by Nick Carter
A hermit. A true hermit. I had heard of them and read of them, but I had never met one face to face. I had expected hermits to be silent men, taciturn to a fault, but old Pico seemed willing and ready to talk on and on through the days. And I had only four days to complete a truly impossible mission.
"There is something else in the rumors that you should know," Pico said. "It may not be of help, but you should know of it. It was said that the smoke from the sacrificial fires never came out of the mouth of the cave. It was said that for days after victims were sacrificed, thin plumes of smoke could be seen rising from Alto Arete."
I pondered that for a bit, then knew the answer.
"There's a chimney right up through the middle of the mountain," I said. "A kind of tunnel. There has to be."
"That is what the rumors say. One must not be too trustful of rumors."
But, I was thinking, hating myself for the complicated pun, where there's smoke, there's fire. Where there's smoke, there's also a chimney. A chimney right up through the center of Mount Toro, up through that massive column, and out through the top of Alto Arete.
I spent the day moving slowly about the clearing, even testing my legs on parts of the steep trail down. Most of the time, though, I sat near the hut with Pico and picked the man's brains for more information.
By nightfall, I had learned only that the Ninca tribe still lived in an area near the east slope of Mount Toro, and that Ancio was either their chief or had been killed for his zeal in making human sacrifices. I knew that one of my first moves was to find the Ninca Indians and talk to Ancio if he were still around. If I found that ancient cave, I very well might find a way past Don Carlos Italla's fancy defenses.
That's why I broke my promise to Pico and crept away in the night. I had promised to wait until at least noon and the next day. But my days were slipping away too fast, and I felt strong. I set out for the lookout point, hoping against hope to find Antonio there, alive and well.
Dawn was just starting to break when I neared the lookout point Elicia had shown me the night I took her to her cousin's hut. I would have reached it sooner, but I kept getting lost on Pico's crazy trail.
The wound in my side throbbed with pain, but it hadn't broken open and I was convinced that Pico's work would hold up. Unless, of course, I got into a scrap with a guerilla or a Cuban Marine. Needless to say, my long journey from Pico's hermit hut had been a wary one, avoiding all signs of civilization.
I eased through the foliage, approaching the lookout with caution. Antonio could have been captured and tortured, he could have told the Cubans that he was to meet me here. Then, again Antonio could be hiding there with his rifle at the ready, and could shoot me if I made the slightest noise.
It had always seemed silly to me when I'd read in books that people signalled each other in the night with special bird calls or hooting like owls. It didn't seem silly to me now. I wished that I'd worked out such a plan with Antonio.
It wasn't necessary. When I slipped into the clearing and scanned the open ledge, Antonio was fast asleep. A friend with him also was asleep. In the dim light of not-quite-dawn, they looked like two logs wrapped in blankets.
Just in case it wasn't Antonio and a friend, I lowered the heavy Russian Volska I'd been carrying and palmed Wilhelmina. I sat to one side of the trail and aimed at the first blanket-covered sleeper.
"Antonio, wake up."
The log raised up, the blanket fell away and there was Elicia Cortez staring down the muzzle of my luger, her eyes wider than saucers.
"Senor Carter," she exploded, much too loudly for comfort. "We thought you were dead."
Antonio stirred in his blanket and I thought perhaps he had also been wounded, worse than me. But he aroused, proving only that he was a sound sleeper.
As I told them all the things that had happened to me since Antonio and I had parted on that steep hillside with bullets raining down from above, Elicia kept watching my every move, hanging on every word. She also kept inching closer, as though I were a campfire and the air was cold.
"We have heard much of the hermit of Mount Toro," Antonio said when I was finished, "but you are the first man to have seen him in thirty years and to tell about it. The stories say that he cooks and eats anyone who comes near his cave."
"The stories are all wet," I said. "For one thing, the man is a vegetarian. He won't kill animals for food or for wearing apparel. For another, he doesn't have a cave — just a hut he built himself out of vines. Now, tell me about yourselves. How did you happen to wind up together? Where are your friends?"
Both faces went gloomy. Elicia stared at the ground, but remained at my side, touching me occasionally with a knee, a hand, an arm. Antonio told how he had found one of his friends, wounded and roaming aimlessly on a trail. The friend had died in his arms. He hadn't found any others.
Finally, he had returned to his parents' house, hoping that perhaps some of his friends had left word there.
"I wish I hadn't gone home," he said sadly. "What I feared would happen has happened. My parents are gone and a bunch of Cuban Marines are living in the house. I asked around, but the neighbors could tell me only that there was shouting and screaming in the night, two days ago. And there was shooting, then silence. I know, Senor Carter, that our parents are dead. Our property now belongs to Colonel Vasco."
And Colonel Vasco, I knew, would sell it at a high price to Cuban immigrants after the bloody revolution put Don Carlos in control and made both Nicarxa and Apalca allies of Cuba. Antonio had reason to be fearful that his parents were dead. "This may sound ungrateful to the memory of your parents," I said, "but we haven't time to mourn them properly. Our greatest chance is to find the Ninca tribe, get to that sacrificial cave in the mountain and hope to God the chimney is big enough for us to climb up through it."
