The Fifth Harmonic

  But I still had a chance. The crust upstream from my foot fault still held. But who knew for how long?

  “Hurry!” Maya cried, telling me what I'd already guessed. “The whole bed is breaking up!”

  If that happened, I'd be stuck on this ledge until the flow dried up and the lava cooled enough to form another crust that would bear my weight. That might be tomorrow, or it might be next month.

  I shoved the new tine and the flashlight into my pockets as I moved upstream to my right. The ledge allowed me a scant fifteen feet before it merged with the mountain wall.

  I stepped onto the crust and used the Burleigh Shuffle to glide the two yards to the nearest rock. As I leaned on the waist-high granite island to lessen my weight on the crust, I blessed Maya for bringing gloves.

  The next rock was larger, lower, flatter, and fully a dozen feet away. I pushed off and shuffled toward it. Half way there I heard a crack like a rifle shot and felt the crust shift beneath me. Jettisoning caution I took two frantic leaping strides that would have put a Jesus Christ lizard to shame and landed on the next rock with both feet. As I teetered there, windmilling my arms for balance, a hair-singeing, eyeball-searing blast of heat swirled around me like a firestorm. I threw my arms across my face and bit back a cry of pain as the inferno seared the flesh of my forearms.

  A scream from Maya echoed faintly behind more loud cracks. I lowered my arms and parted my eyelids just enough to see. I gasped searing air and struggled to keep my footing as my knees turned to melting rubber: upstream from me the crust had broken away in a huge “V.” Thick, chunky molten lava now flowed lazily on all sides of my little island. Tongues of flame and puffs of acrid vapor reached for me from the glowing surface. Bursting lava bubbles splattered me with droplets of fire.

  Terrified, I turned in a slow awkward circle. I couldn't jump back the twelve feet between me and the rock I'd left. And the next rock on the other side lay a little ways downstream and easily ten feet away. Another half a dozen feet beyond that, Maya's image wavered on the far shore like a mirage.

  I was trapped.

  I had never been so frightened or felt so helpless in my entire life. I had nowhere to go. I was stuck in the center of a lava flow that was slowly broiling me to a crisp.

  I was a dead man.

  I fought panic. There had to be something—

  I started and turned at another loud crack. Looking upstream I saw a piece of crust break free and float by to my right. Then an even larger piece separated with a crunch and started to follow it. But this one migrated toward my left.

  As I watched it approach, a desperate idea took shape in my head. When the chunk of crust came within a yard of my little island, I jumped onto it. It tilted beneath my weight, almost pitching me backward. Dimly I heard Maya scream as I fought for balance. I had to keep moving, had to get off this volcanic flotsam before it passed the next rock. I dug the toes of my boots into the crust, took two stuttering steps across the wobbling surface, then leaped across the intervening lava.

  My left boot landed on the edge of the rock island and slipped an inch. For a heart-stopping moment I thought I was going to fall, but then the ridges on the sole caught and I was across. I didn't pause. I kept moving, leaping off that rock onto the still-intact crust between it and where Maya stood. It crunched and crackled beneath my feet but held until my diving leap onto solid ground.

  Pain blazed through my knees as I landed. I rolled and ended flat on my belly, scared, scalded, bruised, but alive.

  Alive.

  But I'd been so close to a brutal, agonizing—

  I felt a spasm in my stomach, a surge of bile in my throat. I struggled to my hands and knees. My shaking limbs could barely support me as I retched. But nothing came up.

  And then I felt Maya's hands on my shoulders, rubbing them.

  “Oh, Will. Will, are you all right?”

  I nodded, unable to speak right then. She tugged on my shoulders and pulled me to my feet. I wobbled on Silly Putty legs as she stared at me and I stared back. Tears glistened in her eyes.

  She said, “I thought you were . . . were going to . . .”

  I could only nod. My emotions were in an uproar. Truly, I'd thought I was going to be burned alive out there.

