The Codex (41 page)

The rasping breaths began to subside.

“You’re okay.” Tom tried to make it a statement. “It’s all right. It’s over. You’re safe.”

There was another gust of wind, and the bridge shook. A sound, a gurgle, came from Philip, and his whole body tightened on the cable.

A minute passed. A very long minute.

“We’ve got to keep moving,” Tom said. “You’ve got to stand up.”

There was another gust, and the bridge danced and shimmied.

“I can’t.”

Tom understood what he meant. He himself had a powerful urge to wrap himself around the main cable and stay there forever.

The mists were thinning. More gusts came from below, very strong ones this time, and the bridge swayed. It wasn’t a regular motion but a sway with a twist at the end, a snap, as it were, that each time threatened to twitch them off into the gloom below.

The shaking subsided.

“Stand up, Philip.”

“No.”

“You’ve got to. Now.” Time was the one thing they didn’t have. The mists had cleared. The klieg light was shining brightly. All the soldiers had to do was turn and look. He extended his hand. “Grab my hand and I’ll lift you up.”

Philip raised a shaking hand, and Tom grasped it and slowly pulled his brother up. The bridge swayed, and Philip clutched at the vertical cords. There was another series of gusts, and the bridge began to shudder and sway in that awful way again. Philip moaned in terror. Tom himself held on for dear life, his body thrown from side to side. Five minutes went by while the bridge shuddered, the longest five minutes of his life. He could feel his arms aching from the effort. Finally the shaking subsided.

“Let s go.”

Philip moved one foot, gingerly placed it ahead on the cable, then another, then moved his hands, sidestepping along. In five minutes they had reached the far side. Borabay and Vernon had been waiting for them in the darkness, and together they plunged into the cloudforest, running as fast as they could.

64

Borabay led the way through the forest, and his three brothers followed, moving in single file. Their way was lit by that strange phosphorescence Tom had seen earlier; every rotting stump and log was etched in faint green light, shimmering like ghosts in the forest. It no longer looked beautiful—only menacing.

After twenty minutes a broken stone wall loomed ahead. Borabay stopped and crouched down, and suddenly there was a flare of light and he stood up holding a burning bundle of reeds. The wall leapt into view: It was made with giant limestone blocks, almost obscured by a heavy mat of vines. Tom glimpsed a bas-relief—faces in profile, a row of hollow-eyed skulls, fantastical jaguars, birds with huge talons and gaping eyes.

“The city walls.”

They walked along the wall for a moment and came to a small doorway with vines hanging down across it like a beaded curtain. Pushing the vines aside, they ducked through.

In the feeble light Borabay reached out, grasped Philip’s arm, and drew him toward him. “Little brother Philip, you brave.”

“No, Borabay, I’m a dreadful coward and a hindrance.”

Borabay gave him an affectionate slap on the arm. “Not true. I scared out of shit there.”

“Scared shitless.”

“Thankee.” Borabay cupped the brand and blew on it, brightening the flame. His face glowed in the light, making his green eyes golden, highlighting his Broadbent chin and finely formed lips. “We go to tombs now. We go find Father.”

They passed through the doorway into a ruined courtyard. A staircase mounted up the side. Borabay flitted across the courtyard and climbed the stairs, and the others followed. He turned right, walked along the top of the wall, cupping the brand to obscure the light, and descended a staircase on the other side. There was a sudden shriek in the trees above and a commotion, the treetops thrashing and snapping. Tom jumped.

“Monkeys,” whispered Borabay, but he paused, his face troubled. Then he shook his head and they went on, passing through a jumble of toppled columns into an inner courtyard. The courtyard was full of fallen blocks of stone, some measuring ten feet on a side, that had once formed a gigantic head. Tom could see a nose here, a staring eye there, an ear elsewhere, poking up helter-skelter from the riot of vegetation and snaking tree roots. They climbed over the blocks and passed through a doorway framed by stone jaguars into an underground passageway. The air moving through the corridor smelled cool and moldy. The brand flickered. The flame revealed they were in a tunnel of stone, the walls crusted with lime, the ceiling bristling with stalactites. Insects rustled and skittered across the damp walls seeking refuge from the light. A fat viper jerked itself into an S-coil with its head raised in striking position. It hissed, swaying slightly, its slitted eyes reflecting the orange flame. They gave the snake a wide berth and went on. Through cave-ins in the stone ceding Tom could see a scattering of stars though the swaying treetops, lashed by wind. They went past an old stone altar littered with bones, out the far end of the tunnel, and across a platform dotted with broken statues, heads and arms and legs emerging from the tangle of vines like a crowd of monsters drowning in a sea of vines.

Suddenly they came to the edge of a vast precipice—the far side of the plateau. Beyond stretched a sea of jagged black mountain peaks, faintly backlit by starlight. Borabay paused to light a fresh brand. He tossed the spent torch over the cliff, where it flickered and disappeared into the blackness below. He led them along a trail skirting the edge, then through a cleverly hidden gap in the rock that seemed to lead over the sheer cliff. But as they came through the gap a trail appeared, chiseled into the cliff, becoming a steep staircase cut into the very rock of the mountain. It switchbacked down the cliff and ended at a terrace—a stone balcony of sorts—paved with smoothly fitted stones, made by an undercut into the cliff, which rendered it invisible from above. On one side the jagged cliffs of the White City mesa mounted up. On the other side was a sheer drop of thousands of feet into blackness. Hundreds of black doors riddled the cliffs above, with precipitous trails and staircases connecting them.

“Place of tombs,” said Borabay.

The wind shivered and gusted around them, bringing with it the sickly-sweet smell of some nightblooming flower. Here they could not hear the sounds of the jungle above them—only the rising and falling of the wind. It was an eerie, haunting place.

