S
UDDENLY AN EXPLOSION
went off in the cave, impossibly loud. A voice screamed out: “Get away from him!”
The knife froze in place. The voice was distantly familiar. A woman. Who was it, and why was she interrupting this fine ceremony?
Another thunderous explosion. The singing had stopped. The knife remained poised. And then a figure came bursting in, ramming the high priest aside, his obsidian knife flying. A recognizable face came into Gideon’s field of view: short black wild hair, flashing eyes. He knew this woman.
She seized him roughly. “Get up!”
When he tried to pull away, she slapped him viciously across the face, first once, then again. Why was she being so mean? The men, his dear friends, had backed away and were raising their hands in the air, angry, yelling.
He feebly tried to fend her off, to return to the peace that he craved, but now her arm was around his neck and she hauled him to his feet. A gun was clutched in her other hand.
“Stay back!” she cried, the gun bucking with another loud explosion. “Gideon, for God’s sake, wake up and help me!”
He stood, confused and unsteady. He still couldn’t speak and was surprised he had the ability to stand.
“Move your goddamn feet!”
Gripping his arm, she backed up out of the cave, pulling him along with her. She seized a burning brand from its rude sconce and continued on. He tried to mumble a protest but she ignored him. Now they had turned a corner in the stone tunnel and she dropped behind, shoving him ahead. “Run, damn it!”
He tried to run, stumbled. She caught him, grabbed him by the hair, and hauled him up, giving him another slap across the face.
“Move!”
He ran, slowly, his mind full of regret, terrible regret and loss, a longing to return to that beautiful place. “Did you see—?” he began.
“Faster!” This was accompanied by another hard shove.
A moment later he could smell fresh air, hear the ocean, and they came out on the broad ledge. It was night; the sea rumbled below. The fresh air revived him somewhat, began to clear his head. But his vision was abruptly arrested by the starry night sky. “My God, how beautiful…”
Another hard shove reminded him that the angry woman was still there. He had a recollection, a distant memory, of this woman. What was her name? “But look at the stars…”
“Forget the stars. Keep going!”
He stumbled forward and came to the edge of the trail, which started down through a cleft. He swayed, looking at the white edge of surf below, the dark ocean, the cliffs hanging with vegetation. Now he recalled the trail, their ascent. He had to go back the way he had come. How unfortunate.
“Pay attention! Face out, go slow.”
Gideon began heading down the trail, placing one foot gingerly in front of the other. After a few steps, he halted. “Let’s go back…”
This was answered with another whack across the top of the head. “
Down!
”
It seemed easier to obey than to argue, and he continued. He stopped to enjoy the cool, fresh night air flowing up from the sea, and was struck again on the top of the head, so he continued climbing down. Finally, the trail reached the black beach and Gideon fell to his knees, running his hands through the sand. Even this small pleasure was rudely interrupted by the woman, who grasped his hair again and pulled him up.
“To the canoe.”
He stumbled down the beach. She grabbed their drysacks from the beach and threw them in.
“Help me pull it into the water.”
Reluctantly, he grasped the rope and helped drag the long wooden canoe into the shallow water.
“In.”
He got in and felt a paddle thrust into his hands.
“Paddle.”
He stood up, laying the paddle down. “Go back for just a little while…” He tried to stand up to get out.
The woman pressed him back down onto the rough wooden bench of the canoe. He watched as she lashed him to the bench with some loose rope. She pushed the canoe out and hopped in.
“
Paddle
, damn it!”
He put his paddle in the water, pulled, and repeated. Sitting behind him, the woman was paddling like mad. He tried it a few more times, slowly, until she told him to pull harder.
He couldn’t understand why she was so angry, why she had tied him to the seat, but he obeyed. The canoe moved sluggishly toward the roaring break about a hundred yards offshore.
“Harder!”
He pulled strongly. The combers came in, striking the prow and breaking over them. He paddled harder as they came into the heavier surf, the waves curling toward them. The prow burst through the first wave and the canoe was thrown upward. The second wave hit them, spinning the canoe sideways, and a third wave swamped them. Gideon felt the water pushing them down, but the canoe seemed to survive it, half filled with water, and then they were beyond the breaking surf.
And now, for the first time, he felt a twinge of fear.
“Bail! Use your hands!”
Gideon began splashing water out of the canoe, and the woman did the same. But even as they bailed, water kept slopping in over the sides as the canoe rose and fell on the rough ocean.
