The Codex (38 page)

“What do we do now?” Tom asked, standing in the middle of the dirt plaza and looking around.

“Wait,” said Borabay.

A toothless old woman soon emerged from one of the huts, bent double from age, leaning on a stick; her short white hair made her look like a witch. She made her way toward them with excruciating slowness, her beady eyes never leaving their faces, sucking on her lips and muttering to herself. She finally arrived in front of Tom and peered up at him.

Borabay said quietly, “Do nothing.”

She raised a withered hand and gave Tom a blow across the knees, then whacked him across the thighs, once, twice, three times—surprisingly painful blows for an old lady—all the while muttering to herself. She then raised her stick and struck him across the shins and again on the buttocks. She dropped the stick and reached up and groped him obscenely between his legs. Tom swallowed and tried not to flinch as she made a thorough check of his masculinity. Then she reached up toward Tom’s head, making a motion with her fingers. Tom bent slightly, and she grabbed his hair and gave such a yank that tears sprang to his eyes.

She stepped back, the inspection apparently complete. She gave him a toothless smile and spoke at length.

Borabay translated. “She say contrary to appearance you are definitely a man. She invite you and your brothers stay in village as guest of the Tara people. She accept your help for fight against bad men in White City. She say now you in charge.”

“Who is she?” Tom glanced at her. She was peering up and down, examining him from head to toe.

“She is wife of Cah. Look out, Tom, she like you. Maybe she come to your hut tonight.”

It broke the tension, and they all laughed, Philip most of all.

“What am I in charge of?” Tom asked.

Borabay looked at him. “You now war chief.”

Tom was stunned. “How can that be? I’ve been here ten minutes.”

“She say Tara warriors fail in attack against white man and many killed. You white man, too, maybe you understand enemy better. Tomorrow, you lead fight against bad men.”

“Tomorrow?” Tom said. “Thanks, really, but I decline the responsibility.”

“You not have choice,” said Borabay. “She say if you do not, Tara warriors kill us all.”

That night the villagers lit a bonfire, and a party of sorts got under way, starting with a multicourse feast, which arrived on leaves, culminating in a tapir roasted in a pit. The men danced and then gave a hauntingly strange orchestral performance on flutes, led by Borabay. Everyone went to bed late. Borabay roused them a few hours later. It was still dark.

“We go now. You speak to people.”

Tom stared at him. “I have to give a speech?”

“I help you.”

“This I’ve got to see,” said Philip.

The bonfire had been heaped with fresh logs, and Tom could see that the whole village was standing, silently and respectfully, waiting for his speech.

Borabay whispered, “Tom, you tell me to get ten best warriors for fight.”

“Fight? What fight?”

“We fight Hauser.”

“We can’t—”

“Be quiet and do what I say,” Borabay hissed.

Tom gave the order, and Borabay then went through the crowd, clapping his hands, slapping the shoulders of various men, and in five minutes had ten warriors lined up with them, decked out in feathers, paint, and necklaces, each with a bow and quiver.

“Now you give speech.”

“What should I say?”

“Talk big. How you going to rescue Father, kill bad mans. Don’t worry, whatever you say, I fix up good.”

“Don’t forget to promise a chicken in every pot,” said Philip.

Tom stepped forward and looked around at all the faces. The hubbub of talk died quickly. Now they were looking at him with hope. A shiver of fear ran through him. He had no idea what he was doing.

“Er, ladies and gentlemen?”

Borabay flashed him a disapproving look and then, in a martial voice, cried out something that sounded a lot more effective than the feeble opening he had managed. There was a rustling as everyone came to attention. Tom had a sudden feeling of déjà vu—he remembered Don Alfonso’s speech to his people when they left Pito Solo. He had to give a speech like that, even if it was all lies and empty promises.

He took a deep breath. “My friends! We have come to the Tara lands from a distant place called America!”

At the word America, even before Borabay could translate, there was a rustle of excitement.

“We have come many thousands of miles, by plane, by dugout, and on foot. For forty days and nights we have traveled.”

Borabay declaimed this. Tom could see he now had their undivided attention.

“A great evil has befallen the Tara people. A barbarian named Hauser has come from the other side of the world with mercenary soldiers to kill the Tara people and rob their tombs. They have kidnapped your head priest and killed your warriors. As I speak, they are in the White City, defiling it with their presence.”

Borabay translated, and there was a loud murmur of agreement.

“We are here, the four sons of Maxwell Broadbent, to rid the Tara people of this man. We have come to save our own father, Maxwell Broadbent, from the darkness of his tomb.”

He paused for Borabay’s translation. Five hundred faces, lit by the firelight, gazed at him with rapt attention.

“My brother here, Borabay, will lead us up to the mountains, where we will observe the bad men and make plans for an attack. Tomorrow, we will fight.”

At this there was an eruption of an odd sound like rapid grunting or laughing—the Tara equivalent, it seemed, of cheering and clapping. Tom could feel his monkey, Hairy Bugger, scrunching himself down into the bottom of his pocket, trying to hide.

Borabay then spoke to Tom, sotto voce. “Ask them to pray and make offering.”

Tom cleared his throat. “The Tara people, all of you, have a very important role to play in the coming struggle. I ask you to pray for us. I ask you to make offerings for us. I ask you to do this every day until we return victorious.”

Borabay’s voice rang out with these declarations, and it had an electric effect. People surged forward, murmuring in excitement. Tom felt a kind of hopeless absurdity wash over him; these people believed in him far more than he believed in himself.

A cracked voice rang out, and the people instantly fell back, leaving the old woman, Cah’s wife, standing alone, leaning on her stick. She looked up and fixed her eye on Tom. There was a long silence, and then she raised her stick, drew it back, and gave him a tremendous blow across the thighs. Tom tried not to flinch or grimace.

