by Steve Perry
Boukman had been there many times, wreathed in the magic smoke that allowed him to focus his energies so that he could use the permissions granted him by the loa who rode him. When he was properly prepared, when he was in accord with all ways, he could, albeit in a smaller manner, go forth like the loa themselves and find his own horse, could mount it and ride.
Such trips were hard—they took much from him—but they offered great gains, as well.
The patterns of manic geometry strobed across his vision, overlaying the inside of the hut with intricate grids—lines, whorls, the structure of everything made into blueprints designed by the gods, the order of things to the smallest detail, expanded large enough to behold.
Colors sparked along the periphery of his vision, flashes of primary red or blue or even black light, which was not the same as darkness.
Almost there . . .
The sense of weightlessness came over him; his body grew light, lighter than a feather, and it became less than a wisp, less than the smoke around him. He became âme, spirit, and was able to rise, up, through the smoky air, through the thatched room, up, up, above the trees and into the sky . . .
It took effort to keep himself focused. A lesser mage who took the sacred smoke might, as the smoke itself did, dissipate, lose himself, and leave nothing but a fleshy shell behind as he achieved the air, scattering to the winds like dust, never to return. In such a case, his body would breathe; its heart would beat; as long as somebody fed it and cared for it, it would live, but there would be no one home. It would be prey to wandering loa, or some bokor like Boukman, who had the power to stay collected and to move with intent.
Boukman floated above the jungle. He listened and he looked, and there, miles away, was a slender thread of white light, shining up from the forest like a thin beam, reaching to Heaven . . .
Boukman moved toward the thread. He flew faster than a bird until he arrived at the light, and then he rode it down, like a man sliding along a pole, shooting toward the ground and the source of that light, faster and faster, so that when he arrived he would be unstoppable . . .
Indy was talking to Marie as they took a break. Ahead, the trail was narrowing, and soon it would become too small for a man to walk, Batiste had told them. They needed to drink water, for the work of cutting their way through a jungle was about to begin.
Marie smiled at Indy. “Did the Boy Scouts have a vine-slashing merit badge?”
He grinned at her in return. “Not as such. Not a lot of vines in Utah, though we did whack at sagebrush and cactus now and then.”
Her smiled vanished. Her eyes rolled back, showing the whites, and she moaned. She toppled backward off the stump upon which they were perched.
Indy grabbed her as she fell. She felt like rubber under his hands, as if her bones had vanished. “Marie!”
Batiste heard Indy yell. He ran and helped Indy lower her.
“What is it?”
Batiste shook his head, said, “What happened?”
“Nothing! I mean, she was talking and she just moaned and fell over!”
“She is being ridden,” Batiste said.
“By whom?”
Batiste shook his head. “I don’t know. The loa do not usually ride those with power unless they are invited. I have never seen this happen to her.”
“What can we do?”
“There is nothing we can do. Watch her. Protect her body.”
Indy stared at Marie. Her eyelids were partially open, but only the white was showing underneath her pupils.
Marie sat up. She looked around, not comprehending at first, Boukman knew, then she saw him.
“Bokor Boukman,” she said.
Her voice was strong, no fear in it. That was good, he admired that. Of course, some of his blood, much thinned, flowed in her, so it was not altogether unexpected. She was a mambo, and her thread to Heaven, while white, was thicker than many much more experienced.
She was a beautiful child. Her mother had been likewise a beauty. Unfortunately, her mother had also been a mambo of some power who had resisted him, and it had been with regret that he’d had to eliminate her. It was always a waste to destroy beauty, but sometimes it had to be done.
Marie had even features, smooth skin, thick and lovely hair. Very much a woman in her shape. In the flesh, he would be pleased to touch her, to feel the supple muscles and skin, but here in this realm, they were âme, and such sensations were pale compared with the real world. A pity.
Well, that could be remedied later.
He saw her understand what had happened.
“You are very powerful, Oncle Grand,” she said. “More than I knew.”
He shrugged. “More than anybody knows,” he said. “You have grown since last I saw you. Now tell me, what of these blan with whom you travel? Why are they here?”
She said nothing, only watched him.
He smiled. Ah. Brave, the little one was. “Must I compel you?”
He saw her jaw muscles flex and her eyes narrow. She spoke a short phrase, low so that he could not hear, but he saw her lips move and knew it was a spell of power she invoked. A glowing shield began to form about her, like green glass with the sunlight glinting from it.
Boukman laughed. He pointed his right hand’s fingers skyward and closed them into a fist.
Marie’s shield made a noise like a nail being pried from wet wood, and vanished. There came a whiff of brimstone burning. “Child, child, you have heart, but where is your mind? You cannot resist me.”
“I can try.”
He laughed again. Such spirit was to be admired. She knew she had no chance against him, none, but even so she stood defiant. Just as her mother had. He liked her for that. Not that liking her would slow what he was going to do, of course.
He opened his fist, waved both hands, said a Word of Power granted him by The Little Girl that was halfway between a hiss and a curse.
