Alex shifted to look at Kenway, who wore a twisted grin as he watched Emma’s exit.
“Why are you smirking? It was a perfectly valid question.”
“Indeed it was,” he agreed, “and I enjoyed watching Emma try to wriggle out of it. Quite truthfully, I have my own theory about why these people stopped learning . . . but I’m not sure you’d be too keen on it.”
“I’m all ears.”
Smiling, he traced a diagonal line in the dirt. “I believe God created man for one purpose: fellowship. As long as man remained in fellowship with God, he was able to fully exercise his brain, his physical strength, and his spirit. When sin separated man from God, however, man began to atrophy in all those areas. We now use less than 10 percent of our mental faculties, age and disease corrupt our bodies, and our spirits have become withered shadows of what God intended them to be. We physicians treat only the body, often neglecting the mind and paying only the slightest attention to the spirit.”
Alex was on the verge of agreeing with him out of sheer weariness when a small dose of reason shocked her back to her senses. “You think we’re . . . withering.”
“An apt metaphor, yes.”
“And these people—what? Are they more withered than the rest of the civilized world?”
“They are held in bondage . . . to sin, to darkness. Bondage holds them back.”
She closed her eyes as a tide of irritation began to flow through her. Just when she thought she might like the man, he began to spout utter nonsense. “Let me get this straight—despite all the advances of the twenty-first century, you think we are getting more and more stupid.”
He nodded. “We have more toys, more gadgets, yes. But we’re building on what previous generations have accomplished.”
“So you believe we’re atrophying.”
Grinning, he snapped his fingers. “By George, I think you’ve got it. The second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy: In a closed system, energy disperses. All things deteriorate over time. Why should mankind be excluded?”
“Thanks for the lesson, Reverend Doctor, but I think you’re positively loopy.” Alex leaned forward and pushed herself up, then closed her eyes as the world swayed around her. Though she’d pretended to sleep with the others, she’d spent most of the night listening to the sounds of the jungle, her restless companions, and her frightened daughter. Caitlyn behaved like a trooper during daylight hours, but suppressed fears reigned over her nightmares.
The loss of her beloved stuffed monkey hadn’t helped matters.
She squinted into the slanting morning light. “Where’s my daughter?”
“With Deborah, out looking for fruit.” His voice deepened. “Are you all right?”
“I think you’re driving me a little nuts.” Alex forced her eyes open, then gave him what she hoped was a sarcastic smile. “If you keep it up, I’m afraid I’m going to have to go find fresh air, too.”
The corner of Kenway’s mouth drooped as he rested his hands on his folded knees. “I thought scientific research required an open mind.”
She swiped a layer of sand from her forehead, wishing she could still the pounding in her head as easily. “I’m not the one with the closed mind. I’m not clinging to creation myths when every credible scientist on the planet accepts that evolution shaped the earth and everything in it—”
The doctor cut her off with an uplifted hand. “We’re not going to argue that one.”
“Scared, huh?”
“Not likely. But Jesus once said something about being careful not to cast pearls before . . . people who wouldn’t appreciate them.”
She hesitated, certain that his comment contained some sort of insult, but movement from the shaman distracted her attention. He had risen and gestured to his men; some of his warriors were gathering weapons.
“Uh-oh.” She winced, dreading the day ahead. “I think it’s showtime.”
Delmar walked to Olsson and Baklanov, who were sleeping on their backs, as oblivious as dead men. They awoke with groaning and shuffling, then squinted at the squadron of tattooed warriors around the fire.
“Good morning,” Olsson said, idly smoothing his beard as he sat up. “Does this mean our escorts are ready to go?”
“Do you think,” Baklanov acknowledged them with bleary eyes, “they might have anything like a cigarette in this place?”
A few moments later the shaman’s intentions became clear. A group of six warriors would accompany the expedition to the healing village while one white woman remained behind. The natives would carry spears, bows, and arrows; the white men would carry the shaman’s sick wife.
As a group of men brought the sick woman forward, Alex was able to get her first look at her patient. Unable to walk, in the shabono the woman could do nothing but lie in her hammock; on the trail she would have to be transported by one of the men.
