by Jeff Long
Working left to right for a digital panorama, she shot immense stacks of pyramids and squared monuments with ornately carved doorways. The mist seemed to breathe, blossoming then paling. But she realized it was her own heartbeat she was seeing through the lens, the rhythm of blood through the capillaries of her eyes.
“We need a plan,” he said. “We could lose ourselves in here.”
“You’re driving the bus,” she said.
“A basic assessment,” he decided. “Yes. Describe the circle’s edge, then spiral in.”
They returned—with difficulty, a few steps and they were already twisted around—to the head of the staircase. The stairs plunged down into the mist. Somewhere down there Samnang was sitting by his fire.
Duncan set off along the perimeter of the chasm, following a walkway bordered by a fence with nagas facing outward. The walkway curved in a great semicircle along the very edge of the plateau. On their left, the architecture seemed to rush at them like a flood ready to spill over a waterfall. The nagas’ sandstone mantles flared like pink spray.
They came to a fortress wall like the one they had passed through the night before. Standing twenty feet high, it was built of fired bricks. Some of the bricks had loosened and spilled from the top of the wall. Duncan hefted one and noticed a symbol baked into its top. “These are names,” he said.
“You can read that?”
“No.” He picked up a second and third brick, and they were inscribed, too. “But certain Chinese emperors had a quality-control system like this. These are possibly the names of the brick makers. That way, any defects could be traced to its creator and corrected, or the creator punished.”
As they moved on, Molly could practically feel the weight of the names holding up the wall and declaring the inside from the outside. It was like an army of magical symbols, containing the citizens and repelling outsiders.
Where the hillside rose, the wall stepped higher. A deep streambed lined with bricks and bedrock served as drainage, or possibly a moat. A curious moat, thought Molly. This one ran along the inside of the fortress. It was dry just now, but during the rainy season, Molly could imagine water coursing down the channel. In the slickrock country of Utah, she’d seen for herself how a small rain shower could turn the arroyos into deadly flood chutes.
The moat ascended in stages, the stone edges polished and worn by centuries of runoff. From the windows of nearby buildings, the sound of water must have been, by turns, sweet or thunderous. She wanted to veer off into the city and look out through those windows. She wanted to wander among the spires and floating heads.
But Duncan stuck to the path beneath the wall, stopping repeatedly to examine flowers and insects or animal prints and scat. They heard dogs barking in the far distance, and Molly thought there must be a village nearby, even within the ruins. Duncan explained that they were rare barking deer. He could tell the difference between one invisible bird and another by its song or even the sound of its wings. They spent ten minutes studying a spiderweb pattern, and another half hour counting the growth rings on the shells of two different species of snails.
It was maddening, almost as if he were avoiding the city. She didn’t complain out loud as the wall went on and the minutes turned to hours. It took an effort not to direct his story. It would be a labyrinth in there. She had learned from the recovery team the primacy of the grid. The founding event of every dig is the driving of the first stake, traditionally at the southwest extremity. From that benchmark emanated all the squares spreading to the north and east. That had to explain Duncan’s uncertainty. He was hunting for an edge to dub southwest, a corner to the circle from which to begin.
Leaves stirred in the mist. They sounded almost like a child crying very softly. As the sound drew closer, the crying became a little singsong rhyme coming from the trees, and Molly decided it could only be the birds. The sound mushroomed, rushing between the buildings with a blizzard howl. The mist churned open. A great gust of wind broke against them, nearly toppling them into the dry moat. Molly heard shouts and the clash of metal, and screams, an entire battle, all within that blast of wind. Just as suddenly the air was still again.
Molly straightened. “What was that?”
Duncan chewed at his lip, staring at the mist-bound city. “The weather’s changing,” he said.
But there was no more wind, not even a breeze. They went on.
Molly kept looking for a breach in the wall. Surely the forest had broken it open somewhere, and they would be able to see the far side. But the wall loomed intact except along the very upper sections, where the masonry had come undone in fractions. The path and the wall went on twisting with the hill’s contours.
