The Fifth Harmonic (16 page)

“They were prized for their tail feathers. No self-respecting
Mesoamerican priest would be seen without a ceremonial headdress ablaze with quetzal feathers.”

I was staring, captivated by the colors, when something hissed and rustled in the willow branches directly overhead. I shrank to my right and looked up, expecting a snake. I had a nightmare flash of a giant anaconda uncoiling from a branch and wrapping me up in a fatal stranglehold. Instead I saw a five-foot ring-tail iguana sticking out its tongue at me.

Maya laughed. “Do not worry. He does not eat people.”

I stuck out my own tongue at the lizard as we passed. And then I caught a whiff of a sharp odor. I turned my head this way and that, sniffing the air.

“You look like a bloodhound,” Maya said.

“What's that smell?”

“You don't recognize it?”

I sniffed again, detecting a sulfurous component. “No.”

“It is fire and brimstone.”

“Does that mean we're headed for hell?”

“It means we are nearing the place of the fire tines.”

“Why does that not make me impatient to move on?”

She dipped her paddle and began stroking the water. “Now you may paddle.”

The current slowed further as the stream widened again. No villages along this stretch. The sulfurous odor thickened in the air. We came to a curve, and as we followed that to the right, it opened into a wide lake, tranquil and blue, like an aquamarine embedded in a lawn. Low over the serene surface, a sulfurous haze undulated like a muslin shroud. And beyond the verdant rim of jungle towered a ring of black cinder cones.

A volcanic lake, either a water-filled crater or a basin between the cones. More likely the latter since the water was cool to the touch. I gawked, utterly taken with the beauty of the scene.

“Oh, damn,” I heard Maya say behind me.

It was the first time I'd heard her curse. The word seemed almost obscene in this ethereal setting. I turned and looked at her.

“What's wrong? All we need are some monks and a city and we'll have Shangri-La.”

“The lava is flowing,” she said, pointing.

I followed her pointing finger to a plume of smoke and steam rising from the far shore, feeding the haze.

“Is that bad?”

“It can be.” She pointed again. “There, to the left. We will land the boat there.”

She was pointing to a break in the trees and what looked like a beach about two hundred yards this side of the steam plume. I bent my back to the task. No current here to help, and no more shade. I was panting and drenched with sweat by the time we made the shore.

The dugout nosed against the black pock-marked volcanic rock that sloped into the water. I jumped out and pulled the weighty bow as far up as I could.

At least it was shady here.

Maya brought the cooler to shore where we sat on the rocks and finished the rice and beans left over from dinner. I noticed that I was having a little more trouble swallowing the solids than last night. I didn't even bother trying a tortilla.

“You are having difficulty?”

I looked up and found Maya staring at me.

“It's okay.”

“It is
not
‘okay.’ Tell me the truth: Are you having difficulty swallowing?”

“Yes,” I said, meeting her gaze. “But only a little.”

“But it is too soon for that. You told me you had more time.”

“I thought I did. But Captain Carcinoma has other plans, it seems. The tumor is more aggressive than we first thought.”

Maya leaped to her feet and began pacing the lava.

“This bad! This is very bad!”

Was that real anguish in her voice?

“It doesn't really change things.”

“Yes it does! Of course it does! You still have three more tines to claim. You will need all your strength to succeed. If you cannot eat . . .”

“I'll be all right,” I told her. “I'll be fine.”

With swift, almost jerky movements, she began packing up the food and closing the cooler.

“We have no time to waste.”

She pulled a pair of long pants from her duffel and slipped them over her shorts. Then she produced the two pairs of gloves from yesterday and two machetes. She handed me a set of each, plus the flashlight.

“Follow me,” she said, and we started into the brush.

I'd thought it was stifling before, but now we were way beyond that. We were following some sort of animal trail, using our machetes only when we had to, which thankfully wasn't all that often, winding our way through the thick greenery toward one of the black cinder cones. The air grew hotter and more sulfurous with every step.

We'd entered the borderlands of hell, where even the palmettos seemed to be melting. The trail had petered out a ways back—whatever animals used it were apparently smarter than humans and didn't come this far—but we didn't need it anymore, because as the ground became rockier and less hospitable, the trees and underbrush were petering out as well.

