“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
“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.
