Kelly licked her lips but found no voice. Too tired, too scared. The professor’s words drew her attention to the floor and walls. Now that he had mentioned it, the passage showed not a single ax or chisel mark. Only the windows were crude, clearly man-made, hacked through to the outside. The difference between the two was striking. Had the tribe stumbled upon this winding tubule within the tree and taken advantage of it? The dwellings they’d seen on the way here proved that the Ban-ali were skilled engineers, incorporating the artificial with the natural. Perhaps the same was true here.
The professor made one last observation: “The flies are gone.”
Kelly glanced over her shoulder. The flock of flies nattering and crawling among her brother’s bloody bandages had indeed vanished.
“The bugs flew off shortly after we entered the tree,” Kouwe said. “It must be some repellent property of the wood’s aromatic oils.”
Kelly had also noticed the musky odor of the tree. It had struck her as vaguely familiar, similar to dried eucalyptus, medicinal and pleasant, but laced with a deeper loamy smell that hinted at something earthy and ripe.
Staring over her shoulder, Kelly saw how heavily soaked her brother’s bandages were. He could not last much longer, not with the continuing blood loss. Something had to be done. As she walked, cold dread iced her veins. Despite her exhaustion, her pace increased.
As they climbed, openings appeared in the tunnel wall. Passing by them, Kelly noted that the passages led either into one of the hutlike dwellings or out onto branches as wide as driveways, with huts in the distance.
And still they were led onward and upward.
Despite her anxiety, Kelly was soon stumbling, dragging, gasping, eyes stinging with running sweat. She desperately wanted to rest, but she could not let Frank down.
Their guide noticed them drifting farther and farther behind him. He backed down and studied the situation. He moved to Kelly’s side.
“I help.” He struck a fist on his chest. “I strong.” He nudged her aside and took her end of the stretcher.
She was too weak to object, too winded to mumble a thanks.
As Kelly stepped aside, the two men now continued upward, moving faster. Kelly kept pace beside the stretcher. Frank was so pale, his breathing shallow. Relieved of the burden, Kelly’s full attention focused back on her brother. She pulled out her stethoscope and listened to his chest. His heartbeat thudded dully, his lungs crackled with rales. His body was rapidly giving out, heading into hypovolemic shock. The hemorrhaging had to be stopped.
Focused on her brother’s condition, she failed to notice that they’d reached the tunnel’s end. The spiraling passage terminated abruptly at an opening that looked identical to the archway at the base of the giant tree. But instead of leading back into the morning sunshine, this archway led into a cavernous structure with a saucer-shaped floor.
Kelly gaped at the interior, again lit by rough-hewn slits high up the curved walls. The space, spherical in shape, had to be thirty yards across, a titanic bubble in the wood, half protruding out of the main trunk.
“It’s like a massive gall,” Kouwe said, referring to the woody protuberances sometimes found on oaks or other trees, created by insects or other parasitic conditions.
Kelly appreciated the comparison. But it wasn’t insects that inhabited this gall. Around the curved walls, woven hammocks hung from pegs, a dozen at least. In a few, naked tribesmen lay sprawled. Others of the Ban-ali worked around them. The handful of prone men and women were showing various signs of illness: a bandaged foot, a splinted arm, a fevered brow. She watched a tribesman with a long gash across his chest wince as a thick pasty substance was applied to his wound by another of his tribe.
Kelly understood immediately what she was seeing.
A hospital ward.
The tiny-framed tribesman who had ordered them here stood a few paces away. His look was sour with impatience. He pointed to one of the hammocks and spoke rapidly in a foreign tongue.
Their guide answered with a nod and led them to the proper hammock.
Professor Kouwe mumbled as they walked. “If I’m not mistaken, that’s a dialect of Yanomamo.”
Kelly glanced over to him, hearing the shock in the professor’s voice.
He explained the significance. “The Yanomamo language has no known counterparts. Their speech patterns and tonal structures are unique unto themselves. A true lingual isolate. It’s one of the reasons the Yanomamo are considered one of the oldest Amazonian bloodlines.” His eyes were wide upon the men and women in the woody chamber. “The Ban-ali must be an offshoot, a lost tribe of the Yanomamo.”
Kelly merely nodded, too full of worry to appreciate the professor’s observation. Her attention remained focused on her brother.
Overseen by the tiny Indian, the stretcher was lowered, and Frank was transferred onto the hammock. Kelly hovered nervously at his side. Jarred by the movement, Frank moaned slightly, eyes fluttering. His sedatives must be wearing off.
Kelly reached down to her med pack atop the abandoned stretcher. Before she could gather up her syringe and bottles of morphine, the tiny healer barked orders to his staff. Their guide and another tribesman began to loosen the bandages over Frank’s stumps with small bone knives.
“Don’t!” Kelly said, straightening.
She was ignored. They continued to work upon the soaked strips. Blood began to flow more thickly.
She moved to the hammock, grabbing the taller man’s elbow. “No! You don’t know what you’re doing. Wait until I have the pressure wraps ready! An IV in place! He’ll bleed to death!”
The stronger man broke out of her grasp and scowled at her.
Kouwe intervened. He pointed at Kelly. “She’s our healer.”
The tribesman seemed baffled by this statement and glanced to his own shaman.
The smaller Indian was crouched by the curved wall at the head of the hammock. He had a bowl in his hand, gathering a flow of thick sap from a trough gouged in the wall. “I am healer here,” the small man said. “This is Ban-ali medicine. To stop the bleeding. Strong medicine from the yagga.”
Kelly glanced to Kouwe.
He deciphered. “Yagga…it’s similar to yakka…a Yanomamo word for mother.”
Kouwe stared around at the chamber. “Yagga must be their name for this tree. A deity.”
The Indian shaman straightened with his bowl, now half full of the reddish sap. Reaching up, he stoppered the thick flow by jamming a wooden peg into a hole at the top of the trough. “Strong medicines,” he repeated, lifting the bowl and striding to the hammock. “The blood of the Yagga will stop the blood of the man.” It sounded like a rote maxim, a translation of an old adage.