by John Darnton
“Where are we?”
The pilot shrugged. Kane’s exasperation was rising rapidly. “Have we reached the place where the transponder was?”
“Right down below.”
“Can you radio the other chopper?” The pilot tried twice, then a third time. “Come in, X-Twenty-seven. Do you read?” He replaced the radio mike and said, unnecessarily, “Can’t raise ‘em.”
“What do you suggest?”
Again the pilot shrugged. Kane felt anger flooding to his temples, which was not ideal, he knew, for making decisions. There was always the danger at a crossroads like this that momentary pique could push him into taking the wrong path. He chose such a path and knew an instant later that it was wrong, but it was impossible to turn back without losing face.
“Okay, set her down.”
“It’s gonna be hard. We’d better drop some stuff first. Even then you’re gonna have to jump.” Kane nodded a little too vigorously.
The chopper lowered blindly. The pilot was concentrating on the panel and on holding the stick steady. The aircraft was rocking, then bucking like a horse.
“Open the door!” shouted the pilot, nodding his head toward the rear. “Tell them to throw out whatever they can!”
Kane relayed the command. The door slid open with a bang and instantly the craft was filled with frigid wind and swirling snow. The gear fell noiselessly out the door and was instantly swallowed up in the whiteness.
“I’m gonna take you as low as I can, but I can’t touch down,” the pilot shouted. He was less cocky than before. He turned his head over his left shoulder and peered down. Kane didn’t like that; couldn’t he tell where he was from the instruments? He peered down too. Nothing but whiteness. He felt as if he were on the prow of a boat searching the waters ahead for rocks. He had done that once long ago. Where was it?
Suddenly he did see rocks: ugly black surfaces rippling through the snow directly below them. The pilot cursed. The chopper slid over onto its side. Kane saw the blade tilting and spinning awkwardly. Then there was a tremendous sound, the gnarling and smashing of metal and a grinding that he felt up and down his spinal column as the body of the aircraft struck the rocks and then settled into them, moving in fits and starts, like an animal dying.
25
Before setting out for the lake, Susan had made a small bundle of some of her belongings: the pocket mirror, a comb, soap, and a sharp sliver of flint. She was wearing her last remaining pants, a faded pair of old blue jeans, and a flannel shirt that had shrunk. Following the path through the forest across a shaded floor of green dappled with sunlight, she worried, turning her fears over and over to examine them from every angle.
The evening before, Matt had told her about his talk with Van. She was aghast at the forgery of the note at the hotel and she didn’t have to ask the significance of the transponder broadcasting its stationary location for weeks. “We’ve been used,” Matt had said. “We’re the wedge of a huge operation and it’s going to come down on this mountain like an ax unless we can think of some way to stop it.”
“The only way to stop it,” Susan had said, “is to get out ourselves and meet them. That way we can divert them to somewhere else.”
“We don’t have much time,” he had replied. “Only a few days at most.”
“I need one more day here. I want to go to Dark-Eye. It’s a long shot but maybe he can help me puzzle something out—something I saw in the cave.” She described the Khodzant Enigma to Matt in detail, especially the missing panels. She sketched it for him as best as she could remember, emphasizing the portrait of the lone enraged Neanderthal at the end. She knew that the Enigma was itself a key that would unlock a larger enigma.
“How do you know?” Matt had asked.
“I just do,” she had replied. “Maybe ESP.”
“C’mon, Susan. We’ve enough problems. Don’t turn psychic on me.”
She carried the sketch on her now, and she pulled it out and looked at it. Not a bad rendition. She bristled at the memory of Matt’s remark. He was afraid, no doubt, and she had to admit that she was too. So many things were going wrong. She worried that Van’s people would decimate the tribe. And she doubted that the renegades’ raid upon the village was the last that they would see of them. The shock of Sergei’s attack was bound to wear off, and whatever had turned them into predators had been aroused; their blood was up.
