Warren Murphy: Time Trial

The forest thinned as they neared the river. Heat from the dappled sunlight through the leaves overhead burned into his shoulders. By dawn, it was already eighty degrees.

He paused. Sound. Not three men. No footfalls. The only movement besides the motion of the river and the rustling of birds and small creatures was coming from straight ahead, in the clearing by the banks of the river.

One man, he was sure of it. Alone.

He stepped past Chiun and parted the leaves of a eucalyptus. He waited there for a moment, seeing the elements of the picture in front of him, but not understanding. And then he understood, and wished he didn't.

On the far bank of the river, beneath the overhanging branch of a tree, swung the body of Sebastian Birdsong. A handmade hemp rope was twisted around his neck. Birdsong's eyes were bulging with black swarms of flies. His bare feet just touched the surface of the river, parting it into two rippling V's. On the rocks and mud of the riverbank were scattered the white flowers Birdsong had picked.

Standing next to the body, propped on three flat stones piled to make a step, was a boy. He was young, no more than twelve years old, with the black, coarse hair and brown skin of the Guatemalan. He wore only a small cloth between his legs. On his left knee was a gray rag bandage. Birdsong's kid, Remo thought. His one convert.

The boy held a thick knife in his hands. With one hand he steadied the rope supporting Birdsong's body, while he sawed at it with the other. He stopped when Remo and Chiun walked out onto the riverbank. For a moment, his knife hand came in close to his chest, waiting for the two strangers to attack. But they waited, watching, not moving.

After a few moments, his eyes never leaving the silent figures of Remo and Chiun, the boy raised his hands to the rope again.

?Chapter Four

They didn't venture near the boy. Instead, Remo dug a deep grave in the soft earth beside the river bank, opposite where the boy stood cutting down the old man's body. When the boy finished and Birdsong's remains lay in the shallows of the water, he looked for a moment to the two strange men on the far side of the river. One was white, like Father Sebastian. He was younger than the white priest, taller, thinner, yet he carried a weight in him that the white Father had not possessed. Something deep within his eyes, a strength.

The old man had the strength, too, even though he looked to be very old, older than the boy had ever imagined a man could become. In the hills where he had lived with his parents, no one grew to be old. The fever took them, or the spirits of the evil ones. Or the Lost Tribes. They had taken many.

Before his father died, he had spoken to the boy in the Old Tongue now used only by the hill people who lived apart from the villagers. His family spoke Mayan, too, but for special occasions, for weighty matters, the Old Tongue was used. It was the language of the ancients, of the great ones, the speech of those who had seen the coming of the white god Kukulcan in his flaming chariot. The Old Tongue had been spoken since the beginning of time, and it carried magic.

The people who lived in villages no longer understood magic. They held their ceremonies to Chac, the rain god, and consulted the village h'men, the priest with the power, when there was sickness in their families, but there was no more magic. The ancient temples had been left to fall into ruin, overrun by white men with their gadgets and papers, and they had forgotten the language of magic, the Old Tongue with which their ancestors had talked with gods.

But the hill people had not forgotten. And when the boy's father had called him beside the reed mat where he lay dying, his eyes glistening with the killing fever, he had used the ancient language to bless the boy.

"Be strong, for you alone will walk with the gods," he had said.

The boy had wondered then if that meant that he would die next. He did not fear death. He had watched two sisters and an infant brother die, and it had not seemed a terrible thing. There were many deaths in the village, too, and when he had taken the vegetables his father grew and the woven mats his mother made to the village to exchange for a chicken or a ceramic bowl, he had seen the death ceremonies where women wept and the h'men chanted, and could not understand why something so commonplace as death should be treated with such grief.

His father had died after he spoke with his son, and then the boy and his mother carried the body from the house to bury it while the younger children looked on. And while he buried his father, the boy guessed that he would die soon, too.

He was not strong. Though he was the oldest child, he was only barely taller than his brother who was three years younger. And then there was his leg. It was malformed at birth, and his father had broken the bone at the knee to straighten the leg. Perhaps the remedy had worked. He could walk, at least, although the pain in his knee was often so great that he lost consciousness. His mother had kept the knee wrapped with poultices made of the white flowers that grew in the terrible parts of the jungle, and that helped. But the pain was always there.

No, death would not be so bad.

But it was not he who died. After the rainy season passed, while he tried to cultivate the land washed down to clay by the heavy rains, the Lost Tribes had come with their spears and knives and their own magic, the spears of light that their people, according to legend, had stolen from the gods themselves at the beginning of time.

He had spotted them, running out of the jungle brush like savage cats, lithe, menacing. He moved as fast as he could to warn his mother and his brothers and sisters.

What would that have done, he wondered later. Where could they have gone? The Lost Tribes were swift, and they wished only to kill. There was no place to hide from them. But he tried to reach his kin.

If he had reached them, they would have died together. But his bad leg moved slowly, and the warriors of the Lost Tribes were on him before he could even shout to the house. One of them slashed the boy's arm with a knife. The boy rolled down the rocky hill, sliding, skidding. He landed on a heavy rock, square on his knee. The pain had surged through him like a flood, sending bile shooting up into his mouth and the ringing, throbbing red pain into his head. And then the blackness had come.

When he awakened, they were all dead. His mother, three sisters, four small boys. The village had been attacked, too, the first of the attacks on the village.

Father Sebastian had found him several days later, grubbing at roots and eating leaves. His arm had grown swollen and painful, and his knee hurt so much that the boy had chipped one of his teeth as he tightened his mouth to bear the pain.

Father Sebastian was not a strong man, but he had kindness. He had saved his life. He had fed him and kept him with him.

And now he was dead, too, the boy thought, numbly. He could not live in the jungle alone, not with a leg that was like a beast gnawing at him. Certainly none of the villagers would take him in. A lame boy, one more mouth to feed. All that was left for him was a swift death by the Lost Tribes, if he was lucky. If he was not, then it would be a slow death, starvation, fever, mauling by baboons. Or death by the two stange men on the opposite side of the riverbank, the young white man and the old creature who was not like any man he had ever seen. He looked like a prophet.

Or a god.

They did not beckon to him, did not speak. The hole the white man had dug must be a grave. It was the right size and shape. What else could it be?

But why would they help bury Father Sebastian?

As the boy watched the still, silent men, still with a quiet that was almost not human, so precisely unmoving that the very air seemed to swirl and thunder around them, one word came to him, a name from the sacred sounds of the Old Tongue: Kukulcan.