Her eyes went wide as she felt the grip of giant, invisible hands. They pulled her arms up, so they jutted straight out from her body, pulled her feet apart so that her legs were spread shoulder-width apart, and lifted her into the air, a foot, two feet, three . . .
She struggled against the geas, but to no avail. She was a fly in ice, unable to move more than a shiver.
He walked to where she floated and gestured. She settled back to the earth, and at more than six and a half feet tall, Boukman looked down at her. “My zombis are in the jungle. I can keep you here, away from your body and have them kill the white men, you know I can. Tell me.”
“No. You could have killed us before now, if that was your wish. That you have not? Means you do not wish it. The gods might frown upon it.”
He shook his head. Ah, smart, too. Certainly he had uses for women with beauty, power, and cleverness. She would be too strong to be a zombi, but there were other ways to serve.
“Tell me. I can make you suffer.”
She tried to shrug, couldn’t quite manage it.
“They came here for something,” he prompted. “It concerns me, I know this. A thing of power. Hidden somehow, from my sight.”
“And if you kill them, you will certainly never find it.”
“You think not? My servants are tireless. They can search forever.”
“It might take them forever to find it. You don’t have that long, Uncle. If it was open to your gaze, you would have known about it and uncovered it long ago.”
He shook his head. Too smart for her own good.
He reached out, stroked the side of her face with the tip of his forefinger.
Smoke rose from the line he traced across her cheek.
She swallowed her yelp of pain. It came out no more than a grunt.
“Very well, my little niece. You are right—the gods are not ready for me to know, so I will allow your imen blan to live another day. They will lead me to that which I must have. They will die when I need them to die.”
“I will warn them against you,” she said.
&n
bsp; “It would not do any good, ma petite, they are white men, they have no power, and yours is not sufficient to protect them. Besides, you won’t warn them.”
“I will!”
“No, you will not. Because you will not remember any of this. Go back to your self, child. And awaken in wonder as to where you have been . . .”
He gestured at her, spoke another Word.
Her eyes grew wide.
Boukman reached out, took hold of her thread leading skyward, and pulled. His spectral body flew up like the ghost of a monkey ascending to Heaven.
More and more interesting, this. He had not been so intrigued in a score of years, he decided. Perhaps not in two score.
As he flew above the jungle, his âme smiled to itself again.
He would return to his body. And there would be those others in the jungle with whom he must deal. Perhaps there was something to be gained from them, as well. Every small bit gathered was useful.
Marie took a shuddering and deep breath, sat up, and her pupils rolled down, to behold Indy.
He held one hand behind her back, steadying her. “Are you okay?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“What happened? Where’d you go?”
Behind him, Mac leaned in, along with Batiste.
She shook her head slowly. “I—I don’t remember,” she said.
Batiste said something in that soft and smooth language of his.
Indy caught but one word of it: “Boukman?”
“It would seem so. I do not recall the meeting, but there is no one else who is powerful enough to ride me without my leave. And a loa would ask.”
“He would have wanted to know about you,” Batiste said. He nodded at Indy and Mac.
Indy looked at Marie again. There was a red mark on her cheek. It looked like a burn.
“I do not think I would have told him anything,” she said. “But I cannot know for sure.”
“What’s to tell?” Mac asked.
She shrugged. “Not much. But with Boukman, any information adds to his power.”
“So we should be worried,” Indy said.
“Yes, though not so much just yet,” she said. “If he had wanted us dead or taken, he would have already had it done—he has zombis in the jungle, you may be certain of that. He wants something from us, and I think he doesn’t know exactly what it is. He is waiting to see what we do. After we find the artifact, that will be the time of greatest danger.”
“Maybe they won’t be able to get across the river?” Mac said.
“Oh, they can. Tumbling downstream for a mile means nothing to them. They are already dead.”
“Well . . . swell,” Indy said. “Never a dull moment.”
SIXTEEN
SUZUKI SAID, “One of our scouts is missing.”
“Missing?”
“Hai, Yamada-san. He was due to report back an hour ago.”
“Perhaps his watch stopped.”
Suzuki look to see if Yamada was jesting, which was the case, though Yamada did not grin to give it away.
He shook his head. “My men can tell time well enough from the sunlight to know when they are due back.”
Yamada nodded. The man could have had an accident, of course. This jungle was full of places to trip and fall and wind up with a broken leg or worse. He could have tumbled into a river and been swept away. Quicksand, perhaps. Dangers everywhere.
Well. That was the nature of a military unit. One had to scout the terrain and enemies. And some losses were to be expected, whether by accident or by enemy intent.
Maybe the Germans, though if they thought they were still hidden, probably not. They wouldn’t want to do anything to cause Yamada’s crew to be more alert—and a missing man would certainly be cause for concern.
Before he had seen that creature with the blood dripping down its jaws crouched over one of the imperial army’s finest men, he might have been more apt to believe in an accident, but not now. The scout wasn’t going to be coming back if one of those things had gotten him.
“I will pair the men from now on,” Suzuki said.
That horse was out of the barn and closing the door wouldn’t help him, but Suzuki was right—it might help the others.
Maybe.
“One of our men is gone,” Schäefer said.
