Blood Sun (35 page)

The Serpent had created a projection of its own being in another form, its
wayob
, and sent it into the world of man—it was a manifestation of death.

They clambered down and moved across the shallow sandbanks into the edge of the jungle. Flint made them wash the blood away while he went foraging in the undergrowth. He soon returned and gave Max and Xavier a handful of leaves. “Chew these into a pulp, then put them onto the cuts,” he instructed them, shoving some into his mouth. Within a few minutes of dressing the wounds, the steady flow of blood from the bat cuts stopped.

The shadows were deepening, and a moment of silence fell across the forest before the night sounds started.

“We need to get out of the open and deeper into the jungle in case anybody sees us,” Max said.

“There’s no sign or smell of anyone. It’s been a tough day; we need food.” Flint took the straw hat off and ran his fingers through his long hair, pulling it back behind his ears. He was looking over the terrain.

“Where would you choose?” he asked Max.

Max looked around. There were slabs of rock that reminded him of a tor back on Dartmoor. Prehistoric man had once made his campfires on those rocks and used them for lookouts and shelter. He pointed with the broken spear. “I’ll climb up there and see what I can find,” he said.

“What do I do?” Xavier said.

“You come with me and I’ll show you how to catch a snake. Then you can skin it,” Flint told him.

Xavier’s face said it all. “I go with Max,” he said with a grimace.

As Flint turned away and quickly disappeared into the jungle, Max clambered up onto the rocks. Xavier had no desire to be left standing alone, so he exerted himself in trying to match Max’s mountain-goat agility.

When Max finally reached the top, he found he could see deep into the forest, and looking back to the river and the cave mouth, it was obvious they were on the bend of the river. The rocks sheltered a now overgrown clearing, in which stood an abandoned hut. Xavier was bent double from the exertion.

“Down there,” Max said. “It’s perfect. Out of sight but with a clear view of these rocks and the river beyond.”

“I’ve stayed in better slums,” Xavier said. “But after hanging out with you, that place is like a hotel.”

Xavier began to move forward, but Max reached out his hand and stopped him. He pointed with the spear. “Look at that,” he said quietly.

Xavier turned to face Max’s line of sight. The sun had already disappeared below the mountain peaks, needles edging
against the dark sky, but far away in the jungle, a curtain of mist was drawn across the valley. And it was bloodred. They stood for a few moments trying to understand what they were looking at.

Flint, huffing and puffing with his smoker’s cough, climbed up behind them, a dead snake in his hands and fruit tucked into his shirt. Max recognized the diamond-shaped head of the snake, one of the deadliest pit vipers in the tropics. Without a doubt, Orsino Flint was an expert survivalist—no one tackles a three-meter fer-de-lance without knowing what they are doing. He turned back to look at the veil of blood. Flint’s eyes squinted. The breeze was picking up. He sniffed the air. “Aha. You smell that,” he said.

Max nodded. He, too, had caught the slightly disgusting smell of sulfur on the wind.

“That’s an open stream of lava. The rising mist is from the damp jungle. This whole area was once an active volcano. Now it’s just that one mountain bleeding into the land. The mist is the lava’s reflection,” Flint said.

“Dangerous ground. I don’t want to go anywhere near it,” Max said. “At first light, we’ll find a track and see where it leads us. The pyramids and buildings in my mother’s pictures are out there somewhere. We find them and I might find out what happened to her.”

“And then?” Xavier asked.

Max shook his head. He wanted to go home, but the thought of facing his father again twisted something inside of him. He felt no compassion or understanding for what his father had done. Max knew his dad had failed to beat his own fear about something out here. He was determined to find the
truth about how his mother died, but there were moments he wished he had not embarked on such a torturous journey. From the very start, it had caused pain and hurt, and the truth of his father’s actions tore at him.

There was no point talking about it. He didn’t want his own fears bubbling to the surface. Best no one saw that.