The soaking, the wind and water, began to clear his head. The woman who was ordering him about—her name was Amy. That’s right:
Amy
. He put his hand to his throat and felt the shallow cut, the sting of salt water on it. Those men back in the cave…they were going to kill him. They were going to cut his throat. And he was just going to let them. And then there was the ancient skull of a Cyclops…But that was obviously a hallucination, a side effect of the drug. He shook his head. Strange how the mind played tricks.
He bailed with redoubled effort, splashing the water out of the half-swamped canoe with both hands. He felt a headache coming on.
“Good! Keep it up!”
They were caught in the grip of a massive current, which was carrying them past the island and out to sea. As the canoe swept alongside the island, the smaller, more distant island came into view behind it.
“They’re coming after us,” Amy said.
Gideon turned. There were bobbing lights on the water—men holding torches in the other canoe as others paddled furiously.
What had happened to him was slowly starting to emerge from the fog of forgetfulness. They’d given him a drug and they’d been about to sacrifice him on an altar to their god. A ceremony of thankfulness…and
sacrifice
.
“Amy, you saved my life.”
“You can thank me later. Just keep bailing!”
He bailed like mad. In the grip of the current, their canoe was carried toward the outer island, about a mile away. He could see its black silhouette against the starry sky. It was even more rugged, surrounded by sheer cliffs on all sides rising from the water to a broad, flat top, covered with dense jungle.
They were finally making progress with the bailing, even as Gideon could see the lights of the other canoe, catching up fast.
“Good work. Now paddle.”
Gideon obeyed, paddling hard now. The canoe shot forward.
“We’ve got to land on that island,” Amy said. “It’s our only hope. We’ll never outrun them otherwise.”
“Okay, I get it…But where? There’s no beach.”
“When we get closer, maybe we’ll see a place.”
The island approached, a great black form blocking out the stars. As they neared, Gideon could hear a roar of surf, and then, emerging from the darkness, the whiteness of violent seas crashing directly into the base of the cliffs.
“I don’t see anywhere to land,” said Amy.
The canoe was being borne onward, the irresistible currents and waves pushing it straight toward the cruel cliffs rising vertically from the sea.
“We’re going to be driven right into those cliffs,” she said.
The black rocks loomed closer, the surf roaring louder. The other canoe was behind them and pursuing relentlessly, lights bobbing on the water.
Amy tossed him one of the drysacks. “Put that on your back. I’ll take the other. Be ready to grab hold.”
He slung it over his back by the shoulder straps and tightened them down. His head was now painfully clear, with a throbbing headache.
They were now just beyond the breaking surf.
“Listen,” said Gideon. “We’ll let the waves carry the canoe up to the cliff face, and at the last minute jump free and get a handhold. We have to time it just right.”
“Right. Count of three.”
A breaking wave caught the canoe and carried it in toward the rocks, like a surfboard.
“One, two,
three
!”
They both leapt. Gideon hit the rock face hard and was able to grasp a handhold on the craggy rock, scraping his hands and barking his shins. He held on, feet flailing in the air before finding their own holds. A wave dashed against the cliff and swept over Gideon, almost plucking him from the rock. He held on for dear life as a second wave smashed the canoe against the rocks just below him, the surge washing again over Gideon’s lower body, the shattered hull of the canoe just missing him.
When the water subsided he looked about in a panic and was relieved to see Amy, dripping wet but clinging to the nearby rock, pale and strained.
“Climb!” she cried.
They climbed. It wasn’t quite vertical, but close enough to be terrifying. At least, he thought, there were plenty of handholds. Amy, an experienced climber, moved fast and soon got ahead, and then above him. “Follow me,” she called down. “Use the same hand- and footholds I’m using.”
“Okay.”
“Always keep three points on the rock. Don’t overgrip. Keep close to the wall.”
Gideon could see, a few dozen feet below, the canoe filled with men approaching along the edge of the cliffs, the men paddling but staying well out of the break. They didn’t dare get in close. The canoe was moving fast, the men shouting unintelligibly. A single arrow clattered harmlessly off the rock below them, and then the canoe was swept past in the strong current.
They climbed a few hundred feet, the dizzying heights filling Gideon with dread.
They reached a shallow cave, little more than a lava tube in the side of the cliff, with just enough space for the two of them. Gideon hauled himself up over the edge and collapsed on the floor of the cave, gripping the rock, relieved to be away from the terrifying drop. Amy slumped beside him.
He glanced at her again, then started up. “Hey. What’s this?” A dark stain was spreading on her shirt, in her side. “Christ, you’re hurt!”
