Jinxie's Orchids Read online

  Levina watched, shaken as he rolled it between his fingers, bringing the curl up to his nose to smell that now as well. He looked at her, his eyes drifting up to her forehead. He reached up with his armed hand and gently rubbed his thumb across her muddy brow where some of her marriage paint must have been showing through. He shifted slightly on his heels to look down at Takura, where flecks of his own paint were playing peek-a-boo through the dirt that caked him every bit as heavily as it did her. Turning, the native addressed the boastful warrior who had taken the most heads.

  The tribe fell silent, watching avidly between the two men as they spoke rapidly back and forth. They were talking so fast, it almost didn’t sound like words.

  “Wh-what does he want?” she whispered as both elders fixed their black eyes on her and the warrior gestured between her and Takura.

  Listening intently, Takura didn’t answer right away. “He’s a shaman. He’s telling them you carry the jungle in your eyes and fire in your hair…something about a strong tsentsak spirit living inside you. He wants you for his second wife.”

  “Oh,” Levina said weakly. “How terribly…flattering. I don’t suppose it would help matters if I told him I’m already engaged?”

  The warrior made a subdued gesture, first at her and then Takura, but the elders waved that concern (whatever that might be) aside. One spoke to the shaman, who turned to look down at Takura. When he spoke, Takura answered, a rapid stream of calm replies, none of which Levina understood. She recognized a few words though, his name and Manaus. The Jivaro conferred among themselves. The warrior puffed his chest again, but neither the Shaman nor the elders seemed in agreement with him.

  “They’re trying to decide if either I or any of my ancestors has ever instigated a blood debt against them,” Takura told her when she looked at him questioningly.

  Levina was almost afraid to ask. “Have you?”

  “Blood debts can be real or imagined, so I guess it depends on their mood.” He glanced from warrior to shaman and then to the two elders as each took turns speaking.

  “What are they saying?” Levina whispered.

  “They say too many heads have already been taken. Evil spirits might have followed them back to the village. They want the shaman to perform a…a special—I don’t know that word, ritual celebration, I think—to banish them. If they kill me now, they think my spirit will turn wrathful against them.”

  Panic warred with relief in her chest, strangling her. “They’re going to let you go, then.”

  Takura did not look at her right away, but when the Jivaro seemed to come to a decision, a strange expression came over him. Somber. Both strained and calm all at once. “Yeah,” he finally said. “Yeah, they are.”

  He was lying. Levina couldn’t breathe. “Are they going to let me go, too?”

  Takura stared at her, that strange, strained expression darkening across his features as the Jivaro warriors closed in around him. When two bent to grab his arms, he suddenly thrashed to get his bound feet under him and lunged, capturing her lips under the bruising intensity of his own.

  “You’re going to be okay, princess,” he whispered, and then they pulled him away. “Don’t fight them. No matter what, don’t fight.”

  Levina sat stunned, barely feeling it when the shaman caught her wrist bindings. “B-but, wait!” The shaman pulled her clumsily to her feet. “Takura?”

  “Don’t fight!”

  “Takura!” She twisted, desperately trying to keep him in sight even as she was pulled in the opposite direction. The Jivaro shaman led her through what men remained lounging in the shade, past the twin war chiefs who watched her with dark, unreadable eyes, and into the same hut she had seen the shaman exit from just minutes before. Levina barely looked at her surroundings. “Takura!”

  She twisted back the other way, watching helplessly through the open doorway as the warriors dragged him away. They only took him as far as one of the other huts before tying him bodily to a thick pole. Despite her fears, they did not kill him. They simply left him there, far enough to not be in the way, but close enough to be watched by just about everyone. Including her. Including the dark-eyed shaman.

  Holding her bound wrists, the shaman stood silently contemplating Takura for a very long time. He grunted and then physically turned her around, forcing her gaze back to his. She had no idea he still had his knife in hand until she felt the cool brush of metal slid between her wrists. He cut the jungle rope, freeing her.

  They looked at one another.

