The Reckoning (12 page)

Molly slapped him.
The damned.
She slapped him so hard it hurt her hand. His glasses flew off. Coffee spilled across the map.

The brothers halted their low drone.

Molly pulled her hand back. She didn't know what to say. For better or worse, she wasn't wired for conflict, much less a lightning bolt like this. She shouldn't have let him get to her. She shouldn't have slapped him. Then she thought,
The hell with it, maybe she should have slapped him a long time ago.

Kleat nodded his head, thinking, making up his mind. The bared pouches under his eyes were even darker in the daylight. After a minute, he bent to retrieve his glasses. He fit them onto his face.

“Don't apologize,” Duncan said to her. “If you do, I'll have to hit him myself.”

“I'm not.” She'd hit Kleat too hard for that. He would take any apology as patronizing, and besides, she wasn't sorry. “You know,” she said to him, “we could work together here. We came for the same reason.”

Kleat looked at Duncan's scarf around her neck, red and white checkered like the KR—and millions of other Khmer people—used to wear. She couldn't tell if he distrusted the scarf or the giving of it to her, again, by Duncan. “I'm not so sure anymore,” he said. “I know why I came. But there seem to be other temptations in the air.”

That quickly, Molly's anger dissipated. She owed Kleat nothing, not one more emotion, not another thought, and least of all her little flight of fancy about Duncan.

One of them had emptied two MRE packets on the stone top. Molly made a show of pocketing the energy bar. She ripped open the scrambled-egg packet with her teeth and squeezed pieces of it cold into her mouth, wolfing the food down. It took sixty seconds flat. “There, done.” She wiped her mouth. “Later.” She started off into the mist.

“Where are you going?” Kleat said. She looked back at them. Duncan was rearranging his pebbles and twigs on the map. Kleat stood rooted in place with his hands on his hips. The Khmers seemed content hanging by the fire, waiting for the mist.

“I'm getting my socks and shoes out of the truck. Then I'm going up the stairs,” she said. “The light's too fine to waste.”

By the time she finished tying her shoelaces, the rest were ready to go. They left Samnang and his leg by the fire to watch over the vehicles, and started off in a bunch.

The three brothers soon sprinted ahead, the slaps of their flip-flops fading into the mist above. Molly wanted to go bounding up the stairs with them, but curbed her excitement and stuck with Duncan and, by default, Kleat.

“There will be one hundred and four steps,” Duncan told them. He seemed very certain of it.

“You've been here before?” Kleat said, mocking him.

“I could be wrong, of course,” Duncan said. “But the place is monumental, and the statues are like half-breeds, part Buddhist, part animal. My guess is that they built it to a blueprint, one dictated by their gods. They would have dedicated a stair to each of the Buddha's hundred and four manifestations.”

They were tall, steep, narrow steps, like those found on Mayan pyramids, the kind that take confidence to climb upright without hands. Greasy with fluorescent green and blue moss, they would need special care coming down. Tourists, someday, would require a handrail or a chain to hold on to. Vendors would sell them warm Cokes from the stone terraces.

“You could bleed the ecotourists white with something like this,” Kleat said. “There's room down there for a parking lot and a lodge. Put it on the water's edge. Spray the pools for mosquitoes. Clear out the trees.” He pretended only to be tormenting Duncan, the purist. He accused them of giving in to the temptations of the place, and to each other, but Molly heard him warring with himself, the dutiful brother versus the building contractor, the bones versus his visions of development.

“That would destroy everything,” Duncan said.

“Do you seriously think you can hold on to this for yourself? The jack is out of the box. There's no stuffing him back in again.”

“We'll have to keep it secret until we can get the proper protections in place,” Duncan said. “You don't rush something like this. The restoration will take years, even decades.”

“First thing,” Kleat said, “I'd clear the trees. The quickest way would be explosives. Give me a few pounds of C4, I could open up the sky. Better yet, bring in the loggers. Let the development pay for itself.”

Duncan stopped on the stairs. “Kill the trees and you kill the city. Without the trees, it would fall to pieces.”

What city?
It was all conjecture. But like them, Molly was eager. She craved whatever waited above, in the mist. The stairs were building to a climax. Something was up there, she could feel it.

“After the destruction we saw coming in last night?” she said. “It looked like the forest is ripping the place to shreds.”