"I know a shortcut to the Ninca lands," Antonio said, brightening in spite of his grief for his parents. "Are you ready to travel?"
I had traveled all night, but I had also slept and rested for more than two days. I was ready. To make certain, Elicia insisted on carrying my rifle. She would have carried me, if she'd been strong enough. She couldn't seem to show me enough attention, to touch me enough.
It became more and more obvious as we moved along dark trails toward the Ninca lands that Elicia had fallen in love with me. Recalling how I was when I was her age, I wasn't about to underestimate that love. It was real and it was intense. But I didn't fee! the same about her. Ever since my mind had made the connection between Elicia and American high school girls, I had thought of this girl the way a father might feel about a daughter. I had even begun to entertain a fantasy that I might somehow spirit her out of this troubled country and find her a foster home with a friend in the States.
There, I thought in my typically American way of thinking, she could finish out her schooling, live in peace, perhaps fall in love with a handsome blond boy on the football team and settle in suburbia with a couple of cars, a dog and mortgage. And, of course, kids.
We were resting beside a clear-running stream along about noontime when Elicia brought me a container of water, sat beside me and gazed up into my eyes. Antonio was off downstream, looking for edible fruits and vegetables.
"I have not thanked you for saving my life," she said.
"I didn't save your life, Elicia," I said, remembering that night when the Marine with the enormous organ had tried to rape her. "I merely stopped…"
"You saved my life," she said emphatically, placing her slender brown hand on my knee. "I had promised myself that very day that, if the Marines came again and did that to me, I would cut my own throat. What I was living, what I have been living the past three months, has not been life. It has been a kind of horrible death, full of terror and disgust, and no joy. I still feel the disgust."
"For the Marines?"
She looked at me curiously. "No, for myself."
"Why would you be disgusted with yourself? You did nothing wrong?"
S
he gazed at the ground and took her hand from my knee. "You do not think I am soiled? You do not think I am something for disgust?"
"Good God, no. Why would I think that?"
She didn't respond and I began to think how similar rape victims are the world over. They cannot control what has happened to them, they were unwilling victims of one of man's oldest invasions of privacy, yet they always seemed to feel guilt, or, in the case of Elicia, self-disgust. It was a phenomenon that never ceased to amaze me. I had no words to console the girl, or to change her mind about herself. But I still couldn't remain silent.
"Virginity is important to you, isn't it?" I asked.
Her head snapped up and she looked into my eyes for a time. Then, she looked away and muttered an almost inaudible "yes."
Then, you must consider yourself a virgin, Elicia. In your mind, you are. You gave nothing of your own free will. It was taken from you. In God's eyes, you are still unspoiled, if that's the way you must look at it."
A fraction of a smile crossed her lips, and then she was sad again. She looked at me, holding my eyes with hers.
"For many months before the Marines came, she said, speaking as though to a priest, in confession, "I had certain thoughts, certain feelings, that I could not control. In spite of all that has happened, I still have those thoughts and those feelings."
I understood perfectly. The girl was a woman, she had thoughts and feelings about sex. She had had them since she was at least twelve or thirteen. Because she had had them, she felt that what had happened to her was God's will, that she hadn't had her virginity taken from her. She believed her previous thoughts had actually caused the rapes to occur.
"The thoughts and feelings you had and are still having," I said, "are natural thoughts and feelings. Every human and every animal alive has those feelings. They shouldn't be sources of guilt, though. In God's eyes — and in mine — you're still a virgin, still unspoiled, or whatever the word is."
She moved closer, seeming to understand what I was trying to say. Or wanting to understand so badly that she was fooling herself.
"I know what thoughts are natural," she said, "and what thoughts are not. What I am feeling now, for you, is natural. If I am a virgin still, I want you to be the one to receive the fruits of my virginity."
Not even an American high school girl, with all her modern boldness brought on by the national yen for honesty and forthrightness, could have put it more plainly. And very few American high school boys would have turned down such an offer. But I was years away from high school. And I couldn't give as much as I would take.
My silence was my answer. Elicia sat gazing up at me for several seconds, then her eyes fell. I let her think it all out. She would consider all the possibilities. Perhaps I thought of her with disgust, had even lied when I had said that she was still unspoiled, that she had nothing to be ashamed of. Perhaps I thought her beneath me, since I was an obviously important American government agent and she was a lowly Nicarxan peasant girl. Perhaps…
"You think me still a child," she said in a low voice, cutting my speculations short. "Well, I am not a child. I have experienced much growing up in the past three months. And yesterday was my birthday. I now am eighteen, legally a woman."
"Happy birthday, Elicia," I said, smiling.
She frowned. "Make with jokes," she said, turning the frown to a womanly look of shrewd knowledge. "All right. Time will pass and you will learn the truth about me, about my womanliness."
She got up without another word and went to help Antonio search for lunch.
When we stopped for our evening break, Antonio and I searched for food while Elicia disappeared into the jungle. She had spent the afternoon trying to impress me with her womanliness. Each time I neared her on the trail, she lowered the bodice of her blouse to expose more of her ample breasts. She bumped against my hips with her wide hips. She carried more and more of our belongings, including all of Antonio's stolen firearms. Now, as we neared exhaustion and she was showing signs of weariness from all the extra effort, she had disappeared.