As she examined the woman, Alex found herself looking for the telltale signs of a prion disease. Though it was impossible to tell which variant the patient might have contracted—if this were, in fact, a prion case and not some tropical fever or infection—the woman exhibited several symptoms that could be attributed to kuru or CJD. Her body was emaciated, her arms limp, her mouth lax. If this were kuru, this patient had to be in the latter stage. Without proper care, she would die within days.
Kenway agreed with her observations. While Alex didn’t need his opinion to form what amounted to a shaky diagnosis, his support sent a flood of warmth rushing through her. With Carlton gone, she was now working for only herself and Caitlyn . . . but at least she wasn’t working alone.
As she stood from her patient’s side, she saw Bancroft talking to Deborah, one of his meaty hands around her arm. Apparently he was trying to talk her out of staying, for she kept shaking her head even as her hands pressed against his chest.
Overcome by the feeling that she was intruding, Alex looked away.
She would have liked to make a few preparations before setting out, but apparently these tribesmen didn’t put much stock in preplanning. Brandishing their spears, they prodded the expedition members toward the opening in the wall of the shabono, halting only long enough for Bancroft to enter the shaman’s enclosure and lift the sick woman into his arms.
Before they left the village, Alex turned to say one last farewell. Standing with a group of women who had come out to observe their departure, Deborah Simons wore a calm expression, but a look of unutterable distance filled her eyes.
“We’ll be back,” Alex called. “We won’t leave you behind.”
As Deborah nodded silently, Alex gathered her strength, then gripped her daughter’s hand and followed the others out into the tall grass.
They had walked only fifteen minutes when Olsson halted in midstep and lifted his hands in outright mutiny. Alex came to an abrupt stop, her heart jumping in her chest, as one of the taller warriors stepped forward and lifted his blowgun to his lips. A single dart would paralyze Olsson, and the man was too heavy to carry through the dense foliage . . .
Delmar rushed forward, lifting his hands before the warrior. As two of the natives jabbed at Olsson’s midsection with the tips of their spears, Delmar waved and babbled in the native language. After a moment, the warrior lowered his weapon.
Kenway turned to stare at the botanist. “What are you doing?”
The big Swede pointed to the woman in Bancroft’s arms. “We cannot carry that woman like this. We will be exhausted and she will suffer needlessly. But if they’ll give us a few minutes, I think I can make a travois from that specimen.” Bracing his hands on his hips, he inclined his head toward a wide tree with yellow flowers. “The journey will be a bit rough as the back end drags on the ground, but it’ll be no harder on her than the rest of us.”
Delmar pressed his lips together, then nodded. “I’ll explain it to them.” He jerked his thumb toward their guards. “You do what you must.”
While the natives watched with suspicion, Olsson demonstrated what he had in mind. Using odd bits of vine and leaves, he created a miniature version of a travois, then gestured toward the jungle and spread his hands apart. “Like this, but bigger,” he said, looking at their captors.
The light of understanding gleamed in one native’s eye, but it took Delmar another ten minutes to convince the warrior to surrender the stone hatchet tucked into the belt at his waist. Within half an hour, though, Bancroft and Baklanov had chopped two long branches to serve as poles. Reaching high over his head, Olsson used the warrior’s hatchet to slice the bark around the perimeter of the yellow-flowered tree. Then he made a vertical cut about five feet in length, followed by another slice around the perimeter of the base. As Alex and Caitlyn watched in wonder, he peeled the bark from the tree in one long piece, then flattened it on the ground. After piercing the edges and lashing it to the poles with narrow vines, Olsson held the two poles behind him while Bancroft gently lowered the native woman to the travois.
The woman made no sound, but stared up at them with wide, frightened eyes.
“Poor thing.” Caitlyn’s grip tightened on Alex’s arm. “She doesn’t even have a name.”
“Of course she does,” Emma answered, “but she would consider it bad luck for us to know it. Knowing her name would give us power over her.”
“But we have to call her something,” Caitlyn insisted. “Otherwise, she’s just . . . something to drag along behind us.”
Alex’s thoughts drifted back to sunny afternoons in the nursing home, where nurses gaily gossiped around her helpless mother, surrendering to the all-too-common temptation to treat silent people as objects.
“You’re absolutely right, honey.” Feeling the pressure of Kenway’s gaze, she avoided his eyes for fear of betraying her memories. “We’ll call her Shaman’s Wife, okay?”
They moved at a quicker pace once the travois had been completed. The warriors, who positioned themselves at the front and rear of their party, led the way with less bravado, and something that might have been respect gleamed in their eyes.