“Yeah, I’m going to need a little help here.”
Gideon unbuttoned the shirt, pulled it back. A nasty-looking wound was visible in her side.
“Back in the cave,” she said, breathing hard. “A spear…”
“Okay, I’ll dress it right now.” He opened one of the drysacks and took out the medical kit and a flashlight. He shone it on the wound. It looked messy, but at least wasn’t too deep, thank God.
“I’m going to fix you up. You just take it easy.” He tore open a gauze pad and dabbed, cleaning around the edges of the wound, examining it. The ocean had largely rinsed it clean, but he sponged it out with fresh water from a canteen. It appeared to need stitches, but there were none in the kit. He sterilized the wound with Betadine, closed it as best he could with strips of surgical tape, and dressed it. Rummaging about, he removed a bottle of amoxicillin and gave her a tablet, along with a couple of ibuprofen.
“How does it feel?”
“Hurts. I feel a little light-headed. I think I lost some blood.”
“I can’t believe how tough you are—everything you managed to do, and with that wound—!”
She waved a hand. “Sleep. I need to sleep. Tomorrow, we’ve got a major climb ahead of us.”
“You aren’t going anywhere with that wound. We’ll stay here until you’re better.”
She lay back. “If we stay here, we’ll die. It’s as simple as that.”
G
IDEON AWOKE
. The rising sun streamed into the little cave on the cliff face. He could hear the cries of seabirds wheeling about. Amy was still sleeping. She looked flushed.
He sat up and clutched at his brow. His head was pounding, and there was a terrible taste in his mouth. He drank from one of the canteens and took stock. They had two liters of water, the last two granola bars, and two pieces of pemmican-like food, wrapped in banana leaves, given to them by the Indians. The medical kit still had plenty of bandages, antibiotics, and painkillers.
He crept to the edge and peered over. They were perhaps two hundred feet above the sea. But from the vantage point of the cave it was impossible to see upward. From the silhouette he had seen of the island the night before, it was at least a thousand, maybe fifteen hundred feet high.
When he turned, Amy had awoken. He put a hand on her forehead. It was warm.
“How do you feel?”
“Not bad,” she said.
Gideon didn’t believe her. He gave her the canteen, and she drank deeply.
“Let me take a look at your wound.”
She lay back. He unbuttoned her shirt and pulled it aside. The bandages were already dark with fluid. She winced a little as he removed them. Gideon tried to hide his fright and concern. The wound was still closed and he didn’t dare remove the surgical tape, but he applied more Betadine and some topical antibiotic ointment and put on a fresh dressing.
“Thanks.”
“Amy, you got that saving my life. How can I thank you?”
She just shook her head.
“How did you know to rescue me?”
She took a deep breath. “iPhone took me down the beach to a cave. But it was iPhone’s behavior that tipped me off. He seemed to get more and more nervous. When it started to get dark, I tried to question him and he was evasive. That’s when I began to fear something bad was going to happen to you. I confronted him, and while he denied it, he really started to sweat. So I pulled my gun out of the bag and tied him up. And then I went looking for you.”
“Thank you.”
She said, “Did you see that huge skull?”
Gideon stared at her. “You mean, you saw it, too?”
“Damn right I did. It took me a moment to realize—that it was the skull of a Cyclops.”
“And I thought it was just a hallucination.”
“
Hic sunt gigantes
. ‘Here there be giants.’ The map didn’t lie—there were Cyclopes living here once. They were going to sacrifice you to the Cyclops god.”
“I was so zonked, I was ready to have my throat cut without protest…I feel like such a fool.”
“You were drugged.”
“They gave me a black root to consume. That’s got to be the true lotus. It was incredibly powerful, made me forget everything, made me feel so wonderful I never wanted it to end—just like what happened to Odysseus’s men.”
“So what was the pod they gave us?”
“A fake lotus, a ceremonial substitute? Or maybe the aboveground part of the plant.”
Amy licked her dry lips. “There’s something else—something I should have realized earlier…You know this Phorkys Map we’ve been following? Phorkys was a minor Greek god of the sea, a son of Poseidon. Just as Polyphemus was supposed to be the son of Poseidon. In other words, Phorkys was the brother of Polyphemus, the Cyclops. If that doesn’t connect Phorkys to Odysseus and the Cyclopes, I don’t know what does…”
She was rambling, sweating, her forehead beaded. Gideon felt it again. “You’re running a temperature.”
“I know. As soon as possible—before I get any sicker—we need to finish this climb. Because I
am
getting sicker.”
