A female jaguar allows a Maya chief's baby to nurse at her full teat while the child's 16-year-old nanny, Wing, witnesses enactment of the legend of God's first incarnation as a jaguar. To interfere with the big cat's wild desire is a capital offense. When the child's bite causes mama jag to growl, Wing scares her away under scandalized rebuke from the chief who orders her to give herself to King Zac for heart sacrifice. On the way to the city, she encounters jaguar hunter Flint, the king's brother on a mission to warn him of invasion by enemy Toltecs. Wing trades death for life when she substitutes for the king's traitorous Toltec wife in a blood-letting ritual. She finds a friend who turns into a jealous rival after having a vision that Wing is destined for greatness. Events cast Flint and Wing's fate as husband and wife with the king's entourage aboard a fragile raft launched into the treacherous waters of the Gulf of Mexico. They earn their livelihood in life-and-death ballgames. Zac is a star player whose palace guard doubles as his unbeaten team in a fierce game where the losing captain's head is the rubber-encased ball in the next contest. The exiles trade the raft for war canoes, and recruit hometown challengers in the on-going adventure. One of these is a blue-tattooed prince whose uncle sold him into slavery and usurped his rightful title as king of the first city of 40,000 in what is now the U.S. Zac masterminds an alliance to reclaim Blue's kingdom, but at great personal cost to Wing, who helps build the huge pyramid still standing at Cahokia near St. Louis, Missouri, where a spectacular celestial event fulfills the old enemy's long-ago vision of a her star-crossed destiny.
About the Author: Born on the Mississippi, educated in California, lived in several States in between, Pat Winter follows The Madoc Saga with JAGUAR KING... Book One in the Mississippi Saga that will eventually recount the human story of the Great River Road from prehistory through 1865. JAGUAR KING marries action-adventure and exotic romance with ancestors of characters in MADOC and MADOC's HUNDRED. A fourth book about the son of the last Celtic king of Wales is SONGS OF THE BIG CANOE. That book to be published in 2011 recounts the story of Madoc's colony among the Lakota tribe 300 years before Columbus, and his return to Britain for more of his countrymen to start new lives in the New World. As a child, Pat told stories before she could read. TV was a fuzzy black-&-white snowstorm from Memphis; she created a scrolled "TV news" show with photos, two pencils and a shoebox. She staged clothes-line plays silhouetted behind sheets, and gave 6th grade reports about antique light bulbs and other old things from Big Mama's Victorian rooming house. Experience as a mother of two with a boy she married young & divorced early, inspired her first short story about children raised INSIDE MOTHER, a surrogate mama-ship-habitat. Published in the 1970 science fiction anthology Infinity One by Lancer Books with the married byline DeGraw, she was by then a single mother studying under a USC journalism scholarship. Believing Mark Twain's adage that "news is history in its first and most vivid form, of which history is only the pale, tranquil reflection," Pat took a B.A. in print journalism, and later a Masters in documentary TV at UCLA. Analog Magazine's April 1973 featured a second s.f. tale, POLIMANDER'S MAN-THING about a telepathic bat-like creature who steals a radio from human astronauts to build a psychic hearing aid for his silent child. She loved work as a reporter for the San Diego Union, and later writer, editor and on air reporter at KFWB All News Radio where she sold the story SOMEONE I TOUCHED for the ABC TV movie. To support writing her first published novel, the thriller-romance DRIVER, she taught at USC and an LA community college. She taught tech writing for a computer consultancy, and broadcast writing at an NYC media college before launching her first historical novel: WOMAN CALLED ARKANSAS was originally published as the Bantam title RIVER OF DESTINY about French Colonial life on the Mississippi that continues its stream through Pat Winter's life, work and dreams.