Secret of the Slaves (5 page)

“We're here doing research for an institution in the United States,” she said, parrying an internal stab of annoyance at Dan. “I'm an archaeologist and historian by trade. My partner is a representative of the institute.”

“It's a humanitarian institution,” he said. “We're here doing research on
quilombos.
”

Patrizinho raised his brows. “Not many Americans I've met know anything about them.”

A male server appeared. Patrizinho ordered fruit juice, Xia some bottled water.

“What's your interest in the
quilombos,
then?” Xia asked.

“We understand that some of them actually managed to survive as independent entities until Brazil became a republic,” Annja said.

“True enough,” Patrizinho said. “Some of them still exist as recognized townships today.”

Annja glanced at Dan, who seemed to be sulking. “We're trying to track down reports that there might be a settlement derived from a
quilombo
far up the Amazon, which has declined to join Brazil or, perhaps, the modern world.”

Patrizinho grinned and tapped the table with his fingertips. “Hiding like Ogum in the forest!”

“What's that?” Dan asked sharply.

“An old expression.”

“A lost civilization,” Xia said. “Do you really think that's possible in today's world? With airplanes and satellites everywhere. Wouldn't it turn up on Google Earth?”

Annja shrugged. “We aim to find out.”

For a moment they sat without exchanging words. A breeze idly flapped the red, green and yellow awning over their heads. From somewhere came strains of Brazilian popular music, faint and lively.

Since their newfound acquaintances weren't jumping in to offer clues to the location of the lost City of Promise, or even expand on local legends to the effect, Annja said, “Patrizinho, your mention of Ogum puts me in mind of a question both Dan and I had.”

“What's that?” he said.

“We keep seeing people wearing these T-shirts. They'll say something like
Cavalo Do Xango
or
Cavala Da Iansã,
around images of colorful-looking persons. I know those phrases mean, basically, horse of Xango or Iansã. We've seen them for Ogum, too. But who are they, and why do other people wear shirts saying they're their horses?”

“Those people are
orixás,
” Patrizinho said. “You know what that means?”

“We've heard the word,” Dan said.

“Xango is the thunder and war god. Iansã is his wild-woman wife, also known as Oyá, goddess of winds and storms—and the gates of the underworld. If somebody is a horse for one of them, that means they regularly serve as host or vessel for that spirit.”

“You mean like in voodoo,” Dan said, perking up a bit, “where ritual participants are ridden by the
loa?
”

“Pretty much the same,” Xia said. “In fact many people here worship the very same
loa.
Sometimes they're even taken over by Catholic saints, they say, although the saints are usually identified with specific
orixás.
”

“People advertise the fact that they regularly get…possessed?” Annja asked. For all that she liked to think of herself as a tolerant person—and she'd spent enough time among enough people in strange and remote places to have what she thought pretty good credibility for the claim—the notion creeped her out considerably.

“They believe it's an honor, to be chosen by the god or goddess,” Patrizinho said.

Xia checked an expensive-looking designer watch strapped to her thin wrist. “We'd better get on our way, Patrizinho,” she said, rising. “It's been lovely meeting you, Annja, Dan. Perhaps we'll get a chance to see each other again.”

Patrizinho stood, too. With a serious expression he said, “We should warn you to be wary of people who proclaim themselves horses for Ogum, or of Babalu. They are the gods of war and disease, respectively. They are dangerous, cranky spirits. Not to be trifled with, you understand.”

Dan smiled a tight smile that didn't reach his eyes. “I've never been real afraid of gods and spirits.”

“Horses,” Xia said dryly, “tend to mirror their masters' personalities. So perhaps you should keep an eye on
them.
”

Annja opened her eyes to darkness—and the cold conviction she was not alone.

The night throbbed with a samba beat from the small hotel's nightclub a couple of floors below, audible as a bass thrum beneath the white noise of the overburdened air conditioner in the window. For a moment she lay frozen, wondering if she was having a sleep-paralysis experience.