Drawn by a feeling of responsibility for the woman she had named, Alex found herself walking by the motionless patient on the travois. Because the bearer could not handle the travois and clear the path, she took care to hold branches that might have snapped back to strike their patient or the man who pulled the travois. Joining in the effort, Caitlyn picked up a stick and pulled down spider webs overhanging the trail.
Alex knew part of her concern for the invalid sprang from memories of her mother. Despite the differences in time and location, the limp woman might have been Geneva Pace clothed in other flesh.
Alex wasn’t alone in her concern for the woman’s safety. Whenever they stopped to clear a path or drink from a stream, Kenway reached for the patient’s wrist to take her pulse. Alex knew he couldn’t do much without any sort of medicines or equipment, but the woman was now receiving better care than she had in the village.
Kenway’s compassion, she guessed, sprang from his calling as a doctor . . . and because his encounter with Ya-ree had instigated this expedition. Bancroft, Olsson, and Baklanov cared for their patient because her life had become entwined with Deborah Simons’s. If Shaman’s Wife died before they reached the healing tribe, they would almost certainly have to fight to rescue Deborah from the Angry People.
As the hours wore on, Alex’s mind drifted into a weary haze as she followed Olsson on the trail. Her arms itched from mosquito bites, her shirt clung to her damp chest, and her hair hung in ravels about her face. Trapped in what felt like an eternal day, she lost track of passing time. The few shafts of sunlight penetrating the canopy seemed locked in place, slanting neither east nor west. Sunset remained out of reach. Time had stopped, and the world where cars hummed on expressways and radios blared from clean kitchen countertops existed in another universe.
“So, Alexandra—”
She flinched as Kenway’s voice sliced into her thoughts.
“What do you think about our patient?”
Mechanically, she replayed his words in her mind and forced herself to focus on the conversation. “Um, there’s no fever at all,” she said, resting the back of her hand on the woman’s forehead. “So we can probably rule out a typical bacterial or viral infection.”
Michael threw her a puzzled look. “The shaman said she had the shuddering disease. Do you doubt him?”
“I want to be certain, that’s all. If we had the proper equipment we could test the cerebrospinal fluid for increased numbers of lymph cells to definitely rule out infection—”
“Did you look at her back? Bedsores, particularly bad ones. This woman has been immobile for some time.”
Pressing her parched lips together, Alex studied her patient’s mouth. “She’s drooling, despite the heat. An inability to swallow is a late symptom of kuru. But while Creutzfeldt-Jakob patients show early signs of dementia and agitation, this woman is calm. I daresay she knows exactly what is happening around her.”
“If so, she has to be terrified.” Without losing a step, Kenway lowered his hand to stroke the woman’s cheek. Something in the gesture seemed to affect Shaman’s Wife, because an instant later the fingers of her right hand twitched.
“Look.” Alex pointed toward the woman’s trembling fingers. “Athetoid tremors.”
Michael shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think she was trying to respond.”
“I certainly hope not.” Alex looked away as dark memories edged her teeth. “I know this may sound cruel, but I think Creutzfeldt-Jakob patients who experience dementia are fortunate—at least they are mostly unaware of what’s happening to them. Kuru and FFI patients, on the other hand, are awake and cognizant until the bitter end.”
Caitlyn, who’d been walking a few steps ahead, suddenly turned. “Like Grandmom, you mean.”
Surprise whipped Alex’s breath away. While she hadn’t meant for Caitlyn to hear the conversation, she certainly hadn’t meant for Kenway to know about her mother.
Swallowing hard, she lowered her eyes, hoping Kenway had been too engrossed in their patient to listen. They walked for several more steps, during which the living forest filled the silence with birdsong, screeches, and whirrs.
In a low voice, Kenway asked the question she’d been dreading. “Your mother died from a prion disease?”
Alex squinched her eyes shut to halt a sudden rise of tears.
“FFI,” Caitlyn answered, speaking in a matter-of-fact voice as she swiped a monstrous spider web from a wild banana tree. “I was only a baby, but I’ve heard the stories. It was horrible.”
