Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead (16 page)

Yamada had enough room to sit up comfortably in his small tent, in the kneeling butt-on-heels position called
seiza.
Europeans and Americans used chairs, seldom the floor, but such a position was traditional in Japan, save for the very elderly or injured. In such a pose, a samurai could draw and cut with his sword, drink sake, or practice
shodo
—calligraphy—as he now did.

As with the tea ceremony or kendo, there were proper ways of doing things. Yamada had unrolled his tools—the brush, stone, ink stick, and wiping rag—from a thin sheet of chamois and laid them out on the edge of the sleeping mat. He poured a small amount of water into the stone’s well. He preferred a rectangular one over a round one, and his, lovingly made by an expert craftsman, was of excellent quality for a travel stone.

The grinding area was wide enough to rub the ink stick in an oval pattern in and out of the water, which was also his preference, and the resulting ink was black and of the right consistency; it did not stick to the stone. This was a simple activity but had to be done mindfully. He had seldom missed a day doing it in thirty years.

Once the ink was prepared and the paper unrolled and ready, the brush was selected. Some liked the soft goat’s hair, some the harder bristles of wolf’s hair—which was rarely made from wolves, but usually horse or weasel, sometimes rabbit—but Yamada like those with mixed hairs, for his expertise was enough to justify them. He had but two of these with him, and he took great care to make sure they were clean and dry before he clipped them into the special container that protected the bristles from contacting anything once they were encased. Once a brush was worn out, it was proper to bury it, with a prayer of respect for what it had taught you. The two he had should last until long after he was home, but he was careful with them. A day without calligraphy seemed unthinkable.

Ready, he dipped his brush, lifted it, and approached the waiting paper.

There were times when Yamada worked on specific
kanji
to hone his technique—cursive dragon strokes or complex symbols to test his abilities. Of late, he had spent less time on the complex and more on allowing whatever feeling welled within him to take control.

Thus it was this evening. He allowed his mind to go quiet, and his hand took a life of its own and began to draw
bu,
the martial strokes that evoked a warrior with a long battleax stepping forward. Quickly he completed the
kanji
and moved down to begin
shi,
a simple cross-with-a-platform, representing a person—and more, one who was a samurai. His hand flowed naturally down into
do.
This was a highly stylized human head—there the eye, there the hair—and beneath it, a foot to indicate movement.
Do
was the Way, which was embodied by someone moving.

Bu-shi-do,
the Way of the Warrior.

He leaned back, took a deep, slow breath, released it, and beheld his drawing. Yes. The smallest imperfection in the first character, just on the left stroke, a single, errant hair, was not enough to mar the power of the three symbols taken together, and was, in fact, a good sign—that perfection was desired but not always necessary. A fine effort, he knew. Concise, strong, powerful, flowing—which was the essence of the Warrior’s Way.

Yamada smiled. Yes.

It was time to clean the stone and brushes. He was done. The preparation took much longer than the act, and that was also part of the Way.

In the morning, when the ink was dry on his rice paper, he would roll it up and put it into his pack. With luck, he would bring it and other of his better writings home, to install in his private room. Those drawings he had made each day that were unworthy to keep, he burned at the first opportunity.

Once the stone and brush were pristine again, he put them aside to dry. He extinguished his typhoon candle. Then he lay upon his bedding and began to compose his daily haiku. A samurai was a man of culture—he was a warrior who could take a man’s head, satisfy a woman, create art and poetry, and display total loyalty to his lord, his
daimyo.
There had been men who were fierce fighters but could evoke a wren landing on a reed with a few brushstrokes as adeptly as a dedicated artist. That was the goal of a samurai—to be a man of many talents.

Tonight, he thought, he would do a poem about the moon. Not the fuzzy one that hung over the muggy lands so far away from home, but the one that shined like a Chinese bowl in the skies behind Mount Fuji on a clear autumn day.

The buzzing of the mosquitoes became a background drone as he considered his verse. The moon. Not as light, too easy, but as perhaps a painting on the curtain of the sky . . . ?

SEVENTEEN

“W
E HAVE MADE
good progress,” Batiste said.

