Morgan's Mercenaries: Heart of the Warrior
Inca studied him. He was a generous and unselfish person. Not only that, he was sensitive and thoughtful to others’ needs. Her heart warmed to him strongly. Few men had such honorable traits. “Very well.” She got to her feet and went over to the tug captain. Roan watched with interest. Ernesto, his chest sunken, his flesh burned almost tobacco brown by the equatorial sun, reached eagerly for part of the salmon. He took only a little, and thanked Inca profusely for her generosity. She nodded, smiled, and then came and sat back down. Lifting a flake of the meat to her lips, she closed her eyes, rested her head against the cockpit wall and slid it into her mouth.
Roan felt Inca’s undiluted pleasure over each morsel of the salmon. In no time, the fish was gone and only the foil package remained on her lap. There was a satiated look in her eyes as she stuck each of her fingers in her mouth to savor the taste of salmon there.
Sighing, Inca lifted her head and looked directly at him. “Your name. It has meaning, yes?”
Shocked at her friendly tone, Roan was taken aback. Maybe his manners had earned him further access to her. He hoped so. Clearing his throat, he said, “Yes, it does.”
“Among our people, names carry energy and skills.” Inca lifted her hand. “I was named Inca by a jaguar priestess who found me when I was one year old and living with a mother jaguar and her two cubs. She had been given a dream the night before as to where to find me. She kept me for one year and then took me to another village, where another priestess cared for me. When I was five years old I learned that my name meant I was tied to the Inca nation of Peru. Each year, I was passed to another priest or priestess in another village. At each stop, I was taught what each one knew. Each had different skills and talents. I learned English from one. I learned reading from another. Math from another. When I was ten, I was sent to Peru, up to Machu Picchu, to study with an Andean priest name Juan Nunez del Prado. He lived in Aqua Caliente and ran a hostel there for tourists. We would take the bus up to the temples of Machu Picchu and he would teach me many things. He told me the whole story, of what my name meant, and what it was possible to do with such a name.” She lifted her hand in a graceful motion. “What my name means, what my destiny is, is secret and known only to me and him. To speak of it is wrong.”
Roan understood. “Yes, we have a similar belief, but about our vision quest, not about our name. I honor your sacredness, having such a beautiful name.” Roan saw her fine, thin brows knit. “With such an impressive history behind your name, I think you were destined for fame. For doing something special for Mother Earth and all her relations. The Incas were in power for a thousand years, and their base of operation was Cuzco, which is near Machu Picchu. In that time, they built an empire stretching the whole breadth and length of South America.” Roan smiled at her. He saw that each time he met her gaze or shared a smile with her, she appeared uneasy. He wondered why. “From what I understand from Mike, you have a name here in Amazonia that stretches the length and breadth of it, too.”
“I have lived up to my name and I continue to live the destiny of it every day,” she agreed. Eyeing him, her head tilting slightly, Inca asked, “Have you lived up to yours?”
Inca would never directly ask why he had been given his name, and Roan smiled to himself. She wanted to know about him, and he was more than willing to share in order to get her trust. They didn’t have much time to create that bond.
“My family’s name is Storm Walker. A long time ago, when my great-great-grandfather rode the plains as a Lakota medicine man, he acquired storm medicine. He had been struck by lightning while riding his horse. The horse died, and as he lay there on the plain afterward, he had a powerful vision. He woke up hours later with the name Storm Walker. He was a great healer. People said lightning would leap from his fingers when he touched someone to heal them of their ills or wounds.”
“Yes?” Inca leaned forward raptly. She liked his low, modulated tone. She knew he spoke quietly so that the captain could not overhear their conversation, for what they spoke of was sacred.
“One member of each succeeding generation on my mother’s side of the family inherited this gift of lightning medicine. When our people were put on a reservation, the white men forced us to adopt a first and last name. So we chose Storm Walker in honor of my great-great-grandfather.”
“And what of Roan? What is a roan? It is a name I have never heard before.”
