“They’re a forest legend, like what the Romans called their night-walkers,
Kleat’s face screwed up. “Not this again.” He upended the log and let it fall into the fire. Sparks belched. The wet skin of the limb sizzled.
“They claim the forest is full of them,” Duncan said.
“And you believe that?”
Duncan hesitated. “Of course not. But they do. Strip away the layers of Buddhism and Hinduism and you have an animistic religion dedicated to neutralizing the dead and pushing their spirits as far away and as quickly as possible. They were drunk. It was dark. We’re looking for American remains. I’d be surprised if they hadn’t seen things out there.”
“Then add one more
Molly still wanted to run for the causeway and find their own way back to civilization. “What if it’s a trick?” she said. “He could be leading us up so they can desert us.”
“They would never leave their own brother. Don’t you see? He’s our greatest assurance.”
“That’s the part I can’t believe,” Kleat said. “They’re giving us a hostage.”
“That’s not the right attitude, John.”
The fire glinted on Kleat’s glasses. “I’ll bear that in mind,” he said.
29.
It should have been straightforward. They had all visited one or the other of the gates and its statues at least once, but the city was more alien than ever. The mist was like quicksand. Within minutes they were lost.
Molly had begun to memorize her way into and out of the heart of the ruins, but overnight the rapid forest had undone what little was familiar. Samnang had tied knots in the grass, but new grass had sprung up, higher and more lush, taking over the ruins. The saplings he’d bent into careful circles had sprung loose in the rain and grown beyond recognition. It was like entering a different city.
Vin kept sweeping his rifle back and forth at shapes materializing among the trees and temples. With the machete scabbard strapped to his back and its handle standing above his head like an exclamation point, the boy looked overloaded and self-conscious. The American soldiers with RE-1 had taught him how to moonwalk and chew Red Man. Molly and Duncan had treated him like a man, asking about his warrior
“Basically, he’s asking for our cooperation,” Duncan said. “The sooner we find the gate and the statues, the sooner we can leave.”
“He wants to be friends?” Kleat said. He had his eye on the boy’s rifle.
“Does anybody recognize anything?”
“If we could just find the tower,” Molly said.
She longed to return to the room of the Buddhas. The yearning filled her. It overrode her fear of what was happening to them, their disintegration and the creeping violence. As a landmark, the tower might help orient them, but that was only an excuse. It was the room on that man-made summit that drew her. It held…something.
But this morning, with visibility cut to twenty feet, the tower seemed to have dismantled itself. As they penetrated the waist-high grass, nothing was the same. The avenue and side lanes and bridges and canals were all reconfigured. The massive faces projecting from lesser towers and the crests of flattened pyramids were no help. Their serene smiles only added to the sense of entanglement and maddening circles. Molly found herself resenting the tranquil stone expressions.
They chose a canal and followed its trickle of water uphill, reasoning that vertical gain was a direction of sorts. At least, Duncan said, they would not be going in circles. The same trickle of water could not round back on itself.
As they marched higher through the ruins, Vin kept Kleat in the front of the line, where he could watch him. The boy might be naive, but his brothers had instructed him well. As Samnang had put it, with or without his fangs, Kleat was still toxic.
As if hearing her thoughts, Kleat flashed Molly a look, then another one. She was following behind Vin, which put her within easy reach of the machete riding between his shoulder blades, practically a gift to them. She understood Kleat perfectly. He wanted her to kill the boy.
She tried to convince herself that Vin was her mortal enemy, and even that didn’t work. She wondered, if things came to it, if she could even kill an animal to eat. Kleat glared at her. Her thoughts returned to the tower.
After a half hour, they found themselves back at the bridge on the canal where they’d begun. Impossibly, the downhill trickle of water had circled back on itself. “That can’t be,” Kleat objected.
Vin didn’t question it. To him, the perpetual circling of water was just another arcane loop in a city of riddles. He and Duncan had a discussion using the lines on Duncan’s palm as a map.
After a minute, Duncan said, “Okay, a slight revision. We’re going to split into pairs and spread out the search. It should be simple. All we have to do is find one section of the wall, then we can follow it to one of the gates and get what we need.”
Vin chose the teams, himself with Duncan, and Molly with Kleat. Kleat frightened him, and Molly frightened him, too, though differently. His puppy love was obvious, and out of decorum and modesty he did not choose her. It was almost cute.
“What are we supposed to do if we find something, whistle?” Kleat said.
“Stay within earshot,” Duncan said. “Let’s not lose each other.”
They separated into pairs. As Molly wove through the piles of temples and narrow corridors, Kleat railed at her. “The machete was right in front of you. They want heads? We’ll give them a head.”
“He’s a kid. He’s not going to hurt us,” she said.
“He’s one of them. And we’re going to need his rifle and machete. Think.”
“Leave him alone, Kleat.”
Kleat put his face close to hers. “Do you want to live or not?”
She had witnessed paranoia in her career. She’d photographed it in prisons and asylums and at a treatment center for foreign torture victims. She’d even argued with it, her own fears, in therapy and alone. But Kleat’s was a species all its own.
She stood her ground, or tried to. “What kind of question is that?” she snapped.
“Don’t think I’m going to die caged in like this,” Kleat said. “Now’s no time for bleeding hearts. When the time comes, just stand out of my way.”
He bulled on, and Molly slowed. The sound of his crashing through the brush dimmed. Thunder grumbled far away. It seemed early. Without thinking, Molly glanced at her useless watch. The mist was thinning. The morning was getting on.
She strayed alongside a panel of more bas-reliefs, and, like yesterday, they were dense with stories both alien and familiar. The carvings seemed to whisper to her. She imagined herself written in the stone, the lone bird-woman living in a tree, the queen—or goddess—watching over the city, or that infant being held up to the sky by her mother.
Then her eye chanced up, and she was being watched again. This time there was a small troop of the ghostly gray monkeys, perched in the branches and sitting on ancient masonry and terraces. They unsettled her, like in the tower room that afternoon.
It wasn’t that she thought they might attack. They were cute and fuzzy, with a few infants at the long nipples and some wide-eyed youngsters. But they were wild, and there were no bars separating her from them. And they were watching her, not eating or playing, just watching, like the huge, inescapable god heads. Even the infants were staring at her.
They’d been fighting. Slowly she detected the blood. It was mostly on the larger males, whose red penises