The embers of the fire burned in the stone hearth that Max had made in the hut. They had grilled and eaten the snake, and even the reluctant Xavier had admitted it wasn’t so bad and that it tasted like chicken. But now the breeze began to blow through the hut’s windows. As Max peeled fruit and handed it to Xavier, Flint began closing the wooden shutters.

“It’s already hot in here,” Max said. “We need some air.”

“It is not good to have the night wind move across your body when you sleep,” Flint told him as he fastened the shutters. “Some winds are malevolent; they are night spirits. You understand that? Your
ch’ulel
, it can be attacked.”

“
Ch’ulel
?”

“
Ch’ulel
is your life force, your spirit,” Flint explained. “It is vulnerable when you sleep. We’re intruders here, but our presence will be known. There are different ways of stopping us. Shamans can take on the form of animals and travel on the wind.”

“The
wayob
?” Max asked.

Flint nodded. “The windows stay closed.”

Xavier pulled fruit strands from his teeth. “Y’see,
chico
? Peasants. These people live in the forest and they start thinking like monkeys.”

In an instant, Flint had a knife at Xavier’s throat. Xavier
choked. Max’s reactions were just as quick as he gripped Flint’s knife hand.

“Flint! Stop it! We’re in enough trouble as it is. Leave him.”

Flint pulled back but gestured with the knife. “Do not insult a man’s beliefs, drug scum. They sit more deeply than the heart.”

“Apologize,” Max told Xavier, who stared at him in disbelief. “Go on,” Max urged him. “If he wanted to kill you, he could have. I couldn’t have stopped him. He was warning you. If I were you, I’d apologize.”

Xavier grimaced as if the fruit had been sour. “OK. So … so you believe in evil spirits. OK. That’s cool, amigo. It was a joke. OK? I was joking.”

Flint muttered and backed himself into a corner, where he lay down with his back to the wall. “You are the ignorant one, boy. Your
ch’ulel
has already been corrupted. The dark ones took your childhood. You should ask for forgiveness and one day, maybe, you will understand what it means to live like a human being instead of a cockroach.”

Xavier flinched, and this time Max’s hand restrained the boy. “Leave him, Flint. Xavier tried to start a new life for himself and his brother. He’ll come right.”

Flint grunted, rolled a cigarette and let it smolder in his lips as he pulled his hat down over his eyes. He gave a rattling cough, his lungs struggling with the smoke. Both he and Xavier settled down. Max gazed into the fire. He knew about shamans and the creatures they could become. The shaman in Africa who had saved his life had taken him through a terrifying experience. Max understood what it meant to feel
your body turned inside out, to experience the sensation of becoming an animal. Some things you can’t explain. The subtle energies that moved through his body were a mystery, but he had stepped into that maelstrom on more than one occasion. If he were able to, he would beckon it at will, but it was beyond his capability. Something triggered it—he didn’t know what—so he accepted Flint’s explanation. The room was stiflingly hot, but he closed his eyes and let the exhaustion take him into the fractured world of dreams.

Outside, the jungle bristled. Max and the others had been seen by more than the cave-guardian warrior.

A hundred pairs of eyes gazed through the darkness toward the hut.

As daylight broke in the City of Lost Souls, it was the women who came to Charlie Morgan. Half a dozen pickup trucks with armed men had torn up the muddy street as they headed toward the jungle. Charlie wiped the sweat from her neck, tugged her clammy T-shirt away from her body, swallowed the last of a cold drink and crunched ice between her teeth as she waited for the dozen women who had gathered in front of her to speak. They were nervous. One nudged another forward, but the women seemed either shy or afraid. Charlie smiled. Time to be nice.

“¡
Hola
!” she greeted them.

“You are English?” the woman asked. There was no trace of hesitancy. Obviously, Charlie reasoned, they had all been educated.

Charlie nodded. That seemed the right answer, as if it comforted and reassured the women.