Eventually, a gateway surfaced in the mist ahead. Like the one they had entered through the night before, it had a multiheaded turret with eyes that seemed to watch their approach. In her mind, the shapeless citadel became symmetrical. They’d entered the front door, and here was the back, and this road logically pierced the city from side to side. On the other hand, there could be a dozen more gates, with roads leading into some center like spokes.
The tunnel mouth was guarded—or had been, once upon a time—by a host of terra-cotta statues. They were life-size replicas of ancient warriors, dozens of them. “They have to be based on the sculpture army at Xi’an, in China,” he said. “Or, what if the Xi’an army is based on this? Who knows how old it is?”
He kept a curious distance from the terra-cotta warriors, afraid, she thought, of disturbing the artifacts. That didn’t stop her. “I’ll be careful,” she assured him, and moved among them with her camera. “They’re so beautiful.”
Extraordinary, she meant. Exquisite. But not beautiful. Each had his own distinct face, round or lean, vicious or youthful, some with little shocks of beards or delicate Fu Manchu mustaches. But their eyes destroyed the realism. They were primitive round holes, sockets, some still holding bulging, round jade pebbles.
The crudeness of the stone eyes confused her. Every other detail was so refined and lifelike, and these eyes were horrible. Was that the intent, to cow the beholder? Some still had paint remaining on them. As if the bulbous pebbles weren’t frightening enough, the artists had added shocked black circles around each eye. It reminded her of war paint, or a child’s drawing of a nightmare.
“Are these supposed to be like glass eyes?” she asked Duncan. “Sight for clay men?”
“Maybe. Or reminders.”
“Yes?”
“That we come from the earth. I don’t know. Stones for eyes in a city of stone. They could symbolize the all-seeing city. Or the forest.”
Guardians at the gate, she thought. Many had shattered, and their shards still bore bits of colored paint. Others lay unbroken, on their backs or chests like store mannequins toppled by the wind.
Some still stood at attention, though these had all sunk to differing degrees into the earth. They looked like quicksand victims, dragged under to their knees or hips, some to their necks, but still vigilant. A few showed only the tops of their heads. Whatever siege—or exodus—they were designed to guard against, here they waited. They seemed ready to spring into action. Some even wore their original armor of jade plates stitched together with what looked like wire spun of gold. Gold, though? Surely thieves would have taken it long ago. Elsewhere, the wire had failed and jade plates lay scattered like pale green dragon scales. Their fists clenched empty holes where the wood shafts of spears or bows had rotted.
“There’s a fortune lying here,” she said.
“They came this way,” Duncan said. He had stopped and was staring at the tunnel.
“Kleat and the brothers?”
“No, our soldiers, Molly. They were here.”
“They went through the tunnel?”
“Not through,” he said. “But they were here.”
She looked into the dark maw. “How do you know?”
He opened and closed his mouth without a word. The answer man had no answer.
Molly stepped closer. The tunnel looked impassable, choked with vegetation. Ugly with it, to be honest. It disgusted her in a strange way, the messy, clenched chaos in there. She felt physically sick, and thought it might be that compressed cold egg she’d eaten for breakfast.
But as she went nearer, her uneasiness—her sense of outright disease—grew. The walls pressed down at her. The tunnel, this awful hole, made her dizzy. She remembered her repulsion as they’d entered last night, and this was worse. She was on foot. Dread and nausea shackled her. A sudden despair washed over her. What did it take to leave this place?
But she forced herself to the tunnel mouth. Vines and roots clotted its bowels. She reached to part the leaves and something bit her. She yanked her hand back, blood beading on her wrist.
“Molly,” said Duncan. “Leave it alone.”
Peering inside, she saw the culprit. She took a careful grip and tugged at it, dragging it into view.
“Is that barbed wire?”
“What do you think?” she snapped. Clearly this was what he’d seen.