Kenway caught Alex’s eye. “She was alert until—”
“Until the final coma, yes.” Forcing herself to speak in a professional tone, Alex bit back the pain that always accompanied thoughts of her mother’s death. She brought her hand to her brow, wiping away beads of perspiration while she hoped he’d be too distracted to put the pieces together. Caitlyn didn’t know that fatal familial insomnia was supposed to be inherited, but Kenway might know that and much more.
Her scampering thoughts veered toward a story she’d recently read. Alex dared to meet his eyes. “Have you heard the story of Joe Slowinski?”
He shook his head. “Can’t say that I have.”
“I read it in the New York Times magazine. Joe Slowinski was a young man who loved snakes and knew how to handle them. But on an expedition in the Himalayan foothills, he was bitten by a highly poisonous krait. At first he wasn’t too alarmed—the snake was a juvenile, barely a foot long, and the wound so small none of his teammates could even see where the fangs had broken the skin.”
She paused long enough to let Olsson maneuver around a huge termite mound, then she hurried to catch up.
Kenway matched her pace. “Go on.”
Shifting the burden of the travois, Olsson grinned. “Do not keep us waiting for the end of the story.”
Alex settled back into her place. “Slowinski thought he might be okay, but he had to prepare for the worst. As he ate breakfast with his team, he joked about his thick skin and hoped the venom hadn’t penetrated. But when he began to feel a tingling in his hand, he knew. After calling his team together, he explained what would happen to his body as the venom took effect. His brain would continue to function; he would remain awake and alert through everything, but the venom’s neurotoxins would gradually paralyze his body, including his lungs. If he were to survive, team members would have to breathe for him for up to forty-eight hours.”
Alex lifted her hand, warding off the memory of her mother struggling to breathe in the coma. In a slightly strangled voice, she continued: “After two days, Slowinski knew the effects of the venom would fade. His lungs would kick in, and he’d be all right.
“Everyone hoped for the best, but soon Slowinski’s head began to droop, his eyes closed, and his lungs stopped working. Two women on the team began to give him mouth-to-mouth, and though he couldn’t speak, he signaled his wishes by wiggling his fingers—one wiggle for yes, two for no. When a couple of the young men offered to relieve the women, Slowinski demonstrated his sense of humor—and his alertness— by protesting with two wriggling fingers.
“Eventually, though, the effort exhausted the women. The men took over when Slowinski was no longer able to wriggle his fingers or toes. The team members tried to signal a helicopter rescue team, but bad weather prevented the chopper’s landing.
“By the time help finally arrived, Slowinski had expired. But due to the nature of the poison, I think his brain lived until the last minute. It continued to function, so he knew time was passing . . . and help was not coming.”
She looked up at Kenway, whose eyes had softened. “That’s what Shaman’s Wife is feeling; it’s what FFI patients experience. We—they— know what is coming, and yet they are helpless and completely at the mercy of others.”
The softness vanished from Kenway’s face, replaced by a look of shrewd determination. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To find a cure . . . because of your mother?”
Cynicism warred with hope as she met his gaze. “Tell me, Doctor— you’re absolutely convinced your Iquitos patient was healed of an encephalopathy?”
“We may have to qualify the word healed. Though Ya-ree walked and talked, he still bore evidence of the disease in his body. You saw the photograph.”
“I saw proof of his disease. I never saw proof of his healing.”
“I’m convinced he was healed from this.” Kenway gestured to the woman on the travois. “He must have gone to the healers for help when he first noticed symptoms. Whatever they did to him stopped the prions, perhaps neutralized them. I’m convinced the man I treated would have enjoyed a normal life span had he not been wounded.”
She tilted her head, analyzing Shaman’s Wife with a cool, appraising look. “You’re sure this is the same ailment that affected your patient?”
“Ya-ree called it the ‘shuddering disease,’ and if we can trust Delmar’s translation, the shaman used the same term. The source of their infection is no mystery. If they really do drink the ground-up bones of their dead, the entire village may be infected. It’s only a matter of time before they all become symptomatic.”
She lowered her eyes, moving gingerly through the mottled green carpet of ferns on the path. “Then, God help us, maybe we can find a cure.”
“Do you mean that?” A smile lifted the corner of Kenway’s mouth. “You want God’s help?”
“I meant it in a colloquial sense,” Alexandra answered, irritated by his mocking tone.
“Doesn’t matter.” Michael swished a fly from Shaman’s Wife’s face. “I’m sure he will help us . . . and I think he already has.”