  And then her arms were around me and mine around her and we were hugging each other and rocking back and forth. I felt Maya sobbing against me, and her gentle quakes filled me with wonder and light. And then I heard a strange choking noise, a lost, wrenching, pain-filled sound I'd never heard before.

  I realized it was coming from me. I was doing something I hadn't done since I was a kid.

  I was crying.

  6

  In pain and utterly drained, I was in no shape to continue our boat trip. Six months ago I probably could have handled it. But I wasn't that man anymore. Captain Carcinoma was draining my reserves.

  We decided to spend the night on the lake. Maya seemed concerned about losing a day, something about so much to do before the full moon, but finally shrugged it off and said she'd find a way to make up for the lost time.

  After I cooled and cleaned my burned skin in the water, we moved our gear from the lake shore to a spot near the lava flow. Yes, it was hotter, but we figured we'd be less likely to be visited by snakes and carnivores there.

  I had no mirror, but I imagined I was quite a sight. All my exposed skin was bright red; I had second-degree burns on my arms and could feel some blisters on the right side of my face. My hair was singed all around and I'd lost both eyebrows.

  “Before we do another thing,” Maya said as we deposited the sleeping bags and the cooler in a little clearing, “we must treat those burns.”

  “I'll apply some of that bacitracin ointment,” I told her.

  “Your little tube is not enough,” she said. “And I know something better.”

  While I removed my scorched boots, Maya disappeared into the brush with a machete. She returned shortly with a large root and some sort of cactus plant. I sat and watched her peel the former and strip the spiny hide from the latter, then mash the pulpy flesh of both into a thin paste in a bowl.

  “This will help,” she said, kneeling before me with the bowl in her hand.

  I began smearing a thin coat onto my arms while she applied some to my face. I closed my eyes and luxuriated in her gentle touch. We'd broken awkwardly from our brief, tearful embrace there earlier, and quickly recomposed ourselves into our more formal roles. But now I was enjoying the intimacy of being her patient.

  I had to admit to myself that I was becoming increasingly attracted to this strange, enigmatic woman. Was it merely the combined effect of the jungle, the isolation, the crises we'd shared? Or was it the woman herself? I leaned toward the former, because I could not think of another human being with whom I had less in common.

  I was disappointed when she moved back and began tearing long fronds from a palm branch she'd brought back from her little trip.

  “What now?”

  She gave me one of her little smiles. “You'll see.”

  Abruptly I realized that my burns no longer hurt. The pain was flowing out of them like water through a sieve.

  “My skin feels better already,” I said. “I'm impressed. What is this stuff—an old Mayan recipe?”

  “Even older. It is from the Olmecs. They are the people who preceded the Maya in Mesoamerica.”

  “So how come you don't call this ‘Olmec country?’”

  “Because they are gone and we remain. The Olmec civilization collapsed about 2500 years ago, and the Maya took up where they left off. Some of what I know and believe comes from the Olmecs, who anthropologists believe were the first civilization in Mesoamerica. But they are wrong. Far more of my knowledge has passed down from another people, a nameless race, the makers of the tines, who preceded them.”

  “The makers of the tines . . .” I pulled out the fire tine and ran my fingers over its hammered surface. “You mean this was fashioned and hidden away befor
e Christ?”

  She nodded. “Before Rome, before Cheops built his pyramid.”

  Wonder filled me. I looked up and saw that Maya had all the palm fronds stripped off. Now she began weaving them together.

  “Were these nameless folk responsible for that carving on the wall near the fire tines?”

  She shrugged. “Possibly. They are a mystery in many ways. The few anthropologists who know of their existence have had great difficulty proving anything about them. But I know they existed. Their blood runs in my veins.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “I just . . . know. They were not builders like the Olmecs and Mayans. They worshipped the All-Mother and lived simply and in harmony with the world around them. They started the Long Count.”

  “What's that?”

  “It is the count of days that has run unbroken for over five thousand years. Since August 11, 3114 B.C., to be exact.”

  “What was so special about that day?”

