Secret of the Slaves (7 page)

“Look up there,” Annja said. “They're doing
capoeira
out in the street.”

The sun had set low over the inland forest that grew hard up against the edges of the city. Lively music filled the lavender twilight. Two men sparred before colorfully dressed ranks of worshipers laughing and clapping their hands. A small band enthusiastically played a curious assortment of instruments, including a tambourine, a drum like a bongo, two dissimilar bells joined by a horseshoe-shaped handle, a rasp played against a stick and three different-sized contrivances like bows and arrows mated to dry gourds. The man playing the largest of these sang in a high-pitched chant.

The combatants—or dancers—seemed to time their moves to the rhythm of the music.

“Let's watch,” Annja said, striding quickly forward.

Dan hung back. “I don't want to intrude on anybody's religious rituals,” he said. “It can be bad for your health.”

She turned to face him. “That's true,” she said. “It can be rude, too. But why would these people be doing their ritual in public if they didn't want people to watch? It's part of the observance. They have private and secret rituals—trust me on that. The key being, we don't know about them. They don't hold those out on the street.”

His forehead rumpled and his fists stuck deep in the pockets of his shorts, Dan shrugged. He seemed to be genuinely uncomfortable.

“Come on,” she urged.

They had spent an exhausting and dispiriting day hunting for further clues to the mystery of the hidden
quilombo.
An Internet search had turned up frustratingly little on the River of Dreams Trading Company. A good dinner of seafood and the superabundant tropical fruits available in the area had mellowed them somewhat after the jagged events of the day.

Now Dan turned sullen, reminding Annja of the way he'd acted when Xia and Patrizinho had joined them at breakfast—had it only been the previous morning? It seemed a lifetime ago.

Of course it was, Annja thought, for Mafalda.

“We need to get back to the hotel,” he said, “set up a teleconference with Publico.”

“What's the hurry? We've hit a dead end.” As soon as the words left her mouth Annja winced at their choice. “Unless our employer has some information he's been holding back and cares to share it with us, we might as well fly back to Miami.”

“Don't forget we've got that invoice scrap,” Dan said, “not to mention a dead woman.”

“Jesus,” Annja hissed. “Be careful saying that out loud.”

He gestured at the clapping, singing circle. “Nobody can hear us. Nobody's listening. Nobody'll say anything to the police, anyway.”

“You don't know that,” she said. “The Brazilian authorities pay snitches the same way police back in the States do. And we're foreigners, not family or friends to any of these people. One wouldn't have too much trouble giving us up to save his own hide, say.”

Dan's scowl etched itself deeper on his lean, handsome face. She liked him but he had a tendency to petulance and flashes of anger that bothered her a bit.

“You've got a point,” he mumbled.

She smiled and nodded. It reassured her that he was fundamentally sound.

She turned and walked toward the crowd, leaving Dan to follow or not as he chose. Several bystanders nodded and smiled as the two Americans approached. Some of them were casually dressed. Many of the obvious participants were dressed in white. Some of the women wore lacy dresses that suggested bridal gowns to Annja. She wondered at the symbolism.

“I wonder how you tell the onlookers from the worshipers?” she said to Dan.

He shrugged. He still seemed grumpy and uncommunicative. She looked at him a moment. What's bothering him? This isn't just some weird petulance at my dragging him to do something he doesn't want to do.

The combatants continued their acrobatic match, stepping forward, stepping back, launching kicks and strikes that the other blocked or dodged just in the nick of time. They played with smiling abandon that made it impossible for Annja to tell whether this was actually a competition or some choreographed ritual.

The twang and thump and insistent rumbling rhythm of the music seemed to get inside her bones and resonate. She felt a rising sensation of heat. Somehow she didn't find it oppressive. Oddly it seemed to well within her, owing little to the heavy, humid, tropical evening air.

The crowd cried out together. One of the combatants did a back flip away from his opponent, then both bowed. They backed into the crowd to great applause.

