Only when the animals’ pungent reek reached her nostrils did Em know the llamas and the men were not a mere vision.
Em swore in a parched whisper that she’d die before she let these Hawaiians take her bag.
For a time, they consulted with each other, their language strange to Em’s ears, full of repeated syllables and rhythmic halts, but she recognized an argument when she heard one in any language. Some of the men gestured at the heat mirage on the horizon. Others pointed their weapons at her. If Em had to guess, she would have said the two sides of the dispute could be summed up as “kill her now or take her home and kill her there.”
This went on for at least ten minutes. Em couldn’t be sure, not only because she wasn’t wearing a watch but because she had fainted at least once during the discussion.
When the conversation came to an abrupt halt, one of the men tightened his grip on his axe, the letters “USAF” faded but still visibly stenciled on the blade, and raised it in the air like Daddy about to slaughter a chicken. He came forward.
Em screamed, trying to tell them to wait, but it came out in a choked, inarticulate shriek, not unlike a chicken upon whom the axe has fallen. She tore open the blanket, plunged her hands into the bag, and held its contents aloft, the sun reflecting off the treasure in blinding rays. The man with the axe made a sound almost exactly like the one Em had and threw his forearm across his eyes.
The awed silence that followed lasted perhaps the span of twenty heartbeats.
Then, “Put it back in the bag,” one of the men said. “You’re coming with us. If you try to run, we’ll cut your feet off.”
They led her across the sand to a sprawling shanty village of caliche huts and rusted travel trailers, with skeletal corrals for the llamas made of sun-grayed wood. The sand glittered painfully, sprinkled with fragments of greenish glass, fused sand from the bomb blasts that had given Atomic Golgotha its name.
Em had hopes that she’d be brought into the large tent in the center of the village and that there she would be given water; then she would explain that her presence in Atomic Golgotha was not her fault, that the Templars were to blame (surely the Hawaiians spared no love for the Crusaders who’d nuked the Hawaiians’ desert), and she would beg for her life. Maybe they would let her return to Oasis Town. Maybe they’d even let her borrow a llama.
Instead, she was left by herself in a pen with two llamas and their dung. She drank from the same rusty trough the animals did and was grateful for it. The Hawaiians had left her with the alligator-hide bag, seeming unwilling to touch it with their own hands. Fear and attraction were powerful forces, Em well knew. It was the twin engine that generated awe, and as Daddy said, awe was a lever to move men.
The Hawaiians were the poorest people Em had ever seen. Enslaved and persecuted by the Mayans, cheated and exploited by Continentals and Indians, Christians and Muslims alike, the few surviving bands of nomadic Hawaiians occupied niches of America that few others were interested in. Em had seen a film about them at school. The film had emphasized how much Christians and Hawaiians had in common. After all, hadn’t Christ been born an islander? In most paintings, Jesus was depicted as a white Continental, even as Christ the Mariner, coming across the Pacific on his balsa raft, to preach and die in the Holy City. But if you thought about it, he must have been brown skinned himself.
One of her guards, the man who’d threatened to cut off her feet, told her to get up and escorted her to the big tent. There, he shoved her to her knees to kneel before a huge, glowering man with a broad face and commanding black eyebrows. He was shirtless, wearing only a long sort of skirt, and he was draped in so many necklaces that Em could only assume he was their chief.
She clutched the bag to her lap.
“Where is home?” the man said.
What kind of question was this? A riddle? Some kind of test, for sure. The Hawaiians had been driven out of every home they’d ever had. The story that Christ had been crucified out here in Atomic Golgotha instead of just outside the City was declared apocryphal by Pope George, but the Church still wanted the Hawaiians gone and had even used hundreds of square miles of desert for atomic testing.
Where was home for a Hawaiian? There could only be one answer to that.
“Hawaii,” said Em.
The man frowned, and despite herself, Em winced.
Then he laughed, a huge boom that seemed to make the tent billow. “Miss,” he said, “I was asking where you are from.”
“Oh.” Em’s cheeks burned. “I’m from Oasis Town, New Assyria. I live on a reptile farm there with my daddy and brother. My name is Em.”
“You are a long way from your home, Em.”
And then it all came tumbling out of her, a rapid-fire, half-sobbing torrent of words. She told him about the reptile farm, and Daddy’s grim calculations at the kitchen table, about Trail 66 and Via-40 and the raffle at the Garden Tomb. She told him about Mark and Solomon’s Temple and how she’d evaded the Templars in the Holy City, and she intended to beg for her life and to be allowed to return home, even if it meant parting with the bag and thing inside.
At least, that was what she had intended to ask for.
Instead, not fully understanding why, she found herself saying, “The bag isn’t yours. I have to take it home. It’s important.”
The chief’s eyes were big and dark as charcoal briquettes, and they seemed to express sorrow, amusement, and smoldering anger, all at the same time.
“It is not a small thing to steal from the Templars, girl. They are wealthy as nations and even more dangerous, for their faith is true. When they realize their stolen treasure has come to Atomic Golgotha, my people will be the ones who suffer for it. I am not without compassion for lost souls in the desert, but I can’t think of a good enough reason not to present the Templars with their …item …as well as your head.”
Again, Em intended to plea for her life. “The thing in the bag shouldn’t be hidden away,” she said. “That’s what the Templars will do with it. I won’t.”
The chief nodded, as though he’d reached a firm decision. “We are of different faiths,” he said, which was certainly true, because despite baptism and Sunday school, Em wasn’t sure she really had any faith at all. “But perhaps our ways are not so dissimilar,” the chief continued. “I will allow you to prove your purity by facing an ordeal. Should you please God, I will allow you to go home, and the treasure will remain in your custody.”
Em didn’t ask what would happen if her faith proved insufficient, though she was certain that would be the outcome.
There were no rattlesnakes on the Pacific islands, but the Hawaiians had lost their homeland ages ago and had adapted their customs to the lands they’d settled and been driven from, from the South American jungles to the North American deserts. They had suffered some of their greatest hardships in their Exodus from Texas, and it was there that they had been subjected to the trials of the snake pits. They’d learned some lessons from that.
Under a cloth canopy, in a deep rectangular hole dug in the sand, the snakes buzzed like a lightning machine in an electric circus. Em had never liked their sweet, musky smell, a little like cucumbers, but now it was so strong it threatened to knock her down into the writhing mass.
The Hawaiians stood around the edge of the pit, which for some reason Em imagined as the rim of a volcano. Had the film at school talked about pushing human sacrifices into lava-filled craters? She couldn’t remember now.