The Reckoning (25 page)

She found the tower by looking not up, but down. Overnight, the rain had filled a long, rectangular reflecting pool that extended beneath the trees. This was a new approach, different from her other forays into the city's center. The image of the tower hovered at its far end, upside down in the mirror. There between the branches, a hundred yards ahead, stood the root of the tower.
Lost no more,
she thought. There was her destination.

As she skirted the pool, a ripple spanked the stone. She paused and the water went still. The lily pads lay motionless. She waited and, like yesterday at the reservoir, something shifted in the depths. The surface seemed to open.

Tangled with weeds, a big machine gun rested on the bottom. Coils of belted ammunition were turning green, like old pennies. The gun was not mounted on a tripod or neatly positioned. It had the look of a thing thrown away without care.

Then the surface sealed over. It became a mirror again, and she found herself facing the gunner, or his reflected image. She lifted her eyes. What remained of his skeleton—the limp spine and his skull and a few ribs—dangled from a noose. The rope twisted. The skull turned, and he had jade eyes, also.

First Luke, then the sniper in his coil of wire, now this man. Despair had swept them like a virus. She felt it, too, trapped at the center of the earth, chased by uncertain dangers. Languishing. That was the worst part, the wheel of time turning without measure, the obsessive maps filled with circles. Even that made sense to her. Even suicide made sense.

But why had they separated from one another? When they most needed each other's company, these men had made themselves desolate and estranged. They had retreated to distant lonely hideouts, the sniper to his perch, Luke to his bamboo lair, this gunner to a noose.

There was no evidence of an enemy finding them here. Had the men taken to hunting one another, then? Or imagined themselves being hunted? Why not? The monkey meat could have passed on a brain fever. Had they been killed by their own ghosts?

She looked up, into the ever present smile of God. Where was the joke? In their suffering and confusion? No matter where you turned, the city seemed to mock you. She tucked her head down, containing her anger. Every which way, the place made you mad.

The tower seemed to drift toward her. Duncan would have led them there. It was more wish than calculation. She had no time for the rest of the labyrinth.

She came to the bas-relief crowding the base of the tower. She looked again and the carvings really were in motion. One of the stone children—a little girl—turned and looked right at her. Molly cupped one hand against her eyes and hurried past, to the stairs.

Duncan had come this way. His red and white scarf lay in a heap on the stairs. The rain must have washed it clean. For all his blood last night, there wasn't a drop on the scarf. She draped it around her neck and gathered her courage, step by step.

Higher and higher she wound. She battled her dizziness as she kept to the precarious outer edges. The doorways whispered to her, tempting her to come in and stay awhile. She resisted their havens. She forced herself to climb on.

As she neared the top, a motion in the grass far below made her melt against the stairs.

There was no mist to hide them this time, and the green light was as good as it got. And yet they still evaded a complete inspection. They appeared in pieces from the mouth of one of the great avenues.

A man's shoulder and arm surfaced, then sank into the grass. A head appeared, scouting right and left before ducking behind a pillar. A man's hunched back appeared. Some were bearded and naked. Others wore rotted fatigues stolen from the graveyard. Some went barefoot. Rifles and rucksacks parted the grass. They were a procession of weapons and gear. Their skin and bones were little more than vehicles for the war relics.

All carried the jungle on them. She thought the vines and weeds must be part of their camouflage. But then she spotted the small animals moving on them, lizards, and a snake, and even a monkey riding majestically on one's shoulder. The forest inhabited them. They had lost their souls to this place.

They were not ghosts.

Molly refused to call them that. She clung to her powers of reason. Call them supernatural and she would lose all control over her rational world. It was not that she rejected the idea of ghosts. Her mother was a ghost. But you possessed them, not the other way around. Ghosts were data. They were pieces of your past. They allowed you a dialogue with yourself, and they had no reality except the reality you granted them.

She granted them nothing. She had conjured up none of these hide-and-seek scavengers creeping through the grass below. As eerie as he was, Luke had appeared well before she had any inkling of him, or them. There could be no Blackhorse ghosts because Blackhorse did not belong to her past. She had no connection with the Eleventh Cavalry.

