by Nick Carter
"I will accept an escort to a certain point," Pico said, grinning again to show that he wasn't ready yet to let others know of his hidden plateau. "But you must remain here, Senor Carter."
"Oh, no you…"
"That is a condition," Pico said curtly. "If you are to lead the climb up the chimney, if we find the cave, you will need all the strength you possess. You have pushed yourself too much already. If you don't stay and rest, I will not even try to clarify the mysteries of this old map."
A part of me accepted what he said; that part of me wanted to rest, to let the tensions and the fatigue drain away. Another part, the part that has made me the top Killmaster for AXE, wanted to continue to push, to be in on the action, all the action. The first part won.
I watched from the edge of the square as the giant hermit went down the trail. He was flanked by Antonio and Purano. Behind them went two dozen warriors, spears in hand. I kept my weapons just in case the guerillas from the hollows found their way into the Ninca camp.
Chief Botussin arose from his stool and I was surprised to find that it hadn't been damaged, that the legs hadn't been punched into the ground.
"You sleep," he said, pointing to the council hut. "My servants will clear out the flies and put shades over the windows and door to provide quiet dark for your slumber. Don't expect the hermit for at least two hours. Sleep well."
Some order that. If it took Pico two hours to return with the solution, that left only six hours. The climb up the chimney would take four hours, at least, but there was a two-hour journey to the seven hollows. We had no slack time at all. With such troubled thoughts, I lay on the pallet in the darkened council hut to try to sleep. Elicia, I presumed, had gone off to stay with the tribal women until Pico's return. I hadn't seen her when I had turned back from watching Pico, Antonio, Purano and the warriors disappear down the trail.
I lay there and felt the hopelessness, the desolation, of our plight settle down over my mind. It was hopeless, and I knew it. That parchment was two hundred years old and the ink used to make those symbols had no relationship whatever to the inks used in Pico's books. The herbs he found above the plateau wouldn't have the same effect on the parchment that it had on the books. But I was willing to go along because the experiment spelled hope for these people. If they were to die in a matter of hours — days at the most — let them retain hope as long as possible. The death of hope has always signalled the death of the cause. But hope, I was convinced, was all that we had to go on now.
The good news, I was certain, wasn't really good news at all. It was a vision in the jungle, an ephemeral presence like an image projected on a wall of fog. With that unhappy thought, I began to drift into sleep.
A soft, pleasant dream was already starting. I was in the George Cinq Hotel dining room in Parts. Across from me was Diane Northrup, a woman I had loved in an earlier time. She was smiling, sipping from a glass of champagne. The orchestra was playing our favorite song. Diane leaned forward to kiss me and I heard a familiar voice, close by, sweet, bell-like and melodic:
"When my love is near me,
I am like the rose;
Budding, flowering, blossoming,
More than my love knows."
Still half asleep, I couldn't believe that I would mix Diane Northrup and Elicia Cortez in the same dream. I couldn't imagine Elicia in the dining room of the very proper George Cinq Hotel in Paris, anymore than I could imagine Diane here in this hot hut in the middle of an Indian village in the Caribbean.
Something soft crept up along my chest. Something even softer, and smelling of orange blossoms, pressed against my shoulder. And then naked legs touched mine, slipped up over me and began to move gently back and forth.
I came fully awake, out of a pleasant dream into a far more pleasant reality.
Elicia was beside me on the pallet. She was naked and her hair was still damp from having bathed in the stream below the village. Once again, she had found orange blossoms and had crushed them against her skin, from head to toe.
I gazed into her loving eyes and still couldn't convince myself that I wasn't dreaming. She kissed my lips and I found my arm going around her back, caressing the soft, sweet-smelling skin. My hand went down to her gently-rising buttocks and I felt the erection building magnificently at my middle. This was no dream.
"Elicia, do you know what you're doing?"
She shushed me with a fragrant finger across my lips. "I know," she said. "No talk. Only love."