Then the crowd stilled except for the continued thumping of the drum. A man stepped forward. He was short and wiry, with a blue-and-green headband wound around his forehead and brown, tightly coiled hair. His clothes were shades of blue and green. His feet were bare. He walked crouching, wide kneed, holding a hand flattened above his eyes and peering this way and that.

“Are you Americans?” a woman who stood near Annja asked in English. She was small and compact, dressed in slacks and a tropical-flower blouse. Annja realized from the lines around dark eyes and smiling mouth that the woman must be older.

“Yes,” Annja said.

“Do you know what's happening here?” the woman asked.

The man dropped a hand to the pavement before him. He peered left and right. Although she felt no breeze some must have come up briefly, because Annja grew aware of a smell of the dense tropical vegetation that crowded closely on Belém from inland.

“No,” Annja said. “Not really.”

“Welcome to the
roda,
the sacred circle,” the woman said. “Now, watch.”

Still crouching, the man moved to the band and snatched one of the bowlike instruments from a musician's hand. The musician showed no resentment. He merely smiled and stepped back.

The instrument was held by one end to play. Instead the man in green and blue held it in the middle as if it were a bow. He began acting out the motions of hunting through the rain forest.

“He is Oxóssi,” the Brazilian woman said to Annja, seeing her perplexed expression. “He has momentarily claimed the
berimbau
for his use. That is the bow with the gourd.”

“Oxóssi is an
orixá?
” Annja asked.

The woman nodded. “The
orixá
of the hunt. That man is his horse, you see.”

“Great,” Dan growled on Annja's other side. “A mime. I
hate
mimes.”

“Everybody hates mimes,” she told him. “But he's not a mime. He's a horse for a spirit named Oxóssi.”

The brief wave of jungle smell had gone. Possibly it had been swamped by the smell of the cigars some of the celebrants, men and women alike, were smoking. It was a harsh tobacco, very strong. Annja realized it was making her head swim, and her stomach began to roll like a sea in a rising wind. Oddly, the feeling wasn't entirely unpleasant.

She glanced over at her companion, intended to remark on the smoke, her light-headedness, her slight but ominously growing nausea. She froze.

Dan was wound tight like a tugboat cable. His handsome face had become a purple mask; tendons stood out in his neck. His fists clenched and unclenched as if crushing walnuts.

Suddenly he thrust forward. Oxóssi's horse looked at him. Recognition came into his pale brown eyes. He nodded to the young American, then backed carefully away. His attitude suggested a hunter who had encountered one of Brazil's many venomous serpents in the bush—not fear, but rather respectful caution, wariness.

Puffing out his chest, Dan swaggered around the circle in an exaggerated display of alpha-male machismo. It looks like a bad Popeye imitation! Annja thought.

“Dan,” she called to him. He didn't react. She started forward.

The diminutive woman at her side laid a gentle but surprisingly strong hand on her forearm. “No,” she said. “You can do nothing. You must do nothing.”

To her astonishment Annja saw that none of the worshipers seemed to be taking affront at Dan's thrusting himself into the midst of the festivities. Rather they had begun cheering and clapping in rhythm to his swagger. The drummer beat time. The other two
berimbau
began to play along.

Suddenly Dan strutted to the circle of onlookers, seizing a half-f bottle of rum from a man dressed in white with frilly sleeves. If I'm optimistic, it's half-empty, Annja thought.

“What's going on?” she said plaintively.

“Can't you see? He is taken. He is ridden now by Ogum. A great honor. But worse luck. He must be a very angry young man,” the woman said.

That's true,
part of Annja's mind said, rather louder than the skeptic trying somewhat desperately to scoff this all away.

Dan raised the rum bottle to his lips, tipped his head back and drank until his cheeks puffed like a blowfish and rum ran down his chin and neck and down the front of his shirt. The crowd's clapping crescendoed. None clapped more enthusiastically than the man whose rum bottle he had grabbed. The band played with redoubled vigor. The rasp and the bell joined in.

