Jane (45 page)

The instant McKenzie took aim at his fleeing native captives, Tarzan, with a lion’s bloodthirsty roar, took flight and leaped down upon the man’s back. Conrath stared open-mouthed as a naked wild man fell out of the knotted roots onto his top soldier.

The rifle flew from McKenzie’s hands. They punched and kicked and gouged till McKenzie reached down, retrieved his gun, and began crazily swinging the rifle butt at Tarzan’s head. Tarzan—nimble on his feet—evaded it, looking for a way to bring the man down again and disarm him once and for all. But he couldn’t see what I could from my vantage point: Ral Conrath waiting for a clear shot of this brute. The target … that broad muscular back.

“Tarzan!” I shouted in alarm. His head snapped up, but his turn to find me left him open to a perfect shot to his chest.
I have to do something!
I leaped onto a thick root and, with a savage cry, swooped down. Conrath never saw me coming, only felt a bare foot kick the gun from his hand and the force of the body that followed, knocking him to the ground. He rolled deftly and came to his feet to confront his attacker.

There I stood, bare breasted and back from the dead! My knees were bent, arms held wide like a wrestler’s.

“Surprise,” I said, brandishing a blade as long as my forearm.

He was gaping at me. “Son of a bitch…”

I lunged at him with the Bowie and opened the skin of his hand. He yelped.

“That’s for my mother. Think twice about speaking rudely of her again.”

He couldn’t help leering at my nakedness but was clearly enraged to be trapped like this by a female. And of course he was shocked. I could see him struggling for his usual witty nonchalance.

“Aw, baby,” he finally said, “you gonna make me have to kill you?”

“Again? You’d best do a better job of it this time, Mr. Conrath.”

His eyes darted behind me. From the grunts and shrieks I heard, Tarzan was brawling with several more mercenaries.

“Who’s the Romeo?” Conrath sniped. “That the ‘ape-man’ D’Arnot thought he saw in the trees?” My expression told him he’d hit his mark, so he added, “The one I’m taking back to the Ringling Brothers’ freak show?”

Conrath darted quick as a viper and caught me off guard. The knife flew from my hand.

My weapon is gone,
I thought.
But so is his.
With that I sprang at him. We fell, grappling, to the floor.
He is strong, but not so strong as my wrestling teacher,
I thought. My muscles, from the hours of playful combat with Jai, felt powerful and sinuous, even against this hard, dexterous male body. I was edging our scuffle closer and closer to the Bowie. I could hear Conrath’s ugly grunts and profanity, furious to find a woman his worthy opponent.

The knife was in reach if I could just free my hand. I darted for it, but he used the moment to flip me onto my back. One of my legs twisted around one of his, and with that we began to roll, over and over on the stone floor.

I caught desperate glimpses of Tarzan—three more attackers had joined McKenzie. He’d struck them repeatedly with hard bare-handed blows. They’d fall but get up and charge him again and again.

For a brief moment I was on my hands and knees, steady, while Ral was searching for my dropped blade. I chanced a glimpse at the altar and saw one of Tarzan’s attackers suddenly drop, his skull spurting blood. There was Chief Waziri standing with a rifle barrel in his hand, swinging the heavy wooden handle like a club at the head of a second brawler. This man ducked and the blow missed. He charged at Tarzan’s middle. Lifting him bodily by the waist, Tarzan sent him crashing to the floor.

Tarzan had lost sight of me and was scanning the chamber with frantic eyes. He found me. Then leaving the others to battle Chief Waziri, Tarzan leaped upon the downed pillar and began to climb its diagonal length in my direction.

All at once a sudden and thunderous convulsion rocked the chamber. Sumbula had awakened!

The shaking earth split Conrath and me apart—he on a ledge below, me scrambling for his pistol on a new-made “rock cliff” above him. I watched in horror as the massive column Tarzan was climbing snapped in two, throwing him down on his back. The stone behemoth was inches from crushing his head! He rolled sideways, saving himself, but the rumbling went on. This quake was far stronger and harder than any we’d felt before.

