He wasn’t ready to drop the machete just yet, though. He said, “Back off, Esparza. You can’t have me gunned down fast enough to stop me from cutting this rope, and if I do, Podnemovitch better know how to fly.”
The threat didn’t appear to ruffle Esparza. “If you do that, Señor Hunt,” he said as he brought up a pistol and pointed it at Cierra, “I will kill Dr. Almanzar and then have my men shoot you.”
“Do it, Gabriel!” Cierra cried. “I don’t care what happens to me! Just do it!”
Gabriel glanced along the bridge at Podnemovitch, who now stood over Escalante’s motionless body with a tensely expectant look on his face. He had to know that he didn’t have time to make it back to the other end of the bridge before Gabriel could chop through the final strands of the rope.
But Gabriel couldn’t do it. Slowly, he lowered the machete, then let the handle slip through his fingers. The big knife fell to the ground at his feet.
“Very wise, Señor Hunt,” Esparza said. “More wise than you know. You see, I’ve decided that I’m going to let you live for the time being. I want you to witness my triumphant entry into Cuchatlán.”
Gabriel didn’t say anything. Cursing wouldn’t help matters.
He looked back out onto the bridge and saw Podnemovitch reach down to pick up the Colt Escalante had dropped. As Podnemovitch did so, Escalante’s hand came up and caught feebly at his arm, as if the bandit were trying to throw him off the bridge. That surprised Gabriel a little, since he had thought that Escalante was already dead.
Escalante was too weak to budge Podnemovitch. The Russian laughed harshly, straightened, and said, “Old fool.” He hooked a toe under Escalante’s shoulder and rolled him off the bridge. Cierra screamed in horror as Escalante fell, but not a sound came from the bandit himself.
Gabriel looked away, not wanting to see the end of Escalante’s plunge into the gorge. He saw that Mariella had put her arms around Cierra and turned her away from the chasm as well. Whatever friction there had been between the two women was gone; they had worse enemies to face than each other now.
“Bring all three of the prisoners,” Esparza snapped at his men.
Podnemovitch reached the eastern end of the bridge. The traitor Hector limped across after him. Podnemovitch said, “When the time comes for Hunt to die, Vladimir, I want to be the one to kill him.”
“Of course, Alexei,” Esparza replied with a smile. “I think you’ve earned that right. Señor Hunt has proven hard to kill, though.” His voice hardened slightly. “Next time, make certain that he’s dead.”
With that he turned to stalk onto a trail through the jungle, and his men surrounded Gabriel, Cierra, and Mariella and prodded them along after him.
Gabriel thought bitterly about the turn events had taken. He would soon see the ruins of Cuchatlán for himself…but not the way he had intended.
Chapter 21
The valley was beautiful, no doubt about that, Gabriel thought as the group topped a small rise that gave them a good view of the land spread out before them. Lush and green, stretching for miles between the gorge known as the Blade of the Gods on the west and a wall-like range of cloud-wreathed mountains to the east, the valley gave every appearance of being, as Mariella had said, paradise.
What looked, at first glance, like several small hills rose from the valley floor about a mile away. Gabriel looked closer and realized that instead of hills, they were Mayan pyramids that were so covered with the vines that had grown over the centuries they looked like natural formations rather than man-made structures. A shorter, squatly built hump near the pyramids was probably some sort of ancient palace.
“I don’t believe it,” Cierra said as she trudged along beside Gabriel. “Why has this place never been discovered before now?”
“Think about how inaccessible it is,” Gabriel said. “If you came up to that gorge and didn’t know there was a bridge over it, you might just turn back. And Mariella said there are no passes through those mountains to the east, so nobody could get in that way.”
“Yes, but it should have been spotted from the air,” Cierra insisted. “That’s the way some of the other lost Mayan cities have been found, by people searching with planes and helicopters.”
“Again, the mountains probably have something to do with it. They’re high enough so that an approach from that direction wouldn’t be easy. Not impossible, mind you, but not easy, either. And even if somebody flew over the valley, what would they see? Some hills?”
Mariella was walking in front of them, flanked by two of Esparza’s men. Esparza was up ahead, striding along with Podnemovitch beside him. Mariella turned to look at Gabriel and Cierra, and it was obvious she had been listening to their conversation as she said, “Cuchatlán was abandoned by the Maya earlier than any of their other cities. The vegetation has had more time to cover the old ruins. That’s why they’re so well hidden. You would have to know it was there, like Granville did, to have much of a chance of finding it.”
“You still insist that fantastic story about the Well of Eternity is true?” Cierra wanted to know.
“Of course it’s true. Would so many people have died because of it if it was only a legend?”
Gabriel refrained from reminding her how full history was of men dying because of legends.
Mariella stumbled a bit as she turned toward the front of the group again, caught herself, and passed a hand wearily over her face. Gabriel thought she looked more fatigued, more haggard, than she had earlier.
Almost like she was starting to show those more than one hundred fifty years she claimed to possess.
Gabriel moved up beside Mariella. Esparza’s men watched him closely but didn’t try to stop him. “Who exactly lives here now?” he asked. “You said the Maya abandoned the city when they began moving northward into Chiapas and the Yucatan.”
She nodded. “Other Indians in the region moved in once the Maya were gone. When Granville and his men—and I—reached Cuchatlán…I think it was in 1866, though of course it was hard to keep track of dates here in the jungle…the Indians who had established a village near the ruins welcomed us. They shared the waters of the Well with us, though we didn’t understand yet what they could do. Granville’s men liked it here, and so did I. We persuaded him to stay for a time, to let the men rest. He’d been talking about taking samples of the water overseas, offering it to Queen Victoria if Great Britain would throw all its power and influence behind a new Confederacy.” Mariella smiled. “But he’d been talking about it less and less as time went on, and he talked about it less still once we were here. Finally the beauty of this place seduced Granville, just as it did the rest of us. He has never left. His men married into the tribe. Over the decades we have all become one people, the people of Cuchatlán.”
“Wait a minute,” Cierra said. “If this is true, if all of you who live in this valley are well over a hundred years old, the population should have increased exponentially until there were thousands and thousands of you…perhaps hundreds of thousands.”
Mariella shook her head. “The waters of the Well do not confer invulnerability, just immunity to aging. It’s true that they allow us to recover quickly from illness or injury, but if someone is hurt badly enough, he dies. Accidents happen. People are crushed by snakes or mauled by jaguars. They have falls. Such things keep the population down.” A sad smile came over her tired face. “And truly, everything comes with a price. People who drink from the Well of Eternity…have very few children.”