Suddenly Dan spit the rum into the street in a great alcoholic spray. He seized a torch from another participant, tossed it into the pool of liquid. Red flames flared up. Laughing, he poured on more rum. The stream caught—an arc of fire. Before the bottle could go off in his hand he smashed it in the midst of the flames, which soared up as high as his chest, garish in the near darkness. It underlit his face, turning it into a bizarre mask of joyous rage.

Again he moved with surprising swiftness and yet no apparent haste, snatching a machete from a rickety wooden platform at one side of the cleared circle. He brandished it above his head in a serious of whistling swoops. Then he pressed its point against the middle of his sternum, grasped the hilt with both hands and pushed.

“No!” Annja screamed. She could see the effort, see the muscles stand out like cords on his wiry forearms.

Yet nothing happened. The machete was not pointed like a spear, but it possessed a sharp edge. And she knew Dan was surprisingly strong for his lean build. That much effort should have punched the tip right through his flesh.

It did not. Dan tore his shirt open to reveal his pale skin remained unbroken. Then he punched both hands at the stars in an age-old gesture of triumph. The crowd gasped and then cheered wildly.

Annja's informant nodded with a certain brisk if gloomy satisfaction. “That's Ogum. Two things he can't resist—rum and showing off.”

Dan began a wild swirling dance, swinging the machete. He reeled this way and that, heedless of the onlookers, some of whom began to stumble over each other in their eagerness to get out of his way. He only laughed and danced faster.

Now that he posed a clear danger to the crowd a man in white trousers and white-and-purple headband leaped forward to confront him. Annja gasped as Dan, rage twisting his features, swung the machete at him. The man flung himself into a sideways dive. The blade hissed harmlessly above him as he did a headstand and flipped back to his feet.

“Uh-oh,” the Brazilian woman said.

Dan was all over him. Closing in a flash, he grabbed the man by the throat and lifted him into the air. Annja gasped. There was no way the young activist, fit though he was, should have been able to do that.

And nobody should have been able to throw the hapless man through the air to smash a wooden cart filled with various paraphernalia at least a dozen feet away.

Annja's head spun. Heat rose within her like flames, seemingly rising up through the soles of her feet, her legs, her loins, her belly. A wind seemed to rise. Bits of paper and fallen flowers began to skitter along the cracked blacktop.

Without conscious decision her will exerted itself. The sword sprang into her hand.

She ran forward into the circle to confront Ogum, in defiance of all sense and judgment.

“Ahh,” the crowd gasped. “Iansã is come.”

Things were totally out of control as Annja entered the middle of the circle and took up a stance with the sword tipped back over her shoulder. She felt totally irresponsible. What was happening made no sense.

But it seemed Annja was thinking with a larger mind, one not altogether familiar—yet somehow not totally alien. Her mind saw wind bending palm trees and storms building waves. Lightning filled her thoughts, ripping asunder a black-clouded sky above the gates of an ancient graveyard. Troubling images, yet stirring. For all their fury, violence and darkness, they were untainted by evil. Rather they were thoughts of a warrior who relentlessly battled evil.

Dan spun to confront her. His eyes were bloodshot. Or did they glow red? Was that a trick of the torchlight and—whatever had overcome her?

With a mighty scream of rage he launched himself at her. He cocked his machete over his left shoulder and swung a ferocious overhand cut at the top of Annja's head.

What is he doing? Annja thought in desperation as she flung up the sword to parry. What are
we
doing?

The blades clanged together with a noise like a church bell. The impact sent vibrations rippling down Annja's arm.

With a ringing, singing slide and spray of shockingly bright yellow sparks, Dan ripped his machete away and swung again at her. This time it was a two-handed horizontal strike, aimed to take her head off at the neck.

She wove her body sideways. The black blade swished by overhead.