She smelled a waft of greens and warm, moist, dark earth—

She and Dan had spent a hot, tiring and unproductive day trolling the museums, the dark shops and bustling outdoor markets for clues to the fabled lost city of Promessa. As far as Annja was concerned it was anything but promising. For all the apparent conviction of Mafalda's warning to them the day before, Annja was beginning to suspect they were on a wild-goose chase. And Annja knew enough about folk beliefs and culture to understand too well that Mafalda's role in the community practically demanded she be a skilled actress.

But now—

With a sense of foreboding rising up her neck and tingling at the hinges of her jaw, Annja turned her head.

A figure stood at the foot of her bed. It was a shadow molded in the shape of a human. As she stared, the light of a streetlight and the half-moon glowed through inadequate curtains and enabled her wide eyes to resolve the form into what seemed to be an Amazonian man, short, wide shouldered, with a braided band holding long heavy hair away from what the shadows suggested was his darkly handsome face. His lean-muscled torso was bare; he appeared to be wearing only a loincloth of some sort.

As almost self-consciously quaint as this older part of Belém could be, the apparition had no more place in the climate-controlled room in a modern city than a pterodactyl or knight in armor. I don't believe in ghosts, she thought.

“I am real,” the apparition said. Did he read my mind, she wondered, or did I speak aloud?

“You must stop asking the questions you are asking,” the man said. “Please. Otherwise untold harm will result.”

She struggled to sit up in bed, her heart racing.

“What about the harm you're doing by withholding your secrets from the world?” She said it more to see if she got a response than from any belief that such harm was being done, or that such secrets even existed. “Isn't that the ultimate selfishness?”

The man shook his head. “You speak of things you do not understand,” he said sadly. “There are many things you do not know, and cannot be permitted to know.”

“That's ridiculous.” Anger at the violation of her privacy mixed with the adrenaline of fear surged within Annja.

“You have been warned,” the man said sorrowfully. “We are willing to die to protect our secret. Consider what we will do to you, if we must.” His apparent sadness only added mass to the soft menace of his words.

Annja whipped the sheet clear of her with a matador twirl and jumped from the bed. The sword came into her hand.

During the eyeblink that the sheet obscured her vision, her mysterious sad-voiced visitor had vanished. As if into thin air.

Scowling ferociously, she searched the room, sword almost quivering with eagerness to strike. Sometimes it seemed to have almost a life of its own.

She didn't like to think such thoughts. They smacked of madness. She pushed them firmly from her mind.

M
OMENTS LATER
Annja found herself standing barefoot on the threadbare green-and-maroon flower-patterned carpet in the hallway, wrapped in a white bathrobe, aware that her hair and eyes were both wild. She did not carry the sword, since she felt a grim certainty she was much more likely to encounter alarmed innocent tourists or hotel staff than any crafty cat burglars.

What she did encounter was Dan Seddon, wearing a pair of weathered jeans and a look at once furious and bewildered. His own hair stood out in random directions. Annja thought he resembled Calvin from the
Calvin and Hobbes
cartoons she'd loved growing up. She fought a semihysterical impulse to giggle.

“So I wasn't the only one who had a night visitor,” Dan said. “You look like an avenging angel on a bad-hair day.”

“You're a great one to talk, Calvin,” she said.

He looked confused. “Never mind,” she said. “What did you see?”

“A woman,” he said. “Tall, thin, looked African. Had one of those headdresses on, the ones with the flared tops.” He had extensive experience in sub-Saharan Africa, Annja recalled. “She warned me not to keep seeking the
quilombo
of dreams.”

“And I suppose she vanished without a trace?”

“Absolutely. I rolled over to turn on the bedside lamp. When I rolled back I was all alone. Creepy.”

He made a sound deep in his throat that might have been a chuckle, or passed for one. “Something like this tempts a man to believe there might actually be something to the stories about these Promessans possessing mystic powers.”