Finally we passed our last stunted palm and with only scrub grass to cushion our way we approached the scarred black flank of the cinder cone. Somewhere past the line where the grass browned out and died, we stopped at the bank of another kind of river: an obsidian channel of hardened lava.

This old lava had flowed and swirled around more permanent rocks that had been here first—granite, I thought—leaving them sitting like islands in the stream. The jutting stones among the lava gyres looked like a Zen rock garden done entirely in ebony.

“Didn't you tell me the lava was flowing?” I said, staring down at the rippled rock.

As if in answer, a jet of steam hissed through a finger-thick hole in the crust, about thirty feet to our right.

“It is flowing,” Maya said. “Just below the crust, oozing from the heart of the cone to the lake shore. It has been quiet for many months. But now . . . that temblor last night must have disturbed it.”

“How does that affect my getting to this fire tine?”

She pointed across the solidified flow. “They are over there.”

Another steam jet let loose with a whistle.

“You're telling me I have to walk on a crust of old lava over a stream of red hot lava . . . just to get a tine?”

“Yes. The fire tines are on the far side, inside that crevasse in the wall over there. The best way to get across is to go from rock to rock, stepping on the crust as little as possible.”

“Because it's so hot?”

Maya was staring straight ahead. “Because the crust could crack and collapse.”

“You've got to be kidding, Maya. I'd have to be crazy to set foot out there.”

She kept staring straight ahead. “Not crazy if it will help save your life.”

Suddenly I wanted to shout at her that I had no proof that it would do one damn thing for me. All I had was new-age mumbo jumbo and her assurances. Not enough—not
nearly
enough!

But I said nothing. Instead I placed my gloved hand against my pocket and felt the shape of the earth tine through the fabric. I hadn't thought I'd be able to bring that one back, but I'd done it.

I studied the glistening black expanse, gauging the distance. Not much more than thirty feet across—forty, tops—to the narrow rocky ledge on the far side. Not far. And I wouldn't have to stay on the crust the whole distance—I could dash from rock to rock as Maya had suggested, making quick, short sprints that would keep my time on the
crust to a minimum. But the zigzag course would take me longer, and I wanted to get this over with.

“Do I have to crawl through any tunnels this time?”

“No. The geode is embedded in the volcanic rock.”

I knew if I was going to go at all, I had to go now.

“Here,” I said, handing Maya the machete.

“What—?” she began, but before she could complete the question I was on my way.

I felt a sudden giddy recklessness perking through me. I had no idea where it came from, but a drunken stadium crowd that had seen too many Nike commercials was streaming into my head chanting
Do it! Do it! Do it!
and I saw myself scampering across the crust like a bead of water on a hot griddle.

I stepped off the edge with one foot and tested the crust with half my weight. It held, but God, it was hot here. One hell of a fire was heating this pan.

“Be careful,” Maya said.

Slowly I increased the weight on the first foot, then brought the second down. A deep rumble reverberated through the crust and a mild tremor began to vibrate through the soles of my hiking boots. I was turning to make a quick retreat when the noise and the tremor stopped. I paused, waiting for more, but the crust remained silent. The noise reminded me of skating a frozen lake on a still morning, the eerie basso cracking noises deep in the ice that follow you as you glide along the surface.

But if you fell through ice, you had a chance of survival. No such chance here.

The memory of skating gave me an idea, though.

“Remember,” Maya called from the shore behind me, “go from rock to rock.”

Uh-uh. I was going straight across. And I had to get moving before my rubber soles melted.

I began sliding my feet, one after the other, across the crust. I had no delusions that I could glide across that pocked and rippled surface; the idea was to minimize the impact of my feet as I maneuvered my weight toward the far side.

It wasn't pretty but it worked like the proverbial charm—I was
even considering patenting it as the Burleigh Lava-Crust Shuffle— until somewhere around the halfway point. I'd slid my right foot forward and was shifting my weight onto it when my boot sank with a soft
crunch
. I lurched to my left and snatched my foot free as a jet of steam and smoke, hotter than I'd have thought possible, hissed angrily into the air.

