Naamah's Blessing

his sacred plant was cultivated, was one of his seasonal refuges.
    “That’s what you came to trade for, isn’t it?” I asked him. “This sacred plant?”
    He put a finger over his lips and winked at me. “Shh! Only Quechua royalty are permitted to use it.”
    The spotted warrior Temilotzin chuckled.
    The following day, we set out on the river in higher spirits than usual, hoping that there actually was an end in sight to the journey.It was in the late morning when I noticed a phenomenon along the southern bank of the river, a trickle of darkness moving toward us, oddly shiny in the sunlight. It wasn’t until our paths converged that I was able to make out what it was.
    Ants.
    Tens of thousands of them, pouring in a stream over the rocky shore, black bodies glistening.
    I had to own, it made my skin crawl.
    We pulled alongside Eyahue’s canoe to ask him about it.
    “Nasty buggers,” the old
pochteca
confirmed. “They hunt as an army. We’ll want to stay out of their way.”
    “How dangerous are they?” I asked.
    Eyahue sucked his teeth. “Their bite stings like fire. I’ve never known them to take down prey as big as a man… but I wouldn’t like to be lying injured in their path, either.” He looked askance at the teeming shore, his expression apprehensive. “Can’t say I’ve ever seen quite so many in one place before.”
    As our canoes glided past the stream of ants, the head of the column roiled in confusion, doubling back on itself and reversing direction, following our course. Here and there, I could make out individual insects, antennae twitching as they appeared to regard our progress with their faceted eyes.
    And there were more coming, thin trickles emerging from the depths of the jungle to broaden the stream.
    “Poor Denis,” Bao murmured, paddling steadily. “This must be driving him mad.”
    “Bao?” My voice shook a little. I pointed to the shore. “Would you call that a black river?”
    He shot me a grim look over his shoulder. “Not yet. But I might if it continues to grow.”
    “Drop back,” I said to him. “I want to know what Denis thinks.”
    We back-paddled on the placid surface of the river, drifting on the milky-green waters, letting the canoe in which Denis de Toluard rode catch up to us.
    In the stern of his canoe, Denis was restless and uneasy, his nose twitching, his paddle idle in his hands. “Go,” he said unasked when they drew alongside us. “Go, go, go! That is what they say. Go and see, call the others. Call them all from the depths of the jungle, every last colony.” He rubbed violently at his nose with one knuckled fist. “Not
see
, no. They cannot
see
as we understand it. But they can scent us, and they do.”
    On the shore, the stream grew still for a moment. Antennae perked and twitched, echoing Denis’ movements.
    “Can you tell if they mean us harm?” I asked quietly.
    His haunted gaze met mine. “I don’t think so. They feel like… sentries?” He nodded to himself. “Sentries, yes.”
    We continued onward and the army of sentries streamed alongside us, growing ever larger. The ants foraged as they went, taking down beetles and lizards in their path, stripping them in seconds. They poured over rocks, divided around boulders, the moving mass of them looking for all the world like a black river.
    A sick sense of apprehension settled in the pit of my stomach. Not even Eyahue’s victorious shout as he pointed to terraced fields arising in the heights beyond a vast bend in the river could alleviate it.
    But then the stream of ants altered their course, turning away from the river to plunge back into the jungle, heading overland toward the distant terraces. I wasn’t entirely reassured, but my sense of dread lessened.
    A little later, we came around the bend and got our first sight of Vilcabamba.
    Eyahue hadn’t lied.
    The Quechua city was perched in the highlands, spilling down the western slope of a mountain into the valleys below. It was protected by deep chasms spanned by hanging bridges. Buildings in the valleys were built of wood and thatch, but in the heights, there were palaces wrought of carved and painted stone. Streams trickled down to join the big river, churning the waters ahead of us.
    All of us drifted and stared, unable to believe our eyes, unableto believe that we had reached the outermost stronghold of Tawantinsuyo.
    Belatedly, I realized that we were approaching a long quay with a handful of canoes docked there. On a