Watcher At The Well - Echoes Of The Well Of Souls Part 9

A crazy thought came to her of Gus's fears of a live re-run ofThe War of the Worlds. The repeated explosions from the crater certainlydid sound very regular, like some-thing, well,venting. Nerves, she told herself. Just nerves.

Terry, too, had found shelter, leaning against the tree and gasping for breath. She had fallen, and it felt like she'd bruised and skinned her knee. It hurt like h.e.l.l.

G.o.d! This is one I'm gonna remember for an awfully long time, she told herself. Like all the rest of my life. I been shot at, chased, slapped around, and treated like s.h.i.t, but this may be the worst. And all for a d.a.m.ned hole in the ground! Maybe this is it. Maybe this is G.o.d telling me that it's time to pack it in, demand a studio job, or find some-thing else. And those d.a.m.ned explosions! Bang! Bang! Bang! Like some kind of ghostly war.

She had just decided that it couldn't be much worse when she felt something press against the side of her head. She started; powerful hands pushed her back, and there was a gun right in her face.

"Go ahead!" Campos yelled at her in Spanish with angry satisfaction. "Yell your head off, b.i.t.c.h! They could be five meters away and not hear you!"

He grabbed her, and she tried to kick him in the b.a.l.l.s, but he sidestepped her attempt, which was weak because of the pain in her knee and her general state of near exhaus-tion. He twirled her around and pinned one of her arms be-hind her back, twisting it painfully as he drew her to him.

"Try anything more like that and I will break it! I will break your armsand your legs."

"My G.o.d, Campos! What do you want? You can't get away with this!" she yelled back defiantly.

"You know what I want, you wh.o.r.e!" he snapped. "And what if you do not turn up when the rain stops?

They will suspect, but they will notknow. Do you not remember where you are? Your friends come at our invitation and leave at our demand, and if they reject our story of your disappearance, they can do nothing. We are already on the wanted lists of a dozen countries. Your only hope is to do what I say and pretend you like it. If you convinceme, then maybe, just maybe, I will let you live!"

He pushed her back against the tree and grabbed with his free hand for her rain-soaked khaki safari shirt, the other hand still holding the pistol, now pointed at her abdomen.

"Why? You're gonna kill me anyway. Youmust !And we both know it."

He grinned evilly. "Perhaps the rain will stop. Perhaps then they will hear us, no? You can never tell."

And, with that, he ripped the shirt, almost literally tearing it off her.

She closed her eyes and sank down, resigned now to her fate at the hands of this monster. She waited and waited, and nothing came.

Finally she opened her eyes and frowned, then her eyes grew wide in amazement.

Juan Campos had collapsed in a heap and was lying there facedown, more in the rain than out of it. The pistol had fallen from his hand, and she moved painfully to re-trieve it, not comprehending what sudden miracle had saved her. Gus? But where was he? A falling branch? It didn't look like anything like that.

And then, only a few meters beyond, she saw shapes. She was so shaken that for a moment she imagined they were Gus's Martians or some other kind of creatures from the crater, and theydid look like nothing on Earth. Their faces were tattooed with elaborate designs, with great ear-rings of wood or bone. Small, dark, and threatening in their own right, each figure held a small blowpipe in its hand, eyes wide but fearfully flinching with the sound of each small explosion.

She made a movement for the pistol, and the pipes went up. She stopped, backed away into the tree, and the pipes came down. Primitive, yes, like out of someNational Geographic special, but they knew what guns could do.

Terry tried to think of how to say "friend" in every lan-guage that she knew, but only English and Spanish came to mind. She tried them, but only blank stares were returned.

And then, as dramatically as it had started, the rain stopped, as if someone had turned off a faucet.

Quickly, almost without sound, a trio of the primitives moved in toward Juan Campos's body, first turning him over, then going through his clothing with a thief's skill.

Inanely, Terry could only think, If only I had a camera here! What a story this would make!

