The Templar Legion

child soldiers’ launch point was of no use to them, so Holliday took a few steps down the boar trail. He’d never actually run into one of the creatures before but he was damned glad they’d brought along a couple of the sharpened spears they’d made, not to mention Eddie’s gigantic knife.

“You’d better come and see this, amigo,” said Eddie, stepping back from the base of the falls. He took Holliday’s elbow and pointed.

“My God,” he whispered, feeling a rush of adrenaline slam into his heart and tears gather in the corners of his eyes. The past was coming up to welcome him.

“What is it?” Rafi said as he and Peggy joined them.

The symbols were carved almost an inch deep into a massive boulder thrown up by the falls aeons ago. Whoever had etched the symbols wanted them there forever.

“They’re runes, an early form of Norse writing. It’s a ‘Kilroy was here’ from a thousand years ago. Our friend Ragnar Skull Splitter doing a little graffiti.”

“Can you read them?” Eddie asked Holliday.

“Only a couple. The one at the end is Thor, the Viking’s chief god; the one that looks like an R means journey. I think it’s some kind of prayer of thanksgiving for having made it this far.”

“Amen to that,” said Eddie.

“Arne Saknussemm,” whispered Holliday.

“?Si!” Eddie grinned. “When I was a boy my father read this to me: Viaje al Centro de la Tierra! This Saknussemm, he was an alquimista?”

“Alchemist.” Holliday nodded.

Eddie pointed at the carvings on the black, wet rock. “Like those, I think-his carvings led the others to the center of the earth.”

“Nice dad,” said Holliday. He couldn’t remember his own drunken father ever having read a book to him.

“A nice man, yes,” said Eddie, wistfully.

Rafi was beaming like a little kid. “It’s wonderful! The runes are absolute proof of my theory!” He ran his fingers into the deep indentations that had been carved into the dark stone. He turned to Peggy. “Take a picture,” he said eagerly. “This will put a few people’s noses out of joint back at the university.”

Peggy dug her Nikon out of her pack and Rafi arranged himself proudly beside the deeply etched lettering, like an old photo of a man on a safari, his foot planted on the head of a dead animal.

“For posterity.” Rafi grinned. “And for the pages of the Qedem article I’m going to publish.”

“Maybe you should get Eddie into the picture, since he was the one who found it,” Holliday said. “Maybe give him some credit in the article as well.”

“Uh, sure, that sounds good,” said Rafi, his face falling just a little bit. “Come on, Eddie; get in here.”

“No, thank you, mi amigo, this is your thing. I do not want to interfere. It was only luck that I saw it.”

“Are you sure?” Rafi said without much eagerness in his voice.

“Absolutamente, I am sure.” The Cuban smiled.

Peggy took several shots with Rafi in the frame and then a half dozen close shots, getting the sun shadows as deeply into the engraving on the stone as possible. When she was finished they turned back down the narrow old boar path heading deeper into the jungle, Rafi and Peggy in the lead.

“You should have had your picture taken,” said Holliday. “You did find it first.”

“Only an accident, Doctoro. It is for him, the adventure, the science of all this; let him have it. We are the lucky ones, after all.”

“What do you mean?”

“For Rafi it is dates and kings and radiocarbon dating; for us it is the story, the narracion. Rafi writes it in his notebooks; we feel it in our hearts. It is both our joy and our tragedy, yes, this imagination, this romance?”

“You should have been a poet, Eddie, not a soldier.”

“All Cubans are poets, amigo.” The big man laughed sourly. “You have to be when they only pay you five pesos a week.”

They walked on ahead until they saw Rafi and Peggy stopped in front of an area of scuffed and deeply scratched earth. There were a few cloven hoofprints and the tracks of small, bare human feet, as well. The cracked surface of the disturbed, dry ground indicated that it had recently been used as a mud wallow by the wild pigs that employed the path as a highway through the jungle. The children’s footprints were also indicative; they weren’t far behind the child soldiers.

“Maybe we should turn off,” suggested Rafi.

“The jungle’s too thick. This is no canopy rain forest. This is the only way for now.”

They kept on moving through the morning hours, the trail leading blindly down to the river once or twice, probably to water the animals who used it, then veered away, heading back into the deeper jungle but always moving west. By noon it became too hot to walk and when the trail led down toward the river again they paused to rest for a few minutes.

So far they hadn’t seen any sign of the child soldiers. They had dried food from the attacking team’s stores, but no one felt much like dehydrated beef Stroganoff or dried mac and cheese with “real” ground beef. Holliday let them light a small fire as long as the wood was tinderdry and smokeless, and Eddie went down to the river with his spear to try his luck again. Rafi slept, Holliday tended the fire and Peggy went looking for subjects to photograph.

“Not too far,” warned Holliday, “we may have to bail in a rush.”

“Yes, sir, boss.” Peggy grinned, with a mock salute.

A few minutes later Holliday heard his cousin’s familiar laugh and a little while after that she reappeared, the Nikon over her shoulder and something cupped in her hands. Holliday poked at the fire with a twig to keep it burning and stood up.

“What’ve you got there, kiddo?”

“It’s a baby!” Peggy chortled. As Holliday approached her she opened her cupped hands and showed him what she’d found.

“Oh, shit!” Holliday whispered.

“What is it?” Peggy said, startled by his reaction.

“Put it down!” The little creatures in her hand looked like a furry cross between guinea pigs and chipmunks.

“What do you mean?”

“They’re boar piglets and that means the mother’s around somewhere.”

“But-”

“Put them down! Now!” Peggy froze, Rafi woke up with a jerk and somewhere down the trail they heard a sound like a giant steam locomotive. An angry steam locomotive.

Rafi stood up, blinking away sleep. “What the hell?”

Suddenly the locomotive was making sounds like a hundred hammers striking stone and the sounds were getting closer. Eddie appeared, grinning proudly, a two-foot-long fish with a nose like an elephant held with three fingers of his left hand crammed into its gills, the spear that had impaled the scaleless creature in his right hand.

The sow came down the trail from behind them, screeching her steam-engine cry at the top of her lungs, her sharp hooves pounding the dirt, her head high. The beast was black with traces of bristled rust at the shoulders and from where Holliday was standing he could swear the small angry eyes were as red as a demon’s. Peggy stood frozen, eyes wide, staring at the furious mother of the infant piglets she held in her hands. It seemed incredible that the piglets and the massive mother were even of the same species.

The mother rushed headlong at Peggy, at least two hundred and fifty pounds of toothy, infuriated horror, the muscles in her back bunched and ready to head off any move her quarry could make.