The rushing wind seemed to fill her head, her body, her soul, subsume her. It was as if something—
someone
—else had command of her movements as she wove through a crashing, clashing, whirling battle with the man.

They spun and leaped and stabbed and slashed in a dance as wild and abandoned as any
capoeira
fight. The circle had closed around them. Faces shone orange in flickering torchlight. Many hands clapped in rhythm. The band played their strange moaning, tinkling song.

The thinking part of Annja was freewheeling almost as completely as the rest of her. Not with the passions that raged like a tornado within her—anger and joy and the fierce desire for justice—but with confusion.
Why is he doing this?

Why am I doing this?

The sweat poured down her whirling limbs so profusely she felt as if her skin would slough. Dan's face streamed with sweat as if the tropical rains had moved in again. His features were purple, suffused with inhuman fury that seemed to mount with each attack she parried, each slash she leaped nimbly over or ducked beneath. Her own mad, self-righteous drive to withstand him likewise grew.

The end came quickly. His fury at last overpowered all traces of skill—skill Annja couldn't imagine the young political activist could ever have acquired in the first place. Screaming so ferociously that his voice failed, he ran at her, slashing two-handed with fantastic strength.

But his blows, though powerful enough to cut her in half at the waist should one connect, came looping in like predictable haymakers. Overriding the urgency and sense of presence within, the sheer muscle memory from long, exacting practice at half a dozen styles of swordplay took over. As he swung, she spun away to catch his blade from behind as she completed her circle. She sent it spinning from his hand, end over end above the heads of the crowd and away in the night.

Unbalanced, he staggered away several steps. Then he turned and hurled himself through the air at her, hands bent to claws.

She drew back the sword. A single thrust through the sternum would end this madness.

But Annja took control again. The sword went away. With the strange and terrifying strength that had filled her, she met him instead with a palm-heel strike to the center of his chest that threw him into a backward somersault to smash upside down into the weapons rack, knocking it to splinters and sending spears and machetes flying through the air and clattering on the pavement.

She stood a moment, swaying. Her head spun. Her stomach seemed to rotate in the opposite direction. The roaring wind moved up through her until it seemed centered in her head. Then it seemed to sweep upward and away.

Silence.

Swaying.

Blackness.

S
HE BECAME AWARE
of the taste of raw alcohol filling her mouth and scalding her tongue like boiling water. She sat up choking and spitting.

“Easy, child, easy,” a husky female voice said in Portuguese. “Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Annja said weakly.

“Good, good.” Strong hands grasped her shoulders and drew her back down to cradle her head on the skirted thighs of a kneeling woman. Her benefactor smiled down from a round face. She was not the woman Annja had spoken to, but a big, ample-breasted woman with mahogany skin. Other faces looked down on her, a rough oval against the sky. Their expressions seemed to combine solicitude with a certain awe.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Drink, child,” a man said. He knelt by her side, proffering a bowl of water. It was cool. She sat up again, took it and drank greedily.

At once she vomited violently. The onlookers, possibly realizing such a reaction was likely, leaped nimbly out of the way.

The woman who cradled her pulled her head down to her lap again. Someone soothed her brows, then her cheeks, with a cloth soaked in cool water.

“I'm sorry,” Annja croaked. “So sorry. I don't know what came over me. Over us. How's Dan?”

She tried to sit up again. She was held firmly down. “My friend. Is my friend all right?”

“He's fine,” said the man who had taken back the bowl of water before Annja's explosion. “He's right over there.”

He nodded to his right. Ten feet away Dan sat with his knees up and his face buried against his legs. Celebrants, most in white, knelt around him, speaking in soothing voices, touching him gently but almost furtively. It was as if they were trying to calm some kind of ferocious wild animal.

“Is he badly hurt?”

“Not at all. The power of his rider, Ogum, kept him from harm.”

“But I—” Annja said. “I knocked him through that rack. Unless it was a dream.”