All right, I had tried. Time and again, I had turned away from the pleasures that this girl had offered me. Time and again, I had felt noble about my intentions, about my abstinence. Well, there is a time to put all that jazz behind you. That time was now.
Days of frustration and abstinence and temptation had built up a tremendous drive inside me. My erection was more than an erection. It was a budding, blossoming, flowering instrument of sex and love and lust and frustration. Elicia found the hardness and enclosed it with her hand.
There were no more thoughts about what would happen to Elicia when this caper was over. There were no more thoughts about whether she belonged to me or to Purano. There were no more concerns for whether she was still a virgin by the flesh or by the soul. The future had no place in my mind. Or my body. The needs of the flesh and of the soul were so intense, so ready, for each of us that we shut out past and future and plunged helter-skelter into the present.
I started gently, recalling the brutal rapings this girl had endured for three months from the Cuban Marines. She seemed to like it. I raised up and gazed at those erect, ripe breasts that had tantalized me so often in her loose blouse. I kissed the nipples, tenderly, then with more purpose. I sucked and she arched her back and raised her pubis to me. I lay my hardness along the mound and gently massaged until she let out a moan and bit my ear.
"Enough gentleness," she said, gasping, chewing on my ear. "Take me now and let me know the pleasure of losing my virginity to one I love. Oh, Nick, love me for now, for now only."
When I entered her, she was ready. She climaxed almost instantly and I thought it was over. She took a few seconds of respite and then the passion grew in her to a newer and higher level. She swallowed me up, rising and falling, plunging and withdrawing. She climaxed three more times before it finally happened to me. I had been holding back, savoring it, wanting it to go on forever — or, at least, for the next two hours. But nothing lasts forever. She responded by climaxing again, for the fifth time. I have always envied women that capacity, but I wouldn't have traded that one gigantic climax for all the little ones in the world.
Spent, sated, we lay sweating on the pallet. Elicia's arm lay across my now naked chest. She was silent for such a long time that I thought she was asleep. She wasn't.
"You will think me strange," she finally said, "but I did this as a gesture of farewell."
"Farewell?"
"Yes. In two weeks, I will marry Purano and join his tribe. I told him about you, about how I feel, about how I will always feel about you. He knows that I am with you now."
"He knows? And he agreed to this?"
"Yes, otherwise, he would know that I would always wonder what it would have been like. You see, Nick, I know nothing of love. I mean, this kind of love. What happened to me with those Marines was a world apart from what happened here today. I knew it would be so. Purano understands. Unless I could prove to myself that this beautiful act could be truly beautiful, I would not be a fit bride. Do you understand that?"
I have been all over this globe and have met and been exposed to the cultures of hundreds of peoples. I have understood much. I had to admit, though, that I didn't fully understand this weird triangle between me, Purano and Elicia, or why he would agree to have her come to me when they had just become betrothed. It was equally difficult to comprehend when I knew that Purano had remained single because there were so few suitable maidens in the tribe. There were so few maidens because thirty years ago the surviving females had been «spoiled�
� by Ancio and his gang. I understood a part of it, then. Spoiled had different meanings. Ancio had taken the maidens against their will, therefore spoiling them. Elicia and I had engaged in an activity of mutual agreement, as, I'm sure, Purano and Elicia would do before their marriage. But that was cutting the culture pretty thin and I didn't understand it at all.
"I understand," I lied.
"Good. It is important for me and Purano that you do."
We slept then, but only for fifteen or twenty minutes. I awoke first and was trying to understand more fully why this girl felt she had to give herself to me before her marriage to Purano, to make it a farewell gesture even though she confessed that she loved me every bit as much as she loved Purano. I couldn't understand. What happened next was even more difficult to understand.
Elicia awoke, came to me and we made love again. This second time, she said, would prepare her for a lifetime of joy in the man she had chosen to marry. I didn't try to understand that one either. I merely enjoyed, even though there was a growing sadness that this would be the last of Elicia for me.
