Neeko 8

Never, since the capture of Neeko and Pais’ca, had the Field Roamers stayed outside so late.  They usually retired to their tents an hour after sunrise, but they showed no sign of turning in this evening.  Their speaking around the gathering area was a murmur to Neeko, who sat with his back against his cage and watched them.  Sparks rose overhead after a loud crackle.  They put another log on one of the campfires.

Neeko looked at Pais.  She sat with her head on her arms and her arms curled around her knees.  Her thighs, streaked with grey and black dirt, were thinner than they had been a few weeks ago.  He could disturb her resigned slump with a question, but instead he stayed silent and looked back at the tribe.

A light appeared on the hill behind, a torch.  It had not come over the slope, but had been ignited up there.  With it came a dozen people, Neeko guessed.  Each was a dark shape, barely illuminated by the flickering light in their leader’s hands.  At first, Neeko thought they might be another tribe, attackers, hope, even.  But when they reached the gathering, they were greeted as friends.  Another group of tribespeople that had been up on the hilltop in the dark.  Why?

Something was going on.  Neeko reached out for Pais’ca’s arm when a group shortly broke off from the gathering and marched toward the cage.  He shook her when one of the tribe’s leaders, a big man with a spider drawn across his torso, emerged at the front of the detachment and started giving orders.  Pais looked up.

The gate of their cage—an entire wall latched at the bottom and looped with vines at the top—was swung open and their usual attendant, the hunter with black and white paint dividing his chest and face stepped to the edge.  Pais spoke after the hunter did.  “He said we should go with them.”

Neeko took a deep breath.  “Then we go.”  And we get this over with.

He stood up shakily.  He was so stiff, so sore.  He watched Pais go ahead of him, her mud-caked briefs wobbled as she climbed out of their hole and onto the grass.  She had torn her trousers to shorten them one hot day; one hung from the rungs of their cage as a rag, forgotten now, while the other wrapped up Neeko’s journal to protect it from the wilderness.

The tribespeople led Neeko and Pais into the gathering.  Their chanting was chaotic and unrepetitive, but seemed to grow as the prisoners were ushered in.  Pais offered no explanation as the group made a way for them to enter, and Neeko saw there was a circle amid the fires.  The hunter behind Neeko pushed him down beside Pais.  They both sat on their knees as the biggest tent, previously impenetrable by Neeko’s prying eyes, was thrown open.  The senior warriors and hunters carried out two litters.  Each was occupied by an unconscious man.  One was a middle-aged man, no more than a handful years younger than Neeko.  The other was in his twenties.

‘Then a young man somewhere gets to have a strong back,’ Neeko remembered.  The old man had explained it to him: the trade, the balance.  The men were feverish, but bore no visible wounds.  They had been fed by the strongest in the tribe, and had not been seen outside that tent this entire time.  “They’re sick,” Neeko said, out loud.

The fire nearest Pais popped and she flinched.  She was shaking already, and she grabbed the nearest hunter by his belt.  She tried to say what Neeko had said, but kept saying ‘sick’ no matter how many times she repeated the phrase.  “Please,” she said, and repeated that word in their language too.

The hunter snarled, but did not strike her.  He gently unhooked her fingers from his belt and took a step back.  Pais heaved for breath, just like the men in the cots.

“Wichi ak’ereto siebdo,” began the spider-inked man, standing amidst the circle with them.  He turned around as he spoke, looking at each of the people in the tribe around them.

“What is he saying?” Neeko asked.

Pais’ca panted as she started to translate.  “He’s telling them that the light is gone this night.  There are a few clouds, but none could hide the moon.”  A glance at the sky confirmed it was a moonless night.  She went on.  “He’s saying that the sign has come, to confirm the coincidence of our appearance.”

An elderly woman had walked out of the crowd.  She knelt down and began to draw onto the chest of each of the shirtless, sick men.  She was drawing the shape of a crescent moon.

“Two for two, dark for light, death for life,” Pais’ca intoned, but her voice broke.  She tried to reach for the hunter again, blurting things in their language.  Another hunter grabbed her forearm and tied it behind her back with the other.  Pais started sobbing; she didn’t look at Neeko.  She just looked down and was alone.

Neeko was torn.  Part of him was panicked.  He was pretty sure they were going to kill him, but the reality of what that meant had not found its way into his brain yet.  The other part of him was thinking other things, such as ‘at least they might not eat us,’ and ‘will it work?’  It was a sort of fascination, as he saw the way these people ordered and understood their world.  It was intriguing, but also horrifying.

The woman had finished her artwork.  She passed the grey paint she had been holding to another person in the crowd and walked over to Neeko and Pais.  She bent at the waist and stuck her finger into the dirt.  A dab on Neeko’s nose was followed closely by a dab on Pais’ca’s.  A little black dot to counter the bright grey crescents on the men’s chests.