With an ear-splitting
crack!
and a blast of searing heat, the floor opened up beneath Tarzan. He was now balanced over a widening rift in the ground, and it was upwelling with molten lava. I saw his hair beginning to burn! Springing swiftly to his hands and knees, he vaulted over the crack in the earth.

He was trying to reach me!

Keeping one eye on him, I raced for the skittering knife, all the while knocked about by the unending tremors that seemed to be growing more violent.

I watched Tarzan dart for the nearest intact pillar and begin scaling its height toward the shaking tangle of brown roots above. It was moving under him.
Everything
was moving, and the bubbling red gash was widening with every passing moment.
Were the sharp splintering cracks I was hearing the stone walls and columns beginning to crumble?

I crawled to the lip of the new-made “cliff” and looked down. A mistake. Ral Conrath stood wobbling on two feet, the pistol gripped in the hand of his outstretched arm, waiting for me. He fired point-blank! But the stone floor jerked under him and the shot missed. I was knocked back hard against the wall.

“Jane!” Tarzan shouted above the calamitous roar.

I caught sight of him in the trembling roots above, clinging to a thick vine. “Jane! Bowie!”

Bowie? What did he want me to do with it?

It was then I saw that the chamber itself was splitting in two, a glowing orange river of lava rising over its banks and covering the floor. With a piercing metallic shriek, one of the immense gold deities toppled slowly forward, crashing into the viscous red river, and began melting at once.

“Bowie!” Tarzan barked in a commanding voice, and suddenly I knew his mind. I struggled to my feet and raised the knife high over my head. He leaped from his foothold in the roots, swung toward me in a wide arc, and snatched the blade from my upthrust hand. Then he disappeared onto the ledge below. Thrown to my belly, I watched as the falling blow of Tarzan’s body knocked the pistol from Ral Conrath’s hand. I thrilled as the Bowie sliced into the back of his knee, instantly severing muscles and tendons that held the leg together. Conrath’s strangled cry was cut short when Tarzan lifted him overhead and heaved him like a rag toy far out into the middle of the chamber’s floor, now a dozen feet below us.

Tarzan battled the ever-moving ledges that could, in an instant, have ground him to gory pulp, and climbed up to my side.

“We must go,” he said, urging me to follow.

But if we’d thought that all hell had already broken loose, we had sorely underestimated the fury of Sumbula.

One by one, the giant pillars began to fall, dragging down from above the gargantuan trees whose roots twisted and entrapped them.

“Climb!” Tarzan shouted.

Climb we did, up and over a roiling mass of rocks and earth, roots and treetops. Ulu and the tribesmen were nowhere to be seen, but now I could see Chief Waziri bravely meeting his fate, back against the wall, a shower of coins falling down around his head.

Below us, Ral Conrath, hamstrung by Tarzan’s blade, dragged himself toward the great double doors. He caught sight of us, struggling upward amid the torrent of stones, then looked behind him at the wide river of lava now streaming together with the fallen deity’s melted gold and gaining on him fast.

I had to marvel, for even at the last, Conrath’s arrogance prevailed. “You’re comin’ with me, Janie!” he blustered. “You and your goddamn ape-man! To hell!”

“You’re on your own!” I shouted down at him. “I don’t believe in hell!”

Then the molten soup enveloped his legs and he shrieked, mouth open wide. But the sound was lost in the din of collapse. As daylight shone above us, I turned for one final glimpse of our enemy … now a hideous writhing statue of gold amid a forest of toppling root-bound columns.

Tarzan was pulling me up and away through the mountainous avalanche. The ground had never stopped shaking, and as we reached the surface I was stunned by the sight of the nearest Sumbula foothill crumbling before my eyes—not as a mound of tree-covered earth and rock but in blocks of cut stone.

A pyramid.

“Hurry!” Tarzan called, but as I made to haul myself out into the dust-and-orange-smoke-clogged air, I felt my ankle catch in a mass of tangled roots. They were dragging me down as they fell into the sink of the great chamber.

“Help me!”

