War From The Clouds (7 page)

Even before the giant reached me, I could smell the overpowering odor of him. It was body odor to the Nth Degree, and it filled the small hut to overflowing. Was Don Carlos Italla soap-shy, along with his other talents?

"Eat, my friend," the giant said in excellent Spanish. "Eat and sleep again. Night comes and I do not talk at night."

He said nothing more. The thing in his hand was a bowl. In the bowl were vegetables cooked in a kind of savory broth that was not from an animal. The giant fed me the gruel with his massive fingers, poking tidbits through my lips. I was too hungry to consider the fact that those hands probably hadn't been washed in a year. And the gruel was excellent. It was also drugged.

In five minutes after eating, I was sound asleep again. When I awoke, sunlight had turned the clearing outside into a bright, shiny avenue. I could even make out flies and spiders on the walls and ceiling of the low hut.

And the giant came again to kneel in the doorway and peer at me.

It was not Don Carlos. I could see his face more clearly now and it was an old face, full of wrinkles, with a scraggly, undernourished beard. His eyes, though, seemed young and sparkled like agates. He also was not as big as I had thought last night. His bulk came mainly from several layers of coarse clothing that looked as though he might have woven the fabric himself.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"The question, Senor, is who are you? I found you on the trail, lying with your head in a bush and your body burning up with fever. I found nothing on you to say who you are."

"Well, I'm hardly someone to be staked out like an animal," I said, jangling the vine ropes that still held my arms, legs and head.

"There is no law," he said, "that says only the good and the friendly can be wounded and lost in the jungle. You could be one from the mountain. Your wound could have come from one of his enemies. Until I know who you are, you remain tied, as you say, like an animal."

I began to breathe easier then. He was obviously referring to Alto Arete and Don Carlos. Just as obviously, he was an enemy of Don Carlos. Even more obvious, he was a highly educated and articulate man. His Spanish was of the academic class.

I saw no reason to lie to this man. I told him who I was and described my mission to him. I told him about the Cortez family and how I had saved Elicia and Antonio, only to see Antonio's friends killed in an ambush while following my directions. The old man listened patiently, fixing his attention on each word, regarding me with those glowing eyes. The glow, however, seemed to become warmer as I talked. When I was finished, he remained in his crouch just inside the doorway. I hardly noticed the odor of his body now; I was becoming accustomed to it.

"So I am not an enemy," I continued. "I need your help. The people of Nicarxa need your help. We have only six days to stop Don Carlos from virtually setting the country on fire."

"Four days," he said. "You have slept for two days."

"I was afraid of that," I said. "Why did you drug me?"

He smiled through his wrinkles. "For the healing," he said. "I made a poultice of herbs for your wound, but you were thrashing about in your fever. You would have offset the good of the herbs. I gave you peyote to make your muscles calm themselves."

I didn't ask him how he got the peyote into me when I was unconscious. I had seen Indians in other jungles use primitive bamboo needles to inject themselves with medicines and drugs. I didn't even want to think of the contraption this man might have used to inject peyote into my veins.

"All right," I said, gazing from him to the vines tied to my wrists. "Will you help me? Do you trust me? Do you know that I'm a friend and not an enemy?"

"I will help by keeping you tied for yet another day. If you move now, you will open the wound. Next time, you might die on the trail."

I was starting to feel panicky. Two precious days had already slipped by. I had only four days to reach Alto Arete and stop Don Carlos. I needed time to organize Antonio and his remaining friends, enlist more loyal supporters and find a way through the impregnable defenses of Mount Toro and Alto Arete.

"I must move around a little," I said, pleading with the old man, "or my whole body will become useless. If I promise to stay here with you, to get my body in shape gradually and leave tomorrow, will you untie me?"

He considered the request, apparently saw the logic of it and leaned forward to untie the vines. I sat up slowly, feeling woozy and weak, fighting the dizziness that threatened consciousness. I sat there for a long time, pumping my arms and legs to restore circulation. One more day in that position and I wouldn't have been able to blink my eyes without making plans for it first.