  The urge to run trembled in her legs. Her mind raced, but Levina did not move. This was a test. It had to be. It might even determine how she spent the night, a willing prisoner among the Jivaro or every bit as securely tied as Takura.

  Takura.

  She resisted the urge to turn her head and look back at him. She kept her eyes locked with the shaman’s and she trembled, but otherwise she did not move. Her breaths came quicker, shallower than normal, but she didn’t speak. She didn’t even cry, though her eyes burned from the building of a veritable river of tears.

  It felt as if a small eternity passed between them before the shaman grunted, an assessing sound. He raised his hand to her face, and Levina watched it come. She fought not to flinch when he touched her, fingering her skin and then her hair. He looked down at her clothes. Her skin crawled with the tickling need to fidget, but there was nothing lascivious about his stare. He seemed curiously impersonal as he caressed her, his hand trailing down her cheek to her shoulder, following the slope of her slender, sunburned arm, before circling around her breast and sliding down the muddy front of her tattered shift until his fingers found a patch of bare stomach.

  There his hand paused, hovering just over her womb as he searched her gaze once more. Then he was moving again, and this time it was very personal. He bent slightly to catch the torn hem and slipped his fingers underneath to cup between her legs. His black eyes boring into hers, he held her and waited to see what she would do.

  Levina held herself frozen in place until he grunted again. She must have passed his test; at last the shaman let her go.

  Movement rustled just behind her, and Levina startled when she realized they weren’t alone inside that palm leaf hut. Two women squatted along one wall, each one with a large bowl of frothy orange liquid positioned between her legs. Both watched her, their faces every bit as impassive as the shaman’s. They were also chewing and, as Levina watched, one bent to spit the contents of her mouth into the bowl. She stirred, mixing the liquids together before refilling her mouth with sediment scraped up from the bottom of the bowl. Sitting back on her heels, she looked at Levina and began to chew again.

  They were making manioc beer. Levina tried to swallow her revulsion, recognizing the process from a passage she’d once read in one of the journals sent back to the research library by another explorer. A real explorer. A woman, even, albeit one who hadn’t lied to her parents and fiancé or got herself unwittingly married to her guide or who landed into more trouble than she could get out of, and all just to prove that she wasn’t a jinx.

  No, it was Levina who was the jinx, and now because of her, Takura was going to be killed.

  A trickle of moisture signaled that moment when the first tear escaped over her muddy lashes and began to wind its way down through the dirt on her face. She wiped it away. Crying wasn’t going to do anyone any good.

  With nothing else to do but stand there and hope she didn’t make things worse, Levina watched the Jivaro women placidly chewing and spitting and chewing some more. Her eyes rose to the plants hanging in bits of netting along the walls all around them. Some, like the tobacco, she recognized right away. Others were a little harder to identify, and in some abstract and slightly less frightened part of her mind, the botanist in her wished she could take a few minutes just to examine them.

  Beside her, squatting on a mat a few steps away, the shaman had started a small fire in the dirt floor. He placed a clay bowl of water over it, held
up on carefully stacked rocks to keep the air feeding the small flames. As she watched, he went to the wall and picked a small handful of leaves and a length of dried vine from one net.

  When he walked past her, crushing both together before sprinkling the mixture into the bowl of water to steep, her mind supplied a ready identification: Banisteriopsis caapi. She knew that vine. Just last summer, she had converted field notes into a prepared paper for Parnell to read at the twenty-third annual supper of the Amateur American Botanists’ Society.

  Banisteriopsis, caapi or otherwise, was a powerful hallucinogen.

  Startled, Levina took another look at the nets along the wall. Among the many tobacco leaves and plants that she didn’t know, was one more that she did. It, too, had made it into that speech she’d prepared for that supper: Brugmansia, another hallucinogen, one purported to be even stronger than Banisteriopsis.

