Skeletons (33 page)

Reesa
flowered. Her flesh seemed bursting with human life, the ruddy glow as much from what lay within her as from the wind and the night cold. I could not imagine the world, the universe, without her in it.

When we came at last to the long volcanic plains of the central Siberian platform,
Reesa
stood beside me, holding my hand tight, and pointed north away from their plateau.

"That is where my people came from," she said. "It is said that the tribe was forced east until it ran out of land, and that half of it settled on the
Anadyrskoye
plateau, near the Bering Sea, and the other half crossed the straits."

I looked at her. "You mean into North America?"

She smiled. "Yes. In our tribe the story is that all of America came from our seed. The American Indians, down through the Central Americas to the south, the Mayans and Aztecs—all of them were once part of our lost tribe."

"That's a rather ambitious statement, don't you think?" I said.

Her face was serious. "It's true."

That night, the pains from the baby were upon her. I stayed awake, guarding, tending the fire, until the cramps passed. I then watched
Reesa
sleep in the dim firelight.

Off in the distance I heard the echoing bellow of an animal, sounding huge as the earth itself.

I almost awakened
Reesa
. But the sight of her peaceful sleep made me hesitate. I contented myself with feeling her belly for the kicking baby within and sat the rest of the night alone, with my rifle across my knees, listening to the sounds of roaring and wondering what on this or any earth could make such a thunderous sound.

The next day, as dawn lighted the world, my question was answered. In the near distance, out over the plain below our plateau, appeared the giant rumbling skeleton of a brontosaur. It threw its head back and wailed, moving on until it had found a shallow muddy puddle. Its long skeletal head bent to drink. Again it rose, dripping mud, and bellowed again.

"It's hungry,"
Reesa
said. We stood in the open, and I felt, in the presence of such massiveness, suddenly naked and defenseless.

Behind the brontosaur came another, and another, until a herd, led by two giants, was formed. Ponderously, they moved for the mud hole. The large ones sheltered the young ones as they bent to drink, their own mewling cries mingled with the booming roars of their elders.

We headed down into the shallow canyon away from them, leaving the cries behind.

We stumbled into an ancient bed. Around us on the canyon floor lay the churned craters of their burial ground. We came to the thrashed, risen walls of a pit nearly forty feet long and almost as deep.

"I don't want to see what came out of that," I said.

As we made our way to the canyon wall the air was split by the thunderous cry of a monstrous brute. It towered above us a full four stories. Rumbling by on two stout legs, its bony tail swished along the ground, its monstrously large jaw snapped open and shut. Two tiny clawed appendages that served for arms and hands opened and closed.

It whipped its head around, seeming to sniff the air, searching.

Around the bones was the ghostly outline of a tyrannosaurus, pale green
lizardlike
skin, yellow eyes.

We flattened ourselves against the canyon wall. The monster strode past, making a low noise in the back of its throat. It pawed at the air nervously, turning its head. It looked away, then back

In the shadows we held our breath.

The monster stepped forward, away from us, toward the mud hole where the brontosaurs drank.

Already some of the brontosaurs were scattering. They herded their young ones away with yelping cries. The tyrannosaurus hastened its gait. There was something horribly graceful about its movements. Its white bones looked like the parts in a monstrous eating machine, fitted together perfectly, bone sliding over bone in balletic motion.

The tyrannosaurus charged for the mud hole.

The brontosaurs lumbered away. One small specimen fell behind, crying piteously. The tyrannosaurus looked down at it, moved forward, growled thunderously, and pushed the brontosaur out of the way, stooping to drink.

The tyrannosaurus pulled muddy water into its jaws, spat it out in anger. Its amber eyes searched for a true water hole.

The small brontosaurus began to lumber away, its larger version waiting to herd it on.

The tyrannosaurus raised its head in fury. It ran fiercely through the mud hole and stopped to tower over the small brontosaur.

Screaming in rage, the tyrannosaurus swooped down with its mouth, took the brontosaur in its teeth, at the same time clawing at it with its tiny hands.

The brontosaurus, giving a piteous cry, dissolved into dust.

The tyrannosaurus clawed at empty air. It raised its head, tried to split the sky with its cry of rage. It angled its head down, charged after the herd of brontosaurs still trying to retreat. In a few moments it had caught those in the rear, clawing them fiendishly, whipping its head from side to side, biting and biting again.

One after another the brontosaurs dissolved to dust.

The tyrannosaurus's rage increased. It leaped into the midst of the herd, tore at one after another of the brontosaurs. Soon there was only one large beast left, shielding two younger brontosaurs behind its bulk.

Screaming in rage, the monster reared up, tore at all three in a single flashing moment, and watched, roaring, as they disappeared.

Against the rock wall I unslung my rifle, checked the clip.

The monster whipped its head around, looked straight at me. Our eyes locked.

The tyrannosaurus charged.

I aimed, shot, and missed. Enraged, the beast threw itself forward. I pushed
Reesa
behind me, aimed again. The monster was twenty yards away, closing fast, claws scissoring open.

I fired.

The monster's jaw opened wide, the bullet passing in, and in the midst of a ghostly roar it dropped to dust.

Around us came other sounds. More dinosaurs were drawn to the spectacle from the plains around us.

"We'd better get away from this," I said.

We circled the canyon wall, found a slope, and climbed. At the top we found ourselves on a large plateau that rolled gently downward to the east.

The canyon plain below us was alive with dinosaurs.