Outside the hut, I couldn't open my eyes to the brightness. I squinted and moved around the clearing, inspecting my new home'. We were near the top of a mountain, on a level plateau. The old man, whose name was Pico, had come to this place thirty years ago and had cleared away the trees and brush to make a home for himself, a home that could not be seen from above or below, and was accessible only by a narrow trail that he took pains to conceal each day with fresh brush.

"I found you," he explained, "when I went to the bottom of my trail to gather bananas, coconuts, mangos and vegetables. Nothing edible grows at this height."

We ate another bowl of gruel and I found in it pieces of coconut and mango. As with last night, it was delicious. As we ate, the old man told his story.

He had been a professor of anthropology at Nicarxa University in his earlier years and had risen to the head of the department of Indian Culture, then had become involved in a plot to unseat a tyrannical leader. For his efforts, he was severely wounded, his family was killed and he was disgraced. He was also unemployed. He fled to the jungle and was captured by the Nincas who lived in the hills not too many miles from this clearing. He lived with the Indians for a time and became friendly with a young warrior who said he detested fighting and wanted to become a monk.

"Our friendship was short-lived," the old man said. "My friend, whose name was Ancio, became more fanatic as the days went by. I heard from others that he and a group of his followers were involved in some kind of sacrificial rites on Mount Toro. No one lived on Alto Arete then. There was no trail to the top of that magnificent column of rock in those days. But Ancio and his followers had found an ancient cave and were using it to make sacrifices to this new gow they had found."

"What were they using as sacrificial victims?" I asked. "Goats? Pigs? Sheep?"

Old Pico's face darkened and he closed his eyes. "The rumors said that they were using children from the Ninca tribe. Their own tribe."

The story didn't shock me because it didn't surprise me. History books are loaded with stories about human sacrifices, most of them children or young girls.

"The story goes that Ancio and his friends would take the children to the cave and burn them there on an altar of stone," Pico went on, opening his eyes and letting them glow like embers at me. "I learned certain truths about this when my own child was taken in the night."

"I thought you said your family was wiped out in the revolution."

He almost smiled. "My first family. When I lived with the Indians, I took a wife and she bore me a daughter. When the daughter was eleven years old, she disappeared. I asked Ancio about her and he said he knew nothing. I could tell by his eyes that he was lying. That was when I followed him and his friends and learned that he had indeed lied, and I came away a broken man. I had heard the rumors about him, about the sacrifices, but I had no proofs." He stopped, unable to go on.

"And you found those proofs," I said.

Ancio's head dropped, like a reluctant nod of assent. "The night I followed Ancio and his friends, they went up Mount Toro, along a difficult trail, and came to a deep place in the ground. I followed them down stone steps into a kind of well that had no water. I remember crawling then through a hole and coming out into a huge cavern deep inside the mountain. What I saw there has all but obliterated my memories of that night."

"What was it you saw there?" I asked. I was sitting forward, my skin tingling as I anticipated the horror of his story.

"It was over," he said. "There was nothing I could do. My daughter had been dead several days, yet they continued to ravage her lifeless body. As I watched, they poured oils over the bodies of several lifeless and ravaged young girls and set the torch…"

He stopped, his eyes glowing readily. He closed his eyes. I waited, but there was nothing more to be said. After a brutal death, his eleven-year-old daughter had been sacrificed to Ancio's new and vicious god. She had been burned in that cavern. Ancio raised his head and opened his eyes. He went on, intoning like a ghost:

"My fury was great, perhaps too great. A kind of shock overcame me. I crawled out of that cavern and went up the stone steps of the dry well. I rambled aimlessly on the trail through the whole long night. When daylight came, my fury was still great and so was my shock. It was then that I decided to leave the company of man. Before I left, though, I sought to close up that wicked cavern to prevent further sacrifices, further tortures of the innocent. I sought no revenge against Ancio. His god — or my god — would tend to Ancio's guilt and bring suitable punishment. But I did seek the cavern. I found nothing. In time, I came to this place and built my home. You are the first human I have spoken to in thirty years."