  Standing, the shaman dipped a small cup of steaming tea from the boiling bowl. He brought it to her. He drank first, no doubt to show her it wasn’t poisoned. Then, reaching up to take firm but gentle hold of her chin, he slowly brought the cup to her lips. She was going to fake a sip until she realized his fingers were touching her throat, feeling for that very thing. Her mind racing, she drank instead, one small swallow and then another when he nudged the cup against her lips.

  Finishing all that was left in the cup, the shaman let his fingers caress her cheek and then her throat. He moved slightly closer, gazing deep into her eyes. When he smiled, so did she.

  She knew now exactly how she was going to escape.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Jivaro women bathed her, though whether as part of the wedding ceremony between herself and the shaman or simply because she was filthy, Levina didn’t know. Her chemise tore when they pulled it off her. It was the last tear. With nothing left of the fragile cloth to be mistaken as clothing, they took it away along with the muddy bath water. Maybe they never intended to let her keep it in the first place; at that point, Levina was beyond the ability to care. She held out her arms as if she were Queen of the Jungle and let herself be dressed, if such it could be called, in ropes of wooden beads, animal teeth and beaks, and shells of all shapes, painted colors and sizes.

  Layer upon layer, the ropes were twined around her. They wrapped her waist, crisscrossing up between her breasts, over her shoulders and both her arms to her wrists. Long loose ends were woven into the binding wraps, securing each string of beads in place. They rattled when she moved, turning however the women wanted as the shaman began to paint her, covering the Neuvo’s blue wedding art with red slashes and dots and strange, meaningless symbols.

  Levina vibrated, knowing it was just another effect of the hallucinogenic tea as she watched the things he drew coming alive on her skin. The symbols moved, dancing to the primitive pulse of Jivaro flutes and drums, swaying as the trees and brush around the hut swayed, bowing under the whispering influence of a cool night breeze. When he was done, all Levina felt then was strange. Calm when she knew she should be scared, seductive in her ropes of primitive beads, sexy even and not at all ashamed of her public nudity. She was, at that moment, the most over-dressed person there, and she loved how her skin glowed in the dancing amber of the single fire burning just outside, the only source of illumination left in the village since the sun had gone down.

  The air was thick with smoke—tobacco, burning wood, the boar that was covered in huge palm leaves to cook, nestled down amidst the slow-roasting coals. Men were dancing, playing out the hunt that had culminated in the taking of five enemy heads. The shaman was circling among them, passing out sips of Banisteriopsis-laced tea to everyone in turn. Now and then, he looked her way, obviously distracted though she knew the shadows of the hut kept her hidden from his hungry stare. Now and then, she would look out past him to where Takura was still tied to that pole, not guarded but in full sight of every Jivaro man, woman and child.

  Manioc beer was beginning to flow. The women patted at her, adjusting her beaded adornments and talking rapidly together as they gathered gourd pitchers with which to serve the alcoholic beverage to the celebrants waiting outside. The moment Levina was watching for—that split second when she would be left unattended—never quite came. Like every other woman, a pitcher was thrust into her hands and she was directed out from the shelter shadows of the hut to help keep the cups full. It never once occurred to her to run. She had no clothing, no idea where she was or where she could run to, and certainly no intention of leaving Takura behind.

  And there were ghost people walking in amongst the native people.

  Levina stared at them, vaguely human-shaped shimmers of mist that danced and swayed around the warriors who danced and stomped to the music of the pipes and drums. Knowing it had to be an effect of the tea, Levina stared at them until one of the other women thumped her on the shoulder, scolding in words Levina didn’t understand.

  A mist person was beckoning to her, and Levina quickly left the woman and moved toward it. Refusing to stay in one place, the mist wove a complicated path through the Jivaro and only belatedly did Levina realize it was leading her back into the shaman’s hut. It hovered in the open doorway when she hesitated and beckoned again. It wasn’t real, Levina told herself, even as she followed it inside.