“You can’t climb in your condition.”
“I can do it now. In another six, twelve hours, maybe not. I’m coming down with a fever. It’s getting worse. We can’t stay here. There’s almost no food or water. We’ve got to shoot for the top right now. Otherwise we’ll die here.”
She struggled to sit up, grabbed her drysack.
“This is crazy,” Gideon protested.
“Crazy, yes. Our only option, yes. Just follow my lead. We’ll climb fast and free.”
Gideon looked at her. This was one determined woman. Nothing was going to change her mind. And as he mulled over the problem, he realized she was probably right. They had no other choice.
In silence, they ate the last of the granola bars and drank some more water. And then Amy started climbing up the rock above the cave.
The pitch was terrifying, an almost vertical face of volcanic rock, but with plenty of cracks and bubbles that made for good hand- and footholds. Gideon followed below her, watching where she put her feet and hands and trying to follow suit. He asked a few times how she felt until she told him to shut up. She was doing well, it seemed to him: climbing steadily, silently. The birds cried, the surf thundered below, the wind swept over them. And still they climbed. As they rose, the difficulty varied, depending on the verticality, but the dizzying space below became only more terrifying. Five hundred feet, he judged; six hundred, eight. He tried not to look down, but it was necessary in finding footholds. They couldn’t see up; there was no way of knowing how much farther it was to the top. Gideon’s arms ached and he wondered how Amy could do it. He could see a dark stain spreading on her side, staining her shirt. The wound had opened again and was bleeding.
She began to slow down, fumbling longer for hand- and footholds.
The clouds started rolling in, and there came a rumble of thunder. It began to rain. Several times Amy slipped, rocks tumbling as she hung by both hands for a moment while her toes sought a purchase. The rain came down harder and began streaming down the sides of the cliff, adding a slipperiness to the climb, carrying water and debris pouring over them, getting in their faces and eyes every time they tried to look up.
Amy slowed further. Even in the easy stretches she began to struggle, and at times she stopped and swayed. There was nothing Gideon could do. He was deeply frightened for her—but she was right: they had to keep going.
They finally came to a large, horizontal crack, which Amy crawled into and immediately collapsed. Gideon followed. They were soaking wet and water was now pouring down the cliff face in miniature waterfalls, the wind lashing the rocks.
Gideon saw Amy’s face for the first time in hours. She looked awful—pale as ivory, her lips blue, her eyes clouded and jittery.
“Rest,” she muttered. “Rest. And then more climbing. Must be…must be close to the top.”
It was clear to Gideon that Amy wasn’t going anywhere. He said nothing but reached out to feel her forehead.
She drew away. “I’m fine!” She shivered again. “Rest. Then climb.”
Gideon laid a hand on her forehead anyway. She was so hot it frightened him. He rummaged in the drysack and removed the medical kit, took out some ibuprofen and offered them to Amy.
She took them.
Next he brought out the bottle of amoxicillin. There was another antibiotic in the kit, labeled azithromycin. Should he give her both? Or would that have an adverse effect? Was the wound getting infected? Or was the fever some kind of bodily response to the injury? God, he wished to hell he knew more about medicine.
He gave her both. She took them with trembling hands and then seemed to lapse into a kind of half sleep.
What a place to be
, Gideon thought: jammed into a little crack barely three feet deep on an exposed cliff face maybe twelve hundred feet above the ocean, unable to move, lashed by rain and wind, with a companion who was sick and growing sicker. The sky darkened further and a peal of thunder roared above them. More rain lashed down, developing into a massive downpour. It was like sitting behind a waterfall. Gideon fished out the canteens from the drysacks and filled them with the dirty water now streaming down the sides of the cliff. Amy began to shiver uncontrollably and he took off his shirt and forced her to put it on, despite her feeble protests.
She was going downhill. He took out the sat phone. There was very little battery left. Shielding it from the rainstorm with his body, he turned it on. The screen came on, the
SEARCHING FOR SATELLITES
legend appearing.
The searching went on and on. They were clearly in a bad position, jammed into the cliff. He tried to hold it out, chancing the soaking, but the searching didn’t stop. The battery symbol began to blink red, fast. The display dropped from two percent remaining to one percent. And still the phone couldn’t locate satellites.
He quickly shut off the phone. He would have to make the call from the top.
“What…are you doing?”
He squeezed her hand and tried to smile. “Trying to call Glinn. No luck—we’re too close to the cliff.”
