One woman bent down and picked up Gabriel’s fallen Colt, examining it with great curiosity. Another began to gather up the scattered packs and bundles, poking at their contents as if the packs, too, were entrails to be sorted through.
“What should we do?” Velda whispered.
“Well,” Gabriel replied. “They don’t look overtly hostile.”
“They’ve got spears and clubs,” Rue said. “How much more overt do you get?”
“They saved our lives,” Gabriel reminded her. After a moment, he said, “I’m going down.”
He lowered himself slowly, avoiding any sudden movements. When he reached the bottom the women crowded in closer, spears in hand. They didn’t raise the weapons, however. Rather, they reached out to touch him with their free hands, their palms and fingers traveling over his face and body without any trace of shyness.
“Hello,” he said. “Thank you for what you did. We are very grateful.” He tried this out in several languages—English, French, Chinese, Russian—but he didn’t see the faintest glimmer of comprehension. Throughout, the women continued reaching out to touch, to probe, as though trying to figure out just what sort of creature he might be. “Ladies, if I might—”
One of them said something to him in a melodic, unfamiliar language and took him by the wrist, started pulling him toward the road. He limped after her, one foot clad only in a thermal sock. He saw his fallen boot resting at the base of a nearby tree and broke away to get it. “If you’ll excuse me—”
Two of the women raised their spears in his path, crossing them in front of his face. “My boot,” Gabriel said. “For my foot. Over there.” He pointed, first at the boot, then at his foot, and then at the boot again. They didn’t seem to understand the words, but his gestures were clear enough and finally the women raised their spears and let him through. The boot was slimy with the bird’s foul-smelling saliva. When he sat down to pull it on, the women resumed their exploration of his body, one of them tugging at his hair as he bent forward, another lifting the collar of his shirt to peer inside.
Gabriel stood again and—as gently as he could—disengaged from the probing hands.
He looked back at the tree where Velda and Rue still sat, hidden among the branches. “Well, I don’t think they want to hurt us,” Gabriel said.
“That’s good enough for me,” Millie said, and he dropped down from his tree with a crash. The huntresses who’d been waiting at the base of the tree drew closer in a tight circle around him and began subjecting him to much the same scrutiny that Gabriel had endured.
“All right,” Rue said. “Let ’em pick over me. Just as long as they get us to that plane.”
But when she climbed down with Velda close behind, Gabriel realized just how wrong he was about the mysterious huntresses. Rue and Velda were instantly surrounded by spear points. One of the blonde women snaked a bronzed arm around Rue’s throat and pressed the blade of a stone knife up under her chin.
“Don’t!” Gabriel cried, palms out. “Wait…”
Another blonde grabbed Gabriel’s wrists. He shook off her grip, but the woman with the knife at Rue’s throat pressed it harder against her skin, drawing blood. She said something in the melodic tongue, which suddenly didn’t sound very friendly at all.
The one who’d grabbed at his wrists seized them again, and this time Gabriel let her. He felt his hands being bound tightly behind his back and the empty holster being unbuckled from around his waist. He could have resisted, could have fought—but not with a knife at Rue’s throat. He saw that Millie, too, was being bound, with a double length of thick rope at his wrists and ankles. They tied Gabriel’s ankles as well, and then roped his to Millie’s, linking them like members of a chain gang. Velda and Rue were bound together in a similar fashion, after which the women gathered up the meat and the scattered gear and then prodded their captives at spear point to urge them forward along the path.
“Not overtly hostile,” Rue grumbled under her breath, and the woman beside her gave her a jab in the shoulder with the tip of her spear.
“Things could be worse,” Gabriel said.
“How do you figure that?” Millie said.
“They could’ve killed us already,” Gabriel said. “They must want us alive for some reason.” Then he got a jab in the shoulder himself and shut up.
Gabriel could smell wood smoke. A pulsing beat of distant drums seemed to beckon them onward as they padded before their silent captors through the humid jungle. Clearly they were heading for some kind of encampment or village. Gabriel tried to crane his neck backward to make sure Velda and Rue were all right, but his own personal guard, a tall, leggy specimen with her hair pulled back in a tight, beaded knot, used the flat of her spear’s blade to turn his face back to the trail ahead. Again, Gabriel took some comfort from the gesture. She might have used the point.
Several minutes later, they took a right-hand fork in the path and shortly arrived at a clearing in the jungle. The clearing was filled with round, thatched huts arranged around a single larger structure at the center that towered over the others. Its woven bark walls and high, slanting roof were extensively decorated with pictograms and colorful patterns of dots not unlike native Australian art. Surrounding the massive triangular door was an arch composed of skulls. The one at the peak clearly came from the same species of massive bird that had attacked the team. Also included were several toothy, long-jawed Tasmanian tiger skulls, a pair from what looked to be some kind of crocodile, and most disturbingly, a number of human skulls. The drumming stopped as they stepped into the clearing.
The entire population of the village, it seemed, came rushing out to marvel at them. Or more specifically at Gabriel and Millie. Rue and Velda were kept at the rear of the line and were utterly ignored other than by the huntresses standing guard beside them. All the town’s inhabitants, though, clustered around Gabriel and Millie, jostling each other for a closer look. Strangely, they all seemed to be female, most ranging in age from what looked like their twenties to their fifties. There were also a handful of younger women, in their late teens perhaps, as well as two very old women who, though thinner and taller than most Australian aborigines, had similar facial features: dark eyes, dark skin imprinted with a variety of faded blue tattoos. Several of the older women had brown or reddish hair, but the younger ones more or less all fit the profile of the hunting party: blonde hair, blue eyes; full lips, proud noses; lithe builds, with long, muscular legs. Of the approximately two dozen women in the village, there was only one girl who looked preadolescent, a skinny child of eight or nine. Clearly their geographic isolation had resulted in severe inbreeding, and apparently not much breeding at all in the past decade. But then, Gabriel wondered, how could they be breeding at all? Where were the men?
One of the brown-haired women gave a command and the hunting party split in two. One half led Rue and Velda away toward the nearest hut while the other urged Gabriel and Millie around to the opposite side.
“I don’t like this,” Millie said.
“Try to keep an open mind,” Gabriel said, but he looked back at Velda’s retreating figure with more than a little anxiety.
Their destination proved to be a small domed hut on the edge of the jungle, far from all the rest of the buildings. An anatomically detailed pictograph above the doorway made it clear that they were being taken to the men’s quarters. Which at least answered one question: at least now they knew there were men’s quarters. The tanned tiger-skin flap covering the door was lifted and the guards used their spears to prod the two of them into entering.
Once inside, Gabriel’s nose was assaulted by a uniquely awful odor. Like a combination of burnt hair and rusted metal and bile. It was dark inside the hut except for a small, guttering fire in a shallow pit ringed by smooth river stones. It took his eyes several seconds to adjust to the gloom but when they did, he realized they were not alone.