With sudden amazement coming over her, she realized that the three stripping Campos were all girls-no, women, and, from the look of them, ones that had already lived rough lives. Their faces and bodies were decorated with well-worn designs, and they wore that primitive jewelry but not a st.i.tch of clothing. Their black hair was long but ob-viously not without attention; it was shoulder-length on some, waist-length on others, and trimmed at the ends. Nor was it matted or tangled; much attention was clearly paid to keeping it groomed. Their awareness of how things con-nected on the clothing and of the gun and its purpose showed some knowledge, but everything about them said that they, if not ignorant of anything beyond the Stone Age, rejected all such things totally.

Theywere, however, thorough, and before two minutes had pa.s.sed they had extracted from Campos's body an in-credible a.s.sortment of weaponry, from two more small pis-tols to an a.s.sortment of knives and other instruments of violence. One of the women in the rear brought up a thick tray of woven straw, onto which all the weapons were care-fully placed. By the time they were through, Campos was nude, his clothing put in a heap, and signs of various wounds and scars could be seen all over the man's body.

Clearly his life hadn't always been one of idleness and ease.

Terry heard noises to her left and looked over to see several more of the women with a very frightened Dr. Lori Sutton in tow and others dragging another form which the newswoman recognized. "Oh, my G.o.d!Gus !"

She started to go to the cameraman, but for the first time, one of the women made a sound, saying sharply and men-acingly,"Azat!"

Blowguns went up, and Terry got the message. When Lori saw Terry's torn shirt and Campos on the ground nearby, she gasped, instantly putting two and two together. The scientist reached the newswoman and whis-pered, "Did he . . . ?"

"No. They stopped him. If they hadn't-"

"Azat! Azat!"came the menacing protest again. Gus by now was also stripped, and they gestured that the two women were to strip as well. Clearly they trusted n.o.body, not here.

Oh, G.o.d! The d.a.m.ned bugs are already eating me alive as it is! Lori thought, but she was too frightened not to comply.

"Guza! Guza!"the seeming leader said, pointing, indica-ting that they were to move toward the rest of the primi-tives, who still had their blowguns trained on the captives.They're not going to give us back our clothes and equip-ment! Lori thought with sudden panic, but there wasn't much else to do, and she didn't want to argue, not right now.

They went back into the forest, and the tender feet of the two civilized women were soon feeling bruised and cut by the rough forest floor, compounded by insect bites that the natives seemed to just ignore.

They're taking us away, away from the base camp!Terry thought in panic. The rest of the news team would search, of course, but what chance did anyone have of finding them in the natives' jungle, even if it had just recently undergone ma.s.sive alterations?

It seemed like a very long march, but hardly hours con-sidering that dawn had not yet broken. Finally they reached what the two women first thought was a village but which, on closer inspection, appeared more to be a temporary camp rather than a permanent settlement.

Terry's curiosity competed with her fear, and she won-dered if these women had been here when the meteor had hit. There were signs of debris about, a number of recently fallen trees and the remains of a crude stone fire pit that had apparently blown over. A camp fire burned in the wreckage, giving the whole area an eerie, flickering glow. On one side of the camp several women were lying on thick gra.s.s mats, and they had what looked like dried mud and leaves over parts of their bodies, some secured with vines.

At least one showed signs of singed hair and had the natural bandages over part of her face and one eye.

Yes, they'd been here during impact. It was a wonder any of them had survived unscathed, let alone so many, and it was equally wondrous that any of them could still hear.

The two captive women were taken near the fire, al-though they hardly needed the extra heat, and with signs were ordered to sit. It was mostly mud there, thanks to the runoff from the rainstorm.

To their surprise, they saw the bodies of the two men be-ing dragged into the camp, bound with vine ropes.Then they aren't dead! both thought almost at once, for why bind dead bodies? Some sort of paralyzing drug, then, rather than a lethal poison. Terry was happy that Gus wasn't a ca-sualty, after all, but couldn't help wondering with a little bit of satisfaction what Campos would be like as the captive of a tribe of female savages.