It was Annja's turn to produce an inarticulate noise, this a distinctly unladylike grunt of confirmed skepticism. “It's some kind of trick. It's got to be.”

“Was your window open? You find any sign the door had been jimmied?” Dan looked at her intently for a moment. “From your expression I'm taking that as a no on both counts.”

“Well…still. I'm not ready to buy into astral projection or anything,” Annja said.

He shrugged. “Come to that, if they have some kind of technique of holographic projection, that'd be pretty significant in and of itself, wouldn't it? Moran seems to think whatever secrets the Promessans have are primarily technological, although he doesn't say much about the mystic-powers thing one way or another.”

“But I smelled him. He smelled of soil and plants. Like the rain forest.”

Dan shrugged. “The Department of Defense was claiming to be able to stimulate various kinds of sensory hallucinations by beaming microwaves directly into people's skulls in the late 1990s,” he said. “Maybe the Promessans are using a technology that isn't really that advanced. Just secret.” He uttered a short laugh. “I'm surprised the capitalists haven't started using it for ads, though. Imagine billboards beamed directly into your brain!”

“I'd rather not, thanks.” Annja compressed her lips. “Still, I had the absolute conviction he was really, physically there. That I could have hit him with my…fist…if I'd only been quick enough.”

Dan laughed again, in a lighter tone. “Publico said you were a martial-arts expert with more than a little rough-and-tumble experience. I like that in a woman. And yeah, I had the same sense about the woman in my room. Although it didn't occur to me to hit her. But which impossibility is going to upset your worldview the most? Astral projection, some kind of technological projection, or teleportation?”

“I think I'll just go back to bed,” she said, “and try not to speculate in the absence of sufficient data.”

“Or an overabundance of uncomfortable data.”

“I thought you were the hardheaded, skeptical type, too,” she said.

He shrugged. “Maybe I'm more a reflex skeptic. Sometimes being a skeptic means distrusting the official explanation. Especially when you've seen official explanations revealed as flat-out lies as often as I have.”

Standing in the hallway there was a sudden sense of awkwardness between them.

Dan grinned. “Guess I'll go back to bed, too,” he said. He tipped his head from side to side, stretching his neck muscles.

They stood there a moment longer, not precisely looking at each other, not precisely looking away. The dingy off-white wallpaper was starting to come away in patches on the wall, she noticed. No wonder, in this humidity.

“Well,” he said, drawing it out just a little, “good night.” He turned and padded on his bare feet into his room and shut the door.

“Night,” she said. She stood looking at his door for a couple of breaths longer. Then she went into her own room.

She shut the door with more force than necessary.

“
O
LÁ
, M
AFALDA
!” Annja called as the little brass bells strung on the inside of the door jingled merrily to announce their entrance. “Where are you?”

Followed closely by Dan, she pushed inside. Outside it was full noon. Their eyes, dazzled by the brightness of the equatorial sun, took time adjusting to the darkness within the shop.

“Maybe she's stepped out,” Dan said dubiously.

“And left the door unlocked?” Annja said. “This may not be Rio de Janeiro, but that'd be pressing her luck even here.”

“Maybe the locals are afraid of her magic,” Dan said.

“You don't believe in magic.”

“But they do.” He stopped as the door jangled shut behind them and sniffed. “What's that smell?”

It hit Annja, too. Beneath the astringent smells of herbs and powders, of dust and the moldering bindings of old books, lay a smell of sweetness. And something foul.

“Christ—” The word came from Dan's throat as though around something choking him.

On the counter to the right of the door Mafalda lay with her head, still wrapped in its bright turban, propped on the cash register. Otherwise she was nude. She stared fixedly at the ceiling.

Feathers had been stuffed in her mouth. Mystic symbols had been scrawled on her bare belly in blood.

Her blood. Her throat had been slit.