Ten minutes went by in silence as the rain poured.
“I’m frightened,” she whispered.
This admission scared him more than almost anything else.
Her face was small, her eyes burning and moving restlessly about, her lips white and trembling. Her reserve of determination, the stoical mask of self-assurance that never left her, had crumbled away. She looked terrified—as well she might. There was no way she could keep climbing in her condition—she was stuck in this horrible little crack of rock. They were in a lethal situation. He needed to think, try to work out the options.
“What do we do?” she asked, almost plaintively.
Gently, Gideon spoke to her. “You rest—let me worry about it.”
There was silence for several minutes. She squeezed his hand. “Talk to me. Please.”
“It’s going to be okay, Amy.” He felt lame saying it. He was pretty sure it wasn’t going to be okay.
“My name isn’t Amy. It’s Amiko. Stop calling me Amy.”
“Of course. Amiko.”
She let out a long, shuddering sigh, her eyes closing, opening, as if in slow motion, her hand clutching his like a frightened girl. “My father was Japanese. My mother, Swiss German. I was…born in Japan.”
“You don’t have to tell me all this, not now—”
“I have to talk,” she said. “I
need
to talk. I want you to know some things. If I die.”
“All right.”
“My father had three sons from a previous marriage. All pure Japanese. He was very traditional, very old-fashioned. My mother was…a cold, cold woman. When I came along, I just wasn’t what my father was looking for in a daughter, I guess. I tried, I tried so hard to earn his respect and love. I did it all. But no matter how many karate courses I took, or ikebana, or music lessons, no matter how many A’s I got in math, no matter how many Vivaldi concerti I played on the violin…It wasn’t enough. I was a girl. And I wasn’t Japanese. Not in his eyes.”
She paused, breathed hard.
“When I was twelve, my father was transferred to…a job in America. My older half brothers, all successful with their own careers, stayed in Japan.” She paused again. “I always felt out of place in Japan. Now, in the US, I felt even more out of place. And my father…he didn’t understand America. He was a fish out of water. Things went downhill. We never seemed to have any money, although my father seemed to have a good job. My mother left—just walked out—I never knew why. And then, one day, I came home from school to find my father dead. He…he’d killed himself.”
“Amiko, how awful. I’m so sorry.”
“And then it came out. He’d been laid off eighteen months before. To save face, he continued to leave the house dressed in a suit every morning, not returning until the evening, spending his days in libraries, employment offices, and finally in parks and other public spaces. That was it for me. I was seventeen. I think maybe I wanted to die, too. I just left everything behind. Worked my way through college, by myself…That’s when I tried acting. I was good, but that was no way to make a living…Went to graduate school. That’s when Glinn found me. I did a few black-bag jobs for him, researching treasure maps with my knowledge of ancient languages, and then…following up on what I learned. And here I am.”
She closed her eyes, opened them again.
“And your mother?”
“Card on my birthday…Gift certificate for Christmas…Never saw her again.”
Gideon felt terrible for her. And all this time he’d been feeling sorry for himself, thinking he’d had a rough childhood. No wonder she’d been forced to overcompensate, show a thick veneer to the world.
“Water…I need water.”
Gideon put the canteen to her lips, and she drank. He felt her forehead. It was burning hot.
And now it was growing dark. Night was coming on. The rain poured, thunder rolled across the waters, illuminated by flashes of lightning. The roar of the sea filtered up from far below, the cliffs shuddering even here with their great power as they struck the rocks.
“Talk,” Amiko whispered. “Please.”
Gideon hesitated for a minute. “I’ve got a terminal condition.”
Her reddish eyes swiveled toward him. “What?”
“It’s called an AVM. This big knot of veins and arteries in my brain.”
“Can…can it be operated on?”
“No. Inoperable. Incurable.”
“How long until…?” Her voice trailed off.
“Ten months, give or take.”
He didn’t know, exactly, why he was telling her this. It wasn’t as if the mood needed to be any bleaker. Somehow, it was all that was coming into his head.
“Oh, Gideon,” Amiko murmured.
“It’s okay. I’m reconciled to it.” Maybe, in some strange way, it would make her feel better—knowing she wasn’t the only one of them bearing a secret burden.
“So that’s why you wanted to be the first to try the lotus,” she said.
“Yes.”
They fell silent for a moment.
“Don’t let me sleep,” Amiko pleaded.
But she sank into a fitful sleep anyway, shivering and moaning, her head tossing back and forth. Gideon looked out over the darkening ocean, a feeling of despair washing over him.