Now what?they both wondered. Neither had any experi-ence with anything like this, but it wasn't hard to think of movies, television shows, and books that told of the savage nature of the jungle people of the upper Amazon. And if they were taken far into the jungle before searchers could find them, what hope would there ever be of escape?

Amazonia

SHE WAS NOT OLD, SHE WAS ANCIENT, ALTHOUGH SHE NOlonger possessed the word to express it. The People be-lieved that she was the daughter of a G.o.ddess and almost worshiped her, and after all this time she could no longer recall her own origin.

She sensed that in the distant past she'd been many things, but it was increasingly difficult to remember much of it. Shedid know somehow that the longer time pa.s.sed and the more she remained in any one place, the more her memory faded, leaving only the present and immediate past. But the present and immediate past were such a long stretch of existence that she knew somehow that she was coming to a point where memories were falling into a deep and bottomless pit beyond recall. Some of the knowledge useful to the People remained, but it seemed now to come from nowhere, accepted as readily as magic, without ques-tion as to its origin but rather taken for granted as some di-vine gift. Vast periods of time pa.s.sed when she never even thought of the Past, or that there hadbeen a past, even in her dreams. She didn't mind; in fact, she felt better for it, slept more soundly for it. The present was enough. It was sufficient.

The language of the People was simple and pragmatic; they had all the words that were necessary for them and could express any concepts that were relevant to their sim-ple but demanding lives, but there was no subtlety to it, no multiple meanings, no indirectness. There were also no words for lying, deceit, dishonesty, or most other sins, nor was there a word for property or any great concept of it.

Although there were spirits everywhere-not just in the sky but in the trees, the rocks, the water, the animals, even the wind-who were prayed to in the context of a view of the cosmos both simple and complete, they had no names, only attributes and powers. The names of the People were also simple and generally descriptive: Little Flower, Big Nose, Soft Wind. They had named her Alama long ago, which meant "spirit mother."

She had used no other tongue for so long that she re-called no other. Like the rest of her forgotten past, she had no need of another.

Even time was different here, for the climate never changed, and the only temporal reference, beyond the pa.s.s-ing of day and night, was the births, aging, and eventual deaths of the others. She had tried on occasion to figure out how long she had been with the People by generations, but she kept going back and back so far that all the faces and personalities blurred together in her mind. She did remem-ber vaguely coming across an immense river in a very large canoe powered by the Spirit of the Wind, with huge, ugly men dressed in bright cloth and metal, with four-legged an-imals that they rode. She recalled that sometime afterward she had been beaten and whipped by some of those men and had fled into the jungle, but even that was a blur now, fading and soon to disappear with the rest of the past.

She had a hazy memory, almost a dream, of fleeing in-land, encountering a tribe, and settling with them.

She had felt safe, but something had happened-an accident-and she'd lost a hand. She could never remember which hand it was, anyway, since it wasn't important. It wasn't the loss that had caused the trouble with the tribe but, rather, the fact that the hand eventually had grown back. She had been cast out by the tribal leaders, men who had come to fear her, and she had pressed on, learning when to stay with a tribe and when to leave it, until she had found the People.

Legend said it had been a tribe where the men had grown lazy and no longer provided for the women and chil-dren or respected the G.o.ds and spirits. The women had learned how to hunt and forage and do all the things men did, after which the spirits had slain the men for their evil abandonment of their natural duties. Since that time they had allowed no man in the tribe. Now and then they would find men of other tribes in the forest and capture some of them, and, using the ancient potions made from the forest plants, the prisoners would be kept drugged and would mate with whoever of the tribe chose to do so. After a while the men would again be put to sleep and carried back to where they had been captured, to wake up wondering whether their experience had been real or some kind of dream. Male children born of these unions would be taken to some other mixed tribe and left. Only girl children were kept by the People. It was a part of the blood oath taken at adulthood, and there was a stark but well-understood price for not agreeing to do so: death to the mother, although not to the child, who was then taken to another tribe. It was a hard rule, but this was a hard life in a very hard land, and it had kept them free.