She needed to think. At the lake she chose a secluded spot—curiously, modesty had not totally abandoned her—unbuttoned her blouse, and hung it on a branch. She unzipped her blue jeans, slipped out of them and her panties, dipped her feet into the water, felt around for secure footing, and stepped in. Though it was warm, her nipples hardened as she felt the tingle of rising bubbles. When she began to tire, she stepped out and washed her body with soap and then floated out into the lake again.
Despite her palpable fear, Susan knew she was about to leave a contentment she had never known before. It was hard to separate the strands that wove it together. Certainly there was the professional side, the fact that a lifetime of scientific curiosity had been rewarded by the discoveries here. Then there was the confidence that came from living by her wits and surviving in the wilderness. But on a deeper level she had experienced a serenity that was new to her, as if her demons, that horrible floating anxiety that used to descend out of nowhere, had at last been exorcised.
One reason was this incredible valley, which opened doors to a wider universe. She felt connected to life and death in a new way, not as an insignificant speck of bone and gristle that passed through in an eye blink but as part of an eternal unfolding evolution. Life did have meaning after all. It was like climbing a mountain to reach a peak from which all the slopes and hills you have scaled can be seen; as you gaze upon them you realize that your past has not gone but is there spread out before you, frozen in time and infused with meaning.
Her relationship with Matt had deepened. She was certain of this. She knew it from what she felt when she looked at him, and what she knew he was feeling when he looked at her. “Love comes in at the eye,” Yeats had written.
She sat on a log and cut her hair with the flint, shagging it in layers, checking every so often in the pocket mirror. She stared at herself, a piece of wet hair hugging one cheek, a dark green eye radiating out from a black pupil. With the heavy feel of the flint in the other hand, a pleasing frisson ran through her; she felt primitive, earthy in her nakedness, strong, and sensual. She propped the mirror on the ground and followed her reflection up her body, her thighs, her ribs, her breasts. Where had she done this before? Back in that hotel room in Khodzant, so long ago, when she was a different person.
Suddenly Susan felt she was not alone. She turned; there on the crest behind her, leaning against a tree trunk, was Kellicut. He did not wave or nod; he simply stared. She grabbed her clothes, annoyed. Still, much as she didn’t look forward to it, she needed to talk to him—she hadn’t seen him since before the raid. But when she looked for him, he was gone, as quickly as the shadow of a cloud upon the valley floor.
She dressed slowly and carefully, deep in thought. She knew, suddenly, what she had to do. Slipping the mirror in the front pocket of her jeans, she struck out on the path to the village.
* * *
Dark-Eye was inside his hut. Whether he had known she was coming or not, she could not tell, but he watched her enter with his good eye. She sat down, reached into her pocket, pulled out the sketch of the Enigma, and set it down on the ground before him in a shaft of light from the open door. He peered at it for a long time, expressionless. Then he stood up slowly, and as she rose also he fixed his claw-like hold upon her arm and led her outside.
They took a path Susan had never seen before, through foliage that was pungent and choking. It rose steeply out of the forest, and as they approached the valley wall, it was cluttered with rocks and scree and cut by ruts from rainwater, so that the going was difficult. She was amazed at how agile Dark-Eye
was; he threaded his way ahead of her effortlessly so that soon she was out of breath. He used his staff like a walking stick, and even when she lost sight of him she could hear it strike the ground as if he were summoning her.
Before long they were on a slope of scrub grass and then above the treetops. At the top of the pinnacle was a cave, where he waited for her. The jagged peaks loomed high and seemingly close. One outcropping of white stone caught her eye; it protruded from the enveloping rock like a bone and was shaped with a ridged curvature. She looked at it a long time; it seemed oddly familiar. As a cover of mist moved away so that it stood out starkly against the blue sky, she thought it resembled nothing so much as the back of a clenched fist.