  “Nothing that I know of. It is simply the day they began the count. They had to start sometime. The Olmecs continued the count after them, and the Mayas continued it after the Olmecs. We have a different number system than the rest of the world. You use base ten, we use base twenty.”

  I held up my hands and spread my fingers. “Base ten makes more sense, don't you think?”

  “Why?” she said, pointing to her feet. “You have twenty digits, not ten. Our twenty-day uinal is the equivalent of your week or month— twenty days, not your silly seven-day weeks or variable-day months. Eighteen uinals is a tun, which is the only time we break from multiples of twenty—probably because 360 days is roughly the equivalent of a solar year. Otherwise, it is twenties all the way: twenty tuns is a katun; twenty katuns is a baktun. The thirteenth baktun, which runs about 394 of your years, will end December 21, 2012.”

  “What happens then?”

  “We start the fourteenth, which will bring the Long Count past two million days.”

  As I watched her nimble fingers weaving the fronds into a circular shape, I tried to grasp the magnitude of counting millions of days . . . a count starting centuries before Cheops and his pyramid. The concept was staggering.

  “Our view of time is linear rather than cyclical,” she said. “Every other civilization ties its time to cycles of the moon and cycles of the sun, but both those cycles are unrelated, and neither runs an even number of days. A cycle of the moon is twenty-nine and a half days; but twelve moon cycles is only 354 days, well short of a solar year. And a solar year is 365 1/4 days, which necessitates your silly leap year. Here we ignore cycles and simply count the days.”

  I said, “Those mysterious first people, the ones who began the Count, sound pretty bright. Why aren't they still around?”

  “They turned away from the Mother. They began to worship male gods who demanded wars of conquest and blood sacrifices. The same happened to the Olmecs when they turned from the Mother and began to worship their jaguar god. Both disappeared. We Mayas fell into the same trap. We built and built, we stripped the jungles and exhausted the soil—”

  “Well,” I said, “as far as blood sacrifices go, Mayas are pretty famous for their heart extractions, aren't they.”

  “That originated with the Nahua civilizations in the highlands to the north. My people's willingness to absorb and adapt to other cultures and beliefs is both a strength and a weakness. Unfortunately, we absorbed the wrong things from the Nahua. We adopted some of their gods, bloodthirsty male gods like the Aztecs’ Quetzcoatl who demanded human sacrifices. We shattered our harmony with the Mother and soon after that, our civilization began to fail. We were already well into decline when the Spaniards arrived. If we had stayed in harmony with the Mother . . .” another one of her shrugs, “. . . the history of your so-called ‘New World’ might have turned out differently.”

  “So we're back to harmony,” I said.

  “Yes. Harmony. Always harmony. It is everything. Even the tines have harmony. Show me your new one.”

  I held up the fire tine and watched the light dance on its rosy surface.

  “Isn't it beautiful?” Maya said. “Now bring out your earth tine.”

  I held the golden one next to the red tine and said, “I suppose this means I have two bed mates now.”

  “Yes. Keep both with you always. But before you put them away, clink them gently together, then hold them up to your ears.”

  I clinked, heard their tones, then held the red by my left ear, the gold by my right.

  “Do you hear it?” she said, her eyes wide, hopeful.

  “Hear what?”

  “A blending of the two into a third tone.”

  I clinked them again and strained my ears, but all I heard were two separate tones—and discordant ones at that. Truly, I wanted to hear the third. I didn't want to dash the hope in Maya's eyes. But I wasn't going to lie to her.

  I shook my head. “Nothing.”

  “Oh.” Her disappointment was palpable. “But you will. Soon. At least I hope you will.”

  A huge, fat, black-and-yellow bee intruded on us then. It buzzed around my head—attracted by Maya's balm, perhaps—until we chased it off.

  “See that bee?” she said. “We were speaking of harmony, and bees and flowers are a perfect example. Bees pollinate the flowers as they gather nectar for their hives. The pollination paves the way for more flowers to grow. More flowers means more nectar for the bees which leads to larger hives and more bees to pollinate the extra flowers. A cycle of creation without destruction.”