“No one, no woman, has ever stood up to the men.”

“Well, there’s a first time for everything. Slimeballs need a bit of housecleaning once in a while.”

The women hesitated, seeming uncertain, until their spokesperson translated this into what Charlie assumed was Mayan. The women smiled, nodding. Charlie didn’t usually get on that well with other women, but this seemed to be going OK.

“I’m looking for a boy,” she said. “An English boy.”

“Yes. He said someone would come after him.”

“Max Gordon was here?”

“We do not know his name,” the woman replied.

Charlie tugged out Max’s picture. “Is this him?”

The picture was quickly passed around, and the accompanying shake of their heads answered Charlie’s question.

The woman handed the picture back. “The boy had long hair. He was tall. He had heard of a woman who had gone into the rain forest four, maybe five, years ago.”

Charlie nodded. “His name was Danny Maguire, and he was looking for a scientist called Helen Gordon.”

The woman shrugged. That part they did not know about. “And this boy you are looking for?”

“Her son,” Charlie said. She watched their faces register what it must be like for a young boy trying to find his mother. “The boy with long hair—Maguire—did he go into the jungle?”

“It is forbidden,” the woman said.

Charlie had to tease the answers out of them. “So is standing up to violent men,” she said.

They smiled again. “Yes, the boy got inside, but he became very sick. There is a place where they take supplies through. The man who drives that truck—he is a farmer—he helped him. The man is not like the others. He is Maya. He understands the old ways. He does not like the way these Creoles have been bought by Westerners.”

“Westerners?”

“
Sí
. They come into the mountains in their helicopter. They are important, and they have bought the men here who run drugs, who kill and threaten us, but there is nothing we can do. You should not stay here. We came to warn you. You have shown how strong you are, but they will not forget. The reason they have not killed you is because they are unsure about you. No one has done to them what you did.”

“Where have the men gone?”

“We do not know. They do not tell us.”

“But something has happened. They’ve pulled out in a hurry. Are they after someone, do you think? Did they chase the Maguire boy when he was here?”

“We took a big risk when we helped that boy escape. Some of us were beaten badly, but we did not tell them how we got him to the city.”

“So they
were
after him?”

“
Sí
. They are paid to kill.”

“And Helen Gordon?”

“Some years ago, we heard of a woman who passed through one of the villages. She said she was looking for old
ruins, but everyone knew she was an environmentalist. They live a dangerous life. We do not know what happened to her.”

Charlie Morgan considered her options. She was so close to unraveling the mystery and knew that Max Gordon had to be out there somewhere. He was close. All her instincts told her that. But they also told her that she, too, could “disappear” once she ventured away from this town.

But imagine if she pulled it off. How cool would it be to find Max Gordon, to dig out the mystery and find out what Danny Maguire had discovered? She might even uncover the truth behind Helen Gordon’s disappearance. That would be a real coup. But could she do it on her own? She felt her heartbeat quicken.

“Can you take me to the man who drives the supply truck?”

The women fell silent, and then each of them shuffled past her; they touched her arm, as if they were already grieving at someone’s funeral.

“We can take you,” the woman said. “But we do not wish to be responsible for your death.”

Riga used a handheld flare when he ran into the cave. It helped him to see the tracks made by Max and the others. The grotto of saw-toothed images absorbed the light and became a snarling creature. Riga was not afraid of the shadow-riddled cave. He had never believed in myths and legends; they were lies told by storytellers to scare people or to make them feel good about themselves and create false heroes. Life was not a story. It was hard and unforgiving, and if you did not
think for yourself and make your own decisions, then you became one of the followers, one of the herd. If you did not test yourself, you might be easily deluded into thinking you were better than you were. And that was where so many men entered the realm of fantasy. Riga had tested himself time and again. If he failed, he learned the lessons and became better; if he felt fear, he faced it, controlled it and mastered it. No one was going to make Riga a loser.