Gruber stared at him. “Gone, what do you mean, ‘gone’?”
“I mean he is not with us and cannot be located.”
“Who?”
“Private Grün.”
“Are you sure? How did it happen?”
“He was in the group bringing up the rear. He apparently stepped off the trail to answer a call of nature. Private Schinken waited. When, after a few moments, Grün did not return, Schinken went looking. He did not find him. He marked the spot, and two more of our men went back to look. No sign of the man.”
“Scheisse!”
“My sentiments, as well.”
“The Japanese, do you think?”
“No. Our forward scouts would have certainly seen them heading back along the trail.”
“Then what happened?”
“Perhaps there are larger animals than we know about in these woods.”
“Surely there would have been evidence of an animal attack?”
“I do not know what to tell you, Colonel Doktor. He is gone, and it is as if he vanished into the air.”
“Pair the men,” Gruber said. “Nobody goes anywhere alone, even to answer calls of nature.”
“Already done,” the captain said.
“I do not like this.”
“Nor do I, but done is done. Perhaps he wandered too far, got lost, and he will find his way back to the trail eventually and catch up with us.”
“Do you think so?”
“Not really.”
Gruber sighed. First, they had lost a man to the river. And now this. Turning ugly, this mission.
Ah, well. That had always been a possibility, hadn’t it? They would just have to continue on as best they could, and be more vigilant. They were a crack unit of the German army, men who could shoot a fly off a wall at ten paces or slice a man into bloody ribbons with a pocketknife—there ought not to be anything or anybody in this forest who could stop them from their goal. Nor would he allow that.
“We’re supposed to climb down that?” Mac said.
“Unless you can wave your arms hard enough to fly over it,” Marie said.
Indy looked at the gorge. It was both steep and deep, easily eighty feet of dirt and rock embankment on this side, slightly less on the opposite side. Yeah. He had climbed worse.
Mac said, “Why isn’t there a river at the bottom?”
“There is,” Batiste said. “But there are clefts in the rock—you see? And the river is below, in a natural tunnel through the stone under the ground. Even when it rains, the water does not rise to fill the gorge, but is drained into the river beneath the earth.”
Indy nodded.
Batiste said, “We will anchor ropes here and climb down. If we move slowly and with care, it will not be so bad.”
Indy looked at Marie.
“Do not worry about me,” she said. “I have been climbing trees and ropes since I was a girl.”
“Well, I haven’t done much of that since my last trip to the Schweizer Alpen, in ’34,” Mac said. “I hope I haven’t forgotten how.”
Indy looked at Mac. “The Swiss Alps in ’34? Dufourspitze? That was you?”
Mac grinned.
Marie looked blank.
Indy said, “Leonardo da Vinci had another set of mirror-writing notebooks that disappeared after he died. The story was, somehow those writings wound up in the hands of thieves, who eventually hid them somewhere between Italy and Switzerland. The thieves had a falling-out, some were killed, others arrested and executed, and the location supposedly died with them.
“But in 1934, these notebooks showed up in the British Museum. Found in a cave on the Dufourspitze—so the provenance the English
offered said.” He looked at Mac.
“Modesty forbids,” he said, holding his hands palms up.
“Since when did you develop any modesty?” Indy shook his head. “The Italians were not happy about those notebooks winding up in British hands.”
“And since when are the Italians ever happy? Besides, they had so many of the great man’s writings already and wouldn’t share them. It was only fair. Leonardo belongs to the world, not il duce Mussolini.”
“Hey, I’m not arguing with you—”
“Messieurs,” Batiste said, “we would probably be wise to cross the ravine while the daylight is still strong.”
The descent wasn’t so bad when you had a rope down which you could rappel. It was hard work in the heat and humidity, but the angle wasn’t so steep that it ever approached vertical, so you weren’t ever just hanging there.
Mac had a bad moment halfway down when something slid under his boot and he nearly lost the rope. He cursed, but managed to stop himself after a couple of feet.
“You okay?” Indy asked.
“Peachy,” Mac said. He didn’t sound peachy, though.
Marie was as good a climber as she claimed.
Indy had done enough of this kind of work that he wasn’t particularly worried, but after Mac’s slip, he paid more attention to his footing.
It took only a few minutes for most of them to reach the bottom of the ravine. Indy saw the fissure in the rock at the bottom before he reached it—the gap was probably three feet on average, narrower here, wider there, and had been there long enough so that the edges of the split had been smoothed by time and weather. He could also hear the subterranean river rushing below the crack in the earth. It was loud—the sound channeled up through the fissure from the enclosure was full of echoes.
Indy peered into the gap. The sunlight from above was just enough to get a glimpse of the roiling water about thirty feet down.
“Careful you do not fall in,” Batiste said. “The Fleuve Caché—the Hidden River—does not surface until she reaches the sea, and there she tumbles down a high cliff into a rocky cove. It is most impressive to see the waterfall from a boat offshore. Much foam and spew, it fills the air with rainbows and mist. You would almost certainly be drowned long before you got there, but if you survived the swim and the tide was out, you would be dashed to death on the rocks.”