"Thank you, Mr. Toffler. Well done, by the way."

There was a slight hesitation on the other end. "Hell, ma'am, I just flew around up here."

"Nevertheless, well done. Refuel when you have to, and stand by."

Martha watched through the narrow slit. The room was featureless adobe, and the roof overhang was wide, but the ventilation slit gave a bar of light when the sun was at the right angle, a breath of air, and a few minutes' vision if she braced her toe against a projecting spot in the wall and hung on.

The warriors who straggled back up the broad avenue were a far cry from the host that had set out that morning. Plumes were bedraggled, or hacked away; most of them limped or hobbled, many bore bleeding wounds. Women and children and near-naked servants gathered along the edges of the broad roadway of colored clay, between the basalt pillars and atop the rectangular mounds. They didn't chant and sing as they had when their men marched out to fight, either. Their silence was like a dirge, compounded by the sound of keening grief that wailed from the interior of the houses. Her arm muscles were beginning to quiver. Gasping, Martha dropped down.

"What did you see?" Pamela Lisketter said. She was beginning to look a little more alert. Which may be good if we can do something, but on the other hand, everything she's done so far has been harmful.

Still, it was a little comforting. Having a zombie as your only companion in confinement was hard on the nerves.

"The… army has come back. Badly beaten, from the look of it. Less than half the numbers that went out this morning, and most of those wounded."

"Should I hope for rescue?" Lisketter said, mouth twisting. "What can they do to me that Cofflin and the Town Council won't?"

Martha looked around the room. It was absolutely bare, except for a tall-necked jug of water and an open pot for wastes. The room stank, of sweat and the chamber pot and their unwashed bodies.

"The town jail's an improvement on this," she said dryly. "And as to what they can do, I suggest a prayer that we don't find out."

She sank down in the far corner, concentrating on hope. The Eagle's crew obviously beat them. They may be myth-besotted, but surely they'll respond to a whack across the face. The problem was, she didn't know how they'd respond.

She heard the buzz of the ultralight's engines again, faint through the thick walls of the prison. She didn't try to climb to the ventilation slit again; the angle was wrong, and in any case it was unwise to strain herself, in her condition. Hours passed, in a silence broken only by the skitter and buzz of insects.

The door banged open. Warriors stood there, warriors with bandaged wounds and rough cloth wrapped around their feet. Behind the fanged, carved masks their eyes were as dark and hard as the obsidian of their weapons. Both Americans had learned the local word for "come"; there was no point in being dragged. Outside was a corridor, and then a wooden colonnade enclosing a court. A ball game was in progress there. The object seemed to be to drive a rubber ball through a vertical wooden hoop on either side of the court. Knowing what she knew, Martha wasn't surprised when the three members of the winning team passed through a ritual and then knelt with their throats over a basin. She did turn her head aside, likewise when the priest came by flicking droplets of their blood on the two women.

That made her stare at their escort. She frowned slightly after an instant; he seemed to be ill in a way unrelated to the cuts and punctures on his arms and chest and thighs. He was swallowing convulsively, and now and then putting his hand to his throat, or rubbing at his loincloth.

A suspicion formed in her mind. Sharp terror drove it forth as they were prodded into another court. This encircled one of the oval pools, and more brightly clad members of the priest-king caste stood around it, men and women. The open side giving onto the avenue held one of the giant jaguar-and-woman statues, and all around it were panels of carved stone or stucco portraying the myth of the jaguar-men. A woman alone in the jungle, and the cat sprang upon her. The same woman hugely pregnant; her tribesfolk menaced her with weapons, and she fled into the jungle to squat and give birth, but the babe was born with fangs and talons. The jaguar returned, to devour mother and child, but the child turned within its stomach and the jaguar rose to walk on its hind legs like a man…

"Shamanistic practices aimed at bringing about a complex of feline transformation," she quoted to herself. The archaeologists didn't know the half of it.

"Are… are they going to sacrifice us too?" Lisketter asked.

"I don't-"

A painful rap on the back of her head silenced her. A ripple went through the waiting crowd as the ultralight passed overhead, the setting sun red on its wings. Then they turned their attention back to their task. Imploring the help of their god, or gods, or ancestral spirits, she assumed.

Aromatic gums burned in clay holders. Brightly clad figures, men and women, acted out scenes whose importance-usually whose nature-she had no conception of.

The ritual went on and on. Objects were raised before the huge masked figure who sat immobile and cross-legged on yet another of the table-altars. The ropes he grasped in either hand led to prisoners on either side; ordinary peasants, by the look of them, naked and with one hand tied behind their backs. The other hand dangled limp, pierced by a stingray spine.

The drums began to beat again, a thudding in the same rhythm as a human heartbeat; flute and shell and bone xylophone. She was numb enough that the death of the two captives went by almost unnoticed, like a flicker in a movie someone else was watching. Lisketter's whimper as they dragged her away toward the pond cut through the glaze a little. Priestesses grasped her and stripped away the rags of her clothes, pushing her down and scrubbing her as they chanted. Then they pulled her onto the bank and began dressing her in an outfit that was mostly woven feathers and not many of those. The last touch was to dip wads of cloth in some murky, musky-smelling substance and wipe them across Lisketter's belly and inner thighs and genitals. Then they bore her between them to the altar, binding her over it spread-eagled.

Martha obeyed numbly as she was pushed into a position near the carved block of stone; in one hand she was to hold a stalk of maize, in the other a rod carved to represent a burning snake. It wasn't until warriors led in the muzzled jaguar on two thick leashes that she could bring herself to believe what was going to happen. Lisketter began to scream and heave against the ropes that held her, and the big cat's tail lashed as it licked its nose and took the scent.

The connection was through a relay on the Eagle, but good enough. Alston went on: "The good part is that we gave them a first-class lickin'," she said.

"Casualties?" Cofflin's voice.

Strange to think of him in the air traffic control tower back on the island. It seemed so far, here in the night where the drums boomed and the light of fires silhouetted the great buildings of the plateau-city ahead.

"Ours? One dead, one critical, twelve or so serious, and the rest walkin' wounded. Theirs… couple of hundred dead, maybe more. Plenty of wounded, too." She hesitated. "The bad part is I still can't get them to talk."

Silence came across the miles. "Can you get her back?"

"Not by direct assault. That city isn't walled, but it's over a hundred feet uphill, and they still outnumber us. Storming that… even if it worked, the butcher's bill would be ugly. Nothin' to stop them killing her right off, either. If I try to besiege them? Well, right now we've got them dazed, but they'll get their wits back, maybe call up overwhelmin' numbers to finish us off, or block the river back to Eagle."