Was that one ofher rules? Or had that been here before her? She couldn't remember. She wasn't even really certain if the People had predated her arrival or had come about as a mixture of circ.u.mstance and her own invention. Certainly she strictly enforced the rules: Use nothing not of nature, or of your own making, or the making of those you know. All things of others, even of other tribes, are unclean, to be buried when found and the handler purified afterward. Re-fuse nothing that another needs; have nothing that you would not willingly give away.

She worried about that sometimes, that perhaps she was not helping these women but was instead forcing them into a system to meet not their needs but hers. But wasn't that what a deity did? They did not seem to hate her for it, were not unhappy. If, perhaps, her perception of them as being happier than their counterparts in the more traditional tribes was colored by her own need to be right, they never seemedless content than the others. That would have to be enough. Provided that the tribe could continue to exist, that the forest would continue to exist, even her worries would not trouble her, for even now it was hard to imagine that she had not always been here.

She took no man herself, nor had she in such a long time, she could barely remember the experience.

She felt no need for it anymore, and, more important, the survival of the tribe depended on procreation, particularly when they could keep only the girl children; she knew she was barren. There was only one man who was of her own kind, a man of G.o.dlike power that shedid remember, but she could not remember even him with much clarity.

Still, while she'd banished all the worries of the past, she was concerned about the future. What made the People so attractive to her was their permanence, their unchanging yet challenging life, and their isolation. But it was getting a lot harder to maintain that isolation. The forest was being chewed up by monstrous machines, cleared, farmed, then abandoned because the land was neither loved nor under-stood by those new men and women who exploited her. The tribe had moved many times and more than once had barely escaped discovery, and it was getting harder and harder to find a place that would provide for the needs of the People in their jungle wilderness. Watching the cutting and burning of the forest had brought back old hatreds and fears; it was no less rape for being inflicted on the land rather than on a woman, and it was no less brutally violent.

That was why they were near the remote impact site, searching out a new place to call a home, a new refuge against the rapists of the land. It was a good region and held much promise, although there were others about- violent men, men with deadly weapons and a callous disre-gard for life, who were also planting and growing in the region. These men, at least, seemed to protect the forest to hide their activities from the rest of the world as much as she wanted to hide the People from those same eyes. That made them less of a problem to her and one she could ac-cept. Their traps were elaborate and particularly nasty, but she could discover them easily, and they posed no real threat. And with the poisons and potions that were the leg-acy of tens of thousands of years of experience by the for-est people, an uneasy truce was possible. The men understood that the People had no interest in what they were doing and wished only to be left alone. They also un-derstood that in the forest their murderous guns and traps were little help should they decide to hunt down the forest tribes. After a few disastrous attempts, the men had aban-doned any ideas of that.

This place would probably do, but locating a good site for a more permanent village would take some time. In the meantime, they would camp and move as one.

It had been quite late, and only the guards and the forest were awake. There had been good hunting, the Fire Keeper had a good flame, and everyone had a full belly and was content. The women had been sleeping off the large meal; even the Spirit Mother herself had been fast asleep, when it happened.

Suddenly she had awoken with a start, a horrible feeling sweeping over her like nothing she could dredge up from the most distant of remaining memories. It was an almost inexplicable form of dread, as if-asif she were dead, sleeping forever with nature, and someone was digging at her grave . . .

From above there came a crackling sound and a series of booms like thunder yet unlike any thunder she or the Peo-ple knew. The night flared suddenly into day, and a great sun came almost upon them and vanished in a horrible ex-plosion, beyond anything they could have imagined, power-ful enough to shake the earth, collapse the lean-tos, throw the guards to the ground, and even topple some of the great trees.

Then, for a moment, there was a stillness almost as ter-rible as the crash, and suddenly, a searing wave of heat that burned and blackened whatever it touched swept over them. Women and children screamed both in terror and in pain, and there was fire, awful fire, all around.

