She clawed despairingly, trying to bring herself back and upright. At the last moment he reached for her, trying to lock hands with her from where he lay prostrate. Instinct, more than the will to save her. The inborn teaching of his country and his race.
They came within inches of one another, the tips of their hands. A second's equipoise. They couldn't close the gap. And then they drew apart again, dream-slowly.
The bridge has fallen, she had said. I have my god to atone to. May your god help you.
He was still prone there, the hand that she had missed by so little still emptily out before him in a barren staying gesture. He stared upward at the pallid oval that was her face in the gloom, the moment more that he could still see it. And all she had ever done to him was in it, returned to her now in the death moment. It was going backward, out of his sight. Back and over, into the night. From out of the night, back into the night. Strange ending to fit a strange beginning, A face first seen in moonlight, in a window frame a story above his head. A face last seen in starlight, three thousand miles and five hundred years away, over a cornice dropping down into eternity.
She clawed futilely out on each side of her, seeking to retain a grip on the parapet top. That only hastened her leaving it by that much, sped the process on its way, by the added spasms of motion it threw into it.
It took only a moment to complete itself. It seemed to take the span of a night-long dream, unfolding in its endlessness. She didn't cry out. She gave only a little sobbing moan at the last. And then the parapet was empty. She went as he had first known her, something covered up in shadows from first to last.
"Mitty," he whispered after her, and that was his farewell. He knew he'd never say that name again, not if he lived for forty more years. He knew he'd try never to even think of it, and he knew he'd never succeed.
He didn't try to look down after her. She was with the night, where she belonged. Let it keep her.
He turned and ran down below again to where the lampHght was stiU feebly playing in the chamber. He made a little hasty grab for Chris's hand, and it flew out to meet his, and they went on down the farther stairs, to the ground linked together like that.
They came out into the temple court. Mitty lay there in the shadow, quite still and calm, almost as though she were asleep.
He bent over her for a minute and tipped her shoulder from the ground. Her head hung over strangely, swaying back too much, as though it were something loose, dangling by a string.
"Her neck is broken," he muttered.
He let her settle back again any which way.
"That's the end of her," he said bitterly. "She died too late. Too late to do me any good. She should have died before I ever met her. Or I should have, either way."
Chris just stood there by him, looking at him compassionately. She only had eyes for him, even now at this decisive moment.
He took her hand in his own again. "Let's get out of this cursed place! What are we standing here for? Why should we wait here to die? We stilf may be able to make it. Let's at least try!"
Chapter Twenty-Seven
They ran toward the front of the courtyard and darted through the opening by which he had first entered, hands linked. On the outside of the temple wall the dimly looming buildings were as silent as the moonlit mirages they appeared to be. But there was imminent death, they knew, lurking in every one of them. Her fall from the parapet had gone unheard, perhaps muffled by the encircling courtyard wall.
"We have until the sun comes up," she whispered. "They're bound to find out by then. That's when she always went up there and—"
'"riiat's our head start, then. And how much we do with it is up to us."
He jockeyed her around to the front of him and they went one behind the other, to be able to hug the shadows more narrowly. They scurried along where it was blackest and leaped swiftly over the light patches as in a game of hopscotch. In a little while the peripheral hovels had come, and then the undiluted foliage again, and they were clear of the city, for what that much was worth.
They went in less silence now that they were this far, for branches hissed and spat and jittered at their brusque passage, but they went in less immediate danger also, for there were no sleepers around them any longer to detect these telltale tokens of their flight.
They went fast, at a sort of padding trot, but not too fast, for they both realized this was to be a long sustained test of their endurance, and to be too spendthrift of energy now would only rob them of it later, when perhaps it would be needed even more. Even this trot they didn't maintain evenly, but broke it at times to rest at a fast walk.
The moon had gone down long ago, while they were still in the temple. The night hung in a state of suspended blackness, waiting to break. They both looked up at it several times, as at a clock. It was the only one they had.
Presently he said, "Once they start after us, we won't be able to stick to this trail any longer. They'll shoot straight out along it and come up to us in no time. We'll have to jump off it into the jungle on the side."
"Then how will we be able to keep our bearings?"
"I don't know," he admitted. "Lets do all the distance we can while we can still use the trail."
She had started to flag a little already, he noticed. She spurted forward again now, as if spurred by the reminder.
"Tired?"
"No, not yet."
He wasn't sure she was telling the truth. He couldn't afford to disbelieve her, however, in the situation they were in. She was young, that was one thing in her favor. As young as anyone could well be and still have to run for her life like this.
They must have been going due west. She glanced back one time, not at him but at the sky behind the two of them, and even before she spoke, he was oddly disquieted to see that her face when turned that way was already paler than the rest of her. It was the first time in his life that he'd ever hated to see day come, caught himself wishing it would hold off for a while yet. Daylight, which usually spelled hope and an end to fear, to them spelled heightened danger and perhaps destruction.