  “I gather it's a safe bet to say you're not a meat-eater.”

  “That is true. I do not eat meat. But I do not think it is wrong to eat meat. Anyone who has lived in the jungle knows that something is always dying so that something else may live. Plants die so that insects and herbivores may live and grow, so that they in turn may feed the carnivores. Life and death, eating and being eaten are all part of the cycle of earthly harmony.”

  “So why not eat meat?”

  “I simply choose not to participate in that part of the cycle. As natural as it is, I no longer wish to be responsible for the death of another creature. We rule Gaea's surface. We have made ourselves masters of all that moves and grows; that mastery in turn makes us caretakers of all that moves and grows. And I do not feel we are handling that responsibility well.”

  I thought of the other Maya Quennell who'd been arrested at the logging camp protest in the seventies. I had a feeling that if this Maya had been old enough, she'd have been right beside her.

  “You're talking about pollution, I take it.”

  “And the rest of the fallout from industrialization and technology run wild: strip mining, deforestation, soil erosion, acid rain, toxic dumping—you know the litany, I am sure. All of it hurts Gaea.”

  I wasn't going to let her off scot-free with that.

  “But is your Gaea displeased with how technology and industrialization have improved billions of lives by offering affordable shelter and clothing and medicines and vaccines? Just look what's happened to human life spans. At the turn of the century, average life expectancy for the entire globe averaged fifty years. It now averages eighty. And despite droughts and famines, undeveloped countries have done even better—they've doubled their average life spans to seventy. And no thanks to Gaea—it's all due to human industry and ingenuity.”

  Her jade eyes stared at me a moment, then she sighed. “You have a point, I suppose. I simply wish we would stop and think and look for more harmonious means to reach the same ends. Is that too much to ask?”

  “No,” I said softly, and for an instant as I peered into her eyes I felt as if I were speaking to Gaea herself. “I don't think that's too much at all.”

  Her sudden girlish smile snapped me out of it. She held up the product of her leaf weaving.

  “Here,” she said. “For you.”

  I took it from her and stared at it, turning it over in my hands in amazement.

  ?
??A hat. I'll be damned.”

  “Perhaps, perhaps not, but you will most certainly be sunburned without it. We will be traveling in more open water tomorrow, and your scalded skin will be broiled before we reach our destination.”

  “The next tine?”

  “Yes. The water tine.”

  “Water . . .” I liked the sound of that. Water I could handle.

  We hunted up some bananas to go with the last of the beans and corn, and then I crashed. The predawn rising, the dugout trip, the fire ordeal all combined to leave me too tired even to boot up my laptop. I crawled into my sleeping bag and surrendered to the crushing fatigue.

  But before it carried me away, I thought of Maya, how impressed I was with the efficacy of her homemade balm, how self-sufficient she was here in the jungle. From all I could see, the last thing she needed was money. So why did she want so much of mine?

  With that unwelcome, unanswered question slithering through my skull, I dropped toward sleep like a rock off a cliff.

  7

  We were on the water again first thing in the morning, I in the front, Maya at the rear.

  “Which way?” I said.

  The hoarseness of my voice startled me. I'd been getting up hoarse the past few days, but it usually cleared after I'd been up a little while. Today it seemed to be getting worse.

  “Your voice . . .” she said.

  “It's just the volcanic fumes. Very irritating.”

  Maya gave me a look that said she didn't quite believe me. Frankly, I wasn't sure if I believed that myself. But I damn well hoped it was true. Otherwise it meant Captain Carcinoma was leaning on my laryngeal nerves.

  She pointed toward the far end of the lake. “We head west.”

  The sun was setting a match to the sky behind us as we paddled across the lake's mirror.

  I was feeling a bit shaky. Still the aftereffects from yesterday, I told myself. I put what energy I had behind my paddle, figuring I could work my way through the fatigue.