Free Spider Shepherd: SAS: #1 by Stephen Leather

areas.
    As they walked on towards the village, the jungle gave way to patches of cleared land, planted with maize and plantain bananas. The air was drenched with scents, the musty tang of the rainforest mingling with perfume from the wild flowers covering the fallow land and the blossom of the groves of orange, lime and lemon trees at the side of the track.  They came around a bend and saw huts scattered along the bank of a river. A fish eagle swooped down on the water, then struggled back into the sky with a fish impaled on its talons. There was a flash of vivid colour as a coral snake swam across the surface and disappeared back into the jungle.  Fisherman stood motionless on the riverbank, fishing with long lines, while a little way downstream a group of women were washing clothes. A few shouts were exchanged as they caught sight of the SAS men and a group of children came running to see the cause of the commotion. They greeted the squadron with shy smiles and followed them as they walked in to the village.
    Most of the Mayan dwellings were dirt-floored, small and poor looking, little more than shacks with walls of loosely woven sticks and a palm-thatch, but two were larger, with sugar-cane walls and attap thatched roofs, and the largest house of all was built on stilts. Pilgrim pointed to it. ‘You can always spot the police post in these villages,’ he said. ‘The police are all Caribs - coastal-dwellers - and they don’t like the heat and humidity of the jungle, so they always build their posts on stilts in the hope of getting a little extra cooling breeze.’ 
    Geordie glanced around him. ‘Police? I can’t imagine there’s much of a crime wave round here.’
    ‘There isn’t, and what crime there is, the Maya usually sort out for themselves under their own traditional laws,’ said Pilgrim. ‘Last time I was here, the village elders were holding a court in the hut of the alcalde - the mayor - about a knife fight between two women. They couldn’t establish which one of them had started the fight, so they found them both guilty. Mayan law dictated that the women should be tied to a tree on the outskirts of the village and left overnight as a punishment, but since one of them was pregnant, the elders decided that their husbands should be tied to the tree instead.’
    ‘Sounds quite civilised to me,’ Shepherd said.
    ‘Better not tell your missus, Jimbo,’ Geordie said. ‘She’ll have you tied to a lamp-post before you can say “knife fight”.’
    ‘It’ll make a change from tying me to the bedposts, anyway.’
    ‘More information than we needed,’ laughed Shepherd.
    Pilgrim pointed to a coffee tree and a tall breadfruit in the heart of the village, casting a deep pool of shade. ‘I need to check in with the alcalde,’ he said. ‘So why don’t you take five?’ He walked over to the alcalde’s office - a hut knocked together from used boxes and planks, with a solitary sheet of rusting corrugated iron nestling amongst its thatch - and almost had to bend double to get through the low door.
    Shepherd and the others took off their bergens and squatted in the shade. The village children surrounded them, a circle of silent faces. Their mothers also stared impassively as they sat in the doorways of their huts, their hands never still, grinding the corn for the day’s tortillas. Pigs and dogs chased each other between the houses, a few chickens pecked listlessly in the dust, and Shepherd saw one chase and eat a dark green scorpion unwise enough to have strayed from the safety of the forest.
    Pilgrim emerged from the hut a few minutes later, accompanied by the alcalde. Like most Mayan men, he was little more than five feet tall and all the SAS men towered above him as Pilgrim introduced them in turn. Just then there were shouts and the children began pointing up the track on the far side of the village.  A Mayan man was approaching, leading a donkey. The lower half of his face was a mask of blood and