He quelled his immediate reaction to her sudden warm and animated look. Her face was alive with curiosity, her eyes wide and beautiful. Roan had one helluva time keeping his hands to himself. He wanted to see Inca like this all the time. This was the real her, he understood instinctively. Not the tough, don’t-you-dare-touch-me warrior woman, although that was part and parcel of her, too. When there wasn’t danger around, she was wide-open, vulnerable and childlike. It was innocence, he realized humbly. And the Great Spirit knew, he wanted to treat that part of her with the greatest of care.
“Roan is the color of a horse,” he explained. “Out on the plains, my people rode horses. Horses come in many colors, and a roan has red and white hairs all mixed together in its coat.” He smiled a little and held her burning gaze. “My mother was Lakota. A red-skinned woman. My father was a white man, a teacher who has white skin. When I was born, my mother had this vision of a roan horse, whose skin is half red and half white, running down a lane beneath a thunderstorm, with lightning bolts dancing all around it. She decided to call me Roan because I was part Indian and part white. Red and white.”
Inca stared at him. She saw the vulnerable man in him. He was not afraid of her, nor was he afraid to be who he was in front of her. That impressed her. It made her heart feel warm and good, too, which was something she’d never experienced before. “That is why you are not darker than you are,” she said, pointing to his skin.
“I got my mother’s nose, high cheekbones, black hair and most of her skin coloring. I got my father’s blue eyes.”
“Your heart, your spirit, though, belongs to your mother’s red-skinned people.”
“Yes,” Roan agreed softly.
“Are you glad of this?”
“Yes.”
“And did you inherit the gift of healing?”
Roan laughed a little and held up his hands. “No, I’m afraid it didn’t rub off on me, much to my mother’s unhappiness.”
Shrugging, Inca said, “Do not be so sure, Roan Storm Walker. Do not be so sure….”
Chapter 4
Roan had excused himself and went to the opposite side of the tug from where she stood. Once he felt sure they were safely motoring down the Amazon, the shooters nowhere in sight. His adrenaline had finally ebbed after the firefight. He’d noticed her hands were shaking for a little while afterward, too. It was nice to know she was human. It was also nice to know she was one cool-headed customer in a crisis. Not too many people that he knew, men or women, would have been so efficient and clear thinking in that rain of hot lead.
Absently, he touched the medicine piece at his throat and found the blue stone was so hot it felt like it was burning his skin. It wasn’t, but the energy emanating from it made it feel that way. The stone always throbbed, hot and burning, anytime he was in danger. Roan knew without a doubt, from a lot of past experience, that the mysterious blue stone was a powerful talisman. There had been so many times in the past when it had heated up and warned him of forthcoming danger. One of his biggest mistakes had been not listening to his intuition the day his wife, Sarah, had gone climbing and died. On that morning, before she left, Roan had had a powerful urge to take off his amulet and place it around her slender neck. He knew she would have accepted the gift, but he’d never, ever entertained the thought of giving the stone to anyone. It had been ingrained by his mother and the tradition of his mother’s tribe that the medicine piece should remain with one person until near the time he or she was to die, and then be passed on to the next deserving recipient. Still, the urge to give Sarah the stone had been overpowering, but he’d fought it because of his ancestral tradition. He told himself that it was wrong to take the stone off and give it away prematurely. Sadly, he now knew why his cougar guardian had urged him through his intuition to give Sarah the necklace to wear that day. It might have saved her life. He would never know. Rubbing his chest, Roan frowned, the guilt eating at him even to this day.
When he’d grabbed a cab at the airport to head to the dock, the blue stone had begun to throb with heat and energy. Roan had thought the stone was warning him about Inca, but he’d been wrong. She wasn’t the one to fear; it was the gang that followed him to the dock that had brought danger.
He wanted to ask Inca a hundred questions now that things were calming down, but he knew Indian protocol, so he had to forego his personal, selfish desire to get nosy. Still, being in her company was like being surrounded by an incredible light of joy and freedom.
Moving to the other side of the tug, he dug deeply into his canvas carry-on bag. Because he was Indian, and because it was only proper to introduce himself to the spirits of this new land, Roan pulled out a large, rainbow-colored abalone shell, a stick of sacred white sage and a red-tailed hawk feather fan. Native Americans did not presume that the spirits of the water, land or air would automatically welcome them into their midst. A simple ceremony of lighting sage and asking for acceptance was traditional.