“Molly?”
A wave of anger rocked her. “You could have warned me.”
“I didn’t see it.”
She yanked at the rusted coil. There was a whole Slinky of concertina wire inside, bound in place by years of undergrowth. “We’ll never get out,” she said. Fear seized her. Despair. They were prisoners.
“Come away from there,” Duncan said.
She let loose of the wire and it drew back into the tunnel like a snake. She stared into the devouring pit.
“Molly.” A command.
She turned from the tunnel.
“Come here.”
She started toward him, and with each step her terrible emotions faded.
“Are you all right?” He took her arm and drew her farther away from the tunnel.
“I must be hungry,” she said. “Or yesterday’s still catching up with me.” She sat down, emptied out.
“Drink.” He gave her a water bottle.
“They closed themselves in,” she said. “Why didn’t they just leave?” She glanced at the tunnel, and it was just a tunnel now. But she felt scarred by it, not just scratched by the wire, but wounded by the tunnel. She wanted nothing more to do with it.
“Maybe they felt safer in the ruins,” Duncan said. “One thing’s certain, they didn’t exit this way.”
“You really didn’t see the wire?”
“From here? You didn’t see it until it cut you.”
“Then how did you know they’d been here?”
He frowned. “It’s logical. If they had time to carve names in trees down below, then they would have had time to explore up here. They would have examined the walls, don’t you think, secured their perimeter, whatever soldiers do?”
Her watch read just eight-thirty. They’d left camp at eight-fifteen. The second hand was barely crawling. She pressed the stem and the little night-light glowed. The battery was working, but something was wrong with the mechanism. “The humidity,” she said. So much for “water-resistant to fifty meters.” “What time do you have?”
She’d forgotten that Duncan didn’t wear a watch. And yet he carried an antique compass in his briefcase. She’d have to ask about the contradiction another time, one more quirk to slip into her book.
“We left camp hours ago,” she said. “We should think about getting back. Don’t you want to take a look at the city?” In her mind, the road leading from the tunnel would be a direct shortcut to the head of the stairs.
Duncan eyed the ruins drifting in the mist, and then the path continuing along the wall. She cut off his thinking. “The wall could go on for miles,” she said. Let him connect his circle another day. The mist was thinning. She wanted to see.
“You’re right.” He nodded, then stepped back. She led them away from the sealed exit, in from the wall and toward the ruins they enclosed.
Only now did she discern that there was a road underfoot. Roots burst up through the ground, as high as their shoulders. The paving stones had buckled in waves, or split open in grassy zigzags. They passed between pyramids and terraced buildings. Strangler figs occupied rooftops and walls, like sea monsters with waxy brown tentacles. The careful architecture looked squashed.
Corridors branched off the main avenue, impassable, colonized from side to side with primordial trees. They crossed a bridge over a dried-out canal with little landing porches leading up to dark holes of doorways. “Like Venice,” she said, “a city of water.”
Every bend promised a secret. She had to discipline her photography. The Nikon would hold only so many images, and it was a battery hog. She got Duncan clambering across the wreckage of another bridge, this one pierced by a mahogany giant. She shot spires soaring like delicate, baroque rocket ships, their needles pricking the lower canopy and disappearing from view. She took six shots of a Buddha the length of two whales, lying on his side, head pillowed on one hand like a child lazing away a summer day. She could spend a whole week with him alone.
Everywhere she turned, the city offered itself to her, a prehistoric vision. Her wide-angle lens was not wide enough. The place defied her.
Baby steps, she reminded herself. She was intensely aware of the sum of the place, the notion of a grand design. Duncan was right, it would take years to decode. A lifetime.
He found a coin woven into the belly of a discarded bird’s nest. Only Duncan, in the midst of a lost city, would have thought to look in a nest that had fallen from the branches.