I found a narrow trail leading down to a grove of banana trees and followed it. I had picked a number of ripe bananas when I heard the splashing just beyond the grove and a wall of vines. I put down the bananas and went to investigate, the Volska rifle slung over my shoulder.
The splashing continued and, when I reached the wall of vines, I heard a low singing. It was Elicia. Her sweet, clear voice rose on the dark jungle air, singing an old Spanish love song:
"When my love is near me,
I am like the rose,
Budding, billowing, flowering
More than my love knows."
I wondered if she knew that I was near, was listening, perhaps even peeking at her in the stream. No, I decided. She had no idea that I was near. Her singing was too soft, meant only for her ears. She wasn't putting out a mating call, not yet.
I turned away from the wall of vines, knowing what lovely sight and lovely activities lay beyond it. I had seen this girl in the nude, under extremely vicious circumstances. Seeing her in the nude here, in the stream, and knowing what was going on in her mind and her body, would have spurred me to foolish and damning actions. I may be a killer and an important government agent, but I am no heel. Not on purpose, anyway.
Dinner was a delight. Antonio had found all sorts of fruits and vegetables to add to my bananas. Elicia, however, was the most pleasant of all. She had bathed in the stream and had found orange blossoms to rub against her skin. She smelled good enough to eat, and I had the distinct feeling that she would be better than the fruits and vegetables we were eating. I had trouble keeping my eyes off her, but I decided to merely enjoy the fragrance and the nearness of her, and let it go there.
We rested only two hours after dinner and went on in full darkness. I lost my sense of direction and had no idea which side of Mount Toro we were on. Antonio seemed to know exactly where we were going and, in spite of Elicia's continued game of playing woman and bumping into me in the darkness, giving me the full benefit of her womanly fullness, we made good progress.
It was nearly midnight when Antonio stopped ahead of us on the trail and held up a hand for quiet. We hunched in the jungle, unable to see much more than our hands before our faces. I was about to ask Antonio why we were stopping when all hell seemed to break loose on the trail.
First came a high, discordant warbling, as though a thousand maniacs had just had their cages rattled. Next was a thundering and thrashing all around us, not unlike a stampede of heavy animals. Perhaps elephants or rhinoceroses. We were struggling to get our weapons lined up when lights appeared from all around us and the swarm descended.
Elicia let out a piercing scream. Antonio bellowed. I was opening my mouth to add to the general hubbub when strong hands grabbed my arms and pinned them behind me. I got out one yell before a rough cloth sack was yanked down over my head. I felt the cord being tied, a little too tight for comfort, around my neck. Other hands were on my legs and feet and torso. One probing hand even found the bandage over my wound and sent rivers of pain through my nervous system.
And then, as though a switch had been thrown, the jungle was silent. We were carried along the dark trail for the better part of an hour, circling around to cause us to lose our sense of direction, then dumped onto hard ground. When the sack was taken from my head, I found myself tied to Elicia and Antonio, side by side, in a thatched hut much like the one Pico had put me in. The ceiling, however, was considerably higher, and a bunch of half-naked Indians were standing around us in a circle. Flame torches were attached to hangers on the walls, well out from the flammable thatching.
From the circle of Indians stepped an enormously fat man with all sorts of flowered and feathered regalia adorning his body in strategic places. Most of him was exposed and he looked as though he had been wrapped in a macadam parking lot. I had never seen such expanses of human skin on one skeleton.
"I am Botussin," he said in a deep, rich voice
with only a touch of growl in it. "I am chief of the Ninca." He motioned toward a tall, lithe brown man who was incredibly handsome, who wore a single eagle feather in his long hair and whose privates were covered by a soft lambskin pouch. "This is my son, Purano, heir to my throne. Now, you will provide us with your names and the reasons why you have invaded the Ninca lands, then you will be handed over to our spearchuckers, for execution. You talk now."
He pointed a fat finger at me. Frankly, I was getting a whole lot tired of being tied up and asked to spill my guts about who I was and what I was doing. I could feel Elicia's trembling body against me. Her fear helped me to keep a level head. This fat man meant business and I had damned well better take that business seriously. He couldn't have cared less about what I was tired of. But I really didn't know where to begin with Botussin, just how much I should tell him. For one thing, I didn't know the sentiments of the Ninca Indians in all that was happening in Nicarxa. Nobody had bothered to ask them — and that included our intelligence people whose information had caused me to be sent down here on this wild and woolly caper.
I decided to shorten the distance between what I wanted and what I hoped to get.
"We are here to learn about the cave that Ancio used more than thirty years ago," I said.
I couldn't have gotten more dramatic results if I had plucked a pubic hair out of one of their spearchuckers. That entire circle of half-naked brown men went almost white at the sound of Ancio's name. The chief himself staggered back and looked as though I'd just scored on his huge belly with a sledgehammer. Even the strong, silent son, Purano, appeared stunned, but he held his ground and glowered at me.