiver.
    I was afraid for them, and afraid for the rest of us, too. If the disease passed to our entire company, we wouldn’t be able to continue. We would simply starve to death here in the jungle.
    “It is not that kind of sickness,” Eyahue told me. “It does not pass from one person to another.” He blew out his breath. “Bad spirits in the air cause it.”
    “Is there anything we can do?” I asked him.
    He nodded. “Smoke will help drive them away. Put green wood on the fire.”
    Whether or not it helped, I could not say. No one else took ill, but those who were already sick continued to worsen.
    When we found a campsite not far from a slow-moving segment of river where the whiskery fish were particularly abundant, I called for a day’s rest. While others foraged for frogs and grubs and the sick men rested, Bao and I spent the entire day downriver cloaked in the twilight, catching fish.
    By the day’s end, we had over two dozen. We wrapped them in leaves and steamed them over the fire, everyone cramming the slightly gamey flesh into their mouths with their fingers. I made sure all of the sick men had an entire fish to themselves, hovering over Balthasar to be certain he ate every last bite while he scowled at me, squinting against the green-wood smoke of our campfire.
    I hoped it would help.
    It didn’t.
    Come daybreak, the sick men were no better, and Balthasar’s condition had worsened markedly. He was shaking so hard he could barely sit upright, and in the clear light of dawn, I was shocked to see that the whites of his eyes had turned a vivid hue of yellow, eerily bright in contrast to his dark blue irises. Until that moment, I’d doubted Eyahue’s talk of bad spirits, but now I wondered.
    The old
pochteca
called me aside. “Your friend is going to die before we reach Vilcabamba,” he said bluntly. “Maybe others, too. Today’s journey will be very hard. They are too sick. It would be better to leave them now.”
    My heart ached. “Is there nothing else we can do? No way to save them?”
    He hesitated.
    “Eyahue!” I grabbed his scrawny shoulders and shook him. “If you know something you’re not telling me, I swear by stone and sea and all that they encompass, I will kill you myself!”
    “All right!” He fended me off. “Yes, maybe. Maybe! But it is dangerous.”He pointed downriver. “First, we must pass through a gorge with fast rapids. There is no place to carry the canoes and your sick men will be no help. But if we make it through, there is a tree that grows in the heights whose bark is poisonous to the bad spirits.”
    “It will cure them?” I asked, hoping against hope.
    Eyahue scowled at me. “
If
I can find it, and
if
I do not get killed trying. Where it grows, there are hostiles for sure, the last of the wild forest tribes before we reach Vilcabamba.”
    “We have to try,” I said. “Please?”
    He sighed. “If we survive the rapids, I will try.”
    I kissed his wizened cheek. “Thank you, Eyahue.”
    I explained the situation to the others. No one wanted to leave ailing men behind, although Balthasar protested the decision.
    “As one of the sponsors of this expedition, I must advise against this as a bad investment,” he said in a wry tone