Once the flame was doused, Roan placed the smoldering smudge stick in the shell. Picking it up, he faced the north direction, the place where Tatanka, the great white buffalo spirit, resided. Leaning down until the shell was near his feet, Roan used the fan to gently waft the thick, purling smoke upward around his body. The smoke was purifying and signaled his sincerity in honoring the spirits of this land. Fanning the smoke about his head, he then placed the shell back on the deck. Sitting down, his back against the cockpit, Roan closed his eyes and prayed. He mentally asked permission to be allowed to walk this land, to be welcomed to it.
As he said his prayers, his arms resting comfortably on his drawn-up knees, Roan felt a burst of joy wash over him. He smiled a little in thanks. That was the spirits of the river, the land and air welcoming him to their territory. He knew the sign well and was relieved. Roan didn’t want to go anywhere he wasn’t welcomed by the local spirits. It would have been a bad choice, and bad things would have befallen him as a result.
Opening his eyes, he dug into his tobacco bag, which he always carried on a loop on his belt. The beaded bag, made out of tanned elk hide and decorated with a pink flower against a blue background, was very old. It had been his mother’s tobacco bag. Digging into it, he held the proffered gift of thanks upward to the sky, and then to the four directions, to Mother Earth, before bringing it to his heart and giving thanks. Then, opening his hand, he threw the fragrant tobacco outward. He watched the dark brown flakes fly through the air and hit the muddy water, then quickly disappeared.
To his surprise, four river dolphins, sleek and dark, leaped within ten feet of the tug, splashing the peeling wood of the deck. Stunned, Roan watched the playful foursome race alongside the tug.
“The river spirit has taken your prayers and gifts to heart,” Inca said in a low, serious voice as she approached him from the left.
Surprised, Roan tried to hide his pleasure that she was coming to speak to him. He would never gain her trust if he kept going to her and plying her with endless questions; she’d slam the door to herself tighter than Fort Knox.
The dolphins leaped again, their high-pitched cries mingling with the sound of the foaming, bubbling water. They arced high and splashed back into the river.
Roan smiled a little. “Helluva welcome. I didn’t expect it.”
Inca stopped and gazed at him critically. He looked relaxed, his large, scarred hands resting on his narrow hips. His profile was Indian; there was no question. Only the lightness of his copper skin revealed his other heritage, through his father. “The dolphin people don’t often give such a welcome to strangers to their land, to their river,” she murmured. She saw and felt his amazement and gratitude. Maybe Michael was right after all: Roan stood apart from all other men she’d known before. He was more like a Jaguar Clan member, knitted into the fabric of Mother Earth and all her relations. Roan understood that all things were connected, that they were not separate and never had been. Her heart lifted with hope. It was a strange, wonderful feeling, and automatically, Inca touched that region of her chest. She studied the medicine piece that hung around his thickly corded neck. With her clairvoyant vision she could see the power emanating from around that beautiful sky-blue stone he wore.
“You said your mother was a healer, yes?”
Roan nodded and squatted down. “Yes, she was.” He saw that the smudge of sage had burned out. Tossing it into the river as an added gift, he took the abalone shell and placed it back into his bag.
“And did she heal by laying her hands on others, as we do in the Jaguar Clan?”
Roan wrapped the feather fan gently back into the red cotton cloth and placed it back into the bag as well, and then zipped it shut. He craned his neck upward and met her half-closed eyes. There was a thoughtful look on Inca’s face now. She was so incredibly beautiful. Did she know how attractive she was? Instantly, he saw her brows dip. Was she reading his mind again? Frustrated, Roan figured she was, as he eased to his full height once again.
“My mother was a Yuwipi medicine woman. Her assistants would tie her wrists behind her back and tie up her ankles and then roll her up into a rug and tie the rug up as well. The lights would be doused, the singers and drummers would begin. The ceremony takes hours, usually starting at nightfall and ending at dawn. My mother, with the help of her spirit guides, was released from her bonds. She then prayed for the person whom the ceremony was for. Usually, that person was there in the room. There could be five, ten or fifty people sitting in that room, taking part in the ceremony. Lights would dance through the place. Horns would sound. The spirits brushed the attending people with their paws, their wings or tails. All prayers from everyone were directed to the person who was ill.”