Four-legged beasts, herds of stegosaurus and a lone triceratops fought over a scrubby plant. Small skeletal things on two legs darted from bush to bush. In the middle distance another brontosaur herd ambled toward a far circle of blue promising water. There was a distant splash. A long, sinuous neck of bone rose from the water, looked left and right, and sank down again. Something that looked like a stunted crocodile fought with another low-slung beast, which reared up on its hind legs, turned, slashed at its foe with a ridged tail. In the far distance a huge beast, a monstrous version of a brontosaur, stood still, either unable or unwilling to move, its relatively tiny head swinging languidly from side to side.

There came a hissing sound behind us. I turned to see a man-sized beast, a smaller version of the tyrannosaurus, facing us, claw-like hands twitching.

I struggled to get the rifle up as the thing charged. But it was on me before I could react. I batted it aside with the stock of the rifle.

It slipped to the edge of the canyon, twisted in the air, unable to regain its balance, and went over.

At the bottom it flashed into a puff of dust.

"We'd better go," I said.

We headed away from the plain of dinosaurs, down the gentle slope of the plateau, and before long the monsters were left far behind.

That night
Reesa
was unable to sleep. As we trekked slowly northward it had grown colder. Our fires had grown bigger. This night we had little shelter. We were surrounded by plains of volcanic rock. At the horizon sat the outline of a village, unreachable till morning. I discovered a little cutout in a low shelf of rock and built our fire at its opening.

"Are you cold?" I asked
Reesa
.

She snuggled next to me, wrapped me in her blanket with her. Her face was outlined in firelight.

"Not now." She looked up for a moment at the full moon rising in the east, just free of the horizon.

I felt her shiver.

"It is said it will happen on a night of the full moon," she said.

I looked at her, thinking to tell her to stop her foolishness. But she turned to regard me, her face somber and sad, and I said nothing.

"The night I will die," she said.

I felt anger come into me. "Don't talk like that.”

“It's true," she said. "It will happen."

I poked at the fire with a stick, angrily.

"Was it the sight of those beasts today?" I said. "You've been so content these last weeks. We both know the world has changed. I just don't want to hear any more about . . . prophecies."

She put my hand on her stomach, rubbed gently where the baby was.

"Tell me about your other life,
Kral
Kishkin
," she said.

"What do you mean?"

"Tell me about your life as an assassin."

I stiffened beside her.

"I've never talked about that. That was another person, not me."

"Tell me," she said softly, looking into my eyes.

For the first time in weeks I thought of my life. How many times had I reinvented myself? How many names had I given myself?
Kral
Kishkin
and Peter Sun were only the latest.

I found myself talking, unmasking myself for the first time in my life for this woman who was my life. Suddenly I wanted her to know me, wanted to speak.

"I was born in Prey
Veng
, in Kampuchea, across the Mekong River from
Pnom
Penh," I said. I felt her gentle eyes on me, drawing the poison out of me. "I was named
Jayavaram
after a twelfth-century Angkor king,
Jayavaram
the Eighth, who built hospitals and rest houses throughout his kingdom.

"My father was a farmer, and he supported Lon
Nol
, but his younger brother who lived with us was a member of the Khmer Rouge. My father didn't know this. In 1975, when I was seven, I found my uncle meeting with his communist friends, and he swore me to secrecy.

"When the Khmer Rouge seized
Pnom
Penh two months later, my uncle turned my father in, along with my mother and two sisters. They were shot. This happened in front of me while my uncle put his arm around my shoulder. 'This one is ours,' he said. With those words I was spared.

"Most of my village was considered middle class. Whoever wasn't shot was sent to a rural farming community.

"For the next three years I watched everyone I knew die. Except my uncle.

"When I was ten, the Vietnamese invaded the country. I waited until they entered our community, and then I took the gun my uncle kept and tried to shoot him as he rose from his sleeping pallet. The Vietnamese stopped me, and dragged my uncle away.

"I told them my name was Ho
Vei
. They sent me to Hanoi, and then to Ho Chi Minh City, for study. When I returned to Kampuchea, I helped hunt down and execute members of the Khmer Rouge. All the while I made my way slowly toward the Thai border.

"When I was fifteen, I crossed into Thailand. My name was now
Mongkut
, after a Thai king and statesman who resisted colonialism in the nineteenth century. I told the Thais I had been kidnapped and brought into Cambodia as a child.

"I studied in Thailand for two years. Then I went to America. In America I told them my name was George, after Washington."

I smiled, and in the firelight she returned my smile.

“They didn't believe me. So I told them my name was Peter Sun, a name which I overheard two men talking about. I discovered later they had been talking about Peter Gunn, the television detective. But Peter Sun I became.

"I thought I had become a different person. I studied the works of Gandhi, and the Transcendentalists. For a while I lived in my own Walden, a cabin in the woods with a single bed outside of my university in New York.

“Then my uncle appeared. He had lived as a slave in Vietnam for seven years. He, too, had escaped, following my route into Thailand as a refugee. He now called himself Carl Wong. He had told the Americans that he was Chinese, fleeing the communists, and had been let in.

"He was poor, and had no place to stay. He looked haunted and old. I gave him my bed.

"We lived like this for a year. He did odd jobs in the nearby town. I studied and went to school.

"At night he told me stories of what he had been through, how the Vietnamese had tortured him. He said he hated the communists now. He wept when he thought of what he had done to my parents, his family. Sometimes he would prostrate himself on the floor and beg for my forgiveness. All of this I listened to in silence.