A hermit. A true hermit. I had heard of them and read of them, but I had never met one face to face. I had expected hermits to be silent men, taciturn to a fault, but old Pico seemed willing and ready to talk on and on through the days. And I had only four days to complete a truly impossible mission.

"There is something else in the rumors that you should know," Pico said. "It may not be of help, but you should know of it. It was said that the smoke from the sacrificial fires never came out of the mouth of the cave. It was said that for days after victims were sacrificed, thin plumes of smoke could be seen rising from Alto Arete."

I pondered that for a bit, then knew the answer.

"There's a chimney right up through the middle of the mountain," I said. "A kind of tunnel. There has to be."

"That is what the rumors say. One must not be too trustful of rumors."

But, I was thinking, hating myself for the complicated pun, where there's smoke, there's fire. Where there's smoke, there's also a chimney. A chimney right up through the center of Mount Toro, up through that massive column, and out through the top of Alto Arete.

I spent the day moving slowly about the clearing, even testing my legs on parts of the steep trail down. Most of the time, though, I sat near the hut with Pico and picked the man's brains for more information.

By nightfall, I had learned only that the Ninca tribe still lived in an area near the east slope of Mount Toro, and that Ancio was either their chief or had been killed for his zeal in making human sacrifices. I knew that one of my first moves was to find the Ninca Indians and talk to Ancio if he were still around. If I found that ancient cave, I very well might find a way past Don Carlos Italla's fancy defenses.

That's why I broke my promise to Pico and crept away in the night. I had promised to wait until at least noon and the next day. But my days were slipping away too fast, and I felt strong. I set out for the lookout point, hoping against hope to find Antonio there, alive and well.

Dawn was just starting to break when I neared the lookout point Elicia had shown me the night I took her to her cousin's hut. I would have reached it sooner, but I kept getting lost on Pico's crazy trail.

The wound in my side throbbed with pain, but it hadn't broken open and I was convinced that Pico's work would hold up. Unless, of course, I got into a scrap with a guerilla or a Cuban Marine. Needless to say, my long journey from Pico's hermit hut had been a wary one, avoiding all signs of civilization.

I eased through the foliage, approaching the lookout with caution. Antonio could have been captured and tortured, he could have told the Cubans that he was to meet me here. Then, again Antonio could be hiding there with his rifle at the ready, and could shoot me if I made the slightest noise.

It had always seemed silly to me when I'd read in books that people signalled each other in the night with special bird calls or hooting like owls. It didn't seem silly to me now. I wished that I'd worked out such a plan with Antonio.

It wasn't necessary. When I slipped into the clearing and scanned the open ledge, Antonio was fast asleep. A friend with him also was asleep. In the dim light of not-quite-dawn, they looked like two logs wrapped in blankets.

Just in case it wasn't Antonio and a friend, I lowered the heavy Russian Volska I'd been carrying and palmed Wilhelmina. I sat to one side of the trail and aimed at the first blanket-covered sleeper.

"Antonio, wake up."

The log raised up, the blanket fell away and there was Elicia Cortez staring down the muzzle of my luger, her eyes wider than saucers.

"Senor Carter," she exploded, much too loudly for comfort. "We thought you were dead."

Antonio stirred in his blanket and I thought perhaps he had also been wounded, worse than me. But he aroused, proving only that he was a sound sleeper.

As I told them all the things that had happened to me since Antonio and I had parted on that steep hillside with bullets raining down from above, Elicia kept watching my every move, hanging on every word. She also kept inching closer, as though I were a campfire and the air was cold.

"We have heard much of the hermit of Mount Toro," Antonio said when I was finished, "but you are the first man to have seen him in thirty years and to tell about it. The stories say that he cooks and eats anyone who comes near his cave."