Tarzan was there in an instant, hanging down from above into the pit, slashing with the Bowie at the tough, fibrous roots that trapped my leg.

“Please,” I whispered, watching in horror as a massive slide of pyramid blocks came crashing toward us, tumbling heavily end over end.

Suddenly I was free, aboveground, and we were running for our lives, running amid a course of ghastly obstacles.

“On!” Tarzan shouted and gave me his back.

With me clinging like a barnacle, he hurtled across the deadly gauntlet, the ground alive with convulsions. Myriad vents erupted with scalding steam. Trees toppled, their crowns afire. Jagged crevices ripped apart, glowing red from the center of the earth. And heated stones, great and small, rained down around our heads.

The shaking ceased abruptly. The sound of all living things, normally loud to my ears, had fallen into shocked silence. All that could be heard was the hissing of steam and the crackling of treetops burning. Lava that moved on the surface in sluggish streams shared the scorched earth with pots of boiling mud.

Tarzan set me on the ground, and we surveyed what remained of the range. Rivers of molten rock flowed down the slopes of the high peak, its “trees that touch the sky” afire. The three foothills—all exposed as pyramids—lay in collapsed heaps.

Looking west, we surveyed what was left of Eden. The mountain had given us so many clues and warnings—the steam vents and the basalt makeup of the Enduro Escarpment. The many earthquakes. But never could I have dreamed of what catastrophe Sumbula might unleash.

*   *   *

A great swath of the majestic forest at the foot of the range had been inundated by the river of molten lava. It took only a few days for it to cool substantially and a thick crust to form—it was a brittle black mass of volcanic rock, a mile wide and in places twenty feet deep. Our paradise was a wasteland. There was nothing left of “the trees that touched the sky” on the mountain itself, and all that protruded from the hideous layer of black rock was a graveyard of charred, leafless skeletons.

The Enduro Escarpment—that bogus gold mine of paleoanthropology—proved valuable after all. Its great height had deflected the flow of lava and spared the Waziri village. It was intact, though many huts had crumbled in the shaking, and the forest to the south was largely untouched.

In strained silence, Tarzan and I hurriedly traveled west. Everywhere we went we found terrible devastation. Countless birds lying dead on the ground with their plumage brilliantly intact. Within a circle of fire-ravaged trees were the charred remains of an entire herd of elephants.

The Great Bower had been obliterated by the eruption. A few of the Mangani—the very old and the very young—had perished in the fiery inundation. We searched the forest and located the survivors. It was a strange and joyful reunion. When the shaking had started and the forest to the east had begun to burn, Jai had instinctively and courageously led the tribe south. While shocked by the unnameable catastrophe, they were now calmly grieving their dead and busily rebuilding their new home bower.

When we returned to the Waziri, we found them also mourning their dead and rebuilding their village. For the help we had given them (though I was racked by guilt that all I had done was bring them ravagement in the form of Ral Conrath), they gifted us with as many gold pendants as we could carry and a length of the pretty woven cloth that the women wore. We retrieved Kerchak’s bones and the journal from the top of the escarpment and, with heavy hearts at the loss of so much of our paradise, began the journey home.

To the North

It began to rain. Nothing had prepared me for the incessant deluge. The roaring
rat-tat-tat
on thousands of broad leaves was enough to drive a person mad. By and large we traveled in silence, deeply sobered by the inconsequential nature of man and beast in the face of unimaginable forces of the earth. I met all obstacles with the stoicism I had learned from Tarzan. Thoughts of the mysterious labyrinth, “New Egypt,” and the lost city of Opar lying somewhere in the wilds of Africa consumed me nearly as completely as did the Mangani. Their mysterious existence. Their evolution and survival against all odds. The complicated ethics of revealing them to or concealing them from the world.

Tarzan and I did speak at night, curled up together in the dark in whatever hollow tree or jerry-rigged nest we could quickly fashion. He had endless questions about the maze and everything we’d seen within it, though I was at a loss to explain any of it. That it existed at all was a wonder to me. Its technology—“high antechquity,” I called it—was as enigmatic to me as it was to him.