"It's starting aheady," she warned, and they both sped on faster than before.
He looked back in turn. The first signs of daylight were in the east; the sky was smoked pearl back there and no longer black. It was as though it were being washed with some sort of powerful abrasive that was taking all the color out of it.
The bleach began to spill over from there onto other things as well. Branches and fronds and the trunks of trees became two-toned, lighter on one side than on the other. Chris's laboring form, ahead of him, began to stand out more clearly, particularly when there was any opening in the intermittent canopy over them. Then at other times, when there were completely tunneled spaces they had to pass through, it would blend into the misty foliage, still dark blue with night shadows.
She was slackening a good deal now. He could tell it mostly by the way he continually kept coming up abreast of her instead of staying at her heels. He didn't want to take the lead, for he was afraid that then he might outdistance her.
"Do you want to rest?" he asked her at last.
She could hardly draw breath any more. "Not yet," she gasped determinedly. "Later I—may have to. I don't want to waste any of this head start.
He put his arm around her waist. "Lean on me, it may take a little of the weight off your own feet."
It was an awkward palliative at best. They had to force a passage twice as wide through the interfering leafy web. It eased her a little, that was all, but slowed them much too much. They discarded it again presently, and went forward singly once more.
He looked back again. "It's nearly here," he said.
The eastern sky was saffron now, and beginning to fume as with some unseen chemical agent infused into it from below. The stone shapes of the building they had left behind still looked dismayingly clear and near at hand, whenever they could be seen at all through interstices in the jungle thicket. The temple in particular st
ill bulked so large against the sky, like something immovable, that, no matter how hard they tried to get away from it, it still seemed to keep its same distance from them.
"They look so far yet," he heard her lament.
The mountains, he knew she meant.
They are, he thought; farther than we'll ever get to. We'll never make them, never. He kept that thought to himself.
A golden glint, like some sort of wet spray flung after them from the end of a paintbrush, suddenly splashed far ahead of them up the trail, dyeing it and the immediate leaves on either side of it.
"It's up!" They both said it together. They both knew it, without having to look.
They ran full tilt now, like two deer. No more trotting, no more uncertain slackening. They knew they couldn't keep it up for very long, but they knew they had to do it while they still could. That fiery eye, as Mitty had called it, was open in the sky now behind them, staring venge-fully after them.
He began to count off in his mind, while his feet pounded ahead under hirq. One, two, three, four—
A great dull thud smote the air on the fifth count. It came rolling sluggishly after them, like horizontal thunder, from back there behind them. Then as the first wave spent itself, a second clap came. Then a third.
The alarm drum.
It quickened them still further, as though the ground were burning hot to their feet. She gave a wordless little whimper.
"It's all right," he panted reassuringly. "It had to come sooner or later. It's over with now. Just keep running."
"How much longer can we stay on here?"
"A little while. Not too long. It's taken us an hour to come this far. They can't catch up with us in five or ten minutes."
Full sunrise, with the lower rim of the flashing disk clear of the ground, already found them struggling through a solid wall of steam, temporary but blinding, as the night mists rose from the jungle in evaporation. He kept thinking of Mitty. It was the heat from the sun that was doing it. She'd worshiped that. Maybe it would destroy them. Maybe she was in it, had become a part of it. I'm going crazy, like she was, he told himself, and checked the errant train of thought.
In a little while the steam thinned again, drained off. A hot, invisible exhalation took its place, refracting things, warping them as though they were seen on a dripping wet mirror.
She kept looking back more and more frequently. He hated to make the decision to quit the trail, narrow and difficult and half obliterated as it was. Once they were off it their progress would be slowed to almost nothing. It was like capitulating, giving up their chance of reaching the mountains. But it had to be done; to stay on it meant an invitation to almost certain capture. She was staggering now, lurching, and she'd have to rest soon anyway or she'd collapse.
He held off as long as he could, until he felt that to delay any longer was dangerous. A good half an hour had already elapsed since they had heard the first warning growl of the drum. And maybe it was even more; he had no exact way of measuring time.
He tottered to a halt, and called to her, and she halted too, making a little groggy circle in her tracks that brought her around to lean up against him exhaustedly.
"Come on," he said tersely. "This is where it begins."
They left the trail and went stumbling and moving through the matted growth offside, he now in the lead.
It was all that he had feared it would be and worse. The trail had been a passage already sundered for them, no matter how interlocking and entangling its accompanying vegetation. Here they had to burst their own way through a veritable feather bed of green, making passage for the first time. Even at a hand span away from each other, they were at times entirely invisible to each other below the neck, so cut off were they by great padlike leaves or curved, fringe-dripping scimitars of fernery. At times there was such a choked multipHcity of flora and prismatic colorings around them all at one time, filling every cranny of the three dimensions they were traveUng through, that the whole thing became a blurred, maddening pinwheel, in which white butterflies starting up were mistaken for disks of sunHght on the leaves and disks of sunlight on the leaves were mistaken for the white butterflies, and the whole became just a confusion of spots in front of the eyes.
