“No, I don’t.”
“How about no frigging way! We’re twenty miles from our goal.” She gestured toward the distant islands. “It’s right there. We can see it.”
Gideon stared at her. “Okay. I hear you.”
“I hope you’re going to do more than just hear me. All we have to do is get to those islands, explore them, identify the source of this medicine — which I have little doubt is the very ‘lotus’ these natives gave you — and bring it back.”
“Going against Glinn may have consequences. He might try to stop us.”
“He doesn’t know where we are,” she said.
“He can make a pretty good guess.”
“The only thing I want to know right now is this: are you in or not?”
Gideon took a deep breath. He still had his doubts about her theory — but the appearance of the Lotus Eaters had gone a long way toward quelling them. He’d never seen such conviction or such fearlessness before, in man or woman. “I’m in.”
Amy smiled, leaned toward him. “You know, I could kiss you for saying that.”
“Go ahead.”
“Not right now. We’ve got work to do.”
He started to laugh. “If not now, when?”
“You’ll know it when it happens.” She packed the satellite phone back in the drysack and stood up, brushing off the sand. Then she paused, looking out to sea.
Gideon followed her gaze toward the nearer of the mountainous islands, lying on the horizon at the very edge of visibility, its vastness cloaked in purple haze, so distant and mysterious. A lone cloud clung to the highest peak. Was it possible — even remotely possible — that a cure for his terminal condition might be found in that mythical-looking land?
43
When they returned to camp, iPhone was there to meet them. He invited them to sit by the fire and partake of an unappetizing breakfast of gluey maize pudding with mashed green plantains. After they had eaten, Gideon motioned iPhone over. “Isla,” he said, pointing out toward the invisible ocean. “Vamos isla.” He pantomimed rowing a canoe and pointed again in the direction of the islands. “We want to go to island. Okay?”
iPhone seemed put out by the suggestion. He frowned, shook his head. Gideon persisted. “Vamos isla. Importante. Vamos ahora.”
More shakings of the head and negative murmurings. Finally iPhone got up and went into the chief’s shack. A moment later the chief came out, a somber expression on his face. He sat down with them.
“No vamos isla,” he said, wagging his finger like a schoolmaster. “No.”
Gideon took a deep breath. “Porque?”
“Isla…peligroso.”
Peligroso. What the hell did that mean? Once again Gideon found himself rummaging around his brain for his high school Spanish. “Peligroso? No comprende.”
“Peligroso! Malo! Difícil!”
Difficult. He got that last word at least. Problem was, the chief’s Spanish didn’t seem much better than his own.
“Vamos in canoa.” Gideon made rowing motions.
“No. Isla sagrada.”
Sagrada. Another damn word he didn’t know. He turned to Amy. “Help me out here. You know Latin. What the hell is sagrada?”
“It sounds a lot like sacra. Sacred. And peligroso sounds a lot like periculosum. Dangerous.”
“So the island is sacred and dangerous. But they must go there, or how else would they get the lotus?” Gideon turned back to the chief. “Cuando…” He pointed at the chief and pantomimed the rest of the question. When do you go to the island? After a few false starts, the chief finally seemed to understand. With broken Spanish and much gesturing, he conveyed the general impression that they went there for some sort of ceremony of thankfulness.
“Gracias,” said Gideon.
The chief left, and Gideon motioned to Amy. “Let’s go for a walk on the beach.”
They walked through the brush and came out on the broad beach. There were the canoes, still pulled up on the sand.
“Maybe we should steal a canoe,” said Amy.
“We’d never survive. Just launching a canoe in that surf requires incredible skill — someone who knows exactly what he’s doing.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“We’ll take a page from your old friend Odysseus.”
“Like what? Poke a stick in iPhone’s eye?”
“No. I’m talking about some good old-fashioned social engineering.”
“How?”
Gideon explained his idea. He would feign sickness, which would require them to administer the lotus to him. He would be healed, and then they would have to have the ceremony of thankfulness.
Amy stared at him. “Gideon, that’s a terrible idea. How do you know the lotus isn’t poisonous?”
“One can only hope.”
“Hope, right. And how do you know this is a thanksgiving ceremony? That old man’s mumbling and gestures could have been describing anything.”
“You saw him putting his hands together and bowing. Looked like thankfulness to me. And anyway…I want to try the lotus.”
She looked at him curiously. “Why?”
“Just to see.”
“See what?”
Gideon fell silent.
They spent the next half hour discussing other ways to persuade the natives to take them to the island. But they kept coming around to the one, intractable problem: they went to the island only for the ceremony. Finally Amy gave in. “But I’ll only agree if you promise me one thing: I take the lotus.”
More arguing, but Amy was adamant.
They returned to camp and sat down around the fire again. While Gideon messed with the medical kit, Amy ate a second breakfast — another bowl of thick maize pudding and mashed plantains. It almost made Gideon sick just watching her cram so much food in her mouth. She gestured for a coconut to wash it down. iPhone brought one to her, hacking off the top with an expert swipe of a machete and gouging a hole for her to drink from. She drank and passed it to Gideon, who drank and set it beside himself. Surreptitiously, when no one was watching, he took a small bottle of ipecac he had palmed from their medical kit and poured the contents into the coconut.
Amy called for coconut milk and he passed it back to her. With a knowing glance at him, she drank deep.
And immediately began vomiting.
Everyone leapt up in horror as she continued retching and heaving, bringing up her enormous breakfast. As she puked, she hammed it up, writhing on the ground and shrieking between bouts of the heaves.
The effect was electrifying. While Gideon rushed over and made a show of trying to help her, at least half the settlement fled into the jungle in a noisy panic, taking with them the children. The chief came over, followed, very reluctantly, by iPhone.
“I’m dying!” Amy shrieked. “Dying!”
“Muerte!” Gideon cried, dredging up another Spanish word from his schooldays. The dry heaves had passed — ipecac was very short acting — but she continued to scream, rolling her eyes, clawing the sand, and feigning convulsions. It was so hideous that even Gideon felt his gorge rise. Most of the rest of the village edged farther away, with more fleeing into the jungle.
But the chief and iPhone bravely stayed put, trying to help her. The chief started chanting and laying on hands while iPhone attempted to hold her down.