The morning was hardly what one would call “cool” as the sun’s early light tried to sneak down through the thick green canopy and mostly failed to do so, but it was the least hot part of the day.
Take what you can get,
Indy thought.

“I think we might be able to attain our destination,
laisser d’un Dieu,
by tomorrow night, or the morning following.”

“God allowing,” Marie said in English, echoing Batiste’s acknowledgment.

“What’s for breakfast?” Mac asked. He rubbed at his belly. “I always seem to lose far too much weight on these adventures.”

“Hard to see that,” Indy allowed. “You look like you could skip a week’s worth of meals and not suffer.”

“You are a cruel, cruel man, Dr. Jones, to insult me thus.”

Both men grinned.

Marie said, “We have fruit, coconut milk, nuts, hard biscuits, cold coffee.”

“What? No steak, eggs, sausage, and kippers? No tea? What kind of establishment are you running here, madam? Can’t you at least send the concierge out for
The Times?”

She smiled at Mac. “We could bake bread, but we would need to make a fire and let it burn down to coals, and perhaps our time would be better spent moving before the day warms up.”

“Ah, well. I suppose rabbit food is better than nothing.”

One of Batiste’s men passed around pieces of fruit—bananas, melons, chunks of coconut, and a canteen of coconut milk with bamboo cups. There was some thick, and unheated, tepid coffee, welcome enough even so. Indy chewed on a handful of nuts that tasted like cashews but looked like large peanuts, not bad. He washed the food down with the coconut milk, which was warm, but wet enough. And the coffee.

Marie, sitting next to him, smiled, and he loved the way it looked on her.

“I find it curious,” she said. “You could be a tenured professor in a university, living a comfortable and easy life teaching students. Or in a governmental building in Washington, far from the rigors of war, shuffling papers, and no one would think less of you for it. And yet, you are in the war, in the field, and for relaxation you come to our islands and slog your way through a daunting, dangerous jungle, to collect and protect an artifact that, if you succeed, will wind up in a museum, viewed by people who will not know, or care, who collected it, nor how hard the doing of it was.”

“Well, everybody has to be someplace,” Indy said.

She reached out and touched his hand with her fingertips. “You make light of your calling. But it is not a small matter. Love and dedication are powerful things. A man who knows who he is and thus what to do in his life is a rare and valuable thing. A treasure of a different kind.”

She pulled her hand away and nodded at him.

The sensation of her fingers on his hand lingered, evoking a warmth unlike that of the jungle around them. Lord, another smart and insightful woman. Indy could feel that attraction. In their own way, those kinds of women were scarier than a room full of Nazis with guns. All the Nazis could do was
kill
you—women could do so much more . . .

Two more hours into their journey—it was not really a walk, but a stop-and-start affair involving a fair amount of work with flashing machetes to clear a path, move the cut brush, and then proceed to the next curtain of vines or brambles. Every fifteen or twenty minutes, the men leading would switch places so they could sharpen their blades and relax their tired arms and shoulders. Indy had taken his turns at the front and, after a few minutes’ slashing at the growth, had much more appreciation for the men who were doing most of the cutting. This was hard work.

Two hours, and perhaps five hundred yards’ progress—that much only because a couple of old-growth hardwood trees had fallen sometime in the last few years and provided wooden walkways through the underbrush. Even so, some of the creepers and fast-growing brush had started to reclaim the fallen giants, and those had to be cleared. A few more years in the tropical clime and those huge trees would be rotted and gone, the jungle leaving little sign they had ever been. A militant greenery, this.

At one point, when Mac was coming up to take a turn, they spotted something by their feet:

“Good Lord, look at that! Bloody spider is the size of a small dog!”

Indy shook his head. Maybe not quite that big, but he’d seen smaller rats. “Brown tarantula,” he said. “Got to be almost a foot across. I’ve seen bigger ones, in the Amazon. The Goliaths there eat birds, when they can catch them, and they are bigger than these.”

Mac shuddered.

“Not dangerous to us,” Indy said. “Bite’s no worse than a couple of wasp stings. And if you pick one up and drop it? It will splash like an egg. Fragile things, which is why they don’t climb much.”

