“Look at that, will you?” he said. “It’s the Mongol horde on the march!”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk that way, Barry.”
“I say something wrong?”
“The Mongol horde. This isn’t anything like that. They were invaders, evil marauders. This is a holy procession.”
Jaspin looked at her strangely. She was drenched with sweat, shining with it. Her T-shirt was soaked, almost transparent: her nipples were showing through. Her eyes were glowing in a frightening way. The glow of the True Believer, he thought. He wondered if his eyes ever took on a glow like that. He doubted it.
“Isn’t it?” she said. “Holy?”
“Yes. Of course it is.”
“You sound so irreverent sometimes.”
“Do I?” Jaspin said. “I can’t help it, I suppose. My anthropological training. I can’t ever stop being a detached observer.”
“Even though you believe?”
“Even though.”
“I feel sorry for you,” she said.
“Come on. Ease off.”
“I don’t like it when you make jokes about what’s happening. The Mongol horde, and all that.”
“All right,” he said. “I’m flippant. So shoot me. It’s in my genes, being flippant. I can’t help it. I’ve got five thousand years of flippancy in my blood.” He reached out for her, lightly touching her bare arm, gliding his fingertip through the perspiration on her skin and leaving a streak. She pulled away from him. She was doing that a lot lately. “Come on,” he said. “I’m sorry I was flippant.”
“If this is the Mongol horde,” Jill said, “you’re one of the Mongols too. Don’t forget that.”
Jaspin nodded. “You’re right. I won’t.”
She turned away, rummaging in the car, groping in the water-cooler. After a moment she came up with a bottle of water, took a deep pull, put it back without offering him any. Then she wandered away and stood staring toward Senhor Papamacer’s bus.
The new Jill, he thought.
There had been a subtle change, he noticed, in her attitude toward him since they had set out from San Diego with the tumbondé caravan. Or perhaps it wasn’t so subtle. She had cooled; she had become very distant. She was much less the timid waif now, much less tentative and subservient, much more self-assured. No more gratitude that the wonderful erudite Dr. Barry Jaspin of UCLA kindly permitted her to stick around. No more of that wide-eyed awe from her now; no more gaping at him as though he were the custodian of all human wisdom. And the sexual thing between them, which had been so free and easy the first couple of weeks, was fading fast, was hardly there any more. Well, some of that had been inevitable, Jaspin knew. He had been through it before with other women. He was human, after all, feet of clay right up to his eyebrows like everybody else, and she was bound to find that out sooner or later. She was starting to see that he was less wonderful than her fantasies had led her to think, and she was starting to look at him more realistically. Okay. He had warned her. I am not the noble, romantic, intellectual figure you think I am, he had told her, right up front. He might also have said he wasn’t the awesome lover she imagined him to be, but no need; she had had time by now to discover that herself. Okay. Okay. Being worshipped wasn’t all that great anyway, especially when it wasn’t based on anything real. But something else was going on, something a little scary. She was still basically a worshipper at heart, a dependent personality: what she had done was shift her dependence from him to the gods of tumbondé. The awe she had had for him was reserved now, it seemed, for Senhor Papamacer as Vicar-on-Earth of Chungirá-He-Will-Come. She would, he suspected, do anything the tumbondé men asked her to do. Anything.
He stared toward the south again, looking up the high mountain wall. The vehicles were still streaming down into the Valley, an unending flow of them. This was the fifth day of the journey, and day by day the size of the procession had grown. They had taken the inland route to avoid problems with traffic and with the authorities in the big coastal towns; they had gone up through places like Escondido and Vista and Corona, and then around the eastern edge of Los Angeles. It was a slow trip, with frequent stops for rituals and prayers and enormous communal meals. And it took forever to get things started up again when the order went out to head for the road. Probably the bulk of those who were here were people who had been part of the caravan since San Diego, Jaspin figured—tumbondé wasn’t widely known outside the southern half of San Diego County, where the big refugee populations were—but as the vast procession had rolled along, a good many other people had joined in, perhaps a great many others. There might be fifty thousand people by now. A hundred thousand, even. Truly the Mongol horde on the march.
“Jaspeen?”
Turning, he saw one of the high tumbondé men, the one named Bacalhau. It was getting easier to tell them apart, now. Despite the intense heat, Bacalhau was wearing full tumbondé rig, boots and leggings and jacket, even the sombrero, or whatever it was, that flat black wide-brimmed hat.
“The Senhor, he want you,” Bacalhau said. He glanced at Jill. “You, too.”
“Me?” she asked, surprised.
Jaspin was surprised too. Not that Senhor Papamacer would summon him to an audience—he had done that yesterday evening, and also two days before that, each time treating Jaspin to a long rambling repetitious monologue describing how the first visions of Maguali-ga and Chungirá-He-Will-Come had happened to enter his soul two or three years ago, and how he had immediately understood that he was the chosen prophet of the new gods. But why Jill? Up till now the Senhor had shown no indication that he even knew Jill existed.
“You come,” said Bacalhau. “You both.”
He led them to the Senhor’s bus. It was painted in the colors of Maguali-ga and bore the huge papier-mâché images of Prete Noir the Negus and Rei Ceupassear mounted on the hood on either side of the front window. Half a dozen other members of the Inner Host were lounging around its entrance when Jaspin and Jill approached it—Barbosa, Cotovela, Lagosta, Johnny Espingarda, Pereira, and one who was either Carvalho or Rodrigues, Jaspin was not sure which. Like Bacalhau they were all in formal tumbondé costumes, though some had loosened their collars.
“Maguali-ga, Maguali-ga,” Lagosta said, sounding bored.
“Chungirá-He-Will-Come,” Jill replied before Jaspin could make the ritual response.
Lagosta stared at her with a flicker of interest in his chilly eyes, but only for a moment. He gave Jaspin a frosty look too, as if saying, Who are you, pitiful branch, sad honky noodle, to rate so much of Senhor Papamacer’s attention? Jaspin glowered back at him. Your name means lobster, he thought. And you, Bacalhau, that’s codfish. Some names. Lobster, codfish. The holy apostles of the prophet.