“I know that's how it looks. But the trees are the only thing binding it together,” Duncan said. “It's true, the trees have invaded the architecture, but they're also locking it in place. I've seen this at other sites. The forest is like a living glue.”

He started pointing out the phantoms of trees in the mist. “Banyan trees. Giant strangler figs. And that one there, the most common invader, a form of ficus.
‘Spong,'
the Cambodians call it,
Tetrameles nudiflora.
They can live for up to two hundred years, and all the while birds are scattering more seeds, spreading the forest's skeleton.”

Kleat lost interest in his game. “We didn't come for this. The ruins are a distraction. Ignore the city, if that's what it is. Our mission is to find the remains of the Eleventh Cavalry men.”

“You need to be prepared to find nothing,” Duncan said.

“We know now they were here.”

“Were. It's entirely possible they left the names of their women and headed on.”

“On to where?”

“I don't know. But there's no sign they stayed. Did you see any of their tracks in the clearing?”

Kleat was quiet for a minute. His boots methodically slugged at the steps. “Our gang of mercenaries will have the place looted to the ground before we even see it,” he growled. He accelerated, stumping upward, leaving them behind.

Molly held to Duncan's leisurely pace. They were going to be the last ones up. It wasn't a race, she told herself. If this proved to be half as big as it promised, Duncan was going to be the crux of her story. Let the others disperse into the ruins, out of frame. She would make him a hero. And herself a name. Kleat could find his bones. There could be something here for everyone.

As they passed the ledges leading off to the tents, she could see how the brothers had spaced them apart last night. Knowing the Americans liked privacy, they'd pitched each tent on a separate terrace. She began counting the steps from her ledge to the top so that she could find her own shelter even in the dark, but gave up. She let go. She was not alone. She was with Duncan. The two of them could manage somehow.

“How does it feel?” she asked Duncan. This could be his triumph. If only he would climb a little faster. Then she realized that he was lagging on purpose.

“I'm afraid,” he said. “What if it's not what we think?”

“What do you think it is?” In her head the tape recorder was running. She had her camera out.

“I don't know. Have you ever had a dream that wouldn't let go of you? I don't know how to put it. These stairs, it's like I've climbed them before. But I've got no idea what comes next.”

“You deserve this, Duncan.”
And so do I, whatever comes.

She'd paid her dues. She'd turned her sweat and blood into black ink, and made her eye the camera's eye, thinking to make the world a little better through her witnessing. But over the years, for one reason or another, she had squandered herself on trivial events and prideful men and women who tried to manipulate her pen and camera. She'd become a cynical hack. A hireling with no faith. That was about to change. The stairs were leading to something larger than life. Every writer should have that.

They worked higher into that netherworld of green mist, and when she looked down, the abyss seemed bottomless. At last she could make out the shape of cobra hoods, poised along the crest like gargoyles. The stairs reached their apex. One final step, and the ruins heaved up before them.

There was no transition from below to above, no sense of arrival. They took a few steps and the architecture seemed to hurry around, enclosing them.

It was a city, a phantom city of buildings and statuary and the tangled network of the forest, a city of hints. If anything, the mist was thicker here, lush and aquamarine. Molly took a deep breath, and the air was so dense she could taste the smell of vegetation growing from its own rich compost, and flowers that were as invisible as ideas. The mist deformed the ancient metropolis. It softened the squared corners, revealing and devouring hints of towering spires, and washing against vast stone heads like a tide.

“God,” said Duncan.

She got his astonishment on camera, his blank, plain daze. Every square in the red and white scarf around his neck jumped out from the mist. The background was pure Seurat, tiny dots of color flooding the air. The suggestion of a massive stone head peered over his right shoulder.

That would be the cover photo. This was a book, not an article. Done right, it might stand as a classic. She took a step and it felt like planting a footprint on the moon. They were the first, it seemed, to discover this place.

“How can this be?” she said. “A lost city in this day and age?”

“Why not?” said Duncan. “They're still finding Mayan cities and Incan tombs. There are species in these mountains that scientists thought were just myths. And look at the forest canopy. The ruins have been buried for centuries, not forgotten, just lost.”

She was too stunned to arrange her thoughts.
Shoot,
she commanded herself.
Sort it out later.

“Where did the others go?” Duncan said.

“Who cares?” For the time being, the two of them owned the ruins.

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?”