“I’m sorry, but a spider that can span a serving platter is more than I want sharing my tent, thank you.”

“Wimp,” Indy said.

“Oh, look—a snake—”

Indy jumped.
“Where!?”

Mac laughed. “Now who’s the wimp, eh?”

“Not funny, Mac.”

“Oh, but it is!”

Indy dropped back from his stint of chopping and slashing, letting Mac take his place. Snake jokes were definitely not funny. He looked at the nice new red blisters on his hand, despite the leather work gloves. One of Batiste’s men appeared from behind them and came forward to hold a hurried conversation with their guide.

Batiste waved the others to stillness while he listened.

Marie drifted back to where Indy stood. “Hebert has seen men in the forest trailing us.”

“Zombis?”

“No. From his description, they are Asians. And they move like soldiers.”

Indy frowned. “Asian soldiers? Here? Why would they—ah . . .”

Marie nodded.
“Oui.
It would be a coincidence of great magnitude that they just happened to be in this jungle for any reason not connected to us. Especially since they are following us.”

Mac walked over, raised an eyebrow in question.

Indy told him what Marie had said.

“They are after the pearl,” Mac said.

“Maybe. Maybe they don’t know about the pearl and are tracking us to see what
we
are after,” Indy said.

“Doesn’t make sense, following us,” Mac said. “They would have had to trail us from the main island—no way they could hang about here for long without the locals spotting them. My sources for information about the Heart of Darkness were not particularly secret. Anybody with an archaeologist’s nose and a little money to grease the wheels might have sniffed it out.”

“Unless they’ve been watching us since Port-au-Prince,” Indy said. “Remember what Marie told us about spies on Haiti?”

Marie said, “Yes. There are representatives of both the Allies and the Axis in the capital. Germans pretending to be Dutch, Japanese disguised as Chinese.”

“Really?” Mac said. “I could see Germans passing for Dutch, but I would have thought the differences between Chinese and Japanese would be all too obvious.”

“To a man as well traveled as yourself, perhaps. Here? Not too many opportunities to compare and contrast.”

“Point taken,” Mac allowed.

Batiste came to join them. “You heard?”

Marie nodded.

“Hebert saw only one man, but heard others moving in the bush. He also heard them speak at a far remove, and he did not know the language, but he said the voices had harsh, singsong tones.”

Indy and Mac glanced at each other.

“Japs,” they said together.

“What would they want with such an antiquity?” Marie asked.

“War has been running against them,” Mac said. “Might buy a few new tanks with what the pearl would bring. And some of the high mucky-mucks in the Gestapo and SS are art collectors, too. They’ve looted scores of museums and private collections. Maybe the Japanese are taking lessons from the Krauts.”

Indy shook his head. “That’s a reach, Mac. Japanese hunters halfway around the world because
maybe
there’s a big black pearl out in the jungle? Not the same as looting the Nanking museum.”

Batiste looked puzzled.

“The Nazis want to show they are cultured,” Mac said. “Demonstrate that the Third Reich has taste. As a result, they have stolen a raft of Western art. And caused many of Europe’s most famous paintings and sculptures to be hidden away in barns and basements all over the Continent. The Japanese aren’t averse to swiping artwork themselves, though I’m not sure they have quite the same motives as Jerry.”

Indy wasn’t buying this line. “Still doesn’t scan. Assuming they got the same information you did, why follow us? Why not just go and collect it themselves?”

“Maybe they got to Haiti after we did? Maybe they just wanted somebody to blaze a trail for them. Or maybe they heard about the
zombis.
Could be they didn’t get the same information. Who knows?”

“I don’t like it,” Indy said. “Something’s not right about this. Maybe we should go and collect ourselves one of these Japanese and discuss it with him.”

Batiste said, “Perhaps not the wisest action. The jungle is full of dangers, and that includes the undead. Does it really matter why they are here?”

“It matters,” Indy said. “But maybe not so much yet. Can your man find out more about them without being spotted?”

“Oui.
This is our forest, we know its ways better than anybody from outside.”