And so, while these men might haunt the ruins and mimic the dead, they were real in some way. If only she could focus her mind. There had been no way to directly confront their whispering and silhouettes on her tent and their slouching through the mist, but she could dispute their unreality. They were hunting her. She was hiding from them, whoever they were. And Duncan had probably sacrificed himself to shield her. All for nothing. They were bound to find her.

The real contest was not with them anyway, but with herself. She had no hope of defeating them. There were too many of them, and this was their territory, and she was fading fast. She couldn't beat them, but she could make sure they didn't beat her. Just holding on to her sanity would be a triumph.

The line of men—looters, lunatics, or manhunters caught in a Vietnam loop—worked diagonally across the overgrown square. They moved like a patrol, spaced in a line, taking their time. They had nearly reached the far trees when the ambush caught them.

At first, Molly couldn't understand what was going on. It looked more like a squall striking the grasses than an attack. Some havoc burst from the trees. Limbs bent, leaves parted. Birds sprang from their perches and filled the air with their colors and cries. From three sides, furrows sliced through the green surface of grass.

Peeking down from the edge of the tower, Molly saw shapes, degraded shapes, pieces of creatures that were even less than these pieces of men. They were human in theory. Human in outline. But in fact she couldn't be sure she was seeing anything at all.

They seemed to be part animal, part glass—or water—as they streamed out from the trees. They cast shadows like the shadows of fish, amorphous and distorted, muscling in the green light. She saw their weapons better than she did them, not bits and pieces of the Blackhorse arsenal, but ancient things, swords and axes scything through the grass, and they appeared to almost move of their own will, racing for the kill. The forest shapes converged on the patrol.

The battle had no real form. It was over in seconds. The grass thrashed in a furious centrifuge of shapes. It bent and whipped and pressed flat. She heard a howl crowded with men shouting. Then the whole aspect of the violence lifted. It was as if the wind had touched down and gone on. The men, the suggestions of them, vanished.

She didn't move for another minute. Something had happened down there, something elemental, a microburst or a dervish. The grass lay torn and flattened in a whorl, and that howl echoed another few seconds from the forest as if a battle of spirits was swirling within the fortress walls. Then the shadows went still again. The birds returned to the trees.

She could have descended at that point. Her pursuers were gone, or seemed to be. But where would she go? Her legs were going on her. Even if she made it back to the terminus, there was nothing left but ashes.

On her hands and knees, Molly resumed her climb. She was terrified of losing the last of her strength out here in the open. She wanted enclosure. She wanted sanctuary. A fairy-tale tower where the bad men could not find her.

She had to whisper her way to the top: “A little more.” She had never before felt burdened by her flesh like this.

She reached the summit deck and peered over. The city wheeled in circles down there, a mandala of ruins and emerald grass.

Even as she looked, her hunters reappeared. The patrol emerged from the mouth of one of the great avenues. A man's shoulder and arm surfaced, then sank into the grass. A head appeared, scouting right and left before ducking behind a pillar. A man's hunched back appeared.

They were repeating themselves. Endlessly recycling. Ghosts, she thought, after all.

The infection had spread into her wing muscles. The walls of her chest and shoulder and back were burning with strep. And yet she managed to stand and face the door.

The blood rushed from her head. She was patient. The spinning stopped.

The stone Amazon that had toppled from her niche was now restored to her place. Molly couldn't even tell which of the twins had been broken. Even the doorway looked restored. The sagging lintel stood level. The red columns seemed brighter, the moss scrubbed away.

“Duncan?” she whispered into the room. Not a whisper back.

She stepped inside. The statue women let her pass, and the room was just as she had left it. Where she and Duncan and Kleat had peeled back the carpet of leaves, the floor still broadcast its black SOS. Brass shells littered the stones. The aperture in the roof was pouring green light onto the far wall. She was alone with the remains of the Buddhas.

Their desecration didn't shock her this morning. She understood now. The soldiers had seen through the cosmic smiles. The city's tranquility was a lie. Beneath its facade, the fortress sanctuary was a deadly trap. In chewing off the Buddha faces with their gunfire, the men had been erasing a terrible deceit.

