The Mirror of the Moon

By Mark Aitchison

Ian MacMillan is a famous explorer, entrepreneur and president of MacMillan’s Tours and Cruises. When word reaches him in his retirement that his rival Roland Reed has uncovered strong evidence in Brazil of the existence of the Amazon women warriors of legend painful memories of a romantic past are rekindled in MacMillan’s mind. Physically unable to challenge his nemesis and reach the Amazons first MacMillan sends his beatnik grandson, Carruthers, south in his place. Manaus and the Amazon rainforest are formidable odds to the carefree young American however. And only with the help of an ancient Indian, MacMillan’s blood-brother in his youth, is Carruthers able to reach back across time and distance to reach a nation of hidden Amazon people and to save them from the exploitation of the modern world that threatens them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark Aitchison
• Release date: May 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311754134

Mark Aitchison

I was born in England (London) to Scottish parents and lived in Nigeria during my earliest years before moving to Canada (Toronto) where I grew up and went to prep school (Upper Canada College, class of 1981). At Bennington College (Vermont, USA, class of 1985) I studied latin american literature and fine arts (painting). After college my family moved to Cape Cod (Massachusetts, USA)- where we had a summer house for many years- and opened a country inn in Eastham (outer cape) called The Over Look Inn. There I began writing seriously for publication (fiction mostly) and travelling every winter to South America. In 1992 I met my wife-to-be, Tania, in Brazil (Manaus). We were married in June of 1992 and started an adventure travel company called Swallows and Amazons that same year. I continue to live in Manaus today with my family (Tania and our 2 daughters Kelly and Stephanie) where I still run Swallows and Amazons Tours, write fiction (mostly adventure stories) and non-fiction (mostly about conservation), and make plans for the future.

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The Mirror of the Moon

by

Mark Aitchison

Copyright 2014 Mark Aitchison

Published on Smashwords

Formatted by eBooksMade4You

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

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CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter One The Amazons

Chapter Two Youth

Chapter Three Arara

Chapter Four The Mirror of the Moon

Chapter Five Final Instructions

Chapter Six The Guide

Chapter Seven Anthropology

Chapter Eight The Road of Jade

Chapter Nine The Lake Beneath the Hills

Chapter Ten The City of Stone

Chapter Eleven Sacrifice

Chapter Twelve Captivity

Chapter Thirteen Escape

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Preface

They had come far, these men. Many days and many nights they had hacked and clawed their way through the never ending jungle. At last out of the bush and into the light of the sun they were but relics of the men they had been. They were gaunt and bearded, emaciated with hunger and dying of thirst.

But while their bodies gave way beneath them, as they fell to their knees by the edge of the lake known as the mirror of the moon, as they drank of the crystalline waters they had long searched for they gave thanks, simple heartfelt thanks to the god they had not believed in at the beginning of their search, the god who had watched over them as they progressed, and who had tested them as they went. Bent over in thanks by the lakeshore the group of six explorers gave thanks as Columbus had to his god for delivering him from darkness into the Promised Land.

Or so they believed.

They believed their god was in the act of rewarding them for their efforts. But they should have known that god does not reward the hunger of men such as these, whose hunger was lust and little more. Theirs was a hunger for gold and for women. The gold was there, they were sure, hidden just beyond the lapping waters of that mystical lake somewhere in the hills which surrounded them. But was it the right lake, in the right mountain pass? Was it the lake of the Amazons, the Mirror of the Moon, as legend called it?

Across the lake the women came, as if out of a dream, certainly out of the past and out of legend. As if from the rocks themselves on the opposite shore they emerged and they took to their canoes to cross the lake to where the half-crazed white men kneeled over in exhaustion and submission. The Amazon women came for the men who sought them. And as they drew nearer the men saw that they were as they had been depicted in legend and fantasy- they were, as the conquistador Orellana’s chronicler Friar Gaspar Carvajal described them,

...white and tall, and have hair very long and braided and wound about the head, and they are very robust and go about naked, with their private parts covered, and their bows and arrows in their hands...

The men could only watch in wonder and disbelief. They knelt in the cool still water and watched the procession of canoes approach them. Their mouths hung open and a mixture of putrid sweat and virgin water dripped down and over their exposed chests. The Amazons reached the men and they were not gentle with them. The weakened men saw that these women were not as other women were. They were direct and hard and they beat upon the men who had come to have their way with them and steal their wealth. They knocked them senseless and then took the broken bodies in their canoes back across the lake from whence they had come. They took them away to their fate.

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Chapter One

The Amazons

It was the sudden death of his wife that turned old MacMillan’s sights back towards the Amazon where it had all began so many years before. After all he’d never really done much in the way of researching her odd history. He had never taken seriously the legends of the Amazon women warriors she had occasionally told him. To Ian MacMillan the stories were fables and little else. His own travels into the Amazon interior had shown him how difficult it was to find anything in the jungle, and how the land and rivers preserved few archeological records. A serious archaeologist, or anthropologist, had to accept that and live with it if he were to persist in the study of Amazonian history.

Devastated by Tania’s death MacMillan had come close to a complete physical collapse himself. But then, out of nowhere, appeared an extraordinary book by the Scotsman Roland Reed, rival and rude acquaintance of Macmillan’s from earlier days in Manaus. The explosive theories expounded upon in that book- theories about the Incas of Peru, the Yanomami Indians of Northwestern Brazil and the Amazon women warriors of legend- pumped new blood into the old man. His grief found an outlet, even if it did derive from as ambiguous a source as Roland Reed. Stranger developments were to follow of course.

Roland Reed was a new kind of explorer and the kind MacMillan cared little for. The Scotsman was part statesman, which was fine, and part charlatan, which was not. Reed was a painter, a colorful figurative painter from the Scottish school of painting that included Ian Bellamy amongst other now aging artists. He had been living in Brazil some 40 years and his artwork helped to support, and illustrate, his peculiar penchant for exploring the reality (if any) behind Amazon myths and legends. His controversial writings had appeared in numerous international magazines. His painting had, in time, become archetypical of contemporary Amazonian painting; if you wanted to own something contemporary and representative of the Amazon then you could do no better than to buy yourself a Roland Reed.

In any event it was his writings and not his paintings that caught the eye of Ian MacMillan. Reed’s investigations in the field were based upon extensive study of the history