“Oh, no. We all saw. You were ridden by Iansã of the winds,” a woman said. “You and your friend are both very holy people. Very fortunate.”

Some of the bystanders didn't look so sure. “Maybe your man is not so lucky to have been picked out by Ogum,” another woman said. “He is very terrible.”

“I am so sorry,” Annja said again. “We did not mean to intrude.”

It came to her to wonder if harsh tobacco was all that was being smoked, or if perhaps the incense had an extra kicker. Half the world's ethnobotanists, it seemed to her, were in the depths of the Amazon at any given moment. And while they were legitimately looking for the next medical miracle in the largely untapped natural pharmacopoeia of the rain forest, the fact was many of them were most interested in loading up on the local hallucinogens. Could she and Dan have been dosed by some kind of aerosol form of drug, she wondered.

But Annja's helpers were trading knowing glances and big grins. “Intrude?” the woman cradling Annja said. “We told you—Iansã happened. She took you over good.”

“Good thing she did, too,” said another woman standing nearby. “Ogum got your friend pretty hard. And he seemed pretty pissed.” Whether she meant Dan or the
orixá,
Annja couldn't tell. Possibly the speaker drew no distinction between them.

“That's not possible. We don't practice
candomblé.
We're American.”

“Anyone can see that, child,” the man said, holding out the water bowl again. Annja took a mouthful of water, sloshed it around, turned her head to spit without endangering anybody's skirts or feet. Then she drank again, more cautiously than before. Her stomach seemed to wallow a few times like a tugboat in a high sea, but the water stayed down.

“It's a sign.” The words were English. Annja recognized the voice of the trim middle-aged woman who had spoken to her before. “The
orixás
have marked you as their own. They don't do that much to foreigners. Obviously, you are acting out some great and powerful destiny.”

She opened her mouth to say, “Nonsense.” The syllables turned to ash on her tongue.

“Who's Iansã?” she found herself asking instead. “What's she like? And—did you see me with a sword?”

“Of course,” the large, cheerful woman whose lap cradled her said. She held out the front of her T-shirt. “Iansã always has a sword. See?”

Annja half turned to look. The woman wore a shirt labeled
Cavala Da Iansã,
Iansã's Horse. It showed an African woman dressed in swirling skirts of red and pink and yellow. In one hand she carried a horsetail fly whisk.

In the other she carried a cutlass.

“Iansã,” the woman said. “She is the wind, the tornado and the lightning. She fights like a man for justice alongside her husband, Xangô, the sky father, lord of thunder.”

“I don't know how I'd feel about being married to the god of thunder,” Annja said shakily.

The onlookers laughed. “Don't worry,” the woman in the Iansã shirt said. “There are some things an
orixá
won't ask her horse to do.”

“She prefers to do those things herself,” said another woman, to even louder laughter.

T
HEY MADE THEIR WAY
back to the hotel through streets filled with music and cheerful people. Walking through the humid air was draining. The night seemed full of chattering voices that pierced the ear like needles and jagged colors that bruised the eye.

Annja and Dan walked with arms around each other for support. Dan had a black eye and half his face was covered by a bruise that had already begun to go green and yellow. Annja's right hip hurt, as did her ribs every time she breathed. She didn't remember being hit during their battle. But she felt as if she'd been used to hammer nails.

The doorman on duty in his natty white cap, shirt and shorts—a pretentious touch for such a modest hotel—didn't blink when the two staggered by, undoubtedly looking overly amorous, drunk or both.

They said nothing to each other as they crossed the threadbare carpet between the potted palms in the comfortably shabby lobby, nor as they rode the elevator. In silence they walked the short distance to the adjoining doors of their rooms.

Fumbling slightly, Annja got out her key card and unlocked her door. Dan followed her inside. She did not question it, internally or aloud. It was somehow unthinkable that he not do so. After what they'd been through, they needed to be together.