But it was not all this prohfic. There were patches that were comparatively sparse, and even occasional dells and glades where the going was almost normal. The trouble was that these clearings were all isolated from one another, and in between were stretches that were almost impassable, where it was like walking through the upper branches of a dense, spreading tree for all practical purposes, save that they could not fall through it to the ground if they should miss a step.
For a length of time that seemed to equal the time they had spent on the trail—though since they were going slower it was probably only half as long—they lurched and wavered through this botanical spume, until they'd stumbled upon a place that was almost made to order to hide and rest in. To have gone beyond it would have been suicidal. Neither of them could have by now, even had they wanted to. A tree had fallen, whether shattered by lightning or from some other cause they could not tell. Even prone, its massive trunk was nearly the height of their waists. It was festooned by a curious vinelike growth, lashing it to the ground along its entire length, but this did not cling closely to the turn of the trunk but stretched out from it taut, like a sort of green spiderweb. Close beside the trunk, therefore, it formed what amounted to a triangular bower or lean-to. To make it better still, a little rill of water ran nearby, the first they'd come upon so far.
He wouldn't let her drink at sight, knowing what it might do to her. He dipped a corner of the rags he wore
into it, and sponged her lips with it and pressed it out against her forehead and the back of her neck. Then he let her have a few tantalizing handfuls from his own hand, and promised her more later.
Within this little tent of natural green they crawled, and then collapsed, lungs beating against the cages of their breasts like swelling bladders threatening t6 explode.
She cried a little when she felt better. He liked that about her, that she was a girl who cried and not a damned Indian jade without emotion. "It hurts too much," she whimpered, "even to stay alive."
"I know, I know it does," was all he could say.
They had been there about five minutes, and were only beginning to draw breath more slowly, when suddenly he tightened his hand on her wrist, holding it down and holding it taut, and she understood, made no move.
There wasn't a sound or the trembling of a fern around them to show anyone was approaching. And then suddenly the green facade walling them in split into two saw-toothed edges and a figure flashed into view, at a distance of not more than ten yards from where they crouched. Cinnamon-brown, crouched low in deadly quest, making its way with a swift, soundless dexterity they never could have attained.
He was stunningly near. For a moment the hard-pitted black eyes seemed to glance over the very coverlet beneath which they lay, in their whiteness and helplessness. He slithered on, with a snake's vertebral twistings. The saw-toothed edges of visibihty on the oposite side interlocked once more behind him, and there was nothing to show they had seen what they had seen.
He let go of her wrist, but outside of that neither of them moved. She simply turned it over and left it there, supine on the ground.
"That was close," he breathed. "They're not sticking to the trail either. Not all of them, anyway."
"How did you know in time?"
"I couldn't tell you now any more. Must have been some variation in that chirping and twittering going on all around us."
Her head bent over dejectedly. "They'll get us."
"What's the good of giving up before we have to?"
Twice he left her after that, but for just a short distance, and not upright but creeping out on his hands and knees. Once to bring her more water—he dipped his entire shirt in this time, and they both squeezed it out into their mouths—and the second time to brin
g back some berries.
He tried them himself first, and made her wait a while. Then, finding that he'd had no ill effects from them, he gave her some.
Then after that they lay still; breathing, surviving, nothing else. Waiting for the friendly night to return. To He hidden like that in one place was the safest thing to do during the dayUght hours. In that way they had only one dangerous series of movements to guard against: their enemies'. Had they moved about themselves, they would have had two: their enemies' and their own as well, which might have worked toward one another when they least expected it.
He looked at her and her eyes were closed. She'd dropped into a sound sleep, head pillowed against his recumbent shoulder.
He was glad she could sleep. Only the very young could sleep that way, with imminent death all around them, with hfe hanging by a thread, hanging'on the rustle of a leaf, the turn of a blade of grass.
His own eyes flickered, but he forced them open again. Someone had to watch.
The dazzling sun beating down on their leafy covering spilled through the innumerable little criss-cross, wafile-like gaps, and fell all over them in leprous disks that burned, almost like the centering of rays through a ground lens. It was like being covered with spangles.
Night came on slowly. He'd never wanted to see it before. Where was the vaunted swift nightfall of the tropics, which was supposed to drop like a curtain? It came on slowly, but at last it came. The sun began to redden for its landfall.
He waited, biding his time. The spangled disks slowly went out. Then the shell-like glow, reflecting from above on her upturned face, dimmed too. Cool green and blue shadows began to settle in the hollows of everything, like fungus. Light was leaving the world.
When a gas-green sky over the black jungle was the only remaining vestige of daylight, he finally woke her. He woke her in a strange way. Or at least, it seemed so to him at the time. For when the whisper of her name close down beside her ear and a light touch upon her shoulder failed to rouse her, he put his lips on her forehead and woke her with a kiss.
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