“Do you know who this is?” He handed the coin to Molly. One side was scaled with verdigris, the other bore a crude profile. “I’ve seen one other like it, in a book. It’s Antoninus Pius, the second-century Roman emperor.” He was awestruck. “Whoever they were, these people were part of a trade network going all the way to the heart of the Roman Empire.”
They entered a canyon of carved panels. Red, gray, and blue lichen plastered the bas-relief in neon blotches. It was like falling into myth. Monkey gods and human warriors waged war with exotic weapons. Concubines lounged, children played. Dancers’ fingers curved like currents of water. A majestic peacock was oblivious of two crocodiles stalking it with wide-open jaws.
She and Duncan moved slowly, like lovers in an art gallery, occasionally admiring a find, then drifting apart to continue their separate investigations. The canyon seemed to contain the germs of every kind of fable and myth. The carving was peculiar in its style and demanded her concentration.
Here was a dragon rising from the sea. Here was a great fire set by invaders with spears, and a murderer stabbing his brother. She tried connecting the stories in order, and realized that every arrangement could be disconnected and rearranged to tell other tales. Was the dragon a storm? Were the invaders possibly saviors? Was the fire renewal, not destruction? Was the killer actually a hero? It went on like that.
Molly gave up with her camera. She touched the carvings. They touched her. It was hard to explain. It went beyond seduction. The walls contained her. They invited her to read herself among the carvings. It was as if she inhabited the stone.
Here was a woman exploring a garden. Here was an infant adrift on a river. Here was a woman about to stab herself. Reverse the order: Here was her mother, here the orphan, here the searcher.
She didn’t know she was crying until Duncan laid one hand on her shoulder. He saw what she was looking at. It embarrassed her, and he saw that, too.
“Ancestors,” he said. “The place is full with them.”
“I don’t know why I bother with her,” said Molly. “Kleat’s right. She was just a hippie chick. A suicide. One more lost child.”
“It’s not that easy with ghosts,” he said.
“I found her, though. That should be enough.”
He ran his fingers above the stone, not touching the lichen, only isolating the story. “You still have questions. What else is a ghost but a question?”
“I know everything I need to know
,” said Molly. “She showed up in Breckenridge with a baby in her arms. The old mining towns were going through this Neil Young After the Gold Rush kick, kids—hippies—settling into shacks, you know, letting their freak flags fly. She knitted hats and made candles with flowers in them. She sold them from a cardboard box. She didn’t have the sense to get food stamps, so neighbors brought her meals. People stacked firewood by our trailer in the winter.”
“And your father?”
“Which one? It was the Age of Aquarius. I doubt he ever knew I existed. And what would I do with him anyway?”
“You’re probably right.”
Molly brushed at the lichen, and if she was destroying a priceless carving, Duncan didn’t reprimand her. “She would sing sad songs on the streets,” she said. “An old priest told me that. She had a beautiful voice. Ballads. Hymns. Dirge music.”
“Yes?”
“She died of a broken heart, he said. My poor, crazy mother.”
“And so you’re crazy, too?”
She looked at him, and he was not Kleat taunting her. He was Duncan. “On bad days, I wonder,” she said.
“And the good days?”
“On the good days I sing.”
“Sad songs?”
He had her. She could not help but smile. “Maybe.”
“Then maybe, if I’m quiet, I’ll hear you,” he said.
“So you’re counting on good days ahead, Mr. O’Brian?”
“Days?” He opened his arms to the city. “I’m counting on years. I could spend the rest of my life in here. I was born for this.”
A single gunshot broke their reverie.
18.
At the crack of the bullet, as if the skin of the place had been punctured, the mist drew off in a sudden rush. It didn’t burn away; the sun could not penetrate the triple canopy. It simply lifted and was gone.
They were surrounded—dwarfed—by those god heads and demon faces and the dreams of architects raised in stone and by this complicated forest. The canopy stretched overhead like an umbrella with veins. Molly felt made up, as if the giant stone heads among the trees were dreaming them all into existence.