Dark-Eye led the way into the tiny cave, whose narrow entrance made Susan feel claustrophobic. It smelled of musk. There were boulders for them to sit upon, facing each other. When her eyes became accustomed to the light, she could see a cracked and yellow pile of bones in one corner, ancient by the look of them. Now the old hominid before her looked shrunken, sitting on a boulder with his back against the cave wall. He removed his pouch, set it carefully on the floor, and opened it to reveal a bundle of vine leaves. He stripped them away as if he were peeling a banana and held up a leaf with a small ember, still red and glowing. From a corner he picked up a handful of brown leaves, placed them in a small pile, and ignited them with the ember. He blew upon the tiny blaze until it crackled and caught. Leaning forward on his boulder, he inhaled the smoke deeply. When she did the same, she felt a surging in her lungs and a dizzying rush to her head.
Dark-Eye crumbled a piece of the brown leaf into one palm, produced a pipe from his pouch, filled it with the leaf, lit it and took three or four deep drags, then handed it to her. The stem felt hot to her lips and the smoke burned as it went down. She held it in her lungs for as long as she could, then exhaled slowly. The cave began to spin and shrink still further. She put the pipe down and when she sat upright, she almost toppled over. The smoke burned her eyes, and as she stared into the small crevices of the cave wall, closing around her, she felt the eye of Dark-Eye on her and somehow burning inside her. Her insides unfolded, as if her body were turning inside out, and her head opened wide, expanding to take in the smoke, the cave, and the wizened creature opposite her. She realized he was singing, a strange high-pitched chant.
She swooned. The cave floor opened and swallowed her. Visions entered her: spectral thoughts, apparitions. She was traveling down a long funnel of time, which turned and twisted as she fell into it, following always the burning eye before her. The cave wall shrank until she could feel it coating her skin like a membrane, squeezing her into the funnel. Eons fell away. Suddenly she found her mind floating outside the cave, and as she looked down she could see the plain below, now empty of trees. Two tribes faced each other among the boulders. There was a musky smell of wetness and the rustling of shadows. Now flames flickered along a wall covered with stick-figure paintings in red ocher. Darkness was all around, grunts and scurrying, the feel of wet hair, the smell of sweat and fear.
In the time funnel, the two tribes of warriors are not the same. One tribe is stocky and muscular with protruding heads and bony ridges that jut above sloping brows. They come from the mountains in the north and speak in silence. The other tribe is long and lithe, built for running, with thin bones and smooth foreheads. They speak in sounds and come from the forest in the south. The two tribes have learned to distinguish which eland is weak or wounded and which saber-toothed tiger is about to pounce. Nature has taught them well in her kindergarten. Survival depends upon reckoning differences and choosing sides, and so the tribes are at war, a primal battle between the species.
As her mind floats like a bird, she looks down from above and watches the tribes in combat. They posture and bluster with clubs and spears. They run forward and fall back, shifting dots on the rocky plain. One side charges and the other side flees; then they change places. There is the pungent smell of musk and wet leaves, urine and smoke.
She sees the one good eye boring into her; she feels herself watching herself, seeing the rock behind her head and then floating again through the funnel. Once more the tribes clash. With clubs flailing, they meet like two waves crashing into one another. Weapons smash onto spines and skulls. Some fall to their knees. Blood splashes onto the rocks. A head splits open and brains spill out. The sides fall apart with much yelling and more posturing. The dead are buried in the trees without their eyes. Then, with yells and feints, the combat starts again. They run at each other and clash, the two waves smacking together with the sound of clubs striking flesh and bone. From a distance, near the mount shaped like the back of a fist, the charges look strangely unreal and the sound is muffled. The two tribes join and break apart far down below for a third time, leaving bodies motionless on the ground, like waves that ride up on shore, shunting pebbles back and forth, then leaving them suddenly motionless on the beach.