Inca nodded. “A powerful ceremony. And did the person get well?”
He smiled a little and put his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “They always did when my mother conducted the ceremony. She was very famous. People came to her from around the world.” He glanced at Inca’s shoulder, where the splinter had wounded her. “And your clan heals with touch?”
Inca nodded. “You could say that.”
“And healing is your calling? Your vision?”
“It is my life,” she said simply. Lifting her hand, she watched as the dolphins sped away from the tug, finished with their play. “I took a medicine vow when I became a woman at age twelve. The jaguar priestess who was training me at that time inducted me into the service of our mother, the earth. She then prepared me to go to the clan’s village for training, which began at age sixteen.”
Roan shook his head. “It sounds like you were passed around a lot, from person to person. Did you ever find out who your parents were?” Instantly, he saw her close up. Her eyes grew opaque with pain and her lips compressed. Roan mentally kicked himself. He’d asked the wrong damn question. “Forget it,” he said quickly. “You don’t have to answer. That’s too personal….”
Touched by his sensitivity, Inca found herself opening up at his roughly spoken words. She saw so much in his large eyes, in those glinting black pupils. Normally, if someone broached a question regarding her past, she’d shut down, get angry and stalk off. Not this time. Inca couldn’t explain why her heart felt warm in her breast, or why her pulse quickened when he gave her that special, tender look. Always, she felt that blanket of security and warmth automatically surround her when Roan met and held her gaze. She was unsure of how to react, for she’d never met a man quite like this before. She wanted to be wary of him, to remain on guard, but his demeanor, and the fact that he was Indian like her, made her feel safe. Safe! No one had ever given her that sense before.
“No, I will answer your question.” Inca sat down and leaned against the bulkhead. The last of the shakiness that always inhabited her after a confrontation left her. Being with Roan was soothing to her hard-wired nervous system, which was always on high alert. She crossed her legs, her hands resting on her thighs. Roan did the same, keeping a good six feet of space between them. Inca sighed. There was always something soothing about the gentle rocking of a boat in the arms of the Amazon River. “At times like this, I feel like a babe in my mother’s arms,” she confided throatily. “The rocking motion…somewhere in my memory, a long time ago, I recall being rocked in the arms of a woman. I remember fragments of a song she sang to me.”
“One of the priestesses?”
“No.” Inca picked at a frayed thread of the fabric on her knee. “I remember part of the song. I have gone back and asked each woman who helped to raise me if she sang it, and none of them did. I know it was my real mother….”
Roan heard the pain in her low voice. He saw her brows dip, and her gaze move to her long, slender, scarred hands. “I was abandoned in the rain forest to die. As I told you before, a mother jaguar found me. I was told that she picked me up in her mouth and carried me back to where she hid her two cubs. When the first jaguar priestess found me, I was a year old and suckling from the mother jaguar. I have some memories of that time. A few…but good ones. I remember being warm and hearing her purr moving like a vibrating drum through my body. Her milk was sweet and good. The woman who found me was from a nearby village. In a dream, she was told where to go look for me. When she arrived, the mother jaguar got up and left me.”
Inca smiled softly. “I do not want you to think that the people who raised me from that time on did not love me. They did. Each of them is like a mother and father to me—at least, those who are still alive, and there are not many now….”
“You were on a medicine path, there is no doubt,” Roan said.
“Yes.” Inca brightened. “It is good to talk to someone who understands my journey.”
“My mother set me on a path to become a medicine man, but I’m afraid I disappointed her.” Roan laughed a little and held up his hands for a moment. “I didn’t have her gift.”
“Humph. You have a spirit cougar, a female, who is at your side. Medicine people always have powerful spirit guides. Perhaps you will wait until middle age to pick up your medicine and practice it. That is common down here in Amazonia. Most men and women do not even begin their training until their mid-forties.”
“You were trained from birth, which means you brought in a lot of power and skills with you,” Roan said. He saw Inca smile sadly.