I heard Maya cry out in alarm. A series of booming
crack
s below the surface terrified me and I forgot about the Burleigh Shuffle. With my heart pounding in my throat, I scampered the rest of the way across like a frightened mouse with a hungry cat snapping at its tail.

I reached the far edge and leaped onto the rocky ledge. I crouched there, panting with relief. The surface was hot, but cool compared to the lava crust. To my left I could see the dark slit of the crevasse Maya had mentioned.

I looked back and saw her watching me from the other side, her hands over her mouth.

I straightened and gave her a jaunty wave, as if I did this every day.

“Made it!”

She lowered her hands and I saw her anxious frown. She pointed to the steaming spot were my foot had broken through. I looked closer and saw thick sludge, glowing a dull red, bubbling though the hole and oozing down the slope of the crust. As I watched I saw more pieces of crust breaking away, enlarging the hole, increasing the flow.

“Hurry!” Maya called. “The crust is beginning to break up!”

The old hindbrain was banging on my skull and shouting,
Screw the tine and get your irresponsible ass back to the other side!
But I was already across. If I could get my hands on a tine quickly, I was sure I could find a way back.

“Don't go away,” I shouted—merrily, I hoped—then turned and ducked into the crevasse.

Sulfurous darkness, even hotter than outside on the crust, enveloped me as I rounded the first bend. The air burned my eyes, but at least the passage was high enough to allow me to walk upright. And I didn't have to worry about running into any dangerous creatures in this inhospitable cauldron.

I pulled out the flashlight and played the beam against the obsidian walls. They weren't smooth like the exterior surfaces. These were grooved and chipped. Hundreds of tools had been hard at work here long ago. I was stalking through a man-made passage. But what men had made it? And when? I passed crude carvings of big-breasted, fatbellied women, obvious fertility symbols. The All-Mother?

But where were the tines? Maya had said they were right inside, embedded in the wall. Why didn't I—?

I cringed as pale red light flashed at me from directly ahead. My first fear was that lava had broken through the wall, and then I saw the geode—huge, even larger than the deposit with earth tines in the sand tunnel, but this one was exploding with pink crystals. And nestled in its heart, four tines of crimson-hued metal.

I stepped closer, momentarily taken by the glittering rosy fire. I allowed myself only a few heartbeats of wonder before reaching into its radiant heart and uprooting a tine.

I hurried back toward the light and stepped through the opening of the crevasse with my hand held high. But my cry of triumph never made it to my lips—Maya's stricken, agonized expression slowed it, and one look at the lava bed killed it.

A glowing, growing viscous river of liquid fire separated us.

Terror locked a fist around my throat as I realized what had happened. The little opening I'd punched through with my foot must have acted like a hole in a dike. The leaking lava had surged up, causing longer and deeper cracks, carrying away larger and larger chunks, until a whole downstream section of the crust had dissolved.

But I still had a chance. The crust upstream from my foot fault still held. But who knew for how long?

“Hurry!” Maya cried, telling me what I'd already guessed. “The whole bed is breaking up!”

If that happened, I'd be stuck on this ledge until the flow dried up and the lava cooled enough to form another crust that would bear my weight. That might be tomorrow, or it might be next month.

I shoved the new tine and the flashlight into my pockets as I moved upstream to my right. The ledge allowed me a scant fifteen feet before it merged with the mountain wall.

I stepped onto the crust and used the Burleigh Shuffle to glide
the two yards to the nearest rock. As I leaned on the waist-high granite island to lessen my weight on the crust, I blessed Maya for bringing gloves.

The next rock was larger, lower, flatter, and fully a dozen feet away. I pushed off and shuffled toward it. Half way there I heard a
crack
like a rifle shot and felt the crust shift beneath me. Jettisoning caution I took two frantic leaping strides that would have put a Jesus Christ lizard to shame and landed on the next rock with both feet. As I teetered there, windmilling my arms for balance, a hair-singeing, eyeball-searing blast of heat swirled around me like a firestorm. I threw my arms across my face and bit back a cry of pain as the inferno seared the flesh of my forearms.