Time passes, peace descends. Now two tribes approach each other warily, but not in combat. At opposite ends of the rocky plain they walk slowly toward each other, their weapons held outstretched. They glare nervously at each other as they come closer and closer. They stop some thirty feet apart and discard their weapons. Slowly they straighten up, their eyes fixed on one another, and show empty hands, palms upward. They step over the clubs and continue to walk slowly toward each other, with nervous gestures. Suddenly there is a swirl of movement, dust kicked up. The ground opens and swallows one side whole, dozens of them disappearing into pits below. With yelps of glee, the long lithe ones charge close, pouring down a rain of rocks and dirt to bury the enemy. Caught in the traps below, those with the jutting brows shriek but the earth rains down upon them until it deadens their screams and rises up around them like an avalanche. It covers all of them, slowly and inexorably, until only one pit remains, and in it the leader rants, his fist pounding the walls, his head thrown back. As the dirt falls around him, he stands firm, looking upward. Teeth bared, he opens his throat and pours out a long guttural howl of impotent rage and anguish at the betrayal carried out on him and his tribe by the pernicious thin-skulled enemy. His howl rises up the mountain and lingers, echoing in the valley and through the forest even after the grave is covered over.
Susan stepped outside the cave and filled her lungs with cool air. She looked down at the treetops.
All had become clear, she thought, as she followed Dark-Eye down the trail. Origin and survival myths have an overarching purpose; they are history enshrined and recast as object lesson. The epic of Noah and the flood, an oral legend recounted in various forms throughout Eurasia, warns of godly retribution in reprisal for moral decadence. Adam and Eve is the story of the sin of overreaching that caused mankind’s fall from grace. Cain and Abel tells of the first bloodletting and the price it extracted.
Dark-Eye was far ahead of her now, out of sight as the path curved along the serpentine turns in the rock face. So this had been the singular event in the prehistoric era of the hominids, the turning point that condemned them to a hardscrabble existence in the cold and desolate upper reaches of the roof of the world. It was the story not of how a battle was won but of how it was lost. It was lost not by inferior weapons, lesser numbers, disorganization, or cowardice. It was lost by ignorance, by naiveté, by trust that was incapable of recognizing the depths of the enemy’s treachery. Surely this was a communication worth tucking away in a time capsule for the future. Perhaps it had been emblazoned on the cave wall by a tiny band of survivors of the original battle, blessed by the presence of an extraordinary artist. It was intended for generations to come who would face the inevitable enemy, and it would have one overriding message: Beware the long lithe one, for he has a capacity we do not have.
Susan came to a fork in the trail as it drew level with the treetops. Dark-Eye was way ahead, and she didn’t know which path he had taken. She chose one; around a corner the path widened as it passed a hidden crevice, and just bey
ond, a tangle of vines lay across it. The vines were thick and she had to step among them carefully, so her footing was precarious.
Suddenly, she felt the ground give way and the vines tighten around her ankle. It was like stepping into a nest of snakes. She plunged forward headfirst, and raised her hands instinctively to break her fall, feeling the dirt and pebbles grind into her palms. Still the vines held her feet and then tightened even more, and she heard a scuttling sound behind her from the direction of the crevice and a rock flew up and struck her thigh. Before she could turn she felt an iron grip on her arms, holding them behind her back, and then other stubby powerful fingers held her shoulders and still others clutched her legs.
Helpless, she was lifted from the rear, and as she struggled and her hands were forced into a wooden snare behind her back so tight that her shoulders ached, she felt something brush across her upper back and neck. She shuddered as she realized what it was: the hard unyielding bone of a ridge across the brow.
Matt needed to tell Susan that their escape route was blocked. When she didn’t return to the village by late afternoon, he went looking for her, following the path to the lake, calling her name. On the shore he circled around until he came to the secluded spot where she had bathed. He saw traces of soap bubbles among the floating debris along the shoreline, and on the bank found the thin sliver of flint, which had bits of her black hair stuck on the sharp edge. From there, the trail went cold.
He returned to the village and found Sergei. The two of them combed half the valley by nightfall, splitting it into sectors and crisscrossing it methodically. By the time they returned empty-handed, Matt was distraught. He searched their bower and went through Susan’s rucksack but could find no clue; everything seemed to be in its place.
“I just don’t get it. What could have happened?” he said to Sergei, as they sat by the fire. He had one overwhelming fear, of course, but he did not want to give it a voice.