A hunter had brought a leather-wrapped sleeve out of the crowd and unfolded the covering for the spider-leader.  The man grabbed a bone handle from the sheath and brandished a sharpened stone blade over his head.  More words rambled out, untranslated by the sobbing woman next to Neeko, and the tribe chanted louder…

“I can heal them!” Neeko blurted.  “I know how to heal them!  Tell them, Pais!”

Pais’ca told them, and then she shrieked it at them.

The leader’s words stopped when it was said, and the woman who had dotted them with dirt stopped.  She turned back to look at them with wide eyes, and then jabbed her nose back at the man with the spider on his chest.  “She just told him that if they do not do the ritual tonight, the two won’t survive until another dark night.”  While Pais’ca translated, another hunter started to speak.  She translated it too.  “It is always better to use our abilities than challenge the order of the spirits.”

“Yoritu?” asked the big leader.  His scruffy chin was set, stern, and angry.  His furrowed eyebrows were pointed right at Neeko.  Pais said, “How?” for him.

“I will need my pack,” Neeko said.  It was a lie of course.  He had no idea what was wrong with the men, and he had even less idea if he would be able to remedy a solution to it from his pack.

Words volleyed back and forth—Pais’ca, all the while, breathed with hope.  The lead warrior barked an order to another in the crowd, and the man ran off to find Neeko’s pack.  Arguments continued, but the leader asserted his decision and it was often supported by a murmur from the chanters.  One person suggested, “They do not know our ways.  We have put the marks on them.  We should not insult the spirits.”

Neeko slid the leg of Pais’ca’s pants from his journal and flipped through the water-stained pages.  He was looking for options, first for treating fever.  These men were near death if they had only developed a fever recently.  He needed fast relief for any cause; he wouldn’t know the cause until he got over to them.

Then the man came back with the pack, shoving pouches back into it.  The stuff had been divided between people, it seemed.

“We have all night,” the leader said, silencing many of the opposition.  He tossed Neeko’s pack to him and Neeko crawled toward the two men.

Neeko rooted through his supplies to choose a twig of leaves from one pouch.  Terepto grew on the Sweating Isles, and lowered body temperature while fighting swelling.  He would need to mix it into a drink; these two men were too unconscious to be given anything to chew or swallow.  “I need drinking water,” he said.

Pais told them that, and then said something more.  They untied her, after a nod from their leader.

Neeko started to check their bodies for injury.  Now that he was close, he was more dismayed.  Their bodies were covered in sores, and their flesh was a sickly yellow.  There were no infected wounds, but he did find clusters of sores in one spot on each of them.  On the older man, they were nested over his collarbone.  On the younger man, they were against the side of his abdomen.  He lifted their shoulder and hips to check each one’s back.  More sores, but no more dense groups.  He decided to apply a surface anti-inflammatory as well, a special one that provided swift repair of surface maladies.  The Maga Flower, named after the goddess of the eponymous river basin, would at least give these ignorant hunters a good show.

“Grind these leaves into a paste,” Neeko ordered Pais.  He grabbed a few more pouches from his pack—one was neem, just what he was looking for.  A blood cleanser.  The anti-inflammatories would extend their life, but everything indicated a toxin present in their blood, and the herb would help.  He set it beside him, as they handed him a bowl of water.  He grabbed another rock from the edge of the fire—it was hot, and singed his fingers—and used it to grind the Terepto twigs into the water.

Pais finished her paste, and they dabbed it onto the sores all over the bodies.  As they worked, his companion gave him a wary, wide-eyed gaze over the litters.  Her life was in his hands.  But so too would be lost everything Neeko had learned.  Everything in his notebook.

After giving them each a mouthful in slowly trickled drips, he began preparing the neem in a similar fashion. Without knowing what ailed these two, he could not risk any of the other dozen things in his pack.  Counter reaction and side effects were very real dangers.  Then he realized, pausing his quick grinding of the neem leaves, that he had only enough of the herb to properly dose one.  The amount of blood varied by body mass, and this was only enough for someone with Neeko’s body mass—one or the other.  He could administer a half of his supply to both ill men, but that might result in little-to-no effect.

Which one?  Neeko thought about it as he wiped away one spot of paste from the older man to see the progress of the Maga Flower.  The sore was almost entirely gone.  A sigh went through those still watching, though many of the tribe’s members had settled down near their campfires.  Neeko concealed a smile and, waiting for a count to ten in his head, he wiped away another spot.

“It’s working,” Pais said.  She joined him in wiping their skin clean, as a murmur went through the tribe.  The sores were mostly mended; the skin had rejoined and showed only a red dot on top of the yellow tinge to their flesh.  Most of the excitement was voiced when Neeko had cleaned the older man first, so he reached for his bowl of neem and poured the whole quantity into the older man’s mouth as slowly as necessary.

