He could see the guard’s legs now, athwart the passage entrance; the trunk of his body must be to the side.
One last step, and then there was no room for any more; he was almost on top of him. But he couldn’t get to him from this side, the inside; the wall was in the way. He rose swayingly against the side of the opening, knife still in his teeth. He arched his leg out widely, and put his foot down on the other side of the guard’s legs. He swayed for a moment, off balance between the wall and the guard’s leg. Then he gathered his weight, stepped lightly to the other side of the guard, and dropped down beside his sleeping enemy.
The man was on his back, nostrils pointed up, bared chest exposed in its serried gradations, which were like steppingstones downward.
Suddenly the moon came up, just in time to be in at the death. It came up in fitting hue for it, too; lurid coppery-red.
He put out his hand, opened it, and sheltered for a minute the place where the heart was. As if to mark it, as if to bid it stay there where it was for an instant longer. He put the hand toward his mouth, and it came back with the knife in it.
The bloodthirsty moon was paling into yellow now with impatience.
There was a middling-sized flat stone lying there (the guard was using an even larger one for a head rest). He picked that up in his other hand. He held the knife perpendicular to the heart now. He raised the stone high overhead, and swung, from all the way around in back of him.
There was a crack as it crashed into the knife haft. He let it roll off down the side of the man’s body, and he sank prostrate beside him, spent by the blow.
The man slumped over a little more to one side, that was all, and then stayed that way.
When he raised his own head again to look at him, the only change was that his mouth was now open instead of closed. The haft was all that protruded of the knife; the rest of it had all gone in.
He got to his feet, and crossed the man’s ankles so that he could get a good grip on them, and dragged him that way, a little at a time, around the turn of the opening, and into the passage, and down the length of that, and finally left him right there by the barrier.
Then he worked on the knife haft, and with the help of his foot against the body, finally managed to get the knife out again. It was dark in there, so he couldn’t see it while he was doing it, only know it, which wasn’t so bad. He whetted the knife this way and that against the hard-packed earth floor to dry it off, and then he sheathed it against him, and went back to the entrance to wait for her.
The moon had whitened now, as if from loss of blood.
He stood there straining his eyes and ears, watching for her coming, listening for the sound of it. Nothing moved. The night was still and empty.
She’d said she’d be here when the moon came up. The moon had already been up for ten minutes now, for fifteen, for who knew how long? Every added minute was a minute taken off their chances. A remark she had made one of the other times came back to him now in agonized foreboding: “If I stay too long, then I may never come again.” They might have— They wouldn’t, would they? Of course they would, why wouldn’t they? If they had torn the living heart out of an elderly man, and he had seen them do that with his own eyes, why would they spare her? The distinction between the sexes, the sparing of women, that was something that had only come into being with feudal Europe, with knighthood. That wasn’t known among primitives. And she, the other one— He’d heard somewhere that women could be far crueler toward other women than toward any man. Maybe it was true and maybe it was not; he only knew she wasn’t here, and the moon was high, and something must have happened to her.
He’d have to go look for her, then, and try to find her, and try to save her. If it wasn’t too late. And then the thought occurred. But if I leave here, if I start out, she may come by another way, and I may lose her altogether. We may never find each other at all that way.
Three times he started out from the shelter of the inked-in doorway, and three times he lost his courage, his feet faltered to a stop within a few paces, and he slunk back again to wait some more.
The moon was far above the rim of the world now, and condensed to about the size of a tennis ball. The moon of the Mayas, haunted, lonely, come back to look for its own. A moon of the fifteenth century.
He did things that a year ago he wouldn’t have done. But then a year ago he wasn’t as he was now. The long solitude, the confinement, the impoverished diet had unmanned him. He breathed her name in desperation toward shadows that fooled him into thinking they were she. “Chris! Chris! Hurry, Chris!” But the shadows stayed where they were and didn’t come on any closer after all. He turned and buried his face within his squared arms against the side wall of the passage, and his face writhed, and his body shook, but without tears. He pounded desolately against the wall with his palm, then stopped, for that made a sound that might attract attention.
Suddenly he left his place of concealment, and this time, he knew, there was no turning back. Either he’d die with her, or they’d find each other and escape together. Even freedom wasn’t worth the price that he’d been paying the last few minutes.
The moon of the Mayas seemed to swell and gloat as he came out within its ken. Hungry for death, never tired of looking down on death, not even after five hundred years.
He tried to orient himself as best he could, after just one look at the scene many months ago and with his eyes glazed by exhaustion after the long travail through the mountain. And to make it harder, the whole world was piebald now, patches of black, patches of white, with no in-between gradations.
But he remembered the direction from which they’d been brought toward the temple, into which Mitty had gone, and Chris with her. He could remember the shape of its doorway, broader at the bottom than at the top, like that of an ancient Egyptian temple. And peering ahead, he could see something like that right now, milk-white in the moonlight, jet-black in its recesses. Its upper tiers made shadowy cubes against the spangled sky.
He crept along, hugging the walls closely, staying deep within their shadows whenever he could, in case unseen eyes were awake in the night around him. Where there were gaps between the structures, he leaped quickly across the canals of white that these formed, into the sheltering dark again, like an animated chessman hopping from black square to black square, to keep from being checkmated in a game in which death was the opposing player.
He reached the pylon-shaped opening at last and stopped cautiously before it. Moonlight showed on the inside as well as the out. There must be a court open to the sky in there, with the lintel forming just a squared-off black bridge between.
This was it. He’d seen her go in here that first day.
He passed under the massive stone lintel. It threw a brief bar of black across him, no more, then he emerged into full moonlight again. Beyond there was a peripheral courtyard or compound, a sort of dry moat, separating the temple proper from the outer wall that ringed it.
A second, inner entrance faced him, smaller than the first, and black, black as doom, black as perdition. It was set higher from the ground then the first, steps going up to it. And at the foot of these, one on each side, were two things that made him quail for different reasons.
On the one side was a warrior sentry, sleeping huddled. Not across the steps, it is true, as his own guard had been back there, but at their side. And on the other side, discarded, lay an empty earthen jug, such as was used for carrying water. But it was not upright; it lay on its side, as though it had rolled over several times. As though the bearer, seeking to slip out with it, as a subterfuge for fetching water had been discovered and stopped and forcibly dragged back inside again.