Although in shock, she realized that somehow she'd re-ceived only a minor burn on one side and was otherwise all right. But others had been badly hurt and needed immediate attention. She got up on her feet and ran to the center of the camp, calling loudly, "Keep calm! Keep calm! We must help those who are hurt, and quickly!"

The sight of her and the sound of her commanding voice rallied those who were no more injured than she was, and the entire tribe went into immediate action.

Those who had been caught out in the open in the firestorm had suffered. Two were dead, struck full in the face by the heat, and another had been crushed to death by a falling tree. There were several broken limbs to be set, some seared hair that smelled and looked ugly but wasn't serious, and three or four serious burns.

"Susha! The healing herbs!" the Spirit Mother snapped, examining the badly burned side of Mahtra's face. There was a virtual pharmacy in the oils, balms, herbs, saps, and leaves of the great forest, and she had made certain that a kit of such things was always available. "Utra! Bhru! We will need water, both cold and very hot. Get urns! Bhru, fix the fire pit! The rest of you-if you are uninjured, help carry the hurt to the mats over there so they will be seen to quickly! Get any burning limbs out of the camp!

Quickly! Time is all for the living! We will mourn and tend to the dead when we can!"

It was a frantic time, but in a way that was good, for the practical needs of their tribe, their family, drove out the ter-ror that would have otherwise consumed them, and within an hour or two they were too weary to clearly remember their panic and fright. But though they were tired, they were not without curiosity.Something had blown up; some-thing had exploded with enormous force very near to them. If it was something made by the Outside, what their tongue called "not forest," it might bring other Outsiders. If it was something run by the men of violence, that would be im-portant to know, too. And if it was some kind of evil spirit come from the night sky to Earth, then that needed to be known most of all.

Alama, however, could not go. As she was the religious as well as temporal leader, her duty was to remain with the injured and to see that the ceremonies of the dead were per-formed, lest their spirits, deprived of a return to the bosom of the Earth Mother, be doomed to wander eternally with-out rest.

"Susha will remain and see to those who are burned," she ordered. "The guards must also remain, for none can travel until healed. Bhru, as Fire Keeper you will help me in the preparation of burial. The others, those who can, will go and see what has happened. Then you will come back and tell us what you see. Two groups, one under Bhama, the other under Utra, will go, one toward the great fire, the other below it here. Take care. The fire still burns at the tops of the trees, and there is much danger." She stopped, feeling a sudden drop in air pressure. "Rain comes. Rain will help with the fires and will make your journey better. Go now. Come back and tell us what you see, but do not be seen yourselves. Those too hurt for such a thing but able to help here, stay. There is much to do. All must be back before first light. Go!"

The long and exhausting night wore on. The graves were quickly and expertly dug, and the victims were wrapped in leaves, in spite of the driving rain. Most of the trees in and around the camp still stood, and Alama was proud of that. She always seemed to pick just the right spot when unfore-seen danger lurked.

The rain continued intermittently. Finished with all but the ceremonies and the actual laying in the earth, Alama and Bhru came wearily back into the camp and stopped dead in their tracks. Two naked strangers, Outsider women, were being kept by the fire under guard, and two others, naked Outsider men, were lying unconscious on the side of the camp opposite the wounded tribes women. The women knew that the men were not dead, for why bring dead men into camp and defile it?

"Bhama! Utra!" Alama snapped angrily. "What is this?"

The two squad leaders, as weary as their chief, jumped to her call.

"They all hiding in the trees," Utra tried to explain. "One of the men,that one," she added, pointing to Juan Campos, "attack the dark woman. We put darts in him to stop him. Mother, we cannot just sit and watch such a thing! She sees us. It is not a time for deciding but just doing. If others come, she will say that she sees us and how many we are. Then they come try and find us. You say the wounded can-not travel, so we take them with us."

Alama sighed. She wished she'd been with them. Some-times direct, pragmatic logic wasn't always the best course, particularly when dealing with Outsiders. "And the other two?"