“There are days when I wish…” Her voice trailed off. Shaking her head, she muttered, “To be hunted like an animal, with a price on my head…to be hated, feared and misunderstood.” She glanced over at him. “At least the Indians of the basin understand. They know of my vow, know I am here to help protect them. The white men who want to destroy our rain forests want my life. The gold miners would kill me if they saw me. The gaucqueros, the gem hunters, would do the same. Anyone who wants to rape our land, to take without giving to it something equal in return, wants me dead.”
Roan felt her sadness. Quietly, he said, “It must be a heavy burden to carry. I hope you have friends with whom you can share your burdens and dreams.”
Rubbing her brow, Inca whispered, “I am all but thrown out of the Jaguar Clan. Grandfather Adaire has sentenced me and told me never to return to the village where all clan members train. I—I miss going there. Grandmother Alaria…well, I love her as I’ve loved no one else among those who have raised me. She is so kind, so gentle, all the things I am not…. I am like a rough-cut emerald compared to her. She is so old that no one knows how old she is. I miss talking to her. I miss the time we spent together.”
“Then you’re an outcast?” Roan saw the incredible pain in every feature of Inca’s face. In some part of his heart, he knew she was opening up to him in a way that she rarely did with anyone. The energy between them was tenuous…fragile, just like her. He found himself wanting to slide his arm across her proud shoulders, draw her into his arms and simply hold her. Hold her and comfort her against the awful weight of pain she carried. In that moment, she was more a hurting child to him than a warrior woman.
“No, not exactly an outcast… Oh, to be sure, some members have been cast permanently out of the clan.” She gave him a pained, one-cornered smile, and then quickly looked away. “My sentence is an ongoing one. Grandfather Adaire says I am walking on the dark side with some choices I have made. And until I can walk in the light all the time, I am not allowed to return to the village as a full member of it.”
Roan frowned. “Light and dark? Familiar words and themes to me.” He opened his hands. “Where I come from, in our belief system, light does not exist without darkness, and vice versa. You can’t have one without the other. And no human being is ever all one or the other.” He glanced over at her. “Are they expecting you not to be human? Not to make mistakes?”
She laughed abruptly. “The Jaguar Clan is an honorable part of the Sisterhood of Light. There are rules that cannot be broken…and I broke one of them. It was a very serious thing. Life-and-death serious.” Inca frowned and tugged at the frayed thread on her knee until it broke off in her fingers.
“Mike Houston said you saved his life,” Roan said. He ached to reach out to her now. There were tears swimming in her eyes, although Inca’s head was bowed and slightly turned away from his in an effort to hide them from him. In her softened tone he could hear the wrenching heartache she carried. She moved her hands restlessly.
“That is why I was asked to leave my own kind, my home…. Michael was dying. I knew it. And yes, I broke the rule and went into the light where the souls of all humans who are dying go. I pulled him back from the Threshold. I gave my life, my energy, my heart and love, and drew him back. If not for Grandmother Alaria, who revived me because I was practically dead after saving Michael, I would not be here today.”
“So, you saved a life? And Grandfather Adaire kicked you out of the clan for that?” Roan had a hard time understanding why.
“Do not be judgmental of Grandfather Adaire. He was only following the code of the clan. You see, we are trained in the art of life and death. Because we have the power, that means we must walk with it in strict accordance to the laws of the universe. I broke one of those laws. Michael had made his choice to die of his wound. I had been caring for him for a week, and for the first time in my life, I felt as if I had met my real brother. Oh, he was not, but that was the bond we had from the moment we met. It was wonderful….” She sighed unhappily. “I saw him slipping away daily. My heart cried. I cried alone, where no one could see me. I knew he would die. I did not want it to happen. I knew I had the power to stop it. And I knew it was wrong to intervene.” Inca smiled sadly as she looked at the shore, which was a half a mile away on either side of the chugging tug.
“I wanted a brother just like Michael. I’d been searching so long for a family—I was so starved to have one—that I did it. I broke the law. And I did it knowingly.” Gravely, Inca turned her head and met his dark blue eyes. “And that is why I was asked to leave. What I did was a ‘dark side’ decision. It was selfish and self-serving.”