“Duncan?” Sweat seeped down her spine. It was cold.

Her grip slipped on the doorway. She caught her balance. She asserted it. Once down, there would be no getting up.

She scanned the room for a friendly patch of ground. The monkey hands reached out from the fire pit. The gutted radio set stood along one wall. War junk and dank shadows crowded the corners. Animal dung plastered the boxes and cans.

This was important stuff, the choice of her bed. It was her Kodak moment: Someday, a hundred years from now, another expedition would ascend this tower. And while they weren't going to find any Sleeping Beauty, she could at least compose her mortal remains without monkey hands and garbage for her backdrop.

Her eyes went to the chopped, riddled Buddhas. In and out of focus, they seemed to float in the green light, luminous and detached from the world, separate from one another, even separate from the wall. For all the savagery that had been heaped upon them, for all the bloodshed they had presided over in this spirit city, they still promised peace. Now if only some of their karma would rub off, maybe she could come back as a complete human being next go-round.

She set off across the hall, shuffling through the bullet shells and beetles. The Buddhas retreated into their niches. Ravaged by bullets, they looked more like lepers than deities, like victims, not masters of the universe.

Molly glanced up at the canopy. No sun, not even a single beam? It would have been so sweet to curl up on a spot of heated stone.

She arrived at the knife in the wall.

The knife was all wrong, a spiteful thing. Would they think she had stabbed the Buddhas? Kleat had grappled with it, and she knew the blade was jammed, but she gripped the handle anyway.

The blade slid free.

The wind must have moved the canopy, which had moved the trees, which had moved the stones. The joints had opened. The knife practically fell from the seam. The weight of it, all eight ounces, yanked her arm down. It dropped from her fingers.

She stared dumbly at the thing lying at her feet. The blade was scratched and mottled, a name engraved above the blood gutter. With the next storm, the stones would have shifted again and bound the knife. She'd happened along at the right moment, that was all.

A string of saliva dangled from her mouth. Lovely. In a stupor, she lifted her eyes.

“God,” she whispered, and lurched backward.

The statues were changing.

Their pox of bullet holes was smoothing over. The Buddhas were regaining their stone flesh.

It had to be a trick of the light. Clouds were crossing above the canopy. Whales passing through the deep.

She closed her eyes and staggered, fetching up against the wall. Now was not the time to be seeing things. Her mother had died from hallucinations. And yet she could feel the wall against her palms and cheek, and the cool, gutted surface really was mending itself.

She pushed away from the wall.

Molly had spent a lifetime learning the rules. They allowed for yetis and unicorns, so long as you winked. They allowed for lost cities to float out like dust bunnies. You could hold heaven as a hope. But the rules did not allow for this.

The wall—the entire length of stone and statues—was healing. The bullet tracks dissolved. Thirteen smiles glimmered into being, so many Cheshire cats paying a visit. Faces formed around the smiles.

A vine tripped her. She might have blacked out. She smiled up at the fever dream. The metamorphosis streamed on.

At the far end of the wall, where the facade had been blasted, rubble began to reassemble. Lying there, Molly could not find words to describe it. Pieces of stone did not fly through the air and into place. Somehow the wall drew the destruction back into time.

She went with it, a pleasant delirium. As fissures sealed and lead slugs pattered to the floor like hailstones and the leprous figures became beautiful again, she forgot her pain and exhaustion. She all but vanished from her own mind.

Consciousness came and went.

Perhaps the wall had never been destroyed. Perhaps she had imagined it. Or again, that wondrous thought, maybe the ruins had imagined her. If the stones could command a people to shape them into a city, if the city were nothing more than an instrument for monsoon songs, why couldn't she be that little girl carved among all the other stories? What else was humankind—all life—but a figment of a stone spinning through time?

Her eyes opened. The wall was whole again. The war was gone. It had never been. How righteous, she thought. How stoned-out cosmic cool.

She rolled onto her back, a change of view. Parrots flickered overhead like bits of flame. A gecko eased in along the skylight. A few monkeys perched along the rim. Like this, in unconditional surrender, her mother must have watched the snow descend.