Naamah's Blessing

survived without it. I nodded. “Tell them.”
    Reluctantly, he did.
    The jungle folk conferred amongst themselves. One strode forward, addressing the empty air in a firm tone.
    “They want to see us,” Eyahue informed me. “They will not agree unless we show ourselves.”
    I took a deep breath. “Then we will do so. Ask them to lay down their weapons as a gesture of trust.”
    It was a tense moment. At last, the five men stooped and set down their weapons, glancing around uncertainly. I lowered my own bow to the ground. Bao unslung his staff, leaning unobtrusively on it.
    I let the twilight go.
    All of us stared at one another. The hunters’ appearance in the daylight was startling, their faces painted bright red. I remembered the boy in Tipalo’s village smearing his cheeks as he mimed a hunter with a blowpipe. The gesture was more ominous in retrospect; and yet there was fear in the hunters’ eyes, more than I thought our emergence from the twilight warranted.
    Their leader addressed us.
    “He wants to know if we are spirits from the black river,” Eyahue said in a puzzled tone.
    “What does that mean?” I asked him.
    The old man shrugged. “No idea.”
    “Tell him no,” I said. “Tell him we are harmless, and we seek their help because our magic is weak here.”
    “I’m not telling him that!” Eyahue gave me a withering look. “You don’t know the first thing about bartering, do you?”
    “Moirin knows a great deal about befriending people,” Bao said quietly. “I suggest you do it.”
    Grumbling, the
pochteca
acceded.
    The hunters relaxed visibly. Moving slowly, I extended my hands palms upward, then placed them together in the soothing
mudra
of reassurance that the Rani Amrita had taught me so long ago.
“Sulpayki,”
I said carefully, bowing toward them. “Thank you.”
    Unexpectedly, the leader grinned, his teeth white against his crimson-painted face. He mimicked my gesture and replied in a rapid spate of Quechua, while one of the others picked up the ground-fowl and examined them with approval.
    I glanced at Eyahue, who was looking thunderstruck. “He says they are honored by our visit,” he said. “They saw our boats and our sick men and wondered if they should kill us before we joined the black river and grew stronger. But now that they know we are good spirits bringing gifts, they will help us.” He nodded at the leader. “His name is Paullu. He says we should bring our people to his village, where they already have
cinchona
bark. The shaman there will heal them.”
    I bowed a second time. “
Sulpayki
, Paullu.”
    The naked hunter with the crimson face-paint returned my salute with dignity. “
Imamanta
,” he replied.
    You’re welcome
.

FIFTY-TWO

    B itter!” Balthasar said in protest, making a face as he drank a concoction of dried, powdered
cinchona
bark. “Ah, gods! It’s so bitter.”
    I folded my arms. “Just drink it.”
    Wincing, he did.
    It had not been an easy task to escort eight feverish men up the steepest part of the cliffs and trek for an hour through the jungle to Paullu’s village, but we had done it. Putting our trust in the hospitality of our new friends, we’d left behind the last of our food stores with the majority of our crew. Under Septimus Rousse’s direction, they were searching for a
marupa
tree to replace our lost canoe. In exchange for the generosity of Paullu’s villagers, we brought an array of glass and crystal beads and a couple of hand mirrors that delighted them to no end.
    I found myself liking them.
    Like the Maghuin Dhonn, they lived close to nature; and yet in some ways, they were more sophisticated than my mother’s solitary, reclusive folk. The village was a surprisingly elaborate configuration of thatch-roofed wooden buildings, often linked by bridges and walkways. They fished and hunted and foraged, but they grew crops in the jungle highlands, too.
    Bao, who knew a great deal more about it than I did, praised their shaman’s knowledge of herb-lore.
    “Look, Moirin.” He plucked a leaf from a shrub the shaman Atoc had shown him, rubbing it on his forearm and releasing a sharp, not displeasing, odor. “It helps keep the mosquitoes at bay.”
    “I wonder how Eyahue missed that one in all his travels,” I said ruefully. “Mayhap it amused the local folk to see him suffer. Would that we’d known of it sooner.”
    Bao shrugged. “Better now than never.”
    Mindful of my role as a good spirit bearing gifts, not to