"Mother, it rains hard then," Bhama told her. "We come up to the burning place from below. All at once we see this man there, under the trees. It was so sudden, we do not ex-pect it. We are in the open to his eyes, and he sees us. Then he smiles. He reaches for something and holds it up to his face. We think it is some kind of weapon, and so we shoot him with darts. We still trying to decide what to do next, when the rain stops. Then this white woman comes toward us. She seems afraid of us when she sees us, but she does not try and run from us but runs to the man. We stop her. Then we hear our sisters nearby. We see that they have the others. We know there are no more. So we agree, all of us, to purify them. We bury their unclean things as the law commands. Then we bring them back with us for you to decide."

In a direct sense, what they had done was exactly right, if the facts were true. "How do you know that it is only these? That no others are here?"

"We see them come," Bhama a.s.sured her. "They come on a big, terrible bird that roars like thunder.

They and their things get off, n.o.body else. Then the bird fly away."

This was not good, not good at all. There were certain to be others coming, and they would look for the missing foursome. Still, they couldn't just be released, not now. She looked up and sensed the wind through the charred and smoky atmosphere. It was raining again over there, and here soon as well. The sensible thing would be to destroy the camp, disguise the wounded, leave a few volunteer guards to watch over them, and move everyone away as far and fast as possible until they could find a place to hide. There would be a search, yes, but it would not be a major one, not in this jungle. But what then?

The men couldn't be kept, nor could they be left bound and drugged forever. Even now they would slow everyone down. If these two women were their wives, they'd never give up searching, and the places where they could continue to hide out from the encroaching Outside were becoming more limited each day.

But if they killed the two men, what reaction would that bring in the women? They both already seemed too old to ever accept and adjust to the life of the People; there were potions, of course, drugs that would dull the mind and con-trol it so that one could never disobey. Still, it was a dis-tasteful business, and she didn't like it at all. In all these years she'd not faced a problem this complicated.

She looked at the two warriors. "And the thing that burns? What of it? Did any see it close?"

Utra nodded. "Yes, Mother. We see it. It is the heart of the Moon G.o.ddess come to Earth. It is all black and burned around where it sits, and it is in a great hole that it makes for itself. It is bright and yellow, and it look like a great jewel the size of the full moon in the sky. And it beats, like the heart."

Alama frowned. A big jewel? Beating like a heart? That made no sense at all in any traditional lore, nor did any-thing from that buried past come to explain it, either. This was something totally new. Like the horrible feeling that had awakened her and still made her shiver when she thought about it.

Still, her past of fog and mist did not totally desert her.Meteor, it said, and she had an instant vision of a great rock in s.p.a.ce coming down toward the Earth and striking with enormous force. But meteors didn't glow yellow and beat like hearts.

Now another concept came, likemeteor without a true word but rather as an idea and picture:Satellite.

In a world as primitive as this? Or had it been longer than she thought since she'd entered the forest? Far longer . . .

Bomb.The most worrying concept to come from that mental unknown and the most likely to be something that throbbed. How advanced might portions of Earth now be, anyway?

s.p.a.ceship.No, surely not that advanced. She was certain of that. But what if it wasn't a human s.p.a.ceship? What if it was from something or someonereally Outside?

"I must see it, and soon," she told them.

"But what of the ceremonies?" Bhru asked worriedly. "It is almost first light now."

Yes, that was the trouble. It was almost first light, and at some point, perhaps even now, certainly within hours, others would come to search for these missing four. Others would come to see what had fallen here, as the four cap-tives probably had, for why else would they be here? There just wasn't enough time! And only a few hours earlier she had felt the luxury of timelessness.

There was no way around it, though. Theyhad to break camp and play for time, no matter what. She gave the or-ders, and the two exhausted Outsider women watched as the camp became a frenzy of activity, turning a primitive campsite back into wild jungle.

"They're covering up to run!" Lori hissed. "And taking us with them!"