  She found herself alone in the hut with the apparition, and really, only one of them was real anyway. The mist seemed to know her plans. It pointed at the unguarded bowl of hallucinogenic tea the shaman had made. Not knowing how long she had, Levina moved fast. She dumped the entire contents into her pitcher and then filled the gourd the rest of the way with more manioc beer. No sooner had she finished, then did another woman enter the hut and shoo her back outside. She nearly ran head-on into the shaman.

  His headdress was on fire.

  He didn’t seem to notice.

  Levina stared at the flames, feeling no heat emanating from them when the shaman caught her face between his hands and leaned in to peer into her eyes. They weren’t real, she told herself. They couldn’t possibly be. The fire wasn’t burning him; not even his hair was singed. She forced herself to smile. Hoping to show him nothing was wrong, she filled his near empty cup with tainted beer from her pitcher.

  Seemingly satisfied by that, the shaman let her go, but did not drink. He turned to watch as she moved off through the crowd. Afraid of arousing his suspicions, Levina worked her way through the crowd, serving her special mixture to as many as she could reach. She filled empty cups. She topped off those that were half-full, and she did her absolute best not to glance at Takura so no one would know how firmly thoughts of escape were planted in her mind.

  The dancers drank thirstily and gratefully. The warriors celebrated their hunt, enjoying her tainted beer. The elders held up the cup they shared, nodding when she approached them and making subdued gestures after she moved on, perhaps pleased that she was so readily integrating herself into their tribe. And through it all, Levina stubbornly resisted every urge to glance Takura’s way, especially when she looked back at the shaman and found his black eyes locked on her, dark and unreadable.

  He drank as she watched, and if he noticed the taste was off, he didn’t show it. Emboldened by that, Levina served her tainted beer to the celebrating Jivaro until her gourd pitcher ran empty.

  How long before they began to feel the effects of the Banisteriopsis? Levina didn’t know, but just as she was beginning to think the beer had diluted the drug too much, she noticed a change in how the dancers were moving. They were slowing down. Some had stopped completely and now stood almost motionless, seeming to be watching the same wisps of mist that Levina could see moving through the tribe.

  A young girl was struggling to crawl onto her mother’s lap, hiding her face against the oblivious woman’s chest and hair every time a misty shape passed too close by. The shaman was weaving on his feet, waving his hand through the apparition who stood directly in front of him, passing its ethereal hand back through the shaman. A woman sat in the dirt betw
een two huts, grabbing at the air as if trying to catch something that wasn’t there. And far across the village near the cooking pit, the apparition who had led Levina into the hut to fetch the Banisteriopsis tea, beckoned her back to it.

  The roasting pig smelled heavenly and her stomach rumbled as she made her way to it, following the direction of its pointing hand until she spotted the discarded knife. The mist angled its ghostly, featureless head, pointing when she raised her eyes to stare at it again. She didn’t need to look to know it was pointing to Takura.

  She also didn’t need to be told twice.

  “Thank you,” she said, fully aware in some obscurely scientific part of her that she was talking to figment of her drugged imagination. Still, the knife felt real enough when her hand closed around the cool, hard handle. She had no clothes to hide it in. All she could do was press it up against the side of her pitcher and hope everyone was too drugged to notice when she disappeared.

  Keeping to the shadows, she circled the Jivaro—the majority of which were growing increasingly distracted—and no one seemed to care when she made her way back to the shaman’s hut. She had to pass the shaman to go inside, but obsessed by the waving motions of his own hand, he barely glanced at her. He was talking, soft, guttural sounds under his breath as she slipped past him.

  Dropping the gourd by the bowl of manioc beer and hugging the knife, Levina dashed out the rear door. Skirting the outer ring of bamboo huts, she quickly made her way to the pole where Takura was tied.

  He jerked when he saw her. “Are you crazy?” he hissed, craning his head back to see the drifting Jivaro over his shoulder.

  “It’s okay.” Levina slid in the loose dirt, giggling nervously as she more fell on top of than beside him. “I drugged them.”

  “You drugged them?” Takura echoed, his voice dropping to whisper. “What do you mean, you drugged them? Drugged them how? With what?”