There was shouting out in the square and we quickly dressed. Elicia walked boldly out the front door and I followed, a sheepish grin on my face. If the others in the square knew about our tryst, about Elicia's strange logic on how to say farewell to the man she was turning down, they gave no hint of it.
The shouting was because a sentry below had spotted Pico, Antonio, Purano and the warriors returning. I checked my watch. They'd been gone just over an hour. We were well within the schedule, if Pico had anything to offer concerning the map and the hidden cave.
He had.
The circles formed again in the square, with Pico and the map at the center. Behind Chief Botussin, I noticed, Elicia had moved up beside Purano and they were conversing in that strange ritual of staring at the ground near each other's feet. She was probably telling him about our love-making. With a slightly bitter thought, I figured she was telling him that I was a lousy lover, that he had nothing to worry about. But no, I thought again, she would be truthful. The truth was that we both were good lovers. Purano would have to go some to replace my performance in Elicia's eyes. I wondered, with another ping of jealousy, if she would sing the rose song to him. I knew she would.
"Time was saved," Pico said, "because I still had a supply of the clear liquid from my last batch. I had to coat the parchment three times, but the third time the images became distinct. As you can see, the cave is near the top of the fifth hollow from the east, or the third hollow from the west. It would have taken several hours to search all the hollows. Worse yet, without the map, we would not have found the cave even if we had gone directly to the fifth hollow."
He pointed to a faded mark that looked like a child's rendering of a fly. They were big on flies in this part of the world.
"The fly once was the symbol of fertility among the Nincas," Pico continued. It still was judging from the size of the flies that were right now munching on me. "This fly is facing due west, indicating that the cave entrance is to the west side of the hollow. Possibly, there's a ravine there separating hollow five from hollow six. We won't know until we inspect the premises. But I've found a small dot that I don't understand. Under the magnifying glass, the dot is actually a tiny circle. Whether this was by intent or by accident, I don't know. If by accident, it means nothing. If by design, it means that the cave entrance is through a well or a deep hole in the ground. Finding a hole up there will be like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. I know that I followed Ancio and his friends down some steps in a dark place. The open circle on the map indicates the presence of water, but I recall no water. My memory is of no help to us. And there's more potential bad news."
We waited. Pico gazed at the faces, then glanced at the sun that was telling that it was mid-afternoon. I checked my watch. It was 2:26. We were tight on time, but there was enough if we had no further problems.
"When we were returning from my plateau," Pico said, "we saw a group of red-shirted guerillas moving up toward the area of the hollows. These are the elite corps of Don Carlos, of Ancio. There were perhaps a hundred of them. If we encounter them on the trail, it is all over.
"Then," I said as positively as I could, "we'll just not encounter them. Unless you have anything to add, Pico, I think we ought to leave immediately for the cave entrance."
After a brief altercation between Elicia and Purano about her going along, it was decided by old Chief Botussin that, if the Ninca tribe was to link up with the Twentieth Century at last, they might as well accept the new role for women. In short, he said, Purano shouldn't tell the girl what she could or couldn't do. Elicia went along and, even though Purano had nodded his approval, his face and eyes didn't seem any too happy about the decision.
I had already been keeping my eyes on Purano since spending that lovely hour alone in the council hut with Elicia. The boy had known that Elicia was in love with me, had been with me on the trail. But it had seemed to me a somewhat extreme test of his love to tell him, as Elicia had, that she was going to give herself to another man before the marriage. The more I thought of it, the more I realized that women in other cultures were similar in that respect. A great number of American women have a final fling with a former lover before entering into marriage. The difference, though, is they keep quiet about it.
So far, I hadn't seen any signs of animosity out of Purano. He treated me with his usual silent respect. If he was plotting any mischief against me out of jealousy, he didn't show it. And we hadn't been on the trail ten minutes before his obvious pique about losing his first argument with Elicia seemed to have dissipated.
