On the bright side, Mei had found a boat and a way off the island. She hadn’t escaped the island on her own, but at least she’d tried. She’d fought back against the system that had unfairly trapped her here and that, at least, she could be proud of.
On the other hand, she had just been captured by indigenous Caribbean folk who had poisoned with curare and kidnapped her. Her breath came in very short jerks as the giant, wooden canoe she was in slowly moved up and down large ocean rollers. And there was nothing she could do about it.
She lay there, utterly helpless as the time between rapid breaths grew shorter and the breathes grew shallower. Her eyes, stuck open, painfully teared up constantly in an effort to keep the sore orbs hydrated. At some point, someone closed them for her, leaving her in darkness. Her only sensation was a faint notion of the canoe’s rocking movement. It was scary.
And then her breathing stopped altogether. Her chest tightened and a stab of pain grew within. And her fear magnified many times over.
She felt herself dying. She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. But she could do nothing but stare at the darkness, scared out of her mind.
Then someone said something from the back of the canoe. Someone else shoved something into her mouth and pumped. Air forcefully pushed into her lungs. A rush of bliss! Then another. She was breathing! The movement jostled her eyes open again.
The device came into view. It was probably an animal bladder of some kind. Pieces of wood had been tied to either side of it and brown hands pumped the bladder open and closed. It was a bellows. Like the kind you use with a fireplace. The Caribs were trying to keep her alive by forcing her lungs to work after the curare had shut them down. Did that mean she would survive? Maybe, maybe not. This didn’t seem like it was the most medically sound procedure.
But it gave her hope and it kept her alive. For a moment. Her entire existence shrank down to that single breath being forced into her body and the glorious oxygen it gave her. She swung back and forth between burning pain and…less pain. Someone closed her eyes again. That was nice of them. She wondered why they bothered.
There was no way to tell how long the journey took, except that at some point someone else took a turn at keeping her barely alive. She knew that because her eyes opened during the switch, only to be closed shortly after. She thought she fell asleep for a time, though she wasn’t certain.
Every now and then, her sense of touch would start to return. Then someone would prick her with a wooden needle. It didn’t hurt much. But the numbness would rapidly spread again.
Eventually, they stopped giving her more curare. Her body very slowly began to regain function and she even started to breath on her own again. And that was painful too. She felt the canoe hit land and come to a halt, which triggered her eyes open once more. It also caused her to roll off the dead man under her and flop against the side of the canoe. The light was blinding, which only made her tear up again, but there was nothing for it but to endure.
The Caribs hauled their prisoners out, then Mei and the two corpses. She was dragged up the beach and into jungle, along a twisting path whose entrance wouldn’t have been obvious to anyone walking by, let alone sailing by, even with a telescope. They didn’t have to go far, only a dozen meters past a thick wall of trees and vines and leaves. Then they arrived in a small Carib village.
Wood and grass and wood huts formed a circle up against the jungle. They were small buildings, poorly made and with dirt floors. A large fire pit sat in the center of the village, unlit, while a couple of smaller ones outside the huts burned low. All the warriors that had captured Mei and the others had been male. For the first time, she saw females. The squatted and sat in small groups in front of the huts, working on crafts or cooking and most were talking. They wore only skirts and feather or bead decorations, their breasts bare.
The returning warriors were very vocal. They entered the village full of loud boasts and triumphant gestures, big grins on their faces, dancing and shouting and waving weapons around. One did not have to understand their language to see that they were excessively prideful. Mei supposed that made sense considering these so-called primitives had just successfully raided a colony with far higher levels of technology. These David’s had casually swum over and stolen from Goliath with ease; of course they felt superior.
The women looked over and some rose. There were smiles and a few cheers and laughs. The females were, however, much more reserved than the exuberant males. Still, some of them came to see the prisoners and studied them. Some plucked at clothing and fingered buttons and laughed. When they saw Mei, a crowd of the females gathered, eyes wide as they chattered and pointed at her features before touching their own eyes and noses. Perhaps they’d never seen an Asian person before.
The prisoners were not hauled into the village. Next to the village entrance were a series of cages that were too short to stand in. Unlike the crude huts, these were made of slender logs and rope and sturdily built. Mei watched as the men and women taken from Barbados were stuffed into cages that barely held them all. Mei, however, perhaps due to all the attention she was getting, was pushed into a cage by herself.
She lay there, gradually coming back to all her senses, when another shout went up and more attention was drawn to a pair of warriors entering the village. Turning her head a little, she gasped.
The two warriors had the jaguar strung upside down on a pole carried between them. The animal had a crude wooden device over its head and neck to prevent it from moving its head and biting anyone. The villagers, old and young alike, danced about in awe and a few even dared to approach and gingerly reach up to stroke the great cat’s exposed, furry belly. They’d run their hand over the white fur and then hastily pull it back and giggle to each other. The warriors carried the cat to a smaller cage next to Mei and put it inside.
She could see from the groggy look in the jaguar’s eyes that it was still under the affects of the curare and likewise scared. It tried to snarl and bite but could hardly move, its breathing shallow and ragged. Despite the fact that the creature had perhaps tried to kill her at one point and was quite dangerous, she watched it suffer horribly and her heart went out to it. Surely it had no idea what was happening to it or why.
Mei had always hated seeing animals abused. It had long been a problem in her home country and she’d gone out of her way to report stories on the illegal pet trade, cruel farms, and animal testing. But nothing pissed her off more than trophy hunters who turned beautiful animals into rugs, and the infuriating idiots who still believed in the superstitious nonsense of ‘traditional medicine’. As if grinding up some rare animal’s testicles into your tea was going to give you a boner or cure your cough. She hated that way of thinking.
The warriors left the captive animal laying on its side and untied it from the pole, then they tied its feet to the bars of the cage. The device over the jaguar’s head, too, was tied to the cage. Even after it recovered from the drug, there would be no way that it would be able to do anything.
Mei wondered what they planned to do with it. If they were going to skin it or eat it, why go to all the trouble of keeping it alive like this? Or were they going to torture it or sacrifice it to some strange god?
Her ability to blink regularly came back. And her breaths became more measured. A sense of relief came over her as she felt immediate death recede. And then she saw the corpses being brought in from the canoes.
Warriors dumped the two dead marines next to the large, central fire pit. Women clapped their hands and excitedly pointed at the bodies and poked them and nodded to each other, everyone smiling and looking quite happy. And then they got to work.
First, they pulled out crude stone knives and cut away the soldiers’ jackets and clothing while two teen girls started a fire in the main pit. Buttons, especially the gold coloured ones, were cut out of the clothing and there was much excitement over the distribution of them as everyone, male and female, seemed to want them to add to their decorative accessories. And if things had stopped there, Mei might have understood that they were just stripping the two of finery before burying them. But the Caribs didn’t stop there. And what they did after that made Mei’s stomach heave.
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