“The trail’s about vanished.” Ryan stood still. “I can hear water falling close by.”
The native woman smiled at him, recovering something of her nerve. “Yes. Close now.”
THE BASE DIDN’T COMPARE to some of the massive redoubts that the friends had encountered over the past months. It wasn’t built into a mountainside or hidden deep underground.
At first glance it looked like an average long-abandoned air base back in Deathlands a few weather-stained administration buildings and Quonset huts surrounded by tumbled towers and fragmented coils of rusted razor wire.
But it seemed as if a camouflage expert had been at work, disguising the complex.
Most of the roofs had fallen in, the windows broken, and moss and vines were draped all over the ruins so that they almost vanished into the background of the forest.
Everyone stopped and stared at the lost relic from before the brief and bloody war that ended civilization as the world had known it.
“Kind of spooky,” Mildred said quietly.
“I doubt we will find any human remains here,” Doc said. “Not after nearly a hundred years of tropical weather.”
“But there could be some hardware hidden away,” J.B. stated hopefully.
“I not go in,” the young woman said, seating herself comfortably on a fallen baobab tree. “Wait here you coming back. Much time.”
“Frightened of ghosts?” Jak asked, sitting by her.
“Yeah. Am.”
“But you have god with you. Nothing to be feared with god at your side.”
“What kind of god is Jak?” Ryan asked. “What’s the story about this?”
IN THE END, the process of discovery was protracted by the young woman’s poor grasp of the American tongue, but they learned something of the background to Jak’s godship.
As they stood there, close to a small, stagnant pool, a swarm of midges pestered them, forcing a move closer to the ruined base. They walked past the crumpled remains of the red-and-white pole that had once been the first step in the security of the place, now lying broken and neglected, overgrown with weeds.
They stopped by the old guardhouse, with its warning notice board almost illegible from age, showing warnings in American, Portuguese, Spanish and in what they guessed had to be the language of the local natives. There was absolutely nothing inside the building, except for a scattered carpet of splintered glass.
There Rain Flower finally unraveled a complicated tale of legend and myth.
It seemed that back in the long-lost times of first man and first woman, when the gods walked the earth in their various guises, there was a very beautiful girl, barely past puberty.
Her name was Tlazolteotl and she was beloved by many of the gods, who all desired to lie with her and father her firstborn child. Because of her rare beauty, they all knew that her sonit had to be a sonwould be one of the most marvelous humans ever known.
But the maiden had no wish to be either the bride or mistress of any of the gods, for she truly loved a young warrior of her own tribe.
One night she fell into a deep sleep and dreamed a most mysterious dream.
She was swimming in the bottom of a deep and beautiful lake when a dolphin came to her.
Finding out from Rain Flower what kind of a creature it was took several minutes until Doc used the ferrule of his swordstick to scratch a sketch of a dolphin in the soft dirt in front of the old guardhouse.
The dolphin was a nameless god who was sympathetic to the weeping of Tlazolteotl, and he took her to a grotto filled with mountains of precious stones, glittering and dancing like living fire.
He touched a round piece of rare white jade, valued above price, no larger than a half-ripe pea, telling the young woman that she would be preserved from the lusts and unwelcome attention of the other gods if she would swallow the jade.
On waking, she walked in the forest.
It had rained, and some loose dirt had washed from a steep bank outside her village. And there, among the mud, lay a tiny berry of pure white jade.
She swallowed it and immediately became pregnant.