There were seventeen of us in the party heading out to find the entrance to the sacrificial cave and, hopefully, a way to the top of Alto Arete. Besides me, Elicia, Antonio, Purano and Pico, there were twelve warriors armed with knives and spears. We left the Indian camp at 2:32 in the afternoon, giving us just six hours to reach Don Carlos Italla's lair and to stop him from giving the war signal.
We had no time for toe-stubbing.
Purano and his warriors led our party. Purano knew of secret trails which would take a few minutes longer, but which would keep us out of danger from the guerilla patrols. Even so, we spotted the red-shirted members of the elite corps in half a dozen places before we even approached the entrance to the fifth hollow.
Strangely, there were no guards or guerillas at the mouth of the fifth hollow. It was quiet there; not a soul was about. We found the campfires used by guards only recently, and places on the jungle floor where they had slept. The warriors in our group spread out to make certain the guerillas weren't waiting in ambush, but the whole area was clear.
As we made our way up the hollow, through ever-narrowing ravines and along high ledges above a cascading stream, I began to feel more and more uneasy about the absence of guards. If we had spotted guerillas and avoided them, I would have felt easier. At least, we would have known where they were.
This way, the jungle hollow had an eerie feeling about it. Even the birds and the rushing water seemed to have muted sounds, as though anticipating a disaster.
As we neared the top of the hollow and were weary from an hour-long forced march over difficult trails, Pico called a halt and we rested. He sat down and studied the ancient map, getting up frequently to check certain points. Elicia and Purano sat side by side on the grass, gazing at invisible points near each other's feet. I wondered just how those two would help propagate the race among the Nincas, but decided it was none of my business.
I used the time to study my crude map of the top of Alto Arete, based on information I had gleaned from Luis Pequeno, the hapless Marine sergeant who had helped me plunge into this whole mad affair. There were squares for the main buildings; the barracks for the monks, the minefields and other fortifications. Even as I pondered the map, I had the distinct feeling that it would be useless. Luis Pequeno could have lied through his teeth about everything, or he could have made the whol
e thing up just to keep me from torturing him. But it was all I had to go on and I had the others study it closely.
We moved on. It was 3:45 when Pico spotted a deep ravine separating the fifth and sixth hollows. He had been right about that. We slid down the steep banks and came up on the other side, through a wall of vines and into a small clearing about the size of a high school gymnasium.
It was quiet in the clearing, quieter than it had been on the trail. Not even the sound of the tumbling water from the ravine behind us reached our ears. Not one bird sang or called out. Pico spotted a mound of rocks at the far end of the clearing, up a steep slope.
"That would be where the well is," he said. "If my calculations and faint memory are correct, the entrance will be through the well."
I had a great deal of nylon rope in my knapsack, and Purano and his warriors had brought long lengths of well-made hemp rope. We could use it all for climbing down the well — and possibly for climbing up the natural chimney. The husky Indian and Pico started off briskly up the slope. The hemp rope in hand.
For some reason I still haven't been able to fathom, I decided to remain behind. I smelled danger. I signalled Antonio to take a post to my right with his Volska automatic weapon. I pointed toward the mound of rocks and Antonio dropped to one knee. He aimed at the rocks. Elicia, unaware of our vigilance, went on up the slope with Purano, Pico and the warriors.
My hunch of danger proved true. Pico was no more than halfway across the clearing when guerillas came streaming out from either side of the rock pile. They opened fire and the big hermit was the first to fall. The warriors began to let out hideous war cries and then flung their spears.
The spears fell harmlessly against the rocks and the guerillas advanced down the slope, cutting the warriors to pieces with automatic rifles.
Antonio was going crazy near me. He wanted to fire and I kept holding him back. Elicia had seen the guerillas and had made a dash for the jungle off to her right. She was temporarily out of danger.
