“Strange ugly people in a dream,” she said contemptuously. “Ugly people with their ugly houses and their ugly ways. Love — pah!” She spat toward his feet. “And pecking at each other with their lips, like a parrot nibbling a mango. Yes, I remember that bad dream, now that you have brought it back. But it will go again. When you die, it will go and never come to me again.
“We have met across a bridge, I don’t know how. You from one side, I from the other. And now the bridge has fallen, and we are apart. I have my god to atone to. Let your god help you.
“It has been told to me what it was that happened. Two men of your kind came here and found us in our valley. They broke open the sleeping places of our dead and brought them out one by one. They made many marks on paper, they made many quick flashes like lightning. I was sick with the fever that brings sleep. I had been placed in the coolness of a cave to die. They found me there, and found that death had not yet claimed me. In ways they had, that we had not. By feeling the weight of my wrists, by listening with long feelers to the voice of my heart.
“Then they emptied out one of the sacred molds of the long-ago dead, and placed me in instead. They fastened it to the back of one of the little gray-coated animals they had brought with them. Eyes watched them from the jungle, saw everything they did. They carried me with them that way, and my people could not stop them, for they had the iron fingers that point, and cough fire, and kill from beyond the reach of the farthest arrow or spear. Two of my people they killed that way, when they came too close, and one they withered the arm of, so that he had to be destroyed.”
She had crept unnoticeably nearer while she spoke. Now she began to rise up, close to him. The hate in her eyes, if it were still there, was veiled; the lids drooped half closed over them.
He kept staring at her, unable to take his eyes away.
“Larry!” he heard Chris gasp.
This time there was a sharpness needling the cry that made him snap his head around.
The warrior, the sentry from the steps below, was right at his back, eyes twinkling malignantly, like black sequins sewn into his seamed face. The knife was already up, poised to fall.
Chris’s scream and the knife both slashed the air simultaneously.
He swerved, with an instinctive, floundering loop of the waist, and the knife and the warrior’s whole body came down on him. He went over backward against the pallet, and managed to deflect the knife by crossbarring the flat of his own arm to the arm that drove it, so that it glanced too far out and plunged deep into one of the skins just back of his prone shoulder, with a thrumming crunch.
The two of them sidled intermingled to the floor, and he had a horrid feeling for a moment of having a maniac octopus squirming upon him. The knife came free again, reared up a second time. But it never fell.
His own came out of his waistband, but in the wrong hand, and there was no room between their two bodies to aim it for a driving blow. Instead he just pointed it upward between them and gave a sudden nudge. It went in somewhere, probably the abdomen, with such effortlessness that there was no feel to it at all. For a moment he thought it had missed entirely.
Then the handle turned warm, almost hot, and as he let go of it with a sort of horror, the octopus-like arms and legs stopped their movements, and the whole mass slithered off him to the floor, leaving tracks of spongy red across his own body, as though a wet paintbrush had been streaked across him.
The warrior’s mouth was open a little wider, showing more of the yellowed tusks than before, that was all. The indented sequin-like eyes had disappeared completely into two blind tucks of skin.
“The sun should try to save him now,” Jones panted aloud, to no one in particular.
He turned and looked, and she was gone. He jumped to his feet. Chris was lying sprawled at the bottom of the staircase leading up, as though flung back in an unsuccessful attempt to hold her. She pointed upward in frozen fright, toward the temple rooftop. The rooftop where the war drum was.
He understood. He raced over to those stairs, sprinted up them. The stars burst into full flower as he emerged onto the flat superstructure above, and she was outlined against them like a darkling figure of doom. The drum was round and vast and shoulder-high. It reared there like an enormous caldron. A little block of stepping-stones, meant to gain sufficient height for the drum-beater, stood against it on one side, and atop this she already stood poised, arms flung overhead and back, a long-handled mallet-shaped implement caught in her double grasp, about to strike it.
Dark-outlined against the sky like that, she was like one of their own idols, something malefic, a Mayan goddess of vengeance. Though he couldn’t see her features, her figure expressed it in every line, bent outward at the middle like a taut bow about to loose an arrow.
There was no time to do anything but fling himself bodily against her, hoping to overthrow her before the imminent blow fell. He ran at her crouched low, buffeted himself into her shoulder-first. The drumbeat never fell. Her arms scissored wildly, the mallet kited out of her grasp, glancing harmlessly off the side of the drum. She went toppling off the perch, and her body struck against the squat parapet edging the roof just on the other side of it. He went down on hands and knees, short of it, and she fell across it, her back curved over it. For a moment she lay there like that, helpless. But too much of her weight was too far out upon it.
She clawed despairingly, trying to bring herself back and upright. At the last moment he reached for her, trying to lock hands with her from where he lay prostrate. Instinct, more than the will to save her. The inborn teaching of his country and his race.
They came within inches of one another, the tips of their hands. A second’s equipoise. They couldn’t close the gap. And then they drew apart again, dream-slowly.
The bridge has fallen, she had said. I have my god to atone to. May your god help you.
He was still prone there, the hand that she had missed by so little still emptily out before him in a barren staying gesture. He stared upward at the pallid oval that was her face in the gloom, the moment more that he could still see it. And all she had ever done to him was in it, returned to her now in the death moment. It was going backward, out of his sight. Back and over, into the night. From out of the night, back into the night. Strange ending to fit a strange beginning. A face first seen in moonlight, in a window frame a story above his head. A face last seen in starlight, three thousand miles and five hundred years away, over a cornice dropping down into eternity.
She clawed futilely out on each side of her, seeking to retain a grip on the parapet top. That only hastened her leaving it by that much, sped the process on its way, by the added spasms of motion it threw into it.
It took only a moment to complete itself. It seemed to take the span of a night-long dream, unfolding in its endlessness. She didn’t cry out. She gave only a little sobbing moan at the last. And then the parapet was empty. She went as he had first known her, something covered up in shadows from first to last.
“Mitty,” he whispered after her, and that was his farewell. He knew he’d never say that name again, not if he lived for forty more years. He knew he’d try never to even think of it, and he knew he’d never succeed.
He didn’t try to look down after her. She was with the night, where she belonged. Let it keep her.