The thin silk of her dressing gown was no protection and she heard herself scream before the pain became too intense to be endured.

As the last blow fell she was half-unconscious.

Far away, as if she was separated from reality by a fog, she heard his footsteps going away from her, leaving her alone.

She prayed for oblivion then, but it did not come to her. Instead she was conscious of the agony of her back, but worse still of the agony in her mind. She had thought already that she had suffered humiliation at his hands, yet this was worse than anything she had ever anticipated.

Like an injured animal that wants only to hide, she crawled under the bedclothes, where she lay utterly still, hardly breathing, hardly thinking, only suffering the tortures of the damned in the depths of a personal hell.

It grew dark and still she did not stir.

Neengai lit one candle and tiptoed from the cave. And then at last, when there were only the shadows and the crucifixion of her own thoughts, Skye heard him come to the bedside.

“Skye!”

He spoke her name, his voice deep and resonant and somehow, it seemed to her, that there was a note of pleading in it.

She did not answer and after a little while he blew out the candle and left her.

His footsteps died away in the distance and she was alone in the darkness.

Chapter 7

“Why did you come here?” Skye asked Neengai.

The Indian girl looked up from where she was sitting cross-legged on the floor and a smile lit her sad sloe-like eyes.

“Very happy here, señora,” she said. “My father and I came many miles from Peru. We starved when we arrive. No one want us until we find El Cabeza.”

“How did you find him?” Skye asked.

“People tell us to come here. We come and El Cabeza say, ‘welcome, I have work for you’. He great and good man, señora.”

There was no disguising the earnestness or the sincerity in Neengai’s voice.

“You think El Cabeza is good because he gives your father work. Would you think the same of anyone who found you employment?”

This was too hard for Neengai to understand.

“Excusa, señora?” she asked uncertainly.

Skye laughed.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “El Cabeza is good as far as you are concerned.”

“Si, si, señora. Very good. El Cabeza very great chief, my father say so.”

There was nothing to say in the face of such blind devotion and Skye, rising from the couch, walked across the room to stand looking out through the window as she had done a dozen times already that day.