My God, thought Tom, to think that Father’s up in those cliffs somewhere.

Borabay led them through a dark doorway in the cliff, and they now ascended a spiral staircase cut into the rock. The cliff face was honeycombed with tombs, and the staircase passed open niches with bones inside them, a skull with a bit of hair, bony hands with rings winking on the fingers, mummified bodies rustling with insects, mice, and small snakes, disturbed by the light and retreating back into darkness. Several niches they passed contained fresh corpses, emanating a smell of decay; there the rustlings of animals and insects were even louder. They passed one corpse on which several large rats were crouched, eating.

“How many of these tombs did Father rob?” Philip asked.

“Only one,” said Borabay. “But it was richest one.”

Some of the tomb doors were smashed, as if broken into by grave robbers or shaken loose by ancient earthquakes. At one point Borabay stopped and picked something up off the ground. Silently he handed it to Tom. It was a shiny wing nut.

The staircase turned and ended on a ledge halfway up the cliff face, about ten feet wide. There was a massive stone door, the largest they had seen, which faced outward across the dark sea of mountains and the starry night sky above. Borabay held the burning brand up to the door, and they stood looking at it. All the other tomb doors had been unadorned; this one, however, had a small relief carved into its face, a Mayan glyph. Borabay paused, then took a step backward, saying something in his own language, like a prayer. Then he turned and whispered.

“Father’s tomb.”

65

The old gray men sat arrayed like mummies around the boardroom table, high above the city of Geneva. Julian Clyve faced them across the wilderness of polished wood, beyond which, through the wall of glass, was spread the Lake of Geneva with its giant fountain, like a little white flower far below them.

“We trust,” said the head man, “that you received the advance.”

Clyve nodded. A million dollars. These days not a lot of money, but more than what he was earning at Yale. These men were getting a bargain and they knew it. No matter. The two million was for the manuscript. They still had to pay him for the translation. Sure, there were others who could now translate ancient Maya, but only he could manage the difficult archaic dialect that the manuscript was written in. He and Sally, that is. They hadn’t yet discussed the particulars of his translation fees. One step at a time.

“We called you here,” the man continued, “because there is a rumor.”

They had been speaking in English, but Clyve decided to respond in German, which he spoke fluently, as a way of throwing them off balance. “Whatever I can do to help.”

There was an uncomfortable shifting in the wall of gray, and the man continued to speak in English. “There is a pharmaceutical company in the United States by the name of Lampe-Denison. Do you know of it?”

Clyve continued in German. “I believe I do. One of the big ones.”

The man nodded. “The rumor is that they are acquiring a ninth-century Mayan medicinal codex containing two thousand pages of indigenous medical prescriptions.”

“There can’t be two. It’s impossible.”

“That is right. There can’t be two. And yet the rumor exists. The price of Lampe stock has risen more than twenty percent over the past week as a result.”

The seven gray men continued looking at Clyve, waiting for his answer. Clyve shifted, crossed his legs, then recrossed them. He had a momentary frisson of fear. What if the Broadbents had somehow made other arrangements for the Codex? But they hadn’t. Before she left, Sally had reported back to him in detail on how things stood, and since then the Broadbents had been incommunicado in the jungle, unable to strike deals. The Codex was free and clear. And he had great faith in Sally to do his bidding. She was bright, capable, and very much under his thumb. He shrugged. “The rumor’s false. I control the Codex. From Honduras it’ll be coming directly into my hands.”

Another silence.

“We have deliberately refrained from inquiring into your affairs, Professor Clyve,” continued the man. “But now you have one million of our dollars. Which means we are concerned. Perhaps the rumor isn’t true. Very well. I would like an explanation for the very existence of this information.”

“If you’re implying that I’ve been careless, I can assure you I’ve spoken to no one.”

“No one?”

“Except my colleague, Sally Colorado—naturally.”

“And she?”

“She’s deep in the Honduran jungle. She can’t even contact me. How could she contact anyone else? And she is the soul of discretion.”

The silence around the table stretched on for a minute. Was this what they had called him all the way to Geneva for? Clyve didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all. He was not their whipping boy. He rose. “I am offended by the imputation,” he said. “I’m going to keep my end of the bargain, and that’s all you gentlemen need to know. You’ll get the Codex, and you’ll pay me the second million—and then we’ll discuss my fees for translating it.”

That was greeted with a further silence. “Fees for translating it?” the man repeated.

“Unless you intend to translate it yourselves.” They looked like they’d just sucked lemons. What a gaggle of morons they were. Clyve despised businessmen like these: uneducated, ignorant, their slavering greed hidden behind a genteel facade of expensively tailored fabric.

“We hope for your sake, Professor, that you will do what you’ve promised.”

“Don’t threaten me.”

“It is a promise, not a threat.”

Clyve bowed. “Good day, gentlemen.”

66

Seven weeks had passed since Tom and his two brothers had gathered at the gates to their father’s estate—but it felt like a lifetime. They had finally made it. They had reached the tomb. “Do you know how to open it?” asked Philip.

“No.”

“Father must have figured it out, because he robbed the tomb once,” said Vernon.

Borabay set some burning torches in niches in the rock walls, and together they made a minute inspection of the tomb door. It was solid stone, set into a doorway squared out of the white limestone of the cliffs. There was no keyhole, no buttons or panels or hidden levers. Surrounding the tomb, the rest of the rock had been left in its natural state, with the exception of a number of holes drilled into the rock on either side of the door. Tom held his hand over one and felt a cool flow of air—evidently airholes to the tomb.

The eastern sky brightened with a predawn light as they examined the area around the tomb. They rapped on the door, called, hammered and pressed and tried everything to open it. Nothing worked. An hour passed and the door remained immovable.