He turned and ran down below again to where the lamplight was still feebly playing in the chamber. He made a little hasty grab for Chris’s hand, and it flew out to meet his, and they went on down the farther stairs, to the ground linked together like that.
They came out into the temple court. Mitty lay there in the shadow, quite still and calm, almost as though she were asleep.
He bent over her for a minute and tipped her shoulder from the ground. Her head hung over strangely, swaying back too much, as though it were something loose, dangling by a string.
“Her neck is broken,” he muttered.
He let her settle back again any which way.
“That’s the end of her,” he said bitterly. “She died too late. Too late to do me any good. She should have died before I ever met her. Or I should have, either way.”
Chris just stood there by him, looking at him compassionately. She only had eyes for him, even now at this decisive moment.
He took her hand in his own again. “Let’s get out of this cursed place! What are we standing here for? Why should we wait here to die? We stiff may be able to make it. Let’s at least try!”
Chapter Twenty-seven
They ran toward the front of the courtyard and darted through the opening by which he had first entered, hands linked. On the outside of the temple wall the dimly looming buildings were as silent as the moonlit mirages they appeared to be. But there was imminent death, they knew, lurking in every one of them. Her fall from the parapet had gone unheard, perhaps muffled by the encircling courtyard wall.
“We have until the sun comes up,” she whispered. “They’re bound to find out by then. That’s when she always went up there and—”
“That’s our head start, then. And how much we do with it is up to us.”
He jockeyed her around to the front of him and they went one behind the other, to be able to hug the shadows more narrowly. They scurried along where it was blackest and leaped swiftly over the light patches as in a game of hopscotch. In a little while the peripheral hovels had come, and then the undiluted foliage again, and they were clear of the city, for what that much was worth.
They went in less silence now that they were this far, for branches hissed and spat and jittered at their brusque passage, but they went in less immediate danger also, for there were no sleepers around them any longer to detect these telltale tokens of their flight.
They went fast, at a sort of padding trot, but not too fast, for they both realized this was to be a long sustained test of their endurance, and to be too spendthrift of energy now would only rob them of it later, when perhaps it would be needed even more. Even this trot they didn’t maintain evenly, but broke it at times to rest at a fast walk.
The moon had gone down long ago, while they were still in the temple. The night hung in a state of suspended blackness, waiting to break. They both looked up at it several times, as at a clock. It was the only one they had.
Presently he said, “Once they start after us, we won’t be able to stick to this trail any longer. They’ll shoot straight out along it and come up to us in no time. We’ll have to jump off it into the jungle on the side.”
“Then how will we be able to keep our bearings?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Let’s do all the distance we can while we can still use the trail.”
She had started to flag a little already, he noticed. She spurted forward again now, as if spurred by the reminder.
“Tired?”
“No, not yet.”
He wasn’t sure she was telling the truth. He couldn’t afford to disbelieve her, however, in the situation they were in. She was young, that was one thing in her favor. As young as anyone could well be and still have to run for her life like this.
They must have been going due west. She glanced back one time, not at him but at the sky behind the two of them, and even before she spoke, he was oddly disquieted to see that her face when turned that way was already paler than the rest of her. It was the first time in his life that he’d ever hated to see day come, caught himself wishing it would hold off for a while yet. Daylight, which usually spelled hope and an end to fear, to them spelled heightened danger and perhaps destruction.
“It’s starting already,” she warned, and they both sped on faster than before.
He looked back in turn. The first signs of daylight were in the east; the sky was smoked pearl back there and no longer black. It was as though it were being washed with some sort of powerful abrasive that was taking all the color out of it.
The bleach began to spill over from there onto other things as well. Branches and fronds and the trunks of trees became two-toned, lighter on one side than on the other. Chris’s laboring form, ahead of him, began to stand out more clearly, particularly when there was any opening in the intermittent canopy over them. Then at other times, when there were completely tunneled spaces they had to pass through, it would blend into the misty foliage, still dark blue with night shadows.
She was slackening a good deal now. He could tell it mostly by the way he continually kept coming up abreast of her instead of staying at her heels. He didn’t want to take the lead, for he was afraid that then he might outdistance her.
“Do you want to rest?” he asked her at last.
She could hardly draw breath any more. “Not yet,” she gasped determinedly. “Later I — may have to. I don’t want to waste any of this head start.”
He put his arm around her waist. “Lean on me, it may take a little of the weight off your own feet.”
It was an awkward palliative at best. They had to force a passage twice as wide through the interfering leafy web. It eased her a little, that was all, but slowed them much too much. They discarded it again presently, and went forward singly once more.
He looked back again. “It’s nearly here,” he said.
The eastern sky was saffron now, and beginning to fume as with some unseen chemical agent infused into it from below. The stone shapes of the building they had left behind still looked dismayingly clear and near at hand, whenever they could be seen at all through interstices in the jungle thicket. The temple in particular still bulked so large against the sky, like something immovable, that, no matter how hard they tried to get away from it, it still seemed to keep its same distance from them.
“They look so far yet,” he heard her lament.
The mountains, he knew she meant.
They are, he thought; farther than we’ll ever get to. We’ll never make them, never. He kept that thought to himself.
A golden glint, like some sort of wet spray flung after them from the end of a paintbrush, suddenly splashed far ahead of them up the trail, dyeing it and the immediate leaves on either side of it.
“It’s up!” They both said it together. They both knew it, without having to look.
They ran full tilt now, like two deer. No more trotting, no more uncertain slackening. They knew they couldn’t keep it up for very long, but they knew they had to do it while they still could. That fiery eye, as Mitty had called it, was open in the sky now behind them, staring vengefully after them.
He began to count off in his mind, while his feet pounded ahead underneath. One, two, three, four—
A great dull thud smote the air on the fifth count. It came rolling sluggishly after them, like horizontal thunder, from back there behind them. Then as the first wave spent itself, a second clap came. Then a third.
The alarm drum.
It quickened them still further, as though the ground were burning hot to their feet. She gave a wordless little whimper.
“It’s all right,” he panted reassuringly. “It had to come sooner or later. It’s over with now. Just keep running.”