And then they had to wait.  Neeko shifted off his knees and folded his legs under him.  “We have to wait for their bodies to react,” he told Pais.  She tried a few words to communicate it to the tribespeople.  Even more sat down near their fire.  The leader paced anxiously.

The moonless night endured an hour while they waited.  Neeko checked the declining temperatures of the two.  The man he had given the Neem relieved himself, soaking the cot.  The tribe reacted like this was a bad thing, with sighs and scowls and skeptical words, but it was good.  That was the only way for the body to get rid of the toxins the herb had filtered from his blood.

After even more moments of waiting, the older man stirred.  The leader came close, pushing Neeko aside with two fingers.  He knelt and shook the middle-aged hunter.  To Neeko’s excitement, the man’s eyes fluttered and he mumbled something under his breath.  Then the hunter asked him something and leaned close to hear a mumbled answer.  Neeko looked at Pais.

“He said—”

The word was cut off by the brawny leader as the man’s gaze snapped to the stressed woman’s.  He shook his head and said something else.  “You will not repeat it,” she whispered, shaking her head to indicate she was not just providing a translation of what the man had said.

The leader turned back to the old hunter, but the man had slipped back into his trance.  The leader poked him, then shook him, and then looked at Neeko.

“It will take time for the inflammation to decrease, the fever to fade,” he said.  “We’ll need more herbs.”

Pais started to translate it, but the hardened man stood up and started to step away.  And then an argument began.  Someone pointed out that their sores had been healed and the leader nodded.  He had received his report, too.  But then came more words from other members of the tribe.  Neeko didn’t understand them, but they stung like an insect tucked behind his ear.

Translating quickly, Pais tried to keep up.  Her voice slipped into desperation as she said that the man fell unconscious again so nothing may have been accomplished.  A chaotic freneticism slipped in as she recounted the repeated words of a man who had spoken earlier that evening.  The marks had been drawn on them.  The spirits awaited the action.

“I can do more,” Neeko said, grinding his teeth in frustration.  “I need more time and more plants!  If they have a medicine man, maybe they have what I need!”

Pais rambled off syllables, looking at Neeko with wide, jerky eyes, and back at the spider-tattooed man.  The sizeable man lifted his hand swiftly to cut her off.  When she tried again, someone levelled a spear at her.  Though the leader waved it away, it was clear Pais could say no more.

Neeko clenched his fists.  “I just, dammit!  Let me keep working.”  He patted his pack.

The leader lowered his head and murmured another phrase.  Pais moaned, falling forward onto her hands.  Amidst the string of begged syllables she pled, Neeko heard “please” twice.  The broad warrior pointed at the two sick men and said something else, addressed to his people.  Pais’s ranting grew in desperation, but fell on cold indifference.  She turned to Neeko.  “Do something, do something, please.  ‘Either the work you have done will work or his choice will’, he said…”

“Choice?” Neeko asked.  “What choice?”

The subordinate brought forward the leather wrapped dagger again, and the chanting began again.  “Pais, what choice?” Neeko demanded, but she was crying in horror, her mouth open and her cheeks glistening.  The herbalist glanced between Pais and the leader as the big man raised his knife overhead again and repeated his phrase—‘two for two, death for life.’

“I need more time!” Neeko shouted.  “I just need more time.”

He leaned forward as they came to drag Pais and he back from the ill men; he rummaged through his pack.  Somewhere was a small bloodletting pin, a thin piece of metal with a single point and a simple wooden handle.  Maybe they removed it from his pack.  He shoved aside pouches and a lump of wrapped meat.  It had to be here…

They grabbed Pais’s shaking shoulders and pulled her back to her first spot in the dirt.  Then they grabbed Neeko—and his fingers closed around the pin.  It slid behind his belt as he was returned to position and he concealed it with his muddy elbow.

“Pais,” Neeko gasped.  “Do you believe in any gods?”

Her answer was almost lost in the din of chanting.  “No,” she mumbled.

“I wish I did right now.”  Neeko had no idea where those words came from.

She stared at him with glazed eyes and then the leader took a step toward the duo.  Pais threw her head back against her captor, slamming into his ribs and knocking him back a step.  She clawed at the dirt as she tried scrambling to her feet.  A hunter stepped forward, painted with white and black paint, and put a spear through her hamstring.  Her screeching rent the air.  She contorted in the dirt, and the leader went for her first.

Neeko yanked free of his own surprised captor and stepped toward the hunter who had stabbed his friend, brandishing the bloodletting point toward him.  “I just need more time,” he cried out.  He found their word for it.  “Wadiklo.”

The burly warrior, their chief, grabbed Neeko from behind.  Massive forearms wrapped around his sore shoulders and neck.  Muscles yanked against muscles.  Neeko tried changing his pin’s direction, stabbing that sinewy flesh, but he didn’t have enough of his arm’s movement to draw any blood.  Then he was down on his knees again, and Pais was staring up at him, and the sharp point of a stone knife was dragging across his throat, and then it was over.