Then the old woman cried out something in a wizened voice.

“What’d she say?”

Borabay turned. “I do not know how to translate. She speak a strong Tara expression. It mean something like: You kill or you die.”

57

Professor Julian Clyve propped up his feet and creaked back in his old chair with his hands behind his head. It was a blustery May day, the wind twisting and torturing the leaves of the sycamore tree outside his window. Sally had been gone now for over a month. There had been no word. He hadn’t expected to hear anything, but Clyve still found the long silence perturbing. When Sally left, they both expected the Codex would usher in one more academic triumph in Professor Clyve’s life. But after thinking about it for a week or two, Clyve had changed his mind. Here he was a Rhodes scholar, a full professorship at Yale, with a string of prizes, academic honors, and publications that most professors didn’t accumulate in a lifetime. The fact was, he hardly needed another academic honor. What he needed—let’s face it—was money. The values of American society were all wrong. The real prize—financial wealth—did not come to those who deserved it most, to the intellectual movers and shakers: the brain trust that controlled, directed, and disciplined the great stupid lumbering beast that was the vulgus mobile. Who did make the money? Sports figures, rock stars, actors, and CEOs. Here he was, at the top of his profession, earning less than the average plumber. It was galling. It was unfair.

Wherever he went, people sought him out, crushed his hand, praised him, admired him. All the wealthy people of New Haven wanted to know him, to have him to dinner, to collect him and show him off as evidence of their good taste, as if he were an Old Master painting or piece of antique silver. Not only was it disgusting, but it was humiliating and expensive. Almost everyone he knew had more money than he did. No matter what honors he gained, no matter what prizes he won or monographs he published, he still wasn’t able to pick up the tab at a reasonably good restaurant in New Haven. Instead they picked up the tab. They had him to their houses. They invited him to the black-tie charity dinners and paid for the table, brushing off his insincere offers of reimbursement. And when it was all over he had to slink back to his two-bedroom, revoltingly bourgeois split-level in the academic ghetto, while they went home to their mansions in the Heights.

Now, finally, he had the means to do something about it. He glanced at the calendar. It was the thirty-first of May. Tomorrow the first installment of the two million from the giant Swiss drug company, Hartz, was to arrive. The coded e-mail confirmation should be coming from the Cayman Islands soon. He would have to spend the money outside the United States, of course. A snug villa on the Costiera Amalfitana would be a nice place to park it; a million for the villa and the second million for expenses. Ravello was supposed to be nice. He and Sally could take their honeymoon there.

He thought back to his meeting with the CEO and the Hartz board, so very serious, so very Swiss. They were skeptical, of course, but when they saw the page Julian had already translated, their old gray mouths were almost watering. The Codex would bring them many billions. Most drug companies had research departments that evaluated indigenous medicines—but here was the ultimate medical cookbook, all nicely packaged, and Julian was about the only person in the world, apart from Sally, who could translate it accurately. Hartz would have to strike a deal with the Broadbents over it, but as the largest pharmaceutical company in the world it was in the best position to pay. And without his translation skills, what use would the Codex be to the Broadbents anyway? Everything would be done correctly: The company had of course insisted on it. The Swiss were like that.

He wondered how Sally would react when she learned that the Codex was going to disappear into the maw of some giant multinational corporation. Knowing her, she would not take it well. But once they started enjoying the two million dollars Hartz had agreed to pay him as a finder’s fee—not to mention the generous remuneration he expected to receive for doing the translation—she’d get over it. And he would show her that this was the right thing to do, that Hartz was in the best position to develop these new drugs and bring them to market. It was the right thing to do. It took money to develop new drugs. Nobody was going to do it for free. Profit made the world go round.

As for himself, poverty had been fine for a few years while he was young and idealistic, but it would become unendurable over thirty. And Professor Julian Clyve was fast approaching thirty.

58

After ten hours of hiking into the mountains, Tom and his brothers topped a bare, windswept ridge. A stupendous view of mountains greeted their eyes, a violent sea of peaks and valleys, layered toward the horizon in deepening shades of purple.

Borabay pointed. “Sukia Tara, the White City,” he said.

Tom squinted in the bright afternoon sun. About five miles away, across a chasm, rose two pinnacles of white rock. Nestled between them was a flat, isolated saddle of land, cut off on both sides by chasms and surrounded by jagged peaks. It was a lone patch of green, a lush piece of cloudforest that looked as if it had broken off from somewhere else to lodge between the two fangs of white rock, teetering on the brink of a precipice. Tom had imagined it would be a ruin with white towers and walls. Instead, he could see nothing but a thick, lumpy carpet of trees.

Vernon raised his binoculars, examined the White City, and passed them to Tom.

The green promontory leapt into magnification. Tom scanned it, slowly. The plateau was heavily covered in trees and what appeared to be impenetrable mats of vines and creepers. Whatever ruined city lay in that strange hanging valley was well covered by jungle. But as Tom scrutinized it, here and there, rising from the verdure, he could make out whitish outcrops that began to take on faint patterns: a corner, a broken stretch of wall, a dark square that looked like a window. And as he looked further at what he thought was a steep hill, he realized it was a ruined pyramid, heavily overgrown. One side of it had been gashed open, a white wound in the living green.

The mesa the city had been constructed on was, truly, an island in the sky. It hung between the two peaks, separated from the rest of the Sierra Azul by sheer cliffs. It looked cut off until he saw a thread of yellow curving across one of the chasms—a crude suspension bridge. As he examined it further he saw that the bridge was well guarded by soldiers who were using a ruined stone fortress evidently built by the original inhabitants to protect the White City. Hauser and his men had cut down a large swath of forest at the foot of the bridge to give themselves a clear field of fire.