I swam to the rocks and crawled out onto what had to be the bottom of the sacrificial cave. I lay panting for several minutes and was just starting to investigate the huge cavern when something broke the water in the pond and I saw Elicia floundering near the rocky bank. She was too weak to swim any longer. I leaped back into the water and nudged her to shore.
One after another, the warriors popped up into the pond like corks from bottles. One after another, I jumped in and brought them to shore.
I waited five minutes after the last warrior was through and then began to pull on the rope, steadily but firmly.
Sure enough, Pico and Purano had tied six automatic rifles to the end of the rope. We were all armed, but we were also cut off from escape. It would have been impossible to swim back to the well without the rope to guide us.
After checking to make certain that Wilhelmina and the rifles weren't waterlogged, we began to move about the cavern. The light, we discovered, came from a wide fissure high up in the rocks. There was no way up to the fissure, so we concentrated on the center of the domed chamber. There was a raised section, like an immense stage. We climbed onto it.
As we stumbled across the stage, through the half-light of the cavern, we began to shuffle through ashes and bits of burned debris. Elicia picked up a charred object, screamed and immediately flung it down.
It was the remains of a human thigh bone.
Somewhere in this debris, I thought, were the ashes and charred bones of Pico's eleven-year-old daughter. In a way, I was glad that the giant had been wounded and wasn't along. It would have been painful for him to walk through these ashes. It was painful to me.
I couldn't take my eyes from the ashes as we walked through them. I didn't really know what I was looking for, or if I would recognize it when I saw it. And then the toe of my boot struck something that clattered.
I looked down and there it was, charred and blackened, but recognizable as a necklace made of seashells. I turned my head so that the warriors and Elicia wouldn't see the tears.
When we had reached what we determined to be the center of the immense platform, we stopped and gazed at the high dome of a ceiling. There were black smudges here and there. One of the warriors suddenly began to jabber. He was pointing to a small outcropping of rock at the center of the dome.
We moved around on the platform, looking at the outcropping from different angles. From one side we could see that a narrow opening went up through the dome. From below, it looked too small to accommodate a man, but the smoke around it clearly identified it as the start of the chimney up through the mountain.
"We have found it," Elicia said wistfully, her shoulders slumped and her face sad, "but we can do nothing. It is too high and this cave is empty of everything but rocks and bones and ashes." She shuddered.
We could have piled up rocks to give us more elevation, but that ceiling was thirty feet away. It would take days to pile up enough rocks to do us any good. By my calculations, we had just over three hours to do four hours of climbing, as it was.
The realization of failure was stronger because it also signalled our entrapment. We couldn't go forward and we couldn't go back. Our bones would be added to those in the cave, and it was no solace to us that we would not have been burned in sacrifice. Death by starvation, my boss David Hawk once said, is no damned picnic.
The four warriors also realized the hopelessness of our situation. They sat on the cold floor and began to chant in a kind of sing-song fashion that made my flesh creep. In my mind's eye, I envisioned scenes of years ago when young maidens were brought here for ceremonial torture, ceremonial sex and then ceremonial burning. I imagined that the torturers — Don Carlos leading them — had chanted in that same creepy way.
I was about ready to join them, though, when I looked up again at that outcropping of rock that had hidden the opening from us when we had first looked up. I walked around in a circle, kicking burned bones aside, studying that piece of jutting rock.
It stuck out from the ceiling at right angles, spearing across a corner of the hole. And I could see that the hole was bigger than we had first thought. There was ample room for a man to get past that outcropping, that spear of rock, and into the chimney.
But how was a person to get up to the jutting piece of rock?
The answer was still tied around my chest. I looked down at the rope trailing away into the darkness. It was thin, but it was strong. And it was supple.
"What are you doing?" Elicia asked as I began coiling up the loose end of the rope.
"I'm going to play cowboy," I said, grinning at her. "Just watch."
The four warriors stopped their chanting to watch my strange activities. I tied a loop in the end of the rope and coiled about forty feet of it around my shoulder. I took a few practice throws, but the loop never rose more than twenty feet in the air. The warriors and Elicia were looking at me as though I'd lost my senses.
"All right," I said, grinning at them as I coiled the rope for another throw. "That's enough practice. Now I go for the real thing."
"For what real thing?" Elicia asked.
"Just watch."
I went for the outcropping of rock. The lariat arched up through the air and missed the rock by inches. The warriors, not understanding what I was trying to do and convinced that I'd gone daft, began their chant again. Elicia suspected the truth and began to bite her lower lip and give body English to the trajectory of the lariat.
On the fifth try, the loop snaked over the end of the rock spear and I tugged gently on the rope. The loop tightened, but it was far out near the end of the rock, at its weakest point. The chances of the rock supporting my weight were sparse, but I had no other choice.
I put more weight on the rope and the loop tightened more. Pebbles came loose somewhere up there and rained down on us. The warriors chanted louder and began to howl. Elicia bit her lip so hard that I expected to see blood spurt out.
The suspense was also killing me. I took a chance then. I lifted myself by the rope, felt a ping in my side from my wound, and began to swing back and forth across the platform of old bones. The warriors let out a cheer. They finally understood the principle of the lariat. They also were hoping that I was more powerful than the curse put on the cave. I'd try not to disappoint them.
But we were far from out of it. I climbed a few feet on the rope, my eyes on that slender point of rock that jutted out beside the chimney hole. I flopped about, testing the strength of the rock, then began a swift, hand-over-hand climb.
When I was ten feet off the ground, I heard a fluttering sound and thought perhaps the whole ceiling was starting to crack open above me. I saw nothing. The rock was holding and the ceiling had no new cracks in it. I climbed faster.
I reached the twenty foot level when the fluttering came again, louder, more menacing, closer.
"Look out, Nick," Elicia screamed.
Her voice echoed through the chamber and seemed to come at me from a hundred different directions. I looked up and saw why she had shouted.
Something huge and black and pulsating had dropped from the chimney and was zooming straight down toward me. I thought at first that it was a great glob of soot, then I thought of a soot-blackened boulder.
But why was it pulsating?
The black glob was about to hit me when it seemed to break apart with a great fluttering sound. I nearly let go of the rope. My heart was pounding several hundred miles an hour. I let out a yip of my own and heard the cries and shouts of Elicia and the warriors below.